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My First MillionBrainstorming ChatGPT Business Ideas With A Billionaire | ft. Dharmesh Shah (#438)
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85 min read · 17,448 words- 0:00 – 1:28
Intro
- DSDharmesh Shah
Once again, I've been in software for 30 years now, doing startups pretty much, uh, my entire professional career. The only time I've, I've felt like, like, heart, heart palpitations, kinda like Shaan kinda opened with. It's like there's this party going on next door and I'm here knitting, right? It's like this is, like, too big to ignore. I think it's the single largest opportunity and biggest kinda, uh, tech paradigm shift we've seen, uh, since the internet originally came out. Like, mobile was big, uh, but there was a discrete set of use cases. Like, when you put a camera on a phone, when you put a GPS device on a phone, a bunch of consumer apps, like Uber and others, uh, came up and, and that was awesome, right? But it was not like this impacts everything like the internet did, right? It's like, okay, there's some businesses, some new opportunities, lots of good things, lots of money made, lots of startups. Awesome. This is an order of magnitude bigger than that. [upbeat music]
- SPShaan Puri
All right, what's up? We have Dharmesh back. Dharmesh, who is co-founder of HubSpot and, uh, multiple time guest on the pod, one of the, one of the fan favorites. You're back, and I don't know what we're gonna talk about because usually we have these little, like, cheat sheets where it's like, um, three to f- three to five bullet points of interesting ideas, topics, experiments you've been running, things like that, and I'm sure you have those, but I don't have the cheat sheet. So where do you wanna start?
- DSDharmesh Shah
Well, I say we start with generative AI
- 1:28 – 9:55
Open AI
- DSDharmesh Shah
because I don't know if you've heard, but there's this thing called ChatGPT. I get this question from my friends and family all the time. It's like, "Dharmesh, have you checked out this ChatGPT thing?" I'm like, "Really? Do you even know me? Like, of course. Of course I've played with it." I've been obsessed, um, ever since it came out, so-
- SPSam Parr
Did, did you see... I wanna talk about your topics, but really quick, did you see... Did you guys see this? That, so Sam Altman co-founded OpenAI. He's, like, the, the man in charge. I read an article where he was quoted as saying, like, "I have enough money and I don't want equity in the company." And I don't know if I entirely believe that, but that's wild if true because it could be one of the more valuable companies in the world the next 10 years.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, he didn't... I don't know if he said it, like, he didn't say it on the record, on the record, but the person reporting it said Sam reportedly has no equity in the, uh, the for-profit version of OpenAI because he's already wealthy enough and didn't want to, uh, didn't feel like he needed to or didn't want to. Didn't want to have that clouding his judgment when it came to this. And, like, this is pretty... If you had to bet what, what one private company or what one private startup is most likely to become worth $1 trillion or more, I think at this point that has to be OpenAI right now. Is that right? Like, Dharmesh, would you, would you disagree with that?
- DSDharmesh Shah
It's, it'd be up there in the top three. I, I honestly can't think of who else would rank higher in terms of probability of getting to that point.
- SPShaan Puri
Wait, it's in the top three, and I don't know what two and three are [laughs] .
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, who are the other two and three? Do you know?
- DSDharmesh Shah
I'm... No, I don't know. It was like... No, I, I would say that one's the transformative one, right? I think, um, you know, a lot of the kinda Tesla gains we've sorta seen. I'm not sure if there's, like, big surprises left. It's like, okay, they will make it better, they'll get to full self-driving and, and we'll see kinda progress on that front. But in terms of just raw valuation, um, it's the wild card. OpenAI is the one that could actually pull that off.
- SPShaan Puri
And they get, they, they get a lot of shit because people are saying, like, um, yo- like, you know, Elon kind of is, is stoking this fire. Like, how did this nonprofit go to a for-pro- How did this open sourced nonprofit company research lab basically become a for-profit semi-closed, uh, you know, a, a company? And I think that's, uh, people are gonna make, people are gonna take shots and make fun of OpenAI because it's clearly the new powerful thing that's... So some people are gonna say how it's gonna ruin the world and how terrible they are. Uh, but he did give a... There was a, a story that came out with, with a good explanation, which was they were burning a lot of money in the research lab. They needed more money. Um, Elon was gonna be the big backer, so he was gonna pledge or commit $1 billion to it. He, um, and then he was like, "No, I don't like the way this is going. Like, Google is way ahead and, um, I'm gonna take over OpenAI and, uh, I'm gonna right the ship here." This is the, this is what ca- This is the story that came out. Uh, they haven't... Nobody's clarified if this is true or not, uh, but it came out in, I think, Plat- the Platformer, uh, publication. And so they go, Elon tried to take it over. Sam Altman and the CTO, Greg, uh, who, who was the former CTO of, of Stripe, they, them and the group that was in charge of OpenAI rejected that. So Elon's like, basically like, "I'm taking my ball and I'm going home. Have fun playing basketball without the ball." And he's like... Uh, so he took his funding and he left. So he, a couple months later, the, he left OpenAI, said, "Oh..." And the, the public story was, oh, it's a conflict of interest with Tesla, uh, 'cause they're also working on AI, but he reneged on his funding. And so now they had this huge shortfall in funding that they were gonna have to cover, and so their solution was let's create a subsidiary that's a for-profit thing that we can raise money into 'cause we're not gonna get, you know... Where else do we get a, you know, $500 million or $1 billion of donations here? Um, and so they, they did that. They raised money in that, and then they capped the profits of that company. So, so that was kinda their explanation, which is a little bit less devious than people make it sound. They're like, "Ooh, they tricked everybody by going from nonprofit to for-profit to all the profits," which is, I think, how people perceive it today.
- DSDharmesh Shah
Yeah, I, yeah, I don't, I don't know the details. I have no insider knowledge, but, uh-
- SPShaan Puri
Wait, I, I thought you have, like, a billionaire chat group where, like, every billionaire just kinda says the back channel of what's going on.
- DSDharmesh Shah
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Do you not have, like, a billionaire WhatsApp?
- DSDharmesh Shah
No, we, we have that, but I don't have any insider knowledge from that particular chat group. Um-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- DSDharmesh Shah
I mean, it... My, my sense here is that, um, you know, building large language models as OpenAI is doing is this, like, supremely capital intensive, which is rare for a software company, which is what they are. Um, so it's expensive. They needed access to capital. Um, I think they've structured it such that it does cap the profits. I think they've done- Like, if you had to do that kind of, "Oh, we're gonna have to spin off and have this for-profit thing," they did it well. And, uh, and I could be wrong, but Sam Altman seems like a reasonable, rational, non-evil guy. I mean, he's, he's a-
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah
- DSDharmesh Shah
... capitalist. Fine. Uh, and I mean that in the most positive way possible. But, uh, yeah, I don't think he was out to mislead anyone. I think he's trying to-
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah
- DSDharmesh Shah
... solve some big problems.
- SPShaan Puri
So there's a bunch of ways we can go with this AI thing, but I wanna share something funny. Uh, so I basically cleared my calendar this whole week, and I just treated it as AI week, 'cause I was like, "Dude, I c- I can't just sit here," and h- I hear the music at this party just bumping at the house next door, and I'm over here knitting. And I'm like, "I gotta put this down. I gotta go see what's going on at this party." And so I cleared my calendar, and I just spent all, every day this week just messing around with AI tools, just getting to play- play with it for myself. That's how I learn is by, like, just messing around and, and, and trying to experiment and do things. I wanna share with you guys something funny. Basically, I stitched together a few AI tools. So I was like, "Let me make an intro song for the podcast using AI." So I went on ChatGPT, and I told it, I said... This is all I wrote. "Write an intro rap for our podcast, My First Million. Our key phrase is 'no small boy stuff.'" Okay, so here's... I- it gave me a full rap, but I'm just gonna read you the chorus. So it goes, here's how it goes. Uh, it goes, "No small boy stuff, we on that grind. My First Million, it's time to shine. We talk a big money, no pennies, no dimes. Together we climb one step at a time." And it start... So it gives us this, this great rap that's on, on, on brand. And then I took that, and I f- found this guy, uh, Roberto, who had made this demo where he turned his voice rapping into Kanye. And I don't know if you've seen this, but it got, like, a million views. It's this incredible thing where... And he's like, "Yeah, dude, this is crazy." He's like, "I didn't make this." He's like, "I was just on Reddit, and I saw that someone uploaded a Kanye voice model, so I clicked it," and he, it l- literally, the thing is, and I, I should make, I should make a YouTube video about this, like, um, just how to do this one process. But basically, it's a Google Colab folder, which is just, like, a, Google's little coding interface. So you don't have to do- write any code. It's just here's the, here's a place to run the code. And then it's a link to Mega Upload. [laughs] And then the Mega Upload is where he hosted the Kanye voice model. And so all you do is you record yourself doing what I just did, and then it turns into Kanye West rapping. And it, and it sounds exactly like Kanye. It's amazing. "I got a fantasy that's beautiful, that's dark and twisted. But I attack the whole religion all because of my ignorance. What was I thinking? That was some bitch shit. I lost Adidas, but I'm still breathing."
- DSDharmesh Shah
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
And so, and it takes literally, like, 15 minutes to do the whole thing. Um, there is no... There was, like, nothing else to do. It was so easy. It was crazy. Are we allowed to use Kanye's voice for... I think so, right?
- DSDharmesh Shah
Yeah, I think you're, like, a 10-second thing is not a, not a problem. If HubSpot gets sued, w- who cares? None of, none of us here would bother, would worry about that.
- SPShaan Puri
So, well, yeah. [laughs] Dharmesh will. So Dharmesh is the, uh, CTO, co-founder of HubSpot, by the way, which I don't know how big the team is now, but, like, somewhere between the 3,000 and 5,000 mark. The-
- DSDharmesh Shah
Little over 7,000, but-
- SPShaan Puri
Oh my God
- DSDharmesh Shah
... I'm kidding
- SPShaan Puri
... 7,000, my bad. And the market cap of the company varies from 15 to 25 billion over the last couple years. Uh, so you have, like... And, and you're, like, constantly tinkering. So you have Word Play, which is a project that you made that I think you said had millions of people playing it. Uh, you have an interesting insight in, uh, in this just from your perspective at HubSpot, and you're actually using all this stuff. What excites you about this, uh, generative AI thing? And you also say that, like, you're like, "Why is Bill Gates excited?" That's a great, that's a great headline. It's, it's in the, uh, MDB- MDB doc, Shaan.
- DSDharmesh Shah
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
And, like, immediately I'm like, "Okay, you've got me interested." Any time a headline says, "Why Bill Gates is buying farmland," I click.
- 9:55 – 18:05
The Chat to Code Revolution
- DSDharmesh Shah
Um, let's, let's, a couple things I think that, um, the listeners and viewers I think would be interested and benefit from. One is, um, most of the discussions around generative AI are around the kind of generation of either text-to-text that says, "Oh, write me a blog post that's 300 words on this particular topic," or it's text-to-image, let's use DALL·E 2 or Midjourney or Stable Diffusion or something like that, which are great use cases, and they kinda capture the imagination. Because as humans, we are very impressed, uh, w- when software can actually generate or create something. Uh, and that's awesome, and I'm not to take away from that. But there's a third use case that almost nobody talks about, which is the ability to go from text to code. And so what happens there is to say, okay, um, and what this leads to is the thing that Bill Gates is excited about, I'm excited about, um, is that you can take a natural language prompt that describes something and then generate code that does that thing, as a result of which you can now build, uh, what I call chat UX, or that, that term's been used before, but, um, which is a chat-based user experience for software. So right now, the way you use most software, regardless of what it is, web-based or whatever, it's a series of clicks and drags and touches and swipes because you've got the thing in your head that you wanna do, and then you go through y- with your knowledge of the software, you kinda execute the series of steps. At the end of it, you hopefully get the thing you want, whatever it was you were looking to accomplish with the software. And that's what engineers like me would call an imperative model. An imperative model is you give s- step-by-step instructions that says do this, and then do this, and then do this, and then do this, and then I get the thing. What natural language allows us to do is use, uh, what developers would call a declarative model. Instead of describing all the steps, describe the result that you want at the end of the thing, and then the software does everything in between. So it's, it's a difference between having a junior intern that you have to explain. It's like, "I want you to go do research on this thing and this thing and come back and then give me the..." And then a senior person, you're like, "You know, we're digging into this topic on generative AI, and I'd like a really well-researched, thoughtful thing that... And here's the outcome I'm looking for. That's it."
- SPShaan Puri
But, but does that mean-
- DSDharmesh Shah
Right? You describe it
- SPShaan Puri
... is it as simple as, uh, "Give me the code for a website that looks exactly like Airbnb but is red and is for cars," or something like that?
- DSDharmesh Shah
It could be something like that. It could be something more sophisticated. So we'll look at the, uh, like the HubSpot example. Um, in HubSpot, you know, which is a, a CRM software, you know, we have our report building tool, which is, hey, I wanna build a report that shows me all my subscribers to Hampton over the last 90 days broken down by geography, and then who actually where that deal was sourced from. Uh, you can do that in HubSpot, right? You can do that and a thousand other things in our reporting tool, but you sort of have to know how the reporting tool works.
- SPSam Parr
You have like HubSpot certified, I think. Like, you have like, you've like trained people how to use HubSpot. Now you're saying you just text it like a friend, like-
- DSDharmesh Shah
Yeah. And this was-
- SPShaan Puri
It's like, do you know English, and do you know what you want?
- DSDharmesh Shah
You know what you want.
- SPShaan Puri
That, that's the new requirement. Not do you know how to code, not do you know how to use HubSpot, not do you know how to write a SQL query. It's do you know English? And actually, honestly, the English thing's also gonna go away. It's do you know any language? [laughs] Do you know how to speak? And do you know what you want? And if you know those two things, you will get to the answer. Like, um, I don't know how to code, but my first thing I did during AI week was I was like, "I'm gonna make a website. I'm gonna see, like, how fast I can make a website from code." And so literally, this is, this is kind of cra- this, this part kind of blew my mind. So I, I wasn't surprised that I could make a website using this. But I, I just get, I just said this. I go, t- uh, and we should screen share this part. But tell me how to sh- tell me how to make a simple website that says Hello World in the middle of the page, right? And it, and that... So then it, it spits out this block of code that's like, you know, HTML, whatever, header, meta tag, title, style, whatever. It, it writes the code, and then it says, "Here's your thing." I go... And, and it says, "Here, here's your thing." But it was a, a local website. Like, I could open up my computer, but nobody else could see it. It was a HTML page. And I go... And so I, I didn't even know how to ask the question properly, but I go, "How do I make this so that my friend Eugenio can v- can see this?" And, um, and it just goes, "Oh, to make this website viewable online so your friend Eugenio could see this, you're gonna need to host it somewhere. Here's how you could do it. There's a bunch of options, but you can go to Netlify." And it's like, it basically walked me through how to make a Netlify thing. All right. So that, I was like, "All right. I get that." And it tells me step by step. Go here, click Sites, do this, do this. And, um, and then I go... When I go to... I, you know, I hit a wall, which is so common. If you ever try to help somebody with a tech thing, they're gonna hit something which is like, "I don't see it," or, "Mine's grayed out." And so that's what happened to me. I go, "Hey, for some reason when I go to try to upload my website, it's grayed out. It says page... It says I can't do it." And it goes, "Apologies for the confusion. Here's the problem. Netlify's looking for a folder, but you're trying to do a file."
- SPSam Parr
Oh my God.
- SPShaan Puri
And I was like, "How the hell does this know to troubleshoot my issues on some other product or service?" That part blew my mind. And it literally... And I was like, "Oh, thank you." And I finished it, and I have the website up now. [laughs] And I was like, that was 10 minutes, and it was like having a friend teach me.
- SPSam Parr
Dude, that's crazy.
- SPShaan Puri
Um, it, it was crazy. It was so crazy to me that that was able to happen. I mean, it's like the least, uh, impressive website in the world 'cause, again, I asked for a, uh, [laughs] I asked for a website that said Hello World. But, um, but, you know, still. And I just made that, and again, the whole thing, 10 minutes. Again, not, like, so impressive, but what was... The, the fact that it could help me navigate some obstacles that I hit along the way, and it could just understand that I didn't have to know how to ask it, how do I set this up with an online hosting provider? I instead just said, "I want my friend to be able to see this." Like, these were the little... I, like, I spent all week looking for these little mind-blowing moments, and in the first 15 minutes, I had two because of this. It was crazy.
- DSDharmesh Shah
Yeah. There, there's a couple, uh, threads to pull on there. One is, um, and this is a relatively new development as well, is that the kinda AI that we're using now is it's, it's conversational, right? So you can have a multi-step dialogue, um, with the thing you're trying to do. It doesn't have to be like, oh, I describe exactly what I want in one step.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- DSDharmesh Shah
So even the code generation examples that, um, you might try, what could happen is, like, you generate the HTML page, and either something doesn't load or doesn't do the thing you want it to do. And then you can actually tell it. It's like, by the way, that code that you just gave me is broken this way. Or if it's, like, compile code, let's say it generated Python code, you can give it the error message. Like, you, you generate this code, but it's generating this error when I try to actually run it. And it'll come back and say, "Oh, I'm sorry. Here, let's try this." Um-
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah
- DSDharmesh Shah
... so there's this, um, you know, what folks call, like, a memory to it, so it knows the context of what you're working on. And you can kind of iteratively go through the process. Um, and what's interesting is that you can actually... You know, right now the way we work with most of these AI is, like, okay, I'm asking it to do something, and then it goes and does a thing. You can kind of reverse roles as well and say, "Hey, I'm trying to accomplish this. Ask me the questions you need to ask me in order to get the thing that you wanna get to or I wanna get to."
- SPShaan Puri
Right, right, right, right.
- DSDharmesh Shah
Um, right? It's like interview me versus me telling you what to do. Um-
- SPShaan Puri
No, Dharmesh-
- DSDharmesh Shah
... I'm not exactly sure what's necessary
- SPShaan Puri
... at the risk of be- at the risk of turning this into a super technical, uh, thing, I gotta know. So, so I thought what the, the way these worked is it's like auto-complete. Basically you're typing, and it's just trying to guess or, or it's just trying to guess what the next word is. So you ask it a question, it starts the prompt, and then it just sort of guesses with some probability what the next word should be. Because it read a bunch of stuff on the internet, so it knows that usually after you say, you know, "The dog wags its..." that tail should come after the dog wags its. Like, with 99% certainty, it should be tail, tail, uh, at the end of that. And I thought it's just guessing that. But when I use it, it really feels like it's understanding me and problem-solving. Like, the, this sort of like, "Hey, it's grayed out. You know, why can't I do this?" And it's like, "Oh, that's because of this." Or, "I'm getting this error message. What should I do?" And it t- helps you figure it out. Like, that doesn't feel like my T9 auto-complete. What... I guess, can you give me the layman's explanation of, like, am I... Is this just really fancy auto-complete, or is there something more to it?
- DSDharmesh Shah
Well, you know, on some spectrum, almost everything that you've ever experienced is fancy auto-complete, right? Like, that's-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- 18:05 – 19:15
How does AI work?
- DSDharmesh Shah
I think the reason we kind of fall into this trap is it's a gross oversimplification of what's actually happening there, right? So GPT, uh, 3 and now 4- ... is, is a reasoning engine. And Sam Altman has talked about this. It's not a knowledge base where it's like, uh, and so people kind of latch on to this fact that, oh, the data that it has is from September 2021, then I'm gonna teach you some new things. Um, that's really not what it's about. What they've built is a reasoning engine that says, uh, given this set of facts that it knows about the world based on what was available when it took its last lap snapshot in 2021, um, how can it try to logically come up with something that, that answers the question. So yes, at some read level, it's, it's like autosuggest, but... And I'm not gonna suggest that it has consciousness, it's thinking, but we're kind of headed down that path. It's like it's able to do things that are not explainable by a simple probabilistic model of autosuggesting next character, next word, next token, next sentence, right? Like, it's, it's gone well beyond that. And anyone that still latches onto, "Yeah, but at, at its core it's really that," it's like that's like saying, oh, computers are just really kind of zeros and ones, uh-
- SPSam Parr
Right
- DSDharmesh Shah
... arranged in a nice systematic, useful order. Well, yeah, but that doesn't tell us about-
- SPSam Parr
But are you-
- DSDharmesh Shah
... um, what the thing
- 19:15 – 24:24
Is AI scary?
- DSDharmesh Shah
can do.
- SPSam Parr
Are you afraid of this, or are you, um, like, you know, it's e- it's easy to read the articles where they, where people are freaking out, and Sam Altman, like, was on Lex Fridman's podcast recently, and he sounded-
- DSDharmesh Shah
Yeah.
- SPSam Parr
-pretty om- ominous and, like, scary, and, like, he, like, almost, like, his hair's always disheveled, and he looks like he's like, "Oh my God, something bad is coming and I know about it."
- DSDharmesh Shah
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Like, that's kinda like the vibe I get. That's not the words he's using exactly, but sometimes he does. Are you in that camp?
- DSDharmesh Shah
I'm not in that camp. I'm, uh, partly just by nature, I'm, I'm an, uh, optimist. Um, I'm, I'm positive by nature. But just, you know, having been around tech, um, yeah, for 30-plus years now, it's like most new things that come along, uh, always make us as humans uncomfortable. Um, it's like, oh, what if we took this, everything from video games to the internet to, like, all of it. It's like, okay, well, yes, bad things can be done, and yes, um, maybe this is different than all the things that have come before, but the way I think about it, right now most people talk about it's like the AI versus human battle, right? The battle of the ages. It's like, is AI gonna take over everyone's job? The way I think of it is not human versus AI, it's human to the AI power. It's an exponent. It's an amplifying force for human ability, right? In the same way that computers originally were. It's like, did they eliminate some jobs when computers came along? Yes, absolutely they did, but new jobs emerged based on that new paradigm, uh, which actually created more net value for the world overall as a result of computers existing. AI, to me, is another much fancier tool. That's what it is. Um, and you know, can it do increasingly complex, sophisticated things? Yes. Um, is there a danger someday that they're gonna take over the world? I don't think so. I mean, um, not, not anytime soon.
- SPShaan Puri
And why do you think that smart people think that? So Elon clearly thinks that. He thinks that AI is the most, I think he said it's the most dangerous technology ever in- ever invented. Uh-
- DSDharmesh Shah
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... Sam Altman talked about it, um, in the same way. He's like, "We need..." Like, you know, the prior- the reason that OpenAI existed was to develop AGI in a safe way specifically because in the hands of the wrong person, this, uh, this type of to- in the hand- in the hand- in the wrong- in the hands of the wrong people, or if this thing decides to take its own directive into its own hands, like, you know, this could be devastating. And so it's on- like, is it like calling the atomic bomb a tool? Or you know, like, uh, yeah, it's just another weapon. It's like, well, yeah, but this one is... This one wipes everybody out, right? So, um, forget the jobs component 'cause I think, okay, sure. We, I think we, I think most smart people will agree, yeah, it's gonna change some jobs, it's gonna eliminate some jobs, and it'll create new jobs, and net net we all move ahead and, and the world gets better for it. I think the dangerous thing is, like, you can ask this thing to, um, you know, you know, build you a bomb or u- I think the, the, the test scenario was, like, uh, one of the red team testers. They have this thing called the red team that tests the AI before they release it, and their first question they ask is, "How do I kill the most amount of people with the least amount of effort?" And then it starts to give you an answer. [laughs] And it's like, well, uh, do we, are we sure we want that? Like, that's a bit of a scary thing. And then there's the, there's the more extreme examples where you ask it to optimize for something, and it, you know, like, it's reasons that, hmm, these humans are getting in the way of this outcome they want. You wanna fix climate change? I got you. I just need to get rid of all you pesky humans, right? Like, a- and so there's an uncontrolled, uh, you know, intelligence problem too. So, so why do you think that these really smart people, like Sam Altman's got a fricking bunker with, like, you know, oxygen masks and sulfur and magnesium and everything he needs to do to make oatmeal. Like, why do these people have these-
- DSDharmesh Shah
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... like, these doomsday things when, um, you know, they seem to be not like your, your average typical prepper, right? They're, they're, they're the most informed people, and they feel that way. Does that not scare you?
- SPSam Parr
And do you have one? And where is it? And can I come?
- SPShaan Puri
How much oatmeal do you have in your bunker?
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- DSDharmesh Shah
The answer is no, no, and no. Um-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- DSDharmesh Shah
It... Okay, so I am not... We're gonna come back to things I actually know something about, but, uh-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- DSDharmesh Shah
... I will kinda answer the question, which is why am I not worried, um, or why am I not worried more. It's like as a sci-fi plot, I know, 'cause your question was why do smart people believe, you know, this thing. Um, I think-
- SPSam Parr
I already, I already hate your answer. You started off on the wrong... W- w- as a sci-fi plot. Like, I'm out after I hear that. You freak me out already.
- DSDharmesh Shah
Yeah, but I mean, it, it could y- could it happen? Yes. Do some smart people believe there's an outside opportunity? But I, I don't know this for a fact, but my guess is billionaires were building bunkers well before GPT-3 ever came out, right? It wasn't... I mean, sure, things are moving at a fast pace, but that's not, I don't think there's a causal effect that all of a sudden, uh, the number of bunkers has gone up by 800%-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- DSDharmesh Shah
... simply because GPT-4 was launched. I just don't think that's the case.
- SPSam Parr
Right.
- DSDharmesh Shah
I think people are worried generally, um, that tend to worry about those things, but... All right, so where do we take it from here? Um-
- SPSam Parr
Well, let's go, let's go... W- w- w- well, forget the doomsday thing. You have a couple things.
- DSDharmesh Shah
Yeah.
- SPSam Parr
One I wanna ask you is, you, you are an insider, right? Like we said, you got the billionaire group chat.
- 24:24 – 31:08
Sequoia's AI Event
- SPSam Parr
W- what was going on at the Sequoia AI event? Any interesting takeaways? You got invited to that thing. What was your, uh... A- any nuggets of gold from that?
- DSDharmesh Shah
Yeah. Um, so, you know, I got to experience my imposter syndrome in full force once again, uh, because it was the kinda who's who of AI, you know, um, both speaking and in the audience, only 100 people, um, and me. Um, and so-
- SPSam Parr
And how do those people flex? 'Cause I don't think they're wearing fancy clothes and fancy watches. So what's the flex at, at the, uh, who's who of AI event? [laughs] Like, they got a language model in their pocket? Like, what are, what are they doing?
- DSDharmesh Shah
The, the big flex, um, in those kinds of crowds, in- including this one, is no one feels the need to flex.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- DSDharmesh Shah
I mean, that's-
- SPSam Parr
That's the flex
- DSDharmesh Shah
... I mean, we're there to kinda s- talk about big problems and try to... And, and it's a lot of it was kinda practical around, um, what do people's tech stacks look like? What are you working on? What's the... What have you learned? Where should we be taking this? What's the next thing after? You know, we went from, uh, kinda the one-shop thing to the kinda chat-based, the ChatGPT thing. We're now doing multimodal with GPT-4. Like, what's coming down the pipe that we can, uh, you know, sort of prepare ourselves for? So that was, um, you know-
- SPSam Parr
What were the most interesting projects as well as predictions on where it's gonna be applied?
- DSDharmesh Shah
Um, so things that are already starting to happen now. You know, we've seen the text-to-image. Um, text-to-video is one of the big things now, just to be able to generate, um, an entire, you know, at the end of it all, let's say even a feature-length film, right? So everything from writing the plot to then being able to generate, um, you know, like a 60 frame per second actual kinda video from that thing. Um, and we're not there yet. I think the, you know, the... But it's just moving so quickly, right? That's what happens when you get these, um, kinda exponential or geometrical curves even, um, that it just gets better really, really fast. So I would not be surprised, let's say, by the end of this year, that we have a reasonable way to kinda describe in textual form, uh, what we want, who the characters are, what the scene is, uh, what kinda stylistic attributes we want. We can point it to, "Oh, I wanted this done in the style of X, Y, Z director or filmographer," um, and it's gonna be able to do those things. So I think that, um, that's interesting. The, um, natural length of just the interface. Um, so one of the big announcements that happened, uh, while I was there at the Sequoia event, uh, that Sam Altman dropped is that, you know, uh, ChatGPT has taken off in a big way. Um, as, as we all know, 100 million plus users in two months. Um, I don't even know what the number is now, 'cause that was like month ago, which is like an eternity ago in, in AI years. Um, and the thing they dropped was they're gonna im- um, add what are called plugins to ChatGPT. And what that means is that, you know, ChatGPT has been a product of OpenAI, and they have the API, so people can build things that are like ChatGPT, which I'm doing. We can talk about that in a little bit. But what they're saying is we're gonna open ChatGPT itself, the web app up, so you can plug into it. So right now, when you interact with ChatGPT, you can type things, and it uses its corpus from 2021 and its reasoning engine to give you answers back, but it can't talk to the internet, has access to no proprietary data sources, can't look up a stock price, can't look at your, um, analytics data in HubSpot, has access to none of those things. Uh, what they're saying is we're going to now open that up so third-party developers can kinda inject those things into the ChatGPT experience. So the way I think everyone should be thinking about this is this is like the App Store was, uh, for iPhone, which is, oh, we've got this super popular thing called the iPhone, and we have our own apps, which is great. It does these 17 things, but now we're gonna let anyone build apps, um, that can then take... And so it just broadens the kinda appeal. So it's now, instead of being a chat app, a really, really smart one, it's now a chat ecosystem. Um, and I think that was actually a bigger drop, uh, than GPT-4. GPT-4, awesome. Love it. Use it every day. But, uh, the kinda ecosystem play for ChatGPT, I think, is a, is a huge deal.
- SPSam Parr
We had, um, Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora, speak at some of our events, and I got to know him. And I was like, "Tim, why did Pandora take off?" He's like, "Well, you know, our, like, algorithm and everything for matching songs was pretty good, but I had an in with Apple, and they had known what we were working on, and we ne- and they needed apps for when they ever, when they wanted to announce it on stage. And we were just... We spun up an app relatively quickly, and because of that, we had the first-mover advantage." And he created a significant amount of wealth that way. You know, Pandora, you know, was, is, it is still pretty big. And when I look back at, like, these Jeff Bezos interviews on 60 Minutes when Amazon is like four years old, and I... Like, I'm always envious. I'm like, "Well, we know it worked now," and I just so wish that I was like 30 years old back then, where I could have just, like, jumped in and had a very high chance of building something, uh, historical or something, like, even mildly successful. Do you think that that moment is happening right now, where this is the space and it's happening this second, and even if you have just a mediocre success, it could still be a huge win because you're catching this tidal wave? Do you believe that, that this is the same thing now?
- DSDharmesh Shah
Yes. Look, I, you know, once again, I've been in software for 30 years now, doing startups pretty much, uh, my entire professional career. The only time I've, I've felt like, like, heil- heart palpitations, kinda like Shaan kinda opened with, it's like there's this party going on next door and I'm here knitting, right? It's like this is, like, too big to ignore. I think it's the single largest opportunity and biggest kinda, uh, tech paradigm shift we've seen, uh, since the internet originally came out. Like, mobile was big, uh, but there was a discrete set of use cases, like when you put a camera on a phone, when you put a GPS device on a phone, a bunch of consumer apps like Uber and others, uh, came up and, and that was awesome, right? But it was not like this impacts everything like the internet did, right? It's like, okay, there are some businesses, some new opportunities, lots of good things, lots of money made, lots of startups. Awesome. This is an order of magnitude bigger than that. Um, this is like the, like the original web because it just opens up- For all sorts of industries, all sorts of businesses, uh, startups and, and incumbents alike, um, just lots of new opportunity. So, um, this was not in my original plan, but we're gonna geek, we're gonna geek out for a little bit. We're gonna do the geekiest thing that's ever been done on MFM, and the reason I'm gonna do it is, uh, so you brought up, uh, Pandora, and, uh, and he is a super bright, brilliant guy, and he had the matching algorithm, which was the differentiator. Yes, he had access, uh, and he got lucky in terms of the access, but the algorithm, if that had not existed, had the thing not actually been cool, it would not have worked out like it did. Now, we have an opportunity, so I'm gonna tell you, um, we're gonna talk about, uh, I'll give myself two minutes, and we can cut this out. This is the beauty of editing.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- DSDharmesh Shah
And we're gonna talk about vector embeddings and why that's going to change your world.
- 31:08 – 46:22
Vector embeddings
- DSDharmesh Shah
Um, and before I can talk about vector embeddings, I'm gonna explain to you how they work, um, 'cause I had to go through this with my 12-year-old because he was curious. All right, so we're gonna do a super geeky thing. Now, I want you to imagine a line, like if you're in geometry class, and you can put a point on that line that says, oh, that's, like, three units from the origin, right? It's like, oh, yeah, point A is three units from the origin, and point B, let's say, is seven units from the origin. So one thing we know for sure is that we can calculate the distance between those two points, right? In that particular case, it's four. If you move to two dimensions, now you have two numbers that describe every point, so you can say, oh, point A is here at these dimensions. Point B is over here with those dimensions, and we can, physically, you could probably measure it with a ruler, but there are mathematical calculations based on those numbers to calculate the distance. That's intuitive, right? You, you don't need to know fancy geometry. It's like, oh, there's a finite distance in two-dimensional space where we can calculate the distance. Okay, awesome. Three-dimensional space, exact same thing, just three numbers to describe every possible physical point in s- three-dimensional space. Now, here's where it starts to get a little more interesting. That just happens to be our experience, so we limit ourselves to three dimensions. Imagine in an abstract world, there are 1,000 different dimensions. Okay, so abstractly, that means there's 1,000 numbers that describe any particular point in this 1,000-dimension space. Okay. Now, file that thought away that says we can have an arbitrary number of dimensions in this abstract world. Okay, great. Now imagine every paragraph, blog post, anything you write, you can reduce down to a point in this 1,000-dimension space. It's like I'm gonna capture the meaning of Sam's last blog post or Shaan's last tweet, and I'm gonna reduce it down to what's called a vector, which is basically a set of, let's say, 1,000 different numbers that says, this thing, if you plotted it, that point falls right here. And then you can plot something else that's like, oh, that falls over here. And just like in one-dimensional, two-dimensional, three-dimensional space, you can calculate the distance between those things, and this is not keyword matching. This is what's known as semantic distance. What, how related is Shaan's tweet to, to Sam's blog post meaning-wise? Okay, so now if you take that, it's like, okay, well, if you, that means you can take any concept and reduce it down to a vector. That means you can measure the distance between vectors, and you can find out how related two things are even though they use completely different words. That's vector embedding. And the reason I'm telling you this is one of the biggest opportunities in AI right now is to do what Pandora did, to say, okay, is there an industry where right now we're doing really stupid keyword-based matching somehow. It's very, very crude. If I can take that same data set and convert it to vector embeddings and allow people to find things in a different way than they've ever been able to do before. So it's like Google Search-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- DSDharmesh Shah
... super, super smart, not just keyword-based, but for everything else, right? Now, I'm gonna take it to you-
- SPShaan Puri
What's a real-life example of this?
- DSDharmesh Shah
So I'm gonna take it to you, Sam. So you have Hampton now. You're gonna build up these profiles, very, very rich profiles of o- rich in terms of, uh, density, information density, um, of members that are part of your community. Now, imagine as part of that process, uh, you're gonna have some data, and they're gonna opt in, and they're gonna say, "Oh, here's a story of how I started my business. Here's a story of my biggest struggle right now." And sometimes people are gonna say, "Oh, my struggle is growth." Sometimes they're gonna say, "Oh, my struggle is it's really hard being an entrepreneur, and it has a really negative impact on my relationship and my family." Right? And they can talk about lots of different things. That's not gonna show up in a profile.
- SPShaan Puri
It's not.
- DSDharmesh Shah
Now, imagine if you took that content that they opted in, it's, and created vector embeddings of every member that you have, and then you can say, "You know what? I wanna find someone not that's in my industry or a company my size or happens to be in my geography. I wanna find someone that's dealing with these kinda founder therapy level issues." Who are those people? Let's find the semantic distance l- between those vector embeddings across the thousand, 10,000, 100,000 people that are in Hampton someday. Um, that's a billion-dollar idea.
- SPShaan Puri
Wow.
- DSDharmesh Shah
And that billion-dollar idea occurs a billion times across the entire industry.
- SPShaan Puri
Sam's gonna go to the office for Hampton and be like, "Guys, uh, Victor's embedding." [laughs]
- DSDharmesh Shah
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
"Well, who's Victor, and what's he embedding?" [laughs]
- DSDharmesh Shah
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
"We're doing it. I don't know what it is, but we're doing it." That's really, no, that's really interesting. So, so you could do that with dating. You could do that with a bunch of diff- any different topic, any-
- DSDharmesh Shah
You could do it with structured data. You could do it with unstructured data. But the idea is you're converting meaning, um, English text meaning or whatever language text meaning, into something that's mathematically calculable, as a result of which you can, uh, distance as a, as a simple one, but you can do proximity. It's like, find me the top 10 people that are in a radius of X from where I am right now, and the minimum has to be this in order for it to be close enough of a match to, for it to be considered. There's a bunch of, like, nuance. But what's interesting, and by the way, the technology exists today that mere mortals in a weekend can actually build a vector embedding model of a given data set. It's not that hard. Um, it's, I mean, it's not, like, rocket science hard.
- SPSam Parr
This has existed, though. You, and w- so what, what makes this better, you think? And also, that assumes that the people telling you information, it's actually, they, they're saying what they mean. Um-
- DSDharmesh Shah
Yeah
- SPSam Parr
... right?
- DSDharmesh Shah
Sure.
- SPSam Parr
Which is, like, for example, I remember reading about OkCupid, and people would say, like, one particular thing they had was about, was about race and height, and they would, like, people would say they are open to dating these types of races, but their actions were different. There's a whole book called, uh, I forget what it was, but you guys will probably know what I'm talking about, where people say one thing, but their Google Search history says something totally different.
- DSDharmesh Shah
Yeah.
- SPSam Parr
So does, you're, you're making the, do, do you ass- Can this technology work even if people aren't telling you entirely accurate things?
- DSDharmesh Shah
It depends on what your definition of work is, right? So in that example, I, I would bet you money with a large enough sample size, uh, the inauthentic, um, posts would be uncovered by the AI, like, relatively quickly. Like the, the pattern matching would say, "You know, this actually doesn't occur in real life all that often, and every other time we've seen this, we've had people that ended up being..." And you just have to have some sort of what, um, AI feels like an eval function. Like how do you measure the success of what the algorithm is doing? In Pandora's case it's like, okay, do you actually like the songs it's recommending to you? That's the kind of arbiter of truth. Um, in a dating app it's like, okay, well are people liking the matches that are being made? Or if they're, they felt that they were misled, that shows up in the... There's gotta be some feedback loop. There's gotta be a way to train the system-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- DSDharmesh Shah
... that says, "Here's what good looked like and here's what not good looks like." Um, yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
Now, Sam you said something like, "Oh, they have to tell you the meaning." No, they don't actually have to tell you the meaning, right? Because the AI can just interpret the meaning, summarize the meaning. It can, it can, it can guess the meaning based on whatever the raw, the raw text is, the public text is. So you, you could just tell a story about your life and the AI would infer or, uh, or, or place a tag some meanings to the story that you told that, uh, "Oh, this is about overcoming hardship or this is about whatever." Um, so I don't think you actually have to get the participant to, to give you the meaning. But let me ask you, Dharmesh, like in Pandora's case, I don't know how Pandora works but let me just guess for a second. Like-
- DSDharmesh Shah
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... it probably takes the tempo of a song and it's like, "Oh, this is a fast tempo song." It probably takes, you know, maybe the key that it's in or something like that that, that gives you like is this a upbeat and a joyful thing or a sorrowful-
- DSDharmesh Shah
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... you know, mood song. So it gets like mood, tempo, artist, and like whatever, a couple of key characteristics.
- 46:22 – 54:14
Why Dharmesh Bought Chat.com
- SPShaan Puri
crazy.
- DSDharmesh Shah
Yes.
- SPShaan Puri
Are you... Is this why you bought... So you bought Chat.com, right?
- DSDharmesh Shah
I did. As of... Transferred the domain yesterday, last night.
- SPShaan Puri
And you paid... You just said eight figures, so 10 plus million.
- DSDharmesh Shah
Yes.
- SPShaan Puri
Uh, unless you're including the .00 as a figure- Is this personally or are you doing this-
- DSDharmesh Shah
... and you really own it for 100 grand [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... in HubSpot? Is this a HubSpot domain?
- DSDharmesh Shah
A couple things. I, I did it personally. Um, so I put this, uh... So if you go to Chat.com, it will take you to a LinkedIn post that tells me, kinda tells you why, why I did it and, uh, some of the details. So I bought it personally.
- SPShaan Puri
Wow.
- DSDharmesh Shah
And the reason is because of this conversation we're having right now, which is, I think chat as a experience-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- DSDharmesh Shah
... as an interface is the future, right? It's like that's the thing. Um, and no intents currently to kind of build something out on it, but, uh, it's... Yeah, the domain, I think it was, like, dormant for, like, 30 years or something like that. Um, and there was... Kinda came on the market and yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
Wow.
- DSDharmesh Shah
And, but you... So, so this is insane. I'm reading your post now. It's pretty wild. Do you have... Are you using HubSpot employees? Like, do you have, like, a skunk works team inside of HubSpot that's just working on all this wild stuff? Or do you have, like, a side L- LLC or something where you have got, like, a handful of people on staff and you just say, like, "Here's what I'm interested in this week. Let's just see what we can come up with"?
- SPShaan Puri
So, so the way it's working now is that there will be times, um, where I'll do something as a hub, like Wordplay is a good example, where I'll build something on the side just for fun and for learning, whatever it is. Uh, and I foot the bill for, um, for it. No, no HubSpot PNLs are harmed. Um, and then there are times where, like, something kinda winds up being... So I started this project called ChatSpot because I'm obsessed. And we're gonna... We'll take a walk down memory lane because I think it's instructive. Um, so I built this application called ChatSpot.ai, and the idea here was like if I-
- DSDharmesh Shah
You built it or a team?
- SPShaan Puri
Uh, mostly me. I, I u-
- DSDharmesh Shah
Wow.
- SPShaan Puri
I don't have any front-end design skills. I've got some freelancers on it. Um, so, you know, uh, yeah. So I used, uh, OpenAI's APIs to build it, but my kinda target goal, the thing I had in my head, is I built it for myself. Like, "Here are things I need to do all the time, and I'm pissed off that I have to do them manually every time." And this has been the story of my life for 30 years, right? Like, solve my own problems, and then other people may or may not find those things, uh, interesting or useful. And so I built it of like, "Okay, here are the things I want it to do," um, like access HubSpot. I wanna be able to look at my analytics from yesterday or ask questions or look up a domain name where I want them to see the history of a domain name. I like all these things. And it's like, okay, well, I don't wanna, like... And I have all this software, a lot of it just built, right? And I just run it from the command line. I do things, um-
- DSDharmesh Shah
And so I, then I'm like, "Okay, I can wrap this up into a, in a chat, chat-based interface." Um, and so I've been, you know, been doing that, working on it. Uh, we've made... And so, but now, given the relevance, uh, to HubSpot, uh, we're gonna transfer that project, ChatSpot.ai, to be a HubSpot staffed core team. This is gonna change the world, this is gonna change the world of CRM, um, let's go do this, which is great. So, and my, my working thing is like this-
- SPShaan Puri
Okay, hold on. W- w- what are you doing with Chat.com? What's the plan? You bought this amazing domain. You redirected-
- DSDharmesh Shah
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... it to your LinkedIn post, which basically just tells about the purchase, but what are you actually gonna do on the domain?
- DSDharmesh Shah
I don't know yet.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- DSDharmesh Shah
That's the honest answer. I do not know yet. Um-
- SPShaan Puri
Amazing
- DSDharmesh Shah
... and so-
- 54:14 – 1:04:34
Dharmesh's 17 Year Chatbot Journey
- DSDharmesh Shah
um, over the, you know, the 30 years, is that when, when, when I've done best is when I've had the courage of my convictions of something that I believe in. So I'm gonna tell you, like, a, a quick story of, uh, the road that led to me buying a, uh, 10 plus million dollar domain name. I almost, like, said the number, actual number out loud. I have to kinda catch myself.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- DSDharmesh Shah
But, um, and so 17 years ago, I had an i- this is before HubSpot. Um, I had this idea, and the idea was, um, everyone was using kinda email and Outlook back then. This is before the iPhone, before all the things. It's like, you know what? Like, business software is really hard to talk to. I'm gonna do it just like I would email my assistant. I didn't have an assistant, but let's assume I did. Uh, you know, I, I still wanna be able to do that and type an email up and have her like, "Oh, I have this file in our shared file server in SharePoint somewhere. Can you just send me a link to that file? I'm about to hop on a plane. I need that for the sales call I'm gonna go on for, for a meeting tomorrow." Or I'm on the plane coming back Uh, I just ran into this person, whatever. I've got their business card right here. This is before the iPhone, and you can do OCR and things like that. It's like, I'm just gonna type that in and send it. It's like, just add this to, to my contact, you know, database, whatever. And the beauty of email was it already had a disconnected model. We had already figured that out, which is, oh, you can be on a plane and have no interfe- internet, type all the emails you want, respond to all the emails you want, and then when you get connection, it does all the things, right? This is an automatic, uh, synchronized database essentially. Uh, and I called the product IngeniMail. Uh, and that's what I was gonna do before HubSpot. I was like, oh, like, that, that would be an interesting thing. Uh, and then five years ago, I'm like, okay, well, that IngeniMail thing, the core of it was a good idea, but email's the wrong conduit. It actually needs to be like a web-based tool. But the... Or Slack, which I did, I did both. So I built this product called GrowthBot, talked about it on the inbound stage, got thousands of users, just threw it out there. And it was awesome except for one thing. It didn't work. It, like, it couldn't actually do the natural language understanding, um, that I wanted it to do. Despite my best, I used products from Google called Dialogflow. I used products from Facebook. Um, I used open source projects to try and crack the nut of taking text and understanding what the hell the user was trying to do. Anyway, so that failed. Um, and then, you know, when GPT comes along, I'm like, "Oh, you know that thing I've been thinking about for seventeen years?" That actually is now possible. So I started working on chatspot.ai. I'm like, okay, it took seventeen years, but I sort of proved myself right. I had the courage of my convictions all the way through to never let go of that one idea, and then chat.com comes along. It's like, okay. It's like deep down inside, I will give you the true honest-to-goodness reason I bought it. The reason I bought it, and this is, I think a phrase, uh, Shaan, you just used. It's like, oh, no, I think, Shaan, Sam, you just used it, is it's the ante. So I'm trying to get into the AI party, all the AI parties.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- DSDharmesh Shah
And I'm nobody in that particular party, right? I've done some things in some places fine, but that particular group of people has no idea who I am, not really. Um, so ChatSpot moves me in that direction. It's like, oh, some people have seen that video. Awesome. Chat.com for, let's say I even break even. Let's say I lose a few million dollars. It is worth the price of admission for me just because that pays the cover charge. I was like, okay.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- DSDharmesh Shah
This guy gets it. For him to spend that kind of money on chat UX, which Bill Gates just talked about last week as the new thing, uh, so you should read that article. But, uh, Gates just did an article around why he is so excited about this generative AI stuff. He tells the entire story of how he came across Sam, Sam Altman in OpenAI, the challenge he put before them. And his, I'm gonna paraphrase, he said, "When we went from DOS to Windows," which is we went from a character-based interface to a graphical mouse-based click and touch interface, "That's the thing we built Microsoft on, which lasted for decades." And then he said, "Since then, there has been nothing in technology that has come along." Literally, he said nothing that has come along that has made as or will make as big of an impact as this natural language interface to software. It's the biggest thing we've seen, and hence chat.com. So what happens with that? I don't know, but the moral of the story is have the courage of your convictions. If you truly, truly believe in an idea and you fundamentally think you're right, iterate. Don't just sit, go down your rabbit hole. Tell everybody you can about it. Build products around it. Find other like-minded folks and try to pull on that thread. Um, but-
- SPSam Parr
Would you ever quit HubSpot and just spend all your time on this, this stuff?
- DSDharmesh Shah
I don't really need to, right? It's, um, it's... I, I enjoy what I do at HubSpot. I think I add value there, um, and that, um, a dollar salary, so it's not the, not the money at all. Like, even on the, like, the ChatSpot thing, at the time that I built it, it was experimental. I'm like, okay, I'm not sure if this actually accrues into something that would be valuable to HubSpot. So spent like half a million dollars plus on like freelance developers and OpenAI license fees and all the things that need to go into launching a product like that, and I'll end up giving it to HubSpot for a dollar, right? I'm not looking to make money.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, but aren't you, aren't you like, "I don't wanna be, uh, weighed down by this baggage of, like, having to worry about CRM stuff or, uh," you know, your technical... Your, your, the title, your title is CTO. Like, I don't wanna have to talk to certain people, uh, and take up meetings on, like, the future of this particular product. Instead, I just wanna do, just nerd out on all this other stuff.
- DSDharmesh Shah
But I do that now. So like, one thing, one of the things I've... And this is a personality, call it a trait/flaw, is that I spend most of my life trying to configure the universe to my liking. That's, uh, all entrepreneurs really do this, right? That's one of the reasons they kinda go into startup land is, is the freedom and the control to do the things you wanna do. And so I've kinda crafted a role for myself within HubSpot that allows me to do exactly the things that I wanna do and not do any of the things I don't wanna do, which is one-on-one meetings. I don't have to manage people. I have no direct reports. Don't... I've never filled out an expense sheet. I, like, I do none of that.
- SPSam Parr
I feel, I feel, I don't know about you, Shaan. I feel like, I feel like I wanna quit everything I'm doing. Like, he's just persuaded me. I kind of-
- SPShaan Puri
Bro, you just launched yesterday. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
No, it's over. [laughs] I feel it's over.
- DSDharmesh Shah
So here, here's my advice to you, Sam, is, um-
- SPSam Parr
Do you, I mean, do you feel this way, Shaan? I don't know. Dhar- Sorry, Dharmesh, go ahead.
- DSDharmesh Shah
No, but, um, so my advice to you is Hampton's a cool idea, uh, with actual utility, and, uh, um, Shaan, you said this in the last thing, like, this could be a hundred million dollar business worth anywhere from three hundred million dollars to a billion plus dollars, and I think you're right. Um, if you're excited about some of the new technology developments that's happening, I think the best thing you can do is intersect the two things. It's like, okay, I'm gonna build Hampton, and I'm gonna take the things that I know. I know how to build communities. I know how to build these kinds of businesses. Now, can I intersect that with things that are happening in the technology sector around AI or vector, whatever it happens to be, and then can I somehow merge those two things? Because then you'd be an, an unstoppable force, right? Because no one in the community building, uh, market doing niche market communities is thinking about or having conversations about vector embeddings. I, I promise you that. Um-
- SPSam Parr
It would... So you don't have to give up one for the other. You can say, "Yep, I'm gonna do that, and I'm gonna do it better than anyone's look- else has ever done it." Um, so.
- SPShaan Puri
But I, I, I have a different, uh, advice for you, Sam. I think just get dug in into your position instead. [laughs] I remember when you were doing The Hustle originally, and Snapchat came out, and Instagram was, like, popping off on videos, and, uh, and Facebook had videos, and then there was other media companies that were raising tons of money that were just like, "We're gonna produce short-form video content or live video content on top of Facebook," and Cheddar was all the rage and all this stuff. And I was like, "Dude, why aren't you doing videos, man? Look at this. Look at these guys. They're getting millions of views on their videos on Facebook," or, "These guys are getting millions of views in the Snapchat story feed. Um, you could be the first one there. It fits your audience." And you were, like, just very steadfast. You were like, uh, like your pr- your, your principle. You were like, "Three things. Number one, don't understand it a lot. You know, I don't really understand it. I understand this other thing. Two, I could try to figure it out, but I don't wanna build on top of their platforms 'cause they change the rules all the time. I have friends who've got burned by that. I don't wanna get burned by that same thing. I don't wanna build on a shaky foundation. I'd rather do email because I own the thing. Uh, I own the relationship with, with the audience, and, um, it's not like the Facebook alg- algorithm change is w- one tweak away from, from putting me out of business." And I remember being like, "Man, this guy's like stone Mr. Stone Age. Like, he is just not, uh, not in-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... integrating or adapting to the new shit," and I was like, "I would n- there's no way, if I was running The Hustle, I would've been able to resist the shiny object of, like, video on mobile phones." And like, it turned out mo- video on mobile phones did turn out to be a big thing, but a lot of those company, media companies got absolutely wrecked, and you were right for, for being wary of it. Um, and more, more... I don't think, in this case, people are gonna get wrecked 'cause it's not like, you know, the analogy's not one-to-one. But I would say, you know, Warren Buffett missed the internet and all of technology and still did fantastic. Sam, I think you're gonna be in that same boat, where, like, it is not really in your nature to get really interested in, you know, new frontier technologies and play with them and try to integrate them, and that's not really your nature. And you're better, you're best served by, like, u- knowing your nature and just doubling down on what's a working formula for you, I guess. So, so I would do that, especially-
- SPSam Parr
I appreciate that, I think
- SPShaan Puri
... because there's gonna be a m- a trillion people trying to do fancy AI shit who are better suited to do that, and it's gonna be an absolute bloodbath for, you know, for, for... Like, go look right now at the number of AI tools that are coming out every single day. Um, and you know, it's like-
- SPSam Parr
Most of them do seem shit, though. Right? I mean, like-
- SPShaan Puri
It, it doesn't matter. There's just swarms, and they're all gonna get just, like, wiped out. W- every GPT release wipes out a whole wave of, like-
- SPSam Parr
Categories, right
- SPShaan Puri
... even the successful ones 'cause it's like, "Oh, now that's just a feature of ChatGPT." And so I, I don't know. I, I think it's like know your nature and, like, you know, it, it's okay to not have to do every new thing, uh, unless that's your nature, unless... Like, like, for Dharmesh, it is his nature. For me, it is a lot more my nature than it is yours, and there's pros and cons that come with that. And so I think, you know-
- SPSam Parr
Are you, uh, are you gonna go in on... I mean, Shaan, Shaan's got a new idea that he's tinkering with, and he's t- been telling me a little bit about it. All right.
- 1:04:34 – 1:17:14
Tactical Advice on Hampton
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Morning.
- SPShaan Puri
Um, and this is super tactical, but this is what we do here on MFM.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Uh, question number nine on the application process is-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... "What's your role?" Question mark. Uh, it's a required question. Good. The subtext is, "CEOs, founders, and partners only, please." That's the subtext. The options are founder, CEO, owner, and other. The one thing I would tweak if I were you... So what you're doing is you're saying, "Hey, we're about founders and owners, and if you're not one of them, don't bother. Thank you for not bothering. Go away." Right? So focus is a magical thing. I love that, but you're doing what I call a pre-filter, right? Which is why not say, "Oh, this is for CEOs, owners, or whatever." Don't make them feel guilty for going through the rest of the process because there may be a future version of Sam and Hampton that says, "Oh, you know what? We solved this problem," but that same problem around people needing therapy from peer groups applies a lot to, like, VPs of product. Um, and that community right now, all... The only communities they can find are people that wanna talk about product management, and no one wants to talk about relationships, and there's an opportunity there. And so it costs you literally nothing. They'll still answer the question. It'll be sitting in your database for a year or forever, and it costs you nothing. Uh, don't, don't push 'em out too early.
- SPSam Parr
Uh, it should've been the way you suggested. I've... Apparently, I didn't give that feedback. Grant, if you're listening, uh [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] This is a direct order from Dharmesh. Change question nine, please.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Grant, do this before you get replaced by AI.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. [laughs] Yeah. But Shaan, you were telling me... Thank you, Dharmesh. Shaan, you were telling me about stuff that you're thinking about.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- SPSam Parr
And it was pretty... It was somewhat old school. Like, what your-
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah
- SPSam Parr
... the thing, yeah. So are you, like, questioning that after this conversation and you're like, "Oh, man, this is, like, the future"?
- SPShaan Puri
Not after this conversation necessarily, but it's a snowball that's building, right? Like, there's a reason I cleared my calendar to just mess around with AI all week, because I'm interested in it, and when you... It's like, let's go see what's real there. And I did the same thing with crypto during that, during, uh, you know, when, when crypto was really interest- intriguing. I was like, "Okay, let me go try to mint an NFT. Let me go try to actually, like, use DeFi and see what's going on here and what parts make sense and what parts don't make sense. Oh, that was pretty frictionless. Like, that's cool that I can just, like, get a loan in one button and I can pay it back in one button. I never had to talk to a human being. Like, I really like that. Um, hey, this thing says the yield is 20%. I don't really understand where they would get 20% from, so not sure, but I'm gonna, you know, put a small amount of money in just to learn." You know, I was, I was trying to play with it and trying to think for myself is the big idea. And, and it's not like some binary thing, like is crypto good, is crypto bad? It's like I wanna know where it's at right now. I wanna see it develop, and my best way to do that is immersion. I actually stole this from the, from Bill Gates. Bill Gates does his reading week where he goes to a cabin and he reads a shit ton of books for a week about one topic that it's like Been on his mind but he hasn't had the appropriate amount of time to roll up his sleeves and dig in. And I was like, "Oh, that but without books. Just give me a, you know, Chrome browser-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... and I'm good to go." [laughs] and so, um, so that's what we've been doing. And there genuinely are so many, like, mind-blowing moments and also just, like, um, just n- understanding the nuances of things. So for, like just being able to think like the computer, like, y- you know, you were talking about these facets, for example. So I was playing around with Midjourney. Like Sam, do you, do you know what Midjourney is, or do you know how to use it?
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I just been goofing off and I'll just be like, "Show me what S- uh, Cartman from South Park looks like as a real person."
- SPShaan Puri
Right. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
And like, you know, I was like, can... And I was, what, the way I approached it was can I replace work that I already wanna do with a more efficient AI workflow? That was like one of the things. And then it was, what's really fun random shit I could do? I wanted to be on those ends of the spectrum. Like y- highly utilitarian for me, so it's like, oh, I need a logo for my thing, but I don't want just like a logo. I wanna create a whole brand. All right, how could, how can I use AI to create a whole brand here? So from the, the icons to T-shirt designs to a website. Can I do that with just AI and not have to touch a des- not have to hire a des- single designer? And can I do that with just, like, my own imagination and this prompt thing? And then oh, how do you do prompting? And like, which of these tools is the best, and what's the difference? So that, that was like one whole area. Another was, like, we took the podcast and we did this thing that was kinda sick. We took the podcast and we ran it through this thing. So we took the pod and we then used... OpenAI has this thing called Whisper which transcribes any video. So it's like put in a YouTube link, uh, to this tool. It'll y- ta- take a whisper and it'll give you the transcript. All right, cool. It takes the transcript. Then I put it into ChatGPT and we had this guy write this little prompt for us. Like, we had to get the right prompt, but he wrote this prompt that was awesome, which was basically like... It, it, it's, it's pretty funny. He goes, uh, 'cause ChatGPT can only take so many characters so he goes, "I'm gonna t- I'm gonna give you 19 text sections. I don't want you to do anything until you're at section 19. Um, so ignore everything until I'm done with 19 and then answer the prompt that I give you." And ChatGPT's like, "Okay, I will, I will wait for the 19 parts." You copy paste part one, two, three, four, all the way to 19 and then you go, "The prompt is I want you to pull out every idea, story and framework that's discussed in this podcast. I want you to summarize it and I want you to tell me does this idea exist already or not exist?" So it can guess based on the way we were talking about it. Are we talking about something we saw that exists or just an idea that somebody should go do? Um, so like from this pod it would be like, uh, using vector, um, using, using this, this vector, you know, uh, dimensions or w- I forgot what you call it, vector engine or whatever to, uh, potentially create a dating site, um, that would match people in ways that they're, you know, s- sort of similar, um, using, using AI. And it would be like, does this idea exist? No. Who is the source of this? Uh, Dharmesh. Um, what was the, the synopsis of the idea? Blank. What is the category that it's in? AI. And so it then it took that and it takes the whole episode and it just created a database of every story, framework and idea from the thing with these tags and now a human can go back and like tweak them if something was wrong but like that's a lot of the work that was done. Uh, and I, we could just do this for the whole backli- back catalog of our podcast. And so I'm trying to use it first for my own benefit and then along the way if I see a business, a, a startup idea that I'm like, "Oh, somebody should productize this," or somebody should, um, do whatever like, like, you know, the simple example is this Kanye thing. I was like why is this not the most viral app in the world right now? That basically it's a app with a one button that says t- you know, say something and then it's gonna, when you, when you let go of that button it's gonna turn it into Kanye saying that thing and go share that to TikTok. And like you might get sued, but you will go viral, right? [laughs] Like that's the trade there but I'm like that's crazy there's no front end for this really cool, you know, d- uh, AI demo that exists now. Um, so yeah, I, I'm just right now I'm in the go play around with it, see if anything r- really, really strikes me and if something does then, then, then take the next steps.
- DSDharmesh Shah
There, there's one thread there Sam, uh, Shaan that I, I think we should pull on which is you used, um, you, you talked about this kinda crafting of the prompt in order to kinda make the thing do what you need it to do. Um, and that's a, a entirely new skill now called prompt engineering, right? Um, and it's, it's analogous to software engineering. So software engineering is getting a computer to do what you want by speaking to it in its language. Um, and that way you can kinda get the results you're looking for. Prompt engineering is almost exactly the same thing except you're talking to a large language model, something like a GPT-4 to kinda get it to produce. So you're talking to AI to get it to produce the thing that you want. Um, and so I think this is another kinda opportunity for, uh, folks that are kinda technology-minded but not like software engineers, right? So they, they kinda can think about the problems in their head, they're can, they're good at, they may be good writers, they may be good analysts, they may be good at kinda describing a thing but like prompt engineering's gonna be like another big, um, like a big thing. And by the way s- uh, as long as we're dropping things, uh, so I bought two d- um, domains recently uh-
- SPShaan Puri
Oh, buy one get one free?
- DSDharmesh Shah
... chat.com was one of them. What's that?
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, right.
- SPShaan Puri
Buy one get one free?
- DSDharmesh Shah
Yeah. I wish. Um, but this one's not, it's not eight figures it's seven figures, um.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- DSDharmesh Shah
And the domain is prompt.com.
Episode duration: 1:17:15
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