How to Scale a Profitable Agency with 0 Employees (Using AI Agents)

my brain kind of explode a little bit was oh so any business you can flip the sales model on its head absolutely if you could basically instead of reaching was hey would you like me to maybe do this for you if you pay me and hire me and versus saying check this out i made this for you yes you wanna work with me that's obviously that's gonna be a better sales pitch but now ai made that scalable i was not sc exactly i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a less travel never look i think about matt m i think about i think about the word early so yeah whether it was investing in companies early you got you know you were a part of a portfolio that had uber had twitter had you know tons of hits and you're early at c to the internet trend yeah like you're saying like first one to sign kinda like youtuber talent to a traditional hollywood agency or get hollywood talent to put stuff online now you're early ish and early on the ai train like you've been texting me photos of myself and my house but redesigned using a like ai style agent so can we talk about this well it starts with my wife making me she's like your entire closet is black and white you don't buy clothes ever like you default to the same exact things it's like a laughable thing so we took a we took a few months and lived in japan and korea and everyone on every corner is the most stylish person you ever seen they're all put together i'm like what is it that they all look like they're out of a magazine and i look a sc and i realized that i've just never taken the time to do it so i'm like fine i'm gonna i'm gonna try to train this ai model both three which is spectacular no and has all the vision modeling i'm gonna try to train it like a korean color theorist and that's where i'm gonna start have you ever heard of these things so i've seen on tiktok the idea of color theories yeah they like hold up a bunch of watches and they're like this one brings out scam this one clashes avoid these do these like an allergy you test for fashion that's right perfect example and like people spend like hundreds thousands of dollars i if you get a stylist in the us it's like hundreds or thousands of dollar right like again it's one of these classic like things rich people do that eventually like open to everybody right i'm like i'm gonna see if the vision models are good enough so i run the color theory of myself and my wife and it tells me okay you're a soft autumn which you know i was gonna say that i'd appreciate that for what it's worth you're a dark winter which i think is super but for me it was like here your hear your primary colors and then i was like okay great what do i need to avoid and then it gives me a list of like colors that i gotta wear and it tells me how to put them together and as i dig further and further into it i'm like oh can you like give me a capsule collection that i could do and i'm like give me brands that i that i like here's my here's my measurements on like brands that i wear here's how i think about it and i'm like my wife and i are doing this and we start like building it for each other and then we start product it for friends and so you sent it to me and you're were like you basically sent me of an ai version of me yeah and then it had me dressed up way better than i actually dressed up yeah and then it was like yeah you can just like push a button and it'll buy this outfit that's where we're going to yeah so like it's not there yet and this is part of why like people laugh at like the ai wrapper but i actually think like there's a huge moment in time to just be like the rapper you be the rapper right and sell the service sell the outcome and like do the work for somebody before they even ask for it like i didn't ask you for selfies i just found selfies of you i didn't ask you for like your fashion sense and your c do you wanna color theory i just ran color theory on you right and like i gave you a final output of like here's a bunch of looks that you're gonna look great in and i got to the endpoint of what you actually want so let's put the style thing over here for because this is golden nugget to me number one this is the one i picked up from you in the last few months which is this key insight which is that ai is not just a product it can actually be ai can be the the the the the go to market so what you're doing is very very smart and i think you have a few ideas that are in this bucket but you're like alright what if instead of just using ai to to to do the job i use ai to sell the customer to get the customer on board and what you're doing is you're basically saying instead of i as a customer have to find you decide if i wanna try and sign up pay you and then you do the work what you're doing is you're saying let me just grab pictures of you let me grab pictures of your house and you got my house off zillow or whatever and then you were like hey here's here's what your house could look like wanna use my service yeah and that like do the work front yeah seems to be like that's not casual advice my brain kind of explode a little bit i was like oh so any business any business now you can flip the sales model on its head on it absolutely if you could basically instead of reaching us i was like would you like me to maybe do this for you if you pay me and hire me and versus saying check this out i made this for you yes do you wanna work with me that's right obviously that's gonna be a better sales pitch but now a i made that scalable that was not scared exactly right hey i think you've nailed it like that's actually the thing that triggered for me which is like when i think about like new technology unlocks like i'm i tried to think about like did it come with a distribution unlock too right like i got to start investing at a time when like mobile and social got birthed and like both of them came with totally new distribution mechanics like the feed the algorithm social sharing the app store were all like these greenfield distribution hacks gotcha so not just apps are new but app store is also new that's right not just doing a a connected tool but oh wait social sharing which gonna make this single single lets you like share natively as part of the product just a social game it's a social share that's right all of it was big natively into the products ai doesn't really come with that right ai has like this is why the incumbents are moving so fast it like makes your existing product distribution okay much better right you can add auto suggest auto cracks you can like put gemini in every product if you can tell your gmail to like just respond as if you're and like do all of these things and if you're chi like you've you were novel enough and early enough and powerful enough that you're now the dominant and default for the for the category but it didn't come with like new distribution for everybody yet right like there was the cheap jeep custom gp that was like trying to get there there's mc that's like trying to get the but nothing obvious but what did change was it let you do the work in advance cost of work drop the cost of work dropped so dramatically that instead of selling the promise you can just sell the finished work right and so we sell the proof instead i think a lot of people are still stuck in this paradigm of like you know how there's like all those head shot apps that came around like that's kind of a perfect example it's like let's say nowadays it's like two to three cents to create like a high res head shot right right everybody was creating these like head shot products and saying i'll make heads shots for you and you still to go in and use the tools and make the heads shots and upload the thing but like their photos are out there right like there's probably an addressable market like call ten million super high intent like they all need shots right you know exactly who they are you can audit linkedin and just be like their shots are terrible like we can make it much better that's your target market and you could literally just for like a penny two pennies like create a low res version right of it and sell it direct don't ask them do you wanna set up a whole new shot just do the thing give them a new heads shot and then use that as the entry point to a whole other part of the business like i'll do the rest of your linkedin your linkedin could be optimized right the the second order service can be the service that you actually end up selling right but you closed them you got the opportunity to meet with them and close them on those other things right because you gave them the value without ever having a so you could theoretically what you could do is you could basically say i'm gonna do the color theory part proactively and for essentially free for everybody and then i might even suggest a couple of looks yeah and then if you actually if i can do it for you every day do you want it every day yeah and you wanted me to keep track of things that are in in style right you wanna personalize it over time right like those seem like and then that's that's this upsell but the kind of the the initial cell is pretty powerful and then you string it together with tools like clay or whatever which is like mass mass personalized outreach yeah so what okay so what do you have now is entrepreneur now you have the ability to say alright for any given market let's just take real estate agents as a market yeah okay i know who the agents are i know what their listings are yeah let's say i had an app that could but with ai could take your photos off your listing and i could stitch it together into a cool like instagram ready real perfect alright easy i can then go i can go into a tool a like clay and i can say real estate agents california i can get all those i can put a ai agent that will go scrape all their listings yeah because that's all publicly available get their listings get their photos you do the ai wrapper thing which says stitch these photos into a social video based a social optimized video and then i literally just email that person hey steve saw you had a listing on four ten montgomery way built you a real i built you real for it i think it'll be really great you could share this on your instagram you know i hope you i hope you like it let me know if you have any suggested changes then the guy could be like wow this is incredible but like cool would you like me to be doing this for all your listings i think this actually a help you sell sign up for this to end like that yeah sales process is now like what totally does versus what a sales guy does that's right let's do another example because when i heard what you were doing which we haven't talked about on this yet but that's okay i texted ben and i go ben this is a billion dollar secret yeah because if you actually learn like a differentiated scalable sales mechanic it's like our friends who started doing google ads back in like o five and like dude i used to buy clicks for a penny and like you know friends who are doing e commerce on facebook back when it was like you know one dollar cpm yeah right or less than a dollar cpm and say those are billion dollar secrets that like there's this arbitrage that can exist right now where there's new sales model new distribution model that's less tapped today yeah what what's a what's an example you could use this i think the beauty of like most enterprise software is like you're you're either helping to make more money save money or save time and it's like most businesses are pretty focused on the first of those like just help somebody make more money and so you can kind of go and help almost anybody generate new business generate new clients right and so like the exercise could just be like hey i delivered you new clients like imagine i am the person running sales for company x you can do this with o three i wanna help them generate new business what are two or three new innovative ways that i could use o three to generate business for this company just do that playbook for every business it could be like start a list serve that targets all of the potential customers of that client it could be create an instagram account that like highlights that business don't need to ask permission be like best hvac service destin right and like create an instagram account for that person at do it at scale and like if anybody comes in as dms be like hey i got three new customers potentially for you right i think those kinds of arbitrage like now exist for basically every company right because there's gonna be this lag there's always a lag between like what's possible today and like how long it takes the average person to end up figuring it out what what do you think so you you had some ideas that you had sent me one of the ideas you talked about you give me a bullet point which is i think it's called the the mario mario kart theory what is the mario criteria theory yeah the mario criteria theory is is actually like you could have made a lot of money investing in tech over the last handful of years or at least in the saas you just followed this one you just followed like everything's better in multiplayer like like build things that are like multiplayer by default fig mic fig notion air table slack yes slack like take the communication tools or the the enterprise tooling and like make it real time and and and cloud based those things have effects to them those things like instead of our cards better than friends mario kart better with friends and so like but like if i look at ai today it's all siloed it's almost like i'm having an individual conversation like where's where's like group chat gp like you and i are in a conversation all the time like why isn't gp in their with there yeah why isn't it living with us in those social moments why do i never see your ex exhaust out of your feed like there's a bunch of stuff you'd be fine with sharing like there's a bunch of stuff that we'd all get better at like mid journey was right mid journey like built like it's almost like lost to history of three years ago that mini journey was like on discord they they were social by default that you had channels where you could see everybody's like outputs yeah and it was like kind of a magical experience but almost nothing else went that direction like it's all isolated and private and like hidden and like it's a it's like a t that like the outputs for the free tier of gp are private by default majority is a great example of bad is better because on product design you're like wait so okay cool i download the draft like now you open up discord you join our discord and in the discord there's gonna be a thousand channels you know there's different numbers just hop into anyone and there's a flood of absolute random people generating absolute random images yeah but it was actually kind of amazing because you go in and suddenly you're inspired you see like oh that guy using this to design t shirts and this person's creating like anime and then you see that same person changed their prompt and make their images better you're like oh i'd never thought to add that to my problem we copy paste that so we were all teaching each other the thing and this is like you know this is not the like chef's kiss product design looks sweet and a mock up like no but it was just like the hack way to get going but it actually had this tremendous bet like the the one thing it was great at which just putting you around other people doing the same thing yeah i'll outweighed all of the downsides totally you know the the that initial user experience and they could focus on just making the model better it and have to focus on like front end resources and how to think about it like just we know it's not perfect right we'll eventually get to the thing but that was like model five or six by the time they built the destination site right and it frankly feels like less social to me in a lot of ways they have the feed there but i'm not like seeing it the same way that i saw when it was native and discord and so right i bet there's a bunch of tooling like that like the style the style idea would probably be better as a social environment in discord like you and i are different color types right similar body types maybe we should have the similar channel for our like right for our area because if i saw you actually like this is actually be kinda magical right like if i went in and i'm let's just put pretend i was also soft bottom and i'm like i'm in with my soft autumn the soft autumn boys we have our our channel and i see you actually like proactively doing stuff yeah and you're prompting it you're like i got a wedding coming up and you prompt it it gives you really good recommendation you actually like take action on it you upload a photo of you in it i'm like if that actually worked out if you look good now your success kind of like triggers me inspires me teaches me how to use the tool and then i go back in and use it like that's a fundamentally better experience more it's gonna be a more powerful experience than that's right you doing this on your own me having to discover this learn this remember to use it and then get the only the benefits are siloed in my experience right this i i designed your a redesigned your house like from zillow photos i'm like that's a probably better in a social experience right like i just delivered you the work right like i used to have to sell you on the idea that i'm a great designer and call call my references right don't do any of that here's a your do you like this room i can do the rest of your rooms right you have a different budget you have iterations i can do it all for but should that should live in a social environment almost all of these experiences outside of like the health ones and illegal ones are probably good enough that like a free social tier would be like acc to the value and like right now we're all like these bon no like you ever see the videos of ben with like the ants on a stick they're like they're like they're like the first example like two tool you spreading right and it's like they put the ants they put the stick in the tree they get the ants out and the another but i was like that looks like an ant lollipop i like that right and they go go and do the next thing and it's like instead we're like cut off from everybody else and so i'm the only one eating the ant lollipop right nobody else gets feel like that's a really big idea like i think you could without don't need to make a model you don't even really need to make a new use case you just have to like design a social experience of the same use case social by default is always better right so is there no anyone doing in this right like is there any like have you seen any cool social like i wanna basically take something like claude which cloud is so powerful claude kinda losing the race of the individual yeah user thing i'm just thinking like what would be the fig type of experience where you you know what would be the use case like is it something like with work so for example you know i have a lot of friends we're all looking at how we can use ai in our yeah in our company and everybody's kind of self doing the law the stick and the and the tree get the ants where it's like oh you set up a thing where you connected it to your calendar and it yeah the workflows it researches who you're meeting with and then it sends you the brief through text message and then you have that and like oh i want that how did you set that up and i have to like ask them for yeah tutorial whereas i really should just be able to fork that yeah right like and that's what i think gun blue lube and some of the other guys are gonna get towards where like yeah one person makes a great workflow it's like that problem should now be solved for the rest of us yeah and we should just be able to fork that people are doing i mean zapier there's tons of like recipes or whatever for like workflows that you can use the thing that's missing is the social proof the thing that's missing is like how many people liked it what are the comments on it like what are the likes what are the like the remix that you're doing who's using it like if you're using it that's a big signal for me like if i'm doing it and i'm like getting value out of this fashion thing right like that's probably a good signal for you like those are things that like i think tip people and it's what's missed like these were like lessons of web led two point o that are kinda like gone right like they're just like like we we've almost like collectively forgotten a bunch of these things that were like oh social by default like like makes it ton sense like all the social apps although like a ios apps went social it feels like collective for like forgetting right and some it does feel like a big market gap you know one of the things i've picked up from you is that you have this like your process is sort of like i go try to do a thing yeah firsthand experience in doing so i run into the problems of doing that thing maybe it's like styling yourself or whatever it is yeah and then and then learn by building yeah and like i it's so funny because i thought of you because you started your career with like c and you're like this like kinda charming guy from you live in la i just thought it you i was like this is like hollywood pretty boy and like actually you're more bullshit hacker tinker yeah you focused on the pretty boy boy i know but you're actually like a hacker tinker type and i i'm am curious i don't know the full story but like i would bet that that's led to some very good things to career even though you're not building the end company yeah but it's the learning by tinkering oh that led you to the investment that led you to the opportunity to for that can you tell a story that yeah yeah yeah right so during covid i i have a buddy brian wagner he's was like one of the best product guys i've ever met i like back in the day he was building a company i was like that's not the right company but this is a guy who just like i wanna spend time around because like we just i love jamming with them i love the way you thought about it and so we'd always like built different products together it was like our weekend hang is like the thing that we would do and during covid we got obsessed with this idea of a product called road trip which is like a music listening product that you c listening and it was like you could talk all this in music and it's like it was this experience where like when we got into it we would be in a room and i don't know if you've experienced this you probably sit on a phone for like five minutes of silence two minutes of silence and it's like i gotta get off the phone call it's like the most awkward thing but if you sit in a in a room with somebody and there's music playing it takes all of the edge out and you could last for like hours right in a room with a grown man and have like at a conversation that dips in and out as long as there's music playing in the background it's almost like the music creates the substrate that lets you pay attention and we started building this thing and you know it ended up not working we couldn't figure out retention it turns out live is really freaking hard synchronous is really really hard but in the process of building it like god fire based just sucks fire based sucks every like it's like i'm in the google universe like everything is tied to the eu universe like if somebody brian i remember this moment where he's like dude to ever you see a company i was you know investing early stage of code two it's like do if you ever see a company that is like an open source post grass like fire based alternative like that's our ticket a week later by the way from the outside it just seemed like fire solved problem fire does this yeah it's probably fine right if you weren't building you wouldn't know i would never i would never thought he's like then we built many social products is like every time you gotta go through the same thing it's like you're stuck in this like fire based universe and eventually you try to sit like cycle off of it and it's like know pain in the ass to migrate and you ever do it and they weren't upgrading the product a lot now they're actually putting a little bit more attention because it's like they're rep right competitor but at the time there was like no development there and so a couple weeks later it's like yc and i'm looking at the list of the yc companies i'm just ripping through it and i'm like super base open source fire base alternative right and i'm like okay this is just this this feels like a a great moment in time and i'm talking i'm talking all my partners he's like i love this idea and and ben tu who's like an incredible tinker of builder investor out there was an angel in the company he made the connections and we ended up leading the seed round at at c two and did a a series a there as well and it's a great company i love those founders and i i think it'll be a great investment but i never would have gotten close i never would have thought about that idea if i hadn't experienced the pain first and so do you when you're going into them is it like i'm doing this to learn or i'm doing this because i think this is the next big hit and i just turns out that's wrong and then the learning was like the consolation prize like mentally how do you approach that it's curiosity sometimes it's because i'm solving a problem it's because i have an idea that's been sitting on me a nagging me and i just gotta build it and get it off of my brain sometimes it's like i just think this is gonna be a category that's gonna be huge and i have to like understand it like i built live or a video shopping product okay i got upset so i'd spent a lot of time with the team at byte dance and i one of the i used to spend like a few hours a month and we would share notes on like what i saw it coming in the us and what they saw coming out of china and it was just like a really fun jam with like the team at byte dance one of those sessions we spent on like video commerce and i was just like you know was four years ago five years ago and i was like this is gonna be just like such it was such a massive category in china and nobody had cracked the nut in the us and seen attempts at it and i was like it just feels like somebody's like we're all just close on it i was like i'm gonna go build in that space so i can understand why it's not working here right and like what's broken here and so i built like a my my wife is a a korean expert and knows beauty really well so we built like a the first shop we built was like around korean beauty products and i like went through the whole process i went and found wholesale i went spend hours at like different korean beauty shops to like get a sense like what were the products and like what was the full stack of a korean beauty process they told me how shitty my skin was and like i went through the whole process with them and built the store on tiktok and like did the fulfillment myself and was like going down because i think that's like that's one it's fun to learn these things too the only way to do it is get close to the medal of it and if you just approach it out of curiosity like it's just a win no matter what it maybe it turns into an interesting business and at the very least you've like seen what the pain points there most feces don't do this do that i don't know everybody's got a different process i think like my process has always been like i will be better at understanding the pain points i think it'll resonate more with the founders if i can talk like cog talk about how i've used the product like those things matter and it's like you're you have more authenticity and it's like i don't know if other feed people do this but it's like my best way of learning like i actually know what the product does i actually used the product and it like makes me better like when i was talking to i'm job from rep from rep who did an awesome pod with by the way i love that that episode i love that product i we were lucky enough to lead the series because as a board member at at rep and partially because like i love tinkering and it was like a tinker dream that you had know like never afterwards worry and i was technically but like never could have built like some of the products that i wanted to build and it was like the idea that rep would help me get closer to being able to unlock that felt like something that everybody would want turns out i was like perfect timing for like the entire ai wave as well but like the way i got to to spend time i was like i was just using the product like the first meeting i ever did i built a rep is like free to hang and as was like i learned python to like figure out how to send him an app in a rebel that i could like you know pick a meeting tie i mean it was like a vc courtship i like it so what's their story with with rep and with because he seems like a real force in nature like when he came on the podcast i just really thought like he just seemed impressive to me he seemed like somebody else got a shot to build one of these generational companies and i don't if rep will i'm investor in i hope it succeeds i think it could succeed but like i just think he was really unique and that product was really unique and the story of how he got the origin story is amazing what mean what what has stood out to you from him or that's i just that he was always hacked it wasn't like a new thing for him he like didn't have access to you know to the tools of technology knew how powerful they would be and would like find whatever way possibly and working in like pc bong or whatever in like in his hometown and like to like just get access to the computer it was like the same thing that like you know the when when people were like spending time at like the research labs in you know in silicon valley to like get access to their first computers it felt like he was going through that like hero's journey right just to get access to competitive kid and jordan jordan and then like you know and then he was obsessed with like spreading it to everybody so he was like one of the first guys at what's it called cod cat and like you know he was it was like the mixture of true believer technical enough to build it knew what the pain points were for him and for like everybody else who was coming up has like real mission to like make a billion like there's gonna be a billion developers and if he has anything to do he's like gonna get to that endpoint and then he's almost like a an endurance athlete in the sense that he's willing to wade through like decade of boredom like there is like it's sexy now because like there's rep agent and like you can build your idea and you can vibe code and he's like it feels like a wild roller coaster ride right now but it was like years of waiting through like school like be going to schools building tools for teachers to teach kids how of code and like the infrastructure needed to full stack it and a religion around the fact that you had to full stack and you couldn't outsource these things and it was like all that min show would like there's a lot of people out there were like i'm gonna build the ultimate five coding platform it's like you know this whole moment we we're in and like where it's like the idea guy's time and like everybody's like the have the time for the idea guy it's like the idea guy like now you get to skip like what was the first six months to validate the thing but it really just gets you to the the entrance of the maze right and it's like now you've gotta go through like dear guy welcome yeah welcome to you ready yeah you off this because the maze sucks and you're gonna tear apart every idea it's all that matters is like the number of iterations on the experiment you can run and like ripping that idea you had in half and like telling you like the world telling you your ideas is garbage and like giving you the feedback that like is brutal and honest from your customers that they hate your idea and it's like maybe there's a kernel of something from that idea that leads you to the next one it's like the idea guys time has common that like we can validate ideas really fast but it's like i don't know if you've experienced this but like just because you can build the thing like and we've moved from like your apple notes to like rep with the ideas fully the mvp built right doesn't mean that you wanna spend the next you know decade eating glass for that world i have a lot of friends who are like idea guy builder product people who are like i'm just looking for the person who wants to take this idea over right like no that's actually the job yeah it's like the job is the you know going and spending time like hoarding a dentist to sell them a product the same thing with people who are like taste does all that matters now oh dude the taste ko even more it's even they're obsessed the idea guys so i no i don't even take the idea i just tastes i just judge the idea i hear another person talk about taste in this market you know you ever read the articles of lisa doll for from a decade ago do you know the story about oh my god it's it's an epic story lisa doll is like the korean master of go okay do you understand this moment that happened a decade ago with alpha alpha like everybody's was like best that go chess chess is known thing but no one will ever get to alphago and it's like there's more possibilities in alphago than there are atoms in the universe was like the quote like hearing that yeah this is the quote it's like at least it all you know that we're safe and it's like you know least it all plays alphago and at some point alphago makes a move and it's like this absurd move that nobody's like this is a alphago made a mistake right all those possibilities have made a mistake and it's like seventy eight moves later the alphago beats the shit out of the human and like he's sitting there looking at the mirror retire it's like a sad story you're like he retire and it's like you know the quotes are things like i never truly scratched the surface of go and it's like you know i'm embarrassed and i feel helpless like the feelings of helpless and it's like i feel like everyone you know is gonna have that moment and it's like all those people are talking about in vc safe it's like it's all about taste and psychology all those people are gonna experience like a taste moment where it's mixed at all where they're gonna be least at all and they're gonna have a moment where it's like you're gonna present their taste and the ais taste to the end consumer because ultimately taste is in the eye of the consumer it's in the eye of the customer and it's like they are the ones that are ar of taste you think you're a pacemaker maker until you put like the burger in front of the person like actually i like this burger more it's like but that's a mcdonald's burger you're like yeah i like the mcdonald's burger billions of people like mcdonald's burger more than you're like you know saint char for charles burger and it's like i prefer this thing and so you might you know it might not win the award but it wins the the choice of the consumer and so i think all these people who are like taste is our salvation are gonna get least all it's gonna hurt real it's gonna hurt real bad they're gonna run into the brick wall of consumer choice on taste well dude this just happen like remember i don't know rewind five seven years ago and it was like self driving cars what people working on yeah what's gonna happen to the truck drivers so we it was like the truck drivers and the grocery store checkout people like you know we're just gonna have to find them new jobs and then all of a sudden like dolly and these other tools came out i was like oh shit it's actually us for everything oh no it's us first it's the graphic designers the copywriter they're like like what were the first things that actually chat gp yeah and like the modern wave of tools were good at is just like writing did like the fake podcast of joe rogan talking to steve jobs i was like podcast alright that's gone i'm like yeah it was just a matter of time you know yeah and and so i don't really think there's really any sort of like safe space yeah but i definitely don't think it's the oh i have i have unique taste because you're right like whether the ai maybe has better taste or it takes one million shots on goal yeah while you take one and it's just gonna play the like the law of large numbers and get it get it right just by doing so many variations like yeah i tried to write a movie script i was like oh i wanna write the opening scene of this idea for this movie i have yeah and so i'm like sit down i'm like oh shoot like the idea was really great i told like five people they do that's incredible this is great you should do this and then i sit down and i just actually have to do the work oh like god my god this is so hard how do i what where do i start yeah are they in a cafe or are there a borrower where do the characters what do they say and so i go chat gp and i upload a script of the social network yeah and i upload like all of aaron so like work and i'm like alright you're kinda like aaron so but you're also me and you here's the idea for the movie give me a draft gives me a draft kinda sucks i'm like give me another one gives me another one instantaneously with no with no ego about it gives me another one gives me another one gives another one and eventually like it got pretty good at doing that scene and a pretty good measured by your your my taste as by your taste one of the enjoyed right but what i saying is like even if let's say my taste maybe is right or maybe wrong either way it did ten attempts before i even lift a face volume with it the volume is gonna win in a taste game is it take a hun thousand shots on google whole same thing with like ads right like if you look at like fashion brands that you go to facebook ads go look at their ad library it's not like they have one david og sitting in the room and he just comes up with this one beautiful ad they're running like a thousand ads in a catalog yeah quantitatively testing which one gets the highest roe it is and they're doubling down on that it's so funny because like we've gotten over the idea of taste in all these like really fuzzy areas of like human consumption and it's like taste on video taste like turns out like people preferred the algorithm of byte dance and tiktok to like you're following your you know programming on television like your years of study of what people are you know enjoying got replaced like big by like the a go you know get i can't tell you how many mistakes i watch that's the true the a is literally the definition of type taste i it's already proven that the a dominates that's right you know whether it's editors inside the company or it's me for myself it's better than than i what i could do for myself even it's funny and we make these mistakes all the time i'm watching i mean you could argue that apple lost the entire podcast business based on like based on their their religion around taste like apple that so like apple started the entire podcast movement right like they owned every podcast got launched on apple right and they were like we really on the other side of apple they're like we really need to own the future of entertainment and they're like what is the future of entertainment it's like great shows it's hbo it's taste that's tasteful creators tasteful makers like things that are just like no s no s but on the other side of the house the the volume was being made by people that didn't look like the top hollywood creators and all of them no no product iteration no help for monetization no like featuring of them no studio production no tools no budgets no like give them bet metrics and data back none of the things that you would do if you had like a million free creators doing things and building awesome audiences that turns out can now sway elections and all of them start on your platform and then you fast forward it's like where's the where's the most of that consumption it's like youtube and spotify and you're like they fumble and they fumble because like they didn't think it was tasteful and they missed it and it's like youtube back in the day did the same thing they actually had half a billion dollars for content they there was like the original originals right the originals it was like half a billion dollars and they came all the agencies and say we want your best creators and we all went and pitch them five million dollar channels and they gave a big budget and then they gave like five million dollars for the native creators like phil franco and michelle fo got like little touches of like cashier and there like the only channels left standing were the creators the native creators didn't match the taste profile right of like the advertisers that were upstream of all this shit but they were the ones creating stuff that people wanted i mean sam alt got like the initiation point for basically every new business that's getting built right and he turns out he ran yc for a long time we're not like that far away from him saying like hey why not just build like a funding model into a the next gp and be like somebody's talking about starting a business i actually like that business like do you think it'll make money let's provide them like credits let's provide him a little bit of funding to get going and like i don't know does that change how investment works is that maybe like upstream of all of the taste makers so what think it looks like let's say hey i just keep you better yeah there's no there's no life raft for the taste guys or the idea guys or whatever like ai i was getting better at all these things and you're gonna you know so what happens what happens to us what what do you do how do you think about that i think you just keep creating things that people want and like you know use the tools to piece them together and it's like just get to the final get to the answer faster like do customers want this thing and give them give the customers what they want that's true north like build something people want like it's the i mantra it's like build a product people want and it's like how fast can get the product to people that they want and like to many times can you iterate on the thing so that eventually you get the thing that people want and it's like just laser focus on that and cut everything else out of your life and like that's how you build most of these like scaling businesses right and it's to me that's like that's never gonna go away people are always gonna want things you can use these tools to provide those things to them and there's probably a good ar for for the next long while like we got a long period of time before this stuff filters through the economy because it's not how fast the technology is moving it's how fast people adjust their reality in their habits and that's like the friction that actually exists here technologies mind boggling yeah but like my mom learning how to second brain is like even though you and i learning how a second brain is really hard do you do you have any other ai sort of theories or frameworks that that are interesting that you've been n on yeah i've i've only i've made i made three and investments post c two okay as an angel all of them follow the same kind of for framework one of them is to a buddy of ours in the in the travel space and the other two are founders that i backed before but all of them are basically agent platforms one's called cognition which is like the maker of a product called devin and the founder scott was a founder that i backed once before and scott is like a genius correct he yes actual mathematical among many things of the one of the things i was r on was like it's possible that devin is just scott in the background answering all the coding questions because he's so good and then another product is called augment it's har abbott and har was a founder of a company that i was on word of called deliver which was like third party logistics for everyone it was like amazon prime for everybody he worked at amazon an in fulfillment and then built deliver sold it to shopify for a couple billion dollars and like har is one of those humans where like if you could imagine what the ultimate like logistics hire would be you would hire har no detail escapes him he doesn't mind staring into the abyss of like a warehouse and figuring out how to optimize every minute detail of like product comes in where does it go what platform how do you get optimize what's the routing down to the minute like he's that brain it's just his it's his gift it's a dark gift and so both of these people actually all three of these people have these dark gifts where it's like you could never in your wildest streams hire scott if you could never hire har to do your logistics but what you can do now is they've like they've built these platforms that are agent and so it's like imagine if like the reinforcement training was done by the ultimate employee and that was priced at tokens well does that actually means so like they're billing an agent that's gonna be like let's say your logistics yeah employee but he himself is literally like kind of auditing the like the answer scene that he's building art saying like hey we know exactly what goes into building world class fulfillment and logistics we've gone today amazon we did a deliver like i know all these details now you've got a company that's an smb in the e com and it's like you don't know the knowledge that i have but i can program it into into an agent so that like all the workflows that you're eventually gonna have to do this agent can help you with and it'll give you the the things that would otherwise take you a lot of time even if you were the best in the world at it'll do those things automatically for you and so i think we're moving this world where like the best the best at a task will be able to product themselves as these agents and delivered so you know when social media came out yeah one of the cool things that happened and one of the reasons why there's this word influencer is because prior to social the only people you knew who did a thing were the people around you you were limited your geography yeah and the internet the superpower of the internet is that it vaporize geography so you know like we when we had a baby we're following these like it mom influencer types who are teaching you like how did it like get your baby to sleep and like little tips on you know sw and diapers and all these little things like i'm getting the best yeah mom coaching and dad coaching yeah from like not just my geography but like the world and those people became so the best teachers we're not teaching in schools anymore the best teachers were teaching on instagram and youtube and other places like that and they were getting millions and millions of followers because like the best teacher actually should have few billion students yeah and so the best got rewarded in that way and so that's what the internet you know like like last fifteen years has done and now with agents it's kind of the same thing it's like the best employee you're no longer limited to who you can afford yeah or who's nearby you who you can hire locally but actually like no globally who's the best at travel planning and booking who's the best at logistics you know workflow planning and analysis who's the best coding who's the best who's the best engineer you know right it's actually not who's best engineers who's the best engineer period yeah he can program himself in the same way that like content creators were able to like make pieces of content that's scaled and you know i can go to sleep and millions of people can listen to this podcast and now they're doing that with like a piece of software a piece of code that's gonna actually like take their brain and be like y i got i got that guy's brain here in this piece and do the digital work that they would have done for you right and they can and just like the best teachers have millions of students the best employees now actually work for millions of companies this is what what's gonna end up past yeah that's amazing i wanna do some stories i think who have here oh this is pictures these are scary we're gonna draw a card and then i want is there people that you've encountered in your life i want you to tell me some stories or story time make a card yeah and show the camera what you get i got peter till peter till do you have any peter till either lessons learned funny encounters interesting stories seeing him in action what you got on peter till the only time i've ever encountered peter peter till was on in the opportunity to invest in rep we were both going for the opportunity and i think when you go against somebody like peter till you plan to lose in most cases and i didn't i didn't end up losing the opportunity to invest in rep and i think part of it is the the realization that like any given sunday in in in a lot of games it's like a lot of people count themselves out but on any given sunday you have the opportunity to to to pull out a w and i i love that product i love it authentically like i use it all the time i love the vision of like empowering like a billion people to build the companies that they wanna build and to like i feel visceral visually like the tinker dilemma of like i'm not an expert but i wish that i were and i wish i could bring this idea to life right and that software is this like bicycle and i don't i'm like i'm i'm on a tri i'm on a tricycle i'm on like training wheels at best and like this thing makes you feel like you're on a motorcycle and i'm like i love that feeling and if you can tell that feeling to somebody and get them as excited about it as you are and use the product and abs ob obsessed over the details of it like i would send omni job like every product thought i had every like i have i'd have shower thoughts about it i was like you know whatever and it wasn't like work it wasn't like you know the art of the vc deal i was like i just genuine i genuinely loved it and then i think there was a moment where like where he was like i can have a guy who's probably the one of the best at on you know investors of all time or i can have matt and matt loves me and and and that was his choice and so i think that's the i think the lesson is like if you if you really do the work and you really love it like you might not win them all but at any given sunday you could pull out the dub bond who you got david bond okay tell his who's he and david bond interacts with bond passed recently david bond was the founder of t g david bond was a guy i got to know later in life he worked with a a very close friend in mentor of mine named rick and he was during during my sa article one of the things that i was like i'm just gonna go and try to spend time with people who i've always admired and never really gotten to to meet and david was on the shortlist list david had ultimately been part of the group that acquired a majority position in c and i got my first exposure to him there and he had just had this like incredible s career of like how he you know he ultimately you know it was huge investor in like the airline industry and you know at owned sports teams and was like a titan of industry and did it his way and what was his come up by the way because like you know that were cool stuff you do it the well he worked for the bass family and he was like he like helped build into like the investment strategy for the bass family in texas and ultimately like pivoted that into i think the first investment was like continental airlines where he made his first real like boo exit and ultimately ended up building t g into like one of the titans of the private equity industry and i got to spend a bunch of time with david like hours at a time he was like the kind of guy who where like he was late in life but he still had it like he he'd have these days where he was just like as hot and fired up as anything and so some days it would just be like let's just spend time talking about his job and his career and like lessons along the way and then other tyler sorry how how did you do so you're on your sa somatic yeah i wanna spend time this but would you call them him up you're like hey can i just come hang for what do you say i called rick hess and rick was building a a new strategy for investing i was just helping friends and he was like i was spending time doing you know doing i treated like all of my friends and family kind of like i was still in the portfolio vc i was i'm gonna treat them all like portfolio companies i'm just gonna go do things for them that matter and help and so like i would help friends like start companies i would like go over and clean out their garage i would like i had time for the first time in my twenty years and like i just wanted to spend time with people that i love and i a list i wrote a list of all the people and i like would say hey i i've time for the next couple of weeks can i help you on something and so rick was like well i'm building this thing and i'm partnering with david he's like why don't go over and talk to him about it and one of those trips he was like hey david's was really interested in ai will you like put together some thoughts and i was like a hundred percent and so i got to go and spend like a three hour session with bond and i was just like laying out where i saw ai got going i'm like showing mid journey i'm showing him like chat you know and and like just walking him through all the new products and and he's just silently like kinda like b on it and like asking a couple questions here and there and and at the end he's like what are you gonna do i'm like i know i'm gonna invest in a couple friends who are smart and building stuff here and i'm like what would you do and he goes i'd buy railroads and i'm like okay this guy maybe maybe he's just gone crazy maybe he's gone crazy i'm like i didn't understand what he mean i'm like i you gotta explain that to me i don't know what the hell you you're talking about he goes well there's two ways to play it one is these this world is moving so fast that everything is changing and it's like if you build software today or you build a product today it feels like it's moving so fast that it could be obsolete in six months and so that's shifting sand you can play towards the bleeding edge but that's where everyone is gonna be playing because it's shiny and it's fun and it's distracting or you can buy a railroad and it's like think about the things that in the times of most change are still gonna be here and it's like focused on the industries that aren't going anywhere and it was it was like this moment where we're like oh i'm talking to like business yoda and it was just like a really interesting framework and it's like i think it does apply as like the business that that i've been that ended up spending a bunch of last year working on is in a really old dirty industry that is like gonna be around forever but applies the these tools to it and so i kind of like met him in the middle which is like i was gonna use the tools that are available today to help an industry that i knew would be stable in the face of all of this change and so he was just like one of those guys where he could like pull out a invest in trains and have it be like one the most incredible business you know pieces of advice alright we got three more i think the thing that i pulled from from mark was like the idea that like where venture was heading and the institutional centralization of it kind of feels to me like we're at the almost the apex of that like when i joined this industry like there was all of this tribal knowledge there was like things that were hidden secrets what's an example well like you like like how to write a term sheet was like unknown like how to do a closing process was unknown like how to you know the the real mechanics of the industry were unknown let alone like the metrics of like what is good great bad growth metrics of retention or net dollar retention like a lot of venture today feels like it's really like institutional and it feels like even like further out where at this point of like the industry where it's like the knowledge is all shared it's all public people have like posted almost as as much institutional knowledge about an industry as possible we have like documents like the safe fit like revolutionize it like y created a whole process for like how to institutional a horn raising the handshake protocol like we protocol the industry and it's like we're at like the furthest ends maybe not the furthest end but we're like the match the mature part of this industry like when i got into it there were like ten seed funds in market that like you know you didn't have to be good just had to be alive to like go and find these things and there wasn't a ton of competition there weren't like mega funds coming in and doing seed rounds it's like you met a founder you liked the founder you went to yc there were fifty other people in the room you kinda like she said hey i like this one let's do it and you got to a handshake on a on a note mark i think saw where the world was heading on this he's like all these asset classes are maturing and we're going to build like a much bigger platform for it and i think was inspired by a lot of the c mentality early on of like c shifted the way that agencies have been on it went from this like i represent one client with one deal and it's like boutique but also like strategically like overt had this in insight that like if i rip an agent away from another agency all their clients come and it was like where is it c one client sat in the middle of ten agents with each of their own like personalized expertise and it's like in vc the same thing kind of existed you had one eight one one vc you had this boutique you're like i've got this board member that's my person and then reason comes along and it's like no you've got all of us and we all come with this like value proposition and it's like recruiting and marketing and all of these services and he like it was the realization that like vc was a service industry and institutional of that that like changed the way that a lot of venture was there like had had been done and then everybody rushed to create platforms and teams and like structure because they were just beating people on that on even if it wasn't like defective right they pushed the edge of that and they owned the brand of that of like what a platform vc could be and the other edge you had like benchmark and you know founders fund and like people were like you need me and or founder fund were you like you don't need anybody right you know so i i think what i took from that was like platform you can look at it at any industry vc included and like bring a new institutional centralization to it and i think they're still doing it i think they just acquired tu and thorn and that it's like the realization that like one of those edges that you're competing again is like distribution yeah media and you know if you can bring customers right like what are the startups ups really care about it's like customers and retention the scarce resources attention and so it's like we're gonna build attention into the offering and it's like that feels again ahead of like the customer first centric like customer centric like response and it's like most vcs were sent selling things that weren't necessarily like what the customer needed right it was capital like i named gill something he he invest in wiz and like every security sharpen basically he was like he un unbelievable the model he's like cool we're not gonna help you with you know marketing or recruiting like we have a network of cis at the top yeah five hundred companies and get to two million in arr if you invest with us yeah and then to those guys he was like hey you're gonna own a piece of portfolio yeah while you're sitting in your job you're gonna also be a venture investor of venture partner in our fund yeah and like kind of create a little bribery network that like actually worked and actually just like turns out here huge huge results like in a way outperforming results by figuring out that platform yeah and i think like those are like what he's continuing to do is find like what those gaps are what the what the customer really wants right and it's like if you could tell me like i want revenue like i want that's what i really want and you can deliver that that's pretty incredible and part of what the startup founder wanted was like you know the brand a sixteen z cool i want cool i wanna be at i wanna andrea to be like at our i wanna meet him i want these different things that you know again just work backwards from what else what actually resonates most vcs were selling cool right they were selling they were selling maybe not cool they were selling the promise of der risked right credibility yeah the the promise of credibility that we that we were something that had been like validated they were selling like if you got a sequoia investment like that's like there's a real business they've they've looked at billing like how many trillions of dollars of market cap or like from those people we're among that you you sell the association with market cap alright this derek cheater i have i have one absurd derek diet your story that's that's super funny so one of the things you realize at a talent agency and being around like like a list stars all the time is that like a lot of people go a little book bananas there's almost no equivalent though for sports stars because something embed in your brain when you are a little kid that these people are like larger than life and so i am a young vc at lower and derek jet and his partner are starting like a media company a sports media company and they're like we wanna spend time and like i i saw all this anything in like media tech i was like i saw for years and so we like go out for a dinner we go out to this nice restaurant in in beverly hills and we're sitting down to three of us and up to the table walks a guy and the guy is like the thickest deepest new york accent that you have ever heard in your entire he's like hey guys and like he sees jet and he's like about to talk about the specials and his face melts the guy almost like he gets like time is a flat circle and he is lost and it's like one of those moments where you see him like like reverse age agent into an eight year old and he's like this is like the moment of his life and so he's going he's like captures and like mister gina is gina like i'm i'm big fan he's like goes through the whole thing and at some point we all order the same thing we wrote to like this special if the guy recommends it it's was like truffle positive he comes back to the table a little bit later and he's like you know it's fresh truffle on top and he gives me a little bit of fresh truffle and he gives the his manager a little bit of fresh truffle and then he's over at mister jet and he looks at mister jet and he's putting the fresh truffle on and it and he just like he his brain freezes but his hand doesn't and it it gets to a point where it is it is so funny that we just start laughing as it's happening because it is an ongoing mountain o truffle on this plate it is the whole plate is black it is it is it must have been hundreds hundreds of dollars of fresh truffle on mister jet plate and he's like he's just looking at mister jet and he's like i think you got it and it was just one of those moments where you're like it's really funny to watch people in that moment of your life i don't have i don't have like a good laugh in front i just have like a different level of cool it's like it's another thing it transports you to being a little kid and so you know i i've had i've had one of those experiences myself and yeah is well this might be the one that is that is that is the one i grew up as a as the most die hard of diehard lakers fans i grew up in la i went i i was a i went to college during during the shack kobe years and the high school and the shaq kobe years high school you know christmas was like link game on tv like that's what we did he's one of those people for me that was like i got to watch this guy and then i got to be obnoxious at college like watching this guy beat the crap out of the celtic and it was really fun but as a again at at lowercase i had an opportunity there's a brief moment in time where i was managing director of a fund called lowercase thirteen which was a a kobe bryant partnership and it was like for a split second how does that happen what kobe reaches out i had a friend who was advising kobe her name is betsy sc nick and betsy said hey matt kobe is i think he'd been injured at the moment he was like he's thinking about what comes after basketball and he's always been obsessed with tech and adventure and he really wants to learn will you come down and have dinner and spend time with with kobe and teach him a little bit about venture capital and this is my jet like like truffle moment like i'm let's go i'm ready like i'll do you me to come now in the car i'll come right now and we can do it and she's like great we'll set up a time in the next activities so you can can come down so chris and i go down and have dinner with kobe and we like sit there and where he's like asking questions and it was like one of these things where you can kinda tell some people like whether they have like the second gear of curiosity like sometimes they ask the surface question and then there's another layer of curiosity where they asked like every relevant follow up question that you could imagine having been in the industry for a long time you're like oh this person's gone through and like they have real depth of curiosity they wanna know the details they don't want just the surface answer they wanna be like but how this is actually what makes you great at at like podcast podcasts and interviews is like you do the second question you don't just leave it at the first you do the follow and he did it for the entire there's like a three hour dinner and by the end he was just like this was awesome thank you so much i'd love to find a ways to do this again when you send me stuff that i can read and i was like okay i'll i'll send him some stuff that he can i put together like like the the essential reading list adventure every blog post that i ever love like i'm going through all the girly posts with wilson post and like all the all the stuff and thinking that he would like never read it two am i get a text you like i read that post and was just like whoa he was like in it and he would like text and like we'd had these conversations in the middle of the i was like listen when does this guy's sleeping i must be like going crazy because he was injured he's like just like texting and then eventually he goes i really wanna go spend some time and meet like we'd suggest that like you can come with us and go to san francisco and meet a bunch of the startup up companies he's like i'd love to again thinking like he'll never do it he's like let's go when when when are we going and so we take them up to san francisco and we go to see a couple startups so we spread it it's like early stage apartment startups and then we go to twitter and and we do like the tour of twitter and twitter just bought vine and we're like walking around we're onboarding and divine and doing the conversation with dick and adam d castle and out of bane and he's like i wanna see the whole place so we go down to like the engineering floor and he's walking past one of the like the hang rooms for the engineers and there's a kid in there and there's papa shot basketball and the kid have you ever watched those people who are like sa and h shot yes and they can like both handed it and it's like they go into like whatever the fourth gear of like the the matrix that you know they're in it and they're like both handing and like yeah they look like the tesla humanoid robot then like yeah if you're like this guy is that to the t and kobe looks in and he's like i gotta do it and he walks up behind him a guy and he goes i got next and all the engineers see like dick and adam and then they see kobe and they're like holy shit like jimmy is about to play kobe and they rush in and it's like vine has just come out at all like taking video this thing and like kobe goes he's gonna bang he hits like eighty and then like jimmy goes and it's like benjamin he hits like eighty two and the room like rob and it's like the greatest moment in this guy's life he has never been like it the whole like no it's like no one will ever believe for moment right he's like i beat kobe i papa shot that guy and like you expect every you expect kobe to be like oh congrats dude high five and i just remember the look on c face where it was like legitimately pissed it was like i wasn't like a fake it was like i'm buying one of these things never fucking happen yeah i will destroy you the next time i see ever letting that shit happen again and he like walks out it delete this twitter i would say yeah anyway so it i it was pretty incredible like getting to spend the time with him and then yeah we he was like hey really wanna build a shop and so for a brief moment we had like a side fund that we were putting together with kobe and made like two investments was like one of them was ended up being stripe out of that fund but he had a he had a business partner who ended up like trying to renegotiate and we don't do those kinds of things so anyway matt full of stories this is amazing super fun can thank you everybody doing it i feel like i could rude to word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a travel never looking back