The Venture Capitalist Who Finds the Best AI Products—Before They Win - Ep. 45 with Nabeel Hyatt

As a general partner at Spark Capital, Nabeel Hyatt backs just one or two companies each year. But when he does invest, Nabeel picks winners. He was an early investor in Discord, video editor Descript, self-driving startup Cruise (acquired by General Motor for over $1 billion), and, recently, AI note-taking app Granola. Nabeel’s investment thesis is to look for products like the Japanese toilet. Don’t fret—Spark Capital hasn’t pivoted into the sanitaryware industry. Nabeel isn’t looking for startups that are disrupting plumbing. Rather, just like Japanese toilets, he’s looking for products that delight users with new experiences they didn’t know they wanted—and if his past investments are anything to go by, Nabeel has a good eye for that. On my recent trip to San Francisco, I sat down with Nabeel to talk about the qualities shared by remarkable products and the founders that build them, why he chooses not to invest in more than a couple of startups a year, and how he’s actually using AI in his daily life. Nabeel is one of my favorite people in AI, and this is one of my favorite recent conversations. It’s a must watch for founders who want to build useful AI products with soul. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free. To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper Links to resources mentioned in the episode: Nabeel Hyatt: @nabeel, https://nabeelhyatt.com/ Spark Capital: https://www.sparkcapital.com/ The piece Chris Pedregal wrote for Every: How to Build a Truly Useful AI Product Chris Pedregal on AI & I: 🎧 The Secret to Building Sticky AI Products The AI tools Nabeel talks about: Windsurf, Wordware

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Rory Sutherland says there's like three types of innovation. There's faster horses and then there's teleportation. Like you want it to exist, you don't know how to get there. But if I tell you, you want teleportation, you want teleportation. Everybody wants teleportation. And then there's like Japanese toilets. For me, the things I'm like wandering around and trying to find are the Japanese toilets of AI. I am looking for mostly new experiences, things that surprise you with the place that they're playing.

• 0:38Dan Shipper?

  Hey, it's Dan. We're going to get to the episode in a moment, but I wanted to share with you one thing before we do. I think that writing is the most important skill in the AI age. Now that you can code in English, the line between a writer and a builder is blurring. And I think in a world like that, the most important thing you can learn to do, no matter what your job is, is learn to tell great stories. That's why I want to tell you about How to Write with AI. It's a course we put on at every, led by our lead writer, Evan Armstrong. It's a four-week course designed to teach you everything you need to know to write incredible things with AI. We go through all of the latest technology, including ChatGPT, Claude, and some of our internal incubations like Spiral and Lex to give you a powerful toolkit to tell amazing stories.

• 1:19Dan Shipper?

  The course starts February 13th and early bird access ends this Friday, January 24th. So if you want to save $300 off list price, grab your spot at writewithai.xyz. And now on to the episode. Nabeel, welcome to the show.

• 1:32Speaker 00

  Good to be here.

• 1:33Dan Shipper?

  So for people who don't know, you are a partner at Spark Capital.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:38Dan Shipper?

  You've made a bunch of impressive investments, including in Cruise, Discord. A very recent one is Granola. And before we start, you, you said something which I didn't know about you, which is, your investing strategy is not prolific. You only do a couple a year. Why is that?

• 1:55Speaker 00

  First of all, I just think that, so I was a founder before becoming an investor. And I found that I had no horror venture capital stories that sometimes investors have or entrepreneurs have. But I also basically had a bunch of no-ops. I had investors that were fine and great board members and maybe offered a random piece of advice, but weren't in the muck enough and in the nuance enough to give good feedback because they were investing in 15,000 things.

• 2:24Dan Shipper?

  What does no-ops stand for?

• 2:26Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 2:27Dan Shipper?

  No opposition?

• 2:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:28Dan Shipper?

  Okay.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  They were just fine.

• 2:31Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  It was like, there no damage. I don't have a horror story, did no harm, but was also like, would the company have been exactly the same if they were not there? Probably. And I just, you know, there's a thing on our website that I think we collectively believe at Spark, which is that there aren't really any startup playbooks. Like, I think as a founder, you know, you're doing something super unique with every, so you probably already believe there's really no playbook for what you're trying to do.

• 2:58Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  But generally, every single journey is unique and all the devil's in the details. And so I think for me, the like proxy is if you're a startup CEO or running a small org, you can manage like eight or nine direct reports where you kind of understand everything they're doing.

• 3:16Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 3:17Speaker 00

  And outside of that, it starts to, the edges get fuzzy. And it's just the same thing. Like, I want to work with eight or nine or 10 companies really closely, as much as a founder really wants me around, and I'll go away if it's not. And so you try and make the rest of the math work.

• 3:31Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  And like, construct life about the way you want to live and then see if you can make it work versus letting somebody's financial or business model force you into working what you don't want to work.

• 3:41Dan Shipper?

  I like that. I mean, I think it's, it takes some balls. It's better than like, like, I think obviously the sort of spray and pray, like small checks into a lot of things, like that, that's a well-trod strategy. But I think. Taking enough risk to be concentrated and to actually call your shot is, I think it's, I think it's quite cool.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  Well, it's not even, spray and pray even on, on the front end. I mean, basically the whole venture capital industry, since I joined, I've been to this for over a decade now, is basically doing that at both ends of the spectrum, right? You've got the, I'm going to write 100K checks into a million things. And then you have the, well, if I raise 100 gajillion dollars, then I can own a proxy of the whole market firms, which is like a lot of our peers that started around the same time we did. That's been their strategy to mitigate risk over time. And I'm like, look, the whole point of this thing is risk, like, accept the risk and like, go do the work you want to do with good people.

• 4:37Dan Shipper?

  That is interesting. Something about what you said about doing something unique triggered something for me. I think you'd have good thoughts on this, which is, I feel like I've been grasping for words for how to describe whatever is for, for a while recently.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:54Dan Shipper?

  And I think that that's a really interesting place to be because, like, we're doing something that's working and there isn't yet a word for it. The closest thing I've come up with is multimodal media company.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  Right.

• 5:08Dan Shipper?

  And

• 5:08Speaker 00

  Wait, what was the other idea you had a little while ago that was not good?

• 5:11Dan Shipper?

  Malleable media.

• 5:12Speaker 00

  That's terrible.

• 5:13Dan Shipper?

  Meta media. Multimodal media is my

• 5:15Speaker 00

  I like multimodal media.

• 5:16Dan Shipper?

  There's a lot, there's a lot of Ms. in it, which is a problem. So like, it's multimodal publishing, maybe. I don't know. We're, we're, we're working on it. But like, the point is we publish writing, we publish videos, we publish podcasts, and we publish software.

• 5:29Speaker 00

  But that's of the time, right? Publishing software is a lot closer to publishing articles in 2025.

• 5:36Dan Shipper?

  Right, exactly.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  Than it was 10 years ago, right?

• 5:38Dan Shipper?

  And that's new, you're newly able to do that, right?

• 5:40Speaker 00

  That's a new thing.

• 5:40Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. So like, there's, so there's not really a word for it. So I'm trying to like, figure that out. But there's this interesting thing where like, I'm like, I'm realizing that working on something that I don't have a word for is actually like, really valuable and really cool, especially because it, because it's starting to work. But then there's also this, this trap that I think you can get into sometimes. And I've definitely fallen into this too, where it's like, you think you don't have a word for it, but there is actually a word and it's been done a lot before. And you, you can't, you can't fool yourself.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  Do you have an example of that in your head?

• 6:14Dan Shipper?

  I don't have, I don't have like a specific example off the top of my head, but like, I don't know. When we started Every, for example, we were like, oh, like this kind of media company has never been done before. We wanted to be a bundle of different newsletters. And it's like, it's a magazine.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  A bundle of newsletters is a magazine.

• 6:30Dan Shipper?

  It's a magazine. And so like, and yeah, there were some things that were different about it. But like, like about a year or two in, we realized that all of the complexity that we had built into the model like, didn't need to be there. And it was just like, it was just a newsletter, basically. And, and, and the, and the way the newsletter worked was sort of like a magazine.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  That's the tension though, in anything new, which is like, of course it proxies to something that's pre-existing. Of course it proxies something that, but, but if you then adhere, once you, did something change in you when you start calling it a newsletter? Because that, that, that, that's also a trap. Like, like the early days of, we were an early investor i- in Postmates and back in this on-demand land, you had, you had Postmates and Uber and DoorDash and Lyft. And, and you know, the, the Twitterati looks at that and is like, you know, that's just a delivery company. That's the same thing as a taxi company. And, and yet if those founders had internalized that and just been like, yeah, we're just a taxi company, you just wouldn't have done, like, you wouldn't have done any of the things that you ended up doing over time. And so I, I, I don't

• 7:34Speaker 00

  know. I think definitions really matter if you're doing something, if you're doing something new, which I think you are trying to grasp for something new right now.

• 7:41Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, we're trying.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  I would, I would like find the weird words that, that are, are capturing that essence inside of you, right?

• 7:47Dan Shipper?

  I think for me, like actually calling us a newsletter was quite freeing because it was like, we were doing all this complicated stuff to not just be a newsletter. And then once we just like dropped it and it was just like, no, it's just a newsletter and like, it's a bunch of creative people writing stuff and like, we're gonna do interesting stuff. We just, you know, we don't know what it is yet. But for now, we're just gonna write because that's what we love to do. That was like, that was really helpful because I think what's been, what's been quite important for me entrepreneurially is to

• 8:20Dan Shipper?

  Start to be really comfortable with like whatever it is that I authentically believe and want to do as opposed to like triangulating between like what I believe and what I think will sound okay and like what I think I can justify basically. And I think like being able to say, no, it's a newsletter and I'm like gonna write a lot is like was an expression of that. It's like, that's what I want to do and everything else has like flowed from that. And then we found some new stuff that we're doing that is like, oh, I can't really describe what this is, but it's really cool. And there's like this creative soup happening and I'm like really excited. It's so fun. So yeah, I obviously like in entrepreneurship in general, like there are no hard and fast rules. Like sometimes you don't want to call yourself a newsletter because like that ruins the like, you want to find the magical thing, but you don't want to like force it.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. The irony of this conversation is like what you're doing to find what you really want to do is a little bit rooted in the past, but also this awkward new thing you're now trying to describe. And then like what I found that I really want to do is is also anachronistic, but because it's the old way venture capital used to be. Like I just want to invest in a handful of companies, work really close to those founders in a smallish firm where I trust my partners. We all work together on something, you know, there's only seven of us on the venture team at Spark. And like that was how Sequoia was 40 years ago and it worked well. It's just not the way people are building firms today.

• 9:38Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. What does that like do? Like now that the ecosystem is like these gigantic mega funds that look at like seed investing as like lost leaders for like big growth rounds, you know, like how are you thinking about how that changes? Or it seems like it doesn't really change what you're doing, but like, how does it affect your approach?

• 9:56Speaker 00

  Hmm. We're still good, like I think an important start of this is we're still good citizens with all of these players as well, right? You end up co-investing with people.

• 10:06Dan Shipper?

  I really wanted you to shit on them.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  I know. I was like, I must hold back slightly from.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  It is not a, I think those firms are a viable strategy. I think they are a different product. And as long as a founder understands what product they're buying, then I'm super happy with all of them existing in the ecosystem. I think the things that make me frustrated is when I'm in a conversation, sometimes with the current founder, like I'm on the board of this company, they're going out to raise, so never mind, I'm competing with them. Like, they're going out to raise a Series B or a Series C. And, and the stories they're being told by investors about what the product is, without going through the whole, is just like, not entirely truth.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  You, you cannot be investing five times a month and operating out of a $10 billion fund and get anything more than a random phone call every four years on a thing. And there are firms that are very good at being transparent about what that, this is a transactional relationship, you get the money and you run away. I think actually Founder's Fund is very good at being very honest about this. And there's lots of the people that do a lot of storying around what they're selling. So as long as people know what they're buying and what they're selling, it's fine. We sell a different thing. And some founders, that's really important and it's wonderful and they want that process and some don't. You have a connection, a kismet with anybody, or you don't, and we work on those things.

• 11:39Dan Shipper?

  That makes sense. Well, I want to talk about like, one of your latest investments, which is Granola, which is my, one of my favorite AI products. And I think it's, it's becoming one of everybody's favorite AI products.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  Pretty quickly, yeah, yeah.

• 11:51Dan Shipper?

  We've had Chris on the podcast. Chris wrote an article for Everywho that did really well. It's like, really amazing stuff. I think he's super talented. What did you see in that when you invested?

• 12:02Speaker 00

  Well, um.

• 12:03Dan Shipper?

  When did you invest? Like, was it before they had the product they have now, or is it after?

• 12:08Speaker 00

  So, I've known Chris for over a decade. Chris was a founder of a company called Socratic, back in the day, kind of like previous AI generation, and he, that was actually a Spark portfolio company. And so, he's been part of the family for a really long time. And

• 12:28Speaker 00

  His first attempt at making this was, as he'll talk about now, was a little bit of a misfire. So he got to notes as a canonical thing that you can work on. But it was very interruptive and the use flow without going through it all wasn't, just wasn't the thing. It was like the place to play, but not the thing. And so I hung out with about much at seed. We played and talked about product and looked at early prototypes and so on and so forth. For us, it just wasn't over the line. And so he did raise a seed from somewhere else. And then we just, you know, you connect with certain people. And so we just kept in touch. And then probably about four or five, six months, something like that, after the seed, he stumbled into what is now granola.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  As soon as you play with that, if you have any taste or product sense.

• 13:14Dan Shipper?

  You're like, this is the future.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  You're like, oh, this is the thing. Yeah, this is great. Well, let's go. And so, and so we then catalyzed around really quickly at that point and.

• 13:24Dan Shipper?

  And that was a big round, right?

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Um, I don't know what big is.

• 13:28Dan Shipper?

  It was like 20 million, right?

• 13:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:30Dan Shipper?

  That's pretty big.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, it, it was the thing that felt so unique. And I know you're somebody that, like, I listen to your podcast. We've caught up a bunch. I know you're somebody that struggles with as well is like, there's a, um, I don't know, Rory Sutherland says there's like three types of innovation in his like canonical way of talking about the world, which is like, there's, there's faster horses and there's like, which is like, obviously like, just make the thing go faster. And, and, and then there's teleportation, which is like this thing that you don't know should, like you want it to exist. You don't know how to get there. But if I tell you, you want teleportation, you want teleportation. Everybody wants teleportation. Should we have a colony on Mars? Be awesome. Like, I don't know how we're going to do that. That's, and then there's like Japanese toilets.

• 14:16Speaker 00

  Which is like, nobody, you didn't know. You didn't know you needed Japanese toilets in your life until the first time you go to Japan. And then you're like, walk out of the toilet. You're like, why isn't this everywhere?

• 14:27Dan Shipper?

  I've been missing this my whole life.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  My whole life. And it's not even that complicated. And that's granola.

• 14:32Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  Like, it's this thing, it's not like, the execution is actually really subtle. It's really hard. But I, I think for me, the things I'm like wandering around and trying to find are the Japanese toilets of AI. Like, like the faster horses are mostly what's getting funded. It's mostly what's come out of this like B2B sass. You know, big industrial machine that we have in venture capital is churning out startups after startups and incubator after incubator. And most of that stuff is like, fine, and it'll also be arbitrage out of existence in like four years, and who cares? And so mostly you're looking for new, I am looking for mostly, new experiences, things that surprise you with the place that they're playing.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  And, and like, so for me, when I use granola, you're like, oh, this is so intuitive. It's like the 50,000th AI note taker. Like, like, did we, did the world need another AI note taker? It's like, yes, except I didn't want to use any of those other AI note takers.

• 15:32Dan Shipper?

  When Fireflies joins my, my Zoom meeting, I'd never let it in.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  Oh, the anger. The immediate anger. Yeah. And whereas this is just like, no, no, it just basically looks like Apple Notes, and it's just gonna like append a little, a little extra to the things that you took notes on and make you a little smarter along the way. Yeah, it's brilliant.

• 15:53Dan Shipper?

  How do you think you become someone who makes a Japanese toilet?

• 15:56Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 15:57Dan Shipper?

  You know, like versus a faster horse, you know, like there's something, I was talking to Chris about this, like something about like the way that he looks at, or thinks about the soul of a product and the way his intuition works and all that kind of stuff. And I'm kind of curious, I assume you've invested in other people that have that same kind of archetype, like what have you learned about that?

• 16:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a similar journey to Andrew Mason, to Script. There's a similar journey to an investment I did that was just announced recently called WordWare. They have a similar milieu, which is very different from, you know, I would say Kyle Vogt at Cruise, that, that, that's an example, like that's a teleportation, like pitch. That's like, you, like self-driving cars, like amazing, probably impossible, can you do it? Like, that's a very different kind of pitch. What are the habits of those kinds of founders, or what are the journeys that they're on? I would say that the remarkable thing that comes out about a person like that usually

• 16:58Speaker 00

  comes out when they're talking about how they got to whatever solution that they're talking about.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  I don't, yeah, I'm trying to like, what is the right answer here?

• 17:13Speaker 00

  What's the authentic answer here? Why is Chris or Andrew really special?

• 17:20Speaker 00

  I'm trying to think about this through the lens of when those kinds of founders come in to our firm, you can feel it in the room. It's not just me, like the whole team. And this is partially because we cast for these types of people, but like the whole firm like rallies pretty quickly. And so what are the patterns in that pitch? It's usually that they are telling you insightful reasons why they put things into the product that you would have never normally thought of from customer development calls.

• 17:53Dan Shipper?

  Okay. So it's like some combination of like storytelling and attention to small details in a way that like levels up into something that makes all makes sense together.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's some, yeah, there's some connectivity between the choices a person made in the product that like you can feel and some insight about a customer. Like they're listening very, very closely to the behavior of what's happening. And so in Chris's case, it's just noticing, for instance, the very first version of granola was a tab complete, almost like Copilot, right? So you type a couple of words in and you type tab and it starts filling out. Seems actually kind of magical when you first look at it. It's like, it's, but if you just like listen to yourself closer, if you're self-aware enough closer, especially if you're the user of the product and you're your own customer, you've realized like, ah, I'm kind of like super distracted in this meeting because every time

• 18:48Speaker 00

  I press tab, like it fills out things and it makes an error and then I want to correct the error and now I'm not paying attention, I'm not making eye contact. It's like, not why I'm on this Zoom call, like it's that. And so that little, I don't think, it's not brilliance. It's not, it's not even creativity in the like, in the like canonical definition of creativity, where you've come up with 15,000 ideas and it's more like investigation.

• 19:13Dan Shipper?

  Or like a word that's coming to mind is like sensitivity. Like you're sensitive to what's actually going on. You're like got your hands like all in the. In the milieu and you can kind of like feel the changes in the weather patterns or something like that.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Yep. Yeah, it's like the the spectrum on scale is like how kinetic, how much kinetic energy do you have? Because you have to move very fast, right? But we all know people that like are just all horsepower, like they are just kinetic energy. They're the people that are like, I want to start a startup. And the way I'm going to start a startup is I'm going to come up with a new business plan every single day for the next three months until I find the right thing. And I'm going to push it through like that. And that's good kinetic energy without a lot of sensitivity. They are trying to plow through the problem. They are very, very uncomfortable with fog of war, with like wandering in the

• 20:05Speaker 00

  wilderness to find the thing. So the opposite spectrum is sensitivity. And, and the problem is that sometimes if you go too far in the sensitivity side, then you're the artiste who is just like has absolute like analysis paralysis. You just think and think and think and think and think and think and think and think and think and think and think and it's just too slow. Your iteration cycle is too slow. And again, you're trying to solve by listening closely that fog of war. Like you're trying to just listen to every single animal in the forest to figure out how to track it before you walk in. And so it's this like, I think those types of founders you're trying to sense for are they have a pro nation to movement. They will move, but they will move while still listening.

• 20:47Dan Shipper?

  I love that. That's beautiful.

• 20:53Dan Shipper?

  Tell me about, tell me about WordWare, because I have a feeling that there's something very spiritually aligned between WordWare and whatever it is that I'm doing.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Really? So I'm not diving into WordWare until you start answering that. Like, what do you mean?

• 21:07Dan Shipper?

  Well, I've been thinking a lot about like, okay, what does it mean to be like a multimodal publishing company, media company, like that, that kind of thing. And the way that I've been thinking about it is, as you can start to code in English, writing is building.

• 21:25Dan Shipper?

  And I think the opposite is true, like building becomes like at every, it informs all of the writing that we do. So there's this sort of feedback loop and usually in most organizations, you have builders over here and writers over here, or they're in totally separate organizations. And in every there, there's a lot, a lot, a lot of overlap because all of our, all of our EARs, everyone that works at every, they write articles. They don't just write articles, they write code by like writing prompts. And, and, and so if I, if I have to like, pull, pull on that thread a little bit, like, the commonality is writing, but like the, the, the, the, underneath that is like storytelling, like

• 22:07Dan Shipper?

  having a perspective and bringing a perspective to like, the medium or the craft, the thing that you're, that you're doing, whether that's like the output is actually writing, whether it's podcasts, whether it's building. And, and so I'm, that's like the unifying thing between all of the different like, parts of the organization. And something about WordWare, the way it's phrased, just like, expresses that really cleanly.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  It's certainly trying to put people in the role, it's trying to open up, WordWare is certainly trying to open up the idea that everybody is a maker. And that you should, like, it's still really frustrating to me, that, and I'm sure you bump into this a lot, like, nobody's really using, nobody is using Cursor and WinSurf and

• 22:53Dan Shipper?

  It's crazy.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  Replit agents.

• 22:54Dan Shipper?

  It's crazy.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  And Claude for code and all, all of these things. Like, I had a random, look, during lunch today, I, I made an app. Like, I had 15 minutes and I was like, somebody had tweeted out, a couple of days ago, the right way to structure O1 prompts. And I was like, you probably saw this tweet, right?

• 23:13Dan Shipper?

  I saw that, that's great.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  Seems great. So I, I took a whole article on that, and I just shoved it into a Replit agent. And I was like, here's your PRD, make me an app, so that I can just write here, and, and then pitch, pitch to Claude to give me back an expanded product. Took 15 minutes. It was like while I was waiting for my next call. And like, that's nothing that would even pass through my head a year ago.

• 23:34Dan Shipper?

  That's the thing is like, writing is building, but software is now content. So one of the really cool things is like, when we, we just launched this app called Cora and like, that has 10,000 people on the waitlist. Those are all now every subscribers. Like you can't like, write an article that's gonna like get you 10,000 subscribers. But you can write software that does it. And that's like, that's incredible. But yeah, I interrupted you.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  So anyway, like, I, I think the, the vast majority of people, just simply if you sit down and, and show them Replit agents, which is a great brilliant product. McKelley's amazing.

• 24:09Dan Shipper?

  I've never used it, actually. I used Replit a lot like a couple, like a year ago-ish. And, but I have not used their new agent stuff. Like what is the, how do you compare it to like a cursor composer or like a windsurf?

• 24:22Speaker 00

  I think it's in the same category. These are, these are direct competitors. I would put, you know, almost if you put a, if you put a spectrum on coding agents, and we're going to come back to WordWare, because this will link back in. But I can keep these all in my head. If you put a spectrum on all the coding agents today, the spectrum I would put on them is not, is basically like, how long are they allowed to work? Before they ask for feedback. And so if we're starting at the low end, you have like Microsoft Copilot, which is trying to finish one line of code. And on the other end of the spectrum, you have Devin. Which is trying to run away for four hours.

• 24:57Dan Shipper?

  That's a great spectrum.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  And, and I actually think when I talk to people today, when we're going through product sessions and I'm working with teams about this, on whatever they're trying to innovate on, that's the spectrum I first start from, which is like, hey, for whatever problem you're trying to solve, let's try and think about what is the reasoning of our current soda models? Let's think about how long do you think you can leave them? How good are your evals internally? Because if you can evaluate longer and better, and how good the codebase is, you can let it work for longer. So how good are your evals internally? And then let's set a mark. Are you letting this thing go for an hour? Four hours, three days, one sentence, 16 seconds, based on whatever you're trying to solve? And that's a really interesting new heuristic. I found a couple of different product innovations from startups I'm working with come out of,

• 25:41Speaker 00

  literally just that thought exercise. And so I would. I would say the interesting thing about Replit is it generally works far less than Devon, which I think we found Devon, for most people, they find Devon to be like, it breaks a lot.

• 25:56Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 25:56Speaker 00

  Unless it's very specific, it's a little slow. Like, it will be an amazing product over time. They've made a long debt, but right now, they probably set the mark a little bit too long on how long the leash they go. I find for me, Replit agents, even though the models probably aren't as smart and so on and so forth, the kind of time variance they give before they come back and ask questions is like a little bit longer than Windsurf, a little bit shorter than some others. Like, they just set the right, Mikel A, who's the, who's the head of AI there, now president, just did a great job setting a variance. And really, that sounds simple. They do a bunch of really other good things about the product they want to do right now. Just literally that,

• 26:38Speaker 00

  setting the right altitude of reasoning is everything for getting really good results out of it. Because they're all using, well, most all of them are using Claude at the backend anyway. It's all Claude and, and full disclosure, you know, we're like, it's all Claude, they're great. We're an investor in Anthropic, love it. Build more things on top of Claude.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  So I'm gonna loop that back to WordWare.

• 26:57Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, please.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  So, WordWare is starting from a different orthogonal, which is, what do I have to give this thing for it to be able to understand what I really mean? And it turns out if you open up, I don't know, Windsurf, or if you open up Cursor, or if you open up Replit Agents, it's a chatbot. Like, it looks like a chat window. And so what is the normal thing that a person who doesn't talk to ChatGPT or Claude all day long, like you and me do, they type in one, three sentences, two sentences, which is like plenty, just enough room for a model to hang itself.

• 27:33Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:36Speaker 00

  Right? Like, it's exactly the wrong amount of information to give a model to go then code and make a bunch of things.

• 27:42Dan Shipper?

  That's the thing is like, I find with like the Windsor for, or cursors of the world, like, the agent experience, it will just start without, like, I kind of wanted to start in a, like, we're gonna define together a little bit more precisely what I actually mean before you start coding, but it just

• 28:03Speaker 00

  It really wants to write code.

• 28:04Dan Shipper?

  I'm like, I often, like, at the end of the initial prompt, I'm like, if anything's unclear, like, ask me questions before, which helps, but

• 28:12Speaker 00

  My other very common prompt there is, give me five ways to solve this.

• 28:16Dan Shipper?

  Oh, interesting.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  Like, I would say every second or third prompt into one of these coding agencies, give me five options, so that it doesn't run ahead.

• 28:26Dan Shipper?

  And so is WordWare, like, is it like a Google Docs instead, where it's like a big, like, empty sheet of

• 28:32Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 28:33Dan Shipper?

  space?

• 28:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:34Dan Shipper?

  And then does it, like, prompt you with how to fill that in? Like, is there some sort of?

• 28:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is working on that as a second stage right now. Right now, the way it approaches you, I would say the first big trick it does, that's very simple, is by approaching with a blank doc, and maybe, maybe there's a commonality between Descript and WordWare and granola, that I think blank

• 28:57Dan Shipper?

  You just love the blank page.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  There's something about a blank page, man, that then AI helps you fill out.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  But, but WordWare, just literally the conceit of, please just write down, in plain English, the way that you would maybe write a long email to an engineer on your team, what you want built. Let's start with that. You can already imagine, your brain can do all of the things that WordWare is gonna do over time, which is, right now, you have to do at symbols to call different functions, and say which inputs and outputs you want. And honestly, WordWare, and the founders would say this, it's like, a little overly technical today, but the thread that you'll, they will pull with their customers over the next couple of years, and this is why they're seeing so many people use it right now, is that once you have that blank page filled, it's pretty easy to then learn the syntax of how to use WordWare, how to call certain functions, how to fill it out, and how to really build,

• 29:54Speaker 00

  like, a usable product.

• 29:55Dan Shipper?

  And is it, like, intended for programmers, or is it intended for, like, PMs who are sort of like, have, you know, they take a coding class in college, or is it intended for, like, An 18-year-old who's never coded before and is just like, I want to get.

• 30:08Speaker 00

  I would say today's level of functionality is very good for somebody who is just slightly technical. I don't think you need to have been a coder, but it is better if you understand what an input is and an output is, and you think in if-then statements just a little bit, like that's going to help you an awful lot. That stuff gets glossed over time, pretty easily.

• 30:26Dan Shipper?

  Going back to that spectrum that we were talking about, like the agentic spectrum, which it sort of reminds me of, you know those dogs that like the dog leashes that like they extend out? It's like, how much leash do you want?

• 30:42Dan Shipper?

  How do you find the right setting? Like, are you just trying different things? Or, yeah, how are you, when you're working with people, or what are you finding for people? How do they find that sweet spot?

• 30:52Speaker 00

  Oh, isn't that the wonderful journey that we're all on with AI? Is that changes like every quarter?

• 31:01Speaker 00

  Like, I have a company right now that will go nameless because they're about to release a pretty awesome new thing, that actually had an aha moment relatively recently about this, that they've been in AI for a while, they're doing really well, but they realize like that, I call it, it's a short leash product. And they kind of had the epiphany a month and a half ago, like, oh, these models are good enough that if we just stitch them slightly differently, what would a longer leash product version? And it's like, and it's not, I say just longer leash, it's not just that it thinks differently, it's like, oh, that makes different demands of the UI and the UX, like, it just is a different thing. It's a whole flow, is a different flow, and it'll feel like a different product. So we got to, I mean, if you are-

• 31:38Dan Shipper?

  Try it out, see if it works, and then like in three months when a new model comes out, like try again.

• 31:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, if you aren't reevaluating, how would I destroy my own startup six months later, every six months right now, during this like Cambrian explosion of stuff? Like, that's the way you have to navigate things today.

• 31:54Dan Shipper?

  Have you gotten O3 yet?

• 31:56Speaker 00

  I do not have O3. We have somebody on the team who has O3.

• 31:58Dan Shipper?

  What is, what do they say? What are the early, early signs?

• 32:01Speaker 00

  That is not, that is not, that is not, that is not a conversation we're having.

• 32:08Dan Shipper?

  Okay. I had to try.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  Not my place.

• 32:11Dan Shipper?

  I had to try. Um, okay. Uh, and then, and I know you're playing around with, uh, so you're, you're doing a lot of, um, working with these sort of like coding agents and, and, and thinking a lot about agentic workflows. Like what else are you learning or what else are you excited about in, in that whole space?

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Well, the first thing that I've noticed in my own behavior over the last six months, and this is definitely how you're running every, is like, because we can code so quickly and make so quickly, we just make so much more. Like I, I, I am simultaneously working harder on Spark than I've ever worked. And also I'm building a card game with my kids. Um, I'm also opening a board game library with a handful of friends.

• 32:56Dan Shipper?

  Wow.

• 32:56Speaker 00

  Like, it's not just code, like, like I'm opening a fricking retail space. We'll see if that works at all.

• 33:02Dan Shipper?

  That's amazing. For, for board games? For the board game library?

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, for board games. A private library. It's called Tabletop Library. It's a private library for people who play board games together.

• 33:11Dan Shipper?

  Where is it?

• 33:12Speaker 00

  Berkeley? Of course it is. It's actually, it's on a block in Berkeley. The other things on the block are a, a science fiction and fantasy bookstore and a comic bookstore. It's like the nerdiest block in America.

• 33:23Dan Shipper?

  That's the best. Do you live in Berkeley?

• 33:25Speaker 00

  I live in Berkeley. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, that's a good example of like, there's no way that I have enough available time. And, uh, and the other people involved in the product are all startup people. Like, there's no way any of us have available time to ever do this before AI. And so like, that, that's a strange thing, cause it's not like an AI project.

• 33:40Dan Shipper?

  What, yeah, what part of it is AI making more efficient for you?

• 33:44Speaker 00

  Literally every single thing from the beginning, from the more boring bits that are like, oh, we just got a lease draft in, on retail. I've never looked at this, I'm gonna drop it in chat GPT and ask questions. That's the normal stuff.

• 33:59Dan Shipper?

  Are you, are you, you're going to chat GPT for that? Are you going, you're going to O1? Are you doing Claude? Like what's your, who's your, who's your legal advisor right now?

• 34:05Speaker 00

  Legal advisor would be O1.

• 34:09Dan Shipper?

  Not O1 Pro.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  Not.

• 34:11Dan Shipper?

  Too expensive.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  O1 Pro, O1 Pro. A little likely, yeah. Legal advisor, O1 Pro. I mean, come on, it's a real contract.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  Most, everything else where I actually care about the output in terms of its language, the way it speaks to me, things I might reuse, that's all Claude. Everything's Claude. All coding's also Claude. Everything's Claude. But so that's the obvious one is just like, please analyze a contract. But like, I'll give you example, like, I mean, I could show you the code. But like, over Christmas break, we started to get square, like a floor plan back of the space. And so like, I fed the floor plan into Claude, started coding. That turned into a windsurf project, which turned into an actual like, demand model to try and project how many members we would have in the space before we maxed out demand,

• 35:02Speaker 00

  which then boiled into like, oh, well, we have six to eight personas for different types of people that come at different times. And that turned into a price sensitivity test. These are all Python apps now. And like, this is all a model that then I can go fix and change and rerun. And like, that would have never.

• 35:19Dan Shipper?

  I mean, you could have done that before, but you would have had to like, hire people and think about it and like, or you just had to spend your own time, like, you know, hours and hours and hours and hours. And now you can just be like, I want to see, like, what's the sensitivity analysis? And you're like, oh, here it is. You know, yeah, that's the best.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  Another, another one, exactly in the same project, just to rat hole on board game clubs, is like, we went through a process where we then talked to all of the like, SaaS companies that exist out there, like, vertical SaaS companies that exist out there that help you, you know, run a membership club, run a coworking space, you know, there's that kind of thing, like, and all of them, after evaluating them, they do what all SaaS software does, which is like, kind of good, they're not ever perfect for me, so on and so forth. And about halfway through, we realized like, I don't know, the four of us could just build this ourselves. And so we were building all the custom bespoke software for running the space. And so now you can do things like, make a voice phone call and say, hey, I want to

• 36:17Speaker 00

  play ARX with three friends Wednesday at 3:00 PM. It checks an air table, agentially looks the thing, writes it in the table, like, all of it. It's just all bespoke.

• 36:27Dan Shipper?

  What does this do in your mind to like, funding models for software businesses, now that software's so much cheaper to make?

• 36:35Speaker 00

  I mean, I don't know. I think the precise amount of people that should work at any company is eight.

• 36:43Dan Shipper?

  We just passed that, so.

• 36:48Dan Shipper?

  But I think, but I, around where we are, I love it. It's so, it's so much fun.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  And by the, you know, I've been a operator and founder everywhere from, you know, one to hundreds, like, you know, and like, it's, there's something incredibly magical about that, you know, one pizza stage.

• 37:09Speaker 00

  And that's where it feels like a team. That's where it feels like a literally just one cohesive pod team. And so, I don't know, I think the challenge is, how much can we use AI to solve all of the things that are really just faster horses problems? You know, I have this story that stuck in my head for many years.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  It's Paula Scheer, the designer. She has a story, we should talk about the difference between art and craft, and how, and she's a very famous graphic designer, logo designer. Back in the day, she did some really famous record covers in the 70s, and you fast forward and she did like Shake Shack logo and stuff like that. So just like legendary logo designer. She used to talk about back in the day, someone would come in with an album cover and they'd be like, "Oh, it's a new Led Zeppelin album, we need a cover for it, blah, blah, blah." And then she talked about what it would take to get that done. And, you know, back then, this is obviously pre Adobe, pre Photoshop. She's like, "There's a person that spent a whole week just on the lettering, just like literally hand drawing every single letter on this cover.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  There's 20 people working on that project." And she's like, "Listen, the truth is that only one to two of those was actually, they were all quote unquote artists and they all quote unquote went through art school." All that's craft. Like, there's really only one person making artistic decisions and making the core decisions. Almost everybody else is just execution. And the execution goes away when the craft is now covered by software. That's already happened. Now I open up Illustrator and I pick from fonts and maybe I tweak a font or I custom a font, but it like, it all happens in a day or two. And instead, I get faster iteration cycles where we then work on this to make it better. If you fast forward to today, it's the same thing at a company level. Like, if I'm at 16 people, you have to ask yourself, or 20 or 200, you have to ask yourself,

• 39:06Speaker 00

  like, how many of those people are actually making the core decisions of that company? And how much of them are involved in just literally whittling the wood?

• 39:15Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. That's, that's sort of where we are internally is like, everyone at Every is like a generalist who's multi-dimensional. Many of them are technical. And we have like, we have three products that we run internally, aside from the media product.

• 39:34Speaker 00

  You know, there's that whole other thing where we're writing some of the best stuff in the industry that you should all subscribe to.

• 39:42Dan Shipper?

  Thank you, I appreciate that.

• 39:43Speaker 00

  But also, that's, you rooted it like a-

• 39:44Dan Shipper?

  That was not a paid promotion.

• 39:49Dan Shipper?

  And each one of those has a GM. And the GM is doing everything from writing the code, like, writing the release notes to like, whatever. Then we have some, we have our creative lead who, who does all the design for everybody. And then we have writers who will go in and do some reporting on like, what are we releasing this week? And then write that up in our, in context window, which is our Sunday newsletter. And then we have a bunch of writers. But it's, it's interesting. Like, it feels like, it, it feels very cohesive, but everybody has their like, little domain or their little universe where they're responsible for a lot of things.

• 40:31Dan Shipper?

  Instead of like, one person who just, their job is just like to tweak this like, one knob, basically. And I really love working with, with-

• 40:42Dan Shipper?

  Those kinds of like multi-dimensional people and it's it's quite common, I think, for like early-stage startups to like have a bunch of generalists and you replace them with specialists and whatever. But I think it's quite uncommon. I think A will be able to get further than we would have before with the sort of like generalist vibe. But it's also quite uncommon for a really early-stage company to like be able to have three products and and a media product that it can do. Like I think we can do them at a high level. And that's like totally new and it and and and it allows us to like and it's driven by generalists who have these like special power tools that can like do all of the like execution work. So that they just need to know what to do and then they can get it done really quick.

• 41:26Dan Shipper?

  Like we've done like, I think, three feature like real releases for Quora so far this week. And like, that's one, one guy. Karen, he's super talented. It's one guy and O1 Pro.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  To be clear, it's also this many billion-dollar model doing a thing in the background.

• 41:49Dan Shipper?

  But yeah, I just, it's, I think there's this, there's something new happening where those kinds of like, yeah, eight-person, one-pizza companies can.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  And do you always use O1 Pro, by the way? Is that your go-to?

• 41:59Dan Shipper?

  Well, it's interesting. I, so I use O1. O1 is like my go-to model. I rarely use Claude anymore, which is really interesting because I was a big Claude guy for like a long time.

• 42:13Dan Shipper?

  Actually, the the place where I use Claude the most frequently is actually not in Claude itself. It's in Lex, which is the AI writing app that we incubated. And that that default model is Claude. So I do use it a bit, but I'm mostly, I'm mostly O1. I use O1 Pro a little bit. Like I, I do this exercise every year where I like reflect on things that I've learned and like I set goals and like do all that stuff, right? Yeah, it's really cool because I've been doing it for five years and I can just like go back. It's like right before I started every is when I started doing it. So I can just go back and just like look through each year and there's so much like juicy stuff in there. So I just like took that and I put it in, I put it in Claude, I put it in O1 and I put it in O1 Pro. And O1 Pro is definitely the best. Like, I cried. I cried a little.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:58Dan Shipper?

  Because especially like the like O1 and O1 Pro, because they can do the kind of like chain of thought and they can like retrace their steps or whatever. They're much better at following a progression and like seeing and like seeing how something changes and like putting together a narrative that they find.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 43:14Dan Shipper?

  And Claude's a little a little more like because it's just like it's just saying what it sees like it's it's just it's less good at that.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, deeper, deeper reasoning. That's what it should be at. It's it's got a whole bunch of without going through the whole O1 structure like that's just literally what it's programmed to do. It's nothing else.

• 43:29Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  It's programmed to do that more. So of course it does that more. It's not like magic.

• 43:33Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, but I haven't I, you know, like some of some of the people that that work at every that are doing more coding than I am like they're definitely like just they can just one shot a file and it like it will fix all the bugs and it's like. It's crazy, you know. I've had that a little bit like I I I'm doing some some like apps that are I wouldn't they're like they're light incubations like maybe they'll be coming like in every product or maybe not and.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I get like one of those a week.

• 44:01Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  We actually for a while, we don't have one right now, but for a while we had an AI hacker in residence at Spark for the same reason that that you guys have people like that, which is just like. Because the number of particular things that you just want to take like a quick one shot is like more than I have available time in the day.

• 44:18Dan Shipper?

  Exactly.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  So like, please can we play with whatever's new, build things out, half of them will get thrown away, but you have to be playing. Yeah.

• 44:25Dan Shipper?

  And so like sometimes like I'll build something with O1 or with Claude or whatever and and like this, the particular example I'm thinking of it like had some. It had some like more complex stats that it was doing that I like I'm not like a big stats guy. So like I was just like, I think this looks right, but I don't know. And I just put it into O1 Pro and I was like, check the work here. And I just trust that if O1 Pro says it's okay, that it's it's. Because there's a trust problem, right? It's like, it's the same thing for like a manager when like a human manager is managing someone to do work that they don't know how to do themselves. Right. That's why technical managers have a much easier time managing engineers. And what's really interesting about AI right now is I can really cheaply manage an intelligence

• 45:09Dan Shipper?

  to do a lot of things that I'm not qualified to do. And there's a question of like, how do I know if it's right? And that's a really, that's a really interesting question to figure out.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  But that's trust based on like, have you ever tried, have you ever found a set of prompts that are good at asking the model whether it thinks its previous work was good and getting a good response out of that? Because obviously if you say, hey, are you sure? That tilts the model towards not being sure. So it almost always comes back like, no, now that I've rethought it. And it gives you almost like the wrong answer.

• 45:40Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, that is interesting. I mean, I mostly am like, I do say, are you sure? So maybe I shouldn't do that. Or like, I will take it and put it into another bottle and I'll just be like, like, do you see any problems with this? This is what I'm trying to accomplish. Like, are there any issues in this code, basically, or in this, the way this is set up? Do you have anything like that?

• 45:57Speaker 00

  I have trended towards asking for confidence intervals and pluses and minuses. Like, how confident are you in your answer? Give me a reason why you could be right and give me a reason why you could be wrong. Again, kind of chain of thought-y, which is, and that usually gives me enough information, which is, again, proxying back to human behavior. If you don't understand something, get somebody to explain their logic around it a little bit more and you can kind of try to figure out whether they made an error or not.

• 46:22Dan Shipper?

  Is this for code or like what, for what kind of problems?

• 46:25Speaker 00

  Literally everything. Like, whenever I'm unsure about a response back, because you're talking about trust and one way of talking about it is, you know, use a model you have more trust in. But we're always going to be wandering into weird territories and so you kind of have to develop some techniques for trying to figure out what they're right about.

• 46:41Dan Shipper?

  That's interesting. Because the reason I ask is one of the things I've found with Claude, like, if you ask it for editing feedback and you're like, can you grade this? It pretty much always gives you like a B plus, A minus, no matter what.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  That's right, it does.

• 46:52Dan Shipper?

  And then even if you only change a little bit, I'll give you like, oh, now it's an A or whatever.

• 46:56Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 46:57Dan Shipper?

  And then if you give it a rubric, like it still does the A minus thing. And so I think Owen's a bit better at that. But I, yeah, I haven't, I haven't yet had a lot of success with like. Getting accurate confidence intervals.

• 47:10Speaker 00

  So I find that it's right, it's better, it's very bad at grading its own work that way. How, how good was this writing? Subjective reads, objective logic.

• 47:20Dan Shipper?

  I see.

• 47:21Speaker 00

  It's quite good at.

• 47:22Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  So, hey, you just answered a question about the history of startups. And that I like, how correct were you about that? First, give me your reasoning and then afterwards, give me, give me a confidence interval. Usually in that order. And it's quite good at that.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. But again, like all these models, it's like trying to figure out what they're good and they're bad at. I find if I care about the answer. Being like specific, then maybe O1 is better right now because it basically because it's doing reflection and thinking about it longer. So like, great. Think about it longer. Awesome. You saved me five more chats to get you to think about it longer to get the right answer. Sure. Shortcut. If I actually care about the words that are being used. Like I might reuse those words or I'm literally trying to brainstorm how to talk about something or storytell something. Claude is still so much better at.

• 48:12Dan Shipper?

  It, yeah, I think, I think, I think you're right. I guess I don't really.

• 48:16Speaker 00

  But you might not be using it that way right now, right?

• 48:19Dan Shipper?

  I do. So I'm using, when I use Claude, it's in Lex and I do use it to sort of like. I'll often like, I'll be writing something and I'll have it like sort of complete. Lex does like the, it's, it's sort of copiloty. So it'll complete like maybe three more sentences or whatever. And I find that to be helpful. But I, I think O1 is getting better at writing. Like if you give it a big enough sample. It'll be, it'll be much better than I think it used to be somehow. I don't know. It's, I know it. I know that that doesn't make any sense, but like, that's my experience.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  Are you sure that's not just a skill issue? You've gotten better at feeding and stuff?

• 48:58Dan Shipper?

  But I know you, I know you, you probably use, I know you saw the like O1, like how to prompt O1 article you mentioned that was going around. How, do you have any specific like things you've learned about O1 Pro that has, have gotten you better results?

• 49:13Speaker 00

  No, I'm just a student there, honestly. Like I, I, I will say, well, actually I'll put it this way. Uh, I read the tweets about how to use O1 and I read the guides on how to use O1.

• 49:25Dan Shipper?

  It was like basically give it more context. It's not a chat model. That's the like gist.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  That just is give it more context and.

• 49:31Dan Shipper?

  Tell it what you want. Give it an example of what you want or whatever. Yeah.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  Say more.

• 49:35Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  And, and you know, for anybody who plays with these things every single day and is really out on the edge, like I was already starting to do that anyway. So mostly it was like a head nod, like, yeah, I should probably do that more. You're right. Um, more than it was some kind of like big epiphany or some unlock. I'll let you know if I get an unlock on O1, bro.

• 49:56Dan Shipper?

  Any other like startups or products or like researchy type advances that you're like thinking about or interested in right now?

• 50:05Speaker 00

  The, the areas that I really think about right now, and we'll go back to this earlier. You, you, I'll give you an example directly from earlier. You, you have, you do every year like annual review.

• 50:18Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  Is it the same like five questions or 10 questions or something like that that you ask yourself or is it just more an exploratory conversation?

• 50:25Dan Shipper?

  Um, the format is I will do, um, uh, goals.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:33Dan Shipper?

  Like I'll do, I'll do some like value exploration of like, what do I want to like, uh, move toward in my life? Like what is important to me? And then I'll also do like a bunch of, uh, uh, uh, like what are the things that I learned about myself or about the world or, or whatever. Um, and so it's not necessarily like a pre-prescribed set of questions, but it is a sort of prescribed output format. And then I'll like use a bunch of different questions and a bunch of different ways to get to those answers.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  Yep. So like it's quite possible that existing out there in the world is a best practices for how to do your annual review. And it's quite possible that. There's no one answer. There would be one that's better for you than somebody else, but there's probably people that have really, really thought about this. And the reason, one of the reasons the coding models work as well as they do is because we actually have lots of books about best practices in coding. We have, we have popped up one altitude and we don't just have a bunch of samples of code that get fed into a model. We actually have a bunch of examples of PRDs and descriptions and documents that describe how to do coding well and how to make this thing well and then

• 51:52Speaker 00

  the output afterwards. And I am looking for markets where either a company or, or somehow we have that. And so like it is one thing, for instance, to build the AI therapist. It's another thing for me to start an exploration at altitude, one level above that, where I get to figure out what the right therapist is for me with what like area of knowledge that I want to bring to bear for this journey. And there's very little that operates at that altitude. Most of them try to get to solution really, really fast and let you like wander very, very low in the altitude, you know, the same as just starting to give you code without saying, to go back to the word rare example, like, why don't you write down all the things you want here and then we'll get started.

• 52:36Dan Shipper?

  Interesting. Well, there's a, I mean, like, let's take therapy, for example, like there's a lot of like books about how to do therapy, how to be a better therapist. Is that an example of the kind of, is that a field you're interested in?

• 52:46Speaker 00

  That's why I picked it. Okay. Like I picked it because there are, is an incredible amount of academic literature and other literature about ways to do therapy that are more effective and not effective and so on and so forth. Now that has to be translated into model language and so on and so forth. I'll, I'll tell you another area that's actually quite hard. What makes a game fun?

• 53:05Speaker 00

  Like if I pick up and play, in fact, there's, there's no, it's called ludology. There's no great ludology that would explain Super Mario Brothers on a, on a spreadsheet. Like I can't look at Super Mario Brothers and we don't have a language for even describing how you would get to fund there.

• 53:21Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, I think that that touches on some of the like, um, some of the stuff we've talked about in previous conversations about, uh, like, okay, so for for therapy, like, one of the problems is that there's, there's no one answer to that because the thing that like makes therapy effective is the therapeutic therapeutic alliance. It's like, is like, do you like your therapist? Do they like you? Like, is there a fit? Right? Like, the form and the context is a fit.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  You think it's literally just personality fit?

• 53:48Dan Shipper?

  I don't, I

• 53:49Speaker 00

  You could bring any theory of therapy to practice, but if we vibe, we're good?

• 53:54Dan Shipper?

  Um, what I

• 53:57Dan Shipper?

  Yes.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, that's a hot take.

• 54:00Dan Shipper?

  What I think is that, um, really skilled clinicians can, um, can reduce some part of their skill to rules and and and ways that they make decisions. But actually, like, what's going on is like totally sub symbolic and it's it's totally intuitive. And, um, and the way that a non skilled clinician would apply that rule is very different from the way that an actual skilled one, uh, will apply it. And so, um, the the way to like, uh, for example, to create a model that, uh, does really good therapy is, I think, to some degree,

• 54:42Dan Shipper?

  like, the methodology or whatever can be helpful, but it's really to, um, capture all of the nuances of a lot of really high quality interactions and then have the model learn all the like little sub symbolic rules that no one can really talk about to apply in the appropriate contexts. It's very contextual and it's it's, there's no, there's no answer to that, to those questions of like, what should you do in in this situation that is like, that can be made explicit? It's like, um, it's thousands and thousands of different answers that you apply, uh, at the right moment, which is, uh, exactly what AI models are really good at and exactly what, uh, was previously incredibly hard to transfer, um, between humans. And that's why we're, we love like rules and logic and like,

• 55:26Dan Shipper?

  scientific explanations and all that kind of stuff.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  Okay, so we, so we, so we kind of agree there, but let me just Disagree a little bit. Please disagree. So, yeah, you're pulling on a thread that we've talked about before and I actually do agree with, which is like, there's this incredible opportunity by capturing enough knowledge that the model itself will understand things about the world that we can't understand. Like, the only way we pass down science and the way science works is because I found a way to verbalize the thing so I could tell you about it and then you can go do the thing again. And so there are just going to be a new set of things that we still don't have the words for, and it's awesome. There's new knowledge that's being created, even if we can't describe it. Awesome. Love that. I think that's quite different than the point I'm trying to make. Okay. I think the point that I'm trying to make is there are times where the user's choice

• 56:12Speaker 00

  about the knowledge that they want to navigate or use themselves has value. And so a good example of this is just thinking about the keywords that we use sometimes when we're trying to tell a model to go somewhere. Can you please rewrite this essay in the style of Paul Graham? Like, we are using a keyword to try to normalize to a bunch of behaviors and to try to give it an indication. But where is the Wikipedia of all of the APIs that exist in the world? And all of the, like, chains of thought that exist in the world? So that I can navigate and look at that library myself? I don't necessarily trust ChatGPT to pick the right modality of therapy or whatever it is,

• 56:57Speaker 00

  just as much as I don't really trust them to, like, pick the restaurant for me. I want to talk about the theory of why I, what kind of restaurant I want. And similarly, like, there's millions of things in the world where there's like, there's like a set of five different ways you could go do the task. And certainly sometimes it's like, just pick whatever. But many, many times incorporating that into a flow where me as a user now has control, just tell me what, tell me not, tell me the five different best practices for how this could be done. And let me pick that versus your, you know, weirdly amalgamated, you know, LLM version of best practices all merged together.

• 57:37Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, you want to be able to like, allow, like, you can't make the entire terrain of possibilities explicit because it's going to be too big, basically. But you do want to make, I think what you're saying is like, rather than have the LLM like zoom right into a specific.

• 57:55Speaker 00

  Answer, I'm supposed to give you the answer.

• 57:57Dan Shipper?

  Like, yeah, get better at making some of the implicit stuff explicit so you can like, you can explore within reason and then dive, dive a little bit more deeply.

• 58:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll give you a really, a really, a simple side project. But I think there's actually like real startup opportunity, business opportunity here. But like my mental side project was the first thing I ever built in WordWare was a startup advice, like, it was like a, I don't know, with a, was it like a startup investor? So basically a little webpage you go to that you say, this is the startup decision I'm trying to make right now. It just says like, what decision are you trying to make? What in your gut do you think it should be? And then hit go. And then instead of just doing the chat GPT thing, which is just like, I'm just going to splurge out an answer. I fed it very simply, like a bunch of PDFs of like HBS articles and like a bunch of other stuff, which is basically decision theory.

• 58:52Speaker 00

  Like what are the 20 to 30 best practice decision theories, SWOT analysis, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so the first order of business it does is actually just trying to figure out three or four decision theories that you could use to come to decision, make a recommendation on those and then walk you through the steps that those things do to get you to the answer. It's that, it's like pop up one altitude, help me learn from the things other people have used to structure whatever discipline they have been working on for 100 or 200 or 300 years.

• 59:21Dan Shipper?

  I love that. That's really interesting. What it, what it makes me think of, it actually brings me back to the, the agenda continuum you were talking about, it's like how much of a leash?

• 59:29Speaker 00

  It's exactly the same thing.

• 59:30Dan Shipper?

  Where I was thinking, it's like, it's a, it's maybe a, a related continuum, which is like. Uh, how like, do you want it to have like a microscope like go right in? Or do you want to like, look through binoculars? Or do you want to look through like panoramic, like theater, you know, glasses or whatever? You know, um, and you need both of you need to get those both those dimensions dialed in. And right now, like, the models are like, uh, only doing the microscope thing. They're only zooming in right away for you unless you ask it specifically. Don't do that. Like, give me, start with the like, you know, decision theories or whatever. But yeah, I love that. I think that's really cool. Are people working on that?

• 1:00:08Speaker 00

  I come across it very rarely.

• 1:00:09Dan Shipper?

  Okay.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  I would love to, if you're, if you're thinking that way, let's jam.

• 1:00:15Dan Shipper?

  Great.

• 1:00:18Dan Shipper?

  Cool. Well, uh, that's actually a really, uh, good place to start to wrap it up. If, uh, if people are looking to jam with you on, uh, on any of these ideas, where can they find you?

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  You can email me, Nabeel at Spark Capital. I'm on the web. It's not hard to get to.

• 1:00:36Dan Shipper?

  Great. Um, thanks so much for coming. This is awesome.

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. And thanks so much for doing what you're doing. We need more multimodal media companies in the world.

• 1:00:43Dan Shipper?

  I appreciate that.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh, folks, you absolutely positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to AI and I. Why? Because this show is the epitome of awesomeness. It's like finding a treasure chest in your backyard, but instead of gold, it's filled with pure, unadulterated knowledge bombs about ChatGPT. Every episode is a roller coaster of emotions, insights and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat, craving for more. It's not just a show, it's a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship. So do yourself a favor, hit like, smash subscribe and strap in for the ride of your life. And now, without any further ado, let me just say, Dan, I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you.