Team owners
Meet the team owners
Ricky Bobby Talent is run by Bob Michaels, Rik Avalos and John Michaels, the co-founders of TRINZIK AI. Between us: building the web and its AI systems since 1994, twenty years building the teams behind companies like Tesla, Google and Neuralink, and 27 years leading enterprise technology sales at Dell, VMware and AWS.
01 Co-founder · Technology · Guitar
Bob Michaels
Bob has built for the web from Austin since 1994, before HTML was a standard. After Hurricane Harvey he built recovery.texas.gov, the first CDBG-DR/MIT disaster recovery website in history, and HUD published his Best Known Practices as a development model. He ran every public-facing website for the Texas General Land Office, serving 11 years as its Web Accessibility Officer, built the profiling system Dell rolled out for worldwide trade compliance, and built platforms for more than 40 universities, including Texas A&M, the University of Texas, Emory and the University of California system. He holds U.S. Patent 7,373,346 in security architecture.
At TRINZIK AI he builds the product and the technology: AI-native websites, a research engine that measures who ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Grok recommend, and the agents behind them. That is the technology running Ricky Bobby Talent and every microsite on the roster.
Bob has played music most of his life, and guitar since 1988. He has played Austin stages at clubs, festivals and private events with bands like the Rave and Slippery Fish, and in 1995 he put the first live music internet stream from Austin on the air from a bar on 6th Street. Today he plays lead guitar in the Rik Avalos Band, and sings and plays guitar as Bobby in Ricky Bobby Music.
02 Co-founder · Business and talent · Bass and vocals
Rik Avalos
Rik has spent two decades finding, building and leading the people behind category-defining companies: early hypergrowth at Tesla and Google, Head of Talent at Neuralink, and the founding VP of People, Talent and Culture at Outdoorsy. At Teladoc Health he led talent strategy through the Livongo and Teladoc merger, one of the most complex organizational integrations in digital health, and built the company’s Argentina recruiting operation from scratch.
At TRINZIK AI he is Chief Business Officer, running go-to-market, partnerships and a 30,000-person decision-maker network. Finding great talent and building around it is what he has done his whole career. Ricky Bobby Talent points that at the stage.
Rik has been making music most of his life. He came up fronting Austin rock bands on the Sixth Street club circuit with Dirty Oliver, and in 2022 he founded the Rik Avalos Band, where he writes and sings original music, recording at Austin’s 512 Studios. Today he sings and plays bass as Ricky in Ricky Bobby Music, with a range that runs from a low Garth Brooks growl to a Smokey Robinson falsetto in the same night.
03 Co-founder · Business development, marketing and sales
John Michaels
John is the team’s business development, marketing and sales expert. He has spent 27 years in enterprise technology sales, with more than $100 million in career sales across Dell, VMware and AWS. At VMware he carried a $60 million annual quota through the Dell Americas channel, hit 150 percent of a $50 million year and made Presidents Club. At AWS he closed about $6 million in cloud services in 2016 and led HIPAA and FedRAMP certification efforts for healthcare and government accounts. Back at Dell he delivered more than 150 percent of quota on integration, automation and IoT solutions for Fortune 500 clients.
At TRINZIK AI he is co-founder and Head of Sales, building the go-to-market strategy, the channel partnerships and the sales methodology that take its AI business agents to market. Before any of that he served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps as a radio technician, and he is a Desert Storm veteran. Every booking inquiry and talent submission on this site goes to John.
One team Technology, talent and sales
What we bring to Austin music
Put the three of us together and every part of the job is covered: Bob builds the technology, Rik finds and develops the talent, and John opens the doors and closes the deals. Bob and Rik have loved music all their lives and still perform it at a commercial level, so we know what it takes to win a crowd and what it takes to get booked. We are pointing all of it at the Austin music scene. The bands, karaoke hosts and DJs on our roster get the technology, the marketing and the sales behind them that local acts rarely have, and the people planning events get an easier way to find great Austin talent and hire it.
Powered by TRINZIK AI
The technology under the hood
TRINZIK AI is the Austin company we founded together. It builds AI-native websites written straight to code, measures how ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Grok describe and recommend businesses, and runs compliance-grade chat. Every act on our roster gets a microsite built and run on that same technology, free.