Meeting between Dmitri Sunshine and David Hodgson — Full Transcript
Date: March 20, 2026 | Duration: 62 min | Speakers: David Hodgson, Dmitri Sunshine
David Hodgson: Sa.
Dmitri Sunshine: This meeting is being recorded.
David Hodgson: Hey there. Sorry I’m a bit late. My.
Dmitri Sunshine: There he is.
David Hodgson: Previous.
Dmitri Sunshine: You’ll get an email from me in just a moment though. That’s the only thing. It’s still like, I have a 30 second delay.
David Hodgson: Yeah, my. My previous call was quite talkative, so it was like, I need to go. And, you know,
Dmitri Sunshine: it’s one of those.
David Hodgson: Yeah, it was fascinating. It was a good call. It was just. He’s doing things with trees in Canada, which was very interesting.
Dmitri Sunshine: That’s cool. But I was just thinking, have you ever seen a extension or plugin for Zoom where it starts the. Like the wrap it up music, you know, from the. Oh, like the Oscars or whatever, where they do that. It’s like, okay, your time, it’s. You gotta mosey off.
David Hodgson: That would be a good plugin to create. Yeah, yeah.
Dmitri Sunshine: Do you have any extra time for that?
David Hodgson: It’s not the highest priority thing on my list, no.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay. Fair.
David Hodgson: Yeah. So how. How are things. Is that. Are you actually sitting in front of a black curtain? No. You’re not. That is. Or are you. Is that. Oh, it is, yeah. I’m not sure if it was just a backdrop. Ah, we have doors exactly like that downstairs.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah, it’s. I’m very particular about not having glare into the monitor from the. The windows and the doors.
David Hodgson: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So how are. What’s. What’s going on in the world of Dimitri?
Dmitri Sunshine: What’s going on in the world? Let’s see. We’re having a baby. I don’t know if I told you that last time we spoke.
David Hodgson: No. Congratulations.
Dmitri Sunshine: Thank you.
David Hodgson: Is that your first?
Dmitri Sunshine: This will be our first together. This will be my third child and third son. So. Yeah.
David Hodgson: You’ve had the. You. You’ve been through the overall experience before.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah. Yeah. What’s that?
David Hodgson: I’ve only got one in total.
Dmitri Sunshine: That will make you wealthier.
David Hodgson: It does add up, doesn’t it?
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. I feel like at this point I need to start a school, a daycare and then a school like, for like. Do you. Did you ever watch the Captain? Fantastic movie.
David Hodgson: It sounds. I can’t. It doesn’t trigger anything. Concret.
Dmitri Sunshine: Well, we’ll look it up afterwards and check it out. I mean, it’s really good. It’s like, God, so poignant. You will laugh, you might cry. It’ll definitely be like, oh, anyways. But yeah, that’s a whole another topic. But to stay on point. So the startup that I had, that was very similar to what you were doing with the guy in league. This match key startup essentially just had to let that go because I’m like, okay, this is not going to generate the revenue that I need. So go. Going back to my roots and doing essentially what kind of roots? I mean I had a software company. I never actually did fractional consulting. But this to me feels natural. It’s just come in and be like, okay, I learned all these things from actually having to do it myself and love to help out. So doing, you know, fractional CIO type of work. Would love to niche down to wealth management because I’ve got a essentially like a grand vision for lasting legacy foundation, which is this. I don’t know if we talked about it before, but it’s essentially a nonprofit that does a perpetual leases to grants model. So shakes up the traditional way where people like donate their whole estate to one nonprofit. So this will give, I think the largest impact you could have in the long term.
David Hodgson: Oh, but so okay, so anyway, so
Dmitri Sunshine: that’s farther down the road, but I want to set myself up for that by already having their relationships with the, you know, investment advisors, estate attorneys, foundations. Right. Because I mean some of those foundations can’t even take on or like the non profit struggle to offer to be operationally savvy. So they’ll walk away from a lot of gifts. There’s like, oh, that sounds like too hard. Like, wow, we’ll take it. We’ll make that work. Like, because they, you know, anything that’s like, oh, there’s any kind of tax l clean, there’s any kind of this, like they just don’t, they don’t want to touch it unless it’s completely easy and clean. And a lot of them just don’t even want to touch, they can’t touch it. They just don’t have the resources or at least they think they can’t because there’s a bunch of companies that provide this service. But anyways, so nonprofits, as you know, not the best at operations and business.
David Hodgson: Yep.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah. Anyways, that’s, that’s long term. But right now just focused on, it’s like, okay, how the hell do you break through especially into that. Like the wealth management space is so trust based. Like you really have to spend a lot of time with these people. Ideally. Yeah,
David Hodgson: yeah, that’s, yeah. That wealth. Yeah. I’m, I’m quite curious about that myself because they see lots of those. At least from where I’m sitting, it seems like lots of the wealth management folks are, well, not, not Giving rich people the advice I would give them.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah. But although, although I’m meeting more and more people who are like very heart centered. Like they spend a lot of time focusing on. It’s like, like, what’s your, what’s your intent? What’s the legacy? Yeah, I’d love that. And it’s refreshing.
David Hodgson: Yeah. So do they. I’ve never dug deeply into that. I mean, I’m connected to a few on LinkedIn.
Dmitri Sunshine: Dude, you’re connected to like every other person I find. It’s like David’s a mutual connection. It’s like how the. He was. I, you know, some people are like, oh yeah, I’m a super connector. And then you’re like, you’re connected to, you know, a handful of people. But you, dude, you’re. Yeah. I don’t know how long you’ve been playing the LinkedIn game.
David Hodgson: 15, 15 years. 16 years.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay. Got some years on me.
David Hodgson: Yeah. And at a certain point it becomes self. It’s a positive feedback loop because people see exactly that. And so when you reach out to them, they will accept an inbound because they’re like, oh, yeah, I’ve got 10 connections with this person or I’ve got however many. You know, my, my best case overlap is about 2, 000 people. Which is ridiculous. Yeah, I know. So then, you know, so I talked to somebody the other day and they were like, oh, look, we’ve got 10 people in common. That’s, you know, that’s really amazing. And I was inside, I was like, 10 people. Wow.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah. You just let them keep thinking that though.
David Hodgson: Yeah. Okay. In some cases I made. Yeah. Inform them otherwise. But. Yeah, but I’ve never looked into how. What, what the production, you know, how people become wealth advisors is not something I’ve looked at. I don’t know how many of them came from. I know there’s a few who, I’m aware of who I know, you know, have inherited some money and then started, you know, advice, basically advising their friends because it’s. Yeah, there’s a, there’s a certain dynamic that’s available there and I, I’m pretty sure there’s an American US association of Wealth Advisor things, wealth advisory people that has some kind of training program attached to it.
Dmitri Sunshine: It’s a lot of work. I mean, and I think most of the people are, they’re not actually wealthy people. It’s just people who are attracted.
David Hodgson: Right.
Dmitri Sunshine: It’s like they want to be in the finance world and they, they think this is a good way to go about It. And then there’s like kind of like the under category of financial advisors.
David Hodgson: Yeah.
Dmitri Sunshine: Kind of like, oh yeah, we’ll, we’ll help you even if you don’t have money. Right. Anyway, so it’s, it’s been a fascinating world to kind of try to understand, but it’s definitely very relationship based. It’s like you have to find. So it’s this kind of chicken and egg problem. It’s like you have to get in the right rooms with the people, but to get in the right rooms with them, you have to know them enough.
David Hodgson: Invited into the right rooms. Yeah.
Dmitri Sunshine: Which takes time. Like I know some and I’m still feels like there’s kind of this like, okay, dude, you know, if you, if you’re still here in six months maybe kind of thing. Right?
David Hodgson: Yeah, yeah. As there’s definitely a persistence thing. A persistence and visibility thing. I mean that’s been part of my general experience, I guess in both directions. But yeah, you know, I’m talking to a guy, Tarot Mustard next week. And I’ve known him 12 years through SoCap Social Capital Markets conference.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yep.
David Hodgson: And he runs this, he’s Norwegian, runs this thing called Catapult which does. Runs a, runs a conference in Europe. It’s going to be in Amsterdam this year in May where he brings together lots of kind of impact investor people. And you know, I think he’s a, an impact investor himself. But yeah, we were introduced by a friend about 10 or 12 years ago and you know, I’ll, I’ll occasionally tag him on posts on LinkedIn when I know it’s something that he’s vaguely interested in. And yeah, we’re actually having a, a real zoom conversation next week. But it’s. Yeah. Yeah. Because there’s a thing about. Oh yeah, if this person keeps popping up and is saying interesting things that are related to my interests and I see him doing that for, you know, 10 years, then maybe we should have a conversation. Yeah. Not that they all take that long, but. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, that’s more just a, a general exploration because I’ve just been posting about. He’s doing a lot of work around systems change stuff, so. Well, he’s very interested in systems change stuff, which is what I’ve been posting about a lot recently. But yeah, it’s that. Being visible and. Yeah. At least floating around in the open conference. Yeah. Hanging out. You know, there are places you can hang out with some of those people. Right. Where you don’t need to be invited along in quite the same way. I mean, there’s the more closed door spaces and the more open door spaces. And then there’s the, yeah, just, Yeah, it’s a, it’s a, I was going to say there’s the, you know, part of what I’ve done over the years is just create community, you know, virtual community things where I just have invited people along and then I, you know, facilitate various conversations and I don’t make direct, you know, never made direct asks of anyone, which is a bit of, which is a bit of a problem in some ways. But. Yeah, but then they, you know, then it becomes inbound inquiries at a certain point in time. Right.
Dmitri Sunshine: So no, no one ever calls those show and tells anymore, do they? Because to me that’s, that sounds really exciting. It’s like, hey, let’s do a show and tell together. It’s like cool. You get, you know, like you’re five minutes in front of the class.
David Hodgson: Yep, they should.
Dmitri Sunshine: Do you want to do one? Did you ever watch yes man?
David Hodgson: The, about the folks. The yes Man.
Dmitri Sunshine: No, no, that one. That’s the documentary I think you’re talking about. Yeah, yeah, I watched that a while back. This is, this is the Jim Carrey thing from like early 2000s.
David Hodgson: No.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay. My wife was like hounding me to watch that together. We finally did the other day.
David Hodgson: Is he an advertising. I, I, I, I do vaguely remember he, he had, he, he, he couldn’t say no. It was, yeah. What was the premise?
Dmitri Sunshine: He essentially goes to like a Tony Robbins style seminar. And the thing is, you know, you have to commit to saying yes to everything, even if you don’t like this. Yeah. So it’s like all, you know, it’s like serendipity starts unlocking for him in all these ways. And even though the things that led up to it were like, what the am I doing? Yeah. I mean, it’s a beautiful, it’s, you know, what it feels like is it probably was a super powerful story and then Hollywood kind of like undercut it a little bit to make it, you know, kind of more palatable for everyone. But the underlying, you know, message is like the power of surrender and just saying yes. I’m not saying you should do that right now because I asked you to do something, but, but I want to do that. I want to do that with somebody because I, I actually, I did a salon and it turned out to be really organic and like just all the, like, I had all this like, schedule and everything set up for it. And then next thing I know, I’m just Like, okay, it. That’s not what’s happening. This wants to happen. And then like somebody was ended up reading a passage from the Artist’s Way by Julie Cameron and it was just like blue. It’s just like. And someone else shared something. It was just like, whoa. Okay. This is like way better than I could have ever orchestrated. So I. I love this like more organic feeling. It’s not like just anyone just talks. It was just like, okay. It’s like, who hasn’t shared yet? It’s like, what do you have something that feels. Wants to come through.
David Hodgson: That sounds cool. I took. I have. I have the Artist’s Way somewhere on my bookshelf.
Dmitri Sunshine: I’ve never read it, but you get the gist. I don’t know if you really have. Everyone’s talked about it so much. Like, I probably don’t need to read it now.
David Hodgson: How I feel about many of my. Yeah, I think I got it about 20 years ago and it was. Yeah, lots of my books are aspirational, but that is the right. At least. Yeah. I, I facilitate things in a somewhat similar way. Generally. I’ve historically had a tendency to over design and then, you know, you start doing, you know, and it’s good. It’s that whole thing. Planning is everything, but the plan itself isn’t that important. It’s the process of the planning.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah.
David Hodgson: And the Mike Tyson quote, right. Of everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah. I need to look up if it’s. Maybe he said it different ways, but is it if you get punched in the face or if you get punched in the mouth, Whatever it is.
David Hodgson: Mindful. Yeah. Yeah.
Dmitri Sunshine: Either one sucks. Yeah. But David, what. What’s been happening for you in your world? Like, where are you at with. With all your. I mean, like last time we talked, it was a lot of. There was a lot of overlap. There’s a lot of interesting things and. Yeah. Curious. What, like what’s been transpiring since then?
David Hodgson: What. What has been transpiring? I guess my. My business development strategy is operating on a similar way to your facilitation of your salon in that it evolves, evolving. It’s evolving as it goes. I set up and, you know, run running these two, I guess, two virtual. I mean, two ish virtual communities. But, you know, the. The guy in league thing is just ambient, so I don’t need to do very much with it. Right. It just is creating ambient value for the people participating. But yeah, set up this other one that is the future network futures collab. And the goal there was to just invite in all of my friends who were working on networks of some form or another and build out. Yeah. Kind of start to collide that together to see what would come out the other side. And that’s proving to be quite, I mean, interesting. Very emergent. So I just got connected through that to Brendan Johnson, who I think’s in Italy, who’s running. What the hell is that called? Some European based kind of network of networks type entity and end of. My friend Jane was giving a keynote for on. She’s been studying. She’s an academic who does keynotes around network leadership stuff for nonprofit associations primarily. So we went up to Sacramento together the other day because she was giving a keynote at the California association of Land Trusts. And as part of that, you know, we threw up a QR code for a network thing that we’d stood up for them and you know, 10% of the people were really interested. So we’ve got. Yeah. Spun up an initial network for them where all it’s going to do again is the matchmaking piece. But then on top of that, I’m proposing that they run a, ideally a weekly open space kind of gathering where a virtual gathering where it’s just, here’s an hour, you know, whoever shows up at the right people, somebody’s sitting there hosting it. But you know, very lightweight facilitation, totally emergent. And just split people into groups of three with 20 minute rotations just to start, you know, and with, without, without even a structured prompt, it’s just like, okay, drop people into those groups of three or four and they will talk about, you know, because even if you give them a prompt half the time, I’ve noticed that people will talk about whatever they, you know, whatever’s top of mind for them anyway.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah.
David Hodgson: But it will start just building that kind of collaborative culture across the network, which was the whole point of the thing. So that’s good. And I started opening up the platform to other people who had signed up for the beta. Yeah, I’m still not, I’m getting minimal revenue still, but.
Dmitri Sunshine: Well, it’s better than nothing. I mean, you’re saying you’re getting some revenue.
David Hodgson: Yeah, getting some revenue.
Dmitri Sunshine: Congratulations.
David Hodgson: Yeah, it’s about, I guess with, with this group who just signed up. Once I send them the invoice, it will be about a hundred dollars a month revenue. It does feel like there’s a non. There’s a very non. Linearity to it.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah.
David Hodgson: Of, you know, because what I’m seeing in the gr in the Gaian League thing is people who are just like, oh yeah, I’m having such great, you know, thanks for setting this up. I’m having such great conversations. They’re really interesting people and so forth. So it’s, it’s working. And I think if I can just get critical mass, there is a network effect thing that will happen on top of it, I’m pretty sure. But I do have a feeling it’ll be slow, slow, slow, slow, and then speed up. There’ll be some kind of inflection point because it also takes for people who are on the platform being connected to one another, it takes a couple of months. Once you’ve had about six interesting conversations, probably then people are like, oh yeah, this is pretty cool. Maybe I could use it for something I’m doing. I was about to turn on that functionality so that at the bottom of the emails that go out, it goes, oh, do you want to run, have you got a network you want to run on top of this? Okay, click here to actively encourage that kind of. Yeah. Virality piece. But yeah, and then you know, also looking at kind of a resellerish thing with people such as Jane who are going out, you know, the kind of the consultants who are working in the space to act as less as reset. I mean kind of resellers. I’m not looking at giving them a kickback so much, but it isn’t, it is an extra value that they can sell to their customers and they could, you know, mark it up or provide some extra lightweight consulting on top of it.
Dmitri Sunshine: Do you have a pitch deck for that or one pager you could send me?
David Hodgson: I will set. I, I should.
Dmitri Sunshine: If you want help, like if you want any, you know, if it’s not already rolling along enough.
David Hodgson: Yeah, no, I, I, I need to, I need to document. Yes. I need to create something like that because I need to propose it to a few other people. You know, it’s working well with Jane because she’s evangelist. She’s enjoying meeting people so much it to everyone she’s talking to. Which is, which is awesome.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah.
David Hodgson: Having a champion. Yeah. More than one would be effective. Yeah. So stuff’s moving. Yeah. And then, you know, there’s bugs. There’s always bugs.
Dmitri Sunshine: There’s especially. You’re doing vibe coding, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you checked out the, the get shit done repo for planning like at a deep. Like it’s, you essentially can give it a PRD file and it really like breaks it up and there’s a GSD2 that essentially is its own CLI that can sit on top of either Claude Code Codex. What I’m hoping is you can extend it. I don’t think you. Right now you can, but I, you know, it’s open source because for me, I would love to have cloud code is like my main, My main man. And then. But I want to have Codex review the plan at least.
David Hodgson: Oh.
Dmitri Sunshine: And then provide its feedback because there’s a bunch of like the agent, the sub agents thing. It doesn’t work that well because it’s still the same model. When you have a completely different model review another model’s work. Yeah, it’s way better than like the whole, oh, I have a reviewer agent. You’re like, well, that’s great,
David Hodgson: that’s interesting. I wonder what GitHub by default uses for their code review stuff. Because yeah, I’ve got. I have some review functionality built in where it’s. Before it checks things in, it will review, but it is the same model doing the review. Whereas when I know that when I’ve done text stuff, I’ll write something in Claude, then I’ll bounce it off Gemini for review. And yeah, you do get rid. Having those different model perspectives is hugely valuable. You’re right.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah, yeah. And then are you doing the GitHub? Is it the teams or the Pro that gives you the automatic bugs and security review on each pr?
David Hodgson: It must be. I don’t have teams, so it must be Pro.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay. Like the four dollar a month thing. Yeah, yeah. Which is crazy. Like if it’s really good. But to answer your question, which model. I mean, I think it gives it away that it’s all. It’s owned by Microsoft and Microsoft is deeply tied to open AI. So you’re getting probably the 5.3 Codex, whatever. Hopefully not the mini Codex. Yeah,
David Hodgson: yeah. So it probably is open AI, I would imagine. Yeah, yeah. I, I’d heard of gsd, but I’d not actually looked at it.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah. Because.
David Hodgson: Yeah. There was some other stuff I was just doing with Claude code. Just some side stuff because I’ve created a task, a desktop task manager app.
Dmitri Sunshine: Another one
David Hodgson: I needed a way. Yeah. That has Claude code sitting underneath it so I can.
Dmitri Sunshine: Oh, okay.
David Hodgson: Because I was using Claude desktop and there was functionality, you know, their core ontology. You know, it’s. They have projects, but the way they’re thinking about projects currently isn’t that useful. You know, it’s just here’s a folder with all these documents in, but they don’t really have a concept of tasks within you know, I needed a concept of tasks underneath projects. So I can then go, oh, yeah, okay, I’m using Vercel to do that. I’m using V0 to do this. I’m using Claude code to do this. I’m using Gemini to do this. And I just needed a place where I could actually track all of the things and that then pointed at the resultant documents from each. Because otherwise it was like, oh, God, I did that. I was having to remember, oh, this task thing that I did. I know there’s a document that it generated some. Where the fuck is that document?
Dmitri Sunshine: And did you try the ClickUp integration?
David Hodgson: And my problem with ClickUp, or at least when I tried it, was that the right. And same with Notion, it wasn’t. It didn’t do a good. You could read stuff. The right functionality was limited. So through the mcp at least. So I couldn’t.
Dmitri Sunshine: Free. Right. I think Clickups API is free. So, I mean, I’ve been. I remember listening to Peter, was it Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, and he was like, oh, I created this MCP Porter. So it changes MCP or APIs to CLI because the COD code works so much better with CLIS. Yeah. And so that’s what I’ve been doing. It’s just like, okay, wait, there’s an API, great, let’s do that. Let’s definitely go that route instead. I’m still waiting for someone to come up with like a much better, like, Claude Code Manager. Because, like, having a shitload of terminals running is okay, but, like, yeah, I don’t know, maybe Anti Gravity might be the answer, but we’ll see.
David Hodgson: Yeah, I’ve not gone down the Anti Gravity rabbit hole yet. And what’s the other Google thing that does the. The UI one, the UI designer? Is that Anti Gravity?
Dmitri Sunshine: Google AI Studio?
David Hodgson: No, there’s a. There’s another thing that they, you know, they’ve just got such a suite of things now, but they’ve got one that’s a ui, specifically UI design thing that. I know there was a video that went past on my YouTube feed this morning that was about mashing that up with Claude to get really good UX stuff. Yeah, yeah, there we go. Google just changed the future of UI UX design.
Dmitri Sunshine: Oh, will you shoot that over to me real quick if you have it up?
David Hodgson: Yeah, Google Stitch.
Dmitri Sunshine: Google Stitch. Nothing about Stitch. Just. I don’t know, doesn’t. Doesn’t sound that great.
David Hodgson: It’s not the best. Yeah, it’s not the best brand in the world. I totally agree. There’s only so many words left in the English language.
Dmitri Sunshine: No kidding. I was trying to rebrand because no one can pronounce Solanasis properly right now. And I was like, oh, I up. I need a rebrand. And I’m just like, oh yeah, I picked that name because there’s. It’s so impossible to pick company names that aren’t already taken.
David Hodgson: Yep.
Dmitri Sunshine: Have like a beautiful. Like I was looking for something that had like a beautiful meaning behind it and then came up with like vera nari. And it’s, it’s actually means. It’s a Sanskrit word that’s like the. This female protector. And I was like, oh, actually, actually is cool, right? Because it’s like we want to get into like CSIO kind of work, right. Cyber security and like hardening of systems. But then I was like, I told that to my wife and she’s like, you know, it sounds like an Indian firm. And I’m like, yeah, you’re right. It’s like, damn, that’s. That’s what people are going to think. It’s like, oh yeah, you’re just a front for like a Indian firm. So
David Hodgson: worst things. Yeah. Just talking about that. Have you seen the. Some of the open source pen test. AI pen testing stuff?
Dmitri Sunshine: No, no. That sounds interesting. I should. Yeah, you have that up too. Do you have like the thousand tabs that you search through?
David Hodgson: See if I can find that quickly.
Dmitri Sunshine: The problem that, that I found so far with just wanting to promote that we could do pen testing is just the liability for it. Oh, and chat, GBT and Cloud are both like, just don’t touch it. Just like what you can do is just resell some professional pen testing company. But you don’t like do like never just get into that at this point it doesn’t make any sense for the liability. And so I haven’t.
David Hodgson: Yeah.
Dmitri Sunshine: Touched that rabbit hole much.
David Hodgson: That makes. Yeah, I’ve not thought about that on the security side of things.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah, dude, I had, I was at this event a couple months ago and the guy was a physical penetration tester and he was telling a story of how he, you know, when they sign an agreement they usually have like only a couple people who know about the work that they’re being done. So you know, the security isn’t going to be. They’re going to act normal. Right. And that guy, his like main contact person ends up going on a vacation or something. Like had to go like have some emergency time off, whatever it was. And he gets caught by security guards. And he’s like, okay, we’ll call this person. Like, we can’t. He’s like out of reach. He’s like, oh, so he sat in jail because he got caught. It’s like, oh, this is breaking injury. He had to sit in jail for like 24, 48 hours before the firm find, like the guy finally got back. And it’s like, oh. So I was like, yeah, that can happen.
David Hodgson: Oh, that is crazy. Yeah. So this is the thing. Yeah. So they sell it as a service and then, you know, it’s open source. I think they’ve got a bit of it that’s closed source. So if you want the full thing, you know, you pay the money to do it and. But you can run the open source version yourself and get, you know, some degree of coverage. And I got Claude to review all the code and they were like, oh, yeah, this is pretty good.
Dmitri Sunshine: Um, that’s good to hear.
David Hodgson: That’s like, you know, it’d be great, wouldn’t it, if there’s an open source pen tester where the core thing of it is that it stole your keys or something.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah, well, I mean, that’s, that’s the beauty of open source. Right. See what it’s doing.
David Hodgson: Yeah. And they don’t allow open submission. So whilst anyone can run it on their own machine, and especially if you’re using Claude, if you run it on your own machine where you can log in using your primary CLAUDE account. Right. You don’t even have to pay the. Because I think if you were running it using the API, it would be 50 bucks a run or something, which is still from a commercial entity, then it’s not too bad versus standard pen testing. But if you can run it through your standard Claude account, then, you know, 100 bucks a month or something. Right. It’s all included.
Dmitri Sunshine: Love it. David. So I was curious. I mean, you’re. You’re much more plugged in into this world right now. Are you seeing a need for C, like fractional work like CIOs and CSIOs?
David Hodgson: I would say yes. Oh, and are you hooked to Hank Holiday and the Quorum One?
Dmitri Sunshine: I’d have to go. Look, I’m not going to open up my LinkedIn right now because that’s like a can of worms.
David Hodgson: Yeah, yeah. So it could be. Quorum One that started off as a network of Salesforce consultants has, has expanded into. They’ve structured it kind of as a co op. And yeah, the goal is to allow a bunch of, you know, smart folks who are offering different services to kind of come together and fundamentally kind of start to resell each other’s offers at some level. So it could be useful to. To know about. But yeah, that. I mean my general sense is the fractional thing is the way that lots of people are. Yeah. I mean a friend of mine was doing fractional CEO work.
Dmitri Sunshine: Interesting.
David Hodgson: Yeah.
Dmitri Sunshine: That’s not what I would imagine being fractionalized. Okay.
David Hodgson: Yeah. It was somebody who was a good. I mean he would come in and help the. I mean there was nominally, you know, a CEO or whatever of the organization but that person wasn’t necessarily hugely numbers oriented or hugely, you know, whatever. And he was coming from a corporate finance ish background. And so I mean maybe more he was. And the person wasn’t necessarily, you know, had a good product or whatever, but needed help with the str. You know, strategy compliance. Somewhere between a CFO CEO role that he was doing because he. And it was more CEO coaching plus some CEO CFO type functionality. Right. So I think there’s a. And especially on. Yeah, there’s probably a bunch of entities that you know, when historically there’s been. There’s organizations of a certain size. Right. Where they. It doesn’t make sense for them to hire somebody in a full time role to cover some of this functionality. But they really need help thinking about it and operationalizing certain aspects. Right. So yeah, over the last six, seven years I’ve seen a lot of people operating in that kind of fractional. In the fractional world quite successfully.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah. It’s just breaking. I think the challenge I’m seeing is just breaking in. Right. It’s like you need those initial cases because if you’re like oh I had this previous company. You’re like oh, what’s the case studies? You’re like I can’t give you away this stuff from the company. You know, it’s like anyways, that’s been a challenge. I’m trying to figure out what’s the ways around it. Like how do you reframe it without having. Without giving away anything. Right. Because it’s like. Yeah, especially it’s. My ex wife runs the company that I had. Yeah. So you know, going to her and trying to get her approval to share stuff is not something I want to do.
David Hodgson: Yeah, I understand that kind of situation. I too would not want to talk to my ex wife about such thing about anything actually. That was not a relationship that necessarily ended on the best of terms.
Dmitri Sunshine: Usually doesn’t. That’s why it ended. Right.
David Hodgson: Yeah.
Dmitri Sunshine: But yeah, that’s.
David Hodgson: That is A bit. And you’re in Denver. You’re in Denver.
Dmitri Sunshine: Boulder. I mean, Denver. You know, it’s Denver metro in some ways, but I like to look at us as segregated. There’s a. There’s a clear bubble. There’s like this line that you cross over. It’s like you cross this hill and then you’re like, ah, you know, the promised land.
David Hodgson: Yeah. Are you. Have you wandered down to a Regen hub at all?
Dmitri Sunshine: Oh, you know, those guys. Funny, I was just talking with Ag, who’s one of the. I don’t know if he’s one of the key people, but to me he feels like it. Aaron Gabriel. N. Do you know him or who do you know from Regen?
David Hodgson: Benjamin Life.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay.
David Hodgson: And Todd Youngblood.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay. Todd yet? Yeah, I haven’t actually met him in person.
David Hodgson: Todd’s. I like. Oh, a walkie is there. I know a walkie was there.
Dmitri Sunshine: Oh, yeah, yeah.
David Hodgson: Who I think I’ve talked to once, several years ago now when I was.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah.
David Hodgson: Operating.
Dmitri Sunshine: He’s like a mythical creature in some ways. Like. Oh, there he is. Get him before he disappears into the Ethereum.
David Hodgson: He’s like a Pokemon here.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah.
David Hodgson: Catch them while you can. Yeah, they seemed. But, Yeah, I mean, for. I mean, for many of the things that I’ve got myself involved in, it has just been through. Not because I’ve had case studies I can necessarily point to. It’s just that I ended up, you know, meeting people somewhere, having some interesting conversations with them, and then they wanted to have more conversation, you know, more interesting conversations. Right. So at a certain level, I didn’t have to have an external thing I could point at other than what they could see in my overall resume. Yeah. But. Yeah. And so my strategy has always just been find interesting people and make. Make. Make friends with them. Become friends.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah.
David Hodgson: Where. So it becomes less transactional. So having those kinds of things hasn’t been as necessary, I guess, because the transaction is less commercial.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah.
David Hodgson: Certain way. And, you know, I can always, you know, if needed, I can always get other people with, you know, some kind of visible credibility to, you know, endorse me if needed. Yeah.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah, good points. No, I love this. And yeah, having a portfolio site for personal reasons I think is probably important for me.
David Hodgson: Yeah. You know, you’ve done a bunch of interesting stuff. Yeah. Interesting stuff. Right. So it’s not as if you can’t throw something like that together.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah, No. I mean, and it’s. It’s so easy these days. I’m. I’m really grateful for really leaning into cloud code and it’s like kind of releasing more and just coming back and be like, okay, fine. Tune those edges. Yeah, yeah. David, I’ve got a meeting in six minutes. I want to make sure I have time to prepare and go. Yes, you should do that.
David Hodgson: Has the system connected you to Jerry Mykowski by any chance?
Dmitri Sunshine: I don’t think so, but I need to check. I’ve been missing those emails, to be honest. I’ve, I’ve seen some and then I’ve missed some. So I do appreciate being there. I do need to update it though, for this. Yes. And include this like, bigger picture vision of this lasting legacy foundation to see who does that end up linking me to.
David Hodgson: Yeah, yeah, you should totally do that. No, it’s just that it’s. Jerry is this fascinating. He’s up in Portland and you should go. But. And it’s not. It’s the only reason you are. You. You look like a younger Jerry Mykowski.
Dmitri Sunshine: Interesting. Okay.
David Hodgson: Yeah. Must come from the. Have family lineages that trace back to a similar part. Ukrainian, right? Your history is Ukrainian. Yeah, his family ended up going through Argentina before he came to the. Right, before they came to the U.S. but yeah. Some part of the Jewish exodus from Ukraine at a certain point in time.
Dmitri Sunshine: Interesting. Well, I would love to meet him, if you’re open to introducing. Being like, I think I found your long lost relative.
David Hodgson: It’s. It is. You know, I think when I first met, I was like, you remind me of somebody. It was earlier on this call today. I was like, oh, yeah, you have a spitting image of Jerry.
Dmitri Sunshine: Oh, okay. Well, then I definitely want to meet him. I want to see. I look at him, be like, I don’t know what, I don’t know what David’s talking about, but what you look like when you’re. He’s right.
David Hodgson: 60 years old. Yeah. He’s you. In the future,
Dmitri Sunshine: by the way, I want AI to generate an image of me when I’m 70, but looking really buff and healthy. Oh, and be like, what if I did everything right, took all the peptides, what’s the best case scenario? And I’m going to have that on my wall to just be looking at. It’s like, oh, yeah, that’s what you’re going for.
David Hodgson: That’s a really good idea.
Dmitri Sunshine: You’re gonna do that now?
David Hodgson: Yeah, I might do the same thing.
Dmitri Sunshine: Love it. Yeah.
David Hodgson: That’s what we do. Okay, go to.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah, yeah. So good. So good to connect with you. Love, love your laugh, love your personality. Thank you for sharing yourself with me. Oh. And yeah, Be in touch. We’d love to. Yeah, we’d love to. We’d love to co host with you. At some point you want to do a salon, so think about it.
David Hodgson: Okay?
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay. Cool, brother. Ciao, ciao.