Building the ‘Picks and Shovels’ of the AI Gold RushBuilding the ‘Picks and Shovels’ of the AI Gold Rush

Building the ‘Picks and Shovels’ of the AI Gold Rush Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: Look, I’m incredibly excited for today’s show. I think this is going to be fun. 

Jeff White: Yeah, it’s a really interesting topic.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. And here we are, 300 and some odd episodes in, and there’s still something new every day. 

Jeff White: Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: It’s gonna be really cool and yeah. Good to be chatting with you again. 

Jeff White: Yeah, for sure. And I think, there are sometimes marketing strategies that are propelled by a unique and compelling founder story, but it is not common as you were saying.

Carman Pirie: It’s not, it certainly doesn’t seem to be as common in the industrial slash manufacturing space. 

Jeff White: Yeah. We talk about the founder kind of thing in the SaaS world. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. SaaS or even like that kind of health and beauty brands and things of that nature. Like, that’s certainly a common thing. But yeah, it is just not as common in this space.

And if there is a founder story in this space, it usually takes place during the time of the model T. 

Jeff White: Yeah. 1900’s. 

Carman Pirie: Although, I’m an old man now, and I recently discovered that the kids refer to somebody my age as somebody born in the late 19 hundreds.

Jeff White: I know. 

Carman Pirie: And that concerns me more than a little. But nevertheless, we digress. Let’s get on with it. 

Jeff White: Yeah. This is not something we’re gonna fix on a podcast about manufacturing. 

Carman Pirie: It’s not something we’re gonna fix at all. 

Jeff White: As my kids keep telling me, I’m someone born in the 1900s. So joining us today is Preston Wickersham. Preston is the Director of Content Marketing at Giga Energy. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Preston. 

Preston Wickersham: Thanks so much for having me. I don’t have the answers for the late 1900s, but as someone who’s also from the late 1900s, I hope we can keep each other company.

Jeff White: You strike me as somebody from later in the 1900s than say Carman or I.

Preston Wickersham: as long as it’s still the 1900s. I think the kids of today are unforgiving.

Jeff White: I have three adult children of my own. I’m so familiar with this. 

Carman Pirie: Preston, really good to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us today and bringing the story of your work and specifically your work with Giga Energy to our audience. I’d love to start with a bit of an introduction to you and then maybe tell us a bit about how you ended up at Giga Energy.

Preston Wickersham: Of course, I got my start in journalism actually. So I graduated from Texas Tech University and spent a little time writing for the newspapers. And then as many of us did in marketing, I realized very quickly that they were never going to pay me very much, and if my heart was not in the mission of news as much as it needed to be, that I needed to go somewhere else. 

So I did that. I bounced around a couple of different marketing roles and technology. I eventually ended up at a public sector technology company called Tyler Technologies. We did a lot of local government things and then after that, ended up starting my own agency for a few years, ended up at remote.com as one of the very first employees there. We grew from about 20 people during my time to a little over 2000 when I left. Over the course of about five years, which is a really cool growth journey and a very exciting time. And near the end of my tenure at Remote, a representative from Giga Energy reached out and said that they were looking to do something a little different in the world of manufacturing. That they liked what I had accomplished at Remote and that they wanted to talk. And so that’s really where it started, and I think that’s where it usually starts. It’s just a conversation when you’re trying to do something new and trying to do something interesting. As you have a conversation and say, Hey, we’ve noticed something that’s broken. We’ve noticed something that isn’t working the way it needs to. We’ve noticed something that has a great opportunity to be better than it is, and we’d like to talk about it. And so we had several conversations with Sam Burns, who is the VP of marketing at Giga Energy, and then the founders as well. We had some great chats and it made for a good fit. So I’ve been there for, coming up on a year now, it’ll be a year this spring. We’ve done a lot of very cool things and I’m really excited about the trajectory of the company and what we’re doing.

Jeff White: Were you coming in as their first marketer or one of their first marketing folks, or were you building out the team? 

Preston Wickersham: Yeah. We still have a fairly small marketing deal. I think the company in total right now is around the mid one hundreds in terms of how many people we have, which is a little crazy to see because we’ve already grown by more than double, I think, since I joined the team just last year. But in terms of the marketing team, we had Sam Burns, who is the VP of Marketing as I mentioned, and we had a photo/video leader at the company at that time. I believe that was the entire marketing team before I got here, and then I became the third one. And then of course now we have, I think, around 10 people on our marketing team and still growing, of course. Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: Tell us a bit more about the company, what do you all do? It sounds like you do energy, but I’m guessing most of our audience maybe hasn’t heard of it yet. 

Preston Wickersham: Yeah. They will soon, I hope. Giga Energy… We are a Houston based manufacturer and developer of electrical infrastructure and AI data centers. So, we have a three prong approach to what our business is. So first we have the manufacturing. We are an American manufacturer. We have a factory out in Long Beach, California. We recently signed a contract to open our new media voltage transformer factory in Houston, Texas. So that will be opening here in just a few weeks. So we’ll be bringing on new capacity online from a transformer factory in Houston. So we do a lot of manufacturing for transformers for switchboards, for substation transformers. We also do, of course, the data centers, the modular data centers in air and liquid cooled form. And then we also, of course, build the sites. So the second part of our company would be site origination development and operation. And so what that means is we find sites, we find places where we can hook up to power or we can build a data center. And we will from the ground up construct that data center. We’ll bring in all of the equipment that we manufacture ourselves, which makes things very easy, or not, I shouldn’t say easy. It’s never easy to build an entire data center from scratch, but it is nice when you don’t have to wait on somebody else who is in charge of that part of the supply chain. When you are talking about building a data center and instead of saying, oh, I’ve gotta reach out to some manufacturer representative, or I have to reach out to somebody, you can just call the person that you work with ’cause you work for the same company and say, Hey, where is this piece of equipment? Or Hey, what can I do about this? 

So it’s very nice to have that vertically integrated infrastructure for everybody to work underneath. So we develop the sites and then it depends on what we do after that. Sometimes it’s a turnkey situation where we will hand off the site to whoever the end customer is there, whether it’s an AI company, whether it’s somebody else in a flexible load data center situation. We will either build it up and then operate it ourselves, which we do with several different sites. And we can, in that place, we can rent rack space to, say you’re an AI startup and you need data center access, but you don’t necessarily want to have your own multimillion dollar data center that you own and operate yourself. We say, okay we’ll rent you rack space in the data center that we have built, and you can, it’s called a co-location. And so we offer co-location and you can just do that on the contract. 

Carman Pirie: And you’re also the electrical equipment that you’re manufacturing, you’re also just selling to utilities and whatnot as well, correct?

Preston Wickersham: Oh yeah, for sure. Renewables is definitely a big market, commercial and industrial utilities and yeah and also data centers as well. So not only do we build data centers, but we also will sell switchboards and transformers and various, different pieces of electrical equipment to other data centers. So yeah, pretty much anybody who needs it. Good quality American manufacturing, that’s what we do. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Preston this may be a weird question, but I was just wondering like what percentage of the business or kind of area of focus or whatever is around the more deeply vertically integrated, producing a data center with all the equipment that we actually make versus how much of it is about making that and selling it to other folks?

Preston Wickersham: It’s a good question. I don’t have a specific percentage split ready for you. I will say that we have, obviously we have our revenue targets that we’re tied to. And there’s a split on that, the site development origination and selling those sites and building data center sites.

And then there are various different components of equipment manufacturing and who we’re selling that to. I will say that given the data center explosion in the United States and what’s happening right now, you may have seen the report from last year that said; if you took data centers out of  the equation, the United States GDP only grew one 10th of 1% in 2025. Because data centers make up a massive piece of the economy at the moment because they’re just really that important. You also may remember the Department of Energy released a study in the middle of 2025, I think it was around July where they were talking about the state of the American grid and the infrastructure that we have. And that report was obviously fairly damning because you look at that and you say. The average transformer that’s out there is going to be or already is, 10 years out of date from when it should have been replaced. And so you look at that and what something like Giga Energy is doing is we’re building sites, which adds megawatts to the grid as well, right?

So whenever we’re building sites. We’re hooking up utilities. We’re putting this electrical infrastructure in. We’re adding more megawatts to the grid and making the grid more resilient in doing so. But in doing that, we’re also, again, adding, not just the megawatts themselves, but we’re adding the pieces that deal with those megawatts, so these transformers, all the electrical infrastructure that goes into that. And so in doing so, we’re adding more of those pieces to the grid and trying to make the grid more resilient. So overall, if we were looking at a split of what that is, I don’t think I could say it’s about half and half. ‘Cause a data center project is robust. It takes so much time to build one of those up.

But again, we’ll get orders for very large orders for transformers or for substations. And those can be major multimillion dollar pieces of equipment because the scalable electricity you’re talking about comes into that. So it’s a funny industry because unlike SaaS, it’s never a recurring subscription, somebody will call you and say, we need a massive piece of machinery that’s going to live for the next hundred years. And the whole time it needs to handle loads of electricity that could kill a thousand people at once if poked with your finger or more happily, power thousands of homes at once.

Jeff White: There you go. It’s an incredibly good news story because you’re talking about, advanced manufacturing coming online, you’re talking about, contributing massively to the American GDP while also making the grid more resilient and, so there’s all these different pieces, but how do you tell the story of Giga energy more broadly? Like what’s the overarching marketing messaging that you’re working on? 

Preston Wickersham: I think whenever I first came in, the story that I heard and the story that I quickly came to understand is that out throughout the rest of the industry, what we’re looking at is steaks and handshakes. You’ve been buying this stuff from somebody for the last 20 years. He sold it to your father at your company as well. And it’s just these relationships that have been there for so long. And when you come in to disrupt something like that, to disrupt your relationship, you can’t just come in and say, oh, we’re offering something faster, better, cheaper, whatever. You have to come in and say we’re going to be partners for a very long time. We’re going to be dependable. We’re going to be there if you need us. A post-sale support kind of thing. 

And so the story that we’ve started with really starts with our founders. And our founders are two young men, Matt Luster and Brent Whitehead Texas A&M graduates and, of course, Houston based company. And both of them got their start in the bitcoin world when they were 19 years old. And they were out in the oil fields of East Texas welding together their own data centers, I mean spray painting and welding their own stuff together. ‘Cause they wanted to give this a shot. They wanted to try it out. As often happens, whenever two entrepreneurial people get together and start working on things, they say, oh, we can do this ourselves. Like we don’t need to buy it from somebody. Let’s do it. And so they start doing it and they say, okay, we can weld together our own data centers out of old shipping containers and whatever we find. And after they do that and they say, great, we need power. Why does it take two years for us to get a crappy transformer that isn’t gonna work? And why won’t anybody call us and talk to us? So they say, we built the data center, we could probably build the transformer too.

And that was truly the beginning of the electrical infrastructure part of the story where they say, okay, we can take over that part of the supply chain too. And so six years ago, that’s what happened. They said, alright, we’re gonna start manufacturing that. So they shipped off one of their early leaders to manufacturing centers and said, okay help us figure this out. Like, how do we make these things? In doing so, they said, okay, now we make transformers. And then they said, okay now we’ve opened our factory in Long Beach, California to do this. The switchboards are an incredibly important part of this. We’ll make those too. And so in doing that for a long time, we weren’t selling to people who were buying these pieces of equipment. We were building them because we, the founders, wanted the machinery and the equipment for their own use cases. People talk a lot in SaaS about dogfooding at remote.com.

We talked about that because we used our own HR and payroll software. To run our own HR and pay us. And these guys were doing dogfooding in terms of manufacturing our equipment because we need the equipment that we’re building, which is a very unusual case in the manufacturing industry. That happened and as the company grew and as they started doing more of this, people started to come up to them and say. Can I buy these pieces of equipment that you’re building? Can I buy these three phase pad mounts? We don’t really do one phase pad mounts anymore, or one phase transformers, but we do a lot of three phase pad mounts. And somebody came and said, Hey, can we buy those? And they said, yeah we’re building them. We have the supply chain, we have the infrastructure. And over time they quickly realized that we’ve actually solved this problem of speed, especially for being a smaller company. At the time when they were doing this, they weren’t going to sell a 2000 transformer order to somebody who was going to go to Schneider or something like that. But they could fill out, if that person needed another 80 to 100 phase pad mount, they could say, yeah, we can take that order for you, especially if you’re waiting on this massive order from Eaton or Schneider or one of these big ancient operations that’s been doing this forever. And then as the company has grown, we’ve obviously taken on bigger orders now. We do, like I mentioned, substation, transformers, medium voltage, high voltage substations. And we’ve really expanded out the footprint of what we can handle within the electrical infrastructure. So we do continue to this day.

And of course as AI has come about, we continue to build out those data center projects to refine our approach to what that looks like, to continue to increase what we do in our product lines. And of course now we’re able to build up not just the modular data centers with the shipping containers and the other equipment involved in that. But of course, now we can do the full AI factories. The buildings that you hear about are established buildings with GPUs inside, and then they’re running and humming and powering all the data center AI boom. That, as I mentioned, is pretty much the entire reason the economy didn’t slide backwards last year.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, you hear about the concept of dogfooding so much in SaaS. To your point, you don’t hear it so much in the manufacturing space, but when you do, it’s so powerful because the proof is just built in, right? When you think about everybody else, if you’re working in product development or whatever you’re trying to, in some ways stay synchronized with the customer you can be as good about that as you want to be, but you’re still not the customer. You’re still having to, in some ways, relate to the customer and hope that the product you’re building meets that need in a square peg, square hole kind of fashion. In this instance, I’d be curious, Preston when you think about it, you mentioned Schneider and Eaton and other big players like that… I guess it makes me wonder, have you found a way to build, essentially equipment that is of the same or similar spec, just faster, or have you found now that you’re actually building different equipment because you know it more intimately like, your transformers or what do you fundamentally offer a different bit of value because of how they’re built? Or are we running to the same spec but just getting there faster? 

Preston Wickersham: Yeah, that’s a great question and I will say that we are able to build things that are not only fast, but they are different and differentiated. And so lead times are very much something that we pride ourselves on in an area where we routinely beat a lot of the bigger players. Because simply, if you are somebody smaller and you need something like this it’s pretty common whenever you’re working with one of these bigger people, especially if you’re a distributor or someone like that where you will send an email, you’ll call and you will wait weeks and weeks to hear back from one of these people. So lead times are certainly part of it, but the actual equipment that we’re selling is also very advanced and very good. I’ll use our switchboards as an example here, because that is an area where switchboards can be incredibly complicated depending on what you go on. So recently we actually had… I don’t know if our engineering team wants me to say this because they turned this project around so quickly that I don’t think they want me to advertise that they can do this and they are capable of doing this, but I’m gonna do it anyway. 

So we had an order. As kind of an intermediary between us and one of the big publicly traded AI companies. Like a name that every single person who has ever read the news is very familiar with, and we had one of these big AI companies on the other end of it, and they needed an incredibly complicated switchboard that had all these different modularities to it, and it needed to be completed within five weeks. So from spec to shipped and onsite and ready to go in five weeks, which is a crazy timeline to do anything. And so this is something that if you’d approached a legacy provider, they’ll be talking to you about months, not weeks. And it would be… 

Carman Pirie: You’re not even returning the phone call within five weeks.

Preston Wickersham: Oh yeah no, exactly. So we’re talking about something crazy like that. And so not only did we manage to turn it around in five weeks, but the customization inside which we were able to do. It’s like any startup story, right? Like what does the small startup have against the big industry or the big established player, it’s agility, it’s flexibility, it’s adaptability, it’s saying we can do that because we’re still building out a lot of these things. And the nice thing about Giga is that, again, because we’re dogfooding this, they’re saying, okay, how do we know that you can do this? How do we know that? And a lot of the legacy players would say, oh, we’ve done extensive testing. Oh, we have these certifications, and Giga has those certifications, and we’ve done the testing. But we also say, oh yeah, we’ve got this in the backyard because we opened a site, we have sites all across the country, and we can say, if you wanna see how it’s working, how it’s in operation, come look at our factory, where we’re using it outside. Come look at our data center sites around the country where these switchboards and these transformers are working right now. And yeah the quality of the equipment is top notch. And again that’s part of the American engineering difference. There are of course people who will say they will have a faster lead time than we have, because a lot of the time what they’re doing is they’re an intermediary for, one of the cheaper operations coming out of China or India, where they’re saying, we’ll get you a transformer, we’ll get you a three-phase pad mount and we’ll get it to in three, four weeks.

But it’s going to be what was in stock already. In one of these international manufacturers, they won’t have the engineering team internally. So for us, if we sell that, you’ll get the product, it’s a quality product, and then once you are energizing it and installing it, we also have our post-sale support team, which is all American engineers living here, boots on the ground. So if you say, Hey, I don’t get it. I don’t know how this works, or Hey, I don’t know if this is what we ordered. Can you help us? We send a guy out there on a plane and he’s there the next day or whatever, and he’s boots on the ground. He’s an engineer. He’s living here in the United States, and he can walk onto your site and tell you what’s going on. How to get the most of your order, how to hook everything up. It’s a pretty incredible system when you really start to think about it, especially given the humble origins of welding out in the oil fields by ourselves. 

Jeff White: It’s almost an embarrassment of riches for a marketer to have access to all of these different stories to tell. You have exceptionally interesting, well-engineered, American equipment that is in place and running and doing the thing that people want to use it for. I’m assuming charismatic founders as well, if you’re also able to leverage their energy, as part of your marketing palette. What made you choose to go down the road of promoting the founders’ message over all of these other things, which clearly are a competitive advantage for Giga?

Preston Wickersham: Yeah, I think we… I wouldn’t say that we are choosing one over the other, honestly, because the founder story is incredible and one of the reasons that we talk about it is because people are very interested in it. How can two people so young come into an industry like this? And again, Giga Energy is already more than six years old, I think now. And yes, the founders are young, but the company has already been around… And when I say six years old, we’ve been producing and creating equipment and opening data centers and manufacturing things for years. And so people get very surprised when it’s… It’s very common for say, a VC funded company, right? To come in and say, oh, we had a vision and we raised a bunch of money. And it’s very uncommon for a situation like Giga where you ask, who are your investors? Who are your backers? And we’re saying, oh, we just built stuff and sold it to customers. And that’s where all the money came from. We built it and we sold it. We built it, and we continued to grow and grow because there was demand. So we never had to do a pitch and prove product market fit. 

The product market fit was that the founders ran and opened the company. And so that was a pretty powerful story and people were very interested in knowing that. And it brings a lot of comfort to people who are potentially buying products from Giga or partnering with Giga because, there’s no secret, there’s no, we’re not racing to please somebody else on the outside. The board is the leadership at the company, right? The leadership of the company is the people who were at the very beginning doing the building of this themselves. Now of course we’ve hired a wonderful and robust engineering team in multiple different places. The founders aren’t there welding quite as much as they used to be, as far as I know.

I don’t think we want them doing that if we can avoid it. But we have hired better engineers than they were back in their youth, but they know the story of the founders is really cool. And it guides the ethos of the company, which is very ownership heavy, very, we trust you to figure it out. We’ve given you a responsibility and a role and we’ll trust you to do that. And that permeates throughout the company. And it gives everybody a lot of ownership and a lot of autonomy to do what’s good. And in doing so, it attracts attention because people like it when a company is doing what they say they’re going to do and they aren’t waiting for a broader climate to, again, I’m talking about VC money and SaaS and what it’s like to work for a company where you’re beholden to timelines and goals that have nothing to do with whether the company is ready or whether the company has produced what it’s supposed to. You’re beholden to a lot of comparisons. Where at Giga, we’re all beholden to what is working, what do our customers want, and what are people actually buying? 

Carman Pirie: I wonder, Preston, when I think about these more disruptive stories, which this certainly is one, and I’m fairly certain that there’s nobody in your space that has a similar business model. Many folks look at this space that you play and say it’s one of the more conservative slices of manufacturing and industrial even. So do you still encounter those people where the disruptive nature of the story is actually not persuasive? Like they’re so conservative, there’s a reason why I used to say, look, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM or buying HP. It’s similar. Nobody ever gets fired for buying Schneider either. I’m sure there’s lots of benefits to having this story, but is that still one of the drawbacks?

Preston Wickersham: Absolutely it is. And that is again, that’s one of the reasons why the dogfooding aspect of this is so important is the proof points of if you’re going to sell to somebody who’s been in manufacturing for a long time, the first thing they’re going to wonder about is your reliability, your consistency, your longevity? Are you going, not only have you been here for a while, but are you going to be here 10, 20, 30 years from now? Is another question that they have. And one of the ways that we end up often working with, especially for distributors of electrical equipment or people who are already working with these bigger players is they will make a very large order from Eaton or Schneider or one of these big places. And one of those places will say, okay, yeah, we can get you 80% of what you want. But the rest of it’s going to take a long time. Like you can either find it somewhere else. We’ll give you the bulk of it and that person will say, okay, I’ve got my deal with Schneider or Eaton, or whoever it is, but I’ve still got 20% of this order that they’re not gonna be able to fill. What should I do? And so that’s an area where somebody like Giga can come in and say, Hey, if you need stuff that’s, again, the quality is unmatched. We’re not losing out on quality to anybody. The engineering is American, the manufacturing is American. We can go out and do the post-sale support and they’ll look at that and they’ll go, okay I’ve got another 20% of this transformer order. I’ll give it to you. 

That’s the way you get in the door as those smaller opportunities like that. And you get an opportunity to prove yourself and say, okay, yeah, like you’re still working with these big guys. We understand that we’re not trying to rip you out and replace everything that you’ve ever done. But we’d love an opportunity to show you that we are going to be just as good. The lead times are going to be better. The post-sale support, if you are used to buying industrial equipment in the United States, the post-sale support is going to shock you, we don’t just respond. But we know what we’re talking about and we’ll go look at it. Like it’s not just, we’re gonna answer the phone, which we are. We’re not just gonna answer the emails, which we are, but we know what you’re talking about. We’ll send a guy out there and we’ll figure it out together. And that responsiveness does play a really big part in developing those relationships.

Distributors and people who work in that area can be very transactional because, when you have a list of a hundred or 200 pieces of equipment you need to buy, you’re not going to just depend on pricing. That whole thing, like there is a relational component to it, but you have so much to do. Your plate is so full that you can’t be bothered to spend all of this time nurturing a relationship and talking to it. It’s Hey, we can get you what you need. We promise we will. And the relationship is built upon the consistency and the reliability and the dependability of, Hey, I need something.

It’s a bid for a relationship. My partner’s a clinical psychologist who specializes in relationships, and what she would say is it’s a bid for connection, right? So a bid for connection will be: Hey, I need some equipment. And that’s a bid for connection. Are you going to give it to me at the timeline I want with the specs I want? Is it gonna be in the place where it needs to be on the correct timeline? And once you fulfill that, those bids keep coming back and forth. And over time, that’s how you develop a relationship is that every time I do this, Giga shows up, they’re reliable, they’re consistent, and they get me what I need. And then you just build those relationships over time. So yeah, disruptive can be a scary word, especially in a place where you don’t want a disruptive transformer, but you might want a disruptive relationship with somebody who makes them. And so that’s the area where we’re trying to get better. 

Carman Pirie: Preston, I can’t believe you waited until a half hour into this conversation before dropping the whole piece about your significant other. I mean that this opens up an entirely other episode of the podcast. We’ve had one other guest that I can remember who had a spouse in a similar space, and that led us to some interesting conversation about the relationship dynamics that frankly still make my mind spin to this day. I think we’re gonna have to stop on this one and hit record again and just pick up a relationship based podcast. 

But no, I really thank you for sharing your story with us today, Preston. It’s been lovely to have you on the show. I wonder, you’ve made in some way a transition that a lot of people, I think a lot of other marketers ought to be thinking about making is how do they take skill sets that they may be honed outside of manufacturing and industrial marketing, but start to apply it there. What piece of advice would you give to somebody following in your footsteps if they were you a year ago? What’s the number one piece of advice you’d give them? 

Preston Wickersham: Stay curious and stay humble. I think it would be, and I don’t mean humble in a, oh, you’re gonna be successful, but stay humble. What I mean by that is, as I mentioned at the very beginning of the show, I started out as a journalist. I was a writer. I am a writer by trade. That’s where my skills became the strongest. That’s where if you pick me up and drop me in anywhere, I’m going to be the best writer in most of these places. And it’s because I spent a long time crafting that skill. Whenever I had an agency, it wasn’t just a general marketing agency, we were a writing agency and I developed the bulk of the work there. And so I spent a very long time getting good at the craft of writing and communicating that way, and AI came around and just blew up a lot of that. And am I still a better writer than what’s gonna come out of a lot of AI? Yes. Am I such a better writer that somebody is going to pay me versus the $20 a month subscription to OpenAI to have that writing? No, probably not. And nor should they. So I would say staying curious means getting into the new tools, the new opportunities that come around. I’ve been in software forever. I loved the idea of the big software company. You’re always working from home, you’re doing the cushy thing. But manufacturing came around. I said, you know what? I’m looking around the AI revolution that’s happening and the needs for the power that’s going to be behind it. I would love to be involved with the companies that are building that infrastructure. The thing that I talk about Giga a lot is the AI Gold Rush is happening in California, in Austin, but the picks and shovels that are powering that gold rush are being built by Giga, in Houston.

And that was a really compelling piece of that for me, and I was very curious about that. And for anybody who’s looking to either make a pivot in their career as a marketer or to do something just a little, whether you’re a marketer or not, do something different. I would say the thing about staying humble is I can’t out race what AI is going to do forever. And I’m not saying that you need to jump in and just say, okay, I’m an AI guy now. But you need to stay curious about how that changes things for you. You need to stay curious about what that’s going to mean. And you need to stay humble and say, okay, the skills that I’ve developed are still valuable. Like the fact that I’m a writer makes me so much better at a lot of these AI use cases than anything else. And sometimes just good writing has to be done. There’s a lot of cases where you need to write an email to a very important person, or you need to communicate something in a customer order very well. Or there’s a PR opportunity, if you say the right thing people are going to notice if you say the wrong thing, maybe nobody notices. It doesn’t hurt you, but you miss out on an opportunity. So I think the humility of that is never saying, oh, I’ve done this. I’m good at this. I’m gonna rely on what I have.

It’s saying, okay, things change. What I do today is not going to be what I do 10 years from now. Things advance too quickly to be too proud of that. So I say, if you were just getting started, you may have heard a lot of advice about how things work. You used to hear from people born in maybe the mid 1900s who would tell you to walk around and bring your resume places and shake hands. And of course anybody who’s been born in the last 40 years or so knows that really doesn’t work anymore. But all of the advice that you’ve also heard about, oh, go to school and get your software engineering degree. And then get out there in the world and everything’s gonna be fine. That really doesn’t work anymore either. There’s a whole new world that’s popping up. We have an abundance of people who are doing this code stuff. And now if you look around manufacturing, if you look around the marketing that surrounds all these things, there’s a very broad new greenfield of opportunity that you can do a lot in. But you have to be curious and you can’t be obsessed with the skills that you develop to get there. You have to continue to develop the new skills to operate in the new world. 

Jeff White: Man there… There’s another podcast we could have right there.  

Carman Pirie: Yeah, exactly. Great advice. Preston, thank you for joining us today. It’s wonderful to have you on the show. 

Preston Wickersham: Oh, thank you for inviting me. It’s been a pleasure.