10 AI Business Ideas From The Queen of AI ft. Sarah Guo

Episode 612: Sam Parr ( https://twitter.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://twitter.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Sarah Guo ( https://x.com/saranormous ) about the Ai ideas she thinks could be $1B swings. — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (4:00) IDEA: AI companions (16:00) IDEA: AI interior design / professional headshots (22:30) IDEA: A richer version of The Sims (25:00) The speedy way to do this if you're non-technical (27:00) IDEA: Your Personal Seller (32:00) IDEA: Generative Voice API for service providers, SMBs, restaurants (38:00) IDEA: Next Gen Auto-Fill (40:00) Software 3.0--what's coming (42:00) Boring verticals fertile for AI: Legal and medical (44:00) Ask: What's already being outsourced? (47:00) Ripe for disruption: energy storage, chips, (49:00) “Ai's $600B Question” (52:00) Sarah Reacts: Doomsday scenarios in Ai (56:30) If you're 22, hungry and optimistic, go west — Links: • Sarah Guo - https://sarahguo.com/ • Conviction - https://www.conviction.com/ • No Priors Podcast - https://www.youtube.com/@NoPriorsPodcast • Replika - https://replika.com/ • Character.ai - https://character.ai/ • HeyGen - https://www.heygen.com/ • Icon - https://icon.me/ • Arcads - https://www.arcads.ai/ • Interior AI - https://interiorai.com/ • Aragon - https://aragon.ai/ • Chatbot App - https://chatbotapp.ai/ • Cartesia - https://cartesia.ai/ • Somewhere - https://www.somewhere.com/ • AI’s $600B Question - https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ais-600b-question/ • Eureka Labs - https://eurekalabs.ai/ • Conviction Embed - https://embed.conviction.com/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I think it is worth talking about the fact that there are ways to make a million bucks. And then like ways to make a million bucks that could turn into a billion bucks. Right. And I think we should talk about both.

• 0:08Shaan Puri?

  Ah, are we, do we hit record already?

• 0:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 0:11Shaan Puri?

  That's the intro. All right.

• 0:21Shaan Puri?

  So what do you mean by that? You're saying there's ways to make a million bucks? And then there's ways to make a million bucks that could turn into a billion bucks. You have my interest. Let's go.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  Okay, okay, let's go. So I think maybe, and I don't mean this any dismissive way. I think venture capitalists are very often accused of dismissing something as like a cash flow lifestyle business or whatever. Right?

• 0:41Sam Parr?

  Which by the way, for anyone who is not in the VC world, you go to a VC, you say, I've got this great company. I think it can make five million in profit in year eight. 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.

• 0:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  It is. That's cute. Yeah.

• 1:00Sam Parr?

  I remember my first time doing that. Of course, the thing is, is that anyone who actually is an entrepreneur, including anyone who's a VC, they know that you can oftentimes get richer and have a less stressful life if you have a quote lifestyle business.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I'd say like, there's many type of valid businesses. Right. And then also a lot of things that have become very interesting start very small. So I want to recognize that, but I think a reasonable analogy is if you can figure out internet distribution and then get, you know, super powerful models, getting increasingly powerful to just do something useful in a niche. Those two things together, that's like the new drop shipping. You know how like for maybe seven or eight years, I'm like too old to know what the exact timeline was. But there 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 like make my first hundred thousand dollars. I think this is it.

• 1:51Shaan Puri?

  Yes, so 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 could push a button. You never had to make the product. You never had to warehouse the product. You never have to ship the product. It will just magically appear at your customer's door, you know, somewhere between one and three 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 or a song or whatever. And if you just do the marketing bit, you can actually almost like drop ship a product or a service to the to the customer without having to make it yourself. Is that the idea?

• 2:33Speaker 00

  That that is. Thanks for explaining it. And I think it's like easy with easier with a few examples. Right? Like copy editing is probably a prototypical one, right? You can do not amazing, but like reasonable copy generation with these models today. And so there 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. And then you have a website with decent SEO. And then like you add some Stripe integration and you're in business.

• 3:05Shaan Puri?

  What's an example?

• 3:06Speaker 00

  Well, I I think like CopyAI and Jasper, these companies started this way.

• 3:10Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 3:10Speaker 00

  Right? And and then I have several friends who have shipped like AI companionship apps. Just look at, you know, paid apps in the App Store by charting and, you know, some of those people are generating a million dollars of cash flow for themselves. It's not because they're deep AI people.

• 3:24Shaan Puri?

  When you say companion, you mean like a digital girlfriend?

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Or boyfriend, right? I think people think that is skewed toward girlfriend way. That's not necessarily true. But if you and you know, you can have your own ethical points of view about like whether or not that's good for people. But it's a pretty basic human need. And guess what? People want all sorts of different things in terms of niche companionship and how you might distribute that.

• 3:46Shaan Puri?

  Aren't these quietly very huge? Like, can we do some like ballpark, you know, give people a sense of the size and scale that these have gotten to? So there's there's Replica. I think that's probably the most well-known one, which is a digital boyfriend or girlfriend. They kind of try to say friend, but I think the use case is a little bit more in the in the relationship side of things. And I don't I don't remember their exact numbers, but I don't think I would be crazy for saying they're doing like 50 million a year in revenue. And I believe she had bootstrapped it for a while, at least, or raised very little money to get there. Is that right? Tell me if I'm off base. I might be wrong on some of that.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, Eugenius built a very cash efficient business.

• 4:24Shaan Puri?

  Okay, is that like code for something? Are you an investor?

• 4:27Speaker 00

  I'm not an investor.

• 4:29Sam Parr?

  Dude, you just said everything without saying a thing. It was basically like you're friends with her. You know, the number and they're killing it.

• 4:35Shaan Puri?

  Are they killing it from your perspective?

• 4:38Speaker 00

  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?

• 4:45Shaan Puri?

  Okay, what are the other ones that are interesting? So there's character AI that has like some absurd amount of traffic. But I've also heard some things about like, I don't know if this is all legit traffic or what, but there's character AI. What are the other ones that are interesting or what do you, what do you?

• 4:58Speaker 00

  I want to touch on character for a second because I think like, you know, when you look at consumer companies, one of the things that I learned was that the behavior patterns, like when something just really, really stands out from all other products in their category or previous categories, that's when you pay attention. It's like the, you know, dumbest metric, but it is really clear when something has special consumer behavior around. And the thing that is really interesting to me about character or the companion apps that work really well is like, people spend hours with them, right? Like, you know, in terms of the number of products, like, how many products do you spend hours with every day? Not a lot, like social media.

• 5:39Sam Parr?

  Shawn, that's like my product that I spend hours a day with.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:44Shaan Puri?

  You were at Greylock, I think, when they invested in Discord. I think the timing is there. And Discord was one of those things that was probably overlooked because it was like, you know, mostly teenagers who play video games that were using this thing. And it kind of looked like a chat room, but you're like, oh, well, how is it going to make money? It's not like Slack where you can charge the company. But the stat was people were spending like seven hours a day or something on Discord, something ridiculous like that. Just living in Discord, it was their social life. And so you're like, well, there's, there's definitely something there. And they were able to make a ton of money just even selling emojis at that point. Because if you have that much engagement, you can't fake that.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 6:19Shaan Puri?

  By the way, I just went to character AI and there's an option to chat with Elon Musk. And the, the preloaded question, why did you buy Twitter? So I click it. So it starts a chat with Elon Musk as a character. And then it's the first response literally goes, you're wasting my time. I literally ruled the world.

• 6:35Sam Parr?

  Okay, so by the way, on according to similar web, which is like you multiply by two or three and then you divide by two or three and that's the huge range. But according to similar web, it says that character AI has three hundred and ten million monthly uniques. Are you kidding me?

• 6:53Shaan Puri?

  I mean, that's more than the Wall Street Journal. It's more than like a bunch of.

• 6:57Sam Parr?

  That's insane. Is this company really that big?

• 7:02Speaker 00

  I think people want companions. This is what I'm saying that the like engagement characteristics around this stuff is real. And so for anybody like starting a new business, you know, one person company shipping AI companion app to a niche, like generating a million dollars of cash flow for themselves.

• 7:19Shaan Puri?

  Do you know how these things grow? So I mean, three hundred million monthly visits is no joke. What is, what's the growth channel for something like this?

• 7:27Speaker 00

  Well, I think that's going to be like an advantage in the future. I do think one of the weird things about these AI capabilities is they are so novel and unique that they do drive word of mouth. For example, with character, you can make new characters and people share them, right? So there's inbuilt virality there. But like, maybe I'll give you like two other examples of just like when I say the capabilities are just really new and they're powerful and people want to talk about them. Like, I don't think you can engineer that, but it's just characteristic of these companies. Okay, so one example is I am an investor in a company called HeyGen. You can make a video avatar of yourself. You cannot tell the difference and you know, reaching that bar of quality is new as of this past year.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  And like people create content that is unbelievable and they share it. And so like now HeyGen is in tens of millions of revenue. Great. They've never spent a dollar on like paid marketing.

• 8:19Shaan Puri?

  Sam, have you seen this thing before? By the way, HeyGen?

• 8:21Sam Parr?

  This is one of those products that I'm seeing all over the place, but it felt like it was just like people younger than me talking about it. So I felt embarrassed.

• 8:28Shaan Puri?

  Well, this is not like, like the character AI was like, you know, that's like teenagers kind of sharing stuff. It's more like Whatpad or something. This is a corporate use case. So this is basically using like, I make a digital AI of me or of a, or, or just like a fake character altogether. And 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 to 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 million in funding, but I think the, the chart I saw was pretty absurd that, you know, they basically raised 20 million in ARR very, very fast.

• 9:12Sam Parr?

  Holy crap.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  Some of the usage actually also, yes, it's a business use case, but it's like all kinds of businesses, like creators, SMBs, like high-end enterprise advertisers. And so like for you guys to be like, okay, well, like actually I bet there's a lot more demand for Sean and Sam talking than the amount, I'm sure you hang out on the pot a lot, but like then even each of you can contribute. And so if the marginal cost of more time of Sam talking is free, like you probably do more with it, right? I think that's just what people are discovering.

• 9:45Sam Parr?

  Have you guys used this? Is it, the landing page makes it look amazing?

• 9:49Shaan Puri?

  I've used it.

• 9:50Sam Parr?

  Is it amazing or is it still up and coming?

• 9:52Shaan Puri?

  No, it's like pretty good. This, this cross, 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 you're trying to use it for your use case. And you're like, how come the tweet had such a good output, but mine is kind of whack every single time? Or like, well, this is good, but it won't let me change the text on it, which is what I would need to use it in my, my real thing. I would say this one is, is definitely production ready. They wouldn't have, you know, tens of millions in revenue if they weren't actually usable by customers.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  Well, and they just did like a public campaign with McDonald's, right? Like an advertising.

• 10:25Shaan Puri?

  But there's some good limits, right? Like you can't be like moving around. It's like a face on camera, or at least that's what it used to be when I tried it like six months ago.

• 10:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's some new stuff. You should try like, you know, you, you can be walking around now, right?

• 10:36Shaan Puri?

  Oh, wow. Okay. I stand corrected.

• 10:39Sam Parr?

  All right, and we're back. Can they just, can we just upload our YouTube page or do we have to stand in front of it and film?

• 10:46Speaker 00

  Um, you have to stand in front of your web or phone camera for two minutes and film. And it's more of a safety thing than anything else because they don't want people being able to take your YouTube and make you, if that makes sense. Like they want, they want you saying specific words about like, I Sam Parr say it's okay to make this avatar.

• 11:05Sam Parr?

  And you said that you started the podcast by saying there's like a lot of, you had a, 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?

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Uh, I think, I mean, I think the market for this company is very deep because people, like, they want a lot of video. And I think more, like, if you just think about the domain of making video, you guys know much more about this than me, but, like, people want a lot of control, right? They want quality, they want specific expression and brand and motions, and they want, like, one person, two people, three people, like, person walking around, product, whatever it is. And so I think there's actually a lot, like, there's a lot we still cannot do with research, and the company wants to continually pull, like, push the bounds of what you can do. And so I think this is a good example of, like, I think there's a billion dollars of video generation revenue for them or for

• 11:59Speaker 00

  others, but, like, you know, you actually have to invest in the product pretty deeply, but it doesn't mean that your wedge can't be really powerful across a single use case.

• 12:10Shaan Puri?

  Sam, have you seen the ones that do this for D to C products, the AI for D to C product ads? So, go to icon.me. If you scroll down, you can watch the video. So, see the video of the Asian dude who's holding, like, a collagen peptides thing? So, that's an AI-generated video. It's the product in his hand, that's not actually in his hand, with a script that was written, he never recorded it, and now you have a UGC, very authentic-looking ad for an influencer. You go to the next one, look, he's holding a different product. That's because he didn't reshoot it, they just put a different product in his hand, and it looks super fucking real, am I right? What? Isn't this wild? This is amazing. And so, he's got another one with ramen. And so what he's doing is interesting. What

• 12:55Shaan Puri?

  he's doing is he's letting actual, and so these are not AI-generated people, this is a real person. This is like an Instagram guy who's got, like, whatever, hundreds of thousands of followers. So, he's letting popular Instagram people say, hmm, okay, I'll do it, I'll create my, my digital twin. That will be able to do my brand, like my branded content. So a brand can come in request from a, let's say an Instagrammer with a million followers and say, I want you to sponsor this video. Here's the script. Here's my product. And if I click yes, then it will AI generate that video. I never needed to like, open up a package, grab a thing, you know, take 20 minutes, set up my tripod, record an ad, send it to the brand, ask them if it's okay. Then they say yes, and then I get paid. Instead of this case, it's basically like, I just approve the brand,

• 13:36Shaan Puri?

  it uses my digital twin to make the ad. If I'm cool with the ad, I get paid. And that's it. And so that's what he's doing. Arcads is the same thing. If you go to Arcads, it's like, pretty fucking wild. And in their case, these are fake actors. So these women that you see on the thing that are like promoting stuff, these people do not exist. This is an AI-generated woman who looks like a real person that is promoting some product. And you script it, and you can, you know, get these made. These are the-

• 14:03Speaker 00

  Or it might be like a real person, but they said like license to the company. You can do whatever you want with it.

• 14:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. I think in this case, they might have started with a couple of those. Like, I think they found one of the girls from this, like on Fiverr or something. 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. But 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. And it is very simple to create. I think, Sarah, this is the type of idea you're talking about where two people can kind of take the existing models, you know, maybe customize them here. But then, it's just in a wedge. In this case, it's for e-commerce companies. And they're going to try to build a business here that will do, it'll be these, both these businesses, very quick to get to, you know, mid seven figures

• 14:53Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think a piece of it is just like, for me, like, okay, what's the difference between like, the first million and the next 999 million? It is whether or not the capability exists in the company to- Make the product deeper and keep expanding scope for what you do for your customer, right? And but there's a ton of these wedges. So staying with visual content, you can use this category of models, they're open source, to be fine tuned for different use cases that are super commercial, right? So it could be models or creator videos for e-comm, as you described. It could be renderings for like interior design or buildings. I don't know if you guys have ever looked at a floor plan.

• 15:46Speaker 00

  Like, maybe I just have terrible visual spatial reasoning, but I can't look at a floor plan with like a couple of blocks and then like a fuzzy piece of fabric and be like, yes, I see it.

• 15:57Shaan Puri?

  I'll put my life savings into this.

• 16:00Sam Parr?

  And our friend Peter Lovell has a thing where you take a picture of your home and then it does interior design for you and shows you mockups, which is pretty cool.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, but but I'd say like those, you know, those renderings traditionally generated costs like thousands of dollars, right? And now if you can give it to people for very little incremental costs, like that's an interesting wedge. Like, there's a handful of AI headshot companies making revenue. If you guys have ever gone like a professional headshot taken.

• 16:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, dude, I so this actually, this is like a kind of actually interesting version of the drop shipping idea. So these are, this is, I bet you this would work. So there was an ad I saw on Facebook, I think it was a Facebook ad and it basically was a guy and he had a headshot, I think of somebody who I recognized, maybe it was 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 your LinkedIn, whatever. It's good for business, good for your career. And you click a site and it's a bunch of people in the tech industry. And it was like $300 or $400 and I went to some warehouses type of place in some little like photo shoot studio in San Francisco, stood there awkwardly, got like headshots made and paid this guy, you know, 350 bucks. And he was running Facebook ads profitably to do that.

• 17:10Shaan Puri?

  So he was able to put in and he was acquiring a customer for whatever, 70 bucks and he was generating 350 bucks off them. And now you could run that same funnel, just without the San Francisco studio and without the guy taking the picture and without any other cost, right? Like, you just say, awesome, give me a couple of your photos and then boom, here you go. And I've seen a couple of these go viral of like viral headshot, viral yearbook ideas, but I haven't seen too many people just like running paid on them and making them work. But I'm pretty sure that you could create a paid funnel that would print cash for a period of time and maybe not forever, but an arbitrage period of time.

• 17:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but what's what's exactly so I've seen the same ones where it's like you look like a 80s glam shot model.

• 17:49Shaan Puri?

  But I think the professional one, people are willing to pay more, right? So if it's actually going to be for your.

• 17:54Sam Parr?

  What's an example of one?

• 17:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, look at this, um, look at this company, Aragon.ai.

• 17:59Shaan 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 they just that same photo becomes the after. That is very well done.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Looks good.

• 18:12Sam Parr?

  Sarah, how hard is something like this to make?

• 18:14Speaker 00

  So like, there are a million of these wedges, right? And I think that means like, it's an amazing time to, as you were saying, like, be good at distribution, understand like how to make a funnel and how to market something. And like to be an idea person, right? Fundamentally, like if you run into problems all the time and you like see the

• 18:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  basic capabilities, you're like, oh, I can think like you guys are both like, oh, I can think of like five other use cases for this, right?

• 18:39Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, you know, the distribution thing, so this is a good example. The, so I invested a little bit in Jasper and Jasper was started by guys who were internet marketers first, not AI researchers, not AI, you know, engineers, not, not even frankly, very good engineers, probably. They were just like internet guys, internet, internet business guys. And they were, I think they were doing something before this that wasn't really working very well, but they had spent a lot of time building like internet marketing funnels. And so when they got access to probably chat GPT three or something like that, they, they were kind of back before, or sorry, before chat GPT, just when it was GPT three. They got access to the API and they built Jasper, which was a, took that same capability, but now made it useful for marketers.

• 19:21Shaan Puri?

  So if you're a marketer, you need a blog post written or an email, or you needed, um, you know, copy written for an ad, whatever it was. They just made a standalone tool that would do that. Under the hood, it's, you know, the OpenAI model is doing 80, 90% of the work. They maybe customized the last, last mile of it. But they were so good at internet marketing that they started running Facebook ads on this thing. And it's the fastest company I've ever seen get to 50 million in ARR. They got to 50 million ARR in, in one year, which is. To go from zero to 50 million in revenue in one year is just absurd. And the way, the reason they were able to do that is because their background as internet marketers, as guys who are like, as soon as I have anything that works, I will just plow the maximum amount of cash into Facebook ads as I can. And I will just keep optimizing the ads until I get this thing, you know,

• 20:05Shaan Puri?

  a dollar in equals a dollar 50 out, or a dollar in equals two dollars out. And that's why they were able to be so successful early on, because they had a different skillset than most of the Silicon Valley people. Most people in Silicon Valley don't ever run paid ads. That's just like a pretty crazy thing.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  I think like if we just go to the difference then, like a challenge for any one of these companies that gets this wedge and like is rare to see zero to 50 in one year, that's pretty special. But even if you get like a product to hit in terms of initial adoption, then I think the like, the, the next 999 million of revenue has to be like, I think more traditional modes.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  Because the problem is if it was, I'm not saying the distribution piece was easy, but let's say you were just first with an idea. And like you hit it on Reddit because it's a novel capability. Like I think then you need to get to traditional like reasons companies get really big, product velocity, depth of product, ability to serve the customer, social engagement or something. Right. So like, if you think about companions, it could be like, what are the arguments for like, why somebody gets to dominate that, that business?

• 21:17Speaker 00

  There's a version of a companion business or any business with paid spend. And you know this really well, that is like just a treadmill, right? Like I make money, but I have to keep putting money in. It's the opposite of compounding. And if I like stop working hard or other people compete with me, like the treadmill gets steeper or I fall off. And I, I think one simple answer is on companions. Did you guys ever play The Sims growing up?

• 21:42Shaan Puri?

  Of course.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  Sure. Like, it's very hard for me to not imagine The Sims better if the characters are like smarter and like richer in interaction and have like what looks like realistic video and voice. Um, and so like technically, instead of it just being like, I'm talking to a person, it could be, you know, that person has some combination of memory of me, other interactions, goals, and like the media experience of them is richer. And we haven't gone there yet, but I think like there's a version of that company that's somewhere between like a companion and a game world that will be very big.

• 22:17Sam Parr?

  It's kind of an interesting exercise. Well, if I could just get to a million, then I've increased my likelihood and then maybe I can get that to 10, and then 100, and then a billion. I actually firmly believe that if, if something can scale to 10 million, there, it may take a while, but if it can get to 10, it can almost always get to 100. Like, there's enough people in the world to, to make that work. But it's actually an interesting exercise to think of all the things that you need to do in order to make those jumps. And now, getting it to a billion, I've actually, that's been, that's been hard for me to figure out how to do that. But, uh, that's a fun exercise to think, well, if I can just get to a million, I bet you I can get to 10, and if I get to 10, I know for a fact I can get to 100.

• 22:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. By the way, The Sims, lifetime sales, $5 billion. So, uh, without AI, The Sims was able to get to 5 billion in sales. If you made it more engaging by, by AI powering all those characters, that's gonna be even stickier.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  It's gonna be a big business, right?

• 23:10Sam Parr?

  Um, hey Sarah, why, dude, you're like, pretty in the know, fuck this fun thing. Like, why don't you just go do this?

• 23:18Shaan Puri?

  Go make one of these.

• 23:20Sam Parr?

  Go make one. This sounds way more fun than investing in it.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Um, I get to, I like, really like doing the zero to one thing repeatedly, right? And, and so I think you just have to figure out what you're motivated by. I, uh, am really motivated by working with people that are entrepreneurs that I like and respect and I think are super special. And I do not like working with people that, um, that I don't have as much enthusiasm about, right? That's like a very specific personality trait. And like law of large numbers, as soon as you manage very large teams, not everybody is gonna be at the same level. Um, and so, like, doing, investing, like, and making, being able to contribute to other people being successful that are really special. And then the competitive nature of

• 24:05Speaker 00

  Be right with skin in the game and then know what is happening. Like I like all of that, but I never say never. And then we incubate companies where like it's essentially like, oh, I see it. I see it. I see it. And then there's frustration that like the right, you know, a set of people you're really excited to back just hasn't come together around a certain idea.

• 24:26Sam Parr?

  Sean, you are more technical than me, but you're still not technical, I would say, but you're more than me.

• 24:33Shaan Puri?

  A Sam Parr classic compliment. Thank you very much.

• 24:35Sam Parr?

  You're not technical. You're more technical than me, but you're not technical.

• 24:38Shaan Puri?

  But you're also not technical.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  You're almost good looking.

• 24:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:43Sam Parr?

  You're hotter than me, but I'm a one, you're a three.

• 24:47Sam Parr?

  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?

• 24:58Shaan Puri?

  Would it be hard to build one of these?

• 25:00Sam Parr?

  Just like a really simple project because I know she's, Sarah's getting me all hyped on this shit. I'm like, this looks really fun to mess around with.

• 25:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think it's like anything else. You got to, you'd have to have a partner to speed you up. Like you learning to code, to be able to do these things would be the slow way of doing it versus the easy way is you find an engineer who's excited about this and doesn't have clarity of vision around it. Maybe doesn't have a, doesn't want to run the business side of things and you say, great. Hey, let's, let's build X together. I have a clear idea that X will work and I'll handle the marketing side. You got to make this product do, do this. And that's not so hard. That's, that's pretty easy.

• 25:34Sam Parr?

  This is exciting. You get to see a lot of cool shit.

• 25:36Shaan Puri?

  Let's, let's do some of your like specific kind of thesis. So you have this website conviction.com. Good website, by the way. How'd you get that domain?

• 25:44Speaker 00

  I'm an internet person. Yeah.

• 25:46Sam Parr?

  Did you see her website? She has a website for her, I think it's the incubator where you got to like code in order to get access to it. You don't really code, but like the menu is set up like that.

• 25:56Speaker 00

  It's a little, yeah, it's a little CLI.

• 25:58Sam Parr?

  What's, what's that URL?

• 26:00Speaker 00

  Um, I think it was called Commit. It was like our program for like hackathons, college students, et cetera. Yeah.

• 26:06Sam Parr?

  Commit dot conviction dot com, Sean. It's a pretty cool website, actually.

• 26:10Shaan Puri?

  Oh, you open up? It's a terminal?

• 26:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 26:12Shaan Puri?

  Oh, God. Uh, let me see. Let me try to do this. So run.

• 26:16Sam Parr?

  No.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  He's just trying to break it now.

• 26:20Shaan Puri?

  Dot html.

• 26:21Sam Parr?

  You gotta type in help. So if you type in help, it like gives you the menu. Anyway, it's cool.

• 26:26Shaan Puri?

  Slash is like a folder. I don't know. I don't know how to do this. Um, all right. So you have a website with a bunch of, basically like requests for startups or, you know, things that you think are gonna, gonna be built in, in, uh, in AI. So let's run through some of these, cause I, that's actually why initially was like, we gotta have her on the pod to, to kind of, to talk some of these out. So let's do one that's you call your personal seller. Do you remember this? You might've wrote this a while, while back, but your personal seller.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  It might've been one, like my partner, part of Reddy's or something, but we can certainly talk about it. Yeah.

• 26:56Shaan Puri?

  Okay. I'll, I'll give you the summary. So the summary is, uh, your personal seller, I think the idea here is that there's a bunch of places online to sell stuff, Etsy and eBay and Amazon, a bunch of different places to sell things. But actually like doing that is a bunch of work, like creating the store, listings, changing prices, writing the copy, all of that. And I think what you're saying is somebody should be able to just like have a product and then the AI should be able to like, do the actual econ management of this, of the, of the, of setting up the shop and running it. Is that what that means?

• 27:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think like, um, it's probably, it, it matches like a larger theme that I really think is exciting about AI, which is like, because all of these skills and it could be, um, run a basic like social marketing campaign, right? Or like send email to your customers that are likely to be repeat customers or improve your website for indexing. Like there are a bunch of things that, um, are probably not related to, let's say it's a, let's say it's a. Shopify drop shipping store for like a particular type of sock and you love socks as an entrepreneur. It's not like related to the merchandising decision or the design decision of like, what is the sock I want to give the world? Right.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  And like, that's kind of the essence of like, why like, sometimes people become entrepreneurs. And so can you, can you take a bunch of these tasks that require skills and all these different domains and just automate them, uh, at least at a basic level? Like, I think you can now, right? And I think like that there are the platforms, um, Shopify and, and Square, et cetera, they're, they like, you know, they now have native assistant products that help you use the platforms better. But I, I think across the spectrum of how to be a good internet entrepreneur, like in the e-commerce sense, I think there's more opportunity there.

• 28:52Sam 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?

• 29:02Shaan Puri?

  Well, usually if you have 10,000 SKUs, you have like, it's a, you have like, you don't have 10,000 unique, uh, totally variant.

• 29:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but you could have.

• 29:11Shaan Puri?

  Color variance, size variance, things like that. So like, I'll give you, uh, I'll tell you in our case, right? So I have an e-comm store and we have, we spend, uh, let's see, probably like five or six grand a month on just Shopify prep plus or whatever, like the enterprise Shopify thing. So that's just the Shopify cost. On top of that, I would say we probably have another, um, three to five grand a month on Shopify apps. So you need an app for search, you need an app for, uh, bundles, you need an app for this, that, you know, there's like a ton of things that Shopify doesn't define. So my all in just software cost is at least 10 grand a month, probably a little bit more on top of the fees they take of every transaction. Then I have an e-commerce store manager. His job is just to like, run the store, like we have new products coming up, make sure

• 29:56Shaan Puri?

  those launches go well, move things around, oh, this is broken, there's a bug, whatever. We then have a merchandiser. The merchandiser goes every day, looks at the collections and says, this thing is sold out, it shouldn't be at the top anymore, we don't have sizes for this, or we don't have colors for this, so let me move this other thing to the top. Or hey, the season just ended, these need to be rearranged. So there's a human being that does that. There's also apps that do that, but you kind of need the app plus the software today because the app's not quite good enough to do it by itself. We then have VAs that go in and they do all the product pages, the descriptions, the templates, the tagging, so that our inventory data is correct because we need to be able to analyze our inventory. To do that, you need to tag every product accurately. So there is like four or five people that are just making sure the store runs in addition to five apps that make

• 30:40Shaan Puri?

  the store run. That all today is, shouldn't be the lead like future state of things. That's just the current state of things.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  And Sean, I think the future state is for entrepreneurs who cannot recruit managed pay the five people it takes to run your store. Like, what do they do? As Sam said, like, I think it will be easier in the future, right?

• 31:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  I think this is also kind of like similar as an idea to all of the, another area that we are, and I'm like personally really interested in is the voice automation market. I think like a lot of your listeners will have seen the GPT-4O demo, where it's like a voice that may or may not sound like Scar Joe talking, like in real time.

• 31:23Sam Parr?

  Well, we played with 11 labs.

• 31:26Shaan Puri?

  No, but that's dubbing. She's talking about just being able to like Alexa. You just talk to it and it just talks back and it'll sound like Scarlett Johansson, just like chat GPT, but you don't have to type.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, but both of these things, either like it could be in your voice or like some spokesperson for a brand or a company, but like the ability to give reasoned, you know, knowledge-based responses in a human voice, I think is just really powerful, right? And I don't think people are thinking enough about the opportunities here where you mentioned 11. There's like exactly one independent voice API business and tens of millions of revenue, and that's 11. They're great. That's amazing. I think there are other opportunities. So like, there's a company called Cartesia that does like more real-time voice, for example.

• 32:09Sam Parr?

  You think 11 is, by the way, 11 labs, you think they're at 10s of millions in revenue?

• 32:13Speaker 00

  They are, they're definitely at, you know, a, a large number that is in the tens of millions of revenue.

• 32:18Shaan Puri?

  That's insane.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  I'm not surprising, surprising the market with that. But, you know, a lot of developers will immediately gravitate like toward API business. But that is not how the rest, like the world is full of niches and people running businesses that don't think about APIs and won't use them. Right? And, and so like just to, just like, you know, your personal seller. Um, I think there are going to be a bunch of interesting voice services for everything from restaurants to HVAC companies to dental reception that are just like, answer the phone. I think that's one of the ideas we had. And it could be informational, like we are open from eight AM to six PM. Um, or a lead generation business where I'm like, well, like my plumbing broke and like, are you available tomorrow at three PM?

• 33:03Shaan Puri?

  I'm a huge believer in this, huge, like. And what, Sean? This, this simple idea. So you know, like when the, when the internet came out, it was like, um, oh, it's going to be so crazy. But like, one of the obvious things was like, hey, every restaurant just kind of needs their menu online. Like you should put your, you should put your restaurant exists where it's located and then put your menu up there, even as a PDF. That's still like value add for you. It's like, it became where every business needed a website. And now what I think it's going to have is that every business needs an agent. And so what's the agent for most small businesses? So like, I call pest control because we always get a little bunch of like mice jumping in our pool for whatever reason. And try calling pest control. Nobody ever picks up the damn phone. And because there's usually, it's usually run by like, it's like Mike's pest control and Mike's out in the field doing things all day.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  Controlling the pest.

• 33:48Shaan Puri?

  Actually doing work. And so he doesn't pick up the phone. And so then you leave a message and you're like, you, and then, 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 Mike doesn't pick up the phone. Mike also is not going to hire somebody to just sit there and wait for the three phone calls a day that he's going to get. It just wouldn't make sense. But now you go and I built one of these in our like AI, uh, like weekly tutoring sessions that I have basically. I was like, I want to build one of these. So. We have the same problem for our offshore recruiting business. So we own a 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, they find you elite talent.

• 34:27Shaan Puri?

  Now, the big problem, if you go to Somewhere.com, it's like you say, okay, I'm looking for a designer or I need somebody who could do, who get me leads for my marketing business or my real estate business, or I need somebody to do data entry, right? So you have all these jobs. Now, the button on the site is basically like, you want to start hiring? Fill out this form. So you fill out the form and then it's like, awesome, we will get back to you soon. Or it's like, schedule a call. Here's the call tomorrow or two days from now. And no matter how many sales agents we have, a call tomorrow is not as good as, "Talk to me right now about what I need because right now is when I'm interested. Right now is when I'm on your website. Right now is when I'm not thinking about other variations of how I might solve this problem and you have an opportunity to sell me."

• 35:09Shaan Puri?

  And so Sam, I don't know if you've seen this, but like, check out bland.ai. This is the one I built on.

• 35:14Sam Parr?

  If the answer is, have you seen this? Assume it's no, and my mind is being blown by all this stuff.

• 35:19Shaan Puri?

  But basically it lets you build a phone agent for yourself. So I went on here and I built a phone agent. So I built a guy who could answer the phone so that when somebody goes to Somewhere and they want to, they want to hire somebody, it'll be like, awesome. What are you hiring for? Have you ever hired overseas? And you're like, yeah, I have. It's like, cool. Tell me what you're looking for in a couple, you know, 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, a little bit less? And then it answers it. It basically does the intake, the initial sales call for you. And it's like, no problem. We've hired this month for 85 other Shopify brands who are looking for Shopify developers.

• 35:58Shaan Puri?

  You're in good hands. We do this all the time. We will, I'm going to start looking for candidates now. I'm going to email you tomorrow with three candidates. How does that sound? And the person's like, great. I guess I can just like, wait for that to happen or it'll pull from our existing database and be like, here's an example resume. This is the type of person we'd be looking for. Would this person fit your needs? Yes or no? So then the human salesperson will come into work and see a ticket that's like, The AI agent did the initial sales call and found the customer's requirements and kind of already warmed the sale up and told the customer what they needed to know, the things you repeat every time on the phone. And now you could follow up with a more bespoke answer for that person. That's the future that I see. I wasn't able to fully build that. I did like a prototype of it, but that's what I think websites, even like ours, which is

• 36:43Shaan Puri?

  an internet business should have, which means that every plumbing and pest control and restaurant, they're going to have their version of that.

• 36:50Sam Parr?

  This is 100% way better than having a call center, or it might, or it will be when it, as long, so long as it works as good. But this is absolutely the way to go.

• 36:58Shaan Puri?

  All right, let's do some more. So you have another one on here. That's, I think, an easy one. That's cool. Next gen autocomplete. And I think the idea here is you do a Chrome extension or a browser extension that not just like autocomplete helps you fill in the next word it thinks you're going to say, or how to spell a word. But what you have here is that it starts to learn your voice. So it can write your, it can help you write your emails or your blog posts in your voice, which is kind of like the next level up from autocomplete, next level up from Grammarly. It doesn't just kind of correct or spell check your stuff, but it actually writes the way you write because it has watched the way you write. Is that the thesis here?

• 37:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And 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, this is actually my friend Mike Vernal's idea. I think he suffers from the same thing I do that might be true for you, which is like I'm an incredibly picky writer. And so I will use the models today for generation of basic content, or I'll ask my amazing EA to like draft emails for me and then I will go rewrite the whole thing because I don't like the tone because it doesn't sound like me or because it's not tight enough or because I want to use a certain phrase. And I think the next level of like value and impact is definitely going to be fine tuning to specific voice.

• 38:18Shaan Puri?

  And nobody wants to write like Chat GPT, like nobody wants to be the generic AI either. So what everybody wants is the thing in between.

• 38:25Sam Parr?

  This is just all wild to me. Is there anyone right now doing that that you like? Because I would like to use this today.

• 38:31Speaker 00

  I mean, Superhuman has like really interesting AI features, but I think the unlock is going to be the personalization.

• 38:38Shaan Puri?

  And what's your overarching investment thesis? So you have this thing called software 3.0, which by the way, most VC thing to do to be like, oh, software 3.0, web 3.0, you've done it. You've gone full VC. What is software 3.0?

• 38:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay. So the seed for that phrase, software 3.0, it comes from actually an essay that Andre Karpathy wrote years ago about software 2.0. And the base premise here is that like you had to write a lot of software by hand in a prior generation before machine learning. And then software 2.0, Andre worked at Tesla, was working on autopilot, was really about dataset labeling, right? 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, a lot of it is about manipulating foundation models.

• 39:38Speaker 00

  And they're called foundation models because they have a lot of capability out of the box. You don't need to train them from scratch. You just need to give them like guidance, reinforcement, the information specific to your business. And so an example would be like Sean was talking about for his lead capture intake form voice bot. Like he doesn't need to go train a model. He doesn't need to go like collect data for that software application. Like the voice agent is a software application. He just needs to like, make sure it's plugged into his scheduling system and his database of candidates and be able to retrieve the right information about the business

• 40:19Speaker 00

  and like, you know, respond consistently to customers in a certain tone, right? And so that's more about like manipulating a bunch of this base work that people, like labs have already done for you. And the premise here is like that last mile of getting a foundation model to be like something that serves all these use cases in the real world that, you know, maybe the research labs think of as niches. Like the world is composed of very large niches. And so I think it's a, I think it's a really big opportunity for entrepreneurs and for us.

• 40:49Shaan Puri?

  What are some of your like hot takes or maybe your contrarian takes? Anything that you think that might be counter to what the most people say, most people do, most people are betting on? Do you have anything that is against the grain?

• 41:03Speaker 00

  You know, I'm gonna get, I'm gonna give like a somewhat arrogant answer, which is I don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the entire market thinks. Actually, so I'm like, I don't know which of these things are contrarian. I can tell you where like my opinion has changed dramatically. Like, let me give you one example. For many years, including, you know, the tenure of my investing at Greylock, I was one of several people who were like, okay, we're gonna go understand healthcare and digital health. And I was like, oh, healthcare sucks, right? It's a quarter of the economy. It's really important. How could you not want to work on this mission? But it is so slow and the incentives are so screwed up that like trying to enter that market with technology or the speed of entrepreneurship that, you know, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are seeking is like not a good idea.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  And we just did a healthcare administration automation company. So I'm like, oops, like changed my mind, real hypocrite here. And like one of the reasons being, I'm like, well, if you think about the mind numbing work that happens in healthcare administration, like billing, authorization, coding, claims processing, like all like even, not even mind numbing, but just like expensive and manual, like patient support. It's actually really fertile for an AI company. And, you know, we backed something that's like growing really quickly in one of those domains, right? And so I just say like, I guess I've changed my point of view on healthcare.

• 42:23Sam Parr?

  I went to the pediatrician yesterday. My doctor is with my baby there and I'm sitting there and she's got her iPad on like a table and there's a video like there. And I'm like, who the fuck is that guy? And they're like, oh, that's just like my scribe. I, uh, he's just listening in and he's, and he's taking notes. But she was like, I used to stay up until 3:00 AM taking notes on all of my patients. They just do it for me. And obviously the wheels are turning in my head. I'm like, yeah, that, 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, this has been around for a long time. I was like, I've never seen that.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do think one framework for like your listeners, like thinking about different ideas is like, what parts of work have been outsourced services already, right? Because like it used to be the doctor taking the notes. And they're like, wow, we pay this person a lot and like they should see more patients and think about their patients more like, let us outsource that to a cheaper tech in our office. Let us like outsource that tech to India or the Philippines. And now there are a number of scribe businesses in medicine that are growing really fast, like a bridge, Nablafried. Like it is happening. And so I think that will happen in a bunch of different areas where like basically if you can

• 43:41Speaker 00

  create separation of that work already to outsource it, then maybe you can outsource it to a machine as well.

• 43:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Sam Mollman had a good thing. He was like, everybody worries about AI taking your job. That's not the right way to think about it. It's AI will take your tasks. Uh, like you have to think about it not at a job level, but at a task level. There are certain tasks it can do really well. There's certain tasks it can't do really well. There's certain tasks today it can't do that in the future it can do. And so eventually a job becomes a bundle of tasks. Um, but, but for now it's, you can't think of the whole bundle because it can't replace the whole job, but it can replace specific tasks, which might be just the way it works in the long run is that there's a huge slew of tasks that can be, that can be done by AI. And then there's people that bundle those tasks together to make sure that they're getting done well or at the right time.

• 44:27Speaker 00

  I think that's like approximately right, but to be intellectually honest, like that there was a scribe in that outsourced BPO that had that job. And so it's not taking the doctor's job, but it's taking the piece of the job that like the doctor's job that already got separated out, the task that they didn't like, but that became a job of its own.

• 44:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the task became a job and the job goes back to being a task, basically in this case.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good framework.

• 44:51Sam Parr?

  Sarah, are you, are you investing exclusively in AI related businesses?

• 44:56Speaker 00

  I am a technology investor. I'm not a machine learning researcher. I've been working on this stuff for a handful of years and I really believe it. I think it's like the most important thing to happen in technology in a long time. But I'd say like, I'm also here to just. You know, invest in great tech companies. And so

• 45:11Sam Parr?

  You're also here to get paid.

• 45:13Speaker 00

  I am also here to work on things that will work that are important, right? Um, and so like if a, if an entrepreneur that I think super highly of, or like that I've worked with before, or whatever comes to me and says like, I have a great idea. Nothing to do with AI. I'm still definitely going to be really interested in that. If you ask me, like, what are the ideas that we think about or are hunting? It is all in AI. I do want to put one more thing out there, which is definitely not a idea that just anyone can go after. It's kind of the opposite of the like easy wedge idea in terms of how can I put distribution around like one functionality for a niche on a, on a model, like a AI headshot application or something.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  But I do really want to hear from anyone who has a point of view on what happens to the like Nvidia compute monopoly and overall what's changing in the data center. I don't know if this is a hot take to your former question, but like, I think a lot of people intellect, in technology, really, the intellectual like, are like, oh, yes, of course. Workloads are changing from not AI to AI. But they don't actually think about like what that means in terms of scale and market cap. Like, that means like chips, memory bandwidth, networking, energy, storage, optimized system design, like, that was a lot of technology company market cap before. And so like, if that's true, there's going to be a bunch of different, like new specialized solutions, and it's trillions of dollars of value at stake.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  And it's not just like single direct attack on Nvidia that is like the opportunity.

• 46:45Shaan Puri?

  What, what else would be in that category? If it's not just like, hey, our chip is better than Nvidia's chip. What, what else is, what is, what's another shape of a company that could be in that, that space?

• 46:53Speaker 00

  So I, I guess an example would be like, well, what are other bottlenecks like? Memory bandwidth, what, like, what if you design storage to be specific for AI data centers? What if you, like, you could do cooling systems for, like, there are, if you just reimagine the entire data center around like big AI inference?

• 47:12Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  I think you end up with like totally different needs.

• 47:16Sam Parr?

  The, uh, the New York Times had this article the other day, and I don't remember the stat entirely, but it was something like the amount of AI capacity or in chips like currently created right now. We need to create like another like four trillion dollars in market cap in order to satisfy like the amount of capacity that we have. And they were sort of writing it in a 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 where you think about, well, in 1998, if you said, like, 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. And I remember reading this article the other day, and I was like, that's just absolutely astounding that we're in one of these moments.

• 48:01Shaan Puri?

  Sequoia, Sequoia came out with a sort of blog post, or I don't know, PDF or something like that about this, the, I think they called it the 600 billion dollar hole or something. It was basically saying, well, we've, we've invested this much, or we're investing this much in capex. So if you invest that much in capex, what do you need to get out to make that, you know, return? And that's a VC saying that, which is, which is not just like some journalist who doesn't get it, who doesn't get tech. Sarah, what was your reaction to that? And what's your take on that?

• 48:27Speaker 00

  I think it is a lot of capex. I think if you put it in context of like, how does it compare to other big capex spends in the past, let's say, like, the broadband build out, like, well, we wanted the internet, you know, like, we spent about $2 trillion on broadband to date. Like, we're not there yet, right? That was worth it. And so what I would say is, yes, like, it's a totally valid question. We're spending a lot of money. What are we going to get out of it? I think we're going to get a lot of value.

• 48:58Sam Parr?

  We had Darmesh on the, Darmesh founded HubSpot.

• 49:01Speaker 00

  Darmesh is amazing.

• 49:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he's really wise. And he's tends to be right more than he's wrong. And I think he said something great when I asked him, I'm like, man, I'm a little nervous about a lot of the stuff, where the world is going to go. And he's like, well, I'm fairly educated. And I think that it's not going to be as good or bad as you think it's going to be. Do you agree with that sentiment?

• 49:20Speaker 00

  No, I think, I think it's actually pretty bimodal. I think it'd be like, bad, or and it's like, it could be much, much better. So I don't.

• 49:27Shaan Puri?

  It's, it's the opposite. It's either going to be much worse or much better, is kind of your take.

• 49:32Sam Parr?

  What's the bad like, what's the bad situation look like where like, like for example, I think the bad situation, and I'm fairly uneducated, so take it with a grain of salt. The very bad situation is that there's just gonna be this massive gap between the haves and the have-nots. And like, if you have money now, that's gonna grow and you're gonna be awesome.

• 49:48Shaan Puri?

  The bad situation is AI kills us all, right? That's the doom situation.

• 49:52Sam Parr?

  That's a bad situation. But then, but in route to that, there is just this massive separation of the haves and have-nots. You have nots. You know what I'm saying? That kind of freaks me out. What's your, what's your, where do you see the bad situation going, going towards?

• 50:06Speaker 00

  So I think it is not necessarily that correlated that your, your resources or your capital today mean that you most take advantage of the, of the AI revolution, right? I actually think people have a lot of agency in this. They can go start these businesses, make a million dollars.

• 50:26Sam Parr?

  That's such a small group of people.

• 50:27Speaker 00

  Why does it have to be?

• 50:29Sam Parr?

  Because of human nature. How many people know about this shit? Well, your parents are tech entrepreneurs, but go, go ask Sean's mom and dad. Go ask my parents. Go ask my brother and sister, like.

• 50:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, most people are not entrepreneurial. Even if this widens the number of people who can be successfully entrepreneurial, it's not gonna, like, it's gonna go from 0.1% or whatever, 1% of the population to, I don't know, not 50, right? It's not gonna go that far.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know if it has to express in pure entrepreneurialism versus like, you will get increased productivity for people in lots of different types of jobs. And it's not obvious to me that's like, just the people who are already most highly paid today.

• 51:09Shaan 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, we had Emmett Shear on the podcast, and Emmett's a smart, thoughtful guy, and he's like, you know, the P doom, the probability of actual doom here is, it's pretty scary. It's not zero. And here's, you know, here's where I think it is.

• 51:32Sam Parr?

  What do you think about that? What are the odds that AI truly is a sort of like a critically dangerous thing?

• 51:39Speaker 00

  You know, I don't actually spend a lot of time thinking about this problem because the because it is like conjecture in the future of both the objectives of these models and capabilities of these models that are kind of like hand wavy, right? Like, like, I think when you talk to experts about some of the suggested scenarios, like, here are two classic ones. Oh, you know, people are going to use this to design a virus that kills us all, bioweapons, or somebody is going to make the objective for a foundation model that is super powerful to be like, make the most money or generate the most paperclips 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.

• 52:24Speaker 00

  And so when when people ask me about like the doom scenario, like I am much more concerned about abuses we actually do understand. So for example, like, what if people don't understand what information is true or not? Or like, people are going to use this stuff for hacking and fraud and lots of like, bad activities today. And like, we should go understand that and react as quickly as possible to that. And as a country, like, probably want to stay ahead on these capabilities technically.

• 52:55Sam Parr?

  Well, have you heard any, what are some, what's a wild example of how people use this for hacking or for fraud?

• 53:00Speaker 00

  Oh, I mean, like-

• 53:01Sam Parr?

  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.

• 53:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's the simplest example, which is, well, like, what happens if you can create really authentic sounding media? Like, you know, are your parents, like, you know, going to not pick up the phone if it's a spoofed phone number and it sounds like you and you say you need something? Like, that's a bad scenario. And so I think we need more tools to protect against that. And general education about it. So I worry more about that. And then I'd say, like, I think of the probability of a bad scenario, I said, was like, it is possible. I can't see exactly how we get there. And if you ask me, like, what are the reasons in which

• 53:54Speaker 00

  broad use of cheap intelligence are going to be great, I can give you so many reasons. Right? So Andre Karpathy just started a company around education and like the the fields that have been super resistant to cost improvement, basically healthcare, the government and education. Like, I think this will actually move the needle on some of the domains that matter a lot to all of us humans. And I think like when when people talk about like the doom scenario, it's really fun and scary to talk about the dystopian doom scenario. But I think the opportunity cost of not exploring the ways in which like there,

• 54:35Speaker 00

  you know, you can have an economy of abundance. We need to talk about that. And that is really what I focus on.

• 54:41Shaan Puri?

  Same. Do you know who Andre Karpathy is?

• 54:43Sam Parr?

  No, but I love his name.

• 54:46Speaker 00

  It's a lovely name. Andre is a amazingly well-respected research scientist and educator who's trying to create like an experience that is AI-powered in education where like the most amazing expert in a domain is like a personal tutor taking you through the material interactively.

• 55:05Shaan Puri?

  And he's one of like the five big thought leader type guy. 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.

• 55:21Sam Parr?

  It says he's listed as a co-founder of OpenAI. So I guess he's the man.

• 55:25Shaan 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, chief AI guy.

• 55:35Sam Parr?

  When I lived in San Francisco, it was a fun period. I lived there from 2012 to basically 2020 or 2022. And back then, it was like the Airbnbs of the world and Tesla.

• 55:48Sam Parr?

  Uber and we had Sidecar back then where it was like, holy crap, we're gonna get into a stranger's car. And this is so exciting. This is so new. And, and you'd go to hackathons and people were working on like meal delivery services. And that was like, really cool. I went recently, or this was about a year ago, and I was walking around the Ferry Building. And this kid recognized me. He's like, Oh, Sam, you know, I like the pod. I go, Hey, what's up, man? And he said, I'm doing a hackathon right now in the Ferry Building upstairs. Do you and your wife want to come up and like, see what's going on? And I was like, hell, yeah, let's do it. And so we go up there. And it was so invigorating. I was like, dude, we used to do these exact same thing, but it was around like, the sharing economy and all this type of stuff. And they, I was just talking to

• 56:31Sam Parr?

  people what they were building. And I remember thinking like, this is like, totally, I guess it happens in San Francisco a bunch. I was like, this is like the Renaissance, like, there's something really, really cool going on. And everyone was doing AI stuff. And I just thought, it's magical.

• 56:44Shaan Puri?

  Right when I moved there, it was like, mobile was the thing. It was like, oh, X for mobile. Everything we got to make, we got to make it work on iPhone and an Android. And then you would see like, you know, some like false flags, like front back came out. It's like, oh, shit, this is the next thing. This is the next big social app. And then it would kind of die. But then, you know, Instagram, Snapchat, you know, they, they, they actually, they stuck. And I remember the early days of Musically that now become TikTok. And so, mobile was like, 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 the steam for crypto, because crypto was a lot more international. But now it looks like for AI, San Francisco at least is back as the, the hub. Sir, are you in, in San Francisco?

• 57:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're in the mission in San Francisco. And like, I think we really believe in the sort of like, community aspect of, not in the like, maybe in the squishy sense of the word too. But like, if you're thinking about looking for ideas for companies and being inspired to like, be committed to the grind and have the right ideas, then the right thing to do is not do it, like alone in your basement. What you have in San Francisco are people who are optimistic, and then like, work oriented. They believe lots of things are possible. They're learning about what's going on at the frontier. And we actually do this grant program, embed, embed dot conviction dot com to create that kind of community and a bunch of other stuff. But it is, it is around this idea that you, people want to have the experience that you

• 58:08Speaker 00

  described, Sam, which is like, well, like, not all of this is going to work. But what are smart

• 58:15Speaker 00

  Trying that is some version of the future in this area of AI and like that will probably educate and inspire me and some of it will be really big.

• 58:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think that like if you're 22 and you're young and single and you're into this shit, I would just say two words, I would say, go west. Go west, young man.

• 58:34Shaan Puri?

  By the way, people always talk about San Francisco, it's dangerous, it's dirty, it's lawless. That's the appeal, baby. You can say you you made it in the war-torn city of San Francisco. You don't want to be a billionaire who is coddled. You want to be a billionaire who grew up on the mean streets of San Francisco.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  They're not that mean.

• 58:56Shaan Puri?

  All right, I think we have to wrap up. Sarah, thanks for coming on. Where should people find you and where should they follow you?

• 59:02Speaker 00

  You can just Google Sarah Guo or conviction.com and I'm on Twitter.

• 59:06Shaan Puri?

  All right, that's it. That's the pod.

• 59:08Speaker 00

  Thanks, guys.