0:00:03 All right, my friend, I recorded one of my favorite types of episodes.
0:00:05 My friend Howie started a company called Airtable.
0:00:09 They’re worth around $10 billion, so he has seen it all.
0:00:12 He knows what’s going on in the world of AI, and he has an amazing perspective.
0:00:15 And for this episode, I asked him a very simple question,
0:00:19 which is, if he were 21 again today or he didn’t have Airtable,
0:00:23 what companies or business ideas would he want to work on?
0:00:25 And he came with seven.
0:00:28 Seven different ideas that he would work on today.
0:00:32 And so if you are looking for a different business idea or you’re an AI nerd,
0:00:35 which a lot of us are right now, you’re going to love this episode.
0:00:45 Tell me about live shopping with AI avatars.
0:00:47 I personally think this is a really interesting area.
0:00:51 I mean, you think about live shopping, which is a huge thing in Asia.
0:00:56 I mean, there’s probably tens of billions, if not $100 billion plus GMV
0:01:00 in commerce dollars that are getting transacted through live shopping.
0:01:04 This is basically where you have an influencer go and peddle a product.
0:01:05 Is this like on Instagram?
0:01:09 I mean, I pay attention a little bit to Asia, but is there a website I can go to to see this right now?
0:01:14 There’s actually a big chunk of Timu that is powered by this and definitely TikTok.
0:01:24 So TikTok has a huge amount of these kind of like influencers that basically go and, you know, there’s actually a shop tab that you can even click on.
0:01:28 You see these products and it’s a person basically describing the benefits of a product.
0:01:37 So think about like influencer marketing, like taken to the extreme where you just watch, you know, people peddling products and you click it, you buy.
0:01:42 And there’s actually one company that’s doing really well in the U.S. called Whatnot.
0:01:45 Oh, yeah, I like Whatnot.
0:01:46 Yeah, exactly.
0:01:50 And, you know, what’s cool about it is like there’s so much personality, you know, to the content.
0:01:52 Like in a way, it’s almost like watching Twitch.
0:01:55 It’s not just about the actual product.
0:02:04 It’s about like seeing this person like talk about this product and maybe it’s a, you know, like a really cool, like new shoe from Nike or like a vintage shoe.
0:02:11 And they’re talking about like their own experience with it and childhood, you know, experiences with like the Jordan brand or whatever.
0:02:14 And so it comes this like really interactive experience.
0:02:22 You know, my pitch for this idea is basically, well, obviously you can have like really rich, engaging experiences in the very near future with avatars.
0:02:26 Right. And if you go to HeyGen.com, it’s a great avatar product.
0:02:29 It’s the easiest, fastest, self-serve avatar product out there.
0:02:30 Are you an investor in these guys?
0:02:34 I am an investor in HeyGen and I really like the team there.
0:02:38 And they just built like the best, easiest to use avatar product.
0:02:39 That was kind of their claim to fame.
0:02:43 They have basically pre-made avatars.
0:02:49 So these are like, you know, trained on or effectively created from like real human actors that they’ve licensed from.
0:02:52 So, you know, you can use one of their pre-made avatars.
0:02:54 Or you can create your own.
0:02:56 You know, I think of this as like a really fundamental capability.
0:02:59 Like you think about all the things you can do with avatars.
0:03:07 You know, sending a sales video where you’re pitching each target customer, you know, in a personal way.
0:03:07 Right.
0:03:12 So a CEO sending a thank you note via video to every single attendee of our last event.
0:03:13 That kind of thing.
0:03:20 In this case, like I think applying the avatar concept to live shopping where you can now have this one-on-one interaction with.
0:03:21 And it could be a celebrity.
0:03:26 Like maybe you get some like real influencers to sign on to this.
0:03:31 And, you know, it’s like Kim Kardashian type who’s actually like represented in avatar form.
0:03:38 And each person shopping gets to have a one-on-one interaction with her about Skims and, you know, the Skims products that they want to try out.
0:03:41 Are you guys using any of this at Airtable?
0:03:44 We actually do have an internal setup where it’s all powered by Airtable.
0:03:50 We use our own Airtable web agents to go in and research different target customers.
0:03:56 We’ve learned a lot about them and then we can actually generate customized email pitches for each of them.
0:03:57 So right now it’s just email.
0:03:59 But we are experimenting with more of the video stuff.
0:04:08 We actually have a setup internally where we can now generate an avatar video powered by HeyGen automatically from content in a row of Airtable.
0:04:10 So it could be a list of different event attendees.
0:04:17 And that use case I just described, like I may actually do it for thank you notes for different events that I host in the future.
0:04:27 Like if I host a dinner with some of our customers, I could actually now go and automate creating a video that looks like it’s me.
0:04:33 And I would probably be upfront about it and say like, hey, like here’s an avatar version of Howie, like saying thank you for coming.
0:04:36 And like the novelty of it itself actually would tickle people’s fancy.
0:04:43 But like to send a personalized thank you video from me to every attendee for all of our events.
0:04:44 Can you do that now?
0:04:46 Like if I wanted to implement, I mean, that sounds awesome.
0:04:49 If I want to go and do that right now, how would I set that up?
0:04:50 So you can do it today.
0:04:53 It just requires a little bit of scripting in Airtable.
0:04:55 And that itself you can actually generate with AI.
0:05:03 So the idea is like you would go and create like a list of different people you want to send the video to or even a list of topics you want to create a video for.
0:05:08 And then we already have an Airtable, a scripting layer where you can define any arbitrary code.
0:05:10 It’s hosted in our infrastructure.
0:05:14 And in this case, you would just define the code to go and talk to the HeyGen API.
0:05:17 A lot of these AI products have APIs.
0:05:28 And so you can go and create your own kind of orchestration layer and Airtable to go and automatically for each row ask HeyGen to generate a video program programmatically for you using this avatar.
0:05:34 And then you get a link to a HeyGen video that you could then go and directly send to a customer or download it and then attach it, etc.
0:05:40 Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible, but that’s exactly what Sandler training did with HubSpot.
0:05:48 They use Breeze, HubSpot’s AI tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch.
0:05:50 And the results were incredible.
0:05:52 Click-through rates jumped 25%.
0:05:54 Qualified leads quadrupled.
0:05:58 And people spent three times longer on their landing pages.
0:06:02 Go to HubSpot.com to see how Breeze can help your business grow.
0:06:05 What’s this AI personalized news thing?
0:06:15 When I think about, like, my news reading habits, you know, it’s like I do sometimes appreciate reading just, like, the front page of, like, the journal or the Financial Times, right?
0:06:19 And there’s something very valuable about, like, that curated experience.
0:06:21 Like, everybody sees the same front page.
0:06:30 So, ironically, like, I actually do get the print edition of newspapers because I like that, like, physical and consistent experience.
0:06:34 Like, I know I’m seeing the exact same paper as, like, millions of other people out there.
0:06:46 But for anything else, like, if I’m reading something online or if I see a link, like, I end up usually just taking all of the contents and copy-pasting it into Chachkati or Claude and then asking it to summarize, right?
0:06:49 And say, like, hey, like, pull out, like, the key information, et cetera.
0:06:51 And I even have some save props to do this.
0:06:56 But what I really want is not just to do that manual summarize for each article.
0:07:01 I want it to go and, like, automatically look for all of the articles that are interesting to me.
0:07:03 Like, there are certain topics that I care about.
0:07:08 And I just want, like, an AI news aggregator that goes out and knows what I care about.
0:07:14 And more importantly, like, it doesn’t just summarize the news for me into, like, here’s the summarized articles.
0:07:17 It actually becomes this interactive agent that I can talk to.
0:07:22 So, like, you know, your friend who is the super news expert, they’re always reading all the articles.
0:07:27 Like, Nick, our mutual friend, as an example, like, he knows everything that’s happening in the world.
0:07:31 Like, you go to Nick and you get 30 minutes with him and you learn about any topic you want.
0:07:32 Like, I want that.
0:07:37 I want Nick in, like, AI form where I can just ask it, like, tell me more about this.
0:07:39 And it can go and give you more info.
0:07:46 Dude, so my company that used to own this podcast before we sold it was The Hustle.
0:07:48 It was a daily newsletter.
0:07:49 This was our pitch to our customer.
0:07:51 We were like, we are your smart.
0:07:56 I think our tagline was, we’re your smart, no bullshit friend who will tell you what you need to know every morning.
0:07:59 And I had a team, it was crazy.
0:08:03 We had a team of three people who would reach almost 3 million people a day writing this newsletter.
0:08:05 And we actually were tinkering with this idea.
0:08:11 And it was so manual where we were like, what if a user tells us what they care about?
0:08:19 And we write tons of different bits of news and we plug it into someone’s email based off of what their interests are.
0:08:20 And then we’ll even go.
0:08:21 So you can mix and match.
0:08:22 Yeah.
0:08:26 And I was like, we’ll even go and get, like, an expert, like Howie, to, like, comment on some of the stuff.
0:08:29 And we’ll put some of the comments in the thing, in the newsletter.
0:08:32 And it was like, I was like, oh my God, this is so manual.
0:08:38 And what you’re describing is, like, whenever I’m thinking about newsletters, I’m like, this just changes everything.
0:08:42 And I actually think, you know, it could still be a great business.
0:08:44 I would just use AI for all of it.
0:08:44 Totally.
0:08:54 And maybe, like, you could take it to the next level, which is, like, it actually becomes a platform where, like, Substack, you allow creators to actually create their own branded newsletters.
0:08:57 And they push the distribution promo of each one.
0:09:04 But because you’re powering this, like, kind of white label AI, you know, powered platform, like, they can very easily spin up their own custom newsletter.
0:09:09 You know, a different direction is, like, you create these, like, different AI personalities.
0:09:15 I think a commonly underappreciated thing is, like, AI doesn’t have to be robotic, right?
0:09:23 Like, it doesn’t have to just be, like, utilitarian, summarize this article in, like, a clean, you know, AP, you know, style.
0:09:35 Like, you could actually have it injected with tons of personality and say, like, be like a TMZ gossip reporter who just, like, sensationalizes the crap out of this, like, new celebrity gossip, right?
0:09:38 And I think there’s just so many interesting ways to play around with that.
0:09:44 And, like, news by nature is, like, a very high engagement use case, right?
0:09:48 It’s, like, literally something you read every day or maybe even every hour.
0:09:54 And so, like, the opportunity to, like, change how people interact with, like, finding out about this stuff.
0:09:59 Like, I think that’s a, there’s going to be a very large business to be created there, right?
0:10:01 Like, BuzzFeed, you know, Hustle, et cetera.
0:10:05 Like, you know, all of these were, like, high-growth businesses in that era of news.
0:10:10 And I think now there’s going to be a different high-growth era of AI news.
0:10:12 Hey, I got a quick break because I want to tell you something cool.
0:10:15 So our sponsor for this episode is HubSpot.
0:10:19 But instead of the ad telling you about HubSpot, they just want to do something that’s useful for you.
0:10:24 So they did some research, and they found that a bunch of people in our community have side hustles.
0:10:28 They start a business on the side, they get it going, and then it becomes their main hustle over time.
0:10:33 And so instead of just telling you about the features of HubSpot, they wanted to give you something that would be useful for your side hustle.
0:10:42 And so they have put together a database of AI prompts, so things that you could put into ChatGPT or your favorite AI tool that will help you with your side hustle.
0:10:43 So check it out.
0:10:45 It’s going to save you a bunch of time, I think.
0:10:51 It’s a prompt database that you should be using to make your side hustle more successful.
0:10:57 And you could use this as your little personal little cheat sheet, your tool set, to be a better operator with your side hustle.
0:11:03 So you could either scan this QR code that’s on the screen or get the link in the description to get the AI prompt database.
0:11:04 All right, back to the show.
0:11:06 Are you a personal finance nerd?
0:11:07 Kind of.
0:11:09 You know, I was a very early Mint user.
0:11:18 And I remember, like, really, you know, wanting to let go and more, like, have visibility over my different expenditures and, like, aggregating it.
0:11:27 I will say, like, the tedious act of going and, like, doing a lot of planning is not my forte.
0:11:34 But, you know, I have, like, basically a multifamily office type setup that now helps with a lot of that stuff.
0:11:39 You know, you listed on here, real-time AI avatar products for different vertical applications, like personal finance advisors.
0:11:41 Tell me about that.
0:11:55 So the idea here actually is, like, you know, if you’re a very high net worth client, you can get a very strategic wealth advisor who literally sits down with you, looks at your balance sheet, looks at all your assets, and talks about your goals.
0:12:05 And actually comes up almost with, like, a plan as good as a, you know, a CFO’s plan for a real corporation, but for you as an individual, right?
0:12:14 Like, the business of you, Sam, as an individual, and you can plan it out, you can think about the cash flow needs you have, what kind of assets you want to invest into for near-term, for long-term yield.
0:12:20 And, I mean, the reality is, like, most people don’t get that level of attention, right?
0:12:25 And don’t get that level of, like, you know, thoughtful design to a financial plan.
0:12:32 And, you know, furthermore, like, most people don’t even have access to a live financial advisor to just call up and talk to, right?
0:12:37 Like, there is something very comforting, I think, about, like, getting to, like, literally talk to somebody.
0:12:42 And it’s maybe why a lot of banks still have, like, you know, retail locations, right?
0:12:45 So many of them, even though, like, you know, for most transactions, you don’t really need it.
0:12:47 Like, people want to go in and talk to a person.
0:12:52 So I think the idea here is, like, using the really smart reasoning capabilities of the newest models.
0:13:01 Like, I don’t think you could have done this pre-03, where you actually can come up with, like, a very thought-out, you know, kind of personal financial plan.
0:13:06 And, you know, recommend, like, here’s how much you should invest into equities versus bonds.
0:13:08 And, like, here’s how much you should spend.
0:13:13 But do it, like, with a, you know, an avatar on top of it so that it’s a very human-like experience.
0:13:19 And you get to talk to them and just, like, call them up anytime you’re feeling stressed about your financial situation.
0:13:24 Do you use any consumer-facing personal finance apps at all now?
0:13:30 I don’t because I have this team that I can actually go and talk to.
0:13:35 But, like, I think, you know, to me, it’s, like, if everybody could have that experience, I mean…
0:13:35 It’s awesome.
0:13:37 Everybody would be able to plan better.
0:13:38 Have you seen…
0:13:39 Let me show you one.
0:13:40 It’s called Kubera.
0:13:43 K-U-B-E-R-A dot com.
0:13:45 I have no association with these guys.
0:13:49 But I’ve talked about them so much that I’m actually, like, on their homepage because they, like, quote…
0:13:50 Oh, cool.
0:13:51 They, like, quote…
0:13:51 That’s awesome.
0:13:52 They quoted me.
0:13:52 Oh, yeah.
0:13:53 There you are.
0:13:56 And this doesn’t matter if you’re worth $50,000 or $100 million.
0:14:02 A lot of people use software to aggregate their net worth.
0:14:06 Because even if you only have 50 grand, sometimes you’ll own a couple cars.
0:14:08 You’ll own maybe two bank accounts.
0:14:11 You’ll maybe have some amount of money in Robinhood, whatever.
0:14:15 And then if you’re really wealthy, you have many, many dozens of accounts, right?
0:14:20 You have, like, you have some money with this person, some money with that person.
0:14:21 You have probably…
0:14:22 You have some, like, private investments.
0:14:27 And this just does a really good job of aggregating it, of all of it.
0:14:29 Which a lot of companies claim they do that.
0:14:31 The issue is, is that…
0:14:31 Yeah.
0:14:32 Adapar kind of does that for, like, the high end.
0:14:33 Yeah, dude.
0:14:34 Adapar seems awesome.
0:14:36 But I think you have to have a…
0:14:39 Like, I think, so, like, Morgan Stanley or JP Morgan, I forget who I talked to, you have
0:14:44 to have at least $50 million in liquid net worth with one of those banks in order to get access
0:14:45 to Adapar.
0:14:46 Or something, like, insane.
0:14:47 Like, you have to have…
0:14:51 You have to be a little bit more, even, than an ultra-high net worth client.
0:14:55 So, like, Adapar is crazy, but I’ve never even seen it.
0:14:59 But with Kubera, they do such a good job of aggregating all the stuff because the connections
0:15:01 don’t break.
0:15:06 And so, anyone who’s ever used Mint or who have used Wealthfront or, like, whatever,
0:15:09 the connections to all of your accounts breaks all the time.
0:15:11 And you got to, like, re-enter the password.
0:15:12 Just, like, log in every month.
0:15:12 Oh, my God.
0:15:13 It’s the hugest pain.
0:15:15 And so, these guys have done a good job with that.
0:15:20 But what they do is they have this version where you can export the information.
0:15:21 What’s it called?
0:15:22 Is it called JSON?
0:15:23 Yeah, JSON.
0:15:27 So, you can export it in JSON format, which is what ChatGPT uses.
0:15:31 Or you could just connect your Kubera with your ChatGPT.
0:15:32 Oh, very cool.
0:15:33 It started as an export.
0:15:35 Now, it automatically does it.
0:15:37 And you can ask it questions.
0:15:40 And so, what I’ve done is I’ve used Kubera.
0:15:43 So, I use Kubera to upload all my accounts.
0:15:47 And when you do this, they don’t actually have access to transact, obviously.
0:15:48 They can just view your accounts.
0:15:54 And then I use ChatGPT where I will create a project that has, like, a Warren Buffett book.
0:16:01 Or sometimes I’ll have, like, a more aggressive financial advisor, like, a book of someone who has written something on financial advising.
0:16:04 Because, like, you have different gurus sometimes.
0:16:04 You know what I mean?
0:16:05 Like, different.
0:16:05 Yeah.
0:16:10 And I can use this to ask it questions and have my own personal finance advisor.
0:16:10 Do you know what I mean?
0:16:11 Yeah, yeah.
0:16:16 Like, give me advice using the fundamental investor theory.
0:16:16 Yeah.
0:16:20 And so, you’ll be like, look, my net worth is blank today.
0:16:25 If I want to be at this mark in 10 years, show me what I should do.
0:16:33 Or if I want to buy a house in eight years, what would you suggest is a good budget to have based off of what you know about me now?
0:16:34 You know what I’m saying?
0:16:35 Yeah, yeah.
0:16:37 I’m sure it works great for that.
0:16:37 Dude, it’s awesome.
0:16:39 It’s so awesome.
0:16:46 Now, having a financial advisor is still great sometimes because you still, like, financial advisors, oftentimes, the value is not in the advice that they give.
0:16:48 It’s the fact that there’s a human being that you can trust.
0:16:51 But anyway, this is how I’ve been using AI.
0:16:59 I mean, imagine that, like, that experience that you’re getting, but, like, now, you know, to your point about, like, feeling like you can trust a human more.
0:17:06 I mean, how much of that is based on, like, the fact that it actually is a human versus how much of it is, like, literally just, like, the psychology of, like, talking to a face?
0:17:10 No, I think you and I think that because of our age.
0:17:12 Here’s what I had to bet.
0:17:14 I’m making this up.
0:17:24 I bet that the 18-year-old today, in five years, they’re going to go to the doctor, and when they go to the doctor, they’re going to tell their doctor, this is the illness that I have, and I think it’s this.
0:17:32 Because what you and I would have said five years ago, or your parents would have said five years ago, is WebMD says that it appears as though I have this illness.
0:17:33 Right, right.
0:17:33 Yeah.
0:17:42 No, so the young guys nowadays, they just say, ChetGPT said this, and the doctor is going to say, well, I agree with you, and according to my belief, ChetGPT says blank.
0:17:46 And ChetGPT, I think, is going to be the stamp of approval, or AI.
0:17:49 Like, I think they’re going to trust AI more than a human being.
0:17:50 Does that make sense?
0:17:50 Oh, for sure.
0:18:02 I mean, I think, like, today, it’s already better to, I mean, everybody should be taking all of their, you know, personal, like, health diagnostics, you get a blood test or whatever, and, like, running that through ChetGPT.
0:18:09 Like, upload it, ask 03, like, hey, like, here’s my other symptoms, here’s how I feel, like, tell me what I might have, right, or tell me what could be wrong.
0:18:23 Like, I’ve seen so many stories from, like, both personal friends, as well as, like, on Reddit, Twitter, et cetera, of, like, people who caught diagnoses that their doctor just missed, not necessarily because they’re bad doctors, although a lot of doctors probably are bad doctors, right?
0:18:24 Like, if there’s a curve there.
0:18:25 Dude, they spent 10 minutes with you.
0:18:26 Like, what are they going to solve?
0:18:39 So, like, I got an injury lifting weights, like, two months ago or something like that, and I just used ChetGPT to do PT, and they just told me what to do, and I just followed the routine for three weeks, and, like, my back improved.
0:18:39 Totally.
0:18:43 I mean, it’s literally trained on the best knowledge out there.
0:18:55 Like, you’re getting the, like, wisdom of, like, Peter Atiyah meets Huberman meets, like, you know, all of these, like, you know, health prognosticators to inform, like, you know, ChetGPT is a response to you.
0:19:08 I’ve become the most extreme version of optimist for new disruptive entrepreneurs and startups, meaning, you know, I think the world moves through these different, you know, kind of phases, right?
0:19:21 And in a stable phase where the technology has been pretty stable, you know, that was basically true of the web and web tech for, you know, at least, like, 2018, maybe, until, like, Gen AI hit.
0:19:32 So, for a few years, like, it was very stable, the technology became very mature, and then it really became about, like, how can you go and either leverage your existing distribution if you’re an incumbent?
0:19:44 So, it’s really hard to compete against big existing players like Salesforce or Microsoft, et cetera, you know, in that era, to now, like, it’s like all of the assumptions are off, and every company is kind of up for grabs, right?
0:19:56 And what I mean by that is, like, you can look all the way at non-tech companies, and let’s say if you’re a property management firm, like, you know, half of your cost structure is automatable, right?
0:19:57 If not more.
0:20:01 And in that world, like, the margins on the business are so low.
0:20:06 Like, I actually talked to the founder of a company based in Germany that’s doing exactly this.
0:20:14 They’re buying up different property management firms and basically using their own AI tech to automate a large part of the job.
0:20:15 And actually, they don’t fire people.
0:20:18 They keep everybody employed, but they take on more business as a result.
0:20:35 And so, they’ve quickly become one of the largest property management companies in Germany, if not in Europe, by just going and aggregating these traditional businesses and creating that AI leverage, taking what probably was, like, a low percents margin business to become a, you know, tens of percents margin business.
0:20:38 I mean, you know, from a PE standpoint, that leverage is huge.
0:20:52 So, I think that’s a playbook that we’re seeing a lot of, like, excitement around because I think every traditional business, especially one that has a large, you know, part of their cost structure that could be automated, is kind of up for grabs.
0:21:01 Like, think about, obviously, call centers, BPOs, but really any labor-intensive business process outsourcing companies.
0:21:11 So, that’s basically, you know, there’s a lot of these offshore companies that have, like, literally thousands of employees that you can go and outsource very rote tasks to, right?
0:21:20 So, like, analyst work, like, go comb through these documents and look for, you know, kind of facts or, you know, do research for me.
0:21:23 Support centers themselves are a form of BPL, right?
0:21:28 So, you have these, like, big call centers that are basically client agnostic.
0:21:30 So, it’s not just one company’s call center.
0:21:32 They can take on business from any client.
0:21:36 So, we could go and say, like, hey, like, I want to spin up a call center for Airtable.
0:21:44 And traditionally, that just meant, like, you have a whole bunch of humans sitting in a room somewhere and, you know, you’re basically hiring them on demand.
0:21:47 And now, of course, a huge amount of that can be automated.
0:21:49 Dude, I get so many of those calls a day.
0:21:52 And a lot of times they say that they are an AI.
0:21:53 They’re horrible.
0:21:55 They still suck.
0:21:56 Do you get a lot of those calls?
0:21:57 I do.
0:21:59 Although, I mean, I don’t pick them up.
0:22:00 Dude, I pick them up.
0:22:01 I always pick them up.
0:22:03 Like, I, like, want to get to know these people.
0:22:06 Like, you know, sometimes it’s, like, I could hear, like, where they are.
0:22:07 Like, here’s what I get all the time.
0:22:10 I always get a text message that says, this is Coinbase.
0:22:13 Someone in Serbia logged into your account.
0:22:15 And, like, I know it’s a scam, but I call them.
0:22:19 And I’m, like, let’s, like, figure out how this scam works a little bit.
0:22:21 Like, I do it all the time.
0:22:21 So, I’ll spend, like.
0:22:23 I mean, first of all, you’re totally feeding the bear.
0:22:28 Because if you even give them a response, they know you’re, like, you’re a more likely target.
0:22:30 Dude, I’m so into it.
0:22:31 They’re, like, what’s your name?
0:22:32 I’m, like, oh, it’s Kevin Smith.
0:22:34 And they’re, like, oh, I see your account right now.
0:22:36 I’ll be, like, you do?
0:22:36 What?
0:22:37 Like, tell me about it.
0:22:37 Tell me about this.
0:22:38 How much do I have?
0:22:39 Yeah, this is awesome.
0:22:43 And so, like, they go through these whole scripts.
0:22:46 And I’m, like, this is awesome that you found my account.
0:22:47 That is really cool.
0:22:48 Do you?
0:22:49 You’ve got to figure out how to scam the scammer.
0:22:52 Like, by the end of it, you get them to give you their info.
0:22:54 Have you seen the YouTube channels that do that?
0:22:55 They’re so funny.
0:22:57 No, I haven’t.
0:22:57 Dude, there’s guys.
0:22:58 This is going to be my weekend.
0:23:15 There’s guys on YouTube that have 10 million subscribers, and they’re really, like, sharp guys, and they’ll, like, get, they’ll pretend like they’re old ladies, like they use a voice changer, and they get this scammer to install software where they, the scammer’s web camera will come on, and they can control, like, the, it’s, like, the greatest.
0:23:16 Oh, no.
0:23:17 This is the greatest gen.
0:23:17 That is insane.
0:23:18 It’s the greatest.
0:23:18 That’s amazing.
0:23:23 But these AI call companies, they’re still horrible.
0:23:24 Are you bullish on them?
0:23:35 Well, you know, I think the models have to get better at real-time synchronous interactions for, you know, especially for voice calls to fully get taken over by AI.
0:23:40 I think for chat, like, you’re chatting with somebody, like, it’s already better in many cases, right?
0:23:46 Because, like, you know, those chat experiences are horrible with humans because, like, the human is probably doing, like, 20 different parallel chats.
0:23:50 They don’t really know or care about you, whereas an AI can be fully attentive.
0:23:51 But I agree.
0:23:53 I think the voice is just not quite there yet.
0:24:02 You’ve probably seen that Sesame voice demo where it’s, like, you know, one of the better real-time voice interactions.
0:24:02 What’s it called?
0:24:04 Sesame.ai.
0:24:06 You can literally call it.
0:24:08 Oh, yes.
0:24:09 I did see this.
0:24:12 I absolutely, do you think this is a good product?
0:24:18 You know, it’s a research team, and this is a demo product, but I think it shows where the models are going.
0:24:29 And I think, you know, it could be from this team and this company, but also, I mean, you know that OpenAI and Eleven Labs, et cetera, they’re all working on making that interactivity better.
0:24:36 OpenAI revealed the last voice mode release where you could actually interrupt the AI halfway through a conversation.
0:24:37 Like, that was kind of a big deal.
0:24:40 It’s still not there yet because it doesn’t feel right.
0:24:49 I mean, if you just talk to it, like, it doesn’t feel like a human, but I think that will be a frontier that we just, we pass or across in the next year or two.
0:24:53 So, one of the last things you had on here was AI productivity tools.
0:24:55 You said cursor for email.
0:24:57 What’s that look like?
0:25:05 So, I just generally think this form factor of it’s not about using AI to completely replace the current workflow, right?
0:25:13 So, the cool thing about cursor is it’s not just, like, a chat interface alone that you’re using to generate code or to say, like, hey, you don’t need to code.
0:25:15 Like, it’s actually an IDE.
0:25:20 Like, they forked VS Code, a popular IDE, and then they added this, like, agentic coding experience on top.
0:25:23 But as a developer, you can still be in the code.
0:25:25 In fact, I think that’s the value of cursor.
0:25:39 So, I just think applying that paradigm to a lot of other productivity experiences, one of them being email, it’s, like, you think about email, you go in, and, like, usually you just come in and, like, you know, click on each email, read each one, et cetera.
0:25:48 You can currently go to a separate product like Gemini, or now Claude and OpenAI both have integrations into email, and you can ask questions about your email.
0:25:58 But I think the ideal experience is actually a blended one, where you can actually do agentic workflows, and maybe AI is automatically doing some pre-reading of your emails, telling you what’s important, what’s not.
0:26:11 Maybe even doing some, like, research across your other content sources, like looking up, you know, info in your other accounts, in your calendar, doing a web search to help you decide, like, hey, like, I got this pitch from an entrepreneur who wants to be on my podcast.
0:26:12 Like, is it worth my time, right?
0:26:14 And it can already have a recommendation for you.
0:26:28 So I just think, like, you know, one of the places that you spend a lot of time today, I mean, news, I think email, if you’re a developer, you’re in your IDE, like, I think that’s where I would attack, is, like, start with where people are actually spending a lot of time.
0:26:33 And on first principles, like, a lot of that time could be automated or augmented with AI.
0:26:43 So I’m going to ask you how you’d build this, because from my, I had an email company, I know a little bit about email, but not, I don’t know the tech, I don’t know the technical capabilities of everything.
0:26:48 But, like, email sucks to build on top of, because Gmail owns everything.
0:26:58 And Superhuman did something interesting, where, for listeners, Superhuman was a brand new email client, and you download Superhuman, and you use that instead of Gmail.
0:27:03 They recently sold last week for, I think the rumor was $800 million, or something like that.
0:27:03 Yeah, I saw that.
0:27:05 Yeah, to Grammarly.
0:27:08 And it was a very bold mission.
0:27:12 I think they fell short if they sold, or that’s what I’m guessing, if I had to guess.
0:27:17 But it was pretty magnificent of an effort to, like, get after it.
0:27:26 And my question to you is, if you were going to build something like this, you pretty much would have to start from scratch, I would think, of a new email client, not a Gmail plugin.
0:27:31 Yeah, so interestingly, I also worked in email before Airtable.
0:27:39 So my startup before then was a YC company, Etax, and it was, actually, I think we were the first startup to build a Gmail plugin.
0:27:41 And it wasn’t, like, an official plugin at the time.
0:27:42 There was no plugin framework.
0:27:52 Like, we literally figured out, like, kind of on our own how to hack what’s called the DOM, which is basically the HTML representation from Gmail of the email client.
0:27:57 And, like, literally just injected a UI on top of that with a Chrome extension.
0:28:01 And so, you know, we kind of pioneered this idea of, like, oh, wow, you could be an email.
0:28:08 And then we added our own sidebar to every email that you had to show information about who you’re talking about.
0:28:09 But could they have banned you?
0:28:16 They could have certainly, A, sent us a cease and desist and said, like, what you’re doing is against our TOS as a site.
0:28:21 And then, B, they could do some things to make it annoying for us.
0:28:25 And, like, it’s almost like they could just keep moving the target.
0:28:33 So, like, they could change the layout of the page in the HTML without making it look different, yeah, to the user in ways that would break our integration.
0:28:34 And that did happen.
0:28:35 I don’t think it was intentional.
0:28:39 I think they would just update the page, re-render it, and then it would change the layout.
0:28:42 And then, like, for a day, our extension would, like, be broken.
0:28:45 And we’d have to furiously try to, like, code a fix to it.
0:28:46 And that was, like, kind of the really, really early days.
0:28:55 And, ironically, Superhuman, the founder, Rahul, was actually the founder of a company that kind of competed with us back in that time, like, 2010.
0:28:55 Reportive.
0:28:56 Reportive.
0:28:57 Yeah, yeah.
0:28:58 Oh, man.
0:29:06 For anyone who’s above probably 33 that was involved in technology, Reportive was a game-changing tool.
0:29:07 That was so cool that they created that.
0:29:08 Yeah, yeah.
0:29:18 So, you know, email has been, like, I mean, it’s interesting because from the time that Reportive and eTax existed to now, like, email really hasn’t changed very much at all.
0:29:21 Like, you look at Gmail, like, it’s kind of the same product.
0:29:24 And, you know, the status quo argument is, like, well, it’s, like, good enough.
0:29:25 Don’t fix it.
0:29:30 But I think that, like, you know, to me, Superhuman was, like, an interesting innovation on email.
0:29:32 Like, they did build their own client.
0:29:34 I don’t actually think it’s that hard.
0:29:40 Like, certain things seem really hard to do in theory, but then in practice, like, it’s actually not that hard.
0:29:54 Like, Airtable, I mean, obviously, it’s hard to build Airtable, but, like, you know, we ended up architecting our own proprietary database engine to power it instead of using something off the shelf, like MySQL or Postgres, to power the real-time collaboration parts of Airtable.
0:30:04 And it turned out that, like, it was the right decision, and ultimately, it turned out to be cleaner and better for us to go that route than to try to repurpose something off the shelf.
0:30:05 But it’s harder.
0:30:05 You know, my quick thought.
0:30:12 You have to raise tens, or you did, and someone else would also have to raise a fuckload of money to do that.
0:30:15 But also, getting revenue for that, I think, would be a slog.
0:30:18 I don’t, you guys did it fast, but, like, Superhuman did not.
0:30:22 Yeah, and I think, I mean, Superhuman was an interesting product for a number of reasons.
0:30:35 I mean, one, I think it was a really good product, but it was really hard to articulate, like, what is the killer feature or set of features that make it 10x better than email without, you know, or normal email, right?
0:30:37 And I think it was, you know, it was, like, faster.
0:30:39 They had some nice features, like, tracking emails, et cetera.
0:30:43 But it was hard to say this is, like, clearly a different paradigm.
0:30:45 Like, this is 10x better, right?
0:30:50 And I think that with AI, like, you could now build a product that actually is radically different, radically better.
0:30:58 And so, in fact, like, a former Airtable employee of mine, JBE, is now working on a company that’s doing exactly this.
0:31:01 I did a little funding round into it.
0:31:03 So, chief.so.
0:31:04 Oh.
0:31:05 Is it loading for you?
0:31:06 Okay, there we go.
0:31:06 Yeah.
0:31:09 You have to give them, you have to write a bigger check, though, so they can get, like, a .ai.
0:31:11 Exactly.
0:31:12 Yeah.
0:31:14 I think it’s a really interesting space.
0:31:19 I think, I actually think that you can build this product without a massive team and a massive funding round.
0:31:32 And maybe part of that is because, you know, like, in a very meta way, like, if you’re very AI leveraged in how you build products, like, you can get so much more done as an AI leverage team than you could have done in the past.
0:31:33 Like, Cursor itself.
0:31:36 It’s just hard to build a business when you charge $20 a month.
0:31:42 Meaning it’s, like, that’s not enough or that’s, it precludes too many people.
0:31:43 The first one.
0:31:58 Yeah, and so, actually, one of the premises here is that there is a top 1% audience, and not necessarily meaning, like, 1%, like, richest people, but, like, there’s a 1% power user audience of email for whom email is, like, their life, right?
0:32:02 Probably for you, definitely for me, every VC, maybe even, like, realtors, lawyers, et cetera.
0:32:05 Like, email is everything to them.
0:32:11 Like, and, like, if you can make them 10% more efficient at email, like, they’ll pay not 20, but 200 a month, right?
0:32:12 Maybe even, like, 2,000 a month.
0:32:24 Like, if you gave me an awesome email product that even saved me, like, call it 5 hours a week in time, and, like, not only that, but allowed me to not miss key opportunities.
0:32:30 Like, sometimes, like, I mean, I get, like, literally hundreds of real emails every day that Gmail considers important.
0:32:33 Frankly, with that many coming in, like, I miss some, and sometimes they’re really important.
0:32:40 I have a full-time assistant, and it feels like a large chunk of her job is just categorizing my emails.
0:32:41 Yeah, for sure.
0:32:52 And, you know, some people have, like, you know, a full-time EA who, like, literally doesn’t just categorize the emails, but, like, goes through and does research on each one and tells you, like, hey, I did some research.
0:32:53 This is how you should respond.
0:32:56 So I think it’s a huge, huge space.
0:33:01 And, I mean, one of my lessons learned from Cursor, actually, and I remember…
0:33:02 Did you invest in them?
0:33:03 You know, first looking at Cursor.
0:33:04 What’s that?
0:33:05 You invested in Cursor?
0:33:20 I did, and actually, I was introduced to them by Peter Fenton from Benchmark, who’s our investor at Airtable, and, you know, just one of the most, like, phenomenal pickers of talent and opportunity spaces that I’ve ever met.
0:33:23 And just, you know, brilliant in every way as an investor.
0:33:28 But I remember having this discussion with him of, like, what is the TAM for something like Cursor?
0:33:30 And you have to factor in, like, of course, like, Microsoft exists.
0:33:34 They actually literally own VS Code, even though it’s open source and you could fork it.
0:33:35 They already have GitHub.
0:33:37 They have this massive developer audience.
0:33:40 Like, how big can an upstart get?
0:33:43 And this was when, like, Cursor was probably, like, low millions in revenue.
0:33:52 And, you know, my argument, actually, was that, like, the developer audience for AI-augmented coding is so large.
0:33:55 I mean, today, you might have, like, call it 30 million developers.
0:33:57 That’s the number that Stripe always quotes.
0:34:01 Maybe that actually will expand to, like, 50 to 100 million developers.
0:34:02 Yeah, no brainer.
0:34:03 Because it gets easier to develop.
0:34:15 And then on top of that, like, it would be perfectly rational for every single one of those people to pay at least $1,000 a year for an AI, like, a coding agent that makes them way more productive.
0:34:17 Like, not, like, 10%, but, like, 2x, right?
0:34:20 And maybe even rational for them to pay $10,000.
0:34:24 Okay, now you’re talking about, like, a 30 to $300 billion TAM.
0:34:31 Like, carving off even a small few percent niche of that, especially when, like, coding itself is so fragmented.
0:34:35 You’ve got, like, different types of coding and different languages, front-end, back-end, et cetera.
0:34:41 Like, all you have to do is win, like, a sizable 5% niche, and you’ve built, like, a multi-billion revenue business.
0:34:46 Is that the framework for how you think of what’s interesting for starting companies?
0:34:46 I think so.
0:34:55 I mean, I think there’s, like, you can either go really broad, like, in this, you know, cursor example or cursor for X.
0:34:58 So pick a market that’s just so big.
0:35:02 Like, there’s so many potential target users, like, tens of millions at least.
0:35:07 And for whom the value is significant enough that they will pay for it.
0:35:10 It’s not a freemium, or it’s not purely, like, a free ad-driven product experience.
0:35:11 It’s not a consumer product.
0:35:18 Pick something that’s, like, broad enough and deep enough where there’s just a very large pie to capture value out of.
0:35:28 And then, even if you end up only capturing a niche of that pie, like, you have a really large business on your hands, I think the alternate path is go really deep and narrow.
0:35:37 So this is more like the property management example where it’s, like, you’re probably never going to have, like, 100 million users who need property management software.
0:35:40 But, like, if you go into that vertical and you attack it.
0:35:41 You might have 5,000.
0:35:42 Yeah.
0:35:42 Yeah.
0:35:47 And if you go and attack it very deeply, and for each one, you can extract even more revenue out of them.
0:35:58 Because in this, I mean, the most leveraged way you can extract revenue out of that space is, like, not just to sell white-label software that you charge a property management firm X dollars per month.
0:36:04 You actually take the entire cake by buying them out outright, running the PE playbook, and getting leverage on there.
0:36:06 And what’s Airtable, the first one?
0:36:07 Airtable is definitely the first one.
0:36:15 So, you know, we’re in a space where, like, especially now that we’ve relaunched the product as basically an agentic first product.
0:36:20 So you can literally come in and talk to our agent, Omni, to ask it to build any app, right?
0:36:24 So, like, it’s very much akin to the Vibe Coding products out there.
0:36:33 But the difference is, like, ours is backed by the reliable no-code components that we’ve spent the past 10 years building and making scalable and real-time collaborative, et cetera.
0:36:39 And so if you want to build any business app, I mean, for you guys, for instance, for your business, like, if you want a CRM, right?
0:36:45 If you want a way to track, you know, people who are coming on your show, if you want, like, a content pipeline, any of those things.
0:36:50 Like, we want to be the best way to spin up a reliable business app for internal operations.
0:36:55 Like, we’re not trying to be, like, an external consumer-facing prototype tool.
0:37:01 Like, if you want that, go to, like, you know, the Replets and the VZeros, et cetera, of the world to spin up, like, a consumer-facing hobby app.
0:37:11 But, like, for a business app, like, you know, the need for that definitely is at least tens of millions of people out there who want to build apps for their own business.
0:37:21 And every single business should be creating apps this way and probably replacing, you know, over the next few years, like, old legacy software with this.
0:37:22 All right, listen up.
0:37:25 Turn the volume up because it’s your boy, Sean, and I got a little message for you.
0:37:32 I talk to hundreds of founders a week, and when I talk to founders, everyone says the same thing, that the one thing they need the most is not funding.
0:37:34 It’s not more resources.
0:37:36 It’s just having more time.
0:37:41 The goal here is to win, and the way you win is you get yourself free time to do stuff that’s high impact.
0:37:42 How do you do that?
0:37:43 Well, I’ll tell you my solution.
0:37:45 The answer is Gabby.
0:37:47 Well, you might be wondering, who is Gabby?
0:37:48 Gabby is my assistant.
0:37:50 She is my wonderful assistant.
0:37:54 Gabby lives in Latin America, and she helps me save about 20 hours a week.
0:38:03 So what she’s doing for me is every morning, my inbox is sorted and triaged, and the most important stuff is right at the top with draft replies ready for me.
0:38:04 So I’m never behind on email.
0:38:09 And then as I’m on the go, I’ll just send her voice notes saying, hey, can you find my kids a soccer class?
0:38:11 Hey, can you take care of this car registration thing for me?
0:38:16 All these little tedious BS things that would take up time in my day, she takes care of for me.
0:38:18 And so that’s free time I’m getting back.
0:38:22 So if you are a CEO who’s serious about growing your company, you need to get yourself an assistant.
0:38:24 The best place to go is somewhere.com.
0:38:28 Somewhere sources the best assistance from low-cost areas for you.
0:38:36 So you can get an amazing executive assistant who’s got business experience and has supported other CEOs for $7, $8, $9, $10 an hour.
0:38:42 And so go ahead, go to somewhere.com, tell them I sent you, they’ll hook you up with a good deal, and get yourself an assistant, and you can thank me later.
0:38:43 All right, back to this episode.
0:38:45 What’s the last question?
0:38:49 What’s this, all you wrote on the sheet, you just wrote, exotics, question mark?
0:38:53 Exotic ideas for AI.
0:38:56 So it’s more off the beaten path stuff.
0:39:02 I think there’s some really interesting new niches that will be created.
0:39:07 An example would be, what’s the next consumer social app that’s AI native, right?
0:39:14 And I don’t think that just means like, you know, it looks like Instagram, it looks like TikTok, and it’s got some like AI features to help you like write posts and so on.
0:39:25 Like, I think it might mean like, I mean, there are a few startups that are trying to do this where, you know, it’s like you actually have like social networks or chat groups where half the participants are actually AI avatars, right?
0:39:27 And like, what does that look like?
0:39:39 And I think what’s interesting about this space is that like, unlike the PE AI approach, where it’s like, take a known problem and do something that’s very like solvable, right?
0:39:42 Like automate support costs, automate property management costs with AI.
0:39:45 It’s like, you can very clearly visualize what that looks like.
0:39:52 I think what’s really interesting is that like, we don’t know what the consumer behaviors are going to look like in an AI native era.
0:39:58 Like, you know, we saw the transition from like, linear TV to internet, to mobile, etc.
0:40:06 And at each point, I think there were there were some surprises about like, that the way that the content and the engagement patterns actually changed, right?
0:40:09 It’s not like we just took people watching linear TV, right?
0:40:11 And then gave them YouTube, like do the same thing.
0:40:13 We somehow went from TV to watching video games on my phone.
0:40:14 Exactly.
0:40:15 Yeah.
0:40:17 I mean, like, nobody would have guessed like Twitch, right?
0:40:19 Like, how’s that like the big thing?
0:40:33 And so I just think like there’s, when you have people who are not just technologists, like the first wave of post-Chat2P innovation was very much driven by like technologists who were very close to the models and the model research and understood what the models were capable of.
0:40:47 I think we’re going to see more and more people who are actually more artists than technologists and think about like the artistry of like, what is consumer psychology and behavior look like when you have this this new paintbrush, which is like AI powered experiences.
0:40:58 In some cases, I think you can create like hyper-engaging consumer engagement, consumer experiences that like actually could be even more addictive than, than, you know, social media is today, right?
0:41:07 Imagine like you have, you know, people have like the perfect girlfriend or boyfriend avatar, you know, people are already kind of doing this right with even Chat2PT or Grok, et cetera.
0:41:08 Grok unhinged.
0:41:10 I don’t know if you played with that, but like, it’s, it’s pretty interesting.
0:41:25 Like it’s Grok, the Elon AI product, but unhinged mode is where, and they also have a sexy mode, which you can guess what that is, is basically where they’ve taken off all of the, the PG and safety features that Chat2PT and Claude have, right?
0:41:41 So like, you could have a very explicit conversation with, with this AI and it will happily engage, which just kind of shows you like most of the AI experiences we’re getting, especially from the big model companies have been very like cleaned up.
0:41:44 Dude, I ask my, my Chat2PT controversial questions all the time.
0:41:48 Like, yeah, like it, it’s like, it refuses, it refuses.
0:41:55 And sometimes I ask it things where I’m like asking on a, like, like, for example, I love history and I’ll like, if I’m reading about World War II,
0:42:05 I’ll ask it about very sensitive topics, but I’ll just like explain to me this topic, but I’ll be like, but anyway, it, it won’t even touch some of these things.
0:42:06 Yeah, exactly.
0:42:13 And, and, you know, that’s the whole debate is like, you know, it’s a little bit like free speech censorship, but like applied to AI, right?
0:42:32 It’s like, you know, at, at like, how much can you actually, you know, sensor AI for safety and, and for, um, like moral clauses, uh, how much of that is, is even like globally applicable versus like what’s moral for one, one, uh, one culture, maybe immoral for another, et cetera.
0:42:41 And, and I think it’s interesting to see Grok be, uh, not like completely on, uh, unfiltered, but like, it is a lot more pushing of the boundaries.
0:42:41 Right.
0:42:42 So I had never heard of this.
0:42:44 I don’t think there’s, yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:42:45 No, I mean, you should try it today.
0:42:50 Like, like, like, like I was trying to learn about the Israel Palestine conflict.
0:42:55 Like, I’m just trying to understand the background and like chat GPT won’t even like touch some of the topics.
0:42:57 And I’m like, oh, I’m just trying to learn controversial.
0:42:58 Like, exactly.
0:42:59 Yeah.
0:43:05 Like, um, and, and so I think that’s, that’s gonna be really interesting when, when you start to see like people really push the boundaries.
0:43:14 I mean, you know, they say, um, uh, a lot of great, uh, tech is like always, always, uh, pioneered for like the, uh, the salacious, the black market, you know, I mean, Silk Road type stuff.
0:43:15 Right.
0:43:18 Like, and, and so like, what is, what does that look like in the AI era?
0:43:20 Well, you’re the man.
0:43:21 I appreciate your, your insight.
0:43:22 I like, uh, I enjoyed this.
0:43:23 This was awesome.
0:43:26 It’s fun because, uh, you have a really interesting perspective.
0:43:32 You’re a young guy, but you’ve been in the game for like so long and you have such breadth because of the size of your company.
0:43:41 And so it’s really cool to just see your thinking and, uh, how you, uh, how you, uh, are gonna like somewhat predict the future and, and, and all that stuff.
0:43:42 But, uh, dude, you’re bad-ass.
0:43:43 I appreciate you doing this.
0:43:44 Oh, thank you.
0:43:47 Well, really enjoyed the combo and, uh, happy to chat anytime, bud.
0:43:47 All right.
0:43:48 That’s it.
0:43:48 That’s the pod.
0:44:13 All right, my friends.
0:44:16 I have a new podcast for you guys to check out.
0:44:21 It’s called content is profit and it’s hosted by Luis and Fonzie cameo.
0:44:31 After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and orange theory, fitness, Luis and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue.
0:44:38 In each episode, you’re going to hear from top entrepreneurs and creators, and you’re going to hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit.
0:44:43 So you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcasts.