Writer

“I don't want to say it's a complete non-event, but you could already do this in Salesforce and Claude. At Rider, where I work, people connect to Salesforce and run all types of queries. It's actually one of the most valuable things I've found for my day-to-day…”

“I think it's not that dissimilar to writing, and so I do think that, like, being a little bit tortured, having a bit of a, like, messed up personal life, just in general, I, you can think of the idea of, like, comics or something. Yeah, and maybe posting is a …”

“I still think there's such a massive gap in terms of what does the data look like? What is the actual problem? Does the customer, Or the person actually understand the goal in a clear enough way that they're able to define it to kind of push that loop forward.…”

“Interoperability model routing based on request being model provider agnostic on the foundation model side is where I see this going. It's not gonna be one, and I mean, we've talked about this for a long time, one model to rule them all, systems that can route”

“Each person in each of those three fields is going to be able to expand laterally and pick up those other, those additional skills. And then as a consequence, you're going to have more people Who can write and direct or write and act or direct and act or do al…”

“2017, writers were not the sexiest customer base in the world. No one thought they were going to build a billion dollar tech company by serving writers. In fact, people were forsaking writers, forsaking the media, turning their back on that, they'd given up on…”

“Either you get on board with that and you become an orchestrator and editor in chief, or you don't have a job anymore.”

“We had a customer basically in a weekend rebuild Cordoba using Writer.”

“So we, we've always had our own technology down to the LLM. There was a very brief period, literally like three months, where we, for some of our apps, used GPT-III because it was just so much better.”

“I mean, it is a flat JSON file. This is stored in a Postgres database. It's not even, A graph database.”

“This was L'Oreal about a year ago, you know, literally like a 180 apps, and we needed help, right?”

“Just on GPUs, but yeah.”

“We give folks, this is another reason we build our own models, a billion randomized tokens that they can query themselves to validate that we use copyright free information and that, you know, our bias and toxicity distribution is what we say it is”

“No stage performer goes on stage just kind of cold and low energy. But almost every writer starts cold and low energy and just sits there somewhat miserably. And there's even some weird glory from, like, this, like, I don't know, this, like, pain that's martyr…”

“I think it's not writers that do that. I think it's entrepreneurial people who do that. And then they are just like, and I'm just going to write to fulfill on the demand. But I think the people who are actually talented at writing almost never think about this”

“Writing is super strategic, but is the last unstructured business process that a company does.”

“Now we've got 18 models. The biggest ones are GPT-IV level quality, but at a fraction of the cost of hosting. Super, super fast for the enterprise use cases that That our customers run them on.”

“We now have a Palmyra financial services model, you know, customers like Vanguard and Northwestern Mutual and Goldman use a medical model that United Healthcare and other healthcare customers use.”

“Over the past year, we have really been selling to IT and the office of the head of AI. And then they really bring us into that first sort of big impactful use case.”

“We don't do chatbots. We don't do ticket deflection. No one's gonna build something that sits on a website.”

“If it's zero shot, they don't need any data, right? And it's not medical, it's not financial services, and it doesn't need to be on-prem, they should use GPT-IV.”

“We don't work with agencies. We don't work with SMBs. We don't work with the corporate segment.”

“We rolled out to 21 brands at L'Oreal, right? We know the thirty-ish use case families that we did across that whole company.”

“Showing people that we've got champions who are signed up with procurement to take a hundred million dollars of costs out of their organizations completely built on writer.”

“And so our team is really good at politely declining to engage, right? Not just because the use case doesn't fit or it's not ICP, but we qualify the champion out, even if it's a CIO.”

“I think, you know, the deals around POCs and innovation and, you know, sort of, I call it funny money. You don't really want that stuff, actually. I think that is a distraction, because it's easy to cut. Your team will have spent a lot of time, and it'll be fo…”

“We have 209% NRR.”

“I like to strip that away from deals that are bigger than a certain amount and then look at the NRR on just smaller accounts, right, who've got lots of optionality. That's still a 160 something percent NRR, which is amazing.”

“I think this should be a 400% NRR company.”

“And for us, the vast majority of enterprises we talk to, that stuff can't leave their environment, and they're not excited about the kind of lock-in that an Azure AI requires, right? And the way that that scales the amount of engineering effort that's required…”

“You know, our kind of tests on inference on quality for agent use at work. It's just transformers. Just, it was current capabilities, really not able to do what we wanted them to do. And so new architectures that we're working on are super, super promising.”

“Like, it's fine when I am, I've indexed 50 pages, but when it goes to 50,000, you know, I can't get this needle in a haystack out of my kind of VectorDB approach.”

“It also really reduces politics for folks to see that, right? We have an executive meeting every other Monday, and then on the alternate weeks, it's a team leads meeting. So smaller meeting, a big meeting, but all leaders in the company. And, you know, we don'…”

“And so we're able to have a really low meeting culture as a result because, you know, we are able to do things as a group. That meeting is 90 minutes. Sometimes it goes two hours, a little bit longer. But, you know, as a result, I don't really have one on ones…”

“The writers that are working for me, they feel very good about the deal, and I think that, you know, writers have always felt really beholden to studios and networks, and it feels like the networks and studios are not happy about where we landed, and the write…”

“I mean, the reality is people who, like, what the writers should be doing is building a rabid fan base around them and a specific niche that they own, where those people are gonna trust them, they're gonna, like, hear from them, they're gonna, like, care what …”

“Don't forget that you're a writer first and foremost, and not a social media manager. I find with like myself and with other people who are out there is like, they'll stretch themselves so far on every single platform that it's just sort of like devaluing and …”

“And I do have to say, I think the, like, pattern of people being duped To think, like, equity is gonna be worth something in the vast majority of cases is very sad, so. I got very mad when, like, Substack tried to convince its writers to invest in Substack, be…”

“If you have an audience anywhere, a sub stack's never going to be the place where you have the biggest audience probably, but it's certainly should be the place where your most valuable audience comes home to where they get your best work.”

“And if they can't tell me a story about something that they spent four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on, then they're just not going to be a good writer because they're not interesting enough.”

“On the East coast, for example, media, media businesses have sort of software engineers as a second class citizen, right? They're just guys who build the app and the writers are kind of the first class, right? Traditionally in tech, it's been the opposite. You…”

“We have some writers that, you know, they make in excess of a 100,000 dollars a year with us, and they buy their own medical insurance”

“The reason it's hard to write is usually because the idea you're saying Is it right? You have this, like, conflict in your head, and the reason it's hard to write is because you know in your head that what you're saying does not make any sense.”

“In some cases we're going backwards, particularly with writers where, you know, so many writers have written really good scripts and really good projects that somehow didn't come together. And in the hustle bustle of daily life, you've got to move on to the ne…”

“It's, you go from being a writer who's writing at home in your pajamas to having 350 people working for you.”

“In film, we always say the director fires the writer, and in television, the writer fires the director. Like, and that's always been the way it's been.”

“Because I think people who kind of came up during that time, not only as bloggers, but kind of as writers more broadly, because it was this amazing way to kind of cross train and just force yourself to, like, write something in public every day, even if you di…”

“That's the number one advice, is just make the stuff that you want to watch, and you really, you have to just make it for an audience of one, and of course hope that, that ends up resonating with an audience of millions”

“That's a question that I asked the writers, and I started to realize that, like, it was kind of on their radar, but they didn't really understand the significance of Y Combinator in Silicon Valley.”

“I do not think that AI is anywhere near replacing programmers, which I think are creative people, or editors, or writers.”

“What you don't do, what I think is the most dangerous thing for writers to do, is to just, and maybe it works when you're writing fiction, I don't know, but sitting down and just writing. Like, you can't hit a target that you didn't aim for.”