Des Traynor - Real Talk about AI and Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.340]

29:01And then we need to train it on the customer's knowledge store. There's a process that you've built. They'll let your customers work. Why isn't there a company that you could just hire to do all that for you, given that it seems like everyone's going to want one of these agents in their business? what matters is the data. It's not, it seems to me like what's valuable is the companies that have great data, not the flow. So why isn't there just a provider that does that part for everybody? You know, that phrase that people are too optimistic about what's possible in the short term and too pessimistic about what's possible in the long term.

29:32That's very much how I see the commentary around AI. If you said, all right, drink in all the S1s that are published every year and produce stock tips or something like that. The drinking in piece isn't actually hard. It's hard to find a moat there. I think basically what is proprietary and easy to differentiate on is either your data store or the actual workflows that you build on top of the LLM's interpretation of the data. So it is definitely easy to point an LLM at a large source of information and even point it out, I say like through something like Pinecone, point it out a vector search across that so we can filter it down and really get to the specific bits you want to see.

30:10What's genuinely hard is making it useful and making it do something that actually displaces a large amount of work. And if you take an area like finance or legal, I think the threshold or the requirements you'd have are pretty high in terms of trustworthiness. And I think the challenge would be being able to make a bold enough claim that you can stand over to say, hey, this thing will not get your conclusions wrong. If you could package that up and then integrate it into an existing workflow, I think you would actually have a great opportunity. But I think simply the ability to filter information and consume it and then given this thing, answer this question.

30:43That's not the hard bit. The hard bit is make that into a product. We're touching on the difference between a feature and a product, if you know what I mean. The ability to consume information and spit back some stuff is a feature. The product around it is reporting, accuracy, collaboration, all of the other shit that actually makes it into something that a business would adopt. That's, I still think, a challenge that you have to take on if you do a startup in this space. You said earlier that this was on the borderline of being a red alert or something for Intercom. Talk about how that gets managed inside of a company.

31:12I imagine there's lots of companies that are looking at this as both an existential risk and opportunity. So what do you think you did well, poorly? What advice would you give other people facing down this seismic change in terms of just managing and steering an existing company through it? I think the thing we got most correct, and I put a lot of credit to this, although he won't take it, Owen, our CEO, was just the speed of decision making. I think it's very, very easy for a company to say, hey, it looks like this OpenAI stuff is going to be a thing. Let's form a small cross-functional team and we'll do an investigation and we'll get a readout from them in three or four weeks.

31:51And then we'll finish out the quarters roadmap as we planned and then we'll take stock and see where we're at. And I think that's probably the norm behavior for a lot of companies is to work in that methodical way. And that's not what we did. What we actually did practically was abandoned multiple projects, deleted multiple roadmaps for our automated support group, for our ML team, for our inbox team, literally binned everything they were working on and worked on this thing instead. So startups often talk about how important speed is or whatever. And I certainly do this. I often feel when I'm talking to founders that I've invested in or whatever, I'm always trying to say it's not their speed, it's your speed.

32:26How quickly are you going to make this decision to unlock them? If they know you take a week for a decision, they're not going to come to you quickly with stuff. So in this exact example, Owen was like, let's go. We weren't going to wait for the data. We weren't going to wait for the evidence. We weren't going to wait for our competitors to say that they're also looking at this. We were just, it's go time. So I think that is probably the single biggest unlock. We were able to fire the starter pistol that quickly. As in, I think like 14 hours after ChatGPT dropped, we were able to go. And we started working on it.

32:53And then we probably also had a small advantage. We'd been dabbling in AI for years. We had a live product called ResolutionBot, et cetera. So anyway, my advice to other companies, I think if we go back to the topic I said about the ratio of in your new world, how important is AI and how important is everything you've already built? I think you need to work out if there are core product assumptions that are just no longer valid, you need to down everything. Nothing else matters. If you get this wrong, nothing else matters. And if you get this right, nothing else matters. It's the only thing. I think if it's not that, is it, hey, there's significant workflows we can just cut out and rebuild that use AIs.

33:29So like reporting or whether it's image creation or something like that, then I would say like it's almost too late if you're trying to be the first in your category to say we have blah, but with AI. I think everyone's over this idea of we also have a lightning bolt in our UI that if you click, it can invent some text. It's a done deal at this stage. You need to look at, in my opinion, proper end-to-end workflow automations. I would start fixing my gaze a lot more on what pieces of work can we remove entirely? Because that's where the actual formula change is. We often talk internally about the formula of support, which is number of inbound times the amount of time it takes to solve a conversation divided by the amount of support reps and all that.

34:07We look at all that. If you can just chomp out a massive amount of one of the numbers in that formula, that changes the optics of the business entirely. And I would encourage other startup founders to say, of all the tasks that have to happen in our product, which can we remove as much of as possible? Take away so much of what would now be seen as undifferentiated heavy lifting. Where can we just delete it? And that's how you like a winning product. That's interesting. So if you think about the many of these things where it's, I'll call it co-pilot for X, Y, and Z, I think that you're saying something very different.

34:38Don't build another co-pilot. Everyone's doing that. Everyone's adding AI to their existing thing. Instead, say what part of the customer's workflow can we just literally kill? Just have to go away completely without them. We almost don't want customers to interact with AI. We just want things to happen as a result of AI that they don't even think about. That's the highest order goal you can go for. And there are cases where you can achieve that end to end, pure automation. I mean, you've done it. Yeah, exactly. I wouldn't say that the Copilot style things are useful. If you take, say, actually, let's say GitHub Copilot, the most famous of them.

35:15It turns out finishing the sentence in code is something every programmer does dozens of times a day. So if you look at how often does the thing happen and how long does the thing take? if you start writing a for loop in code sure it doesn't take a lot of time for you to finish the bracketing and all that stuff but you might do that whatever 20 times a day so being able to hit tab instead of having to type anything there is a if you just multiply the two things out frequency times time spent you'll actually get a sense of where the value is a non-ai example this would be like spell checking or something like that it's just like hey people type all the time they have to go back and fix if you can do the for them that's better i think you can look at it from that perspective but i just think a lot of startups tend to go for the co-pilot thing because bluntly I think it's the easiest thing to do.

35:55Hey, write an idea for a blog post and we'll suggest the opening paragraph. Whoopity do. It's not really a huge thing. What might be a huge thing is find the most common SEO terms that we're not ranking for and suggest articles we should write and write the articles and go to Dolly and create the images and then suggest them back and then criticize them. And then now I sit down in front of 12 suggested articles that are fully spec'd out. Now I'm starting to think, huh, this could be replacing a workflow. Everything else is just a little bit of an ICT along the way. I think. As an investor, how much have you seen that is exciting in this spirit?

36:28I would have to say I see much more of the, what I would call like the easiest API call type AI. That is honestly, right now, the majority of what I see is not amazing. It's very much just, we also know how to summarize a piece of text or change the tone of a piece of text or whatever. And that could be like we're a sales tool, but we can guess the opening introduction in your paragraph or whatever. And I think those things are basically dead in the water. I think stuff like say what Rewind AI are doing, I think is far more powerful. Drinking in a massive amount of data and then giving me a natural query engine on top of it.

37:05I think that's like really exciting. I think some of the visual stuff I've seen be like mid journey or be like there's one I've invested in called Kittle where like, again, you just describe the visual of what you want and they produce a vector. And what's really cool about a vector is you can actually tweak it yourself then if it's not exactly what you want it. I've seen really good examples of that type of thing. But I do believe that we have yet to get to the bottom of where the AI, the high order stuff I'm describing where it's like complete automation. I think a lot of that's still to come.

37:34The question for me is, will it come from the incumbents or not? That's still, I think, an open question on a lot of these industries. When you're having conversations with peers at other software companies, you and I are introduced by John Collison at Stripe. What are the most common discussions, interesting discussions that you're having about all of this that's unfolding? The biggest question I always try to zoom in on is, I know AI is really important and it's core to this new workflow that you're going to automate or whatever. Talk to me about the rest of the products that you're building around it.

38:08And this sounds like it's maybe perhaps not the sexiest answer to give you, but I think a lot of folks have forgotten that you still have to build world-class software these days and genuinely it's not i think you said previously on twitter something to the lines like strategies for amateurs and executions for winners and i think having a cool idea for an ai feature is genuinely can be unique and maybe you spotted the capability or just haven't but in most cases you still have to go and build an incredible piece of software around it so you might have a unique twist on how project management should be done and it involves a bit of ai and that's awesome but you still need to have a pm tool that's as good as linear and that's still going to be a huge amount of work so what i try to do is shift the conversation to there just to make sure that there's actually something behind this because my fear in so many of these ai cases is that we're all just pinging text over to open ai and these prompts and these bits of text they might be proprietary you might have a bit of an edge there you might do some clever shit client side before it goes over there but it can't be that you're the only person who's worked out the right prompt if you're investing in something that is built on ai the thing that you're doing still has to be pretty brilliant which might mean really good integrations really rich platform beautiful ui etc the only other area i'd say i've had some interesting discussions in is and again i don't know if this will fall into incumbents benefit or startups benefit is this idea of chat driven ui so i'm sure there is at least one piece of enterprise bloatware that you use in your day-to-day life that is just awful for me it might be say workday or coupa or one of those tools where the tool is just so deeply complicated and all i wanted to do was file an expense or request a day off or something like that and the next thing you know i have nine tabs open and i've got three drop-down menus and i'm still none the wiser i really really in those tools want to press command J, book des October 17th return or something like that.

39:59I think chat UI will be a massive impact to that whole industry where the way I describe this is when the user knows what they want to do, but they don't know how to do it in your insanely powerful or complicated, to be complimentary, when the user knows what they want to do, but they don't know how to achieve it, that's when chat UI is really going to take off. And I don't know if you saw equals the spreadsheet tool? Yeah, a little bit, not much. So equals is basically a spreadsheet tool. One of the things they have built in is AI and the other thing they have is live data sources. But the cool thing I like about the way in which they've used AI is I don't know Excel query language very well.

40:33And with equals, I don't need to. I just say sum up all of these that were expensed before January 17th and multiply it by the CPC return. And it works it out. So you can literally write Excel queries in natural language. You can also write SQL queries in natural language too. So what that does, from my point of view, that has made the spreadsheet an infinitely more accessible tool to millions of people who never were going to learn Excel. And I think that's where you can blow up your total addressable market just through the magic of a chat UI. So I think that's another area of excitement for me where when I see a sustainable advantage that the chat UI would open up, that's another thing that gets me excited.

41:10How do you think about the risk side of this? you mentioned earlier finance or banking or maybe healthcare, places where certainty is more important than in other places. And in Excel, I guess it's the same thing. If this is lower stakes or approximations are fine, then that sounds amazing. But if this needs to be precisely right, then great. I'm glad I can write the query for me, but then I still got to go double check that the query is doing the right thing. And in customer service, I'm sure there's elements of this too, where some things are really easy to handle. You're just pointing someone at the right document or something but sometimes it's criticality rises and the cost of error goes up and then you start you start to then worry about these models so how do you think about tail risk of a big complex thing that we don't really know how it's working but it just works most of the time but we need 100 of the time yeah and to make it more complicated because you've unlocked a wider addressable market the person will not identify the mistake i won't know if there's a bug in the excel stuff because i didn't know what it's supposed to look like in the first place.

42:09I think this is a genuine risk. So the answer I'm supposed to give you is, and that's why there's always going to be a human in the loop when you turn this around. So rather than doing it for the DESs of the world, you do it for the person who actually builds spreadsheets for DES, and instead you speed them up. And I think that works to some degree. But we even see this, say, assistive driving AI, where the person has their hands on a wheel, but they're not paying anywhere near amount the same of attention as they used to, because they know the car is actually driving itself. So you actually have this challenge of when criticality is high, should you, AI basically be left out?

42:40Do we need to have a higher threshold? How do you define that threshold when it is purely generative? It's hard to say. I can tell you what we do in Intercom is we have a separate product to Fin called Custom Answers. And what Custom Answers does is more of, how would you say, an old school traditional AI existed before November. And in that case, its behavior is quite different. It works something like, if this query looks like it's relating to an important topic, let's say refund or locked out of my account or authentication, then so that's your AI there. It's just like if fuzzy logic matching then, and then we have a very specific answer.

43:16And what we do is we use custom answers to target really specific things where we have a precise set of steps and we actually can't afford to have generative conclusions. We actually need to control every word that is said. A lot of our customers use Fin and this together, and they just effectively splice out stuff that sounds incredibly important and let finn take care of the rest but even at that there's still going to be a weakness there somewhere if you keep scratching and sniffing you'll find something that actually turned out to be more important than it sounded i think this is the fuzzy world we're all heading into where things will be possibly more wrong than they used to be but they'll happen in real time as opposed to taking days weeks months depending on the task being optimized i do suspect this is why you won't necessarily see gpt used in doctors diagnosis apps they might speed up the doctor but they'll still need to be human in the loop and we just have to hope that say the driver in the ai augmented car that they're still fully switched on to what's actually going on and they're not just copying and pasting shit out of chat gpt or whatever but i think this is a new world we're entering into there's no denying it there are gates and there are railings but there are no i don't think any guarantees it's hard to take the new technology into society and prevent all its downsides.

44:25As an investor, I'm really curious how you are, whether it's different or the same as you've always viewed this as an investor. But the first time we talked to you, I had some really interesting thoughts on just the things you look for in young companies. Even since Intercom started, the friction and expectation for starting companies has changed. There's so many of them. YC batches are so much bigger. If there's a whiff of an opportunity, all of a sudden, you get 20 people leaving their jobs to start a company. It's amazing. It's great. The world benefits from this for sure, but I think it makes investing harder, especially given sometimes the prices are quite high.

44:59How have you evolved as an investor? What are the things you're looking for? Any philosophical changes over your investing career? And then I'll obviously talk specifically about the change that LLMs have on that too. Early days, I used to get fooled a lot by just a great looking product. And I'm out of field is probably the wrong word because some of them actually worked out pretty well. But just, I thought if you could build software that that was enough almost and in some cases some of my earliest investments that actually turned out to be enough of a judgment but not certainly in later years beautiful ui and stunning landing pages became more commoditized or like maybe more easy to do for people and as a result it was probably easier to fool me at least but i'd suspect probably easier to fool half the industry so i think i've learned now that a product can be a really really nice beautiful execution and perhaps still just not work out.

45:50And I actually had one of those recently. It was a meeting, like a Zoom competitor that was built with AI inside it for identifying action items and all that stuff based on what people were saying in the call and would produce meeting notes afterwards. And it was incredible, it would produce a highlight to reel up the conversation so you could zoom into the exact specific moments that mattered, et cetera. It sounds cool. Problem is no one wants to pay for that on top of Hangouts on top of Zoom, full stop. But the product, if you saw the product today, you'd be like, that's insanely brilliant. it's awesome it looks great it works great i've used it many times etc but if you try and take it to a company and say well you pay seven dollars a head for this on top of your zoom fees and you're already probably buying the g suite anyway the answer just basically says no so that's one thing that i've just become more wise to which is and it sounds so stupidly obvious when i say it like that but the route to market times the user's propensity to put their hand in their pocket is a real thing and in those cases zoom already has the route to market and g suite is already there with their pseudo monopoly on all things productivity inside a company.

46:45Another change I've just been trying to distill of late has been, I find myself asking startups the same question a lot lately, which is, what is the single thing you can say that is unique to you, valuable to your user, true and simple? And all four things matter. And most people fail on one of the four. It's either too complicated to pitch or other people can say it or your users don't give a shit or it's not true and that has been a really impressive and i often say this if it's a mirando company i barely know or a lighter week intro i often say it as a pre-qualifier to actually bothering to take a call or even sometimes reading a pitch deck and that's a maturity that i didn't have i would have heard the pitch five years ago and gotten really caught up in how nice their product looked and all that whereas now i find if you fail at that hurdle the chances of you being a really successful business the outsized outcome that makes angel investing make sense is pretty slim and then the third one i just continue to beat a drum about it's just execution and i won't say too much about it because i know you agree if your idea is any good you should assume it'll become commonplace and everyone will have that idea because they're going to see your version of it and then everyone's going to try and do it and if someone does it a lot better than you or can do it the same as you but faster you're gonna lose it won't be close you will definitely lose first really doesn't mean a whole lot unless you helps you build a bit of a brand maybe but you'll get outpaced pretty quickly once somebody has a feature you don't so i care a lot about do the founders get that?

48:07And if the founding team isn't super technical, as in they can't design, build, execute their own software, then I always worry about that because they often don't. How did Intercom itself solve that execution problem? Because I think relatively early on, people realized, oh yeah, this is a thing. This is a good idea that there's a simple digital way to interact and connect with my customer in the space that they are. I'm assuming, I don't know much about Intercom's early history, but I'm assuming that lots of people tried to do this and you won. So is the simple answer just execution? You just went faster and basically followed the advice you just gave about investing, but for building?

48:44I'd love to say yes, but it would sound arrogant. I will say we had a shitload of competitors, copycats, people who were just literal right-click view source, let's have some of that messenger code. And there are still many, there are people who literally just copy our source on a regular basis. I think ultimately what our customers know is that if you want the latest and greatest intercom this company that has it and i think a bet on intercom is a bet on the persistent position as the people who are doing the newest stuff best and that's why it surprised basically none of our customers when we launched the ai shit because the tone we heard back from a lot of them was like of course you guys have first for a lot of our customers that's why they sign up and we talk a lot about this we even publish if you go to intercom.com slash changes you'll see the rate of release from our product I think I've heard it glibly referred to as like the gingerbread man strategy, which is run, run as fast as you can.

49:36You can't catch me. That's our thing. You can copy and you can copy, but it's going to be consistently yesterday's technology tomorrow. And that's not what customers want. They want the best stuff out there. So I think we do talk a lot about speed internally. If you talk to any of the intercom folks, they'll be like, they're sick hearing about it. And it's not just speed again. It's encoded really hard, hands on the keyboard type stuff. It's speed as in processes, decision making, et cetera. I think for what it's worth, a pet theory has all SaaS is basically UI on top of databases. So everything is copyable pretty quickly.

50:07The goal is to get a position that looks daunting to copy. If you're trying to build a project manager tool and you're saying, hey, let's rip off linear, you're going, oh, well, there goes the first two and a half years of our roadmap. It's a tough one to take on. Same with Stripe. And I'd hope same with Intercom or whatever. You just look at me like, shit, we really have to build all that. We're going to be at this quite a long time. And by the time we've done it, those guys move fast. So by the time we get to where they are today, they'll be long gone. And that's the hope that you can build with just raw product momentum as a moat, if you will.

50:35Do you worry about, I guess I'll call it the Red Queen effect of that style of building relative to, I'm trying to think of an extreme example, like Visa or something, which notoriously is an extremely good business because they built an unassailable competitive position, but there's no speed at Visa. If anything, it's better to have more bureaucracy, like don't screw up this position that we've carved out for ourselves. There's no product velocity at Visa. Running faster than everybody seems like a great way to win. And I think it is. But do you think it's necessary but not sufficient? And ultimately, you need to get yourself in a Visa-like position of even if you wanted to copy this and you also moved really, really fast and had unlimited resources.

51:15There's something about it you just can't even copy, whether that's a classic moat question. How do you think about that for Intercom? I think this to me is honestly where a brand comes in. And that's ultimately you need to build and we're in the middle of undergoing pretty extensive distillation and rebrand, if you like, of what Intercom is all about. But I think you need to transfer the energy that's felt in their product momentum into being a sustainable brand position to ultimately get to a place where it's just, why wouldn't you just use Intercom? that's i think the best way to turn a dominant product position into a sustainable thing where you become the it would just seem odd to not use slack or stripe or figma or intercom whatever it's just why wouldn't you and i think because all those tools you have to assume will get caught eventually because in idn or something like that will whatever stripe release now they'll have it in two years so there will be some eventual there is not infinite runway in all feature sets eventually start releasing shit just for the sake of it and that's a dangerous place to be so the goal as you're doing this is to transfer the credibility that exists proofably in your software into the brand and ultimately capture hearts and minds from that point of view and then there are other like more tactical things community evangelism advocacy making sure you reward the people who use your product a lot then there's the technical version of that which is integrations and interoperability do you fit much better in the tech stack than everyone else does do you sign good partnerships and good data share agreements if you use intercom plus GitHub or Jira, it works really well together.

52:42And if you try and use a new app with the same, it'll be harder for them to get the same co-promotion, the same partner status, whatever. So there's other aspects to it as well. But I think job one is to honestly have the best product and the best way to do that is to move really, really fast. Job two is to transfer it out into being a brand position rather than a technical position. And then job three, I think, is to then expand your tentacles into everything. As I said, the hearts and minds of your customers, partners, et cetera. One of the prevailing ideas in the business world is that the pure software business is the ultimate in business because it has very high margins.

53:12It can have very high retention, sometimes doesn't necessarily require a ton of upfront capital to get going. It's just a beautiful thing. If you're on a debate team or something, and I force you to take the opposite side to say, actually, here's the bad things about software businesses. Here's why it's not a panacea. Here's why you should consider building something other than software. what would be your debate points and i ask this as somebody obviously that's done this that succeeded in doing this at a company that's grown very large what would be your contra points in that debate i think the two things come to mind obviously because of the debate i'd prepare but two immediate things come to mind one is there are very few durable modes in software so whatever it is you have it's almost by definition going to be copied someone will infer the database structure and right click copy the UI and all of a sudden they have the gutsier product.

54:04So that's a challenge and we don't really play the patents game. We don't really play the exclusive partnership game in software in general. We generally tend to put it on the internet for everyone. So whatever your piece of software is, assume everyone's coming for it. And then also the second piece, which is just as important, software has a really, it's very perishable. What it took to be best in class in project management, even just three short years ago, is nowhere near good enough for today's standards. And there are not a lot of categories where you can have a great product and also know that it's going to be dated as hell in 36 months.

54:40But software is one of them. So you have to continually reinvest to maintain your position. That's the first, if you compare that with other areas, other non-software areas you might go into, you'd find industries that don't have those true traits of insane perishability and lack of a moat of any sort, really. The third one is more of a, perhaps a nuanced point but there's a tension in software in general which is the ideal software is one line of code that everyone uses in the exact same way and it's got a massive margin on it and needs no maintenance but in practice in order to get a second customer you usually need a second line of code and the thousand customer needs another line of code and if you are chasing an actual trying to grow a business the more customers you're trying to attract usually the more at least settings and preferences that you have to add so that you work a different way for enterprise than you do for startup or whatever permissions all that shit which means the product just keeps getting bigger and bigger and if you want to have a large market you generally tend to have to adopt loads of different styles of workflows and that means loads of different code and that means more complicated ui so in essence for a product to be big and successful it has to get worse you get worse for any individual but better from a market capture point of view so you're constantly trying to find a sweet spot along the collision of those two lines how big is the market and how simple can the product be?

55:57And what you'll find is to maintain a large product, because in a product with a large total addressable market, you usually have to have a lot of software. And bearing in mind, as we just agreed, that software is both not protected by any mode, and it's going to age out pretty badly, pretty quickly. So you have this tension of the need to continually reinvest. And now we reinvest lots because it turns out to go for a large market we've built a shitload of software and that is just a difference this bottle of coke is the same one that barack obama would drink and the same one that bill gates would drink and i'm drinking it and some rando in the street would drink it too that's not the case in software if we want to say hey we do ticket tracking or we do customer support or whatever the yc startup the 50 person company the 505 000 or the 50 000 there it's a whole different ball game at every level Yet if you say we want to be it for number one for the entire industry, that's a lot of if statements to deal with all those workflows.

56:52And every one of those if statements has a team of engineers and PMs and designers behind it. So you have that tension of market size versus product quality. And it's a hard puzzle to solve. And again, there are other industries, in this case, Coca-Cola or whatever, where they don't actually have to play that game. So that's my other ding on software to invalidate my own career. It's an amazing, amazing answer and list. does it stand to reason then that the best software ever is bitcoin oh possibly i actually there are a few software products i've seen to give you a shitty example just say like the notes app on ios where actually i know megacorp people and i know aged old grandfathers or whatever and they all use notes so there are some products that cut through and just say we're one thing and we're that one thing for everyone and y 'all like it and i think that's really really cool another example of will be say bear.app which is a really nice note-taking tool that i use where they've just one product for everyone, but everyone uses the product and everyone uses it roughly the same way.

57:46So you get a lot closer to the idea of liquid profit because they just need to build one thing for one person and it works really, really well. Maybe Craigslist belongs on the list or something. Yeah, for sure. I think there's a lot to be said about something like Craigslist in that regard. And they dodged a lot of bullets by keeping it simple. And the flip side is, imagine if Craigslist had VCs. Imagine the ways in which it would have gone wrong because they would have been pushed for growth, pushed for growth. They would have added features. They would have gone through pointless redesigns and rebrands and all that.

58:14And they probably would have honestly lost their way somehow. So I can't comment on Bitcoin specifically. I always feel that I'm undergone in terms of knowledge. But I do think a simple thing to load through will use the same way is a really nice place to be. But I can't help but feel the wolves would be constantly at the door trying to copy exactly your thing because it looks so easy. Well, what's interesting is when you think about the different counter examples, maybe Twitter is an interesting one here, not that it's ever been a great business, but it's more or less been the same. the product velocity is not high.

58:41So the value is the network. Or maybe the other examples would be vertical market operating system software, where the software also sucks there. But the data store that gets dumped into this thing is so valuable that no one bothers to switch because my whole business is built on this thing. So maybe your point is right about all software is just the database and some UI on top. And you should think more about the database either as a network of people or critical information that a business is storing inside of it. And that's it. You just invest in one of those two things and avoid everything else.

59:13Avoid workflow, avoid nice UIs, like you said. It's a fascinating question. It is. It's unfortunately what we have to spend our lives trying to wrestle with. But yeah, I don't want the wrong way to pass all this is Des thinks UI doesn't matter. It absolutely is not the case. It just does not think UI is a sustainable position. And to make it sustainable, you have to be maniacally investing in it all the time to keep it as the Michelin star project management app or whatever it is in order to stay at the top. Do you have other worldviews that would be spiciest at a dinner table conversation or something to rile people up?

59:46Yeah, I have a whole folder of things that Des can't tweet. Give us one or two. Here's a hot take right now that I've seen a lot of my own portfolio go through. And it's not a positive one, but I'm sure you see a lot of investment reports that go like this, say, we're a series A or series B. We've managed burn. We've executed a riff. we now have 74 months of runway and we feel really good about that and what i translate that to is i am going to piss away six years and two months of the best productive years of my entire career pushing this boat up a hill to see if it gets to the top and it's not going to and honestly i want to reach out to the founders and connect to them on a human level to say hey neither i nor i don't think many of your vcs who are actually good humans want to see you do that I think you should set yourself a time limit of like six months or a year to get this thing growing.

1:00:37And if it doesn't wrap it up, it's not because I want the money back. It really isn't. It's just, it's such a waste of human capital. I think what happens in an existential crisis is people try to preserve their life. And you have to realize your life is not your startup's life. And there's a line between them. And the worst thing that happens to you isn't that you go out of business. The worst thing is that you stay in business, banging your head off a wall. waste your time in your life and in both cases i'm not seeing my money back but at least one of them you're not emptying the best years of your career and i think that's probably one where even as the second now it sounds still too blunt but the point i don't think is talked about enough right now there are a lot of companies that are dead by definition based on their last round or their last two rounds valuations and honestly i don't think that suits anyone i think even from a venture capital perspective i think they'd rather take the scraps or the pennies on the dollar back they'd probably back to founder again just under different market conditions 2021 was a hell of a drug we all lost a run of ourselves and that's okay you don't have to pay the full price of that the last thing i always say to people is you have to measure the roi of the time you spend based on the future expected value of it so go on a rager with your friends and wake up hungover and that's fine as long as you feel like those friendships and those memories are going to be useful to you in the future great similarly whatever you're doing with your business think about it from a point of view of when you're like 50 or take your age and double it or whatever will you value the things you've been doing right now a lot of this is my way to get people to stop scrolling instagram or tiktok whatever because this is not a useful use of time but i think it's quite easy i say this because i probably regret most of my 20s in this regard but it's quite easy to go through life just too much in the moment so you forget to actually think about the compound interest of the time you're spending and i think by the time you realize that that shit matters you're like 30 and I'm haunted by this quote that is, I read it somewhere, inside every 80-year-old is an 18-year-old wondering what the fuck just happened.

1:02:29And I think that's something that haunts my mind. Yeah, it is scary because I'm 42. So I'm already starting to wonder what happened. I've so enjoyed talking to you from the early days of when you were conceptualizing Finn. And it's been such an interesting example for me to watch of really talented team and company approaching something new that could be this disruptive innovation story. but in many cases, yours included. I don't know. It's always different. And it's always interesting to see how companies handle this. I've so enjoyed our conversations in this one too. I asked the same traditional closing question of everybody and I'm bummed we're out of time.

1:03:02What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? I'll try and stay emotionally neutral as they tell the story. I wrote about this story on my blog, but when I was growing up, it was 1980s Dublin, not a very rich place. My dad had left home. My mom was left. I'm the youngest of seven children and three older brothers, three older sisters. And in 1988, when I was seven years old, I basically was obsessed with this computer called the Amiga 500 by Commodore. I don't know if you remember it. And one of my friends just seemed like the coolest thing ever. And I just wouldn't shut up about it.

1:03:33Clearly, I just wouldn't shut up about it. And I guess I was still just at that awkward age where I was too young to work out why I couldn't have one. Because basically, my friend had one, therefore it was gettable. So why didn't I have one? And I guess my mom didn't now you know how to explain Pernice 1980s Dublin divorce well divorce wasn't even welcome in Ireland at that time so it was just why is this woman not got her husband anymore that was how Catholic Ireland would have seen it and then one day for my birthday I think it was my ninth birthday I'm not even that sure I think it was my ninth birthday it showed up and at the time I was really thankful but it was only really when I was like 25 or something like that that the actual penny dropped off like how the hell did she pull that off and because of genuinely I can give you a full lineal history because of the Amiga 500.

1:04:13I learned Amiga Workbench. I learned Amos. I learned how to program bits of memory. I enrolled in computer science. I met a guy. We started a blog. I met Owen, who's the CEO of Intercom. I met my wife at the same meetup that Owen had organized, where I met him for the first time. The entire history of my career goes back to that one machine. I still don't really know how she got the money to get it for me, but she did. And that was the kind of thing. I only hoped I could pay her back, but she passed away, unfortunately. So whatever costs like 700 Irish pounds, which is probably a grand or something like that in dollars.

1:04:45I would have loved to have, now that I've got some money, I would have loved to have paid it back, but that opportunity was never presented. It makes me really interesting to think about what equivalent thing could you do to unlock a path like that for somebody else? I think about that a lot. I think that is an incredible question to think about. And probably more often than not, it's something that may be doable. It's the thought about what it could be and then going and doing it is a magical, wonderful, awesome story. I've done a lot of these, I think around 400 or something. And I haven't heard a story quite like that in response to the question.

1:05:18So what an awesome place to close. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode, check out joincolossus.com. There you'll find every episode of this podcast complete with transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning. You can also sign up for our newsletter, Colossus Weekly, where we condense episodes to the big ideas, quotations, and more, as well as share the best content we find on the internet every week.