Brainstorming $10M AI Business Ideas w/ the Airtable Founder

0:00All right, my friend, I recorded one of my favorite types of episodes. my friend Howie started a company called Airtable. They're worth around$10 billion. So he has seen it all. He knows what's going on in the world of AI and he has an amazing perspective. And for this episode, I asked him a very simple question, which is if he were 21 again today or he didn't have Airtable, what companies or business ideas would he want to work on? And he came with seven. Seven different ideas that he would work on today. And so if you are looking for a different business idea or you're an AI nerd, which a lot of us are right now, you're going to love this episode.

0:42Tell me about live shopping with AI avatars. I personally think this is a really interesting area. I mean, you think about live shopping, which is a huge thing in Asia. I mean, there's like probably tens of billions, if not$100 billion plus GMV in commerce dollars that are getting transacted through live shopping. This is basically where you have an influencer go and peddle a product, right? Is this like on Instagram? I mean, I pay attention a little bit to Asia, but is there a website I can go to to see this right now? There's actually a big chunk of Timu that is powered by this and definitely TikTok.

1:15So TikTok has a huge amount of these kind of like influencers that basically go and there's actually a shop tab that you can even click on. You see these products and it's a person basically describing the benefits of a product. So think about like influencer marketing, like taken to the extreme where you just watch, you know, people peddling products and you click it, you buy. And there's actually one company that's doing really well in the US called Whatnot. Oh, yeah, I like Whatnot. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, what's cool about it is like there's so much personality, you know, to the content.

1:51Like in a way, it's almost like watching Twitch. It's not just about the actual product. It's about like seeing this person like talk about this product and maybe it's a, you know, like a really cool like new shoe from Nike or like a vintage shoe. And they're talking about like their own experience with it and childhood, you know, experiences with like the Jordan brand or whatever. And so it comes this like really interactive experience. You know, my pitch for this idea is basically, well, obviously you can have like really rich, engaging experiences in the very near future with avatars. Right.

2:22And if you go to HeyGen.com, it's a great avatar product. It's the easiest, fastest, self-serve avatar product out there. Are you an investor in these guys? I am an investor in HeyGen. And I really like the team there. And they just built the best, easiest to use avatar product. That was kind of their claim to fame. They have basically pre-made avatars. So these are trained on or effectively created from real human actors that they've licensed from. So you can use one of their pre-made avatars. or you can create your own. I think of this as a really fundamental capability. You think about all the things you can do with avatars, sending a sales video where you're pitching each target customer in a personal way, right?

3:07So a CEO sending a thank you note via video to every single attendee of our last event, that kind of thing. In this case, I think applying the avatar concept to live shopping where you can now have this one-on-one interaction with, and it could be a celebrity. Maybe you get some real influencers to sign on to this. And it's like Kim Kardashian type who's actually represented in avatar form. And each person shopping gets to have a one-on-one interaction with her about Skims and the Skims products that they want to try out. Are you guys using any of this at Airtable? We actually do have an internal setup where it's all powered by Airtable.

3:44We use our own Airtable web agents to go in and research different target customers. we learn a lot about them and then we can actually generate customized email pitches for each of them so right now it's just email but we are experimenting with with more of the video stuff we actually have a setup internally where we can now generate an avatar video powered by hey gen automatically from content in a row of air table so it could be a list of different event attendees and that use case i just described like i may actually do it for um uh thank you notes for for different events that I host in the future.

4:17Like if I host a dinner with some of our customers, I could actually now go and automate creating a video that looks like it's me. And I would probably be upfront about it and say like, hey, like here's an avatar version of Howie like saying thank you for coming. And like the novelty of it itself actually would tickle people's fancy. But like to send a personalized thank you video from me to every attendee for all of our events. Can you do that now? Like if I wanted to implement, I mean, that sounds awesome. If I want to go and do that right now, how would I set that up? So you can do it today.

4:50It just requires a little bit of scripting in Airtable. And that itself, you can actually generate with AI. So the idea is like you would go and create like a list of different people you want to send the video to, or even a list of topics you want to create a video for. And then we already have an Airtable, a scripting layer where you can define any arbitrary code it's hosted in our infrastructure. And in this case, you would just define the code to go and talk to the HeyGen API. A lot of these AI products have APIs. And so you can go and create your own kind of orchestration layer and air table to go and automatically for each row, ask HeyGen to generate a video programmatically for you using this avatar.

5:28And then you get a link to a HeyGen video that you could then go and directly send to a customer or download it and then attach it, et cetera. Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible, but that's exactly what Sandler training did with HubSpot. They use Breeze, HubSpot's AI tools. to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch. And the results were incredible. Click-through rates jumped 25%. Qualified leads quadrupled. And people spent three times longer on their landing pages. Go to HubSpot.com to see how Breeze can help your business grow. What's this AI personalized news thing?

6:05When I think about my news reading habits, I do sometimes appreciate reading the front page of the journal or the Financial Times, right? And there's something very valuable about like that curated experience. Like everybody sees the same front page. So ironically, like I actually do get the print edition of newspapers because I like that like physical and consistent experience. Like I know I'm seeing the exact same paper as like millions of other people out there. But for anything else, like if I'm reading something online or if I see a link, like I end up usually just taking all of the contents and copy pasting it into Chachkati or Claude and then asking it to summarize, right?

6:46And say like, hey, like pull out like the key information, et cetera. And I even have some save props to do this. But what I really want is not just to do that manual summarize for each article. I want it to go and like automatically look for all of the articles that are interesting to me. Like there are certain topics that I care about and I just want like an AI news aggregator that goes out and knows what I care about. And more importantly, like it doesn't just summarize the news for me into like, here's the summarized articles, it actually becomes this interactive agent that I can talk to. So like, you know, your friend who is the super news expert, they're always reading all the articles, like Nick, our mutual friend, as an example, like he knows everything that's happening in the world.

7:27Like you go to Nick and you get 30 minutes with him and you learn about any topic you want. Like I want that. I want Nick in like AI form, where I can just ask it, like, tell me more about this. And it can go and give you more info. Dude, my company that used to own this podcast before we sold it was The Hustle. It was a daily newsletter. This was our pitch to our customer. We were like, we are your smart. I think our tagline was, we're your smart, no bullshit friend who will tell you what you need to know every morning. And I had a team. It was crazy. We had a team of three people who would reach almost 3 million people a day writing this newsletter.

8:03And we actually were tinkering with this idea. and it was so manual where we were like what if a user tells us what they care about and we write tons of different bits of news and we plug it into someone's email based off of what their interests are and then we'll even go yeah so you can mix and match yeah and i was like we'll even go and get like an expert like howie to like comment on some of the stuff and we'll put some of the comments in the thing in the newsletter and it was like i was like oh my god this is so manual and what you're describing is like whenever i'm thinking about newsletters i'm like this is just changes everything and i actually think but you know yeah it could still be a great business you i would just use ai for all of it totally and and maybe like you could take it to the next level which is like it actually becomes a platform where um like substack you allow creators to actually create their own branded newsletters and they push the distribution promo of each one but because you're powering this like kind of white label ai you know uh powered platform, like they can very easily spin up their own custom newsletter.

9:05You know, a different direction is like you create these like different AI personalities. I think a commonly underappreciated thing is like AI doesn't have to be robotic, right? It doesn't have to just be like utilitarian, summarize this article in like a clean, you know, AP, you know, style, like you could actually have it injected with tons of personality and say like, be like a TMZ gossip uh, reporter who just like sensationalizes the crap out of this like new celebrity gossip. Right. And, and I think there's just so many interesting ways to play around with that. And like news by nature is like a very, a high engagement, uh, use case, right.

9:44It's like literally something you, you read every new every day, or maybe even every hour. And, and so like the opportunity to like change how people interact with like finding out about this stuff. Like, I think that's a, there's going to be a very large business to be created there, right? Like BuzzFeed, Hustle, et cetera. All of these were high growth businesses in that era of news. And I think now there's going to be a different high growth era of AI news. Hey, I got a quick break because I want to tell you something cool. So our sponsor for this episode is HubSpot. But instead of the ad telling you about HubSpot, they just want to do something that's useful for you.

10:20So they did some research and they found that a bunch of people in our community have side hustles. They start a business on the side, they get it going, and then it becomes their main hustle over time. And so instead of just telling you about the features of HubSpot, they wanted to give you something that will be useful for your side hustle. And so they have put together a database of AI prompts. So things that you could put into ChatGPT or your favorite AI tool that will help you with your side hustle. So check it out. It's gonna save you a bunch of time, I think. It's a prompt database that you should be using to make your side hustle more successful.

10:51And you could use this as your little personal, little cheat sheet, your tool set to be a better operator with your side hustle. So you can either scan this QR code that's on the screen or get the link in the description to get the AI prompt database. All right, back to the show. Are you a personal finance nerd? Kind of, you know, I was a very early Mint user. And I remember like really, you know, wanting to let go and more like have visibility over my different expenditures and like aggregating it. I will say like the tedious act of going and like doing a lot of planning is not my forte. But I have like basically a multifamily office type setup that now helps with a lot of that stuff.

11:34You know, you listed on here, real-time AI avatar products for different vertical applications like personal finance advisors. Tell me about that. So the idea here actually is like, you know, if you're a very high net worth client, you can get a very strategic wealth advisor who literally sits down with you, looks at your balance sheet, looks at all your assets, and talks about your goals and actually comes up almost with like a plan as good as a, you know, a CFO's plan for a real corporation, but for you as an individual, right? Like the business of you, Sam, as an individual. And you can plan it out.

12:09You can think about the cashflow needs you have, what kind of assets you want to invest into for near term versus long term yield. And I mean, the reality is like most people don't get that level of attention, right? And don't get that level of, of like, you know, thoughtful design to a financial plan. And, and, you know, furthermore, like most people don't even have access to a live financial advisor to just call up and talk to, right? Like, um, there's something very comforting, I think about like getting to like literally talk to somebody. And it's maybe why, uh, a lot of banks still have like, you know, retail locations, right?

12:42So many of them, even though like, you know, for most transactions, you don't really need it. Like people want to go in and talk to, to a person. So I think the idea here is like using the really smart reasoning capabilities of the newest models. Like, I don't think you could have done this pre-03, where you actually can come up with like a very thought out, you know, kind of personal financial plan. And, you know, recommend like, here's how much you should invest into equities versus bonds. And like, here's how much you should spend. But do it like with a, you know, an avatar on top of it, so that it's a very human like experience.

13:14And you get to talk to them and just like, call them up anytime you're feeling stressed about your financial situation. Do you use any consumer facing personal finance apps at all? Now? I don't because I have this this team that that I can actually go and talk to. But like, I think, you know, to me, it's like if everybody could have that experience, I mean, it's awesome. Everybody would be able to plan better. Have you seen? Let me show you one. It's called Kubera.com. I have no association with these guys. But I've talked about them so much that I'm actually on their homepage because they quoted me.

13:52Oh, yeah. There you are. And this doesn't matter if you're worth$50 ,000 or$100 million. A lot of people use software to aggregate their net worth. Because even if you only have 50 grand, sometimes you'll own a couple cars. You'll own maybe two bank accounts. You'll maybe have some amount of money in Robinhood, whatever. And then if you're really wealthy, you have many, many dozens of accounts. right you have like uh your you have some money with this person somebody with that person you have probably have some like private investments yeah and this just does a really good job of aggregating it of all of it which a lot of companies claim they do that the issue is is that adapar kind of does that for like the high end yeah dude i adapar seems awesome but i think you have to have a lit like i think so like morgan stanley or jp morgan i forget who i talked to you have to have at least 50 million dollars in liquid net worth with one of those banks in order to get access to adipar or something like insane like you have to have you have to be a uh a little bit more even than an ultra high net worth client so like you adipar is crazy but i've never even seen it but with kubera they do such a good job of aggregating all the stuff because the connections don't break and so anyone who's ever used mint or who have used uh wealthfront or like whatever the connections to all of your accounts breaks all the time and you got to like oh yeah re-enter the password login oh my god it's the hugest pain and so these guys have done a good job with that but what they do is they have this version where you can export the information is it called is it what's it called is it called json oh yeah json so you can export it in json format which is what chat gpt uses or you could just connect your kubera with your chat gpt it started as an export now it automatically does it and you can ask it questions and so what i've done is i've i've used kubera so i use kubera to upload all my accounts and when you do this you're they don't actually have access to transact obviously they can just view your accounts and then i use chat gpt where i will uh create a project that has like a warren buffett book or sometimes i'll have like a more aggressive financial advisor like a book of someone who has written something on financial advising because like you have different gurus sometimes you know what i mean like different yeah And I can use this to ask it questions and have my own personal finance advisor.

16:10Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. That's something like give me advice using the fundamental investor theory. Yeah. And so you'll be like, look, my net worth is blank today. If I want to be at this mark in 10 years, show me what I should do. Or if I want to buy a house in eight years, what would you suggest is a good budget to have based off of what you know about me now? You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I'm sure it works great for that. Dude, it's awesome. It's so awesome. Now, having a financial advisor is still great sometimes because you still like financial advisors. Oftentimes, the value is not in the advice that they give.

16:46It's the fact that there's a human being that you can trust. But anyway, this is how I've been using AI. Yeah. I mean, imagine that like that experience that you're getting. But like now, you know, to your point about like feeling like you can trust a human more. I mean, how much of that is based on like the fact that it actually is a human versus how much of it is like literally. just like the psychology of like talking to a face no i think like i put it i think you and i think that because of our age i my if i had here's what i had to bet if i i'm making this up i bet that the 18 year old today in five years they're going to go to the doctor and when they go to the doctor they're going to tell their doctor this is the illness that i have and i think it's this because what you and i would have said five years ago or your parents would have said five is web WebMD says that it appears as though I have this illness.

17:33No. So the young guys nowadays, they just say, ChetGPT said this. And the doctor is going to say, well, I agree with you. And according to my belief, ChetGPT says blank. And ChetGPT, I think, is going to be the stamp of approval or AI. I think they're going to trust AI more than a human being. Does that make sense? Oh, for sure. I mean, I think like today, it's already better to, I mean, everybody should be taking all of their you know personal like uh health diagnostics you get a blood test or whatever and like running that through chat like upload it ask 03 like hey like here's my my uh other symptoms here's how i feel like tell me what i might have right or tell me what could be wrong like um i've seen so many stories from like both personal friends as well as like on reddit twitter etc of like people who caught diagnoses that their doctor just missed not necessarily because they're bad doctors although a lot of doctors probably are bad of doctors right like well dude they spent 10 minutes with you like what are they going to solve exactly that yeah so exactly like i i had a i got a an injury lifting weights uh like two months ago or something like that and i just used chat gpt to do pt and they just told me what to do and i just followed the routine for three weeks and like my back improved totally i mean it's literally trained on the best knowledge out there like you're getting the the like wisdom of like peter atia meets huberman meets like you know all of these like you know health prognosticators to inform like, you know, Chachapiti is a response to you.

18:55I've become the most extreme version of optimist for new disruptive entrepreneurs and startups. Meaning, you know, I think the world moves through these different, you know, kind of phases, right? And in a stable phase where the technology has been pretty stable, you know, that was basically true of the web and web tech for, you know, at least like 2018 maybe until like Gen AI hit. So for a few years, like it was very stable. The technology became very mature. And then it really became about like, how can you go and either leverage your existing distribution if you're an incumbent? So it's really hard to compete against big existing players like Salesforce or Microsoft, et cetera, you know, in that era to now, like, it's like the, all of the assumptions are off and every company is kind of up for grabs.

19:44Right. And what I mean by that is like, you can look all the way at non-tech companies and let's say if you're a property management firm, like, you know, half of your cost structure is, is automatable, right? If not more. And in that world, like the margins on the business are so low, like, I actually talked to a, the founder of a, of a company based in Germany, that's doing exactly this, they're, they're buying up different property management firms, and basically using their own AI tech to automate a large part of the job. And actually, they don't fire people, they keep everybody employed, but they take on more business as a result.

20:18And so they've quickly become one of the largest property management companies in Germany, if not in Europe, by just going and aggregating these traditional businesses and creating that AI leverage, taking what probably was like a low percents margin business to become a, you know, tens of percents margin business. I mean, you know, from a PE standpoint, that leverage is huge. So I think that's a playbook that we're seeing a lot of like excitement around because I think every traditional business, especially one that has a large, you know, part of their cost structure that could be automated, is kind of up for grabs.

20:52Like think about obviously call centers, BPOs, but really any labor intensive business process outsourcing companies. So that's basically, you know, there's a lot of these offshore companies that have like literally thousands of employees that you can go and outsource very rote tasks to, right? So like analyst work, like go comb through these documents and look for, you know, kind of facts or, you know, do research for me. Support centers themselves are a form of BPL, right? So you have these like big call centers that are basically client agnostic. So it's not just one company's call center, they can take on business from any client.

21:32So we could go and say like, hey, like, I want to spin up a call center for Airtable. And traditionally, that just meant like you have a whole bunch of humans sitting in a room somewhere and you know you're basically hiring them on demand and now of course a huge amount of that can be automated dude i get so many of those calls a day and a lot of times they say that they are an ai they're horrible they they still suck do you get a lot of those calls i i do although i mean i i don't pick them up dude i pick them up i always pick them up like i like i like want to get to know these people like you know sometimes it's like i could i could hear like where they are like here's what i get all the time i always get a text message that says this is coinbase uh someone in serbia logged into your account and like i know it's a scam but i called them and i'm like oh my god let's like figure out how this scam works a little bit like i i do it all the time yeah i'll spend like i mean you're first of all you're totally feeding the bear because if they if you can give them a response they know you're like you're a more likely uh target dude i'm so into it they're like what's your name i'm like oh it's uh kevin smith and they're like oh i see your account right now i'll be like uh you do what like tell me about it tell me how much do i have yeah this is awesome uh and so like they're like they go through these whole scripts and i'm like this is this is awesome uh that that you found my account uh do you gotta figure out how to scam the scammer like by the end of it you get them to give you their their uh their info have you seen the youtube channels that do that they're so funny no i haven't dude there's guys on me my weekend there's guys on youtube that have 10 million subscribers and they're really like sharp guys and they will like get they'll pretend like they're old ladies like they use a voice changer and they get the scammer to install software where they the scammers uh web camera will come on and they can control like the it's like the greatest oh no this is the greatest that is insane it's the greatest amazing but these these ai call companies they're they're still horrible are you bullish on them well you know i think the um the models have to get better at real-time synchronous uh interactions for for uh you know for especially for voice calls to fully get taken over by AI.

23:35I think for chat, like you're chatting with somebody, like it's already better in many cases, right? Because like, you know, those chat experiences are horrible with humans because like the human is probably doing like 20 different parallel chats. They don't really know or care about you, whereas an AI can be fully attentive. But I agree. I think the voice is just not quite there yet. You've probably seen that Sesame voice demo where it's like, you know, one of the better real-time voice interactions. What's it called? interrupt and uh sesame.ai you can literally call it oh yes i did see this i absolutely do you think this is a good product i you know it's a research team and this is a demo product but i think it shows where the models are going and i think you know it could be from this team and this company but also i mean you know that open ai um and 11 labs etc they're all working on making that interactivity better.

24:29OpenAI revealed the last voice mode release where you could actually interrupt the AI halfway through a conversation. That was kind of a big deal. It's still not there yet because it doesn't feel right. I mean, if you just talk to it, it doesn't feel like a human, but I think that will be a frontier that we pass or across in the next year or two. So one of the last things you had on here was AI productivity tools. You said cursor for email. What's that look like? So I just generally think this form factor of, it's not about using AI to completely replace the current workflow, right? So the cool thing about Cursor is it's not just like a chat interface alone that you're using to generate code or to say like, hey, you don't need to code.

25:14Like it's actually an IDE, like they forked VS Code, a popular IDE, and then they added this like agentic coding experience on top. But as a developer, you can still be in the code. In fact, I think that's the value of Cursor. So I just think applying that paradigm to a lot of other productivity experiences, one of them being email, it's like you think about email, you go in and like, usually you just come in and like, you know, click on each email, read each one, etc. You can currently go to a separate product like Gemini or now Claude and OpenAI both have integrations into email and you can ask questions about your email.

25:48But I think the ideal experience is actually a blended one where you can actually do agentic workflows and maybe AI is automatically doing some pre-reading of your emails, telling you what's important, what's not. Maybe even doing some like research across your other content sources, like looking up, you know, info in your other accounts, in your calendar, doing a web search to help you decide like, hey, like I got this pitch from an entrepreneur who wants to be on my podcast. Like, is it worth my time? Right. And it can already have a recommendation for you. So I just think like, you know, one of the places that you spend a lot of time today, I mean, news, I think email, if you're a developer, you're in your IDE, like, I think that's where I would attack is like start with where people are actually spending a lot of time.

26:28And on first principles, like a lot of that time could be automated or augmented with AI. So I'm going to ask you how you'd build this because from my, I had an email company. I know a little bit about email, but not, I don't know the tech. I don't know the technical capabilities of everything, but like email sucks to build on top of because Gmail owns everything. And superhuman did something interesting where for the listeners, superhuman was a brand new email client and you download superhuman and you use that instead of Gmail. They recently sold last week for I think the rumor was 800 million or something like that.

27:03Yeah, I saw that. To grammarly. And it was a very bold mission. I think they fell short if they sold or that's what I'm guessing if I had to guess, but it was pretty magnificent of an effort to like get after it. And my question to you is, if you were going to build something like this, you pretty much would have to start from scratch, I would think of a new email client, not a Gmail plugin. Yeah. So interestingly, I also worked in email before Airtable. So my startup before then was a YC company, Etax. And it was actually, I think we were the first startup to build a Gmail plugin. And it wasn't like an official plugin at the time.

27:42There was no plugin framework. Like we literally figured out like kind of on our own how to hack what's called the DOM, which is basically the HTML representation from Gmail of the email client and like literally just injected a UI on top of that with a Chrome extension. And so, you know, we kind of pioneered this idea of like, oh, wow, you could be an email. And then we added our own sidebar to every email that you had to show information about who you're talking about. But could they have banned you? They could have certainly, A, sent us a cease and desist and said, like, what you're doing is against our TOS as a site.

28:17And then, B, they could do some things to make it annoying for us. And, like, it's almost like they could just keep moving the target. So, like, they could change the layout of the page. They just make your life hell. Without making it look different, yeah, to the user in ways that would break our integration. And that did happen. I don't think it was intentional. I think they would just update the page, re-render it, and then it would change the layout. And then for a day, our extension would be broken. We'd have to furiously try to code a fix to it. That was kind of the really, really early days.

28:47And ironically, Superhuman, the founder, Rahul, was actually the founder of a company that kind of competed with us back in that time, like 2010. Reportive. Reportive. Yeah, yeah. Oh, man. For anyone who's above probably 33 that was involved in technology, Reportive was a game-changing tool. That was so cool that they created that. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, email has been like, I mean, it's interesting because from the time that Reportive and eTax existed to now, like email really hasn't changed very much at all. Like you look at Gmail, like it's kind of the same product. And, you know, the status quo argument is like, well, it's like good enough.