SPEAKER_07: This is a company called Dinnerfly where you sign up and then you swipe left or right on the kind of meals you like and the dietary restrictions and whatnot. And basically it creates like the meal plan for you for this week. And then basically it says I want lasagna soup today and caprese salad on Wednesday and chicken pesto on Friday. I think you nailed it. You're a carb guy. You're an Italian carb guy. Here we go.
SPEAKER_05: Italian is your favorite I think.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I mean, you know, we like Italians. Great. And then you basically go here and you say, OK, add it to my shopping cart and you basically just whatever you want. And it just basically orders it via Instacart. Oh, this is awesome.
SPEAKER_03:
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SPEAKER_05: All right, everybody, welcome to this week in startups. It's Madra Mondays every Monday. I like to have my bestie Sandeep Madra on the program to do a demos. And, you know, we talk about AI and we talk about, you know, what we're talking about in our group chat in our slack rooms. And you had an interesting observation just about efficiency and what's happening in this back and forth between employees and employers back to work, back to office, AI outsourcing. Maybe you could just summarize that because it's very controversial, but I think we should attack it head on here.
SPEAKER_07: It kind of stems from kind of the end of the Zurb era, the move towards efficiency and then the rise of AI. And you really have to kind of look at those things as all together right now, because before, you know, in Zurb, we had a lot of excess. Right. And now out of Zurb, companies are looking for efficiency. And guess what pops up instead of humans is AI. And we're starting to see companies do is use AI in and we're going to see some great demos today, but we're starting to use AI in order to replace human operations, customer support, SDRs, you know, sort of all the low level operations are being replaced faster than people can imagine. And even in our group chat today, I think, you know, someone mentioned we will mention the company, but mentioned that they're using it in their tier one support. And so this is it. It's happening right now. And for those folks that don't pick up and become, you know, masters of this technology in terms of implementing and using it, there is a solid chance that the technology replaces you. So we're going through a seismic change between employers and employees.
SPEAKER_05:
COVID threw a huge wrench into the machinery. People went home. And that was during ZURP. This is when people were competing for employees here in America, at least and, you know, globally to a lesser extent.
Now, you have all the major companies, Google, Facebook, etc, laying people off even to this day in 2024, we saw a bunch of layoffs happen at Google. These firms have unlimited capital sitting in their bank accounts, they literally have 10s of billions of dollars sitting there. And they throw off 10s of billions of dollars in profits a year. So they don't need to lay people off. They're choosing to do that to make earnings go up. And because they think some people are dispensable. Now, if you're an employee, on the other side of this, what a swing this has been Sunday, they started having competition, but three years ago, for their services. And the average tenure here in Silicon Valley was probably 18 to 24 months at a company.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, because you were getting outbid by Uber by Airbnb by Google by Microsoft, and then a well funded startup.
SPEAKER_05: Now it's the opposite. People want to work from home, they're being told, come back to the office. And if you don't want to come back to the office, that's fine. You're your job's been eliminated. It's not a choice. It's a mandate. And it might be a mandate for, you know, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, might be a mandate for two days a week, whatever it is, then the unexpected happened, as you're saying, Sunday, AI came into that picture.
And then the bottom third, let's not even say jobs, but I think the bottom third of work we all do has been automated or semi automated this year alone.
What that means is, the employers have an even more leverage over employees. So this idea that an employee can complain about coming back to the office, it's just ending and this is the pendulum that goes back and forth. But do you see the important question is, is there a path to this going back to the employees having power again?
Or is this a permanent shift? Well, everything oscillates, you know, the power balance will, you know, go back in some direction, but it's not going to go back for everyone.
SPEAKER_07: I think the real, you know, sort of the real tragedy in some things in some ways during the ZURP and COVID era was people started taking advantage of companies, right? People started taking advantage of working hours and some people working multiple jobs. And I think what we're not going to, and then, you know, this expectation of not even working like the full time. And I think now there's going to be a big jump in productivity. And I do see there being competition for folks that are AI native. You know, Paul Graham had a tweet last week and he said a number of his companies, you know, in the Y Combinator cohorts have told him a 22 year old with AI is as good as a 28 year old with experience. And so that just, I think that's a really good lens to use as a benchmark of where the value will happen. So if you are a young engineer, that's leveraging AI, or not even an engineer, but just someone within the team that's really using AI heavily, you'll become really valuable. And you will have all the perks and benefits of being courted all over. But if you're not, you're going to become irrelevant.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and there's an incredibly well known infamous subreddit called over employed. And I just pulled it out while we're talking and this got posted over just five hours ago. It was nice while it lasted for a brief period of time. I had three jobs. Unfortunately, I had to drop one due to some conflicts. I woke up today to last paycheck from them. And you know, the comments are great. Wipe your tears with hundred dollar bills. Yeah, had a third. Yeah, I mean, people are literally working multiple jobs. And this has been why a lot of folks are in management are getting upset about this, right.
SPEAKER_05: And so if you just go there, you'll see people abusing the system.
And you know, in their minds, they felt like employee employers were abusing them for many years. And now I mean, it's amazing when you read some of these, somebody will be put in charge of some project. And they're like, I haven't worked on this project in four months. I haven't worked on anything in three months, and they're just collecting paychecks.
SPEAKER_05: Well, managers, I think are learning how to look at activity. And there's still some managers who I guess don't know how to manage remote workers. But it's going to be chaos. So I also think just one last thing, and let's jump into the demos is it's not about managing remote workers.
SPEAKER_07: I think what happened was, and you know, we've seen this in in different businesses that I'm involved in as investors, as an investor, just kind of help as a mentor. You know, the time before COVID, if you had like an appointment, you really wouldn't put your appointment in like the middle of the workday, you would try to know maybe at the start of the day or at the end of the day. Right. This is why dentists would have nighttime appointments, morning appointments and weekend appointments.
SPEAKER_05:
Yeah, they don't even have those anymore now. Exactly. And so now it's very common for someone to just be gone for half the day because their appointments at Yeah, 1130 or 1pm.
SPEAKER_07:
Yes. Yeah. And so it's kind of crazy. I decided I was going to bring my venture firm back to in person two days a week here in Silicon Valley.
SPEAKER_05:
Coming back because it was founded a diversity program is pre accelerator we started is going so well, I just said, let's start doing it twice a week in person. I only have like two employees in the Bay Area now out of 20. And I have, you know, one or two in New York. So we're going to do like one day in New York in two days here in the valley. But I've got to get people back in the office because my competitors are starting to do other accelerators, pre accelerators, etc.
SPEAKER_05:
They're starting to do things in person and then LPS and VCs, LPS, who invest in our fund and VCs who look at our companies, they're all here. They all want us to be back in person. They want to meet the company's person because they want to decide who to invest in. And so I think this is the end game. And I think AI, you're correct, does push us towards the end game. Doesn't mean people still won't use remote workers. Of course they will. They'll still use freelancers. Yeah, but I think the idea of
just abusing the system, the overworked trend that's ending and yeah, I mean, it's gonna suck for some people to commute, but I think there'll be a balance. I think it'll be a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday thing. I think that's kind of reasonable work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday in the office, Monday, Friday, get to work from home. Kind of dope, actually, when you think about it, it's almost it's not a four day weekend, but it's kind of nice to not have to do that arduous commute, whether it's
using all the AI tools, you can be very efficient too. So the first one today is inspired by Reid Hoffman last week, hosted this, which was a short video. I'm just going to play a few seconds of it, right?
SPEAKER_07: What defines humanity is not just our unusual level of intelligence, but also how we capitalize on that intelligence by developing technologies that amplify and
SPEAKER_07: Okay, so one of the bets that we have is we will be able to do a JCal episode, a segment,
SPEAKER_07: sorry, a segment, we said, and people will not be able to tell. Now this is pretty good. I think you can tell it's generated, but you know, so I wanted to test out our one, and so what I did was I went to their platform and I tried a couple things. So the first is they have, you know, these built in avatars, and I picked like a default one, and I just had it do write a like a script on its own and do a quick little introduction for This Week in Startup. So I'm just going to play this really quickly. Okay, let's see.
SPEAKER_00:
Good day to all the innovators out there. Welcome to This Week in Startups, where we bring light to the most groundbreaking stories from the startup world. Today, we're diving into the remarkable realm of artificial intelligence.
From self driving cars to predictive algorithms that can help doctors diagnose diseases better.
SPEAKER_07: Okay, so this is, you know, let's kind of get your reaction to this, and then I'll kind of go a bit deeper.
SPEAKER_05: This looks like because of the tone of the voice being a little bit like a robot. It just takes you right out of it. So it's not smooth enough. In the case of the This Week in Startups person, or in the case of Reid Hoffman, yeah, it feels like it's 60 or 70% of the way there in terms of tone.
Because it doesn't have the ums the ahs. I'm thinking for a second here and I'm tilting my head. It's a little bit too perfect of a performance. And if you have to perfect of a performance and you're doing it in a monotone, it looks like you're reading from a script and then it feels like a robot and I'm doing that with my voice right now. That's what kills engagement. You want to feel like you're talking to a human and humans have that sunny, built into their, you know, emotional cortex, their brain, their emotions, it's
SPEAKER_05: hardwired in us to interpret emotions like you're looking at me right now, with a thoughtfulness in processing what I'm saying, I'm talking to you with a little bit of passion here about the human species. Those are very non obvious cues that are going to have to be learned by AI feels like it's halfway there. Maybe it's 60% of the way there in both of these cases.
SPEAKER_05:
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SPEAKER_07:
script. Anyway, I give these both like a C plus B minus. They would be fine. Yeah, they want to just share one more. And then before we grade it just before we grade it. Okay, here we go. Here we go. And so then what I did was I also created an avatar of myself. And so that's a pretty easy process, you just basically use your iPhone, they use the scanning features of it. And then you don't even have to record a video.
SPEAKER_07: Look like that visually looks like you and so I'm just gonna play this and, and I didn't use my voice. I had to change my voice. And so you'll just hear it. So here we go. And I did like a summary of yesterday's football games. This week in startups is a news and information update featuring stories about the world of tech startups, venture capital, and more. Each episode is packed with insights from leading thought leaders, investors, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Join us for entertaining conversations that dive deep into the
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, so this is, again, you can you can obviously add your voice in as well. And so they really have a really interesting platform, I have to say it's difficult to use, like I had to, you know, spend like, like, almost an hour just to kind of get all these things to work. But end to end, you can get your video. And I think it would have taken a lot of work to get the read one to the quality it is. So now that's great, because I think based on that, I give it a C plus right now the potential is obviously there, it does not cross the uncanny valley. And I think, you know, in a year, we could be looking at it, and it might fool some people if they weren't paying attention. But I still don't think it would fool me. As a performer, and as somebody who, you know, builds media products, I don't think it's gonna fool me, just like I see ads for like crypto on Tiktok sometimes where they obviously take Elon or somebody else Mark Cuban, and then they have them say they're doing some Bitcoin,
SPEAKER_05:
giveaway or some token sale, you know, those fake ads, those defects, and they don't cross the valley for me either. So it feels like we're obviously plus you can see all of our bets at this week and startups comm slash bets. So I can't remember what our bets were for this. But we said, I think by June 1, it would be a segment. So I think you're under and I took me over.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I'm feeling good. Like, if I were to say so I'm kind of in the same as you I think it was like, they've done a really good job. The tech is incredible. The usability is is still hard and making it more real. I think that you know what, if I track the progress of what's happened with the image generators, the image generators are real, right? We did the influencer a couple weeks ago. I just think we have to get the video gen and the voice gen. And that's just like the same thing that happened with the image ones of the amount of fine tuning to make them perfect when in. So I really feel like
SPEAKER_07: we're gonna see that like we're only in so you feel good in your bed. You feel good about your feel good. I know. Okay, no early bio. Yeah. Okay. This weekend startups comm slash bets. I give it c plus. What did you give it? Is it great? I get I give it as a C plus C C plus as well. Yeah, I'm in the same area. The usability was very, very hard. But like the potential is incredible. And to just give people an idea. I remember when we were using PCs, then the internet and then smartphones, we went through the same thing.
SPEAKER_05:
SPEAKER_05:
We went through the same transition image, text, easy images, a little harder. Audio a little harder, and video very hard. So every time a new medium comes out like this smartphones when you had your BlackBerry, like it took a really crummy picture, somebody sent you a picture, it was blurry, you could barely take it. Now you take pictures on your iPhone 15 years into this. And they look better than a digital SLR. So here we are, you know, and I think this will happen in 15 months or 1.5 years or 15 years.
SPEAKER_05: And then in 15 quarters as opposed maybe 15 quarters, four years, this whole thing will occur, as opposed to 15 years. Yeah, still way under on you. But let's keep let's keep going. Money on the line. Okay, the next one, I think you're really gonna love this, Jacob, because it's kind of been a part in and around your business in different way, shape and form last couple years. So this is called bland.ai. Okay, and what is basically they give you a iPhone agents and the ability to create an iPhone agent.
SPEAKER_07: And you can use it for cold calling us in surveys, inbound sales, customer support. Alright, and so what I'm going to pull up here is I just did a little demo, I'm going to have it call my phone, I've created an agent, which is doing some inbound sales. And so you're going to see the platform live. And basically, I've picked inbound sales. And so I've told the agent that it's a part of the sales team for searchlight. And it does, you know, all this kind of stuff. And she gave it a prompt. It's a robust. Yeah, yeah, a pretty robust prompt, and like a sample of a dialogue. Okay, so I'm gonna have it send me the call. And let's kick this off. It's making a phone call. And it's transcribing the call. We have a little heads up display here that will show us the call in real time. Wow, this is potentially amazing.
SPEAKER_05: Hi, Matt. Thanks for taking my call. Confirmed.
SPEAKER_04:
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, this is great. Thanks for confirming. Jump right into it. Could you provide a brief overview of the challenges you're facing with your current pricing and monetization approach?
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, you know, I'm finding my customers are really looking to get discounts on my pricing and I don't really know what I should do.
SPEAKER_04: You know, probably discounts can definitely be a struggle. In your experience, what do you think is driving customers for lower prices? But there's certain planning products or usage levels that we're seeing to trigger those requests more than others.
I just think it's the end of the ZERP era and everybody wants cheaper prices. What can you offer me to help me here?
SPEAKER_07: That's a great question. Our platform is focused specifically on helping companies like yours minimize revenue by ensuring the right customers on the right.
SPEAKER_04:
We analyze the usage patterns and purchasing behaviors. Okay, I'm gonna end that there.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, wow. I mean, apologies because now that is no indication of their software. Just when you put a mic when you do a speakerphone call, it can be it could sound a little not crisp.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I tried to keep it close there. But look, that is less than five minutes of setup. And you can give it, let me put the share back up, you can have it call multiple people.
SPEAKER_07: I guess I use their default prompt. And so you can have it do batch calling really, and you're getting the full transcript of the conversation that your customer is having with, you know, your virtual sales associate really impressive. Like I can find a lot of use cases for this. And you know, especially for enterprises. This is amazing. Wow, I am blown away. I'll tell you what's really compelling about this is I think I would prefer this to talking to a human. Sometimes I'll give you one example is really annoying to get phone calls from a human confirming your reservation at a restaurant, right? Nobody wants that. It's annoying. Yes, now, yes, it is really nice. I get this restaurant I love up in Tahoe called great gold, really great pizza pasta joint. Amazing.
SPEAKER_05:
And, you know, when I it's a hot ticket in town, and it's hard to get a reservation, and so they will text you an hour before, hey, your reservations in an hour, they just want to know if they can release the table or not, for planning purposes, and they tell you in the afternoon, hey, your reservation is confirmed, you know, one to confirm nine to cancel. Super convenient. And I love that texturing. Now, if I were to get a phone call, or I asked for a reservation and said, Hey, what time would you like and we just talked about this on speakerphone or it asked me a couple questions, I would be okay with that, you know, and if I was calling about a product or service and I had questions or an airline, this would be wonderful. And so I could see like, you know, that classic phone call to an airline for customer support classic Uber. I'm calling Uber because my car didn't show up or my Uber E showed up cold, whatever it is like, yeah, I could see this working wonderful. And it feels like it's so close to crossing the uncanny valley.
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SPEAKER_05: And it adapts. Like the thing is compared to any of these before, it can really interact and adapt with you because it has an LLM behind it. And so if you really push its boundaries and start asking it different things, it'll really guide you. And I tested it a few different times. Now if you ask it for like a score to less these games, it tells you you can't. But it can really help you. And the experience is incredible. Like I really was blown away. They made it such that it's like drop in code, super easy to use.
SPEAKER_07: And you can think about this for a number of use cases like collecting feedback from your customers example you talked about, and even just like SDR type things.
SPEAKER_05: Feels like a great SurveyMonkey type application here or type form, etc. Like you could have it ask a series of questions to somebody, hey, thanks for coming to our event. Wondering if you could, you know, answer five questions about the event, and you can talk in your normal voice. And the fact that it makes a transcript is super dope. I love the fact that it does a transcript. You think about this for political calls, right? Hey, I'm calling on behalf of, you know, President Biden, want to make sure you understand that you're voting has happening on this day. Do you have any questions about our platform, whatever that ask questions. But the idea of having that transcript, watching it in real time is super cool. Yeah. And so I give this an A, I think it's an A minus, maybe A or A minus, I think this is
SPEAKER_05: I give it an A to I'm an A this is like, just really well done. Work super well. I think they charge like a really 12 cents a minute for a call, which is you know, think about that from a cost
SPEAKER_07: free. Yeah, it's free. I mean, if you 12 let's say 10 cents a minute. 10 minute call $1 Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you compare that to an agent, it would be, you know, 510 times that so you're saving somewhere between 80 and 90% on each of those calls. Imagine I'm calling I'm a UPS driver. We're at your gate. We have your package, it needs to be signed for because you order an iPad, or your iPad is on the way. It's 10 minutes out, would you be okay with us leaving it
SPEAKER_05:
SPEAKER_05: there since you're not there and signing it? Like think about that use case. You ever have that happen when you order your iPhone? We don't want to leave your iPhone and it's like, please just leave it there. Like they can actually have that conversation with you and then have a record of you saying, Hey, I said, Okay, the driver hears you say okay, boom, because in real time. So yeah, there's real time agents, I can also see them being super annoying. There's gonna have to be some, there's already regulation about robocall. So I think this would all fall under the regulations about robocall. I find this great. I think it's great.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I think you know, like you said, you opt into it with the service you're using, you know, many times on airlines, like there's some basic stuff you want to do, which they don't allow you to do through the online system, but you call in, I'd be okay with an agent where it's like, I'm just trying to get an upgrade or something like that. And it's nothing, you know, magical. So I do think there's a lot of use cases for that.
SPEAKER_05:
I guess the way support works these days is you have these different tiers, as you were alluding to before, some of them, you know, an FAQ, a frequently asked questions will resolve it for you. Sometimes the app or text messaging resolves it for you sometimes talking to a live agent, I guess is when you start to get really intense, but building up the information so that you can get to a resolution is really what you're trying to go for here. I love it for product feedback as well. And then do people really want to be doing these phone calls like humans in a boiler room somewhere they
SPEAKER_05:
don't. So this is like human jobs that will go away in India, in Manila, in other places. And then those people can move up the stack and work on higher level things. That's my true belief. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: All right. So we both gave this one an eight. That's good. I mean, we don't get a often here. But this intelligent agent with the LLM behind it is absolutely fantastic.
SPEAKER_07:
All right. Okay. So the next one is super interesting. You know, we saw some of these very early on in the lifecycle of kind of chat GPT powered use cases. I think we even shared some where, you know, you were asking for meal plans and everything else. And so this is a company called dinner fly. And what they do is you go through like a little bit of like a Tinder like process where you sign up and then you swipe left or right on the kind of meals you like and the dietary restrictions and whatnot. And you go through that process and basically it creates like the meal plan for you for this week. You know, so I did that. I just kind of pick some random things. And then basically it says, okay. And I think I messed it up, but I basically I want lasagna soup today and Caprese salad on on Wednesday and chicken pesto on Friday. And now that you're a carb guy, you're an Italian carb guy. Here we go.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, you know, we like Italians. Great. And then you basically go here and you say, okay, add it to my shopping cart and you basically just whatever you want. And it just basically orders it via Instacart.
SPEAKER_07: And then for tonight, you click on it. And basically this is the lasagna soup recipe. And obviously the ingredients would have been ordered via Instacart and it gives you the preparation and you're off to the races.
So fantastic. All they basically went end to end, you know, coming up with the meals to the ingredients to the process to the ordering. You give it your preferences, hey, your keto, your low carb, etc. It gives you a meal plan for the week, it then gives you all the shopping you need and the recipe. And this doesn't need to be three or four different services. Previously, you you might look at a meal plan from like some health nut website, or you might go to the New York Times cooking app and pick some recipes, then you got to print each one out, then you're going through shopping and you're like, okay, this one needs
SPEAKER_05: onions, this one needs garlic. Oh, wait a second, how much garlic do I need for each recipe? You know, it's, this is fantastic. And if it makes a shopping list, and then goes and orders it from Instacart. Yes, with an agent. So right now, it goes with this. Yeah, and that's it. And it just basically puts it in here, you click order on Instacart and it drops it into your Instacart, you're off to the races. Now what would be really good is if I took a picture of my pantry in this app, I knew I already had olive oil, and it would know that while oil bottle is half full,
SPEAKER_05:
SPEAKER_07: yeah, and say we know you have olive oil. Now you're getting into the realm of having a household assistant like a family assistant, like, you might call it a family assistant, I think, who might do the shopping for you do the meal planning for you. And then also see if you have to refresh the
SPEAKER_05:
pantry. So I love this refreshing of the pantry idea. Absolutely great. I give this a B plus, only because I'm trying to give it some room to improve. But this is fantastic. If it took pictures, take pictures of your food, give you the calorie count, whatever. I mean, it just got so I guess I would give it a day if it had that. Take a picture of your pantry and did pantry management. Pantry management, there used to be this concept that you would have like an a smart egg holder, and it would tell you when you have a certain number of
SPEAKER_05:
eggs. And when you get down to four eggs, it would reorder your eggs automatically. Yeah, yeah. Remember that kind of silly stuff that existed? I think actually, we're going to get to that point where it knows from a barcode or from a camera in your refrigerator, that your milk is at a certain weight, because the shelf has a weight on it. When the milk comes on and off the shelf, it knows the delta in that, oh, you know, when you took it out, it had 16 ounces, when you put it back, it had eight ounces,
SPEAKER_05:
because the shelf had a different weight. And it knew your calendar and that you were going to be away next week. So don't order more milk, or it knows you're in town, have more milk. Like this is actually going to happen, folks, this kind of weird stuff is gonna happen. You know, so people were trying to do this with like refrigerators and smart refrigerators. Yeah, the real enabler will be AI because the the regular software to do image detection to figure all that out was just way too complex. Like you'd need a team of people that are
SPEAKER_07: you know, and would work on it, and they'd only get to like 55% accuracy. Now you can get to 90 plus percent accuracy with just an off the shelf API from pick your favorite LLM provider. I did this, I took a picture of all of our spices, like the spice draw, and the spice was organized nice and neat with the spices facing out. It's like a slide out draw. I slid it out, I took a picture said, what's in here to chat GPT for my app. Oh, wow. So okay, that does work. By the way, I just said what's in what's in the straw, and I did it in my
SPEAKER_05: cabinets. Up at the ski house, I took a picture of each cabinet said what's in here. And obviously, like there's things that are deep, so you can't get them on camera, but it did a reasonable job of like knowing what's in there. So it's really interesting where this could all go. Now you start thinking about, well, we're going to marry what's happening in my refrigerator and with my meal plan, with my health, with my doctor, with my weight, with my sleeping patterns, and it's like, hey, by the way, you're gaining weight, too much
SPEAKER_05:
SPEAKER_05: pasta, Sonny. Take it no more. No more lasagna soup for Sonny. Yeah, yeah, it was it was it was keto. It was a keto recipe. I don't know I don't buy it. I heard lasagna. I don't buy lasagna keto under any circumstance. But anyway, it's fine. Maybe they had like a protein based one. All right, listen, I know I'm a founder just like you. And there are things that I love doing. I love working with my team to build great products and services that delight people. You know what I hate? I hate doing my chores. What's on the top of my tour list?
SPEAKER_07:
SPEAKER_05: payroll HR, man, it's so many details. And it's not the details I want to spend my time on. I hang out with my customers, I want to hang out my team. So I use gusto. gusto is the best they do payroll, they do HR services. And they make running your small business so much easier, because it was designed for you and me, the small business owner, and payroll is something you definitely do not want to mess up. gusto can automatically calculate your paychecks, file your payroll taxes, set up open enrollment. Oh my God, just thinking about that is giving me PTSD from when I had to do all this stuff myself. That's not all gusto also handles onboarding health insurance, 401k, time tracking, community benefits, offer letters, all of it, they even give you access to their HR experts. And this is going to let you focus on the important stuff, your product, your team, your customers. So it's super easy to get started. And if you're moving from another provider, gusto can transfer all your data for you. So you've got nothing to worry about. gusto's got your back, here's the best part
because you're a twist listener, you get three months free 123 three months free 25% of the next year is going to be free for you all you got to do is go to gusto comm slash twist g u s t o.com slash twist. I use them I love them. You must go to gusto. Again, that's gusto comm slash twist. That's my point is it might at some point have your smart scale data, know your blood work, know your weight and say hey, listen, you gained seven pounds this month. You This is what you've been eating.
SPEAKER_05:
Here's some changes you can make. We should get you a salad in here and a caprese salad is not a salad. So a crazy salad is a pound of cheese with a couple of tomatoes on it and some salsa vinegar is delicious. But yeah, let's not call it a salad. Let's call it what it is a ball of cheese with some accoutrement. Well done. I give this a B plus well done to the team over there. Yeah,
SPEAKER_07:
SPEAKER_07:
great job. I think I'm similar with you. I think it did a really good job. Maybe add some features that you can add in what your existing ingredients are. So it simplifies the ordering process and go from there. I'm waiting for this life assistant health assistant to just, you know, have my watch day and be like, great job skiing this weekend. Yeah, you know, you probably could use it a little extra cardio, we noticed your heart rate, blah, blah, blah. You know, here's some ideas for you. Would you like us to put a workout in your peloton for you?
SPEAKER_05: It can't be Apple right now because they're screwing over the company that did the heart rate stuff or the oxygen. Yeah, that was lame. I mean, when I heard that report of how Apple behave there, I think Apple should just apologize. Settle this. No, no, no. And really, on Tim Cook, for those of you don't know, the Apple Ultra watch the Apple met with a team that makes some of that I believe it's the oxygen reporting of your blood or whatever. And they basically according to this claim, and I think the judgment because there was a judgment against them.
SPEAKER_05:
They basically stole this content, stole employees and just acted abhorrently. I mean, to anybody at Apple, you should be ashamed of yourselves and the corporate development team. I mean, do you want nobody to trust you, Apple? And if you could, you have all the money in the world, you have all the distribution in the world, why would you screw startups? A shame shame on you, Tim Cook, for this horrible, obnoxious predatory behavior. And this is something where I think, you know, I'm not big on government intervention. But when I see something
SPEAKER_06:
SPEAKER_05: as abhorrent as this, and the legal stuff happening, this is the kind of stuff that builds up to more government regulation. And so I think it's very stupid by Tim Cook, to allow the business development team that does M&A to behave like this Tim Cook should get send this message to Tim Cook, somebody you have their email to this deep link, Tim Cook. This is not what we expect from Apple in the venture capital startup community. You should make amends, you should explain why you went wrong here. And you should make specific
SPEAKER_05:
changes to your business corporate development group fire whoever did this, whoever acted this sharp elbowed and start over and start over knowing you have unlimited resources to treat the startup community. Well, it's absolutely abhorrent the way you behave, or like, you know, if it's true, classic, the classic line from Rounders paid that man paid that man pay him pay that man his money. I mean, what does it cost you? I mean, you're sitting on a hundred you. They're the largest hedge fund in the world. They have like,
SPEAKER_05: yes, is it up to 200 billion? I mean, they had so much cash, they didn't know what to do with it. Yes. And to just nickel and dime companies where you could just pay the man paid the man his money, pay the man his money, money. Yeah, it's money. It's Rounders, everybody. Yes. But I'm serious, somebody who's got Tim Cook secret email or text, deep link to this. I mean, I'm looking at it as an investor in startups. And now just Tim Cook and the corporate development group over there. If somebody in my group,
SPEAKER_05: in my portfolio said, Hey, Apple's interested about Oh, wow, it's amazing. What a great outcome for everybody involved. And I have had companies sell to Apple, we had a podcast company that sold to them. And, you know, I just feel like I would tell them don't trust Apple, do not talk to their corporate development people. You know, if they sign up for your app, you know, track what they're doing in the app and make sure you do some monitoring of them coming to your website, you know, like, basically look at Apple as the enemy. And why would Apple want to take that stance with startups? I mean,
SPEAKER_05:
especially with small ones where it's like a small tuck in. Apple doesn't do big acquisitions. The biggest one was beats probably like if you're doing tuck ins anyway, just come on. I think the founder of that company like spent his life savings and everything fighting them. So close to him to standing up to Apple, we're gonna keep going here, we've got a couple more. This one is really neat. And it just kind of like continues to build on open source models and fine tunes. And so this is basically just on hugging face. And it's a model by the
SPEAKER_07: user called AI Comic Factory. What it really allows you to do is, you know, I just gave it a short prompt, which is a young boy is a superhero after school fighting bullies, and the style was neurodo. Right. And so that's it, like, and think about, you know, content, and I want to, you know, give this these folks credit here, they've created this wonderful model. And, and, you know, this is it. And basically, you know, he's got this AI Comic Factory,
SPEAKER_07: and this is how seeing innovation happened right now.
Amazing. What was it trained on, I guess, is the question and then are those people being compensated would be my question on this in terms of fairness. Yeah, like, I did this, you know, and it gave me you know, Frank Miller, whatever Wolverine Dark Knight, you know, it's a kind of unfair if I'm capitalizing on his work and trained on his data. So I think that would be my first question is, what was this
SPEAKER_05: trained on? And if it is trained on certain artists, those artists should get a royalty. So this is a this is a perfect example of where you can take the New York Times open AI lawsuit, which we've discussed before. And now you can see crystal clear that this is, you know, in all likelihood, and again, I don't know the training data, maybe they have permission, I doubt it. Because it's an open
SPEAKER_05:
here, they're saying, basically, free and open source demerit to capabilities, you can generate your own comic panels, and code is public and can be deployed. So we just got to say anything on the training data. So yeah, that's where the that's where the rubber meets the road. If this was trained on, you know, images of comic books that are, you know, somebody else's IP, you can really see how this infringes, right? And when you make it in a very narrow case like this, that's where you really can see the unfairness of the
SPEAKER_05: the goodness of this, if somebody spent their life 30 years making a certain style of comic book, and a certain input all their creativity into it, and then you can just take it and have the AI make something in a couple of minutes, and then you then go make a business out of it or work out of it, would it kill you to get a couple shackles?
SPEAKER_05:
Yeah, what if you were just inspired by it, if you were inspired by the art style of Andy Warhol, and you started making art as an individual, that would be okay, if you confuse the audience, or you're monetizing it, or you're infringing upon that person's ability to take on the same economic opportunity with their work. That's where you would be mistaken. That's where you are breaking the fair use doctrine. And so let me just take that apart for a second. Yeah, if it was non commercial,
SPEAKER_05:
and I made something that's an homage to Andy Warhol, and I put it right there, or I made like actually that Blade Runner poster here is a piece of art that some fan made, right? And they sold it right. And I bought it. There's actually an argument here that the owner of Blade Runner or that gladiator poster here has a claim to that now, if it was one off piece of art, non commercial, maybe not. But if Blade Runner was your IP or Star Wars, and then you make a bunch of Star Wars posters,
SPEAKER_05:
and start selling, you obviously know that's illegal, right? These are more bespoke artists doing interpretations of Blade Runner. So it's just the dove from Blade Runner, it's just the mass from there. But they do are these ones are skirting copyright law, because that should be the original IP owners opportunity. Then, if the training data makes this product, and then I could make that product as the owner of these comic book characters and styles, I should have that opportunity, not somebody else. So that's what people don't
SPEAKER_05:
understand is when there is a new medium that emerges, the it doesn't make it a free for all for copyright. So when DVDs came out, or VHS tapes, it wasn't like just because it's a new medium, I can take Star Wars and start selling Star Wars VHS tapes, which I did when I was 15 years old, I was making bootleg copies of Empire Strikes Back and selling them for 20 bucks a copy. I shouldn't have been doing that. That was a terrible thing for me to do. I broke the law, whatever. And so here, yeah, look at that Spider Man.
SPEAKER_07: So in this case, same same prompt, but now this is very clearly Spider Man. And this is, you know, kind of in your,
SPEAKER_05: you can't do this on Dolly, if you try to do the same prompt on Dolly, it wouldn't work. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, this is I know, I know, for some people, this is triggering. Yeah, we're holding back AI, nobody's saying hold back AI, we're just saying if you use somebody else's training data, get their permission and or compensate and or compensate them if they want to be compensated. It's very simple. Yeah, it's not it's not. I don't know why people are so
SPEAKER_05:
triggered by this concept of the original artists getting, you know, some fair shape, you know,
SPEAKER_05: I think there's just been a larger trend in society of not wanting to pay people for stuff. And like, think about all the areas as links to Netflix subscriptions. Like, you know, when when you're sharing that you're hurting Netflix as a company, right? If you're sharing it, and obviously, they've done a bunch of stuff to make that harder now. Right? You know, all the way
SPEAKER_07:
back to, you know, folks, you know, ripping off content in this way. And do you think it's because the ease isn't there? Do you think it's like, in from a societal standpoint, people are just value the creative less and less. I think people don't like to pay for content, and they expect they've been trained to think content is free. That's one piece of it. And then the second piece is I do think there are people who believe that we're holding back a
SPEAKER_05: technology that's going to happen anyway. And I remember this argument with Napster and you remember it too. You know, everybody wanted to just play have a what we would call a digital jukebox. Everybody wanted the concept of a digital jukebox. That's what you used to call it in the 90s. Yeah, and the record labels wouldn't allow you to have a digital jukebox. Everybody wanted to have a video jukebox. That's what they used to call it. And in fact, there were physical products that did this, you
know, I have a device that I from Sony will pull it up on the screen right now, a device that held 50 or 100 CDs in it. And it was a carousel. You remember the carousel? Yeah, you would put every single one of your CDs in there. And you could stack them so you can have 50
SPEAKER_07:
I had one that you could put five, the carousel you drop five into all five shot day albums in there, you put it on random man, you could be a be a great very romantic weekend. Yeah, leave it at that. Now, you also had the one where you could stack the Sony 50 and you front load them and then you would turn the dial to name each one. They're a little cartridges, little cartridges, but all 50. And then I was at a friend of mine had rented this beautiful house, like a resort with, you know, 10 bedrooms in it for a birthday party.
SPEAKER_05: or something in Italy turned out it was George Lucas's. Wow. Okay, it's a movie theater. And we go to the movie, they were gonna watch a movie. This is a long time ago, over 10 years ago. And they had a virtual jukebox. And you started going through it. And I was like, oh, it's all the Spielberg movies, all the judge Lucas movies, everything. And I guess this is before these things really existed. And they had all this DRM and CRM on it to make a digital cloud. This is before Netflix was streaming. This actually was made 15 years
SPEAKER_06:
SPEAKER_05:
ago. And you had to have a media server for this and it costed $50,000. Everybody wanted that. When Napster got shut down, and all these things happen, people complained about it. When a legal option is available, then there's no restricting the technology. It's just fairness. So that's what I think chat GPT for and open AI is trying to do right now. And the New York Times is like, just doesn't like the price or the terms. But they'll come to price and terms and the price and terms should be fair. And it should be ongoing.
SPEAKER_05:
If that's what the IP people want, if the IP people want just one time use, that's fine. If they want to be able to cancel it, that's fine. And if Marvel came out with this, and you can make Marvel characters and Marvel greeting cards with your Disney Plus subscription, which I guarantee you will be able to do next year. That solves the whole problem doesn't.
So why does it Marvel have a subscription where you can make your own comic books? They'll have that next year. So then all this has to get shut down if Marvel has that just like Napster had to get shut down. If Sony Records, Columbia Records, iTunes, Spotify exist. And once you shut down, once you have an illegal option that's priced fairly, piracy goes away. This is piracy. What we just saw that was piracy. Now people don't want to call it piracy. But if you're going to make a subscription, you're going to have to pay for it.
SPEAKER_05:
So this is piracy because it's new and it's different. But it's piracy. The same thing happened with Napster people wouldn't call it piracy. But it was piracy people were stealing stuff. This is just stealing when you can generate Spider Man, and then sell it make t shirts out of it. You're just stealing. So
SPEAKER_05:
the real opportunity is for these businesses to come together and embrace this and and make it available and monetize it and basically allow their fans, their users or customers to really embrace it. And I think that's what we should really maybe promote is that look, the technology is there and it's good. And what you know, sort of like Wattpad, if you're Marvel, and you have, you know, all this great IP, you should allow
SPEAKER_07:
your fans to create comic books and you should have maybe a site or web or mobile app or whatever it is, people can share them. And if the story really takes off, you can basically share in the revenue with your customer. And you can also maybe even turn it into a movie in some ways, right? Like what happened with Wattpad, any of those are possibilities and the rights owner at Marvel Marvel would get to choose. And they might say you can use this app for 20
SPEAKER_05: bucks a month, non commercial, and then but if you want to print it, we will vet it and then we'll decide that maybe you made the character do something that's not something we want, right? You had Spider Man, you know, kill somebody triangle them, you're like, you know what, Spider Man doesn't kill people, he puts his web around them. And that's that's the extent of his violence. He doesn't actually kill people so fun. So yeah, I think this comic book thing is a B
SPEAKER_05:
SPEAKER_06:
SPEAKER_05: plus out of the gate. It's extraordinary. I would give it an A plus if you could, you know, do stuff with it, and it was licensed properly, it would be an A plus for me. But I mean, that's incredible what it can do. And it's just kind of reminds you of programming where when you narrow the data set, the output gets better, correct?
Yes. And that's what's happening here. People are taking these models and fine tuning them and the output is getting better and better and better. You know, as good as what you know, humans would be able to create. And so now, I think the intersection of the business opportunity is where there's big opportunity.
SPEAKER_07: What did you give it as a grant?
You know, like I said, if we're not looking at the licensing stuff, I give it an A. I think it's, you know, and I, you know, I would like to see content come out of that. And I'd like to see people create, you know, the stories are getting weaker, in my opinion, with Disney, I know it's one of the J trades, but I think there's the folks out there can create much more interesting storylines, and give them the platform to do it. We have one more, which is not a demo, but we're going to, this is also an update on one of our bets, which is a short film and quality. And the interesting thing here is this one is generated using all the tools that we've demoed here. So I'm going to just pull this up real quick. And so this one used Magnific, Runway, Pica, and they've created this like sort of three minute short. And so I'm going to play maybe 30 to 45 seconds of it. All right, here we go. Okay.
SPEAKER_05: Whoa, intense.
SPEAKER_05:
All of this is generated by AI, the sounds, voiceover, images.
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_03:
is not lost on this time we use this tapestry and silence. A fabric so intricate, as bad as repeat.
SPEAKER_05: Wow. It feels like a student film, artistic film. It feels like an art film. Yeah. But the CGI in it. And the fact that there's like a burning building in it or some of this like high end CGI means it couldn't be like a student film. But it feels amateurish in like the dialogue and the editing. It feels like it's just like slapping together a bunch of different weird scenes that don't make sense to me. So it's either very avant garde or whatever. But on a production basis, feels
SPEAKER_05: like a well produced trailer of a real movie. So while I don't understand what's going on, it kind of feels like a challenging kind of sci fi indie sci fi intellectual sci fi Sundance film, right, if I was being honest, which isn't everybody's cup of tea, but it's pretty impressive.
Yeah, I think there's like a couple things happening here. One, you know, the technology is still early, but it limits these clips to being relatively short. And so what the person is doing is having to kind of stitch together these very short clips that are maybe at maximum 15 seconds long. What I'm really bullish on our bet, you know, which is again, before June 1 is, I think all the elements are there. And the right storyteller with this with, you know, those set of technologies and the voice was 11.
SPEAKER_07: labs as well. So the whole thing is AI. And the right storyteller can help me win my bet with J Cal. So please, I feel like this weekend startups comm slash bats, you can see the different bets we've done. Hopefully, they'll be up by the time you get there. I think like the for the short film, this is you took the under July 1, I took the over. I feel like I'm still 6040. But I feel like, you know, if somebody put their nose to the grindstone here, they you could win the bet. I think this is a
SPEAKER_05:
pick them. I think this is going to be like, down to the wire, somebody could make a Pixar film, or in this case, a sci fi film. That was indistinguishable. If somebody does do this, and they're doing it non commercially, I do suggest using, like maybe the IP of some characters for people who allow that. So I know Star Wars allows that you can look it up yourself. I think Star Trek does not allow it. So if you did a Star Wars one, and it's non commercial, like I see them all the time. And as long as they put it's non commercial, they don't
SPEAKER_05:
put ads on it. They don't monetize it on YouTube. I think it's okay. So to do it with Mandalorian as an example, I don't know if Pixar allows it or not, because I had said do the rat tattoo we won. And somebody had sent me one directly, where they just slapped together random rat tattoo stuff. And it was, you know, terrible, but it was a non technical person who did it for two hours. So I think you're going to win this one, I got to be honest, I feel like the audience could tip over. And for the short film. The Pixar short, I think is the way we said it like a
SPEAKER_05:
SPEAKER_05: Pixar short that is indistinguishable to the average user. I think you're gonna win it. I'll be honest, because we got four months here. February, March, April, May, June, you got five months, five months. I mean, I think you're gonna win this one hands down. I feel bad about this bet. Alright, everybody, there's been another amazing episode this week and startups comm slash AI this week and startups comm slash bats. This week and startups comm you can see our AI powered website by podcast AI where it's got every transcript of all 1800 plus episodes and you can look at the transcript, you can play it and
SPEAKER_05:
you're going to be soon able to then sunny with podcast AI is going to allow you to highlight a portion of this and create a clip automatically. You know, I was just having this conversation with someone and they were seeing exactly this. It's like why can't you clip and then retweet or whatever portions of a podcast and then have it linked back to it because there's a lot of sometimes great snippets which are very short. There should be a industry HTML like standard for this there isn't or if there is somebody can let us know I'm Jason at
SPEAKER_05: calicanus.com for live you can tweet at me at Jason and at Sun deep on Twitter x and let us know about it. What you can do is I have no problem with people doing short non commercial clips from the podcast as long as they link back to the original. So there's somebody who's doing like founder advice and they do it every day and like every fifth or sixth day they take Paul Graham or Travis or whoever's been on the pod and then they write a little essay about it, they put the clip and they link back to the original I'm fine with that. As long as you're providing some value back to me and it's like a little bit of fair
SPEAKER_05: use. Now if you put an ad on it, you said brought to you by one of our sponsors, I would be like no, but not commercial. You take a clip from here you say something about it. I feel like it's fair use. It's fair feels fair to me. And that's always a thing to keep in mind with fair use. Does it feel fair? It doesn't feel fair. Then you probably got a problem right? So like wholesale, taking a show. No, when Oh, but yeah. Okay, everybody, thanks for tuning in. You can follow at Sandeep on Twitter. definitive.io is your
SPEAKER_05:
website if you're interested in doing a giant project for your big company in the AI space. Sandeep has unlimited resources and knowledge. Okay, we'll see you all next time. Bye bye
