#4: Justin Runes - AI, Real Estate & the Surprising Power of “Human-in-the-Loop” Tech

Full video transcript

What’s going on y’all, Darby here, and in this episode I’m going to be interviewing, in a casual conversation, Justin Runes, who is now an Austin-based founder building an AI startup. We had a great conversation, talked about a lot of things related to the state of AI, where we think AI is going, how entrepreneurs, founders, builders, and other people that are just getting into the space can see what’s going on from the perspective of Justin’s lens, his experience in the field, in tech, and building AI-powered tools and software over the years. Hope you enjoy this conversation between myself and Justin Runes. Let us know if you like and subscribe and drop a comment with any insights or takeaways that you got. Keep calling AI on, we’ll see you on the other side.

Hey Justin, how are you doing?

Hey, pretty good, how about yourself? I’m doing good, doing good myself, good to meet you.

Yeah man, this podcast in our community is just about highlighting people that are building and doing stuff. I’d love to just learn more in general about your background, getting you into AI, what you’re building that gets you excited, and your thoughts on the current landscape of where things are at. We had some conversations about where developers and builders fit into this process. Maybe to kick things off, let people know a little bit about who you are and what you do, and we’ll take things from there.

Yeah, thanks Darby. My name is Justin, and I’ve been building technology apps, mobile apps, for a little bit more than a decade. I moved here from California before moving to Austin, and worked everything from agency work in San Francisco to contracting with Apple on the Apple Search Ads platform team, working on user roles and permissions, and then moving on to AIG working on some more internal tools. But in the meantime, while I was doing my software development work, I’ve always had a fascination with real estate, and it even started as a former real estate agent myself, working at Zip Realty. It was this lead-CRM brokerage firm that provided leads as an agent, and got quickly acquired within six months of me joining, as an agent, to Coldwell Banker for 166 million. It was then that I really understood the value of these real estate brokerages, and the huge competition they’re in to acquire new software and technology, because they’re all competing against one another. So I wanted to always bridge that gap. In the meantime, while I was developing apps for all these enterprise companies, I’ve done a couple different fix-and-flips with some partners, buy-holds, and really being on both sides of the transaction process. I really figured out that there’s still a lot of gaps in the industry, and when all of this AI started popping up, it was almost the perfect chance to hop in and contribute and really add value again back into this industry, because it’s very top of mind not just for agents but contractors too, which is what we’re finding in this space as well.

Sounds like a lot of it centered around making the transaction process just smoother in general, and your background in real estate is obviously contributing to understanding the product. When you’re talking about building the platform you’ve built out and where AI fits in the equation, how critical do you see that being a feature that is, like, right now — is that something agents are eager to use, these tools that are just knowing they’re going to save them more time? Do you find that AI is confusing on some ends? I’m curious how that narrative is, from what you’re seeing the users respond most to, both agents but also contractors. I’m wondering if there’s a mix of how they even feel about these tools — are they loving them or are they hesitant at first?

Yeah, they’re definitely — there are some segments that see it more as a risk, in this very deterministic industry where contracts can’t be 90% complete or accurate, they need to be 100%. So they really do see automation as more of a value than they do AI in its current state, with these probabilistic mechanisms that AI, like chatbots for example, offer. Obviously not the entire market segment is like that, because there are some that really do value this, it just takes a little bit more convincing and time and trust to build. But I did mention this idea of contractors, who we’re finding are a little bit more receptive, because they’re already not just taking up their time, but also see the value of client onboarding and automation around that transaction management and this smart-document back-and-forth process that we’re helping agents out with as well. So they get it in a way, because they’re always trying to adopt and also out-compete in that same competitive landscape. The contractors that do work with real estate agents have a little bit more of that understanding, because especially we do have some contractors that are also licensed real estate agents, and they get it very quickly. So it’s that market segment that we’re really seeing drive this new revolution of adopting this technology and experimenting with a lot of these other tools, like Hey Gen and Eleven Labs, where we’re experimenting and testing right now to be able to merge not just text education and micro-courses for these agents, but also combining that with audio token generation and video avatar generation. What voice and video is capable of today is pretty wild compared to even what it was a year ago. I just saw something on LinkedIn about Eleven Labs posting how the increase in audio consumption today versus 2014 is astronomically higher across the board, in terms of how users are consuming audio but also how people are expressing and interacting online. There’s so much change in how much content is even being produced.

You’ve mentioned the trust of what people can rely on with these systems and language models. I think it’s a top-of-mind subject for a lot of people right now — how do you even know who to trust if everyone has their own AI avatar generating things? So there’s obviously ethical considerations when it comes to developing this technology, especially the experimental side of it. It’s important to remember we’re so early. Is there anything you’re seeing or doing in terms of the ethical and trust factor that you’re finding helps support your cause in building this platform?

Again, I see both sides of the online spheres — one half just can’t trust AI, hates it, doesn’t want anything to do with it, get it out of here, and then there’s the other half that’s super excited about building and doing things with it, and obviously people in the middle. But trust seems to be the thing a lot of people are struggling with, in terms of connecting with companies or just people with AI. Any thoughts on your side, from your perspective, on where that’s playing into how you’re developing and building?

Yeah, that’s a good question, and I want to preface this by saying we are in a very experimental phase as an industry today, and everyone is playing around with all these different models. How we see it is, it’s very expensive today to generate end to end — obviously those costs will come down, and that’s why you’re seeing all of the infrastructure being built out today by Google and OpenAI with Stargate, and X and Facebook and Meta. They’re all building out this infrastructure because of how expensive it’s going to cost to run text token generation plus audio token generation and then video generation, which is what’s going to be needed to fully form an avatar that looks and feels like, say, a real estate agent or a contractor. The way we’re handling that is through education — not education to our customers, but education as a product, because I think that’s the lowest-hanging-fruit, less risky product that will come into the marketplace. It’s this idea of being able to generate self-learning modules. In our industry, for real estate transactions, one of the hardest pieces to understand as either a first-time home buyer or first-time home seller is that end-to-end process — what does it mean to go through all the documents that are needed, why am I signing this, all of these different questions that take up a lot of time for agents today, even if you’re a for-sale-by-owner type of client. You still want to understand that process fully and all the different stakeholders needed to buy or sell a home. We’re starting off by saving the time of the broker and the brokerage themselves, the company, and their agents in that client and training process, because when I was starting off as a first-time agent, you quickly understand you’re in full competition with everyone in your brokerage. You either join a team, which I did, and I got great mentorship — he’s still doing amazing business in Los Gatos, California, David Lewis, great guy, and he taught me everything I needed to know. But I know a lot of other agents either don’t see that as a path, or want to do it themselves, or are in a brokerage where other agents don’t have that capacity right now. That’s why you see sales training courses and real estate agent education courses popping up — to offload that education away from the brokerage and give it to the agent who’s willing to spend that money. We want to drive that cost down from an education standpoint, and that’s where we see the lowest-hanging fruit to add value. Where it gets tricky is the customer-facing avatar agent — that’s what raises the ethical concerns, because now you’re dealing with something that’s supposed to look like you, is trained on you, can speak like you and answer questions like you. That conversational dynamic, token generation back and forth, I think we’re still a little ways away from, even from a cost perspective. That’s why we’re moving forward with video generation first, a video resource library, as our first step.

Is that video resource library where people with access to your platform are able to learn from these different modules and educational pathways you’ve created, rather than it taking your own time to re-explain everything?

Yeah, you can think of it as micro-courses for agents. We want the agent market to continue building that human client relationship in the home buying and home selling process. That’s why right now we’re hesitant about offering home buying or home selling itself as a video resource — we want the agents to build that relationship with clients, because we as a company can’t help every homeowner, home buyer, and home seller in every single market and city around the world. That’s why real estate agents exist, so home buyers and sellers have a resource, a human person they can rely on. That’s the beauty of our business — we’re already built in with a human in the loop as part of our product, because you still need someone to open the door and be there and guide you through that process. It’s a very physical industry in a way — contractors touch the world around them physically, the hammers, the wood, all the materials needed. That’s what makes our industry unique.

Building on that note of the human in the loop, and how critical that is — part of it is identifying where you can remove friction after the human in the loop is done with the process, or what’s preventing them from doing what they do best more often, which to me is where AI really shines on the operational front. A lot of it’s just automation, and it was a thing before AI became the key word in every product, but AI is a great accelerant for processes that are already streamlined and in place. From any contractor standpoint, the less time you can spend on tedious tasks, freeing up those areas of time task by task, will compound — that new time you’re creating for yourself to build relationships is where the biggest value is. I don’t see relationships getting taken away by AI, the need for them, in fact there’s more desire to build deeper connections with actual humans. It’s like you’re on the same page — it’s all around supporting that human in the loop, that point of contact with the customer. What other roles do you see AI, an “operator,” we were talking about prior to this call — those more autonomous agentic AI types — where do you see that accelerating growth in real estate or contracting?

I believe we talked about this on our last call — this idea of how humans in the future will be more reviewers than doers. That’s the role I believe operator is heading toward, with these less-assisted systems in a more remote-access way through an AI. We’ve already seen that with the OpenAI Operator implementation. I’ve been thinking about it more, and you have two sides of the coin with automation — an AI agent controlling all your tasks and having access to everything you need. The problem is this fragmented world we live in, and the workarounds that all these enterprises have already built, which get disrupted even with an operator-type product. What I mean is this API infrastructure and access with tokenization that a lot of these enterprise companies have been building and continuing to build — but now you have remote operators that might sit on your desktop with mouse-and-keyboard visual access to all your systems. I don’t know how the industry is going to handle this, because the whole point of an API integration is security, knowing what user and what actor is performing actions on that platform — say it’s Meta, Instagram, or Facebook, they built that platform to track all the different actions, whether it’s sending a message, a DM, or replying to a comment. LinkedIn’s API has that same functionality, as does the whole Google infrastructure with Google Cloud API, maps, Google Business. Now imagine you have an OpenAI-type application running on your desktop that has access to your full screen — that throws all of that out the door. As an enterprise you don’t have visibility into any actor making actions on your application, you just have to assume that actor is a human or any random user. I think that’s one of the problems OpenAI is probably going to run into, if they haven’t already — how to work with these other enterprises without going against their terms of service. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried this, but being able to create an automated script using Chromium, a Chrome browser, and essentially become an operator, building your own operator-type system — that goes against Meta’s terms of service, and you’ll get flagged very easily for trying to scrape Instagram that way. That’s why you can’t use Operator with Meta and Instagram right now, spam reasons and all of that. I’m sure that’s already in conversation — what happens when a visual model like OpenAI’s Operator has access to your screen, what do other corporations do? I don’t know.

You talked about them having their own operators inside their own platforms, maybe, or maybe it’s a matter of extremely limited access to what the system is able to do.

I don’t know either — it’s this idea that a person could just 100x their use of what they’re doing on our platform, clearly through automation or an operator of some sort. I imagine platforms aren’t going to want that, because it’s going to screw with a lot of their data, and they’re trying to protect user privacy and their platform from spam. When you can do anything, there’s going to be spam, there’s going to be negative effects, but obviously also positive things that come from this technology.

What are your thoughts, if you don’t mind going a little deeper, on these different platforms developing their own systems — we see it with Amazon now too, coming up with their own models. It’s apparently gotten a lot cheaper for some people to develop their own large language models, and that price seems likely to keep dropping, so people will be able to build their own very effectively one day. People talk about it likening it to electricity eventually, everyone having access to it. Do you have any thoughts on what that world looks like, even an operator-driven internet where everyone has their own AI operators doing things they could have done manually before?

Yeah, it’s that idea of abundance that I believe Elon and other leaders talk about. I ran a simple test with two AI agents that both have access to my calendar — one has access, one doesn’t, one’s trying to book. Even just having these two AI agents try to book a meeting on my calendar made it very easy and gave me the lightbulb moment that if everyone had this idea of an operator, an automated agent able to book on your calendar — we mentioned this on the last call too — that’s where you could have a fully booked calendar until the end of time, because your AI agent could theoretically go out and find people you need to meet with, or that would be great for you to meet with, and book you on your calendar and theirs. I had this chuckle because you’ll be sitting in a meeting in front of somebody booked on your calendar through your AI agent, and you don’t even know how you ended up talking to this person, but as you keep talking to them you realize they’re the best match for you in that specific moment. Your whole week and month could be planned out with just people who, in succession, would be perfect for you to run your business or do the tasks you need to do in your life, all prescheduled for you in the best way possible through the use of these AIs and operators working on your behalf. I’m a little more optimistic on that front, at least on the booking and scheduling piece of automation, AI talking to each other and finding the best people you should be interacting with, because us as humans, especially in this day and age, have segments of the market — some people are more introverted, for example, and don’t have the capability to initiate that outbound conversation, but everyone needs help, and that AI agent would almost act as your outbound solution to go out and make a connection. That’s where I think it’s scary in an ethical sense, because as a human I want people to go out and talk to people, shake hands — it is scary, the approach of, say, approaching somebody randomly on the street, and we can always hope for the best of people to do that, but do people do that nowadays? Not sure. If you had an AI agent or operator do that for you, yes it’s great, you’ll meet the best people possible, but is that the right human interaction? I don’t know, and that’s where my own brain kind of melts, because it’s good to a point, but then I feel like you need that skill set of being able to go out and initiate a conversation randomly. I don’t know how you feel about that.

Yeah, if people forget how to communicate with each other, then we’re in big trouble, and you already see that happening from isolation and people being socially disconnected, and it affects people differently. We saw a big thing with the 2020 stuff, and it wasn’t good for a lot of mental health reasons among other things — people kept inside, isolated, not going out. But then just the act of opening up new conversations and meeting new people through the internet, facilitating a Zoom call to connect, there’s pros and cons to it. However you want to approach that, the question that enters my mind is, why am I doing this in the first place — do I want to fill my calendar with 20 calls this week, what’s the purpose of that? If I’m not clear on that purpose, a calendar full of phone calls with people I’ve never met sounds like a huge drain to the introvert side of me. The extrovert side of me is cool with everyone going out and having a fun game night, I’ll get recharged from that, but I don’t get lit up by manually sending 50 DMs to people every single day, even knowing it would be a good conversation to open — it takes time and energy. I think where agents will certainly impact how I operate is being able to execute when I know the time is right to implement some level of outreach to get a conversation started, and being a lot more hyper-targeted about who I want to be meeting with. Getting clear on that, like you said, you want it to be the right people you’re getting on a call with. If I’m a contractor and I want to meet with 10 millionaire homeowners who want to renovate their house and sell it in three months, there’s a lot of work that goes into finding those people. But if I’m able to articulate that to my AI agent that’s an expert at finding these people, I just want 10 emails drafted and sent, I want to review or personalize them before, but I want you to find these people for me — that sounds like a dream, because it takes a lot of the time out of actually identifying that person, and I’m reviewing, that’s where the human is in this loop, on the review process and making the final okay to say we’re going to execute on this.

Everyone’s going to have their own opinions on how full they want their calendar, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting a full calendar. This is really in the context of real estate agents, because I hear this all the time from the hesitation standpoint. I believe there will always be, and I hope there will be, this variety of real estate agents — I like seeing the variety of all the different shapes and sizes of people helping people buy and sell homes, and contractors too, the same way. The reason I say that is I think there’s a misconception that with AI it’ll feel and look like one robot, one voice, with the pushback we saw with Siri and Alexa. But I think in the future, especially with all the customization we’re starting to get with personalized audio and personalized video, that’s where it can come into play nicely — being able to digitize, with your consent, a persona that looks and feels like you, obviously it’s not you but has the same vibe as you.

It’s this sense of having your agent look and understand you the best, so your agent can go out and promote the best qualities of yourself and accomplish the goals you want, a partner in crime that knows you and can go out and accomplish those tasks for you, if that’s the way you want your agent to run. But there’s going to be that use case, at least with real estate agents and builders, where they want to be meeting people, out on the field, calendars booked with in-person meetings. Maybe that’s something we need to promote more — our AI agents not booking a Zoom call, but booking in-person meetings, fewer meetings but the right quality and type of person you can get along with. The reason I bring that up, the variety of why there are so many real estate agents and why I’m excited for that future, is you’re not going to get along with everybody. There are people you vibe with and people you don’t, from builders to construction to every professional, and you want to work with people you get along with and that your partner gets along with.

There’s an app in that too, just like the vibe-check AI, by the way, tangent to that — one of the problems I always had in my head, even since college, was that there’s no way to find a roommate or test out living with a roommate. I think that could be possible in the future — a vibe-check app, like Airbnb, put your two AIs together and have them live together for a week in an AI world, and be like, oh, this guy sucks. They’ve got to have something like that for dating too, coming out soon enough, like Hinge but with AI that actually works. This is the point about the ethical question you just asked — how far do we take this? I think we’re all still trying to figure this out, we’re all in an experimental phase, and there are going to be some hard stances companies should take. I’m still trying to navigate, like every other company and startup, what’s the best stance to take with all of this, because even though we can do it, should we do it — that’s a question we’ll all continue to ask ourselves as we have more tech in front of us, like Jeff Goldblum’s line from Jurassic Park about spending all their time thinking whether they could rather than whether they should.

And with Hinge and virtual dating and relationships in general, we’re all humans, we all need that sense of touch. I think it’s going to be a scary world if we completely turn ourselves digital, and I’m happy in a way that there hasn’t been mass adoption of Apple Vision Pro and headsets — some people are doing it, but I’m happy not to see that grow, because it gives me hope that people do want physical interaction, they want to go out to a club or a bar or an event or coffee shop and interact with people face to face, versus everyone in headsets and virtualization. I know we’re doing this on Zoom, we’re both here in Austin, I’m happier to be able to meet in person for future events. I think that’s something to look forward to. With all this AI and tech, yes there are pros and cons, it is a tool. I had a conversation about this last night, that as a society we’ve gone from a world of not being able to communicate to each other in a sense, to now being able to communicate with our parents across the opposite side of the world with our phones, which is great. It’s not that I’m knocking technology, because we’re building more of it, it’s more about understanding the pros and cons of it — it’s a tool, and we need to figure out the best ways to use it properly as a whole.

I’m with you on that, and I get most excited — I’m working on a project right now to help make it easier to just hang out with people and match up social calendars, actually connecting those into in-person events. I think across the board I’m seeing a big surge in meetups, and you should have gotten the invite too for the AI Founders meetup here in a few weeks. Stuff like that, where you get to meet together, hang out face to face, in an environment where you meet other people doing cool stuff you’re interested in — the more opportunities we can create and facilitate with less legwork, the more good will come from those types of events. You can take it to whatever degree you want, but even setting up events and scheduling, there are still action items AI can help with — writing event descriptions, outreach emails, a newsletter to tell people about your event. If you’ve set up a lot of events, some of that comes more naturally to you, but AI can also enable someone who’s never set up an event before, even just to make a hangout to go play board games with friends you say you’re going to hang out with but haven’t, because how many times have we all done that — “let’s hang out soon” and then six months goes by. Less of that and more actual in-person connections, I think, is going to be a win for building our social connections and deeper relationships rather than shallow, wide ones — more narrow, more deep.

Yeah, and as we keep going on in this trajectory, I think where it gets really scary is the conversation around robots, which I don’t really have a strong opinion on yet, besides being surprised how fast it’s popping up in today’s world — I never thought it would pop up this quickly. I know that’s going to throw a wrench into things, and I scared myself with this thought a couple days ago, thinking about robots that also have your same avatar, a robot that’s like you — that’s when it starts getting scary. I do like the sense of being able to create a personalized avatar for yourself, and maybe that’s a whole other future I’m not ready for, but just thinking you’ll not just have a screen digital avatar that looks and talks like you, but a physical thing that’s also like you — that’s where maybe I draw the line. Have you seen the movie Surrogates?

I know, and obviously they’ve already thought about this, and it’s not like we’re going the opposite direction, if anything we’re going straight into it, and that’s where I’m a little more scared. But I think if we can all start to have hard stances on where we draw the line, that will matter here in the future, because as soon as we say “I don’t care” or “I don’t even want to think about that,” that’s where we let these things take over, and that’s what we have to watch out for — being super mindful about where this is heading and what we’re actually doing. I’m going to look up that quote, because someone said it the other day and it’s super applicable. It’s definitely scary — the quote was something like “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Yeah, and it is scary to think about how quickly the realistic robots and self-driving and — I saw a video, and reposted it a few weeks ago, of a robot dog at Auditorium Shores, and there were like eight dogs around it, just falling around doing dog stuff, and I was like, that’s insane, now you’re going to have robot guard dogs, which is straight out of a Black Mirror episode. With how fast things go, it’s hard — you think you have an opinion on how things are going to go one day, and then a new update comes out and you’re like, okay, we need to rethink how fast this is actually going to be here. I’m pretty sure I’m going to contradict myself a dozen times in the future whenever we do this again, but all I really want, if I did get a robot, is just for it to fold my laundry and clean all day every day and organize — that’s it, that’s essentially all I’d really like to see from the thing.

Yeah, and this is where it gets tricky too — say everyone had an Optimus robot or some humanoid robot. I’m sure you’ve seen the stories of people getting fired for using a mouse jiggler, people who work remote, to keep their work computer awake. You’re going to get to the point where your robot isn’t doing your laundry, you’re just sitting at your desk typing away, using your mouse like it’s working for you, and people are going to end up buying these things just so the robot can end up coding for them. It’s going to be the craziest thing to see happen, and yeah, a lot of this stuff is so wild I still can’t believe we’re living through all of it. It’s fun to contribute and provide that value and be part of the shaping of it — I’m sure you are too, to be part of this journey, because we get to shape all of this a little bit. But I’m trying to focus more on the ethical side and having these conversations to really land on a stance that cuts through all the way to the future.

Yeah, I think at least I’m seeing more people talking about that right now, because it feels overwhelming across the board with how fast the technology is moving, and by the time you form an opinion on something, we’re already five years ahead of where we thought we’d be. I agree with you on having more of those types of conversations. Where things are more than likely going to land is people having their own AI robot assistant at their house, doing the laundry, doing house chores, that sort of thing — that’s obviously going to have huge implications for a lot of people and what they do for a living. With all these different advances changing things for so many people, it’s hard to really understand the grander implications of it. Of course it’s going to create new opportunities too, but across the board there’s just a lot more disruption. I think we’re going to start seeing it even faster — you thought the last three or four years was a lot, imagine what the next three to five years is going to look like. It’s crazy to think that, at least when I started playing around with this stuff, we were playing around with Jasper at the time, and it was like, here’s a blog topic idea, it gave you five ideas, that’s what you were limited to with one template, and they had 20 different templates. Now that, times 100,000, is what it’s capable of doing, and the time it took to write one blog post — don’t quote me on those exact numbers, but that’s certainly what it feels like, what you could do with a single input back then versus what you’re able to get now. What’s that going to look like in five years? I don’t know, but I am looking forward to not having to do my own laundry folding, I can tell you that much.

I know, me too, and it’s coming, I know it’s coming. I think where I sit with all of this is the optimism around how expensive all of this costs today, which helps limit that rate of change and speed, where I feel like we can play catch-up and really control our destiny by that cost, for how fast all of this is progressing. I think where it gets tricky is when all these costs go to zero, and energy is solved in a way where it costs a fraction, pennies, to run actions and video, and the token generation costs just don’t even matter anymore, because the productivity of all these generations, whether video, audio, text, or action, is just so cheap for everybody — that’s where we all have to really look at ourselves and ask what we do as a society. I think about the roles and responsibilities of the man and the woman, I know in the past we were more of that traditional nuclear family type of society, I know that’s been lost because of the rise of inflation, cost of living, and women working now. Obviously families are important, building a family structure is important, I grew up with parents being in the loop, and I think if we can get back to that, and that’s what we do with our free time, really freeing up our time so we can build families and spend time with the people around us and building on those relationships, I think that’s going to be huge for us, because everyone’s time is so taken up with working right now, which isn’t a bad thing, everyone needs to make money. But I think the roles have definitely changed dramatically in the 21st century, and it’s affected a lot of conversations about how people are growing up and what the next generation is going to look like — definitely a species that has evolved from that family structure into a more independent one, and I’m for that too, the whole independence as an individual. But if we’re going to continue procreating and building a society and a culture, people can’t just grow up by themselves. I think we’re going to have to rethink — say we do have a whole bunch of time, what do we do with all that time, if realistically you’re able to free up 80 to 100% of the stuff you do, how do you decide what you want to be doing during that time?

Justin, I hate to cut us off here, but I think this opened up a lot of really good thinking points for what we’ll do with our time, the implementations of what we’re building toward, and how we’re going to process our own work and time with AI, with ethical considerations all taken into place. I think it’s certainly a conversation worth keeping open.

I’m for sure, and I’m looking forward to chatting more with you about it at the upcoming meetup, if you’ll be able to make it.

Yeah, in person, yeah. I know I’ve been doing a lot less Zoom interview-type meetings over the last year or so, because there’s a lot more things I’d like to be doing, like going on walks, than Zoom meetings, but I’m glad we’re able to connect here virtually to meet at first, but definitely excited to see you in person soon, hopefully at the upcoming hackathon as well, March 1st.

Yeah, happy to come along.

Cool, before we sign off here, where can people connect with you if they want to hit you up, learn more about what you’re doing — and I know you live in Austin, so maybe actually meet up in person too.

Yeah, you can always follow me on LinkedIn, connect with me, happy to connect over there, just Justin Runes, and visit our website, Atlas Agent — you can also message and DM through that channel. I should be posting more, but I do have a Substack, Justin Runes dot Substack.

Thanks, Justin, see you soon.