E210: How Startups Can Avoid Being Disrupted by OpenAI w/Eric Olson

0:00How do you keep yourself from getting your lunch eaten from the OpenAIs and Groks and Geminis of the world? This is a question that is on every single founder and investor looking at the AI application layer of where is that line between horizontal and vertical? I think we're getting some pretty interesting data points start to come in because OpenAI has over the last year started to launch a few tertiary products beyond their just general chatbot. An example of one is they recently launched a meeting recorder transcription extension of ChatGPT that directly competes with your granolas of the world that are built into your Zoom meetings.

0:39That's done basically nothing to disrupt a company or product like granola. And everyone still thinks that granola adds all these additional features of delight and some additional depth to the product. If that's the case, I think there's so much room for vertical products to continue to exist. If a product that is as simple as a meeting transcriber in your Zoom window can't be fully disrupted by these horizontal models, there's so much of a different products that we've done. Congrats on your Series A led by Union Square. You also had Nat Friedman and Dan Gross, fabled AI investors. Tell me about where consensus is today.

1:14Yeah, no, appreciate the kind words. Super excited to get that round done. And USB has obviously got an incredible track record and specifically an incredible track record at our stage. And then, as you said, Matt and Daniel, you know, biggest names and some of the biggest names in AI investing today and obviously been in the headlines quite a bit lately as part of the AI talent wars. As far as where we're at today, yeah, we're kind of in this track from Series A to Series B. We have about 20 employees now. We have about 5 million users now worldwide. And tracking towards some of those Series B revenue metrics trying to grow in the 20 % month-over-month range.

1:51You mentioned these AI talent wars. I've never seen anything like it. Somebody turned down a billion-dollar offer over four years. I don't know if that's true or not. But it's these absurd numbers. How does an AI company compete against the metas and the open AIs of the world today? Yeah, I saw the same. I think it was a billion over four years and maybe even won like 1.5 billion. I mean, it's crazy. We're talking contracts bigger than any sports contracts ever given. And these folks are kind of the modern day athletes in some ways. You know, I think for a company like us, you have to know the game that you're playing.

2:26And I think fortunately, to some extent, we're not exactly playing in this same game that some of these big labs and hyperscaler companies are. What I mean by that is a lot of the folks who are getting these astronomical members are this group of, you know, 100 or so folks who are really at the cutting edge of frontier model research and know the magic sauce of how to get these language models from soup to nuts out the door. And that isn't what an application layer startup like ourselves is really trying to do. You know, we are obviously using language models and using AI in our products, and we need to have people who know the models in and out.

2:59But it is much more of a software engineer classic with some AI sprinkled in experience that we're looking for, which are not necessarily the folks getting the billion dollar price tags. That's really concentrated to a very, very, very, very small amount of people. So we're more kind of competing. We're still competing against big companies for folks like that. But it's more of like what startups have always had to do when competing against big companies. Maybe you could double click a little bit about what consensus is and who your product is for. Yeah, yeah. So ConsenSys is an AI search engine for scientific and academic research.

3:34Think of us like if anybody's ever used a Google Scholar or a PubMed at any point in their academic or professional lives, we're trying to build the 2025 AI native version of those tools. Another way to think of it is like super verticalized perplexity for a specific document type and for a specific user use case. So people who are trying to do academic and scientific research. So what that means in practice is the folks using our tool are lots of students, academic researchers, academic faculty members, those in industry. A lot of clinicians use us to do some scientific research, sometimes also answer clinical questions.

4:09And then folks across the industry, we have a lot of R &D workers at biotechs and pharma companies, even R &D workers like CPG companies. Anywhere where real scientific academic research is being done, we usually will have quite a bit of pocket of users using consensus. How big of a TAM or a market is this? Yeah. So I think there's, you know, any way you kind of slice up a TAM, you're making some things up. But to give you a few ways to kind of look at it. So the number quoted a lot for knowledge workers is about a billion users. And I don't think that academic or scientific research applies for all billion of those users.

4:48But if you look at some of those reports of like what are the personas and roles within that billion, about 500 million of those billion have some use case for academic or scientific research. So that's folks in academia, folks in healthcare, and then some miscellaneous industry jobs like R &D, pharma, even in financial services, if you're in the healthcare or biosciences world, there is a use case for a tool like this. So I think the total addressable market is about 500 million end users. And then as a good proxy for that number, Google Scholar, based on their traffic does about 50 million monthly active unique users, PubMed somewhere in the 20-ish million number.

5:25I think of that being some fraction of that 500 million using it on a monthly basis, that about makes sense. So I think without even really expanding our market, which I do think that we can do, of making it more accessible to use research, meaning there's more people who might benefit from using research in the work, I think we can expand that 500 million number. But I think that's a good starting point of people who need insights or need to use these papers today. I think it's about 500 million end users. And I used Google Scholar when I was in grad school. Most people did. How do you guys improve upon Google Scholar?

5:58And maybe talk to me about a couple of use cases. Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the most exciting things about our business is that we are competing against a product that's been frozen in time for about 20 years now. Google Scholar was super innovative. And I think there's a whole interesting story about vertical search if it was one of the first real used vertical search products that split off of a general purpose search engine back in the early 2000s when Google split it off, which I think speaks to the need of a specialization in this use case. But because it was split off, they actually demonetized it.

6:29They no longer put ads in it and they don't make any money off of it. So it's really kind of just been maintained and continued to run by a very, very small group of people within Google and not really prioritized by Google. Because of that, it hasn't really changed. So if you use Google Scholar, it's actually kind of like a fun way to see what Google used to look like. It's the same interface. It's the list of blue links. There's no summary put on top. There's no real great interactability with the results. It's a list of blue links to your query. It doesn't do that well with the natural language query still.

6:56It's really built for keyword searching and finding papers. So I think the simplest way to just improve upon that is what we partially do, which is take all of these new modern practices of building search and analysis products that now exist with the advent of these language models. So that's pulling information out of those papers to give you into this nice, engaging, synthesized way. I think there's a huge just thread to pull on there beyond just the summary within line citations. Like if you use our product, we give lots of different visuals of visualizing the results below. So whether that's showing them in a table, showing this like aggregator count of papers that agree with a certain stance.

7:31will show key papers or key authors will use models to pull all that information out from those papers and give you in that kind of like summary analysis section up top. And that's just like kind of table stakes in AI 2025, search and analysis products. But that's something that luckily our main competitor does not do. And I think there's a lot to do beyond that as well. That think of them more as like workflow oriented features. So Google Scholar really just is, again, a list of links for you to then go interrogate yourself. But there is a lot more depth to somebody doing a literature review process than just that, and a lot of actions that need to be taken following a list of search results.

8:08So that's integrating that with a reference manager to store the papers to go into further. That is potentially diving into one particular paper, asking a bunch of questions of that while still not losing your place on the search results page. So just think of it as like post-search, post getting a high-level analysis, what happens next. We can keep stringing together features and workflows to make that more seamless. Google Scholar's done none of that. So again, all the way back to the top, we're super lucky to be talking about a product that is pretty frozen in time. So anything we do beyond a list of links is differentiating between Google Scholar.

8:42And it's intuitive that you're not competing against the same engineers as Med and OpenAI, as you mentioned. What's not intuitive to me is who in AI is going to win from a vertical and horizontal approach. These LMs are every single day, they get new capacity, they're able to do deep research. And how do you keep yourself from getting your lunch eaten from the open AIs and Groks and Geminis of the world? Yeah, I mean, I think this is a question that is on every single founder and investor looking at the AI application layer of where is that line between horizontal and vertical that makes sense.

9:18And I don't think anybody really knows the answer in the world of AI products today. I think we're getting some pretty interesting data points start to come in because OpenAI has over the last year started to launch a few tertiary products beyond their just general chatbot. So like an example of one is they recently launched like a meeting recorder transcription extension of ChatGPT that directly competes with, you know, your granolas of the world that are building that built into your Zoom meetings. from what I can see, that's done basically nothing to disrupt a company or product like granola.

9:54And everyone still thinks that granola adds all these additional features of delight and this additional depth to the product that can still be there. If that's the case, I think there's so much room for vertical products to continue to exist. If a product that is as simple as, not to trash on granola, people freaking love granola, but a product that is as simple as a median transcriber in your Zoom window can't be fully disrupted by these horizontal models, I think there's so, so, so, so, so much room for vertical products to live. And then I think to the other part of the question of what can products like us do to not get our lunch eaten by them, I think it's staying focused on the problem that you're solving because everybody has a finite set of resources.

10:36Everybody has a finite set of focus, finite amount of focus they can give. And even the most capitalized, smartest people in the world can really only truly be great at a finite number of things. So your moat against big players is your focus in getting into every nook and cranny of your problem, of what your users are facing. There's never not going to be a market for that if you do that incredibly well, even if intuitively some of these products should be swallowed up by a capability of a model. There is going to be someone, like I'm not sitting here and saying that the new capabilities and as these models keep getting better won't make some products obsolete.

11:09We have seen that happen with some. I think people generally overestimate how much that will happen and how much surface area there still is to build vertical products. And I think we're seeing evidence of that still sun today as OpenAI continues to launch out new product lines alongside ChatGPT that don't seem to be ripping successes yet. Yeah, the meeting recorder versus Granola use case is an interesting one. Why is Granola able to delight users in a way that the OpenAI product does not? Double click on that. I'm not a Granola user myself. I have teammates who are and they love it. You know, I, I, but I think I can still answer the question without even being a power user that it's, it's back to what I said before.

11:51It's, it's when you truly focus on something and you can show a user that at every step of the way you are there to solve the problem that they want you to solve. That is a product that delights. And that's what a sticky product is. And you can feel it when you use a product that this is, you know, the fourth priority of a company or like it, it just doesn't feel the same with the whole stepwise process. even if sometimes that core function is the same, all of the tertiary stuff and the product messaging on onboarding, on the emails they then send you after you sign up and what happens after a call and how they deliver you back that information.

12:23If all of that is done maniacally detailed, focused on the particular problem, it will feel different than somebody else working on that same problem when it's their fifth biggest priority. There's so many little things that add up and everybody wants to know that you are there to solve their problems. You mentioned him earlier, Matt Friedman has a great quote that he said to us. I could hire somebody off the street to clean my house, and they would probably do just about as good of a job as somebody who has a cleaning service, but I still go to the cleaning service because they might just be 10 % better.

12:56I know they already have all the supplies because they're there to solve my problem. They're marketing towards me. They communicate in a way that is designed for this exchange, and I'm willing to pay a little bit extra for that for me to know that that person is there to specifically solve my problem, even if the core capability isn't that differentiated. And that I really think does exist in software products. It's kind of interesting if you take it from the framework of scarce resources, the scarce resources that a startup has is caring a lot about a problem and having very smart people going after that product.

13:30So yes, in theory, OpenAI could bring in some of these people that they're paying$100 million a year to focus on this side project. But in reality, they're focusing on the LLM. So what you get is kind of this effect of having the B, B minus players focus on these products, or maybe like in the case of Google Scholar, they have just a couple of people doing it as their 20 % project. So there's something around that focus and around that having like the very top engineers in the company focusing on that one thing that's so critical. Exactly right. And if you don't feel that massive inertia and energy of the whole company behind you two, even if the people that you break out to work on that product might be incredibly talented and just as talented as some of the people we might have in our doors.

14:13But if it's all we focus about, we will have an advantage over you. And I really do believe that even the best, biggest, and most capitalized companies in the world can really only truly be exceptional and best at a pretty finite number of things. And that number is usually smaller than what people think it is because you need that inertia of the whole organization behind you to really truly build grid products. It also really answers the generational – it also answers a question that so many people ask in the startup world, which is why can't Google come in and do this or Facebook? It's that concentration, that focus that could only be done within the concept of a startup and within the incentive structure of a startup where people really care, people have that equity.

14:53Exactly right. I mean, this is the same trope that's existed in startups for decades. It's just faster paced and more on display as we're in this new world with language models. But it's really the same debate that people have always had. And the case has always been there's room for disruption and there's room for startups. And we didn't even talk about the tolerance for risk too involved in all of this and the advantage that startups get of that and the ability to launch and iterate and put things out there and have a risk tolerance that big companies just don't have. I mean, Google, one of their demos, whatever it was, one or two years ago, had a wrong answer of one of their models and their stock price dropped by 8%.

15:30That's$100 billion. dollars and that's by making one you know that is the risk that they have to deal with that you know if they put an llm into google scholar and it summarized the paper that said vaccines cause autism and so make a screenshot that went viral on twitter they might lose 50 billion dollars of market cap is that risk worth it for them like their risk tolerance of doing innovative things just is lower than what you get to do as a startup and allows you to sometimes do more interesting things and build products that they'll never build support for today's episode comes from Square, the all-in-one way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, man staff, and keep everything running in one place.

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17:04Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. So outside of competing with Meta, OpenAI, and Alphabet and all these companies, you're also developing products in a hyperscale market, meaning by the time you've released your product, the AI market has gone to its next iteration. How do you develop your product in such a hyperscale environment? Yeah, it's a great question. And it's crazy, a crazy, crazy world we live in. I think number one, there's absolutely just no substitute for complete urgency, really, really hard work and trying to move as fast as humanly possible because we are in the fastest moving space in the world.

17:48People know how big of an opportunity there is. We are not the only people that have thought of using LLMs for scientific research. And if you are not truly pushing the pace every single day, you are going to fall behind, whether it's your contemporaries doing similar things or the models will just be good enough that people could just end up using them for your use case if you don't truly win Mindshare. And I think back to the earlier point of how do you compete against these other products? I think the bear case for startups is that if you don't capture mindshare and you don't move really, really fast, it isn't that they're going to launch these super competitive specialized products, but their products could be good enough if you don't build a great product.

18:27So I think it does raise the bar that you have to cross. I just think it is an attainable bar if you move really, really fast and build really, really great products. so i think speed is just it is more important than it's ever been before in startups today with it with the moving markets and then i think the second part is kind of what you were you said some of that you were alluding to some of this in your question but i think it's also you know having any mindset of knowing that the models are going to improve they are going to get cheaper they are going to get faster they are going to get have longer context windows and building your product with that in mind and maybe sometimes wearing um you know eating a little bit of cost for a few months because we know GPT-5 is going to come out Thursday and it's probably going to have a bigger context window.

19:05It probably will have smaller iterations that will be cheaper than anything on market and we can get something out faster if we just ship it with GPT-4-0 and know that it's going to be a little expensive and a little slow for a bit, but we'll be able to swap in whenever a new model comes out in a few months. You have to be willing to make some of those trade-offs. You have to do it thoughtfully and we do have finite resources of cash too, but I think startups generally taking some of those swings is the right move, just with an understanding that things are going to get cheaper faster and smaller.

19:33How much of your product development is driven by customer feedback and customer demands versus internally deciding as leadership or as a product manager? This is what the customer should have in the next iteration. How do you balance those two forces? Yeah. Give a shout out to my co-founder, Christian, who's our chief product officer. He's a product manager by background. He's a freaking incredible product mind and leader. What he says he shoots for, and I think we do a decent job of this. You know, there's obviously no way to say it exactly. And it's always some combination of the two. It's about 70, 30, 80, 20, with the 70, 80 being driven by a user's request.

20:13And then you layer in, you know, just like general bets that you want to take given the direction of your company that users aren't saying. You want to layer in some intuition about where the market is going and things that we should bet on. And then also, like, you never want to fall into the trope of just building exactly what users ask for. Sometimes you have to take what they're asking for and distill it down into a problem and kind of craft it in a slightly different way than maybe they asked for it. So that all kind of goes into that like 30 % bucket of what we're doing internally. But the foundations, at least the general directions, should be very, very user guided.

20:47The exact specifics and some other bets you kind of sprinkle in, a lot of that can come from your own synthesizing, your own market observations, and your own goals and desires as a company. But I think 70-30 is roughly a decent heuristic for what we try to do. Said another way, customers always know their pain points, but they're not oftentimes technical enough to understand how to solve those pain points. And so sometimes you listen to their problem and not their solution. Exactly right. It's a classic user interview best practice. It's like always take a little with a grain of salt. The question is usually never, what do you want us to build?

21:18It's more like, what are you feeling when you use the product? And what are you trying to solve for? What is your problem? That is more insightful than strictly just asking, what would you like there to be? There can sometimes be really good ideas, but it is more universally applicable when you look for problems, not solutions. As you build out consensus, how do you think about building a moat? And is that even possible in an AI consumer product? Yeah, good question. I think for startups, moats are kind of a myth. I think the only like, real, real moats that exist are usually distribution and brand.

21:55And those are not typically things you have the advantage of as a startup. I think your quote unquote moat as a startup is your focus, as I said before, and your ability to be narrowed in on a certain set of problems and your speed and ability to innovate and take risks. And I think you just have to rely on that until you truly have scale of distribution and brand. And that truly is a moat against upstart competitors. There are obviously exceptions. I'm not a hardware expert, but I know NVIDIA has some multi-year lead on its competition, technologically speaking. There are some exceptions where there's this like special technological breakthrough innovation that you have internally that others don't.

22:35Usually that's not the case. In the history of software, it isn't that, you know, Salesforce has some incredible technological breakthrough that some other company doesn't have that gives them this moat. What is their moat is they were, they executed incredibly well. They focus on a narrow set of problems. They built a great product. And eventually they had this scale of this brand and this distribution that really is defensible. It really is hard to crack through if you're an upstart. So I think as startups, like a moat and you having something that nobody else could really do is kind of a myth, but you can protect yourself from getting crunched by being really focused and moving really, really fast.

23:10And eventually you build these more durable modes over time. Is that a yellow or red flag when a VC asks you that question? It's a reddish, reddish yellow flag. Reddish. isn't it isn't it kind of an interesting thought experiment though to to think about these things even if it's kind of a misnomer yes and that's why i didn't say it's a full red flag but i if if all they do is they just look at you and say hey what's your moat that's kind of a red flag but if they what's your ip yeah if they ask in a slightly more like thoughtful way with some like kind of other threads to pull on i think it's a perfectly acceptable question of like how do you want to develop a durable business over time is like a perfectly reasonable question.