How Chris Chambers Built Einstein Bridge After Surviving Business Challenges

Anthony Codispoti : Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they will overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today’s guest is Chris Chambers.

Chris is the founder CEO of the Einstein Bridge. This is a revolutionary research and innovation data as a service request platform where data innovation and research converge to drive unprecedented efficiency and sustainability. Their solution addresses critical data fragmentation challenges while providing organizations with powerful tools to unlock insights and accelerate innovation across industries. More recently his research and innovation data as a service company was accepted into the Peach Score accelerator and was selected to advance to the second round of Pepperdine’s 2025 Most Fundable Companies. Chris has received co-author credit or How to Survive and Thrive Volume 2 sharing inspiring stories from entrepreneurs and innovators. He has earned recognition on the President’s and Dean’s list while achieving a 4.0 GPA in his MBA and is a recognized thought leader executive doctor of business administration candidate at Pepperdine Graziadio Business School 2025 Colorado Governor’s Fellowship Selectee and advisory council member of the Harvard Business Review. His forward thinking approach to organization 6.1 and autonomous operations has earned him numerous industry accolades including presentations at multiple artificial intelligence summits, nominations by leading technology conferences for outstanding leadership in technology and excellence in technology awards, and selections for features by top business publications including CIO Views Magazine, Mirror Review, CIO Outlook, the USA Leaders Magazine, and is a 2024 Marquis Who’s Who in America Honored Listee. Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Ad Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year and an extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at AdBackBenefits.com. All right back to our guest today, the founder and CEO of the Einstein Bridge, Chris Chambers. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Chris Chambers : Absolutely, thank you so much. Now look, if you have all this business thing aside, I need a spokesperson, I need a PR person, I know who to come to. Thank you so much for the introduction.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s my pleasure. Let’s jump right into it, Chris. So you’ve got your hands in a lot of different things right now, kind of paint us a picture. What’s the larger goal that Chris Chambers is driving towards? Absolutely.

Chris Chambers : So it came about during my acceptance into Pepperdine’s doctoral program. One of the things I’m coming into the mid part of my MBA, I’m trying to figure out what’s next. And I had never really thought about whether I was going to do a PhD or a doctorate, but it just became the natural next step after I set the goal of getting a 4.0. So there was a, accounting was that class, like if I get past accounting, I knew I had it.

I got a 95, I was like, oh, it’s over. So I started thinking and did some research, and I was trying to figure out really what is the fundamental difference between a PhD and a doctorate. And I came across Pepperdine University, and they basically explained an MBA takes current knowledge, they’re building emerging leaders into current companies. A PhD takes theoretical. So they’re pushing the boundaries of what people think is possible. A doctor, a doctorate in business administration is going to be creating practical knowledge for those leaders, those MBAs and other leaders to implement that difference was fundamental.

And I was like, wait a minute. So if you choose a PhD, you’re going to be engaged in theory, but it’s not necessarily rooted in any practicality. If you take a doctorate, you’re in practicality, but you’re not pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Who synthesizes that? And puts those two together. How do we accelerate the innovation curve by meeting practical knowledge holders, theoretical, you know, pursuers, and then organizational leaders and executors?

That’s the missing piece. Because what I saw in the market, and it was interesting, I was talking to a potential investor, and he said, Chris, you know, the first thing I went on your LinkedIn profile, the first thing I thought was, Oh, this guy’s an academic, he’s reader. And it stunned me. I was like, and he was like, no offense, but academics typically aren’t executioners. And it was at that point, I realized I had to build the Einstein bridge.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay, before we get into Einstein bridge, and I want to hear more about that, couple of things. First, I’d be curious to hear about your recent transition from CEO to venture partner at Iron Key Capital. Absolutely.

Chris Chambers : I absolutely love what Iron Key is doing out in the web three, and the AI space, especially around startup seed stage startups, you know, if you’re looking for an investment, and you’re looking to sustain an investment and hold it over a longer period of time, seed stage companies on average are outperforming even the S &P 500. And doing fairly well. You’re talking about maybe a 14% return with the S &P 500, where if you have a seed stage, diverse portfolio, you could be earning 25% returns. So it’s definitely an area where you’re going to have some ripe opportunity to park assets and have them grow over a longer period of time. Moving in the venture partner for me was just the next evolutionary step. I came in as a strategy advisor, was helping the CEO and founder kind of make it through a transitionary period. You know, anytime there’s a lot of growth, there’s a lot of room for a lot of noise, a lot of process, you know, just a lot of redundancy. And so I stepped in in the CEO spot to help kind of eliminate that redundancy, rebrand a couple of their assets, kind of lead the team towards a more unified cohesive goal. And then was happy to move into the venture partner after we got accepted at the Einstein Bridge into the peach core accelerator.

Anthony Codispoti : So say more about the 25% returns that are possible with seed stage companies as an outsider, I think of seed stage, and I think of somebody who maybe a company that’s not generating profit net revenue yet. Where would those greater returns come from? Absolutely.

Chris Chambers : I’m going to give you three examples of seed stage investors. One is named Mike Markalov. He was the seed stage founder or investor for Apple. People don’t know that. If you watch the Steve Jobs dramatization with Ashton Kusher, he’s the guy that showed up in that yellow Corvette when they were all outside in front of the home. He gave Apple the seed funding necessary. So he owned at one point a third of Apple. Now, you know, remember Steve was fired and he came back, he got moved out of the board, he relinquished his shares.

But that’s one example. A third of Apple today is worth a trillion dollars, right? But at that time, I think he wrote a check for $90,000 seed stage company. Second one is David Marquard. He’s the seed stage funder of Microsoft.

Now, once you, you know, it’s great right now, I’m using on our PC, you’re probably using an iPhone, you’re like, yeah, Chris, those are the big, big, big, big names out there, right? But these companies weren’t that at that time. They weren’t what they are today. They were just companies in somebody’s garage, literally, with Microsoft and Apple. So David Marquard was the seed stage funder of Microsoft and ultimately became a very successful venture capitalist. The last one is Peter Thiel.

And that’s somebody, you know, I think a lot of people may recognize that name. Peter Thiel was the seed stage funder for Facebook. So he put $500,000 in the Facebook. That stake when they went to their IPO was worth a billion dollars. The reason why seed stage companies end up making a lot of returns is because you get a lot of the company in the early stages. So in an early stage venture, you typically are betting on a couple of things. You’re going to either betting on the promise of the idea, meaning you fundamentally believe, hey, if they actually can create this and bring it to market, it’s going to have a lot of value. I have a gut feeling this is going to do very well. Or you’re looking at the team and you’re saying, you know what, this collective group of talent, they definitely can get their act together, especially if they’re aligned behind a mission.

That secret sauce is when you have a great idea and a great team. And then of course, it’s market timing, right? A great example of Microsoft’s own versus iPod. You know, why one succeeded and one failed or Amazon phone.

We love everything Amazon does, but we didn’t like their phone for whatever reason. So it’s not to say that these ventures are not without risk, but ultimately because you’re getting an early think shark tank, right? I’ll give you 150,000 for 20% of the company. The company’s valued at, let’s say, 500,000. Well, the next round of funding that company could be valued at 5 million because they’ve made it to million in annual revenue recurring. Your stake just went up 5x.

Anthony Codispoti : So we’re talking, yeah, certainly higher risk, higher reward, kind of longer term, like, you know, you get in early, if you get in at the right venture, the returns can be really big, kind of long term. So let’s talk about your publication, how to survive and thrive volume to your spotlighting stories of entrepreneurs. I’m curious, two things actually, first, let’s start with how did the idea to get involved with this come about?

Chris Chambers : Okay, so one distinction here, that is actually the founder of Reebok, who is the author. And so what they do is they have this program called one golden nugget that they go out and they reach out to entrepreneurs like myself who want to share a golden nugget, something of nugget of wisdom, a kernel, that they want to share with the Virgin and entrepreneurs.

And so I ended up on the one golden nugget podcast, and they really loved my story. My contribution was, is you have to embrace the turn back moment. There’s a dark, dark moment in almost every, if you really study successful people, I don’t care who you would look at the sharp tank eyes and gap. There’s a moment that you’re going to, you’re going to want to quit because everything is going wrong.

I mean, everything is going wrong. And in that moment of darkness, there’s a, there are two options. You can guarantee that it will never happen because you quit, or you can step forward and the possibility of it happening remains. So you have to either bet on the certainty of never making it happen or the possibility of it potentially happening, which is greater for you.

Anthony Codispoti : Say more about that darkness and maybe what you came to understand about that from some of the shark tank folks.

Chris Chambers : So I mean, I’ve been studying success in terms of, you know, the motivational speakers you today, typically get a bad rap. But what was interesting against is that I started studying success around 2017, 2018, when I, when I’m locked off into entrepreneurship.

And what I found out is that almost everybody had an incredibly difficult uprising to success. I mean, John Rockefeller had a moment where he almost lost everything. Andrew Carnegie almost lost every, I mean, you go, you read Napoleon Hill, Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, you’re going to find incredible almost cyclical, almost program, like a computer program.

Nearly everybody, Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX both faced death early on in his tenure. There is an incredibly dark moment that I think is programmed into the journey of success because when you push past that moment, what is given to you are riches and resources beyond any person’s wildest dream. But what you often hear, I don’t care if it’s Steve Harvey, I don’t care who you’re listening to, they will say, I just never gave up.

I just never gave up. Mark Cuban talked about the fact that he was down to $940, a funny story. Okay, so, so he’s really, he’s, he really likes telling the stories.

I’ll shorten it. He was living in a six people to an apartment. He had this, this Nissan that he was driving with a hole in the floorboard.

You have to put a quarter of a well in it to drive every 60 miles. And the funny thing was that he had a, he got a job as a software sales person and his boss, he loves to say, it’s Michael Hugh, Meckie and he even spells, it’s funny to hear. So Michael Hugh, Meckie is the owner of the company and Mark is like, look, I’ve got a $15,000 sale. It’ll give me $1,500.

So I can get out of this wrap-hole apartment. He wanted to go, you know, so he was like, I got to do that. But his job was to open the store. Most story short, he made the decision to go make the sale. Now, he brings back a $15,000 check and gets fired.

That’s an incredibly dark moment. And what Mark did then was he went and found one of the guys who won his customers who liked him and just said, hey, look, I need $500. You know, basically sold him on investing $500 to help him get the software.

And that became micro solutions that then became broadcast network and it became Dallas Mavericks billions of dollars. Damon John on the show, he was that he was down a million dollars in inventory. He had like $500 in the bank and he said his mother, he was working on his mother’s house. He says his mother was like, I’m going to take an ad out in the newspaper.

He was like, mom, this is stupid. This idea of whatever she took an ad out on the newspaper, a million dollars in sales, but low on cash, 20 investors reach out, three of them he met with. One of them became his mentor today.

And you just go over and over the founder of kind, same thing. He was like, I was down a million dollars. I had almost like it was you’re telling me like, you know, basically days from death’s door and they just kept going. And that’s the cycle that you see across all successful people.

Anthony Codispoti : So you made the comment. It almost seems like it’s programmed into the path. You believe that like it’s sort of hard, if not impossible to kind of get to the top of the heap without facing just death’s door, like adversity that seems insurmountable.

Chris Chambers : Well, I mean, if you’re James Barron friend, you remember the song, paid the cost to be the boss, right? The paid the cost. You have to pay that cost. You can take it in biblical form. How do you get to King David? Well, you start off in the field, you have to slay your Goliath and then ultimately you’ve proven your work.

It doesn’t matter what area you’re in. You know, we can get it at the religious sense. We can get it at the societal sense, philosophical.

You can go through Greek mythology, Roman, I don’t care where you look. The pathway to success accolades having your name recognized as you start off insignificant. You decide you’re going to take this insurmountable challenge on and in this art case, we are typically talking about entrepreneurship, which is typically an insurmountable challenge and you push and you push and you push and then you ultimately break through, but not before you almost die. Netflix is another one.

Jeff Bezos faced this. It is like a program. I don’t know any other way to describe it because if you’re just looking at it at basically what are the probabilities that every successful person tells nearly on a identical story. It’s got to be some level of programming because they all start from different walks of life.

Anthony Codispoti : You know, my dad, since I was a little kid, always said if it were easy, everybody would be doing it. And I think that’s sort of a different spin on kind of the message that you’re saying is, I think to find success in something, right? If it were easy, it’d be a very crowded space and your success would get washed out. So to find success in a very competitive world like this, it takes struggle. It takes facing those hard moments. And so I’m glad that we’re giving voice to this and you’re talking about multiple examples of household names, very successful people that on the verge of throwing in the towel, but they couldn’t because they had no towel. They couldn’t afford it, right? And they just found a way to pick themselves back up and keep pushing forward.

Chris Chambers : Absolutely. You know, the interesting thing is Mark Cuban talked about the fact that he had stolen the towel from Motel 6. So that’s funny you grabbed on the towel, but it really is. It is entrepreneurship. It gets glorified in our society. You get your Instagram reels, your TikTok reels, your YouTube reels, the best 60 seconds or 90 seconds of somebody’s life. And you know, their overnight success is about a 20 year cycle. If you really think about it, you know, there are some people who had rocket shots right away, but they’re feeling far between. Overnight success looks like a lot of failure, a lot of heartache, a lot of tears, a lot of anxiety, a lot of sleepless nights over and over and over and wondering if you made the right decision, especially if you have to pivot.

That’s also a very terrifying moment. But if you pivot and then it starts working and then something in the macro environment, maybe it’s COVID, maybe it’s generative AI, we’ll get to that, that disrupt your plan and you just have to keep going. And so that’s what success looks like. It typically is associated with your possessions, your bank account and things of that nature. But true success starts with the ability to manage your time and own it. Have you worked hard enough to where you can own your time? Regardless of how stressful it is, do you own your time? Can you control your destiny and in and of itself that success? Now, if you end up becoming monetarily successful, it’s because you’ve delivered incredible value in some way.

Anthony Codispoti : You know, I, this is great that we’re talking about this. We kind of get into this in most of my interviews a little bit later. But since we’re here, I’m going to go ahead and ask you the question, Chris, what’s the hard thing that you got through? How’d you get through it? What did you learn going through that process?

Chris Chambers : Oh, man. Okay. So I spent 16 years in corporate America, I moved up to a business engineer. You know, really thought I knew my stuff, right? I did to a certain degree in corporate America, because I’m being handed a budget. Here’s a $60 million P and L, manage it. All right, got money, have a CapEx budget.

I can do that ready. So 2018, I’m early 30s, I know it all now. I got it. Oh yeah, let’s go ahead and get out here and be an entrepreneur. Let’s build this business. The millions are flowing.

I’ve solved tens of millions of dollars, help integrate hundreds of millions of dollars in business units. I got it. I know what to do. Then I got out here. And one of the things that stunned me right away was that I had never struggled in my life to get a job, meaning that if somebody had to define me, I could show up with my CV, regardless if I had experience in it or not, they just like something in my background. I could articulate my understanding of the problem set in the industry and whatever else I’d studied on. And ultimately, we get an offer. You get to the entrepreneurship side. That’s not the conversation you’re having at all.

Not. And it stunned me, because the very first idea I had was a company called Product Exec, short for Product Executive. I had spent the last tail of my career, the last five years as a product leader in multiple software organizations.

So I really knew the space. I ended up selling that concept, which is now fractional, but I wasn’t calling myself a fractional back in 2018, was selling that new, built a portfolio of about 10 startups. And there was a, some equity stakes, some revenue shares, you know, some cash, a bit of, but a good mix, but they were all startups in 2018. Around 2019, I started making money close to what I was making in corporate America. I was feeling good, right?

I was just Q4. I’m feeling good. Okay. I’m going to tell you right now the first mistake I made as an entrepreneur. I didn’t listen. I did not listen to my customer. One of my customers was a company fit for trips.

Hey, Marcus, if you were going to my hike, Mount Kilimanjaro, or the Swiss Alps, or even the Rocky Mountains, let’s say you were going to, his company helped you get ready for the terrain, the elevation, the breathing that’s necessary to be in high elevation. This is Q4. This is around November.

His major source of customers were tour operators worldwide. And in November, they had begun telling us that on the, on the Eastern side of the world, that there was some virus that was causing mass cancellations.

Anthony Codispoti : November of 2019.

Chris Chambers : I had a four month head start. And it was over and over and over. It was just, and we were stunned because now he’s facing the death of his business.

We’re stunned how quickly. So by the end of 2019, now, you know, I have a, I have a broad portfolio. So I’m, I’m, I’m okay. Right. But I’m trying to help Marcus navigate this.

And then COVID hits February 2020. The business closed or shut down. He eliminated all but one of the startups in my portfolio. I have a, I’ve truly never felt pain like that before. I really never felt that anything before that, not, not to that degree. And I remember when I got off the phone with my last founder, who was like, Hey, man, I’m going to have to find a job, man, I can’t do this anymore. And, you know, I told him I understood and respected it because it was, it was an incredibly difficult period. But I realized I made some mistakes. Right then and there, it was the most humbling moment ever. Because in hindsight, I can tell you about the November phone calls that I had the four months. The reason why I didn’t pay attention to that is because I violated a principle of business, pestle, political, economic, social, technological, environmental, legal, that was an environmental change.

COVID was an environmental macro phenomenon that was happening was spreading like wildfire. And I didn’t have the maturity and also the knowledge necessary to factor that into my decision making. So I went back to school for a business degree so that I could understand how to use macroeconomic trends. Along that way, while I was pursuing my business degree, I got an opportunity to purchase a company, TrueLeadGen.com off of Flippa.

And what was interesting was that, you know, Flippa, if you all don’t know, is a place where you can buy dot com businesses, e-com businesses, things of that nature. So TrueLeadGen wasn’t making any money. But boy, I knew that brand, TrueLeadGen, TrueLeadGeneration, easy. The company was built to be like an Amazon of Mar-Tex. So you’re thinking, Google products, constant contact, the big brands, but it was going to be like Amazon from Mar-Tex.

Just come to TrueLeadGen and you can get anything you need to DIY. We ran about 400,000 outbound emails across 17 product verticals. And again, we’re talking about the product teams there, the marketing teams that are building this collateral of Google, constant contact, HubSpot, had extraordinary open rates and extraordinary click rates, but no conversions. And it stunned me, right?

Because I remember reading the constant contact one, it was like a 73% open rate for the constant contact themed campaign and like a 35% click rate. I mean, extraordinary. And I thought to myself right then and there, I was like, wait, I’ve seen this pattern before. Three terms in my career, I left being a million dollar producer in terms of revenue for a smaller competitor of a Fortune 500 company and bond. We’re talking about direct one-to-one, AmeriQuest to FirstNLC, bond.

I went from doing $10 million, $11 million in non-mots and sales. FirstNLC comes, gets me. They asked me if I’ll do the same thing for them. They pay me, you know, and I’m young. I’m like 19 at this point. You’ll get four X’s to money. I’m like, so no brainer.

Nobody’s picking up. AmeriQuest is the most well-known mortgage company at that time. Insight to GHA Technologies. Insight is a Fortune 500 company who had just implemented the most technologically advanced stadium at that time, Arizona Cardinals. Robert Haff to Genuine.

And that was the last time I needed to see the pattern. Robert Haff is the most well-respected or one of the most respected companies in America. Genuine was a smaller competitor. All three times they offered me more to do the same amount of production, but I didn’t recognize something until later in life.

What was that? When I saw the constant brand, it was brand. When I saw the constant contact performance, but no conversions, I was like, the constant contact makes money. I just literally just Googled how much annual revenue constant contact may divide about 365, then divided that by 24. I was like, if I spend an hour reading this and trying to figure it out, constant contact has made X number of dollars since then.

It’s clearly not constant contact issue. It’s true legions. I was like, okay, I’m in trouble. I purchased the brand and I paid a premium for it. I’m trying to figure it out and I’m getting to the broader point of the struggle because I’d already lost a business portfolio to COVID. In this particular case, I was like, well, I automated my business development position at Robert Haff in 2010 and I made millions of dollars in gross margin for the company. Staffing industry really respects Robert Haff’s name. Here’s what I’ll do.

I’ll find the best in class LinkedIn automation tool. I’ll socialize that story. When I sit down with the people, number one, I already got you because you came through automation. I’ve proved automation works. This is 2022.

Now, all I have to do is explain to you what I did for Robert Haff and how I did it. I’m now closing 60 customers over the next 12 months. The asset started at a valuation range between 7,000 to 32,000. By February of 2023, I got excited because I was tracking the founder path and the valuation had risen to 787,000 to 2.5 million.

There’s four buying categories. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I couldn’t believe. I was like, whoa, this is, you don’t get that kind of appreciation for anything other than California real estate.

I’m a California kid. It’s time to get ready to sell. I had founder path do an assessment of the business. One of the risks I had was that it was a month-to-month business. I prided myself on being able to retain people by selling them every month because you could just walk away. I had to close my customer every month. I felt good about that, but business was an extraordinary risk. Let’s get to it. I didn’t see chat GPT coming at all. That’s again another violation of PESTL as the technological.

Anthony Codispoti : To be fair, Chris, you’re saying I didn’t see chat GPT coming. I didn’t see COVID coming. Put yourself in the same bucket as billions of other people. Nobody’s got the crystal ball to, yeah, this virus. There were some stories about it, but nobody knew what it was going to become. So I’m just saying be a little easier on yourself, but please continue with the story.

Chris Chambers : Well, hold on. Okay, okay. I’ll give you COVID, but there was the Spanish flu. Let me give you the chat GPT thing. In 2013, I was in an oil and gas consulting engagement with Saudi Aramco, some reservoir engineers, and they were describing four key indicators off of a well. And they wanted to stream those into a big data set so we can figure out how to reduce the well health or the well maintenance costs and extend well life. I recommended that we use those four key indicators, big data, advanced analytics, and IBM Watson, who had just smoked humans on jeopardy. IBM Watson was the first generative AI application out, and I was in 2013. So I knew the technology was there. What I didn’t realize when I say I missed it, chat GPT is, is that what my business was built on was my ability to understand nearly instantly any industry or any market, any position. So really what it boils down to was is that I was really good at crafting high impact messaging that resonated with anybody. You could be in bio bioinformatics, and I go from bioinformatics to construction.

You go from construction and says Salesforce, CR, it doesn’t really matter what the industry was. I know how to speak to people at a fundamental level. And my messaging was high performing.

But then when chat GPT shows up, it’s me in a box. Why would you pay me a premium for my ability to craft high performing messaging? If you could pay $20 to something that reads the same.

See, the biggest thing is, and we’re learning it later, but it read the same, right? So I’m verbose. I was delivering verbosity in automation before anybody else was because if you haven’t noticed by now, I’m verbose by nature.

This is truly who I am. So I was giving people the ability to take my verbosity and deliver it to their customer. Basically a blurb of an insight of how well I understood the market or in their case, how well they understood the market so they could get a meeting. Well, chat GPT comes along and within two weeks of the mid part of February, I heard this often and this I’m generating from one person 1400 replies in four months. They were like, you know, Chris, you know, we’re just and it was that it was very, I could tell was like, Oh, you discover chat GPT.

And so they one by one, they would end their their term with me over and over and over and over and there it was. It’s painful because I didn’t. Yeah, I didn’t set the business up and I was trying to get to five million. But but in that, I’ll tell you what what what dawned on me.

The reason why I was tracking in founder path has nothing to do with the ego side. Yeah, I’m pretty proud that I delivered like a 10,000% return. What I was trying to do was figure out, how do I scale this?

How do I find 10 other people I can do that to because if you can go from seven, 7,000, 32,000 to 787,000, 2.5 million, one person, if you do it with 10, look how big the pot can grow. And so I went back to school for my MBA because I really wanted to understand leadership principles. And so in that moment, I decided I’m never going to do the solo solo preneur thing again. No more, you know, I’ve got to do the Jackson five, it’s really hard to be Michael Jackson out here. Right. So I got to get to the Jackson five and be Michael in the five, right?

Because that’s how everybody fell in love with them. You know, the solo act comes later. And so right now, I’m building four teams out of the rubble of those first two failures. And it’s actually really fun.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay, so is this a good time to segue into the Einstein Bridge?

Chris Chambers : Sure, I mean, yeah, we can go there wherever you’d like to go.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah, I mean, I think this is kind of your your passion at the moment. This is, you know, where you’re putting a lot of your energy. So kind of break this down into simple terms for us. I explain sort of the the impetus behind the idea and what it is that you’re in there.

Chris Chambers : Absolutely, absolutely. So I come out of my MBA or midway through. And I remember so accounting was, and there’s that one class now, if I got past accounting, I was going to make it happen.

And at shop for 4.0, not because I think anybody cared about it, but it’s because you have to set goals. One of the things that that’s really interesting about the physical world in a gym or the academic world is if you set a goal, you can achieve it through just your work. Now in the professional world, it doesn’t work that way at all.

It doesn’t matter. You can work hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, and never make your goal, never get promoted because maybe your boss doesn’t like you, or maybe your organization that there’s a lot of reasons why you can’t reach your goal in the professional world through sheer hard work. It’s a lot of luck, a lot of networking. But in my MBA, I was at the point where where I wanted to know what was next. And I googled what is the difference between a PhD and a doctorate? And Pepperdine University came up, and they had a blurb on their on their website, their business school website that was like something to the effect of MBAs are trained to be leaders in the current business world.

PhDs do research in the theoretical, and doctors create practical usable knowledge today. And I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I at that point was me deep in kind of building an advisory firm.

So it wasn’t really thinking too deeply about it. And more and behold, for both, I do a lot of blogging, micro blogging on LinkedIn and out of nowhere. And I mean, you know, maybe maybe it was out of nowhere, I don’t think so, right?

We all got machines and technology that can track you down to your IP level. And academic advisor for Pepperdine, ends up in my inbox. It’s like, Hey, Chris, would you like to explore the executive doctorate at Pepperdine?

I googled them and was like, Whoa, yes, yes, I’m going to, but I was just honored for the opportunity. And so I get into the admissions process, I make it through phase one, in the phase two, phase two is an interview. And I’ll never forget, we’re going over, you know, how to narrow down, attend the boil the ocean a bit, we’re going to get to the moon. It’s like, Yeah, Chris, but you got to create the metals, you got to create the rocket fuel like, like get to the steps. So they narrow it down, help me kind of distill down my autonomous operations concept. I am something practical.

And I remember the question that closed off the interview, is just like, Okay, Chris, this is great. I love your research proposal. Where are you going to get the data? And right when he said that it didn’t take me like a fraction of a second, I was like, I’m going to build a research and innovation advisory company, the data company, I’m going to build a company to do it. And at that moment, because I’m doing research around automation with operations managers and leaders, that I was like, Ooh, what if I built a bridge between the people, the doers, and the knowers, but there are two types of knowers. There’s the doctorate, the practical builder, the theoretical PhD, when you intersect those with the doer, that collaboration and collision, if you think of it like a, you know, an atomic bomb, is an explosion of innovation. And that’s what we’re building today.

Anthony Codispoti : And so where is it today? What’s what stage?

Chris Chambers : So I’m in the process of solidifying my leadership team. I’ve got a really strong group behind me. I’m in building the first prototype should be done within the next two, maybe two and a half weeks. I’ve gotten some interest from investors. I’ve been accepted into accelerator.

I got another offer for an accelerator. It’s really one of those companies I’m at the I’m at the pre seed stage, right? So pre seed is you have a really good idea, or you have a good idea, and you’re socializing it to the point people want to get in early. Seed stages really, when you’ve gotten a little bit of traction, where you grab a couple of clients, things of that nature. So I’m in the process of bridging the gap between C, pre seed and C, by going out and getting clients, I can, you know, explain the theoretical or the principle, you know, with the best of them and get people to understand, you know, what I’m looking for, if you look at the product diffusion curve, it’s about 2.5% of the market is innovators, you know, that’s the traditional Jeffrey Morris crossing the chasm diffusion curve. And then another 12.5% of what they would call early adopters, they get in early. So it’s about 15% of any market that will really get behind the principle, but the innovators, the people that’ll make that jump are about 2.5%, which is why we went research. Research and development is a tax deductible thing for a business to engage in. And so what that ends up doing is it moves us out of the bucket of consulting, and the types of engagements that we can get into our research and development, which ultimately could be tax deductible. But I’m not a tax professional, that’s not tax advice.

Anthony Codispoti : Right on. What lessons can you take from some of your previous ventures in lead gen, etc. and parlay into what you’re doing now to kind of try to get some of those early customers?

Chris Chambers : I think it’s really it’s really not building for yourself. In each of the in each of the two previous ventures, while I had moderate success, if you want to call it that, they were all built for me to be a one person Accenture. That was my goal. When I came out of when I came out of corporate America is like, I’m going to be a one person Accenture. And I made that goal.

I had no idea the flaw in that goal until I went through it. And I think that’s really the biggest thing. You know, the other thing is, is that those previous ventures also gave me a lot of a lot of content, right? I can tell the story authentically. And it has helped me as I socialize the story to get fairly well recognized for some of the things that I’ve been doing, you know, from an innovation in that perspective. And so it’s helped me gain a little bit of notoriety. And with that, you know, and I shared this with you pre show, but I’ll share it with people. I was driving to Colorado from Houston.

That’s about 16 hour drive. I decided I’ve never watched Shark Tank a day in my life. And we’re talking about just this past Wednesday, last week, never watched it.

This I was going to play it for 16 hours. And one of the things that kind of humored me a bit was that Mark Cuban and Kevin O’Leary, now Kevin, he had just sold a $4.2 billion value at its software company, right? So Mark Cuban is a famous billionaire, they’re kind of bickering. And Mark Cuban goes, yeah, man, money’s all the same, but your name and my name, it’s not the same. And if you know Kevin O’Leary, he’s Mr.

Wonderful. And I thought very, very deeply about what he was saying. And what he was basically saying is that there are a couple of ways to do it in life. But one of the ways that you really get out there is if your personal brand is incredibly well respected, well known. It is one of the things that allows for you to command opportunity for others. And that’s what Mark Cuban does. And that’s what I’m doing now, by going about the business of building the Einstein Bridge.

Anthony Codispoti : A comment you made to me before we went live with our interview here is that you’re hacking the machines. What do you mean by that?

Chris Chambers : So it’s not a coincidence that we came into contact. So I’ll tell the story really quick. I have always been somebody who wrote to the 3000 character and like, I guess I know it’s a 3000 character limit, like I just write all the way to it.

Sometimes I have to chop the, you know, I’m going to get to that very last character. Whether everybody reads it or not, I’m only looking for a certain type of reader. Here’s what I didn’t realize. At a certain point in life, in probably the last three years, the readers are machine learning.

They’re algorithms. Because as I continue to tell my story, all of a sudden, it’d be near instantaneous. Like I’ll write an article about some innovation that I did back in my, back in my, my, my lifetime. And then I’ll get an email that says, you have been selected for, and then I remember when the Harvard business review selected me and I was like, that was new. We live in a world of machines and everything is machine learning.

The machines are listening and they’re reading everything that we do. And so one of the things that I found out is that if you really can write well, if you can write, you know, one thing is you have to have the background, right? Like GPT, you can GPT your way to 17 years in a field.

Like you have to have been there and done it and walk the war stories. But if you’re, if you’re diligent about it, the universe will find you and it’s because of machine learning.

Anthony Codispoti : What about machine learning and AI would the average person find surprising? What, what aren’t we getting or seeing that is either already happening or just around the corner? Okay.

Chris Chambers : So for the average person right now, AI begins with chat GPT in November of 2022. There was a chat bot, a virtual psychotherapist named Eliza produced by Stanford and MIT in 1967. Artificial intelligence is over 70 years old. Expert learning systems, IBM Watson. Many people don’t know about IBM Watson because it’s too expensive. IBM Watson, if you go and you Google IBM Watson and jeopardy, what you will find is in a general knowledge competition where the rules are, you get a statement and respond, the answer is in the form of a question. AI in 2011 destroyed the best humans, even Ken Jenning, the host today.

Destroyed them. IBM Watson was like 77,000. The humans, Brad, Brad, Rudder and Ken Jenning were like 21,000. They just could not keep up with that with IBM Watson at all.

That was in 2011. Chat GPT comes up and because it’s democratized, people think it’s the birth of AI. It’s not. It’s the latest in a long line of applications, machine learning, Netflix. Do you remember when Netflix used to just give you the top, the top recommendation? We’re talking about early in Netflix days.

That was machine learning. That’s how Facebook knows what ads to show you. Amazon knows what products to present to you.

That’s how Netflix knows what movies to present to you. Machine learning is an old technology. We use it all the time. These two technologies are core. It’s niche in novel to a certain segment of the market, the broader market. Because in the product diffusion curve, you have to cross the chasm. Crossing the chasm is a literal gap between the innovators, the early adopters, which are about 15% of the market.

So think people who worked in deep tech, neural networks, data science, machine learning, AI, those people, they understood the technology. Crossing the chasm is when you have the general market being fully aware that early majority, 34%, the late majority, 34%, and then the laggards at the very end, the final 50.

Anthony Codispoti : Where do you see it going? What’s coming in the next call at six months that you’re in tune with that is going to blow our minds?

Chris Chambers : I think we’re hitting a point now where agentic AI, AI that can perform on its own is really going to start changing the way we understand how work is going to be performed. It’s one of the fundamental cores of my concept autonomous operations. In 2010, during a programming class, I came up with the concept that you could integrate several technologies together.

At this point, it was robotic process automation, workflow automation, and cognitive automation. And ultimately, that you would be able to simulate human activity and invert Pareto’s principle, the 80-20 rule. And so what we’re going to be seeing a lot of over the next six months is really the push for agentic to get smarter, to get broader, to get deeper. And ultimately, the capabilities of LLMs, while they seem to be close to peaking, that peak plus agentic AI plus other innovative ideas are going to spawn an explosion of business models and explosion of innovations that we really had never seen before. We’re talking about now being able to innovate in days and weeks instead of months and years.

Anthony Codispoti : Chris, can you give a practical example for, I don’t know, your average business owner or business executive where they might be able to utilize an AI agent today in their business? Absolutely.

Chris Chambers : I think one of the things is really, if you’re going to use AI, you definitely want to have it connected to the external market. One of the hardest things for businesses is you have the day-to-day demands of the business all day, every day.

There’s not a day you’re in business that you’re not dealing with the day-to-day. In that, I’m not the only business that messed up in lifetime and missed an economic external. Lehman Brothers at $68 billion.

We didn’t see the simultaneous collapse of the subprime mortgage market, which had an extraordinary impact and led to the fourth largest corporate bankruptcy in the world, or at this point possibly the largest. Those are the types of things that if you can get AI and agentic AI to really be focused on the external market, so you can see, I mean, just imagine being a marketing and advertising agency in November of 2022, and you didn’t pay attention to the release of chat GPT. Trust me, by the middle of 2023, you knew exactly who it was, because it was eating through all of your profits and your customers. I think agentic AI would be very well suited for business owners and executives to connect to the external environment that they operate within and to get intelligence from the external environment. That’d be something that you could make strategic pivots on fairly quickly rather than hitting the iceberg and hoping you can see them all.

Anthony Codispoti : So let’s say I’ve got like an SEO marketing agency, or I do PPC for companies. What would an agent possibly be doing for me in the background that’s helping my business or my clients?

Chris Chambers : It’s really understanding how websites need to be built today. One of the things that I came across reading an article says, we used to build for humans, now we have to build for machines and I’ve actually touched on that. And so one of the things an agent would be doing in the background for a business like that is really understanding how do you now build for the AI models that are out representing the humans, right? It’s a lot of machines talking to machines. And so an agent can go out into the marketplace and understand, well, what are the best trends in terms of SEO now that machine learning is a dominant portion of the market?

Or in a paper click campaign, what are the highest performing paper click campaigns in the industry and why? Those are the types of things that you can get an answer to and you can get it summarized, right? It’s one thing to come across an article that’s like it’s a 10 minute read, but you really have 10 minutes.

We used to, right, when it was newspapers, but we don’t really have 10 minutes anymore. So those are the types of things that if you were running an SEO or a paper click company and you were using agent to AI, it’s really about being able to stay in front of the typically going to have people who are very expressive in terms of monitoring algorithm, think Reddit, you know, those types of pages where people are really, really deep into understanding how algorithms work on the social platforms. Well, you need something that’ll be able to call and summarize what they what they’re actually saying, right? And so think, you know, micro blogs and blogs, like all of this information is out there. But can you really get a core distillation of what am I supposed to do with it? That’s where I say agent to AI.

Anthony Codispoti : And so how could a small to midsize business go about creating their own AI agent?

Chris Chambers : So a couple of ways to do that. In number one, it always boils down to why are you doing it that way? What do you really need to solve? Right? Because if you’re going to build something proprietary in house, it’s going to be fairly expensive. And one of the big things you’re going to run into is where you’re going to get the data. Like that’s that’s one of the questions people are what state is your data in? So you may say, okay, if we’ve got a million dollars, let’s say you’re your decent size SMB, we’re going to million dollars, we’re going to set aside and built this agent to AI solution. Then you get into it and you realize you’re going to have to park another 500,000 to 750,000 for data cleaning for it, right?

Because your data is not necessarily usable in a way that can actually power an SLM small language model or large language model. So what it really boils down to is what are you trying to accomplish? And does it require your company data proprietary or trade secret type knowledge? Or does it does it require maybe guidance, maybe scenarios, right? And you can go through those scenarios and then that spurs the innovation of the trade secret holders in the organization.

It’s always a gift and a curse. But if you are going to go down the path of building your your first model, you’re going to have to start with the data. And so what you want to do is you want to have a consultation with somebody who really understands how data is structured and whether or not your data is in a form that’s usable for an AI model or a gentek AI.

Anthony Codispoti : So when we’re talking about these AI agents, like I think, tell me if I’m right or wrong here with the $20 version of OpenAI chat GPT, you can create your own agents that will do X, Y or Z for you. Is this what we’re talking about? Or are you referencing something that’s kind of operating at a different scale?

Chris Chambers : Well, I think it just depends on what you’re again what you’re trying to solve. Right. So I use OpenAI. So one of the things that that OpenAI does an incredible job of, but it’s also to our detriment is it shows us the wonders of generative AI. But I’ll break it down in real math terms. So I was doing some research on the AI models when they first came out trying to understand the difference between the models across Claude, Jim and I chat GPT. And I asked one of the models, I said, I always hear the term 175 billion perimeters. Can you equate that to me in terms of volumes of encyclopedias worth of information just so I can understand human equivalency?

Said, sure, Chris, what that means is that I have access to 52,500 ,000 volumes of encyclopedias worth of information. That’s OpenAI and all the work they’ve been doing. OpenAI has been around a very long time building that knowledge base.

That is not how an AI project or start at a company who wants to build a proprietary model. And that’s the Delta. And so what it boils down to is, do you need the information now? Or do you need the competitive edge?

Those are that’s really the line of demarcation. If you’re looking for a competitive edge, then you’re talking about creating an AI model that expands your organizational capabilities. If you’re looking for the answer now, as long as you’re not exposing company data, you generally can use an out of the box GPT or Jim and I.

Anthony Codispoti : So if I want the competitive edge, what’s the process? Am I hiring a special kind of developer to build this, you know, internal tool for us that we can feed our data in and it’s kind of, you know, firewalled off or how does this work?

Chris Chambers : You start with a use case. You first want to define what the use case of that AI model is. The second thing you want to do, figure out if people have had success with that use case. So you Google that use case and see if there are other companies that have implemented had success with that. Ultimately, what you’ll find is if there is success, there’s also successful implementers of that model, right?

Because it’s typically in a case study form. Then you figure out who those who those implementers are and you reach out to them to see whether or not they’re inside of your budget. But you want to define a use case or use cases that you believe are ultimately going to be successful and figure out if there are case studies of successful implementations. One of the biggest challenges with with artificial intelligence implementations is that 80% of them never reach their intended goal. And the reason for that is because it’s more about the technology than the use case. And if you start at the use case and really understand what are we trying to achieve as a business, and is it necessary for us to achieve it in the way that we’re proposing it? Who else has achieved this and who did they use? Then you’ll ultimately find more success.

Anthony Codispoti : Chris, if you had to recommend one resource, a book, a course, a podcast, for someone to level up in these things that we’re talking about with AI and machine learning, what would that be?

Chris Chambers : Oh, man, I got to give it to Big Blue. Now, let me kind of, if you’re a scientist at heart, I love IBM. They’re a pioneer in the space. They’ve been doing it the longest. They’ve built the best systems. They’re claiming the fame of the many that they built an AI model that beat a grand champion at chess.

Right? So being able to think ahead. IBM is a wealth of resources in terms of really understanding what these technologies are and where they have had success. Not everybody can afford an IBM in terms of the implementation partner, but I would say that IBM’s the gold standard in any industry around the advanced technologies. They hold the most patents. They’re deep into the space. So I would start with IBM.

If you are looking for a less sciency way and you just really want to have some fun, really understand it. I would YouTube Mark Cuban in AI. He does a very good job of explaining AI, relating the concepts in a way where you really get to some of the baselines of what AI is possible. I like him to be able to kind of broker the conversation if you don’t want it on a science level.

Anthony Codispoti : Any particular daily habits or rituals that you go through, Chris, that kind of help you either get started in the day, keep you on track, keep you centered? Yes.

Chris Chambers : So as soon as I wake up, usually the very first thing I do, definitely take organic lion’s mane for the brain. It’s one of the best supplements for cognitive ability.

Alpha GPC is another one. And then I get to the gym. And during my gym time, all I listen to is motivational speeches or the stories of success. This is where I spend my time. I coat my mind.

I try to get at least two hours of mind coding before I let any outside external influence of any kind enter my atmosphere. So I don’t check my email. I don’t check my text messages.

I don’t check anything. I just get to that. I get my brain stimulated with the organic ingredients. And I get to the gym. I get the right coding so that when I get into the flow of the day, because once the day starts flowing, it starts tumbling. And then at probably about the midpoint in the day, so Ed Miley is famous for this, that he has compressed time into three six hour days. So it’s like 6 a.m. the noon noon to 6 p.m. 6 p.m. the midnight.

And those are so he’s like I have three days in the span of your one day. And it actually does make some sense when you think about the speed at which we can get information on no longer have to drive to the library to get a book, which took time. Now I can just get the answer in a millisecond. So I fundamentally accept it and I’ve applied it. So around like the four or five o’clock mark, I’ll take a moment and I’ll kind of take it’s you know, stock of the day, you know, what have I accomplished?

What do I need to get done? And ultimately take about two hours to read. Right now I’m in design thinking and innovation is really a core book of mine that I’m really holding on to. And then of course, thinking grow rich, you know, you can never go wrong with that as a master principle. You know, get my two hours of reading and then around the seven o’clock mark, you get back after it.

And you really just try to push that that pedal to the metal home. Because this is a full contact sport. It’s 24 by seven. You know, there’s when you achieve work, work-life balance, it’s because you you you’ve balanced your bank portfolio. Right. That’s when you really achieve work-life balance. So you work till you get it. And then once you get it, you remember the days that you had to work so hard to get.

Anthony Codispoti : I like the especially the morning part of that. I’m curious, where do you find the motivational speeches or the success stories to listen to?

Chris Chambers : I love so Evan Carmichael is a really good resource that he aggregates them. You know, your 10 rules of success. You can find it on the microjord. You can find it on Kobe Bryant. You know, you name the business persona. Bill Gates is Steve Jobs. He’s really, really good aggregator. Ben Lionel Scott is another one. He’s got really, you use like a Evan Carmichael when you understand principles, right?

They’re going to be communicated to you in a very serene, direct mode. You use a Ben Lionel Scott when you want to get motivated because his video is going to get you running through a wall. Motivosity is another one that are really, really good. And these are aggregators of motivational speeches.

They’re really good. And then ultimately, you know, YouTube has been a phenomenal source of information. So I can find anything on anything I need to know, right? So Ted Talks, you know, Stanford lectures, you know, MIT like whatever I need. So I would say that that that YouTube is a great resource for that. But ultimately, if you find a great podcast or call Spotify, you know, I love Neil DeGrasse, Tyson. So, you know, those types of Spotify is a good resource as well. But I prefer YouTube. Okay.

Anthony Codispoti : Chris, let’s say you and I reconnect in a year. And you’re celebrating one thing. What is that one thing? That I broke through for others.

Chris Chambers : The whole purpose behind the Einstein bridge, you know, I kind of ran over it. So I’ll give you a little bit more of what it meant to build a bridge is doctorate and PhDs. Once they complete their research, and they’ve got their credentials, they still have to go out monetize. And that’s typically not what they’ve been taught to do. They’ve been taught to research, they’ve been taught to grip. So there’s a challenge with the academics. And then there’s also pushback in the in the doer side of the market, right?

The executioners who were like, Well, you do all you do is practice theory. And so what I wanted to do is create the largest decentralized network of researchers who can all contribute to an operations database, the operations data repository that combines their ability to contribute from a research perspective. We use a blockchain so that we can have proof of work. So anybody who contributed to a particular data set that ends up being consumed by the doers gets paid for their contributions. And so what I wanted to do was create a way for the researchers of the world to be able to profit off of their research, off of their capabilities. And so part of the Einstein bridge is building that that that basically that economic model, that ecosystem, where PhDs and your doctorate level researchers can come in and they can contribute to a knowledge base, we commercialize that knowledge base, we get it sold or get it licensed. And they they share in the profits because the blockchain ledger shows that they were part of the contribution of that data set. And then it just becomes a circular economy, where I’ve got my researchers creating the information and in the middle, of course, is an artificial intelligence, a genetic AI and other technologies that are helping my doers do more. And so that that’s really the big thing. So I think a year from now, what I would be celebrating was the fact that I created a lot of opportunity for doctorates, PhDs, operations leaders and managers.

Anthony Codispoti : I like it. Chris, I’ve just got one more question for you. But before I ask it, I want to let people know the best way to get in touch with you or follow your story. What would that be?

Chris Chambers : I’m pretty heavy on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is, you know, it’s one central source of truth that typically on a human. So you can check me out Chris Chambers, come in VA, I should be one of one of the only. But if you need an additional keyword, check Pepperdine.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay, great. And we’ll include a link in the show notes for everybody. But last question for you, Chris, looking ahead, do you foresee a major shift in how venture capital firms are going to collaborate with AI driven organizations?

Chris Chambers : I think there’s there’s still a lot of buzz and a lot of excitement. One of the things that the low and no code movements have done is it made it very easy for almost anybody with an idea to get that idea to market. It used to be you used to have to have a technical co founder yet to have some coding capabilities.

And if you didn’t have it, you couldn’t get in. And so I could see venture capital continuing to put money behind AI companies, because low and no code will give more ideas birth, right? At the end of the day, AI and computer science, whatever, they’re all mediums of delivering value, right? Value hubs, value customer value, all around whether or not there’s a value consumer and is there a value hub, you know, Amazon consumer, Amazon marketplace, right?

And in between that is a lot of technology. So this is going to be an incredible time that venture capitalists are going to be looking for the idea creators in the world to leverage AI, because people just love the term AI, right? You don’t really even have to be a true AI company. You can just have AI in your in your company name or something about it being AI driven.

And people love that. And so the other thing AI is going to do is because of the speed at which these these machines move, we’re going to see an extraordinarily fast shifting marketplace, right? So venture capitalists are going to have to look at at their portfolios and rebalance them often, because there’s there’s always somebody coming out with a new AI thing, right? And that’s one of the core reasons why my autonomous operations concept, generative AI and agentic AI are one of eight technologies that we are integrating together to power the operations of a business operations being product operations, marketing operations, technology operations, business operations, finance operations, the customer service, there’s a lot of operational components to a business.

So we didn’t want to centralize around one particular technology, rather than it be a set of components, because not every department, not every use case needs generative AI or agentic.

Anthony Codispoti : Chris, it’s been fascinating conversations. I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Chris Chambers : Thank you so much for having me. Have a great day.

Anthony Codispoti : Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.