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

0:00 Alright, my friend, I recorded one of my favorite types of episodes. My friend Howie started a company called Air Table. They're worth around ten billion dollars, so he has seen it all. He knows what's going on in the world of AI, and he has an amazing perspective. And for this episode, I asked him a very simple question, which is If he were twenty one again today, or he didn't have air table, what companies or business ideas would he want to work on? And he came With seven. seven different ideas that he would work on today. And so if you are looking for a different business idea or you're an AI nerd, which a lot of us are right now, You're gonna love this episode.

0:43 I personally think this is a really interesting area. I mean, you you think about live shopping, uh, which is a huge thing in Asia. I mean, there there's like probably Tens of billions, not a hundred billion dollar plus. uh GM V in commerce uh dollars that are getting transacted through live shopping. This is basically where you have

1:01 uh an influencer go and peddle a product, right? Is this like on Instagram? I like I mean I pay attention a little bit to Asia, but where like is there a website I can go to to see this right now? There's actually a big uh chunk of Timu that is powered by this, uh and definitely TikTok. So TikTok has a huge amount of these um These kind of like influencers that basically go and and uh You know, there's actually a shop tab that you can even click on. You see these products. And it's a person. basically describing the benefits of the product. So think about like influencer marketing

1:31 like taken to the extreme where You just watch. you know, people peddling products and and you click it, you you uh you buy. And uh there's actually one a company that's doing really well in the US called Whatnot. Um and it actually Yeah, I like Whatnot.

1:45 Yeah, exactly. Um, and you know, what's cool about it is like there's so much personality, you know, to the content. Like in a way, it's almost like watching Twitch. It's not just about the actual product, it's about like seeing this person. like talk about this product and maybe it's a you know, um like a really cool like new shoe from Nike or like a vintage shoe, and they're talking about like their own experience with it and childhood, you know, uh experiences with like the Jordan brand or whatever. And and so it comes this like really interactive experience. You know, my pitch for this idea is basically Well, obviously you can have like really rich engaging experiences in the very near future with avatars, right? I mean, if you go to heygen.com.

2:25 It's a great avatar product. It's the easiest, fastest self serve. Avatar product out there. Are you an investor in these guys? Uh, I am an investor in Hey Gen, uh, and I really like the team there. And they just built like the best easiest to use avatar product. Um, that was kind of their their claim to fame. They have Uh, basically

2:42 pre made avatars. So these are like know trained on or effectively created from like real human actors that they've licensed from. So um you know you can use one of their pre-made avtars Or you can create your own. You know, I think of it this as like a really fundamental capability. Like you think about all the things you can do with avatars. Um, you know, sending a sales video. uh where you're pitching each target customer

3:05 You know, in a in a personal way, right? So uh a CEO sending a thank you note via video to every single attendee of our last event, that kind of thing. In this case, like I think applying the avatar concept. to live shopping where you can now have this one on one interaction with and it could be a celebrity, like maybe you get some um uh some like real influencers to sign on to this. And You know, it's like uh Kim Kardashian type who's actually like represented in avatar form.

3:31 And each person shopping gets to have a one on one interaction with her about skimps and you know the skims products that they want to try out. Are you guys using Did any of this at Airtable? We actually do have an internal setup where it's all powered by Airtable. We use our own air table web agents to go in and research different uh target customers.

3:51 We've learnt a lot about them and then we can actually generate customized email pitches for each of them. So right now it's just email, but we are experimenting with with more of the video stuff. We actually have a setup internally where we can now generate an avatar video powered by Hey Gen. automatically from content in a row of air tables. So it could be a list of different event attendees and that use case I I just described, like I may actually do it for um Uh thank you notes for for different events that I host in the future. Like

4:18 If I host a uh a dinner with with um our uh you know some of our customers I could actually now go and automate creating a video that looks like it's me. And I I would probably be up front about it and say like, hey, like here's an avatar version of Howie, like saying thank you for coming and like the novelty of it itself actually would tickle people's Fancy, but um but like to send a a personalize

4:39 Thank you video from me. To every attendee for all of our events. Can you do that now? Like if I if I wanted to implement I mean, that sounds awesome. If I want to go and do that right now, how would I set that up? So you you can do it today. It just requires uh a little bit of scripting in Airtable. And that itself you can actually generate with AI. So The idea is like you would go and create like a list of different people you want to send the video to, or even a list of topics you want to create a video for. And then we already have an air table.

5:05 a scripting layer where you can define any arbitrary code, it's hosted in our infrastructure. And in this case you would just Define the code to go and talk to the Heygen API a lot of these AI products. Have APIs.

5:17 And so you can go and create your own kind of orchestration layer and air table. To go in automatically for each row. ask Heygen to generate a video program programmatically for you. Using this avatar. And then you get a link to a Hey Gen video that you could then go and directly send to a customer or download it and then attach it, et cetera.

5:34 Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible, but that's exactly what Sandler training did with HubSpot. They use Breeze HubSpot's AI tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch. And the results were incredible. Click through rates jumped twenty five percent. Qualified leads quadruple. And people spent three times longer on their landing pages. Go to HubSpot.com to see how Breeze can help your business grow. What's this AI personalized news thing?

6:05 When I think about like my news reading habits. Uh, you know, it's like I do sometimes appreciate reading just like the front page of like the journal or the Financial Times, right? And there's something very valuable about like that curated experience. Like everybody sees the same front page. So ironically, like I actually do get the uh the print edition of um of newspapers because I like that like

6:28 physical and consistent experience. Like I know I'm seeing the exact same paper as like millions of other people out there. But For anything else like If I'm reading something online or if I see a link, like I end up usually just taking all of the contents.

6:42 and copy pasting it into ChatchKati or Claude and then asking it to summarize, right? And say like, hey, like pull out like the key information, et cetera. And I even have some save props to do this. But what I really want is not just to do that manual summarized for each article. I wanted to go and like automatically look for all of the articles that are interesting to me. Like there are certain topics that I care about. And I just want like an AI news.

7:05 aggregator that goes out and knows what I care about. And more importantly, like it doesn't just summarize the news for me into like here's the summarized articles, it actually becomes this interactive agent that I can talk to. So like You know, your friend who is the super news expert. They're always reading all the articles, like

7:23 uh Nick, our our mutual friend, uh as an example, like he knows everything that's happening in the world. Like you go to Nick and you get thirty minutes with him and you learn about any topic you want. Like I want that. I want Nick in like AI form. Uh, where I could just ask it like, Tell me more about this, and it can go and give you more info. Dude, my um so my company uh I uh My company that used to own this podcast before we sold it was the hustle. It was a it was a daily newsletter. This was our pitch to our customer. We were like, we are your smart I think our tagline was we're your smart, no bullshit friend who will tell you what you need to know every morning.

7:56 And I had a team it w it was crazy. We had a team of three people who would reach almost three million people a day writing this newsletter. And we actually were tinkering with this idea And it was so manual where we were like What if a user tells us what they care about? And we write. Tons of different bits of news and we

8:16 plug it into someone's email based off of what their interests are. And then we'll even go. Yeah. And I was like, we'll even go and get like an expert like Howie to like comment on some of the stuff and we'll put some of the comment in the thing. In the newsletter. And it was like I was like, Oh my god, this is so manual. And what you're describing is like whenever I'm thinking about newsletters I'm like This is just changes everything. And it's actually thinking.

8:40 Yeah. It could still be a great business. You j I would just use AI for all of it. Totally. And and maybe like you could take it to the next level which is like it actually becomes a platform. Where um like Substock, you allow creators to actually create their own branded newsletters and they push the distribution promo of each one. But because you're powering this like kind of white label AI. you know, uh powered platform like they can very easily spin up their own

9:04 Custom newsletter. um, you know, a different direction is like you create these like different AI personalities. Um I think A commonly um underappreciated thing is like AI doesn't have to be robotic, right? It doesn't have to just be like utilitarian, summarize this article in like a clean You know, um uh AP uh you know, style.

9:23 Like you could actually have it injected with tons of personality and say like Be like a TMZ gossip uh reporter. who just like sensationalizes the crap out of this like new celebrity gossip, right? And and I think there's just so many interesting ways to play around with that and like news by nature. is like a very

9:42 a high engagement uh use case, right? It's like literally something you you read every new uh every day or maybe even every hour. And and so like the opportunity to like Change how people interact with like finding out about this stuff. Like I think that's a

9:56 there's gonna be a very large business to be created there, right? Like Buzzfeed, you know, Hustle, et cetera, like you know, all of these were like high growth businesses in that era. And I think now there's gonna be a different high growth era of AI news. Hey, I got a quick break because I want to tell you something cool. So our sponsor for this episode is HubSpot, but instead of the ad telling you about HubSpot, they just want to do something that's useful for you. So they did some research and they found that a bunch of people in our community uh have side hustles. They start a business on the side, they get it going, and then it becomes their main hustle over time.

10:28 And so instead of just telling you about the features of HubSpot, they wanted to give you something that will be useful for your side hustle. And so they have put together a database of AI prompts. So things that you could put into ChatGPT or your favorite AI tool that will help you with your side hustle. So check it out. It's gonna save you a bunch of time, I think. It's a um prompt database. that you should be using to uh make your side hustle more successful. And you could use this as your little personal little cheat sheet, your tool set to be a better operator with your side hustle. So you can either scan this QR code that's on the screen or get the link in the description to get the AI prompt database. All right, back to the show. Are you a personal finance nerd? Kind of. Um you know, I I was a very early mint user, um and I remember like really

11:11 um, you know, wanting to let go and and more like have visibility over my different um uh expenditures and like aggregating it. I will say like um the the tedious act of going and like doing a lot of planning is not uh is is not uh my forte. Um but I you know I have like a Um

11:30 like basically a multifamily office type setup that now helps with a lot of that stuff. You know, you listed on here real time AR AI avatar products for different vertical applications like personal finance advisors. Tell me about that. So the idea here actually is like You know, if you're a very um high net worth client. Um, you can get a very strategic wealth advisor who literally sits down with you, looks at your balance sheet, looks at all your assets.

11:54 and talks about your goals and actually comes up almost with like a plan as good as a You know, a CFO's plan for a real corporation, but for you as an individual, right? Like the business of you, Sam, as an individual. Um, and you can plan it out. You can think about the cash flow needs you have, what kind of assets you want to invest into for near term versus long term yield. And I mean the reality is like most people don't get that level of attention, right? And don't get that level of of like

12:22 you know thoughtful design to a financial plan And and you know, furthermore, like Most people don't even have access to a live financial advisor to just call up and talk to, right? Like Um, there is something very comforting, I think, about like getting to like literally talk to somebody and it's maybe why uh a lot of banks still have like Yeah, retail locations, right? So many of them, even though like

12:44 you know, for most transactions, you don't really need it. Like people want to go in and talk to to a person. So I think the idea here is like using the really smart reasoning capabilities of the newest models. Like I don't think you could have done this pre-03, where you actually can come up with like a very Thought out. um, you know, kind of personal Financial plan.

13:02 Um and you know, recommend like here's how much you should invest into equities response and like here's how much you should spend. Um but do it like with a you know, an avatar on top of it so that it's a very human like experience. And you get to talk to them. And I'm just like

13:16 Call them up anytime you're feeling stressed about your financial situation. Do you use any consumer facing personal finance apps at all? No. I don't because um I have this this team that uh that I can actually go and talk to, but like I think um Yeah, to me it's like if if everybody could have that experience, I mean everybody would be able to plan better. Have you seen um let me show you one. It's called Coubera. K-U-B.

13:41 E R A dot com. I have no association with these guys, but I've talked about them so much that I'm actually like on their homepage because they like quote quote. They quoted me. Oh yeah, there you are. And this doesn't matter if you're worth fifty thousand dollars or a hundred million dollars. Uh you y a lot of people use um software to aggregate their aggregate their net worth. Because even if you only have fifty grand, sometimes you'll own a couple of cars, you'll own Maybe totally two bank accounts. You'll maybe have some amount of money in Robin Hood, whatever. And then if you're really wealthy, you have many, many dozens of accounts.

14:15 Right. You have like uh you're you have some money with this person, some money with that person, you have probably some like private investment. And this just does a really good job of aggregating it. Of of all of it. Which a lot of companies claim they do that. The issue is is that Atapar kinda does that for like the high end. Yeah, dude, I Atapar seems awesome, but I think you have to have a lit like I think so like Morgan Stanley or JP Morgan, I forget who I talked to, you have to have at least fifty million dollars in liquid net worth with one of those banks in order to get access to Atapar.

14:46 Or something like Insane. Like you have to have a you have to be a v uh Mm, a little bit more even than an ultra high net worth client. So like you you Atapar is crazy, but I've I've never even seen it. But with Cubera, they do such a good job of aggregating all the stuff because the connections. Don't break. Or who have used uh Wellfront or like whatever.

15:06 the connections to all of your accounts breaks all the time and you gotta like re enter the password. Oh my god, it's the hugest pain. And so these guys have done a good job with that. But what they do is they have this version where you can export The information is it called is it what's it called? Is it called JSON? Oh yeah. JSON. So you can export it in JSON format, which is what chat GPT uses, or you could just connect your Cubera with your chat GPT. It starts it started as an export. Now it it automatically does it. And you can ask it questions. And so what I've done

15:39 Is I've cr I've used Cubera. So I use Cubera to upload all my accounts and when you do this you're they don't actually have access transact obviously they can just view your accounts and then I use chat GPT where I will uh create a project that has like a Warren Buffett book. Or sometimes I'll have like a more aggressive financial advisor, like a a book

15:59 Of someone who has written something. on financial advising'cause like You have different gurus sometimes, you know what I mean? Like Different. Yeah. And I can use this to ask it questions and have my own personal finance advisor. Do you know what I mean?

16:11 Yeah, yeah, that's all they're like. Give me advice using the the uh fundal fundamental uh investor theory. Yeah, and so you'll be like, look, uh my net worth is blank today. If I want to be at this Mark in ten years. Show me what I should do. Or Uh if I want to buy a house in eight years

16:29 What would you suggest is a good budget to have? Based off of what you know about me now. You know what I'm you know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. I'm sure it works great for that. Dude, it's awesome. It's so awesome. Now having a financial advisor is still great sometimes because you still like Financial advisors oftentimes the value is not in the advice that they give, it's the fact that there's a human being that you can trust. But anyway, I've this is how I've been using uh AI with my I mean imagine that like that experience that you're getting, but like now

16:56 You know, to your point about like feeling like you can trust a human more, I mean How much of that is based on like the fact that it actually is a human. versus how much of it is like literally just like the psychology of like talking to a face. No, I think like I put I think you and I think that because of our age. I my I w if I had a here's what I had a bet. If I I'm making this up. I bet that the eighteen year old today In five years they're gonna go to the doctor.

17:19 And in and when they go to the doctor, they're gonna tell their doctor, This is the illness that I have, and I think it's this Because What you and I would have said five years ago, or your parents would have said five years is Web Web M D says that it appears as though I have this illness. Right. Yeah. No so the young guys nowadays they just say Chat GPT said this and the doctor is going to say, Well, I agree with you and according to my belief, Chat GPT says blank. And Chat GPT I think is gonna be the stamp of approval Or AI. Like I think they're gonna trust AI more than a human being. Does that make sense? Oh for sure. I mean

17:51 I think like today it's already better to I mean it Everybody should be taking all of their, you know, personal like uh health diagnostics, you get a blood test or whatever. And like running that through ChatGPT, like upload it. Ask O three like hey. Like here's my my uh other symptoms, here's how I feel, like tell me what I might have, right? Or tell me what could be wrong. Like

18:10 Um, I've I've seen so many stories from like both personal friends as well as like on Reddit, Twitter, et cetera, of like people who caught diagnoses that their doctor just missed, and not necessarily because they're bad doctors, although A lot of doctors probably are bad doctors, right? Like if it's dude, they spent ten minutes with you. Like what are they gonna solve? Exactly. That so exactly like I I had a I got a an injury lifting weights to the uh like uh two months ago or something like that, and I just used Chat G P T to do P T and they just told me what to do and I just followed the routine for three weeks and like my back improved. Totally. I mean, it's literally trained on the best knowledge out there. Like you're you're getting the the like wisdom of like Peter Tia meets Huberman meets like you know all of these like

18:50 you know, health prognosticators. To to uh to inform like You know, Chat G P T's response to you. I've become the most extreme version of optimist. For

19:00 New disruptive Entrepreneurs and startups. Meaning You know, I think um I think the world moves through these different, you know, kind of phases, right? And in in a stable phase where the technology has been pretty stable. You know, that was basically true of the web.

19:15 um and web tech for, you know, at least like twenty eighteen maybe until like Gen AI hit. So for a few years, like it was very stable. The technology became very mature and then it really became about like how can you go

19:29 and either leverage your existing distribution if you're an incumbent. So it's really hard to compete against big existing players like Salesforce or Microsoft, et cetera. you know, in in that era to now like It's like the and all of the assumptions are off and every company is kinda up for graphs right. And What I mean by that is Like you can look all the way at non tech companies.

19:50 And let's say if you're a property management firm Like you know, half of your cost structure is is uh automatable, right? If not more. And in that world, like the the margins on the business are so low. Like Um, I actually talked to a uh the founder of a uh of a company based in Germany that's doing exactly this. They're they're buying up different property management firms and basically using their own AI tech to automate.

20:12 A large part of the job. And actually, they don't fire people. They they keep everybody employed, but they take on more business as a result. And so they've quickly become. Um, one of the largest property management companies in Germany, if not in Europe, um, by just going and aggregating these traditional businesses and creating that AI leverage, taking what probably was like a low percent margin business. To become a you know, tens of percent margin business. I mean the you know that from a PE standpoint, that leverage is huge.

20:39 So I think that's a playbook that We're seeing a lot of like excited around because I think every traditional uh business, especially one that has a large you know, uh part of their cost structure that could be automated.

20:51 It's kinda up for graps like think about obviously call centers, VPOs. Uh, but really any labor intensive. um business process uh outsourcing uh company. So that's basically, you know, there's a lot of these um offshore Companies that have like literally thousands of employees. That you can go and

21:08 outsource. Very um rote. Tasks too, right? So like analyst work, like go comb through these documents and look for um you know, kind of uh facts or or uh you know do research for me.

21:21 Um support centers themselves are a form of BPL, right? So you have these like big call centers that are basically uh client agnostic. So it's not just one company's call center. They can take on business from any client. So we could go and say like Hey, like I want to spin up a call center. for air table. And traditionally that just meant like you have a whole bunch of humans sitting in a room somewhere. And you know, you're you're basically hiring them.

21:44 on demand. And now, of course, a huge amount of that can be automated. Dude, I get so many of those calls a day and a lot of times they just say that they are an AI. They're horrible. They they they still suck. Do you get a lot of those calls? I I do, although I mean I I don't I don't pick them up. Dude, I pick'em up. I always pick'em up. Like I like I like want to get to know these people. Like, you know, sometimes it's like the I could I could hear like where they are. Like here's what I get all the time.

22:07 I always get a text message that says this is Coinbase. Uh someone in Serbia logged into your account. And like I know it's a scam, but I call them and I'm like Oh my god. Let's like figure out how this scam works a little bit. Like I I do it all the time. I mean you're first of all, you're totally feeding the bear because if they if you even give them a response, they know you're like You know you're a a more likely uh target. Dude, I'm so into it. They're like what's your name? I'm like, Oh, it's uh Kevin Smith. Oh, I see your account right now. I'll be like uh You do? What like tell me about it. Tell me about it. How much do I have? Yeah, this is awesome. Uh and and so like they like they go through these whole scripts and I'm like, This is this is awesome, uh that that you found my account. That is really uh do you You gotta figure out how to scam the scammer.

22:49 Like by the end of it, you get them to give you their their uh their info. Have you seen the YouTube channels that do that? They're so funny. No, I haven't dude, there's guys on me my weekend. There's guys on YouTube that have ten million subscribers and they're really like sharp guys and they'll like get they'll pretend like they're old ladies, like they use a voice changer, and they get the scammer to install software where they the scammer's uh webcam will come on and they can control like the dust it's like the greatest Oh no that is insane. It's the greatest amazing but th these these AI call companies They're hor they're still horrible. Are you bullish on them? Well, you know, I think the um the models have to get better at real time synchronous

23:29 uh interactions for for uh you know, for especially for voice calls. to fully get taken over by AI. I think for chat, like you're chatting with somebody, like it's already better in in many cases, right? Cause like you know, those chat experiences are horrible with humans because like the human is probably doing like twenty different parallel chats. They don't really know or care about you, whereas an AI can be fully attentive, but I agree, I think the voice uh is just not quite there yet. Um, you've probably seen that sesame um

23:56 voice demo where it's like uh Uh yeah. Yeah, one of the better real time voice interaction. Interrupt and Uh sesame.ai. You can literally call it

24:06 Oh yes, I did see this. I absolutely do you think this is a a good product? I you know, it's a research team and this is a demo product, but I think it shows where the models are going. And I think, you know, it could be from this team in this company, but also I mean you know that opening I

24:24 Um, and eleven labs, et cetera, they're all working on making that interactivity better. OpenAI revealed the the lit the last voice mode release where you could actually interrupt the AI halfway through a conversation like that was kind of a big deal, it's still not there yet because it doesn't feel right. I mean If you just talk to it like it doesn't feel like a human. But I think that will be um a frontier that we just

24:46 We pass or across. in the next year or two. So the one of the last things you had on here was uh uh AI productivity tools. Um you said cursor for email. Uh, what's that look like? So I just generally think this this um this form factor of it's not about using AI to completely

25:03 replace the current workflow, right? So the cool thing about cursor is it's not just like a chat interface alone. that you're using to generate code or to say like hey you don't need to code. Like it's actually an IDE. Like they forked VS Code up their IDE, and then they added this like a genetic coding experience on top. But as a developer.

25:22 You can still be in the code. In fact, I think that's the value of cursor. So I just think applying that um paradigm to a lot of other productivity experiences, one of them being email. It's like you think about email, you go in and Like usually you just come in and like you know, click on each email, read each one, et cetera.

25:40 You can currently go to a separate product like Gemini or now Claude and Opening I both have um integrations into email and you can ask questions about your email, but I think the ideal experience is actually a blended one where you can actually do agentic workflows and maybe AI is automatically doing some pre-reading of your emails, telling you what's important, what's not, maybe even doing some like research across your other content sources, like looking up you know, info in your other accounts, in your calendar, doing a web search to help you decide like, hey, like I got this pitch from an entrepreneur who wants to be on my podcast. Like Is it worth my time, right? And it can already have a recommendation for you.

26:15 So I I just think like you you know, one of the places that you spend A lot of time. Today, I mean news. I think email. Um if you're a developer, you're in your IDE like

26:24 I think that's where I would attack is like start with where people are actually spending a lot of time. And on first principles like a lot of that time could be automated or augmented with AI. So I'm gonna um ask you how you would build those because from my

26:38 I had an email company. I know a little bit about email, but not I don't know the tech I don't know the technical capabilities of everything, but Like email sucks. To build on top of because Gmail owns everything. And Superhuman did something interesting where so for the for the listeners, Superhuman was a a brand new email client and you download Superhuman and you use that instead of Gmail. They recently sold last week for I think the rumor was eight hundred million or something like that. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah, to um Grammarly. And

27:06 It was a very bold mission. I think they fell short if they sold, or that's what I'm that's what I'm guessing, if I had to guess. But it was pretty magnificent. of a of an effort to like get get after it. And my question to you is If you were gonna build something like this You would pretty much would have to start from scratch, I would think, of a new email client, not a Gmail plugin.

27:27 Yeah, so Interestingly, um I also worked in email before Airtable. So my my startup uh before then was a YC company ETAX. Uh and it was actually I think we were the first startup to build a Gmail plugin. And it wasn't like an official plugin at the time. There was no plugin framework. Like we literally figured out like kind of on our own how to hack what's called the DOM, which is um basically the HTML representation from Gmail of of the email client. Like literally just injected a UI on top of that with a Chrome extension. And so you know, we kind of pioneered this idea of like, Oh wow, you could be an email.

28:02 And then we added our own sidebar to every email that you had to show information about. who you're talking about. But could they have banned you? They could have certainly A sent us a cease and desist and said, like what you're doing is against our TOS as a site. Um and then B

28:18 They could do some things to make it annoying for us and Like it's almost like they could change they They could just keep moving the uh target. So like they could change the layout of the page. They just make your life HML without making it look different, yeah, to to the user in ways that would break our integration. Um and and that did happen. I don't think it was intentional. I think they would just update the page, re-render it, and then it would change the layout and then like for a day our our extension would like be broken and we'd have to furiously try to like code a fix to it. And that was like kind of the really, really early days. And ironically, um Superhuman. Uh the founder, uh Raul was actually the founder of a a company that kinda competed with that time, like twenty ten. Reportive would be reportive was gameplay. Oh my man. For the anyone who's above probably thirty three that was involved in technology, reportive was

29:04 Uh a g a game changing tool. That was so cool that they created that. Yeah, yeah. So you know, email has been like I mean it's it's it's interesting'cause From the time that reported and eTAX existed to now, like Email really hasn't changed very much at all. Like you look at Gmail.

29:19 Like it's kind of the same product. And you know, the um status for argument was like, Well, it's like good enough, don't fix it. But I think that like You know, to me Superhuman was like an interesting innovation on email. Like they did build their own client. I don't actually think it's that hard. Like certain things seem really hard to do. Um, in theory, but then in practice, like

29:39 It's actually not that hard. Like air table, I mean obviously it's hard to build air table, but like You know, we ended up architecting our own proprietary database engine to power it, instead of using something off the shelf like MySQL or Postgres to power the real time collaboration parts at our table. And it turned out that like It was the right decision, and ultimately it turned out to be cleaner.

30:00 And better for us to go that route than to try to repurpose something off the shelf. But it's harder. You have to raise you have to raise tent or hun or you did. Uh and someone else would also have to raise a fuckload of money to do that. But also Getting revenue for that I think would be a slog. I don't you guys did it fast, but like superhuman did not. Yeah, and I think I mean superhuman was an interesting product for a number of reasons. I mean one

30:23 I think it was a really good product, but It was really hard to articulate like what is the killer feature or set of features that make it 10x better. Then Email without, you know, or or normal email, right? And I think it was, you know, it was like faster. They had some nice features like tracking emails, et cetera. But it was hard to say this is like clearly a different paradigm. Like this is 10x there, right?

30:45 And I think that with AI, like you could now build a product that actually is radically different, radically better. Um and so in fact, like uh a former airtable uh employee uh of mine, JB, uh is now working on a company that's doing exactly this. I I did a little funding uh round into it. Um so chief dot SO. Oh Is it loading for you? Okay, there we go. Yeah. You have to give them you have to write a bigger check though, so they can get a like a.ai. Exactly. Yeah.

31:13 I think it's a really interesting space. I think um I actually think that you can build this product without a massive team and a massive funding round and maybe part of that. Is because Yeah. like in a very meta way, like if you're very AI leveraged in how you build products, like you can get so much more done. um as an AI leverage team.

31:30 than you could have done in the past. Um like her uh cursor itself. It's just hard to build a business when you charge twenty dollars a month. Meaning it's like it's that's not enough, or that's It precludes too many people. Uh the first one. Yeah, and so actually um one of the premises here is that there is a

31:48 Top one percent. audience and not necessarily meaning like one percent like richest people, but like there's a one percent power user audience of email for whom email is like their life, right? Probably for you, definitely for me. every VC, maybe even like realtors, lawyers, et cetera, like Email is everything to them. Like and and like if you can make them 10% more efficient at email, like they'll pay not twenty, but two hundred a month, right? Maybe even like two thousand a month. Like If you gave me an awesome email product that even saved me like

32:17 call it five hours a week in in uh in time and like not only that, but allowed me to not miss Key opportunities like sometimes like I mean I get like literally hundreds of real emails. every day that Gmail considers important. Frankly, with that many coming in, like I miss some and sometimes they're really important. I have a I have a full time assistant and it feels like a large chunk of her job is just categorizing my emails.

32:40 Yeah, for sure. Um And You know, some people have like uh you know a full time EA who like literally doesn't just categorize the emails, but like goes through and does research on each one and tells you like, hey I did some research, this is how you should respond. So I think um I think it's a huge, huge space. And um I mean one of my lessons learned from uh from Cursor actually.

33:00 And uh I remember um Did you invest in them? You know, first looking at Cursor. What's that? You invested in Cursor? I I did. Um, and uh actually I was introduced to them by uh Peter Fenton from Benchmark, who's our investor at Airtable. And uh, you know, just what one of the most like phenomenal uh pickers of talent and opportunity uh spaces uh that I've ever met, and just you know, brilliant in in uh every way as an investor. But I remember having this discussion with him of like, what is the TAM?

33:27 for something like Cursor and you have to factor in like of course like Microsoft exists. They actually literally own VS Code, even though it's open source and you could fork it. Um, they already have GitHub. They have this massive developer audience. Like, how big can an upstart get? And this was when like Cursor was probably like low millions in revenue. And You know, my argument actually was that like

33:47 The the developer audience for for AI augmented coding. is so large. I mean, today you might have like call it thirty million developers. That's the number that um Shripe always quotes. maybe that actually will expand to like fifty to a hundred million developers. Because it gets easier to develop.

34:03 And then on top of that, like it would be perfectly rational for every single one of those people to pay at least a thousand dollars. A mu uh a year. for a AI Um, like an a coding agent that makes them way more productive, like not like 10%, but like 2x, right? And maybe even rational for them to pay$10,000. Okay, now you're talking about like a thirty to three hundred billion dollar TAM.

34:24 Like carving off even a small few percent niche of that. Especially when like Coding itself is so fragmented. You've got like different types of coding in different languages, front end, back end, et cetera, like All you have to do is win like

34:37 A sizable five percent niche. And you've built like a multi billion revenue business. Is that the framework for how you think of what's interesting for starting companies? I think so. I mean I I think there's like You can either Go really broad.

34:51 Um like in this You know. Cursor example or cursor for X. So pick a market that's just so big, like there's so many potential target. Users, like tens of millions at least.

35:02 And for whom. The the value is significant enough that they will pay for it. It's not a freemium or it's not purely like a free ad driven product experience. It's not a consumer product. Pick something that's like broad enough and deep enough where there's just a very large pie to capture value out of. And then

35:20 even if you end up only capturing a niche of that pie, like you have a really large business on your hands. I think the alternate path is go really deep and narrow. So this is more like the property management example where it's like You're probably never gonna have like a hundred million users. who need property management software, but like If you go into that vertical and you attack it. You might have five thousand. Yeah.

35:42 Yeah, and if you go in and attack it very deeply, and for each one you can extract even more revenue out of them because in this, I mean the most leverage way you can extract revenue out of out of uh that space is like not just to sell white label software. That you charge a property management firm X dollars per month, you actually take the entire

36:00 cake by buying them out outright, running the PE playbook and getting leverage on their own. And what's air table, the first one? Air Table is definitely the first one. Um, so you know, we're in a space where like Especially now that we've um relaunched the product as as basically an agentic first product. So you can literally come in. And talk to our agent Omni To ask it to build any app, right? So like it's very much akin to the vibe coding products out there. But the difference is like ours is backed by.

36:26 the reliable no code components that we've spent the past ten years. building and making scalable and real time collaborative, et cetera. And so if you want to build any business app, I mean, for you guys, for instance, um, for your business, like if you want a CRM, right? If you want a way to track um, you know, people who are coming on your show, if you want like a content pipeline, any of those things, like we want to be the best way to spin up a reliable business app for internal operations. Like we're not trying to be like an external Consumer facing Protect tool like If you want back, go to like

36:57 you know the replets and the V zeros, et cetera, of the world to spin up like A consumer facing hobby app. But like for a business app, like You know. The the need for that definitely

37:06 is at least tens of millions of people out there who want to build apps for their own business. And every single business should be creating apps this way and probably replacing Is you know, uh over the next few years like old legacy software with this. Alright, listen up. Turn the volume up.

37:23 Because it's your boy Sean and I got a little message for you. I talk to hundreds of founders a week. And when I talk to founders, everyone says the same thing. That's the one thing they need the most is not funding. It's not more resources. It's just having more time. The goal here is to win, and the way you win is you get yourself free time to do stuff that's high impact. How do you do that?

37:42 Well I'll tell you my solution. The answer is Gabby. Well, you might be wondering who is Gabby? Gabby is my assistant. She is my wonderful assistant. Gabby lives in Latin America and she helps me save about 20 hours a week. So what she's doing for me is every morning, my inbox is sorted and triage, and the most important stuff is right at the top with draft replies ready for me. So I'm never behind on email. And then if as I'm on the go, I'll just send her voice notes saying, Hey, can you find my kids a soccer class? Hey, can you take care of this car registration thing for me? All these little tedious BS things that would take up time in my day, she takes care of for me. And so that's free time I'm getting back. So if you're a CEO who's serious about growing your company, you need to get yourself an assistant.

38:22 The best place to go is somewhere.com. Somewhere sources the best assistance from low cost areas for you. So you can get an amazing executive assistant who's got you know business experience and has supported other CEOs for seven, eight, nine, ten dollars an hour. And so go ahead, go to summer.com. Tell'em I sent you, they'll hook you up with a good deal and get yourself an assistant. And you can take me later. Alright, back to this episode. What uh last question, what's this uh All you wrote on the sheet you just wrote exotics. Question mark.

38:49 Exotic ideas um for um Uh for AI. Like so You know, it's more off the beaten path stuff. Um, I think I think there's some like really interesting new niches that will be created. Like an example would be like

39:04 What's the next consumer social app? That's AI native, right? And I don't think that just means like You know, it looks like Instagram, it looks like TikTok, and it's got some like AI features to help you like write posts and and so on. Like I think it might mean like I mean, there are a few startups that are trying to do this where

39:19 Yeah, it's like you you actually have like social networks or chat groups where half the participants are actually AI avatars, right? And Like what does that look like? Um, and and uh I think What's interesting about This space is that like

39:32 Unlike the PE AI approach where it's like take a known problem. And do something that's very Like solvable, right? Like automate support costs, automate property management costs with AI. It's like You can very clearly visualize what that looks like. I think what's really interesting is that like

39:47 We don't know what the consumer uh behaviors are gonna look like in an AI native era. Like, you know, we saw the transition from like linear TV to Internet, um to mobile, et cetera. And at each point, I think there were there were some surprises about like that the ha the way that the content and the engagement patterns actually change, right? It's not like

40:06 We just took people watching linear TV and then gave them YouTube to do the same thing. We somehow went from TV to watching video games on my phone. Exact exactly. Yeah. I mean, like nobody would have guessed like Twitch, right? Um like How's that like the big thing? And so I just think like there there's um when you have people who are not just technologists, like the the first wave of post-Chache P innovation was very much driven by like technologists were very close to the

40:30 uh the models and the model research and understood what the models were capable of, I think we're gonna see more and more people who are actually more artists. than technologists. And think about like the artistry of like What does consumer psychology and behavior look like when you have this new paintbrush, which is like AI powered experiences? In some cases, I think you can create like hyper engaging consumer engagement, uh consumer experiences that like actually could be even more addictive than than uh you know social media is today, right? Imagine like you have

41:00 You know, people have like the perfect girlfriend or boyfriend, uh, avatar, you know, people are already kind of doing this, right, with even ChatGPT or Grok, et cetera. Grok Unhinged. I don't know if you played with that, but like it's it's pretty interesting. Like it's Grok, uh the the Elon uh AI product. But Unhinged mode is where and they also have a sexy mode, which you can guess what that is, is basically where they've taken off all of the um uh the uh PG and safety features that ChatGPT and Claude have, right? So Like you could

41:27 have a very explicit conversation with with this AI. And it will happily engage, which just kind of shows you like most of the AI experiences we're getting. Especially from the big model companies have been very like cleaned up. Dude, I ask my my Chat GPT controversial questions all the time. Like

41:45 Yeah. Like it's like it refuses I can't answer that. And sometimes I ask it things where I'm like asking out of like I like for example, I I love history and I'll like I if I'm reading about World War Two, I'll ask it about very sensitive topics, but I'll just like explain to me this topic. But I'll be like Uh but anyway it

42:04 It won't even touch some of these things. Yeah. Exactly. And and you know, that's the whole debate is like you know, it's a little bit like free speech censorship, but like applied to AI, right? It's like You know

42:14 at at like how much can you actually Yeah, sensor AI for safety and and for um like moral. Clauses. Uh how much of that is is even like

42:26 globally applicable versus like What's moral for one one uh one culture may be immoral for another, et cetera. And and I think it's interesting to see Groc be Uh they're not like completely

42:37 Un uh unfiltered, but like It is a lot more pushing of the boundaries, right? So I had never heard of that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, tr I mean you should try it today. Like uh trying the unhinged button. Like I was trying to learn about the Israel Palestine conflict. Like I'm just trying to understand the background and like Chad GT won't even like touch some of the topics and I'm like uh I'm just trying to learn. Exactly. Yeah, like um and and so I think that's

43:01 That's gonna be really interesting when when you start to see Like people really push the boundaries. I mean Yeah, they say um uh a lot of great uh tech is like always always uh pioneered for like the uh the salacious the black market you know I mean Silk Road type stuff, right? Like in And so like what it what does that look like in the AI era?

43:19 Well, you're the man. I appreciate your your insight. I like uh I enjoyed this. This is awesome. It's fun because uh you have a a really interesting uh perspective. You're uh a young guy, but you've been in the game for like so long and you have such breath because of uh the size of your company. And so it's really cool to just see your thinking and uh how you uh how you uh are gonna like somewhat predict the future and and uh and all that stuff, but uh dude you're badass. I I appreciate you doing this. Oh thank you. Well really enjoyed the the combo and uh happy to try any time, bud. All right, that's it. That's the time. All right, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit, and it's hosted by Luis and Fonzi Cameo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Louise and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators, and you're gonna hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit.

44:39 So you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcasts.

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