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Tech

The Birth of CountrPT: The Convergence of Technology, AI and Personal Empowerment

There’s a storm brewing; one that has been in the making for decades.  And it’s about to pour.

Our Humble Beginnings

Ash Hynie and Jake Brower first started working together at Credit Karma back in March 2017 where we were both leaders in the software quality space.  By that time in our careers, each of us had managed hundreds of individuals and had seen it all.  We saw the frustration because we had experienced the disconnect many times ourselves.  We are both empathetic leaders and continually sought to help our own employees obtain success whether via a promotion, more opportunities to lead or simply by recognizing them.  We also encouraged our employees to document specific moments, ideas, or conversations that they could use to help us better understand their contributions, because as managers of people, we didn’t always know everything our employees were working on.

After we parted ways with Credit Karma many years later, we both moved to other companies and noticed that the divergence was even more apparent: HR departments were so disconnected from their employees that they were leaving in droves as they felt undervalued as managers were further out of touch than ever before.  We saw a kind of spiralling where employee churn was at an all-time high with no signs of slowing.

Ash, as the CEO & Founder, reached out to me in February 2024 to discuss an idea for a new company that would help reduce the friction between employees, their managers, and their companies to transform personal performance - and to ask if I wanted to be the CTO & Co-Founder.  This idea could help individuals take charge of their own performance, growth, and satisfaction.  And with the emergence and wide-spread usage of generative AI, what if we could harness its power to reduce the barrier to entry?

Enter CountrPT.  Oh, and I also said yes to joining the company :)

Why did we Start CountrPT?

We started CountrPT to help employees create a living resume that helps document important moments in their professional careers - whether working toward a promotion or to keep track of specific meetings with their manager or to time spent on growth.  We saw an opening where companies with HR departments were focusing very hard on employee engagement and satisfaction, but then wondering why those scores were always low.

CountrPT was born out of the need to bridge the gap between HR tooling and personal empowerment while using AI to help employees take charge of their destiny.  Most HR departments don’t care about individuals, but more about meeting company goals.  The human and IT systems they have in place aren’t about helping people realize their potential, but more about keeping them in check, making it nearly impossible for employees to really grow.  People should be growing every day, but we think the key for growth is you.  Not your manager, not your colleagues, not your company…YOU!

CountrPT & AI

One of the main driving ideas behind CountrPT was the notion of harnessing the power of current and future generative AI capabilities to help keep our users feel engaged, prepared, and on top of their performance.  Since AI is now ubiquitous and found in all types of apps - from productivity to healthcare and beyond - we knew that including it was paramount as it would enable all types of functionality.  

As CountrPT is brand new and our feature set small, the initial use of generative AI is that of invoking OpenAI/ChatGPT to convert raw voice or manual text to formatted summaries that can be shared to Slack or other external platforms.  Longer notes can have a dramatic effect on summarization as this is where ChatGPT excels.

Future releases of CountrPT will utilize AI in several ways, such as chatbot-style interfaces, user-specific reminders, automatic tagging, iterative voice searching, automatic prompting, resume-to-job alignment, and so much more. We know that by employing generative AI as the basis for CountrPT, we can create highly tailored user experiences by analyzing data and dynamically adjusting the functionality to meet individual preferences, thus unlocking a deeply personal journey through technology and documentation.