10 AI Business Ideas From The Queen of AI ft. Sarah Guo

i i think it is worth talking about the fact that there are ways to make a million bucks and then like ways to make a million bucks that could turn into a billion bucks right and and i think we're should talk about both are here do you record already yeah that's the intro alright i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal less travel ever so what do you mean about you saying there's ways to make a million bucks and there's ways to make a million bucks that i could turn into a billion bucks you have my interest let's go okay okay let's go so i i think maybe and i don't mean this any dismissive way i think venture capitalists are very often accused of dismissing something as like a cash flow lifestyle business or whatever right which by the way for anyone who is not in the vc world you go to a vc you say i've got this great company i think it can make five million in profit in your eight i and then after that maybe we can grow this for another fifty years and one day it could be a thing and they say that's that's a really nice lifestyle business it's like them saying that's cute right our that's cute yeah i i remember my first time doing that of course the thing is is that anyone who actually is an entrepreneur including anyone who's a vc they know that you can oftentimes get richer and have a less stressful life if you have a quote lifestyle business yeah so i i'd say like there's many type of valid businesses right and then also a lot of things that are become very interesting start very small so i i wanna recognize that but i think a reasonable analogy is if you can figure out internet distribution and then get you know super powerful models getting increasingly powerful to just do something useful and in niche those two things together that's like the new drop shipping you know how like for maybe seven or eight years i'm like too old to know what the exact timeline was but there's was a period of time where people like oh you know i'm an internet kid i'm gonna figure out some drop shipping thing and like make my first hundred thousand dollars i think this is it yes so so basically for people who don't don't really know you could go on alibaba or all the express that was like the open ai in this case right so it was like this thing exists that you didn't have to build but it's magic watch this you could push a button you never had to make the product you never had to warehouse the product never have to ship the product it will just magically imperial at your customer's door you know somewhere between one and three weeks later all you have to do is the marketing bit and kinda what you're saying is open ai and the other ai companies have built this magic that basically will take piece of text and turn it into a video or a song or whatever and if you just do the marketing bit you can actually almost like drop ship a product or a service to the to the customer without having to make it yourself is that the idea that that is thanks for explaining it and i like i think it's like easier with easier with a few examples right like copy editing is probably a put a typical one right you can do not amazing but like reasonable copy generation with these models today and so there are a series of companies where you just have some templates that make it more obvious to somebody writing marketing copy how to use these models and then you have a website with decent seo and then like you add some stripe integration and you're in business what's an example well i i think like a copy ai and jasper these companies started this way right right and and then i have several friends who shipped like ai ship apps just look at you know paid to apps in the app store by chart and you know some of those people are generating a million dollars of cash flow for them it's not because they're deep ai people when you say companion you mean like a digital girlfriend or boyfriend right i think people think that is skewed toward girlfriend way that's not necessarily true with you and you know you can have your own ethical points of view about like whether or not that's good for people but it's a pretty basic human need and guess what people want all sorts of different things in terms of niche companionship and how you might distribute that aren't these quietly very huge like yeah can we do some like ballpark you know give people a sense of of the size and scale that these have gotten to so there's there's replica i think that's probably the most well known one which is a digital boyfriend and a girlfriend they kinda try to say friend but i think the use case is a little bit more in the in in the relationship side of things and i don't i don't remember their exact numbers but i don't think i would be crazy for saying they're doing like fifty million a year in revenue and i believe she had bootstrap it for a while at least or raised very little money to get there is that right tell me if off base i might be wrong on some of that yeah eu eugene built a very cash efficient business okay is that like code for something are you an investor no i'm i'm not an investor dude you just said everything with odds sake a thing it was basically like you're friends with her you know the dub and they're killing it are are they killing it from your perspective i think they are making a lot more revenue than most startups i i don't think it's fair for me to give the number it's not my number right okay what are the other ones that are interesting so just character ai that has like some absurd amount of traffic but also heard some things about like i don't know if this is all legit traffic or what but there's character ai what are the other ones that are interesting or what do you what you who who doing sean character for a second because i i think like you know when you look at consumer companies one of the things that i learned was that the behavior patterns like when something just really really stands out from all other products in their category or previous categories that's when you pay attention it's like the you know dumbest metric but it is really clear when something has special consumer behavior around and the thing that is really interesting to me about character or the companion apps that work really well is like people spend hours with them right like you know in terms of the number of products like how many products do you spend hours with every day not a lot like social media sean that's like my product that i spent hours a day with yeah oh you were at great like i think when they invest in discord i i think the timing is there and discord is one of those things that was probably overlooked because it was like you know mostly teenagers we play video games that we're using this thing and it kinda look like a chat room but you're like well how is it gonna make money it's not like slack where you can charge the company but the stat was people were spending like seven hours a day or something on discord something ridiculous like that just living in discord it was their social life and so you're like well there's there's roughly something there and they were able to make a ton of money just even selling emojis at that point because if you have that much engagement you can't fake that yes by the way i just went to character ai and there's an option to chat with elon musk and the the preloaded question why did you buy twitter so i click it so it starts a chat with elon musk as a character and then it the first month literally goes you wasting my time i literally rule the world okay so by the way on according is similar web which is like you multiply it by two or three and then you divide by two or three and that's the huge range but according to similar web it says that character ai has three hundred and ten million monthly unique are you kidding me i mean that's more than the wall street journal it's more than like a bunch of insane is this company really that big i think people want companions this is what i'm saying that the the like engagement characteristics around this stuff is real and so for anybody like starting a new business you know one person company shipping ai companion app to a niche like generating a million dollars of cash flow for the so do you do you know how these things grow so i mean three hundred million monthly visits is no joke what is what's the growth channel for something like this well i think that's going to be like an advantage in the future i do think one of the weird things about these ai capabilities is they are so novel and unique that they do drive word for example with character you can make new characters and people share them right so there's in built viral vitality there but like maybe i'll give you like two other examples of just like when i say the capabilities are just really new and they're powerful and people wanna talk about them like i don't think you can engineer that but it's just characteristic of these companies okay so one example is i am an a investor in a company called h jen you can make a video avatar of yourself cannot tell the difference and you know it's reaching that bar of quality as new as of this past year and like people create content that is unbelievable and they share it and so like now is tens of millions of revenue great they've never spent a dollar on like paid marketing have you seen this thing before by way this is one of those products that i've seeing all over the place but it felt like it was just like people younger than me talking about it so i felt embarrassed well this is not like like the character ai was like you know that's like teenagers kinda sharing that's more like what pat or something this is a corporate use case so this is basically using like i make a digital ai of me or of a or or just like a fake character altogether and then it could be used in training videos it can be used in intro videos with customers things like that so you could basically create a you don't have to actually send up a camera film a video have it edited and then post it in order to send a video to a prospect or send a video internally to a in in a training system or educational product and so that's what this is and that's why they it just as it says i thought race sixty million in funding but i think the the the chart i saw was pretty absurd that you know they basically raised twenty million in arr very very fast holy crap some of the usage actually also it yes it's a business use case but it's like all kinds of businesses like creators smb like high end enterprise advertisers and so like for you guys to be like okay well like actually i bet there's a lot more demand for sean and sam talking than the amount i'm sure you're hanging out on the pot a lot but like than even each of you can contribute and so if the marginal cost of more time of sam talking is free like you probably do more with it right i think that's just what people are discovering have you guys used this is it the landing page makes it look amazing like i've used it is it amazing or is it still up and coming no it's like pretty good this this crop this one crosses the line i would say of usable in real re real life versus cool demo which is the hard thing with ai you get a lot of cool demos then you go in and you're trying to use it for your use case and you're like how come the tweet had such a good output if but mine is kinda whack every single time or like well this is good but it won't let me change the text on it which is what i would need to use it in my my real thing i would say this one is is definitely production ready they wouldn't have you know tens of millions in revenue if they weren't actually use all like customers well and they just did a like a public campaign with mcdonald's right like an advertising but there's some good limits right like you can't be like moving around it's like a face on camera at least that's what it used to be when i tried it like six months ago yeah there's some new stuff you should try like you know you you can be walking around now for a while okay i stand corrected alright ever back can they just can we just upload our youtube page or do we have to stand in front of it and film you have to stand in front of your web or phone camera for two minutes and film and it's more of a safety thing than anything else because they don't want people being able to take your youtube and make you if that makes sense like they want they want you saying specific words about like i sam say it's okay to make this avatar and you said that you started the podcast by saying there's like a lot you had a real you the line and you said it was awesome which is like there's a bunch of ways to make a million dollars that could eventually become a billion is this one of those companies where it started that way i think i mean i think the market for this company is very deep because people like they want a lot of video and i think more like if you just think about the domain of making video you guys know much more about this than me but like people want a lot of control right they want quality they want specific expression and brand and emotions and they want like one person two people three people like person walking around product whatever it is and so i think there's actually a lot like there's a lot we still cannot do with research and this the company wants to continually pull like push the bounds of what you can do and so i think there's a good example of like i think there's a billion dollars of video generation revenue for them or for others but like you know you you actually have to invest in the product pretty deeply but it doesn't mean that your wedge can't be really powerful across the single use case sam right have you seen the ones that do this for d products the ai for d product ads so go to icon dot me if you scroll down you could watch the video so i see the video of the asian dude who's holding like a collagen and peptides thing so that's a ai generated video it's the product in his hand that's not actually in his hand and with a script that was written he never recorded it and now you have a u very authentic looking ad for an influencer you go to the next one look he's holding a different product because he didn't res shoot it they just put a different product in his hand and it looks super fucking real am i right what isn't this wild this is amazing and so he's got another one with ramen and so what he's doing is interesting what he's doing is he's letting actual insulin these are not ai generate people is a real person this is like an instagram guy who's got like whatever hundreds of thousands of followers so he's letting popular instagram people say okay i'll do it i'll create my my digital twin that will be able to do my brand like my branded content so a brand can come in request from a let's say industry number with the million followers it's say yeah i want you to sponsor this video here's the script here's my product and if i click yes then it will ai generate that video i never needed to like open up a package grab a things you know take take twenty minutes set up my tripod record and add send it to the brand ask them if it's okay then they say yes and then i get paid instead of this case it's basically like i just approved the brand it uses my digital twin to make the ad if i'm cool with the ad i get paid and that's it what and so that's what he's doing ads is the same thing you could archives it's like pretty fucking wild and if and their case these are fake actors so these women that you see on the thing that are like promoting stuff these people do not exist this is an ai generated woman who looks like a real person that is promoting some product and you you script it and you can you know get these made i these are the or or it might be like a real person but they said like life sense to the company you can do whatever you want with it yeah exactly i think in this case they they might have started with a couple of those like i think they found one of the girls from this like on five or something but the idea would be i i don't know too much about the under under the hood stuff of i just started playing with them but the idea would be that you know people are not gonna know what the hell really what's not this these look like real people in their home giving a genuine endorsement of some product that they like and it is very simple to create i think sarah this is the type of idea you're talking about where two people can kinda take the existing models you know maybe customize them here but then it's just in a wedge in this case it's for e commerce companies and they're gonna try to build a business here that will do it'll be these both these businesses very quick to get to you know mid seven figures of revenue without you know much marketing spend or much of anything just because a product is such a wow product and then you know from there who knows if it can get you know really enormous or or not yeah and i think a piece of it is just like for for me and like okay what's the difference between like the first million and the next nine hundred ninety nine million it is whether or not the capability exists in the company to make the product deeper and keep expanding scope for what you do for your customer right and but there's a ton of these wedges so you you're staying with visual content you can use this category of models they're open source to be fine tuned for different use cases that are super commercial right so it could be models or creator videos for e comm as you described it could be rendering for like interior design or buildings i don't know if you guys have ever looked at a floor plan like maybe i just have terrible visual spatial reasoning but i can't look at a floor plan with like a couple blocks and then like a fuzzy piece of fabric can be like yes i see it the room i'll savings into this and our friend peter levels has a thing where you take a picture of your home and then it does interior design for you and shows you mock ups which is pretty cool yeah but but i'd say like those you know those rendering traditionally generated cost six thousands of dollars right and now if you can give it to people for very little incremental cost like that's an interesting wedge like there's a handful of ai heads companies making revenue if you guys have ever gone like a a a professional heads shot taken yeah dude i so the this actually this is like kind of actually an interesting version of the drop shipping idea so these are this is i i bet you this would work so there was a ad i saw on facebook i think it was a facebook ad and it basically was a guy and had a heads shot i think of somebody who i recognized maybe there's a vc in silicon valley it was basically like if you're in san francisco i take awesome shots for you you you should have a great shot for your website for your linkedin whatever it's good for business so good for your career and you click a site and it's a bunch of people in the tech industry and it was like three hundred or four hundred dollars and i went to some warehouse to type of place in some some little like photos shoot studio in san francisco stood there awkward got like heads outs made and paid this guy you three or fifty bucks and he was running facebook ads profit to do that so he was able to put in and he he's acquiring a customer for whatever seventy bucks and he's generating three hundred fifty bucks off them and now you could run that same funnel just without the san francisco studio and without the guy taking the picture and without any of the costs right like you just say awesome give me a couple of your photos and then boom here you go and i've seen a couple of these go viral of like viral heads hedgehog viral your book ideas but i haven't seen too many people just like running paid on them and making them work but i'm pretty sure that you could create a paid funnel that would print cash for a period of time and maybe not forever but an arbitrage period of time yeah but what's what's an so i've seen the same ones where it's like you look like a eighties glam shot model remember that i think the the professional one people are willing to pay more right so if it's it's actually gonna be for your what's an example of one yeah look look at this look at this company ara dot ai oh dude look at this landing page this is genius they just have a side scrolling carousel and it's the before and then there's a line and then they just that same photo becomes the after that is very well done how good sarah how hard is something like this to make so like there are a million of these wedges right and i think that means like it's an amazing time too as you were saying like be good at distribution understand like how to make a funnel and how to market something and like to be an idea person right fundamentally like if you run into problems all the time and you like see the right basic capability capabilities you're like oh i can think like you guys are both like oh i can think of like five other use cases for this right and by the way you know the distribution thing so this is a good example the so i'm just a little bit in jasper and jasper was started by guys who were internet marketers first not ai researchers not ai you know engineers not not even frankly very good engineers probably they were just like internet guys internet internet business guys and they were i think they were doing something before this that wasn't really working very well but they had spent a lot of time building like internet marketing funnels and so when they got access to probably chat gp three or something like that they they were kinda back before or sorry before chat gp just when it was gp three they got access to the api and they built jasper which was a took that same capability but now made it useful for marketers so if you're a marketer you need a blog post written or an email or you needed you know copy written for an ad whatever it was they just made a stand tool that would do that under the hood it's you know the opening model is doing eighty ninety percent of the work they maybe customized the last last mile of it but they were so good at internet marketing that they started running facebook ads on this thing and it's the fastest company i've ever seen get fifty million in arr they got to fifty million arr in in one year which is to go from zero to fifty million in revenue in one year is just absurd and the way the reason they were able to do this is because their background as internet marketers as guys were like as soon as i have anything that works i will just plow the maximum amount of cash into facebook ads as i can and i will just keep optimizing the ads until i get this thing you know a dollar in equals a dollar fifty out or dollar and that equals two dollars out and that's why they were able to be so successful early on because they had a different skill set than most of the silicon valley people people with silicon valley don't ever run pay ads mh that's just like a pretty crazy thing i think like if we just go to the difference then like a challenge for anyone of these companies it's that gets this wedge and like is rare to see zero to fifty and one year that's pretty special but even if you get like a product to hit in terms of initial adoption then i think the like the the next nine hundred ninety nine million of revenue has to be like i think more traditional modes because the problem is if it was i'm not saying the distribution piece was easy but let's say you were just first with an idea and like you hit it on reddit because it's a novel capability like i think then you need to get to traditional like reasons companies get really big product velocity depth of product ability to serve the customer social engagement or something right so like if you think about companions it could be like what are the arguments for like why somebody gets to dominate that that business there's a version of a companion business or any business with paid spend and you know this really well that is like just a treadmill right like i make money but i have to keep putting money in it's the opposite of compounding and if i like to stop working hard or other people compete with me like the treadmill get steeper i fall off and and i i think one simple answer is on companions do you guys play the sims growing up of course sure like it's very hard for me to not imagine the sims better if the characters are like smarter and like richer in interaction and have like what looks like realistic video and voice and and so like technically instead of it just being like i'm talking to a person it could be you know that person has some combination of memory of me other interactions goals and like the media experience of them is richer and we haven't gone there yet but i think like there's a version of that company that's somewhere between like a companion and a game world that will be very big it's kind of an interesting exercise well if i could just get to a million then i've increased my likelihood and then maybe i can get that to ten and then a hundred and then a billion i actually firmly believe that if if something can scale to ten million there you no it may take a while but if it can get to ten it can almost always get to a hundred like there's enough people in the world to to make that work but it's actually an interesting exercise to think of all the things that you need to do in order to make those jumps now getting it to a billion i would actually that's been that's been hard for me to figure out how to do that but that's a fun exercise to think well i can just get to a million i bet i can get to ten and if i get to ten i know for a fact i can get through a hundred yeah by the way the sims lifetime sales is five billion dollars so without ai the sims was able to get to five billion in sales if you made it more engaging by by ai powering all those characters that's gonna be even stickier it's gonna be a big business right hey sarah why dude you're like pretty in the no fuck this fun thing like i wanna don't you is go do this this sounds make go make one this sounds way more fun than investing in i get to i like really like doing the zero to one thing repeatedly right and and so i think you just have to figure out what you're motivated by i am really motivated by working with people that are entrepreneurs that i like and respect and i think are super special and i do not like working with people that that i don't have as much enthusiasm about right that's like a very specific personality trait and like law of large numbers as soon as you manage very large teams not everybody is gonna be at the same level and so like doing investing like and making being able to contribute to other people being successful that are really special and then the competitive nature of be right with skin in the game and then know what is happening like i like all of that but i know never say never and we we inc companies we're like it's essentially like oh i see it i see it i see it and then there's frustration that like the right you know a a set of people you're really excited to back just hasn't come together around a certain idea sean you are more technical than me but you're still not technical i would say but you're more than me but sand park classic compliment thank you very much you're not technical you're more technical than me but you're not technical you're also technical you're almost good looking yeah you're out of the me but i'm a one year a three did you when you're i know you've been like studying this stuff when you like this seems like a really fun weekend thing just to to play with are these actually would it be really hard for me to learn how to do this would it be hard to build one of these just like a really simple project because i i know she's sarah's get me all hyped on this shit like this looks really fun to to mess around with yeah i think it's like anything else you gotta you'd have to have a partner who to speed you up like you learning to to code to be able to to do these things it would be the slow way of doing it versus the easy way is you find an engineer who's excited about this and doesn't have clarity of vision around it maybe doesn't have doesn't wanna run the business side of things and you say great hey let's let's build x together i have a clear idea that x will work and i'll handle the market side you gotta make this product do do this and that's not so hard that's that's pretty easy this is exciting you can see a lot of cool shit let's let's do some of your like specific kinda thesis so you have this website conviction dot com good website by the way how'd you get that domain and i'm an internet person yeah okay did you see her website she has a website for her i think it's the incubator where you gotta like code in order to get access it you don't really code but like the menu is set up like that it's a little let's yeah it's little cli what's what's that url i think it was called commit it was like our program for like hack college students etcetera yeah commit dot conviction dot com sean it's a pretty cool website actually oh you open it up it's a terminal yeah oh god let me see let me try to do this so run no type bring h two gonna type and help yeah so if you type and help it like gives you the menu it's is like folder i don't know i don't know how to do this alright so you have a website with a bunch of basically like request for startups ups or you know things that you think are gonna gonna be built in in in ai so let's run through some of these because i that's actually why initially was like we gotta have her on the pod to kind of to talk somebody's these out so let's do one that's you call your personal seller do you remember this you might have wrote this a while but while back but your personal seller it might have been one like my partner product of ready or something but we can certainly talk about it yeah okay i'll i'll give you the summary so the summary is your personal seller i think the idea here is that there's a bunch of places online to sell stuff at etsy and ebay and amazon have a bunch of different places to sell things but actually like doing that is a bunch of work right creating the store listings changing prices writing the copy all of that and i think what you're saying is somebody should be able to just like have a product and then the ai should be able to like do the actual comm management of this of the out of of the of setting up the shop and running it is that what that means yeah i think like it's probably it it matches like a larger theme that i really think is exciting about ai which is like because all of these skills out and it could be run a basic like social marketing campaign right or like send email to your customers that are likely to be repeat customers or improve your website for indexing like there are bunch of things that are probably not related to let's say it's a let's say it's a shopify drop shipping store for like a particular type of sock and you love socks as an entrepreneur it's not like related to the merchandising decision or the design decision of like what is the soc i wanna give the world right and like that's kind of the essence of like why like sometimes people become entrepreneurs and so can you can you take a bunch of these tasks that require skills and all these different domains and just automate them at least at a basic level like i think you can now right and i think like that they're the platforms shopify in and square etcetera they're they like you know they now have native assistant products that help you use the platforms better but i i think across the spectrum of how to be a good internet entrepreneur like in the e commerce sense i think there's more opportunity there how do companies do that now so let's just say you're a company with ten thousand skus how do you get accurate descriptions for all of them well usually if you have ten thousand skus you have like it's a do you have like you don't have ten thousand unique totally variant yeah but you could have like call very size variance things like that so like i'll give you i'll i'll tell you in our case right so i have eco com store and we have we spend let's see probably like five or six grand a month on just shopify per plus or whatever like the pre big enterprise shopify thing so that's just the shopify cost on top of that i would say we probably have another three to five grand a month on shopify apps so you need an app for search you need an app for bundles you need an app for this that you know this like a ton of things shopify doesn't fine so my all in just software cost is at least ten grand a month probably a little bit more on top of the fees they take of every transaction then i have an e commerce store manager this job is just to like run the store like the we have new products coming up make sure those launches go well move things around oh this is broken there's a bug whatever we then have a merchandise the merchandise goes every day looks at the collections and says this thing is sold out it shouldn't be at the top anymore we don't have sizes for this or we don't have colors for this so let me move this other thing to the top or hey the season just ended they these need to be rearranged so there's a human being that does that there's also apps that do that but you kinda need the app plus the software today because the app's not quite good enough to do it by itself we then have vas that go in and they do all the product pages the the descriptions the templates the tagging so that are inventory data is correct because we need to be able to analyze our inventory to do that you need to tag every product accurately so there is like four five people that are just making sure the store runs in addition to five apps that make the store run that all today is shouldn't be the lead like future state of things that's just the current state of things and and shy i think the future state is for entrepreneurs who cannot recruit manage pay the five people it takes to run your store like what do they do as sam said like i think it will be easier in the future right yeah i i think it's also kind of like similar as an idea to all of the another area that we are and i'm like personally really interested in is the voice automation market i think like a lot of your listeners will have seen the gp four o demo where it's like a voice that may or may not sound like sky talking yeah like in real time well we play with eleven laps mh no but that that's dope she's talking about just be able a like alex alexa you just talk to it and it just talks back and it'll sound like scrub your johansson just like chat but you don't to type yeah both of these things either like it could be in your voice or like some spokesperson for a brand or a company but like the ability to give reason you know knowledge based responses in a human voice i think it's just really powerful right and i don't think people are thinking enough about the opportunities here where you mentioned eleven there's like exactly one independent voice api business and tens of millions of revenue and that's eleven they're great that's amazing i think there are other opportunities so like there's company called cart that does like more real time voice for example you think eleven is by the way eleven labs do you think they're at tens of millions of of in revenue they are they're definitely at you know a a large number that is in the tens of millions of revenue hopefully i'm not surprising surprising a market with that but know a lot of developers who immediately gravitate like toward apis business but that is not how the rest like the world is full of niches and people running businesses that don't think about apis and won't use them right and and so like just to just like you know your personal seller i think there gonna be a bunch of interesting voice services for everything from restaurants to hvac companies to dental reception that are just like answer the phone i think that's one of the ideas we had and it could be informational like we are open from eight am to six pm or a lead generation business where i'm like well like my plumbing broke like are you available tomorrow at three pm like is a much huge believer in this huge like i want sean this this simple idea so you know like when the when the internet came out it was like oh it's gonna be so crazy but like one of the obvious things was like hey every restaurant just kinda use their menu online like you should put your you should put up your restaurant exists where it's located and then put your menu up there even as pdf that's still like value add for you it's like it became where every business needed a website and now what i think is gonna have is that every business needs an agent and so what's the agent for most small businesses so like i called pest control because we always get a bunch of like mice jumping in our pool for whatever reason and try calling pest control nobody ever picks up the damn phone and because there's it's usually run by it's like mike's pest control and mike's out in the field doing things all day controlling the pack actually doing work and so he doesn't pick up the phone and so then you leave a message and you're like you and then but you call ten of them because you're not sure if mike's gonna get back to you so then it becomes whoever gets back to you first mike loses business because mike doesn't pick up the phone mike also is not gonna hire somebody to just sit there and wait for the three phone calls a day that he's gonna get it just wouldn't make sense but now you go and i built one of these in our like ai like weekly tutoring session that i have basically i was i wanna build one of so we have the same problem for our our offshore recruiting business so we own a offshore recruiting business called somewhere it's like you can fire you can find an amazing talent they're just somewhere out in the world just have to find them so what somewhere does is they find you elite talent now the big problem if you go to somewhere dot com it's like you say okay i'm looking for a designer or i need somebody who could do who get me leads for my marketing business from my real estate business or i need somebody do data entry right so you have all these jobs now the button on the site is basically like you wanna start hiring fill out this form so you fill out the form and then it's like awesome we will get back to you soon or it's like schedule a call here's the call tomorrow or two days from now and no matter how many sales agents we have a call tomorrow is not as good as talk to me right now about what i need because right now is when i'm interested right now is when i'm on your website right now is when i'm not thinking about other variations of how i might solve this problem and you have an opportunity to sell me and so sam i don't know if you've seen this but like check out bland dot ai this is this is i have when i built it if the answer is have you seen this assume it's no and my mind is being blown by all this stuff but basically it let you build a phone agent for yourself so i went on here and i built a phone agent so i built a guy who can answer the phone so that when somebody goes to somewhere and they wanna they wanna hire somebody it'll be like awesome what are hire for have you ever hired overseas and you're like yeah i have it's like cool tell me what you're looking for a couple you know sentences oh great it sounds like what you're looking for is somebody who could be a developer for your shopify by store our our noble budget for that is two thousand a month would that work for you or you're looking for something a little bit more or a little bit less and then it answers that it basically does the intake the initial sales call for you and it's like no problem we've hired this month for eighty five other shopify brands we're looking for shopify developers you're in good hands we do this all the time we will i'm gonna start looking for candidates now i'm gonna email you tomorrow with three candidates how does that sound and the person's like great i guess i can just like wait for that to happen or or it'll pull from our existing database like here's an example resume this is the type of person we'd be looking for with this person fit your needs yes or no so then the human salesperson will come into work and see a ticket that's like the ai agent did the initial initial sales call and found the customer's requirements and kind of already warmed sale up and told the customer what they needed you to know the things you repeat every time on the phone and now you could follow up with a more bespoke answer for that person that's the future that i see i i wasn't able to fully build that i did like a prototype of it but that's what i think websites even like ours which is an internet business should have which means that every plumbing and pest control and restaurant they're gonna have their version of that this is one hundred percent way better than having a call center or it might or it will be when it if as long as long as it works as good but this is absolutely the way to go alright let's do some more so you have another one on here that's i think an easy one that's cool next gen auto complete and i think the idea here is you do a chrome extension or a browser extension that not just like auto complete helps you fill in the next word it thinks you're gonna say or how to spell a word but what you have here is that it starts to learn your voice so it can write your it can help you write your emails or your blog post in your voice which is kinda like the next level up from auto complete next level up from grammar lee it doesn't just kinda correct or spell check your stuff but it actually writes the way you write because it has watched the way you write is that the thesis here yeah yeah absolutely and i i think it can be you know lots of different types of business communication but especially like email so i don't know this is this is actually my friend mike ver idea i think you suffered from the same thing i do that might be true for you which is like i'm an incredibly picky writer and so i will use the models today for generation of basic content or i'll ask my amazing ea to like draft emails for me and then i will go rewrite the whole thing because i don't like the tone because it doesn't sound like me or because it's not tight enough or because i wanna use a certain phrase and i think the next level of like value and impact is definitely gonna be fine tuning two specific voice and nobody wants to write like chap gp like nobody wants to be the generic ai either so right if what everybody wants is the thing in between this just all while me is there anyone right now doing that that you like because i would like to use this today i mean superhuman human has like really interesting ai features but i think the the unlock is gonna be the personalization and what's your overarching investment thesis so you have this thing called software three point o which by the way most vc thing to do to be like oh software three point o web three point o you you you've done it you you have you've have gone full vc what is software three point o yeah okay so the seed for that phrase software three point zero it comes from actually an essay that andre ka wrote years ago about software two point o and the base premise here is that like you had to write a lot of software by hand in a prior generation before machine learning and then software two point zero and andre you know worked at tesla was working on autopilot was really about dataset labeling right you know you you are teaching a machine learning model by the data you choose to put into the pipeline how to do new tasks software three dot is the idea that the next generation of software a lot of it is about manipulating foundation models and they're called foundation models because they have a lot of capability out of the box you don't need to train them from scratch you just need to give them like guidance reinforcement the information specific to your business and so an example would be like sean was talking about for his lead capture intake form voice button like he doesn't need to go train a model he doesn't need to go like collect data for that software application like the voice agent is a software application he just needs to like make sure it's plugged into his scheduling system and his database of candidates and be able to retrieve the right information about the business and like you know respond consistently to customers in a certain tone right and so that's more about like manipulating a bunch of this base work that people like labs have already done for you and the premise here is like that last mile of getting a foundation model to be like something that serves all these use cases in the real world that you know maybe the research labs think of as niches like the world is composed of very large niches and that's why i think it's a i think it's a really big opportunity for entrepreneurs and for us what are some of your like hot takes or maybe your contra takes anything that you think that might be counter to what the most people say most people do most people are betting on do you have anything that is against the grain you know i'm gonna i'm gonna give a like a somewhat arrogant answer which is i don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the entire market thinks actually so i'm like i don't know which of these things are contra i can tell you where like my opinion has changed dramatically like let me give you one example for many years in including you know the tenure of my investing at gray i was one of several people who are like okay we're gonna go understand health care and digital health and i was like oh health care sucks right it's a quarter of the economy it's really important how could you not wanna work on this mission but it is so slow and the incentives are so screwed up that like trying to enter that market with technology or the speed of entrepreneurship that you know silicon entrepreneurs are seeking is like not a good idea and we just did a a health care administration automation company so i'm like oops like changed my mind real hyper critic here and and like one of the reasons being i'm like well if you think about the mind numbing work that happens in health care administration like billing authorization coding claims processing like all like even not even mind numbing but just like expensive and manual like patient support it's actually really verbal for an ai company and you know we back something that's like growing really quickly in one of those domains right and so i just say like i i guess i've changed my point of view on health care i went to the pediatrician yesterday my doctor is with my baby there and i'm sitting there and she's got her ipad on like a table and there's a video like there and i'm like who the fuck is that guy and they're like oh that's just like my scribe i he's just listening sitting in and he's and he's taking notes but she was like i used to stay up until three am taking notes on all of my patients oh wow they just do it for me and obviously the wheels are turning in my head i'm like yeah that that job is gonna be unnecessary a few years but it was amazing to have a medical scrub i've never seen such a thing and she's like oh dude this has been around for a long i was like i've never seen that yeah i do think one framework for like your listeners like thinking about different ideas is like what parts of work have been outsourced service is already right because like it used to be the doctor taking the notes and they're were like wow we pay this person a lot and like they should see more patients and think about their patients more like let us outsource that to a cheaper tech in our office let us like outsource that tech to india or the philippines now there are number of scribe businesses in medicine that are growing really fast like a bridge knob bluff fried like it is happening and so i think that will happen in a bunch of different areas where like basically if you can create separation of that work already to outsource it then maybe you can outsource it to a machine as well yeah sam mom had a good thing he was like everybody worries about ai taking your job you but this that's not the right way to think about it it's ai will take your tasks like you have to think about it not at a job level but at a task level there are certain tasks it can do really well there's certain tasks it can't do really well there certain task today it can't do that in the future it can do and so eventually a job becomes a bundle of tasks but but for now it's you can't think of the whole bundle because it can't replace the whole job but it can replace specific tasks which might be just the way it works in the long run is that there's a huge slew of tasks that can be that could be done by ai and then there's people that bundle those tasks together to make sure that they're getting done well or at the right time i think that's like approximately right but to be intellectually honest like that there was a scribe in that outsourced bp that had that job and so it's not taking the doctor's job but it's taking the piece of the job that like the doctor's job that already got separated out the task that they did they didn't like but that became a job of its own yeah and a job and the job goes back to being a task basically in this case yes yeah yeah it's a good framework there are you are you investing exclusively in ai related businesses i am a technology investor i'm not a machine learning research i've been working on this stuff for a handful of years and i really believe it i think it's like the most important thing to happen in technology in a long time but i'd say like i'm also here at just you know invest in great tech companies and so you're also here to get paid i am also here to work on things that'll will work that are important right and so like if a if an entrepreneur that i think super highly of or like that i've worked with before or whatever comes to me and says like i have a great idea nothing to do with ai i'm still definitely gonna be really interested in that if you ask me like what are the ideas that we think about or or hunting it is all in ai i do wanna put one more thing out there which is definitely not a idea that just anyone can go after it's gonna the opposite of the like easy wedge idea in terms of how can i put distribution around like one functionality for a niche on a on a model like a ai heads shot application or something but i do really wanna hear from anyone who has a point of view on what happens to the like nvidia compute monopoly and overall what's changing in the data center i don't know if there's a hot take to your former question but like i think a lot of people intellect in technology really the intellectual like are like oh yes of course workloads are changing from not ai to ai but they don't actually think about like what that means in terms of scale and market cap like that means like chips memory bandwidth networking energy storage optimized system design like that was a lot of technology company market cap before and so like if that's true there's gonna be a bunch of different like new specialized solutions and it's trillions of dollars of value at stake and it's not just like single direct attack on nvidia that is like the opportunity what what else would be in that category if it's not just like hey our chip is better than a nvidia chip what what else is what is what's another shape of a company that could be in that that space so i i guess a an example would be like well what are other bottlenecks like memory bandwidth what like what if you design storage to be specific for ai data centers what if you like you could do cooling systems like there are if you just reimagine the entire data center around like big ai in france right i think you end up with like totally different needs the the new york times had this article the other day and i don't remember the stat entirely but it was something like the amount of ai capacity or in chips like currently created right now we need to create like another like four trillion dollars in market cap in order to satisfy like the amount of capacity that we have and they were sort of running it in a in a way of like i don't know if we're gonna be able to do that but then when you think about it the other way around where you where you think about well in nineteen ninety eight if you said like you know what how big is the internet going to be i'm sure it went far beyond virtually one hundred percent of the expert opinion as to how big it will get and i remember reading the article the other day and i was like that's just absolutely astounding that were in one of these people sequoia sequoia came out with a a sort of blog post or i don't know pdf or something like that about this the i think they called it the six hundred billion dollar hole or something it was basically saying well we've we've invested this much or we're investing this much in capex so if you invest that much in capex what do you need to get out to make that you know return you know that's a vc saying that which is which is not just like some journalists who doesn't get it who doesn't get tay sir sarah what was your reaction to that and what's your take on that i think it is a lot of capex i think if you put it in context of like how does it compare to other big capex spends in the past let's say like the broadband build out like well we wanted the internet you know like we spent about two trillion dollars on broadband to date like we're not there yet right that was worth it and so what i would say is yes like it's a totally valid question we're spending a lot of money what are we even get out of it i think we're gonna get a lot of value we had da mesh on the der founded hubspot their mesh is amazing yeah he's really wise and he's tends to be right more than he's wrong and i think he said something great when i asked him i'm like man i'm a little nervous about a lot of the stuff where the world is gonna go he's like i'm i'm fairly educated and i think that it's not gonna be as good or bad as you think it's going to be do you agree with that sentiment no i think i think it's actually pretty bim i think it would be like bad or it's like it could be much much better right is is it's the opposite age it's either gonna be much worse or much better it's kinda your take well what what's the bad like the what's the bad situation look like where like like for example i think the bad situation i'm fairly uneducated so take it with the greatest the very bad situation is that they're just gonna be this massive gap between the haves and the haves not and like if you have money now that's gonna grow and you're gonna be awesome the bad situation is ai kills us all right that's the the doomed situation that that's a bad situation but then i there but in route to that there is just this massive separation of the haves and halves not you have not you know what i'm saying that kind of freaks me out what's your what's your where do you see the bad situation going going towards so i think it is not necessarily that correlated that your your resources or your capital today mean that you most take advantage of the of the ai rev mission right i actually think people have a lot of agency in this right then go start these businesses make a million dollars that's such a small group of people why does it have to be because of human nature how many people know about this shit you go do your well your parents are tech entrepreneurs but go go ask sean's mom my dad i go ask my parents go ask my brother and sister like gonna not entrepreneurial even if this widen the number of people who could be successfully entrepreneurial it's not gonna like it's gonna go from point one percent or whatever one percent of the population to i don't know not fifty right now and it's not gonna go that far yeah i don't know if it has to express in pure entrepreneurial versus like you will get increased productivity for people in lots of different types of jobs and it's not obvious to me that's like just the people who are already most highly paid today you're somebody who thinks a lot about ai you spend your time in the ai ecosystem a lot of very smart people are actually worried about the doom scenario you know from elon musk to we had emmett shi on the podcast and emmett it's a smart thoughtful guy and he's like you know the pd doom the probability of of actual doom here is it's pretty scary it's not zero and and here's here you know here's where i think it is what do you think about that what are the odds that ai truly is a sort of like a critically dangerous thing you know i don't actually spend a lot of time thinking about this problem because the because it is like con in the future of both the objectives of these models and capabilities of these models that are kinda like hand wavy right like if like i think when you talk to experts about some of the suggested scenarios like here are two classic ones oh you know people are gonna use this to design a virus that kills us all bio weapons or somebody is going to make the objective for a foundation model that is super powerful to be like make the most money or generate the most paper clips and it's gonna take over all of the resource in the world and kill all there's no linear path from here to there and and so when when people ask me about like the doomed scenario like i am much more concerned about abuses we actually do understand so for example like what if people don't understand what information is true or not or like people are gonna use this stuff for hacking and fraud and lots of like bad activities today and like we should go understand that and react as quickly as possible to that and as a country like probably wanna stay ahead on these capabilities technically well have you heard any what are some what's a wild example of how do people use this for hacking or for fraud oh i mean like for for my company we get emails from me it's not really me and sometimes it will have or like i'll have a link to something that sounds like it's in my voice yeah i think that's the simplest example which is well like what happens if you can create really authentic sounding media like you know are are your parents like you know going to not pick up the phone if it's a spoof phone number and it sounds like you and you say you need something like that's a bad scenario and so i think we need more tools to protect against that and general education about it so i i worry more about that and then i'd say like i think of the probability of a bad scenario i said was like it is possible i can't see exactly how we there and if you ask me like what are the reasons in which broad use of cheap intelligence are gonna be great i can give you so many reasons right so andre ka just started a company around education and like the the the fields that have been super resistant to cost improvement basically health care the government and education like i i think this will actually move the needle on some of the domains that matter a lot to all of us humans and i i think like when when people talk about like the doom center is really fun and scary to talk about the dystopian doom scenario but i think the opportunity cost of not exploring the ways in which like they're you know you can have an economy of abundance we need to talk about that and that is really what i focus on same to who entrepreneurs no but i love his name it's a lovely name is a is a amazingly well respected research scientist and educator who's trying to create like an experience that is ai powered in education where like the most amazing expert in a domain is like a personal tutor taking you through the material interactive and he's one of like the five big thought leader type guy he ran tesla's ai program you know in terms of self driving cars he was like one of the let's say five most known and respected guys about that he then went to open he then quit open ai it says he's listed as a c founder of open ai so something yeah he was a man he was like the early it was early mine behind it and at tesla he was basically the the guy leading their entire self driving unit yeah i think he's i friend forgot what his title was because he's like you know chief ai guy when i lived in san francisco it was a fun period i lived there from two thousand twelve to basically two thousand twenty or twenty twenty two and back then it was like the airbnb of the world and tesla or uber and we had sidecar back then where it was like holy crap we're gonna get to a stranger car and this is so exciting this is so new and and you'd go to hack and people were working on like meal delivery services and that was like really cool i went recently or this was about a year ago and i was walking around the ferry building and this kid recognize me he's like oh i you know i like the pod i hey what's up man and he said i'm doing a hack right now in the ferry building upstairs doing your wife when it come up and like see what's going on and i was hell yeah let's do it and so we go up there and it was so in i was like dude we used to do these exact same thing but it was around like the sharing economy and and all this type of stuff and they i was just talking to people at what they were building and i remember thinking like this is like totally i guess it it happens to it's francisco school a bunch was this is like the renaissance like there's something really really cool going on and everyone was doing ai stuff and i just thought it's magical right when i moved there it was like mobile what the thing it was like oh x for mobile everything we gotta make what we gotta make it work on an iphone and an android and then you would see like you know some like false flags like front back came out it's like oh shit this is the next thing this is the next big social app and then it kinda die but then you know instagram snapchat you they they they they actually they stuck and i remember the early days of music that now become tiktok so mobile was like the big thing at the time then it became crypto and it became the crypto hub but it started to lose a little bit of the steam for crypto because crypto was a lot more international but now it looks like for ai san francisco at least back as the the hub are you in in san francisco yeah we're in the mission in san francisco and like i i think we really believe in the sort of like community aspect of not in the like maybe in the squishy sense the word too but like if you're thinking about looking for ideas for companies and being inspired to like be committed to the grind and have the right ideas then the right thing to do is not do it like alone in your basement what you have in san francisco are people who are optimistic and then like work oriented they believe lots of things are possible they're learning about what's going on the frontier and we actually do this grant program embed embed dot commission dot com to create that kind of community and a bunch of other stuff but it is it is around this idea that you people wanna have the experience that you described sandwiches is like well like not all of this is gonna work but what are smart people trying that is some version of the future in this area of ai and like that will probably educate and inspire me and some of it will be really big yeah i think that like if you're twenty two and you're young and single and you're into this shit i would just say two words i would say go west go last young man like billy people oh sorry about san francisco it's dangerous it's stu it's law that's the appeal baby you can say you you made it in the war torn city of san francisco you you wanna be a billionaire who cod you wanna be a billionaire who grew up on the mean streets of san francisco yeah what that mean alright i think we have to wrap up sarah thanks for coming out wish should people find you and where we're where should they follow you you can just google sarah or conviction dot com and i'm month i'm on twitter i'm alright that's it that's the fun thanks guys i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like the days off on a road less travel never looking back