Conversations on Applied AI

Caroline Holden - How Artists Will Shape the Future of Tech

• Justin Grammens • Season 5 • Episode 5

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The conversation this week is with Caroline Holden. Caroline is a dynamic creative technologist with more than seven years of experience across startups, venture capital, and media in Minneapolis and New York City. She's known for delivering impressive growth, including 10,000% year-over-year sales increase at Mercado, boosting YouTube engagement by 336 % at DataVolo, and amassing 43,000 views on her AI-focused YouTube channel. Caroline's achievements span managing major events like Twin Cities Startup Week, producing award-winning scripts, and driving innovation in strategy operations and marketing. She's collaborated with top brands like MasterCard and Verizon, and has a proven ability to find creative solutions to complex problems. Most recently, she was the growth and marketing manager at DataVolo, which was recently acquired by Snowflake in November. 

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Resources and Topics Mentioned in this Episode

Enjoy!

Your host,
Justin Grammens

Caroline Holden (00:00)

It's so interesting because like I said earlier, growing up, I felt like I was never going to be able to work in tech. I would never be able to be successful in business or anything like that because I was not apparently a world-class mathematician. But it turns out that my greatest strengths when it comes to working in tech is the fact that I am very design-focused. I was almost an art major in college. I am a filmmaker. I understand how to build product and understand how to build a scene and figure out how to capture people's attention over time.

And it is my people person skills of being able to talk to people, talk people's ear off, figure out how to write things, communicate things down. Frankly, the tech industry doesn't hire more people who come with art degrees to me is very confusing because all of those things have been what has made me successful, what has made me stand out and what has made me frankly, maybe a little bit more competitive than some of my peers.

AI Announcer (00:54)

Welcome to the Conversations on Applied AI podcast where Justin Grammens and the team at Emerging Technologies North talk with experts in the fields of artificial intelligence and deep learning. In each episode, we cut through the hype and dive into how these technologies are being applied to real world problems today. We hope that you find this episode educational and applicable to your industry and connect with us to learn more about our organization at appliedai.mn. Enjoy!

Justin Grammens (01:25)

Welcome everyone to the Conversations on Applied AI podcast. I'm your host, Justin Grammens and our guest today is Caroline Holden. Caroline is a dynamic creative technologist with more than seven years of experience across startups, venture capital, and media in Minneapolis and New York City. She's known for delivering impressive growth, including 10,000 % year-over-year sales increase at Mercado, boosting YouTube engagement by 336 % at DataVolo, and amassing 43,000 views on her AI-focused YouTube channel. Caroline's achievements span

managing major events like Twin Cities Startup Week, producing award-winning scripts, and driving innovation in strategy operations and marketing. She's collaborated with top brands like MasterCard and Verizon, and has a proven ability to find creative solutions to complex problems. Most recently, she was the growth and marketing manager at DataVolo, which was recently acquired by Snowflake in November. Wow, Caroline, you have a rich and well-versed background.

And I'm super excited to have you share all of this with the audience. So thank you for being on the Conversations on Applied AI podcast today.

Caroline Holden (02:24)

Thank you so much for having me. And man, I sound like really spectacular. You don't normally, you write these bios for LinkedIn or for whatever. You don't actually hear them out loud very often. That makes me sound so fancy and I promise I am not.

Justin Grammens (02:41)

Well, for the little I've gotten to know you, which has been just pretty much five minutes here, you do seem very, very down to earth. So, you know, give us a little bit of background. I know I mentioned where you are today and some of these impressive things that you've done, but did you grow up here in Minnesota? Like, how did you get to where you are today?

Caroline Holden (02:55)

Yeah, so I actually did not grow up in Minnesota that much. Both sides of my family are from here. So I grew up coming here for Christmas and spending all summer long. went to like so many different summer camps here. wow. I did live in Minnetrista for like a hot second. I'm in the first and second grade before mostly growing up out in Connecticut in New York City suburbs. So I'm a bit of a weird Midwest East Coast hybrid.

Justin Grammens (03:24)

Gotcha, gotcha. Well, were you always into technology and stuff? mean, take us back to your high school and college years and stuff like that. Do you ever think you would be where you are today?

Caroline Holden (03:33)

Well, that's one of the funnier things about my career is I was 100 % like a creative kid through and through. So ever since I was in early elementary school and preschool, was miss, you know, wanting to do everything arts, painting, writing, performing. I started filmmaking in elementary school. Wow. And so it's really funny with the filmmaking stuff. They're like, how long have you been filmmaking? And I'm like, I'm not telling you.

That is not a socially appropriate number. People do not believe me, you know, when you start filmmaking in the fourth grade. So I actually grew up believing that I was not smart enough to work in tech. I really believed that you had to be an extremely advanced mathematician to do anything in finance or to do anything in tech or basically anything serious in general.

And so I accepted from a remarkably early age that I was just going to be some form of an artist. And so my plan was, I really wanted, I think, to be a novelist. But my backup plan was being a filmmaker, which is totally bizarre.

Justin Grammens (04:47)

Yeah, well those are two tough industries I think to break into, I would think. yeah. You mentioned like you have to be this sort of math whiz and boy it feels like the more and more I've been speaking to groups and going out and talking about AI and stuff like that, I'm starting to come to this realization that, and I quote this book often, it's a book by Daniel Pink called A Whole New Mind and his whole story is like people like us have kind of been growing up to thinking of logical left brain. Like that's how you're going to succeed. And what I'm seeing is it's more and more the creatives. And that's what he wrote this book probably almost 10 years ago. But the whole advancement of AI is, you we talk about prompt engineering. We talk about basically being creative with these large language models. I don't know. How do you feel like that? You feel like it's great because you do not have a background in computer science and you've been able to succeed in this space. Like what's your perspective on this?

Caroline Holden (05:38)

My perspective, especially with generative AI in particular, is that creatives are going to be the future of the tech industry. So I gave a talk at Twin Cities Startup Week a couple of years ago now with the title just being that it was why creatives are going to be the future tech giants. And the reason why is because the tools that are coming out are making it so much easier to build new products or to build new marketing campaigns or to make films in different ways. Like no matter what it is, when it comes to AI.

If you are creative and have good ideas and are passionate about things or have expertise in a certain field, you're going to be able to go out there and execute and build things in a new way. And so that's been my thesis for a while, which is why I love talking to arts students in particular. A lot of arts students are not encouraged to go into tech. They're not encouraged to look into business other than learning how to make enough money to survive.

And I think that's a massive mistake because I really think the future is going to be for people who are creative enough and driven enough to actually make things happen.

Justin Grammens (06:45)

Yeah, you talk about art students. Have you connected with like MCAD, Menaebus College of Art and Design?

Caroline Holden (06:50)

A little bit. I've talked to some students there. I talked to a lot of students who reach out to me on LinkedIn. And I went to St. Olaf College. So a lot of students there will reach out and chat with me. I haven't really done talks for students yet. I keep talking to professors who say, hey, you should be doing this. And I say, yes, absolutely. But it just hasn't happened yet. So not quite sure when that will. But it definitely seems like something I need to be doing sometime soon.

Justin Grammens (07:17)

Yeah, my sister went to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She graduated early 2000s, I think. So it's been a long time, but I talked to somebody recently, his name's Tim Brunel, and he's local here in the Twin Cities. And so I'm at a local event and they're bringing entrepreneurship and him specifically bringing all the generative AI creative stuff into the students. So students that are going through the program now are being, it's not just like, hey, make your art and have fun, see you later. Cause that's kind of what it felt like with my sister. Now it's really more like you got to think about this as a business and you got to think about how you promote yourself. You got to think about social and you got to think about how you're to use Gen. AI tools because they're not going away. They should be complementing what you do.

Caroline Holden (07:53)

Yeah, absolutely. And I've met several MCAD students who are in the entrepreneurship program and they definitely, it seems to be like a different division of the school. And I think they are probably really fascinating to talk to and how they're approaching AI in general. I don't know how much more traditional artists are really playing around with it. I know a lot of people who are my age who are still operating in the arts are very, very anti-AI in general. And so I spend a lot of time just in conversations with my friends trying to say, hey, no, actually you could try using this and this and this. Like, we're not trying to get rid of your jobs. Like a lot of this is finding out what other opportunities are out there and what are new art forms that you can be playing with. So I've been really encouraging people to use it as a tool and to at least understand how everything works so that they can continue to be competitive in various ways or to find out if there are new job opportunities that were not even possible a few months ago, right?

Justin Grammens (08:58)

Right, yeah, yeah. People ask me, well, are people's jobs going away? And I think in a lot of ways, they're just going to change, right? Like what it means to be a software engineer is going to change. What it means to be a marketer is just, it's going to change, right? What it's going to mean to be a salesperson is going to change. I mean, obviously if you can't keep up with the times, yes, you are going to lose your job. But I think the tasks that you do are going to change and evolve over time. That's just my perspective. I don't know how you see it as you've gotten out of college and you've been able to make a successful career here more on the marketing side, right? Is that kind of more what you focus on?

Caroline Holden (09:31)

Oh my gosh, my career is all over the place. Funnily enough, I have the least amount of work experience in marketing. I like to say that I've had a double-faceted career. So on one half is intensely creative, but not necessarily entirely marketing. So I was a film major at St. Olaf College. I got my first job in marketing. I was a junior producer in advertising at McCann. So working with some big mega brands there. And that's where, you know, MasterCard.

Microsoft and Mucinex come in, because somebody's got to take care of that booger man, right? But I left that job after a year to go be a freelance comedian. So I was performing in New York, my scripts were placing in different national competitions, things like that. I was working on all of these different web series, but I really couldn't land myself a job. A lot of times if you're working in comedy in particular, you mentioned it being really challenging. It's exceedingly challenging. The expectation is you're going to work for free for 10 years before you actually get paid.

So my peers who are still in the business in the last two years have just started getting their very first assistant jobs. So not even on writing staff for television, things like that. So if you're looking at like the entry level writers for most TV studios, you're looking at people who are in their thirties plus essentially, unless you went to Harvard and were part of Harvard's lampoon. Okay. Or like you have some sort of insider industry connection in that way.

So it's really, really rare as somebody under 30 to be getting writer jobs, essentially. And I think that's part of the reason why, especially in the entertainment writing or things like television or film or whatnot, that people are very scared about AI potentially taking their jobs when they can't even get them. And when the industry has been contracting and contracting and contracting, I think the fear ends up being less about the technology and more about how these industry and studio heads are gonna react. But that's one half of my career, right? Advertising, the film, and I've had YouTube experiments on and off over the last several years, not super consistent, but on and off. But the other half of my career has been in tech, and it's actually mostly on the client relations and sales side. I started in venture capital in New York at a VC firm called Loeb NYC.

I then went to work for one of our portfolio companies. That was the grocery delivery at Mercado where we scaled like crazy in the very first three months of the pandemic, which was bananas. So there I started on the phones and they changed my job actually five times in the first day because everything was on fire. I was there very first COVID hire. I knew them because I had known them at the office in New York at the VC firm. so I got the offer on Friday, Bobby posted on LinkedIn, help we've grown 200 % in two days, who wants a job? I sent him a note saying, me, when can I start? He calls me five minutes later, he says, Carolyn, you're hired. I said, great, what's my job gonna be? And he goes, we don't know yet. See you on Monday. just absolutely, and at that point we were thinking about going in the office and I was like, just kidding. We're doing that anymore. So it was an absolutely wild time. So I was there for a while and then I went and built my own little startup, a real estate, social media, platform called Home Surfing, which I shut down about a year and a half ago, then ran Startup Week, which was, I guess, more of an operations kind of a role. And in that regard, it was just how are we going to make Startup Week happen in five weeks? There was some shenanigans going on there. So jumped in to help save the day. And then getting this job at DataVolo was my first time back in marketing. But I got the job because they saw my YouTube show and wanted to have somebody who could break down really complicated jargon and AI tech in general and be able to translate it for investors or to businesses or to potential clients. One of those potential clients was Snowflake who then turned around and decided to buy us. So I was only there for four months and was definitely a really wild ride.

Justin Grammens (13:43)

I bet, I bet. Well, you know, the thing that I love about that story is, and this is one of things I tell people that are introverted or engineers, is like, you got to show your stuff. The whole reason that I think you have been able to advance in your career, which again, it's these creative outlets that you're just, getting a chance to try something and you're doing a YouTube video here. It sounds like you go to a lot of events. I mean, you're part of startup week, you've probably met a hundred people at these various events, obviously. So you're getting out in the community and just meeting people because that's how these doors open and how these things happen. Would you agree?


Caroline Holden (14:13)

yeah, I think it's so interesting because like I said earlier, growing up, I felt like I was never going to be able to work in tech. I would never be able to be successful in business or anything like that because I was not apparently a world-class mathematician. But it turns out that my greatest strengths when it comes to working in tech is the fact that I am very design-focused. I was almost an art major in college.

I am a filmmaker. understand how to build product and understand how to build a scene and figure out how to capture people's attention over time and understanding what things are going to look like from their perspective. And it is my people person skills of being able to talk to people, talk people's ear off, figure out how to write things, communicate things down. Those have all been my superpowers in this space. And so the fact that frankly, the tech industry doesn't hire more people who come with art degrees to me is very confusing because all of those things have been what has made me successful, what has made me stand out, and what has made me, frankly, maybe a little bit more competitive than some of my peers.

Justin Grammens (15:16)

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's those broad-based skills. People are like, I'm going to lose my job because of AI. I'm like, if you can keep the human side of what you do, which is relationships, it's empathy, it's like you said, it's just, can break complex subjects down into something that's simple, that humans can digest and I do it authentically. Like, I feel like no matter what industry, you could go into medicine, Caroline, right? You could go into agriculture. Like these are skills that you have that can be used regardless of a specific industry. So it's almost like, don't go super deep, like on one specific thing, because in some ways you're going to pigeonhole yourself.

Caroline Holden (15:46)

Yeah, and that's one of the reasons why, I mean, I went to St. Olaf College, I'm such a liberal arts nerd, right? Like I'm an arts person, but with that foundation of liberal arts, taking a look at the world, understanding literature and history and paying attention to politics and what's going on and you know, the human condition, taking classes in psychology, I think all of that is incredibly valuable and I think.

A lot of times people try to narrow, narrow, narrow, narrow, narrow. I know that can help you get a job, but I don't know if it helps you actually succeed once you get to that point.

Justin Grammens (16:22)

For sure. So let's talk a little bit about AI. So you've been in a couple AI companies and you've been, obviously I saw you interview Micah Rufalo, right? So he was on your program, probably among a bunch of other people that you've had on there. So you've been absorbing this and obviously in early on, understanding some of the concepts. What are you, we don't even need to go into the details per se, but like, what's your overall, like, how do you explain AI to people first? That's one of the things like people say, well, give me an elevator pitch on what AI is, Justin, right? And so,

I like to maybe ask people on the program, like, would you explain that or what are you seeing going on right now?

Caroline Holden (16:57)

Yeah, well, the first thing that I try to do, because especially I talk to a lot of people who are not in tech, are typically the people who are asking, what is AI, right? And I talk to a lot of artists and I talk to a lot of liberal arts nerds. And so I have two different definitions. And the first thing first is that artificial intelligence is just software programming machines, whatever, who are trying to think and behave and act like humans. And that can be in a variety of different ways.

Generative AI in particular, it's trained on a lot of data, especially unstructured data, which is what we were doing at DataVolo. so training on written work or arts or things like that, so that it can best predict what is the next thing that would be the most logical thing to write if somebody writes a question in this way, or if somebody prompts a machine to say, I want artwork that's like this. It can go through

all of these inputs, hundreds of thousands of millions of inputs of different types of art and how they're labeled and identify what is the most likely outcome that it's seen before. So in that way, it can't really create anything completely new. It's only creating things based off of things that have seen before. But also because it's a computer and it's not a person, what it's seen before isn't necessarily what we see. So sometimes it does create images that we haven't quite comprehended in a specific way. So sure.

Justin Grammens (18:26)

Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Yeah. And it's good to break it down and make it very simple because I think a lot of people get into the nuts and bolts and the weeds of, you know, machine learning and neural networks and everything like that. And I see people's eyes sort of like glaze over. So what are some of the audiences you typically has spoken to? You mentioned the startup week thing. Are you speaking at to other groups? Obviously, you know, you're talking about artists and stuff. Are there other like who are you targeting as well? Now that I'm just kind of thinking for your YouTube channel, is it anybody?

Caroline Holden (18:54)

love to do more speaking gigs. haven't done that many. Part of it was I was ramping up this YouTube show. This past spring and summer, I was job hunting and I decided I got bored. So it's like, might as well do YouTube, right? And so I made all these videos evaluating specific AI startups, trying to explain to people what was the business situation going on with companies like OpenAI and their new projects like Sora or

perplexity or clod and giving people basically a big picture breakdown of what these different companies did. And then also sometimes interviewing experts in the field like Michael Arulpha. And so at the time I was starting to get a little bit of speaking gigs, but it really started ramping up within the week that I got the job at DataVolo, which ended up being such a time suck because we were doing great work. But like it took up so much time that I...

lost all momentum. Sure. And you know, didn't get any speaking gigs or anything like that and wasn't seeing those types of opportunities. So it's now been three weeks since we sold to Snowflake. So I've been interviewing. I'm trying to get a job as quickly as I can, but I will probably be posting more videos soon in the new year. So starting sometime in January for sure.

Justin Grammens (20:14)

Excellent, cool. Well, yeah, so for all of our episodes, we always have links off to people's, you know, we have like liner notes and stuff like that, and we'll be sure to put links off to your LinkedIn and your YouTube and whatever else you want to give me, you know. We'll still talk for a little while here longer, but I will make sure that you can get all your contact information out so people want to get a hold of a smart person like you for their next job, you know. So it sounds like you can provide a lot of value. So what is your perfect day in the life, right, for somebody if you were to kind of get your next gig?

Caroline Holden (20:43)

man, so this is a hard question for me to answer because my ideal work environment is having things change all the time. But I think the things that I thrive at are incredibly creative work and people work. I kind of, I know this sounds a little crazy to some people, but I really consider product management and product design and video and content creating is basically the same part of my brain.

They really do seem to operate in that same space. And although they're different mediums, I just consider them as being basically the same thing, which is why I feel really comfortable in both marketing and in product roles. But that said, I'm also a people person who likes to talk. So the nice part about marketing is I'm able to communicate especially complicated things. And with that content creation, that can be stellar. But I also honestly really love digging into the product.

I haven't had a product title before, but I did a lot of product work while building my own startup and when I was at Mercado. So if anybody wants to hire a fun cross-functional person who equally enjoys quiet, focused time creating things as well as talking to people, my ideal environment is to be able to do both of those things in whatever capacities those are. Specific, I know HR people and ATS systems obviously love me.

Justin Grammens (22:07)

Good. Well, how do you see AI then, you know, affecting your next job? Whether it be, we can focus on product if you want, like how do you see AI sort of changing as you got involved? Or imagine if you could go back to your startup that you did, you know, some years ago, like how would it be different if you had access to AI?

Caroline Holden (22:22)

Well, the first thing with my startup was I did have one person who told me, Carolyn, you should be using low code tools to build your app. I really wanted a team member to collaborate with rather than doing everything by myself. But he said, Carolyn, you're going to live to regret this. And he was right. So low code tools like Bubble, my co-founder Mike was fabulous, so nothing on him. But we would have been able to build a lot faster if we had built on a low code tool like Bubble or probably used various AI tools. don't know exactly what those are at the moment. Do you have any hot shot suggestions for product building AI tools that you've been playing around with?

Justin Grammens (23:01)

Well, you know what's interesting is I go into a couple of different businesses over the past probably year or so and really just shown them the power of GPTs, custom GPTs, right? So there are so many different custom GPTs that companies have put out there and they will help you with your product plan. They will help you with your roadmap. They will help you with your Gantt charts. They will help you with your, you know, test creation. So.

My whole story to everybody is like you have a product team and it's not just a product manager, right? It can be a chief architect, it can be a software developer, it can be a UI UX designer and every one of those people can find a tool, frankly, that will make their job go faster. So then the tools come out, they're fast and furious, right? I know. Everyone's like, there's this new tool to do this. I'm like, what? Never even heard of that. So it's so hard.

Caroline Holden (23:47)

and they're selling so quickly and then Adobe just copies them immediately, especially on the marketing side. So I use ChatGBT very thoroughly on a regular basis, but I haven't been that good at using a lot of other new tools other than within products I've already been using. like in Adobe Premiere, when I'm doing filmmaking, the text to video editing has been my biggest godsend ever whenever I'm doing scripted work, I frequently stutter the first word of a line like two to eight times before saying the line correctly. And so as a video editor, if you were looking at that in a visual way, I'd have to like look at each bump and try to audio like line, right? And try to be like, okay, where was it? And then like listen and then wait and then move until I edit it. And now I can just say, look, I said snowflake six times.

I was like, snow, snow, snow, snow, snow, I was able to do this and this and this. Now I can just go through the text, delete it, and then afterwards watch through it and then go and finalize the itty bitty details. So that has, gosh, cut my editing time down dramatically. And that's not even a super crazy AI tool. It's really rather simple, but it's those types of things that I've been using regularly and also playing with Canva.

especially. So those are probably the tools I'm using most often. It's funny because I'm talking to marketers who are like, I found like 50 cool new tools I've used. So I'm like, I probably should be doing more investigating on individual tools, but I'm able to use a lot of the stuff that was already using and the new capabilities within those tools, probably the most frequently.

Justin Grammens (25:31)

Yeah, for sure. And sometimes it can just be, I don't know the word I want to use, just the tsunami of tools that are all the same. They're basically doing the same thing and they're freemium versions and they don't really work very well. I'm seeing a lot of AI just being sort of brought into what you do. So like, I do a blog on WordPress and interestingly enough, they're starting to add in all this Gen.AI stuff, generate a feature image for this blog that you just wrote, help you rewrite it right inside the tool, right? So I could...use chat GPT, hop out and copy and paste and stuff. But in the tool, they're allowing me just to kind of click through. And that's what I think is going to be interesting. I mean, being a Microsoft 365 or we use G Suite a lot here, I'm seeing Gemini just now all of a sudden just being built into my Google Docs, being built into all of the stuff. And so it's making it easier and easier for people that maybe don't know what this AI thing is, but it's just going to start coming in all around us, right?

Caroline Holden (26:21)

Yeah. And I think it's a good thing because I think a lot of people are using AI who don't realize that they're using AI because they just see it as, I mean, if you think even, grammarly, I mean, isn't grammarly? It's been around for ages and people have used that for a long time, but they don't consider that to be an AI tool. Right? Or they don't necessarily, if you're a filmmaker, you don't necessarily know that the text to video editing

Justin Grammens (26:36)

and release AI.

Caroline Holden (26:49)

is an AI tool, they're just like, this is a cool new thing that Adobe is doing. So I think a lot of people think AI is a lot harder than it is. And I know a lot of creatives in particular are very, scared. And a lot of that is because you're always in a scarcity mindset in the creative space. There's never enough money. There's never enough opportunities. And there's a massive influx of people who are trying to break in. But the thing is, if you're able to use these tools to accelerate yourself to be able to do a lot more to make better outlines. You know, I really don't use ChatGPT as much for writing as maybe I should be. And it's mostly because ChatGPT does not have my sense of humor and likes to take out all of my jokes out of every single draft that I make.

Which I find to be extremely rude, has no proper sense of humor. So, Justin, if you can help me figure out how to make a better AI agent that's going to come up with jokes that I would have also come up with, that would have been great. But there's something about that missing context where I can figure out my writing style for like professional work. But when it comes to adding anything funny or interesting, it just doesn't do it. So I need to work on probably giving it all of my life's work of comedy content in order for it to figure it out. But so much of my comedy is also informed with what have I noticed in the last week in my day-to-day life. So that's my next challenge is how do I get Chad's TV to be funny in the way that I would be funny without being so funny that it's intimidating, right?

Justin Grammens (28:16)

Yeah, right. Had to kind of walk that line. mean, you're right. It's really good at dad jokes, right? That's what I think. But beyond that, actually like creative jokes, you're right. I think out of the box, you need to prompt it a lot. You know what? It was interesting as you were talking about people being afraid of jobs. And again, that seems to be a common theme that we're kind of getting back to here. But I'm just thinking about I'm thinking about a really interesting parallel in the creative industry and also in the software development industry that I've seen. And it just kind of clicked to me. These people that you say that you know, they've been in the business for 10, 15, 20 years, whatever it is, and if they're just finally getting a break, right? And so in some ways they're probably the most afraid. They're to be like, look, I finally climbed this mountain, right? And now all of a sudden I'm going to be taken over by this machine. Well, in the software engineering world, I'm feeling the biggest pushback from the same sort of people. These people that have been in the industry writing code for 15, 20 years.

They have a whole bunch of knowledge in their head, but yet, I mean, literally overnight, they can be completely taken out because people used to pay, you know, very expensive engineers just to write three or four lines of code, right? Like that's what you did. You were an expert in a specific syntax, a specific language, and you get paid a lot of money just to write essentially sentences, right? And those are the people that are the most vulnerable and those are the people that are the most scared. So it's almost like the veterans of the industry. I feel like no matter what you're in, whether even you're a doctor too.

Those are the people that are in some ways the most worried because you have accumulated all this knowledge in your head and you just have finally made it and yet now you're going to be outsourced in some ways.

Caroline Holden (29:46)

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think it's really interesting talking to students about chat GPT or just AI in general, because some of them are using it extensively. Like everybody is using it to help with their homework. One of my favorite stories that I had with a student who I will not name was how he had a general requirement course in ethics that he really didn't like. And so he was using chat GPT to write all of his papers, which I thought was particularly amusing.

Yes. But at the same time, there's also a lot of young people, especially young artists who are getting really depressed really quickly, that they're not necessarily going to have a future in what they thought was going to happen. But then there's also kids who are like, well, I'm going to use this to my advantage. if you think of, I've noticed it most, think, with animators, if you look at the day-to-day job of what an animator at, Pixar has been doing.

AI is now able to basically do what they would spend months or weeks doing in a couple of hours. So that field in particular where it was so technical, where now you have college kids who are able to lap you, think is like little bruises your ego a little bit. And it also means that the teams are smaller. So from my perspective, it's like, great, let's make twice as many movies.

But from studios' perspectives, they may not be ready to try to do that much, especially because the cost of marketing hasn't necessarily gone down at the same speed of creating the content. Because when you think about film production in particular, lately for all of these films, they typically spend the same budget on marketing as they do on the production of the entire film. So every Marvel film, they talk about it costing maybe $150 to $200 million.

They are also spending 150 to $200 million to market the film, especially Wicked, which was a massive production that was very expensive. think the marketing costs exceeded the costs of actually making the film. It's really aggressive. so I think from… And part of that is it's harder to reach people because of social media, people not paying attention, and also just like people not going to the movies automatically anymore and being more interested in staying home and watching streamers or just going on YouTube, which is free, and there's endless content forever, right? So I think it's really, really, especially in film, more so than a lot of other industries is something that people are really worried about.

Justin Grammens (32:20)

Yeah, for sure. Do you have any, I mean, obviously your YouTube channel has got, you know, content, stuff like that. Do you have any, I don't know, for lack of a better term, books or resources or podcasts or any stuff that you're looking at that maybe people might suggest signing up for? Newsletters, anything?

Caroline Holden (32:35)

Ooh, okay, let me see. I did write down a few books. Let me pull them up really quick, because I can't remember the author's name, so I want to make sure I get it right. Okay, when it comes to books, I have three books that I think have really helped shape my career in the last couple of years in particular, but I also feel like are really relevant to what's going on right now.

So the first one is a bit more startup related and that's We Are the Nerds by Christine Magario Chafkin, I think is how you pronounce her name and that's all about building Reddit. It is a wild book and really shows just quite the journey it is for young founders trying to make it and then doing so and the big ups and downs and then suddenly Serena Williams shows up in the second half. It's great. Wow. Well, yeah, it like any of them.

Another one is Ranged by David Epstein, which is all about how generalists and creative individuals are going to be the future. Again, my big thesis, right, is if you're a creative individual who's really passionate and you're able to use these tools to dramatically accelerate your career or build new businesses, I think this is going to be a really big renaissance for small businesses. That's something that a lot of people aren't necessarily considering and we really need to teach people, as many people as possible, entrepreneurial skills right away. And then my third favorite book, is Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. It's based off of a very popular class at Stanford. So I would say those are like the three biggest books that I've found to be most influential for me in recent years. Gosh, and newsletters. Well, let's see. So we've got Morning Brew. I'm a big news nerd. So I follow like the New York Times and The Morning and things like that.

I saw some politics ones, but maybe you shouldn't share those on a podcast like this. And there's a generalists group that I really like on LinkedIn. And I think they have an email list that I'm following. Cool. Yeah, we got a lot of stuff in there.

Justin Grammens (34:36)

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. No, very much more on the creative side, more broad-based. You mentioned the one designing your life. I was trying to remember, I'll have to post it afterwards, but it was the guys that did the D school, I guess, at, I think that's Stanford. They wrote an interesting book on that was really about, again, how do you get the creatives to actually open up and share stuff? Like when you have a team of a bunch of people, sometimes people don't share. Yeah. And so that can be a very unique skill to try and...whole lot of people.

Caroline Holden (35:06)

And so much of that book, so it was two professors, one was from the design school and one was, I think, an engineer. And the idea was how can people create the careers that they want to live that are going to be, you know, pay them what they want and be challenging enough and be interesting enough for whatever their goals are. And so in the book is a whole bunch of exercises to just get you thinking about careers in different ways.

And the whole thing is also don't apply for jobs online just by hitting the quick easy apply button on LinkedIn because that is the least successful way to get a job. basically don't apply for jobs anymore. I only network because frankly, I just can't get past ATS systems at all. But also the most interesting opportunities that I have found have basically been people saying, Hey, we want to hire you, Carolyn.

figuring out the job situation later, which I know is not necessarily the best strategy for moving forward, but it's worked so far. You I never thought I was going to be head of marketing at Datafolo or that I was going to be working on client relations while also solving major credit card fraud problems while also running all client communications at Mercado, right? So frankly, the way I got my job in venture was through comedy.

which is so random. I was at a point where I was so desperate for a job. You know, I tragically turned 26 and didn't have health insurance. And so I was looking for a real big kid job, right? And so I would go, if I was doing a show, would go in front of a crowd or if I was in rehearsal, you know, I would just say, hi everybody. I have a really quick announcement. My name is Carolyn Holden. You are here in New York City, presumably because you can maybe afford it.

Probably because you have employment and if you do have employment that means that you can help me find a job. Hi, I can do whatever. And I was comedically begging people for jobs and eventually it worked and I ended up on a roller coaster that I never expected, right? So, and that was all through talking to people and not applying for jobs online.

Justin Grammens (37:15)

No, totally. I think that is huge advice. I think you're right. I can't name any job in my career that I've gotten from a cold, just a cold outreach, right? It was out of the probably dozen positions I've held, every one of them has been some link to somebody I met somewhere. And maybe it's somebody you meet a year in the past, right? All of a sudden your name pops up in conversation. But yeah, it's so hard just to sort of get yourself in there. Because it's oftentimes it's who you know, and there's a lot of trust, right? Yeah.

If somebody talks to me and they've been somebody that I've known and I've, will trust and vouch for them and vice versa. So that's great advice.

Caroline Holden (37:50)

And just because they don't know you yet doesn't mean that you can't find a way to meet them either, right? You can use LinkedIn to introduce yourself to people. I did not know anybody at DataVolo. They saw one of my YouTube videos. They actually saw the one with Michael Arulfo. Yeah, that specific one. So I thought it was funny that you brought it up.

Justin Grammens (38:05)

wow

Caroline Holden (38:09)

And they knew Michael Rulfo and they're like, wait, who's this kid who's got Michael Rulfo on their show? We're trying to pitch him to get Boston Scientific as a client, right? Yeah. man. So, and then it turned out that one of my top mentors for my startup home surfing went to college with my future boss, Luke, right? So, Building relationships is so important and I think a lot of people, especially young people, view networking and getting jobs through people they know as like nepotism, but you have to think of it more of like finding friends who you're going to vouch for.

Justin Grammens (38:44)

Yes, for sure, for sure. Well, this been awesome. I do want to give you a chance. Like, how do people reach out and find you, Carolyn?

Caroline Holden (38:50)

Yeah, absolutely. Come find me on LinkedIn. That's where I post the most. my name is Caroline Holden. Let's see. R-O-L-I-N-E Holden. H-O-L-D-E-N. If you want to find my YouTube show, I really need to come up with a name for it. I probably need to just have Make Chat GBT do it for me. So maybe I'll have one in a few weeks. But at the moment, the easiest way to find it is either to go onto my LinkedIn and click around for a bit or Google me with my full name, which is Caroline Swift, like Taylor Swift Holden.

because otherwise you're just gonna get photos of Yasmin Bleefe on the set of Baywatch. So it's really quite tragic or delightful depending on your perspective.

Justin Grammens (39:26)

That's great. That's awesome. Boy, we got a lot that we should have talked about. I I like the Swift part. Is that your maiden name or?

Caroline Holden (39:34)

No, it's my real middle name. We did confirm through genealogy I'm very distantly related to Taylor Swift, not in a way that she's giving me free tickets to the Arrows Tour, alas.

Justin Grammens (39:47)

Well, one can only imagine, maybe in the future. Well, awesome, Carolyn. No, I appreciate you taking the time to be on our program today. It was awesome. And I'm sure we'll see you at future Reply to AI events. And you're always welcome back. And obviously, we'll have a conference coming up here in May. It'll be our next one, Reply to AI 2025. Love to have you present some of these thoughts. Again, I think we all get our own little cocoons, and we listen to our own stuff and listen to our own echo chamber. And I love having people on the program that kind of

Caroline Holden (39:49)

Maybe someday.

Justin Grammens (40:16)

break out of that, right? So you have a very unique perspective that I appreciate you sharing with the community today.

Caroline Holden (40:21)

Thanks so much, Justin, and thank you for building such a marvelous community here in Minneapolis. Whenever I ask anybody, we're in the Twin Cities, who do I need to talk to when it comes to AI? It's very consistently applied AI, applied AI. Go to the conferences, go to the events, talk to Justin, talk to Emily, talk to Allison. So heard you guys loud and clear.

Justin Grammens (40:42)

Awesome

AI Announcer (40:44)

You've listened to another episode of the Conversations on Applied AI podcast. We hope you are eager to learn more about applying artificial intelligence and deep learning within your organization. You can visit us at appliedai.mn to keep up to date on our events and connect with our amazing community. Please don't hesitate to reach out to Justin at appliedai.mn if you are interested in participating in a future episode. Thank you for listening.


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