Podcasts

Brendan Foody

Guest: Brendan Foody - CEO and co-founder of Mercor. Brendan is the youngest unicorn founder ever, having grown Mercor from 1 to $500 million in revenue in just 17 months. Mercor helps AI labs and companies hire experts to train their models using AI. Key Takeaways: Era of Evals: Evals are becoming crucial as they serve as the product requirement documents for AI models, determining how success is measured and achieved. Labor Market Shift: There's a transition from low-skilled data labeling to high-skilled expert involvement in AI training, focusing on specific domain expertise. Future of Work: The demand for experts to create evals and train AI models will persist as long as there are tasks humans can do better than AI. Hiring Insights: Focus on leading indicators in fast-moving markets and maintain high standards and intensity within teams to drive rapid growth. AI Utilization: Embrace AI tools to enhance productivity and leverage them to automate and improve workflows across various industries. Topics Covered: Importance of AI evals, AI training labor market, future of work with AI, Mercor's growth strategy, hiring practices, AI's role in productivity.

Ethan Smith

Guest: Ethan Smith - CEO of Graphite. Ethan is a renowned expert in SEO, having been deeply involved in the field since 2007, and is now at the forefront of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). Key Takeaways: AEO is crucial for showing up in LLMs like ChatGPT, which summarize multiple citations. To win, get mentioned as often as possible across various platforms. Early-stage companies can quickly gain visibility by being cited in diverse sources like Reddit, YouTube, and blogs, unlike traditional SEO which requires domain authority. Traffic from LLMs is significantly more valuable, with Webflow seeing a 6X higher conversion rate compared to Google Search traffic. Effective AEO involves traditional SEO practices, optimizing for long-tail questions, and ensuring presence in citations across different media types. Conduct experiments with control and test groups to determine what AEO strategies are effective, as much of the conventional wisdom may not be accurate. Topics Covered: AEO vs. SEO, Impact of LLMs on traffic, Citation optimization, Experiment design in AEO, AI-generated content pitfalls.

Ben Horowitz

Guest: Ben Horowitz - Co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Ben is a renowned venture capitalist and author, known for his influential role in the tech industry and his bestselling books on leadership and company culture. Key Takeaways: Decisive Leadership: As a leader, hesitation can be detrimental. It's crucial to make decisions even when both options seem unfavorable, as inaction can lead to worse outcomes. Founder's Confidence: Maintaining confidence is essential for founders. Losing confidence can lead to hesitation, which can destabilize the company and create internal politics. Hiring Philosophy: As a CEO, focus on hiring people who make you and the company great, rather than trying to develop low performers. This ensures managerial leverage and effective leadership. AI Opportunities: The AI landscape is vast, with significant opportunities in infrastructure, foundational models, and application layers. Founders should focus on areas where they can leverage proprietary data and build unique models. Cultural Impact: The U.S. must lead in AI to maintain its global influence and ensure a balanced distribution of power, which is crucial for fostering innovation and opportunity. Topics Covered: Leadership and decision-making, founder confidence, hiring strategies, AI industry opportunities, U.S. global influence, cultural impact of hip-hop.

Howie Liu

Guest: Howie Liu - Co-founder and CEO of Airtable. Howie is a seasoned entrepreneur who has led Airtable to become a leading platform for building collaborative apps, emphasizing the integration of AI in product development. Key Takeaways: AI Integration: Companies must rethink their mission with an AI-native approach, leveraging existing strengths while embracing new AI capabilities. Organizational Structure: Airtable restructured into "fast-thinking" and "slow-thinking" groups to accelerate AI investments and maintain product innovation. Cross-Functional Skills: Success in the AI era requires individuals to develop skills across product management, engineering, and design, fostering a holistic approach to problem-solving. CEO Involvement: CEOs should engage directly with AI tools and products to understand their potential and drive innovation, embodying the "IC CEO" trend. Continuous Learning: Encourage team members to explore and play with AI tools, fostering a culture of experimentation and rapid iteration. Topics Covered: AI-native company strategy, organizational restructuring, cross-functional skill development, CEO role in AI, continuous learning and experimentation.

Asha Sharma

Guest: Asha Sharma - Chief Vice President of Product for Microsoft's AI platform. Asha oversees AI infrastructure, foundation models, and agent tool chains at Microsoft. She has a rich background with leadership roles at Instacart and Meta, and serves on the boards of Home Depot and Coupang. Key Takeaways: Product as Organism: Shift from static products to dynamic, learning organisms that improve with interactions. This is becoming the new intellectual property for companies. Rise of Agents: The future involves embedded and embodied agents, leading to a work chart that reflects tasks and throughput rather than traditional hierarchies. Post-Training Focus: More investment is moving towards post-training models, optimizing them for specific outcomes using reinforcement learning. Planning in AI: Use a flexible "season" approach to planning, focusing on current industry shifts (e.g., the rise of agents) rather than rigid timelines. Full-Stack Builders: The future favors polymath builders who can navigate across functions to optimize the product development loop. Topics Covered: Product as organism, rise of agents, post-training vs. pre-training, planning in AI, full-stack builders, reinforcement learning, organizational structure in AI, Microsoft's AI strategy.

Garrett Lord

Guest: Garrett Lord - Co-founder and CEO of Handshake. Garrett has built Handshake into a leading platform connecting college students with job opportunities, used by every Fortune 500 company and over 1,500 colleges. Key Takeaways: Expert Network Advantage: Handshake leverages its vast network of 18 million professionals, including 500,000 PhDs, to provide high-quality, expert-driven data for AI model training, eliminating customer acquisition costs. Shift from Generalists to Experts: The demand for AI model training has evolved from generalists to experts, as models now require specialized knowledge to improve further. Rapid Business Growth: Handshake's new data labeling business reached $50 million ARR in four months and is on track to surpass $100 million within the first year, highlighting the explosive demand for expert-driven data. Separate Business Unit Strategy: To successfully incubate this new business, Handshake created a separate team with distinct roles and a startup-like culture, focusing on rapid execution and maintaining high data quality. AI's Impact on Employment: Garrett believes AI will enhance productivity and create new job opportunities, particularly for AI-native young professionals who can leverage these tools effectively. Topics Covered: AI model training, expert networks, business growth strategies, data labeling, AI's impact on employment, startup culture within established companies.

Eoghan McCabe

Guest: Eoghan McCabe - Founder and CEO of Intercom. Eoghan is a seasoned entrepreneur who successfully transformed Intercom from a plateauing SaaS company into a rapidly growing AI-first business. Key Takeaways: Embrace AI Aggressively: AI is set to disrupt every industry, and companies must integrate AI into their core operations or risk becoming obsolete. Founder Mode Leadership: In times of significant change, a top-down, decisive leadership approach can be necessary to pivot effectively and overcome internal resistance. Cultural Overhaul: Transforming company culture to align with new strategic goals may involve significant turnover, but it can lead to a more motivated and aligned team. Outcome-Based Pricing: Aligning pricing with the value delivered, such as charging per resolved customer ticket, can simplify pricing models and enhance customer satisfaction. Continuous Self-Reflection: Personal growth through therapy and self-awareness can enhance leadership effectiveness and resilience. Topics Covered: AI disruption, founder leadership, company culture transformation, pricing strategy, personal growth and self-awareness.

Brian Balfour

Guest: Brian Balfour - Founder and CEO of Reforge. Brian has led growth at HubSpot and has witnessed the evolution of major distribution channels like Facebook, Google Ads, and the Apple App Store. He is recognized for his insights into growth strategies and emerging distribution platforms. Key Takeaways: ChatGPT is predicted to become the next major distribution platform, offering a new growth channel for companies. Early adopters stand to gain significantly. New distribution platforms follow a four-step cycle: market conditions, moat identification, platform opening, and platform closing for control and monetization. Startups should focus on placing strategic bets on emerging platforms like ChatGPT to gain a competitive edge before incumbents catch up. Companies should prepare for the closing phase of platforms by developing strategies to maintain independence and avoid over-reliance on a single platform. Effective AI adoption within companies requires setting hard constraints and fostering a culture of independence to drive transformation. Topics Covered: ChatGPT as a growth channel, distribution platform cycles, strategic betting on platforms, AI adoption in companies, fostering independence in children.

Matt LeMay

Guest: Matt LeMay - Product Leader and Author. Matt is a seasoned product leader and author of "Product Management in Practice," a highly regarded book in the product management field. He has consulted with numerous product teams to enhance their operational impact. Key Takeaways: Align Team Goals with Company Goals: Set team objectives that are no more than one step away from the company's primary goals to ensure alignment and impact. Continuous Impact Focus: Maintain a focus on impact throughout the entire product development process, not just at the goal-setting stage. Impact Estimation in Prioritization: Use impact estimation in the same unit of measure as your goals to guide prioritization decisions effectively. Proactive Communication: Present options and recommendations to stakeholders to facilitate decision-making, rather than simply saying yes or no. Embrace Constraints as Guides: View the commercial realities and constraints of your business as opportunities to shape and guide your work. Topics Covered: Product management alignment, impact-first teams, low impact PM death spiral, setting effective team goals, prioritization frameworks, stakeholder management, business constraints as opportunities.

Nick Turley

Guest: Nick Turley - Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI. Nick joined OpenAI three years ago when it was primarily a research lab and played a pivotal role in developing ChatGPT, taking it from concept to over 700 million weekly active users. Key Takeaways: Iterate Quickly: Nick emphasizes the importance of shipping quickly to learn from real-world use cases, noting that with AI, you often don't know what to polish until after you ship. Empower Teams: OpenAI's culture allows ideas to come from anywhere, fostering innovation by empowering small, interdisciplinary teams to work collaboratively. Focus on User Goals: ChatGPT is optimized to help users achieve their goals rather than maximizing engagement, ensuring it provides genuine value. Balance Speed and Safety: While speed is crucial for learning and iteration, OpenAI maintains rigorous safety processes, especially for high-stakes AI applications. Curiosity Over Experience: OpenAI values curiosity and the ability to ask the right questions over prior experience in AI, believing this leads to better problem-solving and innovation. Topics Covered: ChatGPT development, AI product management, user retention strategies, balancing speed and safety in AI, interdisciplinary team dynamics, future of AI interfaces, AI-driven growth strategies.

Bret Taylor

Guest: Bret Taylor - Co-founder and CEO of Sierra. Bret is a renowned tech leader, having co-created Google Maps, invented the "Like" button, served as CTO of Meta, and co-CEO of Salesforce. He is also the chairman of the board at OpenAI. Key Takeaways: Outcome-Based Pricing: Bret advocates for outcome-based pricing in AI, aligning software value with measurable business outcomes, as demonstrated by Sierra's model of charging based on customer service resolutions. Agent-Centric Future: The future of software is moving towards autonomous agents that perform complete tasks, leading to significant productivity gains and reshaping business models. Flexible Identity: Success across varied roles comes from a flexible self-identity, focusing on impact rather than sticking to familiar tasks or roles. AI in Education: AI can democratize education by offering personalized learning experiences, acting as a tutor to cater to individual learning styles. Systems Thinking in AI: Understanding systems and context is crucial for leveraging AI effectively, especially in coding, where context engineering can enhance AI-generated code quality. Topics Covered: AI market dynamics, outcome-based pricing, productivity gains with AI, future of coding, education and AI, systems thinking, go-to-market strategies in AI, Bret's career insights.

Madhavan Ramanujam

Guest: Madhavan Ramanujam - Managing Partner at Simon-Kucher. Madhavan is a leading expert in pricing and monetization strategy, having worked with over 250 companies, including 30 unicorns, and authored the book "Monetizing Innovation." Key Takeaways: AI companies must focus on monetization from day one, as they bring significant value and need to capture it early to avoid underpricing. Use a two-by-two framework to determine your pricing model based on attribution and autonomy, aiming for outcome-based pricing for maximum pricing power. In negotiations, master gives and gets, create affirmation loops, and co-create ROI models with customers to justify pricing and extract full value. For AI companies, POCs should be framed as business case creation opportunities, and charging for POCs helps qualify serious buyers. Regularly revisit and adjust your pricing strategy, especially in the fast-evolving AI landscape, to ensure it aligns with the value delivered. Topics Covered: AI pricing strategies, outcome-based pricing, negotiation tactics, POC management, pricing model frameworks, scaling innovation, market share vs. wallet share.