Conversations with Andreas Ramos

Today we’d like to introduce you to Andreas Ramos.

Hi Andreas, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I came to Silicon Valley in 1992 and worked in technical writing, marketing, and web sites. I worked at large corporations, many startups, I build two startups, and ten years ago, was asked to teach a university course. I really enjoyed working with students, so now I teach at two universities.

It’s been a long evolution in working with text: I used large printing machines in the late 80s, switched to HTML and websites in the mid-90s, spent twenty years in SEO for websites (and wrote more than 22 books about this), and now in the last three years, I’ve learned how AI works. I’m teaching a course this fall on “SEO for an AI Web” (a very loose descripti0n); how AIs understand the web and how to restructure websites so AI can present them to people.

This will be a deep rewrite of the web. Websites as we’ve been using them for the last 30 years won’t matter much. There are deep changes happening.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It’s been a constant “learn a new thing, build a career in it, throw it away, and learn yet another new thing, over and over”. I’ve been very lucky to survive the constant boom/crash cycles of Silicon Valley. I’ve seen many good people who worked hard yet ended up losing here.

I tell people that I’ve been lucky: I honestly could not foresee what would happen. Our best guesses were often wrong. The Hollywood film industry knows it comes down to fickle audiences and their emotional reactions.

Although Silicon Valley is a technology industry, it’s also very much like Hollywood. Venture capitalist (VCs) and investors have very little insight in how markets function or develop; only 2% of VCs make significant investments. Most VCs and investors lose money. As for startups, only 10–15% achieve meaningful exits, which means they made money. 85-90% lost money.

The emotional toll of working 60-hour weeks for years on end, living in an area which is 100% tech-focused (zero interest in literature or any arts), the precarious reality… yeah, I’ve been very lucky.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
For the last ten years, I’m been a professor at various universities. For a long time at INSEEC/Omnes, a large French private university (30,000 French students) and now at CSTU, a private university in Silicon Valley, where 75% are Chinese and 20% are Indian, plus several other universities.

I teach AI+digital marketing: how to use AI for marketing. My courses cover all of marketing: traditional marketing with newspapers and other non-digital approaches, digital marketing that’s not search engines (social media, email, etc.), and digital marketing that’s based on AI.

As I said earlier, I’ve written many books about this, spoken at many conferences in the US, Europe, Saudi Arabia, China, and so on. I’ve kept only a few clients: Harvard and Stanford. I don’t take on new clients.

What sets me apart? There are only a very few people who work at my level. I try to understand how AI works and how to apply it for marketing.

What’s next?
My plans for the future? 🙂

In terms of what I do, I know that what I do today will be obsolete in six to nine months. That’s been the cycle, over and over, in AI for the last three years.

In general terms of work; I’m 70s years old now, but I’m more active in my work than I was ten or twenty years ago. There is tremendous interest in AI. It may sound absurd, but every week, two or three major corporations ask me to join them. Nike, Coca-Cola. Louis Vuitton, and so on. Salaries are absurdly high.

But I prefer teaching. One of the best signals of success for me is when a student gets a good job. So I’ll keep teaching for another few years.

Asides from work, my wife and I take vacations, travel, work on our garden, watch Netflix with the cat, and lots of lunches and dinners with students and colleagues.

Pricing:

• No pricing.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://andreas.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreasramos/
• Twitter: https://x.com/Andreas_Ramos

Image Credits
Andreas Ramos