Jesse Zhang, CEO of Decagon, discusses the unreliability and noise in investor expert network calls during startup diligence.
Opinion
Fears of AI customer support layoffs are overblown due to natural attrition
“I think it's a little bit overblown of like, oh, AI is replacing jobs and so on. I think most of, even the BPO as we talked to not really that concerned because what typically happens anyways, is that there's already very high turnover in these, BPO's cause li…”
Insight
Zhang: AI application startups should ignore margins and prioritize market share
“Like right now, I would argue that if you're building an application, you're Margin shouldn't really matter that much. Like, people will often sort of critique the coding agents like they're hemorrhaging money. Yeah, but, you know, again, things are improving …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Frontier AI labs will move toward applications due to API commoditization
“That's why I think the open AI's of the world will continue to move towards applications because it's quite hard for them to make money longterm on like their API, for example, because There's like such high competition, all the labs are building, and it's lik…”
Opinion
Forward-deployed engineering models require a minimum customer deal size of $1 million
“Oh, like probably a million.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Experienced founders warned Zhang that AI customer support was too obvious
“Essentially what everyone told us, including like, you know, very smart, older founders that we knew and so on was that yeah, this is like excuse case, like super obvious. There's probably just going to be incumbents that are just tacking onto the product. And…”
Insight
Customer service AI deploys faster due to pre-existing human escalation infrastructure
“The other property, which I think is a little underrated, is that it's very easy to go live. And I think a lot of Gen AI use cases are struggling with that right now, especially at the enterprise level, because there's risk involved, right? Like people don't w…”