Brainstorming $10M AI Business Ideas w/ the Airtable Founder

my friend i recorded one of my favorite types of episodes my friend howie we started a company called air cable they're worth around ten billion dollars 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 questions which is if he were twenty one again today or he didn't have air table 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 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 gonna love this episode tell me about live shopping with ai avatars i personally think this is a really interesting area i mean you you think about live shopping which is a huge thing in asia i mean there's like probably tens of billions not a hundred billion dollar plus gm in commerce dollars that are getting transact through live shopping this is basically where you have an influencer go and peddle a product right is this like on it's like i mean paid attention a little bit asia but where like there website i can go to see this right now there's actually a big chunk of t move that is powered by this and definitely tiktok so tiktok has a huge amount of these these kind of like influencers that basically go and and 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 the product so think about like influencer marketing like taking to the extreme where you just watch you know people pedal products and and you click it you you you buy and there's actually one company that's doing really well in the us called whatnot and it actually yeah i like whatnot yeah exactly and then 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 like a really cool like a new shoe from nike or like a vintage shoe and they're talking about like their own experience with it and childhood you know experiences with like the jordan brand or whatever and and so it comes to like really interactive experience you know my pitch for this idea is basically well obviously you can have like really rich engaging experiences in a very near future with avatars right i mean if you go to h jen dot 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 i am an investor in h jen and i really like the team there and they just built like the best easiest to use avatar product that was kind of their their claim to fame they have basically pre made avatars so these are like get trained on or effectively created from like real human actors that they've licensed from so you know you can use one of their prem avatars or you can create your own you know i think of it 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 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 action 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 skim and you know the skins products that they wanna trial are you guys using the any of this at air table we actually do have an internal setup where it's all powered by air table we use our own air table web agents to go in and research different target customers we've learned a lot about them and then we can actually generate customized email pitches for each of so right now it's just email but we are experimenting with with more of the video we actually have a setup up internally where we can now generate an avatar video powered by h automatically from content in a row of air table so it could be a list of different event attendees at that use case i i just described like i may actually do it for thank you notes for for different events that i host in the future like if i host a a dinner with with our you know some of our customers i could actually now go and automate creating a video that looks like it's and i i would probably be front of about it and say like hey like here's an avatar version of how we like saying thank you for coming and like the novelty of it itself actually would tickle people's fancy but but like to send dave a personalized thank you video from me to every attendee for all of our events can you do that now like if i i wanted to implement it i mean that sounds awesome if i wanna go and do that right now how would i set that up so you you can do it today it just requires a little bit of scripting in air table 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 wanna send the video too or even a list of topics you wanna create a video for and then we already have an air table 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 h gen api a lot of these ai products have apis and so you can go and create your own kind of orchestration layer and air table to go and automatically for each row ask h to generate a video pro programmatic for you using this out avatar and then you get a link to a h end video that you could then go and directly send to a customer or download it and then attaching it etcetera cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible but that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and the results were incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadruple and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow what's this ai personalized news thing when i think about like my newest 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's something very valuable about like that curated experience like everybody sees the same front page so ironically like i actually do get the the print edition of 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 obviously a link like i end up usually just taking all of the contents and copy pasting it into chat to your claude and then asking it to summarize right and say like hey like pull out like the key information etcetera and i even have some save prop 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 meet like there are certain topics that i care about and i just want like an ai news ag that goes out and knows what i care about and more importantly like it doesn't just summarize the news for me into like here's the summarize articles it actually becomes this interactive agent that i can talk to so like you know your friend who is the super news expert they're always reading all the our goals like nick our our mutual friend as an example like he knows everything that's happening in the world like you go to nick and you get thirty minutes with him and you learn about any topic you want like i want that i want nick in like ai form where i could just ask it like tell me more about this and they can go and give you more info dude my semi company i my company that used to own this podcast before we sold it was the hustle it was a it was a daily newsletter this was our pitch to our customer we were like we are your smart i think our tagline line was where your smart no bullshit friend who will tell you what you need to know every morning and i had a team it 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 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 we can mix in that yeah and i was like well even go and get like an expert like how we to like comment on some of those stop and we'll put some of the comments in the thing in the newsletter and it was like 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 has just changes everything and and i actually think you know yeah it could still be a great business you i would just use ai for all of it totally and and maybe like you could take it to the next level which is like it actually becomes a platform where like subs 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 kinda of white label ai you know powered platform like they can very easily spin up their own custom newsletter you know regression is like you create these like different ai personalities i think a commonly underappreciated thing like ai doesn't have to be robotic right it doesn't have to just be like utilitarian summarize this article in like a clean you know ap you know style like you could actually have it injected with tons of personality and say like be like a tmz gossip reporter who just like sensational the crap out of this like new 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 a high engagement 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 think that's a there's gonna be a very large business to be created there right like buzzfeed you know hustle etcetera like you know all of these were like high growth businesses in that era of news and i think now there's gonna be a different high growth era of ai news hey i got a quick break because i wanna tell you something cool so our sponsor for this episode is hubspot but instead of the ad telling you about hubspot they just wanna 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 hustle 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 me you about the features of hubspot they wanted to give you something that will be useful for your side hustle and so they have put together a database of ai prompt so things that you could put into chat g or your favorite ai tool that will help you with your side hustle so check it out it's gonna save you a bunch of time i think it's a prompt database that you should be using to make your side hustle little 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 of the description to get the ai prompt database alright back to the show are you a personal finance nerd kind of you know i i was a very early mint user and i remember like really you know wanting to like go and 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 is not my forte but i know i have like a like basically a multi family 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 strategic wealth adviser who literally sits on with you looks at your balance sheet looks at all your assets and talks about your goals and actually comes up also with like a plan as good as a you know a cfo 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 wanna invest into for near term for 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 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 adviser to just call up and talk to it 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 like people wanna go in and talk to 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 is pre o three 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 should you should spend 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 at all now i don't because i have this this team that that i can actually go and talk to but like i think you know to me it's like if if everybody could have that experience i mean it's awesome everybody would be able to plan better have you seen let me show you one it's called k cabrera k u b e r a dot 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 they're like quote they quote that's awesome they quoted me that yeah there you are and this is doesn't a matter if you're worth fifty thousand dollars or a hundred million dollars you a lot of people use software to aggregate their aggregate their net worth because even if you only have fifty grand sometimes you'll own a couple cars you'll own oh maybe two bank accounts you'll maybe have some amount of money in robinhood whatever and then if you're really wealthy you have many many dozens of accounts right you have you have like you're you have some money with this person somebody money with that person you have probably some like private investment yes and this just does a really good job of aggregating it of of all of it which a lot of companies claim they do that the issue is is that add perk kinda does that for like the high end yeah dude i add a part it seems awesome but i think you have to have a lit like i so like morgan stay or jpmorgan i forget who i talked to you have to have at least fifty million dollars in liquid net worth with one of those banks in order to get access to add par or something like insane like you have to have a you have to be a a little bit more even than an ultra high net worth client so only like you at part is crazy but i've i've never even seen it but with k cabrera 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 wealth front or like whatever the connections to all of your counts breaks all the time and you gotta like oh yeah reenter enter the password login in i gotta say huge just pain and so these guys have done a good job with that but what they do is they have this version where you can export the information is it is it what's it called it is it called json oh yeah json so you can export it in json format which is what chat gp uses or you can just connect your k cabrera with your chat gp it's started it started as an export now it it automatically does it and you can ask it questions and so what i've done is i've i've used k cabrera so i use k cabrera 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 gb where i will create a project that has like a warren buffett book or sometimes i'll have like a more aggressive financial adviser like a a book you of someone who has written something on financial advising because like you have different guru sometimes you know what mean like different yeah and i can use this to ask it questions and have my own personal finance advisor do you what mean yeah yeah that's all like give me advice using the the fundamental of fundamental investor theory yeah and so you'll be like look my net worth is blank today if i wanna be at this mark in ten years show me what i should do or if i wanna buy a house in eight years what would you suggest is a good budget to have based off of what you know about me now you know what you know what i'm saying yeah yeah i'm sure it works great for that dude it's awesome it's so awesome now having a financial adviser is still great sometimes because you still like financial advisers oftentimes the value is not in the advice that to give it's the fact that there's a human being that you can trust but anyway this is how i've been using ai yeah with my i mean i 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 ecology of like talking to a face no i think like i could've have i think you and i think that because of our age i my i what if i had here's what i had a bet if i i'm making this up i bet that the eighteen year old today in five years they're gonna go to the doctor and in and when they go to the doctor they're gonna 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 is web web d says that it appears as though i have this illness right yeah no so the young guys nowadays they just say chat said this and the doc is going to say well i agree with you and according to my belief chat gb says blank and chat gb i think is gonna be the stamp of approval or ai like yeah i think they're gonna trust ai more than a human being does that make sense oh for sure i mean i think like today it's already better to i mean everybody should be taking all of their you know personal like health diagnostics you get a blood test or whatever and like running that through chat boutique like upload it as three like hey like here's my my other symptoms here's how i feel like tell me what i might have right or tell me what could be wrong like i've i've seen so many stories from like both personal friends well as like on reddit twitter etcetera of like people who caught diagnoses that their doctor just miss not necessarily because they're bad doctors although a lot of doctors probably are bad doctors right like it well wasn't worth there dude they spend ten minutes with you like what are they gonna solve exactly that yeah so exactly like i i had a i got a an injury wait to like two months ago or something like that and i just used chat to do pt yeah 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 you're getting the the like wisdom of like peter meets hub meets like you know all of these like you know health pro to to to inform like you know chat bts of response to you i've become the most extreme version of opt for new disruptive entrepreneurs and startups meaning you know i think 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 and web tech for you know at least like twenty eighteen maybe until like jenny 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 etcetera you know in in that era to now like it's like the end and all of the assumptions are off and every company is kinda up for cracks right and what i be by at 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 auto right if not more and in that world like the 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 they're buying up different property management firms and basically using their own ai tech to automate a large part of of the job and actually they don't fire people they 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 the from a pe standpoint that leverage is huge so i think that's a playbook that we're seeing a lot of like excited 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 kinda up for grabs think about obviously call centers bp but really what's the bp labor intensive business process outsourcing company so that's basically you know there's a lot of these offshore companies that have like literally thousands of employees that you can go and outsource very rote tasks too right so like analysts work like go comb through these documents and look for you know kind of a facts or or you know do research for me support centers themselves are a form of bp right so you have these like big call centers that are basically 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 air table and traditionally that just meant like you have a whole bunch of humans sitting in a room somewhere and you know you're you're basically hiring them on demand and now of course a huge amount of that can be audited of automated do i get so many of those calls a day and a lot of times they say that they are in ai they're horrible they they they still suck do you get a lot of those calls i i do although i mean i i i don't pick them up do not i pick them on always pick them up like i like i like wanna to i get to know these people like you know sometimes 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 someone in serbia logged in your account and like i know it's a scam but i call them and i'm like oh let's like figure out you how this scam works a little bit like i i do it all the time i'll spend like i mean first of all you're totally feeding the bear because if they if you can give them a response they know you're like yeah you're like target dude i'm so into it they're like what's your name like oh it's kevin smith and they're like oh i see your account right now i'll be like you do what like tell me about it tell me how much do i have how yeah this is awesome and and so like they're like they go through these whole scripts and this is this is awesome that that you found my account that is really 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 their info have you seen the youtube channels that do that they're so funny no i haven't dude there's guys i be like weekend there's guys on youtube that have ten million subscribers and they're really 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 the the scammer webcam camera will come on and they could control like the it's like the greatest oh no this the greatest genesis it's the greatest amazing but these these ai call companies they're who they're still horrible are you bullish on them well you know i think the the models have to get better at real time synchronous interactions for for you know for 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 in many cases right because like you know those chats there's are horrible with humans because like the human is probably doing like twenty different parallel chats they don't really know or care about you whereas an ai can you 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 interact what's the call or won't get interrupt and sesame dot ai you can literally call it oh yes i did see this i'd absolutely and 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 in this company but also i mean you know that opening eye and a eleven labs etcetera are they're all working on making that interactivity better open i revealed the the lit 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 an ai productivity tools you said cursor for email what's that look like so i just generally think this this 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 fork vs code to pop their ide and then they added this like agent 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 i just think of applying that paradigm to a lot of other productivity experiences is 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 etcetera so you can currently go to a separate product like gemini or now claude and opening i both have 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 agent workflows and maybe ais 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 i just think like you 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 or 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 would build this because from my i had an email company i 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 yeah super did something interesting where so for listener or so super was a a brand new email client and you download super and you used that instead of gmail they recently sold last week for i think the rumor was eight hundred million or something like that i saw that too great to grab and it was a very bold mission i think they fell short if they sold or that's what i'm that's i'm guessing if i had a guess but it was pretty magnificent of a of an effort to like get get after it and my question to you is grab if you were gonna 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 i also worked in email before air tables so my my startup for then was a yc company tac and it was actually i think we were the first start up to build a gmail plugin it and it wasn't like an official plugin in at the time there was no plug in 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 a 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 cease desist and said like what you're doing is against our to 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 change they they could just keep moving the target so like they could change the layout of the page they just make your like my html without making it look different yeah to to the user in ways that would break our integration and then 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 and then like for a day our our extension would like be broken and we'd have a furious h like code fix to it and that was like kind of the really really early days and ironically superhuman the founder ra hole was actually the founder of a a company that kinda competed with loved in that time like twenty ten reported what reported would yeah yeah game oh my med for the anyone who's above probably thirty three that was involved in technology reported was a 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 reported and detox 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 a status i i 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 architect our own proprietary database engine to power it instead of using something off the shelf like my sequel or post grass to power the real ten collaboration parts at our table and it turned outlet 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 repurpose something off the shelf it's harder you know but you thought you have to raise yeah you have to raise tens or or you did and someone else would also have to raise a fuck load of money to do that but also getting revenue for that i think would be a s i don't you guys did it fast but like superhuman did not yeah and i i mean super was an interesting product for a number of reasons i mean won 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 ten better than email without you know or or normal email right and i think it was you it was like faster they had some nice features like tracking emails etcetera but it was hard to say this is like clearly a different paradigm like this is ten x better right and i think that with ai like you could now build a product that actually is radically different radically better and so in fact like a former air table employee of mind jb is now working on a company that's doing exactly this i i did a little funding what the call round into it so chief dot s o oh is it loading for you okay there we 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 oh i think it's a really interesting space i think 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 leveraged in how you build products like you can get so much more done as an ai leverage team that you could have done in the past like her cursor itself it's just hard to build a business when you charge twenty dollars a month meaning it's like it's that's not enough or that's it preclude to many people the first one yeah and so actually one of the premises here is that there is a top one percent audience and not necessarily meaning like one percent like richest people but like there's a one percent 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 etcetera like email is everything to them like and and like if you can make them ten percent more efficient at email like they'll pay not twenty but two hundred a month right maybe even like two thousand a month like if you gave me an awesome email product that even saved me like call it five hours a week in in a in time and like not only that but allowed me to not miss key opportunities like sometimes like i get like literally hundreds of real emails every day that gmail considers important frankly with that many coming in like i miss up and sometimes they're really important my 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 and you know some people have like you know full time ea who like literally doesn't just categorize it but it 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 i think it's a huge huge space and i mean what have my lessons learned from from cursor actually and i remember did you invest in them you know first looking at cursor what's you invested in cursor i i did and actually i was introduced to them by peter fe from benchmark our investor at air table and you know just what one of the most like phenomenal picker of talent and opportunity spaces that i've ever met and just you know brilliant in 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 they already have github they have this massive developer audience like how big can an ups start get and this was when like cursor was probably like low millions in 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 thirty million developers that's the number that stripe always quotes maybe that actually will expand to like fifty to a hundred million developers brainer gets 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 like an a coding agent that makes them way more productive like not like ten percent like two x right and maybe even rational for them to pay ten thousand dollars okay now you're talking about like a thirty to three hundred 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 etcetera like all you have to do is win like a sizable five percent 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 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 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 gonna 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 five thousand yeah yeah and if you go in 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 leverage what you can extract revenue out of out of a that space is like not just to sell white label software that you charge a property management firm x 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 the air table the first one air cable is definitely the first one so you know we're in a space where like especially now that we've relaunch the product as as basically an gen 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 five coding products out there but the difference is like ours is backed by the reliable no code components that we've spent the past ten years building and making scalable and real time collaborative etcetera and so if you wanna 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 wanna be the best way to spin up a reliable business app for internal operations like we're not trying to be like a external consumer facing prototype tool like if you want back go to like you know the rep in the v zero outside 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 is you know over the next few years like old legacy software with this alright listen up turn the volume up because it's bo sean and i got a little message for you i talked to hundreds of founders a week and when i talk to founders everyone says the same thing that's the one thing they need the most is not funding it's not more resources it's just having more time the goal here is to win and the way use you win is you get yourself free time to do stuff that's high impact how do you do that well i'll tell you my solution the answer is gabby well are you like be wondering who is gabby gabby is my assistant she is my wonderful assistant gabby lives in latin america and she helps me save about twenty hours a week so what she's doing for me is every morning my inbox is sorted in triage and the most important stuff is right at the top with draft replies ready for me so i'm never behind on email and then if as i'm on the go i'll just send her voice notes saying hey can you find my kids a soccer class hey could you take care of this coverage registration thing for me all these little tedious bs things that would take up time in my day she takes care of for me and so that's free time i'm getting back so if you're are a ceo who's serious about growing your company do you need to get yourself an assistant the best place to go is somewhere dot com some sources the best assistance from low cost areas for you so you can get an amazing executive assistant who's got you know business experience and has supported other ceos for seven eight nine ten dollars an hour and so go ahead go to somewhere dot com tell him i sent you to hook you up with a good deal and get yourself and assistant it and you could take me later alright back to this episode what's last question what's this all you wrote in the sheet you just wrote exotic question mark exotic ideas for for ai like so that you know it's 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 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 sell right like automate support cost automate property management cost with the eye it's like you could very clearly visualize what that looks like think what's really interesting is that like we don't know what the consumer behaviors are gonna look like in an ai native era like you know we saw the transition from like linear tv to internet to mobile etcetera and at each point i think there there were some surprises about like that the the way that the content and the engagement patterns has actually changed right it's not like we just took people watching linear tv right and then gave them mute i do the same somehow from tv to watching video games on my phone is that exactly yeah mean nobody would have guessed like twitch right like how's that like the big thing and so i just think like there there's when you have people who are not just acknowledge like the the first wave of post chat innovation was very much driven by like technologists who are very close to the the models and the model research and understood what the models were capable of i think we're gonna see more and more people who are actually more artists than technologists and think about like the artist artificially 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 consumer experiences that like actually could be even more addictive than than you know social media is today right imagine like you have you know people have like the perfect girlfriend or boyfriend avatar you know people are already kinda doing this right with even chat or g etcetera rock un hinge i don't know if you played with that but like it's it's pretty interesting like it's rock the elon ai product but un hinge 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 the pg and safety features that charge and claude have right so like you could have a very explicit conversation with with this ai and it will happily engage which just kinda shows you like most of the ai experience were getting especially from the big model companies have been very like cleaned up dude asking my my ketchup boutique controversial questions all the time like yeah like it and it's like it refuses can't answer and sometimes i ask it things where like asking on a like like first example i i love history and i'll like if i'm reading about world war two i'll ask it about very sensitive topic but i'll just like explain to me this topic but i'll be like but anyway it it won't even touch some of these things yeah exactly and and you know that's a 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 safety and and for like moral clauses how much of that is is even like globally applicable versus like what's moral for one one one culture maybe immoral for another etcetera and and i think it's interesting to see rock it's crazy not like completely una unfiltered but like it is a lot more pushing of the boundaries right so i had never heard of i don't think there's yeah yeah yeah no i mean you should try today like like i try like the un like i was trying to learn about the israel palestine sign conflict like i'm just trying to understand the background and like chat won't even like touch some of the topics and i'm like just trying to learn controversial like exactly yeah like and and so i think that's that's gonna be really interesting win when you start to see like people really push the boundaries i mean you know they say a lot of great tech is like always always pioneered for like the the sal installations the black market you know i mean silk road type stuff right and and so like what it what does that look like in the ai era well you're the man i appreciate your your insight i like i i enjoyed this this it's fun because you have a a really interesting perspective you're a young guy but you've been in the game for like so long and you have such breath because of the size of your company and so it's really cool to just see your thinking and how you how you are gonna like somewhat predict the future and and and all that stuff but dude to your bad i i appreciate you doing this oh thank you really enjoy taking of the combo and have haven't to chat any anytime bud alright that's it that's a pod well alright my friends i have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit and it's hosted by luis and fo ka after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like red bull and orange theory fitness and fans are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're gonna hear him share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit so you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcast