SPEAKER_02: The reason why I built this in the first place is I would go to these conferences all the time when I worked on nonprofit stuff trying to meet people. You forget it all. I wanted like a perfect CRM. I just stumbled upon something far deeper, but I like that.
SPEAKER_00:
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SPEAKER_01: on this week and startups and it's working. It's getting better and people are actually getting value from these products 10 years ago and Fitbit came out. Yeah, it counted your steps was accurate plus or minus 50%. But since that time, we had Tom from aura, you know the ring he was on Episode 1812. Back in September, we had Will from whoop people are crazy about that Episode 1786. And we recently had Dan from rewind AI, he's building that AI pendant. And of course, I've said it over and over again, the Apple watch was complete trash until I don't know whatever this ultra pro one I have is. And that's acceptable. So now wearables are here. And they're here at a very interesting moment in time. And all the components work battery life's gotten better. It's cheaper to make these things. But AI is here and chat based interfaces are here. Voice based computing is actually working. So after a couple of decades of grinding it out on voice recognition, on AI, on wearables on the subcomponents of wearables, it's all starting to come together. And we're going to have a very interesting moment like the communicator on Star Trek, we just press a button and you talk to a computer. And today's guest Avi Shiffman has been working on a wearable AI interface called tab like the old diet soda. And if you haven't seen the demo, pretty great. It went viral on x the platform formerly known as Twitter back in October Avi, welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Jason. I think there's a lot to talk about.
SPEAKER_01: There's a lot to talk about. So let's talk about what you've built. What does the tab do? Is it in market yet? Are people playing with it? Because you did this viral demo? Just generally tell me where's the company out? What's the origin story here?
SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, yeah. So I've been working on this since about April. So it's been about like, seven, eight months, something like that. A lot of what we're trying to do is like, no one has really done much of this before. So things are definitely still in like, different stages of development. What I what I posted on Twitter a few months ago, it's definitely more of like an assistant type thing. And I think I've gone a lot deeper since then. I think you know, you have this primitive of like 15 hours of audio a day now. And you know, you can just feed these into systems that can not only transcribe it, but also do emotional sentiment analysis. And you can start to really like, you know, really build like a mental model of who you are through all that data. And I think like, again, you could build some kind of assistant where you speak to this and I don't know, obviously book your flights for send emails or whatever that type of shit is. Personally, I don't think anyone is going to be like Apple or open AI with some type of like Jarvis productivity AI. I think that whole industry I think there's a lot of like low hanging fruit people are grabbing right now. There's a lot of interesting products built in that space, probably some other wearables too. But like, ultimately, I think there's a far more interesting use case that I also don't think incumbents are going to work on, which is kind of this like what was kind of taboo right now, but I really think is not going to be so taboo going forward, which is just like talking to an AI about things in your life. AI companionship is by far like the biggest winner in AI so far, you know, products like replica, character AI, etc. These things have hundreds of millions of users, characters raising what like at 5 billion right now, right? These things are doing really well. I think, though, whenever there's a new industry like this, there's always porn and gaming slash entertainment that always leads new technology. But like something that appeals to more of a mainstream consumer, something that's like more and more useful for the average person. Like personally, I don't really need an AI girlfriend. I don't really need to like do a little role play with some kind of little AI friend in my day. But some kind of companion that like actually understands me because it's with me throughout my day. And can help kind of like help me with much more deeper aspects of my life, such as like, just kind of how am I coming off to other people, a lot of just kind of more deeper emotional support, or just kind of helped me understand who I am, kind of act as like a like a sounding board to. I mean, if you think about like, what you may be like, you become the people you surround yourself, right? The average of your five friends, but most people don't surround themselves with the greatest people or you know, they're not always available. They're just kind of like low agency, not that intelligent, can't maintain that much context, not really with them, etc. But when you build like a wearable like this, that's literally with you ingesting all this context of your life, and you can talk to it, and it can maintain all this context, it's far more intelligent, you know, it can act as like that, that amazing sounding board, that amazing emotional support, etc. And it's gonna be a little lower taboo.
SPEAKER_01:
So explain what it does, and what the hardware profile is here, the size of it, what's in it, microphone, camera processor, or what's not in it, and why. And then what does it do?
SPEAKER_02: I've got a simple prototype, you can see around my neck right now. So it's just kind of, well, we'll make it smaller over time. But it's kind of just like a little, little amulet pendant type shape. And it has a just a simple microphone on it, Bluetooth to your iPhone, your iPhone sends it off to the server all in background mode. And then you can pass it on the kind of hardware side on your phone, you have like a mobile interface on an application that acts as like, you know, the syncing for the Bluetooth, and you can also kind of communicate with this companion. I'm trying to like distill the interface down to be as simple as possible. I very much like Pi from Inflection, they've got just like very clean UI, there's really no other distractions. I'm trying to think about like, how would you actually build the UI of something like her? That's kind of where we're at right now.
SPEAKER_01: So you when you talk to it, it's just picking up any human voices, it hears 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and then transcribing everything. And then creating a language model where you can ask it questions about the voices in your life and every conversation you've had. Yeah, yeah, I actually think the far more interesting use case or kind of like user
SPEAKER_02: interface paradigm that I'm trying to explore right now is how we can be proactive because it's like always listening. How can it like hear something and then take action and just save me time without me having to do anything? I just want examples on and make my life easier. So I don't know, for example, maybe we're in a conversation like this, and it ends. And maybe tab knows that usually after meetings, I like to know maybe my action items are I'm trying to work on my communication skills recently, and just kind of starts the conversation with me. I feel like a big issue with chat as a UX right now is that it's so open ended, you don't even know a question to ask in the first place. And like, I'm basically building you like, you know, your own personal God, right? But like, you still just don't know what question to ask it. But something that just learns how you use it, what you need right now, it's kind of just like, reading your mind in a sense, because again, it's building up this mental image of who you are, it understands your daily routines, you know, has an emotional baseline. So it knows when you're kind of spiking, or kind of going off track, you know, here's maybe more specific examples, like the other day, one of my engineers here, he was on the phone, like with his mom, and his mom suggested, Oh, it's your birthday coming up. You know, go ride a bike around like the Golden Gate Park, or across the bridge, whatever, things like that. He's like, Okay, thanks, mom, tap sends him a text and he's like, and you know, got that that that's great idea. A few days later, it's his birthday. He's kind of near the area. He's mentioning something about like, Oh, it's his birthday, etc. Wondering what he should do talking about this with a friend, tab then also sends him a text and like, Oh, remember, like, your mom wanted you to go across the Golden Gate Bridge, etc. And he's like, Oh, yeah, you know, goes and does that you don't have to do anything. It just makes your life easier. I think that's if we were in a conversation, you know, over dinner, and you mentioned a
SPEAKER_01: book and I said, Oh, I'll definitely read that. It could then I don't know the next day say, Hey, here's an action item, you should buy this book or something. Maybe I think one thing that's interesting, right is a lot of action items that are presented
SPEAKER_02: to you that aren't necessarily like very direct, like, Oh, I need to do this. It's more like, oh, maybe you know, you mentioned you're running low on milk, like at the fridge, and you like completely forget about it. Maybe you're at a grocery store, right? You can have this like location based reminder that uses that context. Just just things like that passively making your life easier. I think that's what wearables are all about. Not new interaction paradigms like humane etc is trying to focus on.
SPEAKER_01: Right. And so humane obviously, is a pin. It's by some Apple people. Sam Altman, I think backed it or amongst the backers of it. Have you played with it yet? Have you seen it in person? And what's your initial impression of this new model where it projects? It uses AI but it also projects I guess, onto your hand. So if you think of it like maybe a little bit smaller than maybe a pack of cigarettes. So if you had a pack of cigarettes or a half a pack of cigarettes clip to your shirt, you can put your hand down it projects onto it and then you can kind of interface with it that way or audio. So have you played with it? What do you think?
SPEAKER_02: I have a lot of thoughts on humane. I haven't personally played with it. But you know, I've been doing I've made similar prototypes of like a pin form factor for what I'm working on. So I have a lot of experience there. One note I think is kind of interesting because you mentioned Sam Altman, he actually owns more equity in humane than both the founders do. Which thinks about that. That's why I mean, that's what happens when you raise hundreds of millions of dollars before you get a product in the market. You got to have some trade offs there. But um, so I think to me, the big issues with humane is that it is not always on, but it is a wearable. And so for a wearable to actually, you know, take consumer hold, it needs to just be not just 10x better 100x better wearables are a really tricky thing to like actually get to work right. You have to charge it, you have to put it on every day, it has to maintain with your outfits, etc. That's really tricky. So it's not always on only lasts about like four hours, right? You have to fiddle with these battery packs. I just don't think that is ultimately what wearables are supposed to be. If you think about other wearables, let's say Fitbit, etc. or as right, like, these are not things you interact with, you just put them on and you're passively obtaining context that you feed into just like, maybe your phone and a much better system.
SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, yeah. And again, like I think they're trying to go down a little different route by trying
SPEAKER_02: to completely replace your phone build a new thing there. Personally, I'm very interested in also having like an LTE module etc. on this product down the line. I just think to get this into the market and for initial adoption, it's you need like a halfway step kind of Fitbit for your life before you fully replace your phone. Also again, no one is going to be Apple or open AI with Jarvis and that seems to be what the what direction they're going in.
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SPEAKER_02: Right. I just don't view tab as a recording device, I would more so view the microphones like the ear for your personal AI. I don't have access to your transcripts, you don't have access to your transcripts, we're not storing audio or anything like that. I think the great part about LLM is just, you know, it's just artificial intelligence to make a product like this work, you need to have some intelligence go and parse all this data. And now it's just that can be done securely, because no human needs to be involved. There was like a whole a whole like industry of products called like life logging, I'm sure you've seen things like the narrative. Etc. back in the day. And like those to me are weird, right? Because you have like a 12 hour recording of your life. I don't want I can't even do anything with that much. But I think you more so just have to look at the incentives, not what I say. I personally am much more interested in making money with this startup by selling you like a monthly subscription to use it, rather than selling your user data. I think there's far more money to be made in allowing other people to build off your data and making this kind of like your secure, like personal knowledge base that feeds into companions allows other applications to be contextually aware about you things like that, rather than selling your user data and letting you have access to it. You know, so when it's recording, if you and I were co founders of the startup, we got
SPEAKER_01: in a blowout argument, we set all kinds of reprehensible things to each other. It transcribes it puts it into the language model, but then it deletes the transcript and there's no audio file ever. Am I correct there?
SPEAKER_02:
I'm playing around with like more of a rolling window. I think for the transcripts, I think the big issue people have with a product like this is worrying about like maybe being subpoenaed. Maybe if they say some short, I think that's a big issue. I'm definitely trying to think about overall, though, I think it is it is private. And the last major project I worked on before this was like an online housing platform for you current refugees, where I had to deal with like the user data of like refugees in an active war zone. We never had any data leaks. That's an absolute priority for me. It's an absolute priority for this product as well. But again, like consumers want their lives to be easier. I do think if it provides you enough utility, these things that appear taboo now will become very popular. Apple just put a camera and a microphone on your face. We've got Amazon echoes in all of our houses. This is just where the trend is going. And I think a lot of people in tech look at this and they're like, that's never going to catch on. But then the consumers I talk to and the people and I present this as like the core problems people have in their lives and how this can make better. That's all they care about. They just want their life to be easier. I think the reason why things like this have not really caught on in the past is just the like the value just did not exceed the taboo-ness and the weirdness of having like an always on recording device. But again, it's like it's not really recording. You're just kind of feeding data into some model. There will definitely be a lot of new legislation built around this over the next decade. I generally agree.
SPEAKER_01:
Privacy concerns can go down when value goes up. So having Find My iPhone is a pretty great feature. Having Uber and seeing cabs come to you and knowing the distance, you have to give your location but you get something. This is kind of different in this situation where you and I were the co founders with this crazy argument and then maybe it becomes litigious or something. We all make claims. I could ask it in the current model. Hey, summarize my conversation with Jake. How we got in that blowout fight. Leave the last part out. But summarize my last conversation with Jake. I'll give me every time Jake. I'll talked about his stock options and summarize it. And you'd have a whole history of all the times we talked about our stock options and you and I got in an argument about it. I don't know, maybe that is in the best interest of the person who got the oral arrangement and the other person denying it. But it also feels like a road to insane amounts of discovery and litigation.
SPEAKER_02:
Maybe I mean, that might just be think about your iPhone, you have a lot of stuff in your notes, etc. that gets used in court cases all the time. I think that there will be a lot of not just out just all kinds of second order effects may be affecting people's relationships, etc. with a product like this. Ultimately, though, I feel like that's probably for the best. And again, it's not like anyone's forcing you to wear the product like this. I think if you look at a surveillance state like China, you have no say in that you're kind of always being recorded. But in the US, these are ran by private companies. You don't have you're not forced to use this product. You don't have to be around other people that use it if you don't want to. Ultimately, though, this is just where we're headed. I think there will be a lot of people that go, Oh, I don't want to work on this, things like that. And then there will be people like me that will work on it. And we will build a future that your family uses.
SPEAKER_01: When you use a VHS camera, there's a little red light on the front, people can know that it's recording. So have you considered something like that? So the pendant lets people know it's recording. And in fact, in public spaces, when you do have cameras, depending on location, geo, you have to let people know you're recording. And I think you also have to let people know you're recording at the workplace as well. So this is a very controversial topic. cameras at workplaces, microphones at workplaces, you could do it, but I think employees have to be informed. So how do you think about consent and informing people with a device and again, the device isn't out yet. People aren't using it, you're just beta testing it on yourself, correct?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and just kind of people around me. So I actually have thought a lot about this. I'm definitely subject to change this. But I feel that because the device is always on, it kind of just acts as the indicator itself. I think people just kind of become familiar with this concept. I don't think you necessarily, I think by adding an LED on it, it kind of makes it feel more weird. And I also think the reason why those have it is because you can selectively choose when to record and when not to record. And that makes it be like, Oh, when when is he doing it? Whereas with a product like this, it is kind of always on. I think, you know, with products like Google Glass, people always compare things like this to that. Look, I mean, the reason why Google Glass never caught on was not even because of the recording issues. It was just it was not that useful. It's just it was never that useful. I'm very bearish. Anyways, wasn't useful.
SPEAKER_01: I agree with that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. But anyways, one thing I wanted to say was kind of cool. Tap sent me a text. I'm playing around with one aspect of how it can be like, maybe supportive or kind of these positive affirmations in a way I think a lot of people struggle with just being seen and like feeling this momentum. It was like you can see I got a text here. It's like insightful AI perspectives. I notice your thoughts on AI companionship and the mainstream appeal of practical AI applications. It's a refreshing perspective that aligns with your vision for TAB. Keep pushing the boundaries, Avi. Very simple. But just having this thing of like I noticed, you know, keep doing this great job. I'm playing around with that doesn't mean that it's going to be in the final product. But like there's people, people want to feel seen. It definitely helps you with your just kind of just keep things going. I think this is a lot of what like some of my best friends in life have done for me, but they're not always there.
SPEAKER_01: So if you were having a tough day and you got into an argument, you could say afterwards, hey, that sounds like a really tough interaction you had with your coworker. Here's some strategies for, you know, maybe coming down from that intensity. You might want to consider, you know, sending a follow up note or doing, you know, doing some meditation or whatever.
SPEAKER_02: Right. One one like thing I noticed, like I did an interview like a few weeks ago with the Crimson and I talk a lot about like conquering. I literally have a poster of Caesar out about this desk of him crossing the Rubicon. I've got a statue of Caesar in my house. I could talk about this all the time, but I'm also trying to kind of build you like your best friend in a way, this like super intelligent sidekick. So I'm having to like market and pitch friendship. Right. And I talk about conquering. And so I did this interview and Tapp sent me a text right after I said something. And because the interviewer was like, by conquering, do you mean raping and pillaging villages? And I was like, oh, no, no, no, not like that. It's like, look, here's a specific instance of like how this negatively affects your pitch and how these things kind of juxtaposed together friendship and, you know, conquering these don't really match. You should probably not talk about it that often. So when I pitch to investors, et cetera, I don't hit on the conquering stuff at all anymore. I pitch a lot more friendship. Just a little bit of awareness to things really changes your behavior.
SPEAKER_01: Ah, fascinating. All right. Listen, we all know starting a business used to be a real pain in the neck. You need to get a lawyer. There were tons of hidden fees. It was a mess. Now with Northwest registered agent, it only takes 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Northwest provides everything you need to start and maintain your business. Every LLC corporation or nonprofit Northwest forms comes equipped with registered agent service, a business address, a website and hosting email, a phone number. And all of this is covered by Northwest privacy by default settings. Again, your full business identity is going to be live in 10 minutes and in 10 clicks. So here's a very simple call to action for 39 bucks plus state fees. They're going to form your LLC, your corporation or your nonprofit, and you'll be able to launch your business in just minutes. Visit Northwest registered agent.com slash twist today. That is North West registered agent.com slash TWI. See today. So you, uh, you saw and you had a little interaction with Dan, the founder of rewind AI. I had him on, I asked him the same hard questions I'm asking you, but it was kind of interesting. He's recording the desktop and trying to build a similar model, which is like a DVR, uh, you know, of your, uh, entire desktop, which in some ways would be your entire life. We had some good discussions about, Hey, well if signals on your desktop and the expectation is that's private, are you sucking that? And he's like, yeah, currently we are. We could make that a user setting and I said, well, maybe that shouldn't be a user setting. You as the creator of this should know that that's used for that purpose and not put it in just like an incognito window might be used for having privacy. Why would you record something that the person has explicitly turned on for privacy? But you had an interesting interaction with him. Uh, you were, you went viral and then, uh, what happened next?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. So I posted my demo. I'm the first one I've seen of any kind of always on AI wearable and the necklace form factor. And then the other day I see a whole shitty post from Dan of just kind of like a shitty version that's copying this. And like, I mean, you can tell that he hasn't thought it through that much, even based off your interview with them. Of course it was very rushed. Um, I'd love to be a fly on the wall in their Slack channel when they, when they posted that. But I mean, personally, I think here's the thing is like, Jason, how much today did you really need to pluck out of detail from an earlier conversation? It's not really, I think it's maybe cool. Maybe cool.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, I was going to say, I was thinking, I was actually thinking about the question. I was like, no, I haven't.
SPEAKER_02: Right. Perfect memory is a cool primitive that I think feeds into something like a companion that uses that to make your life better and its interactions. I think it's more so like it takes all these details and facts that it kind of learns about you from previous conversations and uses that to like answer your questions properly. It's just all that context is just more constraints to get you a more specific answer later on. I think perfect memory is cool, but ultimately that's like much higher up on the Maslow's hierarchy of needs that I've got over here. It's cool. I'm kind of familiar with a few productivity focused things, but again, like I think a companion that can help you find clarity will be a far bigger boost to your productivity and happiness than any kind of Jarvis utility, send emails a bit faster type of thing, which seems to be the direction they're going on. I think I'm sure they'll release a great product. I'm sure it'll be though a lot more focused on the prosumer, that kind of angle, people that want their screen recorded, things like that. Personally, if it's on my screen, I'm kind of already keeping track of it. I don't really like have a huge need for that. I'm not going to be sending an email in five years, but I'm probably still going to be having conversations. I think consumers don't want all these integrations putting weird things on their screen. It feels weird. I also think there's far more sensitive data that is on your screen, such as your signal chats or, you know, my bank information, bank numbers, all that stuff is in there.
SPEAKER_01: It's going to be a massive. It gets hacked, right? Like a huge mess. And then I guess the question is, is it actually storing the recordings or just digitizing them, making knowledge out of them and burning them? That I think is like one of the key things you have to think about if this does become a thing in the world, if it has the knowledge of it, but doesn't have the transcript, I guess that feels like a little bit of a buffer, but yeah, it's it's a new category. Why a pendant? I'm curious, like I suppose to a trip, watch or other type of wearable, what does a pendant do for you?
SPEAKER_02:
A few reasons because I prototyped I prototype necklaces, clips, pins, ear things, wrist things, everything, right? So core functions, right? It needs to be close to your voice and other people's voices. It needs to not be obstructed. It needs to be intuitive to kind of wear and kind of fit into your your stylistic choices throughout the day. The big issue with a pin, you can even see this in Imran like Humain's demo. He's wearing a heavyweight shirt. It's still sagging his shirt. Think about this. I'm wearing like a little T-shirt. I'm putting something like that. I'm going to look like that. It's going to look weird. I tried that. It's weird. I would often forget it on my clothing. I'm always putting on jackets, take them off. It's going to go right in the watch.
SPEAKER_01: That's what happened with everybody with Fitbits. I did. You used to clip onto your belt and they all went through the wash. I literally did that to myself.
SPEAKER_02:
I put it in the wash by accident. I was like, fuck, you know, the big issue with clips, too, you're always having to think about where on your body to place it. Virtually every culture on this planet knows how to wear a necklace. Look, I can easily just put it underneath my shirt. You know, if it's raining outside or something like that, it's intuitive to wear. Also, it is a great opportunity for more context sensors in the future. I do plan on adding a camera down the line and it is facing outwards, right? Which is a great addition. Pendants, too, I think are just sticking out a lot more. I think this will become a status symbol in a way that like if you have a product like this, you're taking your life far more seriously. I'm using Tab to build Tab, right? That demo you mentioned, Tab came up with the entire outline for that. I practiced my pitch with it. You know, I worked on all the context with it. I'm using a product like this to build the future. And I think you'll see other people wearing a product like this and you'll think the same. That's why I plan to market this also to other founders and people like that initially. That's actually an interesting idea.
SPEAKER_01: If you put a camera on it, you probably wouldn't want to go through the expense and complexity of putting a camera on both sides of the pendant. And so a interesting concept might be if the camera's out, it has like something like a recording light and if you flip it over, it's off. So then if the culture phenomenon was, hey, can we Tab this? If it became a verb, oh, hey, can we Tab this? Can you mind if I take notes during this? I flip it over. And if not, you flip it the other way and it has some kind of notification that it's off or it's dormant. Right.
SPEAKER_02:
Personally, though, I really want it to just be you said it and forget it. You don't even have to think about this. I think this is why a lot of people say, oh, like you use your phone and record conversations. I'm not really conversations happen spontaneously. You're not thinking about it. I'm not going to hold up my phone and press an audio recording app and record everything that way. I just want to make your life easier with you having to do is least amount of mental effort as possible. Also, another big thing about risk things. Look, I'm wearing long sleeves. It's just not going to pick up the audio. My hands are in my pockets. They're behind my back. You're moving them around so much. It just doesn't work.
SPEAKER_01: So when will the product be widely available? Yeah. And how are you thinking about your go to market strategy?
SPEAKER_02:
Yeah. I mean, I'm hoping to get this into the market like my target is summer. I hope we'll get it there done. Our hardware is going to be completely December 22nd, at least for like Apple one version of this. So like I've got an earlier prototype here, a few others on my desk back here, but the new version is going to be ready to like mass produce the tens of thousands of people. Again, I've been working on this for about like seven months now. Software wise, again, like I have built I have tried every user experience possible with something like this. Originally, I made much more like an auto AI for your life. Here's all your conversations, here's your action items, references, etc. I hate the word like insights and things like that. You know, I want it to be much more actionable and directly useful. And that's why I'm playing around a lot more of the software being more like this proactive thing and kind of helping you. That's a great insight.
SPEAKER_01: Because with AI, the the tyranny of the chat interfaces, I have to ask a question, I have to form a question. And people are putting some prompts in there to try to get people over that tyranny of it. But it would be really nice if when you took out your app and your interface, it said, hey, when you talk to Jason, he mentioned these two books, and you're near a grocery store. And I heard your partner asked you to pick up milk. There's one two blocks away, you know, and just like you're saying, give context. And oh, hey, looks like you had a really talkative day. And you know, your stress and the cadence of your voice became strained at the end of the day. Like it's actually there's a lot you can tell them people's voices. And there are people who are experts at reading tone of voice. And so the AI is going to know you're stressed out. It's going to know you're happy. You had a bunch of hey, you didn't you didn't laugh at all today. Imagine that like, hey, you haven't laughed in three days. You know, here are three. What can I tell you a joke? Or would you like to watch a movie? This is kind of like, mind blowing when you think about it on a psychological or companionship basis. I'm kind of coming around to your concept here.
SPEAKER_02: It's kind of just like, you know, your mom or your friend knows when you're slightly off, right? And AI is only balanced steroids. So there's a few other things I want to hit on there is like, something I think is far more actionable in a way is maybe a week ago, I talked about, oh, I'm going to go on this podcast, I wanted to reference a specific thing tab. I'm here in my room, you know, a few minutes before I talked to my friend here, about to prepare for the podcast, it knows Oh, shit, you know, obviously, about to have this podcast sends me a text again, proactively reminding me of something I wanted to say, I think there are things like that. Like, the idea of analyzing your communication patterns and skills, too, I think is a really
big one. For example, I had a meeting other day, I was like a design firm, and I guess I was too harsh. I felt I was talking to about it just I felt like I was mean. So after I'm talking to it, like, you know, was I mean, things like that? It was like, yeah, maybe you kind of went off a bit too much on this one thing. And not only that, though, is the thing it like, came up with this thing. Apparently, there's a whole concept called the sandwich method where you start with something nice, then you say your critique, and then you say something nice again, and like gave me specifically how I could have reworded what I talked about to you to be like that. And you could have it, you know, mentioned that and then the next time I have a meeting with them remind me of that again, things like this, I think are are far deeper and more referencing, of course, the ish sandwich, as we say, whenever you're going to deliver
SPEAKER_01:
bad news. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, I know you've been trying really hard and I appreciate that. God, you did a horrible job, or your sales numbers are way off, we have to fix them. And I listened to a couple calls, you didn't do a great job if I'm being candid and then, but I know you're committed to doing better. And we have a training person. See how nice it is. I learned this over years when I was your age when I was in my 20s. I was a brutal, insane samurai with everybody. I just cutting arms off and as a lunatic. And you do have to learn over time, that fear or being super critical, which when you become a leader, you know, the challenge obvious, everybody comes to you with big problems. And everybody comes to you with the problem child, everybody comes to you with, you know, the bad news, these three people aren't doing a great job. And you have to be the one who focuses on all the problems in your entire day becomes problem, problem, problem, problem, everybody else works on the all the wins and all the success. And they bring you all the remnants of the chores, they can't get done. And so of course, it sounds like you're being critical. And then also, you have to maintain the standards. So you have to be able to say, hey, this interface is hardware, the fit and finish of this is not good enough. It doesn't hit our standard. And we need to and you can even see the language I'm saying, hey, this doesn't hit our standards. So you kind of learn over time as you grow up, and you become a better leader, how to phrase these things for, you know, both making people feel good, but also, you know, lighting
SPEAKER_01: a fire, right? It's a balance, and you get there over time. And nobody's nobody's perfect, I think. And it's also a culture thing. Some companies have a culture of candidness. Other people have a culture of nonsense and right. And I think it's fantastic if most people on this planet have this and you see how hitting
SPEAKER_02: on these things is far more deeper than like a perfect memory recording device type of thing. I think this this form of utility, I need this, I want other people to have this. I struggle far more with just understanding like, just my deeper purpose, finding these patterns and connections in my life, just having like this, this kind of thing to talk to, I think you'll see there's a new kind of relationship that will be formed with products like this, which is like radical transparency without the risk of judgment. I think that'll be it's kind of like a like going to a priest maybe or like, you know, in the confessions booth. Yeah, you go to your rabbi, you can put in psychologist, right?
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SPEAKER_02:
I think a big issue with coaches and therapists and all those things out there is it's what you say you do. It's not what you actually do, but something that's there at the source and that is available 24-7 and that you feel super comfortable talking to, I think that'll be a big hit. And I think you can see products like Pi kind of start to wedge into this and see that there is of course PMF for a product like this. But to build something like Pi, you need context. Tell everybody about Pi.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Pi is a great simple chatbot. I think focus is if you think about an end of productivity Jarvis stuff on this end and like companionship stuff that I've been talking about on this end, Pi is definitely on that other end completely. You know, you don't really use this to like really learn things or anything like that. You go to it saying I'm stressed. Here's the thing. You know, if I send a message to Pi being like I'm stressed, it's going to give me some bullshit answer like, oh, take a deep breath, whatever. Whereas something like Tab can literally like it thinks to itself like why might Avi be stressed, analyzes holistically my recent conversations, who I am, the projects in my life, the issues I'm having recently, my concerns, etc. and can bring up things like you'll never see another companion like Tab that can say things like I noticed or I've seen you doing this, things like that. And hitting on those personalized like core instances makes you actually like it's real. It feels like you're actually finding awareness of these things in your life. Another thing I wanted to say earlier, too, but other companions, I think you were hitting on something. It's not only that Proactiv makes it easier and whatnot. It's just a struggle to write all this context to an AI that it that'll know everything about you only what you say to it. It's just too much manual friction. I don't think people realize in their conversations how much you say, oh, I like that. Oh, I don't like that. Oh, I'm struggling with this, things like that, that an AI can just passively pick up if it's with you all day every day.
SPEAKER_01: A therapist once a week, or even if you went twice a week or three times a week is going to get your version of the truth Rashomon style. You know, and you're gonna, you know, give three hours. And you know, if you let's say you were a lunatic, like Howard Stern and go into three hours or four hours of therapy a week, double sessions, whatever, it's still your version of reality, as opposed to actually ground truth. And so and you know, we're seeing sentiment analysis, and percentage speaking as a this, there's a service gong and some other services that, you know, record salespeople's phone calls and then tell them and then you just correlate that with actual sales. And you like they found out it was very interesting. The empathetic people who asked really good questions close the sales. So if you want to close out, it turns out in many cases, asking really probing questions and listening and being thoughtful, and letting the other person speak increases the chances of closing a sale. And in fact, if you go to this week in startups.com, a company called podcast AI now shows the percentage I talk versus the guests. And so you'll see in a news program, I'm 80%. And then in a, you know, the news reader might choose stuff up for me. And then in a conversation with you, you can see that I might be, you know, a third of it or half of which is really where I should be for my podcast, other people's podcasts, they might be 20% like Lex Freeman asked very short questions. And he just lets people meander in this, I like to have it be a little more interactive and but it does help to have these tools to give you feedback. And so yeah, continued success with this. If people want to learn more, where can they go? Just follow me on Twitter at obvious shift.
SPEAKER_02:
Put a link up there. There's no you know, I haven't focused on building a website or Twitter handles or any of that kind of stuff out. We raised our funding. It's just a team of three of us right now. But you know, we'll be we'll be going over time. It'll be dope. Right.
SPEAKER_01: Awesome. And yeah, your full contact on Twitter, your full contact Twitter, which is great. Candid and you're mixing it up out there. So great job. Thank you. And we'll see you all next time on this week in startups. Bye bye.
