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My First Million10 AI Business Ideas From The Queen of AI ft. Sarah Guo
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65 min read · 13,299 words- 0:00 – 4:00
Intro
- SGSarah Guo
There are, like, ways to make a million bucks, and then ways to make a million bucks that could turn into a billion bucks, right?
- SPShaan Puri
This is Sarah Guo, the Queen of AI. She's got a $100 million fund that she's investing into AI startups, and we invited her on to brainstorm AI business ideas.
- SGSarah Guo
I mean, I think the market for this company is very deep because people want a lot of video, and so I think there's a billion dollars of video-generation revenue.
- SPSam Parr
Sarah, how hard is something like this to make?
- SGSarah Guo
People are generating a million dollars of cash flow for themselves. It's not because they're deep AI people.
- SPShaan Puri
And it looks super [beep] real. Am I right?
- SPSam Parr
What?
- SPShaan Puri
Isn't this wild?
- SPSam Parr
This is amazing. [upbeat music]
- SPShaan Puri
So what, what do you mean by that? You're saying there's ways to make a million bucks, and then there's ways to make a million bucks that could turn into a billion bucks. You have my interest.
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- SPShaan Puri
Let's go.
- SGSarah Guo
[laughs] Okay, okay. Let's go. So I, I think maybe... And I don't mean this in any dismissive way. I think venture capitalists are very often accused of dismissing something as, like, a cash flow lifestyle business or whatever, right? Where, like-
- SPSam Parr
Which, by the way, for anyone who is not in the VC world, you go to a VC, you say, "I've got this great company. I think it can make 5 million in profit in year eight. I... And then after that, maybe we can grow this for another 50 years, and one day it could be a thing," and they say, "That's, that's a really nice lifestyle business." It's like them saying, "That's cute."
- SPShaan Puri
Right. I remember my-
- SGSarah Guo
It is, "That's cute." Yeah.
- SPSam Parr
I, I remember my first time doing that.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Of course, the thing is, is that anyone who actually is an entrepreneur, including anyone who's a VC, they know that you can oftentimes get richer and have a less stressful life if you have a, quote, "lifestyle business."
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah. So I, I'd say, like, there's many type of valid businesses, right? And then also a lot of things that have become very interesting start very small. So I w- I wanna recognize that. But I think a reasonable analogy is if you can figure out internet distribution and then get, you know, super powerful models getting increasingly powerful to just do something useful in a niche, those two things together, that's like the new dropshipping. You know how-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SGSarah Guo
... like, for maybe seven or eight years, I'm, like, too old to know what the exact timeline was, but there was a period of time where people were like, "Oh, you know, I'm an internet kid. I'm gonna figure out some dropshipping thing and, like, make my first $100,000." I think this is it.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah. So, so basically, for people who don't, don't really know, you could go on Alibaba or AliExpress. That was like the OpenAI in this case, right? So it was like-
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm
- SPShaan Puri
... this thing exists that you didn't have to build, but it's magic. Watch this. You can push a button. You never had to make the product. You never had to warehouse the product. You never have to ship the product. It will just magically appear at your customer's door, you know, somewhere between one and three weeks later. Um, all you have to do is the marketing bit, and kinda what you're saying is OpenAI and the other AI companies have built this magic that basically will take a piece of text and turn it into a video or a song or whatever. And if you just do the marketing bit, you can actually almost, like, dropship a product or a service to the, to the customer without having to make it yourself. Is that the idea?
- SGSarah Guo
That, that is. Uh, thanks for explaining it. And I l- I think it's, like, easy with a, easier with a few examples, right? Like, copy editing is probably a prototypical one, right? You can do not amazing but, like, reasonable copy generation with these models today. And so there are a series of companies where you just have some templates that make it more obvious to somebody writing marketing copy how to use these models, and then you have a website with decent SEO, and then, like, you add some Stripe integration and you're in business.
- SPSam Parr
What's an example?
- SGSarah Guo
Well, I, I think, like, Copy.ai and Jasper, these companies started this way.
- SPSam Parr
Right.
- SGSarah Guo
Right? And, and then I have several friends who have shipped, like, AI companionship apps. Just look at, you know, paid apps in the App Store by charting, and you know, some of those people are generating a million dollars of cash flow for themselves. It's not because they're deep AI people.
- 4:00 – 16:00
IDEA: AI companions
- SGSarah Guo
about, like, whether or not that's good for people. But it's a pretty basic human need, and guess what? People want all sorts of different things in terms of niche companionship and how you might distribute that.
- SPShaan Puri
And aren't these quietly very huge? Like, uh-
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... can we do some, like, uh, ballpark, you know, give people a sense of s- of the size and scale that these have gotten to? So there's, there's Replika. I think that's probably the most well-known one, which is a digital boyfriend or girlfriend. They kinda try to say friend, but I think the use case is a little bit more in the, uh, in, in the relationship side of things. And I don't, I don't remember their exact numbers, but I don't think I would be crazy for saying they're doing, like, 50 million a year in revenue, and I believe she had bootstrapped it for a while at least, or raised very little money to get there. Is that right? Uh, tell me if I'm off base. I might be wrong on some of that.
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah. Eugenia's built a very cash-efficient business.
- SPShaan Puri
Okay. Is that like, uh, code for something? Are you an investor in Replika? [laughs]
- SGSarah Guo
No, no, I'm, I'm not an investor. She-
- SPSam Parr
Dude, you just said everything without saying a thing.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
It was basically like you're friends with her, you know the number, and they're killing it.
- SPShaan Puri
Are, are they killing it from your perspective?
- SGSarah Guo
I think they are making a lot more revenue than most startups.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SGSarah Guo
Um, I, I don't think it's fair for me to give the number. It's not my number, right?
- SPShaan Puri
Okay. What are the other ones that are interesting? So there's Character.ai that has, like, some absurd amount of traffic, but I've also heard some things about, like, I don't know if this is all legit traffic or what. But there's Character.ai. What are the other ones that are interesting, or what do you, what do you, who's, who's doing well?
- SGSarah Guo
I wanna touch on Character for a second because I, I think, like, you know, when you look at consumer companies, one of the things that I learned was that the behavior patterns, like when something just really, really stands out from all other products in their category or previous categories, that's when you pay attention. It's like the, you know, dumbest metric, but it is really clear when something has special consumer behavior around it. And the thing that is really interesting to me about Character or the companion apps that work really well is, like, people spend hours with them, right? Like, you know, in terms of the number of products, like how many products do you spend hours with every day? Not a lot.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
Like social media.
- SPSam Parr
Shaan.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
That's like my product that I [laughs] spend hours a day with.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah.
- SPSam Parr
Um...
- SPShaan Puri
You were at Greylock, I think, when they invested in Discord. I, I, I think the timing-
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm
- SPShaan Puri
... is there. And Discord was one of those things that was probably overlooked 'cause it was like, you know, mostly teenagers who play video games that were using this thing. And it kind of looked like a chat room, but you're like, "Ah, well, how's it gonna make money? It's not like Slack where you can charge the company." But the stat was people were spending like seven hours a day or something on Discord, something ridiculous like that, just living in Discord. It was their social life. And so you're like, "Well, there's, there's definitely something there." And they were able to make a ton of money just even selling emojis at that point because if you have that much engagement, you can't fake that.
- SGSarah Guo
Yes.
- SPShaan Puri
By the way, I just went to Character.ai, and there's a option to chat with Elon Musk. And the, the preloaded question, "Why did you buy Twitter?" [laughs] So I click it, so it starts a chat with Elon Musk as a character, and then it, the first [laughs] response literally goes, "You are wasting my time. I literally rule the world." [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Okay. So by the way, on, according to Similarweb, which is like you multiply by two or three and then you divide by two or three, and that's the huge range.
- 16:00 – 22:30
IDEA: AI interior design / professional headshots
- SPShaan Puri
it's just in a wedge. In this case it's for e-commerce companies, and they're gonna try to build a business here that will do... It'll be, these, both these businesses are very quick to get to, you know, mid-seven figures of revenue, uh, without, you know, much marketing spend or m- much of anything, just 'cause the product is such a wow product. And then, you know, from there, who knows if it can get, you know, really enormous or, or not.
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah. And I think a piece of it is just, like, for, for me, like, okay, what's the difference between, like, the first million and the next 999 million? It is whether or not the capability exists in the company to make the product deeper and keep expanding scope for what you do for your customer, right? And but there's a ton of these wedges. So i- in staying with visual content, uh, you can use this category of models, they're open source, to be fine-tuned for different use cases that are super commercial, right? So it could be models or creator videos for e-com, as you described. It could be renderings for, like, interior design or buildings. I don't know if you guys have ever looked at a floor plan. Like, maybe I just have terrible visual-spatial reasoning, but I can't look at a floor plan with, like, a couple blocks and then, like, a fuzzy piece of fabric and be like, "Yes, I see it."
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- SGSarah Guo
"That is the room."
- SPShaan Puri
Well, our, our, our friend- I'll put my life savings into this. [laughs]
- SGSarah Guo
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
A- and our friend Peter Lovells has a thing where you take a picture of your home and then it does interior design for you and shows you mock-ups, which is pretty cool. But-
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah. But, but I'd say, like, those, you know, those renderings traditionally generated cost, like, thousands of dollars, right? And now if you can give it to people for very little incremental cost, like, that's an interesting wedge. Like, there's a handful of, um, AI headshot companies making revenue. If you guys have ever gotten, like, a, a, a professional headshot taken.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, dude, I... So th- this actually, this is, like, a kind of actually interesting version of the drop shipping idea. So these are, this is... I, I bet you this would work. So there was a ad I saw on Facebook, I think. It was a Facebook ad, and it basically was a guy, and he had a headshot, I think, of somebody who I recognized, maybe it was a VC in Silicon Valley. It was basically like, "If you're in San Francisco, I take awesome headshots for you. You, you should have a great shot for your website, for your LinkedIn, whatever. It's good for business. It's good for your career." And you click a site, and it's a bunch of people in the tech industry. And it was, like, $300 or $400, and I went to some warehouse s- type of place in some, some little, like, photo shoot studio in San Francisco, stood there awkwardly, got, like, headshots made, and paid this guy, you know, 350 bucks, and he was running Facebook ads profitably to do that. So he was able to put in, and he, he's acquiring a customer for, whatever, 70 bucks, and he was generating 350 bucks off them. And now, you could run that same funnel, just without the San Francisco studio, and without the guy taking the picture, and without any of the cost, [laughs] right? Like, you just say, "Awesome. Give me a couple of your photos," and then, boom, here you go. And I've seen a couple of these go viral, of, like, viral h- headshot, viral yearbook ideas. But I haven't seen too many people just, like, running paid on them and making them work, but I'm pretty sure that you could create a paid funnel that would print cash for a period of time. And maybe not-
- SPSam Parr
Well-
- SPShaan Puri
... forever, but an arbitrage period of time.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
And-
- SPSam Parr
But what's a, what's an ex- So I've seen the same ones, where it's like you look like a, a '80s glam shot model. Remember, like, the-
- SPShaan Puri
No, I think the, the professional one, people are willing to pay more, right? So if it's, it's actually gonna be for your-
- SPSam Parr
What's an example of one?
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah, like, look at this, um, look at this company, Aragon.ai.
- SPShaan Puri
Oh, dude, look at this landing page. This is genius. They just have a sl- side-scrolling carousel, and it's the befores, and then there's a line, and then they just... That same photo becomes the after. That is very well done.
- SPSam Parr
How-
- SGSarah Guo
Looks good. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Uh, Sarah, how hard is something like this to make?
- SGSarah Guo
So, like, there are a million of these wedges, right? And I think that means, like, it's an amazing time to, as you were saying, like, be good at distribution. Understand, like, how to make a funnel and how to market something, and, like, to be an idea person, right? Fundamentally, like, if you run into problems all the time, and you, like, see the-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- SGSarah Guo
... basic capabilities, you're like, "Oh, I can think..." Like, you guys are both like, "Oh, I can think of, like, five other use cases for this," right?
- SPShaan Puri
And by the way, w- you know the distribution thing? So this is a good example. The... Uh, so I invested a little bit in Jasper, and Jasper was started by guys who were internet marketers first-
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm
- SPShaan Puri
... not AI researchers, not AI, you know, engineers, not, not even, frankly, very good engineers, probably. They were just, like, internet guys, internet, i- internet business guys. And they were... I think they were doing something before this that wasn't really working very well, but they had spent a lot of time building, like, internet marketing funnels.
- SGSarah Guo
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
And so when they got access to probably ChatGPT-3 or something like that, they, they were kind of back befo- Or sorry, before ChatGPT, just when it was GPT-3, they got access to the API, and they built Jasper, which was a... took that same capability but now made it useful for marketers. So if you're a marketer, you need a blog post written or an email, or you needed, um, you know, copy written for an ad, whatever it was, they just made a standalone tool that would do that. Under the hood, it's... You know, a- the open AI model is doing 80, 90% of the work. They've maybe customized the last, last mile of it, but they were so good at internet marketing that they started running Facebook ads on this thing, and it's the fastest company I've ever seen get to 50 million in ARR. They got to 50 million in ARR in, in one year, which is... To go from zero to 50 million in revenue in one year is just absurd, and the way, the reason they were able to do that is 'cause their background as internet marketers, as guys who were like, "As soon as I have anything that works, I will just plow the maximum amount of cash into Facebook ads as I can, and I will just keep optimizing the ads until I get this thing, you know, a dollar in equals $1.50 out, or a dollar in equals $2 out." And that's why they were able to be so successful early on, because they had a different skill set than most of the Silicon Valley people. Most people in Silicon Valley don't ever run paid ads.
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- 22:30 – 25:00
IDEA: A richer version of The Sims
- SGSarah Guo
gets to dominate that, that business? Um, there's a version of a companion business or any business with paid spend, and you know this really well, that is, like, just a treadmill, right? Like, I make money, but I have to keep putting money in. It's the opposite of compounding. Um, and if I, like, stop working hard or other people compete with me, like, the treadmill gets steeper, or I fall off. A- and I, I think one simple answer is on companions... Do you guys ever play The Sims growing up?
- SPShaan Puri
Of course.
- SGSarah Guo
Sure. Like, uh, it's very hard for me to not imagine The Sims better if the characters are, like, smarter and, like, richer in interaction and have, like, what looks like realistic video and voice. Um, and, and so, like, technically, instead of it just being like I'm talking to a person, it could be, you know, that person has some combination of memory of me, other interactions, goals, and, like, the media experience of them is richer. And we haven't gotten there yet. But I think, like, there's a version of that company that's somewhere between, like, a companion and a game world that will be very big.
- SPSam Parr
It's kind of an interesting exercise. Well, if I could just get to a million, then I've increased my likelihood, and then maybe I can get that to 10 and then 100 and then a billion. I actually firmly believe that if, if something can scale to 10 million, there-
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah
- SPSam Parr
... It, it may take a while, but if it can get to 10, it can almost always get to 100. Like, there's enough people in the world to, to make that work. But it's actually an interesting exercise to think of all the things that you need to do in order to make those jumps. Now, getting it to a billion, I've actually... That's been, uh, that's been hard for me to figure out how to do that. But, uh, that's a fun exercise to think, "Well, if I can just get to a million, I bet you I can get to 10, and if I get to 10, I know for a fact I can get to 100."
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah. By the way, the The Sims, lifetime sales, $5 billion. So, uh, without AI, The Sims was able to get to 5 billion in sales. If, if you made it more engaging by, by AI powering all those characters, that's gonna be even stickier.
- SGSarah Guo
It's gonna be a big business, right? Um-
- SPSam Parr
Hey, Sarah, why... Dude, you're, like, pretty in the know. Fuck this fun thing.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Like, why don't you just go do this? This sounds pretty awesome.
- SPShaan Puri
Go make one of these. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Go make one. This sounds way more fun than investing in it.
- SGSarah Guo
Um, I get to... I like really like doing the zero to one thing repeatedly, right? And, and so I think you just have to figure out what you're motivated by. I, uh, am really motivated by working with people that are entrepreneurs that I like and respect, and I think are super special, and I do not like working with people
- 25:00 – 27:00
The speedy way to do this if you're non-technical
- SGSarah Guo
that, um, that I don't have as much enthusiasm about, right? That's like a very specific personality trait. And like law of large numbers, as soon as you manage very large teams, not everybody is gonna be at the same level. Um, and so like doing investing, like, and making... be- being able to contribute to other people being successful that are really special, and then the competitive nature of be right with skin in the game, and then know what is happening, like I like all of that. But I, you know, never say never.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] Yeah, I mean-
- SGSarah Guo
I- I mean, we, we incubate companies where like it's essentially like, "Oh, I see it, I see it, I see it," and then there's frustration that like the right, you know, a, a set of people you're really excited to back just hasn't come together around a certain idea.
- SPSam Parr
Shaan, you are more technical than me, but you're still not technical, uh, I would say. [laughs] But you are more than me.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Uh, but-
- SPShaan Puri
A Sam Parr classic compliment.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs] Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
Thank you very much.
- SPSam Parr
You're not tech- you're more technical than me, but you're not technical.
- SPShaan Puri
But you're also not technical.
- SGSarah Guo
You're almost good-looking.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. [laughs] You're hotter than me-
- SGSarah Guo
We're in love
- SPSam Parr
... but I'm a one, you're a three.
- SGSarah Guo
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Uh, did you... Uh, when you're... Wait, I know you've been, like, studying this stuff. When you... Like, this seems like a really fun weekend thing just to, to play with. Are these actually... Would it be really hard for me to learn how to do this?
- SPShaan Puri
Would it be hard to build one of these?
- SPSam Parr
Just like a really simple project. 'Cause I, I... Now she's... Sarah's getting me all hyped on this shit. I'm like, "This looks really fun to, to mess around with."
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, I mean, I think it's like anything else. You gotta... You'd have to have a partner who- to speed you up. Like, you learning to, to code to be able to, to do these things is... would be sl- the slow way of doing it versus [inhales] the easy way is you find an engineer who's excited about this and doesn't have clarity of vision around it, maybe doesn't have a... doesn't wanna run the business side of things, and you say, "Great. Hey, let's, let's build X together. I have a clear idea that X will work, and I'll handle the marketing side. You gotta make this product do, do this." And, um, that's not so hard. That's, that's pretty easy.
- SPSam Parr
This is exciting. Uh-
- SPShaan Puri
Let-
- SPSam Parr
You get to see a lot of cool shit.
- SPShaan Puri
Let's, uh, let's do some of your, like, specific kinda thesis. So you have this website, conviction.com. Good website, by the way. How'd you get
- 27:00 – 32:00
IDEA: Your Personal Seller
- SPShaan Puri
that domain?
- SGSarah Guo
Eh, I'm an internet person, yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
Oh, okay. All right. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Did you see her website? She has a website for her, uh, I think it's the incubator where you gotta, like, code in order to get access it.
- SGSarah Guo
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
You don't really code, but like the menu is set up like that.
- SGSarah Guo
It's a little s- it's li- yeah, it's a little CLI type kind of thing.
- SPSam Parr
What's, what's that URL?
- SGSarah Guo
Um, I think it was called Commit. It was, like, our program for, like, hackathons, college students, et cetera. Yeah.
- SPSam Parr
It's commit.conviction.com, Shaan. It's a pretty cool website, actually.
- SPShaan Puri
Oh, you open up, it's a terminal?
- SPSam Parr
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
Oh, God.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
Uh, let me see. Let, let me try to do this. So run [laughs] -
- SPSam Parr
No. T- uh, ty- type run-
- SGSarah Guo
[laughs] He's just trying to break it now. Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... give me a job.html.
- SPSam Parr
You gotta type in help.
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
So if you type in help, it, like, gives you the menu. Anyway, it's cool.
- SPShaan Puri
I think slash is like a folder. I don't know. I don't know how to do this.
- SGSarah Guo
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Um, all right. So you have a website with a bunch of basically, like, requests for startups or, you know, things that you think are gonna, gonna be built in, in, uh, in AI. So let's run through some of these, 'cause I... That's actually why I initially was like, "We gotta have her on the pod to, to kind of, um, to talk some of these out." So let's do one that you call Your Personal Seller. Do you remember this? You might have wrote this a while b- while back, but Your-
- SGSarah Guo
I f-
- SPShaan Puri
... Your Personal Seller.
- SGSarah Guo
It might have been one... Like, my partner, Pranav Reddy's or something, but we can certainly talk about it. Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
Okay. I'll, I'll give you the summary. So the summary is, uh, Your Personal Seller. I think the idea here is that there's a bunch of places online to sell stuff, Etsy, and eBay, and Amazon, a bunch of different places to sell things. Um, but actually, like, doing that is a bunch of work, like creating the store, listings, changing prices, writing the copy, all of that. And I think what you're saying is somebody should be able to just, like, have a product, and then the AI should be able to, like, do the actual e-com management of the, of the sel- of, of the... of setting up the shop and running it. Is that what that means?
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah. I think, like, um, it's probably... It, it matches, like, a larger theme that I really think is exciting about AI, which is, like, y- because all of these skills, and it could be, um, run a basic, like, social marketing campaign, right? Or, like, send email to your customers that are likely to be repeat customers, or improve your website for indexing. Like, there are a bunch of things that, um, are probably not related to... Let's say it's a, let's say it's a Shopify drop shipping store for, like, a particular type of sock, and you love socks as an entrepreneur. It's not, like, related to the merchandising decision or the design decision of, like, what is the sock I wanna give the world.
- 32:00 – 38:00
IDEA: Generative Voice API for service providers, SMBs, restaurants
- SPShaan Puri
shouldn't be the lead, like, future state of things. That's just the current state of things.
- SGSarah Guo
And, and Shaan, I think the future state is for entrepreneurs who cannot recruit, manage, pay the five people it takes to run your store. Like, what do they do, as Sam said? Like, I think it, uh, will be easier in the future, right?
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
Uh, I, I think this is also kind of, like, similar as an idea to all of the... Another area that we are, and I'm, like, personally really interested in is, um, the voice automation market. I think, like, a lot of your listeners will have seen the GPT-4.0 demo, where it's, like, a voice that may or may not sound like ScarJo talking-
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah
- SGSarah Guo
... like, in real time. And-
- SPShaan Puri
Well, we played with, uh, ElevenLabs.
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- SPShaan Puri
No, but that, that's dubbing. She's talking about just being able to... Like Alexa, you know, you just talk to it, and, um, it just talks back, and it'll sound like Scarlett Johansson. Just like ChatGPT, but you don't have to type.
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah, b- b- both of these things, either, like, it could be in your voice or, like, some spokesperson for a brand or a company, but, like, the ability to give reasoned, you know, knowledge-based responses in a human voice I think is just really powerful, right? And, uh, I don't think people are thinking enough about the opportunities here. Where you mentioned Eleven, there's, like, exactly one independent voice API business and tens of millions of revenue, and that's Eleven. They're great. That's amazing. Um, I think there are other opportunities. So, like, there's a company called Cartesia that does, like, more real-time voice, for example. But-
- SPShaan Puri
You think Eleven is... By the way, ElevenLabs, do you think they're at tens of millions of, uh, in revenue?
- SGSarah Guo
Uh, they are, they're definitely at, you know, a, a large number that is in the tens of millions of revenue. Hopefully-
- SPShaan Puri
That's insane. Yeah
- SGSarah Guo
... I'm not surprising, surprising the market with that.
- SPShaan Puri
They-
- SGSarah Guo
But, you know, a lot of developers will immediately gravitate, like, toward API business, but that is not how the rest... Like, the world is full of niches and people running businesses that don't think about APIs and won't use them, right? A- and so, like, just to, just like, you know, your personal seller, um, I think there are gonna be a bunch of interesting voice services for everything from restaurants to HVAC companies to dental reception that are just, like, answer the phone. I think that's one of the ideas we had. And it could be informational, like, "We are open from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM," um, or a lead generation business, where I'm like, "Well, like, my plumbing broke, and, like-
- SPShaan Puri
Yep
- SGSarah Guo
... are you available tomorrow at 3:00 PM?" But it's a much-
- SPShaan Puri
I'm a huge believer in this. Huge. Like, um-
- SGSarah Guo
In what, Shaan?
- SPShaan Puri
This, this simple idea. So, you know, like, when the, uh, when the internet came out, it was like, um, oh, it's gonna be so crazy. But, like, one of the obvious things was like, hey, every restaurant just kinda needs their menu online. Like, you should put your, you should put your, your restaurant exists, where it's located, and then put your menu up there, even as a PDF. That's still, like, a value add for you. It's like it became where every business needed a website, and now what I think it's gonna have is that every business needs an agent. And so what's the agent for most small businesses? So, like, I called pest control, 'cause we always get a little, bunch of, like, mice jumping in our pool for whatever reason, and try calling pest control. Nobody ever picks up the damn phone, uh, because there's us- it's usually run by, like, it's, like, Mike's Pest Control, and Mike's out in the field doing things all day-
- SGSarah Guo
Controlling the pests [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... actually doing work. And so he doesn't pick up the phone. And so then you leave a message, and you're like, you... And then but you called 10 of them, because you're not sure if Mike's gonna get back to you. So then it becomes whoever gets back to you first. Mike loses business because Mike doesn't pick up the phone. Mike also is not gonna hire somebody to just sit there and wait for the three phone calls a day that he's gonna get. It just wouldn't make sense. But now you go, and I built one of these in our, like, AI, uh, like, weekly tutoring session that I have, basically. I was like, "I wanna build one of these." So we have the same problem for our, our offshore recruiting business. So we own a offshore recruiting business called Somewhere, and it's like you can fire t- you can find amazing talent. They're just somewhere out in the world. You just have to find them. So what Somewhere does, they find you elite talent. Now, the big problem, if you go to somewhere.com, it's like you say, "Okay, I'm looking for a designer," or, "I need somebody who could do, who'll get me leads for my marketing business or my real estate business," or, "I need somebody to do data entry," right? So you have all these jobs. Now, the button on the site is basically like, "You wanna start hiring? Fill out this form." So you fill out the form, and then it's like, "Awesome. We will get back to you soon." Or it's like, "Schedule a call. Here's the call tomorrow or two days from now." And no matter how many sales agents we have, a call tomorrow is not as good as, "Talk to me right now about what I need, 'cause right now is when I'm interested. Right now is when I'm on your website. Right now is when I'm not t- thinking about other variations of how I might solve this problem, and you have an opportunity to sell me." And so Sam, I don't know if you've seen this, but like check out bland.ai. This is-
- SPSam Parr
Dude, I have-
- SPShaan Puri
This is the one, the one I built on
- SPSam Parr
... if, if the answer is, "Have you seen this?" Assume it's no.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
And my mind is being blown by all this stuff.
- SPShaan Puri
But basically it lets you build a phone agent for yourself. So I went on here and I built a phone agent. So I built a guy who could answer the phone so that when somebody goes to somewhere and they wanna, they wanna hire somebody, it'll be like, "Awesome. What are you hiring for? Have you ever hired overseas?" And you're like, "Yeah, I have." It's like, "Cool. Um, tell me what you're looking for in a couple, you know, a couple sentences." "Oh, great. It sounds like what you're looking for is somebody who could be a developer for your Shopify store. Our, our normal budget for that is 2,000 a month. Would that work for you, or are you looking for something a little bit more or a little bit less?" And then it answers it. It basically does the intake, the initial sales call for you, and it's like, "No problem. We've hired this month for 85 other Shopify brands who are looking for Shopify developers. You're in good hands. Uh, we do this all the time. We will... Uh, I'm gonna start looking for candidates now. I'm gonna email you tomorrow with three candidates. How does that sound?" And the person's like, "Great." I guess I can just, like, wait for that to happen or it'll, or it'll pull from our existing database and be like, "Here's an example resume. This is the type of person we'd be looking for. Would this person fit your needs, yes or no?" So then the human salesperson c- will come into work and see a ticket that's like, the AI agent did the initial sales call and found the customer's requirements and kind of already warmed the sale up and told the customer what they needed to know, the things you repeat every time on the phone. And now you could follow up with a more bespoke answer for that person. That's the future that I see. I, I wasn't able to fully build that. I did, like, a prototype of it, but that's what I think websites even like
- 38:00 – 40:00
IDEA: Next Gen Auto-Fill
- SPShaan Puri
ours, which is an internet business, should have. Which means that every plumbing and pest control and restaurant, they're gonna have their version of that.
- SPSam Parr
This is 100% way better than [laughs] having a call center. Or, or it might, or it will be when it, if as long, so long as it works as good, but this is absolutely the way to go.
- SPShaan Puri
All right, let's do some more. So you have another one on here that's I think an easy one that's cool. Next Gen Autocomplete. And I think the idea here is you do a Chrome extension or a browser extension that not just like autocomplete helps you fill in the wo- next word it thinks you're gonna say or how to spell a word, but what you have here is that it starts to learn your voice, so it can write your... It, it can help you write your emails or your blog posts in your voice, which is kinda like the next level up from autocomplete, next level up from Grammarly. It doesn't just kinda correct or spell check your stuff, but it actually writes the way you write because it has watched the way you write. Is that the thesis here?
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, and I think it can be, you know, lots of different types of business communication, but especially, like, email. So I don't know if... This is, this is actually, um, my friend Mike Vernal's idea. I think he suffers from the same thing I do, that might be true for you, which is like I'm an incredibly picky writer, and so I will use the models today for generation of basic content, or I'll ask my amazing EA to, like, draft emails for me, and then I will go rewrite the whole thing because I don't like the tone.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- SGSarah Guo
'Cause it doesn't sound like me or because it's not tight enough or because I wanna use a certain phrase. And I think the next level of, like, value and impact is definitely gonna be, um, fine-tuning to specific voice.
- SPShaan Puri
And nobody wants to write like Cha- GPT. Like, nobody wants to be the generic AI either. So [laughs]
- SGSarah Guo
Right
- SPShaan Puri
... what everybody wants is the thing in between.
- SPSam Parr
This shit's all wild to me. Is there anyone right now doing that that you like? Because I would like to use this today.
- SGSarah Guo
Uh, I mean, Superhuman has, like, really interesting AI features, but I think the, the unlock is gonna be the personalization.
- SPShaan Puri
And what's your overarching investment thesis? So you have this thing called Software 3.0, which by the way,
- 40:00 – 42:00
Software 3.0--what's coming
- SPShaan Puri
most VC thing to do to be like, oh, Software 3.0, Web 3.0. Uh, you, you, you've done it.
- SGSarah Guo
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
You, you have, you have gone full VC. What is Software 3.0?
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah. Okay. So the seed for that phrase, Software 3.0, it comes from actually an essay that Andrej Karpathy wrote years ago about Software 2.0, and the base premise here is that, like, you had to write, uh, a lot of software by hand in a prior generation before machine learning. And then Software 2.0, Andre, you know, worked at Tesla, was working on Autopilot, was really about dataset labeling, right? You know, you, you are teaching a machine learning model by the data you choose to put into the pipeline, um, how to do new tasks. Software 3.0 is the idea that the next generation of software, a lot of it is about manipulating foundation models, and they're called foundation models because they have a lot of capability out of the box. You don't need to train them from scratch. You just need to give them, like, guidance, reinforcement, the information specific to your business. And so an example would be like Shaan was talking about for his lead capture intake form voice bo- Like, he doesn't need to go train a model. He doesn't need to go, like, collect data for that software application. Like, the voice agent is a software application. He just needs to, like, make sure it's plugged into his scheduling system and his database of candidates and be able to retrieve the right information about the business and, like, re- you know, respond consistently to customers in a certain tone, right? And so that's more about, like, manipulating a bunch of this base work that people, um, like labs have already done for you. And the premise here is, like, that last mile of getting a foundation model to be, like, something that serves all these use cases in the real world that, you know, maybe the research labs think of n- as niches. Like, the world is composed
- 42:00 – 44:00
Boring verticals fertile for AI: Legal and medical
- SGSarah Guo
of very large niches, and so I think it's a, uh... I think it's a really big opportunity for entrepreneurs and for us.
- SPShaan Puri
What are some of your, like, hot takes, uh, or maybe your contrarian takes? Anything that you think that might be counter to what the most people say, most people do, most people are betting on. Do you have anything that is against the grain?
- SGSarah Guo
You know, I'm gonna gi- I'm gonna give a, like, a somewhat arrogant answer, which is I don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the entire market thinks Actually
- SPSam Parr
Okay
- SGSarah Guo
So I'm like, I don't know which of these things are contrarian. I can tell you where, like, my opinion has changed dramatically. Like, let me give you one example. For many years in- including, you know, the tenure of my investing at Greylock, I was one of several people who were like, "Okay, we're gonna go understand healthcare and digital health." And I was like, "Oh, healthcare sucks," right? It's a quarter of the economy. It's really important. How could you not wanna work on this mission? But it is so slow, and the incentives are so screwed up that, like, trying to enter that market with technology or the speed of entrepreneurship that, you know, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are seeking is, like, not a good idea. And we just did a, a healthcare administration automation company. So I'm like, oops, like, changed my mind. Real hypocrite here. And, and, like, one of the reasons being, I'm like, well, if you think about the mind-numbing work that happens in healthcare administration, like billing, authorization, coding, claims processing, like all, like even... Not even mind-numbing, but just, like, expensive and manual, like patient support, it's actually really fertile for an AI company. And, you know, we backed something that's, like, growing really quickly in one of those domains, right? And so I just say, like, I, I guess I've changed my point of view on healthcare.
- SPSam Parr
I went to the pediatrician yesterday. My doctor is with my baby there, and I'm sitting there, and she's got her iPad, uh, on, like, a table, and there's a video, like, there, and I'm like, "Who the fuck is that guy?" [laughs]
- SGSarah Guo
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
And they're like, "Oh, that's just, like, my scribe. I, uh... He's just listening in, and he's,
- 44:00 – 47:00
Ask: What's already being outsourced?
- SPSam Parr
and he's taking notes." But she was like, "I used to stay up until 3:00 AM taking notes on all of my patients."
- SPShaan Puri
Oh, wow.
- SPSam Parr
"They just do it for me." And obviously, the wheels are turning in my head. I'm like, yeah, that, that job is gonna be unnecessary in a few years. But it was amazing to have a medical scribe. I've never seen such a thing. And she's like, "Oh, th- this has been around for a long time." I was like, "I've never seen that."
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah. I do think one framework for, like, your listeners, like, thinking about different ideas is, like, what parts of work have been outsourced services already, right? Because, like, it used to be the doctor taking the notes, and they were like, "Wow, we pay this person a lot," and it's like, "They should see more patients and think about their patients more. Like, let us outsource that to a cheaper tech in our office. Let us sh- like, outsource that tech to India or the Philippines." And now there are a number of scribe businesses in, um, medicine that are growing really fast, like Abridge, Nobla, Freed. Like, it is happening. And so I think that will happen in a bunch of different areas where, like, basically, if you can create separation of that work already to outsource it, then maybe you can outsource it to a machine as well.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, Sam Altman had a good thing. He was like, "Everybody worries about AI taking your job." You have a... And that's not the right way to think about it. It's AI will take your tasks. Uh, like, you have to think about it not at a job level but at a task level. There are certain tasks it can do really well. There's certain tasks it can't do really well. There's certain tasks today it can't do that in the future it can do. And so eventually, a job becomes a bundle of tasks. Um, but, but for now, it's, you can't think of the whole bundle 'cause it can't replace the whole job, but it can replace specific tasks, which might be just the way it works in the long run, is that there's a huge slew of tasks that can be, that can be done by AI, and then there's people that bundle those tasks together to make sure that they're getting done well or at the right time.
- SGSarah Guo
I think that's, like, approximately right, but to be intellectually honest, like, that there was a scribe in that outsourced BPO that had that job. And so it's not taking the doctor's job, but it's taking the piece of the job that, like the doctor's job, that already got separated out, the task that they d- they didn't like, but that became a job of its own. And I think that has to be-
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, the task became a job, then the job goes back to being a task, basically, in this case.
- SGSarah Guo
Yes. Yeah, yeah. It's a good framework.
- SPSam Parr
Sarah, are you, are you investing exclusively in AI-related businesses?
- SGSarah Guo
I am a technology investor. I'm not a machine learning researcher. I've been working on this stuff for a handful of years, and I really believe it. I think it's, like, the most important thing to happen in technology in a long time. But I'd say, like, I'm also here to just, you know, invest in great tech companies, and so-
- SPSam Parr
You're also here to get paid.
- SGSarah Guo
I am also here to work on things that'll work that are important.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SGSarah Guo
Right? Um, and so, like, if a, if an entrepreneur that I think super highly of or, like, that I've worked with before or whatever comes to me and says, like, "I have a great idea, nothing to do with AI," I'm still definitely gonna be really interested in that. If you ask me, like, what are the ideas that we think about or are hunting, it is all in AI. I do wanna put one more thing out there, which is definitely not a idea that just anyone can go after. It's kind of the opposite of the,
- 47:00 – 49:00
Ripe for disruption: energy storage, chips,
- SGSarah Guo
like, easy wedge idea in terms of, how can I put distribution around, like, one functionality for a niche on a, on a model, like a AI, um, headshot application or something? But I do really wanna hear from anyone who has a point of view on what happens to the, like, NVIDIA compute monopoly and overall what's changing in the data center. I don't know if this is a hot take to your former question, but, like, I think a lot of people intellect- in technology really, they intellectually, like, are like, "Oh, yes, of course, workloads are changing from not AI to AI," but they don't actually think about, like, what that means in terms of scale and market cap. Like, that means, like, chips, memory bandwidth, networking, energy storage, optimized system design. Like, that was a lot of technology company market cap before. And so, like, if that's true, there's gonna be a bunch of different, like, new specialized solutions, and it's trillions of dollars of value at stake, and it's not just, like, single direct attack on NVIDIA that is, like, the opportunity.
- SPShaan Puri
What, what else would be in that category? If it's not just like, "Hey, our chip is better than NVIDIA's chip," what, what else is... What is a, what's another shape of a company that could be in that, that space?
- SGSarah Guo
So I, I guess a, an example would be, like, well, what are other bottlenecks, like memory bandwidth? What, like, what if you designed storage to be specific for AI data centers? What if you... Like, you could do cooling systems for... Like, there are... If you just reimagine the entire data center around, like, big AI inference-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- SGSarah Guo
... I think you end up with, like, totally different needs.
- SPSam Parr
The, uh, the New York Times had this article the other day, and I, I don't remember the stat entirely, but it was something like the amount of AI capacity or, and chips, like, currently created right now, we need to create, like, another, like, $4 trillion in market cap in order to satisfy, like, the amount of s- capacity that we have. And they were sort of writing it in a, in a way of, like, "I don't know if we're gonna be able to do that." But then when you think about it the other
- 49:00 – 52:00
“Ai's $600B Question”
- SPSam Parr
way around where you, where you think about, well, in 1998 if you said, like, you know, what, how big is the internet going to be, uh, I'm sure it went far beyond virtually 100% of the experts' opinion as to how big it will get. And I remember reading this article the other day and I was like, that's just absolutely astounding that we're in one of these moments-
- SPShaan Puri
Well, even, even Sequoia, Sequoia came out with a, a sort of blog post or, I don't know, PDF or something like that about this. The, I think they called it the $600 billion hole or something. It was basically saying, "Well, we've, we've invested this much," or, "We're investing this much in CapEx." So if you invest that much in CapEx, what do you need to get out to make that, you know, return? Uh, that's a VC saying that, which is, which is not just like some journalist who doesn't get it, who doesn't get tech. Uh, Sarah, what was your reaction to that, and w- what's your take on that?
- SGSarah Guo
I think it is a lot of CapEx. I think if you put it in context of, like, how does it compare to other big CapEx spends in the past, let's say, like, the broadband build-out. Like, well, we wanted the internet, you know? Like, we spent about $2 trillion on broadband to date. Like, we're not there yet, right? That was worth it. And so what I would say is, yes, like, it's a totally valid question. We're spending a lot of money. What are we gonna get out of it? I think we're gonna get a lot of value.
- SPSam Parr
We had Dharmesh on the... Dharmesh, uh, founded HubSpot.
- SGSarah Guo
Dharmesh is amazing. Yeah.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, he's really wise. Um, and he's tends to be right more than he's wrong. And I think he said something great when I asked him. I'm like, "Man, I'm, I'm a little nervous about a lot of this stuff, where the world is gonna go." And he's like, "Well, I'm, I'm fairly educated, and I think that it's not gonna be as good or bad as you think it's going to be."
- SGSarah Guo
Hmm.
- SPSam Parr
Do you, uh, agree with that sentiment?
- SGSarah Guo
No, I think, I think it's actually pretty bimodal. I think it could be, like, bad or, and it's, like, it could be much, much better. [laughs] So, I-
- SPSam Parr
Great.
- SPShaan Puri
It's, it's, it's the opposite.
- SPSam Parr
Great.
- SPShaan Puri
It's either gonna be much worse or much better [laughs] is kinda your take.
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah. Yes.
- SPSam Parr
Well, what, what's the bad, like, the, what's the bad situation look like where it like... Like, for example, I think the bad situation, and I'm fairly uneducated, so take it with a grain of salt. The very bad situation is that there's just gonna be this massive gap between the haves and the have-not. And, like, if you have money now, that's gonna grow, and you're gonna be awesome.
- SPShaan Puri
Well, the bad situation is AI kills us all, right? That's the, uh, the doom situation.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. That, that's a bad situation. But then I, there, but in route to that, there is just this massive separation of the haves and haves not, have-nots, you know what I'm saying? That kind of freaks me out. What's your ig- what's your... Where do you see the bad situation going, going towards?
- SGSarah Guo
So I think it is not necessarily that correlated that your, your resources or your capital today mean that you most take advantage of the, of the AI revolution, right? I actually think people have a lot of agency in this, right? They can go start these businesses, make a million dollars. [laughs] Um-
- SPSam Parr
That's such a small group of people.
- SGSarah Guo
Why does it have to be?
- SPSam Parr
Because of human nature. How many people know about this shit? You go, do your... Well, your parents are tech entrepreneurs. But go, go ask Shaan's mom and dad. Uh, go ask my parents. Go ask my brother and sister, like, you know what I mean?
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, most people are not entrepreneurial. Even if this widens the number of people who can be successfully entrepreneurial,
- 52:00 – 56:30
Sarah Reacts: Doomsday scenarios in Ai
- SPShaan Puri
it's not gonna... Like, it's gonna go from .1% or whatever, 1% of the population to, I don't know, not 50, right? Not, it's not gonna go that far.
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah, I don't know if it has to express in pure entrepreneurial-ism versus, like, you will get increased productivity for l- people in lots of different types of jobs, and it's not obvious to me that's, like, just the people who are already most highly paid today.
- SPShaan Puri
You're somebody who thinks a lot about AI. You spend your time in the AI ecosystem. A lot of very smart people are actually worried about the doom scenario, ev- you know, from Elon Musk to... We had Emmett Shear on the podcast, and Emmett's a smart, thoughtful guy, and he's like, "You know, the P doom, the probability of, of actual doom here is, it's pretty scary. It's not zero, and, and here's, here, you know, uh, here's where I think it is." What do you think about that? Uh, what are the odds that AI truly is a sort of, like, a critically dangerous thing?
- SGSarah Guo
You know, I don't actually spend a lot of time thinking about this problem because the, because it is, like, conjecture in the future of both the objectives of these models and capabilities of these models that are kinda, like, hand-wavy, right? Like, if, like, I think when you talk to experts about, um, some of the suggested scenarios, like, here are two classic ones. Oh, you know, people are gonna use this to design a virus that kills us all, um, bioweapons. Or somebody is going to make the objective for a foundation model that is super powerful to be, like, make the most money or generate the most paperclips, and it's gonna take over all of the resources in the world and kill us all. There's no linear path from here to there. A- and so when, when people ask me about, like, the doom scenario, I, like, I am much more concerned about abuses we actually do understand. So for example, like, what if people don't understand what information is true or not? Or, like, people are gonna use this stuff for hacking and fraud and lots of, like, bad activities today. And, like, we should go understand that and react as quickly as possible to that, and as a country, like, probably wanna stay ahead on these capabilities technically.
- SPSam Parr
Well, have you heard any... What are some wi- what's a wild example of how people use this for hacking or for fraud?
- SGSarah Guo
Oh, I mean, like-
- SPSam Parr
Is it, like, for, for my company, we get emails from me. It's not really me. And sometimes it will have... Or, um, like, it'll have a link to something that sounds like it's in my voice.
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah. I think that's the simplest example, which is, well, like, what happens if you can create really Authentic-sounding media. Like, you know, are, are your parents, like, you know, going to not pick up the phone if it's a spoofed phone number and it sounds like you and you say you need something? Like, that's a bad scenario. And so I think we need more tools to protect against that, and general education about it. So I, I worry more about that, and then I'd say, like, I think of the probability of a bad scenario. I said was, like, it is possible. I can't see exactly how we get there. And if you ask me, like, what are the reasons in which, uh, broad use of cheap intelligence are gonna be great, I can give you so many reasons, right? So Andrej Karpathy just started a company around education, and, uh, like, the, the, the fields that have been super resistant to cost improvement, basically healthcare, the government, and education, like, I, I think this will actually move the needle on some of the domains that matter a lot to all of us humans. Um, and I, I think, like, when, when people talk about, like, the doom scenario... It's really fun and scary to talk about the dystopian doom scenario, but, uh, I think the opportunity cost of not exploring the ways in which, like, there, you know, you can have an economy of abundance, we need to talk about that, and that is really what I focus on.
- SPShaan Puri
Sam, do you know who Andrej Karpathy is?
- SPSam Parr
No, but I love his name. [laughs]
- SGSarah Guo
It's a lovely name. Uh, Andrej is a, is a, uh, amazingly well-respected research scientist and educator who's trying to create, um, like, an experience, uh, that is AI-powered in education where, like, the most amazing expert in a domain is, like, a personal tutor taking you through the material pr- uh, interactively.
- SPShaan Puri
And he, he's one of, like, the five big thought leader-type guy. He ran Tesla's AI program. Uh, like, in terms of self-driving cars,
- 56:30 – 1:00:46
If you're 22, hungry and optimistic, go west
- SPShaan Puri
he was, like, one of the, let's say, five most known and respected guys about that. He then went to OpenAI. He then quit OpenAI.
- SPSam Parr
It says he's listed as a co-founder of OpenAI, so s- so I guess he's the man.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, he was, he was, like, the early, uh, th- early mind behind it. And at, at Tesla he was basically the, the guy leading their entire self-driving unit. Um, I think he's... I forgot what his title was, but he's like, you know, chief AI guy.
- SPSam Parr
When I lived in San Francisco, it was a fun period. I lived there from 2012 to basically 2020 or 2022. And back then it was, like, the Airbnbs of the world, and Tesla or, um, Uber, and we had Sidecar back then, where it was like, holy crap, we're gonna get into a stranger's car, and this is so exciting. This is so new. And, and you'd go to hackathons, and people were working on, like, meal delivery services, and that was, like, really cool. I went recently, or this was about a year ago, and I was walking, uh, around the Ferry Building, and this kid recognized me. He's like, "Oh, Sam, uh, you know I like the pod." Uh, I go, "Hi, what's up, man?" And he said, uh, "I'm doing a hackathon right now in the Ferry Building upstairs. Do you and your wife wanna come up and, like, see what's going on?" And I was like, "Hell yeah, let's do it." And so we go up there, and it was so invigorating. I was like, dude, we used to do this exact same thing, but it was around, like, sh- the sharing economy and, and all this type of stuff. And they... I was just talking to people about what they were building, and I remember thinking, like, this is, like, totally... I guess it ha- it happens in San Francisco a bunch. I was like, this is like the Renaissance. Like, there's something really, really cool going on. And everyone was doing AI stuff, and I just thought, it's magical.
- SPShaan Puri
R- right when I moved there, it was, like, mobile was the thing. It was like, oh, X for mobile. Everything we gotta make m- we gotta make it work on a iPhone and an Android. And then you would see, like, you know, some, like, false flags. Like, Frontback came out. It's like, oh, shit, this is the next thing. This is the next big social app. And then it would kinda die. But then, you know, Instagram, Snapchat, you know, they, they, they, they actually, they stuck. And I remember the early days of Musical.ly that now become TikTok. And so mobile was, like, the big thing at the time. Then it became crypto, and it became the crypto hub. Um, but it started to lose a little bit of the steam for crypto because crypto was a lot more international. Um, but now it looks like for AI, San Francisco at least is back as the, uh, the hub. Sarah, are you in, in San Francisco?
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah. Uh, we're in the Mission in San Francisco. And, like, I, I think we really believe in the sort of, like, community aspect of, um... Not in the, like, maybe in the squishy sense of the word too, but, like, if you're thinking about looking for ideas for companies and being inspired to, like, be committed to the grind and have the right ideas, then the right thing to do is not do it, like, alone in your basement. What you have in San Francisco are people who are optimistic and then, like, work-oriented. They believe lots of things are possible. They're learning about what's going on at the frontier. And we actually do this grant program, Embed, embed.conviction.com, to create that kind of community and a bunch of other stuff. But it is, it is around this idea that y- people wanna have the experience that you described, Sam, which is like, well, like, not all of this is gonna work, but what are smart people trying that is some version of the future in this area of AI, and, like, that will probably educate and inspire me, and some of it will be really big.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, I think that, like, if you're 22, um, and you're young and single and you're into this shit, I would just say two words. I would say go west.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Go west, young man. Like, like-
- SPShaan Puri
By, by the way, people g- always talk about San Francisco. Oh, it's dangerous. It's dirty. It's lawless. That's the appeal, baby. You can say you, you made it in the war-torn city of San Francisco.
- SGSarah Guo
Mm.
- SPShaan Puri
You don't wanna be a billionaire who was coddled. You wanna be a billionaire who grew up on the mean streets of San Francisco. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
They're not that mean. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
All right. I think we have to wrap up. Sarah, thanks for coming on. Where should people find you, and, uh, where, where, where should they follow you?
- SGSarah Guo
You can just Google Sarah Guo or conviction.com. And I'm on, I'm on Twitter.
- SPShaan Puri
Um, all right. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
That's it. That's the pod.
- SGSarah Guo
Thanks, guys. [upbeat music]
Episode duration: 1:00:46
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Transcript of episode hMvnKX0yeJw
