SPEAKER_00: okay everybody happy monday welcome to this week in startups today we have two great segments for you first up i interviewed tome ceo and co-founder keith paris basically tome is text to pitch deck software yes we've been talking about generative ai imagine if you could just talk to your powerpoint if you could talk to keynote google presentations whatever it is then we have another awesome tactical talk from the founder university podcast jen ryan the cmo of velocity growth is going to walk you through how to get started with paid acquisition you're going to learn how to find and create custom audiences that you can use for ad targeting and then how to create engaging and relevant ads where you can find your competitors ads and how to see what's working for them so hey

SPEAKER_01: listen you can copy what's working with other folks so it's going to be an amazing show stick with us

SPEAKER_03: this week in startups is brought to you by the microsoft for startups founders hub helps all founders build a better startup at a lower cost from day one startups get up to 150 000 in azure credits access to free open ai credits free dev tools like github technical advisory access to mentors and experts and so much more there is no funding requirement and it only takes minutes to join sign up today at aka.ms this week in startups clumio immutable air-gapped automated affordable clumio provides simplified backup as a service that helps companies streamline data compliance optimize long-term data retention and dramatically reduce their aws backup bills start a free trial to uncover compliance gaps optimize backup spend and identify unprotected assets learn more at clumio.com twist and mercury where innovation meets peace of mind now more than ever startups need a safe place to put their cash mercury offers a simple way to manage bank risk and protect every dollar with up to five million dollars in fdic insurance and a money market fund visit mercury.com to apply in minutes

SPEAKER_05: hey everybody welcome back to this week in startups the pace of artificial intelligence is moving faster

SPEAKER_07: than any other technological revolution i have seen in my 30 years in the industry and i'm including in this the explosion of apps in apple's app store the internet itself during the dot-com boom cloud computing it's just moving so fast so we thought instead of trying to just talk about the news we'll bring the founders on who are building the future and just talk about what they're building and how it's going and then maybe even talk about this pace and where they think ai will be in the next 6 to 12 months because every literal two or three days somebody produces something that the people i know who've been in the industry for i don't know two or three decades goes whoa and uh the whoa factor here from

SPEAKER_10: people in the know is significant today on the program uh is a founder named keith paris he is the ceo and co-founder of tome t-o-m-e i'm pronouncing it correctly keith yes exactly all right so welcome to the pod tell

SPEAKER_14: me what is home and then we'll do a demo of course uh thanks jason excited to be here uh i would think about tome as an ai powered storytelling tool for ideas and what i mean by that is um you know when you're when you're thinking about describing ideas using work artifacts you know some of them are pitches you want to make some of them are you know products you want to build at your company and some of them are children's stories you know where you want to put together and tell your kids every night and uh you know tome is a very simple way to tell a wide variety of stories using different modes

SPEAKER_07: whether it's text video image prototype and more awesome so uh let's do a demo here i'm assuming

SPEAKER_18: if i wanted to make a pitch deck or i want to make a story to tell my my daughters before bedtime today

SPEAKER_07: those things involve uh some amount of text prompting something that seems to be uh really in

SPEAKER_20: the wheelhouse of this genre of ai movement and then of course creating images on the fly also in the wheelhouse so it sounds to me like you're combining two of those aspects into unique output

David Friedberg: am i correct yes exactly what are you what is this all built on are you using uh the chat gpt open ai um

SPEAKER_13: you know api or is it a another language model you're using for the language side uh so we're using a

SPEAKER_14: couple of different ones to to be honest uh we uh are generating our our story outline from gpt4 you know in the sense that it's read millions and you know maybe billions of stories so it's important to be able to tap into that really large model get the structure of a story um but then we use gpt 3.5 for the littler things uh maybe you want to rewrite a paragraph or something and you know we're playing with uh with anthropic for things like i want to rewrite a sentence because it's just really fast and uh you know we're just trying to use the best tool for the the job to create this customer experience

SPEAKER_29: and uh this is truly amazing like while you were talking i was like well let me just sign up

SPEAKER_07: real quick over here and uh i just said uh it said what do you want to create and i said i want to create a deck for launch fund for our latest venture capital fund and it went out and it made me a series of uh looks like eight slides introduction to our latest venture capital fund what makes our fund different our investment philosophy our portfolio companies our track record conclusion i mean

SPEAKER_05: literally if you were going to create a deck for a venture capital fund these would be some of the

SPEAKER_07: seminal slides and this blank page experience that people have is paralysis and what you've already done just in the first sentence here is just like hey uh pretty pretty great start so i don't want to steal your thunder but why don't you start a demo here and uh it also by the way added an image uh to each of these um now these are not stock images i'm seeing these are images that were created

SPEAKER_20: and it also put a paragraph on each page to kind of get me started so all of this was done with

SPEAKER_07: chat gpt4 and then just creating some images sort of and putting it into a uh presentation format now were you making presentation software before this and then you added ai or was this all at the same time

SPEAKER_14: so so we were uh we were sort of building this product for for years and um uh you know i'd say there's a couple of things that we were sort of tapping into i mean henry my co-founder and i were both consumer mobile people so you know we were really frustrated with the fact that your powerpoints don't scale to a vertical touchscreen device uh you know we also were we were both working at cloud companies i was i was at instagram he was at facebook and what you know all of our presentations were screenshots of different web services um and we're like oh we gotta build something that connects to all of these different data sources and um and then we sort of had this idea of at some point we got to be able to drive this thing using a large ml model um and we we sort of got this idea because we were reading every deck we could find you know on slideshare um from our friends pitching and um there's sort of this like common narrative structure to every story right like every startup pitch deck has like a problem solution opportunity arc um you know if if you uh i love every pixar movie but they all have a sort of similar heroes journey so we're like wait a minute if we could find um a foundational model model that had read every story on the internet um we could build something you know that's you know truly a 10x uh gain in productivity so we were always building the system in mind thinking it could be driven by an ml model um but we just weren't sure if it would be in 2022 or in 2025 or in 2030 and uh then the the technology sort of uh really picked up with gpt3 and uh and we started playing around with it and realized actually this is creating um you know meaningful results already

SPEAKER_34: all right everybody tom davis is here he's a senior director at microsoft for startups he's a former founder himself tom microsoft has a huge huge uh cloud computing super computer azure everybody

SPEAKER_37: knows about that but you've started to run giant llms maybe talk a little bit about what it takes to run a giant llm in the cloud and this is a lot of iron isn't it absolutely and really thanks to the

SPEAKER_39: partnership that we have with open ai for the last few years we've been spending a lot of time really building an ai focused supercomputer we went back and looked at everything the gpu configurations the networking to really get it right to be able to run these large language models as uh and make them available uh for startups through the azure service that we now have that you can get through founders hub and so yeah it takes a lot of compute power but we've managed to optimize that we've spent a lot of time working with startups to help them optimize things as well over time and as more and more innovations come into this we will make them available to startups not just open ai but anyone just starting up a startup we offer 150 000 worth of credits to so startups can leverage that and really

SPEAKER_34: get going on their journey the founders hub that microsoft provides offers 150 000 in azure cloud

SPEAKER_37: credits all the development tools like github and teams office all that great stuff you get all that for free five minutes to sign up six figures and benefits aka dot ms slash this week in startups

SPEAKER_44: thanks so much tom yeah fantastic so give me a demo here uh we'll show your screen if you're not

SPEAKER_45: watching the video spotify supports our video on this week in startups uh there should be a little video icon you can click or turn your phone sideways or if you're on apple podcast you can search for this we can start a video there's a different separate feed but you can go to youtube.com slash this weekend to see the videos as we do them so uh yeah keith take it away great so i'll i'll jump

SPEAKER_50: right into tome and um you'll notice that some things sort of feel familiar like a slide you know

SPEAKER_14: you've got some some slides on the the left or pages on the left and uh some things don't feel familiar wait a minute where's the the 16 by 9 rectangle that's gone um and uh you'll also notice that the way you interact with tome is a little bit different than the way you'd interact with uh you know a slide tool that that came out in the 80s right there are some things that you can directly manipulate there are things you can add but you also have this sort of command system um where you can you know take a document turn it into a presentation you could add a page you could uh you know maybe add a tile like a figma tile if you want to show off your design work and um you know we're going to go into create a presentation um and you know in the old world you'd have to look up a template that someone made years ago try to find something that's roughly match what you were trying to do um and then you know edit it and modify it but the the way tome works is that you can just tell tome what kind of presentation you want to make you know when i had queued up was a fundraising pitch we have a lot of early stage founders building pitch decks and um you can write as much or as little as you want and we'll try to fill it out for you and um yeah you can see here you can either read that prompt there yeah yeah for sure it's a fundraising pitch for a company that makes telescopes that takes beautiful images of planets in the night sky um and by the

SPEAKER_20: way the aesthetic feels a little superhuman-esque so you have this sort of like command k you kind of uh in the middle of the screen instead of just having to navigate the file new menu like in the microsoft or apple you know google offices kind of thing it's just like here's uh all the commands in one location just go ahead and start typing a command and we'll figure it out with you

SPEAKER_14: exactly exactly and we're building more controls where um i'm the sort of person that prefers an outline where i just want the prompt and i'll write my own story or you can you know choose a descriptive story if you want um and then you can choose the aesthetic if you'd like and then examples of the aesthetic there oh great question you know you might want fantasy you might want some watercolor you might want some pop art cyberpunk my favorite exactly my personal favorite yeah um and we're adding more and more controls here um just because you know a lot of folks are not sure what they can type in um that's uh and then you can hit enter and you can sort of see on the screen we're first creating the structure um and then we're filling out each page with you know what what we think should be there um some example content and uh and an image um you can sort of see in seconds i'll go through these pages first we created this outline you know your pitch you should probably talk about your telescopes your mission your team um and then on each page you know we uh generate an image for you you're using dolly at the moment and and some example text and now the the really fun thing about tome is um

SPEAKER_67: maybe this isn't exactly what you want um you can this being the our impact page so we're on the our impact page you're like ah maybe this copy doesn't make sense exactly uh so you can you can type in

SPEAKER_14: and edit it just like a you know an editor like you would in google slides um or you can sort of ask tone to help shape this for you and you can like wait a minute i actually want to uh i want to reduce that you know this is the button i wish i had um at or when i was at instagram i just make this a little shorter um and then it rewrites and then you're like uh so we'll take the four sentences

SPEAKER_55: and make it three take three sentences from 12 words each down to nine or something so kind of doing a little hemingway on it just let's make it a little simpler let's make it a little tighter

SPEAKER_14: exactly exactly and uh you know maybe this isn't exactly what you want but uh but you just want to see another version of it you can hit try again it's kind of like working with a friend right you're riffing you know um and uh and then you know you can you can add stuff to it too right and like i don't really like this this sort of uh layout so i'm just dragging this handle in the middle making the image bigger or smaller um you know we've sort of designed the system so that you don't have to think about the layout it just sort of works um then you click it into a format that makes

SPEAKER_20: sense so you know image aligned right text left image on top text below it basically is a bit more intelligent than just randomly drop it and make it look ugly it's going to snap it into some sort of logic and is that ai doing that or is that just you uh doing some a basic decision tree it's a good

SPEAKER_71: question so uh this is all a decision tree with with heuristics but the next thing we realized with

SPEAKER_14: our growth is that we have millions of these being created each week uh so now we're going through the process of labeling um all of these these anonymized layouts and you know very soon we're going to be able to to use um machine learning to generate the perfect layout depending on your content um so that's sort of one piece and then you know when building your telescope company you might want to add a uh a prototype to to to show like what's this light so i can uh for example i'll drag this web tile that you know terms based on this tile system into the page and um let me grab let me grab like a 3d model you know so i just went to another tab i opened up this product called spline a lot of folks use for for 3d work and then i can go back here and just paste this prototype you know and it knows

SPEAKER_67: that format and it makes a nice clean embed yeah exactly exactly and we we play with it so they don't

SPEAKER_14: flicker and refresh and you know all of the things that you don't like about about embeds um so that's that's what it's like to to construct a story and i'll show you one more thing if uh if if you're up for it jason yeah yeah please um so one of the most common workflows that that our customers have is you know they're like i've already written what i want to say i've written the story i want to tell um in a document um so can you ingest that document and turn it into a presentation instead of using you know the corpus of content the gpt is trained on um so i could take a book i could take a pdf a

SPEAKER_20: report a deal memo a long email a notion page whatever it is describing our project we're gonna we're gonna do our uh you know parents 50th wedding anniversary and we've made a bunch of uh

SPEAKER_55: items and and have subheads etc i can just upload that and have it go to work exactly exactly makes

SPEAKER_14: sense i'll grab a uh a notion doc i have around of uh this is about nuclear energy you know it's sort of a sort of a heavy piece uh you know and you can tell it's uh pretty unstructured it's all sort

SPEAKER_84: of like narrative prose and um i mean it's 20 power dense paragraphs it has no headings except for the

SPEAKER_23: title so you're dealing with something that is not structured exactly we're not highly structured

SPEAKER_14: yeah exactly i'm gonna copy that go uh go back into tome open this command menu on the right and hit document to presentation and um now i'm just gonna paste this here uh you know and it sort of keeps the the structure that's there and now i'm going to hit the the generate button here and we actually read the whole document understand it break it up into parts and then summarize um you know the contents on each page and uh you know this was this was possible before but so honestly with the huge context window in gbt4 that sort of came out in the past few weeks um we were able to make this really

SPEAKER_20: good really fast and so when you look at this you know we we had a bunch of paragraphs without subheads and now it's made uh it looks like an eight or nine tights not eight to nine slide deck but it's really

SPEAKER_55: said hey here's the importance of nuclear energy research team and presentation electricity sector and cost implications recommendation for construction technology etc etc yeah it's figured out what each paragraph is about or so and then did this now you said this is some contextual uh feature of gpt4 can

SPEAKER_08: you explain what that is and and what it enables yeah yeah so um i would say with the some of the older

SPEAKER_14: foundation models um you had this this context window where you could share you know something about the document or or something about what you're trying to create as well as the prompt and uh the sort of problem with the the the language models from last year was that you could only maybe put three or four pages in there so we you know we would need to be really creative for your 25 page memo right uh where we would need to summarize it and chop it up before we could understand the whole document but um you know with uh with gpt4 you know we can read 25 pages at a time um so now we just have like this much deeper understanding of what you're trying to say so we can capture the the essence of it and break it up

SPEAKER_07: so here's a question for you um could you take another aesthetic an unnamed aesthetic and then give it to your software and say hey and i just did one i just did like a cyberpunk you know tokyo kind of

SPEAKER_55: situation and if i said here's the url of this cyberpunk there it is here's a pinterest board um which is you know people create mood boards on pinterest so here's a mood board it's cyberpunk japanese

SPEAKER_20: neon kind of aesthetic you can you can imagine it yourself uh which is how ridley scott sort of imagined los angeles people would be speaking some combination of chinese and spanish i think they

SPEAKER_101: called it changlish uh was the what you hear some of the police officers speaking in blade runner so if

SPEAKER_102: i gave you that are you at the point where you could say just try this style and here's a url to

SPEAKER_14: get inspired by or is that next i would say that that is next um it's exciting because it's it's possible now right to feel like here's a board here's an image what's the style what's in it and now let's create a prompt to create more and i would say we're months away from that not years

SPEAKER_07: well i mean and so if i said write it in the style of michael lewis or malcolm gladwell

SPEAKER_26: could you do that yet or is that another kind of concept coming in the future i would say that

SPEAKER_33: we're we're very close with with some characters um which is to say that you know we could rewrite it

SPEAKER_14: uh in the tone of elon musk uh because there's just enough content from him that have trained these

SPEAKER_114: foundation models exactly style of elon musk could get dangerous quick yeah for sure i mean it raises

SPEAKER_50: some some interesting questions of you know should we even let people do that right well yeah i mean

SPEAKER_102: it'll be exciting i mean you could also just take a i mean i assume you could just take a video a youtube video of sam harris giving a talk uh and say you know well or christopher hitchens and say you know i want this to be clever like hitch or i want it to be more somber like sam harris or i want it to be more enthusiastic and wacky like jordan peterson it was kind of interesting to apply styles and it'll be super interesting when it's not a drop down of the styles it's you know give us three examples of style and let us go from there here i want to write like stephen king you know i want to write like ernest hemingway and that to me is really interesting same article but you know using different styles are you trying to build the next uber or robin hood i hope so well here are three

SPEAKER_119: important tips for you first make sure your data is protected obviously remember just because your data is in the cloud doesn't mean it's automatically backed up your data is your responsibility you got to make sure it's backed up second don't let backups and compliance requirements distract you let your engineers focus on product innovation not writing scripts for compliance audits and when it comes to backups the major players have major limitations like snapshots if your account is compromised your backups are compromised but lumio stores your backups on a different server so if your main account is compromised your backups are always safe the way it should be and third take control of your cloud costs you'd be surprised how much of your storage costs come from backups snapshots versioning and replication or maybe you're maybe you wouldn't be surprised because you've seen these jaw-dropping bills well clumio can help you with all three of these important points they provide turnkey data protection that is air-gapped immutable and cost optimized clumio has saved customers over 30 percent on backup costs while putting security and compliance on autopilot visit them at clumio.com slash twist to start a free backup or sign up for a demo that's clumio.com slash twist how do you think

SPEAKER_07: about training data sets you believe you provide the data sets or you empower users to do it where's this

SPEAKER_55: all going to wind up in the in the coming weeks months here yeah it's a good question so so i i think um

SPEAKER_33: you know we're both a consumer well we're we're both a consumer and an enterprise company and i imagine you know for our consumer offering we're going to continue to use these sort of large base models

SPEAKER_14: um and and you can get pretty far with them you can sort of get stuff that that feels sort of globally compelling um but the most common ask that we get from our customers that are using tome for work is wait a minute i want to train these models on what's in my google drive you know i want to train these models on what you know what's written the data in our data warehouse and i want you to use the facts that we hold to be true um and do you have customers doing that yet have you have you because

SPEAKER_07: it feel this feels very single player mode not enterprise mode yet but have you gotten to the multiplayer multi-department multi-international company mode where you know a google says hey here's our style guide or apple probably be more evocative example but here's the apple style guide here's examples of you know i mean perhaps the worst canonical like just the the here's the origin text of steve jobs and how he speaks and how our copy editors write and just try to keep it towards

SPEAKER_127: this aesthetic and this type of copy has an enterprise done that yet yeah so we're working with a couple of

SPEAKER_14: larger companies but we're in the very early phase of sort of doing this by hand um actually a very common ask they've had is you know when you're at a giant company uh the ceo or the leaders like to be presented to in a certain way and and that sort of gets an outcome like when i worked at facebook

SPEAKER_33: there's definitely a way to write a memo so that mark would read it and then think about it tell me about

SPEAKER_128: that unpack that what would it what was what was mark's memo style oh it was uh it was definitely sort

SPEAKER_14: of terse um factual you know he wanted to see the data up front and was sort of looking for this really pragmatic recommendation and um and it was crazy because uh you know that's sort of tribal knowledge right you you only know that if you were high up at that meta right and you had spent a bunch of time with mark and the sort of promise with where ai is going wait a minute we can take this thing that only only marks direct reports no and sort of make it available to anyone at a company

SPEAKER_130: who has an idea to share yeah it's fascinating uh you know there is an entire there are entire books

SPEAKER_20: about netflix i don't know um i've had patty mccord on this podcast um and there are two just really great books about netflix's culture as just but one example and they have a culture deck and then they have no rules rules um which um aaron mayer did she was also on the program i haven't had reed hastings yet but patty mccord had hers and uh then reed hastings did one this no rules rules netflix and the

SPEAKER_07: culture of um reinvention so you take those two books you take some interviews with those individuals like having patty or aaron on this podcast you start to put that together with the culture deck and man you got a really interesting internal ai base then you take bezos's 20 letters that he's written over time and you can really start to understand some things about business i think um that are particular

SPEAKER_55: to the organization that's kind of brilliant and proprietary and people don't want to share that so

SPEAKER_07: i think if i was gonna man if i was an investor in your company which seems like i missed the window uh how much is the company worth now you guys raise a lot of money is it this ai thing you probably were toiling away telling investors you're doing a presentation software layer and they ignored you they added ai to it and now they must be knocking your door down at south park what's going on with

SPEAKER_10: the uh tell me what it's like to add the the ai pixie dust in 2022 and 2023 to your product yeah it's

SPEAKER_14: a it's a good question you know we um we were building this for years and uh we sort of were selling people on um building better collaboration and editing software and it's the sort of thing where um you know if you play with tome if you're in it for hours you start to recognize the value of the format um and all of the non-ai parts of it but you know we had the hardest time selling you know the average person on hey this is a better way of sharing ideas versus you know using powerpoint or using google slides and you know when we added that ai component it just became so clear to to everyone you know investors customers students we have a ton of students using to wait wait a minute this thing is different and um you know in the past few months we we sort of went from a couple thousand folks using tome to uh you know a little over three million um and and growing and you know as a result uh we've we've had uh you know a lot of investors uh sort of interested and uh you know over the holidays uh as we were growing and we sort of had this this hockey stick moment uh we were we were lucky enough to be approached by some great folks to to get our series b done amazing 300 million

SPEAKER_55: dollar valuation for 40 million dollars raised with just a handful of paying customers it's an amazing time how do you deploy that capital intelligently and get from wild enthusiasm and sky high valuation to filling in that valuation because you need to have for that valuation to work as a public market

SPEAKER_10: company you know you're going to get a 10x multiple not a whatever multiple 3 300 whatever you wound up

SPEAKER_14: getting here how do you fill that in it's a good question um i mean one of the things that's really exciting about this space is if you truly have a 10x better product uh the internet just finds it you know which is to to say that you know we grow a ton from tick tock instagram um twitter people sharing tones on the internet so a lot of our work right now is just deploying that capital for the product to catch up you know we're just to say that we're uh we're we're building a real ai team we just made made our first head of ai higher um we're we're tuning models we're sort of moving on to dedicated gpus so we can be blazing fast and and reliable and um starting to scratch at the surface now for this this really differentiated enterprise product you know um a couple of years ago uh when i was incubating this at graylock uh reed asked me to uh present tome to a bunch of cios you know and at first they were like oh great another productivity tool that we're gonna have to pay for and um you know over our dead bodies uh that we're excited about this but now that the landscape has changed you know i think those buyers and and and those company leaders like wait a minute i can see how i could save hours and hours of my team's time here and um they're way more open to an enterprise product now than than maybe they ever were so we're just trying to build the product catch up and sort of

SPEAKER_20: discover this this enterprise motion on top yeah um talent are you able to find talent uh or do you have to go uh make talent at this point because there's so many people who are looking for mlai it and there

SPEAKER_10: just can't possibly be enough people out there who've worked on this stuff uh it's kind of like asking people you know at the beginning of bitcoin you know i need somebody with 10 years in crypto and it's like well crypto has been around for 18 months so generative ai has been around for a couple of

SPEAKER_07: years in terms of you know beyond the early 100 200 people working on it so how do you uh how do you

SPEAKER_10: you staff something like this in a market like this yeah it's uh it's gotten a lot easier you know

SPEAKER_14: which is to say um you know i i think about when we started the company in in 2020 and uh there were an abundance of startups uh everyone was sort of connected to their golden handcuffs in the in the public companies and um you know it was hard i i think that one of the couple of things that have changed or that everyone's public stock comp in these in these giant companies has come back down to earth and um the other sort of exciting thing is that you know to really be inventing in this space you want to be at a startup you want to be at a place that's willing to to do the imperfect thing that doesn't have managers of managers of uh you know ethics committees uh so we're getting so many folks coming from google and meta being like hey i want to build you know i want to i want to build and

SPEAKER_33: it seems like you all are moving at light speed compared to to what i'm used to was it like that

SPEAKER_155: your your last couple years there at the uh at the facebook corporation was it you know like mark

SPEAKER_20: is saying in his memos now hey we got to get back to pushing product and we got to get rid of managers managing managers managers but what were you in the thick of that managers managing managers

SPEAKER_33: conundrum that he seems to have fixed now yeah i mean it was sort of happening uh it was they were

SPEAKER_14: boiling the the frog slowly right we're just to say that uh during my early years there uh it was all about creating value and speed and you know i remember this uh this poster that said code wins arguments uh and it was all about you know being action oriented and getting stuff out and then at some point um i think it became more about protecting what we had and that's when you know there were managers and process and and all of these safeguards put into place and that sort of slowed things down and slowed things down to the point where it just became you know really hard to to create anything new

SPEAKER_160: or or sort of move against the grain

SPEAKER_119: listen as a founder ensuring your cash is safe is priority number one it's been a bit crazy out there i don't want to put caps locks on right now but i will if you need me to the fdic 250 000 limit is just not enough for most businesses so let me tell you about mercury through its partner banks and sweep network mercury customers can access up to five milli five million in fdic insurance that's 20 times the per bank limit sounds a lot safer doesn't it well these sweep networks protect your deposits by spreading them across multiple banks which limits the risk of any single point of failure and with mercury vault any funds above the fdic limit can easily be invested in a money market fund mostly comprised of u.s government-backed securities so it's easy to get started with opening an account you can apply in minutes and many customers are improved and onboarded in less than two hours mercury also offers great resources for founders including my favorite mercury raise this program connects founders with investors to help them raise funds head to mercury.com to join more than a hundred thousand startups mercury is a financial technology company not a bank banking services are provided by choice financial group and evolve bank and trust members fdic amazing uh well listen continued success with this

SPEAKER_07: it's really impressive already and the pace is getting faster and faster uh as we wrap here do you have concerns about how fast this is moving uh we were talking about it just on all in yesterday and you know people are creating auto gpts uh to go do essentially like cron jobs to be out there prompting other ais and prompting each other and adding items to task lists and that is for people who are listening you know imagine you asked to chat imagine you asked you know this product hey make me a presentation and then it said and then give me the objections that people would have to funding the startup uh and then put those objects answer those objections in the deck and then present it to you know uh venture capitalists like these and then uh you know answer those objections and it just keeps going on forever uh you know doing these kind of prompts and making various versions obviously can be used for nefarious purposes too you could be doing exploits and you know trying to have it attack vulnerabilities in fishing or human factors engineering uh lots of different weird things it could start doing so are you worried about this stuff and the pace that's moving that hey move fast and break things might might break too many things or do you think it's a little farcical to get that concerned

SPEAKER_14: um i i would say that there's a lot to be concerned about um and uh you know there's a wide variety of things i mean one we didn't even get to hallucination right and explain that to the audience um because

SPEAKER_33: that's super important yeah for sure i would say the but the simplest way to talk about how these

SPEAKER_14: fun these large language models exist is they've read a ton of content and now they're trying to predict the next word or the next sentence um relative to what's been written and um you could imagine when you're just trying to predict the next word or the next sentence or the next concept that sometimes it just makes up something that you know isn't really grounded in in facts um and uh you know we're working on a bunch of clever ways to work through that but for example we've uh we've built this classifier that understands if something's a claim you know so we understand if gpt is saying like the sky is green well that's a claim uh or where on the internet does uh does someone credible say that the sky is green and we're not connected it to a web crawler and being able to say well here's an article that says the sky is green it's sort of up to you if you've decided that that's like a credible fact um so so that that's sort of the you know one area of things we're working on um i think i think to your point um we're helping people produce content really fast compelling content really fast right and so the sort of downside of it is that there's going to be a lot of compelling sounding content being created for uh you know maybe ideas that that aren't that compelling or that that are dangerous um right and um i literally did this today it's

SPEAKER_105: interesting you bring it up keith i i literally was having this debate on all in and the episode

SPEAKER_10: 124 comes out today uh or maybe will have come out when this comes out a couple days earlier but i i

SPEAKER_20: was uh wondering like hey people could create websites for phishing then have auto gpt running

SPEAKER_07: phishing experiments where you're trying to get people to give their passwords into fake accounts and i am like reticent to even start brainstorming these things because it doesn't seem super complicated too but um it does seem like a lot of these new language models can be connected through plugins to actually create websites to actually go shoot off emails to actually maybe do an a b test make a hundred different variants of emails and see which ones you know are the most effective at getting people to click then which ones are most effective at getting people to log in then which ones are get people to you know change their password and yeah all of a sudden you you know it might come up with ideas that are just crazy and i just asked it what's the best way you know to trick a receptionist into giving her passwords like oh yeah i can't do that and i was like i'm trying to protect my receptionist from giving away her password what are ways in which people would try to trick her that i can and it gave me like a road map of how people come in oh yeah you know people would come in dressed as an it person uh knowing other people's names have paperwork and then uh try to trick them to let her use her thing to change her password because there's been a security violation i'm like thanks for the road map chat gpt i i never thought of like you know coming in in an outfit like a cia agent might and saying hey your computer's been compromised joe schmo at the home office asked me to come here and i was like yeah pretty obvious but i mean it you can trick these models so easily yeah for sure

SPEAKER_14: um and and i think we have a lot of catching up to do you know which is to say that um we need to think even more critically about what we read uh what's out there on the internet where did this come from should i believe it and you know this was true of even social media right with sort of explosion of content and we need to be more discerning and then certainly with our our ranking and security tools we have a long way to go with wait a minute who wrote this email where did this email come from where did this seo article come from um so uh i think it's going to put a lot of strain on us as people of wait there's there's all of these things that are coming up then we're gonna have to catch up and think about how to how to adjust into the new world so so a lot to talk about yeah

SPEAKER_07: all right listen keith uh where can people learn more and what jobs you're hiring for and what is the url of your career page because you you secured the bag and now you got to build into this valuation and you need to get some people some technical people listen to this podcast so maybe we can help you

SPEAKER_60: fill in some jobs oh um thank you yeah uh so uh we're tom so it's tome.app and you can go to tome.app

SPEAKER_14: slash careers and uh we are hiring you know incredible people from every technical background you know

SPEAKER_81: we're hiring ml engineers we're hiring full stack engineers we're hiring product designers a lot of

SPEAKER_12: designers remote or you like in person well what is your preference these days you know to be honest

SPEAKER_188: we prefer in person and how's that going to me too i i am so lonely that i decided i'm getting an

SPEAKER_10: office in san mateo and i'm just going to hang out there and have entrepreneurs come over and start doing in-person interviews again and just start hanging out because this would have been so much fun if we got to meet and get a cup of coffee before or after yeah yeah for sure and i live in tell me why you like it what what do you like about the in-person what's happening in person that's not happening over zoom no offense to zoom great problem yeah yeah i would say a couple of things

SPEAKER_14: you know one we're we're a creative company and um so much of what we build is because we get in a room and talk about is this the right thing to build and are people going to love it and that's so much easier when you're sharing a table when you can get on a whiteboard when you can look into each other's eyes and you know maybe when after you've had a a big intellectual debate or fight you can you can grab a meal after and sort of talk it over um and we found that you know we we have a couple of great remote employees but it's just so easy to get mad at the person who you're only seeing through zoom or to misunderstand what they're really trying to say and we figured you know we're a 40 person company

SPEAKER_33: versus teams of like 10 000 working on this at google and microsoft we just have to take every

SPEAKER_55: advantage we can we can get yeah i think in person is going to make a major difference uh for the startups that can get that going now you lose the fact that you might have somebody who lives uh you know in lake tahoe that refuses to come to an office and they're just a 10x engineer but there's something weird happening let's end on this one are you finding that the prevalence of 10x engineers is increasing because of uh you know chat gpt4 and other tools you know copilot github copilot whatever tip to make people a little bit more bionic uh this is something i'm starting to hear from my

SPEAKER_07: portfolio companies is like you know developers are getting faster and it's not just the 10xers we got people who were rank and file engineers who are now starting to trend towards 10x maybe they're at 3x

SPEAKER_14: you know yeah i would i would say uh i'm noticing this in a couple of ways one it's it's really easy to ramp up on a new language or a new style of doing things you're using repli you're using github copilot you're reaching out to people in communities uh so that's certainly true another part of that is all of the technology we're using is brand new so it's really your ability to ramp up and keep you know keep your ear on the ground that matters versus you know having been a classically trained research scientist from from 10 years ago uh so that's sort of shifting things and certainly if you're resourceful and you're connected to a lot of people you'll do better uh and maybe the last thing i would say is that when i think about a 10x employee at home it's not just the amount of code they right it's their ability to work with everyone around them and um you're sort of leaving a huge advantage on the table by being a remote only employee when it comes to sort of collaborative productivity uh so i'd say those are sort of the things that i've noticed are changing in the past

SPEAKER_20: few months and you were working at meta when they went remote during covet and you worked there before uh it was remote you experienced both of those things yeah and it it changed didn't it yeah it

SPEAKER_14: changed so much it changed so much you know i um i think when you're an early stage startup and sorry i shouldn't speak in generality when you're our sort of early stage startup it's not like everyone is clear swim lanes and clear milestones and you can just you know shut off slack and work for two weeks and come back we're sort of figuring it out as we go along we're getting so many new users or the technology is changing we're getting new feedback um so so i think sort of giving up on that high bandwidth communication uh just felt like the wrong trade-off for us yeah i agree all right listen everybody

SPEAKER_10: go try this product mind-blowing number two go work for the company and uh number three yeah maybe you got to think about getting your talented people in a room and start working together a couple days a week

SPEAKER_207: at a minimum all right everybody we'll see you next time on this week's startups thanks for coming

SPEAKER_00: on keith appreciate you thanks jason okay thanks so much keith for joining the show next up we have another awesome talk from founder university for you this is the talk on how to get started with paid acquisition it's a great episode and what you're going to want to do is just do a search in your podcast player or youtube and search for founder university so you can find the rest of these tactical talks we've done so next up paid acquisition listen and learn hi my name is jen and i'm the co-founder

SPEAKER_211: and cmo of velocity growth i specialize in paid advertising and have helped companies across

SPEAKER_213: europe and the us grow their business online today i really want to give you the high level strategy thinking you need to position your thoughts towards in order to really grow your business through paid ads a huge portion of this is actually just making sure you know your customer inside out but working off

SPEAKER_215: the assumption that you've already taken the time to really listen to your customer here's where to

SPEAKER_213: start so this is my favorite phrase that i like to kick off every presentation on advertising with

SPEAKER_216: people have the misconception that advertising is intrusive but have you ever hated your favorite

SPEAKER_213: brand for showing you an ad for your favorite product probably not have you ever hated the ad for that game you'll never play absolutely why because relevancy matters people don't hate adverts they hate irrelevant interruptions so what is the trick to resonating with your audience and actually growing your business in a cost-effective way through marketing that's what we're going to dig into

SPEAKER_220: there is multiple components to relevancy the core of advertising is to get in front of the right people at the right place at the right time with the right message but at different stages of your marketing you don't need to get all of these right but these are the key points you have to touch on in order to reach the conversion point but you might be bringing in awareness and when you're looking at growing the awareness of your brand you're really focused on two things hitting the right people with the right message you're in the planting a seed phase your focus is finding your people and hitting them with a message that helps them remember you and then as you move them down the funnel you want to start thinking about hitting them at the right place where they encounter the problem that your solution fits for example or in the right moment of intent which we'll talk about in a second when you hit people at the right place they start considering you they're starting to actively think about you it might not be the right time to convert but they're on the right track and that moves all the way down into a customer converting which is hitting someone at the right place time and with the right message hitting the nail on the head across the board this is where you find people yes that might be an impulse buy on social media because you happen to catch them where they had a moment of time to actually do a transaction the impulse purchased or they might actually have seeked out your solution but at this point this is all you're looking for the right people right place right time and the right message but before we can start picking a platform to advertise on there's a big question you need to ask yourself first what is your problem solution fit scenario if you have a solution to an existing problem people are going to search for you right that's where you can start thinking about search platforms like google ads if you have a new solution that nobody has heard of people are not going to search for your solution right they're not aware it exists they don't even know to consider it that's where you need to start thinking about social platforms more and if you're planning on making people aware of a problem they don't know they have that is going to be an expensive start to paid advertising and you have to factor that in if you're making people aware or creating a new problem that you have a solution to slot in for but your problem solution fit scenario really helps you decide how to deliver your content across different platforms once you know where you're at with your problem solution fit scenario it's time to start thinking about your budget and where your customers are and what stage of the funnel they're at different platforms have different levels of intent and cost as a result of that let's say you're a known solution for a known problem and you need to start getting customers fast google ads makes most sense right what if you're a new solution to a problem that nobody has heard of building out on social makes more sense this matrix is a generic one i have put together but depending on your audience all of this might be different if you had a crypto startup twitter might be a much more intentional an audience than snapchat for example but you get the idea this part of the puzzle is all about getting you thinking about the right place and time once you've selected a platform it's worth noting that privacy changes have made a significant impact to the data that you can use on those platforms most prevalent that is meta so we have to get a little bit more strategic when it comes to being able to find the right people at the right time in the right place with the right message for those who don't know advertisers use a cookie tracking system to monitor your online activity and then target your adverts accordingly but apple essentially stopped that from happening by asking users if they would like to opt out of that tracking this means your messaging and creative is more important than ever before but also i would

SPEAKER_213: encourage you to look at server-based tracking rather than cookie based where possible and leverage what's called utm parameters where you can so that that can support your reporting now that you know how to

SPEAKER_232: think about your paid ads and where you can dig in in terms of a platform to grow your business here are some of my favorite little tips that you can look into even if you haven't started advertising these are

SPEAKER_233: good thought exercises so that you can think about just how much you can leverage the different

SPEAKER_213: platforms firstly we know that creatives are more important than ever so you need to understand what types of ads and creatives are performing well i would recommend checking out the facebook ads library and tiktok ads library so that you can see what's happening in your industry and with your competitors in terms of their creatives you can search for companies search across your industry and see what

SPEAKER_215: are the high performing creatives in that space tick tock is a great resource right now because high performing creatives in tick tock are difficult to achieve so if you come across them there you know that potentially that's going to work very well across instagram as well for example google as

SPEAKER_232: of the last few weeks have also launched their ad transparency network so you can force a view of another company's ads to come up and how you do this is maybe search for the company name or a keyword

SPEAKER_213: that would force an ad to come up the key to this is forcing an ad to come up unfortunately there's no site available to just view these ads so once you have your ads up for the company's ads you wish to see you can click the little downward arrow next to the ad and click see all ads now you can see all the ads they have running on google ads too and you can look at that across region as well display video see whatever they're running too often we think about competitiveness in the ad space but a great additional tip to know is that you can also share your audiences with other people on meta and vice versa

SPEAKER_230: so this is a great opportunity to collaborate with businesses that have a similar audience

SPEAKER_232: but not competing offers take for example a chef and a fitness instructor same one might be selling

SPEAKER_213: cookbooks the other fitness classes their audience may well very much overlap and they could collaborate on some of their audiences and data so that they can share as mentioned the privacy changes are making a big impact but there's actually a ton of data you can leverage that has not been impacted

SPEAKER_216: so you can disrupt the data a little bit and manipulate it to work for you an example of this is on

SPEAKER_213: platform data the screenshot here shows the difference between your sources of data and meta sources as an example essentially only things that happen away from meta such as on your website and add to cart is a good example maybe someone purchased and you don't want them to see ads anymore that data is what's impacted actions that happen off of meta but you can still leverage the data that is

SPEAKER_220: available on the platform like audiences of people who watch the video engage with your page instagram

SPEAKER_232: followers all of the actions that happen on the platform a great tip here create a long form video roll it out and then retarget to people who watch 75 percent or more of the video and use that as your leading indicator for intent for retargeting if someone goes to your website goes to a product page then adds to cart and you set up a remarketing audience of everyone who added to cart but didn't

SPEAKER_213: purchase that data is what's going to be heavily disrupted that's what's made the marketing audiences very difficult to continue using even though they still perform well they're not the perfect science

SPEAKER_220: that they once were lastly google is often overlooked as an opportunity to target audiences but you can create audiences there too two options here that are exciting to look at are creating audiences of people who visit certain websites or use certain apps a great way to build some audiences early on

SPEAKER_213: especially if you don't have much data to begin with there's so much you can leverage the advertising platforms for you can experiment with your messaging you can start getting leads and push

SPEAKER_215: into conversions but it doesn't matter what tactics or options you use you always need to fall back

SPEAKER_220: to these core principles you need to know your audience well enough to find the right people at the right time at the right place with the right message here are some additional resources that

SPEAKER_213: you can use to dive deeper into any of these topics jobs to be done as a fantastic book resource for looking at anything around the customer journey knowing your customer tribe that book is fantastic for anything around the community side of things the psychology of persuasion is a fantastic understanding of user behavior and psychology and contagious biology and everyone writes are great resources for looking at making your product catchy understanding your copy and all of that good stuff in terms of podcasts i love the podcast everyone hates marketers brains is another great one to look at even though it only ran for a short time there's some valuable insights in there and if you don't have the opportunity or time to read full books blinkist is a great alternative to listen to summaries of those as well lastly there's some articles here that you can take a look at around recession marketing using chat gpt and ppc ad copy thanks so much for listening my name is jen brian co-founder and

SPEAKER_215: cmo of velocity growth where we support startups the series a companies grow their business through

SPEAKER_37: holistic marketing views okay that's a wrap for today's episode and if you want to see more tactical content be sure to hit the subscribe button on youtube or your favorite podcast player if you want to rate and subscribe that's great and if you've got an idea right now and you're inspired to build an nvp or an idea that you want to build into an actual company just apply to my 12-week course founder university at founder.university apply it's free to uh come to the founder university if you come to all 12 weeks and we invest 25 000 in the top graduates to help them grow even more again you can apply for the upcoming cohort founder.university apply and if you would like to give a tactical talk here on this pod you can submit your presentation at founder.university submit