How I built a $3B AI Startup + 7 AI Business Ideas

24:49So I've always been obsessed with democratizing the web for everyone. So anyone with an idea has to be able to create. And that's why we created VZero, because VZero is like ChatGPT, but for creating web applications. Instead of giving you text, it gives you a fully working web application. You say, I want to make a, make me an app or a site. Maybe the next DoorDash. You can literally type that in. It'll make one. And the difference, I would say, there's many players that are trying to build this. But one of the things that I'm really excited about is that it's banking on the lessons of the last 10 years of building the world's most popular framework for JavaScript.

25:27And building the production-grade infrastructure to support it. Right? I'll name a cool brand that uses Vercel. Ramp, Supreme.com, Brex. In fact, we have so many successful companies in every market segment that you could imagine. But all of those companies needed expert engineers, right? Like in order to build like a really cool website, like drinkhgwild.com, you need to learn Next.js. Now the magic of our sale is that we cut down the learning from like, I need to know all of the foundations of computer science and all of the foundations of AWS and how to deploy software. where we brought it down to like take a React course and use Next.js.

26:08But with AI, we can cut that down even further. It's just to speak English. And we will steer the model towards what we think are gonna be the world's most successful outcomes. We care deeply about performance. When e-commerce websites deploy on Vercel, they vastly outcompete everything else. So we'd recently heard about a public company that sells billions of dollars worth of consumer electronics a year that improve their conversion rate by 30 % on some markets to 90 % on some other markets. Why? Because the website is faster. So imagine if you could go to an agent and say, I want to create the next big competitor to apple.com.

26:51We're going to make it faster, more accessible, beautifully designed, and deployed on this enterprise-grade infrastructure. You get those out of the box. Get those for free. Out of the box. So, and it's true to the spirit of the company of like, how can we get that Formula One card running as soon as possible? So it's opening up creation and deployment to basically every human on the planet. Okay, but you were saying that's context for the AI ideas because what? Because of two things. One is that with V0, any idea that I have, I can bring it to reality. But then there is a meta. So we're being very successful with V0 because we created AI for web engineers or AI for people that are interested in shipping to the web.

27:32There's going to be so many other verticals that are going to be similarly disrupted. And it seems really obvious to me because I'm on the, you know, to your point, I'm behind the scenes of building things like VZero. But I think there's going to be, for example, why don't we have a VZero for creating video games? A studio that combines the best of both worlds of software 1.0 techniques and software 2.0 techniques. And I don't know if you're familiar with that framework, but - Explain. So Andrew Karpathy, who's the leader of AI at Tesla and later OpenAI, came up with this incredible essay that I think is canon now.

28:08Like everybody must read this because it's so ahead of its time. He called it Software 2.0. And he says, look, Software 1.0 was what I grew up with. Programming languages, data structures, algorithms. algorithms, you learn how to make things more efficient by writing better for loops and recursion, and you're in control of everything. And everything is very deterministic and predictable. Software 2.0, we're still using foundations of computer science, but we're making the process a lot more stochastic, probabilistic. Instead of writing every circuitry of the programming language, we're relying on training models with data.

28:51And the output of what those models do might resemble what a program might do on its own, like a 1.0 program might do on its own. So the best example would be, you can use ChatGPT 4.0 with image generation to produce incredible diagrams. And there's ways of generating those diagrams with traditional software engineering, but this AI is almost like this miracle general purpose program that can do anything. based on what it's been trained on. So let's call training and neural networks and AI software 2.0. And it has all of this magical emergent properties that were not thought through by the engineers.

29:32The engineers didn't have to go and write every if else branch that is under the hood and think about every corner case. And that's why it's so exciting to people because every time a new model comes out, we're all like, we call it discovering the latent space. we're all trying to figure out what is even possible because even the creators of the models don't know what's possible which is in stark contrast to software 1.0 so for 1.0 is like there's a pm giving you tickets right i know exactly what this can do i know exactly what it can't do yes i know if you push this button you're gonna get this exact result i know if you push that button you're gonna get that exact result the new model you're saying even the makers of it are like i'm not sure exactly what it could do how well it could do you push this button, you're going to get something.

30:15It could be phenomenal. It could be a little bit unpredictable in some ways. But what I offer is that the successful AI products of the future are going to be an intersection of these two worlds. The software 1.0 parts of the product are still going to be highly valuable. If not, v0 would just be purely an autonomous AI. But think about it. It's still writing Next.js code. Is it still using UIs that make it friendly for people. It still has a community of templates that you can, with one click, deploy. And it's still banking on the 10 years of investment of Vercel infrastructure and our partner infrastructure like Supabase and Neon and the databases that we bring in.

30:57So I think people are going to be able to do this in many other verticals. So video games is an obvious one to me because you will want parts of the game engine to be just like Unreal Engine is, right? Like you'll want something like a next js but for video games that is under the hood but then you want to open up video game creation to as many people as possible like start with a prompt and you're going to be like i want to create something that is like pokemon red uh but the art should resemble this and it should be in three-dimensional space and it has 10 missions so you start describing with english what you actually want so is this possible today like what is the tech the tech could do this today Oh, yes.

31:40In fact, I'm like - Why has someone done this? Please, like, where are you all at? And so I'll tell you some of the things that we've done to help facilitate this world. So using the game engine metaphor, you can think of V0 as one video game that Vercel built. And you can think of Vercel as a game engine. And so there's gonna be way, many, many other video games that people are gonna create. So if you have an idea for an AI agent, you can deploy it on the Vercel platform. so you can do VZero for doctors, you can do VZero for video games, you can do VZero for lawyers. So any vertical that you can imagine, we even templatized.

32:19So we've open source a lot of what makes VZero so great so that entrepreneurs can come in and say like, look, I see an opportunity for AI to disrupt this space. Let's take the video game example real quick. I think you may, did you make a Doom thing or did you support Doom or was that an AI generated Doom? No, so that was, the one you're talking about is my Doom captcha thing. So for context, I'm a, I hate captcha, first of all. Like captcha is a thing where you go to a website and it tells you, please tell me how many. Makes you feel stupid. Cause you're like, is this a bike? That's right, is this a bike?

32:54Or select the staircases, right? So I created one, which was, instead of you select staircases or stoplights, you have to kill three enemies in Doom. and funny enough, the idea came over Christmas break and what I did is I went to V0 and I said, I want to create a CAPTCHA that looks exactly like Google CAPTCHA because it needs to look familiar for people for the joke to land. Like it pops up, yeah. Yes. And then I basically took advantage of the fact that Doom has been open sourced. So what I did is, and this is kind of like maybe a little bit more of advanced engineering here, but like I took a WebAssembly version of Doom that can run inside the browser and I prompted my way to basically spawn the user in a very specific level.

33:45And then this actually involved hacking the C code base of the game and then basically set it up so that it was a constrained version of the video game. So you kill three players and you pass the captcha. So it's almost like creative engineering, you can call it. And this is something I think is also going to be big in the world. You could argue that someone could create an entire platform for just creative coding, AI for creative coding, where like the next generation of artists are going to be playing in this dynamic medium. They're going to be offering up things that are highly interactive.

34:22So you could create the VZero for interactive art. So it's kind of meta, right? But like I started with VZero and I created this thing and it went viral. and like there's like three or four like news articles written about it. But it literally took a couple hours of prompting. Like myself, I've been an engineer for like, you know, a couple of decades now and I no longer write code. I only prompt. The last one on this video game thing because it kind of blows my mind that that's possible. I would have assumed it's not possible yet. Can it only make very simple Flappy Bird style games or can it make like, can you build a Fortnite?

34:52Can it make Fortnite? You know, where are we at today of like what's actually possible? Yeah, so there's two levels to this. If you go to v0 today, you could prompt and create a one-off video game. But the next level is that I think there's going to be entrepreneurs who are going to create the next big AI platforms and deploy them to oversell. And so it depends on where you want to play. If you just want to create something that looks like Fortnite, you could do that today. You could just prompt. Like it's possible. Really? Yeah. I mean, I think you'll probably go down a journey similar to what JavaScript went through, where you're going to be able to get something basic going and it might take you the next 10 years to perfect it to the level of what Fortnite is today.

35:29But this is the beauty of things like vZero. Like anybody can cook. You can start. You can get it out there. Kind of like DoorDash was six PDFs and a website. You can get the vZero of Fortnite out there into the world. But I think there's also going to be ambitious people that maybe have skills that are more on the game engine side. Kind of like I created Next.js and can say, look, there's an opportunity to create a framework that works really well with LLMs that enables broad, massive scale game creation. And the things that you can facilitate in that world are, for example, for a game to be successful, it needs really high quality textures.

36:11It needs really cool art. So you can start creating kind of like a platform that facilitates bringing the art in. So that's why I mentioned with, you will need software 1.0 skills just to create kind of like the platform and create the connective tissue that facilitates this highly opinionated workflow. Because creating video games, obviously there is a lot that is like art and like emergent. The game creator has to come in with an idea, but there's a lot of things that are highly predictable. Like there is kinds of games. There is like the 2D platformer. What does a 2D platformer need? Well, all of the runtime infrastructure, all of the things that make a game work already exist on the internet.

36:56And the AI is perfectly capable of sort of orchestrating it. So what a would-be game creator would need is a very easy way of like generating the game assets. And so what I would do if I was an entrepreneur doing this is like I would connect it to other image generation models. So that when you come to this game creation studio, I'm kind of like guiding you into like, Like here's all the things that you're going to need. Here's all the integrations. Sound creation is another good example. 11 Labs allows you to create sounds with LLMs. In fact, I've bytecoded a few things that required sound. And instead of like Googling for like open source sound effects or whatever, I just went to 11 Labs and I prompted for that.

37:42So, and I can do that because I know everything that kind of exists in the AI world. I know that 11 Labs exists. You're a creative engineering. Exactly. But imagine a would-be game creator that doesn't know that. So they just want to go to a platform that has already built-in sound creation with AI. And so behind the scenes, you can sort of like plug this in. So maybe to summarize, I think there's all of these permutations of technologies that already exist that are making new platforms possible. And I think entrepreneurs don't need to like go and train foundation models. They just need to go in and put the pieces together into opinionated workflows.

38:19The things that are becoming obvious to people today are, you know, AI for legal, AI for developers. And I think those are kind of like the zero to one is what feels very immediate, what feels very emergent. I sometimes call it unbundling chat GPT. When chat GPT came out, people were like, hmm, I can ask you for a draft of a NDA. And so people said, you know, I can take that slice of an idea and I can turn it into a legal platform. What we realized was like, hmm, you can go and ask it for web UI. ChatGPT was quite good at outputting, you know, React, HTML, Next.js. And so we went and said, oh, this can be v0.

39:03This can be a whole platform for web development. And so what I challenge people to think about is that what are those like clusters of queries that people are going to ChatGPT for that can become entire platforms. And I'm sure there are a lot of people that are going to these things and saying like, I want to create a video game. But this is just one of the many ideas that I shared on that thread. Right. So let's go back to this Typeform idea. So this seems like a super simple one, which I like, because like you don't need to build like world changing, blah, blah, blah, just to be able to do this.

39:32Yeah, yeah. So that one arose from the fact that if you look at why Typeform has been so successful, it's an interface innovation. It gives you one question at a time. It feels friendly for the, I mean, I hate responding to surveys, but the most paddleable that you can make it for me is if you give me small chunks. Multiple choice versus like, boom, oh, I'm gonna have to answer this whole long page. Yeah, here's an IRS form. Please fill it out. In fact, IRS would probably have way higher completion rates and people paying taxes on time if like they create a better UI, essentially. Have you ever used TurboTax, by the way?

40:12TurboTax is actually a phenomenal user experience. It's type form. It's one question at a time. They don't ask you things that you don't know the answers to, which is the problem with taxes. So smart. They don't, I mean, like, what do you owe? No, they just say - And this is one of the golden rules of onboarding, right? Forget about forms. Onboarding, like, give me one thing to do, remove all the distractions, remove all the links that might take me out of the flow. I give people this little hack sometimes, Like if you're in a flow where you want people to complete a task, why are you making the logo clickable?

40:45And why are there like six footer links taking me to like the fucking founding story of the company? Why a destructive person? So I type form kudos, like they nailed that. But I think there might be an opportunity on two levels. One is I keep using this formula of if I need to create a form and very quickly send it to you, I could have the B0 for form creation. where I prompt my way to tune the form. Yeah, because it could even come up with the questions for you. Exactly. Like, hey, I'm coming up with a, I'm trying to get, I'm asking my friends what dates work for the bachelor party. Send a quick survey out to my friends.

41:24In fact, I'm sure someone will go to VZero, listen to this, and start creating the AI form creator, right? I think it's a really good idea. And by the way, I think there's an add-on to this. So I had a similar idea once, but I was thinking, we own this business called somewhere.com. Great domain name. Yeah, we paid a great price for this domain name. I'm not, jury's out on that one. But, you know, you find talent in LADAM or South Africa, or it was like your story, right? There's talent is everywhere. Opportunity is not always everywhere. And so when the website, the way it works today is you land and you click like, okay, I want to start hiring.

41:57And then there's a long form and it's all there. It's a bad experience. It's like your name, what you're hiring for, your budget, you know, do you need a full-time, part-time, whatever. And then it says, great, now book a call. And then you're going to talk to the sales guy. And I'm like, you know, with AI, what this should really do is you should land and be like, hey, what are you hiring for? What do you need? And you say, I need a designer. Cool. So, you know, cool. We got plenty of designers. We actually just hired designers for XYZ company. Tell me, are you looking for a graphic designer or blah, blah, blah?

42:25Totally. Yeah, what are they going to do? And you kind of just quickly tell it. It says, you know, we recently placed somebody like this, candidate profile pulled from our system. Yeah. And just say, you know, would this be the type of person that, you know, would fit the type of thing you're looking for? Or they cost this much. That's pretty affordable to be able to hire somebody of this level of talent. And you're like, yeah, yeah, that would be great. More like that. It's like, awesome. What's your email? I'll send it to you. It's a salesperson. It's not a form. And it's a salesperson that does what all salespeople do.

42:51They ask questions. They follow up. They note what you say. They respond intelligently. They follow up where they need. They disqualify you if you're not a good fit. And if you are a fit, they're basically giving you bits of proof and promise along the way to get you to say, yes, I can't believe this doesn't exist. It's a more dynamic interface, right? So you said something really interesting, which is I think when people have ideas, it's like they're looking, they're staring into like a vector space. They know that there's something there that they want to do. And this is for everything. Like you may have an idea for like a survey that you want to send to your customers.

43:23And you're like, yeah, I know that it's mostly about getting product feedback and how happy they are and what they do for work. but you might be forgetting that there is a very important question that people that do this surveys typically ask and you just don't know about it this is why an ai first type form would make so much sense because when you prompt it i want this form for this thing it'll know things that you don't right and and this even goes back to and it'll by the way summarize all the results for you yeah at the end because it'll be like you know that's otherwise a full manual step i have to do.

43:58Great. We got 300 responses. All right. I got to go through those. And this is why AI is going to disrupt everything because you would, you just talked about like, okay, I can also bring AI to the results process. And my other point was you can even bring AI to the submission process because instead of being rigid and making you select between 20 things, and then you press other and whatever, there might be innovations also in that maybe it's purely conversational, Maybe it's hybrid conversational and what we call generative UI, which is that - On the fly. Exactly. On the fly, it chooses what is the right format to answer this question.

44:36And you might learn, another thing that humans do poorly is, where do you hear from us? And we write down fucking like AOL and Google. And you're like, wait, does anyone use this anymore? That should also, you should also give it to the AI to choose, okay, this customer is coming from Argentina. So in Argentina, no one uses this thing. You know the UTM on their link. That's right. And you know it from GYP headers. But this is an A++++ idea. There were a lot of people nitpicking my idea in the thread, which is like, this is a freaking tweet storm. I'm not describing the freaking entire company, right?

45:12And they were saying, no, but UI is still better because so-and-so. I was like, sure. But again, it doesn't mean that the UI is as rigid as it is today in that the eight choices of check boxes are rigid as well. And I remember there was this company called Wufu in a YC batch at one point. They had created a beautiful for a builder. And the form builder was all drag and drop and you had to select the type of response. All that stuff is going to go away. In fact, that would give you a rule of thumb that if drag and drop is involved as a primary interaction mechanism, it's probably ripe for disruption because no one was actually drag and drop stuff.

45:49You just want to say like, this is my idea. Just build it. Right. Right. Yeah. That's like a tell. It's like a poker. Drag and drop is like the, maybe to use the software 1.0 and 2.0 metaphor, drag and drop was making 1.0 more paddleable and accessible to more people. Visual coding, visual programming was that as well. How can we make 1.0 more accessible? Well, we invented dragging stuff and showing it in two dimensional space. Let's do some more. So you had one that was called AI camera. What's the AI camera idea? This was back to like embrace the rapper. Embrace the fact that models are fucking phenomenal.

46:25And there's a few hyper online people like me that know all of them or try to know all of them of like deep grand V3 just landed on high and pacing, whatever, like. You're paying attention to that level of depth. Yes, but the average consumer just wants to take awesome photos. Yeah. And so I've been, this one came up because we were at a very big meeting for a bank that wanted to use Vercel in New York. And the champion on the bank side was like, let's take a photo with a beautiful, like New York backdrop, whatever. And it was so awkward that we tried it. We tried to take the photo 20 times because it's hard to take a photo with like, where's the sun and the back lane.

47:07We want New York to be visible, but we want our faces to be visible. and like someone blinks during the photo. And so, I mean - If there's men involved in a photo, it's a terrible photo. Yes. It's just a general rule. Taking it, standing in it, posing in it, we don't know how to do any of it. So think of the input from the shutter. Think of the click of the camera. And this is a software camera, like a camera app, as the input into the prompt rather than the output. If you're extremely good at taking photos, it could just be the output. Or maybe it's lightly tuned and filtered and whatever and it becomes the output.

47:41But maybe just embrace the fact that it's an idea to give the AI, right? And the AI will know that if that photo was taken in that place, the goal is to obviously show people smiling. No one should be blinking. The backdrop needs to look amazing. And, you know, maybe actually gives you five permutations of, we know what good looks like. We know the shades, the lighting, maybe it removes objects for you. And so I also mentioned, that there is software 1.0 techniques and software 2.0 techniques to embed into everything. You shouldn't believe that you need the perfect model that'll make the photo perfect either.

48:19You can give people a workflow. So what I had imagined at the time was like, it's going to look like Instagram because I love how Instagram, you took the photo and then - Filter picker. And then it's called like San Ramon filter and whatever, like Oakland and hipster, whatever. So imagine it's giving you permutations, but also maybe it gives you the tool to like select something. Maybe already, I'm just purely brainstorming now, by the way, like you had me like full on brainstorming. Like there's a model that is really good for like that Apple uses for like removing objects on the scene. So maybe by the time it gives you the produced photos, all of the objects are already movable.

48:57So you get, because what happens a lot of the time is someone blinks, but also there's an object that you don't want on the scene. Like your baby was like crawling in there, your dog pooped. And like, you want to take that out. The best one, Argentina. What's the name of that beautiful waterfall? Like the craziest, the waterfall place. Iguazu Falls. Iguazu Falls. Take out the tourists. I go there with my fiance and we take this photo under the waterfall. We're kissing. Somebody takes a photo and there's this dude in the background there. And he's got his shirt off and he's taking like a photo for the boys.

49:29And it's like ruined this photo. And my wife is sick. I want to frame it because I think it's so funny. And she's been trying to find a Photoshopper to like get rid of this thing. A hundred percent. And you're right. Like that would be like her dream would be the magic, magic camera that says, let me guess, you want this guy out of here. Yes. And we have the model that is good at taking, you know, detection and then good at removal automatically. Yeah. And this is all possible today. You know, your job will mostly be to combine models, create pipelines of models, prompting even. Right. Do you think that Apple will just make this kind of default on the camera?

50:03I mean, Apple could have shipped Instagram. Apple could have shipped so many things. Like Apple could also ship that the Zoom annoying popover of facial effects, whatever goes away and they haven't is still broken. Like when the balloons come up. So I know I'm in a post worrying about what Apple does world. I'm actually more worried about their constraints on developer freedom on how they tax you and only let you run one browser engine. That's kind of my mental model. Apple is in the IBM phase of let's preserve what we have at all costs and litigate. They're almost becoming like Oracle of our generation.

50:39Purely, it's all about terms of service and 2.1.1 prohibits this. Hopefully, I'm saying this so that the company becomes better in the interest of open public feedback. Tim Sweeney from Unreal from Epic Games just had a similar comment on the Lex Freeman podcast. I think there needs to be a world where developers can just ship. That's the main idea of Rissell. And like Apple has sort of been constraining that. So I'll tell you, like, there's so many cameras that you can ship to the phone that people love. Right. So there is Halliday camera, I think it's called and it's pronounced. there is obviously Instagram is a camera, right?

51:24So Snapchat is a camera. So yeah, and also - But it's also time, like, you know, these things come in these waves where about every seven, eight, 10 years, the window reopens on, you know, these kind of like things. If you just look at Instagram and Snapchat, when they came out, it was sort of like this eight year period after Facebook came out. And like, there was enough new stuff, new, either new social norms, like people taking pictures everywhere, new technology, like smartphones, that all of a sudden there was like an opportunity for those. It's now been another 10 years post Snapchat and Instagram for somebody to build a better camera.

51:59And there's a wedge through utility. Like you can build a better camera. You can build a better like, oh, just import your photo, start editing. Like the exact approach, I mean, who knows how this is going to happen, but it has to happen. It has to happen that like I can take great photos even if I don't, if I didn't capture everything perfectly. Like the AI is already there. Like just make it happen, people. Yeah, you could even actually just do the camera roll part, right? Because, you know, Google Photos and all these, they try to do this. Like, hey, we made a memory. And like, you know, my mom loves these.

52:26It's like, oh, I forgot about that. It sticks together and it put corny music on top. There's no cool factor to that. Those are all pretty totally bad, but it's your photos and your memory. So it's still good enough. Imagine if you had taste and you did it. Like imagine if Kevin Systrom and you realize, oh, there's a gold mine on people's camera rolls that I could just be generating. I could just be mining that and creating like actually good content. Okay. Yeah. There's so many thoughts that come to mind. One is, look, brilliant things happen when people focus and obsess over a problem domain.

52:56So the operating system makers have so many iras in the fire and there has to be someone that just loves to take great photos and wants to democratize that with everybody else, right? So that's kind of how I think about it. And there's so many angles. There is the memory video creation. There is the photo. There is some aspects of shareability of the photos. So who knows? I mean, like, I think my prediction is more so around like something amazing is going to happen in this space more than like, what is this specific thing? All right, I want to do a couple of your other ideas. Oh, this one was clever.

53:29Absurdly smart autocomplete. Like, I didn't know when you said that, I was like, autocomplete, who cares? And then I saw your kind of like brief description. I was like, that's actually brilliant. Can you explain what this idea is? Yeah, I think when it started to become obvious that LLMs were going to transform software engineering, it was when we started typing code into a code editor, and it just suggested stuff based on the whole project, the whole sort of corpus of code that has existed in humanity. The next wrinkle was that things get better, the richer the context. so if you only give the lm one line of code and nothing else it'll still produce something useful and it'll blow people's minds and i think we're in the time of humanity when like things blow our minds for like a week and then we get immediately bored and used to it um but the next wrinkle was what if you put the content of your clipboard into the into the prompt because developers typically are like what they just saw they put into their clipboard because they intend to search for it or make a mutation.

54:41So what's in the clipboard is likely to be kind of what's in your mind. Could help, yeah. Right? And so auto-completions get better. And then they get better with more context and like smarter models and with search. Because now when I am in a different file, I'm likely to be writing code that is related to the dependency of this other file. So long story short, things get better with better context and auto-completion is sort of the first manifestation of how LLMs and AIs can enhance your cognitive ability. Yeah. I mean, it's just-in-time expertise. Yes. Right. Like in line, right while I'm writing it.

55:24Yes. Give me the perfect thing right there without me having to leave, go ask, think of a question. Just give me a suggestion right there. So now what's the, that worked in code. You're saying, what about the rest? Yeah, exactly. And, and I get frustrated with like how bad spell checking is. So if you look at, you know, macOS spell checker, it's gotten better over the years, but it just doesn't know the things that you literally saw 10 seconds ago. Like someone tells you, hey, can you send me the V0? Someone says in Slack. And then you go to an email and you start writing V0 and Apple goes, I think you meant via.

56:07Like it comes up with a new word. It's like, no, no, no. I literally just was talking about this. How could I possibly want to not write that down? And so that's where the inspiration came for it. And I think there's a lot of ways to go about this. Like one is like you enhance the operating system. It's not a, it's a non-trivial task, but I think this general idea applies to so many things where we forget that the LLMs are here. The context is not evenly distributed. Meaning if you just put the right things into the prompt, magic will happen without changing the actual sort of engine of intelligence.

56:48And so that example you gave of like the V01 sounds minor, like, oh, who cares? You just push backspace twice and just fix it. But what you're saying is if the AI knows what I'm talking about, what I'm thinking about, what I'm working on, what we're doing, then in the same way that in code, it auto-suggests the right code because it knows about my whole multiple files in the projects, it'll do the same when I write that email. It won't just give me the generic thing. It knows how I talk and it knows what we were talking about and it knows what the plan was that I'm trying to relate to this guy.

57:18Yeah. It's like the black mirror, the entire history of you. Is that the one where the camera is like, it's like your memory is an external memory basically. Yeah. The other thing that's really interesting is that this systems are all about next token prediction, right? And right now we're not fully exploiting that because we're not putting in the sequence of everything we're doing and everything we're thinking about. Every time you go from app to app, that context is getting lost. And we typically actually tend to work sequentially. What happens is I read an email that is about a problem. And then I go with another app and I'm likely going to discuss that problem.

57:54Or I'm going to try to look for the person that is an expert in that problem. So the other way to go about this is like, you know, how can you ingest this series of apps and integrations and systems that people use to do their work and you connect the dots? There's one more that you have here. You said more granular v-zero. So this is almost like, hey, come disrupt us. Yeah, it's what I talked about with the game engine, right? Like just like ChatGPT got broken down into like individual things, we have a big effort at Vercel to sort of like, we want to be the platform of platforms. We want the next Shopify to be born on Vercel.

58:34And what I anticipate will happen is that if an entrepreneur says, I want to make it easy for people to sell online. They're probably, just like we did with the Typeform exercise, they're probably going to start with AI. They're not going to build the same Shopify that exists today. They're going to create something that starts with intelligence. It starts with maybe importing a photo of the product that you want to sell. Maybe it starts with a prompt of what you want your store to be. Maybe it's so smart at like, if it's a physical store that already exists, it knows everything about it. It's like one button, create the store.

59:06and it ingests all the products and SQs and categories and whatever. So similar to the game engine thought experiment that we went through, like that would be a more granular VZero. It's like, okay, VZero can create anything. But, and the reason that this would work out is that it's the same reason that Shopify worked out. Like there is things that are very general, like AWS, like Vercel. You know, Vercel sort of is like AWS on steroids in a way. Like we're making it so easy for people, but it's still a broad platform on top of which any idea can be deployed. And so I really believe that AI will transform everything.

59:40It'll transform website building. It will transform e-commerce. It'll transform form building. So a lot of the exercises that I do is like, look, there's going to be V0 for legal. Our general counsel uses a tool called GC.ai. GC.ai is essentially V0 for lawyers and it was built on the Vercel platform. And the other wrinkle is - And it's used to what, build their website only? Or it does more than that? No, this is for drafting contracts. So like you can prompt your way to, you know, saying like, I need this contract between these two parties or I need to review a contract and I need to import documents.

1:00:15And so that's kind of what I mean by the more granular VZero. It's more like a theme than a specific idea. Hey, quick message here, because you know that feeling when you send a wire and it actually works? No friction? Well, I've used Mercury for years now. and let me tell you, it just works. And that's why I use it for not one, not two, but eight of my companies. From credit cards to invoices, I have everything in one place. There's no janky dashboard. I'm never told, please visit a local bank branch. None of that tomfoolery. And a few months ago, I landed a big client. And the first thing I did, I sent them a clean branded invoice.

1:00:49Boom, deal closed, cash in the door. That's the kind of banking experience I want. And that's why I use Mercury. So if you're running a startup and you want banking that feels like it's built in this century, well, go to mercury.com and get started in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Bankless services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column A, and Evolve Bank & Trust, members FDIC. One of the other things I wanted to ask you about, something I brought for you. I thought this was incredible. This is a piece of, you know, internet history here. So explain what I just handed you and the backstory of this.

1:01:22Thanks for printing this out because I use this example so much as like the magic of Silicon Valley. I was, I ended up at this party. You know, the classic, like, could have been an office warming party, something along these lines, or like meetup. And people were, you know, having conversations, passing out drinks. And I met this gentleman named Brian Armstrong. And he did something that I find myself doing a lot, is I walk up to people, not with networking agendas or random ideas. I walk up to people with content. I want to show them something. I want to show them an app. I woke up to people.

1:01:59Strangers, you mean? Or what are you talking about? Well, people in the context of networking. Yeah, you're at an event. I'm at an event, whatever. But I could do it with an Uber driver. I have no limits. I take no prisoners. So he walked up to me and he's like, I'm working on Coinbase. It's like a bank for digital currency. And I'm building an app. And he shows me the app. And then he goes, if you install the app, I'll send you a Bitcoin. just think about how crazy that is. Like if you install an app, like first of all, twist my arm. I love trying out new things. And I loved Bitcoin at that time.

1:02:38I'll give you$100 ,000 or whatever it is right now. The date is on this email. What year was this? Yeah, so November 9th, 2012. So it's the magic of the Bay Area because you can just walk up on both sides. You can just walk up to people and show them things. You can see their reactions. You can get their feedback, et cetera, et cetera. And on my side - And there's some people on the street that will show you some things you didn't ask for too. That's right. That's another part of San Francisco you get. Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. It comes with a lot of diversity. But on my side, it's like, well, you can be on the receiving end of new ideas, new opportunities, new, like you can invest.

1:03:20Like if I had been an investor at the time, I was like, hey, this Brian guy is pretty smart and he's hustling hard. and digital currency, might as well give it a shot, right? So yeah, thanks for sharing this. So he sent you this email. He sent you the Bitcoin through Coinbase. So the important thing is that it says worth$10.81. For the app installed. Now that's$103 ,000 as of this morning. Yeah, and then I actually ended up following Coinbase for many years. At the time, I think I was poor, or I had just began, I can't remember exactly when I sold my company, but I couldn't angel invest most likely at this time.

1:03:55But that was the other thing that I started doing when I sold my first company, right? Like I put it all back into the game, which is kind of crazy. In fact, I talked to this guy who I really respected in the JavaScript community. And he was like, he was also starting to do angel investments. And he goes, well, the way that I treat Bitcoin is like an angel investment. I put in a$20 ,000 check into Bitcoin. And I remember when I sold my company, I did that. and it was probably also because of the serendipity of like having Coinbase and this infrastructure that was nascent but I had been exposed to.

1:04:31The magic of Silicon Valley is that you can still do these things. You can just like make things happen. Did it also help that you were born and raised in Argentina and you had seen kind of like, maybe you questioned currency more than the average bear did, right? Yeah, 100%, 100%. So the concrete memory, I was a young child, but it had everyone in Argentina stressed the F out. And people can fact check us and look this up. But it was like, I think we had like three presidents in three days. One president had almost like, I think he raged quit because it was an economic and financial meltdown.

1:05:13I think this was about like 2000, 2001. The next guy comes in and he's like, oh, cool. and the vice president becomes president. Somebody along the sides is like, cool, I'll try to fix it. Two weeks in, he's out too. And then someone comes in who I'm not even sure if he was like literally like next in line. Another guy comes in and I think this is the guy that I'm pretty sure that is the third guy that goes to national TV. They do the whole thing where like they interrupt all of the ongoing channels and they like, president comes in and it's like, he's addressing the financial turmoil and he's saying, look, there's a lot of noise about how your dollar savings will get lost.

1:05:59And they might get converted into pesos and they might get converted at a non-beneficial rate. And he said, do not worry, Argentinians. And this is a national TV, fully synchronized across every screen in the country. Do not worry. Your dollars are safe. If you deposited dollars, This is the exact quote. If you deposited dollars, you will receive dollars. If you deposited Argentinian pesos, you will receive Argentinian pesos. Literally a week later, it didn't happen. The dollars got converted into pesos, and then the currency lost its value. So basically, your money was stolen from you. the banks were in cahoots with the government to make these transactions happen.

1:06:48Your money is effectively just like, when people joke, I take it personally, this is Michael Jordan, people joke, oh, Bitcoin is just a database. We could replace it with Postgres and we would get a lot more throughput. Say, well, not really. What we had in Argentina was Postgres or maybe worse. Maybe it was Excel or something. And the government literally did go in and in the currency column said, select all, convert. That is the database that is not immutable. And so I became extremely pilled with Bitcoin because I have that, like I have the concrete memory and I have my dad screaming at the screen and saying like, these people are so crap.

1:07:30they're like screwing us. And then the other thing that happened was all this protest of people that had large dollar savings that it was so terrible because Argentina has been guilty of this before melee many times of like, if you're rich, that's frowned upon, that's terrible. You probably got rich by screwing someone up. That is like how the culture was largely configured. So it was very hard to empathize with this protest that would happen because people would literally be outside of the banks protesting that their savings got stolen. But the way that it would get sort of, you know, manipulated by the media was, are you going to empathize with that rich guy?

1:08:12Oh, poor him. He's complaining about his huge dollar savings. So that added even more insult to the injury that there was no empathy to people that were losing their money. And so, you know, that Bitcoin seems so obvious in the context of like, we need a globally distributed database that is immutable, that has extreme security guarantees, because this is your life. This is the things that you might leave for your kids. This is everything you've worked your entire life for. You cannot trust any given actor. You cannot trust the government. You cannot trust the banks. You cannot trust, you know, your friends.

1:08:52You cannot trust anyone. You need to be able to have a cryptographic certainty. You can only trust math and the universe, which is kind of like the two emergent properties of it. You trust the universe in terms of the energetic demands on top of which Bitcoin banks, that it's so hard to mint a block, right? And it's so hard to manipulate and do this cyber attacks and whatnot. And you're also banking on the cryptographic verification. Like if you want, you can be a node and verify the blockchain yourself with software that you run as opposed to trusting the world of like, is this legit? Is this the chain that I should be looking at?

1:09:32Which is why, I mean, we can go into a whole different tangent, but like I've always been somewhat unsympathetic to non-proof-of-work systems because they create an uncertainty about what is the right chain to be looking at. And in that category falls like Ethereum and a few others. Two questions for you. One, given that you went through that, do you like kind of denominate yourself in Bitcoin? Do you like put a huge percentage of your own net worth in Bitcoin? Or like how have you decided to do that? I put my entire net worth into Vercel. So having said all of this, I always think about the mental model that Warren Buffett has offered of like, if I could have a cube of all gold on the planet, I would look at it and it's like, oh, it's this shiny block of gold.

1:10:24Or I could have a cube of all of the productive farmland in the US and all of its companies. What cube would I rather own? But it is a false dichotomy. I want to own both. I want Bitcoin and I want assets in product, productive assets that are going to grow over time that I also want to support. And so I like the idea of by far, first and foremost, placing a bet on myself in Vercel. So that's kind of my primary net worth. But if Bitcoin is not some percentage of my net worth, I would be really worried because I would not have that rock solid foundation that I missed when I was in Argentina. Like it didn't feel like I had access to something that could be so reliable and trustworthy.

1:11:10So I am a fan of a potential future in which everything is denominated under the hood. Everything is re-based on top of this system. That would be really cool. So when I do these podcasts, like the way I, people think that this is the, oh, how did it go? And I'm like, it's good or bad. Actually, for me, I get the win far before we sit down because I when I know you're coming on, I go down a rabbit hole of Guillermo and I go and I read your old stuff and I learn from you. That's where I get. And I'm in I'm in this for the wisdom. So I'm like, I'm looking for the golden nuggets, the insights, the wisdom, the frameworks that he uses, the stories that inspire me or I can remember or I can tie to my own life.

1:11:48So by the time I sit down here, this is all gravy. Now I'm here just having chicken nuggets. I'm eating lunch. But one of the things I saw on your old blog, I think it was like 2016 or something. It was a newspaper clipping. I forget who it was, if it was Edison or who it was, but they had this idea of the energy dollar. It's wild. It's wild. I've never heard of this. But like, I guess back in the day, like the, was it Edison? I don't remember who it was. It might have been Ford. I can't remember. Yeah, it was like two of like kind of the luminaries of the time. It was like Ford and somebody else.

1:12:14Yeah. And they were talking about this concept of an energy dollar. Like, hey, we need a currency that's based off of like the production of jewels, you know, jewels of energy, jewels of electricity or work. And then that'll be a more sort of like rock solid currency. It tracks reality. That's Bitcoin. It tracks the universe perfectly, right? It's also related to the Kardashev scale and like our ability to capture energy from our nearby star and the types of civilizations that we are. And the other one that the reason I've been actually also thinking about this more recently is we're clearly entering a world in which energy can be transmuted into intelligence.

1:12:53I mean, it's already the case that I can do so much test time compute that any problem seems tractable with enough cycles of GPUs. And the only limiting factor does seem to be our ability to harness energy. And so the unit of wealth or the store of wealth has to be something that is rare, right? And it has to be something that's provable. And so the idea of tracking our, yeah, our fundamental store of wealth through energy. I mean, I'm very intrigued by that, so. Well, dude, thanks for coming on. I think what you've built is amazing. Your story is great. You're a big ball of energy. And some of these ideas are really, really good.

1:13:38like i'll share more so there's that you got one more there's uh free ideas to thread coming on x so okay the sequel is it gonna be like a shitty movie sequel or you know just doesn't live up to the first one but i did set a high bar i don't want to i don't want to brag when that comes out can we do brainstorm two on here where we riff on them because uh that's what we do here so all right man thank you so much i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to I put my all in it like no days off On the road, let's travel, never looking back All right, this episode is brought to you by Mercury.

1:14:18They are the finance platform of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. Shouldn't be surprised because I use it myself for not one, not two, but I have eight different Mercury accounts. I have seven for different companies that I'm a part of, and then I have my own personal account because now they have personal banking, which is a really cool feature. I highly, highly recommend it. Like I said, I use it myself. And the reason why is because the way that Mercury works is beautiful. It's very intuitive. And you could tell that it's actually made by a startup founder. It's an entrepreneur. You could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and annoyances and decided to actually fix it himself.

1:14:53And really, any type of entrepreneur you are, let's say you're an agency, well, one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices, easily create them, send them to customers, and stay current on your balances with all your customers. Well, you can do that inside Mercury. And so I think that Mercury is great. Highly recommend you check it out. And thank you for sponsoring the show. For more information, check out Mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.