Paul Cecil on AI Agents, Going Public, and Startup Leadership Mastery

Our AI is essentially kind of a AI real estate agent. What we're trying to reach is so that a home buyer can go through the entire process with this one concierge AI. Welcome to super entrepreneurs podcast. Today we have with us Paul Cecil. He's the VP of strategy at Realpha, the world's first commission free AI home buying platform that's redefining how people invest in real estate. He's been a key player in raising capital, closing acquisitions, and shaping the vision of a tech driven real estate company that's pushing the envelope with AI. I love AI. Welcome to our show, Paul. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. That intro was fantastic. Oh, thank you. Thank you. No, no, it was great to have you, my friend. I know I was 11, 11 am right now, but I gave you 11 minutes of waiting around trying to fix the technology issue that we had, but I'm grateful now that we can talk as well and always, always happens that way, right? Yeah, it always does. It always does. So no, but it's good. It comes back up fairly quickly. So we're good. So your, your story so far, you have been at, at Realpha since 2021, basically one of the early people involved in that startup. Now you're VP of strategy. That's an incredible climb. What, what are the biggest things you have learned about leadership and strategy during that, that journey? Okay. Yeah, there's a, there's a lot there definitely to, to unpack, you know, as far as the climb goes kind of from, as I started, I started as a financial analyst. Right. And for those that have been, that have been following Realpha for quite a while, we had back when I joined, we had a completely different business model and we had, it was a completely different situation. I mean, it was a startup. I was, I was employee number 10. And so I joined as a, as a financial analyst. And so, you know, over time, as we, as we experienced more and more, right. I learned more and more about leadership and, you know, even like getting into the topic of power a little bit to a certain point in, in your career, especially if you're young and trying to, uh, trying to rise in the ranks much faster. Hey, it's easier to do in a, in a smaller company, right? Because you have more visibility, more responsibility, things like that. But B you sort of have to go in, in a transitional period of where leadership no longer becomes about. Obviously doing what you're told to be doing. Whereas it's a transition to, Hey, I can, I could run this and proactively going and saying, I can run this. I can, you know, I could take over this responsibility, this division, this, you know, this idea I have let me run with it. Right. So at some point, kind of that powered responsibility is taken rather than given to you. And so that, that's kind of like the, one of the biggest things I learned as far as rising the ranks in, in a startup or, or even a public company, but leadership, I love that topic. I'm a big follower of Jocko Willink and I study a lot of military leadership principles and things of that nature. So, you know, I like the four, the four simple rules that he puts together, which is a covered move, right. You know, covering for your teammates, allowing them to move up. And helping other people get wins and then having the same done for you. B, you know, taking extreme ownership over, over results and over outcomes. And, uh, you know, really like responsibility over all things and see, you know, keeping it simple. And I'm blanking on the last one at the moment, but you know, military leadership is a big one for me that I've learned along the way. So it sounds like a big component of that is mindset. Do you feel that there's this, your own ability, how you were seeing things, your perspective of what was happening had a lot to do with it as well? I would, I would say so. I think, I think the biggest differentiator nowadays for, for a lot of people is kind of your, call it your locus of control, right? I'm sure you're familiar kind of with that, that terminology. A lot of people nowadays, I feel have more of an external locus of control. So they are giving responsibility of their, their lives and their position. They're, they're basically outsourcing it to, to others, right? Like what's the, you know, where am I, what's the government doing? What's, you know, what's happening to everyone else is responsible. Exactly. Everyone else is responsible versus an internal locus is, Hey, I'm, I'm responsible for everything all the way down to, you know, how I react to somebody yelling at me on the street of New York, right, like, you know, you're responsible for everything. And I feel like that gives you a lot more power. Yeah, no, I love that. I love that Paul, we are responsible for everything. I love that quote because in reality, but we could spend our life just pointing the finger where everyone else did wrong to us, but if we take ownership and work on ourself and become more self-aware, deeper self-awareness of what's happening and it's really cool how we can make changes and I found even the situation circumstances start shifting to match that energy. It's great to talk to you about this stuff. So going from startup to a public company, you had a lot to do with this. What caught you off guard doing during the process and what lessons from that whole journey, do you wish you had known going in? It's a very, very arduous process for, you know, for those that haven't been through it, it is, it is grueling. And we were, you know, we were a very small team at the time. So it was essentially kind of the four or five of us driving most of the process. And I think all in all it took us, we started the foundation kind of in February of 2023 and then it took us all the way till October, 2023 to actually go public, right? And through that, there is a series of back and forth that you do as a company with the Securities Exchange Commission. And I, the easiest analogy is you have to get, you have to metaphorically get naked in front of the public as a business because you have to disclose literally everything down to transparency, down to even like founder lawsuit, right? If, if anybody's personally facing any lawsuits, your, your comp, your stock structure, your every little detail about your business strategy, your yeah. So there's, there's no hiding behind anything anymore. And, and the market will pick up on those things. And even the things that you think you're, that are a little bit more subtle, they will pick up on it and, you know, your stock price will, will reflect that. And so, you know, people should really understand what they're getting into before attempting something like that, because, you know, the SEC kind of comes back with all of these rounds of, of comment letters making you, you know, disclose more and it's essentially a full-time job kind of managing those. And so we got, you know, I think five letters, five comment letters and 92 comments. And these are not, you know, these are not small comments. They're like business model changing kind of, you know, foundational questions and things like that, that they'll, you know, that they'll throw. You have to make changes to the foundation of your startup as well, based on those comments. Sometimes, I mean, especially for a small company, that's like, cause our, you know, our business model at the time was we were, you know, we were buying up properties and essentially like splitting them, fractionalizing them for other investors. And so, because that involves securities, they're asking questions like, Hey, what's the regulation you're using to offer these securities? And because we were, we had one idea for a way we could raise, raise this money through what was called regulation CF. You actually can't do that as a public company anymore. Right? So it's like, Hey, that, that's no longer an option anymore. And so a lot changes, especially from a regulatory perspective. And then, you know, now we deal with things like brokerage, mortgage, title licenses, and, and stuff like that. So that's also all has to be disclosed. So this, this might be a little bit off topic question that came to mind. Maybe that was happening in the past. Regulations weren't as strong as they are today, but companies in the past that defrauded people and they created public companies, took money from people. How did they get away with it then with such strict guidelines? It's definitely gotten stricter over time. They, I mean, the, the one, everybody can name is Enron, of course. And that was when they kind of came out with SOX compliance and a lot stricter accounting regulations. But you know, there's, there's, there's still stuff that can, that can go through the cracks and you, you know, they don't, they don't control you fully, but you do have to kind of disclose everything. And people unfortunately do try and hide things and later it comes to bite them. So these things happen, but as long as stuff is disclosed, then you can't really get, you know, you can't get in trouble for most things, as long as it's disclosed. Being honest. Yeah. Being honest and transparent. Right. And you know, maybe that negative with Enron was a positive in a way that they created such strict procedures to make sure that doesn't happen again. Yeah. I mean, it is a positive. It's, it's more difficult for companies to go and stay public, but it is a good thing for the general public, I think. Yeah. So you were already building AI for property ranking before ChatGPT hit the scene. You had to rebuild everything after, that's what I saw. And what actually changed for your team when you had to do that? Did you see the biggest productivity jump or, or new heights because of that pivot? So there was, yeah, there's a couple of things going on there, right? Our, our original model, like you said, we'd using AI to kind of rank properties and, and now what, you know, our AI is essentially kind of a, the AI real estate agent with what we're, what we're trying to reach is so that a whole buyer can go through the entire process with this one concierge AI, which doesn't exist yet. Right. It doesn't exist to where you can go and do brokerage mortgage and title in one spot. So that's, that's where we want to head. Um, but originally it was like a property ranking system and obviously on a little bit less sophisticated technology than, you know, than ChatGPT. And it was, it was kind of interesting because when, when ChatGPT launched, right, the 3.5 one that everybody was obsessed with, uh, our, our CEO came in that day and, you know, half the people were gone because of Christmas break, whatever, and, you know, he comes in and he's like, listen, guys drop, literally forget everything, you know, because everything has changed now. And he said, just anything, anything you thought you knew, you don't know anymore. We have to reset our thinking, right? Because this is going to be so powerful that it will change everything, every industry, et cetera. So, you know, we basically started from ground zero as far as personal productivity on that day that it came out. Yeah. Hmm. And you're pretty vocal about using open AI and ChatGPT when you are actually reevaluating these new tools. What are you actually looking for? How do you know if something's going to be worth the investment? For me personally, I have just been, for lack of a better term, I abused them. So I will, I will plug every use case that I can possibly think of from a personal perspective into ChatGPT or others just to see how they respond. And, you know, like one of, one of the things I've been playing around with lately is creating a personal board of directors. So I have a series of different coaches for different topics that I'll ask questions and then they actually learn from each other and they talk to me in different ways based on, you know, different, different people or different materials that I've fed them. And then, so, you know, that, that's one of the things that I've been doing lately, but, you know, I really just kind of abuse it for personal purposes and then whichever one works the best, I kind of, you know, put our team on as well and, you know, we use, we use chat, we use open AI, we use cloud, a couple of other ones, but I think, you know, open AI has been the strongest for us. Especially with the, now with ChatGPT 5 is, it has a lot more reasoning capabilities and it's just, it's just so incredible to see where this is going. You know, like you also mentioned that AI made you 50 times more efficient and I agree, same here, you know, it's, it's, it's bold to say that, but it really is the fact, you know, when we work with people, we say for businesses, basically you say, we will try to, we'll actually get you up to 90% free from your daily hustle using AI because it is possible. It will happen in one day. It will happen in an hour. No, right. Each area of the business can be replicated now with this intelligence and this only getting better. And when it gets to a point where it gets to, you know, super intelligence, a lot of people are scared as well. So a lot of people have this fear, generally fears that, that vibe that is very common in humanity. But we can either pick and choose. We can either be neutral or we can say, Oh, I'm so scared. It's going to take over the world. Because if you really think about it, super intelligence, it means that it'll be thinking. It'll be seeing itself as something. And then it might see humans as something lower. And just like with humans over the thousands of years of how ego was developed, it was by seeing ourselves in the mirror, you know, we started seeing our cultures, races, all that kind of stuff. We started feeling better than others and developed the ego started getting stronger and stronger and stronger. And where we are right now in the whole world is very strong in his grip. Same way. If AI superintelligence gets to that point, it could develop a, its own type of ego and could do something. So there's fears, but then there's potential in that too, because, you know, if you're riding this wave and you learn how to use this, you can free up your time, you can come up with innovations. You can come up with creations. You can amplify your life in ways that you could never have imagined before. It requires a strong mindset, of course. But if you, you, you actually ride this, you can take it to some levels that it could help humanity. But I think it's, there's different ways to look at it. I would love to hear your view on that. Yeah, I'm, I'm very optimistic overall, right? I mean, we talked about this earlier, right? I'm, I like to kind of take control of what I can. Right. So it's, it comes down to, it comes down to game theory, right? If, if we don't as a country call it, right. If we don't embrace AI, somebody else will, right? Like China, Russia, anybody, they'll embrace it and they'll get it to the point of superintelligence before we will. And then somebody else will control that. Right. So, you know, that, you know, at a geopolitical geopolitics level, I guess, you know, somebody is going to be in control of it. So it might as well be us and we might as well create that, that reality. And I think on a more, you know, micro level call it, I really like the CEO of perplexity, his, his viewpoint on it. Whereas it's going to help us ask questions. We don't get no to ask because, you know, we're getting these, these 90% increases in or decreases in time spent on other things. And we can automate all these, all these small things. It leaves so much more time for just deep thinking on how to solve problems and, you know, and questions to ask. Even just, you know, think of like science is the next frontier for this because science has become very stagnant due to, due to politics and due to, you know, the whole nature of getting published and the funding and all that stuff, right. So AI is going to be able to speed up that scientific process a little bit more and, you know, help the scientists challenge and ask additional questions, which is what science is kind of built on. I think this is questioning and then testing and then moving forward. So I think it's going to help us ask those questions, get results faster and solve a lot of the world problems. Yeah. So true because, you know, another way to look at it about deep thinking is the fact that people, for example, for in my world, I'm just speaking about me. I meditate, I I'm present, you know, I spend a lot of time in that stillness experiencing the life, right. Experiencing everything that's coming in each moment. I just live by it, you know, and I just look at it with a detachment kind of view, if that makes sense. And that allows me, AI allows me to do that more. And then what happens is that creativity starts coming out, that the ideas start coming out. I feel that deep thinking is what is going to create the new evolution of humanity, meaning that people are going to be at a different level of consciousness because of AI. So I feel like AI came to us at the perfect time when chaos is at the rise. It's say, Hey, I'm here. You know, why don't you calm your mind and see things for how they really are? Love that. Yeah. Kind of getting more of the, you know, getting them more of the present moment and allow, there's a lot of, you know, everybody's distracted. Everybody's off in Lala lands, including myself sometimes, of course. Yeah. And mindset, you know, people, one of the biggest feedback you get from people is that when you give them homework, they say, well, how am I going to do this one hour of studying today when I got this many things to do, but the beautiful thing is a paradox because the more you spend time on your internal world, that chaos decreases. So it's like, it's like a mirror effect, but now without having to explain that and kind of convince of things to people, you can say, Hey, listen, what's taking up your most, most time in your life? Oh, my contact. Okay. Let's convert that into AI, right? And to save that time. And now you have more time to be, you know, present and work on your internal world because the internal world is the mirror of what you can achieve in life. So why not spend time there? So it's a blessing. I feel like it's very special, you know, AI. So you, you talk about AI enhancing thinking as well. This is what we're talking about here is that enhancement, that deep thinking rather than, you know, kind of replacing it because there's people that might be using it to replace it rather than have it as a thought art, a partner thought partner, like having this, this, a series of intelligence staff members that are just out there to help you grow or help you do better or whatever the case may be. Right. Maybe, maybe be even be healthier. How do you actually teach that to your team? What does good AI usage look like versus just becoming dependent on it? Interesting. Very good question. So there's, there's a couple, there's a couple of things that people can do right now to make their youth, their AI productivity skyrocket basically. One is you can create ground rules. So especially, you know, people get, people get very lazy with call it the, the formatting of things when AI just kind of does it for you, right? Formatting and the way, the way information is presented, right? Because you're not, you're not presenting it to another AI. Typically you're presenting something to another human that you've taken from AI, right? Call it a research report or something. So if you put in as a company, right, some ground rules about how the AI should talk to you and present information like, Hey, don't use em dashes, don't use emojis, talking to professional tone, that sort of thing, that'll save you, you know, that'll save you a lot of headache cleaning up later on. Cause they'll always talk like that. Um, and you have to specifically tell it to commit to memory. Right. But if we're, you know, and then the other, the other big thing is. It seems like AI can become a echo chamber very, very quickly. Right. Especially chat to PT. Some of the other ones like, like Grock will be a little bit more honest with you most of the time, but chat to PT can be a bit of an echo chamber sometimes because it'll tell you what you want to hear. So when you're looking for actual feedback on stuff, you have to say things like be brutally honest or, you know, compared versus this thing where compared versus our old state or et cetera, et cetera. Right. You have to get creative with the prompting, but you know, it's going to give you more of what you ask for. So if you are looking for validation, it's going to end up giving you validation. Right. Which is not a good thing. No, no. It's just telling you what you want to hear. Right. So that might cause problems. Definitely. It definitely causes problems. Right. Which is kind of what we staged early on. I told the team, Hey, you know, we need to start doing everything on AI. Right. But then they were doing everything on AI, but not prompting it correctly. So we were getting, you know, it's kind of garbage in garbage out. And since then they've, you know, they've fixed everything and it's fantastic now. Fantastic work. Yeah. Because if you, if you prompt engineer it, if you kind of train it properly, it does a really good job. But you can't just take it out of the box. You kind of mold it to what you want to do. That's wonderful. So once you put in the prompts, engineering prompts, then it started thinking or reasoning differently to match what you were expecting it to do. Correct. Exactly. Yeah. Then the more, you know, the more data, the more context, the more. Call it storyline. You can give it the better, right? It can handle that now, but it couldn't, it couldn't handle it before. Right. Three, five could not handle all of that, but now it's like, now it could just take whole PBS, et cetera. Yeah, I love it. It's amazing. So, you know, going back to the, the wild possibilities that you've mentioned as well, and I'm also very similar to what your thought patterns are towards AI. So far from what I'm hearing now, the possibilities of AI super intelligence or humanoid robots and, you know, universal basic income, all of these are fantastic things that are coming. But which of these do you think will actually see go mainstream and how could entrepreneurs prepare, prepare for such a big shift? The first I'll give my, my biggest piece of advice for, for entrepreneurs planning their strategy for the next three years, I think the next two, in case anybody didn't see chat, UBT slash open AI, they had a leaked strategy document, and so I read through that. Most of it is redacted, but you can kind of get the gist of what they're saying in there, right? Where they are headed in the next, call it two to three years. They're they're phase one is they want to become the super intelligent agent for your life. Right. So they want to have it. So that chat, UBT is the main thing that you send out to do things for you. Right. Right now it's very back and forth, but it'll get to the point where you're sending it out to do things for you. Like, Hey, go make me a meal plan, bring me back the grocery list and then order it on Instacart for me. So I don't have to do any of it. Or, you know, give me, go do the research for my, my health in this specific condition, bring me back an exercise plan that I can use and then, you know, help me sign up for a gym membership, right. Find me the best gym, et cetera. And then it'll go out and reach, reach out to different gyms, et cetera. So, you know, pretty soon that's going to become the new reality, especially as open AI gets more integrated with the Apple ecosystem, which is the majority of phones in the U S. And so it's going to become instead of marketing and doing SEO for, and, and products, even for people, it's going to be who can cater to the AI agents, the best rather than tool people. That's my bold bet for the next few years is like, you know, I think, I think it's going to be more about optimizing for AI agents, finding and interacting with your product rather than. Can you give an example of that? Just to, to dumb it down, you know? Sure. So right now you can have Google call and make reservations for you at a restaurant, right? So you can say, Hey, you know, I want, I'm looking for a reservation during this time and Google will actually call and, you know, find you a time for a reservation on at a restaurant, right? This is really big in New York where reservations are a little bit harder to come. No, I meant, sorry, sorry, Paul. Just to, just to correct, just to make sure we're on the same page. So the actual functionality completely understood that you'll be able to do a lot of things that we could do on a browser, for example, but you mentioned that the future entrepreneurs are the people that have businesses or products and services, they should be looking at ways to figure out ways to communicate with the agents for the future. So can you give an example of that part for, let's just pick up a company that sells, I don't know, shorts, whatever. Before, right. If you were a, if you were a short company, let's call it, you're selling bathing suits for men or something, right? Your, your marketing strategy and SEO strategy will be focused around finding keywords and there's two, two aspects of it, right? Marketing, you're trying to find your audience of people that are say, looking to go to the ocean soon, or they're, they're traveling the ocean and they're searching for things like, you know, bathing suits for men that don't, they don't get dyed by the ocean water or something. Right. And they're searching for that physically. And from an SEO perspective, you're trying to get keywords like bathing suits and best bathing suits for men and stuff like that, right? So it's, it's shifting slightly because now, right. Somebody, instead of actually physically doing that themselves, they're going to say to their AI agent, Hey, go out and find me the best bathing suits. So it's going to be about figuring out what the actual AI agent is, is looking for in those things and how it's analyzing it and bring it back to people rather than the people actually finding it themselves, if that makes sense. No, but it's still doing the keywords research is still doing blogs. The agent will write the blogs. It'll do all that stuff for it to drive people back to the website. But instead of you commanding or trying to do it, it will just do it for you. That's what you mean. Is that the, yeah, there's, there's little, there's little subtle differences such as eventually people will just give their, you know, they'll just give their AI a budget and you know, their AI will go and buy it for them. Right. They buy me the best, whatever the best one, which means the actual design of websites won't matter as much in the, the, the human aspects of it. Like, how does the psychology of the website make you feel? Because the AI will analyze it and point zero, they don't care. They're just looking for, they're looking for hard data and stats, right. Which is where, you know, your stuff like SEO and the new term would be generative engine optimization is becoming much more important than the human psychology aspect of it. The machine aspect has to be taken care of more importantly. Exactly. Right. And we've, we've seen the same thing kind of happen on, on an investor relations perspective as a public company, right? Because now 80% plus of all the trading in the stock market is done by algorithms. So it's like, Hey, you're no longer writing press releases for press releases and materials for humans. You're writing them out for bots basically. So it's like, how do you reconstruct your message to cater towards the bots and the agents that are trading rather than. You know, actual people. This, this is probably the most powerful point in this whole episode. So hopefully people in the audience are fellow entrepreneurs and business people are picking up on this information. I'm very grateful that you came on our show today, Paul. It was, it was fun talking to you about all this stuff because this is my life right now, I completely went from enthusiast to deep into it and the more, the more you study it, the more you look at it, the more like just completely, it will completely change the dynamics of how we live today in so many ways, you know, like once the robot is connected to the AI, literally, you know, they're trying to figure out how to make autonomous cars. Maybe you don't even need to do that. Right. Maybe the robot just goes in the car and drives it to wherever you need to go. Maybe the robot is the most important. So go have a meeting for me. I have a meeting for you on your phone and the robot is sitting with another robot, having a meeting. You can see the other robot, but you're actually, you're talking about Mark Zuckerberg was hoping for. Yeah. Oh, he was, but it did work out. It did not work. Well, yeah, that's why they did the, when VR was huge, he did the whole metaverse rebrand and everything that didn't really catch on, but it didn't catch on, no, I think there's new players coming that are, are changing their dynamic dynamics, the big boys, you know, they're out there, they're trying. But I think with machines, the little guys have a chance, you know, little guys can create something valuable for humanity and, and I don't think anybody should fear the big boys anymore with machine you're able to do a lot now. So there are absolutely zero barriers to entry from a baseline knowledge perspective, right? You can get to 80% of the knowledge on any topic within a very short amount of time. With a, yeah. Imagine like every human being literally is going to be super intelligence. Why? Because, you know, and especially the people that are, that pride themselves on their intelligence, you know, they, and I respect it because they went through a lot, they studied a lot. That's great. Obviously, but it could be intimidating because now everybody's going to have because if they have the glasses, the glass is going to be reading their, even their body motion. Like they could never study that. Right. So it could tell them what they're, you know, how are they vibing? You know, their vibe, like, are they excited right now? Or do you think potentially you're going to close the deal or are they going to walk away or they're, they're scared? What is the reason? Or it could even find out. Predetermine what they're about. Like, Oh, it just blows my mind. It will be very interesting to see as well. What happens with dating? That's the one that I'm very excited to see what happens. Yeah. Oh my God. Oh, man. You guys fun. It's exciting, but it's happening right now. We're in that reality. Let's take advantage of it and grow with it again, Paul. Let's stay in touch, you know, and, and see if anything else, if you're launching anything, definitely you're welcome to come back. Appreciate that. Appreciate you having me on.