this whole thing is I've I've done all of it and I have a lot of pride in that and part of this of thinking that this is even feasible and really why I reached out is that you have talked about this of like era of the solopreneur and it could be you know there were always brilliant engineer types who would then dabble in the marketing side and put together their own thing I don't think there's a lot of examples of a marketing or like business side exact exact yeah doing the code no this is this is going to be the revolution this week in startups is brought to you by LinkedIn jobs a business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters post your first job for free at linkedin.com twist Squarespace turn your idea into a new website go to squarespace.com twist for a free trial when you are ready to launch use offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain and and Northwest registered agent will form your company fast give you the documents you need to open a business bank account and more visit northwestregisteredagent docomo to get a 60% discount on your next LLC all right everybody welcome back to this week in startups we have an incredible show for you today I met Josh Mo gosh 15 years ago maybe uh when he was the first I believe uh GM of uber in New York City uh which was in the first five cities I think Travis launched and the team over there he's uh moved on and become an angel investor run a Syndicate and today we're going to talk about his new uh AI startup which is inspired by this meme that's been going around who's going to build the first unicorn with one or two employees welcome to the program Josh thank you so much it's great to be here yeah so uh you were the first GM of New York City correct yeah so um Travis expanded outside of San Francisco New York was the first spot and how that would typically work when they were expanding is launchers would go to a city and sort of set up the basic uh thing there get the first few drivers get the first few Riders set up some infrastructure and then hire a GM I was actually I was I was in there within the first year there was a team of three who were brought on right before me and it didn't really work out and all three of them left and they hired a fresh group of three at the end of 2011 um and I was the GM from that point on and I I heard I don't know if this is true so I'm not trying to take any credit here but uh at some point Travis had told me the the Chicago LA and New York heads had all seen him on this week in startups that famous episode from 12 or 13 years ago uh that you can watch now is that true did you see the the this weekend startups episode and that's how you became aware my awareness of uber was actually so I used it when they when they really first launched here which was like you know spring summer 2011 I tried it out I thought it was cool at the time I was in an e-commerce marketing and Ops role I had a bunch of those over the years and frankly I just tried Uber and thought it was it was really neat and uh actually the the first time I tried using it was for an airport run at like four 4 AM or so and it actually didn't work I tried to request a car there were no vehicles available I didn't think much of it but later that day I got a note from them saying hey we saw you tried to use Uber and it didn't work you know here's 10 bucks for the next time even though that feels like a typical like interaction now um at the time it did not feel typical at all it was like sort of it was sort of amazing I was like how did you I didn't even use your I just opened the app I looked I didn't see any cars I didn't use it um so that was cool I was like okay there's something interesting here and then a friend of mine you know five months later was like hey they're looking for a GM the job listing was really excited was like unlimited SUV rides you'll ride around like a European Diplomat and it was just like at that point I think um like startup Equity you know employee Equity all that stuff was really not on my radar like I I wasn't really educated on that I was more after something that I knew I would enjoy I was very interested in an opportunity to sort of be the head of of something of kind of like a startup within a startup um and it just sounded like something I would really love into work every day um and that is what it was and so when I when I applied I didn't know who Travis was I knew who Ryan Graves was when I got to S Francisco I met Travis of course and that night like in the you know like after that experience I looked him up and tried to learn everything I could about him and that is when I saw ah you doing your due diligence got it you know what I found about Travis is that you know right away I got to know him i' I've I've probably spoken to him on the phone um you know while I was in the role there we probably had a hundred phone calls over the five years maybe a little more zero of them were scheduled this is a guy who was who who is so uh dialed in on the details of of everything under him you know so there was that aspect of his leadership and also that he really encouraged me to be me and be myself and kind of lean into the way I am and kind of my intensity and the way I go about doing things he made me feel really good about that um and so it was a really really amazing uh experience so even though he wasn't totally on my radar when I got there he was he was my boss and we spoke all the time and it was a real pleasure a lot has been made about his management style and this distributed management style so putting aside press nonsense but just looking at from the inside this distributed leadership architecture that he set up which I think most people would probably think he's doing a cloud kitchens right now who knows since he doesn't talk about it and it's very much under the radar but maybe you could talk about how the edges and individuals had a lot of autonomy and then just generally what was his management style like yeah it was in some ways like remote before there was remote um because most of the employees at Uber were not in the in the San Francisco office you know the New York was like a like a hub I mean we had a big office by the end but it but it grew more slowly than Uber globally and so it always had a tight feel and so I think maintaining the startup feeling on the city level was part of it and really finding a GM in each Place who can be like mini CEO is the way he would talk about it at the time and really represent him and represent Uber when he couldn't be there so a big part of the job particularly after the first little while was dealing with Regulators dealing with the press a lot of kind of local things so I think you know took a lot of trust they spent a lot of time finding the right person I would like to think that in New York they probably had a lot of options I think in Minneapolis they probably have fewer um as we sort of went down to the smaller cities it became harder and harder to find those people but the GM crew I think because it was really the best they could find in every city uh made for a pretty special group and the folks that I'm still in touch with from Uber many of them were GMS alongside me in those early days yeah so um we'll get to your new app in just a moment ask one or two more questions uh New York was uh one of the most vibrant and challenging markets uh if my memory serves me correctly and I remember one day talking to Travis because I see the headline uh deasio is gonna cap the number of Ubers and I said hey DK what are we gonna do here and uh he said oh wait for it and he sent me like a screenshot of something and it was deblasio's phone number yeah the deasio view right the DeBlasio view so explain and deasio I think it turned out worst mayor in New York history since dinkin and that's a pretty low Benchmark to to hit I love talking to New Yorkers well no I mean DeBlasio was an incompetent fool you know uh you know explain the DeBlasio relationship and explain your reaction and where did this idea come from and when Travis says hey I'm assuming Travis came up with this idea or whoever came up with it you're the GM did you come up with that idea and then how did this go over internally externally take us to that moment yeah so if I'm just gonna I I just want to set the the scene I'll spend like less than a minute on this but what you have to know about about Uber New York both in the beginning and still now is that it runs actually a a fundamentally different business than what Uber does Now everywhere else which I would call like ride sharing ride sharing being I have excess capacity in my car a few hours a day or a few hours a week or really whenever I want and I'll turn on the app and it'll be great in New York that system doesn't actually exist it is the black car system uh set up by Ed cotch who is mayor before dkin and this is in the 1980s where you know taxis were great for Manhattan but they needed a system that would work both for kind of Executives who wanted pickups at their office but also folks uh like us who grew up in the bus and so Uber has always operated within an infrastructure and a rural system that has existed for decades it it it was not it never tried to do the ride sharing which was the true innovation of uber it never tried that in New York so as a result from the very beginning we were kind of you know at least from the regulator standpoint we were kind of like good little kids who filled out all the forms right and were kind of more responsive to them maybe than the average carbase owner that was sort of operating in that system at the time so it was never The Regulators that had a problem it was the politician so there was a few different attempts deblasio's first attempt was in like early 2015 to try to pass rules that said the city had a right to review app updates right like that's a crazy one we definitely don't want them to look at code you know um eventually they sort of figured out the way to do it was to limit the growth of Supply so not let any new drivers join the Taxi Limousine system uh that would then join Uber and so it was sort of saying no more Supply and the the challenge with this is that it's actually a death sentence but it's very hard to make people out in the world understand that so at this point we're getting 25,000 New Riders every week we're loading a thousand new drivers every week like we are really going for it and this law comes out this is roughly or a proposed law in July of 2015 saying no more new cars and I think to the Casual Observer that was like okay well what's the big deal about that you'll just sort of not at you have a great business already it's already quite large we'll just you'll just stop adding cars for a bit the sort of nuance people didn't get and I'll get to the thing that you asked about in a second is that actually if you reduce Supply the system becomes unreliable and no one will will want to use it anymore like we have to add Supply to keep up with demand so the winning you know and and we did a bunch of things we tried to explain it in all different ways the winning idea came from someone on the comm's team who is stationed in New York and her idea was to have a deasio view so at this in the app you sort of have a little slider at the bottom that you would choose Uber X Uber black whatever and there was one for deasio and You' go to the deas view and it you all the cars on the map would disappear and it would say ETA 15 minutes because we sort of decid you know the etas at that point were like two minutes and that is actually what would happen it would make a lot of surge pricing the price would go up etas would go down it it would make the system unreliable and the whole prce of uber is a reliable ride you know at that right and so it was a big deal and it was like you know 21 days in July that were probably the most intense of my of my working life and it was like going on CNBC every day talking to the like newspapers every day getting them on board and it was not just me there was like 50 people who worked really hard to get this done and I think we just made the case and we won like they pulled it back they would end up returning in 2018 under a different type of uber with no Travis with no me with no a lot of people and then they would actually get through some version of those rules but in the three years between those I mean it's a game changer I think they probably 10x in those three years so yeah you know okay let me cut to the chase right now because I know you're busy and everyone is hiring right now and you know it's a lot of competition for the best candidates right every position counts markets starting to come back you need to get the perfect person you want a bar raiser in your organization somebody who will raise the bar for for the entire team and Linkedin is giving you your first job posting for free to go find that bar raiser linkedin.com twist and if you want to build a great company you're going to need a great team it's as simple as that LinkedIn jobs is here to make it quick and easy to hire these elite team members and I know it's crazy right LinkedIn has more than a billion users we all watch this happen when it was tens of millions then hundreds of millions and now a billion people using the service this means that you're going to get access to active and passive job Seekers active job Seekers they're out there looking passive job Seekers they got a job but it's not as good as the job you're offering them so you want to get in front of both of those people maybe somebody got laid off wasn't their fault and they're an ideal candidate get that active jobseeker and Linkedin also knows that small businesses are wearing so many hats right now and you might not have the time or resources to devote to hiring so that LinkedIn make it automatic for you go post an open job roll you get that purple hiring ring on your profile you start posting interesting content and you watch the qualified candidates they just roll in and guess what first one's on us call to action very simple linkedin.com Twi linkedin.com twist that'll get you your first job posting forfree on your boy jcal terms and conditions do apply when you look at the recent performance the question was always uh can Uber ever be profitable is it always going to be unprofitable and you're smiling I'm smiling because in the beginning people don't know the Lincoln Town Car business was wildly profitable yeah Uber X well we're going down Market we're trying to get more people to download the app yeah so there were some incentives and yeah you're in a dog fight to get driver so yeah you want to give an extra hundred bucks if they hit X number of rides but it was very clear that once the Habit was formed it didn't matter if an Uber was 8 n 10 or $11 to 90 whatever percent of consumers yeah I think that's right I mean I'm obviously so happy for the folks there now and for Dar and for anyone smart enough to still be holding shares which uh admittedly I am not but yeah I mean I think they kind of worked it out um and it's really wonderful to see um and I use Uber a lot here and it's great it works great um and I don't notice the few bucks and and a lot you know here the unit economics even though we call it uberX because it's that licensed scheme that I talked about earlier and not ride share and Uber is not doing their like excess Insurance umbrella because it's not ride share and the drivers are by and large full-time guys the UN economics very different in New York and like New York has always been a pretty good business just like structurally but but in the ride share places where the competition with lft and others was particularly you know aggressive it wasn't making much money I think it was always sort of like structurally this can make money we are choosing not to now so I never really believed that like it'll never be profitable it's like there's profit on every R it is how Uber chooses to spend that that will change the direction yeah it was just so weird to see journalists pile on and just even CNBC talking as I remember I was on with de Bosa or something at some point and I just I said to De they did a billion rides this is when like we're at a billion rides a year or something I said did a billion rides lost a billion dollars whatever it is or you know lost four billion H you ra you do two billion rides next year you raise the price of $2 all of a sudden you know this thing is going to be a money printing machine and of course here we are they raise the prices you know whatever 20 30% you get the economies a scale and here we are and then lift of of course you know being incompetent um you know was always the greatest gift I think Uber ever had um yeah I mean they weren't always incompetent and I don't pay attention that much but I read like headlines about a misspeak on an earnings call like that sent the stock soaring and then back down to earth like that's like pretty and perhaps indicative of General things going on there but I really have no idea yeah no I just I and then finally searge pricing you see it's coming to Wendy's I did see that finally you can get a chicken sandwich for twice as much but not wait in line I mean I don't I don't know if you've seen this but they're like in buses in New York on the side of buses it'll be like this bus never has surch pricing and like in taxis the taxi screens will say never have surge pricing it like became such a flash point um and I think like you know I think we probably could have done a better job explaining it I think what someone said to me the problem with you Uber people is you think everyone has a degree in math and economics I think like there is some degree of to that we were talking to people the way we wanted to be spoken to and I think particularly in those very early years you know New Year's Eve we would do like a math equation on the thing and people are drunk and they're like you Uber guys I don't know what you're talking about but I'm gonna do it and then get charged a couple hundred bucks or something they thought would cost 20 bucks like you can understand why people were pissed and I think it took a couple years of iterating but I I do think particularly when I would just show you the rate in in in the beginning this this ride will cost $80 do you want it that's probably the end point that's the best way to do it but it's a thing that people just weren't used to but are used to it um whether they realize it or not in things like airfare and hotels and restaurants on Valentine's Day and all all these sorts of things so and T us Rift tickets and StubHub generally I don't think I bought a ticket at face value despite my best efforts in years so I mean it's Perma it's right now we're on Perma surge pricing for tickets that cartel has just destroyed it all you know it's are your kids into Olivia Rodrigo no they're not particularly into any specific artists but I mean it was possible to get tickets for that yeah my 14-year-old's really into Billy Joel so it's like my favorite artist growing up or one of them dire trades Billy Joel about every month he's doing a get the garden I know and he's gonna end his thing in July I think so I'm gonna try to take her to one of the final shows and definitely should if anybody in my audience knows Billy Joel or his like nonprofit or something I got to do like a couple of donations a year anyway somebody put me in touch with that I would just love to introduce him to my daughter and be a hero and just say thank you to him for 30 seconds take a quick selfie and get the hell out of there but maybe I could you know donate to his he's got to have a charity for something I bet you've gotten good dad stuff over the years like for the kids they probably think you're all right you know my my daughter my daughters think I'm cool yeah they also make fun of me because of the podcast they're like oh you're doing your podcast right and so I started doing a daddy daughter podcast with my 2 eight-year-olds um yeah it's pretty funny if you can find the daddy daughter podcast there's one episode out on Spotify right now but I haven't tweeted it or anything I just put it out there just to don't tell my kids that or I'll be buying a second and third you know microphone pretty soon you know what my philosophy of the for the daddy daughter podcast was to just take out my phone put on the voice recorder and then ask them about one topic school being twins food whatever and then I just hold the iPhone towards whoever's talking and I'm like training them to not over talk over each other it's great all right listen you are watching this AI uh craziness happen you've worked at one of the great startups uh in history and you decide I want to create my own startup but I want to do it with this I want to actually write the code or be the developer and you email me and I was like well that's rad uh yeah build the product yourself cool so why don't you tell us a little bit about your philosophy of building this startup wave and Ai No taking app and then just show it to us yeah sure I mean you know I've always been developer adjacent no one's ever paid me to code before but working at startups particularly in like e-commerce not like a little bit at Uber but mostly the other jobs that I've kind of done over the years I've been near engineers and I think I've always had a bit of a like Ed envy and the reason for that is I always felt like they are the ones with their hands on the thing doing the thing and particularly in startups and there's not that many people and everyone is rather self-driven there's decision making there about what to build how to build it that I always always have kind of Envy like I can weigh in I can write a memo whatever but actually doing it you know is a different thing and so I've taken a bunch of like you know udemy classes like YouTube things over the years and I've had little like little increments of getting somewhere but really never actually getting there um it's a cliche but when chat gbt the very first one the the sort of original in like November 2022 came out the first thing I started doing is asking questions about about the code like hey I'm trying to make a website in nextjs how does this work and found that it was a very it really worked well for me as like a question and answer how does this work how do I do it and it'll answer right away a bunch of questions I was probably asking to Engineers that I worked with you know maybe one a day or one a week now I can do like one a minute and just start like really mainlining information and not only that but I also found that it actually could help me write the code itself like not just teach me but actually pair with me and I can kind of guide it um you know like engineering is taking a problem and breaking it up into the tiniest increments and solving each increment and putting it together and you have right and so it was sort of like okay this thing can help me like build magical things and so I'll put a pin in that you know for for one second like around this time you know AI it's a big AI moment I was kind of like into deep learning and learning about that five or 10 years ago it's and I always sort of thought it it like they'll never actually call this AI it's deep but anyway like AI is the thing in this AI era I found there sort of all these demos coming out all the time very cool demos but there's many of them or most of them are either web- based or they're sort of demo is in nature like install this Docker container and then run this like python script and then it'll do the magic thing there's like all these ways to like very sort of artificially generate the like magic in an environment but like I I believe that life's most important moments happen away from your desk and that most normals are not at a computer all day and they're not on Twitter and reading about Ai and trying the demos and it's like what is the AI that my 70-year-old dad is going to use you know and so there is no and similarly there's no shortage of ways even then but especially now there's no shortage of ways to record your zoom and record your meet and record your your you know hangout and teams and all this but like just very little for the real world that's more than just a demo a pro conent what what would it look like if I made a an audio recording app and just like got feedback and just started adding features to people say and and sort of um intuiting things like huh it seems like if I do all the like transcription on the phone it'll take too long like what do I do like oh servers like I didn't really know about that like I knew the word but I didn't really know how it worked oh Cloud functions I'll learn how to do that and so it's sort of been like a walkabout of trying to figure stuff out with Brute Force I have two kids I have like a semi busy life with them I love working remotely and so the idea was like okay like wouldn't it be fun to just see how far can I get this on my own before you know without without hiring you know I I could easily drive this off the rails hire a bunch of people maybe raise money maybe not like do a whole thing but like what about just like tying my hands and like just saying I'll only do what I can do personally and so I made a few different little like mini apps and this is the one that people were interested in I think the real clicking point for me was when my dad brought it to a doctor's appointment and recorded it and then got a summary of what was discussed and that that was much deeper just in the moment things happen and it's good to record and so yeah I was like okay like let me do audio recording and then I added phone call so you can kind of like make a phone call through the app and it records the phone call or maybe I'll import podcasts I could import you into the app and get a summary there like okay people want to share out of the app how should we do it we'll share to notion and we'll share to like a web URL and it just sort of like really just kind of having a good time and it and I like to say like skyscrapers look like holes in the ground for a very long time and then suddenly they start to shoot up and not that this will be a skyscraper but I I have found like it started really small and people in my life were like oh it's Josh's little like retirement project I was like well actually like I'm taking this really seriously and I'm working full time on it and people who live with me know that I'm like going Josh Moore Style on this like I'm just turning it up to 12 and like hammering on this until it's good enough and found some friends who would humor me and like tried and just sort of Polish and polish and you know rebuild and rebuild and rebuild until it kind of It kind of works and now um it's the subscriber volume is like roughly doubling every month it's really kind of insane uh and the most exciting thing I think I've ever done even more than Uber uh because it's like I it's just me it's like me versus the world and I have all these customers and if they chat in the app it goes to my phone it's just like a very there is for the first time nothing standing between me and consumers of the thing that I'm building and that is uh for me at this point in my life a very good feeling and something that I'm really enjoying Martin Square says he makes gorgeous movies Squarespace makes gorgeous websites so it's not really a shocker that Squarespace convinced scorsi to direct their recent Super Bowl ad which you can see on the video right now or you can go Ahad and Google it or look for it on YouTube Squarespace is known for helping people build beautiful websites but it's become so much more than that now you can build or sell anything and your Squarespace experience is powered by AI Squarespace AI can instantly generate content for website text email campaigns and more think about how much time that's going to save you Squarespace also recently extended its bios sites platform you know those linoln bio sites they've always been pretty boring but now you can build them beautifully with Squarespace yes bio sites so so here's your call to action check out squarespace.com twist to get a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com twist to get 10% off your first website or domain purchase that's squarespace.com twist let's demo it let's take a look at what your belt here yeah and if you're listening at home and not seeing the video basically you're looking at a screen that says all recordings all waves and each row is sort of like in a traditional apple style uh with summary so I'll just start to record and this could be I am doing a brain dump uh or I'm in a meeting I actually in preparation for this podcast I was taking a walk somewhere and I recorded about 10 minutes of myself giving my bio and then at the end got a summary of that and sent it over to you guys um so I've been speaking for about it'll be almost about 30 seconds if you're watching the video you see like a uh like an indicator wave that there is sound coming out and when I'm done I'll just press stop and it'll transcribe this in the cloud um rather quickly and then it will summarize it and so there is the transcription right there and then we'll probably have a summary in about 10 or 15 seconds um this will be like gb4 style so it's up the speaker discusses their use of recording feature possibly within an Apper device or capture their thoughts or conduct a brain dump the summary goes on a bit it's on the screen now if you want to check out the video but you know that was a 20 second then I can listen to it I can share it either in a URL or a notion or I can do some changes to the format or I could even change the language let's say I want to send this to someone in uh in you know in Italian um it'll reprocess the summary and transcription in a you know in Italian so I you know um what are people using this for uh it is a lot of meetings meetings not on Zoom but sort of in their office uh I have a guy recording all his sermons at church so here is the summary that I just did a second ago in uh it's in Italian now if that's useful so um that's it and basically just to give you uh some call idea seems like the killer one is that what people are buying it for because I know sometimes you want to record a call and you know you just want to make a quick phone call record it and share it um and then obviously depending on the state you're in could be two-party consent could be one party consent I remember in New York as a journalist I believe it was one party consent so we could record calls without a problem we're talking to people yeah and and look it should go without saying that anyone using this anywhere should be be aware of the local laws and it is not intended to be a secret um so for recording phone calls you know you can't actually like in the phone app if you're using the phone app on your iPhone there isn't actually a way to record a phone call so what this does is it's a uh redirect first you basically verify your phone number so that we know that it's you and then you make a call through the app and what that does is it it calls you first you pick up and it says now connecting and it call the other recipient with with your phone number as the ID so to them it feels like a normal phone call and to you it's a redirect the phone feature is is a big one it's not most of the of the action I think it's poorly marketed and frankly a bit clunky uh people will make a phone call and then press the red button like and why not like the red button is right there so there's like and then they'll stop the call by hitting the red button that's right it all kind of screwed up so you know I'm doing roughly at this point about 15,000 minutes a day and I'd say you know 500 of them are phone minutes and that's so it's still pretty small but it is growing as a segment faster than the than the overall thing so it's sort of like when we started Uber X like you know we're still we still love the main Uber but we introduced something new because people might want to try that um and then you know you can put it into folders and there's all sorts of settings you can do and all this um and that's it and you got 200 people to pay for this already and you're at 100,000 in ARR already so yeah that's when I that's when I hinged you last week so I'm at actually at 130 AR now and I have about 500 paid subscribers it is roughly doubling every month so the numbers are feeling uh fun and silly almost able to cover your salary I mean a couple more doublings and you have hired a developer or if you are using you know non- us developers you already hired two or three so congratulations you know to be honest of of all the parts of it and again I came up in a marketing and Ops background I started selling on eBay in 1998 from a computer at my high school in a computer science seminar that I wasn't paying attention to so I sort of like right turned when I was on the computer engineer path and sort of right turned into marketing but I think this actually might be where I'm going to be for the Long Haul so I don't know that I'm going to hire someone I have so far every bit of code like this whole thing is I I've I've done all of it and I have a lot of pride in that and part of this of thinking that this is is even feasible and really why I reached out is that you have talked about this of like yeah many times era of the solopreneur and it could be you know there were always brilliant engineer types who would then dabble in the marketing side and put together their own thing I don't think there's a lot of examples of a marketing or like business side exec exact yeah doing the code no this is this is going to be the revolution is if a business person doesn't have to find the developer um they can you know and and this did happen with figma Invision uh balsamic before that you know you'd have a business person learn how to make mockups then they learn to make clickable mockups then they you know did web flow uh or bubble uh you know whatever and they and they learned how to do a no code solution and now hey here we are dipping into actual code and in your estimation how many months have you been C with this so I started I showed the first demo to someone who gave me real positive feedback I'll never forget at the end of April perfect so you're you're 10 months in in the 10 months how have the co-pilots advanced if at all and and what do you see in terms of you know things you tried to do 10 months ago that maybe did or didn't work and they might be working now or just how refined they are I don't know if you're using repet or GitHub co-pilot what are you what are you using as a stack and then how has it Advanced yeah so I mean I think the this idea that like AI will flow like electricity and that metaphor did not resonate with me until the last couple years because it really that that is actually the perfect metaphor um and it does flow like electricity so it's it's in the chat apps but it's also now wired into your vs code there's a GitHub version there's the just the standard llm from open AI that kind of feeds in there's all these good ways to do it so I think one big change is both the models have gotten better I started doing this on gbt 3.5 then there' have been a few different iterations of gbt 4 the longer Windows like you be able to put more information into the chat or into whatever you're using is a big one that actually makes the app possible um I can drop two hours or three hours or four hours of spoken audio as language into the thing and it'll work whereas before i' have to like chunk it up so there have been a bunch of improvements on the models themselves and as you pointed out you know it's it's better the the electricity is Flowing more now so it's in your vs codee it's in your it's it's really everywhere it's in my email it's in the app so now it's starting to get to all the places and um you know it's it does make things easier but I think that's sort of the vision it's it's not like you're going to wake up and the robot is going to make you eggs for breakfast it's more that AI can touch your life in a hundred different ways and make it marginally easier and really that is how computers have been for years and decades but it's like step of that if it's like it being everywhere it guessing the next word it's spellchecking you now it's summarizing your email and your body I don't know you saw Raul from superhuman what he released yesterday but now he's got superhuman pre-writing replies to your emails as they come in so when you open your email box it says oh hey Josh we'd love for you to do a keynote at uh you know whatever conference web developer conference 2024 and it has interested not interested um yeah tell me more or something and so you hit like interested it's like oh that sounds great or and it but it's doing it based on how you've responded to those previous emails before so it's now created in llm so if you frequently say you know what I only do page speaking gigs please talk to Jamie K canis my brother who manages that for me you know he's cced above it will do that right it's awesome so here we go and did you see the note yesterday about which company was it that did a Clara oh yeah it was Clara explain that I mean you know I think that so one of the original ideas that I didn't do because I wanted to do wave was to try to so it was pretty obvious like customer support is such a it's been an obvious use case since the beginning um but you would expect big companies to work it out before small ones and so one idea was like do an agent on top of Shopify and I had something working where you could like chat with it like where's my order it's like which of these order that are you talking about like that you know that you placed over the last year like this you know giving it enough information that it could do that and then I just sort of like doing this instead but I think the customer support one totally like it's going to be so many questions are just repeats like is just the art of answering the same 30 things again and again but with fresh energy and I think you know that's a layup for this stuff I think according to the statistics it was getting the AI based uh customer support was getting higher ratings than the humans and the calls went from like 11 minutes to three So Not only was it replacing the humans it was doing a better job and solving people's problems in less time it's like it always spells right it's it's it's awake all the time so I'm gonna be move like wave right now if you chat sport in the app it goes to me it push notification on my phone or it like rings on my computer and that's been invaluable because talking to people is how I know about bugs and about what they want but there will be a point where the system that I use has an AI version where it looks at everything you've ever said and it starts to generate answers and you could build out some actions like reprocess a recording I could give it that sort of that ability um but I'm going to do that because I I would much rather pay you know intercom a dollar a ticket than hire someone not just because the quality might be better but because it's just low drama you know like it's just it's a it's a simpler thing I don't uh I think part of the moment for me in my life and the itch that I'm that I'm scratching and I know most people don't operate this way but it's like there is something truly liberating about depending on no one yeah totally I've Lov the teams that I've built I've Loved I've like loved working with folks and I know I'll do that again but for this moment in my life it's a it's a perfect fit to just go solo and that even means support so it'll be me or the robots I think for for a while I think that was Joe Rogan's like original thing he loved about doing his pocket he said I do my podcast with one person I just turn on the cameras I record it I don't edit it so he specifically was like we're just not going to edit this thing we're just gonna publish it as as is you like it you don't I'm GNA read the ads live done I mean now of course it's gotten more sophisticated since then yeah and I think you know to your point you know this is not uh a big Trend yet but I I do kind of think you'll see more artisanship on the internet you know I think you need big companies for certain things but I think the ability to kind of hom grow something put it out into the world with a small group of people it's just never been easier and not just AI but all the tooling for building things is better like it's easier to make apps this wasn't the first time in my life I thought boy I'd like to learn how to make apps like I tried in 2009 way too hard way to I tried in 2015 getting better but still couldn't do it and now I'm doing it now and part of that it's not just the AI it's that the Frameworks and the tooling and the languages and documentation and the communities on the internet that work with that stuff have exploded so the is also easier to find people doing this you know um something that's kind of cool like engineering World changes fast you know the way you might write an iPhone app will change year-to year the different sort of inputs there so the AI models don't always have a very good grasp on that because they're you know they might have only learned up to last April and things that happened since then but there's a community of people who do this stuff for real and getting involved with that has been really fun too just like being being in in the engineer world and kind of where where do you hang out with those folks online is it discords is it stack Overflow is it Hacker News it's Twitter I mean I've read Hacker News for years but it's mostly Twitter I mean like YouTube a bit too but it's mostly Twitter um and I was saying to my wife yesterday it's it's a a little bit like getting into a really awesome show at season five so you're watching season one and two you don't have to wait for season three it's already out there then season four and so like the things you know different techn that have come out over the last couple of years I have the times run into problems that those Technologies solve and I have to wait I'm like I have this problem and they're like oh yes this thing that like the react people released this year will fix that I'm like excellent so it's sort of like I'm in super fast mode with that um which is exciting starting a business used to be a pain you needed a lawyer there were hidden fees it was a mess now with 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might still be small but the each person who does it can can do more I mean I think what it's important I don't want to leave anyone with the impression that we're at a spot now or frankly that I think we'll ever be at a spot where you just say like make me an app that does these things and it outputs a perfect thing like that's not there's a whole bunch of reasons why that is technically unlikely it's more about dividing the thing into a million parts and having it solve each part um but I think it's certainly a force multiplier it's it's for me it's been a zero to one because I wasn't an engineer and I suppose now I am so the number will go up it'll make I think if you're a great engineer it can make you a lot better yeah make you make you a hero a superhero yeah for sure I think Chachi BT llms generally which are sort of like you could think of them as like fully synthesized views of of the internet you know you're not necessarily going to learn something that you couldn't learn on a web page if you read and had tons of time so it just really makes learning generally more you know easier I was doing some ice skating and my kid was like who invented ice skating and it's like I don't know what did dads do before chat GPT I I I got this from you too I put it on in the car the other day yes the the chat I you for people who don't know what we're talking about here is chat G p4's app has a conversation mode and then the iPhone 15 has a smart button on the side here you're an action button I don't know what they call it but anyway you you can map that button to something I mapped it to open chat gp4 and open up the voice dialogue so when my phone is in the Cradle while I'm driving safely on autopilot in my model y I can just press that button it comes up and then I start talking to it and for history it's unbelievable to sit there with your daughters and talk about history perfect perfect where did ice skating come from it's like great there's actually a really bunch of really good stories about that and you can learn anything and so that's magic you know my my seven-year-old will will say they just can you look it up on the you know just sort of look it up taking for granted that that's a thing but this is like even one level beyond that it's like let's just ask you and I are part of the generation that remembers the time before internet so when you you were born in 1980 or so I'm guessing um which year 1982 82 so you born in 82 that's when dialup started 300,00 B modems and so when you were 10 years old in 1992 dialup was in full swing five bucks an hour three bucks an hour and then you remember the internet when you were 15 or 20 happening but you do remember the time before that right oh yeah I mean shows that are set that are on it a certain time you know yes having four channels to watch I have cable just like CBS NBC Fox ABC that's it yeah you know going to the video store um buying CDs buy buying like records and cassette tapes andu magazines yeah magazines having a magazine subscription it's a whole different thing and I think uh it's a more exciting time I'm glad my kids can have no but here think about this then there was gen Z and Millennials they only remember the online world now there's our kids who will only remember AI right the chat GPT Generation generation GPT this generation I'm going to name them generation AI uh gen AI like gener AI this is Gen AI the the the generation I've now dubbed at that and that's how it will be so the J generation they are only going to know talking to llms you know having it write their papers you know having it format data for them I mean it's just their minds are going to be different yeah they're just going to be formed in a different way that talking to a computer and working in collaboration with a computer it's not like us working with a hammer and a nail for them it's going to be like working with a robot next to them and then there'll be the next generation will be generation robot and that generation in the C3PO generation they're going to be insane because they're going to have Optimus you know Elon or Humane robot and they're going to grow up with one of them in their house so that's gonna take another 15 years 10 15 years but that will happen and then imagine you grew up with a robot yeah you know before my my older daughter was born in 2014 I used to say it sort of as a joke like she'll never learn how to drive and she'll never go to college like those will be two things that you know the cars will drive themselves and the college will be on YouTube you know or something like that and the reality is as she is about to turn 10 like I think she probably will both have a driver's license and go to college so things play out maybe slower than I thought but I do think at some time scale like driving certainly not maybe a little sooner for you guys than out here but like the driving thing seems like pretty much a done deal but people still go to universities to learn things at least for now um and so yeah I don't know but but I absolutely agree like it's a totally different thing and it and it reframes what you have to know no you know do I have to remember history like are all the you know is it the same to be able to look something up is that as good as knowing something maybe um it sort of just reframes that like my kids learn math a lot of it and they and they and like reading is a focus in their school uh but uh you know when my fourth grader writes an essay like she has a school laptop and writes in Google Docs and her teachers turn off spell check and grammar check when they're writing and then they turn back on after and read like comments they write comments in line like boy that's different I mean that's really different um and it's and it's great because it's more in line with the world so I you know I think they should have they should let the kids work on their computer sounds like a great strategy there and then I believe all the testing that occurs and all the paper writing should occur in a proctored room with pens and papers just so your brain can kind of do both things like I remember we had computers towards the you know in high school and then in college but I took a um mechanical drawing class um and I love mechanical drawing you had all these different tools you had a drafting desk and you pin your paper to it and you had grd paper it's rack and my brain is still like loves that concept right um so it's kind of like painting or you know you know cooking or whatever yeah sure you could have your you know we have a gadget that makes like an egg sandwich it's pretty hilarious you put like two English muffins into this like stackable thing girls love it but you gotta also learn how to make a perfect omelet French omelet like teach your kids how to make a French omelet perfect Josh amazing where can people download this and and give you a couple shackles for it and uh keep your progress going uh you can find it in the app store if you search for wave AI wave AI now not raising funding wouldn't have anything to do with the funding I don't think so yeah no I mean I don't I don't take a salary I'm just kind of trying to grow this as big as I can I think taking funding means well I'll just leave on the last note the one of the magic elements of working alone is that the bar for success is just practically speaking much lower like for example if I if I I sort of socialized to friends like if I can get this to 100K mrr like monthly recurring Revenue now I would that such an outsized success it would more than cover my life I would like for Venture skill that's like that's a failure so it's sort of like I'm keeping the bar low for myself because I don't want to work with other people for now I want to do this alone and so it's uh yeah and the website is wave app. aai though it's going to be wave. probably by the time this is out so oh you know before this comes out get a tech domain that's the new hotness is IT Tech you should take a look at it because I just got a couple of good domain names for 12 bucks and um that kid who's making that little robot rabbit device that took over CS he was on the Pod he's using a dote a lot of people are trying to gra has been a huge for it those have all I get 10 people emailing me a month asking me to buy their AI Collections and I'm like yeah not for me interesting I'm a.com guy but I'll settle forco if I I mean I have inside.com I own 20.com for a while I saw you have some serious domage you know I have actually the one I really want to develop is annotated domcom so I had this idea about creating an annotation standard and when we were doing a gadge on these things like people would write comments but I was like you know I want to be able to highlight a sentence at the New York Times or on a gadget right Mouse click and then put a comment there and have it live on the web page for other people who have the notepad on and then I want to be able to share it so I grab the sentence from The New York Times I annotate it and then it makes a landing page you know like a little bitly kind of thing and it just says here I took that paragraph and then I write my comment under it and then I can share that with people so I'm just taking a small portion of something or I take a YouTube video or a clip so I take a clip from Larry David and I say I really like the lighting of this shot and then I say just give me like seconds 27 to 45 and you know just you set it up so it can only take 10 seconds of a video really cool idea man are you busy I'm pretty busy um you know the the lifestyle business the billion dollar lifestyle business it's here I think you're tip of the spear uh my friend Phil Kaplan I don't know if you know Phil who did drro kid and before that company very famous guy I used to sh kid I'm a I'm a okay Dr kid is the is the is the billion dooll solo founder that nobody knows about um so it's it's been done already I think by him um but you know these this idea is going to be there and I think this is like the future of employment is make something bespoke and amazing like maybe you like sourdough bread right I'm just picking something crazy and you make an app for sourdough bread now I would never fund an app as an investor for sourdough bread that's not going to get to a billion dollars in Revenue that's not going to be Uber or Robinhood or Comm but the sourdough bread app could have have 100,000 members easily around the world who are obsessed with sourdough and bread making and charge 10 bucks a month 10,000 people yeah I don't know how many could you get that that's really how the internet should work that's like theise of the internet I think it's being able to just do your thing get out there get the dist no but bread Baking app you couldn't get a developer to work on it but if you are the Baker and you learn how to code and now you've got this bread Baking app and it's 100 bucks a year 10 bucks a month man there there's 10,000 people who sign up for that and it's going to make a lot more than your bakery and the bread will probably be better than what you get at the supermarket 100% 100% yeah it's an exciting time and I appreciate exciting time great time to be alive all right brother I'll talk to you soon uh and everybody go download the app and play with it give them uh some customer support requests oh the one I have for you yes please Anthony at Squarespace um created a note-taking app that I loved was addicted to for a long time you would open the notetaking app You' type your note and You' swipe up and the note would disappear there was nothing in the app the app was just empty it was a piece of paper and then it would email you whatever you wrote in it that's pretty good it was pretty genius so with yours if imagine if every time you saved it it emailed you the transcript and everything now you got it in your email or it put it into a slack room boom with your notes or made a notion page automatically you said you had notion integration or Coda integration can do you can share the notion it does all the like formatting with which is actually not easy but no no it should be automatic so you mean just like every single one just go through yes absolutely absolutely it should just put it into notion you tell it which group you want to put it in and it or it just makes its own wave AI one and just right now you have a choice of making your own but the idea of having things automatically share every time is a good idea I I don't do that yet that's a good one then if I put it there then I get all the features of notion for free or or in my case I love Koda to so we use both of those she just looking at Koda to it's um equally as good and and they each have like different specialities but man if they if it went to both places now I've got two backups and I can edit them I can share them and then there's all kinds of features there you know like database features or whatever I could use so kickass job yeah this is the moment that I relish being alone because if if I had a bunch of people there' be a discussion should we do the Jason idea about the email oh like let's write a memo about it let's talk about it for a while let's think let's let's debate oh you don't want to do it this is like should I do it I'm GNA do it and that's it uh I mean you the notion thing is and Koda those two apps are all the kids in college my understanding is are using these now so they kind of create their own personal space and they just keep all their in there really interesting and then they added AI to all those and so yeah it's pretty cool all right everybody we'll see you next time on this week in startups if you want to see our AI demos uh including this one this week in startups.com /ai every Monday s deep modre and I do our AI thing and uh listen if you're listening to the show for so long and you got to the end of this go write a goddamn review on uh Apple podcast Spotify any of those places or put a comment on the uh YouTube give me a thumbs up subscribe all that stuff I haven't begged for that in about 11 years on this podcast but I'm supposed to so here's your insert begging for likes and whatever see youall next time bye-bye