My name is Brian Reardon and this is my blog. I wanted a place where I could post publicly about my projects and document them easy, then also have a launchpad for the Adopting AI newsletter and other things I’m working on.
My day job right now is finishing work on TurboCRM and doing consulting, tutoring, and contract work to keep the lights on. My goal is to launch TurboCRM by the end of September 2023 as an MVP and raise a seed round based on that.
I feel like for many years I’ve done pretty extensive side projects that I’ve not documented well. The main goal of this blog is to bring to light work in data and AI that I’m doing. My focuses right now are trading simulations, economic simulations, simulations of sports outcomes, reinforcement learning, game ai, and explorations of other complex systems.
The best email for me right now to cut through the noise is brian at turbocrm.co, though I’ll add a mailbox for this site soon. I kind of want to roll my own as I have with the server running this and several other sites.
History / Ramblings
Prior to TurboCRM I worked at Cisco Systems in the Webex Team for about a year before a wave of post-pandemic layoffs hit the Collaboration Group. Prior to that I worked on 202works, which was a startup all about turning public data into business intelligence. We made a ton of different products there but honestly the products I saw an opportunity for but never made really inspired some of the work I do now. In 2018 or 2019 we launched our ‘news events with NLP’ product there and even that was cool. I setup my own categories to track pretty long tail things in the gigantic basket of news events and the results were compelling. It was also just cool to have news sent to you based on not what outrages you, but what you’re interested in. There’s a product there somewhere. What struck me from that experience is just in one public, government mandated data source how much actionable data there is. I’m rambling now.
Before 202 I worked in sales in 3 different small startups, I did pretty much every sales job you can imagine. I did 100 call days to HVAC contractors, set meetings with giants like AirBnB, did walk-ins to Fortune 500 companies. These experiences really shaped the early ideas around TurboCRM. Sales has already changed a lot from then but the core ideas are the same. Just like if you sit down and watch a Chet Holmes bootleg from 20 years ago, the stuff he talks about still applies to day, especially today -> think of the dream 100. Working hard to get just one meeting vs. spamming 15,000 people.