Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions

22:18I want the amount of time it takes you to create that to go down and down and so you're able to just create more and more of the content. Is anyone here creator in any way have a YouTube to channel or a marketer, do you know about just like the gaping mall that can never be fully fed or stated for content that I find so many of our customers are just staring into with despair. And so getting kind of their time to expression down is really important. But one of the ways you do that is just like by creating worse and worse content that it's just a role with an iPhone and you slap some captions on it, which is great for some use cases.

22:53But for others, just like a missed opportunity, like you could have done so much more to create really high quality video content. And so if Descript is also winning on increasing the editing richness, the number of jobs that you're able to do with us and the number of things you're able to do to transform your media and make it really high quality. The interaction of those two metrics is such a great way to drive towards customer value. I will say that like what Gorov said around just like good product fundamentals with retention totally resonates with me. my attitudes where the tourists is you've got a triage of the tourists, some component of them just don't have a use case for your software.

23:30They want to create a voice clone, they want to see it, they're like, who that looks cool, but they don't have anything to do with that voice clone. And it's like, great, let's let them do that. That's awesome. Maybe one day you'll think about Descript or 11 Labs and come back. But then who are these tourists who actually have a legitimate use case and they just don't know it yet? They could be using video to communicate within their company. they could be using text -based video editing to create all of their marketing clips and they don't know that yet. And how can I create software that activates really well that displays all of our use cases and lets them have a good first time.

24:05And I find that like often retention problems or just activation problems in disguise in a trench coat. And so what I really try to focus on to improve retention is just like the activation experience. Just having come from a social media background as well as Snap, such a good point about just DAU and how that can be such a trap. I think social media companies obviously optimize DAU for a reason because money is coming from a different source. And so actually it's good to be out of that game and really interestingly with the generative space, it seems like it's kind of having the opposite effect on what is trying to achieve.

24:40like social media on one end is using AI as well, but really to consume time from people as much as possible, consume as much of your time. It's succeeding. On the other hand, generative AI is actually giving back time to people, so they can actually do more. So pretty cool. Yeah, we talked about this on a recent episode. How some tools, I'm sure people would resonate with this. If you had one excellent session, it could have saved you four hours of work in five minutes. That's actually more valuable than spending 20 minutes every day in an app and you don't see that in the same metrics. Right, so I love that you brought up different metrics that you're paying attention to Laura.

25:15Charles, is there anything that jumps to mind there for you in terms of how you might rethink a business model in terms of what metrics you're paying attention to, the way that you're monetizing a product that might be different because the willingness to pay we've also seen is there, even if it is just, I'm using this once a month, once every two months even. Yeah, and I think it's a really good point, right? Some consumers actually feel that if they need to do something twice, the product is not working well, right? Because that element that we've gone from one side to the other side, so probably like someone in the middle is what it fits well.

25:48I was actually like, you know, meeting with the customer and we presented the C -level last week and the question they came back with was like, okay, so how much time am I going to save? And I was like, well, you're going to save anywhere between 50 to 60 times the time. Like, you give me a 50 to 60, like, it's slashed by 50 to 60 and they were like, no, that's not possible. I was like, let's the math right now. And we did the math and it was very interesting. So, hey, there is an emphasis on that side, but I think like sometimes we try to overemphasize the effects of like the efficiency that you get in with genitive AI, when in fact genitive AI is not perfect, right?

26:20I think like that's one of the main reasons why the AI tourists are there and they're very big. Because everyone comes with like such a big expectation that is going to be solving all of my problems and it's going to be cooking dinner for me tonight as well. And unfortunately it's not going to cook dinner for you, it's just not going to solve all of your problems, but it's going to help you quite a lot. Either because you can do a lot of more monetization with your customers, you can reach new markets, or you can actually do it much quicker, right? But I think framing it on actually what is valuable for you as the business or as an individual is much more important.

26:52So the issue or metrics were like, pew, they were like usage, right? And over the past month, we've ended up like switching to like usage is important, but that does not define like the long -term success of an actual customer for us, right? It's one of our like, yeah, the Asian side is about actually what's the use case that you have and how do we measure that? Or the long term and how do we understand try to insert the use case based on the way you're using the product, right? So that we can offer you the best tools and the best tips and all that stuff. For us that that's essentially those are the key metrics today, best like use it.

27:22Use it's still super important, but I don't really mind if someone uses the product today and then doesn't really go like a week or two weeks because I know that like if we've they're going to come back to explain it, right? I think that's how we are thinking about it. You don't have those social notifications that are like a friend of a friend, maybe posted something, please come to our app. Thank you. Great. Well, so we're going to open up to questions very soon. So if you have any questions, start thinking about them. But I want to do rapid fire one or two more. So the importance of optimizing an application for a specific role or someone's use case.

27:54Who are you? What are you trying to do? So each of you actually comes from different backgrounds, right? So Gorov, you've done design and development, you've been an engineer, Laura, you've been immersed in product, Carlos operations. And so those are roles where there's like, gosh, I don't know how many other people who fit that subset. So I'd just love to hear your perspective, independent of your company. How do you think of AI as, let's say, the next five years? What does an AI powered engineer look like in your case, Gorov, or like an AI powered operations person? What do you need? What's missing?

28:24Are there products out there that actually fit that use case and are doing it well? Yeah, I mean, thinking about it from an engineering perspective or even from a design perspective, I think maybe the closest on the engineering side would be like a tech lead manager, someone who's actually setting up the overall architecture of whatever is being built, right? But a lot of the works been done by AI and they're coming in and they're making edits, they're like, hmm, maybe we need to change this reviewing stuff, right? Same one design, right? Like kind of giving high level instructions and like, let's have this, let's maybe use this style over here, or let's change these components, right?

28:58And getting that output back and kind of reviewing it, leaving comments the same way that a manager might write. And being able to produce hopefully a lot more value and output. So that means that companies can be going to a much larger revenue scales with way for your people, which is going to be interesting. Yeah, I think a lot about this. What is the AI product manager? The paradigm that I use is more like, how do I want to interact with AI to do my job better? One of the use cases I'm excited about is a rubber duck who talked back. You guys hear about rubber ducking where you keep a rubber duck on your desk and you talk through difficult problems with that rubber duck.

29:33And I think like I'm never going to see the control of the creativity and the genius to like the entity, like clearly have you met me. I'm in charge of that. But I think like it can be fun to toss the ball around with someone. And I think I'm excited to see how AI continues to develop to be like a fun thing to toss the ball around and then can take all of the stuff that you're just like spewing out, all of the kind of word garbage and turn it into something crisp and readable and easy to understand. So that's a use case that I'm excited about. I think from an operations site is like even more complex, right?

30:10Because like there's so many things that you need to do. Like how do you automate or how do you get someone to help you on that front, right? So ideally you end up having a product that helps you to twice as much in the same amount of time, not because I'm thinking about it from an efficiency perspective, much more how how I can potentially generate more revenue for the business, right? I think that's where, potentially, and hopefully, like, the market is going to be going, like, on this sales side, it's much easier because you end up having AISDRs this day, we'll end up having AISCSMs, in all those pieces, like, that can be already there in many cases, right?

30:42But purely on the operations side, there's a lot more complex. Charging is your friend, for sure, right? Or on topic if you use it or like any of those tools that will help you generate quite a lot of different things on a day -to -day basis. Is that giving you a 2x? Not yet, right? So I'm not sure. Like I still haven't found the right product that like would help anyone optimize and become like 2x themselves. Maybe someone will build it in the room. I guess final question, does anyone feel free to jump in? All three of your products have a lot of customers. People are using it. Seems like maybe for the retention problem, what challenges are you facing?

31:13whether it's like regulation or not having the right models or hoping that the open source models catch up or just curious of anything jumps out where just calling out a challenge that you'd like to be solved in the next few years. Yeah, I'd say for us it's hiring actually. It's very traditional, right? But I think hiring the right people to solve the particular bonds that we're having in our company and problems grow really quickly. The company's going really quickly, right? And you have to kind of keep an eye on all the different things that are happening where new needs might come up, especially with a company like ours where we've existed for about three years and there's video companies that have been around for a long time.

31:45We've passed everybody in revenue in literally a year and a half and with growth at that scale, you just have to constantly be thinking about what are the new problems that are coming up and who can we hire solve those problems, right? So I think that's very traditional answer and maybe there's some AI recruiters out there, but we have a great team, so I don't think we need them at least. I think it's just that we're in the middle of a paradigm shift, right? We haven't gotten to the end of it, we're in the middle now. And what I can tell you is that the way that we're going to edit video and audio in a year or in two years is going to look completely different than how we're doing it right now.

32:24But we don't know how yet. And on one hand, that's why I'm here. That's why I'm doing this job because this is a place where the next generation of product managers and designers we're going to reinvent the way that humans and computers interact with each other, if someone's gonna figure it out, and God, I hope it's like me, or that I'm part of it in some small way. But that's also just like a very fragile moment, right? It's both a challenge and an opportunity, and I think it's like the challenge of our industry right now. I think for us, it's like this two sides of it. What is definitely hiding?

33:00I can relate a lot on that. It's difficult, we've gone from zero to tens and tens of millions in months, not even years in months, and it's really difficult to find people that have experienced that previously, also because the market has a very quickly in session of time frame. So that's one side. So there's a lot of commitment that we expect from people at the company and we need to be able to actually keep growing at this stage. And on the research side, it's extremely difficult to find the right researchers, on the engineering side, on the operations side, on the sales, even support across the board.

33:31But that's one side of the equation. The other side of the equation is preventing misuse. right there. I think realistically that is something that we have and I think that they gave to that day and night in the 47 but every time that we put you get something that is windy all of the different things that like people make up to try to game it and it is similar to fraud where like you're always like you steps behind and it's really difficult to cut and like keep fighting it. So I think like about those two elements are like the biggest challenges that we constantly facing as a company. Like we're winning but it's just a matter of making sure that you're constantly invading and having resources or something it is important.

34:05Otherwise like the latest calm or like consumer's complain and things like that to be with complain, right? Yeah, you need unprecedented people for an unprecedented pace. Quick Westings, Laura, who's our wonderful producer at the A16C podcast is going to go around. So if anyone does have a question, just raise your hand. And she'll come. Mind you. I'm curious how are we thinking about internationalization or serving users of various levels of digital literacy? We've had an international audience from the beginning, including every country and every region you could possibly imagine. So I think it's been a high priority from the beginning, right?

34:40Because the interesting thing is a lot of the development that AI is bringing is not just things that are usable in like, oh, it's just an English thing or oh, it's just like a US thing or something. It actually brings change in workflows across almost every country and every country you can imagine. and it actually works. I think we've gone and launched new markets where we've had zero users and overnight had an explosion of users in that market. But then we learned something about that particular market where they don't like this particular thing or if you think about, for example, the Middle East, Texas written in the opposite way.

35:17And so that changes a lot about the UI and changes a lot about the user experience. And we've done a lot of work to make that good and make that as usable and as amazing of an experience as it is in any other language. So those are the types of efforts we've made high priority from the beginning. Would you say that other countries or regions are actually more readily adopting the products because I'm just thinking through, well actually maybe they can't hire the software engineer or maybe they can't pay for the traditional video editor or those thousands of dollars. So they're actually more readily adopting these technologies because they're bringing the cost down.

35:49Absolutely. I mean, I think around the world, people are super open to trying something new to see if they can change their workflow. I think as long as you can provide something that is once you try it, you can't go back to what you were doing before. That's it. That's the difference, right? If you can provide that experience in any language, any culture, any country, people will use the product. I mean, I think for us, internationalization has been like since day one there. We have a fully international team, everyone is fully remote. So that actually there's a very strong correlation, fun enough between the actual employee profile.

36:19In fact, there will be multiple countries, everyone can be based whatever they wanted and traveling all of that stuff. in the actual user time that we've got it. So yes, in the initial days, like a lot of our growth came from North America and European markets, but actually this day, when you look at the entire pie, it's like super spread out across the world. And I can relate to that purely, but like on the fact that people won the best tools that will help them on a day -to -day basis, right? And you don't really need to spend these days like thousands of dollars or like hundreds of dollars to actually produce a video or to produce a podcast or produce something, right?

36:52you could do it much cheaper using tools. And that's YouTube. So by default, anyone that truly wants to have a cost efficient solution, we'll end up using any of the tools. It's web caption .lab or anything else that you have out there. So by default, you end up having a strategy that is about international markets, with doing work content, trying to engage your audiences like that's where they are and trying to personalize it to them. Anyway, otherwise, I think you end up having a problem of being very cute towards a market. Traditionally, it's been always that, oh, you go one market, you conquer it, and then you expand to another one.

37:27And this day's just not, it's just a bit quite a lot to not go. Yep, there's time for maybe one, maybe two more. I see one at the back. I'm just wondering what barriers or stopgaps you might be putting in place for people who may be using your products for nefarious purposes and thinking about trust and safety. I think from 11, we invest like millions every single year on actually like preventing this year's, right? And we want to start somebody to implement like a fingerprinting system for any content that gets generated. So since we launched the fingerprinting has been in place, we then opened up the API and the UI, make sure that any check whether something was generated by us or not.

38:05And since then, we've also essentially engaged on monitoring the content that our users generates. That essentially gives someone is generating things that they shouldn't, and essentially we've blocked them. We've gone as far as also the NOGO voices, which is a model that will prevent anyone that tries to clone a celebrity voice for instance. We constantly adding all of these layers to try to make sure that we stay ahead of the curve. But as I was saying earlier, it's an upheld button. There is always weight in which you can game it. But at the same time, you have open source tools. We can try to do our side of the equation, anything that is open source.

38:41And to some extent, you don't really have to much like control over those stores, right? But I think it's important that as a company, we will keep investing like millions every single year and we'll increase it as a market later as well. I have to just quickly ask because it's very timely and I'm sure people in the audience are wondering with some of the recent news around AI voices, let's just leave it at that in celebrity. Are you finding there to be a bunch of false positives? Because I feel like that's maybe something that people wonder. You hear celebrity's voice, but how unique can a voice be?

39:12And So if you're trying to filter out certain people's voices, are you finding that actually, like our voices maybe aren't that unique? That's a really good question, right? The voices have not as unique as everyone thinks, but however they quite unique. So we end up having like false positives for sure, but we end up doing it like if it's a false point of it, if it tells you like, oh, you don't have permission for this voice automatically, it tells you like, oh, but you can still pass the voice structure and it will show you the voice sculpture. So if you pass it because it is your voice, then you're able to actually like like used your own voice, right?

39:43I have a twin brother for the ones that don't know. We do sound exactly the same. And even my parents actually, they sometimes they may mistakes, right? So truly, like I could be talking, but you could be thinking it might win brother, we have exactly the same voice. And that is a challenge that as a company we have and a society we have, right? But I think like we end up building layers as a product, from a product perspective, to help filter those false positives. I think like people understand that like you're trying to go from like everything is free for all and then you can misuse as much as you wanted.

40:11There was like, let's put some controls and even if they some false positives, people understand it online. It's something about the product side of this too, which I do think is super important to sort of like build the safety features from the product, from the ground up, like in the park from the ground up. And that's kind of the difference between offering a technology versus offering a product. If you just say, hey, come to our website, make deep fakes, right? That's offering a technology. And some people might be out there doing that, right? I don't know, right? But I think if you build that into a product, like for example we have the language translation feature, right, which can translate whatever you're speaking to a different language, changes your lip movements as well.

40:45And yes, that's using the same technology, but in a very opinionated way that you can't change what was said, but you can change what language it was set in, right? And so that limits the scope of abuse immediately, quite a bit, right? And then all the traditional methods can be used on top of that as well. Great. I mean, with these groups you can create a voice clone of yourself and sort of like like intermingle, we have this thing called overdub where if I say the wrong word, I can go back and with the text say the word that I actually meant to say and then it will with my voice clone kind of create that.

41:15But obviously there are a lot of misuses there. And so whenever we launch a product, we launch it with protections in place and do a bunch of testing and hire outside people to try to crack it and try to make sure that we do our very best to make sure that it's ungameable. but like you said, if people are extremely determined to crack through security, like they will always find new ways to do it. And this was the case when I was in social media, too, where like you do all kinds of things to try to protect your platform and bad actors, they get up every morning and grind just as hard as you do.

41:49And so you're just sort of in the eternal struggle. And I think like every single tech product should be thinking about like how where people going to misuse us and making sure that they're responsibly providing a bunch of resources to stay in the fight. So as VP of revenue at 11, how do you view the role of open source? Because as a developer myself, I would rather use, for example, Falcon 70B, which is a dollar and dollar out per million tokens as opposed to GPT -4, which is 30 and 50 out. So do you think that open source is a threat to your business, especially as companies like of the meta are kind of taking the scorched earth approach to releasing models?

42:26I mean, I think it's complementary, actually. You always end up having like businesses or like people that like pin go and use open source and they have the means and the tools and the knowledge to make that work. And then you're having quite a lot of different people that like don't really have those means or knowledge, right? So it just ends up becoming like different sites of the business or different sites of the market, right? However, you want to segment it. When I think about voices, we've been talking to each other, the estimates for the past 50 ,000 years, right? And there wasn't really a good technology that was able to replicate how we talk of humans.

42:58So the fact that like as a platform, or like even open source, you're able to actually replicate people's voices with their permission, make it some natural engaging, and then power a new type of communication and like platform and experience, it's like, dammit, it is massive. So by default, you need to have both sides to be able to actually account the balance each other and push each other. But it comes also the open source at a cost which is like, the number of features that you will have is like more limited, right? So you will end up also having like less voices. So what's your preference?

43:31Like you don't have the UI. So what's your preference as a business or as an individual? Is it purely building on the top of it? Then maybe open source is a good way. Like today the quality is not bad yet. But I'm sure that within the next three years, the quality is going to be like, actually anything that is like five. But right, so it's going to be more about like the actual ecosystem did you build around it to make sure that people start using it in a much easier way and then embedded anything. But I actually think it's complementary. With one, we can have the other one. Purely because the market needs both sides.

44:02So just to follow up, would you say that it's important for I guess picks and shovels companies, close source to build an application layer on top to just take a better look. I don't think anyone that has actually built a full LLM if they're not able to build up the constraints on the top of it to make life easier for consumers and businesses. You will end up struggling down the line, whether that is in six months time and that is in 18 months time, you will struggle. Because at the end of the day, I want to launch my own application like my product to use the product like this, in Italy, right?

44:34And if I need to spend the next coding and building the UIs and everything might be that and go somewhere else. Even if it's more expensive, especially if I don't even know where they have product market fit. In product market fit, we always think about actual startups but big corporates might not have even product market set. So if you want to iterate quickly and then go to market first quickly, as possible, then you might want to have a stack that is truly readily available for you. But once you're ready and you've tested it, and the technology fits with enough with ordinary limbs or open source, then you might end up looking to switch.

45:09And we've seen that with OpenAI, the big migration that from developers started using OpenAI, Chatchy PC, API, and GP3 .5, and then now they're migrating towards Anthropic and Nitral or Lama. That's been happening for the past two months. They were thinking happening, right? So you start validate everything goes well, and then you figure out what the alternatives are. What that is, really, I see it in pricing or open source. If you liked this episode, if you made it this far, help us grow the show. Share with a friend or if you're feeling really ambitious, you can leave us a review at ratethispodcast .com slash asexecency.

45:49You know, candidly, producing a podcast can sometimes feel like you're just talking into a void. And so if you did like this episode, if you liked any of our episodes, please let us know. I'll see you next time.