Building Better Software: The Role of the AI Architect | Albert Santalo | Archie Lab

Shamil Malachiyev: Good morning, everyone. Joining me today on The Founder's Code podcast from Miami, Florida, is a computer scientist and internet entrepreneur with a solid track record of building high-growth, venture-backed technology companies. He's now founder and CEO of Archie Labs, a software consultancy that combines human expertise with AI agents to revolutionize the way software is built, using Archie, their AI product architect. Please welcome Albert Santalo. Hi, Albert.

Albert Santalo: Hi, Shamil. It's great to be here. Good to see you.

Shamil Malachiyev: Can you tell our audience a little bit about the work that you do at Archie and the directions you're taking during this AI boom?

Albert Santalo: Sure. First of all, I'd say the real mission around the things that I and the team are doing is really about the transformation of software development in general. We can all see that's beginning to happen with artificial intelligence, but we believe there's a future that still has room not only for the AI, but for the humans. So Archie Labs is really this: if you think of a software development firm, how would you rethink the way it works in the age of artificial intelligence, where humans still play a role? That's what we are. From the first moment you interact with us, you're interacting with the fusion of humans and AI applications, AI agents, to take you through the entire life cycle of software design, architecture, development, and even into the production step.

Shamil Malachiyev: Listening to one of your recent interviews, I really liked that you compared this to electric cars. You said that adding AI to old software development models would be like taking combustion engines and trying to make them somewhat electric, instead of taking the new technology and building around it.

Albert Santalo: Exactly. Exactly. That really references first-principles thinking. Certainly when I was growing up hearing about the potential of electric cars, I thought of it as: okay, we're going to move from combustion-engine propulsion to electric propulsion. But the first time I saw a Tesla, I said, well, it's a lot more than that. It's the car reimagined. And we feel that software development needs that same kind of thinking. You can't just say, well, before we used coding to actually build the software, and now we're going to use artificial intelligence to build the software. It goes a lot deeper than that.

Shamil Malachiyev: How much has the overall product development roadmap and experience changed, in your view, over the last two or three years, once we started getting all these powerful models? Now Opus 4.6 came out, I think yesterday, with up to a one-million-token context. What are the main parallel shifts you're seeing?

Albert Santalo: Well, you've seen that in the last couple of years we've gone from manual coding... there's manual coding, there was low-code development, there was no-code development. I would say low-code and no-code really never fulfilled their true potential, and they are dead models, in my opinion, at this point.

What we saw happen was, depending on what type of person you are: if you're a software developer, tools started emerging that could make you more productive. And they have introduced tremendous productivity. Originally it was Microsoft Copilot, then Cursor came around, Windsurf came around; now we have Google Antigravity and a number of others that make pure software developers a lot more productive. We've seen anywhere from minimum 40% productivity gains to 400% productivity gains with those tools.

But you've also seen things like vibe coding emerge. Vibe coding in its current form is primarily prompts to code: natural-language prompts that generate code and begin to evolve an application. And if you think of the spectrum of human beings, out of 100% of the world's population, about 0.3% of that population can code. Another 0.3% can use low-code and no-code tools. And now vibe coding has expanded it so that about 1% of all humans in the world could actually develop. And vibe coding is still primarily more about prototyping things than actually building sophisticated applications.

What we're all about is making that number a hell of a lot bigger. You'll never have a hundred percent of people; there's still a significant number of people who would rather just say, hey, can you build this for me, because they don't want to learn any tool, and there's nothing wrong with that. But what if we could get to 20% or 40% or 50% of people who could actually self-service and build their own applications, and those applications wouldn't suck? They'd actually be pretty good.

Imagine a world where things have evolved. My belief on where the world is going is that you're going to have less and less corporate jobs and more and more entrepreneurship. So it's going to be beholden, especially on young people, to figure out how they build their own businesses. What used to stand in the way of that? Every business today has a technology component: the cost and the time. All of this stuff that would stand in the way of building a technology-enabled business is beginning to come down, essentially by what we're doing and what others are doing.

Shamil Malachiyev: Yeah. And the thing that shocks me is seeing the share market dropping consistently for SaaS businesses, for most of the largest technology businesses we see today, which really signals that shift.

Albert Santalo: There's a massive shift, and it's terrifying for people. So why is it that SaaS companies, for instance, haven't evolved from an artificial intelligence perspective as much as they should? Why is it that services companies haven't evolved as much as they should using artificial intelligence? It's because they're afraid of what it's going to do to their business models. It benefits the end user, but what does it do to the business model? In services, how do you charge for services in a world where artificial intelligence is doing part of the work? How do you do that in a law firm that's all about billable hours? How do you transform the model using artificial intelligence?

In SaaS companies we've seen it. Most of them, especially the big guys that have entrenched customer bases and maybe have become a little bit legacy these days, are having a real hard time rethinking, using first-principles thinking, the way they do things. So that's been a massive inhibitor. But fortunately we live in a world, especially in the United States, where competition is a real thing, and competitive forces are what's going to drive the transformation sooner or later. Eventually it will.

Shamil Malachiyev: As somebody who has been in technology all his life, and part of that in consulting and software development consultancy, you get to see all of these companies and the way they think about technology: the largest companies, and the real adoption rates. Sometimes I talk to friends running IT consultancies and they tell me about real legacy systems which are not even ripe for SaaS-level implementation, and now they have all this agentic AI, which is obviously not going to be adopted within the next five or ten years for them. But at the same time, they're so capitalized, such a huge part of industry, that having them go down would be a big hit for the towns and countries they live in. What are you seeing over the last five years in real adoption rates, compared to the hype being promised everywhere on the internet?

Albert Santalo: I think, especially in larger companies, especially in regulated industries, it's happening more slowly than it should be. It's very complex in those environments. There's a lot of friction, a lot of resistance. Some of that is human resistance. And truthfully, there's a misconception about artificial intelligence, because we think of ChatGPT or Claude or any of these products; they're really consumer products. They are really conversational artificial intelligence. It's me as a human talking to the artificial intelligence, with the primary objective of making me a better human. It's giving me superpowers. But it's me and the machine, or the machine and me.

But there's this whole other branch of artificial intelligence around AI agents, which is really AI-to-AI communications. Most people struggle to think about that: what that really means, and why that's better or more appropriate in certain settings. But what businesses have to realize is that conversational AI is the first layer, but agentic AI is perhaps the most transformational force that has ever hit business over the long term. More impactful than the industrial revolution, potentially, over the long term. It won't happen overnight, but it has that kind of disruptive ability to it.

Shamil Malachiyev: Whenever I'm exploring the latest tools... with OpenClaw, I recently installed it to see its capabilities: being able to install its own skills, what kind of actions it can take in the world, what kind of apps it can use. And at the same time I'm looking at LinkedIn and people are saying, an AI has opened the browser and searched for a video, oh my God. They're shocked by the very basic things you see after deploying the basic versions of what's currently available. So I'm still seeing a huge lag between what it's currently capable of and what people are used to using AI for.

Albert Santalo: Yeah. The AI stack is very complicated, and you need to spend real time with it. Either be in an environment where it's being used and you've got some really proficient people around you so you can learn quickly, or just dive in and start making mistakes and start figuring it out. But it takes a while to learn it. We've seen this even with very, very strong technologists. It's just a big ecosystem with a lot of complexity. It's not like ChatGPT, where you swipe a credit card and 20 bucks later you've got all these AI capabilities. Actually implementing real AI is complicated. And that gets in the way of some of the expectations that the world was going to change overnight. It actually isn't; it's going to take a little bit longer.

But that said, I don't know how long that is. It might be five years. It might be like the internet, which really took 20 to 30 years to get to where it's at. But it probably isn't that; it's probably a shorter time horizon. Again, competitive forces are driving the transformation. The problem for businesses is that if they realize they're getting disrupted, it's too late already. The reaction time to actually implement AI agents and things like that might be a year or two. By the time a competitor is actually showing up and disrupting you, if you're a year or two behind them, you're in big trouble. Big, big trouble.

Shamil Malachiyev: And that is driving everybody to explore, research, try, and keep throwing things against the wall. You can apply AI to everything: engineering, consumer, support, sales maybe. And there are places people try to get AI into where there's obviously no use for it, but everybody's still trying, because it feels like everybody has to put AI into everything nowadays, right?

Albert Santalo: Everybody really does have to. I'm not sure everyone's trying, though. We talk to a lot of businesses, and I'd classify them as: people that are advanced and leading the charge; those that know they have to do something, can do something, and are actively trying to figure it out; and then those that either don't see it, don't want to try it, or are fat and happy in their current position, and that may be appropriate for who they are. But the reality is I don't think everyone's trying it. In our world we take it for granted, because we are the tip of the spear in terms of these tools. We understand them. We come across a use case when we talk to almost anyone in any business, and we immediately see how they can use AI to figure things out and do things better. But not everyone's at that level of thinking. For me, certainly, it's taken a number of years to understand it all, be a practitioner of it, build our own solutions and help other people build solutions to get to this point. Not everyone's there.

Shamil Malachiyev: I think people are generally scared about how capable they'll find these solutions to be. What do you think?

Albert Santalo: Yeah, I think people are very scared about AI. There are lots of opinions on where this is going ultimately for humanity; I've seen it expressed in many, many different ways. First of all, I think it's going to be a massive productivity boost. If population is in decline in the Western world, which it generally is, then without AI we would encounter a productivity problem. So AI gives us the ability to have more productivity and eventually get to this world of abundance: many of the things we have to do today, or things that cost a lot of money, just become abundant.

And then you hear people talking about universal incomes: if people don't have jobs, do we need to give them money? That part's terrifying to me. People without jobs, and a society that doles out money without necessarily rewarding the people that work the hardest, is a problem. Or at least I think so. I'm not sure where that future goes, because people need to feel relevant.

Some people would say that artificial intelligence is literally an infringement on humanity of sorts: that it is dehumanizing, taking away from the integrity of what it means to be a human being. In the past, technologies like this have simply enhanced who we are and enhanced our abilities. There are so many positive things, including things like curing diseases, solving anti-aging, things we think would be good. But at the end of the day, how many jobs will it eliminate? How many jobs will be reclassified? There's this argument that as jobs have been eliminated in the past, people have retooled and evolved into other things. The question is: if this comes really, really fast, can society actually do it fast enough? And not everybody in society is of high intellect and can understand all these things; there are people that will have a ceiling on how far they can go. So what happens with all of that? I don't have the answers, but these are the things we need to think about.

But if you ask me how a young person should think about this, someone not yet into their career or just beginning: should I be a lawyer, a doctor, an accountant, a software engineer? The answers to those things have changed. To use an example, take software developers, designers and product managers. Typically all three of those roles were absolutely critical to develop good software. But as AI and vibe coding tools have come out, we've seen a convergence of those roles. Now coders are like: do I really need this product manager, or this designer? And the product manager is thinking the same thing: I don't really need the designer, and I don't really need the developer. And the designer is thinking the same thing. The question is, who's right? I think the answer is they're all right.

So what does it really mean? If you are a developer that really only knows the code, who literally has to be told what to build in excruciating detail, with no flair for design whatsoever, that's going to become a problem for you. But if you are a person who understands computer science, has a command of some languages, which could become irrelevant, has experience building software, has experience working with product managers and designers, and knows enough of being a product manager and a designer to be dangerous, then having those multiple skills gives you massive ability and massive opportunity in this world. Because now you could literally take the lead on building somebody's product without having to bring in all these other people.

So my advice to a young person: you have to become a master at wielding the artificial intelligence tools. And it's better for you to be cross-disciplined. Before, it was like: if you're not deep in any one thing, you're irrelevant. I think you want to be deep and broad, truthfully. But you don't want to be so deep in one thing that you don't see what's around you. If nothing else, go deep in one thing and then understand the adjacent disciplines, so that you can wield these superpowers. But really become proficient in using artificial intelligence in its different forms, in your career, and in your life, truthfully.

Shamil Malachiyev: What I think about a lot with younger people trying to find their way in the world is that the very basis of it is building a character. Being a founder is the hardest job out there, and only other founders really understand what it means and what it entails; it's quite hard to grasp for the average person. Could you talk about the moments in your life, starting from your early days, that shaped you into the Albert we see today?

Albert Santalo: That's an interesting question. Look, probably the most important thing that shaped me is that my parents are both Cuban. They both left Cuba in the early 60s, escaping communism. They would call themselves refugees in this country. And one thing you've got to know about Cubans is that Cubans are great Americans. They come here, they integrate, they believe in education, they believe in capitalism, and they're very enterprising. And they bestowed that on me. When I would talk to them about this, they would tell me: look, Cuba is where we came from, but America is our country. So I was brought up from my early days knowing that I was a Cuban American; that Cuba once upon a time was this beautiful, wonderful place, and it got ruined; and that it didn't matter where I was, I could lose it again.

So what does that teach me? It teaches me that I'm incredibly blessed. I'm blessed that I came here, blessed that I live at this time, blessed that I was even born in the first place. And so it's up to me to maximize that. How do I maximize it? I've got to take risk, and I've got to try to be the best version of myself that I possibly can, and try to help the people around me in the process. Try to be a good person. And that's a scary thing, because taking risk and putting yourself out there is scary. Sometimes you put other people at risk, and nobody wants to fail. But when I look at my parents: they left everything, all their worldly possessions, behind, because they had to, and then they started all over again and did well. So what do we really have to lose? I could have been born 2,000 years ago and my life would have been about defending my family and foraging for food. I'm incredibly blessed. I've got nothing to complain about. We were brought up to be educated, to be incredibly hardworking, and to be enterprising. And that set the course of my life.

I figured out when I was about six years old that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I had a vague impression of what that meant. The story is a little embarrassing, but basically I was watching soap operas with my mom, and there was this cool guy on the show. He had the nicest house, he had the prettiest wife, he had the nicest cars. Everybody came to him and they respected him. And I'm like, what does that guy do, Mom? And she said, well, he's an entrepreneur. At that point you think everybody's a policeman or a fireman. I'm like, what is that? It's a person who starts a business. And I'm like, well, that's what I want to be. I didn't really know what that meant exactly back then, but that set the course of my life.

When I was 18 years old, I got married. I was a freshman in college, and my daughter was born before my 19th birthday. So I had a lot of responsibility very early in my life. I had worked through high school serving ice cream, and then I got my first professional job while enrolled at the University of Miami studying computer engineering, at a bank processing company. This was in the late 80s, but we were still using technology that was literally architected in the 60s. I was working on mainframes with assembly languages. It was a wonderful place to start my professional career, because I understood a very complex industry, and I understood the basics of how a computer works; I was literally programming every day in assembly languages, while at the same time interacting with business and understanding what the business needed to do. That experience was very formative for me. Literally everything I do today is somehow influenced by what I did back then.

Then I had an amazing experience in the late nineties: I joined a founding team that had left KPMG consulting. It just so happened that the partner in charge of consulting was based in Miami, a person I admire tremendously. His name is Ted Fernandez. Ted left the firm, took 50 people with him, raised 20 million dollars of venture capital, and I was lucky enough to be one of the early team members there. And we listed on the Nasdaq 11 months later.

Shamil Malachiyev: What was that like? What is life inside a company that goes to IPO within 11 months?

Albert Santalo: I can't take the credit for any of that; I was sitting in the passenger seat watching it. These were older, more accomplished guys; I was in my late 20s at the time. And it was amazing to watch. We built a really solid company, and I watched very carefully that whole process of listing, running the public offering, going public, what that was like. And I was just like, man, that's what I want to do. That's the dream for me: to lead a company, make it successful, and go through that process. But by that time I had four young kids, and my wife is incredibly accomplished, but she's an educator; she's not a person that makes a lot of money. So I was the breadwinner.

Shortly thereafter, the dot-com bubble collapsed in 2000. By 2001, the work I was doing, management consulting, helping large US companies with technology transformation, had gotten incredibly boring. And I was just like: if I'm ever going to be an entrepreneur, who am I? Am I ever going to do this? So finally, about a month after 9/11, I decided to leave the firm and start my first venture with a group of co-founders. And it was an absolutely terrifying experience. Four young kids at home in private schools, investing my own money, going without pay, raising capital for the first time. I evolved as a human being quite a bit during that phase.

Shamil Malachiyev: Having four kids at the age of 30, having to grow up so fast, getting married, proper adult life starting at 19 or 20: did you ever feel like you went into the world of serious corporate business a bit too quickly? You didn't get to live the gap-year type of life a lot of people talk about today.

Albert Santalo: No. I've never been a recluse, and I've never really been a nerd per se. I've always had a social life; I've got plenty of friends and so forth. But I have put it on the shelf many times along the way, as a second priority behind work. And I have no problem doing that. I'm the type of person where work kind of defines who I am. So when I've had problems at work, it can be a challenge, and that's just part of growing up: learning to brush it off and understanding there are ups and downs in everything you do. But the way I'm built, I feel like if you want to do something extraordinary in the world, you have to make extraordinary sacrifices to make that happen. Not only have I never been afraid to do that, but I've had a fair amount of support at home to enable me to do it.

And I'm at an interesting time right now, because people think of entrepreneurs as young, before they have a lot of responsibility. But I've been an entrepreneur a number of times: in my early 30s, my early 40s, my early 50s. And it's been different every time. In my early 30s, it was lots of responsibility, young kids, private schools. And by the way, in my early 30s the dot-com bubble had also blown up; young technology entrepreneurs were out of favor completely, not to mention one in Miami. So lots of friction, lots of impediments to trying to do what I wanted to do, because especially back then, Miami was not known as a place where you would do tech entrepreneurship.

In my early 40s it was a different experience, because by that point your friends have established themselves in business and have money, so they're able to support you. In my second venture, eight million dollars of angel investment came together pretty fast. And this was in the middle of the financial collapse: January 2009 was when CareCloud was incorporated.

Shamil Malachiyev: You love those post-bubble bursts. Housing crisis: time to do something.

Albert Santalo: It just kind of worked out that way, not on purpose. But yeah: I heard a statistic once that there was a hundred million dollars of angel investment raised in all of 2009 in the entire US, and we had essentially eight percent of that in that year. And then we went to Silicon Valley. No company in Miami had been funded by Silicon Valley in at least the 10 years since the dot-com days. We were kind of the first, or at least the first that I know of; this was in 2011, when we secured our 20-million-dollar Series A led by Silicon Valley investors.

So it was very different as a second-time entrepreneur. I felt a lot more in control. I still felt very exposed; my kids were still young enough, still in private schools. But having had success before certainly helped me. I approach any of these ventures with a lot of humility, thinking any one of them could fail, and I really hate to fail. I'm not one of these entrepreneurs that brushes off failure; I don't do well with that at all.

And then when we started 8base, it was different again. I wanted to bootstrap more and not necessarily go to VC; I ended up going to VC anyway. We had a lot of challenges during the 8base days, including a little thing called Russia invading Ukraine, by the way, because we had 50 people in Russia at that time. It was a big, big struggle for us as a business. So very different kinds of experiences. When I started 8base I was also in a different financial position, didn't need to raise a lot of money. Just a different experience.

Shamil Malachiyev: It seems to me that when you were 30 you were working on your first venture, starting it small, and when you turned 40 and started the next venture, you were aiming at much higher levels of impact and numbers. Did it feel less scary to manage that much capital and run the company, compared to 30?

Albert Santalo: There were lots of scary moments, including big burn rates. What I thought was a big burn rate in my first company turned out to be a little burn rate in my second company. And then dealing with venture capital and venture capitalists is always an interesting thing. I've dealt with really good ones, and when I say really good ones, I mean really good human beings. And I've dealt with really bad human beings in that business. So I've had a little bit of everything in between. It's a very tricky thing for a founder.

Shamil Malachiyev: There are a lot of founders trying to get VC funding, and sometimes they jump at the first offer they get, because they want to prove to the world that somebody believes in their idea other than them. So they go for the first money they can find. What can you tell them about how to identify the good and the bad, and to be brave enough to say no to the bad ones?

Albert Santalo: Well, the biggest thing is having the ability to say no. When I started my first company in '01, there was no Y Combinator, there was no Techstars, there was none of the incredible body of knowledge that we have on the internet about best practices for how you actually start companies. You were observing what other people were doing, figuring it out as you went along, and explaining it to a lot of people. And that was really, really difficult. But... Shamil, I apologize, I'll stop right there. Tell me the last part of the question again.

Shamil Malachiyev: With VCs: what is the differentiation between the good ones and the bad ones?

Albert Santalo: Ah yeah, the good ones and the bad ones. So today we've evolved: there is all this incredible knowledge. You can go to the founder school on the Y Combinator site and see videos of really world-class advice on how to do different things, and I encourage any serious tech entrepreneur to do that. But the reality is that there's a playbook that lives inside Silicon Valley, and there's a playbook for everything else, and in every local area they're all a little bit different. When you're in Silicon Valley, talking to that venture community, it's always: yeah, pick the best one, do your due diligence. But most entrepreneurs, even ones who have raised real venture money, will tell you they haven't always had a ton of term sheets show up to fund what they're doing. That got better for a while, certainly in the frenzy of the 2019-to-2021 timeframe, when it didn't matter where you were. But generally speaking, if you look at even artificial intelligence investments, most of the money goes to Silicon Valley. So there's a playbook you have when you're over there, and then there's a playbook everywhere else. I absolutely had a Miami playbook. I always had a foot in Silicon Valley, that was part of the strategy, but I had to adapt the things they would tell me.

Shamil Malachiyev: And capital elsewhere is much more scarce?

Albert Santalo: Much more scarce, and a lot of times there's different thinking around venture investment. There have been times when you saw polar opposites: I remember after the dot-com boom, the West Coast went into a mode of taking big risks and making big moves, while the East Coast, places like Boston, which at the time were venture capital hot spots, were very conservative. And if you look at the southeast United States, although there were people talking about venture investing, it was almost like later-stage venture investing: let me see your unit economics, let me see your financials, let me make sure everything's working, then I'll give you money. It's still the case to a large extent in the southeast. So it's very different depending on where you are, and you're going to have to travel and go places. I had very specific plays for how I made that work, because I didn't want to move to Silicon Valley. I wasn't born in Miami, I got here when I was 11, and I never wanted to live anywhere else. And it's only gotten better.

So you have to do your diligence on the VCs. As a founder, you're better off saying no to VC money completely than you are getting the wrong VC.

Shamil Malachiyev: So what are the red flags in VCs?

Albert Santalo: Because if the wrong VC gets on your cap table, it's very, very difficult, if not impossible, to divorce them. I've seen term sheets and deals done with very oppressive protective provisions, bad board situations, and driving founders to run out of money so they can put in more money. I think overall venture has gotten better when it comes to all those things, because there's so much more transparency. But you still have to be incredibly careful, because I still see those deals happen. Sometimes founders come to me and I give them advice on how you work your way out of those situations; some of them have been able to do it, some of them haven't. I myself have witnessed it: in my first company, the VC behavior was horrific. Things that, if I described them to a venture capitalist today, they wouldn't believe it. That's how bad it was.

Because I think what we can all agree on is that a startup is about the founders. It's about the people who work there. It's not about the investors. The investors play a very important role, but without the founders, assuming they're valid, backable founders, the company's nothing. There are certain rules, and when venture capitalists broach those rules and step in too far, things begin to become dysfunctional. And if the founder or the founding team is not showing up every single day trying to conquer the world, motivated and pumped up, it's not going to happen. It's too hard.

Shamil Malachiyev: How do you stay motivated? Whenever I talk to founders, I usually ask: what is the percentage of good days, when you wake up and it's going to be a good, easy day, versus the days when you wake up and think, okay, what's the next pile of shit I have to shovel? Usually the answer is about 20-80, or 10-90 towards the shitty types of days. And you're still supposed to be motivated, energized, optimistic. What do you tell yourself? What are your life hacks to get yourself back in the seat, driving?

Albert Santalo: Well, look: this is what we signed up for. Whenever I see founders that get into it because they think it's glamorous or cool or hip, I just nod my head and go: it's not, man. If that's your reason to do it, it's not going to happen. You might get that eventually, but if you're chasing it, it's never going to happen.

The job begins with doing the most dreadful thing that you need to do, first. You wake up in the morning and it's like: what's that thing I need to do that I don't want to do, that I keep procrastinating on? I've got to do that first, get it out of the way. You're going to feel a lot better afterwards, and you're going to advance the ball. Doing a startup is a game of inches. It's about de-risking the venture every single day, getting closer to the goal. To use American football terminology, it's not about throwing Hail Marys. It's about running the ball a yard at a time to try to get into the end zone. It's the only thing that really works.

We tend to look at startup stories through the lens of what we read about, which is usually the massive successes and the massive failures. Nobody writes about the stuff in the middle. But most companies are in the middle. They're dealing with the crap, dealing with mediocrity in many, many forms, and asking how they punch above it. And 50% of the battle is about being in the fight in the first place: determination and grit. The other 50% is: do you have a good idea, do you have any chance of success, is your timing right, do you have the right people around you? But 50%, if not more, is about just dogged determination.

So you've got to embrace it and be realistic about it. It's like being on social media all day: if you're on social media all day, you're going to be depressed, because everybody's life is better than yours. If you're reading about the founder that just cashed out for a billion dollars and you think everybody's life except yours is like that, you're not going to make it. The truth is, most people's life as a founder is more like yours than you think. It's dreadful, and you've just got to muddle through it.

But if it was easy, everyone would do it. Who doesn't want to be really rich and famous, to not have to work, to have all the recognition that comes with building something from nothing, to have that personal satisfaction, and to not have a boss? That's the destination. But it's really, really hard, and what stands between you and that is difficult on purpose. It's meant to keep mediocre people out of it. If you are not willing to be excellent, if you are not willing to be absolutely determined, don't even start.

Shamil Malachiyev: A lot of people say: if you want to start with something, start with your body, start with your health, go to the gym. And I know you do cycling, right? What role does physical fitness play in your life?

Albert Santalo: Physical fitness is incredibly important to me. I like to eat, and I stress-eat; I don't like to, but it just happens that way. If I have a lot of stress, I'll eat. And if I don't exercise, I'll lose my sanity. So I exercise pretty much every single day, and it's pushing-myself type exercise: a combination of weightlifting and cardio-type stuff, outdoor cycling, indoor cycling, running, these types of things.

Actually, my friends and I, every two years, do this big production we call the body fat challenge. We're in it right now. It's 90 days, and the penalty for losing is you get your head shaved by the winners. And you can't get out of it. You literally cannot get out of it: you have to write an enormous check that doesn't get cashed, but gets held by an attorney, and if you default, it gets cashed. The check's enormous. I would shave my head in a minute before I let them cash that check. So that's a lot of fun, and we actually get a lot of business done, and it helps keep us healthy in the process. There are 30 of us in the competition right now.

Shamil Malachiyev: How did you get that group together, to hold each other so accountable?

Albert Santalo: I can't take the credit for it. A very good friend of mine, actually an investor in a few of my companies and a very successful guy, started it in 1998, and it's been done religiously every two years since. But to your point: exercise releases endorphins, it makes you feel good about yourself, it helps you cope with stress. It's very, very important to stay active. And if you believe in the mentality of "I don't have time for exercise because I'm working too much," well, eventually you're going to be working less and be less productive, because you're just not going to have the ability to put in all those hours. So you might as well invest a half hour or an hour of your time every day in exercise.

Shamil Malachiyev: I usually find that one of the good qualities founders develop is assertiveness. When they're starting out, a lot of people try to be nice; they don't know the difference between nice and kind. "We're building a family here," you know. How has your relationship evolved with using that healthy aggression and assertiveness for the good of the company?

Albert Santalo: That's a very good question, and my approach has evolved over the years. The first thing I would say is that culture in your company is incredibly important, and the first few people you surround yourself with are incredibly important, because those people help form the culture. And then the culture has to be adhered to.

I've probably seen it all when it comes to this type of situation, but you as a founder have to be very comfortable in your own skin, and you have to assert yourself. Sometimes you have to assert yourself with people you might otherwise think are more successful than you, more intelligent than you, more wealthy than you. And it's really hard for a lot of people. The word humility is interesting here, because sometimes when you're incredibly humble, you listen to all opinions, you try to be diplomatic, you try not to come across as too assertive. But nobody has the responsibility that you have as a founder, or the vision that you have, and not everybody sees it as clearly.

And there comes a point in your company where people want to be you. That's happened to me as well: people around you, your executives, sometimes want to be you or have what you have. I've seen investors do it, people on the board do it. You have to recognize it, but you have to continue to act in a very assertive way.

I was tested once, after my first company and before my second, on some of this. I forget exactly what it was, but it was something about humility and arrogance. One of my friends said: yeah, you're not humble, and you're arrogant. And interestingly enough, the test came back with the opposite. The test said that if I'm in a room with a bunch of really smart people who are more accomplished than me, and I know for a fact what we need to do, which most of the time is correct, because by the time I come to that conclusion I've gathered enough data and used the right judgment, other people in the room might be arguing a different course, and there just comes a time where you have to say: look, this is my decision, and this is what we're doing. And I wasn't strong enough in some of those things. If you look back at the mistakes I've made along the way, that quality in me showed up. So I course-corrected from then on, or at least I mostly did, and it served me well.

By the time we got to where we are now, I feel like my companies are a well-oiled machine. Everybody fits the culture. It doesn't mean we don't have diversity, but everybody fits, everybody knows how to act, everybody works well together, everybody respects each other. There isn't a lot of dissension on where we should be going, and everybody understands that the CEO is the CEO, and that the CEO sets the direction after lots of opinions and lots of information gathering. But at the end of the day, that's what happens. And it's functioning incredibly well, better than I've ever had it in any of my other companies. So knock on wood, let's hope that can continue.

Shamil Malachiyev: What is the culture you're building within the companies? What are the qualities and people that you cherish the most?

Albert Santalo: I look for, number one, intellectual curiosity. No matter who you are or what you do; I don't care if you're a finance person. I want you constantly being a student again: figuring out how you can be better, what tools can help you be better, what's the latest and greatest, and not being afraid of those things.

Number two, you have to have a very strong work ethic. This whole thing of work-life balance... we try to be super accommodating to people, and I don't feel like we're infringing on work-life balance, but we're here to do a job, and it's a job most people don't want to do, at a level of excellence that we expect. If you can't make that a priority, then you just don't belong here. There's nothing wrong with you; you just don't belong with us. I don't care how talented you are. If you can do your job in 20 hours, well then you should be doing two jobs. The bottom line is there's always more you can be doing, and that's what we expect.

And the third thing is you just can't be an asshole, to use an inappropriate word. You have to be a good citizen. You've got to work well with others, and you've got to prop up the people around you versus bringing them down. Sometimes you find you have a very talented person, but they just don't have a good attitude, and what happens? It makes everybody else not work happily and at their peak. So you've got to identify those people, even if they're big contributors, and you've got to get them out. I've done well about 50 percent of the time trying to identify them before hiring. If you talk to most CEOs and ask them the biggest mistake they ever made, most will tell you: I should have moved faster on somebody my instincts told me wasn't a fit. And I'm guilty of that as much as anybody else, because we end up loving people, and we love people that follow our vision. But there just comes a time where it's better for everybody, them, you, and their co-workers, to replace them, which can be painful. So I look for those three things, in addition to the obvious: they've got to be really good at what they do.

Shamil Malachiyev: With more experience, do you ever feel like you have less patience for mediocrity?

Albert Santalo: I have patience for people; I lack patience for people who think mediocrity is okay. We hire new people all the time and bring them into the fold, and they may never have been subjected to a culture that demands excellence. All I ask of them is to allow themselves to be criticized in a constructive way, and to try to do better every day.

If they don't think it's important, or don't make it a priority, or have a self-imposed ceiling, not one of ability, that's where I have problems. I think of business like a relay race. A lot of people think excellence is: we're going to build an excellent product, or have excellent marketing. I think we've got to have excellent everything. Excellent finance, excellent recruitment, excellent everything. Is there a reason one area of the company should be excellent and the rest not? No: everybody has to be in that mindset. They have to be producing better output, and working internally on their own systems to make them better, more scalable, more efficient, all the time. And if they do that, they themselves are going to be enriched, and more valuable in the marketplace. I want people to be recognized: if they have worked in my companies, then they must be a badass. And that has happened. You've seen people graduate from the system, move on, take on bigger roles, and they always come back to: I was really tested when I worked at this company, and it made me better.

At CareCloud it was very pronounced. CareCloud was a really difficult product in a really difficult industry, but we nailed it. We had hyper-growth; the growth was massive and the walls were shaking. There would be times I'd have to call a meeting, and I'd be talking to the troops, and they'd be looking at me like: man, we're tired, it's crazy. And I would say: well, what's the alternative? We have to embrace the success that we have. If any company is not growing, it is dying. It is through growth that we have success and create opportunities for all of you to have bigger roles and make more money. You don't have to wait for your boss to die or retire before you take on their role, when you're growing. It's hard while it's happening, but it's a necessary evil.

Shamil Malachiyev: I can understand that when you were 20 or 30, a young dad from a refugee family, you were focused on making good by your family, earning money, getting that financial security at the start. What gets you out of bed in the morning now?

Albert Santalo: The same things. The financial responsibility is a little bit different; it's actually very liberating, because the kids are older and there's more money in the bank. It's both a money and a time thing, because when your kids are young, you have to spend a lot of time with them. It's different now.

But there's still a lot. I don't feel anywhere near the level of "I've accomplished enough," and I don't ever think about retirement. It's not something I ever think I want to do. Obviously, having the ability to do it if I want is important, but I've never thought about not working. And of all the things I've ever done, and I've done some cool things, this is the most exciting time of all for me. I'm a computer science person, and artificial intelligence coming into the world is the coolest technology a person like me could ever think about. It's unbelievable. I feel like a master of the universe in being able to wield it, not only myself, but the people around me, and what we can do.

Our clients are incredibly happy; it's a delight to work with them. And I have the choice, that's the other thing. I don't have VCs and a governance structure that says I have to do this or that. And this isn't a complaint against VCs; I've had great experiences with venture capital. It's more that I get to do things the way I want to do them. For instance, Archie Labs might not exist if we were backed by venture capital, because it's a services company. It's more scalable, more profitable and more technology-enabled than a typical one, but it's still a services company. And I actually like being involved in the services. At the beginning of our engagements, I like being involved as kind of the principal architect of somebody else's product. I spend some of my time doing that and working with founders, and we develop this really incredible bond in the process that I think they enjoy, and I enjoy, and my team enjoys. Then little by little I might let go and let the team do more. So it's not sucking up all my time, but I have the choice to do it if I want to. And at the same time, I get to focus on the design of Archie, and the marketing of Archie, and all this other really cool stuff. But it's my call. I like that. I didn't have that before.

Shamil Malachiyev: It's almost like creative freedom.

Albert Santalo: Creative freedom, yeah, it's definitely creative freedom. And I'm still business-first. I'm not going to do stupid stuff, or stuff that sucks up all of my time. I'm always going to be about the most important business goal we have. But I have the ability to cut across those things, and nobody's tapping me on the shoulder going: hey, focus on this other thing.

Shamil Malachiyev: As a last question: a lot of people listening to this would say, well, it's easy for you to say, because you've been in technology all your life, you've seen the industries, you have all these connections, you can see the interplay in the industry. But for those just finishing university, with a degree they thought would be useful out there, and now all this talk about people trying to be operators of AI in all these different industries: what advice would you give them to make their path easier, to pick what to do, and to find that internal energy to be able to do it?

Albert Santalo: Complicated question. Not everybody's built the same, and there are a lot of misconceptions that get thrown around, like this one: figure out what you love, and then focus on that. Okay. Sometimes what you love is not congruent with actually making money. I think making money is incredibly important. Contributing to an economy and taking your share of it, and that doesn't mean a lot of money: feeding your family, having stability, being able to have options for what you do with your free time. All of that is enabled through money. So what you have to do is find something you can be passionate about, maybe not the thing you're most passionate about, but something you can be passionate about, be good at, and that translates to making money.

Because look, I guarantee, no matter what it is: if the thing you're super passionate about turns out to be something you can make money around, 20 years into your career you're still going to be tired of it, you're going to be bored of it. The question is how much money you're making at that time. If you're making $20,000 a year instead of a million dollars a year, 20 years in, you're still going to be sick of that job. But at least you're making a million dollars a year.

So through that lens, as a young person: figure it out. Even if you wasted four years in college having fun, just figure it out. Become a master at artificial intelligence. You don't need to be a computer scientist to be a master at artificial intelligence. And try to figure out: are you going to take a corporate path, or a more entrepreneurial path? If you're going to take the entrepreneurial path, try to do something durable, meaningful, and somewhat scalable. These days, with technology, you can scale a small business pretty well. And if you go down the corporate path, make sure you stock away money, invest in other things, buy real estate, whatever it is, so you have a stable financial life outside of your core job. It's not uncommon for corporate America, or corporate Earth, to pull the rug out from somebody, and then they're on the job market looking for the next thing. So try not to be dependent on your core job over the long term.

When you're in your 20s, the number one objective is to learn and set the foundation for the rest of your life. It's not to make all your money in your 20s. And the really hard part is to not spend your money on partying, but to actually stock it away and invest it. This is one of those "do as I say, not as I do" things; it's difficult. But that's the best advice I could give a young person. And then: the stuff you see on social media, people making it look easy, people making it look like they have this amazing life? Don't believe it. It's not true. Life is hard. Life is hard, but don't take it too seriously. Get through the bad times, and have faith.

To that point, the biggest evolution I made as a professional, as a human, when I did my first company, was that I evolved from a creature of logic to a creature of faith. And by faith I didn't necessarily mean religious faith. I meant faith in the universe, faith in myself: that if I put myself in this risky situation, I was going to figure it out, even if I couldn't plot the strategy from before I started. Up until that point, I was the person who would say: here's my goal, this is the strategy. Entrepreneurship is too difficult for that. You've got to be able to make the moves along the way. And so in that process I ultimately had to let go of the logic.

What I found was that if I was in the game, and if I was working hard, and if I was trying to solve problems, doors would open for me that I never expected. Doors that were bigger and better than what I had thought about before I started the journey. And that applies to life. Entrepreneur or not, if you have faith in yourself and you keep advancing, keep trying, eventually things are going to happen in a positive way. Doors and opportunities are going to open. But it's scary. It's super scary, and people don't like to be exposed. But I always go back to the same thing: what if you were born 10,000 years ago? What was your life? Would it really matter if you lost all your money and had to start all over again? Back then it wouldn't have mattered. So why does it matter now?

Shamil Malachiyev: I remember in 2006 a film came out called The Secret. It talks about this way of communicating with the universe: trust the vision, visualize, and just go and do it, take action. How has your communication and relationship with the universe evolved? Because you've mentioned it, and it shows up in my life a lot as well.

Albert Santalo: That's an interesting question. I can be prone to getting caught up in the day-to-day and losing sight of the bigger picture; it's been known to happen. I have to deliberately tell myself to do it every morning and every evening: to reflect and have a conversation with God, or the universe, or whatever it is to different people, and be thankful, and wish for more good things, more positive things, and, to your point, visualize them in your mind.

Smart people have a problem: smart people tend to work every scenario, and a lot of the scenarios are bad scenarios, and they tend to occupy our thoughts. It's really important to get those out of your head. When was the last time you thought about some really horrible scenario and it actually happened? It rarely ever does. Maybe never, to most of us. It lands somewhere on a spectrum from really awesome to really crappy. Worry is a misuse of the imagination. It's much more important to focus on the positive. And if you focus on that hard enough, and believe that it can happen, it will happen. Hopefully that answers your question.

Shamil Malachiyev: This is such a great point to finish the podcast on. I really like the energetic boost that I've got. Right now all I'm thinking is gratitude. And even though it's half past nine in the evening in Spain, I'm still going to go to the gym. That's what happens after talking to founders as energetic and enthusiastic as you. That's what we signed up for: this is going to be hard, and this is what hard feels like.

Albert Santalo: That's funny. That's great. Especially with all the options you have in Valencia; you could go out to a really nice dinner.

Shamil Malachiyev: That's true. And it's quite warm in the evening too. I want to thank you so much for coming to the show, for being such a fantastic guest.

Albert Santalo: Thank you, Shamil. This is great. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Shamil Malachiyev: I wish you the best for Archie Labs, and for Archie, which will hopefully be here in the coming months too.

Albert Santalo: Yes, we will be making some very big announcements in the next few weeks. I know we didn't talk about that too much today, but we'll talk about it another time. Some big announcements will be coming in the next few weeks.

Shamil Malachiyev: Awesome. That's about it. Thank you to everyone for sticking with us for the duration of the whole episode, and we'll see you in the next one.