YouSaid · the spoken record

Jesse Zhang

lines on the record: 84
first: 2025-10-06
most recent: 2025-10-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Definitely pizza high school. So in high school, you did math contests, math Olympiads. So there's like a major contest in the USA Math Olympiad in the US. And there's like essentially a camp for the top folks. And so I went there a few years. That was probably the peak.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For you to develop this. And I think a lot of things I have in life right now are from that. So that's probably the kind of thing my sister as well, like even growing up, she was, I think there was a lot of pressure on me. And in some way for like parents to immigrate who are also ambitious folks, it's very hard for them to succeed themselves in a new environment in a new country. So they put a lot of expectations on their children. Yeah, my sister was also like, she was just always trying to sacrifice things for me when I was trying to achieve things. And so, yeah, try to spend as much time with my parents as possible.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The more unique side is that a lot of times what happens, especially it's like the stereotypical Asian parent, is that that just continues. And you just have overbearing parents. I would say even though my parents were very intense about things, they never had any semblance of overbearingness. They wouldn't like prevent us from doing things we wanted to do, force us to like, hey, you should pick this or whatever and so on. What happened was towards the end of middle school into high school, I think we had already kind of established these personalities. Basically, my parents just pounded a sort of lazy wanting to play around kid into someone that was just very, very driven then to their credit. They just completely laid off. They don't have any opinions on what we do for careers, what we should do. They're like very supportive. So I think that's very kind because you cannot replace it. You can't even pay for that. You basically just need parents that are willing to spend a ton of time crafting this childhood.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“TV in the house. We didn't have video games. We didn't really take vacation growing up. You're kind of in this mindset of you're sacrificing most things to focus on one thing. When you're a kid, actually, you don't have no frame of reference. So it doesn't feel hard necessarily because your parents are kind of setting up the criteria for you. And in hindsight, I had a very happy childhood. But I think that level of discipline and also just competitiveness is very hard to gain that after your childhood is over because when you're in your childhood, your brain's still forming. So that kind of forms your personality. So one, I'm very grateful for that. And I think that's also why when I talk about my generation of, there were a lot of immigrant parents from my generation that came over grad school and they're all around my age. And I think this is our crop of folks just are doing very well, partly because of that, probably because of upbringing. And then my parents did, I think, which was.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I mentioned, our mutual friends, Scott, gave me a heads up here. So I did put a lot of thought into it. So when I was little, call it ages five to 13, like elementary middle school, pretty like lazy kid in general. And I think most kids are. There's very few people that are just intrinsically self-motivated. I wanted to just play games all the time or just like hang out with friends or play sports. And yeah, my parents had like a very interesting way of raising us, me and my sister. What they did was basically when we were really little, it was like an extreme level of discipline. When I was little, it played a lot of piano, essentially like three, four hours a day. And then for competitions, they just pulled me out of school and just go hard at it. And then I guess fortunately for me, my parents decided, okay, math was probably a better way to go. And I was just like quite talented at math when I was little. Even for that, it's just like full force. Like you're just committing everything. We did not have.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's not even a problem necessarily from the pure dollar margins. It just prevents you from scaling. No one can hire good people that fast. It's just hard to hire good people. So if your business is fully constrained on good people, then that's also not a good thing.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That with what startups do, which is startups are just very hands-on and do things on the long scale. But for you to actually have a FDE model, you need to have massive clients. And most people do not have massive clients. So I'm kind of interested to see how that plays out because I do think there's like an over indexing on this forward deployed engineering model right now where yeah, I have a forward point engineer and the deal sizes are like 50k. And that's something we think about a lot as well. We are very hands-on with our customers. I think it's like you have to think about things holistically. You have to think about like, okay, well, how do we scale quickly? We don't have 50k clients, but for every 50k client, you have like someone that's fully staffed them. That's like impossible to scale. So you need to find that line in the middle. And I think the full forward deployed model only works with the Balancier approach.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been a great conversation. I think what has become almost a meme or hyped up a lot in AI startups right now are like a couple things. One, obviously everyone's in person. It's like 996 or whatever. I don't actually think 996 is that healthy. It happens in China and everyone's like super hardcore. But one of the reasons is that no one has jobs over there. So it's very easy for employers to have leverage. I think here you generally want to maintain a good balance because if you're working super high intensity, need time to relax a little bit. But that is one element. The other element is the forward deployment engineers. So everyone's talking about forward deployment engineers. And yeah, I just think it's kind of funny because my co-founder came from Palentier, so they actually have forward deployment engineers. What a forward plane engineer at Palantir means is you're working on a 10, 25 million dollar deal. And so you're actually just almost full time working with either one or a small number of customers and like building very specifically for that. And I think people are a little bit”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the cost of the jacket and just how much people get paid is like trivial, but it just creates like this, hey, we're working towards these jackets. It brings the teams together because now it just feels like everyone's working together towards this common goal. That's been a big culture. It's just finding what is the next milestone.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for us, I mean, one thing we do always is we always have like a flagpole that's within sight that can just kind of rally everyone around it. Having things to rally around are quite helpful. I was kind of thinking about this the other day. I think another type of rallying is around competition, right? I think when people feel like they're in a battle and there's like clear enemies, then it makes sense. Again, you don't want to get to the point where there's like active animosity, but just kind of a healthy level of competition. It ties the team together because there's like something to focus on. Same thing with milestones. Like if you give someone everyone a clear milestone, and this can be like pretty insignificant. Like last year, we had for our revenue milestone, we told everyone we get them super nice jackets. We got like Dekagon Terix jackets. And everyone was like super excited about that. And if you just think about like.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, I would say my friends are very high intellectual horsepower. I think I generally lean a lot more. I don't know why this isn't. It's like personality. I think I generally lean a lot more towards commercial elements of every idea. And again, it's not the only way to build the company, but in my opinion, if you were just trying to optimize for the highest likelihood of success, I think you should really index on the commercial side because a lot of super smart intellectually curious people that are just building very cool projects. And you can make the argument for a lot of huge outcomes. You need to do that because you just need to do stuff where like no one's going to work on this because where are the commercial elements of this? But I think Osham is this way too. It's made a good fit. I think we're just like very locked in on, okay, you just got to be like super practical.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I will say in both the sort of digital native segment, you have folks like Chime, for example, super impressed with the entire team top down. Everyone that is in the org, that's like a case study to study at some point. I think they've done a really good job on culture, really making it so that people are very sophisticated about everything. Everything that the AI agent does, it's like super data centric, they track everything. They're really thoughtful about how to make updates and so on. And they've given us a ton of good product feedback”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We want people that are intellectually just at the leadership level, really curious and excited about technology. You actually see a huge spectrum of that in the enterprise. And some of, in my opinion, the best leaders and like probably the folks that we are most excited to work with, they're just genuinely like, hey, we want to move on AI as fast as possible. We're very interested and just curious about how all your systems work. And as a result, I'm going to help cut through all the crufts and like bureaucracy to get something going. And I think you can tell that pretty clearly in the first conversation. You can tell if someone's, if they're like legit about this is something where I'm going to both push aggressively, but also give you a ton of feedback and like the feedback is going to be good versus someone where they just know it's like a board mandate and it's just like an AI is like a thing on their to-do list.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The labs are quite interested in building applications. So they're building a bunch of coding applications and cloud code and so on. And so those will end up being competitors with cognition or cursor. And maybe for that reason it is wise for the coding agents to start training stuff as well. I think in our space, I would say for us right now at least the sheer amount of functionality of the bill because it is a very top-down product is quite large that has nothing to do with AI. It's just stuff like, okay, how do you have like observability into like what the conversations are? How do you alert? Before you push it out to end users, you feel it's like there's just all this functionality that's there that doesn't really have anything to do with AI really. And so it's just like a lot of stuff that needs to be built.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think generally people say rapper in a derogatory way. It's like, hey, you're just a rapper. It's not black and white. Yes, there are a lot of apps that are just rappers that are not going to become real businesses because there's just not that much value. I mean, one argument, don't know too much about this space, but at least from the outside, it has seemed like copywriting, for example, has been difficult because someone can just log in to ChatGPT and just like, hey, write this for me. And I'll just write it. There are things where there's not enough tooling and functionality on top of something for it to be really valuable and needed. Then maybe it is easier to just leverage the models. But most of the time, that's not the case. And especially when you get into agents, an agent is not just a model, right? You have to like design it. You have to be able to put in guardrails. You have to be able to teach how to do new things. And that's where the software layer on top of the model has come in. And if that's valuable, then it's just much harder for you to just like be made obsolete by a model update. The other side of it is like, okay, well.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that is where we probably see the most dynamic here. And I do think this is generally not really a hot take. In the early days, we were like, oh, there's like chat GPT wrappers and so on. And yeah, a lot of rappers, if it's too thin, it's like not going to be valuable. But if you have enough software built around the models, then that's where you can actually almost capture the most value. That's why I think the OpenAIs of the world will continue to move towards applications because it's quite hard for them to make money long term on like their API, for example, because there's such high competition. All the labs are building, it's very easy for people to swap. It's not like moving from AWS to GCP is like very hard, but moving from a open AI model to anthropic model, you just change one line of code.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say the only thing that we have a principle for is not to have negative margins. In general, we have fairly healthy margins because one way you can think about it is if you just think about supply chain from any good, let's say you're buying like a croissant at the airport or something. That last step where you're actually solving someone's problem, that's where you generally can capture the most margin. Every step along the way, like whoever's enriching the flower or like making the butter or whatever, you're generally making a margin on top of the costs of whatever your goods are. And that's why it's nice to be in the application layer is what you're building is actually solving the business. And as a result, you can capture more of that because our customers, the way they're thinking about it, is great. We're investing a deck on. We don't care that much about what Deckagon's costs are. In fact, we probably don't care about at all. What we care about is what is the business ROI that we're getting? It's like we're downsizing our operations by this much. We're actually generating more revenue now because the AI can engage people and keep them retained.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I just think it's quite unlikely that where we're currently at is like the best that things will be. There's so much effort getting put into it and like one of the main metrics is efficiency. The other piece is that even if things don't get better, there's a lot of ways you can rearch your system so that it is more cost efficient. It's just that it's not worth putting time into that right now where you can put that same amount of time into getting new customers because you know that things will change in the future. So I think that's just one thing where people are like, oh, it's kind of like a scheme where you take VC dollars and then like the VC dollars go to the chips these companies are losing money. If they wanted to, probably they could just like spend a month or even less and just massively improve their margins. But it's just not worth doing that work right now where you're really optimizing for right now is just quality and growth. So if you can do that, then the optimization will always come later on.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's on the flip side of that, where it's underestimated is just things are growing exponentially, improving exponentially. And no one is good at conceptualizing what exponential means in things like this. And so that could be from like a performance, like cost perspective. Right now, I would argue that if you're building an application, your margin shouldn't really matter that much. People will often critique the coding agents like they're hemorrhaging money. Yeah, but again, things are improving exponentially and like the cost will go down exponentially as well. So zero margin doesn't really matter. What really matters is you need to get market share and you need to get mind share of users. Perfectly fine not to have good margins right now. And it's just everything just improves way faster than people think. It's slightly different at the enterprise. I mean, the same principle applies, but generally don't want to be hemorrhaging cash with like an enterprise deal because those are just much longer term. And even though the costs will go down, their expectations might also change.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has to be near perfect. So there's that dynamic that kind of needs to adjust in some folks' mind where instead of evaluating AI in a way where you're just trying to find mistakes, you're evaluating holistically looking at the sort of success rate. And then if you can frame it that way, well, the success rate is going to be way higher than humans because, again, humans are not perfect. So I think that needs to happen. And I don't think that's fully happened yet in the enterprise. So that trend needs to happen. And then on the AI use case side, I think the models still need to get better in a lot of areas, right? We were just talking about voice-to-voice earlier. hallucinations are too high there as those models get better. I think more enterprise use cases will be unlocked. But I do think the general public will just see a really cool demo and be like, okay, oh, wow, like voice is solved now. And as a result, Enrise should be adopting it left and right. C-suites will see that too. But then when they actually get into it, it's just harder to go live. I would say the piece where it's not quite fully there yet. And so it's a little bit slower than people think. I think the thing.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a little bit more behind in being able to unlock a lot of the enterprise use cases, I would say, because of the non-determinism. So two things I need to happen. One, you need to reframe the way that people think about agents. There's the Waymo effect that often happens where it'll be”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another friend of mine is building a company called PICA, building video models. So I just think very highly of that team as well. So he probably put them in there. And the last one probably would want some sort of bet on the underlying model side, even though all the large language models are out there. But another friend of mine I think very highly of, they're building models, but not like the types of language models, but still foundation models for healthcare, for example. So a friend of mine, Josh, is building Chai. They're building a foundational model. So stuff like that. I think it's quite interesting. Or even I would put Locky's company, physical. I think those are very exciting. It's just obviously as early to see how those will turn out. But if I'm building a portfolio, definitely want one of those in there.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me definitely would want to take a bet on the hardware layer, even though it's like a much higher variance. So last time we were talking about Etched, like companies like that, I think you probably put one of those in there. Still on the earlier side, but obviously very high potential.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Dangon excluded. Let's see. Just kind of gravitate towards where most of the talent is forming. I mean, I mentioned close with cognition guys. Cognition would be in there for sure. Cursor also. I'm actually kind of interested in where those might run into each other in the future. Let's see.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work wise, it's not super relevant, but of course, we have our own opinions. I'm very bullish on Google, actually. I just think that with AI use cases, having individual consumers is so important because that's where all the data comes from anyways. And Google is much stronger there. I mean, you could say that Meta, Facebook, also has that element. And so, yeah, maybe their new superintelligence lab will be able to make it work. But something like Anthropic, for example, where they haven't done as well on the consumer side compared to like a chatGBT, I think long term you do need that consumer buy-in because that's where all the new data is going to come from. Yeah, Google and I mean Google just has an amazing team and we've had a couple of rocky starts, but hopefully they'll make it work out. Of course, all the large Mag7 basically are obviously super strong. So we don't really have strong views on them.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of the applications have gotten more mature. So you know how your agent is structured, you know the places where you need models to run, and you can take smaller fine-tuned models, and that improves the entire system, both in terms of performance, but also latency and so on. So I think over time, there's going to be more and more of that. I do think there's always going to be a huge usage of OpenAIs anthropics of the world because you just need intelligence. You need the best models. So I think there's going to be a balance, but at least in the short term, there's going to be more and more of the fine-tuning small models that happen.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we first started, this was about two years ago, people are still figuring out applications. Almost no one was doing fine-tuning. In fact, anyone that was doing fine-tuning, there was a lot of writing at that time was like fine-tuning quote unquote doesn't work because it doesn't really get you that many gains. Another big reason to not do fine-tuning at that time was that the models are changing so fast. You're still kind of figuring out your use case. Why invest a bunch of time in fine-tuning? It's not reversible. You're going to have to throw it out and next time there's a new model release. I think now the open source models, for example, have gotten to the point where definitely not smart enough to do everything, but there's a lot of specific use cases where you just don't need that much intelligence. Example would be even the agent, let's say the first thing the agent does is it just needs to think about like, okay, based on what the user said and everything before, what path do I go down? What data do I need? You can make that a fine-tuned model. That model doesn't have to be good at math or coding or anything. It's just like you just need a smaller model that's just fine-tuned on that. Nowadays, we're seeing much more of that because”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we're kind of fortunate, and now our talent brand has gotten a lot larger than when we were first starting. So it definitely has gone easier to hire. But at the same time, the amount of people we need to hire has also gone up constantly just finding ideas of how to get new people. I mean, we just opened up our New York office, as you know. And part of the reason for that is that, hey, there's another town pool over here. We should leverage that.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely feels like talent is a big team effort for anyone you want to hire, you need the whole team to swarm around them to win highly sought after talent. And you have to go and do all the things, right? There are some parallels to sales, of course. You're trying to convince people that, hey, this is the place they want to be. So that involves oftentimes getting to know their families, getting to know their partners, really figuring out what they want out of their own careers and making sure that you can design a role for them that is like that. Unfortunately, in the application layer, it is not as crazy as the metas and the open AIs. There's only so many top-level researchers. We have some very strong researchers on our team. It's a lot more of like an applied type research. For us, it's the same thing that happens. We're going after, you know, a lot of people on our team, Harvard and MIT and Stanford. There's only so many of these folks that are in the market anytime who are in SF or going to the office. And so it is a competitive place to be.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is, we really want our office to be a place where people enjoy coming to work every day because we spend a lot of time in there. It's like you want people to be happy to be there. They feel like everyone there is supporting them between the organizations. You want people to feel like they're pretty aligned and folks are. Something we just put a lot of thought into, and we want to make sure that people feel like they will be very fulfilled by staying here for a long time.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say there's definitely a level of intensity that's important. And yeah, you definitely want to tell people that up front because you want them to self-select into this culture. So everyone that has joined Dekagon, I would say, they want to work hard. They want to be around other people that are really smart and are like them. And they're motivated by, they view this as maybe the prime of their career where, hey, I'm going to work hard, but we know that because of that, I'm going to build lifelong relationships with like other amazing people and going to have good financial outcomes. I'm going to be able to leaprog steps in my career because the growth is just happening so quickly. So you're attracting people like that. I think that alone creates like a pretty strong foundation for the culture because you have people that are there to work. We have a lot of people that live right next to the office. And part of that is because we've selected for people that like being in the office with other people, right? We're in the office a lot. Those are the foundations. And then I think what you have to be careful on top of.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the best ones, I would say one, they get a very deep understanding of our customers. It's actually funny. Our customers have made probably so much money on expert calls because so many investors are hitting them up. And I think the best ones can, before they even talk to you, they probably already done quite a bit of research and have a pretty full view on your customers. Unfortunately, I think what we've seen is that there is a lot of noise there because like a lot of people just lie on customer calls. We have people who have said that they've used us and we literally never heard of them. But generally, if you do enough research and you're good at it, then you can underwrite the business that way because that gives you the most signal. And the other one is people that index on culture because I think culture is quite important and a lot of good investors know how important that is. And so if they feel like you are becoming a place where good talent is congregating, then folks will index on that more.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or anything. What we really index a lot on is just cognitive ability, raw intellectual throughput. And you can almost feel that out in an investor in the same way you would feel it out in an employee just by spending time with them and just like actually seeing if they're thinking about things from first principles of your company. For example, right, a lot of AI companies are growing much faster than traditional SaaS companies right now because that's the case. A lot of things are different. You generally don't want investors that are just like so many reps. You got to do things like XYZ way. You want people that are just intellectually curious and will think about things along with you and can help problem solve.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number one, I think the best investors get this dynamic. We've definitely talked to a lot of high profile investors where they're just not willing to help much until they're nested. Totally they're right, right? It's like, hey, we have a lot of our current investments. We don't want to use our social capital or whatever to help within it like a new investor or a new investment. But I think from a founder's perspective, okay, if that's the case, then it's hard to tell if you actually be useful or not. There's no difference between you saying that and then someone who can't really help and just saying that. I think the best ones just are able to give a lot of signal to the founder that like, hey, I'm really willing to help. I have the ability to help and we have a very strong network or we're very good at certain elements of go to market and we're just able to show that in the, let's say, it doesn't have to be that long a period of time, like a couple months before the round actually happens. That's one thing. I think the other thing is that if you just think about anyone you bring into the org, this could be employees or investors or”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think there's anything like super crazy. The main thing that we do, and I would actually encourage more founders to do this, is that during the stage where people want to invest, but they haven't yet, that's when they're most willing to be helpful. And so it's actually like a great way for you to use that to proxy how helpful they'll be afterwards. Because if they're not that helpful in that stage where they really, really want to invest and they're willing to do anything, they're for sure not going to be helpful afterwards. I mean, they'll still be friendly and hopefully they'll not be detrimental. That's like your opportunity to really test folks and see how helpful someone will be. And we obviously know a lot of investors very well. And I think they like no one has issue with that. They know that they're going back to competition. They're also in a competitive sport. They know that they need to earn basically the ability to invest in the best companies. And so I think from their perspective, they're happy to work for it. So if you just give them opportunity to, they will.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should not be like a super big factor in that. It should be like, how else is the business doing? What do I believe the potential is? So it feels like there's a little bit of mania, but yeah, we're definitely, I would say, more indexed on the other two things, like talents and customers.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It definitely feels like there's maybe a little bit too much excitement right now on the AI side. It just seems way too easy to raise money. So many companies out there. I mean, for us, we've been very fortunate, right? We don't take it for granted. I mean, I think in my first company, we were also fortunate. It was easy to raise, but it was for different reasons like 2021. Nowadays, it's just there aren't that many AI companies that have real real traction on the revenue side, especially in the enterprise. And so I think that's attractive to investors because they want to deploy their capital into AI and that's like the biggest trend. So I think we've had a great relationship with all of our investors. I think we just really selected for folks that we get along with at a personal level and we feel like will be very helpful for our go-to-market normally. Yeah, that's kind of been an interesting process. So yeah, pretty much after every single time we've raised a round, we just like almost immediately got preempted. And that alone can't be right. Just thinking of first principles to make an investment. The previous value.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number one thing is just APIs for the AI to use. So APIs to take action, APIs look up data, APIs to reformat things. That is often like, hey, if you have those, you already know that within the first month, it's already going to be a great experience. If you don't yet, then we should try to build towards that as soon as possible so that AI can actually achieve that elevated experience. That's the main thing. Most people already have documentation. It might not be up to date, but we can help with that. Most people already have SOPs, I guess. And then we are able to use that and generate our format. We call them AOPs, agent operating procedures. They're just SOPs, but for AI. And then brand guidelines, like I said, people usually have those as well. So you just ingest them.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason why we're excited and we feel like the market is so massive is that, yeah, at the end of the day, what we are building towards is this concept of becomes like a new UI for the product. Just think about how much these large companies invest in their mobile app or their website. And this is literally how everyone communicates with them. So this could be a way where eventually the way any user interacts with any brand is through an AI agent. And for all sorts of different use cases. The benefits are customers for the AI to have all this context because they can seamlessly flow between things. A lot of them want to do sales type use cases at the end of a support flow or vice versa. That's exciting.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People already, almost always, already have brand guidelines because they need to show brand guidelines to their human agents to train them. The nice part is that they already have all this training process for the humans. And you should ideally be able to apply it in the same way as the AI. And so they'll have like, hey, you need to do this. You need to always be confident. Sometimes folks don't want the agent to apologize. Sometimes people really want to be apologetic. So people have different preferences. And that needs to be taught to the AI in an efficient way. That's also kind of a lower throughput way of communicating. I mean, the other way that you can show the agent is just give a lot of examples. So here's examples of what Great looked like from our top agents and just learn from that.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a good analogy. Just like a front end. It's like a UI. But instead of visual UI, it's a conversational UI.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a concierge. It's just a digital concierge that can do everything for you. I mean, you also have to be pragmatic on both sides. Start with a clear use case. But I think that is where folks are building towards. And so in the near term, I do think that different teams, because the reality is that at these large companies, different teams have different budgets and they make different decisions. And so they might have different agents. But long term, you either need to have a unified system that ties them together, like a unified framework, or they could just be literally the same agent.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say that in the natural end state, it is more unified for the exact reason you listed, which is people want a unified brand out there. Brand is very important to them. And for some businesses, it's more important than others. But eventually this becomes the front end for the business. And so that means it's both how you gain new customers, but also how you support the existing ones, make them retain more and so on. It's almost like in the limit if you're working with a bank or airline or telecom company or whatever. The agent could be the only thing that most users interact with. They don't even have to touch your mobile app. They don't even have to go down your website ever. They just have this agent where they're authenticated. It knows everything about them and has all the context of your previous conversations. It has memory. And it can just solve your issue. It can take actions for you. You need to book a flight. You need to upgrade a seat. You have questions about this or that. So I think that's the exciting vision that we're building towards. And in some ways, we often call this.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, don't know nearly enough about that, but I'm just saying that doesn't really matter. If their entire engineering team is like, hey, we love this. This is making us 50% more productive It's like super easy Exactly. And then you think about it from the CEO, and they're like reporting this to the board or something, it's like, hey, my entire engineering work said that they're 50% more productive. This is like worth the investment because these people are all paid this much. Now we can accelerate the product. We can accelerate everything.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is and I know the coding agents quite well, and the way they do it generally is one, it's very easy to test to play out to the engineers. And then you just do a poll on the engineers of like, hey, how much more productive do you think you are? And engineers are often the most valuable resource in these organizations. And so those answers are treated with high importance. Yeah. Engineer tells you that you're like 50% more productive. That's like, okay, great.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You cannot in basically half a sentence explain that, then it's just not going to work right now. They are under a lot of pressure, right? They need to show quick wins. If this is not going to be a quick win, they can point to like, I saved $10 million, then this is not going to be something that's prioritized.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, interesting. I mean, one framework is similar to the sort of framework you talked about before of two ends of the spectrum. And I would say most leaders we talk to are focused on the more bottoms up end of the spectrum, which is like where are the areas that we should just not have humans doing because it's so mundane and repeatable and there's tons of cost efficiencies there. So I would say that's where folks are typically thinking of. So when we talk to leaders, I think there's a couple observations. One, pretty much all AI initiatives are very top down at this point because it is such a board level mandate. So C-suite is very, very invested in like, okay, where do we deploy AI? It almost means that if you want to get something going at a larger organization, you have to have buy-in from the top level because it's going to get up there anyways and they have to make decision at the end of the day. So that's one. Two, the way they think about the use cases, to your point, is back to ROI. It's like, where can we either save a bunch of money or make a lot of new revenue?”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest frontier right now is voice models. And so I know there's a lot of interesting startups as well working on voice. It's exciting because it's still, I would say, definitely not solved. There's a lot to be done there. The bar is very high. So if you just think about how humans communicate for literally the entirety of humanity, I don't know, 150,000 years or something, the UI for every human.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The beginning of the process just feels very different. And folks are willing to give it a chance. So I think that's been exciting.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really just elevating the experience, one sort of metric is usually a secondary metric that folks think about later, but is quite important to us is just how often do people come in and just say like agent agent, like give me to a representative. I want to talk to you. I've done that. You probably have as well. Are you just calling into some sort of customer service and you're just like pressing zero the whole time? And that's because people are used to bad experiences. So they've already lost the trust of these systems. I think what surprised us was that if you just make it really clear off the bat that this is a different experience people are willing to give it a chance and then the outcomes are just way different. One of our customers or a ring like the werewolf ring. We did a case study with them where before having any sort of Janet AI system, one in three customer that came in would just not bother saying anything and just keep jamming agent until they got to one. Now it's one in 20 because we just spent a lot of time making.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source