$1.5B AI Founder: This Is Your Golden Age to Build With AI | Jesse Zhang, CEO Decagon

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0:45Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. What do you think are the jobs that have the highest risk of extinction? Jobs where... Meet Jesse Zhang, 27 years old and already co-founder of a$1.5 billion AI company. His startup Decagon powers conversations for brands like Hertz, Duolingo, and Notion. In just two years, his team has grown to nearly 200. So he is hiring. But the question is, how and who? You're seeing some of the companies actually laying off agencies that they're using, right?

1:23What do you feel like the percentage of these companies is? Within those categories that I listed, maybe one third, one third, one third. So it is happening and you see it. In this episode, we explore the future of work from the jobs most at risk in the AI era. And we're going to talk about new career paths that are opening up and the skills that will define the next generation of leaders. For people with non-technical backgrounds that want to get into it, I think right now is a golden dime. And when you interview people for a company, can you name some skills that you're looking for? Welcome to Silicon Valley, girl, everyone.

1:52Jesse, you founded a company that helps corporations build AI agents to automate processes inside those corporations. And one of your customers said, working with you is like having 65 people working on a particular problem. Do you see it as creating more opportunities or like taking jobs from people who were doing these tasks? Yeah, no, happy to give us some context. So you mentioned kind of using AI agents to automate things. We focus specifically on conversations with end users, right? So as an example, let's say we work with a hotel chain. And as you can imagine, a lot of the customers that go and stay in the hotels and so on, they'll have a lot of inquiries.

2:34Like, I want to book a room, or I want to upgrade my room, or I have questions about my loyalty points. These are classic, you can think of these as customer service or customer support inquiries that come in. and the AI agent's job is to have a conversation with them. This can be over the phone. It can be over live chat. And the AI agent can have the full conversation. It might need to go look up information about you, right? It might need to figure out like what are your past stays or it might need to figure out like what loyalty tier you are. So it can go in and look up information. It can take actions as well.

3:05So it can go and book a room for you and so on. So in a nutshell, that's what we do. And so those are the, you mentioned automating processes. That's kind of what we do. It's more about automating these conversations. So back to your question about how we view the innovation and sort of impact on these organizations. It really depends on what the organization is looking to get out of AI agents. And different organizations are in different stages. Some people are in heavy growth mode, right? So the AI agent is more of an amplification of what they currently do. There's no one that's replacing per se, but it's making their operation just much faster and make it so that it's a lot less operationally intensive for them to grow.

3:47If they grew 5X in the last year, maybe they don't need to 5X their support team. So that's one thing that we see. Other organizations that we talk to are more focused on the quality of experience. Maybe they just don't care about cost, so they don't really care how many. They're not replacing anyone. They're more just kind of like, okay, we think that having an AI agent here will make the customers a lot happier with us because they can get answers instantly. They can get what they wanted within a few seconds rather than waiting on hold. And so that's what we're seeing. And those are kind of different profiles.

4:23And of course, there is also a third category of company where maybe they're just in cost-saving mode. And so what they're using AI for is kind of making their operations more efficient and either reassigning those folks to other jobs or more realistically, Sometimes they're using outsourced agencies, and they can downsize those. So those are the three categories of companies, and we're seeing a pretty good diversity between those. Yeah, because I feel like when we're talking about jobs that might get eliminated by AI, we talk about those customer support roles first. And it's interesting to hear that.

4:59It's like when we talk about mental health. If there is a therapist on your phone, it doesn't mean it's replacing therapists. It's just making therapy more accessible for everyone. But in your industry, you said you're seeing some of the companies actually laying off the agencies that they're using, right? What do you feel like the percentage of those companies is? I think, yeah. I mean, within those categories that I listed, maybe one third, one third, one third. Okay. So it is happening and you see it. Yeah. And I think the agencies themselves, I think they're also just shifting to new things, right?

5:29So let's say you operate a big call center with a lot of folks. I don't think it's a matter of like, oh, crap, there's not stuff for us to do anymore. There's just other things. So instead of handling the tier one types of conversations of book a room for me, you're more involved in building a relationship with the client, handling more the tier two, tier three, complex interactions. And then there's other things that emerge. So for example, a big thing nowadays is collecting data for the AI or having people review the AI. And so I think it's just kind of the nature of the job changes. And that's pretty much what happens every single time there's a big technology shift.

6:08And what do you think is going to happen to entry-level jobs? I just saw these stats where there were 30 % more applications for entry-level jobs this year and 15 % less spots in the companies. What do you think is going to happen? Yeah, I think the types of things that people end up doing now are going to be different, just enabled by AI, right? So if you even think about software engineering as one of the most popular jobs in the last decade or so, we have a lot of software engineers. And there's no way we will slow down on hiring a software engineer anytime soon because the amount of software that you need to build is kind of like uncapped.

6:49It's more like the more people you have. And it's exponentially growing, I feel like. Exactly, right? Like the more people you have, the faster you can get there almost. So it's not necessarily like, hey, there's fewer jobs, but the nature changes, right? So now pretty much every single one of our engineers is heavily using AI in their job. And it's kind of one of those things where it's hard to quantify exactly what the impact is. One, because we started the company after that technology was there. So we've always had that technology. But even if you kind of compared someone just coding by themselves versus with an AI agent, obviously you can feel that the AI makes them faster and more productive, but it's hard to measure the impact.

7:25What are your top three tools to build an AI agent for someone who is non-technical, ideally? I don't really have strong thoughts on those. I mean, I can tell you what we use as a company. So on the coding side, we have classic cursor, cloud code, companies like that. Lovable is quite impressive in terms of prototyping and building things out. So on the non-engineering side, folks use things like note takers and ChatGPT in and of itself is quite useful just for researching and making people more well-equipped on the go -to-market side, for example. So those are the tools. In terms of building AI agents, I don't think like the typical person will build their own agent per se.

8:11I mean, you can build a simple one with ChatGPT, for example, but most of our employee base, I would say, are kind of using tools to amplify themselves instead of like creating their own agents. So do you feel like smaller businesses, like in two or three years, if they want an AI agent, they would go to a company like yours or you still will be working with larger corporations because this is something that's heavier lift for small businesses? Yeah, interesting. I would say that currently our focus is on the large organizations. There's a bunch of reasons for that. I mean, one is that they have the scale.

8:49And so if you think about the number of customer inquiries that they get or the number of customer service requests or customer service agents that they have, it's just way larger than anything else. And so it makes sense for us to work with these companies if we can. Another reason is that AI agents are still generally in their infancy. So there's still a lot of figuring out to be done. and because of that, the product's going through a ton of iteration and it makes a lot of sense to iterate side by side with these larger corporations because you can build around them. And then the ideal path is like, okay, once the product is mature enough, maybe then you can start productizing it for smaller clients.

9:26But I think the issue is that because the clients are smaller, you don't actually have the time or the capacity to really spend time building around them. So you have to have something that's more productized. So I think that's the ideal progression for AI agents is if you can work with the largest corporations, you can work with them closely and kind of refine the product and really figure out like what needs to be in there to craft the agent. And then you can kind of prioritize it more for the smaller folks. So you're automating customer support for others, but inside of your company, what are the processes that used to exist that do not exist now because they're fully automated?

9:59The thing that comes mostly to mind is doing research. So let's say you are looking into a new space and trying to figure out, you know, what are the best fits for Decagon? Or you're trying to understand for a specific company, like, you know, what is the history? So you can be, you know, you can have a good understanding with them. So when you talk to them, you can have empathy, you can have, you know, the right context for them. And so normally people would have to spend a good amount of time, you know, Googling stuff and putting the other notes or watching videos and stuff like that. But yeah, if you use deep research or one of the AI agents to do the research for you, you can get it done within a few minutes.

10:41And then there's sources as well. So you can validate stuff. It makes things much easier. Yeah, absolutely. How many people do you have now on the team? We are a little less than, we're still less than 200. Less than 200. Have you ever gone from more people to less people in the past few years? No, but we've only been around for two years. So you're only growing. Do you see hiring more people in the future? Oh, of course. Yeah, we're hiring super fast right now. And it's one of the bottlenecks, I would say, for the businesses. We need more people. Do you think it's possible to build a company these days without being technical if you want to build an AI space?

11:15Because we're talking about Lovable that lets you deploy faster and come up with MVPs. We're talking about Natan that lets you build AI agents with just a block scheme. Do you think you still have to be technical to build a billion-dollar company, or you can be a one person with a good idea and a bunch of tools, building something that's going to help the market? I don't think you have to be technical, but I think being technical helps a lot because you just have better intuition and you understand the inner workings a little bit more. And so you can make better decisions faster, I would say. But even now, even without AI, you don't have to be technical.

11:57It's just very helpful. If you have the time and the interest, why not learn it? Yeah, it's just maybe for people who are like, they don't see themselves as coders necessarily, but they feel like they're missing out on this huge era of change because they don't understand what's going on. Yeah, I mean, for people with non-technical backgrounds, I want to get into it. Yeah, I think right now is a golden time. You can do a lot more than you did before. I mean, that's part of the reason why a lot of these coding tools are getting so much exposure is that there's just like a much larger audience now, right?

12:31Instead of being someone super technical, you can be semi-technical or not technical at all. And now you have a great opportunity to build your own things. I love that. Can you give advice to people who are watching who are graduating from college? Because you went straight to starting a company. It was another company. It was a company connected with video games. But have you ever had this thought of like, no, I should go work for a company first, get some experience? Why did you decide to go straight into business? Yeah, I mean, I thought about this a lot because we've also recruited a lot of people out of college that we're also considering building their own thing.

13:05And I think my general sense is if you feel ready and you feel a lot of energy and conviction in doing your own thing, then go for it. You know, like it's going to be quite tough. I would say for me, it was very tough right out of college just because you don't have enough intuition around things. But if you feel ready for that and you're okay with it being tough and kind of just trudging through it, then yeah, just do it. I think I love seeing people that are just having the confidence and can just go for it. On the flip side, yeah, the reason to kind of work somewhere would be to gain experience and gain that intuition.

13:38So if you work at a startup um in my my thesis is like if you do choose to work at a startup you should ideally choose one that's posts uh product market fit because otherwise you don't learn that much like if you're pre-product market fit you're you're kind of building stuff but maybe you'll learn some technical skills you don't really learn that much around like what what you should look for in a company and like how to like what good looks like right so okay you join a post pmf company maybe it just hit pmf and things are inflecting and things are really working yeah you that could be really helpful because you gain a lot of intuition around how to work with people, what types of profiles you need.

14:12You gain a lot of intuition around how to approach customers, how to work with customers, what's the right dynamic to have with your customers, how to build products and how to build product at scale that doesn't break all the time. So that's the benefit of actually doing the second route. But yeah, if you have energy, then there's definitely nothing wrong with just learning as you go. Okay, if you were brutally honest, what do you think are the jobs that have the highest risk of extinction in the next five years? I mean, it's hard to say at a very high level, but I would say jobs where it's just kind of straight up output.

14:55Let's say right now, what AI is really good at, it's writing marketing materials. And if the job is just writing marketing materials, then I think those jobs are kind of hard to justify. And so what will happen, I think, is that those jobs will kind of evolve. People often talk about what jobs AI is eliminating because it's kind of easy to see like, oh, well, AI can do this. That means we don't need humans anymore. But that's true of any technology. Any technology that's good at something, you don't really need humans to do that thing. So what the job becomes is like humans kind of like guiding that technology.

15:33So yeah, I mean, a classic example of writing marketing materials or just like writing stuff in general. Do you have that person on your team or is it like a marketer? Yeah, we have a marketing team and they use AI, right? But there's no sort of like need anymore for someone that just writes the copy. Like a copywriter, yeah. You know, have someone who controls the AI that writes the copy, right? So, and the same with what we're doing. When we think about customer service or customer experience, you don't necessarily need people to handle the how do I reset my password type questions. You can have people that either can work on the higher level, harder questions or kind of manage the AI that solves those questions.

16:15And so for us, what we're seeing actually with a lot of our customers is that people kind of grow into new roles that are much more exciting. So it could be like there's now this concept of like a conversation architect or AI architect. And their whole job is to use Decagon to design the way that their AI should behave. And that requires a little bit of a different skill set. You have to be fairly good at reasoning. You have to be fairly good at communicating because that's how you communicate to the AI of how to answer something. And they were customer support before those people? Yeah. So before they were kind of managers, CX managers, or they were in charge of their original knowledge base, or they were in charge of kind of the old school chatbots.

17:02And so their roles have kind of evolved as well, right? So a big part of Decagon is enabling those people. And so we have a big focus on customer enablement. We have a program that we call Decagon University that up levels them into the new AI age. And the benefit is that now you kind of get these folks that were very interested in this, but we've kind of given them a much smoother path to figure out like, okay, here's how you build intuition around AI. Here's how I use them. And now they're much more effective at their jobs because they're now in charge of AI and designing it and leveraging it and reviewing the answers and figuring out how to make it better.

17:37So Jesse's an employer, right? He's hiring people in today's AI world. And again, we've seen the stats. AI is replacing people, no more jobs, blah blah blah. But he's still hiring. His company is growing. He needs more high-skilled workers. The question I want to ask him is what do employers like him look for in candidates in today's market? What skills are critical? How do you stand out? Let's dive into what it really takes to be a part of a high-growth startup. And when you interview people for a company, can you name some skills that you're looking for? Not necessarily technical, but maybe like their personal traits that will help them transition from just being customer support to manager of AI?

18:18Yeah. So, I mean, one, you have to be fairly analytical because you have to be able to break something down into steps, right? So, a big part of the folks that are using Decagon is, oh, I saw this conversation that could have been better. How do I figure out how to update the AI so that it can answer these conversations better in the future? And that involves, okay, well, I need to kind of dig into the conversation. And we have a lot of tooling here that helps them like, okay, this message, here's how the AI got this message. Here's like the reasoning. Here's like the step that it took. Here's the knowledge that it used.

18:52And so someone who can actually clearly think through that is going to be very effective at this. And the other trait I would say is around communication. So in the same way that we communicate with coworkers now, in the future, you have these AI agents. And one of the areas that we've pioneered so far is like, how do you communicate with the AI agent to teach it new things? And the way we do it at Decagon is through natural language. So like plain English. So someone who is really good at communicating can write down instructions essentially for the AI to follow in a very, very nice way. Whereas someone who's potentially less good at communicating, they might write it down, but then the AI could get confused because like two of the steps contradicts with each other or something.

19:30So I would kind of put that into the communication skills. So it's kind of like analytical and communication skills. Yeah, love it. You've been doing this for two years. How did you initially find the problem and what made you stick to it? Because there are so many problems that could be solved with AI. We found the problem mostly through talking to customers. So our whole approach to building products and figuring out what to do is to be super tight with our customers. So you had your co-founders. You were like, let's start something. and the first thing you were going to do, just talk to customers, right?

20:03Yeah, so Ashwin, my co-founder and I, we had both started companies before and we had reasonable outcomes, but they were all kind of like up and down rides. And a lot of the reasons to have downs in a startup's journey, especially in the early days, is that you are building something and working really hard, but then you realize that there's no market for it or customers don't really care that much about it or they won't pay for it. So I think we just became a lot better at that process. and talking to customers and really figuring out what is the ground truth behind what they actually care about.

20:36And in this case, it was conversational AI, customer service. And people have tons of people on their team or kind of outsourced agency that's doing this. And they see a lot of opportunity. And the nice part about what we're building is that it's very quantifiable, right? You can measure how well you're doing. You can see what was the impact on my business. You're trying to specifically B2B, right? Straight away. Because it's not like you were talking to different people to figure out that. Yeah, we were mostly talking to large businesses, yeah. Because you wanted to go into B2B, right? Yeah, I mean, that was a conscious decision, I suppose.

21:09My first company was a B2C company and wanted to try something different. And also, I think it is much easier to reason through B2B. B2C, there's a lot more intuition-based, you know, run experiments. And I feel like fundraising and everything is just... The predictability of a business with B2B is way better. Yeah, for sure. way easier. Thank you. Can you give one piece of advice to everyone who's watching and wants to start a company, an AI? Well, one is that you kind of have to find your own way because one of the things that I believe in is that it's actually super easy to over-index on what other people have done.

21:45And that might not work for you because other people have different strengths and different circumstances as well. And those might not be obvious, by the way, when you first hear about it so i think when you're young you have a tendency to like read these articles or like podcasts or whatever about other founders you're like okay i'm just gonna do that because that's what worked but different people have different strengths right like ashwin and i have different strengths uh you're compared to other founders but also with each other so you have to figure out you know what what works for you that's probably the big thing is like don't over index on what you hear and just try to insta respect and figure out what you're good at uh and then i mean you can learn from other people's stories as well i mean i our story i think the probably the biggest takeaway way is that you have to spend the first stage of your company building journey gathering as much signal as possible and everything is about really getting signal on what to build and what's useful in b2b stuff like the purest signal is like are you getting revenue like are people paying you because if they're not then is what you're doing like actually useful or like i mean that's not necessarily the case but like you just want to get as much signal as possible and i think that's that was our learning basically.

22:55So for other people that are building B2B, I would probably suggest again, you know, figure out your own path, but I would suggest that you should not really try to build stuff first at all. You should just spend time talking to customers and, and not just talking to them. Like you should really figure out like a game plan for how you take a conversation with a customer and like really go deep into, you know, what they're willing to pay for, how they think about ROI, how they make decisions. And once you have enough data points there, then you can actually figure out what is the right thing to build.

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24:10Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Did you actually ask them to pay when you were having those conversations? Yeah, of course. So you're like if we're going to build this or did you ask them to submit the card without having a product? Oh, no. I don't think people would pay. Well, sometimes they would. Like you put you on the wait list. Yeah, maybe. I mean, yeah, so that is like one type of signal, but you want to, yeah, if, yeah, I mean, maybe, yeah, maybe you just have a conversation with someone.

24:48They're like, holy crap, like I need this so badly. I'll just pay you right now. That'd be nice. I think there's no way that'll happen for a sizable deal. That's just not how companies make decisions, but yeah, if you at least can commit, get them to commit to like, hey, if you deliver this, this would be worth this much to us and actually assign a number to it. That is, that's like kind of step one, right? And step two, you kind of get into, all right, well, how are you justifying that? Like who needs to make the call? Like whose budget is it coming out of? It's kind of classic discovery. So I think that's why early stage founding is like so much like sales.