French founders and AI priests with Maxime Germain

21:47Actually, I like the idea of Max just starting it. Max, can you just say what you said again? Yeah, so I, you know, I prepared a bit and we sort of have a backstory with Alice because we've met twice in real life, maybe three times, but two times that I remember. One time, you know, I was very young, I think I was 21 or 22, and we met at this crazy party in New York. And Elise was still a journalist at The Verge at the time. And our friend took us to a little club in New York called The Box, where there was me, Elise. Brian Chesky was here with us as well. It was a small group of like early consumer tech.

22:33It was really fun. it's called the box. And the interior looks like that. And this is exactly the view me and Elise had when we were there because we were just sitting on that balcony up there. And the second time, Elise, I don't know the name of the place. I don't know the restaurant, but we decided it was going to be the classic move when we come to LA. And it's, you know, the picture is from that place that we went to together.

22:59Ellis:Yeah, it's from Oso and Frank's Steakhouse. It is. What was Brian Chesky doing with you guys? Were you all at the same table? No. So I think we had the club for ourselves because Fred decided that he was going to be a private party. And I think at the time, Fred was hanging out a lot with Brian. Brian happened to be in town and he was in New York. So I had to go and get him at the door with Fred because he didn't know if he was really the right place that he should go into. So we came and picked up Brian at the door to get him upstairs at the private party with all of us, which was a crazy, crazy night.

23:38Ellis:I think that was like the latest I ever stayed up as a reporter. I was like, oh, this is clearly a special night. I'm going to be up on a school night until 4 a.m., but it's going to be completely worth it. I mean, I'd never been someplace that I mean like that. I mean, this is just also how much money there was in like the App Store boom of like 2010, 2011, 2012. I mean, there hasn't really been anything like that since. And while I do think the culture has changed, that was definitely a special night. And I guess you weren't yet on our level, Max. What were you doing at the time? I was part of the French mafia crew of early French founders building consumer app in New York.

24:21I was hanging out a lot with Pierre Vallad from Sunrise, Fred, who had phone back at the time. I was running a company. I dropped out of school when I was 20. I was running my first startup from my office in Tribeca. And on the way back home with my red backpack, Fred calls me and tells me, you got to come, you got to join this party. So I went. So that's how I ended up there randomly. Shout out Pierre.

24:47Ellis:Maybe you can answer, how come all my favorite product founders are French? This is something I've been wanting to know for a very long time. And you just mentioned a few of them. Well, I do think I see you with a very European soul in many ways. So I think there is like, there's probably in the European culture, more of an emotional connection to the art, to great product. There is a more depth in understanding, you know, psychology of people and getting to understand these things. And I feel like a bunch of French founders, even those coming with a very technical background, still have, you know, the sensitivity and the ability to sort of like translate into tech, to emotions, to consumer, which works really well.

25:40And yeah, I do feel like that's something that I've always seen you appreciate in the way you appreciate products, in the way you talk with people, even in the work you do or what you're really good at. But you could be European, you could be French in many ways.

25:57Ellis:It's the best compliment I've had all month. I think this actually reminds me of that night at Musso and Frank's. And I did want to ask about this, the difference between American founders and European founders or French founders, especially in AI. But I remember that night at Musso and Frank's, which is like a big steakhouse in LA that's kind of like old Hollywood. I remember just how pumped you were to be there. and you're like, everybody's hustling. Everybody's talking about business. And you're like, no one in France wants to talk about work over drinks. And I just like never thought about that.

26:30Ellis:I mean, is that still true? Yeah, it's super true. I think like once like people, people have work-life balance and they sort of like compartmentalize work and life. And when work is over, they sort of like get into an other mood where like you don't really want to bring work into that place, which I think can be great sometime to disconnect. But also does not foster an environment where, you know, you're pumped by what you do. You're inspired by the people around you. There's kind of like a big downside to it because I don't think it's necessarily about business, the thing we want to talk about.

27:14I think we want to talk about these ideas. We want to talk about building. We talk about the craft. All of this is not only about making money or doing these things. And I feel like once you have, you know, I guess like all the world that I that I evolved in, there's a lot more passion around what we do. So I kind of have that desire to talk about these things, not because I think it's work or it's business, but more because it's completely part of life. And there's so many interesting things going on. Doesn't necessarily have to be compartmentalized. So every time I'm in the US, I'm like reminded that there we I'm going to have tons of great discussions with people and who are actually going to be optimistic and excited about the things that I do.

27:56So I just want to hear Ellis talking a French accent more. That's all I want to hear at dinner.

28:00Ellis:I think it started off well and then it took a turn for the worst. No, you were you were on track. I just love it. Compartmentalize. You think I'd speak with a better accent knowing that I lived for 10 years in New York, but apparently I can't No, why would you want to talk like us, man? It's so boring. Well, do you know about california english maxi? It has more like vocal fry. Well, yeah, but also there's just like this whole meme online like if you say Like yes in california english is yeah, no pretty much for sure Can you try that in that accent? All right. But in return, you're going to have to pronounce my name properly.

28:43Ellis:Okay. Okay. You go first. Yeah. No, pretty much for sure, bro. Okay. So now my turn. Maxime Germain. Germain. Germain. Well, you typed H-U-H. Yeah. Because I was trying to put you in the right track. This is good. Yeah. But I kind of like Maxime Germain because as I told you, it looks like, feels good. Like if it sounds American to French people, it sounds cool. On that thread, I mean, how do you feel as a European founder right now? I feel like there was a lot of momentum in the early AI boom, whether it was with Mistral or other AI startups in Europe. And I feel like I'm not hearing about quite as many.

29:28Ellis:I mean, what does that feel like right now? What are the differences? I don't even look at these things, to be honest, or I don't even consider us being European founders or no like we run a US business have tons of people in the US I spend a lot of time there as well I guess there was an early there was a lot of noise early on but I'm not sure you know noise translate to actual value created or that hype is actually the right driver you should be looking for so I always try to and you know we're in stealth for 18 months as a company, like even two years. So I was trying to avoid that. And I don't participate in the scene at all in Paris.

30:07I might have like a couple of founders friends, but I'm mostly just working. So I'm kind of like out of that. I don't really have an opinion, being honest.

30:17Ellis:It is especially funny because do the grandmas and real estate agents that you're now serving with Beside know that there's some high fashion French guys building their favorite product? I hope so. I hope they feel it in the product. Because I don't know if that's ever been done before. Well, you know, we do speak with them and it's kind of, it's very interesting because I come from that world in many ways. I was born in a small town in Le Mans. All of my family work in the real economy. I don't come from the tech world. I don't come from, you know, a very, you know, knowledge worker background.

31:02So, you know, it doesn't feel super unfamiliar to me because these are the people I grew up with. My first business was actually building websites for plumbers and for, you know, electrician and all the local businesses around me. So I just feel like that has just been a full loop to bring that back to these people. I love when we call it knowledge work. It's like you don't need knowledge to be a plumber or to go out in the real world and do something. It's super demeaning, honestly. Like it's just become part of the vernacular, but it is kind of crazy when you think about it. That's why I was looking for my words.

31:39I couldn't find the right way to put it. But yeah, I agree.

31:42Ellis:Yeah, and full disclosure, Max and I have worked together for a couple of years now. He was actually one of my very first clients at Meaning. And now I'm advising. And one of my favorite things about it is that Max and the crew are bringing their level of thoughtfulness and even just like beautiful, beautiful UI design and brand design to an audience that doesn't usually get that type of love. I mean, I feel like when you look in the news and AI every day, it is almost exclusively stuff for other people in tech. Knowledge workers. Yeah. How did you arrive at this whole real economy idea? And do you feel like they need it more than we do?

32:20Ellis:They need the AI more than us because it certainly feels that way to me. Yeah. Well, so, you know, multiple things came together at once. One, you know, there is this thing from Virgil Abloh that I love, who was saying like one of the best way to do design is to actually only tweak 3 % of an existing product. And the best ideas are oftentimes a 3 % tweak of an existing design. So the way we were considering this internally was that the product should be and feel very neutral to the daily drivers that they already have. So we really took iMessage as a base for the product. And we felt like if we were going to bring AI into these products, we should tweak the 3 % of the UI of iMessage to bring that AI layer in it.

33:18Because if you're working off something that's already widely used and adopted, you're already working a lot of very familiar user experience patterns, user interface patterns that are known. And I think every time people are trying to build their own tools or have like tons of opinions in the way things should be, on 90%, I think it's too much. But if you go down to tweaking the 3%, you actually are able to drive a lot more impact for the end user. So that was kind of the philosophy where we wanted to keep the product super horizontal and the design extremely neutral, taking a product that has billions of daily active users like iMessage and tweaking the 3 % there.

34:11And I think then the thesis we had for the company was not that we would end up with product market fit for the real economy at all. I thought I was building for myself initially, but I kind of like really like this non-opinionated way of looking at if we bring AI into conversations, into a mobile product where all of your conversations would be recorded, where you would have, you know, sort of second brain from all of this conversation, where the AI could answer phones for you. the phone for you or take action based on that conversational data, for whom would it be the most valuable? And we reversed NG.DOT before launching the product.

35:01We started by launching ads, talking about the feature set without saying for whom it was. And what we learned as we were building the V0 of the product was that it would likely be successful with people working in the real economy because they were the people the most excited about the feature set we were building. And even the way we keep building, we build in the less opinionated way as possible. And we completely surrender to the signal we get from the market and from the users and from usage and all these different things. What is the real economy as you define it? Well, at the moment, it's people who are not working behind a laptop, but for whom conversations is where business happens.

35:51So you can take that in many ways, because the product market fit that we have today, the number one user using the product 250 times a day is an insurance group. And it's the person answering the phone for an insurance group who's always on the go. They're always on their phone. They need the context of their conversation. We have priests using the product for their church.

36:16Ellis:Now that's a power user. Power user. Hold on, hold on. Are people praying to beside? Is that what's happening? No. He has so many inbound for the church and so many things to remember about the schedule of people, the things they talk about and like all this stuff that he wants this conversation to happen in B-Side so he can offer back an amazing, meaningful experience when he has a conversation with all of these people reaching out. They're often reaching out for help or for, you know, personal matters. So the B-Side use case is actually amazing for him. Do people know that it's not him? Because you can train with your app, you can train it to be in your voice, right?

36:57So you have two things, right? You have the AI receptionist. That is one part of what we offer. The second part is all of your phone conversation are actually recorded, transcribed, and summarized. So what we've done is that we've rebuilt, you know, phone and texting from scratch. One brick is the AI receptionist, but that's only one of the brick. You then have, you know, full-on recorder and transcriber on phone calls. So sometimes actually just him picking up the phone and not the AI receptionist, but the AI receptionist that he filled. He filled with tons of data from the Bible and like specific things that he wants, you know, the receptionist to say, which is one of the crazy use case we have.

37:43But there are tons, you know, like weird use case in the product that we see.

37:50Ellis:Well, it's not in his voice though, right? You can do voice cloning, but for him, the use case is him talking actually. It's really interesting to me because I think sitting at our desks every day as tech fans and builders, you kind of just assume everybody's a little bit like you sitting at a desk. And when all these different meeting recorder companies come out, you feel like it's commoditized. And then you realize it's like, wait, there's all these people who aren't using Slack or Google Meet or Zoom. They're literally using their phone. And I think that's one of the other cool things that you've done is that so many companies in AI these days are building wrappers, which may be fine if you build the right UX or UI for a specific vertical, you fine tune it, et cetera.

38:35Ellis:But you also have that actual technical innovation of like, as you said, rebuilding the telephony stack, you know, allowing people to get a new phone number. Can you tell us about building that in the year 2025? because as far as I know, nobody's tried that in a minute. But maybe I'm wrong. I feel like that was always kind of the Google Voice dream or something like that. And then it just kind of fell by the wayside. Yeah. Well, I think there are two things to that. One is where you're right is you kind of want to be able to, if everything's going to be commoditized and if the models are only going to get better.

39:11And if we think about the context of AGI and on the way to AGI, what do we need to solve to actually be able to deliver what we all think AGI can be? I think there is a big part of that that's going to be the life context of your life, everything happening in your life. And one of the contexts that is hard to capture is conversations. So on macOS or on your desktop, it's a lot easier because you can record at the OS level and we've seen all of these bots coming, etc. But when you come to the mobile phone and when you come to trying to record a phone conversation, it gets quite hard because you don't have access to it by default on iOS or on Android.

39:54So you really have to be able to power entirely the phone number and all the infra going behind that phone number. Now that we power, you know, I think it's like 2.5 million phone calls every month. We're talking to like the infrastructure provider. We're working with them. We're talking with, you know, the right lawyers in the space to build all of that. And so, yeah, to power that at scale, it's a team of five people in the company. It's probably the biggest moat that we create because both on the regulatory side and the technical side, it's extremely difficult to build. How excited are you to sell the company to Verizon?

40:42No, they're looking into that, actually. Like many of these, like they are all reaching out to run pilots with AI companies because they understand some of these things and they actually want to see like what kind of AI feature we can offer to some premium plans for these people. I find it to be super interesting.

41:02Ellis:Yeah, I feel like in a lot of ways, what you've built, especially being inspired by iMessage and the phone app just reveals how much there is that Apple and Google just haven't really been doing or thinking about when it comes to actually using AI to help us. Do you expect them to come into this market sooner rather than later? Do you feel like they'll kind of let the applications take care of this? Well, Apple does the iOS. I mean, in the new iOS, you can have Siri answer the phone for you. I did it the other day and I think the person just hung up immediately. It's pretty simplistic. It's pretty simplistic, right?

41:37So they're starting to edge into it already.

41:38Ellis:And you can do a call recording and get a transcript on it, but it shows up in the Notes app, which is blasphemously kludgy these days. So, yeah, obviously they're not experts in AI either. Yeah. Well, I think it's wasted potential for both of these companies because there are absolutely amazing experiences to be created if you control the OS with AI. I feel like it's kind of like a widespread feeling in the industry right now where we're all wondering what they're up to and why hasn't this gotten any better. I do think that they will catch up. I do think that I don't see a reason why Apple or Google won't get even better.

42:19Actually Android is a lot better than Apple on the AI at the OS level. What we're discovering though is I think like and one of the product theory that I always have is that I think it's easier to grow into usage than to start from usage. So if you start building with an OS that already has a billion daily active users or two billion and you're trying to build these features you're trying to build them to please a billion or two billion you're not growing into that base and as soon as you push something it's live for everyone so how much depth can you really cover when you're that horizontal can you actually build for specific workflows of people one of the insight we have in the products that that context is leveraged to be shared with teams.

43:10I don't think Apple went into making even macOS or iOS functional as like a business tool or that they would bring the concept of teams within what they build while it is the core of what we offer and becomes the core value as we progress into this unopinionated way of going about things. That's what we keep uncovering is that the shared context within the team, the collaboration features are the key to grow the product further and to expand to the product market fit. So even though they could and they probably will add more AI in the details of their execution and in the details of where we're growing with the product market fit, I don't think it will actually merge or become too competitive that we don't have a shot at existing.

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45:48Ellis:It's a good point about not just AI, but about built for work. is something that Apple at least is not quite as good at. I mean, it's just funny to imagine that everybody at Apple is like, are they using Slack or are they just using iMessage to communicate? Are they using Pages and Keynote? I believe that they are, which have pretty, you know, ancient collaborative tools, and I don't even think they have comments. And meanwhile, you know, definitely a little bit of a different situation for Google where they make so much of their money from a lot of this stuff. But to your point, I mean, even with Gemini being added to Chrome, it's one more button amongst 50 buttons.

46:28Ellis:And even what you were saying about the Virgil Abloh quote, I mean, it just reminds me of my time at the browser company, where you want to do so much because you see so many problems and so many opportunities. And so you create this incredible browser with all these new things. But at the end of the day, if people can't get used to the vertical sidebar, it's kind of a non-starter because you went too far over that 3%. And yeah, I mean, I'm curious, like for the people who are using Beside, like what is the magic moment that is most valuable that hits them quickest when they start using it? The onboarding for a business is consumer grade, leveraging all the best practice of all the top consumer product building where we know how scarce attention is during onboarding, how quickly people can drop and how easy we have to make that.

47:20So we're able to get people to experience the core value of the product quite fast on their own data by doing one really good website scrapper. So we're able to extract all the information about their business, pre-fill that AI receptionist during onboarding. So when you finish the onboarding, you're actually having your first conversation with the AI receptionist that already has data on your business and can already answer quite a bunch of questions as if you were a customer. And the second thing -

47:52Ellis:So you just add your website and besides scrapes all the information for you that's publicly available and uses that to build the bot. Exactly, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And then we call forward your phone to Beside, meaning that your existing phone number that you've already adopted actually redirects to Beside. So that's sort of like you're going to have all of your next calls within the app. You're going to discover the transcriber. You're going to discover the call summary. You're going to see all these things from there. So these are the two tricks that leads to adoption in the easiest possible way in discovering the core value of the product.

48:40Ellis:I was going to say, does this force you to be a green bubble though, Max? I don't know if you could put a price on that in terms of the barriers to entry and retention. Yeah, we're a green bubble, Elise. It's a green bubble world. There is no blue bubble royalty potential in this. And we talked about it earlier. I remember you made me freak out with that blue bubble world early in the company. Turns out it's actually fine. People are, OK, I haven't received a support message on the blue bubble. Well, how much of the real economy? I mean, I bet you the ratio is quite different for Android versus iPhone.

49:19So the people getting into the product are often the business owners. They're all on iPhones. But we had to build Android because the moment they want to invite the team, you enter that like 50-50 split where it's Android, iOS 50-50. So if I use Beside, if I really use it, I am not sending blue bubbles anymore. You're sending green bubbles. Okay. Interesting.

49:45Ellis:I think the idea, though, is that it would be like your work number, right? Right. I mean, how do you handle those different phone numbers, Max? I mean, do you think the idea is that this just becomes your one phone number over time? And beside is your phone app, your messages app, your MVNO carrier? Is that kind of the vision? The people who adopted already had adopted their phone number as their business number. So their life is kind of like spread across business context and personal context in the product. They do like to see that they can have multiple phone numbers in the product. So they will actually separate the two within the product or just adopt the beside number and keep theirs at the OS level and play with that.

50:33The closest competition, when you think about it, is Meta and WhatsApp for business. Because in many ways, this is what Facebook or Meta is pushing, actually, with WhatsApp for business. And those interactions are there. So when I think about the big tech players, it's more than it is Google, more than it is Apple. The real competition is actually WhatsApp for business because the adoption of WhatsApp for business is huge and they're really good at bringing AI into the product and it's quite used. The thing there is people are still searching for businesses on Google and they're still using phone numbers.

51:16Google is not pushing for WhatsApp numbers there. So you still have 50 % of business communication happening over the phone and not on WhatsApp. But at the product thinking level, WhatsApp for business is the closest that serve the same type of needs that our customers have. I'm curious about the note taking aspect of this. That was the first thing that kind of came up when I downloaded your Mac app. I've got three apps in my doc that will do AI note-taking for meetings, Notion, Granola, ChatGPT, and then Google Meet will do it. I was in a meeting the other day, a Zoom, where there were three individual AI note-taking apps in the call from three different providers.

52:02It's super crowded. It's the way that you get into this and you have defensibility because you're actually replacing the phone number. And so if someone's going to buy into that concept, they're going to use you for note-taking because you're playing that kind of game with the context that you have that no one else has? I would see it more from the motion that we have on the go-to market and who we have product market fit with today. So we're actually on desktop not even interested in bringing our crowd and the crowd that we're bringing never heard about Notion, never heard about Granola. They have no idea that these things even exist.

52:43They've never seen a call recorder before. Though sometimes, you know, half of their calls happen on Google Meet because they're real estate agent and sometimes they have to show slides and they have to go through a deck and they want the context of their conversation same as what they had on the phone to live inside the same product. Because if it's scattered among many tools, Not everything is connected to their CRM. Not everything is updating the tools around. The context is lost for their team. So the lock-in is the context. And then the defensibility is just that we're going after a type of audience that is absolutely not the one of the other winners.

53:25So when you look at our product from the tech lens, it's another competitor to Granola, another competitor to Notion Recorder. But if you look at it from the motion of who is actually adopting that product on macOS, the audience is actually completely different.

53:41Ellis:Just say, Alex, it's not for you. It's not for you, Alex. You're not a member of the real economy. You just sit there in a puffy vest and tweet and write on Substack. I just use Granul. Sorry, buddy. Which is great. They've done like Granul is an amazing product. Well, so another technical thing that a lot of these services have in common that you'll really need to succeed at is memory. I feel like it's kind of fake when companies say today that they understand everything that you've ever said do with the context windows being where they are still inherently limited. What are you seeing with that?

54:20Ellis:And how are you trying to build better memory systems? Yeah, so that's a use case that we discovered is not used by our users. They don't prompt their brain or they don't prompt their context as much as we would, because we're probably using it for creative outputs or to write something or to communicate. For them, the accuracy that really matters is the call summary. It is the ability to take the right action in their CRM, sharing the context with their team, and they have very little use case for prompting the AI. Or what they want to do is edit their settings or share something to someone or us doing a call for them, but less so asking specific questions.

55:15about the memory. I do think it is something we need to solve because as we expand, I don't think we're going to stay limited to the real economy. There is more we want to do and we want to go beyond that. To the fake economy. To our fake economy. I want to break into our tech bubble. I don't, you know, it is part of the American dream to get there. But I think the way for us and the way we've thought about it is that many of the note takers are basically storage of notes and information, and they are made to be prompted because that's the only value you can get out of them today. We only wonder, based on that context, what are the actions we can automatically take for you?

56:10How do we make that context very much alive in your experience in your operating system? If we're going to meet again in a week, I want to have a clear meeting prep note based on our past conversation. If I committed to sharing a doc with you, I want this doc to have been shared automatically by the AI. And I think the life context of conversation, when you start thinking about it, not in terms of like storage of notes, but what you can actually take in terms of action on behalf of the users from the context you've captured and what are the things that you can start automating in these workflows and the value you can deliver.

56:48I think you start going away from, you know, an only notes and prompting the notes world to the missing context to feel closer to AGI.

57:04Ellis:What about on the customer's side, though, when they're asking a priest power user questions about the Bible? I mean, if you want to put the whole Bible in there, why not? But can your product search for it? I mean, I feel like that's something I'm still not seeing. like with any AI products reliably, is actually being able to search for information in a way that works. Yeah. So I think when they input some of these things, it knows that they exist, but then it relies on the model itself, having in memory all of that. we don't have a tool calling that would search the web, for example, on the AI receptionist.

57:46That is not something that we've built. I'm not sure we'll ever build it or that will actually be a clear need. So when people go off what's in the knowledge of the AI receptionist, I think it just falls back to the model knowledge and the model training data.

58:03Ellis:Yeah, I feel like this use case in particular is just so helpful for folks like the ones that you've heroed. People who are not as good note takers as reporters like Alex and I and just need to remember all this stuff. But I mean, is there some limit to like how far back you can go memory wise with like your calls, asking things from the past? what are some insights that all my customers are telling me? Things like that, that really rely on like a huge data set to help move the business forward. Or is that not really on the table yet? No, I think like that's the evolution from where we're at to where we're going.

58:48And there, I think until it's fully ready.

58:51Ellis:That may be thousands and thousands of calls, right? Yeah. Well, there, I think you enter more custom prompting, rag building, and you're actually probably building the product around the limitation of the memory of the model. And as you build that or as you invest there, you know, it's just going to be solved six months, 12 months from now from the model itself. so that's the way we approach it that there are some things where we are wondering if we should invest time into building because they might just self uh solve six months itself yeah how do you think about that isn't it yeah a lot of people are going through that right now and thinking about you know that and how do you build a company for agi if that's going to happen or just the models being able to replicate your company potentially yeah um what i'm excited i think uh because what if if we get there what it means is absolutely uh amazing and the technological progress we would have made uh i i am very grateful and lucky to be alive at that time and in the industry on the field because that's the most exciting of times, in my opinion.

1:00:16But beyond that, the way, the importance of unique context that you need to capture. So there are contexts that you're going to be able to capture through an API. There is context that you'll be able to capture because you can build a macOS recorder like everyone is doing. But then there's going to be unique, highly valuable context. the phone context is particularly valuable because what you need to do to capture phone conversation is extremely hard to me the only defensibility as you go is going to be for us the consumer grade experience because if you don't have that dna built into the team and if you were coming from the b2b world or the sas world it's going to be extremely hard to rewire your brain to consumer product design, product building, and product distribution.

1:01:10The other part is finding the right data that other players are not going to easily capture, which for us is the phone.

1:01:24Ellis:One of the questions we'd like to ask as you're thinking about the future is, what do you optimize for? I know you can look at any number of things from call length, call volume, how many questions people are asking, their conversion with customers, how many callbacks. A conversion to a religion. Yeah, conversion to a religion. You could be the first. What are you optimizing for? Accuracy of actions we can take. Did your customer get a great interaction with the voicemail receptionist? Were we able to properly book in your calendar the call that they ask? when you come back to the product, you read a past conversation, does the summary look accurate?

1:02:10So the value of the product becomes extremely passive as we go. So what really matters is that we're able to measure the accuracy of the action we take on your behalf as a user and get as close to 100 % as possible on as many as we can.

1:02:26Ellis:Yeah. Speaking of those actions, I mean, it just makes me think a lot of those actions were for many people taken by humans in the past, whether it's, you know, a scheduler, whether it's at a hair salon or a car dealership or otherwise serving the real economy, growing up in the real economy. I think, you know, where I'm going with this. What's your latest thinking about, you know, the jobs being lost, replaced, changing for these people? What we've seen so far is that we were more coming as a help to people who are already very busy and could not actually delegate to someone. I don't think we've entered a place where we've replaced anyone.

1:03:11What I see is we deliver value for a lot of people where they can actually offer better human to human experience. If you've ever been to this super high luxury hotel where they have concierge, you give your name once, you give your preferences once, and that's it. You won't have to repeat yourself and you will just like flow through your experience. I think that's the beauty of what we can offer. People feel more cared for, the interactions become more meaningful. And there's really beauty in that because as a human, you can't actually do that if you don't have some machine help.

1:03:51Ellis:So one more question for you, Max, before we let you go. Who do you think has the best taste in tech right now? It's a good question. And don't say Johnny Ive boat lamp. No. It could be Jack Dorsey, to be honest. Like, I really love his latest. And then there's Antoine. You know Antoine Martin from Amo? Like, he's probably, you know, the taste goat of consumer. Well, we don't talk about Jack nearly enough. What's Jack doing right that you see? He's still focused on Square. He's also big on Bitcoin at the moment. He also built a messaging app that works with Bluetooth devices. And I really enjoy how he always comes down to like, at some point, he does all these big things and just like comes back and code himself a little app and like start a movement with it.

1:04:50I just find it really cool that he just gets down to this like low level in the arena and just restart from scratch and seems to be excited about it. Yeah, I find this to be inspiring. Some people think he's Satoshi. Have you heard that, Max?

1:05:07Ellis:That he is Satoshi? No fucking way. Yeah. No way. That's a rumor. No way. All right, well, let's leave it there. Max, thank you so much for coming on Access. We'll chat soon. Chat soon. Nice to meet you, Max. Thank you, guys.

1:05:26Thanks to Max for coming on the show.

1:05:29Ellis:Oh, my God. That's what I was going to do. We are a new show, so please follow, like, subscribe everywhere you get to podcasts. You can also find us in video via AccessPod on YouTube. If you like this episode, please subscribe. Leave a five-star review, a great review, a glowing review, a thumbs up. Share it with a friend, even better. And you can find me at Hamburger on Twitter and at Meaning.company. He did give us permission to do this, right, Alex? I think he did. You can find me at sources.news, my newsletter on Substack. Access is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and this show is produced by Hooked Creators.

1:06:06Bye.

1:06:08Ellis:Au revoir.

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