Good afternoon everybody over there on the east coast and today's another Nacho Tuesday and without further ado I'd love to introduce you guys to Ken and Drew over at Ancient Technologies. Please introduce your company and what you guys do at the company.

Good. You want me to go ahead and go Drew?

Go ahead Ken. Yeah.

All right. Appreciate it, Andy. Ancient Technologies, most people know us for is being a nearshore staffing company, but what a lot of folks don't know is really how deep we go. We tend to build and operate high performance engineering teams that turn data into high performing production systems. And again we do that through end to end interactions with engineering, data, cloud and AI.

Two flexible models we have: one is capacity function focused more on staff augmentation with AI enabled senior engineers all the way through that traditional project work where we have co-ownership in that outcome. So, we're excited to be here and dive a little bit deeper. Anything you want to add there, Drew?

Yeah. No, I think that's great, Ken. I think the core idea is our ability to take critical initiatives that a lot of companies have from an idea phase and actually getting that into production and making them actually work. That's AI assisted and enabled and much more efficient. So we've been working with the LatAm cohort for the last several years and we've been really impressed with what they've been able to do and how they've been able to assist US companies. So it's really great.

Great. Tell me more about your guys' background. What led you to joining with Ancient Technologies? Give us a little taste of your career and what you've done in the past.

Yeah, thanks Andy. So just by way of background for me, I'm a career security guy, career data guy. I spent the first half of my career in government and then the second half I was in the private sector where I was a chief security officer at three big companies: Honeywell, SpaceX and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. And so my entire career was really at the intersection of data infrastructure and distributed systems with a really strong focus on data security, trust, immutability.

I first got into blockchain 11 years ago at CME Group and figuring out how to control data as a function of market data systems. And then I had the idea for a data security startup which is ultimately how I got to know these Latin American developers. We had an idea that we brought to fruition that was recently acquired and the teams that helped us do that I was really impressed with from a talent perspective. That's really what got me excited and passionate about what we're doing at Ancient.

Ken, how about you?

Yeah, my story isn't quite as cool as Drew's. I left the army in '92 and went to University of Cincinnati for three weeks. There was a gentleman that was my academic adviser that went to the same high school that I did. He said, "What are you doing here?" because I was going for a degree in computer science because that was the thing you did. He said, "You have the personality for sales." So I dropped out of school. Here I am now.

I enjoy having sales conversations. Customer success is not hard for me. I just like having the conversations and those conversations have primarily spanned IT and marketing over the last almost 30 years. Like Drew, I was introduced to Ancient through a friend, got to know Emmy a little bit and then by getting to know our CEO in Mexico, I got to connect with Drew and here we are today. We just have a great team that does great work. It's rare that you find synergies where everybody comes together and really enjoys everything from beginning to end.

Yeah, definitely. We've done a lot of work with Ancient over the last year and a half, two years. Love working with you guys. I could attest to that as well as a partner. Really easy to work with, always there, always delivers. So speaking of delivery, you guys do a lot of AI projects these days. What are you seeing with AI development today and why do a lot of these initiatives fail that companies undertake? I feel like a lot of companies just want to throw some AI on it for the sake of it. Why do a lot of these projects fail?

Yeah, it's a great question, Andy. It's something we're seeing all the time and in many cases it's almost like they fail before they even get into the LLM modeling or the code writing. Mainly because many companies are looking at bad or inconsistent data across systems which then leads to fragmented architecture where there isn't a single source of truth.

That lack of data architecture and data foundations leads to bad processes, bad code, latency issues. The quality of the code often suffers. The documentation isn't there. The idea phase of getting something to fruition and being able to show a demo is really what we see for most startup companies trying to prove themselves. But really where we specialize is in that next phase where you're looking to take that idea from a demo to a production environment.

That's where applying AI from a surgical perspective is much more important than just throwing an idea and starting to code to actually getting something into production. That's where our bread and butter is. That's where the future of AI and development are going to be for the next couple of years. That's really what we're about in terms of making businesses successful and revenue positive.

I think the only thing I'd add is AI will amplify your inputs and really produce a broken output. If it's not right on the front end, AI is not going to make it better.