Daniel Khachab: "We Are in the Middle of a Cold War for AI Talent" | E1220

... 100%. I think SaaS is dead. Great companies, at least from headcount perspective, get smaller and not bigger. I mean, you go in a, in a different country fighting for talent, that to me is Cold War. In Europe today, we're not producing the chips, we're not producing the energy, we don't have the foundational layer models. Now the real downside to me is that it's that one billion mark. Once we come unicorn, then people think, "Oh, we made it." Like, who the fuck wants to be a rainbow-colored pony? Like, I don't want to be a unicorn. We need more long-term commitment as well. Like, we need founders to say, "I'm going to vis- invest 15 to 20 years. I'm going to commit this now, a substantial part of my life, the best years of my life to make this happen."

Ready to go? Dan, I am so excited for this. Dude, we met at a KOTU dinner with Dan Rose a while ago now, so I'm so excited that we can make this happen in person.

Very likewise. Thank you for having me. Really looking forward to this.

So I want to just dive right in. You were a SaaS company.

Yeah.

You were a darling of the, like, traditional SaaS market, raised a lot of venture money. Why did you decide to pivot from SaaS to 100% of your revenue coming from AI?

I think what kind of gave the spark was just a couple of sleepness, sleepless nights in a row. Because, like, this new technology came out, GPT, and I, like ChatGPT, and I, I played around with it. And then at some point, I, I just couldn't sleep and was literally sitting on my couch, in the dark, staring in- into nothing because I was like, "Man, this thing is gonna learn how to code in no time. And maybe not now, maybe not next year, but maybe '27 and t- maybe in '28, like where's our technological moat is gonna be?" Like, like, it might just be gone, like anyone maybe able to replicate what we have built over years within days. And so I'm like, "Wow, that's gonna be a big shift in company building, and how we gonna position ourselves to win in, in, in such an environment?" And, and while, while I believe that there is some moats, um, I think there were, like, three things that, um, that made us go A- made us go AI first. And, and I think the first thing was, is like, hey, like there's two scenarios that are gonna happen. First scenario is someone is gonna come and replicate our technology, do maybe things in a better way, create mo- more user value, and it's gonna disrupt us. Scenario two is it's actually us doing that. Us disrupting ourselves, um, and hopefully also our, our, our, our competition. And so one of our core values is always play offense, and so we gotta play offense also in that, and we actually have to be that, that driver. I think that's one. The second thing is, you know, if it's true that company building is gonna change so fundamentally because so much value is coming out of the API, then it's also true that there's a lot of skills to be learned. And, um, for every single role within a company, and so we might not know how the future's gonna look like, but the best way to position us for the future is to learn how to build with AI on every single part of the organization. So essentially we're in a race to upskill our teams. And, and, and more so, you know, I w- I told our team at, at some point, you know, "If you were to leave JhoCo tomorrow, and you would not have the skills on how to build with AI, then your skillset will be obsolete." So, so it's also our responsibility as an, as an employer to give our employees the opportunity to learn the most relevant skills, um, of the century.