Harnessing the 'Backyard Advantage': Lisa Thee's Perspective on AI, Community, and Change

In this enlightening episode, we took an inspiring journey with Lisa Thee, an AI expert and author of "Go, Reboot Your Career in 90 Days," who uses technology to disrupt the world of human trafficking. From witnessing a harrowing encounter in Kuala Lumpur to navigating the complex world of data privacy, Lisa's journey is a testament to the transformative power of AI in combating human trafficking and advocating for social justice.

We traced Lisa's path from the corporate world to entrepreneurship, and she shared candid insights into her struggles with balancing work, family, and health setbacks. She urged us to recognize the importance of setting boundaries and finding mentors, sponsors, and therapists who can guide us on our journey.

We ended the conversation with an insightful discussion on the 'backyard advantage' concept, a philosophy Lisa uses to foster love and support within our communities. We pondered how technology and AI are reshaping the job market and underscored the importance of staying current in this ever-evolving landscape.

Lisa will be speaking at GFX2023 and sharing her insights on AI and its potential for social justice. Attendees will also have the chance to purchase her book "Go, Reboot Your Career in 90 Days" and get it signed by Lisa herself. This episode is a powerful reminder of the potential of AI in preventing harm and advocating for the voiceless. Join us on this enlightening episode and immerse yourself in the transformative power of AI and its potential for social justice.

Lisa's Website: https://lisathee.com/
Purchase her book: https://www.amazon.com/Go-Reboot-Your-Career-Days/dp/1639080597

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If this episode inspires you to be part of the movement, and you believe, like me, that entrepreneurs are the answer to our future, message me so we can join forces to support building truly great companies in our region. 
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Subscribe to my channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCom_​... 
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Mark Haney is a serial entrepreneur that has experience growing companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He is currently the CEO and founder of HaneyBiz 
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This video includes personal knowledge, experiences, and opinions about Angel Investing by seasoned angel investors.  This content is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal, tax, investment, or financial advice.  Nothing in this video constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, or endorsement.

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Episode Transcript

Mark Haney (00:00):
And now it is my pleasure to bring on Lisa Thie.
She is she's an expert on AI, but much, much more than that.
She's a very successful business person.
She advises companies and so much more.
So we're gonna get to know her and I was just talking to her before the show about her website.
I looked at her website.
I think it's lisathecom, it is the HEEcom and that website pops.

(00:24):
I mean it stands out, it's got your picture on there and all the different things that you do around your TED Talks and all the different organizations that you help Impressive.

Lisa Thee (00:33):
Thank you so much, Mark.
It was such a great referral that I got actually from the entrepreneur community locally.
Greg Connelly suggested Launch Titans and I've had an excellent experience with them.

Mark Haney (00:43):
Amazing, amazing, and so we're gonna get to know you a little bit, because some of the things in artificial intelligence we think of that as maybe some abstract thing, but you're actually working with it to help solve real problems and so you're an expert in that realm.
So kind of wanna talk broadly about AI but some of the stuff that you're doing.

(01:06):
So maybe you should give us a little bit of your background and how you got from point A to here.

Lisa Thee (01:11):
Absolutely, absolutely.
So I am an accidental technologist.
When I got to college, I remember calling home and saying to my mom I'm so excited I picked my major, I'm gonna be a social worker.
And she said awesome, I pay for engineering school but feel free to study whatever you'd like.
And at 18, I wasn't sure I wanted to take on that much debt, and so I just kind of went with what my family suggested that I do, and so with that, I've always been looking for ways to improve things for humanity from a social justice perspective through the lens of using technology as a tool.

(01:49):
So, working at a large multinational tech company for a decade, I got exposed to a lot of cool things that were happening in personalized medicine and different ways that we were able to take just oceans of information and find the signals and the noise to be able to make a difference in somebody's life or in society.

(02:09):
And one of the places where I really wanted to see improvement is in the areas of marginalized women and children.
I think that flame got ignited in me when I was an IT manager in my late 20s and I got to travel to 36 countries before the age of 30.
And so, being a woman that was raised in the US, I've had a lot of opportunity to step into my power and have a voice or a seat at the table, but I recognized that was not something that was common in all the places that I was traveling to, and so I felt this call that there's really no reason to have power unless you democratize it to people that maybe don't have a voice, and that started me on my journey for disrupting human trafficking.

(02:52):
I think part of that is just family history.
Being second generation of stateless refugees that came to this country in a really dire situation, I've always been called to advocate for those who maybe are without a voice.

Mark Haney (03:08):
Okay, let me stop you there for a second.
You said you have personal experience that people are migrating here.
Is that what I wanted to get to?
Yeah, my grandparents.
I haven't heard the story.

Lisa Thee (03:20):
Yeah, my grandparents came over as stateless refugees my grandfather from China after living in a refugee camp for a decade after World War II and my grandmother after being rescued by a Canadian soldier from the concentration camp when the World War II ended.

Mark Haney (03:38):
What's your grandparents?

Lisa Thee (03:40):
That's my grandparents, and so I've always seen what can happen when good people watch but don't step in, and I wanted to be more part of the solution than part of the problem, and so I don't really have any history with any kind of abuse, with human trafficking or those things, but I did feel like it's something we can do something about.

(04:05):
I can relate as a mother watching your child struggle.
I can relate as a friend watching your friend make a bad decision that might lead down a path they can't anticipate.
I can relate as a mentor to people that maybe have made one or two bad choices that led them down a path that they are having a hard time unwinding.
And so, through local work with places like Women's Empowerment, I got really passionate around trying to help people get back on track and earn that dignity of a paycheck, and I think that my work in IT and seeing that a more global perspective allowed me to kind of widen the aperture and wanna do something more to help identify the people that are in need and need just a little bit of opportunity or course correction so that not only them but their children and their grandchildren can have an opportunity to have a flourishing life, and so, after seeing it real time in places like Kuala Lumpur, I was in a bar late at night cause I was all jet lagged and my time zones were off.

Mark Haney (05:09):
Anyway, that's why I go to them too.
Yeah, yeah.

Lisa Thee (05:13):
And of course it's not for anything else, mark, but I remember seeing two very young children being trafficked.

Mark Haney (05:22):
Oh my gosh.
Right in front of me, you saw it right in front of you.

Lisa Thee (05:24):
In that bar and it was like a Tuesday night, and what was so shocking to me was that it wasn't a surprise to anyone else there.

Mark Haney (05:33):
And what could you do as a whatever, a non-citizen, somebody like visiting?
You're not in a position of power or authority.

Lisa Thee (05:41):
No, not at all, and so what I found was I wasn't able to do something in that moment, but it helped me to carry it forward so that, when I did get more advanced in my career, I could go past like maybe buying bracelets that were made by survivors to things like being able to help point this really powerful technology wave of artificial intelligence towards benefiting women and children globally, because a lot of the things that I learned about this crime it really does get tied in with cartels.

(06:15):
It gets tied in with people that trafficked people typically trafficked guns, they trafficked drugs, but they trafficked humans because it's something you can sell over and over again.

Mark Haney (06:25):
It's so sad We've had Ashley Bryant on our show Three Strands.
I know you're involved in advising on that company, but I'm seeing the disconnect because I wanted you to bridge this gap for me.
How does technology help in this fight, this terrible problem?

Lisa Thee (06:45):
Boy.
Wasn't that a disconnect?
I was pondering for a few years there as well.
So what I found was, when I re-entered the tech workplace after having my own children working again at Intel, I learned that through a documentary they had sponsored, that 72% of human trafficking victims in the United States are actually products of our child welfare system.

(07:08):
So it's our foster youth, it's our most vulnerable, maybe the families that have had visits from Child Protective Services, things like that, and being a parent of young children.
At that time there was just this mama bear instinct in me like not on my watch, like I know what it takes to try to advocate for my own children, and if there's no one there doing that for you, like how do you ever get through the gauntlet of all these tender ages where you can get pulled off track?

Mark Haney (07:35):
And would I remember hearing from Ashley and just kind of understanding this is it's less around, at least in America, around swiping kids up and throwing them in the car real quick, like kidnapping, like you might picture kidnapping.
There's more coercion and coaxing of this to almost get people to find a new friend and next thing you know you're in the midst of some real bad people.

Lisa Thee (08:01):
You're spot on, mark, and that's where the connection to technology comes in, where what I learned through the process of discovering more, working with law enforcement and some of the nonprofits that help to facilitate the communications between the tech companies and the local law enforcement people that recover children from this terrible crime, is that a lot of technology is used at those trends of social and mobile and cloud that have allowed us to build online communities.

(08:27):
But unfortunately, sometimes when you invite people to a party, you don't know who's actually joining, and so, by giving people these powerful tools to connect, some small percentages of those people that are connecting have really bad intentions of connecting with children and forging relationships to manipulate and coerce them.

(08:47):
So when I got into the data and learned at the scale with which this was happening, not only locally but globally, I thought, my goodness, this is a great problem to point technology at, because what technology is good at is looking at math, looking at repetitive patterns like that tedious stuff, and when I would job shadow law enforcement, I would see them just scrolling page after page after page, trying to find a match between the advertisement for someone and a missing child's report, for example, and I would look at that, from the eyes of kind of the work I did for my day job, which is process automation and optimization, how can we start to use some of the tools we use for business in order to apply those to the problems of social justice?

(09:32):
And so we were able to take a partnership approach with Google and Microsoft and Intel to partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children out in Alexandria, virginia, which is the national reporting location for all child sexual abuse material online.
Congress has appointed them to do that work.

(09:53):
They facilitate all the reports from all the tech companies like Metta and the big companies that are catching this kind of behavior and getting it to the local law enforcement agencies that can actually go recover those children.
When we got involved, it was taking them 30 days to be able to process all the information on a report to get it over to law enforcement.
By using artificial intelligence and being able to create something specific for them, we could catch the one time that they screwed up and didn't use a Tor network or the dark web to complete their crime and identify where they were, so that we were sending the reports to the right law enforcement agencies for recovery.

(10:32):
So we were able to accelerate that timeline from a 30 day manual process for their analysts down to 24 hours, which freed them up to do so much more of the investigation and writing more thorough reports so that when law enforcement got involved they had so much more to go on.

Mark Haney (10:46):
And that just sparked that entrepreneurial flame in me that I wanted to keep going, do you feel like it does more in terms of, like, prevention or solving it once it's in the process.

Lisa Thee (10:59):
That's a great segue mark.
What I learned going through that process with them for the two years that we deployed that, was that, unfortunately, the crime is just doubling every year.
Oh wow, and so when we started when I started getting aware of this work back in 2013, they had about half a million cases to follow up on each year.
By the time that you fast forward to even the pandemic timeframe, there was 21 million cases to follow up on with a team of 25 analysts.

(11:26):
You just can't keep adding people to the mix when the growth is that accelerated, and so I wanted to look at ways where we could do something to help on the prevention side.
Honestly, the trauma cleanup business is just too hard on my tender little heart to stay in, and so we focused on the 40% of cases where these images are being created by children themselves because they are making a bad choice, maybe with a dating partner or somebody that they think they're talking to.

(11:54):
But it's really a catfish situation.
To help with that sex distortion piece of making sure that kids don't have the ability to make a 30 second decision that can really put them in a very precarious future.
Did you say sex?

Mark Haney (12:06):
distortion.
I did.
Okay, I hadn't heard that term before, but is that yours or that's the?
Is that the industry standard term?

Lisa Thee (12:15):
It is.
So.
It is a crime where somebody takes an explicit image of someone and then uses it to extort them to send more images and more pervasive images, and it's something that or threatens to maybe release it to their families or other things in order to coerce them into doing other behaviors.

Mark Haney (12:32):
So so I'm imagining, okay, so you mentioned these large organizations very large, the largest in the world that have all this data Google, Meta, others and getting them to cooperate with law enforcement it's interesting because we all are concerned about data privacy and those kinds of things and then to get everybody to work together.

(12:58):
I just hear I'd picture the nightmare associated with getting everybody to work together and not have the wrong information get into the wrong hands and so on.

Lisa Thee (13:06):
Yeah, the good news is I didn't have to coordinate any.
Those things were already happening.
I got to come in and just do a little bit of fine tuning.
So, for example, there is a process called the cyber tip report.
If you identify something illegal content on your platform as a business owner, that's something that's an industry standard and they were already making those reports.

(13:27):
The good news on the privacy front is because they are only matching images of known the loneliest content.
It's really more of a kind of a fingerprint matching system.
So the same way that maybe your spam filter would look at hashes and be able to imagine saying, yep, this is a problem, I'm not gonna let this spammer in, that's kind of what they're doing with these images?

(13:48):
So it's not.
It's very lightweight and it really protects the privacy of the customers.
But what happens is, once those are reported, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has the purview to actually look into them and follow up with law enforcement.

Mark Haney (14:03):
Well, I love that we're talking about AI and technology being good for society and you know so, helping solve a horrific problem which makes it good for society.
But if you turn on the news which I try not to watch too much mainstream media it's there's really a lot of questions about is AI good and where are we going?

(14:25):
So, as an expert in that realm and this technology, maybe just kind of give us your sense as to where are we at.
I think we're in the early innings, or maybe in the beginning of the first inning on AI.
Is it good, what's good about it and what are we worried about?
Should we be worried?

Lisa Thee (14:43):
Absolutely so.
First and foremost, I wanna start with a simple statement that I stand by.
Ai is a tool, not a solution.
It is not good, it is not bad.
It's like asking if a hammer is good in the scenario of building a house or maybe committing a murder.

Mark Haney (14:59):
Okay, yeah.

Lisa Thee (15:00):
It's the tool that you use.
It is a very powerful tool and it's a tool that's getting easier and easier to use and it's getting more democratized.
And the days that I was doing started doing this work back in 2015, the people that had the data to train these models were very few and far between.

(15:21):
They were the large cloud providers that have access to lots and lots of training data.
Today, with some of the things that have become more available to society, with things like open AI and their chat GBT model, what you're finding is that you no longer need to have a lot of money and a lot of technical know-how in order to be able to leverage the output of AI, and I think that's why we're seeing it much more in the public lens.

(15:46):
So let me give you an example of how we applied AI in the company that I founded as an entrepreneur in order to try to benefit society, because I think it will show you a way it can be used for good, but probably a way that it could have been flipped on its side and be used differently.
So when we saw that problem of the 40% of that content being identified being created by children, my thought was my goodness we couldn't get in that much trouble if we tried as kids growing up.

(16:14):
What would you go to?
Like Walgreens and get your pictures developed Like there were?

Mark Haney (16:18):
real world people that would be involved in that.
Come on, that's me.
Yeah, oh, we're right up there together, Mark don't you worry.

Lisa Thee (16:27):
It just seemed ridiculous to me that, like parents and companies even had to be this proactive about this kind of issue.
It just wasn't something that was a big problem going back a couple generations before we had digital natives or we managed it through the Postal Service, for example, to identify it.
So what we wanted to do was use the AI on the chip of a device to say hey, wait a minute, this is a naked image.

(16:53):
This phone belongs to a child, do not save, because, as we know, once things get up in the cloud and get distributed, it's virtually impossible to get them back.
So in that instance, I think that's a way that AI can be applied to be proactive, and it's really just reinforcing the rules that we have in society into the digital world.

Mark Haney (17:13):
So the machine or the artificial intelligence identifies that the picture of the person.
They're not clothed, yes, and it's a.
You know, humans can't go looking at all that stuff because it's too much information.
But the machine can actually identify just based upon the characteristics and then stop it.

Lisa Thee (17:34):
Yeah and just say you know, do not save.
Simple as that.
So that's an example of how we were trying to apply it back in 2017, 2018.
What we're seeing today is it's expanding to a lot of different areas.
I certainly never envisioned during those days when I was still trying to figure out what all this was and, mind you, I had access some of the best experts in the world on these technologies and I would sit in rooms with these people trying to solve some of these challenges and I literally did not think I spoke English.

(18:05):
I'm like the words they're using.
I don't understand the way that they approach.
It is very new and novel to me.
So, even having an engineering background, it was really intimidating to be around, but because we are all aligned around wanting to make an impact on the same problem, it allowed us to come together and just bring our skills.
I'm much more of a salesperson and a connector than I am a technologist these days.

(18:27):
I would not hire me to build you anything at this point in time, but I do speak enough technical lingo to know how to coordinate all the people that can come along on the journey.
And so, using data science, using artificial intelligence, it could be really intimidating because they use math language and statistics language and computer programming kinds of references.

(18:49):
But at the end of the day, really what it is is you're taking a large amount of data and compute power, understanding, based on the labels of the data, what kind of patterns it can pick up in historical information and then making predictions about the future based on that.
And the data sets get so big it's just not what people can't process at a certain point, and so that's what I try to simplify artificial intelligence to, because, just the same way that children learn by practice how to get good at maybe throwing a baseball, for example, that's what's been happening with computers on training these models over the last 20 or 30 years.

(19:26):
You're not explicitly saying go find me, open hand, grasp ball, lift arm, pull back, Like you would with traditional software programming.
Ai is showing examples of and then we're giving feedback as humans back to the computers about whether they got their guess right or not, and I think when you take it down to just the simple brass tax of things, it makes it more accessible to more people and the reason I decided to write a book in this area and I do a lot of the keynote speaking I do is because I really want to see more people coming into this field to be leading, Because we are all co-creating the world that we want to live in and we want to raise our generations in.

(20:08):
And artificial intelligence is just as much about understanding the business or society problem that you're trying to solve with the technology as it is the technology itself.

Mark Haney (20:18):
Yeah, you and I both are involved in helping startups.
We do a lot of investing.
Right now we are seeing many, many companies coming out with AI.
In some form they're using AI to really attack these problems and sometimes it's really like nuanced problems, one of them that we just invested into I think it's interesting.

(20:43):
We have some that are curing disease and doing all this.
You know really big stuff, but something that's kind of big for a guy like me that it might be like a sales guy is using a CRM, right, using our, you know, like a Salesforce or a HubSpot or something like that, and you got to do all that data entry.
As you talk to a customer, you do a Zoom call.

(21:03):
There's all this data entry associated, paying the butt for somebody who's more of the people person.
We invested in a company called 4pm and the name of the company was derived from a kind of that idea that, at the end of the day, don't you hate doing all that input?
What if it was taken from your Zoom call or your meeting and automatically uploaded into Salesforce?

(21:25):
And you know all your next call was said, all the different little to-dos associated with being a sales rep go away, they're automated, and so these little nuanced business things that are very important to some of us may not be the big societal problems, but like making us way more efficient.

Lisa Thee (21:46):
Oh, don't get me wrong, I live in a capitalist society, so all the time that I was running these projects on the side, I was doing my day job as a salesperson.
So I think we can all say anybody that carries a bag for a living hates having to go in and log into all the systems and put in all the pipeline information.
I think we all suffer from that affliction, and those are high cost resources for businesses that have really special, unique talents, and so I think that's a really great example of how AI can be an accelerant as a in partnership with the human right.

(22:16):
The humans still having the meeting, they're still leading the discussion, but the technology is helping them to accelerate some of that work that has to happen on the back end to bring alignment across the whole organization, and so I think that I think that's the more of where we're going to see AI in the future.
So I think a lot of what's talked about in terms of the scary part of AI that we hear about in the news taking over and you know being, you know self aware and all the things I'm not too worried about that in my lifetime, maybe in my children's lifetime.

(22:48):
I think in the short run, what we will see is it is something that allows us to have more free time, more discretionary energy for innovation, for creativity, for relationship building, to do the things that are uniquely human and but also be able to do the things that are part of work, because if it was all fun all the time, they wouldn't pay us, right, mark.

Mark Haney (23:11):
Yeah, so successful, busy mom.
This is interesting because you're a technologist, successful, busy mother and you're on I don't know how many you're on boards of directors.
You're on advisory boards.
You've got a well known Ted talk.
You've got your own podcast.
How do you do it all?

(23:32):
How did I mean?
Okay, that's a lot.

Lisa Thee (23:35):
I don't think that I'm going to win in the how do you do it all argument.
Mark, I think you are definitely doing more than I am.

Mark Haney (23:42):
Being a mom is more than anything I've ever contemplated doing in my entire life.

Lisa Thee (23:46):
Well, to be fair, first and foremost, I don't do it by myself.
My husband is an active participant, and that's thank goodness, or we both wouldn't make it.
Number two, some days aren't as graceful as others.
Try to focus on making sure I get the again, the signals in the noise right, and that's probably why my brain was more focused on things like that.

(24:07):
It's like why do these things have to take so long?
If I could just recover my time doing blotty, blotty, blot, then I could be spending more time in my kids classroom with them or things like that, right?
So the answer is I am really getting better in my 40s around boundaries.
It's not really a word I use very often no, sometimes right.

(24:30):
Exactly.
But I recognize every yes I say to the world is a no I say to myself and my family.
And unfortunately I had to get a little bit hard for me to learn that lesson.
I found myself working on a morphine drip in the hospital after a back injury.
Oh boy because the mission of the work.
I was going to South by Southwest in a few weeks and I was really having a hard time balancing how do I push, how do I decide whether to push through my pain or accept the pain of others, because I'm not moving advancements in the problem to help them faster, and it got me into some unhealthy thinking.

(25:05):
So I credit a lot of time invested in me with mentors, sponsors and therapists to help me understand that I didn't create these problems.
They're probably not going to be solved in one human lifetime and we all need to just focus on what we can do.
So I I put building blocks in place intentionally so that I don't need to be everywhere all the time.

(25:31):
You know, once you do the Ted Talk and it's recorded, once you can send it to people and it's very quick to do, I do a lot of executive coaching for friends and family on, you know, making that transition from the corporate world into entrepreneurship.
Well, I put all of that secret sauce in the book so that I shouldn't be like you know, like I just want to get that.

Mark Haney (25:50):
you knocked out a project, you knocked out the book, you knocked out the Ted Talk, and so these things live on when they don't take as much of your time.

Lisa Thee (25:59):
Yeah, my dream is that it inspires the next generation of innovators to go step out into leadership, whether that be as entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs to go solve whatever they're passionate about.
Maybe it's raising the level of pop you know economic opportunity in the country that they're from.
Maybe it's helping to upskill people into the jobs of the future.

(26:22):
I think, when this new data economy we're all going to have to be lifelong learners, I can't really anticipate what the needs are going to be.
But I do know the dignity of a paycheck and I want people to have more opportunity to participate and I do believe with this wave of innovation there's going to be more of that.
But I think a lot of people opt out before they even try, and I certainly would have.

(26:42):
I never dreamed of running my own company.
That wasn't in my lexicon growing up in Detroit, michigan.
You know you got a good union job and maybe you get a lake house.
Yeah.

Mark Haney (26:53):
And a little bit like growing up in Sacramento.
You hope you get a job for the state.

Lisa Thee (26:55):
So you have peres and it's like, I hope I get a job with.

Mark Haney (26:58):
Jim, so that I've got all the union benefits.

Lisa Thee (27:01):
Absolutely so.
I got lucky that in my network of people my co-founder happened to work for Apple.
He had heard some of my ideas.
He was under an NDA so he wasn't able to say much back.
But our kids went to preschool together and he wanted to give back to Higgs legacy as well, and so when the iPhone 10 launched he called me up and said hey, I'm not under NDA anymore, let's go really make a dent in this problem.

(27:23):
And you know, when people show up with capital, when they show up with sweat equity, when they show up with passion, sometimes it helps you to rise past your fears.
That was definitely my experience and I hope that I inspire the next generation to at least try it.
Because, if nothing else, you know this from all the, all the impact that you make in our community mark, even if your business doesn't succeed, and the traditional money measures, the amount that you learn as a street MBA of running business, I mean from from the first day you go from.

(27:54):
You know whatever your expertise is into, like head of law, head of IT, head of HR, head of HR head, janitor, all the things right and so we.
You learn to be agile and nimble on your feet, you learn to think like an owner and no matter what you do past that, you're going to be a better employee.
You're going to be a better leader in your household.
There's so many things that come from being uncomfortable, and I think that we all have different things that we're really great at, and if we all focused on our strengths and stepping into leadership in those areas, we'd have a lot more progress for us all.

Mark Haney (28:27):
I agree.
You know behind me is a one of my favorite mantras.
I think I stole it from Walt Disney.
It's yes if dot dot dot.
So you can't see it on the camera if you're watching this on YouTube, but yes, if dot dot dot.
To me it has two meanings.
The first one is kind of something we were talking about a second ago.
How do you say no to things?

(28:47):
Well, yes, if does it tie to my building blocks, as you mentioned, or your mission or whatever you're working to accomplish in your life?
You can say yes more often if it.
You know it ties really well back to that.
But also in terms of building a business or creating a life with impact, or doing something that gets you out of your comfort zone, you know anything is possible, right, anything is possible if you have enough imagination, if you have enough commitment, if you have enough love and you for me, if I bring the right people onto my team to help me make, you know, cover up for all the stuff I suck at.

Lisa Thee (29:27):
Oh, success is not a solo sport.
There have been a ton of people that have supported my journey along the way and I hope to be support for others.
So you mentioned I'm on boards and this and that and the other.
That's why I do that right.
So if I'm an operator, I can focus on solving one problem and be married to it.
I feel like in this season of my career now I can help accelerate multiple entrepreneurs that are solving problems and HR and in helping whatever company they're focused on mental health and HR and all sorts of cool projects that people are working on distributed IO for the metaverse.

(30:07):
I get to be exposed to all these cool leading edge things and help to guide and accelerate and bring in resources.
But I'm not that that's like an hour or two of my month, it's not my whole day, every day.
So you're a thought leader.

Mark Haney (30:21):
As I mentioned at the beginning, you've got a website that describes your background, expertise, the kinds of things that you understand and kind of help help the rest of us to understand.
But you were also an operator.
You know you're a corporate operator.
These transitions can be, you know, interesting to navigate In terms of now are you in transition or are you like full time thought leader?

Lisa Thee (30:51):
I think we're all in transition all the time, Mark.
So the answer is yes and.
So I host a podcast and a web series helping people understand AI better.
For launch consulting, I'm their managing director of data and AI.
That's kind of my day job that.
I show up to as an author.

Mark Haney (31:12):
Are you talking about launch Jason Calliakanis?

Lisa Thee (31:15):
Yes.

Mark Haney (31:15):
Oh, I didn't know you were involved with that.

Lisa Thee (31:17):
Yeah, I've been there for about four years now.

Mark Haney (31:19):
Wow.

Lisa Thee (31:20):
Yeah, so that that's kind of my anchor thing that I do.
That keeps me current in technology and I get to work with really cool companies that are solving problems using AI.
So some of the signature things I work on are in healthcare.
Being able to help get more models into clinical settings by reducing bias in their data is an area of expertise, and I worked with the UCSF hospital and Microsoft on a project doing that for B Keeper AI.

(31:46):
Also working with large tech companies on online safety and having a better way to identify when people are violating their terms of service and being able to get their operations teams engaged at the right time In terms of the.
So the podcast and all the a lot of the speaking are tied back to that.
Yeah, but since I lead the group, I don't have to do the day in, day out consulting of it, so that that leaves that space for the thought leader work.

(32:14):
Yes, the book was a labor of love.
I got really sick with COVID and I was kind of stuck in bed for about a year.
Oh wow, and so, as a result of that, the ways that I usually manage my stress and manage my emotions weren't very available to me, and so, instead of maybe going to the gym or maybe taking a dance class or taking my dog for a walk even a lot of those things weren't accessible, and so I was kind of defaulted to writing because that's what I could do with the situation that I was in.

(32:45):
So I felt like it was an opportunity to at least use the time well, and it helped me really process my emotions and my feelings about becoming a new version of myself, maybe somebody that couldn't just will through every challenge.
My body was keeping score and giving me signals of overworking and burnout, and so, as a result, I was able to kind of reignite that in that way.

(33:13):
But I think all entrepreneurs have this, this level of mental health issue, right Once you solve the problem, you want to jump into the next fire.

Mark Haney (33:21):
But it's interesting because I think I'm kind of curious what we can maybe learn from that.
So let's give you it's okay, we'll dive into that a little bit.
So COVID it it's.
Some ways people don't think about that much anymore.
Okay, that's something that happened, remember during COVID and you know.
But people get sick.
So, whether it be COVID or cancer.

(33:42):
Yeah, anything you can you can have these health setbacks that put you in bed for a year.
I had no idea about that because you and I have known each other maybe not very well, but I didn't know that like what, how do you deal with being in bed for a year?

Lisa Thee (33:59):
Well, apparently you write a book.

Mark Haney (34:01):
Okay, so you, somehow, you stay productive.

Lisa Thee (34:03):
No, no, so at a high level.
It was a really interesting time because I was working with that hospital at the same time that I was going through my own health journey.
So in the daytime, I'm advising for the Chief Digital Transformation Officer of one of the world's leading research hospitals, who's a practicing cardiologist, on how to use more data to accelerate some of their research.

(34:25):
But in my own life, I've had this mysterious auto immune disease for 10 years that nobody can get a handle on what it is.
And so when I got COVID early in 2020, before anything was available and you could barely get a test when I got it, it took what was that underlying condition and just 10x'd it.

(34:47):
And so you know every month it was like a new thing.
Like one month I had sudden hearing loss, but only in one year.
So they're checking for brain tumors.
The next month it's they're realized.
I'm like losing words and I'm getting lost when I'm driving and, you know, realizing that I had some neurological impairment.

Mark Haney (35:06):
What about, like getting doctor's appointments and stuff like that?
Because people were, you know it's slower, everything's slower, right?
Because COVID, you know, overwhelmed a lot of the standard stuff and then they created all these extra processes that you know just made it so cumbersome to deal with medical.
I mean, I didn't go to the doctor for like two years, because I mean, what am I going to try to do?

(35:29):
Go to the doctor.

Lisa Thee (35:30):
I was taking all your appointments, Mark.
So, yeah, I was working with 11 specialists to cover the range of things that we were trying to manage because I had long COVID and this autoimmune disease that ultimately we now know what it is.
It's called the Schetz disease, but it's basically my immune system was attacking my healthy veins and arteries and creating aneurysms and all sorts of chaos, and so it's much better under control now.

(35:56):
But you know, when you have those moments in life where you're not quite sure you're going to be around, it starts to get real clear on what you, what matters to you, what kind of legacy you want to leave.
And to me it's it's.
I want to be a great mom and wife to my family, but I also want to be an advocate for those without somebody to advocate for them, and so through writing, through speeches, through building technology, with teams, through advising, I hope that I can bring more resources to protect as many people as I can.

(36:31):
At heart, I just want to be an advocate, and so you know when you have to look at yourself in the mirror and really reevaluate your priorities, I think sometimes it gets really clear what are the, the balls you can drop that are plastic and they'll bounce back, and what are the glass ones.

Mark Haney (36:47):
So for the hard chargers out there, the entrepreneurs that are, you know, feeling like they have this window of time to, I don't know, get their next round of funding, or get over the hump, if you will not go out of business.
There's a lot, and there's people that are not entrepreneurs, that are just extremely driven people that sometimes don't know how to shut it off as well and don't want to accept their own humanness.

(37:14):
What would you say to those people?
How do you self assess for when to shut it down a bit to protect yourself?

Lisa Thee (37:22):
Yeah, so I actually put a dedicated process into my book because I feel like you usually don't think about reassessing these things till you're on the hurry edge of burnout to begin with and so that's where the origin of this book came from was that 90 day process of slowing down, getting out of your head back into your body and starting to recognize the signals of what is working for you and what isn't.

(37:46):
I think we can all be hard charging and work really, really hard when we're in our flow and we're aligned with the people and the mission that we wanna be doing, and that doesn't have to be nonprofit type of work.
It can be anything.
But if you don't slow down enough to recognize what you're uniquely good at and what energizes you, you're gonna be burning a lot of energy on things that just slow you down and do not even get you anywhere closer to where you wanna be.

(38:16):
And so I had to learn that the hard way my body shut down on me.
That's how I learned that lesson.
I wanted to give people a little bit more graceful way to do that.
I'm not gonna lie most people that came into my coaching practice or advising came because of a death in the family, a divorce, a health issue.
Something happened, and that's why we designed it for 90 days, because it's typically the length of a medical leave.

(38:43):
But I think if you spend the first month just stabilizing yourself, being able to even hear your own wisdom and tune out all the noise in the world.

Mark Haney (38:52):
Get to a point where you're getting enough sleep.
Maybe you're eating better.
Exercising a little bit, walking outdoors, seeing the tops of the trees.
Get back to basics for a second.

Lisa Thee (39:01):
Absolutely re-engage in a hobby.
Maybe you have when you were a kid something that just is play driven, that sparks your creative juices.
And then, once you get into the second month of the process, it's really about dreaming.
Who are the people you admire?
What are they doing?
How does that align with your strengths?
Where are the places you have gaps?

(39:22):
What do you wanna be doing?
Not the next job or company, but the one after that.
How do you start to fill in the places where you don't have those skills yet?
And when you get really clear on your values and what you wanna accomplish long term, I think you start to really attract the right kind of people into your sphere.
And you don't have to try to be everything to everyone.

(39:42):
Just cause you can do something doesn't mean you should.
I can do math.
I don't enjoy it.
It's not my shtick.
I spent a lot of years working in corporate America doing really math based jobs because that's what my degree says I'm good at.
But, as we started this conversation, it's really the people that matter to me at the end.

(40:03):
So being able to get back out of what other people deem to success and maybe the expectations you're living up to, and redefining it on your own terms is the fuel and the fire that allows you to get really clear on your mission and then, by months too, in the process, you will have your mission defined enough that you can start to plan and socialize it with others, and nobody gets opportunities in a vacuum.

(40:26):
I think there's a lot of data out there for jobs or companies that a lot of times it's really your network and who you know that allow you to take those next leaps forward and being able to express yourself of what you can bring to the table, because you've done the work to really understand yourself.
But then also where you wanna learn and grow, that's where I find that people are willing to open up opportunities to you.

(40:50):
I don't think I've been qualified for a single job I've had in the last at least 10 years, if not 15.
But when people see something in you that they wanna help nurture and I think that usually comes from building an authentic relationship with someone, not a transactional one it's really amazing how much you can step into new places, and we are all growing, learning creatures.

(41:16):
Nobody is incapable of learning and growth, and so when you can be a little bit more vulnerable and a little bit more transparent.
I find people really wanna take the time to invest in you.

Mark Haney (41:24):
Okay, so I wanna make sure I understand this framework.
So, first 30 days, back to basics.
Second, 30 days is basically figure out what you wanna do, what your vision, what your mission, some of that kind of stuff.
Is the third 30 days, another segment.

Lisa Thee (41:38):
It is.
It's a lot of networking, informational interviews and leveraging your network to get to more loose associations that might have more purview.
I really like the pit bull line ask for money, get advice.
Ask for advice, get money twice.
I've definitely seen that play out of mine, so it's a lot of advice seeking from people.

Mark Haney (41:59):
So you're taking action at that step.
Absolutely Get out there, get off, get out of bed, get out of the house.

Lisa Thee (42:05):
Yes, yes, it's slow down to go fast.
Okay, I think that's really what it is oh, okay, makes sense.

Mark Haney (42:11):
I remember when I had sold my companies and our business was national, so only 1% of our business was here in Sacramento and then there was that transition period, for what do I wanna do with my life?
And I had a lot of ideas that sounded really fun.
But one of the things that I knew I didn't really wanna do that much.
I didn't wanna travel all over the country for work Let me travel for fun and that kind of thing.

(42:37):
I wanna do something that's fun anyway.
But just getting on an airplane, you know, once a week, twice a week or even once a month to go, you know, do something, to go manage something, it didn't sound that fun.
That's why we've been like relentlessly local.
It's actually turned out to be, I think, in some ways, from a happiness standpoint, a blessing in disguise, because we've made a lot of friends here in Sacramento, from having a job where I did, you know, worry about more things on a national basis, to now oh wow, my neighbors, my actual next door neighbors, are part of my new community.

Lisa Thee (43:13):
I love it.
I couldn't agree more.
It's that we are social mammals.
We are made to be connected together.
We can do some of that through distance.
I have some dear, dear friends that I don't get to see every day because they live in Texas, for example, and it's nice to be able to maintain that connection, but I think those connections are really hard to build virtually, and so I couldn't agree more.

(43:34):
It's actually why I come to you at a lot of your events.
I can tell people are looking like you know you're not actively angel investing and you're not actively leading a software company right now.
Why are you here?
And the answer is because I desire to have that community of like-minded people that will just take a chance and be creative and give it a go, and the benefit we all get of being in it together I think is so strong and I think you've done something unique in our community.

(44:04):
That is a huge, huge backyard advantage.

Mark Haney (44:07):
Thank you, lisa.
I really I appreciate that a lot.
But you use the term backyard advantage and I think for a while I've been at this for a while trying to get this to happen right.
And it happens here and it happens there, but now something unique has begun to happen.

(44:28):
You're just going to speak at GFX.
We were talking about that earlier and at GFX we're going to be talking about building the backyard advantage.
The theme of the event it's not just innovation and technology and entrepreneurship, although that's at the heart of it.
Really, it's centered around the backyard advantage, which is building on a culture of love.

(44:49):
Right, we all help each other, love the action.
How do we help our neighbors to have just a little bit better shot at getting from point A to point B?
And those little connections, those little bits of helping people, they add up and you never know.
You mentioned somebody that you met at one of our events previous.

(45:09):
It's like you never know and it's more likely to mature into something super beneficial if they're in your backyard.

Lisa Thee (45:16):
I couldn't agree more, so I'm really looking forward to having some time to talk to people about embracing trust and ethics in AI.
That'll be my topic for the conversation.
The other place I'm looking to contribute is in the panel around career exploration.
I think a lot of people are going to be disrupted in the next five, 10 years in terms of what are the skillsets required to be current in the future of work, and so, I think, helping people to have a little bit of insight as to where the ball's going down the field I'll use my ice skating roots as a reference point.

(45:48):
I was skating to where the puck's going, not where it is.
It's going to be one of the huge advantages that Sacramento does have, because we have a wide variety of people in our local community that can pull all the pieces together that we get a unique view of what it's going to take to thrive five, 10 years out here, and I think that the more that we can share the information that we have and build teams to collaborate and accelerate each other, it's just such a self-fulfilling prophecy that we will all thrive.

Mark Haney (46:23):
Let me dive into that a second because this is really interesting to me.
You think about the tedious jobs that we have in pushing paper and filing right.
Even people are still using paper, but you're just doing these tedious jobs that can be released.
In almost every industry there are people doing this work that a computer could do for them if it was at our fingertips to just do, and so some of these jobs will be gone.

(46:55):
So is there like a central theme around understanding where your job if you think you're going to work the next 20 years doing a mundane I'll call it boring job, where you're kind of doing the similar stuff, analyzing these documents over and over and over and over when the computer could do a lot of that initial analysis for you, you might want to think about how to Do what Pivot get involved in understanding technology.

(47:25):
What do you do if you oh shoot, I'm in one of those jobs.

Lisa Thee (47:29):
I think we all have elements of those jobs in every job that we're in.
So I think, for people that have a subject matter expertise, that requires something that's uniquely human, so that creativity, that connection, that innovation, I think those people are going to learn how to partner with machines a little bit more effectively, and that's going to be the secret sauce of them continuing to develop.

(47:52):
I think there are some things that will just be outright automated, and we've seen that trajectory over time.
So being able to connect with communities for learning, one of the ones I really like is Women in Data, which is open to women and men.
It's open to men too, absolutely, and it has data literacy cohorts that are allowing people to get more familiar with where those data jobs are going.

(48:15):
I think our great opportunity Sadie St Lawrence has done a beautiful job in building that education track and community.
I think there's a lot of free training out there.
I really liked the AI and Generative AI training badges from Google.
They're really lightweight and you don't need to be a technologist to understand some of the terms that are being thrown around in the media, which is really helpful.
And then I think that there's always going to be jobs that require a human touch, Like you're not going to probably replace nurses altogether, for example, but I would have never guessed that the first place as we were going to see AI breaking out and really being focused on education.

(48:56):
I mean, public sector tends to move a lot slower than other things, so I think we're all going to be a little bit disrupted and a little bit surprised.
I mean, if I would have been talking about AI on the soccer sidelines watching my kid play three years ago, it would have blown me away.
But now I have school teachers that are talking with each other about how to use it for peer reviewing of other people's essays or how to help kids that are struggling and sharing tips and tricks.

(49:23):
I think we're all going to be a little bit surprised by where it's applied, but I think as long as you keep a lens of curiosity and lifelong learning, you're going to be able to make the changes with it.

Mark Haney (49:33):
It's going to affect all of us.
I own a concrete company and we were talking the other day oh, it's not going to affect concrete, and then somebody brought up the idea of the robots, which is where I'm invested into robot companies.
They're run by machines and it's like wait, there could be people that finish concrete, not people.
Machines that move the concrete while it's liquid into the forms and get it laid out and set to reduce the amount of human, which we have trouble finding enough concrete people anyway.

(50:05):
So it's really replacing jobs that a lot of people don't want to do anyway.

Lisa Thee (50:09):
And I also see and this is probably from my mid-bless manufacturing roots I started at General Motors and then worked in industrial automation for about eight years.
Out here there are a lot of jobs in manufacturing that require people that have some level of understanding of the technology for automation, for robotics, but not like engineering level the technicians that keep the stuff running.

(50:34):
And back when I was in that industry, like 10 years ago, we already had multiple billions of dollars of loss productivity because nobody wants to fill those jobs or doesn't have identified the skill set to do that as a viable option, and so actually that was my first step into entrepreneurship.
I was taking the technicians out of the factories and upskilling them into system integrators, because that can be a difference of like you're going from like a $10 an hour job to a $30 an hour job.

(51:02):
I mean that could be generational wealth changing for families, and so I think that if you look at what are the ways that we can take the lessons learned from robotic automation and where the needs are, we're going to have the same needs for the professional services jobs.
That may be a little bit displaced, but I don't think we're ever going to not need people.

(51:25):
We're going to need people with different skills, and as long as you come along with that data literacy, I think you'll be in high demand.

Mark Haney (51:31):
I love it.
So don't be afraid of the automation.
Just open up your mind to how you can understand it better and how it might apply to you.
Ok, so last question what did I not ask you that, as a thought leader, what thoughts did I not lead you down the path of helping the rest of us?

Lisa Thee (51:54):
Boy.
We covered so many hardy and meaty topics in such a small amount of time.
I'm trying to think if there's anything that we didn't share.
It was probably one of the best interviews I've had the experience of having.
I really appreciate it, thank you.
I think the only thing that I'd like to say to people is I know sometimes I get into a place where there's so much change happening that it can feel a little bit overwhelming and maybe even a little bit depressing.

(52:26):
Like man, I'm not a puppy anymore, right, I'm an old dog that has to learn new tricks all the time, and I think we can be really hard on ourselves.
So I just want to remind everybody that's out there, grinding the difference between the best day and the worst day of an entrepreneur's life can be like what?
Two or three times a day, and it depends on which phone call you got off last To just remember that you're doing something important and the growth is part of the journey, and to be kind to yourself in the way that you would be to anybody else, and I think we all struggle doing that for ourselves, and there is no time wasted when you're learning and growing, and so just give yourself the space to listen to your body, to listen to your instincts, to have a little play in your life, to reinvigorate that creativity.

(53:18):
Because if you just keep grinding and grinding and grinding, you find at a certain point you're grinding bone and not fat at a certain point.
So I just want to give people the space to slow down when they need to Take it from me.
You don't want to be stuck in the hospital to take that time.

Mark Haney (53:35):
I love it.
Be kind to yourself the way you would be kind to somebody else.
Words of wisdom coming from somebody who has been one of those people that's forward-leaning, hard-charging and has lived to tell about it and helped the rest of us.
So, Lisa, thank you for sharing information, Thanks for all you do for Sacramento startup community, Sacramento entrepreneurial community and beyond, and for all the big causes that you are helping solve.

(54:06):
It's enormously helpful and to think you're here from Sacramento, our hometown, it's super, super cool to have you here.

Lisa Thee (54:12):
Thank you so much.
And for anybody that's interested in learning more about the book, it's available at all the places.
Barnes Noble in Roosevelt has copies on the shelves in the business section.
Please go check it out.
Also, Amazon is obviously good, but it would really help to get the message out there.
So if you have, if yourself you're looking for a reboot in your career or your life, or even if it's maybe a spouse, maybe a friend, it's a great gift for the holidays.

(54:37):
Give somebody the gift of reflection and helping them get unstuck.

Mark Haney (54:40):
What's the name of the book?

Lisa Thee (54:41):
again Go, reboot your career in 90 days.

Mark Haney (54:44):
Go, reboot your career in 90 days.
Go to Barnes Noble, buy a copy.
Bring it to GFX.
Lisa will be there.
I don't know, she might even sign it for you.
I'm not going to promise that you would sign a book.

Lisa Thee (54:56):
Absolutely I will.

Mark Haney (54:57):
But I mean, go get yourself a book and bring it in, and you never know, she might sign it.

Lisa Thee (55:02):
Yes, absolutely, I will have a table.
I will be selling and signing at GFX.

Mark Haney (55:06):
Oh, you're going to be selling books too.
I will be.
Oh wow, you don't even need to go to Amazon or Barnes Noble, just show up.

Lisa Thee (55:12):
No, but I really just think that when you're stuck yourself, it's just really hard to feel like you have one more thing to do to figure out how to get unstuck, and I hope that the book helps accelerate people to start getting some movement so that they can be in the next phase of their future where they're energized and giving back to themselves and their community again.

Mark Haney (55:33):
I love it.
Thanks, Lisa.

Lisa Thee (55:35):
Thank you, Mark.