10 AI Business Ideas From The Queen of AI ft. Sarah Guo
AI Business Ideas: Companions, Auto-Fill, and Software 3.0 - July 24, 2024 (8 months ago) • 01:00:47
Transcript:
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Sarah Guo | There are ways to make $1,000,000 and then there are ways to make $1,000,000 that could turn into $1,000,000,000, right?
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Shaan Puri | This is Sara Guo, the queen of AI. She's got a $100 billion fund that she's investing into AI startups. We invited her on to brainstorm AI business ideas.
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Sarah Guo | I mean, I think the market for this company is very deep because people want a lot of video. So, I think there's **$1,000,000,000** of video generation revenue.
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Sam Parr | Sarah, how hard is something like this to make?
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Sarah Guo | People are generating $1,000,000 of cash flow for themselves. It's not because they're deep AI people.
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Shaan Puri | And it looks super real, am I right? Isn't this wild?
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Sam Parr | This is amazing.
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Shaan Puri | So, what do you mean by that? You're saying there are ways to make $1,000,000, and then there are ways to make $1,000,000,000 that could turn into $1,000,000,000? You have my interest. Let's go!
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Sarah Guo |
Okay, okay, let's go. So I think maybe, and I don't mean this in any dismissive way, I think venture capitalists are very often accused of dismissing something as like a "cash flow lifestyle business" or whatever, right?
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Shaan Puri | or like | |
Sam Parr |
By the way, for anyone who is not in the VC world:
You go to a VC and say, "I've got this great company. I think I can make $5,000,000 in profit in year 8, and 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...
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Sarah Guo | It is. That's cute. Yeah.
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Sam Parr |
I remember my first time doing that. Of course, the thing 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 "lifestyle business."
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Sarah Guo | Yeah, so I’d say there are many types of valid businesses. Also, a lot of things that have become very interesting start very small, so 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 that are increasingly powerful to just do something useful in a niche, those two things together—that's like the new drop shipping.
You know how, for maybe 7 or 8 years—I'm too old to know what the exact timeline was—there was a period of time where people were like, "Oh, you know, I'm an internet kid. I'm going to figure out some drop shipping thing and make my first $100,000." I think this is it.
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Shaan Puri | Yes, so basically for people who don't really know, you could go on Alibaba or AliExpress. That was like the OpenAI 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, and you never have to ship the product. It will just magically appear at your customer's door, you know, somewhere between 1 to 3 weeks later.
All you have to do is the marketing bit. And kind of what you're saying is OpenAI and the other AI companies have built this magic that basically will take a piece of text and turn it into a video, a song, or whatever. If you just do the marketing bit, you can actually almost like drop ship a product or a service to the customer without having to make it yourself. Is that the idea?
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Sarah Guo | That is thanks for explaining it. I think it's easier with a few examples, right?
Copy editing is probably a prototypical one. You can do not amazing, but like reasonable copy generation with these models today. There are a series of companies where you just have some templates that make it more obvious to somebody writing marketing copy how to use these models.
Then you have a website with decent SEO, and you add some Stripe integration, and you're in business.
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Sam Parr | What's an example?
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Sarah Guo |
Well, I think companies like Copy AI and Jasper started this way, right? And then I have several friends who have shipped AI companionship apps. Just look at the 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.
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Sam Parr | When you say "companion," you mean like a digital girlfriend?
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Sarah Guo | Or boyfriend, right? I think people think that is skewed toward girlfriend in a way that's not necessarily true. But if you... you know, you can have your own ethical points of view about 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.
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Shaan Puri | Aren't these quietly very huge? Can we do some ballpark estimates to give people a sense of the size and scale that these have gotten to?
So, 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 relationship side of things.
I don't remember their exact numbers, but I don't think I would be crazy for saying they're doing like **$50,000,000** a year in revenue. I believe she had bootstrapped it for a while, at least, or raised very little money to get there. Is that right? Tell me if I'm off base; I might be wrong on some of that.
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Sarah Guo | Eugenius built a very cash-efficient business.
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Shaan Puri | Okay, is that like code for something? Are you an investor in reference to that?
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Sarah Guo | I'm not an investor.
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Sam Parr | Dude, you just said everything without saying a thing. It was basically like your friends are there, you know the number, and they're killing it.
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Shaan Puri | Are they killing it from your perspective?
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Sarah Guo | I think they are making a lot more revenue than most startups. I don't think it's fair for me to give the number; it's not my number, right?
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Shaan Puri | Okay, what are the other ones that are interesting?
So there's Character AI, which 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... who’s who?
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Sarah Guo | Doing well, let's talk about character for a second. I think, you know, when you look at consumer companies, one of the things that I learned was that the behavior patterns really stand out. When something is truly exceptional compared to all other products in their category or even 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 it. The thing that is really interesting to me about character or the companion apps that work really well is that people spend hours with them.
In terms of the number of products, how many products do you spend hours with every day? Not a lot, right? Like social media.
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Sam Parr | Sean, that's like my product that I spend hours a day on.
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Sarah Guo | With, yeah, you. | |
Shaan Puri | We were at Greylock, I think, when they invested in Discord. I believe the timing was right. Discord was one of those platforms that was probably overlooked because it was mostly teenagers who played video games that were using it. It kind of looked like a chat room, but you might wonder, "How is it going to make money?" It's not like Slack, where you can charge the company.
But the stat was that people were spending like 7 hours a day or something ridiculous on Discord—just living in Discord. It was their social life. So, you're like, "Well, there's definitely something there." They were able to make a ton of money just by selling emojis, too. Because if you have that much engagement, you can't fake that.
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Sarah Guo | Yes.
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Shaan Puri |
By the way, I just went to Character.ai, and there's an option to chat with Elon Musk. The preloaded question was "Why did you buy Twitter?" So I clicked it, and it starts a chat with Elon Musk as a character. Then, the first response literally goes:
> "You are wasting my time. I literally rule the world."
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Sam Parr | Okay, so by the way, according to SimilarWeb, which is like you multiply it by 2 or 3 and then you divide by 2 or 3, that's the huge range. But according to SimilarWeb, it says that Character AI has **310,000,000** monthly uniques. Are you kidding me?
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Shaan Puri | I mean, that's more than the Wall Street Journal. It's more than like a bunch of really...
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Sam Parr | Fun things... insane is this.
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Sarah Guo | Is the company really that big? I think people want companions. This is what I'm saying: the engagement characteristics around this stuff are real.
So for anybody starting a new business, you know, one-person companies can ship an AI companion app to a niche and generate $1,000,000 of cash flow for themselves. | |
Shaan Puri | You do know how these things grow. I mean, 300,000,000 monthly visits is no joke. What is the growth channel for something like this?
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Sarah Guo | Well, I think that's going to be an advantage in the future. I do think one of the weird things about these AI capabilities is that they are so novel and unique that they drive word-of-mouth.
For example, with character creation, you can make new characters and people share them. There's inbuilt virality there.
But let me give you two other examples of just how new and powerful these capabilities are, and how people want to talk about them. I don't think you can engineer that; it's just characteristic of these companies.
One example is I am an investor in a company called Heygen. You can make a video avatar of yourself, and you cannot tell the difference. Reaching that bar of quality is new as of this past year. People create content that is unbelievable, and they share it.
As a result, Heygen is now generating tens of millions in revenue, and they've never spent a dollar on paid marketing. | |
Shaan Puri | Sam, have you seen this thing before? By the way, hey Drew.
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Sam Parr | This is one of those products that I'm seeing all over the place, but it felt like it was just people younger than me talking about it. So, I felt embarrassed. | |
Shaan Puri | Well, this is not like... the character AI was like, you know, that's like teenagers kind of sharing stuff. It's more like Wattpad 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 just like a fake character altogether. Then it can 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 in a training system or educational product.
And so, that's what this is. And that's why they... it just, as it says at the top, raised $60,000,000 in funding. But I think the chart I saw was pretty absurd. They, you know, they basically raised $20,000,000 in ARR very, very fast.
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Sam Parr | Holy crap.
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Sarah Guo | Some of the usage actually... Yes, it's a business use case, but it's for all kinds of businesses: creators, SMBs, and high-end enterprise advertisers.
So, for you guys, it would be like, "Okay, well, 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 pod a lot, but then even each of you can contribute.
If the marginal cost of more time of Sam talking is free, you could probably do more with it, right? I think that's just what people are discovering.
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Sam Parr | Have you guys used this? The landing page makes it look amazing.
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Sarah Guo | Like it. | |
Shaan Puri | I've used it.
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Sam Parr | Is it amazing, or is it still up and coming?
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Shaan Puri |
No, it's like pretty good. This one crosses the line, I would say, of usable in real life versus cool demo, which is the hard thing with AI. You get a lot of cool demos, then you go in and try to use it for your use case, and you're like, "How come the tweet had such a good output but mine is kinda whack every single time?" Or like, "Well, this is good, but it won't let me change the text on it," which is what I would need to use it in my real thing.
I would say this one is definitely production-ready. They wouldn't have, you know, tens of millions in revenue if they weren't actually usable by customers.
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Sam Parr | Well. | |
Sarah Guo | They just did a public campaign with McDonald's, right? Like an advertising campaign.
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Shaan Puri | Campaign limits, right? Like, you can't be moving around. It's like a face on camera. At least that's what it used to be when I tried it, like, 6 months ago. | |
Sarah Guo | Yeah, there's some new stuff you should try. Like, you know, you can be walking around now.
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Sam Parr | Right, okay, I stand corrected.
Alright, guys, really quick. 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 created this sort of playbook for researching different companies, ideas, and emerging trends to help you make money and build businesses.
Well, HubSpot did something kind of cool. They took this playbook that we developed and gave to our analysts, and they turned it into an actionable guide and a resource that anyone can download. It breaks down all the different methods that we use for spotting upcoming trends and identifying different companies that are going to explode and grow really quickly.
It's pretty awesome that they took this internal document, which we use for teaching our analysts how to do this, and turned it into a tool that they are giving away for free. Anyone can download it! So, if you want to stay ahead of the game and find cool business ideas or different niches that most people have no idea exist, this is the ultimate guide.
If you want to check it out, you can see the link down below in the description.
Now, back to the show. Alright, Everback, can we just upload our YouTube page, or do we have to stand in front of it and film?
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Sarah Guo | You have to stand in front of your web or phone camera for 2 minutes and film. 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. They want you saying specific words about, like, "I, Sampar, say it's okay to make this avatar."
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Sam Parr | And you said that you started the podcast by saying there's a lot of... you had a real... 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?
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Sarah Guo | I think the market for this company is very deep because people want a lot of video. If you just think about the domain of making video, you guys know much more about this than I do, but people want a lot of control.
They want quality, specific expression, brand, and motions. They want one person, two people, or three people, like a person walking around a product, whatever it is.
I think there's actually a lot we still cannot do with research. The company wants to continually push the bounds of what you can do. I think that's a good example of the potential for a billion dollars in video generation revenue for them or for others.
However, you actually have to invest in the product pretty deeply. But that doesn't mean that your wedge can't be really powerful across a single use case.
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Shaan Puri | Sam, have you seen the ones that do this for D2C products? The AI for D2C product ads?
So, go to icon.me. If you scroll down, you could watch the video. See the video of the Asian dude who's holding a collagen peptides thing? That's an AI-generated video. The product in his hand is not actually in his hand; it’s with a script that was written. He never recorded it, and now you have a UGC (User Generated Content) very authentic-looking ad for an influencer.
You go to the next one, and look, he's holding a different product. That's because he didn't reshoot it; they just put a different product in his hand, and it looks super freaking real. Am I right? Isn't this wild? This is amazing!
So, he's got another one with ramen. What he's doing is interesting. He’s letting actual people—these are not AI-generated people—this is a real person, like an Instagram guy who's got whatever, 100,000 followers.
So, he's letting popular Instagram people say, "Okay, I'll do it. I'll create my digital twin that will be able to do my branded content." A brand can come in, request from, let's say, an Instagram member with a million followers, and say, "I want you to sponsor this video. Here's the script, here's my product." If I click yes, then it will AI-generate that video.
I never needed to open up a package, grab a thing, you know, take 20 minutes to 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, in 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.
What? And so that's what he's doing. Arcadz is the same thing. If you go to Arcadz, it's like pretty freaking wild. In their case, these are fake actors. So, these women that you see on the thing that are promoting stuff, these people do not exist. This is an AI-generated woman who looks like a real person that is promoting some product. Then you script it, and you can get these made.
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Sarah Guo | Or it might be like a real person, but they said, "Licensed to the company, you can do whatever you want."
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Shaan Puri | With it, yeah, exactly. I think in this case, they might have started with a couple of those. I think they found one of the girls from this, like, on Fiverr or something.
But the idea would be, I don't know too much about the under-the-hood stuff of these. I just started playing with them. The idea would be that, you know, people are not going to know what the hell's real and what's not. These look like real people in their home giving a genuine endorsement of some product that they like.
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 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...
Both these businesses are very quick to get to, you know, mid-seven figures of revenue 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 not?
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Sarah Guo | Yeah, and I think a piece of it is just like, for me, okay, what's the difference between the first million and the next 999,000,000? It is whether or not the capability exists in the company to make the product deeper and keep expanding the scope for what you do for your customer.
Right? And, but there's a ton of these wedges. So, staying with visual content, you can use this category of models. They're open source and can be fine-tuned for different use cases that are super commercial.
Right? So it could be models or creator videos for e-commerce, as you described. It could be renderings for interior design or buildings. I don't know if you guys have ever looked at a floor plan. Maybe I just have terrible visual-spatial reasoning, but I can't look at a floor plan with a couple of blocks and then a fuzzy piece of fabric and be like, "Yes, I see it. That is the room."
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Shaan Puri | I'll put my life savings into this.
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Sam Parr | And our friend Peter Lovells has a thing where you take a picture of your home, and then it does interior design for you and shows you mock-ups, which is pretty cool.
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Sarah Guo | Yeah, but I'd say like those renderings, traditionally generated, cost like thousands of dollars, right? Now, if you can give it to people for a very little incremental cost, like that's an interesting wedge. There are a handful of AI headshot companies making revenue. If you guys have ever gotten a professional headshot taken...
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, dude. So, this is actually a kind of interesting version of the drop shipping idea. I bet you this would work.
There was an ad I saw on Facebook. I think it was a Facebook ad, and it basically featured a guy with a headshot of someone I recognize, maybe a VC in Silicon Valley. It was basically like, "If you're in San Francisco, I take awesome headshots for you. You should have a great shot for your website, for LinkedIn, whatever. It's good for business, good for your career."
You click on the site, and it's a bunch of people in the tech industry. It was like $300 or $400. I went to some warehouse-type place, a little photo shoot studio in San Francisco, stood there awkwardly, got my headshots made, and paid this guy $350. He was running Facebook ads profitably to do that.
He was able to acquire a customer for whatever $70 and generate $350 off them. Now, you could run that same funnel just without the San Francisco studio, without the guy taking the picture, and without any other costs. You could just say, "Awesome, give me a couple of your photos," and then boom, here you go.
I've seen a couple of these go viral, like viral headshot or viral yearbook ideas, but I haven't seen too many people just running paid ads on them and making them work. I'm pretty sure you could create a paid funnel that would print cash.
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Shaan Puri | Of time, and maybe not forever, but an arbitrage of time.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, but what's an ex? I've seen the same ones where it's like, "You look like an eighties glam shot model." Remember that?
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Shaan Puri | I think the professional one, people are willing to pay more, right? So if it's actually going to be for your... what's?
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Sam Parr | An example of 1.
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Sarah Guo | Yeah, like, look at this company, Aragon.ai.
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Shaan Puri |
Oh dude, look at this landing page! This is genius. They just have a side-scrolling carousel, and it's the "befores," and then there's a line, and then that same photo becomes the "after." That is very well done.
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Sarah Guo | That's good.
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Sam Parr | Sarah, how hard is something like this to make?
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Sarah Guo |
So, there are a million of these wedges, right? And I think that means it's an amazing time to, as you were saying, be good at distribution. Understand how to make a funnel and how to market something. And to be an idea person, right?
Fundamentally, if you run into problems all the time or you see the basic capabilities, you're like, "Oh, I can think..." Like, you guys are both like, "Oh, I can think of like 5 other use cases for this."
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Shaan Puri | And by the way, you know the distribution thing? So this is a good example. I invested a little bit in Jasper. Jasper was started by guys who were internet marketers first, not AI researchers, not AI engineers, and frankly, not even very good engineers. They were just internet business guys.
I think they were doing something before this that wasn't really working very well, but they had spent a lot of time building internet marketing funnels. When they got access to probably ChatGPT-3 or something like that, they were kind of back before—sorry, before ChatGPT, just when it was GPT-3. They got access to the API and built Jasper, which took that same capability and made it useful for marketers.
So if you're a marketer and you need a blog post written, an email, or copy written for an ad, whatever it was, they just made a standalone tool that would do that. Under the hood, the OpenAI model is doing 80-90% of the work. They've maybe customized the last mile of it, but they were so good at internet marketing that they started running Facebook ads on this thing.
It's the fastest company I've ever seen get to $50 million in ARR. They got to $50 million in ARR in one year. To go from $0 to $50 million in revenue in one year is just absurd. The reason they were able to do that is because of their background as internet marketers. They were the kind of guys who, as soon as they had anything that worked, would plow the maximum amount of cash into Facebook ads and keep optimizing the ads until they got this thing to, you know, a dollar in equals a dollar fifty out or a dollar in equals two dollars out.
That's why they were able to be so successful early on. They had a different skill set than most of the Silicon Valley people. Most people in Silicon Valley don't ever run paid ads. That's just a pretty crazy thing. | |
Sarah Guo | I think, like, if we just go to the difference, then a challenge for any one of these companies that gets this wedge is that it's rare to see 0 to 50 in one year. That's pretty special.
But even if you get a product to hit in terms of initial adoption, then I think the next 999,000,000 of revenue has to be more traditional moats. The problem is, if it was... I'm not saying the distribution piece was easy, but let's say you were just first with an idea and you hit it on Reddit because it's a novel capability.
I think then you need to get to traditional reasons companies get really big: product velocity, depth of product, ability to serve the customer, social engagement, or something. It could be like, what are the arguments for why somebody gets to dominate that business?
There's a version of a companion business, or any business with paid spend, and you would know this really well, that is like just a treadmill. I make money, but I have to keep putting money in. It's the opposite of compounding. If I stop working hard or other people compete with me, the treadmill gets steeper or I fall off.
I think one simple answer is on companions. Do you guys ever play The Sims growing up? Of course! Sure.
It's very hard for me to not imagine The Sims better if the characters are smarter and richer in interaction, and have what looks like realistic video and voice. So, technically, instead of it just being like I'm talking to a person, it could be that person has some combination of memory of me, other interactions, goals, and the media experience of them is richer.
We haven't gone there yet, but I think there's a version of that company that's somewhere between a companion and a game world that will be very big.
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Sam Parr | It's kind of an interesting exercise. Well, if I could just get to **1,000,000**, then I've increased my likelihood, and maybe I can get that to **10** and then **100** and then **1,000,000,000**.
I actually firmly believe that if something can scale to **10,000,000**, it may take a while, but if it can get to **10**, it can almost always get to **100**. There are enough people in the world 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 **1,000,000,000** has been hard for me to figure out how to do that, but that's a fun exercise to think, "Well, if I can just get to **1,000,000**, I bet you I can get to **10**. And if I get to **10**, I know for a fact I can get to **100**."
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Shaan Puri |
Yeah, by the way, The Sims' lifetime sales are $5,000,000,000. So without AI, The Sims was able to get to $5 billion in sales. If you made it more engaging by AI-powering all those characters, that's going to be even stickier.
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Sarah Guo | It's going to be a big business, right?
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Sam Parr | Hey Sarah, why? Dude, you're like pretty in the know. Forget this fun thing. Why don't you just go do this? This sounds way more fun than investing in it.
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Sarah Guo | I really enjoy doing the **0 to 1** thing repeatedly. I think you just have to figure out what you're motivated by. I am really motivated by working with people who are entrepreneurs that I like and respect, and I think are super special.
I do not like working with people that I don't have as much enthusiasm about. That's a very specific personality trait.
With the **law of large numbers**, as soon as you manage very large teams, not everybody is going to be at the same level. So, like doing investing and being able to contribute to other people being successful—people who are really special—excites me.
Then there's the competitive nature of being right, with skin in the game, and knowing what is happening. I like all of that.
But, you know, never say never. I mean, we incubate companies where it's essentially like, "I see it, I see it, I see it," and then there's frustration that the right set of people you're really excited to back just hasn't come together around a certain idea.
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Sam Parr | Sean, you are more technical than me, but you're still not technical. I would say you're more technical than I am.
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Shaan Puri | Thank you very much for the classic compliment about the sand park.
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Sam Parr | You're not tech. You're more technical than me, but you're not technical.
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Shaan Puri | You're also not technical.
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Sarah Guo | You're almost good-looking. Yeah.
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Sam Parr |
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're out of the... me, but I'm a... one year, three? Did you... when you're... I know you've been like studying this stuff. When you... like, this seems like a really fun weekend thing just to play with. Are these... actually, would it be really hard for me to learn how to do this?
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Shaan Puri | Would it be hard to build one of these?
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Sam Parr | Just like a really simple project because I now... Sarah's getting me all hyped on this. I'm like, "This looks really fun to mess around with."
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, I mean, I think it's like anything else. You'd have to have a partner who just speeds you up.
Learning to code to be able to do these things would be the slow way of doing it. The easy way is to find an engineer who's excited about this and doesn't have clarity of vision around it. Maybe they don't want to run the business side of things.
You say, "Great, hey, let's build X together. I have a clear idea that X will work, and I'll handle the marketing side. You gotta make this product do this." And that's not so hard. That's pretty easy.
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Sam Parr | This is exciting! You're going to see a lot of cool stuff.
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Shaan Puri | Let's do some of your specific kind of thesis. So, you have this website, **conviction.com**. Good website, by the way! How'd you get that domain?
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Sarah Guo | I'm an internet person, yeah.
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Shaan Puri | Okay, alright. | |
Sam Parr |
Did you see her website? She has a website for her... I think it's the incubator. Where you gotta like "code" in order to get access. You don't really code, but like the menu is set up [in a way that mimics coding].
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Sarah Guo | It's a little... it's like, yeah.
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Sam Parr | It's a little CLI type. What's... what's?
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Sarah Guo | That URL, I think it was called **Commit**. It was like our program for hackathons, college students, etcetera.
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Sam Parr | It's commit.conviction.com, Sean. It's a pretty cool website, actually.
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Shaan Puri | Oh, you open up... it's a terminal. Yeah. Oh God, let me see. Let me try to do this. So, run.
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Sam Parr | No type, type, run.
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Sarah Guo | You should try to break.
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Shaan Puri | It now job dot HTML. | |
Sam Parr | You gotta type in "help." Yeah, so if you type in "help," it gives you the menu.
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Shaan Puri | Anyway, it's like a folder. I don't know how to do this.
Alright, so you have a website with a bunch of basically requests for startups or things that you think are going to be built in AI.
So let's run through some of these because that's actually why I initially thought, "We gotta have her on the pod to talk some of these out."
So let's do one that you call your personal seller. Do you remember this? You might have written this a while back, but your personal seller.
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Sarah Guo | It might have been one like my partner Pranav Reddy's or something, but we can certainly talk about it.
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Shaan Puri | Okay, I'll give you the summary.
The summary is: you're a personal seller. I think the idea here is that there are a bunch of places online to sell stuff, like Etsy, eBay, and Amazon. I have a bunch of different places to sell things, but actually doing that is a lot of work.
Creating the store listings, changing prices, writing the copy—all of that. I think what you're saying is that somebody should be able to just have a product, and then the AI should be able to handle the actual e-commerce management of the sale and setting up the shop.
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Sarah Guo | Is that what that means?
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, I think like it's probably it.
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Sarah Guo | It matches a larger theme that I really think is exciting about AI.
All of these skills could be used to run a basic social marketing campaign, send emails to your customers who are likely to be repeat customers, or improve your website for indexing. There are a bunch of things that are probably not related to, let's say, a Shopify dropshipping store for a particular type of sock.
As an entrepreneur who loves socks, it's not directly related to the merchandising decision or the design decision of "What is the sock I want to give the world?" That's kind of the essence of why sometimes people become entrepreneurs.
So, can you take a bunch of these tasks that require skills in all these different domains and just automate them, at least at a basic level? I think you can now.
Platforms like Shopify and Square have native assistant products that help you use the platforms better. However, I think across the spectrum of how to be a good internet entrepreneur, particularly in the e-commerce sense, there is more opportunity there. | |
Sam Parr | How do companies do that now? So, let's just say you're a company with 10,000 SKUs. How do you get accurate descriptions for all of them?
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Shaan Puri | Well, usually if you have 10,000 SKUs, you have like... they have like... you don't have 10,000 unique, totally variant items.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, but you could have.
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Shaan Puri | Color variants, size variants, things like that. So, I'll give you an example from our case. I have an e-commerce store, and we spend, let's see, probably around $5 or $6 a month on just Shopify Plus or whatever the enterprise Shopify plan is.
So, that's just the Shopify cost. On top of that, I would say we probably have another $3 to $5 a month on Shopify apps. You need an app for search, an app for bundles, and so on. There are a ton of things that Shopify doesn't provide.
So, my all-in software cost is at least $10 a month, probably a little bit more, on top of the fees they take from every transaction. Then, I have an e-commerce store manager. His job is to run the store, manage new product launches, and address any issues like bugs or broken links.
We also have a merchandiser who goes in every day to look at the collections. They check what’s sold out and ensure it’s not at the top anymore. If we don’t have sizes or colors for a product, they’ll move something else to the top. They also rearrange items based on the season.
There’s a human being that does that, but there are also apps that assist with this. However, you kind of need both the app and the software today because the app isn't quite good enough to do it by itself.
We then have virtual assistants (VAs) who handle all the product pages, descriptions, templates, and tagging. This ensures our inventory data is correct because we need to analyze our inventory accurately. To do that, every product needs to be tagged correctly.
So, there are about four or five people just making sure the store runs smoothly, in addition to five apps that help the store operate. This is the current state of things, and it shouldn't be the elite future state of operations.
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Sarah Guo | And Sean, I think the future state is for entrepreneurs who cannot recruit, manage, or pay the five people it takes to run your store. What do they do? As Sam said, I think it will be easier in the future, right?
Yeah, I think this is also kind of similar to another area that we are in. Personally, I am really interested in the voice automation market. I think a lot of your listeners will have seen the GPT-4 demo, where it's like a voice that may or may not sound like Scarlett Johansson talking, yeah, like in real time.
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Sam Parr | Well, we play with 11 Labs. Mhmm.
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Shaan Puri | No, but that's dubbing. She's talking about just being able to, like, Alexa. You know, you just talk to it and it just talks back. It'll sound like Scarlett Johansson, just like chat, but you don't have to type.
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Sarah Guo | Yeah, but both of these things could either be in your voice or in the voice of a spokesperson for a brand or a company. The ability to give reasons and provide knowledge-based responses in a human voice is really powerful.
I don't think people are thinking enough about the opportunities here. You mentioned 11; there's exactly one independent voice API business generating tens of millions in revenue, and that's 11. They're great, that's amazing!
I think there are other opportunities as well. For example, there's a company called Cartesia that does more real-time voice.
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Sam Parr | Do you think Eleven Labs is at tens of millions in revenue? | |
Sarah Guo | They are definitely at, you know, a large number that is in the tens of millions of revenue.
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Sam Parr | Hopefully, it's insane.
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Sarah Guo | I'm not surprising a market with that. Yeah, but you know, a lot of developers will immediately gravitate toward API businesses. However, that is not how the rest of the world works. The world is full of niches and people running businesses that don't think about APIs and won't use them.
Just like your personal seller, I think there are going to be a bunch of interesting voice services for everything from restaurants to HVAC companies to dental reception. These services could simply answer the phone. I think that's one of the ideas we had.
It could be informational, like "We are open from 8 AM to 6 PM," or it could be a lead generation business where someone might say, "Well, my plumbing broke. Are you available tomorrow at 3 PM?"
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Shaan Puri | I'm a much bigger believer in this huge idea that Sean has. So, you know, when the internet came out, it was like, "Oh, it's gonna be so crazy." But one of the obvious things was, "Hey, every restaurant just kind of needs their menu online."
You should put your restaurant's location and then put your menu up there, even as a PDF. That's still a value add for you. It became where every business needed a website.
Now, what I think is going to happen is that every business needs an agent. So, what's the agent for most small businesses?
For example, I call pest control because we always get a bunch of mice jumping in our pool for whatever reason. I try calling pest control, but nobody ever picks up the damn phone. It's usually run by someone like "Mike's Pest Control," and Mike's out in the field doing things all day.
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Sarah Guo | Controlling the pest.
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Shaan Puri | Doing work, and so he doesn't pick up the phone. Then you leave a message, and you're like... But you called 10 of them because you're not sure if Mike's going to get back to you.
So then it becomes whoever gets back to you first. Mike loses business because he 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 going to get. It just wouldn't make sense.
But now, I built one of these in our AI weekly tutoring session that I have. Basically, I was like, "I want to build one of these." We have the same problem for our offshore recruiting business.
So we own an offshore recruiting business called Somewhere. It's like you can find amazing talent; they're just somewhere out in the world, you just have to find them. So what Somewhere does is find you elite talent.
Now, the big problem is if you go to Somewhere.com, it's like you say, "Okay, I'm looking for a designer," or "I need somebody who can get me leads for my marketing business," or "I need somebody to do 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 "Schedule a call. Here's the call tomorrow or two days from now."
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.
You have an opportunity to sell me. So, Sam, I don't know if you've seen this, but check out bland.ai. This is the...
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Sam Parr | One, I built on. If the answer is "Have you seen this?" assume it's no. My mind is being blown by all this stuff.
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Shaan Puri | But basically, it lets you build a phone agent for yourself. So, I went on here and I built a phone agent. I created a guy who could answer the phone.
When somebody goes somewhere and they want to hire someone, it will be like, "Awesome! What are you hiring for? Have you ever hired overseas?" And you're like, "Yeah, I have." It's like, "Cool! Tell me what you're looking for in a couple of sentences."
"Oh great! It sounds like what you're looking for is somebody who could be a developer for your Shopify store. Our normal budget for that is $2,000 a month. Would that work for you, or are you looking for something a little bit more or a little bit less?"
Then it answers. It basically does the intake, the initial sales call for you. 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. We do this all the time. 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 is like, "Great! I guess I can just wait for that to happen." Or it will 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 says, "The AI agent did the initial sales call and found the customer's requirements." It 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.
Now, you could follow up with a more bespoke answer for that person. That's the future that I see. I wasn't able to fully build that; I did a prototype of it. But that's what I think websites, even like ours, which is an internet business, should have. This means that every plumbing, pest control, and restaurant will have their version of that.
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Sam Parr | This is 100% better than having a call center. It might be, or it will be, as long as it works as good. But this is absolutely the way to go. | |
Shaan Puri | Alright, let's do some more. You have another one on here that's, I think, an easy one. It's called "Next Gen Auto Complete."
The idea here is to create a Chrome extension or a browser extension that not only helps you fill in the next word it thinks you're going to say or how to spell a word, but it also starts to learn your voice.
This way, it can help you write your emails or your blog posts in your voice, which is kind of like the next level up from auto complete. It's a step up from Grammarly; it doesn't just correct or spell check your stuff, but it actually writes the way you write because it has observed your writing style. Is that the thesis here?
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Sarah Guo | Yeah, absolutely. I think it can be, you know, lots of different types of business communication, but especially like email.
So, I don't know, this is actually my friend Mike Vernal's idea. I think he suffers from the same thing I do, and that might be true for you, which is that I'm an incredibly picky writer.
I will use the models today for the generation of basic content, or I'll ask my amazing EA to draft emails for me. Then, I will go rewrite the whole thing because I don't like the tone. It doesn't sound like me, or because it's not tight enough, or because I want to use a certain phrase.
I think the next level of value and impact is definitely going to be fine-tuning to a specific voice.
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Shaan Puri | And nobody wants to write like ChatGPT. Nobody wants to be the generic AI either. So, right, what everybody wants is the thing in between.
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Sam Parr | 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.
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Sarah Guo | I mean, Superhuman has really interesting AI features, but I think the unlock is going to be the personalization.
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Shaan Puri | And what's your overarching investment thesis? So you have this thing called **Software 3.0**, which, by the way, is the most VC thing to do—like, "Oh, Software 3.0, Web 3.0." You've done it! You've gone full VC. What is Software 3.0?
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Sarah Guo | Yeah, okay. So, the seed for that phrase "Software 3.0" actually comes from an essay that Andrej Karpathy wrote years ago about "Software 2.0."
The base premise here is that you had to write a lot of software by hand in a prior generation before machine learning. Then, Software 2.0, which Andrej, you know, worked at Tesla on while working on Autopilot, was really about dataset labeling. You are teaching a machine learning model by the data you choose to put into the pipeline how to do new tasks.
**Software 3.0** is the idea that the next generation of software is largely about manipulating foundation models. 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 guidance and reinforcement with information specific to your business.
An example would be like what Sean was talking about for his lead capture intake form voice bot. He doesn't need to go train a model or collect data for that software application. The voice agent is a software application; he just needs to ensure it's plugged into his scheduling system and his database of candidates. He needs to be able to retrieve the right information about the business and respond consistently to customers in a certain tone.
So, that's more about manipulating a bunch of this base work that people like research labs have already done for you. The premise here is that the last mile of getting a foundation model to serve all these use cases in the real world is important. Research labs may think of these as niches, but the world is composed of very large niches. That's why I think it's a really big opportunity for entrepreneurs and for us. | |
Shaan Puri | What are some of your hot takes or maybe your contrarian takes? Is there anything that you think might be counter to what most people say, do, or bet on? Do you have anything that goes against the grain?
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Sarah Guo | You know, I'm going to give a somewhat arrogant answer, which is: I don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the entire market thinks passionately. So, I'm like, I don't know which of these things are contrarian.
I can tell you where my opinion has changed dramatically. Let me give you one example. For many years, including the tenure of my investing at Greylock, I was one of several people who were like, "Okay, we're going to go understand healthcare and digital health." I was like, "Oh, healthcare sucks."
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 trying to enter that market with technology or the speed of entrepreneurship that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are seeking is not a good idea.
We just did a healthcare administration automation company, so I'm like, "Oops, changed my mind. Real hypocrite here." One of the reasons being, if you think about the mind-numbing work that happens in healthcare administration—like billing, authorization, coding, claims processing—all that, even if it's not mind-numbing, is just expensive and manual, like patient support.
It's actually really fertile for an AI company. We backed something that's growing really quickly in one of those domains. So, I just say, I guess I've changed my mind.
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Sarah Guo | Of view on health care. | |
Sam Parr |
I went to the pediatrician yesterday with my baby. There, I'm sitting and she's got her iPad on like a table with a video playing. I'm like, "Who the f*** is that guy?" They're like, "Oh, that's just my scribe. He's just listening in and taking notes."
She explained, "I used to stay up until 3 AM taking notes on all of my patients."
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Shaan Puri | Oh wow.
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Sam Parr |
They just do it for me, and obviously the wheels are turning in my head. I'm like, "Yeah, that job is gonna 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 dude, this has been around for a long time." I was like, "I've never seen that."
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Sarah Guo | Yeah, I do think one framework for your listeners to consider when thinking about different ideas is: what parts of work have already been outsourced as services?
For example, it used to be the doctor taking the notes. They realized, "Wow, we pay this person a lot," and thought, "They should see more patients and focus on their patients more." So, they decided to outsource that to a cheaper tech in their office or even outsource that tech to India or the Philippines.
Now, there are a number of scribe businesses in medicine that are growing really fast, like Abridge and Nabla. It is happening.
I think this will occur in a bunch of different areas. If you can create a separation of that work to outsource it, then maybe you can also outsource it to a machine as well. | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, Sam Ullman had a good point. He said, "Everybody worries about AI taking your job." That's not the right way to think about it.
It's that AI will take your tasks. 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, and there are certain tasks it can't do well.
There are also tasks today that it can't do, but in the future, it might be able to. Eventually, a job becomes a bundle of tasks. But for now, you can't think of the whole bundle because it can't replace the entire job.
It can replace specific tasks, which might be just the way it works in the long run. There will be a huge slew of tasks that can be done by AI, and then there are people who bundle those tasks together to ensure that they're getting done well or at the right time.
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Sarah Guo |
I hate that's like approximately right, but to be intellectually honest... there was a scribe in that outsourced BPO [Business Process Outsourcing] that had that job. So it's not taking the doctor's job, but it's taking the piece of the job that already got separated out from the doctor's job. The task that they didn't like but that became a job of its own.
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, the task became a job, and the job goes back to being a task, basically, in this case.
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Sarah Guo | Yes, yeah, yeah. It's a good framework.
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Sam Parr | Sarah, are you investing exclusively in AI-related businesses?
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Sarah Guo | 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 in it. I think it's like the most important thing to happen in technology in a long time.
But I'd say I'm also here to just, you know, invest in great tech companies and so on.
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Sam Parr | You're also here to get paid.
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Sarah Guo | I am also here to work on things that are important. If an entrepreneur that I think highly of, or someone I've worked with before, comes to me and says, "I have a great idea," even if it has nothing to do with AI, I'm still definitely going to be really interested in that.
If you ask me about the ideas that we think about or hunt for, it is all in AI. I do want to put one more thing out there, which is definitely not an idea that just anyone can go after. It's kind of the opposite of the easy wedge idea in terms of how to put distribution around one functionality for a niche, like an AI headshot application or something.
But I really want to hear from anyone who has a view on what happens to the NVIDIA compute monopoly and what is changing in the data center. I don't know if this is a hot take to your former question, but I think a lot of people in technology really understand that workloads are changing from non-AI to AI. However, they don't actually think about what that means in terms of scale and market cap.
That means chips, memory bandwidth, networking, energy storage, and optimized system design. That was a lot of technology company market cap before. If that's true, there are going to be a bunch of different new specialized solutions, and there are trillions of dollars of value at stake. It's not just a single direct attack on NVIDIA; that is the opportunity.
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Shaan Puri | What else would be in that category? If it's not just like, "Hey, our chip is better than Nvidia's chip," what else is there? What's another shape of a company that could be in that space?
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Sarah Guo | So, I guess an example would be like, what are other bottlenecks? Like memory bandwidth. What if you designed storage to be specific for AI data centers? What if you could do cooling systems?
There are ways to reimagine the entire data center around big AI inference. I think you end up with totally different needs.
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Sam Parr | 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 chips currently created right now. We need to create like another $4,000,000,000,000 in market cap in order to satisfy the amount of capacity that we have.
They were sort of writing it in a way of like, "I don't know if we're gonna be able to do that." But then when you think about it the other way around, where you think about, well, in 1998, if you said, "You know, what how big is the internet going to be?" I'm sure it went far beyond virtually 100% of the experts' opinion as to how big it will get.
I remember reading this article the other day, and I was like, "That's just absolutely astounding that we're in one of these moments."
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Shaan Puri | Sequoia came out with a sort of blog post, or I don't know, a PDF or something like that about this. I think they called it the **$600,000,000,000 hole** or something. It was basically saying, "Well, we've invested this much, or we're investing this much in capex."
So if you invest that much in capex, what do you need to get out to make that, you know, return? You know, that's a VC saying that, which is not just like some journalist who doesn't get it, who doesn't get tech.
Sarah, what was your reaction to that and what's your take on that?
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Sarah Guo | I think it is a lot of capex. If you put it in the context of how it compares to other big capex spends in the past, let's say like the broadband build-out. We wanted the internet, you know? We spent about $2,000,000,000,000 on broadband to date. We're not there yet, right? That was worth it.
So what I would say is, yes, it's a totally valid question. We're spending a lot of money. What are we going to get out of it? I think we're going to get a lot of value.
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Sam Parr | We had Darmesh on. Darmesh founded HubSpot.
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Sarah Guo | **Darmesh is amazing.**
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Sam Parr | Yeah, he's really wise and he tends to be right more than he's wrong. I think he said something great when I asked him, "Man, I'm a little nervous about a lot of the stuff where the world is gonna go."
He's like, "Well, I'm fairly educated and I think that it's not gonna be as good or bad as you think it's going to be."
Do you agree with that sentiment?
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Sarah Guo | No, I think it's actually pretty bimodal. I think it would be like bad, or it could be much, much better.
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Shaan Puri | It's the opposite, great. It's either going to be much worse or much better. That's kind of your take.
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Sam Parr |
What's the bad situation look like? For example, I think the bad situation - and I'm fairly uneducated so take it with a grain of salt - the very bad situation is that there's just going to be this massive gap between the haves and the have-nots. And like, if you have money now, that's going to grow and you're going to be awesome.
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Shaan Puri | The bad situation is AI kills us all. Right? That's the doom situation.
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Sam Parr | That’s a bad situation, but then I... there, en route to that, there is just this massive separation of the haves and have-nots. You know what I’m saying? That kind of freaks me out. What’s your... where do you see the bad situation going towards?
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Sarah Guo | So, I think it is not necessarily correlated that your resources or your capital today mean that you must take advantage of the AI revolution.
I actually think people have a lot of agency in this. I think you should go start these businesses and make $1,000,000.
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Sam Parr | That's such a small group of people.
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Sarah Guo | Why does it have to be?
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Sam Parr | Because of human nature, how many people know about this stuff? You go do your... well, your parents are tech entrepreneurs. But go ask Sean's mom and dad. I'll go ask my parents. Go ask my brother and sister, like you...
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Sarah Guo | I'm giving you more.
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Shaan Puri | It's not entrepreneurial. Even if this widens the number of people who could be successfully entrepreneurial, it's not 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. | |
Sarah Guo |
Yeah, I don't know if it has to express in pure entrepreneurialism versus... You will get increased productivity for people in lots of different types of jobs, and it's not obvious to me that it's just the people who are already most highly paid today.
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Shaan Puri | 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 Emmett Shearer, who we had on the podcast. Emmett's a smart, thoughtful guy, and he's like, "You know, the probability of actual doom here is pretty scary. It's not zero."
And here's where I think it is. What do you think about that? What are the odds that AI truly is a sort of critically dangerous thing?
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Sarah Guo | You know, I don't actually spend a lot of time thinking about this problem because it is like conjecture about the future of both the objectives of these models and the capabilities of these models that are kind of hand-wavy.
If you talk to experts about some of the suggested scenarios, here are two classic ones:
1. "Oh, you know, people are going to use this to design a virus that kills us all—bioweapons."
2. "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.
So when people ask me about the doom scenario, I am much more concerned about abuses we actually do understand. For example, what if people don't understand what information is true or not? Or people are going to use this stuff for hacking, fraud, and lots of bad activities today? We should go understand that and react as quickly as possible to that. As a country, we probably want to stay ahead on these capabilities technically.
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Sam Parr |
Well, have you heard any... What are some... What's a wild example of how people use this for hacking or for fraud?
Oh, I mean, like for my company, we get emails from "me" - it's not really me - and sometimes it will have, or like it'll have a link to something that sounds like it's in my voice.
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Sarah Guo | Yeah, I think that's the simplest example. What happens if you can create really authentic-sounding media? Like, are your parents going to not pick up the phone if it's a spoofed phone number and it sounds like you? If you say you need something, that's a bad scenario.
So, I think we need more tools to protect against that and general education about it. I worry more about that.
Then, I'd say, when I think of the probability of a bad scenario, I said it is possible. I can't see exactly how we get there. If you ask me what the reasons are in which broad use of cheap intelligence is going to be great, I can give you so many reasons.
For example, Andrej Karpathy just started a company around education. The fields that have been super resistant to cost improvement are basically healthcare, the government, and education. I think this will actually move the needle on some of the domains that matter a lot to all of us humans.
When people talk about the doom, it's really fun and scary to discuss the dystopian doom scenario. But I think the opportunity cost of not exploring the ways in which we can have an economy of abundance is significant. We need to talk about that, and that is really what I focus on. | |
Shaan Puri | Do you know who Andre Karpathy is?
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Sam Parr | No, but I love his name.
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Sarah Guo | It's a lovely name. Andre is an amazingly well-respected research scientist and educator who is trying to create an experience that is AI-powered in education. The idea is that the most amazing expert in a domain acts as a personal tutor, taking you through the material interactively.
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Shaan Puri |
And he's one of the five big thought leader-type guys. He ran Tesla's AI program 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 OpenAI. He then quit OpenAI.
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Sam Parr | It says he's listed as a co-founder of OpenAI. So, yeah, he's the man.
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Shaan Puri | He was like the early, early mind behind it. At Tesla, he was basically the guy leading their entire self-driving unit. I think he's... I forgot what his title was, but he's like, you know, the chief AI guy.
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Sam Parr | When I lived in San Francisco, it was fun. I lived there from 2012 to basically 2020 or 2022. Back then, it was like the Airbnbs of the world, and Tesla or Uber. We had Sidecar back then, where it was like, "Holy crap, we're gonna get into a stranger's car!" This was so exciting and new.
You'd go to hackathons, and people were working on meal delivery services, and that was really cool. I went recently—this was about a year ago—and I was walking around the Ferry Building. This kid recognized me. He said, "Oh Sam, I like the pod!" I replied, "Hey, what's up, man?" He said, "I'm doing a hackathon right now in the Ferry Building upstairs. Do you and your wife want to come up and see what's going on?" I was like, "Hell yeah, let's do it!"
So we went up there, and it was so invigorating. I was like, "Dude, we used to do these exact same things, but it was around the sharing economy and all this type of stuff." I was just talking to people about what they were building, and I remember thinking, "This is totally... I guess it happens in San Francisco a bunch." I was like, "This is like the Renaissance! There's something really, really cool going on." Everyone was doing AI stuff, and I just thought it was magical.
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Shaan Puri | Right when I moved there, it was like mobile was the thing. It was like, "Oh, X for mobile! Everything, we gotta make it work on an iPhone and an Android."
Then you would see some false flags, like when Frontback came out. It's like, "Oh shit, this is the next big social app!" But then it would kind of die.
However, Instagram and Snapchat, they actually stuck. I remember the early days of Musical.ly, which has now become TikTok. So, mobile was the big thing at the time.
Then it became crypto, and it became the crypto hub. But it started to lose a little bit of steam for crypto because crypto was a lot more international.
Now it looks like for AI, San Francisco at least is back as the hub. Sarah, are you in San Francisco?
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Sarah Guo | Yeah, we're on a mission in San Francisco, and I think we really believe in this sort of community aspect—not in the squishy sense of the word, but in a more practical way.
If you're looking for ideas for companies and want to be inspired to commit to the grind and have the right ideas, then the right thing to do is not to do it alone in your basement. What you have in San Francisco are people who are optimistic and work-oriented. They believe that lots of things are possible, and they're learning about what's going on at the frontier.
We actually have this grant program, embed.embed.com, to create that kind of community, along with a bunch of other initiatives. It revolves around the idea that people want to have the experience you described, Sam, which is: "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?" That will probably educate and inspire me, and some of it will be really big.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, I think that if you're 22, young, single, and into this, I would just say two words: **"Go west."** Go west, young man.
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Shaan Puri |
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 made it in the war-torn city of San Francisco. You don't wanna be a billionaire who's coddled... you wanna be a billionaire who grew up on the mean streets of San Francisco.
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Sarah Guo | You're not that mean, alright?
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Shaan Puri | I think we have to wrap up, Sarah. Thanks for coming on. Where should people find you, and where should they follow you?
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Sarah Guo | You can just Google **saraguaorconviction.com** and I'm on Twitter.
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Shaan Puri | Alright, that's it. That's the pod.
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Sarah Guo | Thanks, guys.
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