10 AI Business Ideas From The Queen of AI ft. Sarah Guo

23:55And so like doing investing, like making, being able to contribute to other people being successful that are really special. And then the competitive nature of be right with skin in the game and then know what is happening. Like, I like all of that. But I never say never. I think we incubate companies where like it's essentially like oh I see it I see it I see it and then there's frustration that like the right you know a set of people you're really excited to back just hasn't come together around a certain idea Sean you are more technical than me but you're still not technical I would say but you're more than me but a Sand Park classic compliment thank you very much you're not technical you're more technical than me but you're not technical but you're also not technical you're almost good looking yeah yeah yeah you're hotter than me but i'm a one you're a three uh did you uh when you're i know you've been like studying this stuff when you like this seems like a really fun weekend thing just to play with are these actually would it be really hard for me to learn how to do this would it be hard to build one of these just like a really simple project because i i know she's sarah's getting me all hyped on this shit i'm like this looks really fun to mess around with yeah i mean it's like anything else you gotta you'd have to have a partner to speed you up like you learning to code to be able to do these things would be the slow way of doing it versus the easy way is you find an engineer who's excited about this and doesn't have clarity of vision around it, maybe doesn't want to run the business side of things and you say, great, hey, let's build X together.

25:25I have a clear idea that X will work and I'll handle the marketing side. You got to make this product do this. And that's not so hard. That's pretty easy. This is exciting. You get to see a lot of cool shit. Let's do some of your specific kind of thesis. So you have this website, conviction.com good website by the way how'd you get that domain i'm an internet person yeah okay did you see her website she has a website for her uh i think it's the incubator where you got to like code in order to get access to it you don't really code but like the menu is set up like that it's a little yeah it's a little cli what's what's that url um i think it was called commit it was like our program for like hackathons college students etc yeah commit.conviction.com sean It's a pretty cool website, actually.

26:10Oh, you open up, it's a terminal? Yeah. Oh, God. Let me see. Let me try to do this. So run. No. Run, give me a job.html. You got to type in help. So if you type in help, it gives you the menu. I think slash is like a folder. I don't know. I don't know how to do this. All right. So you have a website with a bunch of basically like requests for startups or things that you think are going to be built in AI. So let's run through some of these. because I, that's actually why I initially was like, we got to have her on the pod to kind of, to talk some of these out. So let's do one that you call your personal seller.

26:47Do you remember this? You might've wrote this a while back, but your personal seller. It might've been one, like my partner, pun of Reddy's or something, but we can certainly talk about it. Yeah. Okay. I'll give you the summary. So the summary is your personal seller. I think the idea here is that there's a bunch of places online to sell stuff, Etsy and eBay and Amazon, a bunch of different places to sell things. But actually doing that is a bunch of work, like creating the store, listings, changing prices, writing the copy, all of that. And I think what you're saying is somebody should be able to just have a product and then the AI should be able to do the actual e-com management of setting up the shop and running it.

27:28Is that what that means? Yeah, I think like it's probably it matches like a larger theme that I really think is exciting about AI, which is like because all of these skills and it could be run a basic like social marketing campaign, right? or like send email to your customers that are likely to be repeat customers or improve your website for indexing. Like there are a bunch of things that are probably not related to, let's say it's a Shopify dropshipping store for like a particular type of sock and you love socks as an entrepreneur. It's not like related to the merchandising decision or the design decision of like, what is the sock I want to give the world?

28:13Right. And like that's kind of the essence of like why like sometimes people become entrepreneurs. And so can you can you take a bunch of these tasks that require skills and all these different domains and just automate them at least at a basic level? Like I think you can now. Right. And I think like that they're the platforms, Shopify and Square, etc. They now have native assistant products that help you use the platforms better. But I think across the spectrum of how to be a good internet entrepreneur, like in the e-commerce sense, I think there's more opportunity there. How do companies do that now?

28:55So let's just say you're a company with 10 ,000 SKUs. How do you get accurate descriptions for all of them? well usually if you have 10 000 skews you have like it's a you have like you don't have 10 000 unique uh totally variant yeah but you could have like color size variants things like that so like i'll give you i'll tell you in our case right so i have an e-com store and we have we spend uh let's see probably like five or six grand a month on just shopify prep plus or whatever like the enterprise shopify thing that's just the shopify cost on top of that i would say we probably We have another three to five grand a month on Shopify apps.

29:35So you need an app for search. You need an app for bundles. You need an app for this, that. There's like a ton of things that Shopify doesn't provide. So my all-in just software cost is at least 10 grand a month, probably a little bit more, on top of the fees they take of every transaction. Then I have an e-commerce store manager. His job is just to run the store. We have new products coming up. Make sure those launches go well. Move things around. Oh, this is broken. There's a bug, whatever. We then have a merchandiser. The merchandiser goes every day, looks at the collections and says, this thing is sold out.

30:05It shouldn't be at the top anymore. We don't have sizes for this or we don't have colors for this. So let me move this other thing to the top or hey, the season just ended. These need to be rearranged. So there's a human being that does that. There's also apps that do that, but you kind of need the app plus the software today because the app's not quite good enough to do it by itself. We then have VAs that go in and they do all the product pages, the descriptions, the templates, the tagging so that our inventory data is correct because we need to be able to analyze our inventory. To do that, you need to tag every product accurately.

30:33So there is like four or five people that are just making sure the store runs in addition to five apps that make the store run. That all today shouldn't be the future state of things. That's just the current state of things. And Sean, I think the future state is for entrepreneurs who cannot recruit, manage, pay the five people it takes to run your store. Like, what do they do? As Sam said. Like, I think it will be easier in the future, right? Yeah. I think this is also kind of like similar as an idea to all of the, another area that we are, and I'm like personally really interested in is the voice automation market.

31:14I think like a lot of your listeners will have seen the GPT-40 demo where it's like a voice that may or may not sound like ScarJo talking like in real time. Well, we played with 11 Labs. No, but that's dubbing. She's talking about just being able to like Alexa, you just talk to it and it just talks back and it'll sound like Scarlett Johansson, just like chat GPT, but you don't have to type. Yeah, both of these things, either like it could be in your voice or like some spokesperson for a brand or a company. But like the ability to give reasoned, you know, knowledge based responses in a human voice, I think it's just really powerful.

31:50Right. And I don't think people are thinking enough about the opportunities here where you mentioned 11. There's like exactly one independent voice API business and tens of millions of revenue, and that's 11. They're great. That's amazing. I think there are other opportunities. So like there's a company called Cartesia that does like more real-time voice, for example. You think 11 is, by the way, 11 labs, you think they're at tens of millions in revenue? They are definitely at, you know, a large number that is in the tens of millions of revenue. That's insane. I'm not surprising a market with that.

32:22But, you know, a lot of developers will immediately gravitate like toward API business. But that is not how the rest, like the world is full of niches and people running businesses that don't think about APIs and won't use them, right? And so like just to, just like, you know, your personal seller, I think there are going to be a bunch of interesting voice services for everything from restaurants to HVAC companies to dental reception that are just like answer the phone. I think that's one of the ideas we had. And it could be informational. Like we are open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Or a lead generation business where I'm like, well, like my plumbing broke and like, are you available tomorrow at 3 p.m.?

33:03I'm a huge believer in this. Huge. In what, Sean? This simple idea. So, you know, like when the internet came out, it was like, oh, it's going to be so crazy. But like one of the obvious things was like, hey, every restaurant just kind of needs their menu online. Like you should put your restaurant exists where it's located and then put your menu up there even as a PDF. That's still like a value add for you. It's like it became where every business needed a website. And now what I think it's going to have is that every business needs an agent. And so what's the agent for most small businesses?

33:33So like I call pest control because we always get a bunch of like mice jumping in our pool for whatever reason. And try calling pest control. Nobody ever picks up the damn phone because there's usually it's usually run by like it's like Mike's pest control and Mike's out in the field doing things all day. Controlling the past. Actually doing work. And so he doesn't pick up the phone. And so then you leave a message and you're like you and then you call 10 of them because you're not sure if Mike's going to get back to you. So then it becomes whoever gets back to you first. Mike loses business because Mike doesn't pick up the phone.

34:01Mike also is not going to hire somebody to just sit there and wait for the three phone calls a day that he's going to get. It just wouldn't make sense. But now you go and I built one of these in our like AI, like weekly tutoring session that I have basically. I was like, I want to build one of these. So we have the same problem for our offshore recruiting business. So we own an offshore recruiting business called Somewhere. It's like you can find amazing talent. They're just somewhere out in the world. you just have to find them. So what Somewhere does, they find you elite talent. Now, the big problem, if you go to somewhere.com, it's like you say, okay, I'm looking for a designer or I need somebody who could do, who get me leads for my marketing business or my real estate business, or I need somebody to do data entry, right?

34:38So you have all these jobs. Now, the button on the site is basically like, you want to start hiring, fill out this form. So you fill out the form and then it's like, awesome, we will get back to you soon. Or it's like schedule a call. Here's the call tomorrow or two days from now. and no matter how many sales agents we have, a call tomorrow is not as good as talk to me right now about what I need because right now is when I'm interested. Right now is when I'm on your website. Right now is when I'm not thinking about other variations of how I might solve this problem and you have an opportunity to sell me.

35:09And so, Sam, I don't know if you've seen this, but check out bland.ai. This is the one I built on. If the answer is, have you seen this? Assume it's no. And my mind is being blown by all this stuff. But basically, it lets you build a phone agent for yourself. So I went on here and I built a phone agent. So I built a guy who could answer the phone so that when somebody goes to somewhere and they want to hire somebody, it'll be like, awesome. What are you hiring for? Have you ever hired overseas? And you're like, yeah, I have. It's like, cool. Tell me what you're looking for in a couple sentences.

35:36Oh, great. It sounds like what you're looking for is somebody who could be a developer for your Shopify store. Our normal budget for that is$2 ,000 a month. Would that work for you? Or are you looking for something a little bit more, a little bit less? And then it answers it. It basically does the intake, the initial sales call for you. And it's like, no problem. We've hired this month for 85 other Shopify brands who are looking for Shopify developers. You're in good hands. We do this all the time. I'm going to start looking for candidates now. I'm going to email you tomorrow with three candidates.

36:05How does that sound? And the person's like, great. I guess I can just wait for that to happen or it'll pull from our existing database. It'll be like, here's an example resume. This is the type of person we'd be looking for. Would this person fit your needs? Yes or no. So then the human salesperson will come into work and see a ticket that's like, the AI agent did the initial sales call and found the customer's requirements and kind of already warmed the sale up and told the customer what they needed to know, the things you repeat every time on the phone. And now you could follow up with a more bespoke answer for that person.

36:36That's the future that I see. I wasn't able to fully build that. I did like a prototype of it, but that's what I think websites, even like ours, which is an internet business should have, which means that every plumbing and pest control and restaurant, they're going to have their version of that. This is 100 % way better than having a call center or it will be so long as it works as good. But this is absolutely the way to go. All right, let's do some more. So you have another one on here that's I think an easy one. That's cool. Next Gen Autocomplete. And I think the idea here is you do a Chrome extension or a browser extension that not just like Autocomplete helps you fill in the next word it thinks you're going to say or how to spell a word.

37:16But what you have here is that it starts to learn your voice. So it can help you write your emails or your blog posts in your voice, which is kind of like the next level up from autocomplete, next level up from Grammarly. It doesn't just kind of correct or spell check your stuff, but it actually writes the way you write because it has watched the way you write. Is that the thesis here? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it can be lots of different types of business communication, but especially like email. So I don't know if this is actually my friend Mike Vernal's idea. I think he suffers from the same thing I do.

37:49That might be true for you, which is like I'm an incredibly picky writer. And so I will use the models today for generation of basic content, or I'll ask my amazing EA to like draft emails for me. And then I will go rewrite the whole thing because I don't like the tone because it doesn't sound like me or because it's not tight enough or because I want to use a certain phrase. And I think the next level of like value and impact is definitely going to be fine-tuning to specific voice. And nobody wants to write like chat GPT. Like nobody wants to be the generic AI either. So what everybody wants is the thing in between.

38:25This shit's all wild to me. Is there anyone right now doing that that you like? Because I would like to use this today. I mean, Superhuman has like really interesting AI features, but I think the unlock is going to be the personalization. And what's your overarching investment thesis? So you have this thing called Software 3.0, which, by the way, most VC thing to do to be like, oh, software 3.0, web 3.0. You've done it. You've gone full VC. What is software 3.0? Yeah. OK, so the seed for that phrase software 3.0, it comes from actually an essay that Andre Karpathy wrote years ago about software 2.0.

39:04And the base premise here is that like you had to write a lot of software by hand in a prior generation before machine learning. And then software 2.0, Andre worked at Tesla, was working on autopilot, was really about data set labeling, right? You are teaching a machine learning model by the data you choose to put into the pipeline, how to do new tasks. Software 3.0 is the idea that the next generation of software, a lot of it is about manipulating foundation models. And they're called foundation models because they have a lot of capability out of the box. You don't need to train them from scratch.

39:46You just need to give them like guidance, reinforcement, the information specific to your business. And so an example would be like Sean was talking about for his lead capture intake form voice. Like he doesn't need to go train a model. He doesn't need to go like collect data for that software application, like the voice agent is a software application. He just needs to like make sure it's plugged into his scheduling system and his database of candidates and be able to retrieve the right information about the business and like, you know, respond consistently to customers in a certain tone. Right.

40:24And so that's more about like manipulating a bunch of this base work that people like labs have already done for you. And the premise here is like that last mile of getting a foundation model to be like something that serves all these use cases in the real world that, you know, maybe the research labs think of as niches. Like the world is composed of very large niches. And so I think it's a really big opportunity for entrepreneurs and for us. All right, let's take a quick break because I got to tell you a story. Let me tell you the first time I tried to run payroll for my team. I was using a traditional bank and, you know, the type it's got a janky interface.

40:58it's built like a 2002 tax form and it was open only during business hours and i hit send and it froze they flagged the transaction they locked my account they put me on hold for 45 minutes and then they told me i got to visit my local branch and that was the day i started looking for a new banking solution after asking a few founders what they were using i found out about mercury and so now my payroll is two clicks i can wire money i can pay invoices i can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard that's why i use it for all of my companies and so do 200 000 other startup founders. And so if you're looking to level up your banking, head to mercury.com and apply in minutes.

41:32Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column A, and Evolve Bank & Trust members FDIC. What are some of your hot takes or maybe your contrarian takes? Anything that you think that might be counter to what most people say, most people do, most people are betting on? Do you have anything that is against the grain? You know, I'm going to give a somewhat arrogant answer, which is I don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the entire market thinks, actually. So I'm like, I don't know which of these things are contrarian.

42:04I can tell you where my opinion has changed dramatically. Let me give you one example. For many years, including the tenure of my investing at Greylock, I was one of several people who were like, OK, we're going to go understand health care and digital health. And I was like, oh, health care sucks, right? It's a quarter of the economy. It's really important. How could you not want to work on this mission? But it is so slow and the incentives are so screwed up that like trying to enter that market with technology or the speed of entrepreneurship that, you know, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are seeking is like not a good idea.

42:38And we just did a health care administration automation company. So I'm like, oops, like changed my mind. Real hypocrite here. And like one of the reasons being, I'm like, well, if you think about the mind numbing work that happens in health care administration, like billing, authorization, coding, claims processing, like all like even not even mind numbing, but just like expensive and manual like patient support. It's actually really fertile for an AI company. And, you know, we back something that's like growing really quickly in one of those domains. Right. And so I just say, like, I guess I've changed my point of view on health care.

43:15I went to the pediatrician yesterday. My doctor is with my baby there and I'm sitting there and she's got her iPad on like a table. And there's a video like there. And I'm like, who the fuck is that guy? And they're like, oh, that's just like my scribe. I he's just listening in and he's and he's taking notes. But she was like, I used to stay up until 3 a.m. Taking notes on all of my patients. They just do it for me. And obviously, the wheels are turning in my head. I'm like, yeah, that job is going to be unnecessary in a few years. But it was amazing to have a medical scribe. I've never seen such a thing.

43:51And she's like, oh, this has been around for a long time. I was like, I've never seen that. Yeah, I do think one framework for your listeners thinking about different ideas is what parts of work have been outsourced services already, right? Because it used to be the doctor taking the notes. And they were like, wow, we pay this person a lot. And like they should see more patients and think about their patients more. Like let us outsource that to a cheaper tech in our office. Let us like outsource that tech to India or the Philippines. And now there are a number of scribe businesses in medicine that are growing really fast, like Abridge, Nabla, Freed.

44:27Like it is happening. And so I think that will happen in a bunch of different areas where like basically if you can create separation of that work already to outsource it, then maybe you can outsource it to a machine as well. Yeah, Sam Allman had a good thing. He was like, everybody worries about AI taking your job. That's not the right way to think about it. It's AI will take your tasks. You have to think about it not at a job level, but at a task level. There are certain tasks it can do really well. There are certain tasks it can't do really well. There are certain tasks today it can't do that in the future it can do.

44:58And so eventually a job becomes a bundle of tasks. But for now, you can't think of the whole bundle because it can't replace the whole job, but it can replace specific tasks, which might be just the way it works in the long run is that there's a huge slew of tasks that can be done by AI. And then there's people that bundle those tasks together to make sure that they're getting done well or at the right time. I think that's like approximately right. But to be intellectually honest, like there was a scribe in that outsourced BPO that had that job. And so it's not taking the doctor's job, but it's taking the piece of the job that like the doctor's job that already got separated out the task that they didn't like.

45:37But that became a job of its own. Yeah, the task became a job and the job goes back to being a task, basically, in this case. Yes. Yeah, yeah. It's a good framework. Sarah, are you are you investing exclusively in AI related businesses? I am a technology investor. I'm not a machine learning researcher. I've been working on this stuff for a handful of years and I really believe it. I think it's like the most important thing to happen in technology in a long time. But I'd say like I'm also here to just, you know, invest in great tech companies. And so you're also here to get paid. I am also here to work on things that will work that are important.

46:07Right. And so like if an entrepreneur that I think super highly of or like that I've worked with before or whatever comes to me and says, like, I have a great idea. Nothing to do with AI. I'm still definitely going to be really interested in that. If you ask me, like, what are the ideas that we think about or are hunting, it is all in AI. I do want to put one more thing out there, which is definitely not a idea that just anyone can go after. It's kind of the opposite of the like easy wedge idea in terms of how can I put distribution around like one functionality for a niche on a model, like an AI headshot application or something.

46:48but I do really want to hear from anyone who has a point of view on what happens to the like NVIDIA compute monopoly and overall what's changing in the data center. I don't know if this is a hot take to your former question, but like I think a lot of people in technology, really the intellectual are like, oh yes, of course, workloads are changing from not AI to AI, but they don't actually think about like what that means in terms of scale and market cap. Like that means like chips, memory bandwidth, networking, energy, storage, optimized system design. Like that was a lot of technology company market cap before.

47:25And so like if that's true, there's going to be a bunch of different like new specialized solutions and it's trillions of dollars of value at stake. And it's not just like single direct attack on NVIDIA. That is like the opportunity. What else would be in that category? If it's not just like, hey, our chip is better than NVIDIA's chip. What's another shape of a company that could be in that space? So I guess an example would be like, well, what are other bottlenecks like memory bandwidth? What if you design storage to be specific for AI data centers? What if you could do cooling systems? If you just reimagine the entire data center around big AI inference, I think you end up with totally different needs.

48:08the uh the new york times had this article the other day i don't remember the stat entirely but it was something like the amount of ai capacity or in chips like currently created right now we need to create like another like four trillion dollars in market cap in order to satisfy like the amount of capacity that we have and they were sort of writing it in a way of like i don't know if we're gonna be able to do that but then when you think about it the other way around where you where you think about, well, in 1998, if you said like, you know, what, how big is the internet going to be? Uh, I'm sure it went far beyond virtually 100 % of the experts opinion as to how big it will get.

48:47And I remember reading this article the other day and I was like, that's just absolutely astounding that we're in one of these moments. Sequoia came out with a sort of blog post or, I don't know, PDF or something like that about this. The thing they called it the$600 billion hole or something. It was basically saying, well, we've, we've invested this much or we're investing this much in CapEx. So if you invest that much in CapEx, what do you need to get out to make that return? That's a VC saying that, which is not just like some journalist who doesn't get it, who doesn't get tech. Sarah, what was your reaction to that?

49:18What's your take on that? I think it is a lot of CapEx. I think if you put it in context of how does it compare to other big CapEx spends in the past, let's say like the broadband build out. Like, well, we wanted the internet, you know, like we spent about$2 trillion on broadband to date. Like, we're not there yet, right? That was worth it. And so what I would say is, yes, like it's a totally valid question. We're spending a lot of money. What are we going to get out of it? I think we're going to get a lot of value. We had Dharmesh on the, Dharmesh founded HubSpot. Dharmesh is amazing. Yeah, he's really wise.

49:55And he tends to be right more than he's wrong. and I think he said something great when I asked him. I'm like, man, I'm a little nervous about a lot of this stuff, where the world is going to go. And he's like, well, I'm fairly educated and I think that it's not going to be as good or bad as you think it's going to be. Do you agree with that sentiment? No, I think it's actually pretty bimodal. I think it'd be like bad and it's like it could be much, much better. Great. It's the opposite. Great. It's either going to be much worse or much better is kind of your take. Well, what's the bad situation situation look like where like like for example i think the bad situation and i'm fairly uneducated so take it with a grain of salt the very bad situation is that there's just gonna be this massive gap between the haves and the have not and like if you have money now that's gonna grow and you're gonna be awesome bad situation is ai kills us all right that's the uh the doom situation that that's a bad situation but then i there but in route to that there is just this massive separation of the haves and have not you have not you know what i'm saying that kind of freaks me out?

50:54What's your what's your where do you see the bad situation going going towards? So I think it is not necessarily that correlated that your your resources or your capital today mean that you most take advantage of the of the AI revolution. Right. I actually think people have a lot of agency in this. I think go start these businesses, make a million dollars. That's such a small group of people. Why does it have to be? Because of human nature. How many people know about this shit. Well, your parents are tech entrepreneurs, but go ask Sean's mom and dad. Go ask my parents. Go ask my brother and sister.

51:30Most people are not entrepreneurial. Even if this widens the number of people who can be successfully entrepreneurial, it's going to go from 0.1 % or whatever, 1 % of the population to, I don't know, not 50, right? It's not going to go that far. Yeah. I don't know if it has to express in pure entrepreneurialism versus you will get increased productivity for people in lots of different types of jobs. And it's not obvious to me that's like just the people who are already most highly paid today. You're somebody who thinks a lot about AI. You spend your time in the AI ecosystem. A lot of very smart people are actually worried about the doom scenario, you know, from Elon Musk to we had Emmett Shearer on the podcast and Emmett's a smart, thoughtful guy.

52:15And he's like, Like, you know, the P doom, the probability of actual doom here is pretty scary. It's not zero. And here's where I think it is. What do you think about that? What are the odds that AI truly is a sort of like a critically dangerous thing? You know, I don't actually spend a lot of time thinking about this problem because it is like conjecture in the future of both the objectives of these models and capabilities of these models that are kind of like hand wavy. Right. I think when you talk to experts about some of the suggested scenarios, like here are two classic ones. Oh, you know, people are going to use this to design a virus that kills us all, bioweapons.

52:59Or somebody is going to make the objective for a foundation model that is super powerful to be like, make the most money or generate the most paper clips. And it's going to take over all of the resources in the world and kill us all. there's no linear path from here to there and so when when people ask me about like the doom scenario like i am much more concerned about abuses we actually do understand so for example like what if people don't understand what information is true or not or like people are going to use this stuff for hacking and fraud and lots of like bad activities today and like we should go understand that and react as quickly as possible to that and as a country like probably want to stay ahead on these capabilities technically.

53:48Well have you heard any what are some what's a wild example of how people use this for hacking or for fraud? Oh I mean like for my company we get emails from me it's not really me and sometimes it will have or like it'll have a link to something that sounds like it's in my voice. Yeah I think that's the simplest example which is Well, like what happens if you can create really authentic sounding media? Like, you know, are your parents like, you know, going to not pick up the phone if it's a spoofed phone number and it sounds like you and you say you need something? Like, that's a bad scenario.

54:23And so I think we need more tools to protect against that and general education about it. So I worry more about that. And then I'd say, like, I think of the probability of a bad scenario, I said, was like, it is possible. I can't see exactly how we get there. And if you ask me, like, what are the reasons in which broad use of cheap intelligence are going to be great, I can give you so many reasons, right? So Andre Karpathy just started a company around education. And the fields that have been super resistant to cost improvement, basically healthcare, the government, and education, I think this will actually move the needle on some of the domains that matter a lot to all of us humans.

55:15and I think like when people talk about like the doom scenario, it's really fun and scary to talk about the dystopian doom scenario, but I think the opportunity cost of not exploring the ways in which like you can have an economy of abundance, we need to talk about that and that is really what I focus on. Sam, do you know who Andre Karpathy is? No, but I love his name. It's a lovely name. Andre is an amazingly well-respected research scientist and educator who's trying to create an experience that is AI-powered in education where the most amazing expert in a domain is a personal tutor taking you through the material interactively.

55:57And he's one of the five big thought leader type guy. He ran Tesla's AI program. In terms of self-driving cars, he was one of the, let's say, five most known and respected guys about that. He then went to OpenAI. He then quit OpenAI. It says he's listed as a co-founder of OpenAI. So I guess he's the man. He was like the early mind behind it. At Tesla, he was basically the guy leading their entire self-driving unit. I forgot what his title was, but he's like chief AI guy. When I lived in San Francisco, it was a fun period. I lived there from 2012 to basically 2020 or 2022. And back then, it was like the Airbnbs of the world and Uber.

56:41And we had Sidecar back then where it was like, holy crap, we're going to get into a stranger's car. And this is so exciting. This is so new. And you'd go to hackathons and people were working on meal delivery services. And that was really cool. I went recently, or this was about a year ago, and I was walking around the ferry building. And this kid recognized me. He's like, oh, Sam, I like the pod. I go, hey, what's up, man? And he said, I'm doing a hackathon right now in the ferry building upstairs. Do you and your wife want to come up and see what's going on? And I was like, hell yeah, let's do it.

57:13And so we go up there. And it was so invigorating. I was like, dude, we used to do these exact same thing, but it was around like the sharing economy and all this type of stuff. And I was just talking to people about what they were building. And I remember thinking like, this is like totally, I guess it happens to say it's a school bunch. I was like, this is like the Renaissance. Like there's something really, really cool going on. And everyone was doing AI stuff. And I just thought it's magical. Right when I moved there, it was like mobile was the thing. It was like, oh, X for mobile. Everything we got to make, we got to make it work on an iPhone and an Android.

57:45and then you would see like, you know, some like false flags, like front back came out. It's like, oh shit, this is the next thing. This is the next big social app and then it would kind of die. But then, you know, Instagram, Snapchat, you know, they actually, they stuck. And I remember the early days of Musical.ly that now become TikTok. And so mobile was like the big thing at the time. Then it became crypto and it became the crypto hub. But it started to lose a little bit of the steam for crypto because crypto was a lot more international. But now it looks like for AI, Hi, San Francisco. Elise is back as the hub.

58:17Sarah, are you in San Francisco? Yeah, we're in the mission in San Francisco. And like, I think we really believe in the sort of like community aspect of, not in the like, maybe in the squishy sense of the word too, but like if you're thinking about looking for ideas for companies and being inspired to like be committed to the grind and have the right ideas, then the right thing to do is not do it like alone in your basement. What you have in San Francisco are people who are optimistic and then like work oriented. They believe lots of things are possible. They're learning about what's going on at the frontier.

58:50And we actually do this grant program, Embed, embed.conviction.com to create that kind of community and a bunch of other stuff. But it is around this idea that people want to have the experience that you described, Sam, which is like, well, like, not all of this is going to work, but what are smart people trying that is some version of the future in this area of AI? and like that will probably educate and inspire me and some of it will be really big. Yeah, I think that like if you're 22 and you're young and single and you're into this shit, I would just say two words. I would say go West. Go West, young man.

59:26By the way, people always talk about San Francisco. It's dangerous. It's dirty. It's lawless. That's the appeal, baby. You can say you made it in the war-torn city of San Francisco. You don't want to be a billionaire who is coddled. You want to be a billionaire who grew up on the mean streets of San Francisco. They're not that mean. All right, I think we have to wrap up. Sarah, thanks for coming on. Where should people find you and where should they follow you? You can just Google Sarah Goa or conviction.com. And I'm on Twitter. All right, that's it. That's the fun. Thanks, guys. I feel like I can rule the world.

1:00:03I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no day's off. On the road, let's travel. never looking back.

1:00:15Hey, let's take a quick break because there's a quote that I love. I want to read you. It's that we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. And you know, as an entrepreneur, if you're using a bank that was built in the nineties, you're operating like you're in the nineties. And trust me, I've been there clunky portals, random holds on your money, $50 wire fees, and then being told, please visit your local branch. Well, that's why I switch to a different type of banking solution, Mercury. It turns your financial chores into a smooth workflow. You can do wires, invoices, cards, reimbursements, two clicks, and I'm done.

1:00:45If you're already using Mercury, respect. If you're still using one of the old big banks, I got questions for you. So go visit Mercury.com and give it a test drive. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, column N8, and Evolve Bank & Trust members, FDIC.