17-Year Chat Evolution

Dharmesh Shah shares a story about his 17-year journey pursuing a vision of chat-based interfaces, which led to his recent purchase of Chat.com.

"17 years ago, before HubSpot, I had this idea. Everyone was using email and Outlook back then, before the iPhone. I thought business software was really hard to talk to, and I wanted to make it like emailing an assistant. You could just type an email saying 'I have this file in our shared file server in SharePoint somewhere, can you send me a link to that file? I'm about to hop on a plane.'

The beauty of email was it already had a disconnected model - you could be on a plane with no internet, type all the emails you want, and when you get connection it does all the things. I called the product InGentaMail.

Then 5 years ago, I realized the InGentaMail idea was good but email was the wrong conduit. It needed to be a web-based tool. So I built GrowthBot, got thousands of users, but it didn't work - it couldn't actually do the natural language understanding I wanted despite using Google's DialogFlow and Facebook's tools.

When GPT-3 came along, I realized that thing I'd been thinking about for 17 years was now possible. So I started working on ChatSpot.ai. It took 17 years but I proved myself right. I had the courage of my convictions to never let go of that one idea.

Then Chat.com came along. Deep down, the reason I bought it was to get into the AI party. I'm nobody in that particular party, but ChatSpot moves me in that direction. Even if I break even or lose a few million on Chat.com, it's worth the price of admission - it pays the cover charge to show I get it."