Furkat Kasimov Podcast Transcript
Furkat Kasimov joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Furkat Kasimov. Furkat Kasimov is a London-based entrepreneur, angel investor, and author with more than 20 years spent building and advising technology businesses. He is the founder of Applayerai.com, a venture studio building startups in the application layer of AI with a portfolio spanning insurance technology and AI-powered e-commerce.
Earlier in his career, he built his lead generation businesses to nine-figure annual revenue without taking outside investment. Well, good afternoon, Furkat. Welcome to the show.
Furkat Kasimov: Thank you for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. Especially today, you’re hailing out of London. I know your company’s based in Miami, but London to Kansas City is about a six-hour time difference to, in this time that we have today, and I appreciate you because I know it’s hard to navigate these time zones.
So Furkat, if I don’t, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna jump into your first question. Just to kick us off, tell our audience about your journey as a serial entrepreneur and investor and what you’re building today with Applayerai.com and Qatlama.
Furkat Kasimov: I first started investing in AI companies 10 years ago. This was before ChatGPT, before everyone was worried about AI and interested in AI.
My first encounter was at a trade show. It was called InsureTech, and a lot of insurance companies gathered there, and everyone was very worried about deepfakes and impersonations. They thought that that’s gonna increase fraud a lot. And I thought, they’re absolutely right. This technology has potential for good and potential for bad, and there must be companies out there who are trying to detect those deepfakes.
And I came across a company called PinDrop Security, and I invested a little bit of money in it, and that was a huge success for me. They’re doing great. A lot of big banks use them. A lot of large insurance companies use them to detect deepfakes. And I started to think, there’s a lot of other future solutions that we’re going to need in the era of AI.
And I started to think, okay, let me predict the next five years, the next 10 years, and I’m gonna work backwards trying to figure out what solutions are we going to need. Is anyone building those solutions? Maybe I can invest in some of these companies, or I can build some of these companies, and that’s how AppLayerai was created, is, was a desire to build solutions that will be needed in the future.
And in my experience, a lot of large corporations are late adopters of technology, and they’d much rather buy already working solutions than build it in-house. So I thought, well, why not build those solutions to help these corporations then incorporate that AI? And that’s what my company does, is we build solutions that will later be acquired by corporations because they’re solving their problems.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And it’s really cool. I love the backstory. You had a vision. You saw it early on. I thought it was interesting you were an early investor in AI over 10 years ago. You saw the promise of some of these emerging technologies. You recognized the potential, obviously, for good and bad. So you started investing in these emerging technologies and companies, and even gone as far as building these types of emerging solutions, and I thought that was interesting.
So thank you. Furkat, you’ve authored the book, Don’t Do This: A Guide to Business Survival, which breaks down roughly 150 critical business mistakes. What made you focus on avoiding failure rather than just copying success? And what is the biggest operational blind spot leaders miss today?
Furkat Kasimov: The reason I wrote the book is because the journey of an entrepreneur is very difficult.
Business owners constantly have to put out fires, solve problems. And the truth is, a lot of the problems repeat all the time. There’s a pattern. And if you study what are the potential problems that a business owner can have, you would already have that knowledge. And by reading my book, you’re gonna have a knowledge of over 150 different problems.
And then as a business owner, when you encounter those problems, you’re going to recognize them and say, “You know, I read about this. I shouldn’t repeat that problem.” And that was my hope, is to give people a playbook if you will, kind of a, a map of obstacles ahead that they can avoid to make their journey feel a little bit better.
Because there’s a lot of books about success, but the reality is it’s very difficult to replicate success because you might not be able to repeat somebody’s timing, somebody’s luck. But you can avoid somebody else’s problems, somebody else’s mistakes. That’s a lot easier to do. And a- another reason was Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, he said that one day he’s gonna write a book called Alibaba: Thousand and One Mistakes to tell the world about the mistakes he made.
I hope he gets to write that book one day, but until he does, I wanted to give people something to read before he does that.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Maybe he’ll read your book and get inspired and, and push that out. We’ll see. I loved to hear just a couple highlights. The reason for the book, that journey of an entrepreneur is a massive challenge.
You talked about that, and you’ve outlined many mistakes in your book, and you really give that owners a playbook to follow to avoid repeating the same mistakes. And you did mention, and, and we see this all the time, a lot of books out there focus on success, and this is what, this millionaire did or, or that sort of thing.
And, and I’m glad that you did create this playbook for entrepreneurs so that they can really accelerate their journey and, and maybe avoid a lot of these minefields. So thank you. Furkat, there’s a lot of noise in AI right now around foundational models. From an investor and studio perspective, how should executives think about model independence, unit economics and building a real moat?
Furkat Kasimov: This is a great question. I’ll start with model independence. I think you have to look at different foundation models in the same way that you look at cloud service providers. You don’t wanna be dependent on any one of them, and you should be able to switch at very short time period. So I think about building your solutions independent of any particular model.
So you have to build your tacit knowledge, your ontology, your harness for your AI agents, and then plug in a model in a way that you can unplug it, plug in another model, and it will continue to work. That gives you independence. In terms of unit economics, one thing to keep in mind is that a lot of these models are very smart.
But in an organization, we don’t only hire PhDs, we hire people with different backgrounds, they do different tasks. So you don’t have to have a PhD-level model to solve all of your problems. You can find cheaper models for some of the problems, but then use the more expensive models for when you need them.
So that way you can balance your cost by picking the model that is right for the task. And one thing to keep in mind is what you wanna do is you wanna be able to measure your cost of getting certain workflow completed. And if you know that, then you can optimize it, you can test different models, and that will help you with your unit economics.
In, in terms of what we have to look forward to in this is that cost of building applications, building agents has come down a lot, and that allows us to test different things, try them out, build pilots, but then implementing them, that’s where the challenge is. So I urge founders and CEOs to be very careful how they implement those pilots because they have to think about governance, they have to think about consequences and always have a human in the loop.
So that’s my advice.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. Just to highlight a couple things here you talked about looking at different service models, and when you went into building your solution, right, independent of any model, you could actually plug in or unplug various models to see if they work and obviously get those dialed in, of course, which would provide you that freedom to move on to other tasks.
You talked about leveraging the cheaper model also for small, maybe repetitive tasks, less critical tasks, and the more expensive models for that complex work, which helps obviously balance your cost. So I appreciate those insights. And Furkat, this is the last question of the day. As we look ahead to the future, what excites you most about how agile startups are disrupting incumbent industries, and what is your top piece of advice for leaders adopting AI today?
Furkat Kasimov: What excites me the most is the fact that AI is allowing startups to democratize prices for small businesses. It used to be that a small business owner cannot afford to hire an investment banker or cannot afford to hire a specialty attorney to do certain tasks. But now a lot of AI startups start to focus on things that used to require very expensive consultants, very experienced people to do those tasks.
And I think that lowers the entry price and brings in small business owners to use those services to take advantage of that, which gives them a competitive edge because they used to lose out to large companies because they didn’t have access. It was too expensive for them to use those things. But with these prices coming down, small businesses now can compete on the same level and can deliver results that are as good as large companies can deliver.
I think in terms of advice for the leaders, I would say focus on what makes your company great and treat AI just like you would treat a utility. You can use it when you need it you can improve your processes, but don’t forget what makes your business great. And build your knowledge so that you can build multiple agents to reuse that knowledge.
And eventually, that will improve your margins, bring down your cost, and it will help you. But be sure that you focus on your business, why you’re better on your business mode, and that would be my advice
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. Like you, I’m excited to see that with the advancement of AI here, it’s, it’s allowing this democratization of the technology obviously lowering costs and that barrier to entry for the solopreneur in this case, you know, that competes a, maybe against a, a Fortune 100.
But the… Your advice on to leaders, focus on what makes your company great. Treat AI as a utility which can be applied when and where needed. Just again, focus on that excellence, focus on the core of your business and that will help you be successful and leverage AI in those places that you need it most.
So I appreciate the insights today. And Furkat, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Furkat Kasimov: Thank you for having me, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Furkat Kasimov Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
