Pod Insights Y Combinator Podcast Legendary Consumer VC Predicts The Future Of AI Products About this episode Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, has backed some of the most iconic consumer brands of the past two decades — from Warby Parker to Chime to Dollar Shave Club.
In this conversation with Garry, she shares how great products (not marketing tricks) still win, why AI is unlocking a new kind of emotional relationship between consumers and technology, and what founders can learn from the messy creative stage we're in right now. She also breaks down how shifts in distribution, wellness, and digital behavior are reshaping what it means to build for real human needs.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 It's almost the first question we get asked from every new founder that we work with, which is like, tell me how so and so did this for marketing or what happened here?
0:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
0:08 Speaker 00 And I always kind of have to preface and say, I've got good news and bad news for you, which is you've got to do everything. Why do they need your product? Why are they going to come back to your product? Why are they going to add another new thing into their already crowded lives? If you have to like strip everything away, you don't have extra money or resources to do other things, like mail your product.
0:37 Speaker 01 Welcome to another episode of The Main Function. Today I have Kirsten Green, the co-founder and managing partner of Forerunner Ventures. She's a legendary investor who's done all of the great consumer startups over the last 15, 20 years, really. So it's really a pleasure to have you here. To name a few, Chime, Fair, Hymns and Hers, Warby Parker and Dollar Shave Club. Kirsten, thanks for joining us.
1:03 Speaker 00 Thanks, Gary. It's a pleasure to be here.
1:05 Speaker 01 Prior to jumping on here, we were talking about we want to see a lot more consumer AI. We're in the middle of an AI boom. What is the shape of that? Like, what do you think's going to happen? Why hasn't it happened quite yet?
1:17 Speaker 00 I think that it's inevitable and I think that it's starting to happen. It makes sense that it's on the horizon, given that first you have to have the infrastructure built. First you have to have the technology formed. And then in business is typically and understandably the first kind of call to action. It really runs off of competition. So someone starts a business as an outsider, an incumbent sees that someone's coming for part of their business. They respond and competition goes from there. And on the consumer side, of course, you have competition once you have a marketplace built. But to get things started, you really have to deliver something like outstanding for the consumer. It has to be something that's meeting a need in a new way.
2:00 Speaker 00 And you have to draw them in and it has to make it their choice. So it takes a little more, I think, nuance and a little more warm-up time to get people to come around to that. One thing I would say about AI in particular is that I don't know that we've ever seen. Something so readily adopted by consumers. I think the consumers are voting overwhelmingly that they're here for the advancements they're seeing in technology. You know, you just look at the chat G P T numbers and it's like really astounding how many hundreds of millions of people are logging on daily there.
2:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think maybe that's the best example of the fastest consumer launch maybe in the history of consumer launches.
2:43 Speaker 00 I think without a doubt, right? Yeah, it's astonishing.
2:46 Speaker 01 And then, you know, the funniest story about that is, you know, if you spend time with Evan Morikawa, the original P M for that, when they launched, it was a it was a slog. It wasn't that easy to actually push it out into the world like a lot of people.
2:59 Speaker 00 Gary, haven't you learned after this? Nothing is really that easy.
3:02 Speaker 01 That's right.
3:04 Speaker 00 You know, the trick is making it look easy, but it's not, you know?
3:07 Speaker 01 That's right. And maybe that's one of the reasons why we're so excited. I mean, if opening eyed can come out the gate with, you know, just this insane hockey stick, um, you know, where there's smoke, usually there's fire. There will be other new capabilities.
3:21 Speaker 00 I mean, I think, you know, first of all, I think it's shown us like we were just referencing that people are really here for it. And part of it is, is that it's relatable. It's actually even more natural to go online and ask a question than it is to just search a keyword. And so this novelty, which was a novelty, to come online and be able to start having a conversation with technology in a way you hadn't before. It's something we all do every day in our daily lives. So it was taking a behavior that is fundamental and now making it possible online. And I think that's, you know, one of the reasons why it's been such a quick uptick from the consumer. I think one of the reasons it's so exciting for business and for entrepreneurs is that this is really a platform shift. This is more than just the advancements of technology.
4:06 Speaker 00 I think it sets like a whole new paradigm for what's possible. The way I kind of like simply think about it is, is that for the last two cycles, let's call it the internet mobile. We've moved from outcomes and attention into an area of relationships and affection. And I think that's much more dynamic and it's much more in the ordinary course of people's lives. So I think the adoption curve is going to be is going to be really exciting. I think we just need to get the founders to start building.
4:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, I always think about the movie Her where, you know, it is actually about a relationship between, you know, human and computer in that respect, but it's it feels much more like a human relationship. I feel like ChatGPT, even from its initial spectacular launch, has continued to evolve, like the new memory is really powerful.
4:54 Speaker 00 The ability to have memory is obviously an underpinning to this idea of an emotional operating system. And I think that's, you know, that's the the the next level of development, is to be able to create context, not just context in the moment, from the data that you're sharing in a particular conversation, or what's been, you know, stored because you've shared some piece of it, but that you get, that it gets built over time. The real crazy unlocks come from the ability to take that memory that builds over time and intuit it forward. I don't know that we've seen that yet.
5:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's getting there.
5:27 Speaker 00 But it's coming.
5:29 Speaker 01 Oh, three with reasoning is pretty impressive.
5:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, it's it's definitely already doing it in the context of picking facts up over time. I mean, online while it's researching. I'm thinking about, you know, you and I sit down today, we have this conversation. I go have a conversation with three other people about a similar topic, but maybe we we push the envelope a little further on something. And then we come back six months later. And in the context of, you know, in the journey of six months, I've had many conversations, so have you. News has happened. And now the AI is, you know, getting is able to bring all of those things forward and sort of draw conclusions or draw ideas or questions from that body of work. That's something we do as humans, but we haven't had at all an interaction on a computer.
6:13 Speaker 01 I mean, maybe this is a bit of a debate right now, like, you know, I personally almost expect there to be things that sort of rhyme with pre-AI consumer to come out and they'll just somehow be like. Supercharged by AI or by this relationship that maybe you have or a memory? Like, is that how you'd view it? Or are these things going to look radically different?
6:37 Speaker 00 I think one of the reasons that maybe it's taking time for things to brew before we sort of see something that really wows it is I do think it begs for people to go back to first principles and say that like, if I now have the power to build a relationship through these digital means, how will the experience be different? Like, what's the way you start to build that relationship? What's the way you influence that relationship? What's the way you engage with it? I imagine that like every category in some way can be reinvented. And I don't think you can look at like what it looks like today and just add AI on to it, add memory or add a bit of a deeper connection. We're seeing that now, right?
7:19 Speaker 00 And I think there's companies being built in that area that will probably thrive. But I think the ones that like we'll be talking about years and years from now are going to approach it from like, you know, a really new place, a new starting point.
7:35 Speaker 01 So you've said your AI will actually unlock new apps by enabling data to live in a continuous learning loop, you know, actual personalization. So, I mean, that's sort of actually a part of the relationship that you might have, right?
7:49 Speaker 00 I mean, that's what we're talking about, right? So I do think that data has long been talked about as a moat of sorts, but I think it's even more so in this area where you do have the continuous learning loop, where it's not just a data point that I share that then gets reflected back in a specific case. It's it building over time and the ability to take those collections of data points and move a conversation or a relationship forward, just like we do as humans. But we just haven't done that in a digital setting. And imagine that once you start building that relationship, not only the power of what that can unlock in terms of The impact it might have on whatever context you're talking about, whether it's some aspect of your health, some aspect of your education,
8:32 Speaker 00 some aspect of your financial planning, some aspect of your social. It deepens it in a really meaningful way. The other side of that that gets that right. I've invested in that relationship. And I think that, you know, that becomes a key to keeping loyalty with your users and having retention.
8:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's.
8:50 Speaker 00 And the possibility for that is even more meaningful than things we've seen before. Because you've moved from just a transaction into something that's a relationship. So back to the idea of voice, which I think is.
9:00 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, I love voice.
9:01 Speaker 00 Right? So up until recently, almost all my interactions with my digital interfaces were typing things on a keyboard. And I think that even when I'm moving fast, I'm either writing with a lot of intention or I'm writing so fast that I'm putting out soundbites and not clear thoughts. As soon as you get to have voice, I think people take a lot more liberty with how they talk. And you almost let ideas unfold and, you know, you peel back the onion in doing that. Now we've got voice that talks back to us digitally to prompt a conversation. And to the extent that all of that becomes data that gets stored in the context of memory that gets used in the way we've been talking about,
9:44 Speaker 00 like, that is an incredibly rich place to pursue that relationship from that we just, that hasn't been possible before.
9:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:52 Speaker 00 So I think between it being like a more delightful experience, it's also, it's also more rich that can, that can increase like what the output of that could be too.
10:01 Speaker 01 I started using ChatGPT explicitly for this.
10:04 Speaker 00 Yeah.
10:05 Speaker 01 Where if there's like a news article or a podcast that I don't have time to listen to, I don't just paste it and say summarize. It's, I actually paste it and I say summarize and also pull out the things that you think I would find really interesting.
10:19 Speaker 00 Right.
10:19 Speaker 01 It knows that I'm into SF politics. It knows that I'm into making sure kids learn algebra. And then whatever I'm putting in there, like, it'll just pick out different parts of.
10:30 Speaker 00 So, I mean, those are incredible conversation prompts.
10:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:33 Speaker 00 And then you can move from, if that's coming back to you in writing, you can move from there into a voice conversation about it.
10:39 Speaker 01 Which is huge.
10:40 Speaker 00 That's magical.
10:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:41 Speaker 00 It's much more engaging. I, I can think of a couple of times, just with myself, feeling like I could. Pick the phone out of my pocket and start to have a conversation about something I wanted to learn about. Or with my fifteen year old son, we sat down to talk about a topic that he was studying in school that I needed to refresh myself on. We brought chat G P T into it. And the conversation ended up being much richer and much longer. Because we had support in uncovering more insights.
11:07 Speaker 01 You say that we're like sort of in the messy creative stage of consumer A I.
11:12 Speaker 00 Yep.
11:12 Speaker 01 Talk to me more about that.
11:13 Speaker 00 It's a really fun place. I think you have to, you know, as a founder and as an investor, give yourself sort of a lot more freedom with how you approach stuff. It's that time period where we have new technology to play with. And you just ask like, what will, you know, we just talked about like, will the next iteration of experiences build off of the past or will they be all new? And I think they're going to be all new. But to get from where they have been to being something all new, you got to try so many different things. Until you have something that resonates with a large group of people and starts to become like the new way of doing things. All of these things are possible. And the only way to really get to that big idea is to is to try a bunch of different things. So it does feel like I think you've got to shoot your shot.
11:59 Speaker 00 Do some learnings with it, you know, the best teams will iterate from there. There's a lot of things to be explored on the path to that.
12:07 Speaker 01 So one of the key things about consumer often is just distribution. And I mean, you have funded some of the most well distributed consumer brands. I mean, Chime, being able to create a new bank from nothing. There must be some lessons from, you know, those those experience, like building some of the more enduring consumer brands from nothing, just seeing that.
12:28 Speaker 00 It's almost the first question we get asked from every new founder that we work with, which is like, tell me how so and so did this for marketing? Or what happened here?
12:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:37 Speaker 00 And I always kind of have to preface and say, I've got good news and bad news for you, which is you got to do everything. You know, I think that in terms of just a channel or a distribution is just think about, you know, what is core fundamental value that you are coming to market with? What are the things you want somebody to associate your product with, the experience you have? And then be thoughtful about how do you articulate that? In every single possible surface that you can go to, right? And be and be pretty dedicated and thoughtful about that. Don't just think you have a one size fits all message. That one message resonates from a word of mouth. One message resonates on TikTok. One message resonates on an ad. It's very different.
13:22 Speaker 00 And so being thoughtful about that and doing all of them and having sort of that mosaic of those things working together is really what people have to do. Which feels like, you know, an inadequate answer because somebody wants a hack. But the root of all of that is, is that you have to build something that people actually need. And that people actually like enough for those messages to mean something when they get it.
13:47 Speaker 01 So it sounds like the best marketing you're saying is your product.
13:49 Speaker 00 Is your product.
13:50 Speaker 01 Is your product. There's no shortcut.
13:52 Speaker 00 Is your product. You know, so if you if you have to like strip everything away, you you don't have extra money or resources to do other things like nail your product.
13:58 Speaker 01 Often we run into founders who feel like they built the right product. And then it's just a marketing, you know, challenge that, you know, the reason why people it's not blowing up. There's no product market fit.
14:11 Speaker 00 Well, listen, if you have a great product and you are building into something that is a need is is more than a novelty that is, you know, important to more than just a few people, it will get some traction. It might not be at the scale you wish, you know? And that's when you get into that zone of like, okay, what are the different channels that are available to me? And what are the different tactics? The first tactic that I I know everybody in our ecosystem likes to go to that I think is highly valuable is what sort of product marketing can you do? Like, what about your product gets better? Because you bring other people into the experience.
14:46 Speaker 01 Maybe there's a network effect.
14:47 Speaker 00 So, you know, I think that is always going to be true. And the drivers of those network effects or the way that those get out into the world might evolve as like the tech cycles evolve. You have to also do things that are authentic and additive to your product and don't just do stuff for the sake of. Marketing because I think consumers are savvy and they see through that.
15:09 Speaker 01 You can't market products that are bad, so it doesn't matter.
15:13 Speaker 00 So remember the time when everybody had a friends and family 20% off? That worked for a little while because it was new. Like a lot of things work early because they're new. But for staying power, it doesn't work. It doesn't work for any one company for long periods of time. And it certainly doesn't work for the 30th entrant into the market. Right? So I do think there's something to be said for being first, being early and first. And talking about kind of getting people to start building in consumer AI. I think there is an advantage because you have more of a chance of surprising and delighting somebody. More of a chance of somebody saying, wow, I didn't know that was possible. And having that be part of that like magic moment that creates a connection.
15:53 Speaker 00 Once some version of that has been, you know, demonstrated in a dozen ways, like it loses some of its luster. That can help you out of the gate. That's not enough for a long term proposition, but it can be helpful. You can work it to your advantage. I think about like, you know, a couple of the companies you mentioned, Warby Parker, Dollar Shave Club. They were beneficiaries of that. At the time when Dollar Shave Club launched and the founder, Michael Dubin, had that incredible video. That was new. YouTube didn't, I mean, YouTube was big, but it didn't have that many marketing videos. And there weren't that many places to distribute it because social was still ramping up. And so that was a real novelty and people were delighted by it and they shared it. And it went around viral fast.
16:38 Speaker 00 That was never going to make the company, but that was a meaningful moment to start a step change and get into some early scale. But by the time you were the nth company doing something like that, you were just doing what you needed to do to be in the conversation, not to be the conversation. I'm still seeing new ads come out that use that talk track, that tonality as inspiration.
17:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's, I mean, it's very chummy and it doesn't feel like an ad. It doesn't, it feels like someone talking, you know, to the friend, actually.
17:09 Speaker 00 It's been done so many times now, but it was new and novel when it happened. But again, like. I didn't make an investment in that company because of the video, but that was certainly an effective go to market.
17:20 Speaker 01 I mean, that's an interesting example in that like I'm actually have not bought, I haven't shaved in a long time, so. But I'm curious, like, you know, a business school textbook might say that razors are actually probably a bit of a commodity.
17:36 Speaker 00 Razors are a hundred percent a commodity.
17:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:38 Speaker 00 Right? My story about investing early in Dollar Shave Club, I think is one that always kind of makes me smile a little bit in that I had heard about the business, sort of, you know, through people talking. And I was like, pretty dismissive of it in the context of that's a commodity product.
17:53 Speaker 01 Totally.
17:53 Speaker 00 And there's huge players playing in those spaces with locks on distribution and enormous marketing budgets. So, you know, probably other things to do. But this is a case of you meet the founder and you're like, you know what? That person is special. That person has a unique insight. And they're meeting the moment with that unique insight, but their vision is something bigger than that. And I don't think Michael Dubin was building a razor company. I think he was tapping into a trend that was men being part, you know, there was a conversation online about personal care and beauty that was reaching men that had never reached men before. The idea that like, maybe you should use some face lotion. Maybe you should wash your face, other things.
18:37 Speaker 00 Like, I think that was a bigger trend that was underpinning this idea. Shaving was a message to deliver that resonated because every guy knew how to shave. So if you could bring them in through that way and then start to kind of play into that conversation about the broader narrative. I think from a business model standpoint, what was really novel and what, you know, I look back on and think what we were investing in at the time was a shift. So I just talked to you a little bit about the consumer shift, the demand shift. Then there was the technology shift. It was the social web. It was a whole new way for people to discover products, to have conversation, just to, to get ideas about what to buy and how to buy it. And so.
19:22 Speaker 00 That led to a different way to launch a company. Instead of going into a retail store with a huge order that took you nine months to prep for at scale, six months to get data from afterwards. You could put up a website and sell a few products, or you could put up a website and say you were going to sell a few products and understand the demand. So like, that was a novel change in a go-to-market strategy for a business.
19:46 Speaker 01 And I mean, CPG is still sort of transforming. Like, I remember working with the Instacart team and they came and asked, hey, do you have any idea how much money Procter and Gamble spends, both to get the data and to get placement in supermarkets? And I had no idea. And it's billions. It's like a giant percentage of their gross margin just gets plowed right back into things that you can just get on Instacart for much cheaper. It's like a far better value prop for CPG than.
20:16 Speaker 00 Everything is always evolving and changing, right? I heard a really interesting stat from a friend that works at one of the big CPG companies just this week. A few years ago, let's call it five years ago or so, 4% of their sales came from organic word of mouth.
20:33 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
20:33 Speaker 00 What they call like that. Forty-eight percent now.
20:36 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
20:36 Speaker 00 Now, I think that's everything on social that's happening. So, yes, there's big marketing budgets, but there's also all kinds of other unlocks. So that kind of fundamental shift, like, what does that mean for their business model?
20:48 Speaker 01 And that's only happened in the last.
20:49 Speaker 00 In the last handful of years. I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was, you know, it was a data point they were looking at to see like, wow, this shift has, you know, clearly taken shape and happened.
20:59 Speaker 01 I mean, you and I have been like, meeting with founders who've been talking about that for 10 years or 15 years. And it's, isn't that fascinating that?
21:06 Speaker 00 Well, I mean, I think that's one of the really exciting and privileged places of where we're working, where we're involved, is you are seeing things early, right? I think we tend to kind of think like, oh, this is already mass. Everybody knows it, but it's not. That being said, things are, the pickup is happening faster and faster. I think getting back to where we were talking about earlier, like, the adoption of ChatGPT. That is not just young people or people, you know, in certain cities. It is people in the middle of the country, in the middle of their life. That are now showing like the change in search. You know, another interesting thing, and I don't think this is surprising, but just to say, talking to a lot of scaled brands and retailers in particular, that one of the challenges, like one of the first challenges that they're trying to
21:51 Speaker 00 address with new AI tools is search on their sites.
21:54 Speaker 01 Totally.
21:54 Speaker 00 Because they're all built on keywords.
21:56 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
21:56 Speaker 00 And people are showing up to do conversational search.
22:00 Speaker 01 Interesting.
22:01 Speaker 00 Yeah.
22:01 Speaker 01 So it's time to upgrade.
22:02 Speaker 00 It's time to upgrade.
22:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, that sounds like a good idea. It's that's sounds like a more B to B idea, but it's certainly one whose time has come.
22:09 Speaker 00 Like, you know, search across the spectrum is is is a huge opportunity. So is the ad market.
22:15 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, Fiji Simo is the new CEO of Applications at ChatGPT. I believe she built the news feed for Facebook and worked on fundamental pieces of monetization, both for Facebook and for Instacart. So I don't know, what prognosticate like, you know, what does this mean for OpenAI? Should we be expecting ads in our chat results?
22:39 Speaker 00 I mean, what I think it means, it means exciting things for for OpenAI and probably for all of us as consumers of OpenAI. Because I do think that, like you said, she's been involved in some of the most iconic products and made them better. And I think the fact that they're hiring at that level of seniority to oversee the topic of applications obviously says that that matters immensely.
23:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
23:01 Speaker 00 I think the next question, you know, that gets begged to ask off of that is like, are we just going to do everything on ChatGPT?
23:07 Speaker 01 I mean, seemingly, and then that.
23:09 Speaker 00 But I I actually just don't think that's the way the world works.
23:12 Speaker 01 Okay, yeah. What what like, I guess we'll use some Google, some perplexity, some ChatGPT, there will be.
23:18 Speaker 00 Well, so that's in the context of search, right? And I think search is actually like, if you if you kind of look back of like all the big categories, the the big tech leaders from each, you know, domain, we can talk about that. But like, I think Google, starting in search, probably held the most.
23:35 Speaker 00 Dominance in a category, in a, in an activity than anybody else, right? Because like, for instance, Amazon, it's the juggernaut of retail. Probably everybody in America has an Amazon account and shops on Amazon. We don't shop for everything on Amazon. We don't want to shop for everything on Amazon. So, you know, there is a cap, I think, to the market share that can happen there. Because I think that like, there's, there's relevance in the long tail. There's relevance in specialty that by category. And people want to have different kinds of experiences at the category level in, in shopping, too. You have other verticals pop up, right?
24:16 Speaker 00 I guess in search you did too, because if you had ubiquitous search on Google and then you got Yelp and you got, you know, big platforms that became areas for search.
24:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, and it happens in, you know, Amazon, I actually kind of use it as product search. Like, I'm kind of disappointed when something I want to buy isn't on Amazon.
24:36 Speaker 00 I mean, I don't know what the stat is, I knew it before, but like, there is a large portion of shopping journeys that start on Amazon.
24:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, going back to ChatGPT, I mean, will we have to pay for ads? Or, you know, is it back to the SEO game? What's going to happen to that whole game? Do you have a sense?
24:54 Speaker 00 Right now, I'm interested in playing it from both of those, right? Because we don't know.
24:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:59 Speaker 00 But there's a reason to believe that both of those types of disciplines will find their way into our new interfaces.
25:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's wild. What's funny about AI models is I'd be curious if ChatGPT would ever make you pay to make it into the corpus that LLM pre-trains on.
25:16 Speaker 00 That might be a big complicated topic, right? Because does that compromise what you're putting out in your results, right? I mean, I think safer to get to a place where you're like, well, we'll serve up maybe, maybe two types of answers.
25:28 Speaker 01 I think the FTC actually requires you to call out sponsored links.
25:33 Speaker 00 They do, so if you look like that's how Instagram has been, right? You can't, you have to have some indication there that you're promoting a product or you're being paid to promote a product.
25:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, maybe it's just premature to speculate. One funny question would be in ChatGPT, will we have the web search button right in that input box in a, in a year from now? Or will it just be, you know? Obvious that the agent is smart enough. It'll know when it needs to search the web or not. Like today, it's sort of this broken part.
26:01 Speaker 00 My experience of it is, is it already does. Because it didn't have those capabilities when it first came out. It was sort of identified differently. And then they brought in, oh, we have real time web here. So now we have a web search. You don't actually have to press the web search every time.
26:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's right. It started doing it automatically already. So let's talk about your latest trend report. Your two of the things that you pulled out and are really excited about. It's health and wellness and personal security. What are you seeing over there?
26:30 Speaker 00 Just to back up for a sec, we do the trend report every year. And really, we started just two years ago. Publishing it was work we'd done all the time on an ongoing basis, but it seemed like something to share and get conversation going around. So this year, we did a bit of a deeper dive on health and wellness and security. And when we say security, we mean everything from, we mean it like more in the context of securing your life, like having a stable career, a stable finances, those things, not like national security, security, right? Partly that trend popped up because we have, as a society, we've been through so much. And I think at this point, we've been through enough tough things
27:12 Speaker 00 in a short enough period of time that the right idea to pull forward is, that's just how the world is now. Like it moves faster, there's more debates and there's going to be more uncertainty out of that. So this idea of like, okay, what does security look like for me? How do I ensure that I'm going to to live the life I want and flourish in a market that's evolving very fast around me? I think is, you know, it's a, it's a vulnerability. People are showing us that they feel. And I think there's a real opportunity for tech and some of the invention that happens from founders to address some of those needs, which is why we thought that topic was really interesting. And it actually like dovetails into health and wellness a lot, which is a trend that we've all been talking about for a long time.
27:56 Speaker 00 It's not a new trend, but it is a massive trend because it's gone from health, which has been largely a reactive.
28:05 Speaker 00 Trend, if you will, or reactive reality to wellness. So it's broadened in that and it's become proactive health. And that's happened. I think our hypothesis is it's happened because the healthcare system has let people down. So they have felt like we have to be more proactive with our own health. And that was enabled in the context of getting a lot more information. So people could start to have awareness around what it meant to live a healthy life. And now we have lots of tools and products to support that. And even though it's been a robust trend for, let's call it the last decade, there's still so much more that can be done. And I think there's probably a really good, across the spectrum, a really good evolution
28:47 Speaker 00 to come out of Gen AI and the integration there.
28:51 Speaker 01 It seems like it's a PhD and an MD in your pocket at any given moment, actually.
28:57 Speaker 00 I mean, I think that is the dream, right? So there are things called concierge doctor services that some people have. It is not something that's accessible to most people because there aren't enough humans to deliver that and the cost is prohibitive. But imagine things we've been talking about in this conversation with AI, the ability to share your personal data, to have that be context, to develop a track or a history over time, to be able to interpret that data. Think about that being applied in a health atmosphere is amazing.
29:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, can you imagine what's happening right now? It's everyone's getting a 150 IQ Jiminy Cricket on their shoulder that knows everything about them. And then simultaneous to that, they're getting a GLP-1 that lets them control their cravings. But one of the weirder things that's happening with GLP-1s, I'm sure you're tracking, is that it gives you unbelievable willpower. Like people who bite their nails, they stop biting their nails. Or like people who struggle with alcohol, just because they go on a GLP-1, they don't.
29:59 Speaker 00 You take something that's such a big trend like that, and there are multiple second and third order impacts out of that. So I think that while people are adopting. More proactive measures around their health. They're unlocking new needs and new capabilities in that, too.
30:16 Speaker 01 Yeah. Have you seen those social media posts about with ChatGPT? They just sort of explain what's, you know, their symptoms of their back pain.
30:25 Speaker 00 Yep.
30:25 Speaker 01 Or neck pain or things like that. And they literally just do what ChatGPT tells them to do and it fixes it. Or like tinnitus, like there are all these crazy stories of people. You know, they could have Googled it.
30:37 Speaker 00 So I think like this is a good example that kind of ties to what we were talking about earlier, which is like you can go on ChatGPT and you can ask a question. You can get a richer answer than you could ever gotten in the keyword search and the link search. It lacks the context of precisely who you are. So, you know, we think about the ability to have almost like that that search interface, if you will, for like all the major categories. So a destination for your health information, like maybe superpower is one of our investments. You go there, you have your health records brought in. You do an intake form on who you are, what your lifestyle is like. You hook up your Oura ring to give your sleep data. You know, any number of ways you're working with Faye, you put your nutrition information in. You do your blood test, you get your your blood draw.
31:23 Speaker 00 And now you can go in and you can ask a question about your tendonitis or whatever. And all of this context is part of what answer you get back or what suggestion you get back to be better. I think that's magical and I think, you know, that's a step away from that concierge doctor.
31:41 Speaker 01 The things that are sort of unfolding right now, they're sort of happening inside the walled garden of ChatGPT.
31:46 Speaker 00 It's a great like playground for these ideas, right? To see what people are interested in, what's resonating, what the base capability set is. But I do think that for topics that are particularly important to people, there is a lot to be said for a unique interface, you know, a unique interface that is more reflective of that particular topic. So what you would imagine in your dashboard to your health is different than what you'd imagine in your dashboard to your finances or your learning journey or your shopping.
32:16 Speaker 01 You must get asked this all the time, though. I mean, given ChatGPT is so dominant, like what space can, you know, two people sitting in front of a computer creating their own consumer product? How do you compete? Like, what are sort of the the ways forward there?
32:31 Speaker 00 So I do think that ChatGPT can can be a great place for inspiration to just, you know, kind of think about like, okay, now I've got a different tool. I've got, no matter what product you're building, you're going to be using these new tools, the new AI tools. What conversations are you having with that interface that you wouldn't have ever had before? What new things are people, you know, curiosities people had or needs people had before, but but technology wasn't playing a role in that, right? And then back away and say, okay, but if I know some element of this is possible and interesting to people, what would the what would the best experience for this look like? Right? And that gets back to that idea of just first principles thinking on like, I am building something new.
33:13 Speaker 00 I'm building with a new set of technologies that's going to keep progressing. Like, what would a great starting point be? I mean, right now, we're kind of probably most of us are in the zone of like, it's a chat bar and you can do a conversation. I think we can be better. You know, I'm I'm waiting for someone to wow me with that and I I fully expect it to happen. I don't think everything needs to be a chat bar like that. And I think that's where, you know, you have to be bold and getting back to that kind of messy creative stage, like put some stuff out there, experiment with some stuff, like try some different interfaces, because we don't want to be locked into interfaces that are either last generation or things that were basically designed for ubiquity.
33:52 Speaker 01 What other advice would you have? You know, a lot of the people who are watching, they're just starting out.
33:57 Speaker 00 Yeah.
33:58 Speaker 01 And so, you know, are there any things that you're excited about or you would direct their attention to right now?
34:05 Speaker 00 Okay, so big picture, I feel like tech capabilities are going to move into this zone of emotional AI, like the emotional operating system. So I think things where you have an opportunity or a need to build a relationship are like ripe for opportunity, because I do think that. It's going to be hard, not impossible, but hard for existing platforms or existing experiences that weren't built with that to just roll that forward. So it feels like a good entry point. I think there's a lot of hype and a lot of novelty right now. That's okay. It's the messy creative stage, but ultimately like a stronger place to build a business on is like a need. Why do they need your product? Why are they going to come back to your product? Why are they going to, switching costs for a product?
34:49 Speaker 00 Why are they going to add another new thing into their arty crowded lives? Like, are you, what problem are you solving? What couple of things are you consolidating? You know, those are sort of the basics, I think, that are always true about starting a new company. But I think you have a little more liberty now because you've got this new, this new platform and this new paradigm to build into. Anything that you can build in the path of where these L L Ms are going is probably worthwhile. Right? So I wouldn't want to go against them. I would want to build into, into that tailwind. And if you can do that, if you have a need, you can build into that tailwind and you're bold enough to think about a different type of experience, to set a new stage or standard in a category.
35:33 Speaker 00 You'd get my attention for sure.
35:35 Speaker 01 Kirsten, thank you so much for spending time with us today.
35:37 Speaker 00 Oh, Gary, thanks for having me.
Previous Satya Nadella: Microsoft's AI Bets, Hyperscaling, Quantum Computing Breakthroughs Next Fei-Fei Li: Spatial Intelligence is the Next Frontier in AI Page updated October 12, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
