Do The Right Thing Even When No One's Looking With Aaron Schoenberger
Step back and see how people are suffering around you. Then you'll want to step up and do the right thing even when no one's looking. Chad Burmeister's guest today is Aaron Schoenberger, the founder of Brainchild. In this episode, Aaron and Chad discuss how AI is taking big strides in monitoring you and how you use social media. Naturally, this poses a huge ethical problem concerning who manages the information and what they do with it. Join in the conversation and be inspired to do the right thing even when no one's looking. Tune in!
—-
Listen to the podcast here:
Do The Right Thing Even When No One's Looking With Aaron Schoenberger
I'm with Aaron Schoenberger. He's the Founder of Brainchild Group, which is a cool company out of Southern California. If you look at their website, TheBrainchildGroup.com, you'll see downtown Los Angeles where my wife used to work, in the 110 Harbor Freeway. They've done a lot of cool things advising startups as well as Fortune 500s on how to do digital and marketing right. Over the years, they've developed another cool company where Aaron is the CEO and Cofounder of Soteria Intelligence, where they use big data, AI, and a lot of cool things monitoring social media and such. We're going to dig into some of that, I'm sure. Aaron, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. A pleasure to be here.
I like to get started on the show to help our audience connect with you by asking you about when you were a kid, what were you passionate about? When you wake up in the morning, what was your day like? Where'd you live? Were you still in Southern California? Tell us about when you were younger? What are some of the first memories that you had?
I grew up in Los Angeles, right by the Grove and the Farmers Market before the Grove was there. I was always into building things. That's something I always remember, whether it's going to see my family in New York and in the backyard building forts with wood. In preschool and kindergarten, I got sent home because I always wanted to carry a full-sized hammer with me. They said it's not allowed. I insisted on having it. Since then, I was always interested in building stuff. That's been something that carries on to this day. It's a matter of creating something and not just going with the flow. That's one of my characteristics.
Obviously, you created two companies that I'm aware of. In the middle from then to now, what else did you create over the course of your career?
Throughout my career, a lot of what I did in my career was helping companies grow and building companies. I enjoy working with very large companies, but I actually have a lot more fun working with small companies, putting together the initial concepts for marketing. Giving input on the direction, making sure that they make the right decisions early on where they could scale quickly and not run into a lot of the hurdles that I've seen drove hundreds of companies. That's what I enjoy.
I bet it's the same flaws that you see time and time again over the years, right?
Absolutely. A lot of stuff, if you're a first-time entrepreneur, when you're getting into business, there's things that you're just going to make mistakes on. If you look at those over time, a lot of people make the same mistakes. If you could scale a business and understand what those mistakes are early on, it will help you in the end. It's one of the reasons why I brought on a good board for Soteria Intelligence that has been through this for many years. They're able to give me feedback on things using their experience of being in business for 30, 40, 50 years.
It took me a while to learn that having other people who've been there, done that is extremely helpful. I remember going to do a Ferrari race around the track with Gerhard Gschwandtner from Selling Power, Sales 2.0. He had a group of 30 or 40 CEOs. I remember getting in the driver's seat and there was another driver in the passenger seat, who had a break like I had. He was the safety valve, and he could whisper in your ear.
You're going around the corner, clipping 150 miles an hour, and he's going, “Punch it, punch it. Floor it, floor it,” all the way to the end. You're like, “I'm going to hit the wall.” He's like, “No.” He then goes, “Slam on the brakes.” You then realize you're not going to spin out and do a 360 or a donut because of the way the brakes are built on this Ferrari. It took me that experience some years ago to realize, “You can hire people that are expert racecar drivers, so to speak, when you're building your company, marketing, sales, finance. All of it.”
You also have to be open to listening. Many people I've seen in business, they think they know everything and they won't take a step back and take in feedback from different people, weigh it themselves and make the best decision. They just think that they know everything and that mindset gets you in trouble a lot of times.
Are you familiar with PI? The Personality Index?
I am. I am not an expert in it, but I am familiar with it.
I'm a Captain. As I understand it, there's a hook in my personality where I have a pretty good risk tolerance, but also, I'm not going to be the next Bill Gates. I have got the hook. It keeps me. What I've learned is Mavericks, on the other hand, don't have the hook. They have to rely upon people that are smarter than them because they take all the risks in the world. I'm almost thinking, is there a way to flatten the hook, or is that even a worthy cause in life to go after, flattening the hook and become a Maverick? Is it good to own your captainess and say, “I'm just a little more conservative than the Maverick is?”
What it comes down to is there could be things that happened in your life that flattens the hook. Either it's a success, failure, or hardship, if you are successful in a position and you rise within an organization, and you realize, “I could do this better than all these people. Why am I not doing this?” That's one way. Maybe you go through something catastrophic that you have no other option than to flatten the hook because you don't have opportunities.
It's I thought of it while I was meeting so many CEOs in Florida and recognizing that, “That woman from Colorado is a pure Maverick. That person over there, he's not either Maverick or Captain.” You can start to see how all the different personalities will play the role of CEO differently than each other. Share something that maybe was challenging for you in life. Something you're comfortable sharing, obviously, we all have personal experiences. Is there something that you saw as a mountain that was hard to get over around? How did you get around it? When things got tough, what did you do that was unique to get through the negativity.
One of the biggest things is I was on track to do the usual trajectory in school. I went to a good high school. I was in college. My parents have gotten divorced when I was young, about five years old, and I spend most of my time with my dad, the older I got. They lived nearby. I'd see them both. When I was 21, I was at the point of transferring from community college to a four-year school to finish my degree. I wanted to become an attorney. That was always what I wanted to do. It's in my family. I've always been interested in law.
Do The Right Thing: It's a matter of creating something, not just going with the flow.
When I was 21, he woke me up one morning with chest pains and asked me to take him to the hospital. We were living right by the Farmers Market area, Fairfax and 3rd. When he woke me up, I said, “No problem.” We jumped in my car, and the next thing I know, he started having a heart attack in the car next to me. We're on the way to Cedar-Sinai. It's 5:00 in the morning, there are not many people out. I realized I’d have to start going through the red lights to try to get there. By the time I got to the ER and pulled in front, he had pretty much passed away in the car. They came out, checked his bolts and everything and that was that.
In one day, I went from here's my trajectory of my family will help me and stuff to the best that they can. I had a place to live, all of those things, then, a few hours later, I have no way to support the rent for where we were living and to continue college and all of these things. The other thing is, I was working for the Olsen twins at that time for their company, Dualstar Entertainment Group. I learned a lot from the people there and that company, but I had a project that I had to get done. I said I’d get it done on this day. That was the day he passed away. I still, after he passed away in the car, went to work the same day, got the project done.
A week later, funny enough, I was driving on the freeway. Somebody hit my car, which turned into be an insurance scam and totaled the car. Now, I have to deal with my dad dying. A week later, I have no car. The car gets totaled. I had to find a new place to live and all of those things. Everything within a few weeks period. It's made me who I am, but it's also made me harsh in certain ways. I don't have a lot of sympathy in business. If someone's plant died and you say you can't come to work, I have zero sympathy for things like that. I hold people to a high standard, but I also hold myself to a high standard too.
There was a debate online, and I love your story. It's interesting. I'm working with this group called Food For Orphans. When this founder travels to Kenya and to different parts of Africa, he said, “In many cases, a nine-year-old is the head of household,” because both parents have passed away. To your point, it happened when you were at a certain age, and it's hard enough. Now, imagine you're nine. It just makes you want to step up and do the right thing in the world.
I don't think governments are good at getting money to places that need it. For many spectacular businesses like Soteria, your business will have a market cap. Someday there could be an exit, and then it's on us to remember our upbringings and say, “There are other people in the world who are going through similar experiences to what we did.”
One of the most validating and exciting things for me was not buying cars, houses, or other superficial things. There's a school, the Birmingham High School in the valley, and they have a program called High Tech Los Angeles. I got a call from someone, I don't usually take calls about money or donations, I do it in other ways. I got a call, and this girl was so nice. I thought she was maybe in their twenties. It turns out, she was a student at the school. They were looking for donations for the robotics program that wanted me to come by.
I went by, and I see this room. These kids are from the inner city and don't have a lot of resources. They have CNC machines. They're machining their own parts. They're doing all their electrical work. There's another station where they're writing code. I was like, “Wow.” To give them a little bit, but also to go visit and send pizza beforehand and see how excited the kids are. Yes, when we have our exit, being able to contribute to things like that is important. People that need things, whether it's for school, technology, health, or whatever it may be, that are deserving of things but can't get the money or don't have the resources, or don't know the channels to go through to get those months.
My nephew and my son go to the Colorado School of Mines. My nephew did those robotics courses where they would have robot battles and all that kind of fun stuff. It's so cool. That's neat. What about in the work that you're doing on both sides, both companies? What gets you up in the morning? What are you passionate about now?
I'm still passionate about helping companies grow. The reason that I founded Soteria Intelligence was more to do good in the world. In particular, looking at schools, when I realized that in mid-2015, 2013, between that time, school threats on social media took off. There were a lot of students, in the past if you go through the history of it, that specifically stated what they were going to do before they did it. That then resulted in school shootings and a lot of innocent children dying. The same thing happens when you look at terrorist attacks and at workplace violence.
Unfortunately, for many years, the technology was not there to identify these things because the platforms that analyze this kind of data look at keyword combinations. If you think about a student tweeting, on Instagram, or any other social media platform, or even as a group text, I'm shooting hoops at school versus I'm going to shoot people at school. Shoot and school, if you look at those words, you're going to get a ton of false positives and negatives. Whereas if you understand the linguistics behind what's actually being said, you could discover these things, even behavioral characteristics before these actions are made well in advance and try to thwart it.
That keeps me up at night. That is where we started, but it also expanded into looking at a variety of data for a variety of purposes. If you look at, let's say fire spreading, if you can integrate social media on the ground and that data and someone posting about the fire spreading, there's a hotspot here, and they're posting specifically where it is. If you could look at the fire map that is available through various services and then integrate social, you can start to understand how the fire is spreading aside from the other sensors that are out there. There are so many applications of using data for good to analyze good stuff, bad stuff, and everything in between.
I had a talk with a gentleman named Ty Smith, who’s with the San Diego firm. It's a big space out there. I'm comfortable telling you who the company is CommSafe.ai. Have you heard of that one yet?
I have not. It sounds interesting.
He’s such a neat guy. It listens to Slack channels. It's more company versus school. You are peaceful coexistence because they're focused on company communications. They're about to do a raise, a Series A after their seed round. It sounds pretty similar, but it's more for companies. Someone saying something that's violent or making statements similar to what you're listening for, they alert the manager. To your point, they can't have dozens of false positives. That's what the difference is in the technology today than it was before.
Before deep learning, a lot of these things weren't possible. “AI” has been around for a long time and machine learning. It's been useful, but when you look at the real strides, people don't think about it. When Apple removed the fingerprint scanner from the phones, people don't realize that every single time you're looking at your phone, it's taking an image of you and putting that in a model that's being used to allow you to open your phone. Every single time you're on Netflix, clicking around and selecting things to watch or adding them to your list or other actions you're taking, it's learning from all of your actions within Netflix. That's how their recommendation system is so accurate and valuable. All these things are deep learning innovations. I'm excited to see how that progresses in the near future.
To me, the biggest concern is around ethics and who monitors the use of the information. I believe there needs to be a new role called Chief Ethics Officer, CEO 2.0.
It's true because you need to not have models that overfit. You don't want AI models to be trained with some kind of bias. They look for specific things or perform specific actions. It has to be weighed and used ethically.
Do The Right Thing: If you understand the linguistics behind what's being said, you'll discover behavioral characteristics before harmful actions are made.
I remember at the AI conferences that I went to a couple of years ago. I went to about six in one year. There's this woman with purple hair. It’s how I remember her. She was at 3 of the 6 that I went to. She always talked about ethics. She said, “When AI is used properly,” and she cares deeply about this, “If it's reading a resume, for example, it's not going to have a bias.” Hector Gonzalez, it doesn't care. The AI reads it and says, “Hector Gonzalez, cool. Let's look at his stats, at their spaces in employment, and at the keywords.” Whereas a manager could look at it and say, “Hector, I had an experience with a Hector when I was a kid.” They put their own terrible biases into that equation.
That's vile, that needs to be a role. I hope big business or small business, anybody implementing AI now or in the future thinks about it that way. That's something my dad always told me is, “Do the right thing, even when no one's looking.” It doesn't matter, you shouldn't litter. It doesn't matter if people are next to you or no one can see you, you just don't litter. You treat people with respect. You open the door for the elderly lady. All of those things, you don't do it for the purpose to show people, you do it because you should be a good person. That should carry over to software that you develop and how it's implemented.
That's the quote of the day. Do the right thing, even when no one's looking. We've all heard it before, but especially in today's day and age, it rings a bell that we all need to remember that. We can get carried away in the social media world these days. Tell me, you've worked with many entrepreneurs, CEOs and I have to imagine you've seen the struggle. For me, cashflow is always the fun part of the job, not. What advice would you give people that are maybe just entering as an entrepreneur or maybe they're knee-deep in it and they're going, “How do I do this? Maybe I need to go back and get a full-time job?” What's the advice that you would give them to make it through those tough times and decisions?
There are too many people that, now being an entrepreneur because of Shark Tank and shows like Silicon Valley and everything, now being a computer person, a computer geek is actually a cool thing. Whereas before, it was Joe Schmoe in the computer lab, this guy's a geek, but now it's been proven that those people are actually the coolest. They're the ones like Bill Gates that can change the whole world.
Everyone thought that kind of person was a geek but look at Jobs. Now, they have an iPhone and an iMac. Shark Tank and everything in the world accelerated the fact that entrepreneurship is cool. A lot of people want to do it because they want to be an entrepreneur. They want to say that, they want to feel that but they don't have the work ethic and a plan in place to actually do that.
I see a lot of people, especially on social media, “I'm launching this company. We're going to do all these big things,” but they say that before they even have a website. You then look six months later, and it didn't go anywhere. If you're going to dig in and become an entrepreneur, you actually have to be solving some kind of problem. You have to have an idea first, that's viable. You then have to have some sort of capital to be able to push your idea to a certain level, depending on how much capital you have.
There's a great episode on Silicon Valley, the show where Pied Piper, when they got an offer from a VC firm, it was way too much money. They were blown away because they didn't realize that if they took the deal, they lose the entire control of the company and they’d be kicked out. It's a blend of being able to have the funds to get something started and get it to a certain point so you could have other people see the value and come in and see the vision and put their money in to help you with that. That's a broad range of how far you can take it.
For me, I prefer to take things personally as far as I can because then I have control over it. That also comes down to being an entrepreneur, you have to build a great team and you want people to trust you to look up to you. If you take money from people early on, you build some app, you go into Silicon Valley, you raise money from VCs, and they get a few board seats. What happens to these people that are on the core team that you promised certain things to them? Now, you can't physically deliver those things because you don't even have control. The board's taken over, maybe with the amount of equity that you have, you don't have any controlling interest. Even if you're the best person in the world, you can’t deliver on your promises because you physically can't do it.
That's huge. I've been part of the companies that are VC funded. I saw founders come and go. They're like, “What happened? I invented this.” We have not taken any money here, we grew from $300,000 to $1.2 million. 2021, we'll probably do $1.8 million. We haven't taken a dime. There's another company in Indy, a 24-year-old founder, and they'll do $14 million in 2021. They do LinkedIn outreach, similar to what we do. They've grown eight times more than we have in the same time period.
LinkedIn is huge.
He's extremely smart. He works hard. He has the work ethic from his parents that he's acquired. There's a lot of people these days that are like, “I've got this IP that I've generated,” and they don't. They're 25. They don't have the IP generated yet. They think they can work two hours a day and make $400,000 a year. I'm like, “It doesn't work that way.”
Nope. Not at all. I was on the grind seven days a week missing friends, birthday parties, bachelor parties, weddings, and all that stuff working to grow the Brainchild Group and saving. It's to the extreme. I'm to the extreme in many ways. My friends think I'm crazy and I kind of am. After my dad passed, I had this little rinky-dink apartment in West LA and because I knew it was temporary, when I was moving my bed broke. I refused to buy a bed. I slept on the couch that I had from my dad's please, which is six inches or so too small for me.
Here I am for I was hoping to be a shorter period of time but ended up being five years living there sleeping on the couch. I had no fridge, even though I love to cook and I'm a foodie. I was like, “Why am I going to buy that for this place, but I'm not going to be here soon?” It was on the grind five years straight growing The Brainchild Group to the point where then I can buy a house where I want to live. That helped me generate the funds to start Soteria to fund that and to kick that off. Don't fake it till you make it. So many people, especially in places like LA, it's all about, “I'm an entrepreneur. I have this car. I have this,” but you don't really have anything.
When it comes down to it, what are you building? What is the big picture and what's your exit going to be? There's got to be some exit some, whether it fizzles out, you get acquired, or whatever, you have to have some goal for where you're at right now, where are you going, and what are all the steps to get there?
I love the work ethic. It reminds you of Gary Vee. He's one of the hardest-working men in business, and as a result, he's been quite successful over the years.
I worked with for years a guy named Warren Lichtenstein. This is a guy who worked as an analyst at a financial firm in New York. When he was 24 or 25, he decided, “I could do this better. I'm going to go ahead and create my own hedge fund, my own firm,” in many ways. He was 24 or 25, fast forward, he is worth probably $1 billion or more. This is somebody who is one of the leading investors and built it from scratch and grew it to that point.
I always love seeing people that did that, like Gary Vee, when I had companies before and he was just getting on the scene, he was, I believe, helping his family's wine business and starting to get into social media. That then blew up into everything. The sales obviously blew up, but then also his whole career blew up.
Do The Right Thing: No matter how much bad stuff you go through, if you keep pushing forward doing good, good things happen to you.
The other example is Henry Schuck, whom I've known for over ten years, he was with DiscoverOrg. They bought ZoomInfo, Rain King, and all the data competitors. Now, they're a multi-billion dollar company traded on the stock exchange. He built that out of his garage just like a lot of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.
It's cool to see.
Where I'm excited to see because I know a lot of these people like Zoom Video, Eric Yuan, and RingCentral, I worked there for a while, and a lot of people I worked with at WebEx are there. These are companies that went from $10, $14 when I joined, when I left, it was $200 a share. Now, it's $400 a share. You look at some of these people's lives that are changed, everybody has a story. Everybody learns through life. I'm excited to get the chance to give back.
Living a Better Story is about helping people tell their stories. How do you change the future for good is what it's all about? Tell me, the last question I want to ask you here, Aaron, is about faith. I've heard you tell your story. You work hard and you've worked hard to get to where you are. You had speed bumps as we all do. What role does faith play in your day-to-day and in your life?
I would say it plays a big role because there are different types of faith. My background is Jewish. I would say a Jew-ish because I don't practice as much as I should as my family’s older generations do. There's an element of karma too, and what kind of person you are, how you live your life, how you treat other people. I've always been focused on that, who I am as a person to respect everybody and treat them the same whether they're a valet person or they're an executive.
I remember working for the Olsen twins. It was in Century City, the office. When I first started there, it was around my first year of college, and I was just an intern and I grew within the organization. I remember one time the service elevator broke down and I had to take some trash down or something to the loading dock area. Here I am in this elevator with attorneys in the building, these people in suits dressed all nice and I'm standing with a bag of trash. I remember how they looked at me.
Now, until this day, no matter what I'm wearing or where I'm at, when I see someone like that, I always engage them because why not? We're all people. Those kinds of people, people that no matter what level they're at, if you care about them and you talk to them, you treat them the same, then they respect you. You end up building relationships in the most unlikely kind of ways. There's an element of faith in me being Jewish and those principles, but also, I believe in karma. There's something there. No matter how much bad stuff you go through, if you keep pushing forward as a good person, good things happen to you.
That's so well said, I love that. I'm going to blank on his name, but he was in the Bush administration, one of the higher-ups, an African-American gentleman. I heard him speak. He talked about how he’d pull into the parking garage and the people who would park his car, he would find out about their families and get to know them. He's like, “Nobody did that. Guess what, the politicians who were a-holes in the parking lot, they would get the far back three cars deep, and it would take 30 minutes. I'd get out at every time, my car was right there at the front.”
You don't do it, obviously, for that purpose, but you do it and that's the reward. Being nice to the valet guy where you get your car upfront. Being nice to the door person at some restaurant or bar, you don't mean to do it for social engineering purposes, you do it because you genuinely care. Maybe they said they hurt their knees six months ago, and then you ask, “How's your knee?” How the heck would you remember that? Because you care about people. That gets you far in life and in business too.
I love the visual of the trash bag in the elevator with lawyers looking at you. It reminds me of another guy that's at this place we go to called Board of Advisors. There are 150 high-end CEOs that are running family offices, digital media, all of it. There are powerful people in that room, then there's the lighting crew. The lighting crew, I went and talked to them. I got to know them. Coleman, Travis, and all these guys, their normal people that have amazing stories. The same thing, he came to one of our events, a Living a Better Story event. I was like, “What piqued your interest? What caused you to come?” He goes, “Because you pulled me aside, you talked to me. You got to know who I am. Other people who've been there for years brush it off. They don't even know my name.”
Welcome to the world today. More people can change that and it doesn't cost you anything. All it takes is talking to someone. Being a nice person and asking how someone's day is. Not saying how is your day and then disregarding them because you don't care. You're just saying, “How's your day?” Asking them and digging into it and then logging that in your mind and remembering that person, what they’re going through, whatever it is, it doesn't cost you anything. Why not do that?
Aaron, this has been a fabulous conversation. If people want to get ahold of you, what would be the best way to reach out?
Probably via email. Either Aaron@TheBrainchildGroup.com or Aaron@SoteriaIntelligence.com.
We've been talking to Aaron Schoenberger, the Founder of TheBrainchildGroup.com, as well as the Founder and CEO of Soteria Intelligence. A fabulous conversation. I love getting to know people that are making a difference in the world. Thank you for sharing your story, Aaron on the Living a Better Story podcast.
Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. I look forward to keeping in touch with you.
Everybody, we'll catch you on the next show. For now, reach out to Aaron Schoenberger if you have anything in the digital marketing space, he would be a good guy to talk to. Thanks, everybody.
Important Links:
About Aaron Schoenberger
Aaron Schoenberger is the Founder of The Brainchild Group and also serves as the Founder/CEO of Soteria Intelligence – a technology company that used The Brainchild Group’s 10+ years of R&D to deliver revolutionary AI-powered social media analytics, monitoring and digital customer experience solutions that are being used by a variety of large organizations today.
Mr. Schoenberger has spent the past 15+ years studying the internet, including: social media, search engine optimization, online public relations, digital customer experiences, and online behaviors in general. He’s had the opportunity to guide businesses ranging from startups to Fortune 100 companies, spoke at a variety of conferences, was cited as a subject-matter expert by various news outlets and publications (BBC, Columbia Journalism Review, NPR, The Guardian, VideoAge, college textbooks, etc.), and serves as a social media expert witness in federal court cases.
