Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur – Requests of Proposals (RFP’s) and AI

I bet you thought that title is a bit weird RFP’s and AI. Let me tie the two together for you. Back in my days at Stroma, we would reply to many RFP’s. The first one is always the worst as everything needs to be written from scratch. The first RFP we wrote was to become a vendor of record for the Ontario Government for IT services. The government uses this vendor of record to create a list of companies that Ministries or other provincial bodies can use to hire IT subcontractors, i.e. hiring a project manager to run the Corrections IT refresh, which I did. If you are not on the vendor of record list you must go through another vendor that is and that vendor charges you a percentage of the invoice, i.e. 10-20% for just processing the invoice. Because we quickly accumulated about 80 employees working for the government, it was worth our while to bill directly and eliminate the need for a third-party vendor. Now I am writing the responses to this RFP in late August-early September 2001 and the deadline for delivery was September 12th at noon. My plan was to drive it to Toronto on September 11th to give myself buffer because if it arrives at 12:01 pm on the 12th you are late and it is rejected.

I am in the office on the 11th, and I am printing and finalizing the binders completely in my own world, when the news about the attack on the Trade Towers in New York start filtering out. I think one of my employees stopped and mentioned it to me. Then everyone in the office is on the internet trying to figure out what is going on. As we watched the footage, we were all in disbelief and the mood in the office was very somber. I am pretty sure most of the staff were glued to their computers for the day. I had to drive to Toronto and drop off this RFP so off I went. Now I have driven to Toronto from North Bay many times, at all times of day, but on this trip, there was nobody on the highway or the streets of Toronto. It felt like a ghost town. I think everyone was hunkered down watching the news. I dropped off the RFP and listened to the news all the way home. I think everyone remembers where they were on that sad day. I am getting teary eyed just thinking about it.

After that day the RFP’s kept coming and when Stroma decided to distribute Marval software, almost every sale came through an RFP. We became good at writing RFPs, and we wrote hundreds of them. I spent many late nights answering the same questions worded in a slightly different way, and every once in a while, some new questions. We divided the work amongst the team each getting specific questions to answer, me included. We responded to RFPs across North America. There are many that we passed on because we could tell by the way the RFP was written that they had already selected the supplier they wanted, i.e. must have local support, or ask for certain functions (i.e. cloud provider) that only one player had at the time. I don’t think any of us were enthusiastic about writing RFPs, but they came with the territory. We hated RFI’s (Request for Information) even more. If you win an RFP, you win the work. There is no winning an RFI – it is essentially helping the organization write their own RFP. But at times you could not respond to the RFP if you did not respond to the RFI.

When I first started working for Stroma, Bob, my business partner, said everyone needs more than one monitor, at least two. I came from the world of one computer = one monitor. Monitors were expensive back in the day. I went with three. Having three monitors made me way more productive, especially when writing RFPs. To this day I have three monitors and if I am somewhere working with just my laptop I feel like I am working with one arm tied behind my back. I am starting to think I need five monitors.

Rob, my other business partner, had the cleanup job for every RFP. Rob was one of those people that knew every function in Word and Excel. The way he could work with those programs was magical. I brought my kids to the office and had Rob do a Word and Excel session with them. I think he fried their young minds but at least he opened them up to the potential. He was also exceptional at language and spelling. He also made sure that all our responses answered the questions. When you cut and paste lots of answers you miss stuff, but he would catch it. The picture above represents an RFP we did – each binder was one copy. They always wanted multiple copies. It would take us a day in some cases to print and assemble them. We wasted a lot of paper. Sometimes we won, and we always had a lot of fun with our customers. The picture above is a customer dinner in Vegas.

When I look back at this now, I think I would have given my right arm to have AI that could have written all of these RFP’s. It would have been way easier. Once we wrote the first few, we could have just turned it loose on any new RFP. AI now can do most of this work but that does not mean the work volume will go down and staff will be laid off. What will happen is the number of responses will increase as it is easier to pump out RFPs. The issuers of the RFPs will have even more responses to review – they might even use AI to help score. In the end everyone is more productive and generating more work, but it is the same number of bodies doing the work. Now you are just producing more work – just like a computer did when it first came out.

I think the idea that AI will replace us all is somewhat overblown. My generation thought that computers were going to eliminate jobs. It did eliminate some, but it also created a tremendous number of new jobs that never existed before. I think the same is true of AI. I have been using AI (Claude) a lot lately in gofer.run as we have limited resources and it makes us much more productive. However, I would never completely rely on it, as it makes a lot of mistakes. I was using it recently to research and help me write introduction letters to venture capitalists. I review and modify each one and I was surprised at how many times it suggested that a certain individual is the best individual to talk to at a certain VC. When I went to the VC’s website or Linkedin page I found out the person doesn’t work there or never worked there. How can it get something so simple so wrong – because it uses statistical analysis to infer the correct answer.

My greatest worry (on a darker note) is knowing the effect that social media has had on the news. I can see something similar happening to AI models, especially if it uses the web to learn. I am sure there is somebody in Russia already thinking how to subvert this technology as part of the information war against the west and vice versa.

I recently downloaded an AI generated song. They got me once, but I cannot see people going to an AI concert of that artist. I don’t want to read a book generated by AI. I want to know that the author toiled to write it, because I like to be marveled by the mastery. Let’s keep it real.

On that note I absolutely love Dionne Warwick’s song Walk on By.  The whole song is simple, staccato and so perfect you would swear it is computer-generated. I love seeing and listening to talented people. It helps if you crank this one up.

P.S I don’t use AI to write these blogs – I want them to have my voice. It is probably why there are so many run-on sentences, lol.