The Exchanges

Q that. One is you, you look at the costs and then you're like, okay, here's the cost. Let me go and, uh, add 60% margin or whatever to it to create a sustainable business. And the second way, which you actually, you talked about it in your first idea, I think, which is what is the ROI of this thing? And then how do you just anchor to the ROI?

A I mean, if, if it runs all the time, you literally have three full-time developers working on your code base. So like three shifts of eight hours of full-time developer, 24 seven. Um, so you are replacing somewhere north of 200,000 dollars in, uh, in just fees that this person would cost you in a year, right? So you could also anchor it on, on the, the, the job to be done value. Like the job to be done would be to have three people work on your code base all day long. If that's what the tool does, then, you know, that's, that's what the price might be. Although I guess, 300 K a year for a single tool, that is quite the expense, right? So you would really have to have a higher impact than what three developers could do with that time. But this, this also depends on the, the, uh, the potential, um, capabilities of that agent, right? If that agent really can try Wildly different things. Not just write new code and maybe run it, but maybe spin up a different kind of tool, right? You're using, I don't know, RabbitMQ as a message queue between your servers, but the thing is trying to experiment with an AWS Kafka queue or something, and it just changes some part of your infrastructure just to see if that would increase performance, but also reduce cost. Like, if that tool could have the agency to do this, this could save you millions in a year. So, you know, like the question is, what…

AI assessment note: “you are replacing somewhere north of 200,000 dollars in, uh, in just fees”

Q laziest people are the wealthiest people. And in what I mean by that is if you can figure out how to automate a lot of what you're doing, um, and if you can figure out how to get good economics, then you've got a business on your hands. So, um, I, I'm, I'm, Chomping at the bit. I want to hear these ideas. What do you want to start with?

A I think I'm going to go with like the biggest and maybe most complicated one first, because that's the one I wish I had the most, particularly because I'm a solo founder. Like I said, all those hats and some of the hats that I'm wearing, I really enjoy, but many I don't. I'm not a really good marketer. I do that and I can also sell and I can also do biz dev and go through my financials and all of that, but I wish there was somebody else to do this for me. And most of the time we have just Businesses that kind of are agents for us that are like agencies that do this work for us, particularly with like taxes or marketing design. We kind of source that out. But what I want is an AI co-founder. I want a virtual, always on, twenty-four-seven, always available co-founder that does that stuff for me. That is not just there for me to kind of bounce back and forth ideas. We can, we already do this. I think if you look in the founder community, there are many, many people who now use ChatGPT or Anthropics Cloud In this constant conversation about what should I do next? Or how should I do this? Give me 10 versions of this. Give like write an email, but write it with the tone of that person. And then you kind of like piecemeal all of these tasks that you would otherwise have to do all by yourself together with the help of an AI. I think that's like the initial stage we're already at that m…

AI assessment note: “what I want is an AI co-founder. I want a virtual, always on”

Q So are we talking about, like, AI and automation type ideas?

A I think so, mostly. Like, I'm, I've always been a big fan of anything machine learning, anything AI before it was AI, right, the whole GPT movement, the LLMs and that stuff, that made it extremely accessible. But even before that, I always wanted to see what human skill-based task can I give to a machine, and then the machine will do it good enough so that, in most cases, the reliable results that I get Are things that I can just use. Like it's always been my approach to computers. They're great. And if we can just shoot them just right, they can do things that other people would have to do for us, but we don't have to pay them or listen to them or put them to bed or anything, right? Like we have this, this always on thing that does work for us better than we could do it. So that's where most of this is focused around. Yes. AI has been like, I don't think if you start a business today, You can avoid AI, or you should avoid it. You should never avoid it, either in the process of ideation, the process of organizing it, creating processes themselves, implementing the business, operating the business, having parts of the business themselves be features that are running on AI, anything. AI is a very strong accelerator for all of these things. So you'll find it in all of the ideas that I have to either large degrees or smaller degrees.

AI assessment note: “I think so, mostly. Like, I'm, I've always been a big fan”

Q So I don't think you're alone. I think that every founder wants this. Uh, although I'll, I'll speak. I know someone is listening to this and be like, yeah, but Arvid, uh, my co-founder, like there's this, you know, emotional element that I have with a co-founder. Your agent will never be able to do something like that. What's your response to someone who says that?

A I mean, probably not because they're not a human being, but maybe that is not the thing that you need when you even think about getting an AI co-founder, right? It's not supposed to be your waifu or anything like this, right? This is, this is not a kind of a, an emotional attachment. It's not an AI girlfriend, right? Or maybe it is, but on a professional level. Here's the thing, like all these LLMs, all these AI tools that we have in the world right now, they're effectively gaslighting engines. Right? That's the world's biggest gaslighting process that you can ever imagine is like asking a question of an LLM and then seeing as it tries to convince you that it has any idea what it's talking about. Like that happens on ChatGPT all the time. It's always trying to gaslight you into believing that it knows what it's talking about. And then you tell it, I don't think that's right. And it says, oh, so I'm so sorry. I completely missed that. Here's the actual right answer. And then you say, no, that's actually not right as well because I checked this and this doesn't work. Oh, I missed that too. Sorry, sorry. Here's the actually correct answer. This is like all what LLMs do is to try to convince you that they're right by using phrasing that they think might convince you. So in a way, that is also what people do to each other to get their ideas across the table and to get things done, r…

AI assessment note: “probably not because they're not a human being, but maybe that is not the thing”