Why "AI Visibility" is critical for your brand with James Cadwallader, Co-Founder & CEO at Profound

0:00Hello, and welcome to another episode of Ride the Unicorns. Today we're joined by James Cadwallader, CEO of Profound. James, it's great to have you on. thank you for joining us so james we'd love to get into it you're tackling the the hard problem of making sure companies get found within ai search results plus a lot of other things that we can't wait to dive into um but maybe you could just start by introducing yourself and the business and what you guys have done so far sure yeah thanks for having me james hector yes a pleasure to be on here with you guys. I think, you know, as maybe a precursor, this is the biggest platform shift in the history of the internet, maybe the history of capitalism.

0:44You know, if you think about what is the one biggest and most important technology that has been born from the internet, it has been search. You know, it constitutes roughly 200 billion of Google's 300 billion odd in revenue comes from search revenue, search advertising predominantly. and I think it you know it's been a no-fly zone you know but by search has been like a no-fly zone for the last 25-26 years really where it's just been essentially a monopoly and for the first time ever we're seeing that change in this true innovators dilemma where the world is retrieving information from the internet in a different way so people now just talk to the internet and it talks back.

1:29So you ask ChatGPT a question and instead of having to go and click through pages of blue links, you just get the answer that you were looking for. And what's happening on the backend there is very interesting, which is ChatGPT in real time is sending a user agent on your behalf to that same index of blue links or that same index of URLs. And the user agent is essentially representing the consumer now and doing that web browsing. That's the backdrop of our business and it creates this huge second order problem for every company on the planet as now in you know we for the last 26 years if you're a company with a website you've been building content for human beings to consume for human beings to discover and that's been very focused on storytelling and imagery and you know all of the things that matter to humans but now you are building content for user agents who are crawling on behalf of a human being so yeah and user agents look for very different things they don't care about storytelling they're not looking for hyperbole and fluffy sentences they they don't really care about imagery they want the raw information that they can pull through and use to create a compelling answer with the llm inside of the application, which is ChatGPT.

2:51So really, yeah, I guess like using that as a full circle point, that's the backdrop of our business and a profound, we are building a marketing platform for this new era of the internet. This is a platform that helps you understand whether you show up. It helps you understand how you show up when AI talks about your brand and products, services, competitors. but most importantly our platform actually helps some of the biggest brands in the world create content for user agents create content that's designed to be absorbed by ai and yeah we launched in august of last year so august 2024 so kind of coming up to i think 18 months ago it's been a wild journey the team is pushing 100 people now we work with some of the biggest brands in the world are you know we we're relied on predominantly by the enterprise we literally work with fortune 10 brands and thousands of marketers rely on our platform every week to win this new world of ai search yeah obviously you you guys both have sort of investor background so i guess in terms of our fundraising history uh our first you know my co-founder and i met at a an incubator called south park commons uh here in new york city which was set up by two of the founding engineers of Facebook.

4:11We then had Keith Raboy and Coastal Adventures co-led our seed round with a fund called, it was a new fund called Saga Ventures, which was set up by Ben Braverman, who was formerly the CRO of Flexport, Max Altman. Yeah, he was previously Zenefit with Parker Comrade and he famously set up a very successful fund prior with his brother Sam and Thompson Nguyen, who was formerly at KP. So they co-led our seed round with Keith Raboy. Then Kleiner Perkins and NVIDIA Ventures led our Series A. Sequoia Capital led our Series B. And then, yeah, that takes us up to where we are today. So yeah, so there's a long monologue, but that's kind of like the full run through of our business.

4:56No, James, it's fantastic. And yeah, I mean, you guys have done an incredible job positioning yourselves as probably the number one player in this kind of GEO space. And I know you're now doing a lot more than that, but you literally, you know, your customers are customers that we and all of our listeners are using every day. You know, they're our favorite tools. And so you've built an incredible brand very, very quickly. Can you tell us in a little bit more detail what GEO is, like how you are improving visibility for customers and showing them how visible they are, but also talk more about this content production piece that you're now focusing a lot on yeah for sure I think something that's been very interesting on this journey so far is I mean I think initially I underestimated the human tendency towards heuristic we want to make sense of the world that we exist in by inferring from the past and from history so I think everyone wants to be able to put a label on this new art and the closest heuristic is something like SEO which admittedly is a huge industry SEO is a hundred billion dollar or 90 to 100 billion dollar a year industry but I do think both things can be true in that there's similarities there and I think I mean a thing that I would be very cautious to point out is that I think the people that worked on SEO and the people that mastered SEO are very well placed to be the people to be you know some of the main players in this new category but I do also think there's some fundamental differences between this new world of AI search or GEO which stands for generative engine optimization or answer engine optimization on AEO or sometimes I would just refer to it as AI visibility.

6:56It's verging on a meme at this point that no one can put a label or a name on the category. I think what's different at the most philosophical level is that you are creating content for bots, not humans. The whole idea of SEO, if you pass it back to first principles, it's you are creating content that is designed for human beings. It's designed to rank, of course, which is similar to what we're talking about here, but is designed for human beings to stumble across and consume. The whole idea of this new category of answer engine optimization is that you are creating content that's designed for bots, not humans.

7:38And I think that really underpins the core differences in the types of content that you're creating and how you measure it and what the metrics, the matter are changing in that, But for SEO or search, it was all about human traffic. Here it's retrieval traffic. User agent traffic matters more from my perspective. So yeah, the way that our platform works is we capture huge amounts of data. We send prompts to the platforms and capture their responses. We have a huge consumer panel of real user prompts that we use to help us understand what people are actually typing into these platforms. We also integrate into our customers' websites to capture that first-party data that helps them understand how user agents are visiting their content and utilizing their content.

8:25But that's just the first part. Really what we're doing is using reasoning models to then go and analyze and interpret all of that data and all of those insights and use the data as context to build informed new content. and what does the what does that new content look like if you go to you know a huge company let's take british airways as an example um they want to do they want to optimize their search visibility how how does your production engine manifest like are you putting out spinning up new web pages on their website with just sort of raw information that these crawlers love or are you spinning up content that actually looks a lot like SEO platforms.

9:16Well, let's go through it. So let's use that example. Say if it were British Airways, what we would do is we would understand how, let's just say British Airways, and they want to focus just on ChatGPT. We go across all of the models. We look at ChatGPT, Gemini, Claw, DeepSeek, Meta, I'm trying to think, Grok. So we go across all of the major platforms, but let's just say it's British Airways, and they really want to focus on ChatGPT. The first thing that we do is look at one of our sources of data to understand how people are talking about British Airways or flights, etc. When they're asking questions to chat GPT.

9:58we have a database with over a billion real user prompts in that we extrapolate out from to help us understand directionally what people are typing in and how they're searching for things like who's the best airline what's my best airline for london to new york stuff like that yes we'd understand you get that data james is that publicly available or is it bought how did you get that yes it's really hard to find and it's expensive yeah we've gone to consumer panels so consumer panels for you know anyone listening are it's super normal in the marketing world i mean consumer panels have been around for about 102 years nielsen was the the first um they did it for tv it was like a panel to help people you know help marketers predominantly understand how consumers were watching television back in the day and today there's hundreds of different consumer panels that exist and it's all kind there's all kinds of ways to capture consumer panel data it's always opt-in it's always like date compliant with all privacy and data laws of course um but you know sometimes it is people getting paid a small amount to share their data with one cup with you know one company across lots of different behaviors sometimes it can be in exchange for access to a free product that people will opt in to have their data shared sometimes it's an exchange for gifts there's all kinds of mechanisms to encourage people to exchange a window into how they use the internet as a whole in exchange for something so we've basically gone to all of the biggest consumer panels we spent millions of dollars building a patchwork quill of what is essentially now a mega panel of real user prompts which is really hard to do because they as you'd imagine there's lots of different schema and there's like it's not one formalized standardized kind of way in which you collect with this so we've had to do a lot of work in a lot of data value is the value in the first prompt because after that you presumably kind of know what they're asking at that point no absolutely not no i'd say the value is in the whole in in all of it yeah super interesting okay well you know a british airways to know that when someone talks about british Airways, it's usually, you know, in conversation turn number 15, for example, or these are the other things that they're talking about in that same conversation.

12:22So, and I think, you know, the human mind is not great with numbers, but a billion prompts is a lot of prompts. And we add 150 million a month. So we have this kind of real window into a sample of what the world is asking these platforms about and you know it's not just a case of buying the data either you have to productionize all of that data you have to put it into one big panel and then be able to extrapolate directionally beyond it and yeah it's super powerful and it allows us to have a window into an understanding of what people are asking and how they're asking it and we yeah we're super conscious about you know making sure that all of the data is absolutely compliant with privacy laws etc and we don't expose the the raw data in our platform it's only extrapolations and predictions that we expose in the platform but yeah that's that's a long-winded yeah and then you're taking so you're taking this this information then what are you how are you producing the content how are you yeah so we went on a bit of a tangent there so basically there's a there's a few stages here so we're going back to british airways on chat gpt so the first thing we're looking at is how do people talk about british airways and flights and chat gpt then what we're going to go and do is we're going to go and send prompts to ChatGPT and look at how it responds.

13:40How does it respond? When I ask, you know, what's the best airline to fly from JFK to London Heathrow? Does British Airways get suggested? How does it get suggested? What else do these models say? Like, does it just say, it's obviously not going to just provide a link. Like it's going to say something like, you know, ChatGPT loves to opine. We know that, right? It won't just say British Airways. It will say British Airways because of their great service and the attention to detail and the fact that they don't have long lines, for example, it says things alongside. So we're capturing everything that ChatGPT says, and we're doing that thousands of times a day to understand in high volume because these models are probabilistic.

14:21So if you ask the same question 10 times in a row, you'll get 10 different answers from ChatGPT. so we we capture all of those responses in high volume when we understand whether british airways is showing up how they're showing up and then more importantly why because when chat gpt or all of these answer engines provide an answer they have to go to the internet to build that response or like eight or nine times out of ten they do if it's a really simple question a static evergreen question like how do i tie my shoelaces the the model will just use the pre-trained llm but for anything with some sort of like commercial intent like you know what's the best airline or you know what's the best running sneaker for a marathon is as a one that gets thrown around a lot like the models will always rely on the internet because it doesn't just inherently know the most up-to-date information so it's using the web you're sending a user agent to the web to get that information so we're able to understand where did chat gpt go to build that response did it go to britishairways.com Did it go to Skyscanner?

15:25Did it go to the Points Guy, a bunch of random websites? Did it use Reddit, Wikipedia? Where did it go? And that varies from category to category, business to business, industry to industry. You will use different combinations of that. So think of it like this. We're capturing all of that data, everything I've just mentioned. And then this is the important second part. We're giving it all to an orchestration of reasoning models and saying, you know, with the prompt to these reasoning models, hey, here's a ton of context of how ChatGPT answers these questions and where it goes to build these answers.

16:06go and look at the commonalities let's go and look at the patterns like what is it across these 10 websites that are being used to answer the questions like what do you find what are the you know what's the schema of the website what's the structure and the company's visibility well using ai you're then able to build insights and suggestions and recommendations of what you can do and that again varies based on the category the product you know what what it varies from from industry to industry business to business but quite often that will be a combination of let's create content for britishairways.com based on the content that we see is performing best it could be let's look at earned channels like youtube or linkedin or i mean i guess that's kind kind of like operated channels like YouTube or LinkedIn, you know, social channels, the models rely on a lot.

17:04Or it could be earned, you know, going to third party blogs or affiliate sites, et cetera, or even places like Reddit, Wikipedia. So yeah, you're using our platform to build those content strategies and create that content and then distribute that content or publish it. Super interesting. And James, with the greatest of respect, it feels like quite an obvious business idea. But then a very complex one to execute because you've got big players, big data sets, challenges. There's a lot going on there. Were you ever put off by the fact that maybe this was going to happen and maybe it was too obvious?

17:48Or was that the driving force to be like, this is inevitable and we're going to be the ones to do it? No, it wasn't obvious when we started. it was not obvious it was no one else was talking about it there was like rumblings but it was very very uh i remember feeling like i was going crazy because it was i mean i shouldn't say it wasn't it was obvious to me and my co-founder dylan at the time i was really i was i remember vividly feeling very confused it's almost like some version of like gaslighting or something you're like, well, if the biggest monopoly in the history of capitalism has built its entire business on clicks and this new technology means that we don't have to click, then surely that matters.

18:40Surely that's going to completely disrupt marketing. And you'd mention it to people and they'd be like, yeah, yeah, interesting. Yeah, I could see how that could happen. But that was it. like there wasn't you know we really kind of it felt like a leap of faith in the beginning of 2024 i mean we started building profound when chat gpt didn't even use web search so this is when chat gpt you'd ask it who's the president of america and it would say you know as of my last training data and get it wrong yeah and really this whole category only opens up because of the web search that the models are using like trying to influence the the pre-training of LLMs is far less tractable it's much harder to do because really you're just trying to be trying to influence like it's based on what side of the bed like Sam Altman and Greg Brockman get out of to an extent and then so so it was obvious and you almost sort of pained by that that inevitability that this was going to be a massive thing which I think is a brilliant feeling to have probably all that you know it's two ways but uh weird feeling yeah but then you've just talked us through how it actually works and you've broken down each step of how do you actually get to a meaningful outcome to have meaningful results where does that kind of first principle thinking come from for you where did you kind of learn those skills yeah is that your superpower as a founder to go big problem i'll work it out i don't know i mean i've never met ryan peterson but you know i i've always been a fan i think he's an impressive founder and i there's something that he he referred to himself as a business junkie which i found like very relatable as a as a concept i enjoy like left to my own devices if you if you know let's say if profound vanished off the face of the earth and it was my one job was to relax and enjoy myself i would find myself listening to podcasts like this reading books about the great it's david senra a founder's podcast is an investor in profound and i've had this conversation with him before which is i've it was so it was like meeting you know uh an idol when i first met david and he is a he's a fantastic guy but I just listened to his voice so much because I love yeah I love business I don't know what it is like a sport and I enjoy it and I've been running my own companies since I was very young I've never had a real job and yeah this feels like a culmination of everything I feel very lucky to be here yeah so yeah when when the universe as well like you know offers up an opportunity like this where it's like hey this is it you were right this is a huge platform shift you're well placed well timed you go all in you give it everything you reciprocate you reciprocate the opportunity by offering yourself almost in a sacrificial way what what does that mean for you what does going all in mean for you and what you've done with profound i think it means that you can't work harder i think it means that you're you you give everything right you you leave no stone unturned you you work as hard as you can and you know thankfully I I'm 36 so I'm I mean I've been working very hard my my whole life frankly especially as a founder of businesses you know I've got a very thoughtful fiance who puts up with it and it means yeah what does it mean it means that you know you're working 12 to 15 hours a day every day it means that you're in the office on saturdays and you're working on sundays it means that you don't do much else except work you know i i don't have a good response when people ask me what are my hobbies these days there aren't any hobbies left but yes it's people sometimes ask if it's fun i don't know if fun is the right way to describe what this feels like but it's very uh if you know the maslow's hierarchy of needs sorry very self-actualizing i would say is the is the way to explain it which is quite energizing you talked about going against uh well you said how seo has actually quite a good is quite well placed to win in this in the ai space as well like what what do you mean by that and how how can you use your sort of startup mentality and the infrastructure around that to to win i i've got thoughts on this and it's interesting there's been you know not not not unanimously to be fair as well but there's been some pushback from seo folks who i think it comes maybe from a place of fear or i don't know where it comes from entirely but this kind of pushback from seo people being like oh it's i don't i kind of reluctance to see this as can i add something there james i heard an seo expert describe geo as seo they was they were like in denial they were like well geo is just seo it's just making sure you rank top so that when the agent goes and searches you're you're already ranked up which is seo yeah and it's like you know it's not i was he was he wrong was he no there's there's it's kind of also true that there's a ton of similar muscle groups and it's like entirely true and it's like i'm not i wouldn't go toe to toe and say that there's no similarities there and it's like it is the same muscle groups But I'd say the point that I'm making is that I also believe that is truly a different category and it's only going to get more different.

24:12You are building content for machines. You are building marketing for machines for the first time ever. Not for machines to rank, but for machines to consume. You're trying to change the opinion of machines, not humans. You're trying to influence machines, not humans. It's primitive and from first principles, it is very different. But this is my point and this is my kicker and I definitely implore you. In fact, I'd ask very politely that you don't edit this out. I think I'm like so pro SEO. I think SEO teams are like, they have all the right muscle groups to be the market. You know, SEOs for quite some time have been the sort of forgotten child of the marketing stack.

24:54Despite it being a very important part, most businesses still rely quite heavily on search and SEO. But the SEO teams have been this kind of neglected part of the stack to an extent. It's not so sexy. It's got like this kind of like, you know, there's this kind of something that's attached to it that's not so sexy. But I think this is the opportunity for those SEO teams to become the hero of the marketing stack. I think that over a 50-year time horizon, the only thing that will matter in marketing is how does AI talk about your brand and products and services. I think that will be the most important factor of marketing.

25:37And I think SEO teams have this interesting combination of skill sets where they're very analytical. It's like this combination of like there's some creative thinking. It's very analytical. It's very data driven. They're used to this kind of loop of monitoring, measuring, creating and learning over time. And it's very similar muscle groups. And I think, and yeah, of course it does also, it requires indexing and ranking on search. So there's, I think they're so well placed, these teams to dominate here, that they should be celebrating this as a big opportunity. And what are you going to do? I mean, there's a whole startup, well, the whole business world is kind of debating who's going to win AI.

26:25You know, when it comes to agents, is it going to be the startups or is it going to be the incumbents with the data and the distribution? And, you know, that is true from Salesforce to ServiceNow, you know, all of these incumbents who are starting to get their act together and build agents. And it's relevant in your space as well. Like you're speaking highly of the SEO industry, but like what's your advantage as a startup? Why will you win? I mean, I think we've already built this advantage in that, you know, if you were a UFO hovering over planet Earth right now, and you had to select one company with the most data around how answer engines or AI interfaces with brands on the internet, Profound is unequivocally that company right now.

27:13Yeah, we work with all of the biggest brands in the world. We've had that first mover advantage and we've not taken anything for granted, meaning that we've built out an engineering team that has shipped hundreds, maybe thousands of features at this point that I think are just going to be, it's very hard to catch up with us in this space. And James, you said the most important thing will be how does AI talk about your brand? But I think there's that old stat of like CMOs have the shortest lifespan of any C-suite position, like three years or something. And obviously you talked about SEO being the non-glamorous team on the marketing team and that's probably because other things took over like influencer marketing and things like that kind of became the shiny toy for a bit but dave seo has remained important and now it's coming almost full circle back around to to geo or ai visibility so i i agree with everything you've said and it does feel like this is the inevitable wave of importance that you know your brand needs to rank with with ai visibility but what happens if there is another you know shiny toy will the ai visibility just still be it's still going to be important right it's going to be like the seo it just might not be as sexy as it is at the moment yeah i would just point towards the kind of the the size of the platform shift the biggest monopty in the history of capitalism has been built on people clicking links yeah people are no longer clicking links i believe they will stop clicking links if you just speak to the internet and it will speak back to you and even more than that again we're all creatures of heuristic myself included and I think we're not factoring in that you will shop within ChatGPT.

29:16ChatGPT will use software on your behalf. ChatGPT's user agents will be the end user, the actual consumer of software. So if you are, let's use, I mean, you mentioned Salesforce, for example. I believe that at some point in the future, maybe not this year or next year, but OpenAI will essentially navigate your Salesforce instance on your behalf. And then whether ChatGPT decide, you know, when you're standing up your first CRM, whether ChatGPT, which will become your co-pilot, I mean, I guess that's why Microsoft called it that, in this decision-making, whether it decides to suggest, you know, Salesforce or HubSpot or Atio as that CRM will depend on its ability to navigate and use that software.

30:07So it's beyond just discovery. It's like the actual ability to navigate and use software or the ability to purchase goods due to the infrastructure. So I think we're underestimating just how different this will be to information retrieval-based search. Yeah. And then when Google, for them to build out their ad platform, they built a company called DoubleClick I think it was about$450 million which now seems absolutely minuscule considering it's the sort of backbone of the biggest ad platform probably in the world, I don't know but so they brought in third party ad tech to kind of then become Google Ads will OpenAI have its own ad platform or will they acquire how's that all going to work are we going to start to see sponsored responses and things like that you know yeah one thing i've thought of is why certain words aren't already hyperlinked and there's already a cost per click through you know wait if british airways is mentioned it should be hyperlinked so i can go to ba.com and then it's there's a cost per click of 30p or whatever and then you see that then you see the end destination is just hey do you want me to book the flight for you yeah so i guess then And it'll be defunct in a year when they allow it to be agentic and shoppable.

31:35So I guess my question is... Do you really want to go to BA.com and mess around there? Don't you just want to say, don't you want it to just say, hey, there's a flight at 7pm? I just want to know that I'm maximizing my Avios points, to be honest. They seem to say, well, it'd be worth this much. And then you actually get to it. It's about a tenth of that. But so I guess my question is, what what will open ai and some of the big platforms role be what will how will they support or build to innovate around the sort of branding side of what llm responses provide they'll ship ads and the ads will be the most effective form of advertising in the history of humanity yeah yeah absolutely yeah there's there's a reason why fiji would you has been brought in there.

32:26I mean, it's kind of known, but maybe slightly unknown, that Fiji really, like Fiji was at Facebook when really they didn't have their ads model figured out. And Fiji was the product manager on Facebook mobile news feed ads, which was the inflection of monetization, which essentially catalyzed Facebook to become the business that it is today yeah i remember when it became feed-based and it changed everything and we had interstitial native ads and it was what we all now know is like the instagram feed is like literally invented basically by this sort of change of advertising model yeah well they had the product the the consumer adoption was there already but it hadn't really been cracked and i think it's the it was this shift to mobile that facebook executed so well where the every advertiser on the planet woke up and said hey we need to target people on mobile and that opportunity was far more nascent and facebook were very well placed to become a bastion of opportunity for advertisers who wanted to target consumers on mobile and fiji was at the epicenter of that fiji fiji drove that forward and that's you know i think you know that and then you look at the work that she did at instacart as well on you know on the commercialization and it makes so much sense why she's gone to open ai she's one of the best in the world at ads and yeah i think people are underestimating just how powerful advertising will be if it's once it's executed correctly we will have i think hyper i mean personalization is a bland overused term at this point i mean like true truly personalized advertising that is served up to you in a conversational interface at exactly the right moment where you are most interested and most likely to want to respond the amount of intent that cap the chat gpt the amount of intent that a platform like chat gpt captures from those conversations is unreal in comparison to you know it's incomparably incomparable amounts of intent in a chat gpt conversation versus like a four-word google search 100 because chat gpt is like your planning zone so you can you go in there to kind of rip and plan and like flesh out maybe just a seed of an idea whereas google you could to just be searching Rolls-Royce and looking at pictures of them, that you're not intending to buy one.

35:13So there's a deeper level of intent there, and the whole Google ad model is based on intent. So it's super, super interesting. Can we pull the pin on the grenade and ask the question, will Google die? Is this the start of the end for Google? No, I think again You're showing your Nature of Your heuristic seeking Human beingness there We're so used to it being a monopoly That I think we're like Who's going to win this monopoly? What if it's not a monopoly? It doesn't have to be a monopoly I think I think Google And I guess they have Gemini So that's one of the platforms. Yeah, Google is so well placed right now.

36:02They have the whole stack. They're the only player that has the compute with the TPUs and they go all the way up the stack to the consumer application. Every ad relationship on the planet. Every ad relationship on the planet. They're threading the needle very well. They've caught up to an extent from a technology standpoint. It's maybe, you know, I'm sure OpenAI are going to release another model. I heard rumors of a new model called internally called garlic or something today that people were talking about. But yeah, nevertheless, they've, you know, they've, they've reached some level of Google has reached some level of parity on the technology and they own the whole stack and they're very good at ads.

36:40And I definitely, definitely would, it would be crazy to write Google out of this equation. But yeah, I hope it's, I just, I hope it's not a monopoly. I think there's a reason why monopoly, you know, this is me talking as a red blooded capitalist as well. I do think there's a reason why monopolies are illegal and I think it's because they're net bad for consumers I think it's net bad for innovation and yeah I think it would be great to see this new world of AI search or AI yeah AI information just to kind of yeah be a little bit more fragmented just to see you know we have Google we have Gemini we have uh sorry of Google Gemini, we have ChatGPT, we have Claude, we have Grok.

37:24I definitely wouldn't even write Elon and Grok out of the equation here. You have the open source models like DeepSeek. I think people are writing off Meta, but there's a chance that Meta could play a bigger role here. So hopefully we see more fragmentation. Our business doesn't rely on it. It's not existential to profound, but I think just generally for the space and for consumers, I think fragmentation would be good. And James, you're clearly like super ambitious and really smart in this space. and you guys have done a lot of good things in a short period. Where do you want to take Profound?

37:55What's the end goal here and the vision? I think that the internet is changing really for the first time in 25 years. Since its inception, this is the first real, I mean, you could say cloud or mobile or social, but I think information retrieval is changing for the first time since the birth of the internet. And it's going to create an opportunity to build a huge marketing platform, a platform that the modern marketer, the AI first marketer will rely on to create all of their marketing for this new age of the internet. And yeah, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to build a marketing platform for an age of super intelligence, basically.

38:44You'll create marketing, distribute marketing, measure marketing in one place is visual marketing dead like what about yeah in in person marketing department's gonna be trimmed down it's all gonna be focused on agents you know it's obviously not gonna happen overnight but i presume there is still a space right for visual marketing and yeah relying on all of that yeah you'll do all of it in profound is speaking to you know what we see as the opportunity i think visual in ai search right now i think with intellectual honesty it's not the it's not a visual medium right now but i think that's more just due to the nascency or the infancy of these products i think as they mature we're going to see more visual components come into platforms like chat gpt and gemini and it will be generative they won't it will generate new ui or video content or imagery in real time as you speak to the model and i think where and it will be the same paradigm as what we've seen with just standard you know text retrieval now where it will have to get that information from somewhere so how you provide these models with that visual ammunition i think will become again p0 for marketers and you will need technology and a platform to do that so yeah it speaks to the breadth of our opportunity this is gonna be the last business i ever build i'm not doing another one this is like the amalgamation of everything and yeah i would like to to build a platform that every marketer i think marketers will need to become more technology driven more more technical more they will use ai all day every day to create marketing that seems so obvious to me that seems the most obvious insight ever and profound will be that platform where they do that and do bigger companies win or smaller companies win i mean in the influencer space we had companies like gymshark and stuff like that come out which were almost like influencer first and they took on let's just say they took on nike as a as the new marketing channel created new brands will this create new brands or is it better for the british airways and the apples the incumbents that are kind of established big companies obviously those are quite hard categories to go after as a startup airlines and uh and iphones but yeah big companies or small companies who wins?

41:05I think it probably supports the long tail more. I think we saw that with the internet itself as being better for SMEs or small independent businesses because anyone can enter the global stage more easily. And I think agent, if you think of the concept of blue links, right? Or Google SERP rankings, the value has always been being in the top three or the top five blue links, right? But why? Why does it matter that you are in the top three or top five blue links, not a rhetorical one? What do you think, Hector? So I would say that the link, the index is based on, you know, how many backlinks, how much visibility you have on the Internet.

41:49So underneath the ranking is actually something similar to what matters to you, which is, you know, how much of a footprint is there of a brand online and thus what LLMs are trained on. and as a company let me rephrase my question as a company as a brand as a marketer why does it matter that you're in the top three of the team is a sidechain for something they're clicking on the ones first they can't be bothered to scroll yeah you just said it they can't be bothered to scroll agents don't care about scrolling they they they is there some form of social currency happening there of sort of like if google are saying these are the top ones then i sort of inherently trust them a little bit and so you know they've scored there for a reason so i don't need to scroll down because i'm just getting further away from the ones that google say are the best anyway well maybe but you could also say it's just the brand you know it it speaks more to the fat head of the internet you know the incumbents the big players the ones with tons of budget who could create but like this is what i'm saying i'm answering your question that i think we've been constrained by the laziness of human browsing, meaning that I just can't frankly be bothered to go past the third, fourth, fifth link on the internet.

43:05So that is where the value has been in that real estate. User agents are far less limited. Maybe you could say that some level, there's some sort of inference cost of an agent going through 50 links. But if you apply some sort of form of Moore's law over time, that will go down and it will become easy for a user agent to reference 500 links on the internet to build it. And it will be more likely, I mean, put it this way, and I'm maybe over laboring this point, but James, let's say you gave me and Hector the same brief and you said, hey, you two have a competition and it's who can find me the best pair of sunglasses based on this brief.

43:48I get to use five pages of Google. Hector can only use the first three links who do you think is going to give you a better answer? Well it might be the same answer but if you said to me by the way I've gone through five pages I'd go well your answer must be a better answer then. And I can use the first three links that Hector looked at as well. Yeah it's a better rationale you've covered more ground haven't you? I've covered more ground I've been able to look into the long tail so I think all of this is to say to go back to your original question of does this is this good for small businesses i think absolutely because i think user agents are more likely to be able to not just go to the fat head of the internet and explore the long tail which is where a lot of the the beauty of the internet is contained and it goes into that deeper intent piece as well if we're conversationally digging down into what we actually care about uh we're going we're going a few layers beyond just the one google bar so even just the interface changes the depth of intent as well because it's multi-typed messages rather than a single prompt which google is essentially a single prompt super interesting this has been so great every conversation is obviously wildly different james obviously we've had you on as a founder but it's been a a lesson on platform shifting to ai to the world of marketing how that's all going to change you've obviously touched on at the beginning the success you've had on fundraising and it's no surprise really when it's this massive, massive opportunity and the way you broke down how you've actually come out with a meaningful product that's driving meaningful results for some of the biggest brands in the world is amazing to hear.

45:30So thank you so much for sharing all of that. We've got our final two questions. So the first is our future unicorn prediction. So if there was another company that you thought could go all the way, who would they be? so we've been using a company called monk.com m-o-n-k like a like a shaolin monk monk.com for all of our accounts receivable so essentially getting their they've built ai that gets you paid that gets your invoices paid and yeah it's been super transformative for our business i'm friends with the the founder the ceo george curden they're just an incredible team george was like formerly at D.E.

46:10Shore and a professional poker player. And yeah, we knew each other from South Park Commons and it's just, they're an incredible team and they're building, they're using AI to actually, you know, to solve a real problem, which is for any business, you know, we work with thousands of brands and getting paid is like an annoyance of every business on the planet because you send invoices and you have to follow up and they've built incredible software that helps you do that. So yeah, Monk.com would be my prediction. I feel like invoice chasing is one of the best uses of AI because it removes... If an AI agent is chasing you, it's like there's no sort of social like, do you mind paying my invoice?