All right, my friend, I recorded one of my favorite types of episodes.
My friend Howie started a company called Airtable.
They're worth around $10 billion, so he has seen it all.
He knows what's going on in the world of AI, and he has an amazing perspective.
And for this episode, I asked him a very simple question, which is if he were 21 again today or he didn't have Airtable, what companies or business ideas would he want to work on?
And he came with seven, seven different ideas that he would work on today.
day. And so if you are looking for a different business idea, or you're an AI nerd, which a lot of us are right now, you're going to love this episode.
Tell me about live shopping with AI avatars.
I personally think this is a really interesting area.
I mean, you think about live shopping, which is a huge thing in Asia.
I mean, there's like probably 10s of billions, not 100 million plus uh gmv in commerce uh dollars that are getting transacted through live shopping this is basically where you have uh an influencer go and peddle a product right is this like on instagram like i mean i pay attention a little bit to asia but where like is there a website i can go to to see this right now there's actually a big uh chunk of timu that is powered by this uh and definitely tiktok so tiktok has a huge amount of these um these kind of like influencers that basically go and and uh you know there's actually a shop tab that you
can even click on you see these products and it's a person basically describing the benefits of a product so think about like influencer marketing like taken to the extreme where you just watch you know people peddling products and you click it you you uh you buy and uh there's actually one uh company that's doing really well in the u .s called whatnot um and it actually oh yeah i like whatnot yeah exactly um and you know what's cool about it is like there's so much personality you know to the content like in a way it's almost like watching twitch it's not just about the actual product it's about like
seeing this person like talk about this product and maybe it's a you know um like a really cool like new shoe from nike or like a vintage shoe and they're talking about like their own experience with it and childhood you know uh experiences with like the jordan brand or whatever and and so it comes this like really interactive experience you know my pitch for this idea is basically well obviously you can have like really rich engaging experiences in the very near future with avatars right and if you go to heygen .com it's a great avatar product it's the easiest fastest self -serve avatar product
out there are you an investor in these guys uh i am an investor in heygen uh and i really like the team there and they just built like the best easiest to use avatar product that was kind of their claim to fame they have uh basically pre -made avatars so So these are like, you know, trained on or effectively created from like real human actors that they've licensed from.
So, you know, you can use one of their pre -made avatars, or you can create your own.
You know, I think of this as like a really fundamental capability.
Like you think about all the things you can do with avatars, you know, sending a sales video where you're pitching each target customer, you know, in a personal way, right?
So a CEO sending a thank you note via video to every single attendee of our last event, that kind of thing.
In this case, like I think applying the avatar concept to live shopping, where you can now have this one on one interaction with and it could be a celebrity, like maybe you get some, some like real influencers to sign on to this.
And, you know, it's like Kim Kardashian type who's actually like represented an avatar form.
And each person shopping gets to have a one on one interaction with her about skims and you know, the skins products that they want to try out.
Are you guys using the any of this at Airtable?
We actually do have an internal setup where it's all powered by Airtable.
We use our own Airtable web agents to go in and research different target customers.
We learn a lot about them, and then we can actually generate customized email pitches for each of them.
So right now, it's just email.
We are experimenting with more of the video stuff.
We actually have a setup internally where we can now generate an avatar video powered by HeyGen automatically from content in a row of veritable so it could be a list of different event attendees and that use case i just described like i may actually do it for um uh thank you notes for for different events that i host in the future like if i host a uh a dinner with with um our uh you know some of our customers i could actually now go and automate creating a video that looks like it's me and i would probably be upfront about it and say like hey like here's an avatar version of howie like saying
thank you for coming and like Like the novelty of it itself actually would tickle people's fancy, but like to send a personalized thank you video from me to every attendee for all of our events.
Can you do that now?
Like if I wanted to implement, I mean, that sounds awesome.
If I want to go and do that right now, how would I set that up?
So you can do it today.
It just requires a little bit of scripting and Airtable.
And that itself you can actually generate with AI.
So the idea is like you would go and create like a list of different people you want to send the video to or even a list of topics you want to create a video for.
And then we already have an Airtable, a scripting layer where you can define any arbitrary code.
It's hosted in our infrastructure.
And in this case, you would just define the code to go and talk to the Haygen API.
A lot of these AI products have APIs.
And so you can go and create your own kind of orchestration layer in Airtable to go and automatically for each row, ask Haygen to generate a video programmatically for you using this avatar.
And then you get a link to a Haygen video that you could then go and directly send to a customer or download it and then attach it etc cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible but that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot's ai tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and the results were incredible click -through rates jumped 25 qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot .com to see how how Breeze can help your business grow.
What's this AI personalized news thing?
When I think about like my news reading habits, you know, it's like I do sometimes appreciate reading just like the front page of like the journal or the Financial Times.
Right. And there is something very valuable about like that curated experience, like everybody sees the same front page.
So ironically, like I actually do get the print edition of newspapers because I like that like physical and consistent experience like I know I'm seeing the exact same paper as like millions of other people out there but for anything else like if I'm reading something online or if I see a link like I end up usually just taking all of the contents and copy pasting it into Chachkati or Claude and then asking it to summarize right and say like hey like pull out like the key information etc and I even have some save props to do this but what i really want is not just to do that manual summarize for each
article i wanted to go and like automatically look for all of the articles that are interesting to me like there are certain topics that i care about and i just want like an ai news aggregator that goes out and knows what i care about and more importantly like it doesn't just summarize the news for me until like here's the summarized articles it actually becomes this interactive active agent that I can talk to.
So like, you know, your friend who is the super news expert, they're always reading all the articles.
Like Nick, our mutual friend, as an example, like he knows everything that's happening in the world.
Like you go to Nick and you get 30 minutes with him and you learn about any topic you want.
Like, I want that. I want Nick in like AI form where I can just ask it, like, tell me more about this and it can go and give you more info.
dude my um so my company i my company that used to own this podcast before we sold it was the hustle it was it was a daily newsletter this was our pitch to our customer we were like we are your smart i think our tagline was where you're smart no bullshit friend who will tell you what you need to know every morning and i had a team it was crazy we had a team of three people who would reach almost three million people a day writing this newsletter and we actually were were tinkering with this idea and it was so manual where we were like what if a user tells us what they care about and we write tons
of different bits of news and we plug it into someone's email based off of what their interests are and then we'll even go yeah so you can mix and match yeah and i was like we'll even go and get like an expert like howie to like comment on some of the stuff and we'll put some of the comments in the thing in the newsletter and it was like i I was like, oh my God, this is so manual.
And what you're describing is like, whenever I'm thinking about newsletters, I'm like, this is just changes everything.
And I actually think it could still be a great business.
I would just use AI for all of it.
Totally. And maybe like you could take it to the next level, which is like, it actually becomes a platform where like Substack, you allow creators to actually create their own branded newsletters and they push the distribution promo of each one.
But because you're powering this like kind of white label AI, AI, you know, uh, powered platform, like they can very easily spin up their own custom newsletter.
Um, you know, a different direction is like, you create these like different AI personalities.
Um, I think a commonly, um, underappreciated thing is like AI doesn't have to be robotic, right?
Like it doesn't have to just be like utilitarian, summarize this article in like a clean, you know, um, uh, AP, uh, you know, style, like you could actually have it injected with tons of personality and say like be like a tmz gossip uh reporter who just like sensationalizes the crap out of this like news celebrity gossip right and and i think there's just so many interesting ways to play around with that and like news by nature is like a very high engagement uh use case right it's like literally something you you read every new every day or maybe even every hour and and so like the opportunity
to like change how people interact with like finding out about this stuff like i I think there's going to be a very large business to be created there, right?
Like BuzzFeed, you know, Hustle, et cetera.
Like, you know, all of these were like high growth businesses in that era of news.
And I think now there's going to be a different high growth era of AI news.
Hey, I got a quick break because I want to tell you something cool.
So our sponsor for this episode is HubSpot.
But instead of the ad telling you about HubSpot, they just want to do something that's useful for you.
So they did some research and they found that a bunch of people in our community have side hustles.
They start a business on the side, they get it going, and then it becomes their main hustle over time.
And so instead of just telling you about the features of HubSpot, they wanted to give you something that would be useful for your side hustle.
And so they have put together a database of AI prompts, so things that you could put into ChatGPT or your favorite AI tool that will help you with your side hustle.
So check it out. It's going to save you a bunch of time, I think.
It's a prompt database that you should be using to make your side hustle more successful.
And you could use this as your little personal little cheat sheet, your tool set to be a better operator with your side hustle.
So you could either scan this QR code that's on the screen or get the link in the description to get the AI prompt database.
All right, back to the show.
Are you a personal finance nerd?
Kind of. You know, I was a very early Mint user and I remember like really, you know, wanting to let go and more like have visibility over my different expenditures and like aggregating it.
I will say like the the tedious act of going and like doing a lot of planning is not is not my forte.
But you know, I have like a, like basically a multifamily office tech setup that now helps with a lot of that stuff.
You know, you listed on here real time AR, AI avatar products for different vertical applications, like personal finance advisors.
Tell me about that.
So the idea here actually is like, you know, if you're a very high net worth client, you can get a very very strategic wealth advisor who literally sits down with you, looks at your balance sheet, looks at all your assets, and talks about your goals, and actually comes up almost with like a plan as good as a, you know, a CFO's plan for a real corporation, but for you as an individual, right, like the business of you, Sam, as an individual, and you can plan it out, you can think about the cash flow needs you have, what kind of assets you want to invest into for near term versus long term yield.
And I mean, the reality is, like, most people don't get that level of attention, right?
And don't get that level of, like, you know, thoughtful design to a financial plan.
And, and, you know, furthermore, like, most people don't even have access to a live financial advisor to just call up and talk to, right?
Like, there's something very comforting, I think, about like, getting to like, literally talk to somebody.
And it's maybe why a lot of banks still have like, you know, retail locations, right?
So many of them, even though like, you know, for most transactions, you don't really need it, like people want to go in and talk to a person.
So I think the idea here is like using the really smart reasoning capabilities of the newest models, like, I don't think you could have done this pre 03, where you actually can come up with like a very thought out, you know, kind of personal financial plan.
And, you know, recommend, like, here's how much you should invest into equities, response, and like, here's how much you should spend uh but do it like with a you know an avatar on top of it so that it's a very human -like experience and you get to talk to them and and just like call them up anytime you're feeling stressed about your financial situation do you use any consumer facing personal finance apps at all now i don't because um i have this this team that uh that i can actually go and talk to but like i think um you know to me it's like if if everybody could have that experience is.
I mean, it's awesome.
Everybody would be able to plan better.
Have you seen, um, let me show you one.
It's called Kubera K U B E R A .com.
I have no association with these guys, but I've talked about them so much that I'm actually like on their homepage because they like quote, they like quote, they, they quoted me.
Oh yeah. There you are.
And this is, doesn't matter if you're worth $50 ,000 or a hundred million dollars.
Uh, you, a lot of people use, um, software to aggregate their aggregate their net worth because even if you only have 50 grand sometimes you'll own a couple cars you'll own maybe two bank accounts you'll maybe have some amount of money in robin whatever and then if you're really wealthy you have many many dozens of accounts right you have like uh you're you have some money with this person some money with that person you have probably some like private investments and this just does a really good job of aggregating it of all of it, which a lot of companies claim they do that.
The issue is, is that Adapar kind of does that for like the high end.
Yeah, dude, Adapar seems awesome.
But I think you have to have a lit, like I think so like Morgan Stanley or JP Morgan, I forget who I talked to, you have to have at least $50 million in liquid net worth with one of those banks in order to get access to Adapar or something like insane.
Like you have to have, you have to be a little bit more even than an ultra high net client so like you add apart is crazy but i've never even seen it but with kubera they do such a good job of aggregating all the stuff because the connections don't break and so anyone who's ever used mint or who have used uh wealthfront or like whatever the connections to all of your accounts breaks all the time and you gotta like oh yeah re -enter the password log in oh my god it's the hugest pain and so these guys have done a good job with that but what they do is they have have this version where you can export
the information is it called is it what's it called is it called json oh yeah json so you can export it in json format which is what chat gpt uses or you could just connect your kubera with your chat gpt it started started as an export now it automatically does it and you can ask it questions and so what i've done is i've i've used kubera so i use kubera to upload all my accounts and when you do this you're they don't actually have access to transact obviously they can just view your accounts and then i use chat gpt where i will uh create a project that has like a warren buffett book or sometimes
i'll have like a more aggressive financial advisor like a book of someone who has written something on financial advising because like you have different gurus sometimes you know what i mean like different yeah and i can use this to ask it questions and have my own personal finance advisor do you know what i mean yeah Yeah, that's something like give me advice using the fundamental investor theory.
Yeah, and so you'll be like, look, my net worth is blank today.
If I want to be at this mark in 10 years, show me what I should do.
Or if I want to buy a house in 8 years, what would you suggest is a good budget to have based off of what you know about me now?
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, I'm sure it works great for that.
Dude, it's awesome.
It's so awesome. Awesome.
Now having a financial advisor is still great sometimes because you still like financial advisors.
Oftentimes, the value is not in the advice that they give.
It's the fact that there's a human being that you can trust. But anyway, I this is how I've been using AI.
I mean, imagine that like that experience that you're getting, but like now, you know, to your point about like, feeling like you can trust a human more.
I mean, how much of that is based on like the fact that it actually is a human versus how much of it is like literally just like the psychology of like talking to a face?
No, I think you and I think that because of our age.
Here's what I had to bet.
I'm making this up.
I bet that the 18 -year -old today, in five years, they're going to go to the doctor.
And when they go to the doctor, they're going to tell their doctor, this is the illness that I have, and I think it's this.
Because what you and I would have said five years ago Or your parents would have said five years WebMD says that It appears as though I have this illness So the young guys Nowadays, they just say chatgpt said this And the doctor is going to say Well, I agree with you And according to my belief, chatgpt says blank And chatgpt, I think, is going to be the stamp of approval Or AI I think they're going to trust AI more than a human being Does that make sense?
Oh, for sure I think today, it's already better matter to i mean everybody should be taking all of their you know personal like uh health diagnostics you get a blood test or whatever and like running that through chachapiti like upload it ask oh three like hey like here's my my uh other symptoms here's how i feel like tell me what i might have right or tell me what could be wrong like um i've seen so many stories from like both personal friends as well as like on reddit twitter etc of like people who caught diagnoses that their doctor just missed not necessarily because they're bad doctors although a lot
of of doctors probably are bad doctors right like well dude they spent 10 minutes with you like what are they going to solve exactly that yeah so exactly like i i had a i got an injury lifting weights uh like two months ago or something like that and i just used chat gmt to do pt and they just told me what to do and i just followed the routine for three weeks and like my back improved totally i mean it's literally trained on the best knowledge out there like you're getting the the like wisdom of like peter attia meets hooberman meets like you know all of these like you know health prognosticators
to to uh to inform like you know chachipt is a response to you i've become the most extreme version of optimist for new disruptive entrepreneurs and startups meaning you know i think um i think the world moves through these different you know kind of phases right and in in a stable phase where the technology has been pretty stable you know that was basically true of the web um and web tech for you know at least like 2018 maybe until like gen ai hit so for a few years like it was very stable the technology became very mature and then it really became about like how can you go and either leverage
your existing distribution if you're an incumbent so it's really hard to compete against big existing players like salesforce or microsoft etc you know in that era to now like it's like the all of the assumptions are off and And every company is kind of up for grabs.
Right. And what I mean by that is like you can look all the way at non tech companies.
And let's say if you're a property management firm, like, you know, half of your cost structure is is automatable.
Right. If not more.
And in that world, like the margins on the business are so low.
Like I actually talked to a the founder of a of a company based in Germany that's doing exactly this.
They're buying up different property management firms and basically using their own AI tech to automate a large part of the job.
And actually, they don't fire people.
They keep everybody employed, but they take on more business as a result.
And so they've quickly become one of the largest property management companies in Germany, if not in Europe, by just going and aggregating these traditional businesses and creating that AI leverage, taking what probably was like a low percents margin business to become a, you know, tens of percents margin business.
I mean, you know, from a PE standpoint, that leverage is huge.
So I think that's a playbook that we're seeing a lot of like excitement around because I think every traditional business, especially one that has a large, you know, part of their cost structure that could be automated is kind of up for grabs.
Like think about obviously call centers, BPOs, but really any labor intensive business process outsourcing company.
companies. So that's basically, you know, there's a lot of these, um, offshore companies that have like literally thousands of employees that you can go and outsource very, um, rote tasks to, right?
So like analysts work, like go comb through these documents and look for, um, you know, kind of, uh, facts or, or, uh, you know, do research for me.
Um, support centers themselves are a form of BPL, right?
So you have these like big call centers that are basically a client agnostic.
So it's not just one company's call center.
They can take on business from any client.
So we could go and say like, hey, like I wanna spin up a call center for Airtable.
And traditionally that just meant like you have a whole bunch of humans sitting in a room somewhere and you're basically hiring them on demand.
And now of course, a huge amount of that can be automated.
Dude, I get so many of those calls a day.
And a lot of times they say that they are an AI.
They're horrible. They still suck.
Do you get a lot of those calls?
flaws i i do although i mean i don't pick them up dude i pick them up i always pick them up like i like i like want to get to know these people like you know sometimes it's like that i could i could hear like where they are like here's what i get all the time i always get a text message that says this is coinbase uh someone in serbia logged into your account and like i know it's a scam but i call them and i'm like oh my god let's like figure out how this scam works a little bit like i i do it all the time so i'll spend like i mean you're first of all you're totally feeding the embarrassed because if they
if you even give them a response they know you're like you're a more likely uh target dude i'm so into it they're like what's your name i'm like oh it's uh kevin smith and they're like oh i see your account right now i'll be like uh you do what like tell me about it tell me how much do i have how much yeah this is awesome uh and and so like they're like they go through these whole scripts and i'm like this is this is awesome uh that that you found my account that is uh do you you gotta figure out how to scam the scammer like by the end of it you get them to give you their their uh their info have you
seen the youtube channels that do that they're so funny no i haven't dude there's guys on my weekend there's guys on youtube that have 10 million subscribers and they're really like sharp guys and they will like get they'll pretend like they're old ladies like they use a voice changer and they get the scammer to install software where they the scammers uh web camera will come on and they can control like the it's like the greatest This is the greatest. That is insane.
It's the greatest. That's amazing.
But these AI call companies, they're still horrible.
Are you bullish on them?
Well, you know, I think the models have to get better at real -time synchronous interactions for, you know, especially for voice calls to fully get taken over by AI.
I think for chat, like you're chatting with somebody, like it's already better in many cases, right?
right? Because like, you know, those chat experiences are horrible with humans, because like the human is probably doing like 20 different parallel chats.
They don't really know or care about you, whereas an AI can be fully attentive.
But I agree, I think the voice is just not quite there yet.
You've probably seen that Sesame voice demo where it's like, you know, one of the better real time voice interactions, what's it called?
Sesame .ai, you can literally call it.
Oh, yes, I did see this.
I absolutely, do you think this is a good product?
I, you know, it's a research team and this is a demo product, but I think it shows where the models are going.
And I think, you know, it could be from this team and this company, but also, I mean, you know that OpenAI and Eleven Labs, et cetera, they're all working on making that interactivity better.
OpenAI revealed the last voice mode release where you could actually interrupt the AI halfway through a conversation, like that was kind of a big deal.
It's still not there yet because it doesn't feel right.
I mean, if you just talk to it, like it doesn't feel like a human, but I think that will be a frontier that we just we pass or across in the next year or two.
So one of the last things you had on here was AI productivity tools.
You said cursor for email.
What's that look like?
So I just don't really think this form factor of it's not about using AI to completely replace the current workflow.
Right. So the cool thing about Cursor is it's not just like a chat interface alone that you're using to generate code or to say like, hey, you don't need to code like it's actually an IDE, like they forked VS Code, a popular IDE, and then they added this like agentic coding experience on top.
But as a developer, you can still be in the code.
In fact, I think that's the value of Cursor.
So I just think applying that paradigm to a lot of other productivity experiences, one One of them being email.
It's like, you think about email, you go in and like, usually you just come in and like, you know, click on each email, read each one, et cetera.
You can currently go to a separate product like Gemini or now Claude and opening.
I both have, um, integrations into email and you can ask questions about your email, but I think the ideal experience is actually a blended one where you can actually do agentic workflows and maybe AI is automatically doing some pre -reading of your emails, telling you what's important, what's not, maybe even doing some like research across your other content sources, like looking up, you know, info in your other accounts and your calendar, doing a web search to help you decide like, Hey, like I got this pitch from an entrepreneur who wants to be on my podcast. Like, is it worth my time?
Right. And it can already have a recommendation for you.
So I just think like, you know, one of the places that you spend a lot of time today, I mean, news, I think email, if you're a developer, you're in your IDE, like, I think that's where I would attack is like start with where people are actually spending a lot of time and on first principles like a lot of that time could be automated or augmented with ai so i'm gonna ask you how you'd build this because from my i had an email company i know a little bit about email but not i don't know the tech i don't know the technical capabilities of everything but like email sucks to build on top of because gmail
owns everything and superhuman did something something interesting where for listeners superhuman was a brand new email client and you download superhuman and you use that instead of gmail they recently sold last week for i think the rumor was 800 million or something like that yeah i saw that too great yeah to um grammarly and it was a very bold mission i think they fell short if they sold or that's what i'm that's what i'm guessing if i had to guess but it was pretty magnificent of a of an effort to like get after it it and my question to you is if you were going to build something like this you
pretty much would have to start from scratch i would think of a new email client not a gmail plugin yeah so interestingly um i also worked in email before air table so my startup before then was a yc company etax uh and it was actually i think we were the first startup to build a gmail plugin and it wasn't like an official plugin at the time there was no plugin framework like we literally figured out like kind of on our own how to hack what's called the dom which is basically the html representation from gmail of of the email client and like literally just injected a ui on top of that with a chrome
extension and so you know we kind of pioneered this idea of like oh wow you could be an email and then we added our own sidebar to every email that you had to show information about who you're talking about but could they have banned you they could have certainly a sent us a a cease and desist and said, like, what you're doing is against our TOS as a site.
And then B, they could do some things to make it annoying for us.
And, like, it's almost like they could just keep moving the target so, like, they could change the layout of the page.
They just make your lifestyle.
In HTML without making it look different, yeah, to the user in ways that would break our integration.
And that did happen.
I don't think it was intentional.
I think they would just update the page, re -render it, and then it would change the layout.
out. And then for a day, our extension would be broken.
We'd have to furiously try to code affix to it.
That was the really, really early days.
And ironically, Superhuman, the founder, Rahul, was actually the founder of a company that competed with us back in that time, like 2010.
Reportive. Reportive.
Yeah, yeah. For anyone who's above probably 33 that was involved in technology, Reportive was a game -changing tool.
That was so cool that they created that.
yeah yeah so you know email has been like i mean it's it's it's interesting because from the time that reportive and e -tax existed to now like email really hasn't changed very much at all like you look at gmail like it's kind of the same product and you know the um a status quo argument it's like well it's like good enough don't fix it but i think that like you know to me superhuman was like an interesting innovation on email like they did build their own client i don't actually think it's that hard like certain things seem really hard to do in theory but then in practice like it's actually not that hard
like air table i mean obviously it's hard to build air table but like you know we ended up architecting our own proprietary database engine to power it instead of using something off the shelf like my sql or postgres to power the real -time collaboration parts of our table and it turned out that like it was the right decision and ultimately it turned out to be cleaner and better for us to go that route than to try to to repurpose something off the shelf.
But it's harder. You have to raise, you have to raise tens or a hundred, or you did, uh, and someone else would also have to raise a fuckload of money to do that.
But also getting revenue for that, I think would be a slog.
I don't, you guys did it fast, but like superhuman did not.
Yeah. And I think, I mean, superhuman was an interesting product for a number of reasons.
I mean, one, I think it was a really good product, but it was really hard to articulate like, what is the killer feature or set of features that make it 10 X better than email without you know or normal email right and i think it was you know it was like faster they had some nice features like tracking emails etc but it was hard to say this is like clearly a different paradigm like this is 10x better right and i think that with ai like you could now build a product that actually is radically different radically better um and so in fact like a former air table uh employee uh of mine jb uh is now
working on a company that's doing exactly this i i did a little funding uh round into it um so chief .so oh is it loading for you okay there we go yeah you have to give them you have to write a bigger check though so they can get a like a dot ai exactly yeah i think it's a really interesting space i think um i actually think that you can build this product without a massive team and a massive funding round and maybe part of that is because you know like in a very meta way like if you're very ai AI leveraged in how you build products, like you can get so much more done as an AI leveraged team than you
could have done in the past, like cursor itself, it's just hard to build a business when you charge $20 a month, meaning it's like, it's that's not enough.
Or that's, it precludes too many people.
The first one. Yeah.
And so actually, one of the premises here is that there is a top 1 % audience and not necessarily meaning like 1 % like richest people, but like there's a 1 % power user audience of email for whom email is like their life, right?
Probably for you, definitely for me, every VC, maybe even like realtors, lawyers, et cetera, like email is everything to them.
Like, and, and like, if you can make them 10 % more efficient at email, like they'll pay not 20, but 200 a month, right?
Maybe even like 2000 a month.
Like if you gave me an awesome email product that even saved me, like call it five hours a week in, in uh in time and like not only that but allowed me to not miss key opportunities like sometimes like I mean I get like literally hundreds of real emails every day that gmail considers important frankly with that many coming in like I miss some and sometimes they're really important I have a I have a full -time assistant and it feels like a large chunk of her job is just categorizing my emails yeah for sure um and you know some people have like uh you know full -time EA who like literally doesn't
just categorize the emails, but like goes through and does research on each one and tells you like, Hey, I did some research. This is how you should respond.
So I think, um, I think it's a huge, huge space.
And, um, I mean, one of my lessons learned from, uh, from cursor actually.
And, uh, I remember, um, did you invest in them?
You know, first looking at cursor, what's that you invested in cursor.
I did. Um, and, uh, actually I was introduced to them by Peter Fenton from benchmark.
Who's our investor at Airtable.
And, uh, you know, just one of the most like phenomenal, uh, pickers of talent and opportunity, uh, spaces, uh, that I've ever met and just, you know, brilliant in a, every way as an investor.
But I remember having this discussion with him of like, what is the TAM for something like cursor?
And you have to factor in like, of course, like Microsoft exists.
They actually literally own VS code, even though it's open source and you could fork it.
Um, they already have GitHub.
They have this massive developer audience, like how big can an upstart get?
And this was when like cursor was probably low millions of revenue and you know my argument actually was that like the the developer audience for for ai augmented coding is so large i mean today you might have like call it 30 million developers that's the number that um stripe always quotes maybe that actually will expand to like 50 to 100 million developers no brainer it's easier to develop and then on top of that like it would be perfectly rational for every single one of those people to pay at least a thousand dollars a year for a ai um like an a coding agent that makes them way more productive
like not like 10 but like 2x right and maybe even rational for them to pay ten thousand dollars okay now you're talking about like a 30 to 300 billion dollar tam like carving off even a small few percent niche of that especially when like coding itself is so fragmented you've got like different types of coding in different languages front end back and etc like all you have to do is win like a a sizable 5 % niche, and you've built like a multi -billion revenue business.
Is that the framework for how you think of what's interesting for starting companies?
I think so. I mean, I think there's like, you can either go really broad, like in this, you know, cursor example or cursor for X.
So pick a market that's just so big.
Like there's so many potential target users, like tens of millions, at least. And for whom the value is significant enough that they will pay for it.
It's not a freemium or it's not purely like a free ad -driven product experience.
It's not a consumer product.
Pick something that's like broad enough and deep enough where there's just a very large pie to capture value out of.
And then even if you end up only capturing a niche of that pie, like you have a really large business on your hands, I think the alternate path is go really deep and narrow.
So this is more like the property management example where it's like, you're probably never going to have like a hundred million users who need property management software but like if you go into that vertical and you attack it you might have 5 000 yeah yeah and if you go and attack it very deeply and for each one you can extract even more revenue out of them because in this i mean the most leveraged way you can extract revenue out of out of vast space is like not just to sell white label software that you charge a property management firm x dollars per month you actually take the entire cake
by buying them out outright, running the PE playbook and getting leverage on there.
And what's Airtable?
The first one? Airtable is definitely the first one.
So, you know, we're in a space where like, especially now that we've relaunched the product as basically an agentic first product.
So you can literally come in and talk to our agent Omni to ask it to build any app, right?
So like, it's very much akin to the vibe coding products out there.
But the difference is like ours is backed by the reliable no -code components that we've spent the past 10 years building and making scalable and real -time collaborative, etc. And so if you want to build any business app, I mean, for you guys, for instance, for your business, like if you want a CRM, right, if you want a way to track, you know, people who are coming on your show, if you want like a content pipeline, any of those things, like we want to be the best way to spin up a reliable business app for internal operations.
Like we're not trying to be like an external consumer -facing prototype tech tool like if you want that go to like you know the replets and the v0s etc of the world to spin up like a consumer facing hobby app but like for a business app like you know the the need for that definitely is at least tens of millions of people out there who want to build apps for their own business and every single business should be creating apps this way and probably replacing this you know over the next few years like old legacy software with this All right, listen up, turn the volume up because it's your boy Sean,
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What's the last question?
What's this? all you wrote in the sheet, you just wrote exotics?
Exotic ideas for AI.
So that, you know, just more off the beaten path stuff.
I think, I think there's some like, really interesting new niches that will be created, like an example would be like, what's the next consumer social app?
That's AI native, right?
And I don't think that just means like, you know, it looks like Instagram, it looks like TikTok, and it's got some like AI features to help you like write posts.
and so on, like, I think it might mean like, I mean, there are a few startups that are trying to do this where, you know, it's like, you actually have like social networks or chat groups where half the participants are actually AI avatars, right?
And like, what does that look like?
And, and I think what's interesting about this space is that like, unlike the PE AI approach, where it's like, take a known problem and do something that's very like solvable, right?
Like like automate support costs, automate property management costs with AI.
You can very clearly visualize what that looks like.
I think what's really interesting is that we don't know what the consumer behaviors are going to look like in an AI -native era.
We saw the transition from linear TV to internet, to mobile, et cetera.
And at each point, I think there were some surprises about the way that the content and the engagement pattern has actually changed.
It's not like we just took people watching linear TV right and then gave them youtube it's like do the same thing we somehow went from tv to watching video games on my phone is exactly yeah i mean like nobody would have guessed like twitch right um like how's that like the big thing and so i just think like there there's um when you have people who are not just technologists like the the first wave of post chat tp innovation was very much driven by like technologists who are very close to the uh the models and the model research and understood what the models were capable of i think we're going
to see more and more people who we're actually more artists than technologists and think about like the artistry of like what does consumer psychology and behavior look like when you have this this new paintbrush which is like AI powered experiences in some cases I think you can create like hyper engaging consumer engagement uh consumer experiences that like actually could be even more addictive than than uh you know social media is today right imagine like you have you know people have like the perfect girlfriend or boyfriend uh avatar you know people are already kind of doing this right with even
chat bt or grok etc rock unhinged i don't know if you played with that but like it's it's pretty interesting like it's grok uh the elon uh ai product but unhinged mode is where and they also have a sexy mode which you can guess what that is is basically where they've taken off all of the um uh the uh pg and safety features that chat bt and claude have right so like you could could have a very explicit conversation with with this ai and it will happily engage which just kind of shows you like most of the ai experiences we're getting especially from the big model companies have been very like cleaned
up dude i ask my my controversial questions all the time like yeah like it's like it refuses it refuses and sometimes i ask it things where i'm like asking on a like like for example i love history and i'll like if i'm reading about world war ii i'll ask it about very sensitive topics but i'll just like explain to me this topic but i'll be like uh but anyway it it won't even touch some of these things yeah exactly and and you know that's the whole debate is like you know it's a little bit like free speech censorship but like applied to ai right it's like you know at at like how much can you actually
you know censor ai for for safety and and for uh like moral clauses uh how much of that is is even like globally applicable versus like what's moral for one one uh one culture maybe immoral for another etc and and i think it's interesting to see grok be uh not like completely on uh unfiltered but like it is a lot more pushing of the boundaries right so i had never heard of this i don't think there's yeah yeah yeah no i mean you should try it today like like uh like the unhinged like i was trying trying to learn about the israel palestine conflict like i'm just trying to understand the background
and like chat gpt won't even like touch some of the topics and i'm like oh i'm just trying to learn controversial like exactly yeah like um and so i think that's that's gonna be really interesting when when you start to see like people really push the boundaries i mean you know they say um uh a lot of great uh tech is like always always uh pioneered for like the uh the salacious the black market you know i mean soap road type stuff right like and and so like What does that look like in the AI era?
Well, you're the man.
I appreciate your insight.
I enjoyed this. This was awesome.
It's fun because you have a really interesting perspective.
You're a young guy, but you've been in the game for so long and you have such breadth because of the size of your company.
And so it's really cool to just see your thinking and how you are going to somewhat predict the future and all that stuff.
But, dude, you're badass.
I appreciate you doing this.
Oh, thank you. Well, really enjoyed the combo and happy to chat anytime, bud.
All right. That's it.
That's the pod. All right, my friends.
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