The Exchanges

Q It's the AI assistant for email because it goes through big email inboxes and then tells you what you need to pay attention to, and you can go find the rest in an orderly way, right? That's the business, plus a newsletter people pay for. Okay, um, I've heard a couple of things about you. Number one, you say we're mostly bootstrapped. What does it mean that you're mostly bootstrapped?

A Um, basically, we've taken a little bit of money, so we raised 600 K in 2020, which is when we started the business. Um, and then we just raised another round From Reed Hoffman and, um, starting line DC. And that was a two million dollar round, but, uh, we raised it as what I call a sip seed round. So they have committed up to two million dollars, but we can pull down the money whenever we want in whatever amount we want. And we've not, we've pulled down like 500 K or something like that. Um, so, uh, you know, a little bit over a million dollars raised over the last five and a half years. And done in a way that, um, you know, when I, when I, when we raised money originally, I told all of our investors, you should expect that this is the last money that we ever raise. Um, and I think, uh, the investors, this, in this round also are, are, um, aware that we're probably not going to go raise, you know, ten million, uh, ten million dollar series A from Sequoia or whatever. I don't even know if ten million, maybe ten million is too small now for a series A, but yeah. I'm a thirty million dollar Series A from Sequoia, you know, in 18 months. Um, we really try to run the business at Breakeven. Um, and we're growing really fast. Uh, I feel very ambitious about what, what we, uh, what we are doing. And also it's very important to me to preserve, um, this spirit that we have, that we're a…

AI assessment note: “basically, we've taken a little bit of money, so we raised 600 K”

Q I've tried using AI as a therapist. It's like, it's a two out of 10. Have you gotten to the place where you can go to AI as a therapist?

A Yeah, not in a way that replaces my therapist. Like, I go to a therapist every week, but I use it all the time for Stuff just like this, like, kind of trying to figure out, yeah, I'm journaling about my, you know, emotional reaction to this thing, which is something that, you know, I would definitely talk to my therapist about, but I've seen him once a week on Friday, so I've got, like, four days until, until my therapist is going to be there, so at least I get a little bit of stuff from TGPT, and I, I think it, um, It depends on how you do it and how you prompt it. So in a lot of ways you get out what you put in. Um, I don't think it's, it's, it's not a clear, it's not a clean or clear replacement, but as a, either for certain people, like a gateway into therapy or for people who are in therapy, um, a therapist that is always around 24, seven, who can read all your texts or all your emails or your meaning transcripts. It's really good.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, not in a way that replaces my therapist.”

Q So Dan, part of what gets me interested is in the process to go from zero to version one, and then from version one to version two. And I'm wondering how you had that realization that you need to do the interview after you, after you get the, ah, the original content. How do you get to that?

A I was just thinking about how I do a lot. I've done a lot of ghostwriting in my life. Um, how would I do that? And how does that differ from the way AI currently works? And not just that, but like what makes a great ghostwriter? Like how do I do something that ideally puts my finger on who someone is and how they talk and what they actually think in words. And the first step to that is to make someone feel seen because you're actually seeing them. And once you're grounded in who that person actually is, then you can do something that feels more organically like them. And I think no AI tool really is doing that because they're very focused on just give me an answer right now.

AI assessment note: “I've done a lot of ghostwriting in my life. Um, how would I do that?”

Q to accept because I always felt like as, as business people, our, our reason for being is to service an audience, to almost put our customers ahead of us, right? To not be the grocery store that's selling celery because you like celery, but to say, all right, I'm even a vegetarian, but everyone needs meat. I'm gonna have to go beyond, but that's not, that's not necessarily true anymore.

A I think it, it also depends on When and how you're doing it. Like, I think that we serve our audience by thinking about what we want and by giving ourselves what we want because we're, um, uh, in this interesting way, living a little bit ahead of the people who are reading our stuff and using our products. And so by really being in touch with who we are and what we care about, uh, we're doing the work For our users who don't have to think about that so much. They just get the end result of that process. Um, there is a point at which, you know, you have a product in market and you're like, you know, you just get a ton of complaints. People being like, I need, I need Quora, which doesn't, you know, I needed to like use outlook and you're like, okay, like, obviously we don't use outlook, but like, obviously we should do that. You know, that's a service to people. But I think the, um, in the earlier part of the product building phase, when it's a little bit more of this, like kind of creative alchemy, it's, it has to be It doesn't have to be, but I, I think it's best. I like it best. Um, when it becomes, um, the creative alchemy is about what, who you are and what you want.

AI assessment note: “we serve our audience by thinking about what we want and by giving ourselves what we want”

Q that seemed too small for you. It's like, Andrew, you just want to see how we keep notes. That's not a big enough conversation idea, but I still feel like there's a shared empathy and shared awareness that comes from the way you all share ideas like that. I would like to see some of the way, some of the prompts. Will we be able to give that to listeners?

A Yeah, absolutely. So, um, you know, one of the things that we do is we have a lot of things that we do around, uh, prompt sharing, specifically for editorial. So like copy edits, um, because, you know, we have a daily newsletter. We also have like four different apps where we're publishing stuff all the time. We need, um, we've a pretty high bar quality and we need to make sure that everything that we, uh, publish like has gone through that filter. So We have really cool copy editing. Um, but basically we have a cloud project with all of this stuff in it. Um, uh, that can do copy editing, can do developmental editing. So like helping you figure out like which ideas are interesting and why, or where's the hook for the article, that kind of stuff. Um, and I'm happy to share that, uh, after this, uh, uh, for, for your audience.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, absolutely... I'm happy to share that, uh, after this”

Q that surprised me, that you are now hiring people that you don't really know that well, or are working on the company. And in addition to hearing, we are the almost bootstrap company, I've also kept hearing over and over again, we are the fewer than 10 people company. And so, are you more than 10 people? How is this working now, and how are you keeping it closer going?

A Yes. We are more than 10 people. Um, we are about 15, between 15 and twenty-ish, it's a little hard to tell, full-time. Um, we have six business lines now, so, um, yes, a lot. Uh, how am I keeping the culture? Well, one of the really cool things is, well, you know, one is if you have a really solid first 10 people, the culture starts to self-perpetuate. Um, but I think we also have another really cool advantage, um, which you, you can tell from that Naveen story, which is everybody who works at every, essentially starts out as a reader. And if you're reading, uh, if you're watching your videos or anything like that, you probably have, we call it every smell. You probably have like an every smell. Um, you're probably, uh, pretty curious. You probably love AI. You're probably, uh, in some way multidimensional. So everyone at every, like, you know, Brandon, who's our COO, he was like, uh, an architect, but then he ran a insure tech company and now he's our COO or like here and he runs Quora is a, um, He was a baker before this. Um, but he's, he also was like, you know, CTO of a startup. Uh, so like he just, or he was also a composer. So, you know, that sort of multi-dimensional quality. Um, and so, yeah, we're starting, like I was telling you, I just had a meeting with a designer on our team who's super talented, who just joined that, uh, he's been working as a contractor for a wh…

AI assessment note: “Yes. We are more than 10 people. Um, we are about 15”

Q And then do you sit and say, how do we differentiate this? How do we make this more useful? Nothing like that. How do we take it to our audience or customers and see if any of them has anything that they need added?

A No, not really. I mean, we do think a lot about differentiation and, and, or what, maybe not differentiation, but we do think a lot about what is the idea behind the product and what is the concept and, and, and why do we like it and how does it connect? But that's also again, like a more, A more organic process. When you're, when you're building software this way, when you're writing this way, um, and you're making something that you want, you are a very special and unique person. Everybody is. And if you're making something that you actually want, it is going to be different because it's, it's yours. And you may not know at the beginning exactly why it's different, but like by, by putting yourself and your taste into it, it becomes yours. And so what we do is, for example, Naveen built it. And, um, when we started using it internally and then started to, you know, add beta customers to it, cause we have a list and we said, Hey, we have this new thing. We don't know if it's good, but like, you want to try it. What we started to realize is certain people loved it. And, um, some people on the team loved it. And some, some people on the, um, some people on the, uh, uh, in the, in the beta list on the beta list really loved it. And, um, at that point where that, that then it becomes like an interesting, um, psychological, sociological, like investigation exercise where you're like…

AI assessment note: “No, not really. I mean, we do think a lot about differentiation”

Q You feed it all your emails and all your texts? How?

A I do sometimes feed it texts. You can export your, your iMessages. Um, there are like some GitHub, GitHub libraries where you just, um, use the GitHub library to export your texts, and then you can just throw it into ChedVT or whatever. Um, Discord transcripts too. We use Discord as our internal, um, uh, internal messaging service, and then, uh, Granola is actually quite good for this. Granola just introduced this feature that, um, You can ask it questions about all of your notes, uh, all your meaning transcripts, uh, and I, they have this, like, it's like, they have this recipes thing, and, um, it's reusable prompts from different people, and I, I have a recipe on there that I, that I made that I, I really liked it, that was really cool, which is, Go through all of my internal meetings and write our company handbook from what you see. And I want you to capture all of the unspoken ways that every works as a company, both good and bad and pull a read between the lines to tell me like, what are the different personalities? How do we, how do we end up working together? All that kind of stuff. So that, um, it's the kind of stuff that you want a new employee to, to know, but Uh, it would never end up in an onboarding, uh, document because no one's going to take the time to write it down and like maybe some of it's embarrassing or whatever. It was pretty good. It was cool. Um, I high…

AI assessment note: “there are like some GitHub, GitHub libraries where you just... export your texts”

Q the dictation tool, and I wanted to understand how it was built and the way it was built using AI and all these tools fun, fun to watch. But what I'm trying to understand is how do you know what to create? Because there are tons of dictation apps now that are all using whisper. How did you know that monologue is something that's worth spending time on and creating?

A We have a very non-process oriented process for doing this that is, um, very much an outgrowth of the way that we write. And the way that we write is, you know, we write about what we're interested in. Like whatever, whatever I'm currently into is the thing that I'm writing about because I think that's the best, that's the best kind of writing. And obviously, um, there's always, there's always like a nexus between what I'm into and what I think other people will want to read. And I think we, we do the same thing with Um, our, uh, the products that we build, you know, we, we have this place, we have this place inside of everywhere. We've created this loop where everybody into inside of every is AI told. We're all using AI to do everything from coding to writing to editing to design, uh, to marketing, all that stuff. And if you're not doing it with AI first, you're kind of weird, uh, which I think is the reverse of how things are in pretty much every other company. And it creates this like special, uh, Thing where I feel like we're all figuring out how to make an AI first company together, like a truly AI first company together. Um, and then we write about it. And the really cool thing about writing is Um, it forces you to put words to your experience. And when you put words to your experience, you actually create a shared reality that allows you to, um, uh, talk about what you'r…

AI assessment note: “when you're doing that, it actually becomes really clear what you want.”

Q Don't give me the name, but give me, like, all the personal. Was it an investor, or what type? Give me the.

A There's plenty, there's plenty of people. There's, like, there's, uh, there's, Sort of investor people who are like, oh, you know, you're like running a newsletter when you're going to do something real with your life. Um, or there's like, you know, people I've worked with in the past. Um, just, there's just a lot of people who like sort of underestimated me. Um, or maybe not me exactly, but I think we're judgmental of you're running a newsletter, why you're not ambitious enough and whatever. And so I have a little bit of a chip on my shoulder about that. And I was thinking about that, like why Why is that my, one of my first reactions is to like, be like, fuck you, you know, uh, and there's some good things about that, you know, um, there's like that, that expression has like chips on shoulders, like put dollars in pockets or whatever. I don't know. There's something like that. Um, uh, but also it says something about me that, that, that I go there and I, One of the things I love about writing is it becomes an exploration of self where you understand yourself in a new way. Um, so I was writing about that, took a picture of it, threw it into GBD-V. GBD-V is an incredible handwriting, um, recognizer, OCR, you know, character recognition expert. Um, cause I have like this serial killer chicken stretch handwriting. I write in like red flare pens. That's like a, that's like a magic…

AI assessment note: “There's, Sort of investor people... or there's like, you know, people I've worked with”

Q several times that you live in the future, you see what you need, and you build it for when other people come there. I'm wondering, like, how do you live in the future? Beyond the programming tools, which I've seen you talk to other people about, um, what are the things that you do personally with AI that people in the future will all take naturally as part of life?

A Every part of my life has been, you know, I, I don't know if AI fight is the right word, but it is involved in every part of my life. So, um, really simple, quick example. Um, I was in the, in a coffee shop today. And I was journaling and just sort of like thinking about, you pass some cool milestones. Like yesterday I was at Dev Day, OpenAI Dev Day, and I got this like cool plaque that was like, you've processed ten billion tokens through, through OpenAI, which is, it was so cool. Um, and it just, I like to just spend some time like soaking in moments like that because it's, if you don't enjoy it, what's the point? Um, and I was thinking a bit about how that Felt and what it meant to me, and, um, there's some positives to that, and then there's some negatives, because, like, I immediately am, like, you know, I hope XYZ person saw this, because, like, I have a chip on my shoulder about, you know, whatever, uh, people who maybe underestimated me or whatever.

AI assessment note: “Every part of my life has been... I was journaling and just sort of like thinking”