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Des Traynor

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111
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2023-11-15
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2023-11-15
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  1. “Zandesque will have their own faith, it's not incumbent upon us to do anything to them. I think Intercom we want to be like the primary support solution for internet businesses. That's what we want to be. As to where I am in that, I hope that desire less intensity or I found a role that in the company that requires less intensity because I don't see myself as a 52 year old being able to do what I do today. And even if I look at myself today versus when I say 30 when we started or whatever, like I wasn't in this healthy shape or whatever, but there was definitely more energy and more like 9 a.m. till 2 a.m. type energy, right? Like that has definitely shrank a bit. Like I'm now probably working closer to a normal working day. I hope whoever has my position, if it's not me, is able to do it or if it's me, I hope who doesn't need the like nine to nine energy.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, yeah, I think that's true. Certainly that's for founders who occasionally write checks. I think that's probably the bigger lesson that will emerge from 2019 through 23 or whatever. And it's fine.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, I can only assume that they might have realized earlier the world was going to return to a lot more like normality. And I think they did smart work with, like, say StreamYard in that acquisition. I don't know if it's a lesson, but I think when you have like an existential crisis along the lines of, hey, it turns out everyone's just going back to real world conferences and they don't even want to live stream it that much. There's a lot of temptation to push back against that, a hedge against it. Just be like, oh no, no, surely they will. Or there might be another pandemic. You never know or whatever. Whereas I think sometimes you just need to say, hey, look, the thing we thought was true is no longer true. We now need to reorient the entire company to get ready for the new truth. Streamyard and that move was that generally part of that. That's how I saw it as an outsider. I was like, they had to ultimately pivot to live streaming a lot quicker. And they did. They made a great acquisition. Here's a shit lesson that's just true, right? If you're in the weirdest capital market in history and everyone's telling you to like raise billions.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Well, totally, your thinking will evolve, and that means that something I wrote in 2013 is no longer what I think today. Fine. I don't think anyone thinks anything 10 years prior is admissible in court or whatever. It was ultimately, it was like, please guarantee me that you're going to lay it all out there and tell the world why they should use equals. That's ultimately what they ask us.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And being in great shape, he talked through some aspects of marketing, you know, branding positioning like Google Sheets is over here, Microsoft Excels over there, blah, blah. I was like, great, but like, you probably need to tell people that hundreds of times. And I think I wrote 90 or 95 of the first 100 blog posts on Intercom. And if I'm honest, I always felt that Bobby, and to some degree Ben, his co-founder, never really gave me any street credit for that. So some of this was like, eat some greens. You have to commit to tell the world everything you stand for your product, what it is, what it does, how it's used, who uses it, why they use it.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, so basically Bobby asked me to invest, and I said, I will. But I was scarred by too many businesses who forget to tell people what they're all about. What I mean by that is a lot of companies launch and they kind of have this kind of weird incel-like vibe of like, why isn't anyone paying attention to me? And an investment I'd made had just finally wrapped up and I died. It was really frustrating me that they had kind of forgotten to launch. And to me, launch isn't like, oh, we've put up with like an alpha page or something like that. Launch is like when you're laying it all out there. Here's what we think. Here's our vision for the future. Here's our product. Here's our product matches our vision. Here's where our product's going. Here's why I should use our product, right? Looking through my own portfolio and I was like, huh, a lot of these companies that died never really launched. I was like fearful in that period. And I said to Bobby, something along the lines of like, what's the plan for telling the world about this? I mean, simply having a better Excel, you could find yourself just sitting at the bar wondering why is no one paying attention. What's the actual plan for putting yourself out?”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “It changes substantially. It's also its oncoming bracket. It's also like just the new era of where startups are. We got hyper focused on a very specific use case for the longest time Intercom had been kind of a broader tool. When I came back, we were like, right, let's go all in on one thing. Let's set a very clear focus for literally everything we're doing, you know, increase the urgency. We kind of, we had this initiative called P52, which was like 52 weeks to basically rebuild all parts of the company. And it gave us a kind of ticking clock and it gave us a very clear sense of progress and momentum and engagement. We're just finishing it now. We went gung-ho as like the team of 900 folks towards rebuilding like marketing, branding, pricing product. You name it. By the time this goes live or in the next five, six weeks, all of that's going to look different.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I don't really know because I don't know the inner workings, but certainly the PE cash cow playbook would look like raised prices, shrink roadmap, ring the register, and package it up into a very efficient cash-producing machine and hand it over. I'd have no idea where they are, but that's whenever anyone else is going to pee, that's usual”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, as long as you believe that beating them is the right prize. That makes sense. But oftentimes you can find yourself ruling over a graveyard. If we just beat Zendesk, but Zendesk is in the current state it's in, that won't be the full realization of what Intercon can be.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Right way to view competition is with respect, and after you've launched and you're out the door, increasing comprehension. Comprehension meaning you have to understand why they're successful. It's very easy to be like their products, shit, but maybe they're just brilliant to go to market. If you don't understand that, you're never going to be like, why is not paying attention to me? I've got the better product. Respect always, they have the market you want, the market. You have to respect the fact that they got there. The comprehension piece I just ever likes to quote like Jeff Bezos or whatever, like, oh, I ignore my competition. I just listen to my customers. Do listen to your customers. I just don't think ignoring competition, especially if you're in a market where there is competition. I think it's essential to work out why do people pick them over you. Is that not a useful thing to know? You can't listen to your customers if they're using your computer.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “That's what I was going to say, but like, wasn't that true for iTunes and music as well? The rights thing just seems to be like a deal that just needs to be done. I do think Spotify managed to negotiate so that they can play podcasts and music for all over the planet, from all over the planet, getting like Plymouth Argyll to agree that they're matchable leads should be like live streamed. I think it should be doable.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “It's not that it's the chat bar on the side. Like basically, if I was to see how Google, what I do is I'd say, I need you guys to build me a fully functional Slack equivalent that also sits in the sidebar of all these things and has to work also at Google Docs. So when I'm having a hangout with Harry, if we're chatting, it should be the same thing as a persistent chat channel between me and Harry. And if I start a new Google Doc, it should be automatically shared with Harry. All of these things just feel like such donkey work that I have to go through every single time I jump on a call. You know, if I was trying to solve an actual, a realistic tech problem in one day, I think that's probably the thing I'd go for. I'd love to go to Spotify and basically say like we're doing a new thing called Spotify Live where we cover all soccer. I think basically Spotify for soccer like is in the idea that there's a single place you can go to watch all live streaming sports sitting right there and I think it's just everyone's scared shitless”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Oh, yeah. Oh, I think Google, because I don't want to fix Google Meet. Like, yeah, honestly, if it's because if I have to go back to my job after a day and I'm going to go back to my normal life, I think Google Meat is definitely the product I really want to fix up.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I think it made me more efficient in the time I'm at work for sure. I knew that I wouldn't be able to work as much when I went home or whatever. And I noticed this in when I'm on, I need to be on and I need to be like emptying the tank of my A game because at some stage you're going to go home and have all these like kids and I have to deal with them and I can't just come home exhausted and I need to be active when I get home too. So I think that's probably the first way. I don't know if I got more patient necessarily. I mean, I definitely need more patience with my kids. I think the folks I work with, they don't antagonize me that often. Patience isn't a string I pull on a lot, thankfully.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, well, hiring fluctuates between needs and cuds, right? And maybe it's easy to lie to yourself and say the existing, you know, the incremental thing that this person's going to do is going to be transformative. I would bet your second-time founders, they hire slower is my guess because I just think it's an easy way to like burn up opportunity and ultimately lead yourself in a position where you might have to riff. Or like in a lot of these companies say like they're riffing people where it didn't have to hire them, you know.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think you have to put it on the Ferris at that point. Like, as in, if someone gives you the money, you don't have to take the money. If you take the money, you don't have to spend the money. If you spend the money, you don't have to spend it on hiring, you spend it on hiring, you don't have to spend it wastefully. It's a bit of a bit of a”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, yeah. But, like, honestly, in a lot of these cases, superhumanizes feature where if someone mails you, you can see on the right-hand side all the other mails they've sent you. And you only need to click back two or three where it's like, we're excited to announce that we've heard not one, but two VPs of partnerships or whatever. And you're like, oh, you didn't realize that you're planting the seeds at a rift there. You know what I mean? Like, I think the bigger thing I'd say is overhiring. Does an electricity and a spark, in the same way I say you always want your office to be a little bit too small because it gets you this sort of vibrance and this kind of sense of hustle, I think you always want a team to be a little bit like there should always be a pile of work and like there should always be a sense of like, holy shit, we've got so much to do.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Oh no, they're horrible. Here's the lesson. Don't put yourself in a position where you have to do them if it's at all possible. It's just really fucking hard to get through. It's a big time sink. It's a big emotion sink. It's a big engagement sync. And it takes a long time to sort of like plan, perform. And doing it all. The lessons I've kind of learned on rifts are more from other companies than anything Intercom has gone through. The last 12 months for startups in general, every other investor update I get has been, oh, we've done a little riff. We've got, you know.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Well, it wasn't even shit that was just way too cushioned. Like, I remember Lauren or a head of people saying to me something along the lines, if this person's not really upset with you at the end of this, you haven't actually done the job. If this doesn't sting for them to hear, you should be suspicious because it means you've definitely pulled the punch. That was good advice at the time. Because it's just so much easier in a conversation like, but, you know, everyone's going to go good up part. Or just not to have a conversation. That's kind of like the cost of entry for startups because you don't have unlimited headcount. I think bigger companies can struggle with that. But yeah.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I would say radical is something that I struggled with for a long time. And I probably still do. I'm better at checking myself, but the idea of telling somebody what they need to hear so that they have the best chance of succeeding in their own career versus telling them the thing that will make them happy. Society struggles with this in general, they're like, you know, are you ultimately looking out for the greater good for the person or are you just optically looking out for it in the short term? And I think my version of that would be earlier Dez would have given nudge and prod feedback. But like what I probably need to do is to say like, hey, I don't think you can actually make it as a leader of blah until you can blah. And here's the skills that I just think are close to a terminal gap in your skill set. And if you don't close them, I just don't see you either surviving here or honestly anywhere. And I think you need to invest and take me seriously in this. Whereas I was probably 2014, 2015. I was probably more likely to say, I actually think you might go progress. But here's a couple of areas where I'd like to see a little bit more, you know, like.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, well, specifically, I would say you've got people who are early in their career, people who are super experienced, super tenured, brilliant. We have interns. They're not yet A players. But to your question, is it the maximum quality or is it a maximum quantity? I guess what I mean is you're not trying to maximize headcount. And I think for automatic, that's another thing that most seasons entrepreneurs won't do a second time or a third time or whatever. They won't see headcount as a vanity metric at all. The second thing I'd say is, Mace, you want to attract the smartest folks you can at the right level. You don't need a thousand of them in the early stage, but you need four to start. And then as you start to scale your culture, you'll realize, all right, we can't only hire like A++ superstars because we'll be waiting all year for our next engineer. So you start the workout ways to like scale and you say, you know what, how about the A++ person leads the team and they can hopefully drag the B person up to an A plus standard or whatever? So you start thinking about it from that point of view.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “You said 900 people. Yeah, it comes down like we're already trying to weigh talent here or not. I guess what you want. But I don't think”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, I mean, it's a fair question is managing humans the same today as it was five years ago? I probably not in a lot of ways. And definitely generationally, I think it's different as well. But I'm not trying to be evasive here, but if you just take one step up and just talk about it as in like design a culture that attracts the maximum amount of talent and motivates them to work as hard as possible for the climate you're in, for the environment you're in, for the country you're in. Maximum amount of time.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “The right areas are flexible enough in other areas or whatever. So I think that's the sort of stuff that you're investing in. They won't make that mistake again.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “When I think about if I had to start another company tomorrow, I think the stuff that I would definitely bring into the next company is not specific like go-to-market tactics or bottoms-up adoption versus like going into the top of the market. It's not like marketing channels or tactics or anything. I think what I would be about is like, what is the makeup of a senior executive team and what do you want, what are the attributes of leaders at different stages of the company? How to interview, how to give the right feedback to people, how to assess where a hole is in your organization and how to deal with it, how to kind of not lose yourself defending a narrative, but instead like, you know, take reality, face it straight or whatever. I think there are all the sort of things, the more timeless pieces that I would learn. Like, I think it's reasonable to assume hiring executives is going to be a thing. It's reasonable to assume building a company culture is going to be a thing. It's reasonable to assume having a mission and a vision and values by which your business performs. They're all kind of time to skills. And I think serial entrepreneurs know the mistakes they've made in not being firm enough.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “HubSpot approved, and exactly that there's massive businesses to be built without ever having to go all the way up market, right? The advice is almost out of date by the time it's best practice.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I think there is very little best practices advice in startups that actually survives more than five or six years, in my opinion. Because I think everything is just constantly evolving around us. Like even all this AI shit is going to upend a load of product strategy advice that has been holding solid for 10 years, right? Most of the time, advice expires. How you go to market. If you're in 2012 and you're talking to like VCs, you know, senior experienced people about what's the best way to go to market? What they'll tell you is basically hire your sales leader and you kind of run up market and get away from those scrappy little companies, right? That was the sort of norm and all the blogs and all that back then was just like build a sales machine. Hope you go, right? That's a document did it or whatever, right? That's how for build.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Have you had Brian Halligan on before? Dalmash on? You should ask him. I mean, you're literally asking me a question. I can't answer the decision.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Yeah, yeah, of course we all would. That's a tough question. I think I probably would have taken integrations more seriously earlier. Understanding more about intercom's role within the tech stack, knowing that we're not the only show in town, understanding that we have to play nice alongside like workforce management solutions, CRMs, whether it's like Salesforce or HomeSpot or whatever, QA tools, Slack, you name it. I think we could have gone harder earlier on that and I think it probably would have been more valuable to our users.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Yeah, and like the reality is if Bex enters investing, his followership isn't that useful to you. No. You know what I mean?”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “So that's the thing, not a lot, right? Like it doesn't drive a lot of follows, doesn't drive a lot of anything other than a few quote tweets and a few retweets or whatever, like hundreds or whatever. But what's interesting to me is we've been having popular viral moments. The thing I care more about now I'm more excited about is like when we share something that's pretty, I don't want to say boring, which is pretty focused on the only people who give a shit about this are support people. The people who engage with that content is growing. And that's the thing I care about more, Dan Sage's general followership. I'm like effective followership is the thing to look at.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “It's a different approach. I agree with you. Like, as in, I agree if you have a million readers a month and like 1% of them are like your buyer or if you've like I can't do the matza on the fly here but like if you have like 10 000 readers a month and whatever like some the same percentage nets out with the same number total they're both a lot of strategies like a small focused audience or a big unfocused audience that contains in it the small focused audience that works like i mean you're asking me what i do again i think i probably would have just tried to be a bit more focused early on an interesting thing we measure like when we look at say stuff we share on social it's easy to get like a viral tweet these days”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Yeah, even yesterday I was at a conference here. Dude, I read the intercom blog. And I'm like, what are you working on? Like, you know, my program manager on the infrastructure team. I'm like, you're not going to buy customer support software. I think probably I prioritized growing an audience for the blog over growing the right audience for the blog. And the netnet is that we have a large audience for the blog. People who are like design or into product or even into engineering, people who are maybe into like startups in general. Even people who are into marketing. But we didn't go deep on early enough was just the actual sort of people who are best positioned by Intercom.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “If I could change anything in terms of things that I would trust myself to do a better job on, I would probably try to more tightly align the audience we were building with the product that we were selling.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Simon's point's not bullshit. It comes down to what type of marketing we're talking about. In my head, I'm talking about product marketing here. I'm talking about what does the homepage say when you go there. If you go to Asana and it opens up, one day Dustin was struggling to manage a project of Facebook and he really wanted to get an overall view. You're like, dude, I'm closing that top. What the hell is the thing you do? Now, when it comes to consuming the overall brand, if you like, you know, like what is this whole company about? What is its raison d'etre? Which I think is more important in certain industries and verticals. You're like, hang on, if I'm going to really align myself with these people, I need to understand what makes them tick. That's when you're going to like slash about or slash vision or whatever to sort of read a bit more about what the hell's going on here. Like, as in, are you guys just growth hackers who stumbled into a project manager company or do you actually care about the nature of human productivity? Simon's point's not wrong, but I think most of the time when you're trying to sell software, the best thing you can do is probably say what the software is about and not talk about the origin story or whatever.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, it speaks like I'm thrilled to a noun. Yeah, totally jacked about this excited to announce our ongoing relationship with, I think there's a like owner or CEO, it's just so, like, if I could ascribe him one defining quality, it's probably authenticity, but I think it's just speak the words you want to say. That's the thing that is so important to have credible marketing is like you say the things that you would actually say. You don't put on like a marketing hat where you rattle off a load of bullshit, if you know what I mean. Most startups with marketing with B2B or B2C, they forget to say the thing that makes them unique that's valuable to the users. And if they're going up against an incumbent, the worst thing they can say is like, oh, we're like a new type of Inbox, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because they say, oh, I put you into the same category as the incumbent. You need to say, here's the things that were different. Like here's the reasons that we're better than blah. And like, that's usually hammers home. Again, simple so they understand it.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Because he was obviously with Anticom Leave any sort of lasting impression on somebody, I think you have to say something that is like unique, as in, like, it can't be the same thing ever.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Interrogate the value is just like is there something happening now that wasn't possible before? Or is there somebody who doesn't have to do something now that they had to do before? If the answer to either of those is yes, then I'm sort of bought. If it's basically like, you know, oh, you know what? It's really, really important that people like whatever like, you know, summarized a Google dock in real time on the right hand side as they're writing it.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Yeah, when you said about incoming out at first, I was like, yeah, here we go. It comes back to this, like, does the product make more sense with AI or not? I think what we saw over the last three, maybe four months has been a lot of companies. This is what that GIF I tweeted, that video I tweeted was about. You're seeing a lot of people doing really pointless shit with AI. It kind of reminds me of the early days of JavaScript. People did all these fancy effects that were totally pointless. They used libraries like Scriptaculus and all that like to do just fancy like, ooh, it fades away. And you're like, why does it fade away? There's definitely bits of bullshit you're going to see, which is people reaching for the easiest to use features and trying to like reverse engineer a demand for them inside their product. Summarize this shopping cart in natural language, English. You're like, well, it looks like the user is buying a robe and it's a size medium. It's like, who gives a shit? So there's a lot of that happening where in the scale-up space where I think it's somebody looking to wave a flag or get the like marketing juice that comes with saying you're now something AI. What I look to sort of sort of...”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “I'd say it's about, I'm probably more B2B SaaS exposed, so maybe I'm probably more like 60%. But yeah, if the question was like, how much of it mentions AI in bulletry or whatever, then yeah, 100%.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “I would say I have probably like the last five or six checks I've written have all been into companies that are either pure AI or heavily AI infused.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “That's like where I'd be like, yeah, okay, I'd want to see that. And I'm kind of making this up on the fly, but like, if they said to me nowadays, we don't think AI is going to change anything to do with how people query analytics tools. At that point, I'm probably leaving out. I don't know how you can be so confident in that. And if I'm honest, I actually think it will.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “What I mean by that is just I'm opening. No, but like maybe I come out of a different way if you're building a web analytics product today, if someone was trying to pitch me like, we're going to redo GA, everyone hates GA, go Go Google Analytics, it's gotten too complicated. So we're going to do a better version of Google Analytics. My first few questions, because like this is an area that isn't obviously affected by AI and that it's reporting on data points that are gathered on websites about did the user visit the checkout page or not, right? But what I want to see is show me your reporting engine, show me have you considered how like chat UI could be relevant here like basically instead of building like a hundred and fifty million drop downs to like you know query by browser type by day of week by this by that can I just type the query I want to see in can you generate it can in fact can you go one step ahead of me and suggest new things can use AI to like parry a reporting engine to suggest new i reports i should be looking at that i haven't seen before i'd want to be confident that the founders have thought through that and come to a conclusion and it might be we're not going to build any of that or it might be you know what we should really go hard on like natural language is a query engine for reporting”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “If I was investing in a classic commoner gardener B2B SaaS enterprise company in this day and age, I would need to be quite convinced that AI has no role or if it does have a role, the founders are all over and I'm going to lead. Otherwise, I just don't see why I take the risks.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “I think what we're seeing there is a growth in, how would you say, AI powered video customization to do lots of things that people, bear in mind the cost of video editing and all that sort of shit is so high, you have a video that explains how your product works. And then you change the name of one of the features. Now, in the current world, that's a reshoot. In the new world, you edit a JSON file. We're moving into a different fucking world here. I think what we'll see is the area of AI power, I'd say, video creation in that case didn't exist three, four years ago, really. And it's going to be a big area is my guess.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Yeah, that's totally correct. I think the areas where AI will deliver most value in startups will be things that just weren't possible before are now possible. Companies like Cynthesia will have like, they'll produce massive new things that just literally weren't being done before and are like new categories and new jobs, new workflows, new capabilities”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “With AI, a lot was meant at the start of like, ooh, Everyone's in trouble. And I remember when we first released our first wave of AI features, which is just AI in the inbox. It was things like summarization, expansion, change tone, like take this blunt reply and make a plight. Those sort of features, one of the big dogs used it as a showcase of like, this is why there won't be new startups built in this. All the value will go to the incumbents. And I think the hypothesis there is that if the value is available on tap from OpenAI, it's on tap. In our earlier example, it's on top from MailChimp. and it's on top for the new startup too right so the thin integration where you're shelling out for your differentiation to a third party it does not create a way for disruption the disruption comes as we were saying earlier like it's it's when you would build the entire thing differently in a world post ai it's hard to give an answer overall if you put a gun to my head i'd say incumbents will probably do better out of ai than like startups thinking they can displace incumbents but that's not the same thing as saying that like startups”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “It's 85. We're not technologists. Correct. I generally think if you're playing in somebody else's playground and you're bringing one little thing, even if you do have a reason why you're a thing will be definitely better persistently and sustainably, it needs to overcome a lot just to be worth the cost of an extra tool in the stack.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Think right now a lot of value is going straight into the infra. Like, as in we're handing it all out the back door to OpenAI in this case, right? In your first question about commoditization, if that happens, then the value starts to reduce there, right? Because if there's more competitors offering the same thing, that's the beginning of commoditization, or at least you go from a monopoly to an oligopoly to ultimately perfect competition where you, you know, and price goes down on each step. That's how I expect that'll play it. Unless OpenAI can continue to find mass market differentiation, which is always a hard thing to find, right? Like as in the differentiation that all the customers care about, not just specifics, right? So let's assume over time, I believe that the amount of people investing in the space means that I think the infrastructure layer will gradually get a lot more AWS-like, right? Just like razor thin margins. Oh, sorry, not raise it to margins. That's the wrong way of frame it. Price mixed with strength of product as a competitive weapon, if you know what I mean, right? Like Amazon make good money off Intercom, you know, but they're also like, we're all in.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “And it does all this instantly to a pretty high degree of fidelity and just nice polish, like certainly far beyond what an average illustrator could do. And it can do it instantly. So I think we should see a world where there are more people being creative, more people able to weaponize the ideas they have in their head in a visual form than previously could. Previously, you just be like, oh, I have this vision in my head. And then whenever I go to pick up my mouse and open up Photoshop, it falls apart. Now you don't need that. Now, thinking and rendering become like this new sort of skill set that you can have. Adobe could see a significant expansion of people who care about Adobe Tech if they play it well because Adobe is going to be like, oh, if you have an idea and you're struggling to visualize it, just use Adobe. Like, and you're like, oh, here's what I'm trying to draw. And here I want to have a diagram and I want this and I want that. Oh, you got that nearly right. Let me select this piece. All right. Edit that so it's not like this. It's like that and have her facing the other direction. Okay, it can do all that shit like at least detect them as I've seen the stuff that like Scott Belsky shares and all that. It's like phenomenal looking stuff. So I think like.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source