20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn

21:51Yeah. It's a sort of the internet. A lot of people lost money and a lot of the projects didn't work out. This is your famous tweet. You're going to defend again, doesn't it? No, I'm purely asking. Do we think 90 % of VC dollars going into ASTOL -UPS today will go to zero? I think it's reasonable to assume in this massive sea of uncertainty that we're in, and the compute being so expensive, the margins being so thin, that a higher than normal amount of these startups will die for one of the following reasons. They are the thin layer and they get wiped by an open AI upgrade. Similarly, I remember in the early days of the iPhone, it was a torchop.

22:27And there was like a copy and paste app and all these things just got slapped once iOS started chipping right like it was ago Well, guess we don't see that yeah, yeah, it's still sure locking they call it There'll be a more than that thunder would be say in like ye old b2b sass or whatever right? So I think that's gonna be one cause of increased fatality for startups I think a second one will just be margin compression the b2b sass model LTV Cach dynamics and all that sort of stuff It does have some assumption in there of like 80 to 90 % margins maybe 70 % to 90 % margin is kind of what you expect if you're running like an assam or something like that.

22:58So if all of a sudden all your core workflows are now parod by a reasonably expensive API calls that you know it's not yours. Then all the money in the front door is going straight at the back door. I think it was like Shemata disphrase and he said in 2018, 2019, giving a dollar to a startup was just a really losty way of giving it true to Amazon Facebook or Google for a furlough hosting or acquisition. It's arguable in a lot of cases 22, 23, 24, or giving a dollar to a startup is just a lossy way of giving it to open AI or on the topic or whoever, you know, that's who they're based you taking it and shining it up and hunting it onto.

23:29That's going to be a second cause of increased startup mortality. But beyond that, I think the normal dynamics will play. And then the other piece is just in that world. Let's say it in both average number of these new investments, too, but also thinking in both average number of existing incumbents are going to die, too. Their world is going to get torn apart by AI. There's a lot of tools out there that won't make sense in a world the AI. So like what? You have to like take a slightly more future -facing look for this, but let me just describe to you a tool that I know exists. I just don't want to name it because I don't want to tell my friend that they're startups dead.

24:00Let's say it's an ad optimization startup, right? So you log in and it looks at all your adwords and it tells you which ones are like performing or which ones aren't and you can generate new ads and all that sort of stuff and it does that across Google and LinkedIn and Facebook or whatever. And people log in every day and they generate different versions of the winners and they turn off the losers and they look for like the LTV Kak Optima performers and they splice those out into like variants and run tests and they produce a dashboard to show that they're doing their job and they're maximizing the spend of the advertising.

24:29What bit of that do you think AI can't do? If you give it one out and you think it will be 10 versions of this, it'll do it. If you ask me 10 versions of this with a visual, would a visual that's left aligned and a tagline that's under right? Can you run it? Ping the API server to put it live? Can you perhaps tell me, is it performing or not? Can you sort the list by LTVCAC? Can you calculate LTVCAC? Can you produce versions of the winners and turn off the losers? Can you produce the data? What's the reason to log into that product? I agree totally, but I'm just pushing back when you, because if you actually have a product in that space, which does end to end workflow from creation to distribution, to monitoring, to review all, is that not the whole workflow that you suggested earlier was like defensible?

25:10But I agree with you, all of that workplace has just gone. That workplace is not defensible because what the humans are doing is genuinely like automatable. Like there's no actual human intuition or deduction or whatever being applied in that case. Let's say digital asset management, right? Like the example I gave at the outset of the podcast, I was talking about like hey, like we're going to like brand advertising campaigns, whatever, like the assumption in that work flow is the human opinion does matter and the people as you do care about what their logo looks like or whatever, right? If they don't care and they're happy to have a pick to algorithmically, yeah, that whole thing goes.

25:40But like, there are definitely going to be like full workflows and to end no longer matter. Every step is just an if this did not style application of thinking. As in, it's not anyone's opinion, which is the most LTV cock positive out. It's effectively likely to be of low value to have human differentiation and picking the winner or even perhaps producing the variance. Maybe the greatest thing I'd say as to why there'll be a lot of start of mortality is that like, if you and me were to start at this adult optimization start up today, would it look anything like the previous tool that's built? Put it in the right.

26:11If we were allowed Rob any of their code, would we? And I think in a lot of cases where like you'll see the full disruption, the answer is no. You'd build the product totally different today. But then there are some cases. For example, let's say we said we're going to build MailChimp, but here's our thing. We're going to use AI for the composer so you can just tab to complete sentence or something like that. Right. What I would say to you is, okay, is there opportunity there. Well, here's my here's a problem to be way out. You need to build 10 millions of emails. That's a massive challenge for like sender reliability reputation.

26:41You need to be able to do attribution on which links get clicked so you can be just reporting all that sort of stuff. You need to do let's say partnerships. You need to like you know connect with like square space and wix and all that sort of shit like that. You need to have an embeddable subscriber widget all that shit right. We have to go and build all that and our little bit of AI on the composer like that that's your complete descendences. Mailchimp just needs to go and build the complete descendences bit. So what we'd have to believe is that we're gonna build all of their stacks that we can send 500 million Males a day and all that sort of stuff in this space of time that they can't build the AI That's the sort of calculus I think about what I think but where the advantages are I think if you were to rebuild it today and you'd build none of what's there and everything would look totally different Then yeah, it's go time right if you actually wish you could borrow all their servers under sender reputation and all that sort of shit Then I think you're trying to add a thin layer on top of what is ultimately a surviving incumbent We used to say this a lot, but I'm going to say email startups, right?

27:33We're going to do email, but we've got one new idea on a half of email and I'm like, that's great. So you've got five years of roadmap to get to like Gmail quality or even superhuman quality like email and then you can add your little feature on top. No, I love it. You've been fortunate to be back. I kind of wrote to the start. Yeah, long wrote to start. Yeah, and I love that analogy. Can I also, when we think about adoption cycles, I think everyone gets quite excited by everything is going to change over night. Definitely not. Yeah, and this is my point in which I totally agree with you in terms of that ad optimization But when a lot of their customers are denone and are lorry allen year and I was like year of technology is what you're saying.

28:08Yeah, exactly. I hear it. What is this chat GP thing? Oh, totally. And so it's going to be 5, 10 years. Yeah, but I agree with you. I think the nature of the role you have full time and I have whenever on the weekend I decided to write an angel check is I can't really think about like will this be a big bang next year? What I would do is I would say like if I see somebody going after an area where I think there's like a real massive chance for like investment I probably say I should sell my stock Indian combat over the next two years and I should plant the seeds in this Upstart today would have you towards payday in seven years even in seven years time There were revenue streams might not across like this thing could be like this But still far below the other you're betting on the future like those ultimately what we are betting on when I I invested in AI for a startup today.

28:57I'm betting on what the world and adoption and market appetite for AI is gonna be like in like at least four years. If I try and give the fin pitch to a lot of say old school banks or insurance company, they're like whoa, Horacee, slow down. I liked the bit where you said you could handle a simple reset password, but now you're telling me it's gonna like talk to my team. You have that dynamic of like, you know, it's that old that like crossing the Cosmestyle adoption, whereas some people are like early adopters, some people are like open -minded, Some people are like Stix and some people are Lagerads or whatever.

29:25We're definitely only selling to like the first 20 % of the market at the moment. That's still a big market though. I totally agree with you. I think one thing that we're starting to see there with a lot of... We started to create them within the last 12 to 18 months who are selling to incumbents. It's like experimental budget of operation. Yeah. And one of the... You know what I mean? But essentially, they've tried it with a couple of pilots. It's been been interesting. And it kind of hasn't gone anyway. Yeah, some digital transformation project that got some one up for a hundred grand or whatever.

29:50Exactly. How are we about to enter a trough for experimental budgets go to zero, go reduce the M before we see this bike? Yeah. How do you think about that? We care a lot about the ROI of Finn and time free. It's kind of self -evident. Like as an example, yesterday I think opening I had a 45 minute outage and I think everyone got a real taste of what the world was like before you had Finn. Because you got these support teams feeling like, yo, where are all the works this new spike in volume? We're like, oh, Finn had to look hand over to human. but areas where it's very speculative and open -ended, we thought it would be cool if we could run a little bit of AI to generate ideas for a workshop or whatever, right?

30:26They're definitely gonna get cut to zero and somebody's gonna check a box saying, I'm very future focused, but I think anyone who's got a product that is genuinely delivering real value. I think those budgets are gonna stick around and actually massively increase. How these budgets are spent is depending on pricing models. We've seen the Percy model. I have Mars Grimchoron from Banschmark and he's actually a consumption model absolutely user up and overtakers. How do we think about changing pricing models in the face of AI? I think there's loads of obvious applications like our world most directly.

30:58Like if it is indeed doing like 50 % to then like will businesses buy as many seats. What we're seeing a lot is like businesses are choosing to keep to seats and keep to people and like just turn the dial on quality so they just get really good at support. In general, do you think that's because they want to be really good at spoilers was because they don't quite trust it enough yet. It's a good question. I mean, another way of saying it will be like, if in a year's time does the market downturn, will they still hold firm on that? But like in general, his point about like consumption pricing outpacing or like ultimately taking the place of seed pricing, I think is going to be true.

31:30I think a lot of work is going to get handed over to Al Alem's over the next five years. We'll start trying to like price against the work that's being done, not pricing against the seats or the employees, which is say, how much is it worth for you to have all of your digital assets created dynamically or how much is a word for you to have like your customers get sub -second replies to common questions. That's the actual right way to think about pricing in the future. The wrong way to think about it is you know you were selling work, we're not selling seats and we're not selling like incremental tasks completed.

31:59We're just like what does it cost to get done? When somebody actually does a good job of an AI coach or personal trainer or financial advisor, the person who does it really well will be able to justify pricing similar to what the human costs because people have already been paying humans for this for a long long time, but people will be comfortable transferring that fee to a bot because it's 24 serving, it's multi -lingual and they can bring the price down to 60 feet as well. The fees are expensive, but it might as not cheap. No, not at all. It's predicated largely on the cost of compute to be fair on that.

32:28How always is the cost of compute change? Well, it aligns to traditional more law. How do we think about that? And this is all value crew back to Nvidia. There is no tech really in history that is not going cheaper. There is no piece of hardware or software that hasn't ultimately been ripped off by a cheaper candidate to offer a lower prices to more of the market. No matter what way we go, we will see a kind of a flashing out of the spectrum. So right now I think we've got a high -end Nvidia pairing, high -end LLMs. And we should assume on the fullness of time that they're going to continue to produce, and we're going to find more market points that they can sell, potentially simpler or a bit more basic chipset.

33:04And same with the LLMs. There'll be the fast LLM and there'll be the accurate LLM of people who make choices between them and there will be the cheaper one and all that sort of stuff. We'll see the solution space fully explored and in that exploration, I don't think in video in five years time we'll be sitting here prior to the only people who can do a GPU. And I don't think that opening it I will be able to like beat the only people who can do LLM properly. You know, there'll be winners and losers, there'll be like the best. But the best isn't necessarily the biggest marketer. This is all going to be a spectrum and like people are basically going to be finding where is the most dollars to be made right?

33:36Would you be a buyer of open AI at 90 billion? I know that they have a funky thing where you can only make a certain amount of return back on your investment as far as I'm worried. Like I think they have some sort of policy like after 100x you have to sell back or something like that. Wow, I didn't know that. But as an anti -investor would you buy at 90? Yeah, it's just straight up on clean terms when I buy at 90 and I think you're doing a billion in revenue or something like that is what I've heard. I probably would buy a bit to be along for the ride but I don't think I'd be like putting millions into it.

34:02It would be a small phone check for me. On the whole, I'd make the bet that they'll pass 90 in value. I think that's doable. But you gotta see multiples of that. You need to see a five accent. Well, you need to see a five hundred. Yeah, yeah. So, you need to see multiples. I don't. I'm just trying to get in fun when you're at like, yeah. If I was an investor trying to like, you know, make my name, what I go all in, like, on putting like, I don't know, 10 billion in so many different 90s or whatever, I don't think I would. Under reason, whilst I think they'll pass 90, your question was, could they go to 500 in the near term or like within the lifestyle stage of the fund.

34:35The areas I'd be wary of is Amazon. Amazon played this game well. So like I could see Amazon just took a lot of like buying on Throppek and being like let's just make this part of the EC2 cluster and that's just a very easy route to market and I think if opening I run out of new vectors of differentiation and the commoditization starts to kick in even for basic stuff I think it'll just become an easier one. We just use Amazon. It's already in the cloud. It's already virtually private. but you can leapfrog a lot of other adoption concerns. So I think their one risk, in Microsoft, they're probably less of a risk because it is a pretty close partnership to have.

35:08And then I don't really know what Google has up to sleeve. I don't even know if they have sleeves at this point, but I suspect that they won't be totally nopping on this. It is curious. I've been impressed by that. I played a part a bit. I wasn't impressed. It felt like another version of it, Jotgy Pt. I'm more underwhelmed by their leadership in this area. Like it feels like Google who kind of owned all this at the start bear in mind with the original paper on Transformers feels like they have like rescued defeat from the jaws of victory and What we saw on Tuesday of this week from my mind was like some and to some degree even such a out there Talking from a leadership position from an authoritative position about where we are where we're going What's happening and what the future holds etc And I don't think we've had that yet from Google to take a leading position I think you need to like do that thing where you walk out on stage and say like here's our mission Here's where we're going.

35:59Here's where the whole world is like we have a big wide -eyed vision Elon Musk saying he wants to terraform Mars that leading a company in a certain direction saying here's the end go I feel like Bard unfortunately felt like we have to release this because Chachi video is getting a lot of traction It didn't feel like we've actually cracked search again. We've reinvented ourselves all over again You know they need to have that sort of like I'm Jay -Z like allow me to reintroduce myself moment right where they come back and they say like, Google too is here. That's what we need to have here. I do the e, but they don't want Google too because the cost of doing it actually cannibalizes a core business.

36:32Well, yeah, it's Netflix and, you know, and so on. Now you're pulling onto the real potential problem, which is already willing to risk it all to win it all, right? Like, are they willing to disrupt themselves? Or are they happy to take the like long slow decline into obsolescence or irrelevance or whatever, right? Versus saying, no, we're going to like take a massive hit to our own revenue. And we're going to go like LLM first and the future of Google is actually going to be a Q &A style thing, even though we haven't yet worked there, how we're going to monitor that. It's a massive existential risk and people have talked about, I mean it's easy to say here, but if you are CEO of Google and you have shareholders in Wall Street, I kind of hate what I'm about to say, but I'm going to say it because I think it's what I would feel compelled to do.

37:11I'd be scrambling to find ways that companies can sponsor injections into the LLM, so I said like, who is the best footballer in the world? And the answer is clearly like Lionel Messi, but you could say something like according to transfer market, the answer is line on messy, right? Like that's what we've got a sponsored injection, right? And then like you could augment the borrowed style answer with such injections. So it's presenting you facts that it is kind of disowning, right? Like it's kind of saying, hey, like this isn't the LLM deducing this, this is just what we think. This is what we've been paid to say whenever we talk about this type of thing.

37:41That's kind of the attack factor I'd go on and I'd try and float out with all the big odd buyers and sort of say, hey, look, that's to be honest, the world is going to go to LLM's. Even if this doesn't work, we have to give it a lash. Then I try to get some sort of traction going for that type of ad model. Then I'd explain to the investors, we have to move to this because the alternative is the company basically starts to be on a ticking clock right? I just don't know if you can move a Titanic size ship like Google in that direction so radically. Yeah, without just tanking shit all about it. I mean, it's almost like S3B coming out saying, you know, where fucked?

38:15Is that good? Well, I just think the idea of like, let's not talk about it is not a great strategy, you know? You have to be willing to stare at relevance in the face and choose a different path. I love that. I actually had someone on the show the other day and they said, actually the winner will be Apple. And I was like, I'm not that one. And they said, because they own the end consumer. People pay so much everything we need to be the default browser on Apple. Apple could create their own LLM, they own the endpoint on both your IMAQ, your Mac, you iPad, whatever it is, they will be the winner because of that touch point with consumer.

38:46Do you agree? It depends on the winner of what. I think Apple will make massive, massive strides forward with AI. I'm kind of disappointed how long it's taking them. But I think this is my point. Well, maybe as you say that because so far we kind of left searching. Yeah, yeah. For sure. You have to assume Apple's a really well -run company and you have to assume that there's a head of AI in there and you have to assume that you're training LLMs and you're looking for LLMs that can possibly run on the hardware natively. Not even have to talk to the cloud and Apple are very privacy focused. because they're gonna get all that shit correct.

39:13And you have to assume it's all gonna work with your AirPods, your watch, and your phone, and all that sort of stuff. That that's like, I would be shocked if that wasn't the case. So then what will they win is the question. I think what they'll win is this idea of Siri might finally become useful. Siri is currently not useful because it doesn't really have enough smarts. But I think when Siri can be as conversational as chat GPT and can take actions on the device, it'll change the entire interaction model across desktop and iOS as well in huge ways. So I think Apple will be in there, but that doesn't at all open AI's success or Amazon's success selling on Thropic or something like that or any other scenarios They're just think who owns consumer AI?

39:52It could well be Apple and in that world What's interesting is we might see a new type of commoditization of like services So you might just say Siri call me a taxi and you might not give a shit Which taxi shows up and Siri ordered me a burger and Siri played a song? Serious default is gonna be played out song on whatever like on Apple If they become this really nice intermediary layer where you don't even pick the app you launch That is a form of user selection. We don't even want to know that You just say the thing you want to happen and leave it to Apple to work out what should happen Then Apple would take this new a primal position.

40:23It's like owning the homepage of Google or something like that We get to redirect all user intent to anywhere we want What it also opens up in my mind like paid such because if you are a provider you could pay Apple to say hey If you're Spotify you could pay Apple to say hey when someone says play Jay Z Yeah, play odds first. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that's a terrible example. I don't just play it through our service first. I think that's true, but I think Apple will say absolutely no way. That's not their stick, right? Apple are always customer first. Like, another argument there, and this is something more googly.

40:51If OK, Google or whatever, their thing is called, their serial equivalent is called. I could totally imagine Google doing a thing where they give away effectively free Android phones powered by the fact that they now control the intent layer, which is when you say, OK, Google call me a taxi. the Google goes and they get you whatever taxi which comes from whichever of the highest paid provider. That's so interesting. So you give away the whole buffer free as your car, your customer position goes. Yeah, and you make it all back in lifetime services. That's, I mean, Google give away a search engine and they make it back in paid sponsorships, right?

41:19It's the same model that's just a different than a rendering of it. What about Facebook? Facebook can't be asleep at the wheel, but they don't end the end touch point with the consumer. What happens there? Facebook have to look at their actual business, which is like Instagram and WhatsApp. And it's like, you know, Facebook itself and it's Oculus and their question, I'd be scrambling to answer if I was damnist, just like what does AI mean for all of these services? And what does the LLM advances mean for all these services? So I can imagine they might have a bot that sits inside WhatsApp. It could become a new way to find me to nearest Flourist.

41:47And maybe WhatsApp will put you directly in contact with them. You can speak directly to them, or speak directly to the Jair bot. I can imagine them kind of interacting from that point of view. Oculus has really obvious applications of AILM's infinite worlds and insane games. So take a combination of Ella Lambs and Dali and put on a headset and live in that world. It's fascinating to think of what's possible. And in Facebook .com, that feels to me feels like it's like up there with LinkedIn and one of those just like about bastions of the old internet. I don't know what people use it for anymore, but I think we all log into it every day, but we don't really know why.

42:15No, it's fantastic for reminding me of a friend's birthday. That's what I see. That's what we can hear about. Yeah, Rik here. So I know one on the kind of like landscape assessment, but it's just Adobe. How do you think about Adobe's movement? I think they've produced some really cool stuff as it relates to visuals. And I think if they play their cards right they can actually expand beyond creatives if you know what I mean like Adobe previously or here to four is being like the creatives tool like you have to be good at design or whatever to use Adobe and that's even kind of true for their fake macrosation with exception of FIG Jam like if you're not good at like drawing or whatever the tool is not that rewarding to use I think if they play this correctly loads of people want to draw things but can't right like why is it draw me a picture of a penguin right like most people will make a ball so I guess people who want to draw and then a much smaller subset people who can draw and then a much, much smaller subset people who are very good at drawing.

43:03It's an example of the total addressable market and the serviceable market and like how much of them can we actually charge money for. With the idea of like some of the Adobe's features where you just select a bit of text you say make this guy darker and you select the interface and say take this person out of the photo or you say give me a rendering of like a leprechaun walking over a rainbow and it does all this like instantly to a pretty high degree of fidelity and like just nice polish like certainly far beyond what an average illustrator could do on a canoe incident. So I think we should see a world where there are more people being creative.

43:33More people able to like weaponize the ideas they have in their head in a visual form done previously could. Previously you just be like, oh I have this vision in my head and whenever I go to pick up my mouse and open a Photoshop it falls apart. Now you don't need that. Now like, you know, thinking and rendering become like this new sort of skill set that you can have. Adobe could see a significant expansion of people who care about Adobe tech if they play well, Because the obi is going to be like, oh, if you have an idea and you're struggling to visualize it, just use it Obi. Like, and you're like, oh, here's what I'm trying to draw.

44:01And here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to do a diagram I'm going to want this and I want that. Oh, you got that nearly right. Let me select this piece. All right, edit that so it's not like this It's like that and have her face in the other direction. Okay, it can do all that shit really like did at least detect them Most I've seen the stuff that like Scott Balsky shares and all that. It's like phenomenal looking stuff So I think like they could have a really significant expansion of people who could use a Dolby software far beyond just creative geniuses Where does value or crew most? Is it the application layer or is it the infrastructure layer?

44:27And how does that change over the short and long time? I think right now a lot of value is going straight into the unit for like, as in we're handing it all at the back door to open AI in this case, right? In your first question about commoditization, if that happens, then the value starts to reduce there, right? Because if there's more competitors offering the same thing, that's the beginning of commoditization, or at least you go from run -up elite to an auto -gop elite to ultimately perfect competition where you, you know, and price goes down on each step. That's what I expect that'll play out.

44:53Let's openly, I can continue to find mass market differentiation, which is always a hard thing to find. There's in the differentiation that all the customers care about, not just specifics. Let's assume over time, I believed that just the amount of people investing in the space means that I think the infrastructure layer will gradually get a lot more AWS -like, right? It's just like Razer 10 margins. Well, sorry, not Razer 10 margins. That's the only me for a minute. Price mixed with strength of product as a competitive weapon if you know what I mean, right? Amazon make good money off Intercom, you know, but they're also like we're all in on them and we're very, you know, we're very committed to them.

45:27So that's what the competitive battleground will probably be true or four big providers is my guest, probably GCP AWS, maybe open AI directly and I'm sure as you're that's how I think that that layer will play out and they'll end up in direct price competition with each other. Where does the value accrue beyond that? I think just differentiation value just generally follows differentiation around the stock. Whoever has the stuff you can't get on your else can charge your margin state, no one else can charge. That sometimes means quality of software products, sometimes it means quality of network or social network, sometimes it means like we've got the most distributors in our marketplace.

46:01But like whoever has the differentiation to no one else can get is the person who can actually basically charge the highest price. The thing that worries me almost is like the best quality product does not always win. Well, it's bundled into our existing package. We don't need a new vendor relationship, we don't need new security and compliance. It's 85 versus 5. We're not technology, just anyway. So, product doesn't always win. Correct. Generally, if you're playing in somebody else's playground and you're bringing in one little thing, even if you do have a reason why you're a thing will be definitely better, persistently and sustainably.

46:31It needs to overcome a lot just to be worth the cost of an extra tool in the stock. Well, that in mind, if he projects out in his 10 years, will more value agree to start up certain companies. With AI, a lot was meant at the start of like, whoever is in trouble. And I remember when we first released our first wave of AI features, which is just AI and the inbox. It was things like summarization, expansion, change tone, like take this blunt reply and make a plight. Those sort of features, one of the big dogs, you know, use it as a showcase of like, this is why there won't be new startups built in this, all the value will go to the incumbents.

47:01And I think the hypothesis there is that if the value is available on top from OpenAI. It's on top. In our earlier example, it's on top from Mailchip, and it's on top for the new startup too, right? So the thin integration that we're you're shelling out for your differentiation to a third party, it does not create a way for disruption. The disruption comes as we were saying earlier, like it's when you would build the entire thing differently in a world post AI. It's hard to give an answer overall. If you put it going to a head, I'd say Cumbence will probably do better out of AI, done like startups thinking they can displace incumbents.

47:32But that's not the same thing as saying that startups have no business in AI. I think there'll be loads of new stuff in new areas that no one's ever seen before because of AI. And my hard thing is that is that general capital allocated and capital is, it wants to make money, not me. I think the upside is already priced into Microsoft or Nvidia. Yeah. But I'm not looking at them like, oh, there's a buying opportunity now. Right. Because they're so rich, you priced already, I think. Yeah, that's totally correct. I think like the areas where AI will deliver most value in startups will be things that just were impossible before or near possible.

48:03Companies like Synthesia will have, they'll produce massive new things that just literally weren't being done before and they're like new categories and new jobs, new workflows, new capabilities. Bluntly, I'm really in a trouble for this. There's so many people going out to Synthesia space. They don't have a huge amount ahead of anyone else. I think what we're seeing there is a growth in, how just like AI powered video customization to do lots of things that people bear with the cost of video editing and all that sort of shit is so high, you have a video that explains your product works and then you change your name on one of the features.

48:36Now in the current world that's a ratio. In the new world you're editing the JSON file. We're moving into a different fucking world here. I think what we'll see is the area of like AI parrots and video creation in that case didn't exist three, four years ago really and it's going to be a big area as my guess. Kamaz, you're also a fantastic engine ambassador. Given what we've seen in the last year with AI. Right. Is that changed how you think about angel investing? Like, is it like, why not? I'm investing in enterprise software company now. But no way. Is it like, what do you do? If I was investing in like a classic company gardener B2B SaaS enterprise company in this day and age, I would need to be quite convinced that AI has no role.

49:16Or if it does have a role, the founders are all over and I'm gonna lead. Otherwise, I just don't see why I take the risk. I think you can accurately assess whether it has a role. No. I mean, by that it's just like open -air and chat to you, and all the other parts are so good. Maybe they're so fast. No, but maybe I could come out of the different way. If you're building a web analytics product today, if someone's trying to pitch me like, we're gonna redo GA, everyone hates GA, go Google Analytics, it's gotten too complicated. So we're gonna do a better version of Google Analytics. My first few questions, because this is an area that isn't obviously affected by AI and that it's reporting on data points that I got it on websites about, did the user visit to check out page or not, right?

49:50But what I want to see is show me your reporting engine, show me how you consider how to like chat UI could be relevant here, like basically instead of building like 150 million drop downs to like you know query by browser type by day of week by this by that. Can I just type the query I want to see and can you generate it? Can in fact can you go once that we had to be in suggest new thing can use AI to like parry a reporting engine to suggest new web reports I should be looking at that I haven't seen before. I'd want to be confident that defenders have solved true dot and come to our conclusion and it might be we're not going to build any of that or it might be you know what we should really go hard on like natural language as a query engine for reporting.

50:23That's like where I'd be like, yeah, okay, I'd want to see that. And I'm kind of making stuff on the fly, but like if they said to me, no, there's we don't think AI is going to change anything to do it, help people query analytics tools. At that point, I'm probably leaning out. I don't know how you can be so confident about it. And if I'm honest, I actually can go well. And so when you look at your deployment today, has it changed much? I would say I've probably liked the last five or six checks I've been, I've written a volume into it, companies that are either pure AI or heavily AI infused. Have you a deal for today?

50:51how much is AI in the first tagline? I would say for me it's 80%. I'd say it's about, I'm probably more beat to be sass exposed, so maybe I'm probably more like 60%. But yeah, if the question was like, how much of a mentions AI in like subullotry or whatever, then yeah, 100%. Is the majority of like scale up AI programs bullshit? What's the scale up AI program? We are. And everyone has an AI now. And I'm saying that when you said about it, it's coming out. So I was like, yeah, here we go. So yeah, it comes back to this, does the product make more sense for the AI or not? I think what we saw over the last three, maybe four months has been a lot of companies.

51:27This is what the GFY Twitter, that video I Twitter is about. You've seen a lot of people doing really pointless shit with AI. It kind of reminds me of the early days of JavaScript. People did all these fancy effects that were totally pointing to the script. They used libraries like Scriptaculous and all that, like to do just fancy, like, ooh, it fades away. You're like, why does it fade away? There's definitely bits of bullshit you're gonna see, which is people reaching for the easiest to use features and trying to reverse engineer a demand for them inside their product. Sumerized is shopping cart in natural language, English.

51:54You're like, well, it looks like the user is buying a robe and it's size me, and it's like, it gives a shit. So there's a lot of that happening in the scale of space where I think it's somebody looking to wave a flag or get the marketing juice that comes with saying, you're now something AI. What I looked at to sort of interrogate the value is just, is there something happening now that wasn't possible before or as there's somebody who doesn't have to do something now that they have to do before. If the answer to either of those is yes, then I'm sort of bothering. If it's basically like, you know, ah, you know what, it's really, really important to people like whatever, like, you know, summarized a Google doc in real time on the right -hand side as they're writing it.

52:33We love their back and me and your AI first, whatever. I expected Bobby before the show to eat, you know, so he was actually with the adenticom. And he said that you're actually one of the masters of marketing and you sort of as a product OG, but actually you should be credited more with a lot of early marketing efforts. Why does most be to be marketing suck first? To leave only sort of lasting impression on somebody, I think you have to say something that is like unique as in like, can't be the same thing that everyone says, valuable as in a house that she matter to them and simple. Right, they have to be able to get it in one read.

53:05If you can speak to your users in a way that presents some value that they haven't heard before that they can only get from you and that they can understand Then generally speaking you tend to like resonate with your users and it's like you can't just walk in on somebody's life and just start sharing So if you need permission to speak to them and that's where you might lean on thought leadership or like make yourself somebody We're enlisting to but I think most businesses fail to say something that's either they fail on one of the tree tests It's either not unique. It's not simple or it's not valuable to them See, you see things like inbox, reinvented.

53:35You're like, I wasn't really looking to reinvent my inbox. Or it's like, forget everything you know about plans. We didn't know anything about blah. You know, see, you have a lot like this, like marketing speak, if you know what I mean, like which is just people just lean for like their marketing veneer or polish that you get. And it just gets a bit too salesy. And in doing so, it loses its specificity and it loses its perhaps bite or its uniqueness or whatever. I think they also lose humanity. So you get on the intercom marketing manager hat and then you're like thrilled to announce. So yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm thrilled to announce you like Jack about this excited to an answer Are like ongoing relationship with you know, I think there's a like own our CEO It's just so he like if I could ascribe him one defining quality.

54:15It's probably authenticity But I think it's just speak the words you want to say that's the thing that is like so important It's have a credible marketing is like you say the things that you would actually say you know put on like a marketing Heart where you're out of low to bullshit if you know what I mean most startups with marketing with B2B or B2C They forget to say the thing that makes them unique that's valuable to the users. And if you're going up against an incumbent, the worst thing they can say is, oh, we're like a new type of inbox blah blah blah. Like, oh, I put you into the same category as you incumbent.

54:44You need to say, here's the things that we're different. Like, here's the reasons that we're better than Humbla. I like that's usually Humber's home, like, again, simple to understand it. I always love the Simon Sinek, people buy why you do it, not what you do. Simon's point's not bullshit. It comes into what type of marketing we're talking about. I will it might have I'm talking about product marketing here like I'm talking about like what does the homepage say when you go to right if you go to a Santa and like it opens up a one day Dustin was struggling to manage a project to Facebook and he really wanted to get an overall view you're like dude I'm closing that hard what the hell is the thing you do now when it comes to consuming the overall brand if you like you know Like what is this whole company about what is its raise on that right which I think is more important in certain industries and verticals You're like, hang on, if I'm gonna like really line myself with these people, I need to understand what makes them tick.

55:31That's when you're going to like slash a belt or slash vision or whatever, to sort of read a bit more about what the hell's going on here like is in. Are you guys just grow takers who stumbled into a project manager company or do you actually care about the nature of human productivity? Simon's point's not wrong, but I think most of the time when you're trying to sell software, the best thing you do is probably say what the software's about. I'm not talking about the origin story of or whatever. You can find Bobby for this if you could change one thing about you know, Intercom's marketing over the years knowing all that you know now.

55:56What would you change? If I could change anything in terms of things that I would trust myself to do a better job on I would probably try to more tightly align the audience we were building with the product that we were selling. Talk to me about that. You mean the content that you created created this large funnel But it wasn't actually all aligned to the product in the bar. Correct. Yeah. It was large But it was then harder to translate that into demand the ecuCapture Yeah, qualification and stuff. Yeah, even yesterday I was at a conference here, dude, I read the intercom blog. I'm like, what do you work on my program manager on the infrastructure team?

56:25I'm like, you're not going to buy a Cosmere support software. I think probably I prioritized growing an audience for the blog, over growing the right audience for the blog. And the net net is that we have a large audience for the blog, people who are like design or into product or even into engineering, people who may be into startups in general, even people who are into marketing. What we didn't go deep on early enough was just the actual sort of people who are best positioned by your drone. I have two thoughts, sir. I think, first is, you have to go in content, you have to go as niche as possible, get to a thousand true fans as fast as possible.

56:54So I'm kind of on one side, being you agreeing with you there. And then on the other, I'm going, actually does it matter, because if you have huge audience and you just have scale of distribution, what a mouth starts to kick in, brand starts to kick in, but the ability of followerships cuts to kick in, and it will convert. You have to faith that it will convert. It's a different approach. I agree with you, like I said, And I agree, if you have a million readers a month and like 1 % of them are like your buyer, or if you're like, I can't do the math on the fly here, but like if you're like 10 ,000 readers a month and like, and whatever, like get some same percentage with the net set with the same numbers, they're both follow strategies, like a small focused audience, or a big one focused audience that contains in it, the small focused audience, that works.

57:33Like, I mean, you're asking me what I do again, I think I probably would have just tried to be a bit more focused early on. An interesting thing we measure, like when we look at things, stuff we share on social, It's easy to get like a viral tweet these days. What is it? So that's a thing, not a lot, right? Like it doesn't drive a lot of follows, doesn't drive a lot of anything ordered, like a few like quote tweets and a few retreats or whatever, like you know, hundreds or whatever. But what's interesting to me is we've been having popular viral moments. The thing I care more about it now I'm more excited about is like, when we share something that's pretty, I don't want to say boring, which is pretty focused on like the only people that give a shit about this or support people.

58:03The people who engage with that content is growing and that's sitting I care about more or a Dunsage's general followership. I'm like, effective followership is the thing to look at. I totally agree. I honestly, I think we lost ourselves at 20 BCIs who are a lot of content producers around me, getting bigger and better numbers than us. I'm like, fuck you, I can do what you're doing. Yeah. That's not my job. My job is to serve the best venture in Sada Pognoz. I don't need to interview musicians who are entering, manage it, or sports, does it, and know your customer, know your product. Yeah, unlike the reality is if Bex enters investing, his followership isn't that useful to you.

58:39No. You know what I mean? It's not as simple. Yeah, see if I tell you to back him once you got a podcast, you don't want him. No, no, I mean, you know, I would be happy to engage. Yeah, of course we all, but. No, I get you that. Okay, I'm going to flip. Okay. So you can change one thing about income product strategy. What would you change? That's a tough question. I think I probably would have taken integrations more seriously earlier. Understanding more about Intercom's role within the tech stock, knowing that we're not the only show in town, understanding that we have to play nice alongside like workforce management solutions, CRMs, whether it's like Salesforce or Home Spot or whatever, QA tools, Slack, you name it.

59:18I think we could have gone harder earlier on that and I think it probably would have been more available to our users. I'm so getting in trouble with this. Why doesn't a HubSpot just buy into Gump? With HubSpot's market cap today. Have you had Brian Hagen on before? or McDonald's. And McDonald's. You should ask them. I mean, you're literally asking me like a question. I can't answer this. You can change one thing about the sales motion or the sales platform. Looking back. I think Durr is very little best practices advice in startups that actually survives more than five or six years in my opinion.

59:53Because I think everything is just constantly evolving around us. Like even like all this AI shit is going to like upend the load or like product strategy be advised that has been holding solid for 10 years, right? Most of the time, advice is expires. How you go to market. If you're in 2012 and you're talking to like VCs, you know, senior experienced people about, what's the best way to go to market? What did I'll tell you was Basie, higher sales data and you kind of run up market and get away from those scrappy little companies, right? That was to sort of norm and all the blogs and all that back then was just like, build a sales machine, hope you go, right?

1:00:24That's a docky something, did it? Or whatever, right? That's it. Like, for build up call. Yeah, exactly. Your boxers, somebody from like from that just slightly previous era around 2013, 14, 15 people started to realize drop boxers actually doing well. They actually had managed to do it without having to go at all enterprise, but the big dog in the store here is obviously Atlassian who presented an entirely different way to go to market and build a massive business without running up market. If you play it out maybe in parallel I don't think it's necessarily sequential, but Shopify say for example, are still as relevant if I just want to sell this bottle of Fiji water, They're still probably to go to but also they're a massive business, right?

1:00:59So they've managed to like not have to turn into like how just like the you know the old -school big Commerce company where like you go and you have like nine people show up to do solutions engineering and plug in your stuff I mean, we mentioned them look at a hub and spot I mean yeah, I was really hooked spot of proofs and exactly that does massive businesses to be built without ever having to go like all the way up Market right the advice is almost out of date by the time it's best practice Okay, I really like serial entrepreneurs because I find there's so many things that you do very very differently the second time having messed up the first Yeah, does that not render serial entrepreneurship relatively less important when I think about like if I had to start a little company tomorrow I think this stuff that I would definitely bring into the next company is not Specifically go to market tactics or like bottoms of adoption versus like going into the top of the market It's not like marketing channels or tactics.

1:01:49I mean, I think what it would be about is like what is the makeup of? senior executive team and what do you want? What are the attributes of leaders at different stages of the company? How to interview, how to like give the right feedback to people, how to assess where a whole is in your organization and how to deal with it, how to like kind of like not lose yourself defending an narrative, but instead like you know take reality face it straight or whatever. I think there are all the sort of things the more timeless pieces that I would learn. Like I think it's reasonable to assume hiring executives is going to be a thing.

1:02:17It's reasonable to assume building a company culture is going to be taking. It's reasonable to assume having a mission on a vision and values by which your business performs. They're all kind of time to skills and I think the serialed peers know the mistakes they made and not being firm enough on the right areas or flexible enough on the areas or whatever. So I think that's the sort of stuff that you're investing in. They won't make that mistake again. Do you think culture is a time to skill? Like, you know, when you look at post COVID, there is a sense of wanting to work from home a lot more, changing incentives, missions, time spent.

1:02:45Yeah, I mean, it's a fair question. Like is managing humans the same today as it was five years ago? but I probably not in a lot of ways. And like definitely generationally, I think it's different as well. But like, I'm not trying to be evasive here, but if you just take one step up, I just talk about it as in like designer culture that attracts the maximum amount of talent and motivates them to work as hard as possible for the climate you're in, for the environment you're in, for the country you're in. Max, when I'm in the amount of talent or maximum quality of talent. Because I guess my point there is like, you know, but when you said 900 people, it comes out like we already trying to weigh talent here and not like, I guess like what you want.

1:03:17I didn't think that 900 people you can only have A+. You're gonna have some C+. Yeah, well specifically I would say you've got people who are early -interpreter, people who are like seasoned, super experienced, super tenured, brilliant. We have interns. They're not yet A - players. But like to your question, is it a maximum quality or is it a maximum quantity? Like I guess what I mean is that you're not trying to maximize headcount. And I think for what's right, that's another thing that like most seasons entrepreneurs won't do the second time, return time, whatever. They won't see headcount as a vanity metric at all.

1:03:45The second thing I'd say is, you want to attract the smartest folks you can. At the right level, you don't need like thousands of them in the nerdish HRP, you need four to start. And then as you start to scale your culture, you'll realize, all right, we can't only hire like A++ superstars because we'll be waiting all year for our next engineer. So you start to work out ways to like scale and you say, you know what, how about the A++ person leads the team and they can hopefully drag the B person up to an A++ sounder to wherever. So you start thinking about it from that point of view. What's the biggest mistake you've made on culture?

1:04:18I would say radical counter is something that like I struggled with for a long time and I probably still do I'm better at checking myself but the idea of like telling somebody what they need to hear is so that they have the best Chance of succeeding in their own career versus telling them the thing that will make them happy society struggles with this in general They're like, you know, are you ultimately looking out for the greater good for the person or are you just optically looking at for the short term? And I think my version of that would be earlier days would have given like nudge and prod feedback But like what I probably do is to say like hey, I don't think you can actually make it as a leader of blah until you can blah And here's the skills that I just think are close to a terminal gap in your skill set And if you don't close to my just don't see you either surviving here or honestly anywhere And I think you need to invest and take me seriously in this whereas I was probably 2014 -2015 You know, it's probably more like you say, I actually think you're making good progress, but here's a couple of areas where I'd like to see a little bit more, you know, like, oh, it was a long way.

1:05:14Yeah, well, it wasn't even just that, it was just way too cushioned. Like I remember Lauren or had a people saying to be something like that, if this person's not like really upset with you at the end of this, you have an actually done the job. If this doesn't sting for them to hear, you should be suspicious because it means you've definitely pulled the punch. That was good advice at the time because it's just so much easier in a conversation but you know, everyone's gonna go go to a part of it. Or just go to a part of it. Yeah, or at all. Yeah, I mean that's kind of like the cost of entry for starters because you don't have on limited headcount I think bigger companies consider conservative about that.

1:05:43Well, yeah, any big lessons on riffs. Oh, no They're horrible. Here's the lesson don't put yourself in a position where you have to do them if it's at all possible It's just really fucking hard to get through. It's a what it's a big time sink It's a big emotion sink. It's big engagement sink and it takes a long time to sort of like get planned Perform and doing it all you know the lessons I've kind of learned on riffs are more from order companies done on anything Intercom has gone through. The last 12 months for startups in general, every other investor updated I get has been, oh, we've done a little riff, we've got you, you know.

1:06:11But things are generally going good up and... Yeah, yeah. But like honestly, in a load of these cases, superhumanized this feature where you can, you can, some of the males you can see on the right -hand side, all the other males they sent you. And you only need to click back to retreat, where it's like, we're excited to announce that we've hired not one, but two VPs of partnerships or whatever, and you're like, oh, you didn't realize that you're planting the seeds of the riff there, you know what I mean? I think the bigger thing I'd say is like over hiring does an electricity and a spark in the same way I say you always want your office to be a little bit too small because I get to this sort of vibrance in this kind of sense of hustle I think you always want a team to be this a little bit like like there should always be a pilot work And like to show us be a sense of like holy shit We've got so much to do I agree but like we speak about some bigger rounds and more expensive prices before There's so much VC cash that there's still raising 5 on 25 and they've got a lot of money or aid on 40 or whatever The cash is just that.

1:07:01Do you know about the venture market stage? Just running it. I think you have to put it on the fairer's at that point. Like if someone gives you the money, you don't have to take the money. If you take the money, you don't have to spend the money. If you spend the money, you don't have to spend the hurry. You spend the hurry, you don't have to spend the wastefully. Like it's a bit of a fun thing. I get you, but I just think it takes a very skill person to go, we're gonna put it in the bank and we're not gonna touch it. Cause then product to expansion happens. And while we could hire that as your data engineer, we could go into that new product, we could go into that new geography, It's really disciplined.

1:07:29Yeah, hiring fluctuates between needs and goods. And maybe it's easy to lie to yourself and say, the incremental thing that this first is going to do is going to be transformed. I would bet your second time fan is the highest slower is my guess because I just think it's an easy way to burn up opportunity and ultimately lead yourself in a position where you might have to riff. Or in a load of these companies say, there are different people where it didn't have to hire them. You know, final ones we do a quick fire, children wise, I think that's such an important part of one's life and one's mindset.

1:07:59Did having children impact how you manage and meet? Since then I was on a holiday this summer and we were like looking at me and my other half were like tasked with looking off these two kids. Yeah. And they just like, annoyingly approach you when you don't want to be approached instead of going sort off. Yeah. You have to turn out patience, delay demotions. I think it made me more efficient in the time of my work for sure. I knew that I wouldn't be able to work as much when I went home or whatever. And I noticed this in like when I'm on I need to be on and I need to be like emptying the tank of my egg game Because it's some stage you're gonna go home and have all these like kids and I have to deal with them I can't just come home exhausted and I I got I need to be active when I get home to so I think that's probably the first way I don't know if I got more patient necessarily.

1:08:38I mean, I definitely need more patients with my kids I think the folks I work with they don't antagonize me that often patients isn't a string and I pull on a lot thankfully I mean, I also had them for a holiday briefly and so different to having them permanently Yeah, listen I want to move into a quick fly around. So I say, okay, see you have any other company for a day. What company would it be? Oh, I think Google because I don't want to fix Google meat. Like yeah, it's honestly I just I if it's because if I have to go back to my job after a day I'm gonna go back to my normal life. I think Google meat is definitely the product I really want to fix up Just you zoom.

1:09:09It's not that it's the chat bar on the side like basically if I was to see Google what I do as I'd say I need you guys to build me a slack a fully functional slack equivalent that also sits in the sidebar of all these things and it has to work also at Google Docs. So when I'm having a hangout with Harry, if we're chatting it should be the same thing as a persistent chat channel between me and Harry and if I start a new Google Doc it should be sure automatically shared with Harry. All of these things just feel like such donkey work that I have to go through every single time I jump on a call. You know if I was trying to solve a natural realistic tech problem in one day I think that's probably the thing I'd go for.

1:09:40I'd love to go to Spotify and basically say like we're doing a new thing called Spotify Live where we cover all soccer. I think basically it's Spotify for soccer like it's indie idea that there's a single place you can go to watch all live streaming sports sitting right there and I think it's just everyone's scared shitless because it writes. Last was gonna say but like wasn't that true for like iTunes and music as well right. The right thing just seems to be like a deal that needs to be done. I do think like Spotify managed to negotiate such that they can play podcast and music for all over the planet from all over the planet getting like planet -arrogale to agree that their match with leads should be like live streamed.

1:10:10I think it should be doable. I love you and me so much because I'm I probably might as PCI have won a music so I can meet you Aleepa. That was light though, I think. Yeah, yeah. Google meets good too. That's great. Tell me, what's the right way to view competition? The right way to view competition is with respect and after you've launched on your outdoor, increasing comprehension. Comprehension meaning you have to understand wider success. It's very easy to like, their products shit, but maybe they've just brilliant to go to market. If you don't understand that, you're never going to be like, well, it's not going to pay attention to me.

1:10:40I've got the better product. Respect always, they have to market, you want to market, you have to respect the fact that they got there. The comprehension piece, I just, everyone likes to quote like Jeff Bees, I was sort of like a normal competition, I just listen to my customers. Do listen to your customers. I just don't think ignoring competition, especially if you're like in a market where there is competition. I think it's essential to work out like, why do people pick them over you? It's not a useful thing to know. You can't listen to your customers if you're using your competitor. I was sitting in psychology, I used it to fuel your new team and he used to have a common enemy.

1:11:10like we are that to beat them. Yeah, yeah. As long as you believe that beating them is the right price. That, that makes sense. But like oftentimes you can find yourself ruling over a graveyard. If we just beat Zendesk, but Zendesk is like in the current state it's in, that won't be the full realization of what Intercom would be. What state is Zendesk and bought by P and they just like being used as a cash cow? I don't really know because I don't know the inner workings, but certainly the P cash cow playbook would look like raise prices, shrink road map, ring the register, and package it up into a very efficient cash -producing machine and handed over.

1:11:41I don't have no idea where they are but that's what whenever anyone has a gun to pee that's usual. How did Owen coming back change culture? It changes substantially. It's also it's on coming back. It's also just the new era of where startups are. We got hyper focused on a very specific use case for the longest time in the coming being kind of a broader tool. When I came back we were like let's go all in on one thing. That's set a very clear focus for literally everything we're doing. In increased the urgency, we had this initiative called P502, which is 52 weeks to basically rebuild all parts of the company.

1:12:11It gave us a ticking clock and it gave us a very clear sense of progress and momentum and engagement. We're just finishing it now. We went gung -ho as the team of 900 folks towards rebuilding marketing, branding, pricing, product. By the time this goes live, we're in the next five, six weeks, all of that's going to look different. Why did you make Boreade equals right a blog post a week? Yeah, so a basic Bobby asked me to invest and I said I will but I was scarred by too many businesses who forget to tell People what they're all about what I mean But that is a lot of companies launch and they kind of have this kind of weird inset like vibe of like Why isn't anyone paying attention to me and an investment?

1:12:49I'd made I just finally wrapped up and I died It was really frustrating me that they had to kind of forgotten to launch and to me launch isn't like oh We've put up a like an alpha page or smother launch is like when you're laying it all out there Here's what we think. Here's our vision for the future. Here's our product. Here's our product much as our vision. Here's where our products come. Here's why you should use our product, right? Looking through my own portfolio and I was like, huh. A lot of these companies that died never really launched. I was like, fearful in that period. And I said to Bobby something along the lines of like, what's the plan for telling the world about this?

1:13:20Like, mean simply having a better Excel. You could find yourself just sitting at the bar wondering why is no one paying attention. What's the actual plan for putting yourself out there and being in great shape. He talked to true some aspects of marketing, you know, branding positioning, like Google Sheets is over here, Microsoft Excel is over there blah, blah, blah. That's a great, but like, you probably need to tell people that hundreds of times. And I think I wrote 95 of the first 100 blog posts on Intercom. And if I'm honest, I always felt that Bobby and Tissoum de Rie Ben, his co -founder, never really gave me any street cred for that, you know.

1:13:49But so, so many of us was like, eat some greens. You have to commit to tell the world everything you stand for your product, what it is, what it does, how it's used, who uses it, why they use it. And the most important thing I'd say is that your nod is important as you think. So don't worry, actually, if it's not perfect. Well, Toli, your thinking will evolve, and that means something I wrote in 2013 is no longer what I think today. Fine, I don't think anyone thinks anything 10 years prior is admissible and court or whatever, you know. It was ultimately, it was like, please guarantee me that you're going to lay it all out there and tell the world why they should use equals.

1:14:20That's ultimately what they ask us. We both like Johnny a lot. Do you have any lessons from Hopend? Yeah, I can only assume that they might have realized earlier the world was going to return to a lot more like normality And I think they did smart work with like say streamer than in that acquisition I don't know if it's a lesson, but I think when you have like an existential crisis along the lines of hey It turns out everyone's just going back to real world conferences and they don't even want a live stream with that much There's a lot of temptation to like push back against that a hedge against it like you know just like oh no No, no, surely they will.

1:14:52There might be another pandemic you never know, or whatever, whereas I think sometimes you just need to say, hey, look, the thing we thought was true is no longer true. We now need to re -arrange the entire company to get ready for the new truth. Streamard and the dead move was that generally part of that. That's how I saw it as an outsider. I was like, they had to like, ultimately pivot to like live streaming a lot quicker. And they did, they made a great acquisition. Here's a shit lesson that's just true, right? If you're in the weirdest capital market in history and everyone's telling you to like raise billions of dollars or like ridiculous valuations, don't do it.

1:15:22Like it's a weird lesson, right? Like it's a hard thing to like, you know. I didn't think doing it, actually. I think for the Amest, like what was the lesson for me? Like regardless of how other companies doing regardless of trajectory who's joining rounds, if you are in early enough and the prices get high enough, take some off the table. Yeah, I think that's a reasonable. And actually be much more active around it. Be a real manager of your portfolio. Nor they pass of Amest. Yeah, yeah, I think that's true. I think certainly that's for founders who occasionally write checks. I think that's probably the bigger lesson that will emerge from 19 true 23 or whatever like and as fine say well I'm a founder by day, but if it's millions of dollars batch you yeah, it's worth your time.

1:16:01Yeah, totally Yeah, final one for you my friend. Okay, where's Des in 10 years? Jesus, I was in comment 10 as in comp killed and that I think Zandesk will have their own faith It's not incumbent upon us to like doing the same I think intercom we want to be like the primary support solution for like internet businesses. That's what we want to be as to where I am and that. I hope that the desire less intensity or I found a role that in the company that requires less intensity because I don't see myself as a 52 year old Being able to do what I do today and even if I look at myself today versus like when I say 30 when we started or whatever Like I wasn't in this healthy shape or whatever, but like do it with that.

1:16:37It was definitely more energy and more like 9 a .m. Till 2 a .m. type energy, right? Like, that has definitely shrank a bit. Like, I'm now probably working closer to a normal working day. I hope whoever has my position, if it's not me, is able to do it. Or if it's me, I hope who doesn't need to like, nine to nine energy. Listen, I can't thank you enough for joining me. I love our conversations. You've been amazing. So thank you so much. Thank you very much. It's always a pleasure. Now, if you'd like to see the full video that you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 20 VC, we did it in person.

1:17:06And so it's a really fun one. And I think the video actually adds a lot to the interview. So do check that out again as YouTube by searching for 20 VC, but before we leave you today, we need to talk about SANA. SANA is an AI -powered learning and knowledge sharing platform. Think of it like chat GPT for all your company's knowledge. SANA integrates with all your company's apps in under 5 minutes and can search through every single file, doc, pull request video and more in under 100 milliseconds. Assistant is generative AI at its most useful. So you need to create a course on OKR fundamentals for your employee onboarding program.

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