Brainstorming ChatGPT Business Ideas With A Billionaire | ft. Dharmesh Shah (#438)

Dharmesh Shah

Again, I've been in software for 30 years now, doing startups for pretty much my entire professional career. The only time I've felt like... like how Sean kind of opened with us, is there's this party going on next door and I'm here knitting. It's like this is too big to ignore. I think it's the single largest opportunity and biggest tech paradigm shift we've seen since the internet originally came out. Mobile was big, but there was a discreet set of use cases. When you put a camera on a phone, when you put a GPS device on a phone, a bunch of consumer apps like Uber and others came up, and that was awesome. But it was not like this impacts everything like the internet did. It's like, okay, there are some businesses, some new opportunities, lots of good things, lots of money made, lots of startups. Awesome. This is an order of magnitude bigger than that.

Shaan Puri

Alright, what's up? We have Dharmesh back. Dharmesh, who is co-founder of HubSpot and multiple-time guest on the pod, one of the fan favorites. You're back, and I don't know what we're gonna talk about because usually we have these little cheat sheets where it's like 3 to 5 bullet points of interesting ideas, topics, experiments you've been running, things like that. And I'm sure you have those, but I don't have the cheat sheet. So, where do you wanna start?

Dharmesh Shah

I say we start with generative AI because I don't know if you've heard, but there's this thing called ChatGPT. I get this question from my friends and family all the time. It's like, "Dharmesh, have you checked out this ChatGPT thing?" I'm like, "Really? Do you even know me?" Of course, I've played with it. I've been obsessed ever since it came out.

Sam Parr

Did you see... I want to talk about your topics, but really quick, did you guys see this? So Sam Altman, who co-founded OpenAI, he's like the man in charge. I read an article where he was quoted as saying something like, "I have enough money and I don't want equity in the company." I don't know if I entirely believe that, but that's wild if true. Because it [OpenAI] could be one of the more valuable companies in the world in the next 10 years.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, he didn't... I don't know if he said it like he didn't say it on the record, but the person reporting it said Sam reportedly has no equity in the for-profit version of OpenAI because he's already wealthy enough. He didn't feel like he needed to or didn't want to have that clouding his judgment when it came to this. And like this is pretty... you're gonna bet what one private company, what one private startup is most likely to become worth a trillion dollars or more? I think at this point, that has to be OpenAI, right? Is that like... Dharmesh, would you disagree with that?

Dharmesh Shah

It'd be up there in the top three, okay? I honestly can't think of who else would rank higher in terms of probability of getting.

Shaan Puri

in the top 3 and I don't know what 23 are

Sam Parr

yeah well who are the other 23 do you know

Dharmesh Shah

I'm, you know, I don't know. I was like, "No, I would say that one's the transformative one." Right? I think, you know, a lot of the kind of Tesla gains we've sort of seen... I'm not sure if there are like big surprises left. It's like, okay, they will make it better, they'll get to full self-driving, and we'll see kind of progress on that front. But in terms of just raw valuation, it's the wild card. OpenAI is the one that could actually pull out.

Shaan Puri

and they get they they get a lot of shit because people are saying like you know like you know elon kind of is is stoking this fire like how did this nonprofit go to a 4 pro how did this open sourced nonprofit company research lab basically become a for profit semi closed you know company and I think that's people are gonna make people are gonna take shots and make fun of openai because it's clearly the new powerful thing that's so some people are gonna say how it's gonna ruin the world and how terrible they are but he did give a there was a a story that came out with a good explanation which was they were burning a lot of money in the research lab they needed more money elon was gonna be the big backer so he was gonna pledge or commit a $1,000,000,000 to it he and then he was like no I don't like the way this is going like Google is way ahead and I'm gonna take over openai and I'm gonna write the ship here this is the this is what this is the story that came out yeah they haven't nobody's clarified if this is true or not but it came out in I think plat the platformer publication and so they go elon tried to take it over sam altman and the cto greg who who was the former cto of of stripe they them and the group that was in charge of openai rejected that so elon's like basically like I'm taking my ball and I'm going home have fun playing basketball without the ball and he's like I'd say he took his funding and he left so he a couple months later the he left openai he said oh the the public story was oh it's a conflict of interest with tesla because they're also working on ai but he reneged on his funding and so now they had this huge shortfall in funding that they were gonna have to cover and so their solution was let's create a subsidiary that's a for profit thing that we can raise money into because we're not gonna get you know where else do we get a you know $500,000,000 or $1,000,000,000 of donations here and so they they did that they raised money in that and then they capped the profits of that company so so that was kind of their explanation which is a little bit less devious than people make it sound they're like oh they tricked everybody by going from nonprofit to for profit to all the profits which is I think how people perceive it today

Dharmesh Shah

yep I yeah I don't I don't know the details I have no insider knowledge but I

Shaan Puri

I thought you had like a billionaire chat group where every billionaire just kind of shares the back channel of what's going on. Do you not have like a billionaire WhatsApp?

Dharmesh Shah

I have that, but I don't have any insider knowledge from that particular chat group. My sense here is that building large language models, as OpenAI is doing, is supremely capital intensive, which is rare for a software company, which is what they are. So, it's expensive. They needed access to capital. I think they structured it such that it does cap the profits. If you had to do that kind of "oh, we're going to have to spin off and have this for-profit thing," they did it well. I could be wrong, but Sam Altman seems like a reasonable, rational, non-evil guy. I mean, he's a capitalist, fine, and I mean that in the most positive way possible. I don't think he was out to mislead anyone; I think he's trying.

Shaan Puri

to solve the problem ways we can go with this ai thing but I wanna share something funny so I basically cleared my calendar this whole week and I just treated it as ai week because I was like dude I I can't just sit here and I hear the music at this party just bumping at the house next door and I'm over here knitting and I'm like I gotta put this down I gotta go see what's going on at this party and so I cleared my calendar and I just spent every day this week just messing around with ai tools just getting to play play with it for myself that's how I learn is by like just messing around and and and trying to experiment and do things I wanna share with you guys something funny basically I stitched together a few ai tools I was like let me make an intro song for the podcast using ai so I went on chat gpt and I told it I said this is all I wrote write an intro rap for our podcast my first million our key phrase is no small boy stuff okay so here's it it gave me a full rap but I'm just gonna read you the chorus so he goes here's how he goes he goes no small boy stuff we on that grind my first million is time to shine we talk a big money no pennies no dimes together we climb one step at a time and it start so it gives us this this great rap that's on on on brand and then I took that and I found this guy roberto who had made this demo where he turned his voice rapping into kanye and I don't know if you've seen this but it got like a 1000000 views it's this incredible thing where and he's like yeah dude this is crazy he's like I didn't make this he's like I was just on reddit and I saw that someone uploaded a kanye voice model so I clicked it and he literally the thing is and I should make I should make a youtube video about this like just how to do this one process but basically it's a Google collab folder which is just like a google's little coding interface so you don't have to do write any code it's just here's here's a place to run the code and then it's a link to mega upload and then the mega upload is where he hosted the kanye voice model and so all you do is you record yourself doing what I just did and then it turns into kanye west rapping it and it sounds exactly like kanye it's amazing and so and it takes literally like 15 minutes to do the whole thing there is no there was like nothing else to do it was so easy it was crazy

Sam Parr

are we allowed to use kanye's voice for I think

Shaan Puri

So, like, a 10-second thing is not a problem. It helps if I get sued; who cares? None of us here would bother or worry about that.

Sam Parr

So, well, yeah. Dharmesh will... So, Dharmesh is the CTO and co-founder of HubSpot, by the way. I don't know how big the team is now, but it's somewhere around the 35,000 mark.

Dharmesh Shah

the well over 7,000 but

Sam Parr

Oh my god, 7,000! My bad. The market cap of the company varies from $15 billion to $25 billion over the last couple of years. So you have, like, constantly tinkering. You have Wordplay, which is a project that you made that I think you said had millions of people playing it. You have an interesting insight into this just from your perspective at HubSpot, and you're actually using all this stuff. What excites you about this generative AI thing? And you also say that, like, you're like, "Why is Bill Gates excited?" That's a great headline. It's in the MDD doc, Sean, and like immediately I'm like, "Okay, you've got me interested." Anytime a headline says, "Why Bill Gates is buying farmland," I click.

Dharmesh Shah

let's a couple of things I think that the listeners and viewers I think would be interested and benefit from one is most of the discussions around generative ai are around the kind of generation of either text to text that says oh write me a blog post at 300 words on this particular topic or it's text to image like these dall e 2 or midjourney or stable diffuser something like that which are great use cases and they kinda capture the imagination because as humans we are very impressed with when software can actually generate or create something and that's awesome and then not to take away from that but there's a third use case that almost nobody talks about which is the ability to go from text to code and so what happens there is to say okay and what this leads to is the thing that bill gates is excited about I'm excited about is that you can take a natural language prompt that describes something and then generate code that does that thing as a result of which you can now build what I call chat ux or that that term has been used before but which is a chat based user experience for software so right now the way you use most software regardless of what it is web based or whatever if they series of clicks and drags and touches and swipes because you've got the thing in your head that you wanna do and then you go through you with your knowledge of the software you kinda execute the series of steps at the end of it you hopefully get the thing you want whatever it was you were looking to accomplish with the software and that's what engineers like we would call an imperative model an imperative model is you give step by step instructions that says do this and then do this and then do this and then do this and then I get the thing what natural language allows us to do is use what developer could call a declarative model instead of describing all the steps describe the result that you want at the end of the thing and then the software does everything in between so it's it's a difference between having a junior intern that you have to explain it's like I want you to go do research on this thing and this thing and come back and then give me the and then a senior person you're like you know we're digging into this topic on journey of ai and I'd like a really well researched thoughtful thing that I mean here's the outcome we're looking for that's it but right that mean

Sam Parr

Is it as simple as, "Give me the code for a website that looks exactly like Airbnb, but is red and is for cars," or something like that?

Dharmesh Shah

It could be something like that. It could be something more sophisticated. So, we'll look at the HubSpot example. In HubSpot, you know, which is a CRM software, we have our account building tool. For instance, "Hey, I want to build a report that shows me all my subscribers to Hampton over the last 90 days, broken down by geography and then who actually sourced that deal." Now, you can do that in HubSpot, right? You can do that and a thousand other things in our reporting tool, but you sort of have to know how the reporting tool works.

Sam Parr

You have like HubSpot certified. I think like you've trained people how to use HubSpot. Now you're saying you just text it like a friend? Like, yeah.

Shaan Puri

it's like do you know english and do you know what you want you know what to write that's the new requirement not do you know how to code not do you know how to use hubspot not do you know how to run a sql query it's do you know english and actually honestly the english thing is also gonna go away it's do you know any language do you know how to speak and do you know what you want and if you know those two things you will get to the answer like I don't know how to code but my first thing I did during ai week was I was like I'm gonna make a website I'm gonna see like how fast I can make a website from code and so literally this this is kinda this this part kinda blew my mind so I I wasn't surprised that I could make a website using this but I I just get I just said this I go and we should screen share this part but tell me how to tell me how to make a simple website that says hello world in the middle of the page right and it so then it it spits out this block of code that's like you know html whatever header meta tag title style whatever it writes the code and then it says here's your thing and it says here's your thing but it was a local website like I could open up my computer but nobody else could see it it's an html page and I go so I I didn't even know how to ask the question properly but I go how do I make this so that my friend eugenio can can see this and and he just goes oh to make this website viewable online so your friend eugenio could see this you're gonna need to host it somewhere here's how you could do it there's a bunch of options but you can go to netlify and it's like it basically walked me through how to make a netlify thing alright so that I was like alright I get that and it tells me step by step go here click sites do this do this and and then I go when I go to I you know I hit a wall which is so common if you ever try to help somebody with a tech thing they're gonna hit something which is like I don't see it or mine's grayed out and so that's what happened to me I go hey for some reason when I go to try to upload my website it's grayed out it says page it says I can't do it and he goes apologies for the confusion here's the problem netlify is looking for a folder but you're trying to do a file and I was like how the hell does this know to troubleshoot my issues on some other product or service that part blew my mind and it literally and I was like oh thank you and I finished it and I have the website up now and I was like that was 10 minutes and it was like having a friend teach me

Dharmesh Shah

dude that's

Shaan Puri

Crazy! It was so crazy to me that this was able to happen. I mean, it's like the least impressive website in the world because, again, I asked for a website that said "Hello, World." But, you know, still, I just made that. And again, the whole thing took 10 minutes. Not like it's so impressive, but what was impressive was the fact that it could help me navigate some obstacles I hit along the way. It understood that I didn't have to know how to ask, "How do I set this up with an online hosting provider?" I instead just said, "I want my friend to be able to see this." These are the little things. I spent all week looking for these little mind-blowing moments, and in the first 15 minutes, I had two because of this. It was crazy!

Dharmesh Shah

Yeah, there are a couple of points to pull on here. One is that this is a relatively new development as well. The kind of AI that we're using now is conversational. You can have a multistep dialogue with the thing you're trying to do. It doesn't have to be like, "Oh, I describe exactly what I want in one step." So even with the cogeneration examples that you might try, what could happen is that you generate the HTML page, and either something doesn't load or it doesn't do the thing you wanted it to do. You can actually tell it, "By the way, that code that you just gave me is broken this way." Or if it's compiled code, let's say it generates Python code, you can give it the error message. For example, "You generated this code, but it's producing this error when I try to actually run it." It will come back and say, "Oh, I'm sorry. Here, let's try this." So there's this, you know, what folks call a memory to it. It knows the context of what you're working on, and you can kind of iteratively go through the process. What's interesting is that right now, the way we work with most of these AIs is like, "Okay, I'm asking it to do something," and it goes and does a thing. You can kind of reverse roles as well and say, "Hey, I'm trying to accomplish this. Ask me the questions you need to ask me in order to get to where I want to go." It's like, interview me versus me telling you what to do.

Shaan Puri

so I'm

Dharmesh Shah

not exactly sure what's necessary

Shaan Puri

At the risk of turning this into a super technical thing, I gotta know. So, I thought the way these worked is like auto-complete. Basically, you're typing, and it's just trying to guess what the next word is. You ask it a question, it starts the prompt, and then it just sort of guesses with some probability what the next word should be because it read a bunch of stuff on the internet. So, it knows that usually after you say, "the dog wags its," the word "tail" should come after that with 99% certainty. It should be "tail" at the end of that. I thought it's just guessing that. But when I use it, it really feels like it's understanding me and problem-solving. Like, if something is grayed out, I might think, "Why can't I do this?" and it responds, "Oh, that's because of this." Or if I'm getting an error message, I might ask, "What should I do?" and it helps me figure it out. That doesn't feel like my T9 auto-complete. So, I guess, can you give me the layman's explanation? Am I just dealing with really fancy auto-complete, or is there something more to it? Well, you know...

Dharmesh Shah

On some spectrum, almost everything that you've ever experienced is **fancy autocomplete**. I think the reason we kind of fall into this trap is that it's a gross oversimplification of what's actually happening there. GPT-3 and now GPT-4 is a **reasoning engine**. Sam Altman has talked about this. It's not a knowledge base. People kind of latch onto the fact that, "Oh, the data that it has is from September 2021, then I'm going to teach you some new things." That's really not what it's about. What they've built is a reasoning engine that says, "Given this set of facts that it knows about the world based on what was available when it took its last snapshot in 2021, how can it try to logically come up with something that answers the question?" So yes, at some level, it's like **auto-suggest**, but I'm not going to suggest that it has consciousness as it's thinking. We're kind of headed down that path. It's able to do things that are not explainable by a simple probabilistic model of auto-suggesting the next character, next word, next token, or next sentence. It's gone well beyond that. Anyone that still latches onto, "Yeah, but at its core, it's really that," is like saying, "Oh, computers are just really kind of zeros and ones arranged in a nice systematic useful order." Well, yeah, but that doesn't tell us about what the thing can do.

Sam Parr

Are you afraid of this, or are you like, you know, it's easy to read the articles where people are freaking out? Sam Altman was on Lex Friedman's podcast recently, and he sounded ominous and scary. It was almost like his hair was always just shuffled, and he looked like, "Oh my God, something bad is coming, and I know about it." That's kind of the vibe I get. That's not the exact words he's using, but sometimes he does. Are you in that camp?

Dharmesh Shah

I'm not in that camp. By nature, I'm an optimist; I'm positive. However, having been around tech for over 30 years now, it's clear that most new things that come along always make us as humans uncomfortable. It's like, "Oh, what if we took this?" Everything from video games to the internet—it's all the same. Yes, bad things can be done, and maybe this is different from all the things that have come before. But the way I think about it right now is that most people talk about it as the AI versus human battle. The battle of the ages is, "Is AI going to take over everyone's job?" The way I see it is not human versus AI; it's human to the AI power. It's an exponent—an amplifying force for human ability, right? In the same way that computers originally were, did they eliminate some jobs when they came along? Yes, absolutely they did. But new jobs emerged based on that new paradigm, which actually created more net value for the world overall as a result of computers existing. AI, to me, is another much fancier tool. That's what it is. Can it do increasingly complex, sophisticated things? Yes. Is there a danger someday that they might take over the world? I don't think so. I'm not interested in that.

Shaan Puri

why do you think that smart people think that so elon clearly thinks that he thinks that ai is the most I think he said it's the most dangerous technology ever ever invented sam weltman talked about it in the same way he's like we need like you know the prior the reason that openai existed was to develop agi in a safe way specifically because in the hands of the wrong person this this type of or no in their hand in the hand in the hands of the wrong people or if this thing decides to take its own directive into its own hands like you know this could be devastating and so it's like is it like calling the atomic bomb a tool or you know like yeah it's just another weapon it's like well yeah but this one is this one wipes everybody out right so forget the jobs component because I think okay sure we I think we I think most smart people will agree yeah it's gonna change some jobs it's gonna eliminate some jobs it's gonna create new jobs and net net we all move ahead and and the world gets better for it I think the dangerous thing is like you can ask this thing to you know you know build you a bomb or you I think the the the test scenario was like one of the red team testers they have this thing called the red team that test the ai before they release it and their first question they ask is how do I kill the most amount of people with the least amount of effort and then it starts to give you an answer and then it's like well do we are we sure we want that like that's a bit of a scary thing and then there's the there's the more extreme examples where you ask it to optimize for something and it you know like it's reasons that these humans are getting in the way of this outcome they want do you wanna fix climate change I got you I just need to get rid of all you pesky humans right like and so there's an uncontrolled you know intelligence problem too so why do you think that these really smart people like sam altman's got a freaking bunker with like you know oxygen mass and sulfur and magnesium and everything he needs to do to make oatmeal like why do these people have these like these doomsday things when you know they seem to be not like your your average typical prepper right they're they're they're the most informed people and they feel that way does that not scare you

Sam Parr

and do you have one and where is it and can I

Shaan Puri

how much

Sam Parr

oatmeal do you have in

Dharmesh Shah

Your book answer is "no, no, and no." Okay, so I am not... We're going to come back to things I actually know something about, but I will answer the question, which is: why am I not worried, or why am I not worried more? It's like a sci-fi plot. Oh, so your question was: why do smart people believe, you know, this thing? I think I...

Sam Parr

I already hate your answer. You started off on the right track, like a sci-fi plot. I'm out after I hear that. You're freaking out already.

Dharmesh Shah

Yeah, but I mean, could it happen? Yes. Do some people believe there's an outside opportunity? But I don't know this for a fact, but my guess is that builders were constructing bunkers well before GPT-3 ever came out. Sure, things are moving at a fast pace, but I don't think there's a causal effect that all of a sudden the number of bunkers has gone up by 800% simply because GPT-4 was launched. I just don't think that's the case. I think people who tend to worry about those things are generally worried. Alright, so where do we take it from here?

Shaan Puri

Well, let's go... let's forget the doomsday thing. You have a couple things. One I want to ask you is: you are an insider, right? Like we said, you've got the billionaire group chat. What was going on at the Sequoia AI event? Any interesting takeaways? You got invited to that thing. What were your nuggets of gold from that?

Dharmesh Shah

Yeah, so you know, I got to experience my imposter syndrome in full force once again. It was the kind of "who's who" of AI, you know? Both speakers and the audience, only about 100 people, and me.

Shaan Puri

How do those people flex? Because I don't think they're wearing fancy clothes and fancy watches. So what's the flex at the who's who of AI? Is it like they've got a language model in their pocket? What are they doing?

Dharmesh Shah

The big flex in those kinds of crowds, including this one, is that no one feels the need to flex. I mean, that's...

Sam Parr

that's the flex

Dharmesh Shah

There to kind of talk about big problems and try to... A lot of it was practical around what do people's tech stacks look like? What are you working on? What have you learned? Where should we be taking this? What's the next thing? After we went from kind of the one-shop thing to the chat-based ChatGPT thing, we're now doing multimodal with GPT-4. What's coming down the pipe that we can sort of prepare ourselves for? So that was, you know, what...

Sam Parr

were the most interesting projects as well as predictions on where it's gonna

Dharmesh Shah

be applied are already starting to happen now you know we've seen the text to image text to video is one of the big things now to be able to generate the entire you know at the end of it all let's say even a feature length film right so everything from writing the plot to then being able to generate you know like a 60 frame per second actual kind of video from that thing and we're not there yet I think the you know it's just moving so quickly right that's what happens when you get these exponential or geometrical curves even that it just gets better really really fast so I would not be surprised let's say by the end of this year that we have a reasonable way to kinda describe in textual form what we want who the characters are what the scene is what kind of stylistic attributes we want we can? It to oh I wanted this done the style of x y z director or philanthropy and it's gonna be able to do those things I think that that's interesting the natural length of just the interface so one of the big announcements that happened while I was there at the sequoia event that sam altman dropped is that you know chatgpt has taken off in a big way as we all know 100,000,000 + users in 2 months I don't even know what the number is now so that was like months ago which is like 80 trity ago in in ai years and the thing they dropped was they're gonna add what are called plugins to chat gbt and what that means is that you know chat gbt has been a product of openai and they have the api so people can build things that are like chatgpt which I'm doing we can talk about that a little bit but what they're saying is we're gonna open chatgpt itself the web app up so you can plug into it so right now when you interact with chatgpt you can type things and it uses its corpus from 2021 and its reasoning engine to give you answers back but it can't talk to the internet has access to no proprietary data sources can't look at the stock price can't look at your analytics data at hubspot has access to none of those things what they're saying is we're going to now open that up so third party developers can kinda inject those things into the chat gpt experience so the way I think everyone should be thinking about this is this is like the app store was for iphone which is oh we've got this super popular thing called the iphone and we have our own apps which is great it does these 17 things but now we're gonna let anyone build apps that can then take and so it just broadens the kinda appeal so it's now instead of being a chat app a really really smart one it's now a chat ecosystem and I think that was actually a bigger drop than gpt 4 gpt 4 awesome love it use it every day but the kind of ecosystem play for chat gpt I think is a is a huge deal

Sam Parr

We had Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora, speak at some of our events, and I got to know him. I asked Tim, "Why did Pandora take off?" He said, "Well, you know, our algorithm and everything for matching songs was pretty good, but I had an in with Apple. They had known what we were working on, and they needed apps for when they wanted to announce it on stage. We spun up an app relatively quickly, and because of that, we had the first mover advantage." He created a significant amount of wealth that way. You know, Pandora is still pretty big. When I look back at those Jeff Bezos interviews on 60 Minutes when Amazon was about four years old, I always feel envious. I think, "Well, we know it worked now," and I just wish I was 30 years old back then. I could have jumped in and had a very high chance of building something historical or even something mildly successful. Do you think that moment is happening right now? Is this the space, and is it happening this second? Even if you have just a mediocre success, it could still be a huge win because you're catching this tidal wave. Do you believe that this is the same thing now?

Dharmesh Shah

Yes, look, I mean, once again, I've been in software for 30 years now, doing startups pretty much my entire professional career. The only time I've felt like... like heart palpitations, kind of like Sean opened with this, is when there's this party going on next door and I'm here knitting. It's like this is too big to ignore. I think it's the single largest opportunity and biggest tech paradigm shift we've seen since the internet originally came out. Mobile was big, but there was a discreet set of use cases. When you put a camera on a phone, when you put a GPS device on a phone, a bunch of consumer apps like Uber and others came up, and that was awesome, right? But it was not like this impacts everything like the internet did. It's like, okay, there are some businesses, some new opportunities, lots of good things, lots of money made, lots of startups—awesome. This is an order of magnitude bigger than that. This is like the original web because it just opens up for all sorts of industries, all sorts of businesses, startups, and incumbents alike. Just lots of new opportunity. So, this was not on my original plan, but we're going to geek out for a little bit. We're going to do the geekiest thing that's ever been done on MFM. The reason I'm going to do it is you brought up Pandora, and he is a super bright, brilliant guy. He had the matching algorithm, which was the differentiator. Yes, he had access and he got lucky in terms of the access, but the algorithm—if that had not existed, had the thing that actually been cool, it would not have worked out like it did. Now we have an opportunity. So, I'm going to tell you, we're going to talk about... I'll give myself 2 minutes, and we can cut this out. This is the beauty of editing. We're going to talk about vector embeddings and why that's going to change your world. Before I can talk about vector embeddings, I'm going to explain to you how they work because I had to go through this with my 12-year-old because he was curious. Alright, so we're going to do a super geeky thing now. I want you to imagine a line, like you're in geometry class, and you could put a...

Dharmesh Shah

On that line that says, "Oh, that's like 3 units from the origin," right? It's like, "Oh yeah." A is 3 units from the origin, and B, let's say, is 7 units from the origin. So one thing we know for sure is that we can calculate the distance between those two points. In that particular case, it's 4. If you move to 2 dimensions, now you have two numbers that describe everything. So you can say, "Oh, A is here at these dimensions."

Dharmesh Shah

B is over here with those dimensions, and we can physically measure with a ruler. However, there are mathematical calculations based on those numbers to calculate the distance. That's intuitive, right? You don't need to know fancy geometry. It's like, "Oh, there's a finite distance in two-dimensional space where we can calculate a distance." Okay, awesome! In three-dimensional space, it's the exact same thing; we just need three numbers to describe every possible physical point in three-dimensional space. Now, here's where it starts to get a little more interesting. That just happens to be our experience, so we limit ourselves to three dimensions. Imagine, in an abstract world, there are 1,000 different dimensions. Okay, so abstractly, that means there are 1,000 numbers that describe any particular point in this 1,000-dimensional space. Now, file that thought away. This says we can have an arbitrary number of dimensions in this abstract world. Okay, great! Now, imagine every paragraph, blog post, or anything you write can be reduced down to a point in this 1,000-dimensional space. It's like, "I'm going to capture the meaning of Sam's last blog post or Sean's last tweet," and we're going to reduce it down to what's called a vector, which is basically a set of, let's say, 1,000 different numbers that describe this thing. If you plotted it, that would be it.

Dharmesh Shah

Falls right here, and then you can plot something else. It's like, "Oh, that falls over here." Just like in one-dimensional, two-dimensional, and three-dimensional space, you can calculate the distance between those things. This is not keyword matching; this is what's known as **semantic distance**. How related is Sean's tweet to Sam's blog post, meaning-wise? Okay, so now if you take that, it means you can take any concept and reduce it down to a vector. That means you can measure the distance between vectors and find out how related two things are, even though they use completely different words. That's **vector embedding**. The reason I'm telling you this is that one of the biggest opportunities in AI right now is to do what Pandora did. Is there an industry where we're currently doing really stupid keyword-based matching, which is very crude? If I can take that same dataset and convert it to vector embeddings, I can allow people to find things in a different way than they've ever been able to do before. It's like Google search, right? Super, super smart—not just keyword-based, but for everything else.

Sam Parr

what's a real life example of this

Dharmesh Shah

So, I'm gonna take it to you, Sam. You have Hampton now, and you're going to build up these profiles—very, very rich profiles in terms of information density of members that are part of your community. Now, imagine as part of that process, you're going to have some data. They're going to opt in and say, "Oh, here's the story of how I started my business. Here's the story of my biggest struggle right now." Sometimes people are going to say, "Oh, my struggle is growth." Other times, they might say, "It's really hard being an entrepreneur, and it has a really negative impact on my relationship and my family." They can talk about lots of different things, but that's not going to show up in a profile. Now, imagine if you took that content that they opted in and created vector embeddings of every member that you have. Then you can say, "You know what? I want to find someone not just in my industry, or a company my size, or someone who happens to be in my geography. I want to find someone that's dealing with these kinds of founder therapy level issues." Here are those people. Let's find the semantic distance between those vector embeddings across the 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 people that are in Hampton. Someday, that's a $1,000,000,000 idea. And that $1,000,000,000 idea occurs a billion times across the entire industry.

Shaan Puri

Sam's going to go to the office for Hampton and be like, "Guys, Victor's embedding." "Who's Victor and what's he embedding?" "We're doing it. I don't know what it is, but we're doing it." That's really interesting. So, you could do that with dating. You could do that with a bunch of different topics.

Dharmesh Shah

You could do this with unstructured data. The idea is you're converting meaning—English text meaning, or whatever language text meaning—into something that's mathematically calculable. As a result, you can calculate distance. For example, you could do proximity searches like, "Find me the top ten people that are within a radius of X from where I am right now." The minimum has to be this in order for it to be close enough of a match to be considered. There are a bunch of new technologies and lots of people pitching ideas. By the way, the technology today is nearly endless. In a weekend, you can actually build a vector embedding model of a given dataset. It's not that hard. I mean, it's not like rocket science. It's just hard.

Sam Parr

This has existed, though. So, what makes this better, you think? Also, that assumes that the people telling you information are actually saying what they mean, right? For example, I remember reading about OkCupid. People would say one particular thing, which was about race and height. They would claim they were open to dating these types of races, but their actions were different. There's a whole book— I forget what it was— but you guys will probably know what I'm talking about. It discusses how people say one thing, but their Google search history says something totally different. So, you're making the... do you think this technology can work even if people aren't telling you entirely accurate things?

Dharmesh Shah

It depends on what your definition of work is, right? So, in that example, I would bet you money that with a large enough sample size, the inauthentic posts would be uncovered by the AI relatively quickly. The pattern matching would indicate that this actually doesn't occur in real life all that often. Every other time we've seen this, we've had people that ended up being... you just have to have some sort of... what? Yeah, yeah, it felt like an evaluation function. It's like, how do you measure the success of what the algorithm is doing? In Pandora's case, it's like, okay, do you actually like the songs it's recommending to you? That's the kind of arbitrary truth in a dating app. It's like, okay, well, are people liking the matches that are being made? Or if they felt that they were misled, that shows up in the... There's gotta be some feedback loop. There's gotta be a way to train the system, right? That says, "Here's what good looks like, and here's what not good looks like."

Shaan Puri

Like Sam, you said something like, "Oh, they have to tell you the meaning." No, they don't actually have to tell you the meaning, right? Because the AI can just interpret the meaning, summarize the meaning. It can guess the meaning based on whatever the raw text is, the public text is. So, you could just tell a story about your life, and the AI would infer or place some tags on the meanings of the story that you told. This could be about overcoming hardship or whatever. So, I don't think you actually have to get the participant to give you the meaning. But let me ask you, Dharmesh, like in Pandora's case, I don't know how Pandora works, but let me just guess for a second. Yep, it probably takes the tempo of a song and it's like, "Oh, this is a fast tempo song." It probably takes, you know, maybe the key that it's in or something like that. That gives you, like, is this an upbeat and joyful thing or a sorrowful mood song? So, it gets mood, tempo, artist, and a couple of key characteristics.

Dharmesh Shah

here's like there's instruments in terms of what what's actually in the thing and yes so they he had

Sam Parr

By the way, when they first started, they did it all by hand. We had like 500 musicians listening to it and checking boxes to what it was. It was pretty wild.

Hubspot

this data is wrong every freaking time

Hubspot

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

Hubspot

Woah! I can see the client's whole history: calls, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from three days ago that I totally missed.

Dharmesh Shah

hubspot grow better

Shaan Puri

So, let's say they did it. They used attributes. If I wanted to do this in fashion, I would say, "Oh man, I love Sam's jacket. I want to find similar jackets. Can you match this for me?" One way to do it would be to describe Sam's jacket. Let's say it's blue, it has buttons, it has blah blah blah, right? Would those attributes be the same thing as meaning in this case? Or is this more for things that are text-based and content, you know, like content that has some meaning? Or does this work for everything?

Dharmesh Shah

It can work for everything, and we're still kind of uncovering it because this stuff is moving so fast. What you're talking about is what we've been using in e-commerce forever, which is a faceted search. I have a number of dimensions or factors: size, color, what type of clothing it is, all those things. Then you kind of do this faceted search. We've had kind of pure text-based keyword semantic search, and this sort of fits in between. Instead of having to tell it, "Here are all the facets that I'm interested in," it kind of pulls out the relevant things based on that large language model. The idea of vector embeddings and semantic search has been around for a long time; that's not new. What's new is these generative models that are much better at understanding all of documented public human knowledge. They use that to say, "Oh, when you use this word, when you use 'coach' in the context of a relationship, you're probably talking about a therapist." It's just a different word, right? That's sort of what you're talking about. Sam, you talked about this, I think, in the last podcast. It's more about the meaning, and it infers or figures out what the dimensionality is. That's how it kind of translates into those vectors.

Shaan Puri

couple of these companies I just saw 1 pinecone that's like some vector these things are getting valued.

Dharmesh Shah

Pinecone is the number one vector database. So, let's say you had to take these vectors and put them somewhere, which you do in order to be able to do searches. Pinecone is the number one, most popular commercialization.

Shaan Puri

They just raised it to a $700,000,000 valuation or something. There are like three of these that just raised these mega rounds. And that's what, you know, I didn't even know this. It's so funny. You just came on here being like, "Let's talk about this super niche, nerdy thing." Just yesterday, I was like, "Dude, go figure out what a vector database is and why these companies are raising so much money." This is clearly a big deal, and I don't know exactly what this means, but now it makes a lot more sense.

Dharmesh Shah

So, it comes full circle, Sean. You know what? Maybe it wasn't as geeky as I thought. This is actually useful, right?

Sam Parr

You've done an awesome job explaining the theory. I'm literally sitting on the edge of my seat thinking, "This is crazy!" You answered that question where I asked, "Is this like the new internet opportunity-wise?" and you're like, "Yes, absolutely." But when you're making this stuff, what are some of the tools that you're using? You said this isn't rocket science and someone could figure this out in a weekend. What tools are you using to do all of this?

Dharmesh Shah

Yeah, well, I mean, so language-wise, the most common is **Python**. That seems to have emerged as the **lingua franca** of the AI world. Not to say you can't write it in **TypeScript** or pick your language of choice. As for tools that are emerging, it's still early, right? The **Pineco** we talked about, and there's another one called an open-source project called **LangChain**. Can you spell that? **LangChain**. Harrison at the Sequoia event, super nice guy. I asked...

Shaan Puri

I asked somebody yesterday, "How do I know who this company is? Can we invest?" Because everywhere I look in these AI hackathons, it's all about LangChain. It's like, "No, it's not really even a company. It's just an open-source project." There's a guy who made it and is running it, but it's not even a company, correct?

Dharmesh Shah

it's it's not a company yet but yeah but

Sam Parr

wait is it is it lane chris

Dharmesh Shah

what's that

Shaan Puri

lane chain yeah

Dharmesh Shah

LangChain, as in language chain. Oh, okay, LangChain. What it does, basically, is it lets you chain things together. So right now, when we work with large language models, we kind of send in a prompt—what's called a prompt—and you get something back. Then you maybe send it to another thing to do something else. There's like a multi-step process. Amongst other things, LangChain helps you chain those things together. It makes it easier for you to work with either an individual large language model like GPT-4 or get across models and kind of do a lot of the connecting the dots and help you with that. But it's a super useful library.

Shaan Puri

We missed the chance to give a more tangible example. So, you talked about the plugins thing. I think, you know, an example use case here—tell me if I'm wrong because I haven't... no, nobody is... well, very few people have access to the plugins thing, so I'm just kind of guessing. But, like, if you go to ChatGPT today and you say, "Hey, I'm going to visit Austin in April. Make me a travel itinerary for four days with my family. We want it to be fun, family-friendly, with good food and maybe a little bit of sightseeing, but not too much," it will spit out a day-by-day itinerary for you. Okay, that's kind of interesting. Now, let's say, "Oh, I need to figure out where to stay. What hotel should I stay at?" You know, "Here are some things that are important to me," and it will give you a table that says, "Here's option 1, option 2, option 3. Here's the cost, here's the whatever," right? It can do something like that. And with the ability for plugins, you can now say, "Cool, can you just book that for me?" and it will just be like, "Great, we have the Expedia plugin or we have the Airbnb plugin," and it will go ahead and book it for you. So, you know, do you need an executive assistant? Do you need a travel agent when you could do these things? The same thing with HubSpot or Salesforce. "Oh, you know, give me a list of this," and it gives you a list of that. "Cool, put that in an Airtable for me," or "put that into Salesforce and tag the highest value opportunities as blank." It'll just go and do that for you, and it will give you the link to your Salesforce dashboard. It's like, "Wow, that's kind of cool." Like, no, that's a task that I would normally have a human go do because now OpenAI or ChatGPT is not just going to chat you an answer; it can do things as long as the programs that let you... you know, they'll build the interface so that ChatGPT can actually interact with those things.

Dharmesh Shah

Yep, and this is actually a great example. I think we can use that to kind of open up doors for the viewership and listenership. Okay, say travel, which is something we all kind of intrinsically know how to understand. Some of us might remember the evolution away from travel agents. The first thing we did when we had web-based travel bookings is we treated it very transactionally. It's like, "I'm looking for a flight from X to Y, sorted by descending price, or whatever happens to be in fewest stops, lowest time, whatever it is." They do a pretty good job of that. Most of us have used one of those. What's going to be possible now in this new AI world is instead of solving for the transaction, you solve for the experience. What I mean by that is, if you had an all-knowing assistant that was super smart, who scored a perfect score on their SAT, and was going to go out there and just say, "Okay, what you're really looking for is to solve for this experience." You're going to want to stop by this thing, and you're going to want to find a hotel that's around a Michelin-rated restaurant because you only have 15 minutes to get between this.

Dharmesh Shah

And that... I'm going to pull the whole thing together for you. Oh, and by the way, your wife's going with you on this trip. I know she likes that, right? So normally, I would have put you over here, but this time I'm going to put you over there. Oh, and by the way, I know a week ago you were at this other thing, and you had mentioned that you would actually like to follow up with some of those people. I'm going to see if I can make that happen. Imagine it knows everything about you. It has access to the transactional engines to book the flight and all the information to get ratings and reviews. All of that comes together in one chat-based interface.

Sam Parr

fucking insane this is crazy

Dharmesh Shah

are you is

Sam Parr

this why you bought so you bought chat.com right

Dharmesh Shah

I did as of transfer the domain yesterday last night

Sam Parr

And you paid... you just said 8 figures, so $10,000,000. Yes, unless you're including the dot zero zero as a figure in person completely, or you're doing $100.

Dharmesh Shah

In HubSpot, is this a HubSpot domain personally? So, put this: if you go to chat.com, it will take you to a LinkedIn post that tells you why I did it. So, the details: I bought it personally. Wow! The reason is because of this conversation we're having right now, which is that I think chat, as an experience and as an interface, is the future. Right? It's like that's the thing. No one intends to currently build something out on it, but yeah, the domain—I think it was like dormant for about 30 years or something like that. Then it kind of came on the market, and yeah, wow.

Sam Parr

And, but you... so, this is insane! I'm reading your post now; it's pretty wild. Do you have... are you using HubSpot employees? Like, do you have a skunkworks team inside of HubSpot that's just working on all this wild stuff? Or do you have like a side LLC or something where you've got a handful of people on staff and you just say, "Here's what I'm interested in this week. Let's see what we can come up with."

Dharmesh Shah

So, the way it's working now is that there will be times where I'll do something as a hobby. For example, wordplay is a good example where I'll build something on the side just for fun or for learning, whatever it is. I put the bill for... no, no, HubSpot P and Ls are armed. Then, there are times where something kind of winds up being... I started this project called ChatSpot because I'm obsessed. We'll take a walk down memory lane because I think it's instructive. I built this application called ChatBot.ai, and the idea here was...

Sam Parr

you built it or a team

Dharmesh Shah

Mostly me. I don't have any front-end design skills. I've got some freelancers on it, so, you know, yeah. I used OpenAI's APIs to build it. My target goal, the thing I had in my head, is that I built it for myself. Here are the things I need to do all the time, and I'm pissed off that I have to do them manually every time. This has been the story of my life for 30 years, right? Solve my old problems, and then other people may or may not find those things interesting or useful. So, I built it. I'm like, "Okay, here are the things I wanted to do." I want to access HubSpot. I want to be able to look at my analytics from yesterday, ask questions, or look up a domain name where I wanted to see the history of a domain name. I like all these things. It's like, "Okay, well, I don't want to..." and I have all this software, a lot of it just built, and I just run it from the command line. I do things. Then I'm like, "Okay, I can wrap this up into a chat-based interface." So, I've been working on that. We've made progress. Now, given the relevance to HubSpot, we're going to transfer that project, ChatSpot.ai, to be a HubSpot-staffed core team. It's going to change the world. It's going to change the world of CRM. Let's go do this, which is great. My working thing is like this.

Shaan Puri

What are you doing with Chat.com? What's the plan? You bought this amazing domain and you've redirected it to your LinkedIn post, which basically just tells about the purchase. But what are you going to do on the domain?

Dharmesh Shah

I don't know yet that's the honest answer I do not know yet

Shaan Puri

amazing and okay

Dharmesh Shah

so we

Shaan Puri

can we can help you brainstorm

Dharmesh Shah

yeah we can we can definitely do that

Sam Parr

By the way, did you go to the ChatSpot.ai, Sean? It's a simple-looking website; it's one page and there's a 19-minute video of Dharmesh sitting in the exact same chair.

Shaan Puri

do the video yep hey it's me

Sam Parr

And it looks almost like he's reading a script, but he's really good at these videos. It comes off as natural. I don't know if it's a script or not, but it has 200,000 views and it's a 19-minute video of him talking about what this product is. You do the best combination of launching something really quickly and getting it out there. It's just you in your chair talking, and yet it's a pretty sophisticated thing. It has 200,000 views on this video—over just about. That's wild to me! I gotta...

Shaan Puri

I gotta give you credit dharmesh you you are kind of amazing like you know you said a bunch of things in this podcast and I don't know how many of them I'm gonna remember maybe the the vector thing because I enjoyed that math lesson but the main thing is I go around my life now and I'm just looking for people who I'm like I wanna be like you when I grow up and I'm just taking little things from them and they could be it could be like a you know a 17 year old kid who's just like doing something awesome on tiktok and I'm like I wanna be like you when I grow up the guy who made that kanye vocal like transformer I was like I wanna be like you when I grow up I'm just taking little pieces and you have a couple of things that I think are kind of amazing you have a combination of enthusiasm like you come out of this podcast and you are pumped so you are as excited in year 30 or maybe more in year 30 of your entrepreneurship career as you were in year 1 and I'm like oh this this is great that's the fountain of youth is that enthusiasm so like he's got the enthusiasm then I feel like no matter what's happened the the matter how much success you've had you've kept your schedule and your you you invest your time into things you like so like you tinkering on this project whether it's wordplay last time you came on you told us about that it's like wordle's awesome but I got annoyed with these things so I made a me and my son built this project together and like you know to teach him but also to just make the thing we want and like look at this it kinda works even if it didn't work it would've still been worth it so like having that kind of like I'm always gonna tinker because that's what I love to do it doesn't matter that I'm the you know top dog at this you know multibillion dollar public company that doesn't mean I'm gonna stop doing the thing I like to do so I love that love that aspect of it 3rd you are really great at content you do this like dorky form of content that's just like hey it's me I'm gonna show you this thing that I'm pumped about and like you don't overthink it and you just do it whereas like I think most people get really gun shy when it comes to content they're afraid about like you know how to do it what it looks like you're just like oh no I'm just gonna like I'm gonna say the thing that I'm excited about I'm gonna say it and I'm gonna do a screen share it'll it'll just be me me and my screen and I'll be talking about what I'm doing and I love that and so and then the last one is guts so I feel like you put your money into things you believe in whether it's philanthropy or in this case buying a $10,000,000 + domain name with no plan like you just said you know it's like you did the the fire ready aim it's like yeah I bought the thing and now I get to figure out what the hell I'm gonna do with it and I think that takes a lot of guts and I don't think you see things as risky as other people see them and it's not really about like I think the easy way of saying it would be oh yeah well it's you know that's nothing to him he's got a lot of money yeah I don't think that's true and I I know a lot of people with a lot of money and they don't do things like this where they just put their money behind things that they're in they believe in or they're interested in or almost like would you do I don't know if you would agree with this it's almost like you amnied up so that now you're forced almost to do something awesome and interesting in the space that you think has a lot of potential

Sam Parr

But then there's this... This last thing is this rare combination of, and I mean this in a polite way, a nerdy quirkiness. It's like, "I'm just doing it because it's cool," and at the same time, "I can make money." I mean, you have a company that makes... Yeah, you have this company that has close to $2,000,000 and $2,000,000,000 in revenue and is a commercial success. Then there's the artistry of, "I'm just... It's beautiful. This is awesome. I'm gonna do this." It's a very rare combination.

Dharmesh Shah

thank you

Sam Parr

how do you respond to all these compliments

Dharmesh Shah

oh okay well well I'll say this the the lesson kinda I've learned over the years and I think this is if I had to kinda share any kind of advice over the you know 30 years is that when when I've done best is when I've had the courage of my convictions of something that I believe in so I'm gonna tell you like a a quick story of the road that led to me buying a 10 + $1,000,000 delayed name I almost like set a number actual number out loud I have to kinda catch myself but and so 17 years ago I had an this is before hubspot I had this idea and the idea was everyone was using kind of email and outlook back then this is before the iphone before all the things it's like you know what like business software is really hard to talk to I'm gonna do it just like I would email my assistant I didn't have an assistant but let's assume I did you know I just wanna be able to do that and type an email up and have her like oh I have this file in our shared file server in sharepoint somewhere can you just send me a link to that file I'm about to hop on a plane I need that for the sales call I'm gonna go on for for a meeting tomorrow or I'm on the plane coming back I've just ran to this person whatever I've got their business card right here this is before the iphone and you can do ocr and things like that it's like I'm just gonna type that in and send this like just add this to to my contact you know database or whatever and the beauty of email was it already had a disconnected model we'd already figured that out which is oh you can be on a plane and have no inter internet type all emails you want respond to all the emails you want and then when you get connection it does all the things right this is like automatic synchronized database essentially and I called the product in jenna mail and that's what I was gonna do before hubspot I was like oh like that that would be an interesting thing and then 5 years ago I'm like okay well that ingentamail thing the core of it was a good idea but email is the wrong conduit it actually needs to be like a web based tool but or slack which I I did both so I built this product called growthbot talked about it on the inbound stage got thousands of users you threw it out there and it was awesome except for one thing it didn't work it like it couldn't actually do the natural language understanding that I wanted it to do despite my best I used products in Google called dialogflow I used products from facebook we used open search projects to try and crack the nut of taking text understanding what the hell the user was trying to do anyway so that failed and then you know when gpte comes along I'm like oh you know that thing I've been thinking about for 17 years that actually is now possible so I start working on chatbot.ai I'm like okay it took 17 years but I sort of proved myself right I have the courage and my convictions all the way through to never let go of that one idea and then chat.com comes along it's like okay like deep down inside I will give you the true honest to goodness reason I bought it the reason I bought it and this is I think a phrase sean you just use this like oh no I think sean sam you just use it it's it's the anti so I'm trying to get into the ai party all the ai parties and I'm nobody in that particular party right I've done some things in some places fine but that particular group of people has no idea who I am not really so chatspot moves me in that direction it's like oh some people have seen that video awesome chat.com for let's say I even break even let's say I lose a few $1,000,000 it is worth the price of admission for me just because that pays the cover charge I was like okay this guy gets it

Shaan Puri

for

Dharmesh Shah

Him to spend that kind of money on chat UX, which Bill Gates just talked about last week as the new thing. You should read that article. Gates just did an article around why he is so excited about this journey of AI stuff. He tells the entire story of how he came across Sam Altman and OpenAI, and the challenge he put forth. I'm going to paraphrase: he said, "When we went from DOS to Windows, we went from a character-based interface to a graphical mouse-based click and touch interface. That's the thing we built Microsoft on, which lasted for decades." Then he said, "Since then, there has been nothing in technology that has come along—literally, he said nothing—that has made as big of an impact as this natural language interface to software. It's the biggest thing we've seen." And hence, chat.com. What happened was, I don't know, but the wrong story is to have the courage of your convictions. If you truly, truly believe in an idea and you fundamentally think you're right, iterate. Don't just sit and go down your rabbit hole. Tell everybody you can about it, build products around it, find other like-minded folks, and try to pull on that thread.

Sam Parr

would you ever quit hubspot and just spend all your time on this this stuff

Dharmesh Shah

I don't really need to, right? I enjoy what I do at HubSpot. I think I add value there, and that’s a dollar salary. So it's not about the money at all. Even with the ChatSpot thing, at the time that I built it, it was experimental. I thought, "Okay, I'm not sure if this actually accrues into something that would be valuable to HubSpot." So I spent like half a million dollars on freelance developers, OpenAI license fees, and all the things that need to go into launching a product like that. In the end, I’ll end up giving it to HubSpot for a dollar, right? I'm not looking to... but aren't you?

Sam Parr

Aren't you like, "I don't want to be weighed down by this baggage of having to worry about CRM stuff"? Or, you know, your technical... your title is CTO. I don't want to have to talk to certain people and take up meetings on the future of this particular product. Instead, I just want to nerd out on all this other stuff.

Dharmesh Shah

But I do that now. So, I got one thing. One of the things I've noticed is that this is a personality trait/flaw: I spend most of my life trying to configure the universe to my liking. I mean, all entrepreneurs really do this, right? That's one of the reasons they kind of go into startup land. It's the freedom and the control to do the things you want to do. So, I've kind of crafted a role for myself within HubSpot that allows me to do exactly the things that I want to do and not do any of the things I don't want to do, which includes one-on-one meetings. I don't have to manage people; I have no direct reports. I've never filled out an expense sheet. I do none of that.

Sam Parr

I feel... I don't know about you, Sean, I feel like I want to quit everything I'm doing. Like he's just persuaded me.

Shaan Puri

I can't launched yesterday

Sam Parr

no it's over I feel it's over

Dharmesh Shah

so here's my advice to you pam it's

Sam Parr

do I mean do you feel this way sean I don't know sorry dharmesh go ahead

Dharmesh Shah

No, no, no. So my advice to you is that Hampton's a cool idea with actual utility. Sean, you said this in the last thing: this could be a $100,000,000 business worth anywhere from $300,000,000 to over $1,000,000,000. I think you're right. If you're excited about some of the new technology developments that are happening, I think the best thing you can do is intersect the two things. It's like, "Okay, I'm going to build Hampton, and I'm going to take the things that I know. I know how to build communities; I know how to build these kinds of businesses." Now, can I intersect that with things that are happening in the technology sector around AI, or Vectrum, or whatever it happens to be? Then, it kind of merges those two things. Because then you'd be an unstoppable force, right? No one in the community-building market, doing niche market communities, is thinking about or having conversations about vector embeddings. I promise you that. So you don't have to give up one for the other. You can say, "Yep, I'm going to do that. I'm going to do it better than anyone has ever done it."

Shaan Puri

but I I have a different advice for you sam I think just get dug in into your position instead I remember when you were doing the hustle originally and snapchat came out and instagram was like popping off on videos and and facebook had videos and then there was other media companies that were raising tons of money that were just like we're gonna produce short form video content or live video content on top of facebook and cheddar was all the rage all the stuff and I was like dude why aren't you doing videos man look at this look at these guys they're getting millions of views on their videos on facebook or these guys are getting millions of views in the snapchat story feed you could be the first one there it fits your audience and you were like just very steadfast you were like like you're you're principled you were like 3 things number 1 don't understand it a lot yeah I don't really understand it I understand this other thing 2 I could try to figure it out but I don't wanna build on top of their platforms because they change the rules all the time I have friends who've got burned by that I don't wanna get burned by that same thing I don't wanna build on a shaky foundation I'd rather do email because I own the thing I own the relationship with with the audience and it's not like the facebook algorithm changes one tweak away from from putting me out of business and I remember being like man this guy is like stone mister stone age like he is just not not an integrator adapting to the new shit and I was like I would there's no way if I was running the hustle I would have been able to resist the shiny object of like video on mobile phones and like it turned out video on mobile phones did turn out to be a big thing but a lot of those company media companies got absolutely wrecked and you were right for for being wary of it and more more I don't think in this case people are gonna get wrecked because it's not like you know the analogy is not one to 1 but I would say you know warren buffett missed the internet and all of technology and still did fantastic sam I think you're gonna be in that same boat where like it is not really in your nature to get really interested in you know new frontier technologies and play with them and try to integrate them and that's not really your nature and you're better you're best served by like knowing your nature and just doubling down on what's a working formula for you I guess so so I would do that

Sam Parr

I appreciate that

Shaan Puri

Because there's going to be a trillion people trying to do fancy AI stuff who are better suited to do that. It's going to be an absolute bloodbath. You know, go look right now at the number of AI tools that are coming out every single day, and you know, it's like...

Sam Parr

most of them do seem shit though you're right I mean like it

Shaan Puri

Doesn't matter. There's just swarms, and they're all going to get just wiped out. Every GPT release wipes out a whole wave of like... I

Dharmesh Shah

agree

Shaan Puri

Even the successful ones, because it's like, "Oh, now that's just a feature of ChatGPT." So, I don't know. I think it's important to know your nature. It's okay to not have to do every new thing unless that's your nature. For Darvesh, it is his nature. For me, it is a lot more my nature than it is yours. There are pros and cons that come with that, and so I think...

Sam Parr

Are you going to go in? I mean, Sean's got a new idea that he's taken with, and he's been telling me a little bit about it.

Dharmesh Shah

about to that I have one piece of tactical advice I have to share with you sam on on

Sam Parr

yeah yeah yeah

Dharmesh Shah

so I was going through the application process on hampton last night like 2 am

Sam Parr

alrighty

Dharmesh Shah

And this is super tactical, but this is what we do here on MFM. Section number 9 on the application process is the "Won't Be a Role?" It's a required question. Good. The subtext is: CEOs, founders, and partners only, please. The options are founder, CEO, owner, and other. The one thing I would tweak if I were you is... what you're doing is saying, "Hey, we're about founders and owners, and if you're not one of them, don't bother. Thank you for not bothering; go away." Right? So focus is a magical thing. I love that. But you're doing what I call a pre-filter. Why not say, "Oh, this is for CEOs, owners, or whatever?" Don't make them feel guilty for going through the rest of the process. There may be a future version of Sam and Hampton that says, "Oh, you know what? We solved this problem." But that same problem around people needing therapy from peer groups applies a lot to like VPs of product and that community. Right now, the only communities they can find are people that want to talk about product management, and no one wants to talk about relationships. There's an opportunity there. And so it costs you literally nothing. They'll still answer the question; it'll be sitting in your database for a year or forever, and it costs you nothing. Don't push them out too early.

Sam Parr

It should have been the way you suggested. Apparently, I didn't give that feedback. Grant, if you're listening...

Shaan Puri

this is a direct order from darvesh change to question 9 please

Dharmesh Shah

I've seen grant

Shaan Puri

do this before you're replaced by ai

Sam Parr

Yeah, yeah, but Sean, you're telling me... Thank you, Darvesh. Sean, you were telling me about stuff that you're thinking about.

Dharmesh Shah

yeah

Sam Parr

And it was pretty... it was somewhat old school. Like, what you're... the thing. So, are you like questioning that after this conversation? And you're like, "Oh man, this is like not true?"

Shaan Puri

This conversation isn't necessarily about that, but it's a snowball that's building, right? There's a reason I cleared my calendar to just mess around with AI all week. I'm interested in it. When you think, "Let's go see what's real there," I did the same thing with crypto. During that time, when crypto was really intriguing, I thought, "Okay, let me go try to mint an NFT. Let me go try to actually use DeFi and see what's going on here." I wanted to understand what parts make sense and what parts don't. Oh, that was pretty frictionless! Like, that's cool that I could just get a loan with one button and pay it back with one button. I never had to talk to a human being. I really liked that. Hey, this thing says the yield is 20%. I don't really understand where they would get 20% from, so I'm not sure. But I'm going to put a small amount of money in just to learn. I was trying to play with it, trying to think for myself. That's the big idea. It's not like some binary thing—like is crypto good or is crypto bad? I want to know where it's at right now. I want to see it develop, and my best way to do that is immersion. I actually stole this from Bill Gates. Bill Gates does his reading week where he goes to a cabin and reads a ton of books for a week about one topic that's been on his mind but he hasn't had the appropriate amount of time to roll up his sleeves and dig in. I thought, "Oh, that but without books. Just give me a browser, and I'm good to go." So that's what we've been doing. There genuinely are so many mind-blowing moments and also just understanding the nuances of things. For example, just being able to think like the computer. You know, you were talking about these facets. So I was playing around with Midjourney. Sam, do you know what Midjourney is or do you know how to use it?

Sam Parr

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I've just been goofing off, and I'll just be like, "Show me what Cartman from South Park looks like as a real person."

Dharmesh Shah

right yeah

Shaan Puri

and like you know I was like can and I was what the way I approached it was can I replace work that I already wanna do with a more efficient ai workflow that was like one of the things and then it was what's really fun random shit I could do I wanted to be on those ends of the spectrum like highly utilitarian for me so it's like oh I need a logo for my thing but I don't want just like a logo I wanna create a whole brand alright how how can I use ai to create a whole brand here so from the the icons to t shirt designs to a website can I do that with just ai and not have to touch a not have to hire a single designer and can I do that with just like my own imagination and this prompt thing and then oh how do you do prompting and like which of these tools is the best and what's the difference so that that was like one whole area another was like we took the podcast and we did this thing that was kinda sick we took the podcast and we ran it through this thing so we took the pod and we then used openai has something called whisper which transcribes any video so it's like put in a youtube link to this tool it'll take a whisper and it'll give you the transcript alright cool it takes the transcript then I put it into chat g p t and we had this guy write this little prompt for us like we had to get the right prompt but he wrote this prompt that was awesome which is basically like it's it's pretty funny he goes because chat g p can only take so many characters so he goes I'm gonna I'm gonna give you 19 text sections I don't want you to do anything until you're at section 19 so ignore everything until I'm done with 19 and then answer the prompt that I give you and chanceshippy is like okay I will I will wait for the 19 parts you copy paste part 1 2 3 4 all the way to 19 and then you go the prompt is I want you to pull out every idea story and framework that's discussed in this podcast I want you to summarize it and I want you to tell me does this idea exist already or not exist so it can guess based on the way we were talking about it are we talking about something we saw that exists or just an idea that somebody should go do so like from this pile it would be like using vector using using this this vector you know dimensions or I forgot what you call it vector engine or whatever to potentially create a dating site that would match people in ways that they're you know sort of similar using using ai and it would be like does this idea exist no who is the source of this dharmesh what was the the synopsis of the idea blank what is the category that it's in ai and so it then it took that and it takes the whole episode and it just created a database of every story framework and idea from the thing with these tags and now a human can go back and like tweak them if something was wrong but like that's a lot of the work that was done and we could just do this for the whole back light back catalog of our podcast and so I'm trying to use it first for my own benefit and then along the way if I see a business a a start up idea that I'm like oh somebody should productize this or somebody should do whatever like you know the simple example is this kanye thing I was like why is this not the most viral app in the world right now that basically is the app with a one button that says you know say something and then it's gonna when you when you let go of that button it's gonna turn it into kanye saying that thing and go share that to tiktok and like you might get sued but you will go viral right they're like that's the trade there but I'm like that's crazy there's no front end for this really cool you know ai demo that exists now so yeah I'm just right now I'm in the go play around with it see if anything really really strikes me and if something does then then then take the next steps

Dharmesh Shah

There’s one thread in there, Sam and Sean, that I think we should pull on. You talked about this kind of crafting of the prompt in order to make the thing do what you needed it to do. That’s an entirely new skill now called **prompt engineering**. It's analogous to software engineering. Software engineering is getting a computer to do what you want by speaking to it in its language. That way, you can kind of get the results you're looking for. Prompt engineering is almost exactly the same thing, except you're talking to a large language model, something like GPT-4, to get it to produce what you want. So, you're talking to AI to get it to produce the thing that you want. I think this is another opportunity for folks who are technology-minded but not necessarily software engineers. They can think about the problems in their head. They may be good writers, good analysts, or good at describing a thing. But prompt engineering is going to be a big thing. By the way, as long as we're dropping things, I bought two domains recently.

Shaan Puri

oh you

Dharmesh Shah

get one free one of them what's that

Sam Parr

yeah right

Shaan Puri

buy one get one free

Dharmesh Shah

Yeah, I wish! But this one, it's not 8 figures; it's 7 figures. The domain is **prompt.com**. I actually have an idea around what to do with that. There’s going to be this entire... I'm not going to get into details of it yet because it's too good of an idea to actually just put out there in the world. I'm not ready yet to do something about it, but once I get into it...

Sam Parr

prompt prompt.com goes to like a coaching for essays

Dharmesh Shah

I know, but the transfer is still happening. I don't have the domain in my possession yet, but the deal is done.

Sam Parr

Dude, so your portfolio of domains, I mean, mid 8 figures then? Yeah, tens of millions.

Dharmesh Shah

yeah

Shaan Puri

fucking insane

Sam Parr

Dude, I feel amped! When we were talking to Pump, I wanted to go hide under the covers because he freaked me out about the billion or the $1,000,000 Bitcoin thing and the banks with this. I'm like, "I gotta clear up my schedule. I gotta go learn all about this." I mean, I feel amped. This is awesome!

Shaan Puri

Before we go, give us your 2-minute reaction to Biology's warning that the U.S. dollar will crash and Bitcoin will surge to $1,000,000.

Dharmesh Shah

I'll say this, and I don't know him personally, but he is quite literally one of the top five people I've ever encountered, even on the internet, in terms of raw, what I call, wattage—just raw horsepower. He's like an AI unto himself, right? Just the knowledge that he has. Having said that, I think I understand why he's taking the extreme positions. Sometimes, that's what you have to do to kind of shake the world out of its reverie. It's like, "Okay, pay attention here. This is important." But if I were a betting person, I would not bet that the odds are what he thinks they are. It could happen, but it's nowhere near the probability that he's suggesting. That's my take.

Sam Parr

I feel better now. My personal opinion is that I feel better. I like your opinion better; therefore, I think it's true.

Dharmesh Shah

Yeah, speaking of that, we should wrap up on this. One of the things that happens anytime new technology comes along— we saw this a little bit in the kind of crypto and web3 world as well— is that entrepreneurial-minded folks will see this new thing and look for a quick turnaround. I'm all for creating value quickly, but it has to be about creating value. Don't play the arbitrage game. Oh, I'm going to do this thing; this is like, you know, day trading back in the day or whatever. It's like, you know, don't be a grifter. Right? Be something that's pretty simple.

Sam Parr

we're gonna build a shitty app and put web 3 at the end of

Dharmesh Shah

The day... you know, just don't take advantage of people. There are enough real problems to solve where real money could be made. Yes, this technology can now be used in creative ways by lots of people, and you should use those. But don't use it as an excuse just to be like an "AI tourist" that comes through, makes a little bit of money, or whatever, and then that's that. There's a bigger opportunity. I think you're shortchanging yourselves if that's what you end up doing.

Sam Parr

well thank you dharmesh

Dharmesh Shah

thank you for coming on the pod

Sam Parr

Man, that was... yeah, yeah. Well, thank you for coming on the pod. This is awesome! I feel pumped, man. I always like talking to you. But I don't know if you know this, Sean. I slack Dharmesh all the time. I'll just be like, "I'm just trying to get him to give me little crumbs of information," because, dude...

Dharmesh Shah

I I

Shaan Puri

need to get into the hubspot slack it's awesome

Sam Parr

I'll just send something his way, and hopefully I can get something back. But it's fascinating, and I feel lucky to have you as a friend and coworker. This is awesome, and as a podcast guest, this is so fascinating. I agree with what Sean said about kind of looking up to you and observing how people live their lives. You're definitely someone I admire, so I'm happy you came here.

Dharmesh Shah

thanks thanks for having me on again this is fun as always

Shaan Puri

awesome alright thanks for coming on that's it that's the pod