The Ledger, every show

“Like I don't see a line of sight to a trillion dollar company in Europe full stop.”

“I think it's bullshit when actually the job is identical and you're just sprinkling on like salt and pepper, a bit of AI here and there.”

“And the thick wrapper is, is like when you've actually solved the user's problem end to end fully in a way that OpenAI never will, you know.”

“Giving a dollar to a startup is just a lossy way of giving it to OpenAI or Anthropic or whoever, because, you know, that's who they're basically taking it and shining it up and handing it onto.”

“I don't think I would, and the reason, whilst I think they'll pass 90, the areas I'd be wary of is Amazon.”

“I think genuinely customer service is very much in like the kill zone of AI or whatever. I think it's really you know, it's a very vulnerable space if you don't move with the times.”

“We shouldn't be approaching AI from just simply, how can we automate a task? Or how can we automate a little step? Or like, you know, how can we summarize this paragraph? Or you have to actually look at how can we automate the outcome?”

“The era of SaaS is an era of like right click view source. You know, ultimately like if there's a single thing you've done, other people can do it. The job is to build a brand around having the best product. And to do that, you often, you have to have the fres…”

“I do think separate to all this, SaaS is going to be a bit more usage-based and metered anyway. I think the days of, like, seats above all are starting to fade away. AI is going to accelerate it, but I think generally speaking, people are kind of realizing tha…”

“There'll probably be three or four big providers is my guest, probably GCP, AWS, maybe open AI directly. And I'm sure Azure, that's how I think that that layer will play out. And they'll end up in direct price competition with each other.”

“I'd be wary of Amazon. So like I could see Amazon just like Flat up like buying Anthropic and being like, let's just make this part of the EC two cluster.”

“OpenAI will hit some sort of minimum viable kind of what's good enough for everyone.”

“You're never gonna make money filling in the gaps in a platform.”

“It's those who really understand the user workflow are the ones who actually win this, not those who kind of like, you know, straighten their glasses and say, academically, that's been possible for seven months now.”

“Close and narrowing, and like, it's also a work in progress. Like all of these things are moving targets, right?”

“I think it's reasonable to assume in this massive sea of uncertainty that we're in, you know, like the margins being, the compute being so expensive the margins being so thin, that a higher than normal amount of these startups will die for one of the following…”

“I think a second one will just be margin compression. The B to B SaaS model, LTV, CAC dynamics, and all that sort of stuff, it does have some assumption in there of like, 80 to 90% margins. Maybe 70 to 90% margin is kind of what you expect if you're running li…”

“I also think an above average number of existing incumbents are going to die too, because their world is going to get torn apart by AI.”

“If you were to rebuild it today and you'd build none of what's there and everything would look totally different, then yeah, like it's go time, right? If you actually wish you could borrow all their servers and their sender reputation and all that sort of shit…”

“Areas where it's very, how would you say, speculative and open-ended. We thought it would be cool if we could run a little bit of AI to generate ideas for a workshop or whatever, right? They're definitely going to get cut to zero, and they'll, they'll, somebod…”

“I think his point about like consumption pricing outpacing, or like, you know, ultimately taking the place of seed pricing, I think is going to be true. I think a lot of work is going to get handed over to LLMs over the next Five years.”

“When somebody actually does a good job of an AI coach or personal trainer or financial advisor, the person who does it really well will be able to justify pricing it similar to what the human costs because people have already been paying humans for this for a …”

“I don't think NVIDIA in five years time will be sitting here proud as the only people who can do a GPU.”

“Feels like Google, who kind of owned all this at the start, bear in mind with the original paper on Transformers, feels like they have, like, rescued defeat from the jaw of victories, in a sense.”

“If they become this really nice intermediary layer where you're You don't even pick the app you launch because that is a form of user selection we don't even want in our lives. You just say the thing you want to happen and leave it to Apple to work out what sh…”

“I could totally imagine Google doing a thing where they give away effectively free Android phones, powered by the fact That they now control the intent layer, which is when you say, okay, Google, call me a taxi. Google goes and they get you whatever taxi, whic…”

“They'll probably be three or four big providers is my guess. You'll be probably GCP, AWS, maybe OpenAI directly, and I'm sure Azure. That's how I think that layer will play out, and they'll end up in pretty direct price competition with each other.”

“If you put a gun to my head, I'd say incumbents will probably do better out of AI than like startups thinking they can displace incumbents.”

“Here's a shit lesson that's just true, right? If you're in the weirdest capital market in history and everyone's telling you to, like, raise billions of dollars at, like, ridiculous valuations, don't do it.”

“Like, real defensibility, no, it does not exist.”

“If intercom launches a surveys tool, which we did in March, we can't be like limping in with an MVP that doesn't work. It would actually be brand damaging. We need to like, it needs to have all of the traits of intercom.”

“The idea of like just raise prices is silly. I think align price to value is the thing you have to do.”

“Turning spreadsheets into SaaS apps has been a good idea forever. Turning glorified Google Docs into SaaS apps, I think, has never been a good idea.”

“Probably earlier in my career, just being blinded by the logo, I think was probably the biggest thing. Like, such and such a person worked at such and such a company... But that's probably the single biggest thing is like assuming that because somebody worked …”

“The ingredients of a team is not like just a load of people all walking around telling each other the best. Like you actually need a mix and people come to companies to learn. And by definition, that means they're not the best. They believe they can get better…”

“The next piece I would say to people is like, you have to find, you know, be really wary of solving a small, rare problem. You can solve a big problem. You can solve a rare problem. Sorry, you can solve a small problem, fine. A rare problem, fine. But small an…”

“OpenAI is never going to put like five of their engineers going hard on wealth management and like, you know, banking integrations.”

“When I like, you know, I also invest in companies and I talk to companies in my portfolio and a lot of them are kind of building these thin wrapper solutions.”

“If you're willing to tolerate worse answers you can hit a higher resolution rate, but that's a very conscious trade-off that I think people aren't honest enough about.”

“Does it like, you know, we have genuinely a sort of full spectrum of how we're going to automate support to get from our current, say, 40, 50% total automation up to like maybe seventies, eighties, nineties, depending on the business.”

“Fin charges, 99 cents per answer.”

“On average, I would be confident any business who turns on fin will get at least like 25, 30.”

“What we encourage those people to do is just work out a way to dip their toe in. So like, hey, how about if Fin only works with your free customers? How about if Fin only works in the languages you don't speak? How about if Fin only works on the errors that yo…”

“However, I think if you find an area where they're not going to go that deep, OpenAI is never going to put like five of their engineers going hard on wealth management and like, you know, banking integrations, you know?”

“And we see staggering results for Fin. Some people are getting, like, very, very high percentage of total support volume resolved With satisfaction, like above 50% of times, right?”

“I think it's a really important attribute to be able to transition from one LLM to another. Because if somebody does unlock new power, you'll want to be able to use it very quickly. I just, I don't know. I think winning involves more than just simply being agn…”

“And I think they're doing a billion in revenue or something like that is what I've heard.”

“I could see Amazon just like flat up like buying Anthropic and being like, let's just make this part of the EC two cluster. And that's just a very easy route to market.”