SPEAKER_00: this whole thing is i've i've done all of it and i have a lot of pride in that and part of this of thinking that this is even feasible and really why i reached out is that you have talked about this of like era of the solopreneur and it could be you know there are always brilliant engineer types who would then dabble in the marketing side and put together their own thing i don't think there's a lot of examples of a marketing or like business side exact growth exact yeah doing the

SPEAKER_05: code no this is this is going to be the revolution this week in startups is brought to you by linkedin jobs a business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters post your first job for free at linkedin.com twist squarespace turn your idea into a new website go to squarespace.com twist for a free trial when you are ready to launch use offer code twist to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain and northwest registered agent will form your company fast give you the documents you need to open a business bank account and more visit northwestregisteredagent.com twist to get a 60 discount on your next llc all right everybody welcome back to this week and

SPEAKER_10: startups we have an incredible show for you today i met josh moore gosh 15 years ago maybe

SPEAKER_11: when he was the first i believe uh gm of uber in new york city uh which was in the first five cities i think travis launched and the team over there he's uh moved on and become an angel investor run a syndicate and today we're going to talk about his new uh ai startup which is inspired by this meme that's been going around who's going to build the first unicorn with one or two

SPEAKER_10: employees welcome to the program josh thank you so much it's great to be here yeah so uh you were

SPEAKER_18: the first gm of new york city correct yeah so um travis expanded outside of san francisco new york

SPEAKER_00: was the first spot and how that would typically work when they were expanding is launchers would go to a city and sort of set up the basic uh thing there get the first few drivers get the first few riders set up some infrastructure and then hire a gm i was actually i was i was in there within the first year there was a team of three who were brought on right before me and it didn't really work out and all three of them left and they hired a fresh group of three at the end of 2011.

SPEAKER_20: um and i was the gm from that point on and i i heard i don't know if this is true so i'm not

SPEAKER_22: trying to take any credit here but uh at some point travis had told me the the chicago la and new york heads had all seen him on this week in startups that famous episode from 12 or 13 years ago that you can watch now is that true did you see the the this week in startups episode and that's

SPEAKER_18: how you became aware my awareness of uber was actually so i used it when they when they really

SPEAKER_00: first launched here which was like you know spring summer 2011 i tried it out i thought it was cool at the time i was in an e-commerce marketing and ops role i had a bunch of those over the years and frankly i just tried uber and thought it was it was really neat and uh actually the the first time i tried using it was for an airport run at like 4 4 a.m or so and it actually didn't work i tried to request a car there were no vehicles available i didn't think much of it but later that day i got a note from them saying hey we saw you tried to use uber and it didn't work you know here's 10 bucks for the next time even though that feels like a typical like interaction now um at the time it did not feel typical at all it was like sort of it was sort of amazing i was like how did you i didn't even use your i just opened the app i looked i didn't see any cars i didn't use it um so that was cool like okay there's something interesting here and then a friend of mine you know five months later was like hey they're looking for a gm the job listing was really excited it was like unlimited suv rides you'll ride around like a european diplomat and it was just like at that point i think um like startup equity you know employee equity all that stuff was really not on my radar like i wasn't really educated on that i was more after something that i knew i would

SPEAKER_20: enjoy i was very interested in an opportunity to sort of be the head of of something of kind of like a startup within a startup um and it just sounded like something i would really love coming into work every day um and that is what it was and so when i when i applied i didn't know who travis was i knew who ryan graves was when i got to san francisco i met travis of course and that night like in the you know like after that experience i looked him up and tried to learn everything i could

SPEAKER_18: about him and that is when i saw ah you do your due diligence got it you know what i found about travis is that you know right away i got to know him i i've probably spoken to him on the phone um

SPEAKER_20: you know while i was in the role there we probably had a hundred phone calls over the five years maybe

SPEAKER_00: a little more zero of them were scheduled this is a guy who is who is so uh dialed in on the details of everything under him you know so there was that aspect of his leadership and also that he really encouraged me to be me and be myself and kind of lean into the way i am and kind of my intensity and the way i go about doing things he made me feel really good about that uh and so it was a really really amazing uh experience so even though he wasn't totally on my radar when i got there

SPEAKER_20: he was he was my boss and we spoke all the time and it was a real pleasure so a lot has been made

SPEAKER_14: about his management style and this distributed management style so putting aside press nonsense but just looking at from the inside this distributed leadership architecture that he set up which i think most people would probably think he's doing a cloud kitchens right now who knows since he doesn't talk

SPEAKER_11: about it and it's very much under the radar but maybe you could talk about how the edges and

SPEAKER_30: individuals had a lot of autonomy and then just generally what was his management style like yeah

SPEAKER_20: it was in some ways like remote before there was remote um because most of the employees at uber were not in this in the san francisco office you know the new york was like uh like a hub i mean we had a

SPEAKER_00: big office by the end but it but it grew more slowly than uber globally and so it always had a tight feel and so i think maintaining the startup feeling on the city level was part of it and really finding a gm in each place who can be like mini ceo is the way he would talk about it at the time and really represent him and represent uber when he couldn't be there so a big part of the job particularly

SPEAKER_20: after the first little while was dealing with regulators dealing with the press a lot of kind of

SPEAKER_00: local things so i think you know took a lot of trust they spent a lot of time finding the right person i would like to think that in new york they probably had a lot of options i think in minneapolis they probably have fewer um as we sort of went down to the smaller cities it became harder and harder to find those people but the gm crew i think because it was really the best they could find in every city uh made for a pretty special group and the folks that i'm still in touch with from uber many of them were gms alongside me in those early days yeah so um we'll get to your new app in

SPEAKER_22: just a moment one or two more questions uh new york was uh one of the most vibrant and challenging markets uh if my memory serves me correctly and i remember one day talking to travis because i see the headline uh de blasio is gonna cap the number of ubers and i said hey dk what are we gonna do here and uh he said i'll wait for it and he sent me like a screenshot of something and it was de blasio's phone number yeah the de blasio view right the de blasio view so explain and de blasio i think it turned out worst mayor in new york history since dinkins and that's a pretty low benchmark to hit i love talking to new yorkers well no i mean de blasio was an incompetent fool you know uh

SPEAKER_42: explain the de blasio relationship and explain your reaction and where did this idea come from and when travis says hey i'm assuming travis came up with this idea whoever came up with it you are the gm did you come up with that idea and then how did this go over internally externally

SPEAKER_18: take us to that moment yeah so if i'm just gonna i i just want to set the the scene i'll spend like less than a minute on this but what you have to do about about uber new york both in the beginning and

SPEAKER_00: still now is that it runs actually a a fundamentally different business than what uber does now everywhere else which i would call like ride sharing ride sharing being i have excess capacity in my car a few hours a day or a few hours a week or really whenever i want and i'll turn on the app and it'll be great in new york that system doesn't actually exist it is the black car system uh set up by ed koch who is mayor before dickens and this is in the 1980s where you know taxis were great for menhattan but they needed a system that would work both for kind of executives who wanted pickups at their office but also folks uh like us who grew up in the boroughs and so uber has always operated within an infrastructure and a rule system that has existed for decades it it was not it never tried to do the ride sharing which was the true innovation of uber it never tried that in new york so as a result from the very beginning we were kind of you know at least from the regulator's standpoint we were kind of like good little kids who filled out all the forms right and were kind of more responsive to them maybe than the average car base owner that was sort of operating in that system at the time so it was never the regulators that had a problem it was the politicians so there was a few different attempts de blasio's first attempt was in like early 2015 to try to pass rules that said the city had a right to review app updates right like that's a crazy one we definitely don't want them to look at code you know um eventually they sort of figured out the way to do it was to limit the growth of supply so not let any new drivers join the taxi limousine system uh that would then join uber and so it was sort of saying no more supply and the the challenge with this is that it's actually a death sentence but it's very hard to make people out in the world understand that so at this point we're getting 25 000 new riders every week we're loading a thousand new drivers every week like we are really going for it and this law comes out this is roughly a proposed law in july of 2015 saying no more new cars and i think to the casual observer that was like okay well what's the big deal about that you'll just sort of not you have a great business already it's already quite large we'll just you'll just stop adding cars for a bit the sort of nuance people didn't get and i'll get to the thing that you asked about in a second is that actually if you reduce supply the system becomes unreliable and no one will will want to use it anymore like we have to add supply to keep up with demand so the winning you know and and we did a bunch of things we tried to explain it in all different ways the winning idea came from someone on the comms team who was stationed in new york and her idea was to have a de blasio view so at this point in the app you'd sort of have a little slider at the bottom that you would choose uber x uber black whatever and there was one for de blasio and you would go to the de blasio view and it would you all the cars on the map would disappear and it would say eta 15 minutes because we sort of just thought you know the eta's at that point were like two minutes and that is actually what would happen it would make a lot of surge pricing the price would go up eta's would go down it would make the system unreliable and the whole premise of uber is a reliable ride you know at that right and so it was a big deal and it was like you know 21 days in july that were probably the most intense of my of my working life and it was like going on cnbc every day talking about the like newspapers every day getting them on board and it was not just me there was like 50 people who worked really hard to get this done and i think we just made the case and we won like they pulled it back they would end up returning in 2018 under a different type of uber with no travis with no me with no a lot of people and then they would actually get through some version

SPEAKER_54: of those rules but in the three years between those i mean it's a game changer i think they probably 10x

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SPEAKER_22: apply when you look at the recent performance the question was always uh can uber ever be profitable is it always going to be unprofitable and you're smiling i'm smiling because in the beginning people don't know the lincoln town car business was wildly profitable yeah uber x well we're going down market we're trying to get more people to download the app yeah so there were some incentives and yeah you're in a dog fight to get drivers so yeah you want to give them an extra hundred bucks if they hit x number of rides but it was very clear that once the habit was formed it didn't matter if an uber

SPEAKER_14: was eight nine ten or eleven dollars to ninety whatever percent of consumers yeah i think that's

SPEAKER_20: right i mean i'm obviously so happy for the folks there now and for dara and for anyone smart enough to still be holding shares which uh admittedly i am not but yeah i mean i think they kind of worked it out um and it's really wonderful to see um and i use uber a lot here and it's great it works great um and i don't notice the few bucks and and a lot of you know here the unit economics even though we

SPEAKER_00: call it uber x because it's that licensed scheme that i talked about earlier and not ride share and uber is not doing their like excess insurance umbrella because it's not ride share and the drivers are by and large full-time guys the unit economics very different in new york and like new york has always been a pretty good business just like structurally but i know but in the ride share places where the competition with lyft and others was particularly you know aggressive it wasn't making much money i think it was always sort of like structurally this can make money we are choosing not to now so i never really believed like it'll never be profitable it's like there's profit on every ride it is how uber chooses to spend that that will change the direction yeah it was just so weird

SPEAKER_22: to see journalists pile on and just this even cnbc talking as i remember i was on with deirdre bosa

SPEAKER_14: or something at some point and i just i said to deirdre they did a billion rides this is when like we were at a billion rides a year or something i said i did a billion rides lost a billion dollars whatever it is or you know lost four billion dollars uh you rate you do two billion rides next year you raise the price is two dollars all of a sudden you know this thing is going to be a money printing machine and of course here we are they raise the prices you know whatever 20 30 percent you get the economies of scale and here we are and then lyft of course you know being incompetent um you know

SPEAKER_71: it was always the greatest gift i think uber ever had yeah i mean they weren't always incompetent

SPEAKER_20: and i don't pay attention that much but i read like headlines about a misspeak on an earnings call like that sent the stock soaring and then back down to earth like that's like pretty much that was

SPEAKER_00: perhaps indicative of general things going on there but i really have no idea yeah no i just i and then

SPEAKER_77: finally surge pricing you see it's coming to wendy's i did see finally you can get a chicken sandwich for twice as much but not wait in line yeah i mean i don't know i don't know if you've seen this but

SPEAKER_00: they're like in buses in new york on the side of buses it'll be like this bus never has search pricing and like in taxis the taxi screens will say never have search pricing it like became such a flashpoint um and i think like you know i think we probably could have done a better job explaining it i think what someone said to me the problem with you uber people is you think everyone has a degree in math and economics and i think like there is some degree of fair to that we were talking to people the way we wanted to be spoken to and i think particularly in those very early years you know new year's eve we would do like a math equation on the thing and people are dropping they're like you uber guys i don't know what you're talking about but i'm going to do it and then get charged a couple hundred bucks or something they thought would cost 20 bucks like you can understand why people were pissed and i think it took a couple years of iterating but i i do think particularly when we just show you the rate in in the beginning this this ride will cost 80 do you want it that's probably the end point that's the best way to do it yeah but it's a thing that people just weren't used to but are used to it um whether they realize it or not and things like airfare and hotels and restaurants on valentine's day and all all these sorts of things so and tell us we have tickets and stubhub generally i don't think i bought a ticket at face value despite my best efforts in years so i mean it's perma it's right

SPEAKER_22: now we're on perma surge pricing for tickets that cartel has just destroyed it all you know are your kids into livia rodrigo no they're not particularly into any specific artists but i mean it was impossible to get tickets for that yeah my 14 year old's really into billy joel so it's like my favorite artist growing up or one of them dire strength billy joel bob every month he's doing a gig at the garden i know and he's going to end his thing in july i think so i'm going to try to take her to one of

SPEAKER_42: the final shows and definitely should if anybody in my audience knows billy joel or his like non-profit or something i got to do like a couple of donations a year anyway somebody put me in touch with that i would just love to introduce him to my daughter and be a hero and just say thank you to him for 30 seconds take a quick selfie and get the hell out of there but maybe i could you know donate to his he's got to have a charity for something i think you've gotten good dad stuff

SPEAKER_54: over the years like for the kids they probably think you're all right you know my daughter my

SPEAKER_22: daughters think i'm cool yeah they also make fun of me because of the podcast they're like oh you're doing your podcast right and so i started doing a daddy daughter podcast with my two eight-year-olds

SPEAKER_75: um yeah it's pretty funny if you can find the daddy daughter podcast there's one episode out on spotify right now but i haven't tweeted it or anything i just put it out there just to i'll tell my kids

SPEAKER_20: that or i'll be buying a second and third you know microphone pretty soon you know what my philosophy

SPEAKER_22: of the debt for the daddy daughter podcast was to just take out my phone put on the voice recorder

SPEAKER_14: and then ask them about one topic school being twins food whatever and then i just hold the iphone towards whoever's talking and i'm like training them to not over talk over each other and great all right listen you are watching this ai uh craziness happen you've worked at one of the great startups uh in history and you decide i want to create my own startup but i want to do it with this i want to actually write the code or be the developer and you email me and i was like well that's rad uh yeah build the product yourself cool so why don't you tell us a little bit about your

SPEAKER_22: philosophy of building this startup wave and ai know taking out and then just show it to us yeah sure

SPEAKER_54: i mean you know i've always been developer adjacent no one's ever paid me to code before but working

SPEAKER_00: at startups particularly in like e-commerce not like a little bit at uber but mostly the other jobs that i've kind of done over the years i've been near engineers and i think i've always had a bit of uh like envy and the reason for that is i always felt like they are the ones with their hands on the thing doing the thing and particularly in startups and there's not that many people and everyone is rather self-driven there's decision making there about what to build how to build it that i always have kind of envy like i can weigh in i can write a memo whatever but actually doing it you know is a different thing and so i've taken a bunch of like you know udemy classes like youtube things over the years and i've had little like little increments of getting somewhere but really never actually getting there um it's a cliche but when chat gpt the very first one the the sort of original in like november 2022 came out the first thing i started doing is asking questions about about the code like hey i'm trying to make a website in next js how does this work and found that it was a very it really worked well for me as like a question and answer how does this work how do i do it and it'll answer right away a bunch of questions i was probably asking to engineers that i worked with you know maybe one a day or one a week now i can do like one a minute and just start like really mainlining information and not only that but i also found that it actually could help me write the code itself like not just teach me but actually pair with me and i can kind of guide it um you know like engineering is taking a problem and breaking it up into the tiniest increments and solving each increment and putting it together and you have it right and so it was sort of like okay this thing can help me like build magical things and so i'll put a pin in that you know for for one second like around this time you know ai it's a big ai moment i was kind of like into deep learning and learning about that five or ten years ago it's and i always sort of thought it would like they'll never actually call this ai it's deep but anyway like ai is the thing in this ai era i found there's sort of all these demos coming out all the time very cool demos but there's many of them or most of them are either web-based or they're sort of demo-ish in nature like install this docker container and then run this like python script and then it'll do the magic thing there's like all these ways to like very sort of artificially generate the like magic in an environment but like i i believe that life's most important moments happen away from your desk and that most normals are not at a computer all day and they're not on twitter and reading about ai and trying the demos and it's like what is the ai that my 70 year old dad is going to use you know and so there is no and similarly there's no shortage of ways even then but especially now there's no shortage of ways to record your zoom and record your meet and record your your you know hangout and teams and all this but like just very little for the real world that's more than just a demo a proof of content like what what would it look like if i made a an audio recording app and just like got feedback and just started adding features that people say and and sort of um intuiting things like huh it seems like if i do all the like transcription on the phone it'll take too long like what do i do like oh servers like i didn't really know about that like i knew the word but i didn't really know how it worked oh cloud functions i'll learn how to do that and so it's sort of been like a walkabout of trying to figure stuff out with brute force i have two kids i have a like a semi-busy life with them i love working remotely and so the idea was like okay like wouldn't it be fun to see how far can i get this on my own before it you know without without hiring you know i i could easily drive this off the rails hire a bunch of people maybe raise money maybe not like do a whole thing but like what about just like tying my hands and like just saying i'll only do what i can do personally and so i made a few different little like mini apps and this is the one that people were interested in i think the real clicking point for me was when my dad brought it to a doctor's appointment and recorded it and then got a summary of what was discussed and that that was much deeper just in the moment things happen and it's good to record and so yeah it was like okay like let me do audio recording and then i added phone call so you can kind of like make a phone call through the app and it records the phone call or maybe i'll import podcasts i can import you into the app and get a summary there like okay people want to share out of the app how should we do it we'll share it in notion and we'll share to like a web url and just sort of like really just kind of having a good time and it and i like to say like skyscrapers look like holes in the ground for a very long time and then suddenly they start to shoot up and not that this will be a skyscraper but i i have found like it started really small and people in my life were like oh it's josh's little like retirement project i was like well actually like i'm taking this really seriously and i'm working full time on it and people who live with me know that i'm like going josh moore style on this like i'm just turning it up to 12 and like hammering on this until it's good enough and found some friends who would humor me and like tried and just sort of polish and polish and you know rebuild and rebuild and rebuild until it kind of it kind of works and now um it's the subscriber volume is like roughly doubling every month it's really kind of insane uh and the most exciting thing i think i've ever done even more than uber uh because it's like it's just me it's like me versus the world and i have all these customers and if they chat in the app it goes to my phone it's just like a very there is for the first time nothing standing between me and consumers of the thing that i'm building and that is uh for me at this point in my life a very good feeling and

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SPEAKER_03: website or domain purchase that's squarespace.com twist let's demo it let's take a look at what you

SPEAKER_81: built here yeah and if you're listening at home and not seeing the video basically you're looking at a screen that says all

SPEAKER_00: recordings all waves and each row is sort of like in a traditional apple style uh with summary so i'll just start to record and this could be i am doing a brain dump uh or i'm in a meeting i actually in preparation for this podcast i was taking a walk somewhere and i recorded about 10 minutes of myself giving my bio and then at the end got a summary of that and sent it over to you guys um so i've been speaking for about it'll be almost about 30 seconds if you're watching the video you see like a uh like an indicator or wave that there is sound coming out and when i'm done i'll just press stop and it'll transcribe this in the cloud um rather quickly and then it will summarize it and so there is the transcription right there and then we'll probably have a summary in about 10 or 15 seconds um this will be like gbt4 style so it's up the speaker discusses their use of recording feature possibly within an app or device or capture their thoughts or conduct a brain dump the summary goes on a bit it's on the screen now if you want to check out the video but you know that was a 20 second then i can listen to it i can share it either in a url or a notion or i can do some changes to the format or i could even change the language let's say i want to send this to someone in uh any you know in italian um it'll reprocess the summary and transcription in a you know in italian so uh you know um what are people using this for uh it is a lot of meetings meetings not on zoom but sort of in their office i have a guy recording all his sermons at church so here is the summary that i just did a second ago in uh it's in italian now if that's useful so um that's it and basically just to give you uh some call idea seems

SPEAKER_14: like the killer one is that what people are buying it for because i know sometimes you want to record

SPEAKER_22: a call and you know you just want to make a quick phone call record it and share it um and then

SPEAKER_14: obviously depending on the state you're in could be two-party consent could be one party consent i remember in new york as a journalist i believe it was one party consent so we could record calls without a problem yeah i mean we're talking to people yeah and look it should go without saying

SPEAKER_00: that anyone using this anywhere should be be aware of the local laws and it is not intended to be a secret um so for recording phone calls you know you can't actually like in the phone app if you're using the phone app on your iphone there isn't actually a way to record a phone call so what this does is it's a uh redirect first you basically verify your phone number so that we know that it's you and then you make a call through the app and what that does is it calls you first you pick up and it says now connecting and it calls the other recipient with with your phone number as the id so to them it feels like a normal phone call and to you they redirect the phone feature is is a big one it's not most of the of the action i think it's poorly marketed and frankly a bit clunky uh people will make a phone call and then press the red button like and why not like the red button is right there so there's like

Chamath Palihapitiya: and then they'll stop the call by hitting the red button kind of screwed up so you know i'm doing

SPEAKER_00: roughly at this point about 15 000 minutes a day and i'd say you know 500 of them are phone minutes and that's so it's still pretty small but it is growing as a segment faster than the than the overall thing so it's sort of like when we started uber x like you know we're still we still love the main uber but we introduced something new because people might want to try that um and then you know you could put it into folders and there's all sorts of settings you can do and all this um and that's it and you

SPEAKER_136: got 200 people to pay for this already and you're at a hundred thousand in arr already oh yeah that's

SPEAKER_139: when i that's when i pinged you last week so i'm actually at 130 arr now and i've got 500 paid

SPEAKER_00: subscribers it is roughly doubling every month so the numbers are feeling uh fun and silly almost

SPEAKER_14: able to cover your salary i mean a couple more doublings and you have hired a developer or if you are using you know non-us developers you've already hired two or three so congratulations

SPEAKER_00: you know to be honest of all the parts of it and again i came up in a marketing and ops background i started selling on ebay in 1998 from a computer at my high school in a computer science seminar that i wasn't paying attention to so i sort of like right turned when i was on the computer engineer path and sort of right turned into marketing but i think this actually might be where i'm going to be for the long haul so i don't know that i'm gonna hire someone i have so far every bit of code like this whole thing is i i've i've done all of it and i have a lot of pride in that and part of this of thinking that this is even feasible and really why i reached out is that you have talked about this of like yeah many times era of the solopreneur and it could be you know there were always brilliant engineer types who would then dabble in the marketing side and put together their own thing i don't think there's a lot of examples of a marketing or like business side exact growth exact

SPEAKER_03: yeah doing the code no this is this is going to be the revolution is if a business person doesn't have to find the developer um they can and you know and and this did happen with figma envision

SPEAKER_11: uh balsamic before that you know you'd have a business person learn how to make mock-ups then they learn to make clickable mock-ups then they you know did web flow uh or bubble uh you know whatever and they and they learned how to do a no code solution and now hey here we are dipping

SPEAKER_22: into actual code and in your estimation how many months have you been coding with this so i started

SPEAKER_20: i showed the first demo to someone who gave me real positive feedback i'll never forget at the

SPEAKER_22: end of april perfect so you're 10 months in in the 10 months how have the co-pilots advanced if at all and what do you see in terms of you know things you tried to do 10 months ago that maybe did

SPEAKER_14: or didn't work and they might be working now or just how refined they are i don't know if you're using replit or github copilot what are you what are you using as a stack and then how has it advanced

SPEAKER_18: yeah so i mean i think there's this idea that like ai will flow like electricity and that metaphor did

SPEAKER_00: not resonate with me until the last couple years because it really that that is actually the perfect metaphor um and it does flow like electricity so it's it's in the chat apps but it's also now wired into your vs code there's a github version there's the just the standard llm from open ai that kind of feeds in there's all these good ways to do it so i think one big change is both the models have gotten better i started doing this on gpt 3.5 and there have been a few different iterations of gpt4 the longer windows like you being able to put more information into the chat or into whatever you're using is a big one that actually makes this app possible drop two hours or three hours or four hours of spoken audio as language into the thing and it'll work whereas before i'd have to like chunk it up so there have been a bunch of improvements on the models themselves and as you pointed out you know it's it's better the the electricity is flowing more now so it's in your vs code it's in your it's it's really everywhere it's in my email it's in the app so now it's starting to get to all the places and um you know it's it does make things easier but i think that's sort of the vision it's it's not like you're gonna wake up and the robot is gonna make you eggs for breakfast it's more that ai can touch your life in a hundred different ways and make it marginally easier and really that is how computers have been for years and decades but it's like step of that it's just like it being everywhere it guessing the next word it's spell checking you now it's summarizing your email

SPEAKER_22: and i don't know if you saw a roll from superhuman what he released yesterday but

SPEAKER_14: now he's got superhuman pre-writing replies to your emails as they come in so when you open your email

SPEAKER_149: box it says oh hey josh we'd love for you to do a keynote at uh you know whatever conference web developer conference 2024 and it has interested not interested um tell me more or something and

SPEAKER_22: so you hit like interested it's like oh that sounds great and it but it's doing it based on how you've responded to those previous emails before so it's now created an llm so if you frequently say you know

SPEAKER_14: what i only do paid speaking gigs please talk to jamie calacanis my brother who manages that for me you know he's cc'd above it will do that right it's awesome so here we go and did you see the note yesterday about which company was it that did uh clarna oh yeah it was clarna explain that i mean you

SPEAKER_20: know i think that so one of the original ideas that i didn't do because i wanted to do wave was to try

SPEAKER_00: to so it was pretty obvious like customer support is such a it's been an obvious use case since the beginning um but you would expect big companies to work it out before small ones but one idea was like do an agent on top of shopify and i had something working where you could like chat with it like where's my order it's like which of these orders that are you talking about like that you know that you placed over the last year like this you know giving it enough information that it could do that and then i just sort of like doing this instead but i think the customer support one totally like it's gonna be so many questions are just repeats like so it's just the art of answering the same 30

SPEAKER_54: things again and again but with fresh energy and i think you know that's a layup for this stuff i think

SPEAKER_22: according to the statistics it was getting the ai based uh customer support was getting higher ratings than the humans and the calls went from like 11 minutes to three so not only was it replacing the

SPEAKER_14: humans it was doing a better job and solving people's problems in less time it's like it always

SPEAKER_00: spells right it's it's it's awake all the time so i'm gonna be moved like wave right now if you chat sport in the app it goes to me it's a push notification on my phone or it like rings on my computer and that's been invaluable because talking to people is how i know about bugs and about what they want but there will be a point where the system that i use has an ai version where it looks at everything you've ever said and it starts to generate answers and you could build up some actions like reprocess a recording i could give it that sort of that ability um but i'm gonna do that because i would much rather pay you know intercom a dollar a ticket than hire someone not just because the quality might be better but because it's just low drama you know like it's just it's uh it's a simpler thing i don't uh i think part of the moment for me in my life and the itch that i'm that i'm scratching and i know most people don't operate this way but it's like there is something truly liberating about depending on no one totally i love the teams that i've built i've loved i've like loved working with folks and i know i'll do that again but for this moment in my life it's a it's a perfect fit to just go solo and that even means support so it'll be me or the robots i think for for a while i think that

SPEAKER_22: was joe rogan's like original thing he loved about doing his podcast he said i do my podcast with one

SPEAKER_14: person i just turn on the cameras i record it i don't edit it so he specifically was like we're just not going to edit this thing we're just going to publish it as is you like you don't i'm going to

SPEAKER_149: read the ads live done i mean of course it's gotten more sophisticated since then yeah and i think you

SPEAKER_00: know to your point you know this is not uh a big trend yet but i i do kind of think you'll see more artisanship on the internet you know i think you need big companies for certain things but i think the ability to kind of home grow something put it out into the world with a small group of people it's just never been easier and not just ai but all the tooling for building things is better like it's easier to make apps this wasn't the first time in my life i thought boy i'd like to learn how to make apps like i tried in 2009 way too hard way too hard i tried in 2015 getting better but still couldn't do it and now i'm doing it now and part of that it's not just the ai it's that the frameworks and the tooling and the languages and documentation and the communities on the internet that work with that stuff have exploded so that's also easier to find people doing this you know um something that's kind of cool like engineering world changes fast you know the way you might write an iphone app will change year to year the different sort of inputs there so the ai models don't always have a very good grasp on that because they're you know they might have only learned up to last april and things that happen since then but there's a community of people who do this stuff for real and getting involved with that has been really fun too just like being in the engineer world and kind of where

SPEAKER_149: where do you hang out with those folks online is it discords is it stack overflow is it hacker news

SPEAKER_00: it's twitter i mean i've read hacker news for years but it's mostly twitter i mean youtube a bit too but it's mostly twitter um and i was saying to my wife yesterday it's it's a a little bit like getting into a really awesome show at season five so you're watching season one and two you don't have to wait for season three it's already out there and season four and so like the things you know different technologies that have come out over the last couple of years i have the times run into problems that those technologies solve and i have to wait i'm like i have the problem and they're like oh yes this thing that like the react people release this year will fix that i'm like excellent so it's

SPEAKER_20: like i'm in super fast mode with that um which is exciting starting a business used to be a pain

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SPEAKER_22: today what percentage of non-developers do you think will be able to pick this up so if developers are

SPEAKER_14: one percent of the population probably something like that how many of the other 99 how many percentage points do you think let's call it in three years three years time we'll be able to do what

SPEAKER_173: you're doing right now i think the numbers might still be small but the each person who does it can

SPEAKER_00: can do more i mean i think what is important i don't want to leave anyone with the impression that we're at a spot now or frankly that i think we'll ever be at a spot where you'll just say like make me an app that does these things and it outputs a perfect thing like that's not there's a whole bunch of reasons why that is technically unlikely it's more about dividing the thing into a million parts and having it solve each part um but i think it's certainly a force multiplier it's it's for me it's been a zero to one because i wasn't an engineer and i suppose now i am so the number will go up it'll make i think if you're a great engineer it can make you a lot better yeah make you make you a hero a superhero yeah for sure i think chat gpt llms generally which are sort of like you could think of them as like fully synthesized views of of the internet you know you're not necessarily going to learn something that you couldn't learn on a web page if you read and had tons of time so it just really makes learning generally more you know easier i was doing some ice skating and my kid was like who invented ice skating and it's like i don't know what did dads do before chat gpt yeah i i i got this

SPEAKER_22: from you too i put it on in the bar the other day yes the the chat i you uh for people who don't know what we're talking about here is uh chat gpt 4's app has a conversation mode and then the iphone 15 has

SPEAKER_14: a smart button on the side here where you're an action button i don't know what they call it but anyway you you can map that button to something i mapped it to open up chat gpt4 and open up the voice dialogue so when my phone is in the cradle while i'm driving safely on autopilot in my model y i could just press that button it comes up and then i start talking to it and for history it's unbelievable to sit there with your daughters and talk about history perfect perfect where'd ice skating

SPEAKER_54: come from like great there's actually a really bunch of really good stories about that and you can learn

SPEAKER_00: anything and so that's magic you know my my seven-year-old will will say they just can you look it up on the you know just sort of look it up but taking for granted that that's a thing but this is like even one level beyond that it's like let's just well you and i are part of the generation that

SPEAKER_22: remembers the time before internet so when you you were born in 1980 or so i'm guessing um which year 1982 82 so you're born in 82 that's when dial-up started 300 1200 mod modems and so when you were 10

SPEAKER_14: years old in 1992 dial-up was in full swing five bucks an hour three bucks an hour and then you remember the internet when you were 15 or 20 happening but you do remember the time before that right

SPEAKER_134: oh yeah i mean shows that are set that are on at a certain time you know yes having four channels

SPEAKER_20: to watch i don't have cable just like cbs nbc fox abc that's it you know going to the video store um

SPEAKER_00: buying cds by buying like records and cassette tapes magazines like yeah magazines having a magazine

SPEAKER_111: subscription it's a whole different thing and i think uh it's a more exciting time i'm glad my kids

SPEAKER_22: can have it here think about this then there was gen z and millennials they only remember the online world now there's our kids who will only remember ai right the chat gpt generation generation gpt this generation

SPEAKER_14: i'm going to name them generation ai uh gen ai like generative this is gen ai the the the generation i've now dubbed it that and that's how it will be so the gen ai generation they are only going to know

SPEAKER_22: talking to llms you know having it write their papers you know having it format data for them i mean it's just their minds are going to be different well they're just going to be formed in a different way that talking to a computer and working in collaboration with a computer it's not like us working with a hammer and a nail for them it's going to be like working with a robot next to them and then they'll be in the next generation will be generation robot and that generation the c3po generation they're going to be insane because they're going to have optimists you know elon or humane's robot and they're going to grow up with one of them in their house so that's going to take

SPEAKER_42: another 15 years 10 15 years but that will happen and then imagine you grew up with a robot yeah you

SPEAKER_111: know before my my older daughter was born in 2014 i used to say as sort of as a joke like she'll never

SPEAKER_20: learn how to drive and she'll never go to college like those will be two things that you know the

SPEAKER_00: cars will drive and the college will be on youtube you know or something like that and the reality is as she is about to turn 10 like i think she probably will both have a driver's license and go to college so things play out maybe slower than i thought but i do know at some time scale like driving certainly not maybe a little sooner for you guys than out here but like the driving thing seems like pretty much a done deal but people still go to universities to learn things at least for

SPEAKER_20: now um and so yeah i don't know but but i absolutely agree like it's a totally different thing and it and it reframes what you have to know you know do i have to remember history like are all the you know is it the same to be able to look something up is that as good as knowing something maybe um it sort of just reframes that like my kids learn math a lot of it and they and they and like reading is a focus in their school uh but uh you know when my fourth grader writes an essay

SPEAKER_00: like she has a school laptop and writes in google docs and her teachers turn off spell check and grammar check when they're writing and then they turn it back on after and read like nice comments write comments in line like boy that's different i mean that's really different um and it's and it's

Chamath Palihapitiya: great because it's more in line with the world so i you know i think they should have they should let

SPEAKER_14: the kids work on their computer sounds like a great strategy there and then i believe all the testing

SPEAKER_22: that occurs and all the paper writing should occur in a proctored room with pens and papers just so your brain can kind of do both things like i remember we had computers towards the you know in high school and then in college but i took a um mechanical drawing class um and i love mechanical drawing you had all these different tools you had a drafting desk and you pin your paper to it and you

SPEAKER_11: had grid paper to rack and my brain is still like loves that concept right um so it's kind of like painting or you know you know cooking or whatever yeah sure you could have your you know we have a gadget that makes like an egg sandwich it's pretty hilarious you put like two english muffins into this

SPEAKER_13: like stackable thing girls love it but you gotta also learn how to make a perfect omelet french omelet

SPEAKER_11: like teach your kids how to make a french omelet perfect josh amazing where can people download this and give you a couple shackles for it and uh keep your progress going uh you can find it in the app store

SPEAKER_154: if you search for wave ai wave ai now not raising funding you wouldn't have anything to do with the

SPEAKER_00: funding i don't think so yeah no i mean i don't i don't take a salary i'm just kind of trying to grow this because i can i think taking funding means well i'll just leave on the last note the one of the magic elements of working alone is that the bar for success is just practically speaking much lower like for example if i if i i sort of socialize to friends like if i can get this to a 100k mrr like monthly recurring revenue that i would do that as such an outsized success it would more than cover my life i would like for venture scale that's like that's a failure so it's sort of like i'm keeping the bar low for myself because i don't want to work with other people for now i want to do this alone and so it's uh yeah and the website is waveapp.ai though it's going to be wave.co probably by the time

SPEAKER_174: this is out so oh you know before this comes out get a dot tech domain that's the new hotness

SPEAKER_14: is it dot tech you should take a look at it because i just got a couple of good domains for 12 bucks

SPEAKER_03: um and um that kid was making that little robot rabbit device that took over ces he was on the pod

SPEAKER_220: he's using a dot tech a lot of people are starting to grab those yeah dot ai has been a huge forget

SPEAKER_14: it those have all been i get 10 people emailing me a month asking me to buy their dot ai collections

SPEAKER_222: and i'm like yeah not for me interesting i'm a dot com guy but i'll settle for dot co's i mean i

SPEAKER_223: have inside.com i own 20.com for a while i sold you have some serious domainage you know i have

SPEAKER_14: actually the one i really want to develop is annotated.com so i had this idea about creating an annotation standard and when we were doing engage on these things like people would write comments but i was like you know i want to be able to highlight a sentence at the new york times or on a gadget right mouse click and then put a comment there and have it live on the web page for other

SPEAKER_22: people who have the notepad on and then i want to be able to share it so i grab the sentence from the new york times i annotate it and then it makes a landing page you know like a little bitly kind of thing and it just says here i took that paragraph and then i write my comment under it and then i can share that with people so i'm just taking a small portion of something or i take a youtube video or a clip so i take a clip from larry david and i say i really like the lighting of this shot and then i say i just give me like seconds 27 to 45 and you know just you set it up so it can only

SPEAKER_03: take 10 seconds of the video man are you busy i'm pretty busy um you know the lifestyle business the billion dollar lifestyle business it's here i think your tip of the spear uh my friend phil

SPEAKER_14: caplan i don't know if you know phil who did distro kid and before that company very famous guy

SPEAKER_22: i used to sure kid i'm uh i'm uh so distro kid is the is the is the billion dollar solo founder that nobody knows about um so it's it's been done already i think by him um but you know these this idea is going to be there and i think this is like the future of employment is make something bespoke

SPEAKER_14: and amazing like maybe you like sourdough bread right i'm just picking something crazy and you make an app for sourdough bread now i would never fund an app as an investor for sourdough bread that's not going to get to a billion dollars in revenue that's not going to be uber or robin or com

SPEAKER_136: but the sourdough bread app could have a hundred thousand members easily around the world who are

SPEAKER_14: obsessed with sourdough and bread making and charge 10 bucks a month 10 000 people i don't know how many

SPEAKER_234: could you get that that's really how the internet should work that's like the promise of the internet i think it's being able to just do your thing get out there get the dish no bread baking app you

SPEAKER_22: you couldn't get a developer to work on it but if you are the baker and you learn how to code and

SPEAKER_03: now you've got this bread baking app and it's a hundred bucks a year 10 bucks a month man there there's 10 000 people who sign up for that and it's gonna make a lot more than your bakery

SPEAKER_20: and the bread will probably be better than what you get at the supermarket 100 100 100 yeah it's an

SPEAKER_03: exciting time and i appreciate exciting time great time to be alive all right brother i'll talk to you soon uh and everybody go download the app and play with it give them uh some customer support requests

SPEAKER_22: oh the one i have for you yes please anthony at squarespace um created a note-taking app that i loved was addicted to for a long time you would open the note-taking app you type your note and you'd swipe up and the note would disappear there was nothing in the app the app was just empty it was a piece of paper and then it would email you whatever you wrote in it that's pretty good it was pretty genius so with yours if imagine if every time you saved it it emailed you the transcript and everything now you got it in your email or it put it into a slack room boom with your notes or made a notion page automatically you said you had notion integration or coda integration and do you can

SPEAKER_00: share the notion it does all the like formatting which is actually not easy but it should be automatic

SPEAKER_22: so you mean just like every single one just go yes absolutely absolutely it should just put it into

SPEAKER_03: notion you tell it which group you want to put it in and it or it just makes its own wave ai one and

SPEAKER_00: just right now you have a choice of making your own but the idea of having things automatically share every time is a good idea i i don't do that yet that's a good one because then if i put it there then

SPEAKER_14: i get all the features of notion for free or in my case i love coda too so we use both of those i

SPEAKER_248: just looking at coda too it's um equally as good and they each have different specialities but man if

SPEAKER_249: they if it went to both places now i've got two backups and i can edit them i can share them and

SPEAKER_22: then there's all kinds of features there you know like database features or whatever i could use so

SPEAKER_00: check-ass job yeah this is the moment that i relish being alone because if if i had a bunch of people there'd be a discussion should we do the jason idea about the email oh like let's write a memo about it let's talk about it for a while let's think of let's let's debate oh you don't want to do it

SPEAKER_254: this is like should i do it i'm gonna do it and that's it i mean you the notion thing is and coda

SPEAKER_22: those two apps are all the kids in college my understanding is are using these now so they kind of create their own personal space and they just keep all their in there really interesting and then they added ai to all those and so yeah it's pretty cool all right everybody we'll see you next time on this week in startups if you want to see our ai demos uh including this one this week in startups.com

SPEAKER_14: ai every monday sandeep madra and i do our ai thing and uh listen if you listen to the show for so long and you got to the end of this go write a goddamn review on uh apple podcast spotify any of those places or put a comment on the uh youtube give me a thumbs up subscribe all that stuff i haven't begged for that in about 11 years on this podcast but i'm supposed to so here's your insert begging for likes and whatever see y'all next time bye bye