How to Find a Problem Worth Solving

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1:33There's no safe like SimpliSafe. From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show that solves entrepreneurs' toughest problems. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and each week I take a problem that you're probably dealing with and get tactical solutions from people who have been there and solved that. So let's get solving. Here's a question that I think haunts so many entrepreneurs and so many aspiring entrepreneurs. And that is, when do you know that you've got the right idea? Ideas are these abstract promises. They're a thing that just is in our head that we have to take into the real world, that we have to commit our time and energy and reputation to and eventually money.

2:22and then eventually ask other people to commit the same exact thing. And that's really hard because, you know, it's just an idea. We all have a lot of ideas. And I puzzle over this question. I've been asked this question so many times. How do I know it's the right idea? How do I know when it's time to move? And that is why I was really compelled and wanted to talk to my friend Nir on this show. because Nir, well, when I first met Nir, he had a very different plan than the one that he has now because Nir was a guy who had built a company and sold that company and did not plan to do it again. He had done really well for himself.

3:06He was imagining other things for his life. And then one day I got an email from him saying, this is exciting news. I'm launching a new company. And I thought, wait, Nir, you weren't going to be doing that. And now you are. And so the question is, well, how do you find the idea that's worth changing your plans for? And Nir is a smart guy and a really thoughtful guy. And I was pretty sure, and it turns out I was correct, that he would have a really smart and thoughtful answer to that. So first of all, let me introduce Nir. My name is Nir Zikerman. I previously co-founded a company called Anchor.

3:44And if you know anything about podcasting, which, you know, I know a thing or two, then you definitely know Anchor. Anchor was a podcasting platform, let anybody create, distribute, monetize podcasts. Nir founded it in 2015, sold it to Spotify in 2019, and then joined Spotify where he built up their audiobook business. So I was very excited to connect with Nir because, you know, I'm a podcast guy. I knew all about Anchor and I also listened to audiobooks on Spotify. But anyway, that was in the past. Now, here's how he introduces himself. I am the co-founder and CEO of Oboe. And what is Oboe? Oboe is the world's first ever generalized learning platform powered by AI, where anybody can go to learn anything in the most efficient, effective, accessible way ever.

4:36Which is to say that you go to Oboe and you tell it literally anything that you want to learn about, generally, hyper-specifically, and it will produce a just range of ways to teach that to you. It'll create a course. It'll create an audio course. It'll create quizzes. It's like, and all just instantly. It's really cool. But like I said, when I first met Nir, this wasn't on his mind at all. Instead, lots of other things were. He had just recently left Spotify. He was thinking about all these other things that he wanted to do. He was telling me about how much he was enjoying just spending time with his kids and exploring writing.

5:18And I just, I know enough serial entrepreneurs to really have been able to predict that he might have just jumped back into another company, but he didn't seem like that was his direction. And then suddenly it was. And so I asked him now, what was it about this idea, about this opportunity that forced him to change everything? I'll tell you a funny story, which is I have two kids and my son is six years old. And when we launched Oboe, I'd been working on it for about a year leading off to the launch. and in early September we launched it publicly to the world and it was very exciting I'd been working really hard and my kids knew about it they had seen it they gave me a bunch of feedback about it and then on the day that we launched I came home and they knew that it had been a big exciting day and my son asks me now that you launched it are you done working on Oboe and I was like actually this is the very beginning.

6:22It really just started. Can I tell you my version of that story, which is doesn't feature me, but it features a more famous person with my last name, which is that I was having very fun conversation with Michelle Pfeiffer, who had started and continues to run a fragrance company called Henry Rose. But she told me that the most disorienting part of being a now new entrepreneur for Michelle Pfeiffer was that it was literally the complete opposite of the way in which she had worked the rest of her career. Because Michelle would get hired to be on a movie, which would mean that she would spend a bunch of time making the movie, and then it would reach launch, and she would have to do some promotion for the movie, and then it's done.

7:07And then she walks away, and she never has to think about it again. And what she discovered about launching a business is that that's just the start and then it goes on forever. And that was a really hard thing for her to orient to. So it makes sense that other people, especially six-year-olds, would not quite comprehend that. Back to your question around why change your plans and go into this and complete left turn from what I was planning on doing. I think the The real question is why change your plans when you were crazy enough to do this the first time? Yeah. And you saw what it was like. Uh-huh.

7:47How insane it was. Totally. And also, Nir, you had a great outcome, which is beats the odds. So, you know, in a way, somebody could say, come on, man, you rolled the dice and it worked. Why would you possibly do that again? in. Well, look, the truth is at the time that you and I met when I left, I think one of the things that I had not realized is life is short. You want to do things that are meaningful. And most of the things that I had thought of as if I were to go start a company, I would do this or I would do that. The reality was they were just not intrinsically motivating to me. They're interesting business opportunities.

8:30There are interesting jobs. There are interesting things I could have done. But I think one of the benefits of being in the position that I was in is that you could really reflect on what is the thing that I value doing with my time. And for a while, when you and I first met, and this was certainly the case, I took some time off and I spent time with my family. And I was able to drop off and pick up my kids from school and not work hard. And I had projects on the side, but they certainly were full-time things. And that was amazing. And I wouldn't have traded that for anything. And yet, at the same time, while all that was happening, I just kept coming back to the same set of ideas over and over constantly.

9:12I would think about it all the time. So if the question we're asking is, how do you know if an idea is worth pursuing, is worth giving all of your time to? then a good starting point for the answer is what Nir just said, which is to know if an idea is worth your time, you first see if the idea is taking your time, if it's the thing you just can't let go of. Today on Problem Solvers, we're talking about this and so much more. How to identify the right idea, how to pursue it, And this very interesting balance that Nir has identified of when is there a moment of opportunity that can only be seized if you move fast enough.

9:54Coming up after the break. all right we're back today i'm talking to near zickerman co-founder and ceo of oboe and let's just pick up where he left off he was talking about how he had this idea that he just could not let go of even as he was enjoying some downtime after selling his past company and here's what comes next and i feel like everything that was happening in the world around ai and technology and the concerns that people express around the future of AI and the impact that it'll have on us and screen time and social media and the psychological effects of all these things. It really just continually reinforces how negative people are around the future of technology if it's being harnessed in a particular way.

10:47And let's be honest, in the way that most people harness it or most companies harness it. And yet there is a flip side to that, which is this thing that I kept coming back to the realization that all of this advancement that we've had in technology in the past few years could actually be a massive force for good and for positive change around allowing humans to take back the thing that they've given up over the course of the last few decades, which is their attention and their curiosity. And they've kind of, yielded to the algorithm in a way that, I don't know, that's not the future I want to live in.

11:23And that's not the future that I want to raise my kids in. And I want them to be curious and I want them to be adventurous and love learning and constantly want to soak up new knowledge. And I think the problem was an itch that I kept trying to scratch. And the awareness of what you could do technologically now to solve that problem just became so apparent. If I had left my job and taken time off three years earlier, I don't think I would have gotten to the same conclusion. And possibly three years later, I also wouldn't have gotten to the same conclusion. But there was something about this window of time where I'm like, there's this big problem that we have as a species that is not being addressed, despite the fact that the tools are finally there to address them.

12:07Can someone do something about this? Can someone build the first ever generalized learning platform? Because there really has not been one. If you think about how people learn online today. There are billions of people, millions, billions of people every single day who use the internet to learn. They use Wikipedia and ChatGPT and Google and Reddit and YouTube and podcasts, none of which was built for learning. And so people have this innate curiosity. They have this desire to expand their knowledge and to learn new things. And yet they're using resources that were not in any way built for learning.

12:45They're just stitching together these very high friction experiences to try and learn the things that they want to learn on a platform, which is the internet, which was not built for learning. It was built for attention grip. And so could we be, could we finally build the first real generalized platform for learning on the internet and empower people to do the thing that they're already doing at a scale of billions, but doing it efficiently and effectively, productively. Aspiring entrepreneurs often wonder, where does the great idea come from? And you said something interesting there that I want to turn into something of a formula to put back to you to see if you agree or not, which is that the really great ideas come from identifying what had been an unsolvable problem that is newly solvable, which is to say that something has changed, whether that is technologically or in culture or something.

13:42Something has changed that enables this problem to be solved now. I've heard it said that the questions that you should ask yourself when you're thinking about starting a business are, why this? Why now? Why me? uh Naveen Jain taught me that but anyway I feel like that's what you're saying is now is this moment in which we have this new technology in AI that is enabling us to do a thing and to solve a problem in a way that just simply couldn't have before and that is not just a compelling idea but it is actually a call to action because if you wait on it somebody else will do it or the moment will pass you by.

14:29The most compelling way to identify an opportunity worth changing your plans over is, can I find a previously unsolvable problem that has suddenly become solvable? I'll take it even farther than that, which is, I do agree with you, and I'll take it even farther in the sense that entrepreneurship is very hard. It's a marathon. It's very emotionally draining. There are a lot of ups and downs. The people who succeed are the people who are motivated to solve the problem long-term. And I think that starting a company, trying to tackle a challenge that is not motivating at your core, it's an easier way to burn out.

15:08Now, I'm not saying that there are not people who are successful building businesses, that they're not sort of fundamentally motivated to build and to solve, but it makes it a lot harder. And so I think to actually to the why this, why now, why me thing. Learning for me has been something that I have been thinking about and I've been thinking about the pain points of it as it pertains to myself for many, many years. And that to me is a really interesting thing to reflect back on because if you think about a problem for many, many years, and it is a problem personally, even if it's small, if it's a problem that you have been tackling or been thinking about and been coming back to constantly and recognizing, you got to keep your eyes open and look for these things.

15:52Like, where are the pain points that I have in my day-to-day life that I wish were solved? And you just keep coming back to these things. And eventually what happens, hopefully as technology advances, is one of these technical innovations happens that suddenly changes your perspective on that problem. I've been thinking about ways to implement versions of what is now called Oboe for many years to solve problems that I personally had even before AI and LLMs existed and before the AI revolution that we're currently going through, it had been something I continually came back to. I think the turning point for me, the why did I suddenly decide to do this came from a problem that I had already been thinking about.

16:30It's not like the AI revolution opened my eyes to a new opportunity that existed. This is something that I had always been motivated to solve and I'd never had the tools to solve it. My original perspective on it was, oh, great, this lets me build a bunch of stuff to solve the problem for myself. And then the more I started thinking about it, the more I realized, well, hold on a second, it's not just me, it's billions of other people on the planet who suffer from the same problem. Can you define the problem? Like, yeah, that's interesting because, you know, you defined the problem in a way before in a whole bunch of different interesting insights about like, what is the internet built for and what could it be used for.

17:02And obviously, I don't know that we've, we're always as a culture trying to figure out the best way to learn information, to communicate information. So I understand abstractly the problem. When you say you have been grappling with this problem, I'm curious what that actually specifically means for you and how you started to see it in other people. I am a self-taught programmer. A little background on me. So I studied political science undergrad, a degree that I've never used professionally. I then went to law school. You are one of many people out there. But then I did what poli-sci majors do and I went to law school and I got a law degree and I passed a bar exam and I never used it professionally.

17:47And so from an academic standpoint, the formal education that I've gotten and the degrees that I have, sure, they have trained law school in particular, trained me how to think in a particular way. I'm not going to discount that. But the actual piece of paper itself, the diploma that I still have that says that I graduated law school and that I graduated with a poli-sci degree from undergrad have never been directly relevant to the work that I've done professionally ever. And all of the things that I've done professionally came from me teaching myself. So when I was in law school, I started teaching myself how to program originally because I actually envisioned this future in which I would be a lawyer and I would never be able to do interesting technical work, even though there was a part of my brain that really liked math and science and I'd always enjoyed that in school.

18:32And so I started programming because I thought this is a good hobby for me to scratch that itch that will always exist in my brain as I'm doing things that are not technical in the field of law. And as soon as I started teaching myself how to do it, I fell in love with it. It is incredible how much you can learn, especially with the internet and the books that I had access to. This was pre-YouTube day, so it wasn't like I was watching videos of all the stuff that's available to you now. This was certainly pre-LLM, so I couldn't leverage all the amazing technology that exists. I had to really struggle to figure out how to teach myself the things that I wanted to learn.

19:07The resources were just not there. And yes, we've come a long way, But the truth is the resources still are not really there because if you think about all of the people who are interested in learning things, whether it's for personal interests or professional reasons that have to then figure out on their own how to navigate getting that information and retaining it and learning it in a way that's effective, it's a huge burden to place on people despite the fact that everyone has things that they want to learn. Yeah. Right. And so reflecting back on my own journey of learning, I had a program in particular, although this has been relevant to other things I've learned in my career.

19:40I think in a lot of cases, it's not that I learned because of the resources that were available to me. I kind of learned in spite of the resources that were available to me. And I had to force, because I was heavily motivated to learn it, I had to force myself to come up with solutions to this problem of finding the right resources and identifying the right problems to solve and taking on the right projects and finding the way to motivate myself to continue, even though it was really, really hard. Everyone goes through that. And most people give up. Most people give up. And if you ask people what they want to learn, they'll all have an answer to it.

20:14And if you ask them why they haven't learned it, it's some combination of, I don't know where to start. I've tried and it's too difficult and I give up. I'm not sure what resources I should even use. It's always some combination of that, but they all have the motivation. So clearly there's a big problem. There's a big disconnect between the fact that billions of people want to go out and learn a new thing that is not tied to some degree, right? They're doing it often as adults that are out of school and trying to take on new knowledge, and yet they're unable to do it because of the fact that there are not effective learning resources out there.

20:46There are incredible learning resources out there, but they only get you so far. Yeah. Well, I want people to be aware as you are talking about this experience of yours, that what you are also laying out is a really valuable roadmap for identifying opportunity, right? Because the things that you're describing here are you recognized something in yourself and your own experience. And then you started to look around and ask, why is this not being served in a better way? And then also, who else has this problem and experience? And then what are their great frustrations? It reminds me of the classic you know if you want to build a great business and you find something with a high tam and a low nps which is a high total addressable market lots of people want it low nps basically the experience of trying to solve for that problem is unsatisfying and you could build something better so that's what you're describing and that makes a ton of sense and so then the next question is well then how did you start to think through what a better solution could look like great question i think I'd originally envisioned products and technical solutions before 2022.

22:02I'd been thinking about this, as I mentioned, for years, and I'd always had this vision of a learning platform that was powered by a dynamically evolving knowledge graph. One of the interesting insights that I had early on is if you think about learning a topic, you can deconstruct any topic into many, many subatomic units. And if you could do that, all the very small things that a person needs to learn in order to learn something high level, what you can do is build out a knowledge graph that is made up of all of these small atomic units. And then if a person comes in and they tell you that they want to get to a particular outcome, if your knowledge graph is sufficiently large, you can construct a personalized path for them to go achieve that outcome because you know exactly which atomic units you need to stitch together.

22:49That was always a really interesting core idea that I kept going back to. And I had built early versions of something like that pre-LLMs. And in 2022, one of the things that happened was when ChatGPT came out and everybody started talking about how powerful LLMs were, I originally thought, well, there goes my idea because you can use LLMs to basically do what I described, then you don't need to build this whole robust architecture. And as I got to using them more and understanding the underlying technology more, I realized, no, actually, there are really fundamental limitations with what you could do with LLMs.

23:23The real platform that will solve the learning problem to make learning really effective and accessible and efficient is one that is actually built for the learning use case. And so a lot of what we've built is actually sort of at the intersection of these original ideas around knowledge graphs and leveraging atomic units of knowledge in really interesting ways combined with the scalability and the cost efficiency that you can get through LLMs now. And then you have to start thinking, well okay but how do people learn and how could we build something that enables that and how do we start to think about the complexities of how people learn for example lots of people learn in lots of different ways and i'm asking this question because i'm in a way almost trying to reverse engineer the product that i have seen and you and i haven't yet talked about exactly how you got to that product.

24:16So it's fun to do it with a microphone running instead of just at lunch. So when you first sent it to me, I think you had asked it to put together like a course on Entrepreneur Magazine or a course on me or something like that. It was fun. But what was super interesting was just the number of different ways in which it was trying to teach me that information. There are all these different modules, as you had mentioned. There's a quiz, there's a kind of straight lesson, but then there's also like there's a whole variety of things. And I'm going to just hypothesize, you tell me or not, if I'm right, that when you were building this out and you were thinking, well, okay, then how do we improve the way in which people learn?

24:53How do we create a product that is truly designed for learning that you have to take into account what actually drives learning and retention across many different kinds of variables? And that is how you end up with something that tries to teach in multiple ways. Probably not because everyone's going to consume all of it, but rather because people are going to go through it and find the thing that works best for them. But I don't know. I'm just hypothesizing. What were you doing? I think that's right. People learn in different ways. The same person will learn different things in different ways.

25:26I think one of the things that we kept coming back to over the course of the year of building this was the power of multimodality in reinforcing that one of the most effective ways to learn is reinforcement. And reinforcement through multiple modalities is how we best learn. If you think about the thing that you went online to learn yesterday, chances are you actually consumed it through multiple modalities. Interfaced with something through chat. You were reading something passively. You were listening to podcasts. you know, hopefully somebody listening to this podcast now goes off and consumes a different modality to expand, you know, to follow their curiosity path.

26:02That's the behavior that people already exhibit online. I think a fundamental challenge that entrepreneurs often have is this determination of how to latch onto existing consumer behavior. One of the hardest things you can do is introduce a new user behavior and get consumers to start adopting something that you foresee as the future of the space. That's not what we're interested in doing. We're interested in taking the behavior that people already exist online, which is high curiosity, free-flowing rabbit-holing, multi-modality, and putting it all in one place because it's never existed in one place before.

26:34And I also think it's a big core philosophy of mine is you do need to empower users to make their own decisions about how best to learn. Because at any given minute of the day, I'm inspired to learn in a completely different way and engage in content in different ways. You have to give that ability to the user themselves. I think one of the biggest flaws with existing learning platforms that have been built for learning is that they're overly prescriptive around how best to teach you. The user knows best. The user knows how they should be learning. The user knows what they're in the mood to do at any given time.

27:05I'm totally fine with a person creating a course and using only one of the nine different modalities that we have to learn right now. And that's only the beginning. We're going to be adding more. To me, it matters is more that they get value out of the one they want to use rather than feeling like they're, they need to check off a full list of, of different experiences. You know, the enjoyment of the product and the fulfillment of the product stems from using it as you wish, as you're navigating this rabbit hole freely. Yeah. I, if people haven't done this for themselves and I strongly recommend doing it, I have, which is to spend some time thinking about the process that you go through to retain information.

27:46We all learn a lot over the course of a day, whether that's just because we read some article or somebody told us something, and we forget most of it. And I had gotten to wondering, what is it that I do that locks information in? What I found is that for me, and I don't know if this is replicatable in Oboe per say, but like what I found for me, and this is why I love the work that I do, is that talking to a person, having them say something to me, and then me going through the process of teaching that thing to others, like repeating it in some way, re-crafting it in some way, that is the thing that gets information to be sticky in my head.