Growing Lean
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Growing Lean
AI, Entrepreneurship, and Aligning Values: A Conversation with Anisa Aven
Ever wondered how strategic foresight and personal values can converge to drive a successful entrepreneurial journey? This episode unravels the mystery with our esteemed guest, Anisa Aven, co-founder and chief revenue officer at Weave AI and CEO of Tonki Coaching Solutions. Anisa opens up about her early days as an entrepreneur, pinpointing the necessity of outsourcing menial tasks to focus on what truly matters. She recollects her transition from a spontaneous problem-solver to adopting a methodical approach, underscoring the importance of aligning decisions with core values.
This conversation doesn't stop at entrepreneurship. We delve into the fascinating world of AI and its profound influence on businesses and society. Anisa articulates how AI can revolutionize industries like healthcare and space exploration, while acknowledging the potential risks of AI biases and the concept of singularity. Whether you're an AI enthusiast or an aspiring entrepreneur, her advice is a goldmine: never stop learning and resilience is key. As we wrap up, Anisa graciously shares her contact details and expresses her heartfelt appreciation for the engaging talk. This episode is a must-listen for anyone curious about the future of AI and the secrets of successful entrepreneurship.
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Welcome back to the Growing Lean podcast sponsored by Lean Discovery Group. This is your host, dylan Burke, also known as Deej. I'm very happy to be here with Anissa Avan, co-founder and chief revenue officer at Weave AI and CEO of Tonki Coaching Solutions.
Speaker 2:Welcome.
Speaker 1:Anissa.
Speaker 2:Hi, thank you so much for having me, dylan.
Speaker 1:Thank you for being here. So, to get us started, can you tell us a little bit about your history and how you ended up where you are today in terms of the business you're in?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So you know where do you begin. So, honestly, I started early in business and I am a third or fourth generation entrepreneur. My father was an entrepreneur. His father was an entrepreneur, his father, my great-great-grandfather the father was not, he was a bit of a drunk, but the one before that was. So it never really dawned on me and that's on entrepreneurs on both sides, my mother's and my father's and it never really dawned on me to do anything else but pursue business.
Speaker 2:And when I started around 26 years ago with Tonki Coaching Solutions, I had had a couple of failed businesses and just wasn't very fulfilled. And I was at a self-help workshop and I met a coach and I'm like what do you mean? You're a coach? What's a coach? Right, like a sports coach. And he explained no, it's about people development and helping people make things happen. I was like, well, I do that every day, I can get paid for that. Let me in. And so then we expanded and over the years we have around a thousand coaches and trainers around the globe. We had to pivot, as everyone did, and we merged with a or I help co-found. We've AIcom and that combines people transformation, best practices like change management and organizational network analytics, with management consulting and coaching and training, and just organizational change in order to accelerate change, using technology coupled with high-end, high-touch people services.
Speaker 1:Okay, amazing. And have you always known that you wanted to be an entrepreneur? Has that been like embedded?
Speaker 2:in your child you never could imagine doing something else. I guess I often get asked that the first time. I remember the first time Dylan was asked that I thought Did I ever really want to do something else? And of course I did.
Speaker 2:You know as a childhood I was going to be an actress, so moved out to California but even when I went out to California, I opened up my own business in order to pay for my hobby right of whatever else I wanted to pursue. So because of that, I've developed sort of a we'll just call it a ability to be resilient, to know that as an entrepreneur you're never going to get right out of the gate and if you do, that was your lucky streak, so enjoy it while it lasts. It's always about reiteration and reinvention and taking advantage of opportunities and pushing the needle and never, ever resting on your heels, so to speak. Keep innovating and creating new prospects and opportunities 100%.
Speaker 1:I can relate to that so much because I'm also like I know I'm going to be there one day. I'm not there yet. I'm still building up the pipeline, you know. But I've had a bunch of failed businesses and I've learned a lot from them. But when I was a child, I had a very successful uncle and whenever anyone would ask me they're like what do you want to be when you're older? What do you want to be when you're older?
Speaker 1:I'd say, I want to be like my uncle, I want to be wealthy and I want to have my own business. And to this day, my passion is to solve problems and make money doing it, and that's why I just relate to that so much. Sorry, I went on a bit of a tangent there.
Speaker 2:No, I think that that's an appropriate dialogue. Is that your listeners who are interested in entrepreneurship and business? You know, part of it is exactly what you just said. It is a sincere desire to solve problems, no matter what business an entrepreneur is in. We are problem solvers and that means we have to be willing to figure out what's not working as much as figure out what will work.
Speaker 1:Exactly and figure out what's not working and come up with a solution to solve it. That's what I love about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree with that 100%. There are times when I can get mired in the detail, the administrative load, the things that we must do in order to have an effective, successful business, but those are the things you outsource, those are the things that you hire a great team, you create a great team who feels inspired and motivated to work on the vision that you set forth, and you augment your weaknesses and focus on your strengths 100%.
Speaker 1:And, on this topic, what is the biggest problem you faced in your well, let's say in your career, and how have you solved it?
Speaker 2:Gosh, that's a really good question. Well, there's lots of problems as an entrepreneur that we go through. I would say that now that I've all of my adult life I've owned businesses, and there's one thing that I now have developed in a more focused way than I had previously, and that's I would call it strategic foresight. In the past, I would just shoot from the hip this is a great idea, let's run at it. And then I would spend money and resources and time and energy and then only to later and with hindsight, be like oh well, that was kind of a stupid idea, why'd you run with that so fast? Why'd you spend so many resources so fast? And now I am much more methodical about analyzing these great ideas that I have and analyzing is it aligned with my value system?
Speaker 2:If I were to say the one thing that an entrepreneur can rely on is if they set up a really we'll just call it intentional approach to living within their values, then every decision can be juxtaposed against that value.
Speaker 2:Well, I knew what I wouldn't do according to my values, but I never used to use maybe until the last 20, we'll just call it 15 years use my values as a reason to say no or that's not accurate as a reason to evaluate a possible business adventure. Will it give me plenty of time for work-life balance? Does it align with my views of the world, how I want to make a contribution, whether or not this will add value to not just my life but other people's lives? Right, and then eventually, when I realize you make decisions from that place of value, not later evaluating if it hits your values, it's a lot easier to say no, and that is one of the most important things that an entrepreneur can learn how to say no, because you're gonna say no a heck of a lot more than you say yes, but no to the right things at the right times.
Speaker 1:I love that. That's something I struggle with too, just in my like normal life, is saying no. I'm a yes man and it's something I literally have a remind on my phone that says say no, say no, and I think that's so applicable today. Yes In all in the personal and business life. I love that. Come back to Weave AI. Can you run me through your overall business strategy there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so well, at a high level, before I even went into Weave, one of my highest values is partnerships and collaboration. I work at home in a home office and so being on the computer and my only connections to the outside world are my pups in the background and the front door. When I decided to go out so a long time ago, I decided that my business was about relationships, and so forming relationships and finding ways to collaborate and offering my expertise freely was one way to stay in touch and to build relationships. And through collaboration, that's how I grew Turnkey. Well, when the pandemic happened and so much of corporate budget for learning and development was pulled and no one knew what the world was gonna hold in the next six months, my revenue just went, oh like gone, and I thought, okay, time to look for some partnerships and I started simply opening up to collaborating with others. And that's when I met the founder of Weave, ai, the vague manta, and we just started brainstorming on how to solve big problems by combining high-end expertise high-end meaning really competent strategists and executive coaches and trainers and learning in the flow of work with some type of an acceleration technology. That's what I was looking for, and with Weave. That's what we were able to do.
Speaker 2:Weave is a end-to-end people transformation platform and it uses the power of augmented intelligence or artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify who's at risk of leaving in an organization, for example.
Speaker 2:So the network analysis can provide incredible predictive analytics, using about five questions in about 10 minutes to identify where the relationships that either support a person in staying with a company or support them out the door. And with that, the problem is is that the people issues. There's not enough time in the day to have multiple conversations with employees at large, so AI and conversational AI allows us to go out and understand and listen to employees about what's going on. Now we've got insights. Now we've got actionable information. Where we took it one step further is companies don't always have the bandwidth to then do something with that action, and that's where our coaches and experts come in. But the goal is to help organizations retain employees and accelerate this issue to action timelines Most engagement surveys and other analytics programs. Corporations are averaging anywhere from a minimum of 12 months to two years before they're actually taking action on those insights. We accelerate that to about two weeks.
Speaker 1:That's crazy. That's amazing. I'd love to learn more about how that works. That's super interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm happy to share more. It's pretty exciting, though it's. Leveraging the power of AI in a positive way has so many potential benefits for our world. So I get more and more excited every day that I learn one more way in which we can solve our big, very wicked problems with human intelligence and artificial intelligence in collaboration.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Yeah, I love that. And how so you started in 2020,? I see on LinkedIn. How has the shift in the last, let's say, a year and a half, two years, with the release of chat, GPT and open AI, how has that affected your business?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. Anytime an entrepreneur adopts a new technology or a new idea, there's those you're really just aiming for, that slice of the pie that are progressive early adopters, right? Those folks who are like you, so to speak, are like hey what are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm interested, right, and that's a very small slice of the pie. And so up until the release of chat GPT, we were only able to get through to that small percentage and initially that was going to be fine. We were just going to have to work hard to get to the innovative thinkers. Since March now, that AI and the conversation around AI although we have been being developed for years and years, and years, and years and years and years maybe five plus years now, I think it was 2017, when my co-founders originally founded the company and then, when we got together, they shifted their attention. I joined the founding team and we took it in a different direction. But since March it was March that chat GPT folks are like hey, I think there's some real possibilities here. We want to use it for you name it and digital transformation is something that we help with.
Speaker 2:Culture change, mergers and acquisitions. And actually our primary focus is employee turnover, because it's pretty much an existential crisis in some industries. Healthcare, for example, is facing as much as 100% turnover in some cases and it's costing them the average hospital, I think. It's costing. Turnover is costing them around 7.5 million every single year right now. That's crazy. It's crazy and we're going to have a mass nurse shortage globally in the next five to 10 years, so something has to happen to change, and so by augmenting our ability, human's ability to be in more than one place at once and to aggregate data in such a way as to where we can have intelligent decisions and have I should turn that around have the decision intelligence we need to respond proactively to employees' needs. That's going to be, that's what WEAV AI does, and it's also going to be a burgeoning industry itself in this next five to 10 years Amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, someone I spoke to recently. He says AI is going to humans need to work with AI because it's going to allow us to explore at a much faster rate than we could ever do ourselves. He put it in an example of space exploration. He's like there's going to be hundreds of millions of space explorers, but maybe 0.1% of those will actually be humans because we can get AI to do it on the same level and with lower risk. It's just going to allow us to do so much more at the same time, which is, honestly, I'm a little scared, but I'm also very excited. It's going to be an interesting couple of years coming.
Speaker 2:It really is. And you know, I do think that we, as I'd say, just a society, but in the world, you know, the we have to be conscious and mindful of how and what we develop. The challenge is the cat's out of the bag. So there's no regulation in the world that's going to keep businesses from utilizing the power of artificial intelligence. So we will have to face the consequences of a changing dynamics in business. Some businesses won't require certain human capital anymore and there will be some folks who are like I'll get rid of everyone I can, you know, and and we will have to vote with our wallets, so to speak. We'll have to say listen, I don't want to buy from that company because they're using AI for bad and not for good.
Speaker 2:And I think that the, the, the, the great news about, about AI is that it really will allow us to pull our intellect, pull our resources and people in South Africa that are solving, for example you name name a wicked problem climate change or teen suicide. We're able to work with people in Prairie View, texas, you know, on the same issue, solving it in such a way as to where we we don't have to have an in person meeting to solve really, really big problems. We come together, we pull resources, we use artificial intelligence, we use economies of scale to make really big changes in our world, and I think that it's going to make our world better. But I do agree we have to be mindful about AI biases, and the potential for singularity is real. It's real. It's a real problem.
Speaker 2:I don't mean to laugh about it, because it's not, but it is a real problem.
Speaker 1:It is. We just have to hope that humans have done what they've always done and come out on top and solve problems, like we said earlier, and that's what we have, for we have to solve problems and to make sure the world stays the world, basically.
Speaker 1:That is what this is about, right with solve problems together 100% and so we are running out of time, but I really enjoyed this conversation. But before we go, is there any piece of advice you would give to someone looking to enter the industry you're in, business owners or even users.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think the biggest piece of advice that I always share is two fold whatever industry you're in, learn everything you can about it and never, ever, ever stop learning. You never have a time when a successful entrepreneur can stop learning. That's when they'll, even if they have a little bit of success or a lot of success, there comes a point at which the competitor will out out deliver us If we ever suck learning. And then the other pieces is about being resilient. You know, I always say said to my children you can't lose if you never quit.
Speaker 1:Exactly 100%. I love that. Thank you so much, and thanks, anissa, for your time. I've really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2:Likewise.
Speaker 1:I love to be here.
Speaker 2:I'm excited to continue to listen to your podcast and wish you the best of luck and really had fun today.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Thank you, but quickly, before we sign off, what's the best way for people to reach out to an ESA, even if you've got any office for them, or if they want to just follow your story?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I'm on LinkedIn, Anissa Avan, and I'm also. You can reach me on one of my the two websites turnkeycoachingsolutionscom, or we've acom, and it's WEEV A I dot com.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you, dylan, take care.
Speaker 1:You too.