Mordy Hackel is the founder and principal of KJ Technology, a Manhattan-based managed IT services firm he has been building since 1998.

His career has included experience on Wall Street, a game-design startup, and technology work for organizations including the NBA, Sony Music, and Citibank.

Today, Mordy helps small and growing businesses use technology as a force multiplier, with expertise in managed IT services, cybersecurity, compliance, technology strategy, AI infrastructure, and fractional technology leadership.

Mordy is also the host of the Ventures and Visionaries podcast, where he speaks with successful business leaders about careers, entrepreneurship, personal growth, and finding value in a changing workplace.

Episode Host: Henry Lopez is a serial entrepreneur, small business coach, and the host of The How of Business podcast show – dedicated to helping you start, run, grow and exit your small business.

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Artificial Intelligence Episodes

Transcript:

The following is a full transcript of this episode. This transcript was produced by an automated system and may contain some typos.

Henry Lopez 00:12
Welcome to this episode of the How of Business. This is Henry Lopez. My guest today is Morty Hackel. Morty, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks, Henry. I really

Mordy Hackel 00:21
appreciate you having me.

Henry Lopez 00:21
Looking forward to this conversation. You know, technology, of course, continues to change the way that we, as small business owners, operate. But many owners are still struggling to separate the opportunity from the risk when it comes to technology, especially AI technology. And so, entrepreneur and technology expert Morty Hackel joins me today to explore how small business can leverage technology to grow and stay competitive, but at the same time protect themselves from emerging cybersecurity threats. You can find all of the How a Business resources, including the show notes page for this episode, at thehowabbusiness.com, as well as information on my one-on-one and group coaching programs, and I invite you to consider joining this podcast, our podcast community, the How a Business Community, on Patreon, and subscribe wherever you might be listening, so you don’t miss any new episodes. Let me tell you a little bit more about Morty, and then we’ll get into the conversation. Morty Hackel is the founder and principal of KJ Technology. KJ Technology is a Manhattan-based managed IT firm, and he’s been building it since 1998. His path there was anything but straight, and we’re going to explore that a little bit. Starting on Wall Street, pivoting through a game design startup, and cutting his teeth doing IT for the MBA, Sony Music, and Citibank. But today, Morty helps small and growing businesses use technology as a true force multiplier with deep expertise in cybersecurity, compliance, and fractional CTO leadership. Morty is also the host of his own podcast, the Ventures and Visionaries podcast. Morty lives in New York City, and so once again, Morty Hackel, welcome to the show, sir.

Mordy Hackel 01:59
Thank you, Henry. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here. It’s funny that you mentioned the NBA. I don’t think about that. It was so long ago. But a funny story: the then Commissioner David Stern was in the elevator, and I was I don’t know. I was in my 20s, and I was an IT guy, and he had just grown a beard, and he had seen me, and goes nice.

Henry Lopez 02:18
That was your connection to him. Yeah, I didn’t really

Mordy Hackel 02:21
have much to do with him. I was just, you know, on the on the desk doing work. Yeah, and

Henry Lopez 02:25
of course the Knicks just won the championship, so that that brought it all back around. I’m sure. Bring it on, crazy. The

Mordy Hackel 02:31
commissioner Silver was there at the time as well, and I think I may have fixed his laptop once or twice. Is

Henry Lopez 02:36
that right? Wow. Well, this conversation happened because you happen to know, my son-in-law, who works for a company from who you offer IT services. So thanks to Colin for connecting us. I appreciate it, Colin. Thank you. He’ll be listening. He gave me a couple of questions asking here, so prepared with those. But I always am interested in the journey. You, what did you study at university?

Mordy Hackel 02:58
I was an econ major.

Henry Lopez 03:00
What did you think you were going to do when you when you grew up?

Mordy Hackel 03:02
Oh, so you know, I clearly wasn’t smart enough to finish the the physics major that I thought I was going to do, or the finance major that I thought I was going to do after that. You know, math and I we diverged after some some time after you know calc one, and that’s pretty much the end of that. So, so econ was the ability to take a lot of what I had done and finish it. And I always understood that business, technology, those kinds of things were things that I enjoyed and were interested in. How exactly that was going to be, I don’t know. I was just kind of hopeful at the time. I don’t know that I had a plan.

Henry Lopez 03:38
Interesting, because I was terrible at math as well, and yet I ended up in IT also, right? Back then,

Henry Lopez 03:44
our age, or at least my age, you were told you to go into IT, you had to have math skills, and I was terrible at math. I’m still terrible at math, and yet here we are, right?

Mordy Hackel 03:54
It’s fascinating, yeah. It’s I don’t know that I don’t know that the lack of math on that level held me back from doing anything other than advanced thinking, and what I mean by that is, say, you’re trying to project out certain kinds of behaviors, or scaling out a business, or understanding demand, things that most entrepreneurs do on a muscle and feel basis rather than mathematical modeling. And the truth is, at the size that many of our probably our listeners and many of the companies in the United States are. I don’t know that it’s necessary, but understanding the math does have a lot of value.

Henry Lopez 04:29
It does, yeah. The fund, the fundamentals of it. What I found is that what I ended up having to learn was just the basic math of business, which is really rather basic, and even I can handle that with a calculator. Did you aspire to be a business owner when you were younger, or what were the thoughts?

Mordy Hackel 04:45
It was always in the back of my mind. I don’t know that there was a burning passion for it, and you know, my family members were you know not entrepreneurial per se. Although there was a time where you know, Dad did. Attempt a business for a little bit, and you could see that he was happiest at that time, even though the business ultimately did not succeed. So maybe that somehow resonated with me. But there was always a difference between feeling like you own something and are trying to build something that you have a an emotional connection to, and I think that’s true for employees as well. I don’t think that that’s different, but I think creating a resonance between the human and the work probably for me that’s about you know the ability to serve. Other people probably connect some other way, but I think that that’s key to being successful in general. Forget whether entrepreneurial or not.

Henry Lopez 05:36
Yeah, great point. That makes sense. So tell me briefly the story. What what led you to founding KJ Technology.

Mordy Hackel 05:42
So it’s a great story, you know. I really credit my father-in-law of Blessed Memory. He insisted that I wanted to get married, and he said, “You know, you need to get a job. That was that was the that’s how I got into technology. And you

Henry Lopez 05:56
were in between jobs at the time. Is that what was going on? Or

Mordy Hackel 05:59
yeah, the the games business failed, and I had to figure out what to do. And he said, “You need to get a job. And I said, “Okay. So I got a job in technology, and that’s how I did all the consulting gigs at the bigger companies. And then at some point, that business was not doing so well, and I I believed in the customer service model of technology, which, if you remember the late ’90s, that was not such a huge thing. In any event, IT IT folks in those days were known as being brash and not not empathic and not interested in solving problems, or maybe interested in solving problems their way. And you know, you reboot the computer and lose everybody’s data, or you know, like that kind of stuff.

Henry Lopez 06:42
Yeah. Well, well, we solved the Y 2k problem, so we thought that was it. That was our big challenge.

Mordy Hackel 06:47
And the planes didn’t fall out of the sky. I guess that’s something.

Henry Lopez 06:49
Exactly.

Mordy Hackel 06:50
Yeah, that was that was certainly interesting times. Spending a lot of hours trying to patch a lot of computers manually. Thank God that’s been fixed.

Henry Lopez 06:58
So, so this, so you needed an opportunity, and what did you have? Some clients you felt you could serve. What what led you to take this leap?

Mordy Hackel 07:06
Yeah, so we had my business partner’s dad had just sold a business, and he told us that he would, you know, help us out. So that was a little bit of taking the risk out of the equation, and at the same time, a couple of our clients were, you know, look, you know, I mentioned that I was leaving. I said, you know, you obviously should stay with your company, but you know, a couple of them, short time after, were not receiving any service, so they called us, and that was a very nice thing for us to to be able to start out with a little bit of revenue, because at the end of the day, you know, we were bootstrapping the company. The financing was really a a stopgap in the event that we needed it. It was more of that kind of commitment rather than here. Here’s a bunch of money and just spend it in a indiscriminate fashion on you know lovely offices. And yeah, that was that was that was the approach. And the truth is, it it made us independent in a hurry.

Henry Lopez 08:03
So your your partner is John, right? That’s who you partnered with initially, and you’re still partners.

Mordy Hackel 08:07
Yes, yes, he’s still the J and KJ.

Henry Lopez 08:11
Why why do you think this partnership has worked so long over all these

Mordy Hackel 08:15
years? You know, I think that there’s an honesty factor. We’ve taken on subsequently one more partner, and there is an honesty factor that I think doesn’t often exist in partnerships. Look, you’re going to step on toes. It’s a relationship like any other, and there are going to be problems. There are going to be issues. People are going to get their I don’t know, call it their feelings hurt or whatever the situation is, or they’re going to you know. And at the same time, when you realize that somebody’s heart’s in the right place. They’re coming at it because they want to do good. Then forgiveness can be found, and path forward can be forged. Admittedly, it’s never easy. But if the good of the whole is a clarion call, then then then I think it works. And the truth is, the proof’s on the pudding. It’s been 30 years.

Henry Lopez 09:00
Yeah, it’s tremendous. I I think you touch on what what’s a key. I’ve mostly been in partnerships in my business ventures, and that’s one of the key things my my business partner always mentioned is that we we felt like we had each other’s backs. But what I talk about often, Morty, on the show is the the alignment is the hard thing, right? Because over those 30 years, life changes, your needs changes, your partner’s needs changes, so I found that you’ve got to continue to be honest with each other and communicate to stay in alignment as to what you each want and need from the business. Yeah,

Mordy Hackel 09:30
yeah, I think that that’s definitely a true statement. I guess everyone says this in a in a way that I always found a little bit trite, and that is the only thing you can count on is change. But the truth is, it’s the only thing that is. And the if if you’re trying to be in the moment, then be in the moment. But if you’re trying to anticipate what will happen tomorrow, I mean, you can have a generally good idea, but that doesn’t mean that it will be.

Henry Lopez 09:54
Yeah, I also have found that it is part of being an entrepreneur that you almost embrace that. Change. You realize you accept that change is inevitable. If you expect something to be the same and not change much, then you may not be cut out to be an entrepreneur because that’s just what comes with the territory. Is what I’ve found.

Mordy Hackel 10:12
I think you’re right, Henry. I would say that perhaps even a step further. I think the getting a charge, getting an excitement out of change, finding the idea that that these are truly opportunities to everyone uses the word exploit, but it’s not really exploit. No one’s trying to exploit an opportunity. You’re trying to use it to your advantage or help people leverage whatever the word is. I think that entrepreneurs, because of their size and their ability to be nimble. If their mindset’s nimble, then they have an opportunity to take advantage and come to market in a in a very interesting way. Someone was telling me the other day, which I don’t know if this is true or not, but you know, obviously, as the work environment changes in general, they anticipate that almost everybody will come to work almost like a solopreneur, you know, because so much of the show up to a meeting as an entry level person and take notes can now be done by a machine, and the basic work of creating a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint can be done with greater or lesser degree by a machine. So you know, certainly low-level coding can be done by a machine, and maybe this is our entry into the AI conversation. I don’t know. You’ll tell me, but but the idea that we now have the ability to do things in a more interesting way, so that means that I, as a worker in the economy, need to think deeply and hard as to well, what do I have that’s unique in this world? What makes me special? Why would anyone want to hire me? And that obviously, you know, translate to a business too. But why would this business want to keep me? How can I be valuable? And if I think that if everybody focused on that, I think a lot of the problems that exist in the workplace today would just vanish.

Henry Lopez 12:00
Interesting. Yeah, we’ll definitely explore that some more. But let’s level set. Tell us briefly at a high level the services that KJ Technology offers your clients today. This is Henry Lopez briefly pausing this episode to invite you to schedule a free coaching consultation with me. I welcome the opportunity to chat with you about your business plans and offer the guidance and accountability that we all need to achieve success. As an experienced small business owner myself, I understand the challenges you’re experiencing, and often it’s about helping you ask the right questions to help you make progress towards achieving your goals. Whether it’s getting started with your first business or growing and maybe exiting your existing small business, I can help you get there. To find out more about my business coaching services and to schedule your free coaching consultation, please visit thehowabusiness.com. Take that next step today towards finally realizing your business ownership dreams, I look forward to speaking with you soon.

Mordy Hackel 13:08
Yeah, so you know, KJ Technology was always a services business. We do obviously partner with a lot of the you know the manufacturers, whether it be hardware or cloud, and that’s been you know KJ two or three or 4.0 or any of those, and like you know, we would resell some of those services and set them up and configure them, and so we do do services, and that breaks down to a couple of different areas: advisory services, helping people figure out, you know, what are you trying to do with your business, and how does that relate to the technology, and using that as a force multiplier, and that could be anything from cloud, security, AI, all those areas that typically gets folded into a lot of the work that we do for the smaller businesses, maybe less than 100 people. In those companies, we tend to offer a holistic package. You generally don’t have anybody who’s responsible for technology in that area, and will do, for lack of better term, right, an outsource of that entire function. So it starts with you know strategy, design, roadmap, budget, and helps you know alleviate the need for a fractional director of technology. And then we bring in the engineering and the projects, as well as the help desk and helping people with whatever they need. From you know I can’t connect to the Wi-Fi all the way to I’m trying to forecast that we think we’re going to hire three to seven to 12 people next year. We want to make sure their onboarding experience is delightful because that’s kind of what our business is about. And every time we’ve bought computers and they never came right and they were broken and they have to work from home and they’re not connecting to the Wi-Fi, and they can’t get on the Zoom, or they can’t get on the Teams, or these problems are everybody’s problems. So creating streamlined approaches and building in the right kinds of automation, and you know, really, how do you think about all this? Like, I think that a lot of people just think, oh, it’s technology, it’s like a toaster. Maybe, maybe it is, but I have never found. That the use of the technology, the way you want to, is in fact like a toaster.

Henry Lopez 15:04
And so, when you think about the you know that ideal client that is a fit for you, what does that look like generally at high level? How do they bring you in? How do they leverage you in your services? What’s the give me a little bit more about the role that you play within that organization? How does that look when it’s done well?

Mordy Hackel 15:23
So let’s talk about the middle model because I think that that’s something that most people can relate to. The middle model is you know a full outsourcer. So let’s say you know a company of you know 1520 people, maybe that’s a little too large for our listeners, maybe not. I don’t know. But if you’re a company of a particular size, and you’ve reached the point where managing your technology has become too complex for you. We can step in, and what that means is rather than you worrying about most of the identities that people need to have, an identity would be you know I am Morty Hackel, log in as Morty at KJ Technology to a particular system, and we have in most businesses that are small, there’s got to be at least five to 10 different cloud systems that you’re interacting with. The bigger ones, some of them are 40, 5060, The more of these systems that you have, the more complicated it is. So how do I know that if somebody, God forbid, left the company under bad circumstances, or they just left the company, that I actually decommissioned all their data and moved it to the person that needs to have it. How do I make sure that those systems work with a general degree of liability so I can feel comfortable that it’s working properly? Forget about if I have compliance needs, and now I need to actually prove that I did that. So you know those things become more complicated when you reach the point of yeah five five people if you have a lot of complexity like compliance, 1015, people, if you just need to run a business, and then you know advisory services tends to be anybody in the lower end of the middle market. The third piece of our business has been interesting and been a lot of fun and a gift from God, I would say, and that is we do ultra high end residential work for people that you know has gone beyond the abilities of an AV partner. You know, if let’s say you’re a director of a company or an owner of a hedge fund, or you know you’re CEO of a publicly traded company, and you need some business continuity in your home, and your home may also have a number of different staff members, and you’re essentially functioning like a small business, and you need to do some quote-unquote pre-flight checklists if you’re going to your home down south, and you want to make sure everything’s working before you arrive, so that you’re able to work. So those kinds of things we tend to do with the slightly more white glove approach.

Henry Lopez 17:35
And then you touched on. You know, it’s interesting as I think about it, having started my IT career back in the ’80s. You mentioned the point, and nowadays, compared to maybe even the 90s, I just had to take you off your credentials off maybe the ERP system, and and that was about it. Now there’s so many disparate systems and things that I might have signed up for as an employee, all of that. But I want to touch on the the cybersecurity point for a moment. You put it so well as you say that people, I think, small business owners, we can be delusional in thinking that we are too small to be a target, but that often is far from the truth, isn’t it, Morty?

Mordy Hackel 18:11
I think you teed me up well. I think that’s 100% true. I think the philosophy of security by obscurity is not really a good approach. Security doesn’t just mean, oh my God, there’s some guy in somebody’s basement eating pizza and drinking beer and trying to hack me like you see on television. What’s happening in the marketplace today with the proliferation of AI is somebody in another part of the world where English may not be their native language can craft an email that looks very much like, sounds very much like, looks and really pass the sniff test like the CEO of your company. And everyone jokes around. Everybody, you know, they they go on LinkedIn and see you joined a new company. So now they’re going to send you an email from the CEO of that company saying, “Hey, CEO said, “You want to get gift cards? Like it’s inevitable. It’s gonna happen. The question is, are you gonna fall for it? And the issues aren’t about our ability to say, “Oh, I’m so aware. I got the training. I know all about this. But there’s urgency that’s being created. There’s psychological fear. What happens if I let the CEO down? I just started a new job. I can’t look like an idiot. They just want some gift cards. How bad could this possibly be? And this looks right, and the email looks right. So now you go ahead and do it. And like the manipulation level that can be done today using tools like AI can really ratchet up what otherwise would be. You know, you know, everyone would joke around about the prince in Nigeria was trying to give away their money, and my son was hilarious. He’s like, you know, wouldn’t it be sad if there’s really a prince in Nigeria who’s trying to give away money and nobody’s taking it? Nobody’s so mad.

Henry Lopez 19:52
And now, I mean, now what they can do with voice simulation, it’s even scarier, Warty. I mean, somebody could actually make a phone call and it. It would sound like it’s you authorizing whatever it is that you’ve asked me to do on your behalf.

Mordy Hackel 20:05
Yeah, so you and I have podcasts, and we are online. And with the you can’t you don’t need to just take the voice; you can take the video. You have plenty of content from which to sample you or me or anybody else who, for whatever reason, is doing interviews or has an online presence and and and recreate the voice. It’s not hard at all. So you know certainly what we advise our clients is to develop protocols for anything that’s at an inflection point, like you know sharing money, like contract signatures, like authorizing certain kinds of things that are of business critical nature. To have a pre organized method that this happens at, and don’t just do it because someone created a you know a artificial sense of urgency. It’s not easy because you know we we immediately go into fight or flight. You know,

Henry Lopez 20:52
and I I’ve seen where it can be an even bigger challenge for small organizations that are very autocratic. In other words, the boss. That’s just the way the boss does, right? They they just he or she just calls and things get done. And larger organizations have those protocols in place more often than not. So that’s another reason I’ve seen why small businesses are much more susceptible because it would not be out of the realm of possibility that I may not call and ask for something like that, right? As the small business owner.

Mordy Hackel 21:21
Yeah, and I’ll agree with that. I’ll also say that there are other areas that are not just you know a phish attempt or you know a smish attempt in text or you know a vish, which we spoke about a voice phone call. Those are certainly very common and very easy to do. But there are a lot of easy other ways to you know to get to people’s data. Doing a a phone number port or a SIM swap out of a phone is not unheard of. It’s not complicated if you know what you’re doing. A lot of these protocols are are very easy to manipulate, and having a plan or having a way to check for these kinds of things is important. Making sure that if you are either have access to or are part of a protocol that allows for access, that there’s you know a second pair of eyes, that there’s a a good check on this. I got once an email from a friend of mine who claimed this was back when this was still earlier on in the day, claimed to be you know in England, and that is and that his credit cards and his stuff was stolen and you know can I please send him some stuff through some cash through Western Union like and you know somebody that I didn’t feel particularly close with but close enough that if he was stuck abroad like I would have totally helped him out yeah but like you know, it was Friday afternoon at around 330, 4o’clock, and I’m a Sabbath observer, and so was he, and he would have never sent that email on the Sabbath. You know what? What? What is enough to get up your suspicion? You know where? Where do you pick up those clues to think about this twice before you go ahead and act in a way that, I mean, look, once the cash leaves the system, you’re done.

Henry Lopez 23:01
So, for a small business owner listening, we’re on this whole realm. Where do they? I think we’ve touched on it, but where do you recommend that they start to protect themselves?

Mordy Hackel 23:10
So, I think that’s a I think that’s a great question. I think that small businesses have a lot of tools at their disposal, and the first thing they need to start thinking about is education because that’s easy. Awareness, which is not the same as education. Trying to raise awareness within the firm, like tell a new employee as the CEO, I will never ask you for gift cards unless you see me in the office telling you to go buy those, like that kind of stuff. You know, it’s not it’s not that hard to know what the top 10 scams are and educate people on that. Additionally, there are a lot of tools out there that are not as expensive as they used to be, and they’re certainly within the affordability range of a small business that can be put on your computers and in your mail that can monitor for behavior that looks off, and the security operations center can lock that down. I will caution small business owners. Not all SOCs or security operation centers are created equal. A lot of times, the salespeople will tell you that they can do things that technically they do not have the ability to do. So that’s important to try and figure out if you can. You know, but having the SOC having the authority to say yes, I’m seeing this in my email. This shouldn’t be in my email. I’m going to lock this down, and let’s have you work with your IT guy to unlock it. And better be safe than sorry is certainly a good place to go. Yeah, and I think that if you do those two things, you really have protected yourself against the vast majority. And a lot of the other stuff is actually that’s not true. The third part is the patching. Yeah, make sure make sure your computers are are up to date.

Henry Lopez 24:48
Got it.

Mordy Hackel 24:48
It’s it’s you know for the same reason that people can send you a phish because the AI can allow you to create said issue very quickly and easily, deconstructing vulnerabilities in computers for. Which patches have already been issued that have not been deployed? The window for between patch release and deconstruction and using that exploit in the wild is just getting shorter because AI can deconstruct those vulnerabilities in a very easy way. So, patch patch regularly.

Henry Lopez 25:17
All right, let’s introduce AI. I want to jump to it here from this, you know what can go wrong point because that’s not where I want to spend a lot of the time. Because I have chosen Morty to look at AI, I have chosen to bury my head in the sand about the possible negatives of AI, what it can do to destroy jobs, the negatives it can have. All not because I don’t believe it, because but just because I’m choosing to look at all of the positives that the technology can provide for us as individuals and small business owners. Having said that, I do want to touch on it. What is it that a small business owner though needs to be aware of when you’ve got now team members using AI in different ways? What do I need to be worried about there? What do I need to corral?

Mordy Hackel 26:02
So, firstly, I agree with you that you know the opportunities far outweigh the negatives. I also think that the negatives themselves are inevitable, and that goes back to what we had spoken about all the way at the beginning. So, think of yourself: if you were a solopreneur, what would you do to invest in yourself to become better? And that drives directly into what you’re talking about in terms of the opportunities that people can now bring to the business. If I was a solopreneur and I was contracted to help fix the procurement process, or to fix the delivery service delivery process, or the phone answering process, or whatever it is that you’re dealing with, it doesn’t matter if you’re an HVAC company, or if you’re selling any kind of other widget, everybody has three main processes in their business, right? So you have you have sales, you have services slash delivery, and then you have finance and collecting on the on the money. So like on the most elemental level, those processes need to be addressed, and AI can help with all of those. So how would you help? And then the business needs to think. Well, I’m building now intellectual property. Well, what do I do with said intellectual property? You could be vibe coding. What happens with that? You could be trying to stand up a vibe code situation. Well, now you need to deal with the security ramifications or the identity and how much access do people get. And you know, as we said before, the bigger the company, the greater the complexity, and that’s some sort of a logarithmic thing. That again, I said I don’t understand the math, so I don’t. But I know that it is logarithmic, so it just means that it gets inherently more complicated as more people come into the into the mix. But it doesn’t happen linearly, so it just happens exponentially, meaning like it just grows, and then you start to to start breaking things down into either the Jeff Bezos, you know, two pizza pie model, or or even smaller, as people are saying now. But in any event, all that said, I think that the opportunities are immense, and if companies think about them holistically in terms of, like, I’ll give you another example. One of the things that KJ is offering now is an AI aggregator solution. We deal with the security problems by creating guardrails around the identity of the people. So, for example, I, Morty Haggle, have access to certain kinds of files. So now I have this aggregator. In this aggregator, I can use Claude. I can use ChatGPT. I can use I can use XAI. I could use a bunch of others of the big models and some of the sub models within those as well. So about 50 or so models when you pull the whole thing together, and but but I can only access the things that I Morty Hackel have access to. So I can’t pull the CEO’s data. I can’t go into someone else’s email. I can’t take spreadsheets that I don’t have access to and then plug them into the model. And in addition, you want to make sure that you’re not training the model with any of your private data, because that’s super, super, super dangerous stuff. You never know what’s going to wind up getting out there.

Henry Lopez 28:56
You can do that, you you know, without throttling down my individual ability within the organization to leverage AI to the fullest.

Mordy Hackel 29:05
I’m going to say yes, but it’s for most for

Henry Lopez 29:07
most employees. Yeah, from

Mordy Hackel 29:09
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a yes with an asterisk. I will say that this tool doesn’t work for the power users.

Henry Lopez 29:14
Okay, that’s fair

Mordy Hackel 29:15
for the power for the power users. You still need the quad code and all the rest of those kinds of things.

Henry Lopez 29:20
So, is it realistic? Is it a true concern that if I have an environment where I have no controls, you know, I have my own subscription to Claude, and Tony over there has his own ChatGPT, and we all have all of the spreadsheets and all of that information, all of the financials, and we might be using our own versions of of an LLM to do analysis. What’s the exposure really? The

Mordy Hackel 29:44
exposure risk is not a risk in the classical sense that you know someone’s going to come and do bad things with your stuff, assuming everybody’s doing the right thing and acting appropriately. The risk is now Tony left, and this was Tony’s account, and. All that knowledge and institutional knowledge that you built, whether or not it’s an application or a particular process or a language model and a marketing brand that you’ve built around whatever all that stuff is, it may be lost to you. Yeah. So the company is once it’s out the window, it’s gone, and now okay, now what?

Henry Lopez 30:18
So it’s IP leakage as much as anything else, isn’t it?

Mordy Hackel 30:21
Yeah, it’s IP leakage. It’s

Henry Lopez 30:24
confidential information leakage. Could be all of that. You know, you came back to the. You touched on it that in early days, back when when I was in IT, everything was centralized and controlled. Right. Talk to talk about when it wasn’t a service company. The reason vibe coding and all this has come around is that individuals within the organization are trying to solve business problems, and they can’t wait for IT to give them allocation or give them time, so they’re fixing them themselves, right?

Mordy Hackel 30:52
Yes, and it’s not just that IT doesn’t have the ability to give them the time of day, for lack of better term. It’s that the tools that they have purchased and need integration into don’t have the ability to give them the full complement of information that they’re looking for. So you bought Salesforce, and in Salesforce, I’m sorry. I hope I’m not using tools that you shouldn’t be saying names on. I don’t mean this in a bad way, but like in Salesforce, I’m tracking in my CRM. I’m tracking this information of a particular customer, and I build a particular workflow. But in this particular workflow, I don’t really have any more information than whatever’s been built in there, right? It’s very definitive as to what the compute process is going to be. I don’t have the ability for me to say, well, what about all these other pieces of data? Does regulation change my process. Are there things that are changing in the market fluctuations that I would love to have built into this particular work process that I would know, so that maybe my procurement or maybe my expenditure or maybe my inventory or maybe whatever it is that I’m managing is now going to be managed in not in a more real-time way, but in a more sensitive to optimization of cost. So, if I was a big company 100 years ago, I would hire an army of actuaries, and they would figure this all out. But now you have the compute tools to be able to build some of these workflows yourself. So, I would vibe code something that would potentially create opportunities for me to be much more effective in my cash outlay. And am I doing that in a smart way that can really help my business get more out of the money that I already have? It’s a scarce resource. I got what I got, and I can’t make more of it. So, how do I leverage it in the most effective way? I think is almost every business owner’s concern.

Henry Lopez 32:35
Absolutely, absolutely. So, Morty, what I’m seeing, I’m curious as to what you’re seeing. You you you touch a lot more people in this in this arena, obviously of IT and and AI, but what I’m hearing is I’m seeing is two groups forming, and it’s funny because it’s not unlike what it used to be. It probably still is as to how many the small percentage of business owners that had a website, right, versus the ones that didn’t. And back then it was just because people just got paralyzed, they didn’t know what to do, or they didn’t want to get taken. But I see the camp of people who are afraid of it, and so we’re only focusing on the negatives and all the bad that it can do, or this unrealistic principle or standard that’s getting applied to say, “Well, it makes mistakes, which is interesting, right? I always have seen that as something that we apply when we’re afraid of something, well, when it’s perfect, then let me know, right? But when does that ever happen? So they’re shying away from it, and the opportunity is passing them. How? What do you advise to small business owners as it relates to AI and the adoption of

Mordy Hackel 33:36
it? I think that’s a great question. May I take a step back for a moment?

Henry Lopez 33:39
Yeah.

Mordy Hackel 33:40
So there are two kinds of compute processes. I read this on Reddit. I don’t know a few weeks ago, and I thought that was like really well said. So I’m gonna shamelessly steal it, and I don’t remember the exact terminologies. But there’s a definitive right: one plus one equals two. If you have a computer do that a million times, it’ll still come as one plus one equals two. Then you have the non-determinative type of behavior, which is what an LLM is. So LLM is expensive. LLM requires a lot of compute. LLM is a whole bunch of other things. An LLM isn’t accurate if that’s what you’re looking for. So if you’re thinking about will LLM ever become deterministic, like a one plus one equals two calculator, then you’re not using the tool correctly. You are trying to fit a different kind of paradigm into what you think this should be. You will not take an LLM and plug it into a calculator. It’s a waste of resources, and it’s not designed to do what it’s being used for. You will probably succeed getting what you need, but you a have no idea that it’s actually going to be accurate all the time because it may not be. Moreover, like why are you doing this? It’s trying to like open up a broken, you know, a broken pipe and a sink using a hammer. You do far better with a wrench, you know.

Henry Lopez 34:56
I think that’s brilliantly said, and I think that’s the challenge. Is it’s a matter of learning how do we apply this tool for and for what do we apply this tool?

Mordy Hackel 35:06
I think that that’s true. When I read the when I read the post, I was like, you know, I thought it finally clicked in, and and obviously, like, look, many of our listeners may not have a a use case today, but let me draw out a scenario. Let’s say, like we talked about before, you vibe coded a solution that would really take your CRM or your ERP or whatever it is that you have running today, running your business to the next level, and you would incorporate some other things that you don’t currently have. Great, but that comes at a cost. Every single time you run that model to try and do that prediction, you have to spend a lot of tokens or credits or whatever system you’re using. There’s a cost to that. So if you’ve used your LLM-based model to build something that then could be turned into a more of a deterministic model, maybe now you’ve created a hybrid of both models because those models are far cheaper, much more mainstream, and have had the efficiencies already squeezed. You know, to the point where they’re super efficient. So maybe that’s a better way to think about how to ultimately extrapolate your cost out long term.

Henry Lopez 36:19
If I’m following Nick Morty using using an LLM an AI tool to build an app or a tool that then does work for me that that model is that am I following you correctly or did I miss Yes

Mordy Hackel 36:33
yeah yeah no no no that’s exactly right that thing that now works for me isn’t an LLM based thing it is a regular “quote unquote” tool.

Henry Lopez 36:42
Yeah, exactly. That they can run very efficiently and and very economically.

Mordy Hackel 36:47
Correct. Yes, but you said that much better.

Henry Lopez 36:49
Thank you. Trying to understand it, you know, there’s so much. I I make the analogy that for me, as much as I’m trying to stay ahead of it, and I I have a technology background, but it’s like the the the newest of the high speed Japanese trains, and I’m on the outside Mission Impossible side, hanging on, flailing, trying to keep up. That’s how I feel, right? That’s how fast it’s moving, you know. And people like Colin in my life help me stay up to date, but it it is really challenging, and it’s it’s easy for a small business owner to say, you know what, I don’t understand that. I’ll just leave that to the young people, or I don’t need it. I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing. And what what’s going to happen is small business owners are going to get left behind because others are going to take advantage of it and use it to differentiate, to be more effective, to be more productive.

Mordy Hackel 37:39
Yeah, I I think that that’s true, and if I may, I would offer a potential solution using the even the free sets of solutions that are available to pretty much any business owner today. Is go on to some of these tools that you’ve heard of, whether it’s Gemini or you know ChatGPT, Claude. Go on and say, I am a small business owner. If you want to put in your industry, you want to put in your revenue. By all means, go so give some context and say I really want to learn a little bit more about how AI can improve my business. What would be your top 10 suggestions of the things that I should learn over the next 6090, 120 days, whatever it is, and then start digging in from there. Like it doesn’t need to be anything that is, you know, so far ahead of anybody else. You know, you can create an opportunity to teach yourself, and I think there are a lot of people in the world like you, Henry, who are in the coaching space who have the ability to, you know, help people understand that a tool is a tool is a tool. The tool does not have any inherent moral? I don’t know. I’m going to use the word judgment for lack of a better term. 100 years ago, you could use a hammer. Well, maybe with the exception of guns, but you could use a hammer to bash someone’s skull in, and you could use a hammer to build a house. And you can, you know, similarly with the tool these days. You know, I think these tools don’t have any inherent life or morality judgment or any of those things on their own.

Henry Lopez 39:02
Yeah,

Mordy Hackel 39:03
I think they’re a tool. Yeah, and people can use them for good, and people can, God forbid, not.

Henry Lopez 39:08
No, I love that advice for a small business owner. I think that’s spot on, Morty. That’s that’s that’s what I would advise as well. So thanks for sharing that. What do you what do you see? What when you look out there into into the vision, you’re a visionary kind of guy. What what do you think is going to happen? What are we going to see that’s exciting over the next several years?

Mordy Hackel 39:25
You know, I’m not even excited about the next five years. I’m excited about the now. The now. You and I have a similar background from the IT perspective. I stuck it out, so I’ve seen the okay. We had the centralized system, and then we went to client server and then we went to very big client server farms and it was from the office it migrated to the cloud and you know and now we’re building on top of all those evolutions what I’m seeing today is a additional compute model that didn’t exist before so I now have the ability to. Truly think creatively without a lot of extra cycles. So if I’m stuck because I have a writer’s block, I know I need to put together something on a page. I don’t know what to say. Here’s what I’m struggling with. You can tell any of these models to help you write a draft, and then once you have it on the page, well, now you can play with it. Similarly, with any business solution, I’m having this problem. I don’t know how to think about it. Can you help me put this together? You know, I think you and I talked at the beginning of the show, and you may or may not ask me, but you know, we talked about books. One of the books that I find found and still do find incredibly enlightening is the gold. The goal, excuse me, by Doctor Ellie. Yeah, Goldratt. Exactly. That book has kind of fallen out

Henry Lopez 40:47
of favor, but it’s such a classic about my biggest thing. Sorry to interrupt you, but constraints. Understanding the concept of constraints. Yeah.

Mordy Hackel 40:54
So you’re coming exactly at where I’m going. So I was playing around with a Claude model the other day about building a theory of constraints around an issue for issue-solving purposes. You couldn’t do that five years ago. Let’s say I have a hard time expressing why this, these two things that I think are in conflict, why that’s bothering me. I can say use the theory of constraints to build a model to say why is I don’t know. Pick whatever thing you’re worried about, right? Like, why do I want to deal with global optimum versus local optimum, and how do I create that in a particular business that I have? For example, I’m an electrician. Do I want to optimize my purchasing for a blankety blank based on local optimum or global optimum? And then, I mean, Goldred obviously has a very clear answer to that. Global optimum is bad. So, I’m sorry. Local optimum is bad. Yeah, local optimum is bad. But building an evaporating cloud model-if you don’t know what it means-please read the book. This is for me. This was life changing. And building a model that’ll help you think through an issue. I mean, I think that’s and it’s available to us today,

Henry Lopez 41:58
Morty. It’s available to you. And I mean, we that used to be in the realm of you know large corporations with access to huge computers or scientific study at a university. You and I now have that level of compute power at our fingertips, and how it makes us that much more powerful. It’s

Mordy Hackel 42:17
incredibly, it’s incredibly

Henry Lopez 42:19
exciting. The point you made, I, I, you know, I often because I do a lot of writing, as all of us do, and experience writer’s block. There should be no more writer’s block. There’s no such thing anymore because what gets you past writer’s block, as you articulated, is get something, get me started, and that’s what an LLM can do is get me started. I think it’s brilliant. I’m I’m fascinated with all of it that’s coming. I just for the first time a few weeks ago was in a Waymo, the totally autonomous vehicle in Miami. First time ever.

Mordy Hackel 42:47
Cool. They’re all. It

Henry Lopez 42:49
was a fantastic experience. I felt like I was writing the future, and I was just fascinated by it because again, how that technology. I think about if nothing else, as I age, maybe within my age, I’ll still have a level of autonomy even beyond the point that I should be physically driving, and that’s just one of the many realms that that I think about where it can be applied. But for small business owners, it’s it’s so critical that we leverage this in the right way. So, what are you looking forward to next with KJ? What’s what’s next for you and KJ Technology?

Mordy Hackel 43:22
I think the AI advisory services have been very good for us. I wouldn’t say that we are an ideation company, even though I certainly can help in that front. However, we’ve been an infrastructure company roughly our entire life, so I’ll call it infrastructure and security. So if you are vibe coding today, and you need help standing up an application that you’ve taken from concept phase, and you want to start building that into a workable model that can integrate into your company, and you can start leveraging that for helping your business be more successful. I think that is something that we are going to be very helpful with and have a lot of experience with.

Henry Lopez 44:00
What did I not ask you about, Morty, that you were wanting to share, especially as it relates to either cybersecurity or or AI? Is there anything that I didn’t ask you about that you thought we we should talk about,

Mordy Hackel 44:11
Henry? I ask that question whenever I interview somebody or when I go onto a sales call, and I think it’s a great question. You know, off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything to be completely honest, because I think you did a really masterful job of guiding this conversation, and I’m very, very grateful.

Henry Lopez 44:26
Thank you. Hopefully, we’ll have you come back and explore these topics, because obviously, this is moving so fast, and there’s so much there to digest. What’s one thing you want us to take away? If if I’m a small business owner or even an aspiring small business owner, what’s one thing you want us to take away from this conversation that we had?

Mordy Hackel 44:44
I would say it’s a couple of things. The first one is don’t be afraid. Really, like I know it’s a double negative, and and then really like you know embrace it. It’s coming whether you want it or not. You may as well enjoy it and have fun with it and see what you can do, and you know around the. Turn of the year, everyone was, you know, having fun with ChatGPT roasting them and giving them the year in review and their psychological paranoia score and all those. Have fun with it. Have fun with it. And and it doesn’t need to be a burden. And it may just may help you do what you do better. And then the second thing is there’s a smart way to take this stuff and operationalize it, and then there are ways that will probably harm you in the long run. So just be thoughtful about the way you proceed and talk to people who are in this industry, so maybe they can help you.

Henry Lopez 45:34
Where do we go to find out more about you and KJ Technology?

Mordy Hackel 45:38
Yeah, so I’m on LinkedIn. You know, it’s just search for my name, Morty M O R D Y Hackle, just like it appears on the screen, and you know you can reach out to me that way. You can also email info@kjtechnology.com. K is in kilo, j is in Juliet, and the word technology that ends with a Y. I don’t know why people often make it plural, but it’s it’s singular. Some KJ Technology and the Ventures and Visionaries podcast is we didn’t even talk about that, but

Henry Lopez 46:01
yeah, you you are what season are you in of that of that podcast? I think

Mordy Hackel 46:05
it’s we’re we’re in the middle of season two, which went a lot longer than season one. We’ll see. We’ll probably cap it at some point.

Henry Lopez 46:11
Who who is it ideally for that podcast? Who do you recommend it for?

Mordy Hackel 46:15
So I think that is much more for individuals who are looking to understand where they’re going in their career, and I try to bring on people who have been successful in business who can share wisdom with the listeners about well, okay, it’s now my I’m a young person, I’m going into a new world. What do I do? Or I’m in the middle of my career, I need to make a change. What do I do? How do I think about it. Where is my value? Like those kinds of issues, and getting people to find ideas to springboard off of.

Henry Lopez 46:45
Morning, great conversation. You and I could talk forever. Obviously, love to have you back on the show soon. But thanks for taking the time and for sharing and being with me here today.

Mordy Hackel 46:54
Thank you for having me. This was delightful, and I appreciate you asking the questions in such a kind and thoughtful way.

Henry Lopez 47:01
Thank you. This is Henry Lopez. Thanks for joining us for this episode of the How of Business. My guest again today, Morty Hackel. I release new episodes every Monday morning. You can find the show everywhere you listen to podcasts, including the How a Business YouTube channel, my website, thehowabusiness.com. Thanks again for listening.