About
Make people harder to replace
Both of us have spent our careers on the people side of large technology companies — hiring them, protecting them, leading them. We watched those companies adopt AI early, and we watched the conversation about it curdle into a question about headcount.
That framing does not fit the businesses we grew up around. A fifteen-person company has no slack to cut. It has an owner doing payroll at ten at night and a scheduler who has not taken a proper week off since 2023. Used well, this technology gives those hours back — to the business, and to the family waiting on the other side of them.
That is the whole reason we started this. Not to help anyone trim a team, but to help the people already on it get to the work only they can do.
Ethan Hamilton
Co-founder
Talent, sales and go-to-market
Ethan grew up in Lincoln and lives in Omaha. He has recruited for LinkedIn, Tesla and Snap and worked across insurance, customer success and big technology — an unusually honest vantage point on how companies and people actually work.
A father of four and married for 14 years, Ethan coaches soccer, basketball and baseball. Away from the sideline, he loves to travel and watch college football.
He believes technology should not replace the people in a business. It should remove the work that was never worth a person's day, making teams more successful, productive and effective with the tools already available.
LinkedIn · Snap · Tesla
Verify on LinkedIn ↗
Jordan Svoboda
Co-founder
Operations, trust and risk
Jordan grew up in McCook, Nebraska, and now lives near Springfield. His career spans blue-collar work, staffing, sales and small-business ownership, plus operations, sales, risk and compliance roles at LinkedIn and Meta.
As a small-business owner, he ran into the same problem NextPlay now solves: AI and automation sounded useful, but choosing the right tools and fitting them into a real operation was unnecessarily difficult.
Jordan is a girl dad of two and has been married for 16 years. He loves family time outdoors, golf and coaching softball — and he brings that practical, people-first perspective to every recommendation.
LinkedIn · Meta · NextPlay Homes
Verify on LinkedIn ↗We're not here to help you cut staff
Most AI conversations open with which jobs disappear. In a business of fifteen people that framing is not just bleak, it's wrong — you don't have spare people, you have people doing three jobs each. The useful question is which of those three a machine should take so they can get back to the one only they can do.
We've seen this from the inside
Not read about it. We were in these companies while they adopted this technology, close enough to watch which changes produced results and which produced slide decks. That's the difference between a recommendation and an opinion.
Enterprise answers don't transfer
What works for a team of ten thousand rarely survives contact with a team of ten. The principles carry; the tooling and the sequencing do not. Doing that translation honestly is most of the work.
We don't sell software
No referral fees, no affiliate arrangements, no vendor relationships. We have nothing to gain from one recommendation over another, which is the only condition under which the list is worth reading.
25 minutes to find out
If any of this sounds like your business, the fastest way to know what AI is actually worth to it is to have the conversation.