there are like ways to make a million bucks and then ways to make a million bucks that could turn into a billion bucks right this is Sarah the queen of AI she's got a $100 million fund that she's investing into AI startups and we invited her on to brainstorm AI business ideas I mean I think the market for this company is very deep because people want a lot of video and so I think there's a billion dollars of video generation Revenue Sarah how hard is something like this to make people are generating a million dollars of cash loow for themselves it's not because they're deep AI people and it looks super real am I right what isn't this wild this is [Music] amazing so what do you mean by that you're saying there's ways to make a million bucks and then there's ways to make a million bucks that 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 in any dismissive way I think venture capitalist are very often accused of dismissing something as like a cash flow lifestyle business or whatever right or 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 year eight I then after that maybe we can grow this for another 50 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 I remember that's cute yeah 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 have become very interesting start very small so I I want to 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 in a 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 a period of time where people are like oh you know I'm an internet kid I'm gonna figure out some Drop Shipping thing and like make my first $100,000 I think this is it yes so so basically for people who don't don't really know you could go on Alibaba or AliExpress 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 can push a button you never had to make the product you never had to Warehouse the product you never have to ship the product it will just magically appear at your customer's door you know somewhere between one and 3 weeks later um all you have to do is the marketing bit and kind of what you're saying is open Ai and the other AI companies have built this magic that basically will take a 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 uh thanks for explaining it and I I think I think it's like easy with easier with a few examples right like copy editing is probably a prototypical one right you can do not amazing but like reasonable copy generation with these models today and so there's 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 copy Ai and Jasper these companies started this way right right and and then I have several friends who have shipped like AI companionship apps just look at you know paid apps in the app store by charting and you know some of those people are generating a million dollars of cash flow for themselves it's not because they're deep AI people when you say companion you mean like uh a digital girlfriend or boyfriend right I think people think that is skewed toward girlfriend in a way that's not necessarily true but if you and you know you can have your own ethical points of 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 uh can we do some like uh ballpark you know give people a sense 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 or girlfriend they kind of try to say friend but I think the use case is a little bit more in the uh in the relationship ship 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 50 million a year in revenue and I believe she had bootstrapped it for a while at least or raised very little money to get there is that right uh tell me if I'm off base I might be wrong on some of that yeah eugenia's built a very cash efficient business okay is that like a code for something are you an investor in rep no I'm I'm not an investor you just said everything without saying a thing it was basically like your friends with there you know the number 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 um 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 there's character AI that has like some absurd amount of traffic but I've 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 do you who want touch on 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 spend hours a day with yeah um you were at graylock I think when they invested in Discord I think the timing is there and Discord was one of those things that was probably overlooked because it was like you know mostly teenagers who play video games that were using this thing and it kind of looked like a chat room but you're like ah well how's it going to 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 definitely 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 response literally goes you are wasting my time I literally ruled the world okay so by the way on according to similar web which is like you multiply 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 310 million monthly uniques are you kidding me I mean that's more than the Wall Street Journal it's more than like a bunch of really insane is this company really that big I think people want companions this is what I'm saying that the be the like engagement characteristics around this stuff is real and So for anybody like starting a new business you know oneperson company shipping AI companion app to a niche like generating a million dollars of cash flow for themselves do you know how these things grow so I mean 300 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 of Mouth for example with character you can make new characters and people share them right so there's inbuilt virality there um 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 want to 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 investor in a company called haen you can make a video Avatar of yourself you cannot tell the difference and you know reaching that bar of quality is new as of this past year and like people create content that is unbelievable and they share it and so like now hajen is in tens of millions of Revenue great they've never spent a dollar on like paid marketing Sam have you seen this thing before by the way hen this is one of those products that I'm 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 kind of sharing stuff it's more like whatpad 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 all together 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 set 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 uh to in in a training system or educational product and so that's what this is and that's why they it just it says the top raise 60 million in funding but I think the the the chart I saw was pretty absurd that you know they basically raised a 20 million in ARR very very fast holy crap some of the usage actually also is yes it's a business use case but it's like all kinds of businesses like creators smbs 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 hang out on the pot a lot but like then even each of you can contrib 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 used it is it amazing or is it still up and coming no it's like pretty good this this C this one crosses the line I would say of usable in real 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 try to use it for your use case and you're like how how come the Tweet had such a good output but mine is kind of 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 usable by customers W well they just did 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 or 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 right oh wow okay I stand corrected all right guys really quick so back when I was running the hustle we had this premium newsletter called Trends the way it worked was we hired a ton of analysts and we created this sort of playbook for researching different companies and ideas and emerging Trends to help you make money and build businesses well HubSpot did something kind of cool so they took this Playbook that we developed and we gave to our analysts and they turned it into an actionable guide and a resource that anyone can download and it breaks down all the different methods that we use for spot upcoming trends for spotting different companies that are going to explode and grow really quickly it's pretty awesome that they took this internal document that we had for teaching our analysts how to do this into a tool and are giving it away for free that anyone can download so if you want to stay ahead of the game and you want to find cool business ideas or different niches that most people have no idea they exist this is the ultimate guide so if you want to check it out you can see the link Down Below in the description now back to the show all right 're back uh 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 s par say it's okay to make this Avatar and you said that you started the podcast by saying there's like a lot of you had a really the line you said 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 uh 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 motions 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 the company wants to continually pull like push the bounds of what you can do and so I think this is 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 a single use case Sam have you seen the ones that do this for D Toc products the AI for D Toc product ads so go to icon. me if you scroll down you can watch the video so see the video of the Asian dude who's holding like a collagen peptides thing so that's a AI generated video it's the product in his hand that's not actually in his hand with a script that was written he never recorded it and now you have a ugc very authentic looking ad for an influencer you go to the next one look he's holding a different product that's because he didn't re-shoot it they just put a different product in his hand and it looks super [ __ ] 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 so these are not AI generary people this 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 hm okay I'll do it I'll create my my digital twin that will be able to do my brand like branded content so a brand can come in request from a let's say an instagrammer with a million followers and say 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 thing you know take 10 20 minutes set up my tripod record an ad 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 approve 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 and so that's what he's doing arcades is the same thing if you go to arcades it's like pretty [ __ ] wild and it's in 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 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've said like license to the company you can do whatever you want with it yeah exactly uh but 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 Fiverr or something um but the idea would be I don't know too much about the under under the hood stuff of these I just started playing with them but the idea would be that you know people are not going to know what the hell's real and 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 kind of take the existing models you know maybe customize them uh here but then it's just in a wedge in this case it's for e-commerce companies and they're going to try to build a business here that will do it'll be these both these business very quick to get to you know mid seven figures of Revenue uh Without You Know Much marketing spend or much of anything just because the 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 like okay what's the difference between like the first million and the next 999 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 staying with visual content uh 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 Ecom as you described it could be renderings 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 and be like yes I see it that is the room I'll put my life savings into this and our friend Peter level has a thing where you take a picture of your home and then it does interior design for you and shows you mockups which is pretty cool yeah but but I'd say like those you know those renderings Ally generated cost like thousands of dollars right and now if you can give it to people for very little incremental costs like that's an interesting wedge like there's a handful of um AI headshot companies making Revenue if you guys have ever gotten like a a professional head shot taken yeah dude I so this actually this is like kind of actually an interesting version of the Drop Shipping idea so these are this is I bet you this would work so there was an ad I saw on Facebook I think it was a Facebook ad and it basically was a guy and he had a head shot I think of somebody who I re recogniz maybe it was a VC in Sil Valley basically like if you're in San Francisco I take awesome head shots for you you you should have a great shot for your website for your LinkedIn whatever it's good for business good for your career and you click his site and it's a bunch of people in the tech industry and it was like $300 or $400 and I went to some Warehouse type of place in some some little like photo shoot studio in San Francisco stood there awkwardly got like head shot made and paid this guy you know 350 bucks and he was running Facebook ads profitably to do that so he was able to put in and acquiring a customer for whatever 70 bucks and he's generating 350 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 cost 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 these go viral of like viral headshot viral yearbook 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 arbit period of time yeah but what's what's an ex like so I've seen the same ones where it's like you look like a 80s Glam shot model remember I think the the professional one people are willing to pay more right so if it's if it's actually going to be for your what's an example of one yeah like look at this um look at this company Aragon doai oh dude look at this landing page this is genius they just have a sidescrolling Carousel and it's the befores and then there's a line and then they just that same photo becomes the after that is very well done looks good uh 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 to 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 you like see the right basic 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 good example the so I invested 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 gpt3 or something like that they they were kind of back before or sorry before chat GPT just when it was gpt3 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 needed a blog post written or an email or you needed um you know copy written for an ad whatever it was they just made a standalone tool that would do that under the hood it's you know the open AI model is doing 80 90% 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 to 50 million in AR they got to 50 million AR in in one year which is to go from zero to 50 million in Revenue in one year is just absurd and the way the reason they were able to do that is because their background as Internet marketers as guys who are 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 $150 out or a dollar in equals $2 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 most people in Silicon Valley don't ever run pay ads that's just like a pretty crazy thing I think like if we just go to the difference then like the challenge for any one of these companies that gets this wedge and like is rare to see Z to 50 in 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 999 million of Revenue has to be like I think more traditional not um uh 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 uh and like you hit it on Reddit because it's a novel capability uh like I think then you need 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 um uh it could be like what are the Arguments for like why somebody gets to dominate that that business um 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 um and if I like stop working hard or other people compete with me like the tribal get steeper or I fall off and and I I think one simple answer is on companions did you guys ever 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 um 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 10 and then a 100 and then a billion I actually firmly believe that if if something can scale to 10 million there it may take a while but if it can get to 10 it can almost always get to 100 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've actually that's been that's been hard for me to figure out how to do that but uh that's a fun exercise to think well if I can just get to a million I bet you I can get to 10 and if I get to 10 I know for a fact I can get to a 100 yeah by the way the Sims lifetime sales5 billion so uh 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 going to be even stickier it's going to be a big business right um hey Sarah why dude you're like pretty in the not [ __ ] this fun thing like why don't you just go do this this sounds go make one this sounds way more fun than investing in it um 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 uh 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 um 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 going to be at the same level um 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 you know Never Say Never I think we we incubate companies where 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 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 uh but s Park classic compliment thank you very much you're not Tech you're more technical than me but you're not technical but you're also not technical you're almost goodlook yeah yeah yeah you're hotter than me but I'm a one you're a three uh did you uh when you 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 now she's Sarah's getting me all hyped on this [ __ ] I'm like this looks really fun to to mess around with yeah I me think it's like anything else you gota you'd have to have a partner to speed you up like you learning to to code to be able to to do these things 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 a doesn't want to 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 marketing side you got to make this product do do this and um that's not so hard that's that's pretty easy this is exciting uh you get to see a lot of cool [ __ ] let's um let's do some of your like specific kind of thesis so you have this website conviction. good website by the way how'd you get that domain I'm an internet person yeah okay all right did you see her website she has a website for her uh I think it's the incubator where you got to 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 it's yeah it's a little CLI typ what's what's that URL um I think it was called commit it was like our program for like hackathons college students Etc yeah it's commit. conviction. comom Sean it's a pretty cool website actually oh you open up it's a terminal yeah oh God uh let me see let me try to do this so run no try to break job D HTML got to type in help so if you type in help it like gives you the menu anyway slash is like a folder I don't know I don't know how to do this um all right so you have a website with a bunch of basically like requests for startups or you know things that you think are gonna going to be built in in uh in AI so let's run through some of these because I that's actually why I initially was like we got to have her on the to to kind of um to talk some of 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 while back but your your personal seller it might have been one like my partner PR of reedy's or something but we can certainly talk about it yeah okay I I'll give you the summary so the summary is uh your personal seller I think the idea here is that there's a bunch of places online to sell stuff Etsy and eBay and Amazon a bunch of different places to sell things um but actually like doing that is a bunch of work like 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 Ecom management of the of the sell of of the of setting up the shop and running it is that what that means yeah I think like um 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 and it could be um 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 a bunch of things that um 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 like what is the sock I want to 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 in all these different domains and just automate them uh at least at a basic level like I think you can now right and I think like that there the platforms um Shopify and and square Etc 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 um how do companies do that now so let's just say you're a company with 10,000 SKS um how do you get accurate descriptions for all of them well usually if you have 10,000 SKS you have like it's a you have like you don't have 10,000 unique uh totally variant color VAR size variant things like that so like I'll give you I'll tell you an our case right so I have an Ecom store and we have we spend uh let's see probably like five or six grand a month on just Shopify Plus or whatever like the pre the Enterprise Shopify thing that's just the Shopify cost on top of that I would say we probably have another um three to five grand a month on Shopify apps so you need an app for search you need an app for uh bundles you need an app for this that there's like a ton of things that shopy doesn't provide so my all-in just software cost is at least 10 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 his job is just to like run the store like 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 merchandiser the merchandiser 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 these need to be rearranged so there's a human being that does that there's also apps that do that but you kind of need the app plus the software today because the apps not quite good enough to do it by itself we then have vas that go in and they do all the product pages the descriptions the templates the tagging so that our 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 or 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 Le like future state of things that's just the current state of things and and Sean 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 think this is 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 um The Voice automation Market I think like a lot of your listeners will have seen the GPT 40 demo where it's like a voice that may or may not sound like scarjo talking like in real time well we played with 11 Labs no but that that's dubbing she's talking about just being able to like Alexa you just talk to it and um it just talks back and it sound like scet Johanson just like chat GPT but you don't have 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 reasoned 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 11 there's like exactly one independent voice API business and tens of millions of Revenue and that's 11 they're great that's amazing um I think there are other opportunities so like there's a company called caria that does like more realtime voice for example you think 11 is by the way 11 labs think they're at tens of millions in Revenue uh they are they're definitely at you know a a large number that is in the tens of millions of Revenue hope I'm not surprising surprising a market with that but you know a lot of developers will immediately gravitate like toward API 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 so like just to just like you know your personal seller um I think they're going to be a bunch of interesting voice service is 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 8:00 am to 6:00 pm um or a lead generation business where I'm like well like my Plumbing broke and like are you available tomorrow at 3M but it's much huge believer in this huge like and what Sean this this simple idea so you know like when the when the internet came out it was like um oh it's going to be so crazy but like one of the obvious things was like Hey every restaurant just kind of needs their menu online like you should put your you should put your restaurant exists where it's located and then put your menu up there even as a PDF that's still like value ad for you it's like it became where every business needed a website and now what I think it's 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 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 us it's usually run by like it's like Mike's pest control and Mike's out in the field doing things all day controlling the pest 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 you call 10 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 going to 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 uh like weekly tutoring session that I have basically I was like I want to build one of these 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 amazing talent they're just somewhere out in the world you just have to find them so what somewhere does they find you Elite Talent now the big problem if you go to some.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 or my real estate business or I need somebody to do a data entry right so you have all these jobs now the button on the site is basically like you want to 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. this is this is one I built on 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 lets you build a phone agent for yourself so I went on here and I built a phone agent so I built a guy who could answer the phone so that when somebody goes to somewhere and they want to they want to hire somebody it'll be like awesome what are you hiring for have you ever hired overseas and you're like yeah I have it's like cool um tell me what you're looking for in a couple you know a couple sentences oh great it sounds like what you're looking for is somebody who could be a developer for your Shopify store our our noal budget for that is 2,000 a month would that work for you or are you looking for something a little bit more a little bit less and then it answers it it basically does the intake the initial sales call for you and it's like no problem we've hired this month for 85 other Shopify Brands who are looking for Shopify developers you're in good hands uh we do this all the time we will uh I'm going to start looking for candidates now I'm going to 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 it or it'll pull from our existing database and be like here's an example resume this is the type of person we'd be looking for would 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 Anissa sales call and found the customer's requirements and kind of already warmed the sale up and told the customer what they needed 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 going to have their version of that this is 100% way better than having a call center or it might or it will be when it as long so long as it works as good but this is absolutely the way to go all right let's do some more so you have another one on here that's I think an easy one that's cool NextGen auto complete and I think the idea here is you do a Chrome extension or a browser extension that not just like autocomplete helps you fill in the next word it thinks you're going to 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 posts in your voice which is kind of like the next level up from autocomplete next level up from gramarly it doesn't just kind of 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 think it can be you know lots of different types of of business communication but especially like email so I don't know this is this is actually um my friend Mike Vern's idea I think he suffers 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 want to use a certain phrase and I think the next level of like value and impact is definitely going to be um fine-tuning to specific voice and nobody wants to write like chap GPT like nobody wants to be the generic AI either so what everybody wants is the thing in between this shit's all wild to me is there anyone right now doing that that you like because I would like to use this today uh I mean superhuman has like really interesting AI features but I think the the unlock is going to be the personalization and what's your overarching in thesis so you have this thing called software 3.0 which by the way most VC thing to do to be like oh software 3.0 web 3.0 you you've done it you you you've gone full VC what is software 3.0 yeah okay so the seed for that phrase software 3.0 it comes from actually an essay that Andre karpathy wrote years ago about software 2.0 and the base premise here is that like you had to write uh a lot of software by hand in a prior generation before machine learning and then software 2.0 Andre you know worked at Tesla was working on autopilot was really about data set labeling right you you you are teaching a machine learning model by the data you choose to put into the pipeline um how to do new tasks software 3.0 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 Shawn was talking about for his lead capture intake form voice 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 schedule 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 um 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 so 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 uh or maybe your contrarian 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 get I'm going to give 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 contrarian 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 Greylock I was one of several people who were like okay we're gonna go understand Healthcare and digital health and I was like ah healthc care sucks right it's a quarter of the economy it's really important how could you not want to 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 silcon Valley entrepreneurs are seeking is like not a good idea and we just did a a healthcare administration automation company so I'm like oops like changed my mind real hypocrite here and like one of the reasons being I'm like well if you think about the Mind numbing work that happens in healthcare 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 fertile 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 Healthcare I went to the pediatrician yesterday my doctor is with my baby there and I'm sitting there and she's got her iPad uh on like a table and there's a video like there and I'm like who the [ __ ] is that guy and they're like oh that's just like my scribe I uh he's just listening in and he's and he's taking notes but she was like I used to stay up until 3:00 a.m. taking notes on all of my patience 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 going to be unnecessary in a few years but it was amazing to have a medical scribe I've never seen such a thing and she's like oh this has been around for a long time 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 Services already right because like it used to be the doctor taking the notes and they're 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 and now there are a number of scribe businesses in um medicine that are growing really fast like a bridge nabla freed 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 mman had a good thing he was like everybody worries about AI taking your job you but that's not the right way to think about it it's AI will take your tasks uh 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's certain tasks today it can't do that in the future it can do and So eventually a job becomes a bundle of tasks um 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 can 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 like the doctor's job that already got separated out the task that they they didn't like but that became a job of its own yeah Tas became a job and the job goes back to being a task basically in this case yes yeah yeah it's a good framework Sarah are you are you investing exclusively in AI related businesses I am a technology investor I'm not a machine learning researcher 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 to 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 will work that are important right um 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 going to be really interested in that if you ask me like what are the ideas that we think about or we hunting it is all in AI I do want to put one more thing out there which is definitely not a idea that just anyone can go after it's kind of 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 um headshot application or something but I do really want to 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 this is a hot take to your former question but like I think a lot of people intellect in technology really the intellectually 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 going to 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 Nvidia chip what what else is what's what's another shape of a company that could be in that that space so I I guess an example would be like well what are other bottlenecks like memory bandwidth what like what if you designed storage to be specific for AI data centers what if you like you could do cooling systems for like there are if you just reimagine the entire Data Center around like big AI inference I think you end up with like totally different needs the uh 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 and 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 writing it in a in a way of like I don't know we're going to be able to do that but then when you think about it the other way around where you where you think about well in 1998 if you said like you know what how big is the internet going to be uh I'm sure it went far beyond virtually 100% of the expert's opinion as to how big it will get and I remember reading this article the other day and I was like that's just absolutely astounding that we're in one of these moment seoa seoa 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 $600 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 and know that's a VC saying that which is which is not just like some journalist who doesn't get it who doesn't get Tech uh Sarah what was your reaction to that 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 spens in the past let's say like the broadband buildout like well we wanted the internet you know like we spent about2 trillion do 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 gonna get out of it I think we're gonna get a lot of value we had dares on the dares founded HubSpot daresh is amazing yeah he's really wise um 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 nerv about a lot of this stuff where the world is going to go and he's like well I'm fairly educated and I think that it's not going to be as good or bad as you think it's going to be do you uh agree with that sentiment no I think I think it's actually pretty bodal I think it' be like bad or it's like it could be much much better so great it's it's the opposite it's either going to be much worse or much better is kind of your take what what's the bad like what's the bad situation look like where like like for example I think the bad situation and I'm fairly educated so take it with the great ass Sal the very bad situation is that there's just going to be this massive gap between the halves and the halves not and like if you have money now that's going to grow and you're gonna be awesome the bad situation is AI kills us all right that's the uh the Doom situation that that's a bad situation but then I there but in route to that there is just this massive separation of the halves and halves not have nots 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 Cor ated that your your resources or your Capital today mean that you most take advantage of the of the AI Revolution right I actually think people have a lot of agency in this right they can go start these businesses make a million dollars um that's such a small group of people why does it have to be because of human nature how many people know about this [ __ ] go do your well your parents are Tech entrepreneurs but go go ask Sean's mom and dad go ask my parents go ask my brother and sister like people are not entrepreneu even if this widens the number of people who can be successfully entrepreneurial it's not going to like it's going to go from 0.1% or whatever 1% of the population to I don't know not 50 right it's not going to go that far yeah I don't know if it has to express in pure entrepreneurialism 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 EMT cheer on the podcast and emt's a smart thoughtful guy and he's like you know the P Doom the probability of of actual Doom here is is 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 conjecture in the future of both the objectives of these models and capabilities of these models that are kind of like handwavy right like if like I think when you talk to experts about um some of the suggested scenarios like here are two classic ones oh you know people are going to use this to design a virus that kills us all um bioweapons 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 going to take over all of the resources in the world and kill us all there's no linear path from here to there and so when when people ask me about like the Doom 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 going to 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 want to stay ahead on these capabilities technically well have you heard any what are some what's a wild example of how people use this for hacking or for fraud like for for my company we get emails from me it's not really me and sometimes it will have or um it'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 spoofed 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 get there and if you ask me like what are the reasons in which uh broad use of cheap intelligence are going to be great I can give you so many reasons right so Andre kPa just started a company around education and uh like the the the fields that have been super resistant to cost Improvement basically Healthcare 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 um and I I think like when when people talk about like the Doom scen it's really fun and scary to talk about the dystopian Doom scenario but uh I think the opportunity cost of not exploring the ways in which like there you know you can have an economy of abundance we need to talk about that and that is really what I focus on Sam do you know who Andre karpati is no but I love his name it's a lovely name Andre is a is a uh amazingly well-respected research scientist and educator who's trying to create um like an experience uh 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 interactively and he's one of like the five big thought leader type guys he ran Tesla's AI program uh 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 aai he then quit open aai it says He's listed as a co-founder of open AI so so I guess he the man he was like the early uh early mind behind it and at Tesla he was basically the the guy leading their entire self-driving unit um I think he's I forgot what his title was he's like you know Chief AI guy when I lived in San Francisco it was a fun period I lived there from 20 12 to basically 2020 or 20 22 and back then it was like the airbnbs of the world and Tesla or um Uber and we had sidecar back then where it was like holy crap we're g to get to a stranger's car and this is so exciting this is so new and and you'd go to hackathons 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 uh around the ferry building and this kid recognized me he's like oh Sam you know I like the Pod uh I go hey what's up man and he said I'm doing a hackathon right now in the ferry building upstairs do you and your wife want to come up and like see what's going on and I was like hell yeah let's do it and so we go up there and it was so invigorating I was like dude we used to do this exact same thing but it was around like the sharing economy and all this type of stuff and they were I was just talking to people what they were building and I remember thinking like this is like totally I guess it happens in San Francisco a bunch I was like 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 was the thing it was like oh X for mobile everything we got to make we got to make it work on a 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 [ __ ] this is the next thing this is the next big social app and then it would kind of die but then you know Instagram Snapchat you know they they they actually they stuck and I remember the early days of musically that now become Tik Tok and so mobile was like the big thing at the time then it became crypto and it became the crypto Hub um but it started to lose a little bit of the Steam for crypto because crypto was a lot more International um but now it looks like for AI San Francisco at least is back as the The Hub s are you in in San Francisco yeah uh we're in the mission in San Francisco and like I I think we really believe in these sort of like Community aspect of um not in the like maybe in the squishy sense of the word too but like if you're think 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 at the frontier and we actually do this grant program embed ed. conviction. comom to create that kind of community and a bunch of other stuff but it is it is around this idea that you people want to have the experience that you described Sam which is like well like not all of this is going to 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 22 um and you're young and single and you're into this [ __ ] I would just say two words I would say go west Go West Young Man like by the way people always talk about San Francisco it's dangerous it's dirty it's Lawless that's the appeal baby you can say you you made it in the war torn city of San Francisco you don't want to be a billionaire who is coddled you want to be a billionaire who grew up on the Mean Streets of San Francisco yeah not that mean all right I think we have to wrap up Sarah thanks for coming on where should people find you and uh where where where should they follow you you can just Google Sarah Goa or conviction. comom and I'm on I'm on Twitter um all right that's it that's the pod thanks guys [Music]