Increasingly, we believe that a founder will serve a customer and then they will have multiple agents that will have to be part of this portfolio of tools that they offer to their customers. You can't start with an idea. You can't start with a technology. You can't start with a market size. You have to start with who do you want to serve for the next 10 years and what is a fundamental problem that they have that you feel that you can solve. Something that is going to be very important for portfolio entrepreneurship and for companies in the age of AI is durability. And that is are you allowed to offer more than the initial thing that you offer? And some brands do this very well. You can imagine what a Nike hotel would look like, but it's very difficult to compute what a Hilton shoe would be, right? So some companies and brands just have like very clear permission, authenticity, authority to serve their customers in different ways. Some doesn't. This podcast is sponsored by Google. Hey folks, I'm Omar, product and design lead at Google DeepMind. We just launched a revamped vibe coding experience in AI Studio that lets you mix and match AI capabilities to turn your ideas into reality faster than ever. Just describe your app and Gemini will automatically wire up the right models and APIs for you. And if you need a spark, hit I'm feeling lucky and we'll help you get started. Head to a.studio/build to create your first app. The episode you're about to watch is with my friend Henrik Wordin, co-founder of the Startup Studio Prehype, the co-founder of Barkbox, an author, and an investor. Right now, he's one of the co-founders of Autos, which has the goal to help millions of people become entrepreneurs with AI. I've known Henrik for many years. his startup studio prehype is actually where my company ever came from. I hope you enjoy the episode. You know, one thing I was thinking about the other day, I was I'm doing a keynote for at summit and so I'm trying to find like themes. You know what's an interesting theme that I don't think that a lot of people talk about is uh photo portfolio entrepreneurship, you know, which is kind of what you're doing now, which I guess we did at prehigh and I think a lot of people are intrigued about, but also it's been like kind of because so much of the conversation about entrepreneurship has been defined by VCs telling people what real entrepreneurship is. Portfolio entrepreneurship always been like kind of like a bad thing. I totally agree. uh VCs have kind of given it a bad name and and and there's this thing about uh oh you have to focus and and and so having a portfolio sucks and it's like well you're the VC like you have a portfolio. Exactly. People should work 24/7 except you take eight weeks of holiday in the summer. And one of the things I admired a lot or admire a lot about you and um I think people should know there's a lot of um you you know you created this incubator prehype that there's a lot of spirit of prehype uh in every every came out of prehype and and I've kind of shamelessly ripped off certain things that I saw you do. Um, and one of those things is I think you've um, you know, I looked at what you did every day sitting at Prehype and you were, you know, running Bark, which is a now a public company, and you also had all this other stuff going on, which you're absolutely not allowed to do. You're not supposed to do that. And I was like, you know, in my heart of hearts, if I could be Henrik, um, and uh, and have this like this sick ventureback company and also have this incubator that I run that's separate and like writing books and doing whatever it is that you were doing. I was like, I would that sounds like a pretty good gig. And um, I it only took me like six years and I'm definitely not not close to your level, but uh, I'm sure you could sing soon. I have definitely um moved more in that direction and it's quite a good life. So portfolio entrepreneurship a great idea. You know what there's a lot of things that kind of I guess now that I'm looking back over the years 2010 to 2020 2021 which were kind of like a bit of golden age for I think for New York entrepreneurship and I think some of us was kind of lucky to be in the midst of it all. Um there's a lot of like components of that that I'm not trying to understand what actually happened and there are these kind of like things that we don't have terms for right you know like and some of the things I'm exploring now so everyday entrepreneurship so all these people who are trying to build businesses that will never become unicorns and never probably will get an adventure there's these kind of things like um the in between time which I think is this kind of interesting thing that entrepreneurs they have because most people if they're a lawyer or a developer, their next job is as a lawyer or developer. But as an entrepreneur, your next job is definitely not going to be what you used to do, right? Because you probably tired and burned out of it. But so much of your personal narrative is linked up in what you do. So you're kind of like in this weird wasteland in the middle where you used to do something and now everybody's like, "What's next?" And you don't really know. And so there's this beautiful, very vulnerable time, which is this in between time. I guess the last thing that I've been thinking a lot about is this notion of how do you create an environment where amazing things appear? Specifically, how do you do it now when people are increasingly remote? And I visit your studio the other day and kind of got to think about like sometimes you actually have to create an environment like a physical place where people go and they jam and they feel inspired and stuff like that. So yeah, I've been very reflective of that time too. It was a great time. And obviously the golden age ended as soon as you moved back to Denmark. Um that I'll take full credit for that. New York, you know, just not the same. Yes. Yes. But, you know, maybe maybe we'll be back. Maybe it'll come back at some point. Um I'm sure it will. That's actually the cool thing about like I think every time I visit New York now, it's like it is a little bit like a college campus, right? You definitely see there's a new class of people like there's a new crew and they're figuring their thing out, right? And building their kind of places and that's what's so amazing with that city. Definitely. I I I love it here. There's definitely a lot happening and I hope to be one of the people building that building that crew. Um, but I want to go back to the portfolio thing for a second. Why did you feel like you were allowed to do that? And and how did you how did you even pull that off? I mean like I think as many entrepreneurs it wasn't there so I kind of just made it. I don't know how I pulled it off. Um because I think even more so back then it was considered kind of like a bad thing to do. And I'm also trying to trying to figure out like what it is that I did. Um, and I think the one of the kind of the insights for me is that I don't really I don't really think like people who put out a goal and then work towards it. I'm more kind of exploring things. And so, um, I kind of like find stuff that I find interesting and then I look at the projects that I'm involved in and go like, okay, which where would this fit? And so, it's a little bit kind of like a roundabout way of of working. I think honestly the way you get away with it is that you add a lot enough value to the projects that you're involved in so that the people the other people involved don't throw you out or you convince them that you do. Exactly. Like very very good jazz ants. I think I think most of my partners like on the good days will kind of like say that they're very happy I'm involved and on the bad days will go like how does this work again? It means he struck a good deal. Um, yeah, I I actually think um, you know, there are uh, when I when I think about the overlaps or or why I ended up wanting to copy some of your, you know, how you've built your career, um, the desire to be curious and do a bunch of different things. Like some people get exhausted by doing a bunch of different things. and I am just I just want to be doing lots of stuff and then some of those things turn into um larger things and I just aortion more time to them as they become larger but it's a very like bottoms up exploratory process and I think the the more standard startup thing is a little bit more like what a Peter Teal or a Keith Fra boy would you know you just like set a big you call your shot for this like big goal and that's the only thing you're focusing on that's certainly another way to do it um but I think the uh bottoms up exploratory startups as a as a curious way of life uh is a legit path to entrepreneurship and is actually particularly a thing for media entrepreneurs. I noticed a lot of media media people have this because if you want to if you're writing stuff all the time it's because you're a curious person and uh so I think you I think you may have well you have a media background too so you have a little bit of that media thing about you too. Back to the point about having kind of only one way of describing things. I do feel that there's many different flavors, many different pedagogy of entrepreneurship. And it's almost like we have told oursel there's only kind of one way that there's like the or maybe there's a few, right? Like there's the there's the way that they teach you at Harvard Business School about finding a big market and go after that and maybe there's the lean startup and Gary Vaynerchuk had the hustle. you know, there's like different but I do think that there's many many different flavors of entrepreneurship and we probably don't have a very refined vocabulary of how to describe some of these things and I think what you're articulating here is you know maybe the media kind of background approach to entrepreneurship which work for some people and and doesn't work for others and that's fine too 100%. Um, and I I think now now that's that's a really logical segue into um you're thinking about new shapes of entrepreneurs specifically in AI, which I I actually think the media stuff is a particular shape that is now newly possible and and we're we're we're sort of figuring that out. But but you have another um set of entrepreneurs that in the the company that you started Otto um in the book that you wrote, you're um uh you're thinking about how they can start companies too and what what that looks like. What are what have you learned? It's a moving target, right? So I'll give you I know you had Nicholas on a bit ago, my my co-founder at Autos and things. We're about to release our version two of the platform which I can go a little bit detail of what we learned and I think some of it is akin to align with some of the thinking you have. Um I guess like on a few kind of parameters. First, I think entrepreneurship is increasingly being democratized because the entrepreneurial technology toolbox is increasingly being technocratized. And I think it really started back from when the cl the cloud kind of cloud kind of came about and then SAS kind of made it even easier and now with AI you can pipe code. And it's so funny. I thought you said claude not cloud. Yeah. Yeah, I did say that and I realized just listen my brain is completely confused. I know I did say cloud. It's like a anyway um so now you know most people can do stuff and 60% of Americans say they like to start something only 80% does and historically I think there's been a good reason because it required resources required specific capabilities and and now I think there's increasingly less of an excuse and so the area that I'm very interested in is basically how do you make not one person make a unicorn but more how do you make a million people make a million dollar turnover business what we call donkey corn Um and so um what I've learned is that first that we're pretty early in the in the phase of inventing what agentic businesses are. I'm a little bit reminded of when I did a I did a fairly large startup back in 20 in the 2000s in the video space. This is before YouTube and we raised a bunch of money and everybody kind of knew that video would go online and then we raised all this money and then we're like hey wait a minute nobody kind of like know how it will go online like things that are now very basic was just not invented what will an electronic programming guide look on the internet will the video auto start or will you have to place play will the next video then start or should you stop you know and all those different things that now we take for granted were things that we had to invent and I think as we're building autos right now we're realizing that a lot of the agentic frameworks uh just not invented like take claude like for example what should be the name of a bot should that be a a human name like claude should it be a utilitarian name like openai should it be a brand like perplexity and with each of these small decisions we take there's a lot of kind of like thinking that has to go into it and I think we're just kind of chalking along and trying to fix these up where we are right now is we're still have the ambition of launching hundreds of thousands of businesses a year. Uh we've had our first cohort of a few thousand people come through and try to help them make a business. And I guess for what is new and interesting for you, I think one that thing that we totally have gotten uh convinced about which I think you have too is that there won't be that many one agent businesses. I think increasingly we believe that um a customer a a a founder will serve a customer and then they will have multiple agents that will have to be part of this portfolio of tools that they offer to their customers. And so the portfolio thinking that we talked about earlier and I think you've been writing about also I think we're kind of also kind of now subscribing to. So a founder will come up with a customer they have to serve. they'll come up with initial problem that they can solve for them and then they'll create multiple basically agendic businesses or solutions for that specific space. That's interesting and I do think that um that's one of my learnings about um port let's say portfolio entrepreneurship that um I had to figure out by myself. I couldn't just rip this off from you. Well, you obviously have come to this conclusion based on what you just said, but serving the same customer um feels actually like a very important part of portfolio entrepreneurship. Like with every the the thing that makes it work is that the people who come and start companies with us or or build products with us um are from the same pool of people that we are serving that are that are our readers and our subscribers. and the tools that we're building serve those same people. And so the ecosystem builds and becomes this cohesive thing where when we launch a new tool hopefully um everybody in the community likes it because we built it for ourselves and a lot of the people in the community are kind of like us and we're just sort of building this um ecosystem of people who are who are all on the same page versus I think the mistake that I see a lot of people do when they come to me and they're like I'm going to do an EIR thing is they are they're running one business And they're like, "But this is going to be in a totally different area with a totally different customer that I don't even understand. You need to compound." Yeah. You need to compound. And if you if you do, it's like every every nth thing you do just gets it gets better and better. You know your customers better. They know you better. Like um and so you you you you build something. You're building one thing instead of many things. Even though it looks like many things, it's actually just one thing. And uh I think that's one of the things that people miss about this kind of entrepreneurship and what works. I mean like the whole book is the premise of what we call relationship capital. And what we argue in the book is that it's going to be one of the few if not the only moat that's going to be left in a time of a AI where everybody can do everything. And so I mean like if you look at everything that came out of prehype over 15 years, it's basically these relationship capital companies. It's companies that are not defined by what they do, but who they serve. And you take Bark Box as a good example. We never defined oursel as a company that puts stuff in boxes cuz then our next business would have been the cat box. We are the you like which many people ask all the time. What we were about is we were about making products for dogs and the people who love them. And and so the problems that we saw were problems for dog lovers and and their dogs and and so our next big business was an airline for dogs, not a another stuff in a in a box business. And you take Rorow, which obviously also came out of the prehab world. you know, they basically solve um medical problems for men who have something they're a little bit embarrassed about being hair loss or ED or or weight loss. And so I I am a full subscriber of that. The pedagogy that I very much understand is you can't start start with an idea. You can't start with a technology. You can't start with a market size. You have to start with who do you want to serve for the next 10 years and what is a a fundamental problem that they have that you feel that you can solve. And then from that we basically think that relationship capital had these three areas and we can go into them in detail if it's interesting. One is basically uh depth which is how much does a customer feel seen by you and I think you articulated very well people feel very seen when they know that you're kind of a little bit like them but there's also like do you respond to their post when they comment on something on online stuff like that how quickly do you answer their emails the second thing is density which is really how much do they feel that you belong in the community that you serve and I think same point again people know that people in Patagonia or palent on they're part of the community right like sometimes they are in the community and the third part which I think is going to be very important for a portfolio entrepreneurship and for companies in the age of AI is basically durability and that is are you allowed to offer more than the initial thing that you offer and some brands do this very well you can imagine what a Nike hotel would look like but it's very difficult to compute what a Hilton shoe would be right so some companies and brands just have like very clear um very clear permission, authenticity, authority to to serve their customers in different ways and some doesn't know. I think that's that's really good. And my my add to that my build is the way that that has worked for me. um you know cuz I think where you started here is you have to identify a customer you want to serve for 10 years is um instead of knowing who your customer is know who you are and and that's not just a I'm going to journal about who I am although that can be part of it or I'm going to go go to therapy which can be part of it but um it is a dynamic process of building things putting things out in the world and that will tell you about who you are and what appeals to you and and what you like and you have to just like iterate through a bunch of things to to to make that picture clear because a lot of it, you know, sometimes it's not very flattering. It's not actually what you want. Um or not not actually what you think you want to be. So, for example, for me, I think um when I was at prehype, I really wanted to be a writer, but it was very hard for me to admit that cuz I had a whole founder identity and I felt like it would interfere with that. Um and it took me like three years getting into every like for three years when when the whole thing almost fell apart where I was like what am I actually in this for? It's like I I really want to write. Um how can I like organize my day? So, I'm like mostly writing and then uh or at least half writing and then operating and how do I make a business with that? Cuz I also do really love business. I love technology, all that kind of stuff. And so, um, as I've gotten clearer about who I am, the products I can build and the company I can build, uh, becomes a much clearer, solid idea that has staying power because I can be a like the the for the force or energy behind it in a way that's different from um, I'm just putting on a show so that I can like raise the next around for the next year or so. Uh, and I don't really love banking for uh, you know, I don't know, ma male male former male people or what, whatever. I'm just making it up. I don't really love whatever I'm doing, but I'm just going to put on a show. Um, and that's a that's actually it's a it's hard to at least for me it was hard to learn how not to put on a show and just do the thing that was most reflective of me. Um, but that's the I think that's the game. I think the other reason why that is so important is because if if it's not a natural customer for you to serve, if there's not what we think of as customer founder fit, then you don't have authenticity and authority to do it. And then I don't think that people will really buy into the the solution that you're solving. And I think that's going to be even more important again when people can do everything. But do you again I think I sometimes I hear people come and go like oh should wouldn't it be cool if you build whatever and I'm like yeah that might be cool but not for you like that's it doesn't seem like a business that you should do at all. In the book we have this framework we call the five Ps. It's basically powers, passions, possessions, positions or potentials. And these are five ways that you can basically look at yourself and figure out where do I have something that is innate in me that I can extract from and then build something around that. And so I think different people come to that conclusion different ways. I think you had like your journey um and I had mine. But I will echo that every time that I try to build something to make it successful, I end up not building something great. And every time I basically go for I want to build cool with people I like, then I end up doing something that seems to resonate with people. What have you learned about who you are in the process of building companies over the last decade? Huh. Um, I have learned that I have a weird role where I find people who are very talented and then I see something in them and then I help them find that and in many ways that role is kind of like a weird supporting actor role. Um, I kind of had this mental model because prehe was called a studio. Then I went deep and kind of study like music studios. And if you really study the Mottown of the world or um um the one in London I'm just planking on where Beatles had their stuff and there's one in Sweden where Max Martin kind of did a lot of like the the 20s and um pop music. What you see is there's like a few people there that kind of like get these uncut gems in and then they help them find the baseline. They help them kind of cut the music and then they create this magical stuff. And so the amount of like successful musicians that have come out of like Mottowns or Abiro Studios or or the one in Sweden is just incredible. And so I see myself I think I'm learning that that is kind of both what I enjoy but also what I seem to be good at. Finding people and then helping them figure out what should be their their thing. What else? Give me something deeper. Oh something deeper. I guess the thing that comes to mind which I think was most surprising was that um after we went public I took a little bit of time where I didn't do much and I kind of thought that I would I guess borderline retire and suddenly I felt that I was I went to this very high-end conference and my feeling was that I had like a year where I still would be invited back to that. M um and so I got really worried of losing relevancy and I was trying to understand why I was so worried about it and I actually don't think it was about vanity although there's probably some of that but what I really really really enjoy is to get to talk to people like yourself and other people who have new original thought and if you're not relevant then you're basically not get you don't get invited you don't have interesting observation to trade with and so you just kind of wither And that I think that the the the urge and need to be part of that club of people who think about new stuff. 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I'm going to work five or 10 years, maybe more, and then I'm going to get an exit. and then at the very least I'm going to take a lot of time off, but maybe I won't ever work again. And that's maybe part of the point. Um, and a lot of people who have done that, you included I' I've had this at a at a much smaller scale. We didn't IPO, but you know, where you just get to the finish line and then you're you get to the you get to the number that you wanted or the outcome that you wanted and then you're like, well, I have to live my life the next day, but my whole life is now gone. Um, and that's like really hard. And I I was thinking about that and um I think there's a there's two ways of running companies. It's um startups as a means to an end and startups as a way of life. And if you run a company as a way of life, um, ideally you want to run it or or be doing the things that that running companies entails for a long time without like a specific end date in mind. And ideally, you're you know, even if you sell one thing, you're you're kind of your life is set up so that um it's it's a way of life. It's not like I'm going to get to this end date and then do something totally different. It's like I'm I have set up my life such that um I don't maybe I want to take a vacation or maybe I want to like slowly pivot into something else but I don't need to get away. I don't need to have that like one final like it's over I'm out and then I can do something else because that's those are the periods that are I think hurt the most or suck the most for for entrepreneurs or feel very unnatural. Yeah. I I that's very much resonate with me and I think you know you you've been better of doing selfwork you know the the doing selfwork for me is a newer thing you know I didn't get a a coach or therapist until a few years ago where I was like where I had a lot of time I was like ah everybody else seemed to be really enjoying understanding why they are who they are. Look my problems were pretty deep. It was not about enjoyment. Let me tell you, mine was mine, you know, like I don't think I I had these big um the same thing. But I I definitely as I then worked with my coach, you know, you obviously realize that these anxieties and these behaviors you have like something that comes from childhood and from different things and and you try to understand that better and and I found that to be you know obviously sometimes very vulnerable but mo most of the time she's very very interesting and um but I think in terms of what I've learned myself about being an entrepreneur I've done it for so long that I just I don't really know any other Okay. I guess I mean I I'm not sure anybody would ever offer me a job. Um so uh so I guess I'm entrepreneur for life now. Sometimes people ask like would you ever you know would you ever take a job and you're like I don't know it depends what it was you know maybe but people like assume that you just want to be an entrepreneur and sometimes when I hear like people VCs have these amazing I don't know grass is always greener and I've never been a VC but sometimes you hear about them getting this ridiculous kind of management fees and goof around and and then uh I like that seems to be a pretty good job. I was going to say like when was the la what's the last job where you're maybe it wasn't offered to you but like you you had to be you were really thinking maybe I should do that instead of this. I mean like this is pre this is when I did prehype. I was I was had just finished a company that didn't work out and I was basically trying to figure out what to do next and I was keeping all my options open you know. So, I I got offered a job to run BBC uh digital on the international side and that's cool. I got offered and then what I did do was I got offered a job at the there's a kind of design agency called Wolf Olins uh who had an incredible CEO called Carl and uh and he offered me a job and I kind of like pivoted then to be the first project that uh that prehype had and so uh you know I kind of chose my path there. Well, I'm I'm glad that you you chose prehype instead of uh head of BBC digital because I think at my uh my post first company life a lot harder. The reason why I found out was I did this thing where I wrote down all them what I call micromones. Basically micromones for me are things when I'm in flow and things where I'm happy and it can't be kind of like big thing like you know uh you know having a family. It has to be like very concrete things like I like walking over the Brooklyn Bridge in the morning, you know, it's just I get profoundly happy about that, right? Or I like being in brainstorm meetings with people like you and stuff like that. And so I ended up having these micro moments which is these 30 kind of concrete periods where I've done stuff and then I started to use that as a way to measure options that would be thrown at me. So, you know, the BBC it sounded like it was a lot of money and it was like a cool job and it would give me kind of like, you know, I guess self-esteem for a second, but then when I looked at what it would entail, none of the micro moments would be included and so I was like, ah, probably not for me. What are what are your top micro moments and how have they changed as you've gotten older? I think it's probably after I got kids. Um, because now I didn't like kids as much. Before I had them, I was like, they're annoying. Um, and I think even when my wife was like, "We should really look at this kid stuff," I was like, "Uh, why maybe?" Um, but now I have a 5-year-old and 11year-old, and it is just really, really incredible. So, a lot of the moments now are just re kind of reexploring the world with them through them. Um, and they ask all these interesting questions and, you know, like that you don't have the answers to like, um, what's a good one recently? Um, oh, why do some people get very popular at school and some does not? That is that I'd like to know the answer to that. Oh, Dad. Uh, what's going to happen if I won't be able to afford a house like uh the size that we live in. H then I won't I just then I won't love you and then that was it. Okay. Obviously, not like your like your brother better. No. Um but so so I think some of the a lot of the microones around that I also through my 20s and 30s and maybe part of my early 40s I was so anxious to succeed that I don't remember a lot of the stuff and so I have so many micro moments now because I gotten a little bit more kind of chilled um and so I can actually really enjoy all the stuff that I do every day. And um so I think a lot of the a lot of the early years of even a prehype is just a little bit of a blur because I just wanted to make it and didn't really have like the energy to kind of stop and enjoy every day. How are you dealing with your kids in AI? It's a good question. I mean like um my I have an 11-year-old which are kind of just when iPads were kind of and so we took a sbatical with him and people like how was that with a six-year-old at the time and I was like this is great. He had an iPad and there's YouTube so problem solved. And now you know reading uh what's he called? uh Jonathan um Jonathan Hyde's book an anxious generation of like okay that was probably not a good idea. Um um so the the younger one doesn't have YouTube and doesn't have a lot of the same thing. Um have you noticed a difference in you know in their temperament and how they are. Yeah. But I think it might be genetic. Like the young one don't want to play on his iPad because there's nothing interesting on it and the older one is just completely addicted to it. Um, so maybe that's because of Roblox and and YouTube that the older one had access to and the younger one does not. But, uh, what would be the personality explanation? Like what are what are they both like otherwise? You know, I'm increasingly kind of buying into the thesis that a lot of this stuff is just super generic. Sorry. Uh, um, is it's all the genes. Like it's all DNA. I I think we I think we as parents would like to think that we have like so many so much impact on these kids, but I have two boys. They're six years apart. They've gone exactly through the same stuff, right? Pretty much. And they are night to day like the one is blonde, the one was is, you know, brown in hair and they're one is like a little like a clown that talks all the time, the other one is more of an introvert. like they're just like completely different. Um, and I don't think that we ne necessarily did that much different. So, uh, I think on AI specifically, I I think AI is like electricity. I think it's going to be a transformative technology and I drank the Kool-Aid and so I think they have to learn about it and so they have full access to all the different foundational models and they they use it a lot like they will have long conversations with uh I think my youngest like PI the most and the oldest use chat GPT the most. Um, but they have full access to it and I teach them how to vibe code and they know how to do stuff like that and I I'm kind of all all bought into that. And are you like monitoring their chats and if so how? Yes and no. We talk a lot about first principles and so we have first principles of how we inter interface with machines. Um, and we you know that are some of the elements. There's just rules like some of them are just basic rules like you when you talk to somebody on the internet you can't give your real name you can't you know all the different things um I sometimes do go through the chat history and just kind of get a little bit of understanding on it mostly with the youngest the oldest is getting 11 he's a pre kind of puberty teenager getting there and I feel he deserve his privacy and so there are things that that I don't want him to talk about and I have like I put rules on the network level, right? So, I have something called a firewall, which is a kind of firewall that you can kind of put stuff on. I'm so glad you were not my parents. My My parents, they My parents have no idea what a firewall is. Thank God. And my my There's not It's going to be difficult to watch porn in this household. I'm telling you that. I mean like there is they all they all know about VPNs and stuff like that. Um but uh they um uh yeah I mean like we do have a little bit of like a bad like for example the oldest he doesn't have a smartphone he has an Android and it's like completely locked down. It has black and white interface only. you can he can only use useful apps and so sometimes and I'll get a notification every time there's a new app that gets installed even though you can't I locked it so you can't install new apps but he will find ways to do it and so we will have this like how the hell did you get past that security measurement he was like oh I don't know man but he still haven't found a way to disable me knowing about it and so he still get caught when he does it uh but I kind of like that little the little kind of like like having think the competition of Eevee can go circumvent my my security systems. Little cat and mouse game. Yeah, I like it. Um what what do you find they're using it for? I find them they increasingly like me use it for most things. Um the six-year-old, 5-year-old, he talks a lot a lot. And so uh sometimes the family are just a little bit just can't be bothered talking to him anymore. So I think he just like talks to it as it's like somebody's will talk and somebody ask you questions like uh he's he's a very uh proactive guy. So he's like uh I'd like to come up with things to do this weekend with my family and what could you suggest? The older one is more philosophical and so he has like areas of interest. He had the second world war he was very interested in. and he was very interested in Titanic. And so last time I checked, he had spent like hours basically roleplaying that he was in the Second World War and that he just landed on the beach of Normandy and basically was kind of role playinging himself into how that be and and he had like what seemed to be a very very lengthy kind of just using his imagination to be kind of yeah positioned that as he was a soldier in the Second World War. That's really interesting. It's super fascinating. I mean, he also use it for like he'll he doesn't use for school work that much, but they also our school don't seem to mind it. They kind of embrace it rather than kind of shun it. So, uh so uh yeah, use it for that too. He is he is a little bit negative on it. Like there's definitely a sense of dad, can you just stop talking about AI stuff for a second? Oh, so there there's a bit of Yeah, there's a bit of that. Is that because you know his classmates and the the environment is negative on it or is it like a is a personal thing? Like one of the things I've been feeling about the AI wave is it's the first tech wave that I can remember that 25 to 35 year olds seem psyched about it because it was created by 25 to 35 or 40 year olds. Um, but usually it's like the Mark Zuckerberg, you know, 18 in his dorm room. And this is the first big one that's not that. Um, and and I think that that has created a different sentiment among teenagers for it than is normal or is is sort of the usual way it works. So what is what where do you think the negativity comes from? I think for him, I think it's a little bit different from what I sense it is for the rest of the world. I definitely sense also like this, you know, two two-tier world where some people really some people are really into it and some people just just think it's really bad and write a comment every time they see something that's generated on uh by AI online. I think for him I think honestly it's a little bit more just rebelling against me. I think it's a little bit like I'm just tired of you talking about it. That's your thing. It's not my thing. So, I think it's more him just being, you know, the anti parent thing rather than necessarily AI. Got it. Okay, that makes sense. One of the things that occurs to me is you talked about, you know, them asking you all these questions and not being delightful. H how has that affected how, you know, they can get an answer to anything immediately. So, how has that affected what they ask you? And also just being able to get answers and go go deep and just go Y why until you get down to like quantum gravity? Uh, how has that affected them and what they know about the world and how they think about the world? My observation is that they just know so much. I mean, like my son will often tell me something that I just didn't know about. I will sit at a restaurant and he'll go like, "Oh, you know what's happening here is blah blah blah or this specific fruit or you know and you'll go like what? How do you know about that?" Um I also think honestly maybe that's going back to my childhood. I think they just talk much more with us than I talk to my parents. Like we are we're together a lot and we talk a lot about a lot of things and so um there's that. I don't know. I'm just very impressed by I do tons of talks now both at universities but also at high schools and I'm honestly just very impressed by you know young people like they're just very thoughtful and very seem to be very knowledgeable about the world and you know seem to be very sophisticated about most a lot of things and so I don't know like it just seems like you know evolution is doing its thing we were like doing dumb cuz like we had nothing else to do and they seem to be doing smarter things because I mean like I I grew up without a computer and the internet or any of those things, right? And so when you had like a week and it wasn't that my parents was programming my weekend where these kids of course have access to everything and so they will want to have a conversations conversation about stuff and they will have good points and so I'll engage with them in in a kind of adult way. Um but uh yeah, I think it's just it's a little bit like it's just two different species almost. I think that's what it is too. Um you're watching humans become different species and that's always and that happens in every generation and and that's always uncomfortable for adults. One thing that I've been thinking quite a bit about lately, specifically about entrepreneurship, but it kind of goes broader, is how much you should lean into your negative negative view of the world and how much you should leave into a positive. And I do think that people like yourself who have a lot of people who listen to you have like this choice where it's not difficult to see some of the problems in the world and it's not difficult to see how for example AI can make things very complicated by job losses and all these different things. Um but it's also not too difficult to think of all these positive things like if we talk about entrepreneurship for example like we have a country in the US where we're very proud of it being basically born by entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurship that it was born by was not the was not the the unicorns it was the mom and pop stores right which we don't talk about at all and now we have this quite a golden opportunity where anybody who can identify a customer and come up with a original interesting way to solve a problem for them really have the opportunity to do that. That is pretty unique. Like that is incredible. And so if we believe that the future is, you know, what we make it then and we know that we made something wrong when we made the social web, right, which a lot of us was part of. Then we can try to imagine something that is really good for a lot of people. And then we can just try to go and make that and we can go and articulate that we'd like to make it so that everybody gets inspired by and do a little bit more of that. And in general, I think the world is currently pretty cynical. And I think when it comes to my kids and it comes to how I would like to kind of throw energy into the world, I think it's more about trying to find a way of showing where where there could be light rather than where there could be darkness. At every we build new products all the time and we always need beautiful landing pages to launch them and the tool we use for that is framer. Framer unifies design CMS and publishing in one canvas. There's no handoff and no hassle. 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Icons for your site, design them right here. The tool bends to your workflow, not the other way around. Framer stands above the others because it's not just a site builder. It's a true design tool that also publishes professional production ready sites. When you're ready, hit publish. Framer handles the hosting, the speed optimization, and the technical stuff. Are you ready to design, iterate, and publish allinone tool? Start creating for free at framer.com/design and use the code dan dan for a free month of Framer Pro. Rules and restrictions may apply, of course. And now back to the show. I totally agree. That's what I try to do. And I think you make a good point about the social web. I I actually think the reason, one of the main reasons why the default is negative is because the discourse has been so negative about the social web for the last 10 years. and we're applying a lot of the same feelings onto AI in ways that sometimes are fair and and I think in a lot of cases are unfair because they're very different. Um, and it's it was this interesting there's this interesting swing like when when I was really first starting to get aware of the startup ecosystem and whatever in like 2010 it was so positive like you know the social the social network had just come out the movie and like everyone was like this is amazing. Um, and then in 2016 it totally flipped. And I think we're still seeing some of that some of that play out. And and you have this interesting point about why AI is very different to the social web. Yeah. Um, thank you for teeing me up. Uh, the uh, well, that's just because I've been like telling that story like it was mine for a bit. So this is just a little bit just my guilt kind of like just the guilt was coming over me. It's probably because I almost was about to tell the story like it was me that came up with the bin. I realized that I done I did this once. I was sitting with Staca as you know who used to be at prehype and we're sitting at uh we're sitting in can to some festival and I'm we're telling stories about airlines and I tell the story about how I had this kind of you know battle of the armrest and then suddenly at one point like this person said hey do you mind I have a prosthetic arm and then I was very embarrassed and I tell the story like it was me it wasn't my story at all it was Stacy's story and as I'm telling the story I realize that Stacy's He's sitting at the dinner and I'm like, "Oh no, I had to fess off." Um, but so this is what was about to happen. I'm glad that you caught it cuz I actually have had that happen to me where people do my own bits back to me and I'm like I literally we did we talked about this like three weeks ago and like you're you're doing this back to me. In all seriousness, I've given you full credit of that kind of stuff. But do like I don't know. Can you articulate it well? So you probably have like a more sharp version of it now so I can use that for the next few weeks. Uh I the the very the very uh the very basic and you know feel free anyone to rip this off is uh uh the social web operated on um revealed preference. So what you click on is what you want. Uh and we acted as though revealed preference was all that people are because that's that's what you really want. Um and the reality is that you're always going to click on a car crash and so that's where that's where things go. They get more extreme. But I think humans are quite a bit more complex than that. And um the one of the beautiful things about AI is it operates based not just on what you what you click on but what you say. Um and what you say about who you are actually I think has a has a um is is real and relevant. And so and I think you can see the difference in the ways that if I asked you know CHBT to make me a for you page versus my Instagram for you page. Chbt is super wholesome and Instagram is like the trashiest slop. Um, and we may see that change over time and I I assume that, you know, AI will get a little bit more racy over time or a little bit more sloppy over time. But I do think that that is a fundamentally um it's a fundamental difference to the the the way that these algorithms see see us as human beings is they're language models are much much more multi-dimensional and complex. And I think that will make them healthier. I I very much buy into that. I want to buy into that because I want to see something that's positive. But it is incredible. I was just like asking Chhatti what is my my bricks thing and I I realized that my bricks has been debunked. It's like not not something that you should use. But it is incredible that it just immediately goes like you are yes whatever and uh and it's right. Right. So uh it does have a pretty good sense. Yeah. You know what? I literally just posted on on LinkedIn. I'm ESPN. I think ESPN is a TV channel. So, not that uh if you could hear I really use it in a serious way every day. Yeah. Let me tell you as you're asking me. I think that's one of the funniest things I ever heard you say. I know so little about these things. I was at the Goldman conference once and um there's all these like famous people and I know not a lot about American sport because I grew up in Denmark. And so I'm standing there and I talk to this guy and he's very very very kind and nice and he's just pivoting. He's in in his in between time and it's amazing. He used to work in sports and now he's doing like a whatever. And so, um, I talked to him for a while and then, um, you know, turns out he's in he's he was in baseball and then I, my co-founder, Matt Mer, uh, is somewhere and I see him coming. He goes like and he's totally into sports. I was like, "Come on, Matt." And Matt comes over and he gets like all weird and, um, I introduce him. It turns out to be Jared Deer and I just didn't know who he was. Um, and so maybe a little bit. I will tell you on the What am I? I am ENTP. ENTP. Okay. Um I'm I'm in ENTJ. Extroversion, intuition, thinking, pu uh perceiving. So we're Well, actually, I used to be INTJ and now I think I've changed, but I'm like somewhere I'm I'm somewhere close to you. I'm on the border between I and E. I know that. M but then I wrote the blog post and then this therapist that I know basically sent me this long study from a few years ago that basically said that this whole thing had been debunked and you shouldn't use it at all. I think it's useful if you like it's useful if you think about it as um a story that you can try on and it can highlight different things in your life that you find to be real. And um I've got a thesis on it. Now you mentioned the word story and it's about this idea of serving a customer instead of defining your company as what you do. And the thesis is that we need to become much better. Maybe it's just because I'm a media entrepreneur as we just defined it. Um I think you need to be much better of defining your narrative. and the narrative have to be pretty unique and very specific to you because otherwise the AI models won't be able to help you. If I write in to ChatBT, hey, I the founder of Blockbox is two treats, two toys in a chew, and I like to come up with some new products, I bet you'll you'll mention the stupid cat box idea. But if I say, you know, I'm into making dogs and their people happy and blah blah, you know, it might come up with like other problems that dog lovers have and and that. So I do think that there's this interesting point where the narratives that we create are going to come, you know, just going to become very important because that is what we can use as we are putting on this AI iron man suit and and thus is going to be something that you need to have done. the uh there's that Steve Steve Jobs quote which is um the most powerful person is the person who um who who tells stories the most powerful person is the storyteller and I think that's totally right. Um and I I will say I just asked both Claude and Chach what mybriggs is and they both said INTP. So we're pretty close. There you go. Then we'll have our agents talk to our to each other's agents. How far do you think that's away from happening? The pure agent to agent agents talking to agents. Yeah, I mean it's happening I think it's happening now to to a certain degree. Um but I don't think we're I don't think we're too far off. Um like here's an example. I will uh I will submit a PR on on our on our codebase and then uh Kieran who runs Kora which is one of our products like first there's an automated claude that just like runs in GitHub and does a does a code review and then he will pull it down and then just like ask ask his ask his claude to like fix a bug or change the implementation or whatever. So it's already like there's like three there's an agent sandwich. There's like three layers of agents between the two people. Um so I think I think it's really it's happening. What's going to happen to storytelling then when I'm my agent is going to read my every newsletter and then rewrite it? Um, I think there's a lot of much more there's a lot of commoditized information that will be subsumed under AI. Um, you know, like textbooks are a good example. Like most textbooks are just not that useful. Um, or not that individual, I'll say that. Um, but I do think there's always a people want information from from a particular type of from a particular person or particular source because it carries a particular perspective and um we have always consumed summaries of works of art or pieces of writing uh whether that's a book flap or a title or any of those things. And so this is just an extension of that. Um, and I think it is better for artists or writers to have different forms of their work available for people who are at different levels of commitment and have level different levels of attention. And it's always a funnel into the like thing that you're you hope to um you hope people experience, but you can't necessarily expect that to be the first thing that they engage with. And so I think good writers or good artists will find ways to um make compelling, make their, you know, whatever the AI summarizes of their work compelling and make it compelling enough that people want to consume the the deeper real thing. You know what as you're saying this one thing that we haven't announced yet through autos but it might be out when this gets out uh otherwise breaking news um is the um the uh business model that we're looking to do with our entrepreneurs is so autos is obviously this platform where you can build um your own AI startup um and we help you with everything from coming up with the idea to um financing it to making the ads to talk to your customers and all those different things and we've been thinking a lot about what the business model is on many level right what is the business model for founders serving customers like it's probably not just SAS anymore like SAS might be a part of it but there's probably going to be all these other models emerging and we can see that on platform already but for us to the founder what we are increasingly inspired by is basically old labels like music labels and so the first first kind of cohort of founders that we're going to have coming out are basically people that we have signed like we are a label and they're basically an artist, an entrepreneur and residence on our label and then we give them money and resources and marketing and all this stuff that a label will do and then we take a royalty. So we don't take equity in their business. We just take a royalty on the top line. But in many ways and maybe inspired by what you say about media entrepreneurship like maybe a lot of this vibe coded solo entrepreneurship increasingly lookike artist because what they will need to do is to have an interestingness. They will have to have a story, something that resonate with a group of customers and they'll need to be able to articulate that in a way where they get authenticity and authority to do that and then in return they're going to offer not just writing which is traditional obviously media entrepreneurship but also products which you guys of course are doing but that we are now hoping to scale so that if the media landscape got disrupted by YouTube where everybody could make a channel however neat It was I think increasingly we're trying to see it as like the same thing where people will get on our platform, they'll get signed and then they will serve customers and we'll take care of all the boring stuff so they can take care of the relationship capital. H that's really interesting. And are they all serving a similar type of customer? Well, they all serving very different customers, right? I think in many ways we don't have a good way of articulating but we basically have this thesis that the dumba rule is going to work in an AI world too but it's going to be uh exponential so we call it dumbba square so that the tam of a good customer group is 150 lifted in seconds so 200 20,500 and that's the TAM and that is a group where you can do something new. So the people that aren't on the platform are people who um the one we had uh we just had a piece come out in uh the economist about a woman called Sarah. She unfortunately lost her dad and then she realized that the whole world about loss is very non-inovative anything from grief counseling and and support to like body logistics like how do you literally get your dad's body from A to B? And so she's building all these different agents to help you with that. So very niche we have like a woman from Texas. She helps people a women who have just given birth to get in shape after um a pregnancy. And so that of course start with making kind of a fitness protocol, but it also is about calorie counting and sleep and all those different things. And so what you see on the platform is a little bit like YouTube that you just have like people who have this very specific knowledge about tree cutting in Florida or um survival trips in Washington. That's really interesting. Um and when's that launching? I mean like what's fascinating uh this week? May maybe next week like uh you know what was fascinating is and I think a conversation that my my business partner Nicholas and I have a lot is we increasingly writing all the features right so we are vibe coding the features and then we have a few engineers working with us and they are then basically enterprising it so but we have rewritten the platform we launched in June with v1 which was very textheavy and was very kind of aentic And now we're kind of as vibe coding and vibe app creation is becoming easier, we wanted to implement that. And so um we have in this next version a feature you basically come in and you riff with uh our agents on what business you want to make. And then we build the landing page. We build the first initial agents. We built this thing which I think is very important which is basically an agentic communication layer between you and your customers. So you can have high relationship capital like a strong omniirectional relationship with your customers um but done with an agentic layer and then we do the ads and these kind of things and all this stuff we had the core components and so we had the backend system but we rebuilt the whole front end in a few months and so and of course like when you're sitting and writing as you know when you can write code as fast as you can write blog post then you constantly come up with these new things that you want to at to the system and so uh give it give us a few weeks and and the V2 will be be ready. That's great. And uh for people who are listening to this and want to find you or find a um where can they find you? Autos.com is where you can go and make a company with us and so we'll help people do that. Um the uh I'm I'm active on LinkedIn so connect on LinkedIn and here are my my random inks and my uh my bad copies of whatever attention perhaps said. Um, and so yeah, that's probably I wrote this book called Me by Customer and I and I have a podcast called Beyond the Prompt with Stanford Professor Jeremy Oley. So plenty of places where you can hear my me baffling. Awesome, Henrik. Always a pleasure. Thank you so much. Oh my gosh, folks, you absolutely positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to AI and I. Why? Because this show is the epitome of awesomeness. It's like finding a treasure chest in your backyard, but instead of gold, it's filled with pure unadulterated knowledge bombs about chat GPT. Every episode is a roller coaster of emotions, insights, and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat, craving for more. It's not just a show, it's a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship. So, do yourself a favor, hit like, smash subscribe, and strap in for the ride of your life. And now, without any further ado, let me just say, Dan, I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you.