The Role of AI in Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Welcome to Season 10, Episode 3 of the ShermCast! In this episode, co-hosts Liam MacMahon and Andrew Han interview Sherman Center alum and current course instructor, CEO & Co-founder of The Point AI, and Forbes 30 Under 30 Lister and Board Member, Tuan Ho. Join them as they discuss how Tuan's upbringing, experience as one of the first Venture Co-ops @ the Sherman Center, and various accolades have shaped him into the person and entrepreneur he is today. To learn more about Tuan and The Point AI, check out the following links:
Tuan Ho:
LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/in/tuanhho/
The Point AI:
Website- https://www.thepointai.com/
LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-point-ai/about/
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Transcript

Liam MacMahon [00:00:07] Hello! Welcome to season ten, episode three of the ShermCast. I'm Liam MacMahon and. 

Andrew Han [00:00:13] I'm Andrew Han. 

Liam MacMahon [00:00:14] Today we have the pleasure of interviewing Tuan Ho, and we're going to be discussing the role that entrepreneurship and AI play together. Plus, we're going to get plenty of wisdom and valuable tips for all the student entrepreneurs out there. Without further ado, let's just get straight into the interview. 

Liam MacMahon [00:00:28] Up next, we have the pleasure of interviewing Tuan Ho, an alumni of Northeastern University who graduated from Northeastern with a degree in mechanical engineering. He is also the CEO and co-founder of The Point AI, and teaches an engineering innovation course here at Northeastern. If that wasn't enough, he is also a board member of Forbes 30 under 30. How are we doing today, Tuan? 

Tuan Ho [00:00:49] I'm good. It's. It's nice out. 

Andrew Han [00:00:53] Definitely is. 

Liam MacMahon [00:00:54] So before we go into your specific endeavors, can you just tell the audience a little bit about yourself first? 

Tuan Ho [00:01:00] And so I came to the U.S when I was ten from Vietnam. And I feel like if you look up what I say here, you'll see it all over the internet already. But, I came with my mom and she basically sacrificed 40 years of her life to try and get me to the US, because the degree that you get in the US, that worked a lot then other countries. And so when I got here, I work really hard in high school, when I got I was applying to a whole bunch of colleges. I got rejected by a whole bunch, and Northeastern was the only one that accepted me, but I wasn't able to afford to pay for it. So I wrote 120 essays, apply for 40 scholarship, got about half $1 million worth of scholarship. So I went to northeastern on a full ride when I was 20 sophomore year, I had my first co-op, which I performed terribly at because I was so bored. And so what I did and don't do what I do, this is I got away with it. Not sure if you can get away with it, but I didn't do much work at the co-op at all, which gave me got me really bad negative reviews from the co-op, but I was a manufacturing engineer at a semiconductor company and I was really bored. So what I ended up doing was I spend the majority of my time, but I was six months at co-op. I read and listened to over 250 books, and that kind of expanded my mind in terms of what my abilities can be. And what's the potential of the future looks like is I thought that going to college professors and school higher education was going to teach me about a whole bunch of things, but I realized that that wasn't the case. So I had to go outside and attain my own knowledge. And so when I was going through these books, I learned about financial, a lot of finance advice, a lot of investment advice, a lot of business related advice, psychology, history, biographies about the successful people and I that gave me that the or the confidence to go out there and started my own company at 20, it's my first company that's called Scholar Chat. And the premise there was, how do I figure out a way to help students earn scholarship without having to write essays and not have to go through what I had to go through, and through probably seven different pivots, we ended up creating a sort of like a skill base, hiring competitions where we, work with tech companies and tell them, like, hey, there's a way for you to hire entry level, diverse talent. Instead of just looking at MIT and Harvard, to hire for your tech roles, what you should do is propose a competition. And the winner of that competition can earn scholarships. While anyone who participates are essentially being vetted for a job at that, at that company. So at the age of like 21, we sold to some of the most, like, famous companies, Fortune 500, Fortune 1000, Akamai technology, Toast, Wayfair. We work when it was hot. Santander Bank and so on and so forth. So we accomplished a lot when I was just 21, namely not just because of me, but I found two of my other co-founders at Northeastern, who was also extremely smart and, passionate about the problem that we were trying to solve. And so by the time when I was 23, we'd raise a round of funding from investors, and every single thing was basically self-taught. And, throughout that time, Northeastern was a big help in terms of supporting the entrepreneurship endeavor with IDEA and the Sherman Center. And that's when I made it to the Forbes 30 under 30 list. And then we continue on for two more years. And then after that, I became the director of one of my investors company, which was in the arm VR space for education. And shortly after that, I decided and started to see when I was, running Scholar Chat and I started to listen to all the common themes of how defensible are you. And every single thing pointed to the fact that if you have AI, you're defensible. So I started The Point  AI way before Chat GPT comes out, and then when ChatGPT started to pick off, then we were riding that trend. Because I kind of see it beforehand. But then I guess that's sort of like where I am now. 

Liam MacMahon [00:05:54] That is just a fascinating story. I'm pretty sure Andrew could agree with that as well. Just like all the hard work and dedication, especially even with your mom did just giving you this opportunity to come here to America and then you just took advantage of that opportunity completely, just creating your own opportunities and doing basically whatever it took to be successful where you are now. So you mentioned The Point AI at the end of your story. So can you tell the audience what exactly that is? 

Tuan Ho [00:06:18] Yeah. So right now it's it's nothing special. We started off building products and kind of because my experience in the entrepreneurship space, every single thing in the space, you kind of have to figure out how different are you and how to prevent other people from replicating what you're doing. And when we were building just products and trying to market ourself to software as a singular problem, we couldn't find, good enough traction to defend ourselves against other startup because we started to see that everyone has sort of like a ChatGPT wrapper. And so what we decided to do is to go back to square one and started to do the sort of like a software AI development company. So we're approaching companies and asked like, hey, do you want AI and your company and our business operations? And what we do is we typically focus on processes that are operational intensive, and then we inject AI into that, and then all of that goes away. Some of our clients, we help them improve operational efficiency up to 80%. And that basically means that you, are decreasing the costs that you were originally invested into this operation. So then now you're boosting your profit margins by up to 80%. And so what it is is that this ties to the future work, because in the future, there will be those who are building AI, and there will be those who will be using AI. And we want to well, I want to be the ones to be building the tools. And it goes to sort of like the existential question of, well, our AI is going to take all the jobs away from us on actuality, it's just evolve. The jobs evolve to something better and a lot of fear and a lot of the current work days talks about how, everyone's kind of have to go into the office or work eight hours a day, and that's not AI. That's not real like most work, that it can be accomplished within four hours. And there's this guy named John Maynard Key. He wrote a paper a while back. Way back in, like the 19 something. He talks about the fact that as technology progresses, productivity will exponentially increase, and therefore humans will only require to be working four hours a week. But the problem with the US is, for some reason, we've created a culture, which I was part of that culture, the hustle culture, to be working 80 to 100 hours a week to the point of burnout, and then there's no, there's no stopping point, even though productivity is through the roof. And so what I started to see is that most, most jobs that people are hired for, they are, I guess, jobs that doesn't have a purpose. And so people, the companies are hiring people to fulfill the roles as talent farms to keep competitors from hiring, the talent. Just like how Meta, Google has just been through, sort of like a firing wave, because those are talent firms that are trying to get rid of because they realize, oh, we can we don't need these guys because AI can essentially, do those jobs. And so what I'm proposing is that we are getting rid of the manual processes that AI can take care of. Then we can actually hire for roles that are more fulfilling. And so it's actually a benefit for our future work overall. 

Andrew Han [00:09:59] Yeah. So you were talking a little bit about, I guess, using AI, building these tools of AI that could help people, I guess, more exponentially become more productive with their operations. I guess how hard, was the process of getting to that point, saying, thinking, that AI could be used for these and kind of discovering that you could develop these tools and sell them to people that might need them. 

Tuan Ho [00:10:26] And so we approached businesses and asked like, hey, what's your operation looks like? What's the most time consuming aspect of your business? Like, for example, a real estate investment company would be doing so many quarterly reports and so many manual excel sheet performances, and then they need to actually hire people for that, which is fine. But it's it's not a job that anyone that like wake up to be excited for it to be filling out spreadsheets. And so we go to them like, you know, you can actually save so much money if you can have an AI system here. Not only that, you're like saving the brain capacity from getting actual humans to be involved into this. All right. So right, like one is saving time and money. The other one, which most people don't think about, is the freeing up the brain capacity to do other things, than just doing the work or pretending that you're busy doing the work. So we just basically go to business. Hey, what can we improve here? Yeah. And then look at that. And we'd deploy more than just generative AI. We take all of AI, all of their capabilities, all of that capability and compass into what we do. And so, generative AI can apply for certain use case. Other use case. It doesn't. So we go back from scratch and start using machine learning to develop the AI model from scratch. 

Liam MacMahon [00:11:52] Well that is again fascinating. So before we pivot to our next part of the segment, I just want to know if you could give the audience out there some tips on how they could get more involved with researching AI or AI and entrepreneurship. So how do you think students should learn more about AI and its role that it could have in helping them? 

Tuan Ho [00:12:08] I would recommend reading probably 5 to 10 books on AI first, which is like daunting to say, but I'm like, that's really easy peasy. Like, it's how hard is it to read a book, right? I mean, I started out reading for like an hour and I only got into 20 pages, and then I fell asleep. But then I realized while I keep going, then eventually I get surpassed that barrier after I fall asleep, wake up. I'm like, now I'm reading and I'm not falling asleep again because I already slept, right? So first thing first is just to fill your brain with as much knowledge as possible. The other hand is like, if you're not building software, if you're not a coder, that's okay, because where people are coming out with low code solutions, which is one thing that you want to get familiarized with. But if you don't want to build products at all and you want to know how to use AI properly, then I would suggest look into program engineering. There's a whole slew of educational resources there in terms of how to prop generative AI properly to get the results that you want, but most people don't know how to do. It's like when people talk about the problem with, open AI and generative AI, there's like, oh, we don't like AI because they tend to hallucinate. I'm like, well, actually, they hallucinate all the time. The answer that you give, the answer that you get from, ChatGPT is a hallucination every single time. It's just a matter of like, curating the hallucination properly. You just don't know that because you haven't delved into prompting yet. So, yeah, read a lot books, learn prompting and look at local solutions depending on how heavily invested you are and into the space. 

Andrew Han [00:13:58] Earlier you mentioned a bit of, the Sherman Center in your past. Considering that this is a podcast for the Sherman Center, would you mind going into a little more depth about your time in the Sherman Center and what you did there? 

Tuan Ho [00:14:10] Yeah. After, I got my first co-op. I'm like, I started my company when I was 20, and I'm like, I don't want to do another co-op. I want to work on my company. And so, just so happen. I mean, this is sometimes certain things that happen to me that I just feel like it's destiny or something. But just so happened at that time, Mr. Sherman decided to open a fund for the Sherman Co-op program. And I was sort of like the first, pioneer for that program as being the first entrepreneur in that program to drive the success of that. So when we came out of it, we had a lot of success story because from there we moved to Mass Challenge and then we where we raised funding after that. And so it really gave me the opportunity as a student who have the ambition, commitment and dedication to, take advantage of that opportunity because, I think I built a good relationship with, the people at the Sherman Center, and they see that in me that I not only utilize the resources to come back and provide more, of what we've learned back to the center. And, I mean, I'm back now in teaching, as part of the Sherman Center course of the engineering innovation, because I see the why it needs to exist. I don't know if other school has the opportunity to allow students to work on their startup as a co-op, but I feel like that was a really neat situation that I got and a chance to take advantage of and was successful because of that. And so I couldn't be more grateful for for that program. And I don't know how many. I guess I've been out of school for a long time. So it's been multiple cycles of multiple Sherman Center co-ops. So, you know, the success that, came out of me can you can also see it came coming out of other ventures as well. So they can, vouch for that. 

Liam MacMahon [00:16:14] Well, yeah, that's pretty crazy being the first person to be part of the venture co-op program, because as a podcast, we've interviewed so many of the current co-ops and some of the past ones like Phytabar and Exploro, just to name a couple of them. So and again, you were the first person to happen to do that. So was it like a big step or like what did you feel like a risk having to do this instead of the normal 9 to 5? And what made you think that this was something that would legitimately help you develop the entrepreneurial skills to get to where you are now? 

Tuan Ho [00:16:42] To coin the term entrepreneurship. It's figuring things out. Right. So like there's no dedicated structure for things. And so I didn't necessarily needed any guidance per se. because I already know that if I needed something, I will seek it. And so being part of the entrepreneurship is not as joining a structure, but. The structure that you create for yourself. So I already have a structure to work off of. It's just the fact that it provides me with not only the credit, the financial resources to work off of. But I think at the very beginning, being the first one, the Sherman Center still trying to sort itself out in terms of what needs to be provided. Now that I've gotten better at it. But beforehand, I didn't have a lot of structure to work with, which was fine, because it was sort of like up to me to figure it out. And I think that helped kind of, boil the water, which what I mean by that is patiently waiting for your brain to get its act together. Or else because you have the six month of paid co-op and you're if you're not working toward your venture or growing, then it's completely your fault, right? So like, the accountability is on my own. So there's no one to blame. It's not like you join the Sherman Center co-op and they will help you succeed. No, you join it as a way to help you have the time, the resources and the credit and. But every single thing else is up to you. So it's really up to the person that's, it's able to do that. 

Andrew Han [00:18:27] Yeah. That's great. I guess I was also wondering about your experience as an adjunct leader and why you chose to play that role. 

Tuan Ho [00:18:40] This course I'm teaching, it's, customer driven innovation. And I find it funny that, a lot of engineers have similar mindset because I graduated with a mechanical engineering degree, and I find that, engineers are a whole bunch of introverts. Why? Because machines is much simpler to work with. Humans are a lot more complex. Human, like AI, of the advancement of technology led to this point where where AI is now the forefront of everything. And just so that it can replicate humans. Isn't that funny? So we put all this trillion dollars of resources into building, and hundreds of years leading up to this point in time, not even 100 years, millennials of, of different generations leading to this point, just so that we can replicate a human being. Right. And so it's funny that I see engineers being, so drawn into technology. And yet all it points to is that all the technology point to the fact that all our technology reflects a human being. Right. So AI is a reflection of us. And so in the course in the name of itself is customer driven. And most people, when they hear the word customer, what do you think that is. 

Andrew Han [00:19:58] Like customer service. Talking to people I guess interact. 

Tuan Ho [00:20:01] What does customer. 

Liam MacMahon [00:20:02] Mean? I think it's kind of like understanding wants and needs. That's what I'm thinking of. 

Tuan Ho [00:20:06] No, But what is a customer? 

Andrew Han [00:20:08] A person. 

Tuan Ho [00:20:09] Who a. 

Andrew Han [00:20:09] Person something. 

Tuan Ho [00:20:10] A person. Okay. Right. Anyone can be a customer. So if I was to rename the course, it's, people are, yeah, people driven innovation. So most people, most of my students are so focused, I mean, I got the feedback. Oh, I joined this course thinking that this is going to be solely focused on building products. I was like, yeah, about that. There are so many products out there that was created and no one wanted it. Right. And it's failed or product like Juicero. You heard of that? No. Juicero raised $400 million and it's a juice press. You should look that up. I teach that in my course. But, like, there's so many startups that raise hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars. And then to build this product, that thinking they are thinking, oh, everyone would love this once we release it without any actual human innovation involve. Most of it is thinking that once we have the good technology, everyone will buy in. What the course about is more of like engineering under human or people psychology type of aspect. And so there's this whole, this book called Crossing the Chasm, where there's this bell curve, starting from the early adopters to the late laggers and like, do you know what that means? That is a lot of psychology. And what engineers miss most in terms of the entire, curriculums is that they are not taught psychology. So the course that I teach involves so much more about psychology of humans, psychology of buying, selling and how products relates to the success of humans. Right. Unless you're you're building a project for your own and there's no ROI or there's no other humans involved, that's fine. But the majority of the products you're trying to serve to the market revolve humans. What that means is that you need to understand, innovation on the human level. 

Liam MacMahon [00:22:19] Again, that is pretty fascinating. Just to know, just the deeper customer insights are just knowing what people actually want to see in their product, because you're providing a need for the people with engineers, may necessarily they have the ideas to make a product, but then they're just not necessarily familiar with the marketing or the customer aspect or the psychology aspect. So it's kind of like merging the two things together so that you're able to help them learn these valuable skills as well, that can help them in later on in life. So you mentioned earlier on some brief awards, including the Forbes 30 under 30. So I just want to know which of these awards that you received just stood out most to you. 

Tuan Ho [00:22:55] I think these titles are quite interesting. I think I use it in terms of my understanding of the human psychology at the beginning level, when I was really young. It's like, does this whole debate whether or not the college degrees matters? It matters for like the older generation, not the younger generation, because we like, pragmatic approach is to understand that if you have the skill for the job that you want, then you should be hired for it. The degree doesn't reflect that necessarily. And so I have to kind of know where I came from and understand what other people perceive me. I'll tell the sage advice. It's like you shouldn't care what other people think of you. Well, this sage advice also talk about gonna judge the book by its cover. How many people actually listen to that? 99% People judge the book by its cover, right. And so that's just the truth. But people don't like to hear that truth. And so when I go out there raising venture capital, raising money for investor and selling to customers, I was a team of minority entrepreneurs. My co-founder was half Malaysian, half Egyptian, and one is from the Dominican Republic and I'm Vietnamese. There was no white people on my team. So when we went out there, raised money from investors, they were like, oh, is this a school project? It's like, hello. We have Akamai, we have Wayfair, we have Toast as our customer. And you think we got here because of a school project. So there was a like we raise funding and majority of them is rich old white men right. And from that perspective what do I have. Well, if I look at the way that VC approached their portfolio investment and you do reverse engineering on their portfolios and you realize, oh, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, right. So when you look at these like they are biasing and they're placing their bets on safe. That's right. To these institutions that carries weight. I'm from Northeastern were rank probably like below 50th in the nation but like 200 and something in the world which is pretty high still. But that's not been compared to like the top ten by Harvard, number one globally. And most people don't even know what an MIT is. But in the US, people do. Right. And so I have to think about the psychology of that and think for myself, what do I need to get in order to just stand out? And so getting the Forbes 30 under 30 is for me. It helps me break out from the mold. It's like if I get rejected from MIT and Harvard, how else am I going to get to a stamp of approval? So getting on the Forbes 30 let's is like the acceptance rate is even less than Harvard and MIT. And some of these kids like really want to get on the list. But I was fortunate enough to get on it. And I also have a surefire way to get on it, because I also got seven of my other friends on it. I know a way to get there, but, you have to kind of know what what you want it for because you don't technically need it if you don't, if you don't know how to take advantage of it. Just like the Sherman Center co-op. Right. Because they're now I'm on the board serving and organizing communities. In Boston, there are people who are in Boston who are on the list, but they aren't participating, and they're just like having that title go to waste, right? What I typically think about is, well, now that I'm more seasoned and there's new people getting on the list every year, I want to involve them into the conversation and say like, hey, I know what it's like. This is your first venture. You feel like it's your life purpose to make this successful, but that's not your life. That's not who you are. And it's hard to detach yourself away from the things that you do, because oftentimes you think that the things that you do, it's who you are. So let's say if you go out there and raise a whole bunch of money, you fail. You may, have a great customer and you fail, and then you what are you going to do? Well, you're going to have to take a huge mental health toll on yourself, and you're going to go into super depression. There are so many conversation talking about like this. I wouldn't say so many conversations. It's because people are shy from it. I've been in the space long enough in the Boston eco entrepreneurship ecosystem just to know, who...

Tuan Ho [00:27:45] Have taken their own life because of the pressure that this space has caused. And I saw that, and I was going to be part of that population. But, I rise above and now, I organize this community for the Forbes 30 to have more of a fallback that, hey, there are people who understand what you're going through you, and you're not alone. Yes, you are a whole bunch of founders, and you break through the mold of that hey, we're not here to sell product to each other. We're not here to, like, raise money. We're here as friends. We're here as actual people who have intelligent conversation and mature enough to build strong and in-depth relationship, which requires a level of maturity, but also a level of sacrifice that each person has to take that can create common grounds, which is hard to do. But I like to do it just because I want to build communities for myself, even it selfishly for me. But I think it's also selfishly, it's good for other people as well. And so, yeah. So go back to the original question is that the Forbes 30 under 30 community means a lot to me. Mainly to help me stand out from being sort of like growing up in the underserved community of Boston, coming from Vietnam, being absolutely nobody, and being able to be successful in building business and being in the tech world, going against a whole bunch of biases, and then leaning into community building aspect, which not a lot of people understand what that, that title means. 

Andrew Han [00:29:32] Yeah. I think it's great that you're able to use these titles not just for as an achievement and prestige, but also using them as tools to get to the next step of your goal, in which case was like one of them was to create these communities so that you could have a creative support system for its entrepreneurs. And, it's, it's rough that there's I mean, we all know that that exists, but like racial and like, I guess, prestige from being in certain schools. And I guess those challenges you have to kind of get over by finding other solutions. I was wondering if there's like any other, I guess, challenges that you had to face that you haven't mentioned already that you've faced while being in this field of entrepreneurship as well? 

Tuan Ho [00:30:19] I think the wisdom that I've received over the years comes from the amount of failures that I have come across. Most people see my LinkedIn profile, and hearing looking at me from the internet doesn't understand the amount of failure that it needs to get to where I am. Some people, lucked out. For example, I went to the same high school as, Nathan Blecharczyk,  was the co-founder of Airbnb. I come back to high school and give talks, and I, I have a good relationship with my chemistry teacher, who was also have a really good relationship with Nathan Blecharczyk. My chemistry teacher basically told me that while Nathan kind of hit it big really early, and didn't need it. Well, because his dad was an electrical engineer and his dad, like, introduced him to reading very much earlier on. And he built a software program in high school and, like, sold it for $1 million and fund himself through Harvard. Like, when you hear that story, you're like, well, I wish my dad was an electrical engineer and my mom was working at a nail salon. Right. So like, the opportunities didn't present itself to me, but I had to kind of find it for myself. And during the sort of like figuring it out, out process, meets tons of failure. But if you were born and family who if you have two parents who are successful, they are great guidance for you at the very beginning. I had nothing. I had to figure it out. All I had was movies and TV shows to kind of teach me to wisdom, and I kind of pay attention to these life advice. And like the big thing that got me into reading and I can't believe I am telling it now, but like that advertisement back in the day from Tai Lopez, who was here in my garage, right? I was like, what's better than these Lamborghinis. These 2000 books that I read? I was like, it's that's really interesting because when you read these books, you people can't take that away from you. Like, you can't steal knowledge from a person's head because that's in there forever, right? And so I took that advice to heart, and I started reading and it changed my life. Not only that, that was like another interview for Will Smith that talks, he said that the two solutions in life is to, read and run and and it's not necessarily all true, but the, the truth behind it, it's good enough. It's like he said that there's not there's no solutions. There's no problem in the world that hasn't been solved, that someone hasn't wrote down in a book. And to run is to learn how to keep going when you're tired or like when you don't have the determination to. So, I listen to that as sort of like my guidance and kind of push forward from there. Yeah. 

Andrew Han [00:33:25] I thought it was interesting that you brought up Tai Lopez as a person where you got reading books from. You mentioned that, like, your mom was a nail salon worker, and then you didn't really have the the guidance that your friend, the creator of Airbnb, had as his dad was an electrical engineer. I just thought it was interesting because my parents are just like they also came from background where they didn't have that much success. But I guess I as I was growing up, they also grew up. And when I as I researched certain point, they also, I guess tried to guide me and saying, hey, you should read these books that can help improve your life and that might make your quality of life better in the future. And I feel that it's definitely being able to read some of those books kind of changes your mindset, some of these things, and it does really help you improve some aspects of your life that you never thought that were bad in a way before. I guess if you want to. 

Liam MacMahon [00:34:27] Yeah. I mean, I'm absolutely all on the point with the reading thing. I think it was the previous summer that I finally decided to get into reading again, because there's a lot of skills I personally want to read well, learn and touch up upon, for example, marketing, sales, psychology, some of these stuff. So it's like, how am I gonna get this information? And I just looked up some YouTube videos on what are some good books to read. And then I took some of the ones I found were common themes. I started reading those ones, and if I didn't have the time to read the book in person, I just put on an audiobook, for example, about sales and marketing while I'm just like cooking or something like that. That way I could just kind of immerse myself with information, and long term, you're just going to pick up on a lot of that information, like, again, it's not going to be taken away from you just having all that information stored for you. So again, even if you don't have the time to read a book in person, just look up some audiobooks and just find a way while you're walking, you're cooking, or just doing something like that just to surround yourself with more information 

Tuan Ho [00:35:21] Yeah, and there's a philosophy or techniques and reading books too, that most people don't know yet. Up until you read a good enough amount, then you'll understand it better. For example. People often ask me, what are some books you recommend and, like just read and right. No, I've read so many I can't even recall. But the fact of the matter is, like you. The other thing is that as much as I've been getting the advice, I've read books. Don't put it on a pedestal. Some books are trash. Some even though they're successful. The advice is trash, because most people, some people write books and the advice only applies to them, right? So you have to, like, pick and choose the ones, the nuggets of knowledge that applies for yourself, and then give it a few years and then reread. Why? Because before certain knowledge might not apply to you years down the road from your experience, previous books advice will stick up more for you. Not only just read, but reread and read large enough quantities so that you know stuff like what's applicable to you and what. What I tend to say is that the things that tend to get repeated over and over again tends to be the the truthful advice. Because if a lot of successful people and entrepreneurs says the same thing, and then there's are outliers, advice that apply to themself only. The ones that. So if I could draw commonality is the one that you can bank on. 

Liam MacMahon [00:36:55] So we've talked a lot about entrepreneurship today. And just you mentioned previously just mentioning reading some books for some information. But do you have any other tips and advice that you would give to the student entrepreneurs out there? 

Tuan Ho [00:37:05] My biggest advice is to, like, first comes knowledge and then seconds come experience. But depending on how big your ambition is, your ambition. Like the reason why I'm where I am now versus if you were to interview me seven years ago. I'm a huge, cocky, confident guy, right? Like I would give the presence that I know everything. And then over the years, I get humbled because you started off with your ambition. You think you know best and you think I'm a genius at the very beginning. And then over the years, enough failures to teach you that, hey, you need to humble yourself. Over the years, I realized that this is the truth. And it's it's earned from listening to other people as well. Is, you know, the 80 20 rules, the Plato principle. Most people think that it's 80% hard work, 20% luck. It's the exact opposite. Most things in life is 20% hard work. And the rest is luck. You can improve your chances up, luck. And the way you do that is determination and commitment and not giving up. That's how you improve your chances of luck. That's it. Nothing else. If you keep going, then you're more likely to hit your stride. But if you give up too early, then that luck disappear. Right. And so most people, you have to think that your hard work is just a methodology. You shouldn't bank your entire pride and personality on your hard work. Just think about it this way. And the natural state of the world. No one wake up or was born into the world to work. It's just a methodology to get to where you want. And so some people think that they work really hard. I'm like, I've been there. I work 80 to 100 hours a week for nine years straight. Not fun. Sacrifice a lot of friendship. Sacrifice a lot of things. Although I keep my health in check. I, like, wake up at five in the morning and set my bedtime at, like, 9 to 9:30. And try to match that as much as possible. I had such a bad habit for sleeping. I was constantly getting five hours of sleep for five years straight and I was not good. It affects you mentally. You go out there and you talk to people and your head is completely sleep deprived. And sometimes you say the wrong thing. Or like there are so many mental challenges that you only are able to in the entrepreneurship phase. It exposes you to so many diverse experience and challenges and talking to different people. And you're basically on a fast track to grow yourself mentally as well. As a young person, as much as much as you would like to think that you know best and you have all that is that, you know, just wait until ten years later and you realize how much you don't know. And it comes with experience and humility. And so just, you know, go out there. Just know that it's part of the process. And if you you are really trying to push yourself, then you grow yourself mentally. For example, my headspace, I think I have in the mentality of like a 40 year old, a 45 year old, even though I'm like 29, I just turned 29. But that's because of the fact that I've constantly, I think, I mean, 3000 people every year and having interact with so many different people from variety of backgrounds and meeting so many challenges. Because I throw myself out there. For example, I compete in jujitsu, I do MMA, like 12 hours a week. I challenge myself physically and mentally, and going through all that experience teaches you so much of failure, humility like have you? If you want to humble yourself, just joining jiu jitsu gym for a week, and if you think you're like a superhot in terms of like your physical capabilities, go and join the jiu jitsu gym for a week and you'll be humble so fast. So part of it is to throw myself in a situation that I'm uncomfortable. And the more that you do that, the more the faster you grow, which most people don't want to. I've seen people who have been in the same space for 5 or 7 years, ever since I met them, and then meet them later and realize you're still in the same place, because there's nothing wrong with that, actually. It's just depends on how fast you want to grow and how what you want your life to be. Some people can create a bubble of life for themselves and don't care about the rest of the world, which ultimately I want to get there at some point. And. But if you want to be a part of the world, you have to really expand yourself and to the point where you should spread yourself thin, which is the counterintuitive advice that I would give. Spread yourself thin enough. Because why is that? Well, you never know at your full potential until you spread yourself thin. Honestly, when I was starting The Point AI. I was also working a full time job at a company called ServiceNow. And I was teaching at Northeastern as well. And so I was doing so much that I was spread so thin that I realized that I couldn't do this. So I had to leave my job, and I was like, okay, now, now I'm comfortable knowing where my limits lies and where I want to dedicate my energy. But most people don't even get there. Most people just have like one thing to work with, which is fine, but you never know where your potential is if you don't go further, which is wasted if you ask me. 

Andrew Han [00:43:18] Yeah, I can definitely say personally, I've been to like a trial jiu jitsu class before, and, it was it was not comfortable, to say the least. 

Tuan Ho [00:43:27] What class? 

Andrew Han [00:43:28] It was like, it's it's like it's down there next to next Newbury. I don't remember the name, but yeah, it was it was this this instructor. His name was, Levy. Yeah, it was it was a lot of movement. It was so much like. I was, like, out of breath by the end of it. Definitely. I could say it really stretched me thin because I wasn't used to like being in contact with people like that. But I thought as the culmination of all these experiences and talking to people and having, like, the mind of a 40 year old, what do you think is next for you, next for The Point AI. 

Tuan Ho [00:44:10] I want to retire already. It's, it's a lot. I don't know. I honestly can't tell what the future holds. All I have to do is keep up the optimism. And the world is changing so fast. And the people who are in power aren't necessarily, the right people are in power. Especially when it comes to a technology that, according to the center for Humane Technology, says that, majority of AI researchers believe that there's, AI has a 10% chance of destroy humanity. So to draw the equivalency of the example that they gave in their presentation, if people were to say, like, hey, get on this plane, there's a 10% chances that it's going to crash, are you going to get on it? No, but everyone's hopping on the AI train. So to to say that at the very least, America is such a, is an interesting thing. But if you think about it, America is a utopia in and of itself. Most people don't realize it because of the way that marketing is constructed. To say that we lack things, we don't have things. Instead of the grateful mentality. I am so grateful that I know that I have a roof over my head. I if I want anything, I can go out there and grab food. I'm not thirsty. I'm healthy, I have good friends and relationship and I can keep going like this for the next five years or ten years even. Majority though, like if you you have to also utilize the knowledge of history and the past. Most people would die to just get to where we are today. Because back in the day, I mean, I grew up in Vietnam, back when we were living in bamboo houses, right? Like, there's not enough like there's the water in Vietnam. It's not clean. You have to boil it. And, most of the clean water that you get in Vietnam is bottled water, right? Think about where I come from, and that's why I have so much appreciation for where I am. Most people don't. Most people have what they have right now and they don't think about it. And oftentimes when I'm stressing out over things, I take a step back and I realize I can eat, I can, I have a bed, I have a roof over my head, I have friends, I have food. This is great. Life is great. This is I'm living in a king's sort of like lifestyle, you know, plumbing and toiletry. A lot of third world countries don't even have that. So America is a utopia, and we're fighting over conflicts that are made up, and we're lacking things that are also made up. And so that's why I'm, I'm perfectly like I'm at at eight out of ten in terms of happiness for the most part. But the last two is just like a nice to have, right? Most of Americans are probably at around five out of ten. You utilize gratefulness and you get to an eight. In the last two out of ten. You get it by achieving your purpose. 

Liam MacMahon [00:47:22] I think that was just a great lesson. What you had there, just to speak on for the end of the podcast. And so we are about to wrap up. So before we go, can you tell the audience where they can find more about yourself, The Point AI, and about the engineering innovation course that you teach. 

Tuan Ho [00:47:38] You just look me up on LinkedIn. And then you can go to ThePointAI.com for the website, and I think I teach 5010. Not sure. Those codes  never, like, click to me even when I was a student. So yeah. Look it up. It's, it's called Customer Driven Innovation. Engineering under the, Sherman Center program of love from our students to be a part of my class. Because I teach you more than just engineering itself. So. 

Liam MacMahon [00:48:09] Well, it looks like we're about a wrap up for the podcast here. It was great having you on here today and just teaching everyone just some valuable lessons and just recapping your experience. So great to have you. 

Andrew Han [00:48:19] Thank you for coming. 

Tuan Ho [00:48:20] For having me. 

Andrew Han [00:48:22] Today we interviewed Tuan Ho, creator of service Point AI and an adjunct leader here at Northeastern. We learned a lot about his journey to get to the point where he is, and the sacrifices he made to become a top entrepreneur. 

Liam MacMahon [00:48:33] We hope you all enjoyed today's episode. Make sure to like and follow this podcast, and check out the Sherman Center's Instagram at nushermancenter and our newsletter as well. Until then, see you all next time.