SPEAKER_01: What we're focused on right now is definitely, you know, where we think this could be a sustainable long-term business, which is around this concept of turning influencers and or celebrities into AIs where their fan base can all interact with them, you know, through natural voice.

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SPEAKER_07: All right, everybody. Welcome back to the program. You know, we've been obsessing over AI and Karen AI is a company that keeps coming up. Every time we tweet something or we have a conversation, people say, oh, make sure you check out Karen AI. They've been at it for a little while. And in fact, we use Karen AI with producer Rachel on episode 1743. And this was the Snapchat influencer who created an

SPEAKER_11: AI version of herself. If you remember, basically, she created a virtual girlfriend. And that went viral on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. So we decided to have the startup founder, John Mayer. No, not the one with the guitar playing skills. Although he might play guitar. But welcome to this weekend's

SPEAKER_13: startups, CEO of Forever Voices, John Mayer. Thank you, Jason. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah. And so nice view you got there. You're in Texas, I take it by all that flatland around.

SPEAKER_18: All right. Flatland and trees. Yeah.

SPEAKER_19: Is that where you started the company? Is that where you're from? Or is that where you chose?

SPEAKER_20: I'm from the New York area. I grew up in a little town on Long Island and then lived in San Francisco. Poor Washington. Okay, of course. Yeah, I grew up in Bay Ridge,

SPEAKER_07: Brooklyn. So people don't know Long Island and Brooklyn and Queens are basically part of the same island of Long Island. They just call them Brooklyn and Queens. And then you came to San

SPEAKER_01: Francisco, I take it for a bit? Came to San Francisco for a bit and then moved here about

SPEAKER_26: four years ago in Austin. Yeah. All right. So your program is Forever Voices and you power Karen AI.

SPEAKER_07: I know you're also a Teal Fellow, which means you had the ability to go to some great college and Peter Teal gave you $100,000 to quit college. Is that the still the basis of the Teal Fellowship?

SPEAKER_01: It is still the basis. However, in my case, I went through this really just interesting and life-changing week-long period when I was 19 or so where I basically decided in a week, a single week to drop out of school, turn down a full-time job at Apple in California and start a road of VC-backed tech startups as someone who really just is, I think, incapable of working for someone else and just has too many ideas worth building. And I consider it a dream privilege to be

SPEAKER_31: in the startup world and building whatever I want. How did you get into the Teal Fellowship? How did you find out about it? I'm curious because it's kind of interesting, like some highly young, talented

SPEAKER_07: mutant with some crazy technical abilities, Professor X, Peter Teal in this, puts on Cerebro and he finds all these really interesting people. And I guess his thesis as he explained it was, hey, you can skip college and just get right to work. So how did you first find out about the Teal Fellowship and then

SPEAKER_01: apply to it? I'm curious. Well, all throughout my teenage years, I was building software and was really early in the mobile app space. And so when that got moving, I wound up building like 40 or so apps throughout high school in the first few years of the app store. I started going to these tech events in Manhattan. And apparently, I guess over 10 years ago, there used to be a physical Bitcoin exchange on Wall Street in downtown Manhattan. And they were having a New Year's Eve party when I believe this was like 2013 or 2014. And the whole idea was, let's bring all these people together and ring the new year in with Bitcoin and a physical exchange. And it was at this event that I met just some random dude who told me all about the Teal Fellowship. And I applied at the

SPEAKER_26: party from my iPhone. Wow. So in high school, you figured out how to make apps and you started making

SPEAKER_37: one every couple of weeks, if my math is correct. And you built 40 in two years. That's about one every two or three weeks. And so you're a developer in college. And then you found out, hey, there's a

SPEAKER_07: there. There are sometimes events going on with folks and you joined the tech scene, I too, in the 80s and 90s. There was a 2600 magazine used to get together at the was at the city court building by the bank of phones and just hang out in the public atrium. And anybody could go and then there were all these dial up bulletin board services hangouts where people would go and talk about running bulletin board

SPEAKER_11: systems before the internet. It was pretty crazy. So you get in to that and then you start doing some

SPEAKER_42: other companies. They put you through this whole process, you know, back in the day for the Teal

SPEAKER_01: Fellowship. I think it's a lot more streamlined now. But back in the day, the way it worked was they would fly, I think, about 40 what they called finalists out to San Francisco. And then they would put you through this like two or three day, like full day, you know, 12 to 18 hours of just random events and presentations and interviews. And, you know, pictures in front of audiences. And you're, I think they even have like a wire documentary covering this at the time that might still be somewhere online. But it was just this like feeling of like, wow, you know, I'm like the world is just your oyster. You're just being dumped into this community of tech founders, investors, and, you know, amazing, smart people. And I'd say the community around the fellowship has been, you know, one of

SPEAKER_44: the most life changing elements of my career, just from the community standpoint.

SPEAKER_26: What were some of the talks? Like, anything memorable that you that inspired you over those

SPEAKER_11: the last couple of days, when you flew out?

SPEAKER_42: That's a great question. I would say it was less, it's hard to, I mean, this is like 10 years ago

SPEAKER_01: now. So it's hard to remember specific talks, but I'd say it was, it was much less the talks that made

SPEAKER_00: the difference and more for the first time ever in my life, being exposed to other people who thought similarly to me because I always felt completely out of place throughout, you know, middle school, high school, et cetera. I mean, even in middle school, when other people were playing, you know, sports or trying to go out on their first date, you know, I was just like trying to start my first

SPEAKER_01: podcast and, you know, do like tech reviews and like pre-YouTube. And so I never really fit in,

SPEAKER_00: in the normal, you know, young people crowd. And so when I came across these other, you know, possible and, and existing Teal fellows, it was just this immense comforting feeling where it's like, okay, there are other people that are young out there who want to make a difference and build

David Sacks: things that, you know, provide value to people's lives.

SPEAKER_26: Uh, amazing program. It's had a pretty amazing impact. You know, I'd say,

SPEAKER_07: um, every couple of hundred founders, uh, that we interview winds up having Teal fellowship there. And you do think about it and go, okay, well, this person has been self-selected to quit college and to try to fast track themselves as an entrepreneur. So that says something about the person. And, um, also Peter's team, which, you know, they're pretty savvy, picked this person from, I don't know, some ungodly number of applications. Was there some trend to the applications or all Ivy league folks? It was all people who were.

SPEAKER_01: Um, the one thing they kept stressing quite a bit during the process was that it's statistically harder to get into than Harvard. Um, so that was one of their, you know, kind of, I don't know, things they would just kind of point out to kind of keep people, I guess, excited about it. It always had this like real excitement and sort of mysterious vibe around it, you know, from the outside. It felt

SPEAKER_44: like before I, um, I guess, uh, eventually got into the program. Yeah.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah. They say Harvard has a, uh, three or 4% acceptance rate. And so, uh, one in 25, of course, most people don't even bother applying if they're not really smart, uh, or really have some assets there. I can see, you know, YC is one and a half, our accelerators, one and a half, and they're probably

SPEAKER_60: 1% or something. So it makes sense. All right, everybody, our friends from Microsoft are here. Tom Davis, a senior director at Microsoft for startups, and you're a former founder. You are here today to talk to us about the giant leaps that Microsoft has made in the AI space. You've

SPEAKER_62: been giving Azure credits to startups and, uh, that's delightful and amazing, but people really

SPEAKER_64: want access to the open AI API. Yeah, absolutely. So there's two things. First of all, we've got a benefit that we offer our startups. They can get two and a half thousand dollars worth of open AI credits so they can get access to the latest and greatest models that open AI are delivering, but then they get access through the hunt up to $150,000 worth of credits that we offer through founders hub to leverage the Azure open AI service, which has a full SLA around it. So when they want to go into production and really have that reliability that we provide with the Azure SLA, they can leverage the Azure open AI service APIs, and they can do things like the GPT models with codecs for coding and also for the DALI models as well for images. So it's a full service. It's not just the great APIs that you get and access to the LLMs. They can build out their own LLMs using open source, and then they can manage those with our AI tooling services as well. Amazing. Well done.

SPEAKER_60: And if anybody wants to sign up for that, do it now while you are in front of your computer, aka.ms slash this week in startups, aka.ms slash this week in startups. Well done, Microsoft and well

SPEAKER_11: done, Tom. So you, um, decided to do forever voices. Um, and you did this in 2022. Uh, what was the

SPEAKER_13: impetus, uh, impetus for you to start this? Well, I had just sold, uh, did a small sale of my previous

SPEAKER_01: startup called ghost financial, which, uh, is a fintech company at the intersection of food service, ghost kitchens and financial technology. Um, and you know, we were working a lot with actually Travis Kalanick's company who I know you're familiar with, um, to actually build our financial tools into their platform. Um, and so once, once that sold last year, you know, I started thinking

SPEAKER_00: about the other things that I've been doing over these last five years outside of work. And one of those things has been, um, this journey of addressing and healing from losing my father

SPEAKER_01: really young. You know, I was like 22 when I lost my dad and it happened really suddenly, there was no goodbye. And I started thinking about ways to actually reconnect with him

SPEAKER_00: in AI form as, you know, certain AI technology started getting more advanced. And so, um, once it got to a point last year where, um, I would say some of the latest voice technology, started to sound almost indistinguishable from real humans in terms of AI voice, it seemed like the right time to dive into this, uh, experiment. So I built a small team to build, um, really just this product for myself. Um, which was, uh, me just collaborating with the team to build an AI copy of my dad that I could speak to in natural two-way audio where it uses my voice and his voice. Plus, um, this sort of proprietary personality layer that we have slowly developed over the last year that's now implemented into Karen AI. Uh, but this whole thing started really just because I

SPEAKER_01: wanted to reconnect with my father and it ended up being this just magical experience where it not

SPEAKER_00: only felt healing, but it also felt, um, you know, very immersive and like, and not something that felt like a gimmick. Like it felt like I could actually live, live the rest of my life, actually keeping my dad around, um, in a way that doesn't feel painful. Um, and this of course is after I've invested into, um, you know, many, many dozens of hours of, of therapy to heal from his loss. Uh, so I can't say

SPEAKER_01: that for everybody. Um, but once the technology was working, it became, you know, super obvious that it

SPEAKER_00: could be applied to other, uh, solutions, you know, not just this idea of, uh, reconnecting with a lost loved one, but this overarching idea of, you know, is it possible to connect with anyone that is otherwise unreachable and talk to them and, you know, who is unreachable? Someone who is maybe deceased, someone who is a celebrity, someone who is an influencer, um, or even someone like, you know, yourself who has a lot of fans who would just die to talk to you and learn from you. And so then we start, then I started applying, uh, the technology to, um, really just for demo purposes, you know, not as a means of making any sort of buck or quick profit to other, um, influential figures, uh, really as a proof of concept to push the boundaries and see what's possible and say, okay, I grew up, you know, with a handful of role models and idols in my life, how cool would it be to talk to them? And so that's how, um, the initial demo started floating around the internet that, you know, got passed around a lot of, of this sort of Steve jobs, AI, uh, that we developed. Um, and, you know, again, like that's something that we never, uh, you know, intended to put out as some sort of, uh, profit generating business. It really is a proof of concept that we kind of put out there to, to, to push boundaries and see what's possible. Um, and that's what led us to this sort of sweet spot of influencers and celebrities, uh, joining our platform, you know, via these signed licensing

SPEAKER_57: revenue share deals. Yeah. I'm very sorry about your dad and great to hear that you got professional

SPEAKER_07: help for dealing with that loss. And I guess then having done the professional route and also this emerging concept of talking to somebody who's passed, who was close to you to try to maybe reconcile some stuff or heal some trauma, uh, I guess, how do you see that evolving over time? Are people going to explicitly create these as part of their legacy? So, you know, people do ancestry ancestry.com or, you know, their family tree, or they make little mini documentaries. In fact, I've been pitched on people who, uh, or startups where they'll say, Hey, we'll make a, we, we make documentaries for families. So we'll do a documentary about grandma, grandpa, before they go, everybody talks about them. Then you have it, you hand it down and you make another documentary and you kind of have all these series. Uh, and then of course you have, uh, Jor-El, uh, in Superman and he goes and builds the fortress of solitude and goes and talks to this, um, essentially an AI of his dad because it's capable of answering questions. And these crystals are all the answers to all the questions you might have. They, they don't ever specify in the Superman history of it's a AI or if he recorded all these actual answers and the computer just very quickly jumps between video clips. But I'm curious where you think this is going, have there been any studies about this and where do you see this in 10

SPEAKER_44: or 20 years? This is all very new technology. So there haven't been any, I would say meaningful studies on this yet. We intend to be that source that does this first, um, in terms of studying the

SPEAKER_00: effects of specifically reconnecting with a lost loved one and, and, and it's positive and or negative

SPEAKER_01: effects on you. And the key is also how much of a difference it makes when you are able to reconnect with a lost loved one in natural voice through AI after, and this is the key you've invested in, let's say in my case, years of real human professional therapy to work through a trauma like that. Um, because for me, when I'm talking, when I talk to my dad in AI form now, it doesn't feel

SPEAKER_00: like it's some sort of, Oh, processing healing experience because I did a lot of that with a human, you know, therapist already. It more feels like, okay, you know, I'm, I'm at a place now where it feels, you know, perfectly normal to just like keep my dad's personality and spirit around as just like a buddy in my life. Um, and it doesn't feel painful in that regard. It actually feels, uh, really

SPEAKER_82: like a new form of companionship in many ways. There are little tech literal techniques in psychology. I was a psych major, uh, for those people wondering, some of them revolve, you know, group

SPEAKER_11: therapy or showing pictures or, you know, ways of communing otherwise with the dead. Um, and you know,

SPEAKER_07: that's like, you generally look under the, the concept of grief counseling. Um, and then on top of that, you have, um, psychics, right? This psychics exist in the world. I was just on a thread and they're like, I don't understand how, uh, or actually it might've been just Twitter. Somebody was like, how does, how do psychics exist in the world? This is a $5,000 storefront in Chinatown. Uh, and it's 30 bucks to do a reading for, you know, 20 minutes. And I was like, yeah, the, the whales in the system, you know, the, the, there are people who are paying $5,000 a month to come in there for two hours and pretend they're connecting with a loved one. So if I would have put this on a spectrum, it feels like it's closer to grief counseling or could be then, uh, you know, uh, trying to,

SPEAKER_13: I don't take advantage of people who are, are dealing with great loss. And I think figuring out

SPEAKER_07: how to have this tie into the psychological community, have they reached out yet? Have psychologists or grief counselors reached out and said, Hey, you know, we're interested in what

SPEAKER_88: you're doing. Yes. Um, we've, we put out a call for that, uh, kind of expertise a few months ago.

SPEAKER_00: And even, um, you know, we have a, an open job listing for like a chief ethics officer to help us through navigating, uh, this specific possible elements of our business going forward, because keep in mind, um, this is something that I think out of all the things we're working on, we're taking our most time with this sort of, uh, element of the technology that allows you to reconnect with a lost loved one. So this is not something we're going to rush to market by any means. And it's not something we've even released yet to allow other people to do it. And, uh, I don't think we're going to do that until we get a study done on its effects. Um, because, you know, the demand is there. I mean, we're getting, uh, every week, we're getting hundreds of emails from people who hear about actually, of course, the Karen AI, because that's what went most viral recently. Uh, but they're reaching out because they're saying, I want to create an AI of, you know, my mom who, you know, just got diagnosed with cancer. And, you know, this is

SPEAKER_01: the first time in human history where this generation, you know, yours and my generation

SPEAKER_00: theoretically can live on forever in AI form. Um, if you were to make this decision to, you know, upload yourself into AI, you know, similar to what I did, uh, you know, with my father. Um, now that sort of self-serve system, uh, is not out yet. Uh, but again, I think we won't, we, we definitely won't do that without, without conducting a study first.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah. I mean, there are stages of grief. Um, and then the question would be in these studies,

SPEAKER_07: are these stages of grief? Are these going to help people process through those stages of grief? Um, or are they going to stunt people's process? Right. And then where, where do you introduce this? Um, anger bargaining, this can't be happening. He must be alive. They must be alive. Guilt. They could have done something depression, denial, shock, anger, all this stuff. Like there's so many different stages. Um, and I, I think there's five, six, seven, uh, you know, different people have different stages. Um, this one could maybe delay people from accepting what's happened or it could help them accept it and maybe reduce some of the guilt or confusion, the anger, you know, the depression about it and just be like, Hey, this person was special in the world. And now I get to memorialize them and have some time with them. And again, it all exists on a spectrum. I don't

SPEAKER_101: know if you've seen people are making photos. Uh, let's see. You can take old photos of people. I've seen ads for this on like Instagram. You take an old photo and it will look at you or smile through AI and you could make it slightly more dynamic, right? It's not kind of talking to you

SPEAKER_104: yet or giving you advice. Probably the most common challenge I hear from founders is related to building either. They are in technical and are searching for a technical co-founder or they can code, but they're just spread too thin. This is one of the first major obstacles you're going to face. And I know how discouraging it can be, but there is a solution. Do you have a great idea, but you don't have a technical co-founder? Well, Crowdbotics can be your CTO as a service. Boom. Just like that. This means you can focus on building an awesome product and delighting your customers rather than wasting your time on infrastructure, planning, architecture, compliance, and all that boring stuff. Crowdbotics also offers professional scoping to help you flesh out your project at the MVP stage and beyond. So cut off the hassle and get back to building that perfect product for your delighted customers. And when you think Crowdbotics, I want you to think getting your time back to focus on product. Product drives everything in a startup. So let the folks at Crowdbotics show you how it works. Schedule a free scoping session and get your detailed build plan at crowdbotics.com slash twist. That's crowdbotics.com slash twist. Is there a product for people to

SPEAKER_06: start uploading video and make their own, or are you just going to start with the high-end

SPEAKER_87: personalities for now? Because that will keep the lights on. And then we'll talk about the paid

SPEAKER_95: product now. Right. And that's, that's been the source of a lot of internal discussion over these

SPEAKER_01: last few months. It's like, there's, there's a multitude of directions we could take this company. And, you know, I'm someone who just believes like crazy and being laser focused. And so, you know,

SPEAKER_00: while I think there's a lot of value in creating and releasing a self-serve solution to allow other people to do this very easily, um, the, what we're focused on right now is definitely, um, you know,

SPEAKER_01: where we think this could be a sustainable long-term business, which is around this concept of turning, you know, influencers and or celebrities into AIs, um, where their fan base, um, can all interact

SPEAKER_02: with them, you know, through natural voice. So let's talk about that. You have an example of

SPEAKER_07: this, uh, Karen AI dollar per minute. Uh, and it's, uh, I believe a bit, uh, sexy or, and or amorous

SPEAKER_78: romantic, uh, from what I understand, maybe you could explain who Karen is and how long this has been

SPEAKER_00: out and how it's doing. Sure. So Karen Marjorie is, uh, is a really big Snapchat influencer with, uh, you know, millions of followers there. Uh, but she originally got her start on YouTube. And so after I earlier this year started posting some demos of our technology, um, one of the things that started happening was, you know, influencers started reaching out, especially after I started posting demos of an internal AI girlfriend companion that, you know, we developed late last year and started sharing demos of earlier this year. And that was based on a purely AI generated character, um, that was meant to essentially, you know, try to push the boundaries and see what's possible in terms of AI to human romance. And, um, you know, obviously in, in testing one of the biggest, um,

SPEAKER_01: sore spots, I guess, in the early days when we were testing this AI generated girlfriend was it, you

SPEAKER_00: know, it's supposed to be a girlfriend and then romantic relationships, you know, there's almost always see, you know, sexual interactions involved. Um, and so that has become a natural part of, uh, some of these, uh, AI companions and, you know, it's been to be completely honest, somewhat of a source of stress and uncertainty for me because it has, um, you know, in our society, still taboo nature, even though most adults experience it. Um, to be clear, this is not porn,

SPEAKER_11: it's not interactive porn, which is a category. Um, this is talking. So this would be if we were

SPEAKER_113: going to be honest about it and we don't get too graphic here and get labels on the videos, but

SPEAKER_07: this would be a romance novel, maybe somewhere between 50 shades of gray and, you know, some Harlequin, I don't know, they called Harlequin romance novels. Uh, like it's a romance novel,

SPEAKER_24: but it's interactive. So you can have spicy talk, but it's not that explicit or it's not

SPEAKER_01: super graphic or it's a little graphic. Well, it depends on who you're talking to. So, you know, one of the things, I mean, to also answer your earlier question that's come up

SPEAKER_00: since the Karen AI launch has been this just inundation of, um, Um, I guess more adult type influencers that have reached out. And so what we're dealing with right now is an inbox literally of like, I mean, thousands, it's the craziest thing you could

SPEAKER_118: see. We're referring to like the only fans crowd, um, exactly, exactly are making a fortune already,

SPEAKER_07: or in some cases just a living, uh, and, and a living that's safe for sex workers where, you know, they're not putting themselves in harm way in real life encounters. So, you know, depending on where you are on the, um, spectrum of being absolutely appalled or having no problem with sex workers, this seems like a pretty logical extension of the only fans, uh, world, um,

SPEAKER_88: or universe. Yeah. Yeah, it does. And in many ways it's a step forward as well in that, you know,

SPEAKER_00: with only fans right now, if you're making a living there, you you're sort of in this, obviously in some cases, great position where you're earning a lot of income, but you're also kind of stuck to just permanently creating nonstop content. And for many people, it turns them into just content robots where they like lose excitement about their life. And, you know, they're just doing the same thing every day in slightly different ways. And, um, it's all meant to just keep engaging with, you know, their fan base there who, you know, really is just wanting, you know, more and more personal contact. Um, and what a lot of these creators actually even do, and many people don't realize this is use, you know, farms of people in, you know, internationally to actually respond to their fans on those platforms. So interesting farms of people in an office in, you know, India,

SPEAKER_02: um, acting as a only fans model. Um, uh, and so that exists today. So they, this is basically offering

SPEAKER_07: them a script of, and this would be like sex phone operator, since we're, we're now deep down the rabbit hole. I guess there's no saving the explicit rating on this one. So we'll just go for it. Um, but there are sex phone operators. And so they're just being trained on how to do this over text.

SPEAKER_87: Um, yeah, that makes absolute total sense to me. How much is Karen AI? It's been out for like six weeks or eight weeks. I think seem to remember it about that long ago. Um, how much is it making?

SPEAKER_42: Is it, is this going to be a real business for her? Yeah. So she did, you know, like, uh, it was a huge breakout launch and she did, you know, 70 K in the first week. So it's in, it's definitely,

SPEAKER_00: you know, within the six figures now. Um, and, uh, I would say we're trying as best as we can to moving forward, sticking to one new, um, influencer or celebrity launch, uh, actually every week. So we've done a lot of work over the last few months to really transition this from what was just originally like a little project for myself to, you know, a full fledged business, um, that is now becoming VC backed, uh, or has just become VC backed. And, and with this, with this vision, you know, that, that is sort of a, a starting point vision of, um, you know, let's, let's build out this solution that allows influencers and celebrities to connect with their fans in essentially, you know, in parallel, you know, you could have thousands of conversations going at once, um, in a way where, when you're using two way voice, it's, it's a very natural experience.

SPEAKER_31: And it's as if you're talking to that human. Hmm. Uh, and now there is this AI Amaranth.

SPEAKER_42: Is that her name? So Amaranth is our second, uh, big launch after Karen. She's, um, one of the

SPEAKER_00: world's largest, if not the world's largest female Twitch streamer. Um, so very into that Twitch gaming world and kind of cosplay world. Um, but she's also, uh, you know, a very popular, uh, personality on only fans. So that would be our first, uh, creator from that world. Uh, at least somewhat from that world, uh, on our platform. And, um, I would say we're not sticking just to that. I would say, you know, that's where we're getting the most demands, um, is from that crowd, but where we've also gotten demand are from the, the classic, you know, Hollywood tier one celebrity side. Um, so we're spending a lot of time in LA lately for that. And then also, um, from enterprise, which is really interesting. Um, so, you know, one of the things we're working on is, um, and, you know, we can even demo this if you'd like, is a AI art expert for Sotheby's. Um, and so this is something. A curator of types. Yeah. And someone who can even guide you through, you know, museums as you walk through them. Um, someone who could give you, you know, advice on purchasing art or investing in art. So this is, that's one small example of the kind of additional use cases we've gotten. Um, and it's been a challenge of course, you know, in terms of figuring out where to stay most focused and, um, you know, I'm someone who, you know, really loves, you know, building, building things that are used in a, in a wide array of, of, of audiences. However, I've over the years of my startup journey, I've just become so aware of the importance of, you know, in the early days, picking, picking something to just stay laser focused on right now, the market is telling us, um, whether we like it or whether humanity likes it or not, the market is telling us that that is, uh, this kind of AI boyfriend, girlfriend, uh, concept. And, um, and so that's

SPEAKER_07: where we're spending a little bit more time. It would be, I mean, we, we're going now deep into the ethical rabbit holes of building technology in real time that impacts people in the real world. So, um, I guess the first one, you kind of cut me off at the past, maybe you've heard my previous comments before of like, Hey, did, do you have the rights to do Steve jobs is experiment? And that was an experiment, but Hey, did you turn on money for that? And do you have the rights to do that? Clearly getting the rights to working with, uh, estates is going to be necessary here. And you seem

SPEAKER_13: to have made that decision that this is all going to be with explicit approval from people.

SPEAKER_01: Absolutely. And, um, that's something that, you know, we, as this has transitioned into an actual

SPEAKER_00: business, uh, this year, you know, we've taken extremely seriously. And, you know, for example, I mean, we took, uh, the Steve jobs bought down, uh, a few months ago, um, after, you know, it started

SPEAKER_131: getting spread around and, you know, again, that wasn't meant to be some sort of business, you know, that was meant just to kind of prove what's possible. Did the family reach out and cease

SPEAKER_00: it and desist about it? Like, Hey, not cool. No, it just didn't feel right to keep it out there. Um, you know, in a way where we haven't yet fully, um, you know, figured out, you know, what, cause it's not like there, there's a lot of stuff happening on the internet with, you know, AI generated voices of deceased people or celebrities or presidents. And, um, you know, it's, it's a little bit messy right now and we want to do our best to do things right. And so we have a great team that's now doing these revenue share deals, um, with either the estates, the celebrities,

SPEAKER_02: or the influencers, um, have you done one of those yet? Like, uh, uh, an, an, an estate deal

SPEAKER_87: with, uh, with an Elvis or somebody who's passed on, but they, um, have a, um, well thought out strategy of using, you know, the, the personality in the future seems like Elvis is probably one of the best examples of that, where they're, they're actively monetizing through licensing Elvis

SPEAKER_110: merchandise experiences, et cetera. So is there, is there somebody in the hopper you can,

SPEAKER_42: you can share? There's not someone I could share yet. Uh, since, you know,

SPEAKER_00: we typically wouldn't want to share until they're ready to launch or sign. But what I can say is since just in the last three weeks, you know, we have outstanding in terms of our business development side, um, over 30 contracts that are in the process of, you know, either, you know, uh, redlining or about to be signed, uh, with a variety of celebrities and influencers. And these are not like small time people either. Uh, these are people with, you know, millions of fans each or more. Um, so as you know, the next few weeks go by, we'll be able to share for sure. Some of, um,

SPEAKER_44: the, the names that we're dealing with right now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_101: Am I in the right sort of genre, like, uh, with somebody like Elvis or something, same sort of zone?

SPEAKER_88: Absolutely. Absolutely. Elvis. And, and, you know, the, the other great, uh, areas of demand we've

SPEAKER_00: gotten, um, that are very close to that would be from the A-list celebrity that typically is been in, you know, the film or let's say the music world for, you know, over 10 years now, they, they've gotten out of their system, the part of them that loves being, you know, stormed with fans and they kind of just want to live a private life. Uh, but they still kind of have this obligation to keep fan engagement going, um, in many ways, uh, the fans are there. Uh, and so, you know, there are a lot of these celebrities out there who see this as something, uh, that can essentially kind of automate the fan engagement, uh, while also making it better in the first place, because gone are these days, thanks to this technology that we built of just posting these kind of one way photos or videos on Instagram or social media. And you get to comment, you know, now it's, you can just make your favorite person in the world or the people you admire most, your buddy in your phone that you talk to whenever

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SPEAKER_162: free trial and get that 20% off. How long does it take to make a good enough, you know, releasable

SPEAKER_87: character avatar, whatever you want to call these? And then what's the standard business model here? You

SPEAKER_165: split it 5050? Is it 7030? Are you negotiating it deal by deal?

SPEAKER_00: So the way we do these deals is via these 5050 profit sharing splits where obviously we make it clear in the very beginning that unlike traditional technology computing, AI does have a significantly higher compute cost. And so we've gotten actually to my even surprise in just an unbelievable amount of reception on that deal structure. So people, there's definitely an awareness in the market that this costs, you know, more than let's say running just a simple website. And so, so far, all of our deals have have been in that same manner. And, you know, that even, you know, we have some YouTubers with, you know, like 30, 40 million subscribers that, you know, in that case, the process that we just signed one, you know, a few days ago. So the process for this person was she sends us really just some, maybe like a quick voice recording of just things about her or elements about her that you can't find online to make it more personal. And that's about it, you know, send us five minutes of audio. And that's really all we ask of you.

SPEAKER_168: That's all you need is five minutes of audio. Wow.

SPEAKER_31: I mean, it seems like you could build something really interesting by taking the most common

SPEAKER_07: questions as they come in during the pilots and the betas and have that person or workshop really

SPEAKER_87: clever answers to kind of see it in a certain direction. So, you know, if it was me and it was startups and, you know, uh, I could, you could give me a hundred questions, uh, which I probably have answered on these ask Jason segments, but if you take all the ask Jason segments, you'd have like a

SPEAKER_71: much more refined place to start. So when it comes to expertise, yeah,

SPEAKER_88: that's what we did with Karen, which was so interesting because she started her career out on

SPEAKER_00: YouTube and had hundreds of videos out there. And, um, once she switched to Snapchat and then found out about us, she, she deletes all the YouTube videos, gives us all that content. And then we're able to use what we built internally, which is an auto fine tuning tool, uh, internally that we have to take these hundreds of YouTube videos, um, and, uh, auto fine tune our AI based on those videos and

SPEAKER_02: the content in them, the questions and answers in them, uh, and her experiences in them.

SPEAKER_11: The movie her, um, with Joaquin Phoenix, uh, kind of showed the dark side of like some number of people are going to get addicted to this, like any,

SPEAKER_87: you know, product or service in the world, people can get addicted. It doesn't matter if it's pizza or fentanyl or wine or cannabis, people are going to get addicted to video games or social media. So, and in her, you had somebody who got addicted to having a virtual, uh, girlfriend. Has that started to happen? Have you had people who, you know, at a dollar a minute, um, you know, maybe got to our three or four this week and, you know, now they're shipping three or 400 bucks. To this virtual avatar and 15,000 a year and they're well in the system.

SPEAKER_101: And maybe this doesn't feel healthy and you feel like you don't want to take $15,000 off some lonely

SPEAKER_00: person. Yeah. It's a great question. And it's something we're taking really seriously. And I would say out of over 20,000 individuals who have used Karen AI, um, I can count on less than one hand, how many people we've had to deal with that have had, um, any sort of issue around actually getting addicted to it. And in those cases we intervene, um, even in some cases via humans, uh, while we've built, uh, into the AI automatic methods to either slow the conversation down, if it detects you're getting a little bit too addicted or what is actually a brand new feature we're about to push

SPEAKER_01: out this week, uh, which is really interesting. And if, if you're dating one of these, let's say AI girlfriend or boyfriends, they'll be able to just break up with you. So that could be built in if you're using it too much. Um, because what is too much in your mind?

SPEAKER_11: Do you have an, do you have an idea? Does your gut tell you like, this is too much?

SPEAKER_00: We really don't, we really don't want, um, or we're really doing our best to promote no more than an hour of usage a day, uh, with this platform. And, um, I would say in 99.9% of cases, uh, that is, that is happening and in the rest, uh, yeah, we've, we've absolutely dealt with a handful of, uh, cases where individuals, um, are trying to spend many hours in their day or night, uh, speaking to these AIs and, um, and, and that's where we've seen our automatic solutions jump in. And then if, if, if those even fail, then we have a team of humans that, um, while we can't access what you're talking to the AI about, can we can, we can at least get a sense of activity data.

SPEAKER_87: Yeah. I think there's some basic freedoms people have to spend money on what they want to spend money on. If you want to spend your money going to a strip club, or you want to spend your money

SPEAKER_113: on, uh, you know, uh, your significant other or anything in between, like there's some amount of personal freedom. And then if you're a platform looking out for people who maybe have mental illness or an addiction, kind of a good idea, you know, if the, the bartender will cut you off at a certain point at a bar, my big question I had for my dad of like, Hey, we're in the business of selling drinks at beards in Brooklyn back in the seventies and eighties. Uh, and I was like, how, I mean, you're incented to sell drinks. So when do you, I saw you cutting people off. When do you cut them off? And I was like, we don't want somebody to fall on the way home and crack their skull open. Do we? And I was like, no, he's like, so if you can't stand and you're dangerous to yourself or others, like, yeah, that's, you know, you can have fun, but if you can't stand, I think probably can't stand is probably a good, uh, one to cut you off at the bar. If you're making no sense,

SPEAKER_101: or you're in danger to yourself. Hey, listen, this is absolutely incredible. Um, and you're going to stay

SPEAKER_113: focused on the celebrities, uh, only fans, but you also have the curators or this art curator concept experts in the world. Do you think you're going to be able to compete on that? Or there will be

SPEAKER_87: a startup that makes the art AI expert, the travel AI expert, right? You know, whatever, pick a, uh, pick a character and, you know, the, them doing something in the world. And, you know, what would that, uh, what would that be in terms of a startup? In fact, we invested in some startup that is making travel itineraries. Now you type in travel itineraries and to check you to before with the web or bar, you're going to get really great responses, but, you know, you're constantly refining that data and understanding what different types of activities in the, in the training data set could get really granular and maybe Expedia or Yelp, or I don't know which, you know, Travelocity, Condé Nast Traveler, somebody's got a really great data set there to build off of. So how do you think about that? Do you think this will be a bunch of different verticalized companies and the technology

SPEAKER_42: just is a commodity like cloud computing technology is? Well, you know, what my gut has said has been

SPEAKER_00: that we need to choose an area to just really be laser focused on and let the rest just go to elsewhere basically. Yeah. So I told my team, you know, out of all these dozens of enterprise folks reaching out, you know, like the Sotheby's folks and, you know, car dealerships. I mean, it's crazy. Uh, there's so many different use cases. Um, there's a lot to say no to and, um, and, and I, and I really believe in that a lot. And so, um, and, and the other thing that's come and I, I'd love to get your take on this as a surprise has been, I, in the beginning, you know, set out to actually not really raise money for this. Um, and, uh, and kind of bootstrap this whole thing. However, what happened after the Karen AI launch was it became clear that like, this is going to be a huge business. I mean, there's going to be someone, some company out there that has, that just dominates the industry with, you know, hundreds of thousands of influencers and celebrities turning themselves into AIs on their platform with a future that looks like every big celebrity and influencer having an AI copy of themselves. Like that's the future we, we absolutely see now. And so the thing that's come up has been just like really interesting, surprising, uh, reactions from the VC space when they hear that, you know, a big part of our business, if not possibly our future focus is on this, um, kind of AI girlfriend, boyfriend, you know, I think you've nailed it. And you know,

SPEAKER_101: you probably understand having done, I think this is your third formal company that once you raise

SPEAKER_87: money, uh, those people are expecting a hundred times their money back. Right. And then you're managing your customers, your internal team, and a group of people who've given you money with the expectation of you returning a hundred X and those people can be, you know, any version of ruthless, supportive, uh, cutthroat, indifferent, uh, spray and pray or, you know, incredible partners. And so you,

SPEAKER_11: if you do raise money, you don't need to here because I think you could bootstrap this. And so if you can push off raising money, my advice to founders, and you can put this in the Jason AI is always to,

SPEAKER_87: uh, push it off as long as possible, get as much product market fit as possible, and then see if like calm.com, the meditation app we invested in, they went from when I invested, uh, just under a $5 million valuation, their next round was 250 million. The round after that was 1.2 billion. So they skipped, we call those alicorns in the business. Uh, I came up with that because my daughter's explained to me what an alicorn is. It's a Pegasus and a unicorn put together. And I was like, these are unicorns that fly over funding rounds. Uh, and you could just be an alicorn and just skip funding rounds. And so that would be what I would do, uh, is just keep skipping funding rounds, unless you have a group of investors who you've either made money, lost money for who you

SPEAKER_113: like working with who make it more fun for you and who are creative. And then you just send them like my friend, Sandeep Madra does a thing. Every time he starts a company, he just sends our

David Friedberg: poker group, starting a new company. You each have 250 K and I don't know if there's 20 of us

SPEAKER_87: and he can literally raise $5 million. And everybody says, I'll take 500 or I'll take a million. Right. And he says, Nope, Chamath, Saks, J Gal, Freeberg, whoever it is. Nope, I have 250 for you. And then

SPEAKER_101: I say, great, you know, but I'll provide more value. You can come on this week and start up. So I'll give

SPEAKER_87: you, you know, give me 400 kids. Nope, 250. And you just do a very simple take or leave it round like

SPEAKER_00: that. That's essentially what I did over the last two weeks. And as a startup founder, that's one of the most magical experiences, I think, especially someone who is kind of young still and, you know, comes from a beginning that is very, you know, not full of money. You know, I grew up like really just

SPEAKER_01: like, I mean, I was helping my parents out financially when I was 13. And to give you a sense of like the, the shock that comes when I'm in, you know, my late twenties and I get to just text a few

SPEAKER_00: people and get like a few hundred thousand wired the next day to, you know, make this, you know, this whole vision, uh, come to more of a reality. And, and so as you, I guess, as you pointed out, progressing your startup founder career, that ability to raise money from a network of people you've worked with and made money for is, is invaluable.

SPEAKER_101: Yeah. That's what I would do. Send around the seed docs, you know, Hey, here's a reasonable evaluation and then just rock it out from there. Uh, I think it's, I think you're smart also to be super, super focused. So I would stay ultra focused on the vertical that's working. There'll always be

SPEAKER_87: time for other verticals and then build your team, you know, on a slow, steady pace. Who knows if like this, uh, you know, uh, significant other stuff is gonna be a flash in the pan or it's gonna be niche. I don't suspect it will be, but it's certainly there's a 10 to a hundred million dollar business

SPEAKER_101: obviously there and there's hundreds of people and they're gonna make hundreds of thousands a

SPEAKER_175: year. So it sounds like you can get to 50 million dollars just on that. If you just say laser focus on

SPEAKER_44: that, it'd be the biggest success you've had. Yeah. And there's a lot of value to just not fundraising and just building. Uh, I mean, it's, uh, especially if you do reach product market fit, I've noticed.

SPEAKER_110: Yeah. You have product market fit clearly and, uh, yeah, just keep rocking it. All right. Uh,

SPEAKER_87: great to have you on the program continued success. Uh, and, uh, yeah, I'm interested in doing a non-sex, non-adult, non-creepy relationship adjacent AI, just to talk about startups and, uh, raising venture

SPEAKER_221: capital and podcasting, just three or four. It would be an honor to bring that for you.

SPEAKER_222: Yeah. I mean, I would have fun with you and shock you with it, but you know,

SPEAKER_224: after me, by all means I give you a permission to make something, uh, you know, fun and, uh,

SPEAKER_110: experimental for short duration. And if it becomes something, yeah, I'm happy to spend revenue on it. It sounds like a fun project. So let's have at it. All right. We'll see you all

SPEAKER_227: next time in the swing startups. Bye. Bye.