Firing The Man

Building a Tech Startup While Still in College: The Interval AI Story with Brandon Davis

• Firing The Man • Season 1 • Episode 269

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Meet Brandon Davis, the college senior who's turning the collections industry on its head with his AI startup, Interval. While most of his classmates are polishing resumes and stressing over job applications, Brandon is running a growing tech company with multiple employees—all before graduation day.

Brandon's entrepreneurial journey began early, watching Shark Tank with his father and seeing ordinary people building extraordinary businesses. From selling fidget spinners to classmates to running a landscaping service as a teenager, his path to founding Interval was paved with the hustle that defines true entrepreneurs. After cycling through nearly 20 different startup ideas during a university incubator program, Brandon and his co-founder landed on a solution that businesses were actually willing to pay for: automated collections.

What makes Interval AI fascinating isn't just the technology—it's the problem it solves. Every business struggles with accounts receivable at some point, whether it's from expired credit cards, forgetful customers, or those deliberately avoiding payment. Traditional collection methods are expensive, inefficient, and frankly, nobody wants to make those awkward calls. Interval's AI automation tackles this universal pain point, delivering results at a fraction of the cost of human collection efforts.

Perhaps the most thought-provoking aspect of Brandon's story is his perspective on risk. While conventional wisdom paints entrepreneurship as the risky path and traditional employment as secure, Brandon argues the opposite. In an economy where recent graduates might submit hundreds of job applications before landing a position, building your own business offers a different kind of security—one where you control your destiny rather than hoping to survive the next round of corporate layoffs.

Whether you're a seasoned business owner looking to improve cash flow or an aspiring entrepreneur searching for inspiration, Brandon's journey demonstrates that success comes to those willing to persist through failures and pivot until they find what works. Check out interval-ai.com to learn how AI might transform your collections process, or connect with Brandon through his podcast "Get Over Yourself" to follow his entrepreneurial journey.

How to connect with Brandon?

Website: https://getoveryourselfpodcast.com/
Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/get-over-yourself/id1586568369
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC03QFF2URssz6Q1awVk1FhQ
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dodgerdavis16/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandon-davis-bba062223/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getoveryourself_podcast/



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Speaker 1:

Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you are capable of more, then join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your hosts, serial entrepreneurs David Shomer and Ken Wilson.

Speaker 2:

Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast, where we dive deep into the world of entrepreneurship, e-commerce and everything in between. Today, we have a guest who's revolutionizing the way businesses harness AI to drive growth and efficiency. Brandon Davis is the founder of Interval AI, a company at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence solutions designed to help businesses make smarter data-driven decisions. With a background in machine learning, automation and analytics, brandon and his team are helping companies unlock the power of AI to optimize their operations, boost profitability and stay ahead in an ever-changing market. In this episode, we'll break down how AI is transforming e-commerce, what every business owner should know about integrating AI tools and how interval AI is helping brands scale like never before. Whether you're an AI skeptic or a tech enthusiast, this is a conversation packed with insights you will not want to miss. So sit back, grab your coffee and let's get into it. Welcome to the show, brandon.

Speaker 3:

Hey, david, thanks for having me Very excited. Podcast host to podcast, this is going to be fun.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely yeah, this is going to be great. So, to get things started, can you share with the audience a little bit about your path in the entrepreneurial world?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so as I was thinking about hopping on today's episode, I was like getting a little preparation done, thinking about where I can kind of steer the conversation, Because you know somebody can tell their life story for, hopefully, if you've lived a solid life for weeks and weeks and weeks upon end. So what I hope to share to all of you and the listeners out there today is just very simple insights on how they could take action and grow their business, even even in a minuscule way, for the next 30 to 45 minutes here. So a little bit about my background. I am a very young entrepreneur. If you are watching today's episode on YouTube or Spotify or anywhere else that you get your episodes, you can probably tell I'm a lot younger than some of the guests that David has on quite frequently. So I am currently a senior, actually in college.

Speaker 3:

I've been working on Interval for the past two years now. I've been working on interval for the past two years now, but before we jumped into what we're doing at interval, my entire background was entrepreneurship. I remember at a very, very young age and once again hindsight a lot of times when I mentioned that people go. You still are young and I go absolutely, but at a younger age. For myself here, my biggest way I connected with my father growing up. If we weren't watching baseball, we were watching ABC Shark Tank, and my dad was a super busy guy but he instilled some pretty solid values into myself, me and my siblings and one of those values was always making sure you got time with your family members. So despite how busy he might have been or how crazy sports in school were for me back in the day, we always set aside time to hang out with each other and one of those ways was watching ABC Shark Tank. So as we grew up, that was just my absolute favorite show. I had some family members who dabbled in entrepreneurship. I had some sort of an assemblance of what it was, but I loved that show because you get on and you'd see these everyday citizens. You could pass them in the grocery store, you could see them in your local church congregation what have you? They seem just like everyday, ordinary people, but their businesses were doing extraordinary things. They were selling some sort of product or service that was actually resonating and helping people in their lives.

Speaker 3:

Now, obviously, some businesses on Shark Tank are a little bit more serious than others. You have anything from software companies to toy companies, to the next revolutionary pancake and everything in between. But I just remember at that young age I would watch that show and I'd look over my dad and I'd say I want to be just like these guys. And then he'd look over me and go yeah, right, Go to law school. That was the path for me, Super supportive, though, as I grew up and kept watching ABC Shark Tank, I knew that was my journey, laid out in front of me from a very, very young age.

Speaker 3:

I didn't know what business journey was going to be yet, but I knew I wanted to. I wanted to take that, and so fast forward a couple of years. Um, we started getting into that maybe when I was in fifth or sixth grade, so I'm fairly young. Um, fast forward a couple of years. I hopped into every single fun little widget you could possibly sell to kids at school. The fidget spinner era is when I would go. I had bulk order them on places like Alibaba or um at the time Temu didn't exist. But but products like that, um, I would bulk order them, go and sell them at my local school, for when kids were supposed to get lunch money from their parents, they would end up using it on on the dumb products that I'd buy overseas.

Speaker 3:

Um, I'd been turned a little bit of a profit and it just kept slowly ramping up to larger, bigger things until finally, my junior year of high school, I had an old, beat up pickup truck I'd saved up for and I had a friend with some landscaping equipment. So we decided in my small town of Hemet, California, we were going to go door to door and start selling our landscaping services. So we'd knock on a door, give them the worst sales pitch you've ever heard in your life way, undervalue our services. But then we go cut their grass, edge their lawn, things like that. And even though we probably were spending more money and time on the gas powering the truck and the vehicles to actually cut the lawns, that was the moment that I truly understood that I wanted to work for my own dollar and not necessarily have to rely on somebody else to provide my income. And the rest is sort of history, up until where we're at today.

Speaker 2:

That's outstanding. That's outstanding and I think it's really neat that you are a student right now. One thing that you know. I look back on my college experience and you'd sit in the classroom and learn, but you had to wait to apply it until you may have internship opportunities. But I think the retention rate must be a lot higher when you're learning in the classroom and then applying it. Can you speak to that a little bit? What's it been like running a business when you're a student?

Speaker 3:

So I can go on a rant on this. So you'll have to tell me here when you're a student, I, so I can go on a rant on this. So you'll have to tell me here when you're, when you're tired of hearing it. But I am a firm believer that colleges we typically know it is going to be different in the next 20 to 30 years. And with most, most industries, they don't grow that quick and in 20 or 30 years there isn't a whole lot of change. When, when you have these for lack of a better term bureaucracies, when you have these organizations that have been around for years and years and years, they are very, very slow changing. Same as, in business terms, when you have a company that's a startup and they're moving very, very quickly. There's constant changes, there's constant churn, there's a million different things going on, but as they get bigger and more established, that's when you don't see change quite as often and it's a lot more slow moving. In my opinion, college is going to look different in the next 20 or 30 years, just with how, if you look at the trends, a lot less young adults my age are actually going to college because at the end of it, you see so many people and I have friends in this exact boat right now that are struggling finding jobs.

Speaker 3:

I was recently talking with my wife, her cousin's husband. We were at a family party and so we were going and he's graduating from the same university as myself and I was asking him what's your plan? We graduate here in April, so we're what? Four weeks out from finishing up. And I asked him what's your plan after graduation? And he had finally landed a job for Bank of America and I was beyond excited for him. He finally landed this and I asked him how long did it take you? He's been applying to software engineering jobs for over a year and a half now and he has racked up over 500 different applications that he did he put out into the world for trying to land a job. And I'll be at.

Speaker 3:

Software engineering right now is a little bit more of a tough industry to get a job in, especially entry-level software engineering. But moral of the story is it is very difficult right now to put your college degree worse or something, and I see that firsthand as I'm working on my business. It's very interesting People. People always assume oh, you're working on a startup. That's a lot riskier than going and taking that secure job. But in my eyes, if I have friends and people struggling to go out and actually find their quote unquote dream job post-college, it makes me wonder what college is even providing at that point where. Going back to your point, david, you sit down in the classroom. You learn lessons that yes, I've had amazing professors who have taught me a lot, but they're not always directly applicable to what you're going to go do in your actual life or for career purposes, and so I think there's got to be some sort of shift or, in the semi-near future, as mentioned, there's going to be quite a shift of what college is actually providing for you.

Speaker 2:

I definitely agree with that. I was actually just having a conversation with my wife. There's a college savings plan called the 529. And we've been making regular contributions for our kids my oldest is five and so we've got some time but I really do think that is going to change and it's going to be interesting to see how that pans out. So final question on your education and your path what are you doing following graduation?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, great question. So this is one that at first, when people would ask me that and say, where are you going to work after college, oh my goodness, it drove me absolutely bonkers because, just like this podcast promotes, everyone expected me to go and quote unquote work for the man. And and not too long ago I realized no one was coming from a place of malice. That's the traditional path that most people take post-college. It's all right, you go, you give your four years, you go and chase that degree, you work as hard as you can in school to get those good grades and it literally is just a game. And you're applying. What professors can I take that are going to give me an easier opportunity to get an A? Who has the least amount of tests? Is attendance required in these classes? You're not playing the game of, hey, I'm coming to school to go and learn. You're playing the game of how can I do this in the quickest, cheapest and easiest way possible, which is another rant.

Speaker 3:

I could go on for hours and hours on why I think college needs to change, but on that point, like most people do, after you graduate, everyone I know in my, in my close family or friends they say, all right, what's the plan after graduation? And these are people, once again, no malice, coming towards them. They know I've been working on interval, they know interval is going very well, but they still expect you to go and chase kind of that quote, unquote, normal, normal route. And when I tell them, oh, intervals, the plan where, we're sticking with it, it's going great. There's always that little glimmer in their eye where they go I don't know what you're signing up for. And once again it goes back to the principle that they feel like the traditional job is a safer route.

Speaker 3:

And in my eyes, in today's world, with how fast things are changing in the world of AI and how crazy the atmosphere of getting a job is right now. I look at them and I don't say this necessarily every single time, depending on my relationship with whoever is asking, but I do tell them I truly believe what I'm doing is less risky than any of my friends or anybody I know at school right now who's going and getting another job. I know my path is secure for, let's say, absolutely Interval fails. We lost every single one of our customers and we weren't able to grow anymore for the next three and a half years. I know that we're completely safe and we can figure something out, whereas you go and work an entry-level job. You can go work for six months, company has some kind of downsizing and you're gone immediately. So it really just depends on everyone's situation.

Speaker 2:

But as for me, that's kind of the path, so it really just depends on everyone's situation, but, as for me, that's kind of the path. You know. It's interesting that you're talking about risk. I am a very risk-averse individual and I went into accounting a very risk-averse profession and I went to work at a CPA firm, traditionally very risk-averse All of these things lined up with minimizing risk. All of these things lined up with minimizing risk, and during the pandemic, some of my mentors, some of the managers, people I looked up to, got furloughed or laid off and I had an aha moment that, yes, it may seem like a risk-averse profession, but it is not without risk. And and that was something that probably was one of the things that led to firing man podcast starting back in 2016 was, was you know? Thinking, oh, I, I'm safe, I'm an accountant Like, and I've got nothing to worry about, and so I think you've got a lot of really really good thoughts there.

Speaker 2:

And your comments on the people not having malice I think that you're spot on there. It's an unfamiliar territory. Not many people go the route that you're going. However, I don't necessarily think that means that you are going a more risky route, and so you're certainly in an industry and this is I'm really excited to talk to you about this. That's booming with that being AI, and so let's talk about you know, from the inception, from the idea of interval AI to where you're at today, what, what are you doing with the company and and where do you hope to take it?

Speaker 3:

Absolutely Um. So it's kind of funny that you you mentioned AI is kind of the boom right now and it is every, every major company. Anytime you watch a sporting event, what are the? What are the commercials that are being shown? Now it's either pharmaceutical commercials or, uh ai, these massive companies are even even adopting it fairly quickly, which is quite unique, as, going back to my, my recent point of, usually these kind of businesses move very slow but they want to even jump on this train and I do find it interesting.

Speaker 3:

Growing up I was, I was just post the when I was watching shark tank, as I mentioned. I was just post the when I was watching Shark Tank, as I mentioned, I was just post the dot com bubble bursting and it was very interesting, because now I kind of see some similarities with AI, where it's almost as as hype worthy or buzz worthy and um, totally different context in my opinion. But it is interesting to see and I understand it's kind of a new fear that a lot of business owners have. But, um, in the-com burst, when it burst, there was all different types of businesses who thought, just because you were quote-unquote online, that you were going to make it and that clearly was not the case. We had plenty of businesses who absolutely crushed it, succeeded or still around today, but at the same time, you have plenty of businesses who, just because they were an online business, everyone thought that they were going to be the next billion dollar company. And looking around, since AI is the flashy words these days, I find it pretty common, for you can have the most simple product on earth and throw AI at the end, and some people love it, some people hate it. That's not the true point behind it. A true point behind it With Interval specifically for anyone out there listening who isn't familiar with us basically what we do is automate collections, first-party collections for businesses.

Speaker 3:

So our goal is hey, if you have customers who are delinquent on their payments, be that their credit card expired, they forgot, they didn't have the funds at the time to pay, they're outright trying to ghost you, whatever preface that would be, we work with businesses to go and capture those funds back, and so, when we were looking into getting Interval started, as I mentioned, we're about two years old now and we saw this opportunity within the AI space to build something. But, as you probably see, on these commercials and things that pop up on LinkedIn and social media all the time. There's pretty, fairly simple businesses. You can build that with AI these days, coding platforms like Replet or Lovable or Bolt or any of these ones where you can get an early MVP out there very, very quickly. But that also means you could have a lot of competitors jump in very quickly. So our goal with Interval was to make something that number one businesses needed, like any business, should focus on your customers. Number two, one that wasn't easily replicable, even in this age of AI. And then number three, solving some sort of task that, yes, can be done by a human to go out and figure out whatever it is, but it can be done either A cheaper, b more efficiently or C humans just don't like doing it. And in our case, we hit all three of those categories.

Speaker 3:

For an example, if you um in the e-commerce space, it's not quite as common. We work with some e-commerce brands and I know that's the majority of podcast listeners here on this show um, we work with some e-commerce brands who also work in wholesale um and your reis, your dick sporting goods, things like that, or your local Ma and Pa surf shops, where they send out bulk orders of their product to these different companies and those people have typically like net 30 or net 60 day terms to pay up for whatever bulk products they imported from your business, and sometimes even those Ma and Pa shops or these larger chains don't pay on time. So that's when people implement our software. But on the case of collections, it's very common where, number one, your employees don't want to do it because, let's face it, who wants to be the person handling your customers to try and get them to pay? Number two, it costs a ton of money to go out and collect from these customers because, let's say, on the low end, you're paying an employee $20 an hour that's $20. You're paying somebody every hour to sit on the phone dialing up a number, sending an email that has zero guarantee of return, nor zero guarantee that the customer is even going to reply, and then finally, once again, it's just something that is very time consuming overall and so it could be improved on the efficiency side.

Speaker 3:

So once we hit those 3 metrics and we started selling it to different businesses, we recognized there was a huge need for it. At first we were trying to be very industry focused. Okay, what industry struggles with accounts receivable the most. And when we first jumped in, that was our main focus. What industry are we focusing on? And as we got going a little bit farther along the journey, we recognized no, practically any business at some point in their life if it gonna have a customer profession. And so now, to sum up, what I'm trying to say here is, um, with interval, we, we kind of work across the industry with various different companies, um, all in an effort once again just to collect, uh, their past due balances.

Speaker 2:

Outstanding, Outstanding. I love that and it's very specific. I like how you've defined your niche and in terms of being in collections. Where did the idea come from?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, this is the jankiest way. Anyone who's listening who is working on their next project. I semi-recommend this idea. It worked for us. I haven't met anyone who's tried it, so if somebody does, please email me and tell me if it worked or not For us. We were going and battling through a couple different ideas that we were working with.

Speaker 3:

There's this amazing program at my university called Sandbox and, as I mentioned a minute ago, I'm not the biggest believer in college, but I am the most absolute stan of Sandbox. Sandbox is basically this incubator amongst various universities across the US where you get college credit to work on a tech startup. So at the time, I went in completely by myself, didn't know my co-founder or anyone else who is now part of the Interval team, and we got college credit where I didn't have to go to regular classes for an entire year and I could just work on my business. Our professors were local business owners, so they bring in professionals of all different kinds to come and basically just give us lectures on how to grow a startup, and that was our job. We were expected to work 50 to 60 hours a week on this startup, not focus on your typical math or science classes and just grind it out. So in this program, as you can expect, it's a really interesting concept because you have these young college students like myself going and trying to solve pains for the world. And when you're starting a business, where's the first place you always look, unless you had something kind of fall into your lap, you're always going to try and solve your own pains first.

Speaker 3:

So we started with very, very simple ideas. I started working with my now co-founder, um we, we went through 20 something odd ideas before we landed on where we're at today. That actually obviously started working, um, but most of them were focused around the college student. Right, we, uh we. We built a platform we called lecture fi at the time. Very simple concept You'd get your phone when you went into your college lectures or any kind of meeting. You'd press start recording and it would transcribe your college lectures from what your professor was saying so you could pay attention in class and then it would take notes for you. It creates study guides, make little practice quizzes. Pretty, fairly simple concept. We had a bunch of users on it.

Speaker 3:

But early on we learned crap. College students aren't willing to pay anything, and so we made the pivot and then we jumped into a platform we called Venue. It was basically the Airbnb of wedding venues. And then we found out nobody wants to book a venue in the middle of a weekday and liquor licensing is very, very hard to get across these. So we jumped into a new one and, long story short, like I said, we had 20 something odd ideas that we had practiced for some time until we eventually landed on interval. We got our early customers very, very quickly, way easier than it had to we had with other ideas that we were working on. We got paying users quicker than we ever had. Our product was very janky when it first was created, but people were still willing to pay for it because the need was so grand, and that's when we knew all right, this is the one, this is what we've been waiting for, and that was, as mentioned, about two years ago.

Speaker 2:

That's an outstanding story, and one of the things that I love about that story is you had a lot of things that you tried first, and one of the things that I love about that story is you had a lot of things that you tried first and, instead of considering those failures, you pivoted, you took what you learned from that and applied it to the next one and you said 20 ideas. I think that's outstanding and really a solid mindset for entrepreneurship really a solid mindset for entrepreneurship. And so now, as we sit here and record this, in March of 2025, ai is a hot topic. I mean, it's hard to talk to a business owner without AI coming up in some form or fashion. However, two years ago I remember, probably about two years ago I heard Lex Friedman talk about it on a podcast and I just I remember thinking like and I love Lex Friedman, but I remember thinking like he's kind of a nerd like this. I don't know what artificial intelligence is, and so were you guys. You were early on the scene with AI. Is that accurate?

Speaker 3:

Somewhat early. So if, if you look in, these large language models have been around since the eighties, nineties, um, obviously back then you didn't call it AI or artificial intelligence. It was large language models. At the end of the day, all it is is just algorithms. It's it's math functions that are determining what is the next step on this prompt that I was given on how to determine the best outcome for for the answer Um, in some form or fashion, that's obviously summed down in a very, very simple way.

Speaker 3:

But, um, the concept of artificial intelligence has been around for 30, 40 years now.

Speaker 3:

The real application where we know it today maybe back around 2016,.

Speaker 3:

2017 is when companies started understanding it a little bit more, applying it into their businesses, and then, I would say, realistically, around 2020, maybe a little bit after the pandemic, is where people started hearing about companies like OpenAI, and there's obviously other competitors that people recognize. But personally, I think the first time I had ever tried to chat GBT was back in late 2020, during the pandemic time, or 2021, or right when it was kind of released to the public whatever time frame that was. So, relatively speaking, no, we weren't new into the AI space, these large language models, we weren't new, but on the grander scale we were in terms like you were mentioning, where it was still a newer concept. It wasn't the buzzword. But obviously nowadays, as I mentioned earlier, everyone talks about AI in their business in some form or fashion. Heck, I know business owners that I've connected with that. Their business has relatively nothing to do with AI, but they throw a chatbot on their website just so they could say all right, we're a company named AI. Now.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I have seen those and interacted with those business owners and, yeah, it's certainly a hot topic. Now, were you learning about AI in school or was this kind of something you were interested on the side?

Speaker 3:

So this is another dish I have to college. I'm very pro-college in some ways, very anti-college in other ways. If you haven't learned by now, College is not the best environment to learn software engineering or coding. There's a few classes that have been very helpful for my business partner and myself, a couple of machine learning classes specifically but at the end of the day, if you want to get into this realm, college is not the place to go and learn it.

Speaker 3:

Most of our hands-on application has taught us more than sitting in the classroom doing assignments or taking tests Just because, once again, universities they're super large. Their curriculum was very, very slowly. We're learning some things right now, as I'm graduating here pretty soon. That was very, very applicable for 10 years ago, but in the digital world, everything moves a million times faster than college universities, and so the curriculum doesn't stay on top of it. So everything that we've learned inside of interval we always joke about this internally with our team but maybe 5% of it has come from knowledge from actual school and the rest has come from just hands-on trying to figure it out.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it almost seems like AI is in competition with how colleges function. My wife is a professor and AI written papers is like super common, I assume it's huge. Yeah, and you know I, my wife, would tell you that. You know we're trying to prep these, these students, for the real world and when they go out there they're going to have AI in their pocket. It's just kind of like learning long division and the teacher says well, in the future you're not going to have a calculator in your pocket.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yes, we do.

Speaker 2:

And so their stance, at least like this year, has been like anti-AI. If we find you using AI to write your papers, then you're in trouble, and I don't think that that is congruent with prepping people for the real world. Can I ask you a question on that?

Speaker 3:

Absolutely and hopefully this you're allowed to say and this doesn't get your wife in trouble here or anything Does she agree with the policies that no AI or what's her take on it?

Speaker 2:

No, no, she doesn't. And and it it seemed this is my take on it. Uh, so I'm, these are my, my opinions and not hers. It seems like the unit universities. All of a sudden, it needed to have an AI policy and they weren't prepared for it. They didn't. The people making the policies and procedures weren't necessarily prepared to deal with it and all of a sudden, you know, for the last hundred years we've been having students write papers. Well, now there's this tool out there that does that for you. And you know, my opinion on that is you need to change the way you engage students and you need to change the way you're teaching and not encouraging them to use one of the most powerful tools available. I don't think does the students any justice. I don't think that is in line with what college is meant to be, and so I you know I I share a lot of those sentiments with you and, uh, it'll be interesting to see how, how that plays out. I think we're kind of in a weird trying to figure it out space.

Speaker 3:

And I agree with you on that. I think I to not totally bash on college universities. I think they are in that awkward stage of trying to figure it out. They obviously the entire reason they exist is to provide you the higher education and hopefully, at the end of the day, place you into a good career so you could be that model citizen and go to exactly what you're supposed to be trained to do since you were in the first grade. So I think they are trying in some fashions.

Speaker 3:

I have some classes currently as an active student that say these are the parameters on using AI for this assignment and they'll give you kind of layouts you can use it for research, just cite your sources, things like that. Those ones make a lot more sense to me because they're practical. Those professors recognize like all right, let's not beat around the bush, these students are probably going to use it regardless of what we say. And then, secondly, let's actually teach them a tool that's going to be impactful and not just something they're going to forget.

Speaker 3:

And this is another issue I have with a lot of my college classes I've taken the past four years. It's you go in, you study for the test, you go in for that midterm and then you immediately forget the material two weeks later and I hate to admit it, but I'm the stereotypical student with that. I'll grind out, I'll study for a little bit, I'll make sure I get that test pass. I've stopped caring a little bit more ever since. Intervals been going good for the past two years, but my first two years of college I was the total pencil pusher. I was trying anything and everything to get those good grades and I learned the material and then immediately forget it after. So I think the professors that I currently have as I'm exiting that over the past two, three years, have said all right, don't necessarily take the non-AI approach, but at least keep it reasonable. Do your own work. Tell us what portions of AI helped you out with. Those ones have left a longer lasting impact on myself, because I feel like I'm learning more.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. What are your goals with Interval AI?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So it's still something as a young founder I'm trying to figure out and I guess it's kind of a joke because any business owner is always trying to figure it out. You're playing fake until you make it every single day and when employees ask questions, you put on a smile and you answer as best you can, but every day looks totally different. In all my different fun entrepreneurial ventures this is obviously more of the big boy job, for lack of a better term. We recently brought on four different employees besides my co-founder and myself. So I've never managed a group that large. I've never paid somebody's salary Heck. I had to go and ask a business owner, a guy I knew growing up, who was who's. I used to be a boy scout and so an old scout master of mine who who's ran a business for you know 30, 40 years now. I had to go ask him. I'm like, hey, I've never had to pay an employee's part of an employee's health insurance. Like, tell me, who should I contact about this? What do I go and do? And and so there's a lot of things that I'm still learning and I'm very blatant and transparent with with all of our employees now on. There's a lot that I don't know help me is, as the quote unquote boss to to figure this out. And so I just I just lay out our expectations with everyone on staff now very, very simply and say hey, me and my co-founder's name is Connor, me and Connor are really trying to figure this out. You, you be honest and you work with us, and we'll be honest and work with you and come to a middle ground.

Speaker 3:

It's been interesting. There's, there's definitely days where I'm banging my head against the wall, thinking I have no idea how I'm supposed to do X, y or Z, but you figure it out, just like any entrepreneur does, any business owner does. You figure it out every day. So our goal for the next phase of interval is we're yes, we're still in the startup phase, I think just under 2 years old. It's not like anything absolutely out of the ordinary there. Our goal is probably work on it for the next six or so years and then try and sell it off and kind of start a new venture from there. But that's another thing that we we debate back and forth every single day, because we've never. We've never gone to that phase. So we kind of just take it one day at a time and see what happens.

Speaker 2:

I'll tell you what, and I'm not just saying this to to flatter you, but if I'm Brandon Davis, my goal would be and I love this idea it solves a pain point and that's huge, and it deals with cashflow, which is that's business I mean a lot of businesses that's your world, that's your world.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'm a retired CPA and, yeah, cashflow is king and man, if I'm Brandon Davis, I'd build this thing for the next five or six years and then I think you could exit this for mid eight figures or nine figures to Intuit or a huge company like that, and I really like this and I'm going to. I want to follow your story because it's the origin story of probably started out of a dorm room or college apartment and and I love it, I love this idea and it's outstanding. It's been fun learning about it and and learning about your journey and, yeah, so glad to have you on the Firing man podcast. So, thanks, david. Yeah, before we wrap things up, we have the fire round. It's four questions. We ask every single guest Are you ready? Let's do it. I'm ready, all right. What is your favorite book?

Speaker 3:

My favorite book to date. I'm a big David Goggins fan. I'm a big guy. It's kind of your own mentality You're great, Nobody else is coming to save you, I'm kind of guy, so I like. I like his book never finished and can't hurt me. He has both those. I also love shoe dog, the Phil Knight story of creating Nike I think that's just like my go-to. That or I made in America by Sam Walton, founder of Walmart. Those are like my two business books. And then the David Goggin ones are like the get off your butt and go work.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, those are all outstanding reads. What are your hobbies?

Speaker 3:

Outside of actually working, which I know is the cliche answer Probably everyone says when they come on the show. I love hanging out with my wife just doing stupid things like watching TV with her, I don't know, going to the gym with her. We're massive baseball fans. So I'm from Southern California, grew up a Dodger fan, so we actually just had opening day yesterday and today they're playing the Chicago Cubs in Japan. So I was up yesterday and this morning at 4 am to cheer on my Dodgers. So that's some of my hobbies there.

Speaker 2:

That's outstanding.

Speaker 3:

Now the next question is one that we ask everybody, but I'm not sure if it's. We went door to door Um, I was a lifeguard at the time, and so that was like, whenever I wasn't getting um shifts as lifeguard, that's when my friend and I would go um knock on people's doors and cut their grass. And I just remember from day one of when somebody um paid us in cash for our services doing the landscaping. Once again, we still undervalued our services, but I looked at it and I don't remember if it's like 50 bucks or 100 bucks or whatever it is. It's like holy crap, this is how much. I would have had to work for like seven hours doing my lifeguard job or whatever the price was. It was probably even more time than that, but that was my aha moment of saying wait, I don't have to wait every two weeks for an employer to pay me out. I can, I can I get this all set up and uh and and do this in kind of my way, in fashion.

Speaker 2:

I like it, I like it.

Speaker 3:

And final question what do you think sets apart successful entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail or never get started, and that's a tough one to ask a young entrepreneur. Here I could speak just once again on on my experience and and other business owners that I've seen. Um, I think it really just comes down to if they're actually willing to put in the time to make it succeed. And I say that purely because my co-founder and myself we went through the struggles of trying a thousand different dumb ideas and there was other people in that program with us that they also had horrible ideas and I saw some of them fall off a little bit early and not continue until they found the one that was actually working. But then I saw a couple others like ourselves who kept working, kept grinding it out until they found the one that stuck and heck, there's even some that have gone on out until they found the one that stuck and heck, there's even some that have gone on. They worked on the one for the past year and a half or two years now and they've made another pivot.

Speaker 3:

But I know for a fact whatever they end up staying, and whenever they find that one business that they're actually interested in, I know they're going to succeed, because I've seen them work hard enough on the crappier businesses to know that they are the type of person who are going to figure it out and make it work. And then, on the contrary, I saw the people who faced rejection two, three times and said all right, this isn't for me and I'm done, and to each their own. I mean, this entrepreneurial world is a crappy one in many different ways, so it's not made for everyone. But, um, that, that'd be my answer to that.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely Well, uh, if, if people are interested in getting in touch with you, what is the best way?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so uh, as David mentioned at the beginning, I run my own podcast. It's it's for kind of young founders getting started on their journey. It's a way I kind of document a little bit of my, my journey and interval, and I host other fun entrepreneurs who are typically a little bit younger, who are trying to figure it out themselves and to share our strategies. It's called Get Over Yourself. So if anyone wants to check that out and then you could also email me at LOCgetoveryourself at gmailcom and find me on social media LinkedIn, brandon Davis is my name. I'm usually pretty responsive. If there's anything I can do to help out, I'd be more than happy to.

Speaker 2:

Outstanding and to our listeners definitely check out the podcast I have. It's outstanding. If you are a business owner and have accounts receivable issues, go check out interval-aicom. I'll post that in the show notes. Brandon, this has been an outstanding interview. Best of luck on your entrepreneurial journey and looking forward to staying in touch. Thanks, david, for having me. It was a pleasure.

People on this episode

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David Schomer

Co-host
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Ken Wilson

Co-host