The Startup Ideas Podcast - OpenAI DevDay: Dots, Agents & $100B Opportunities

Starting point is 00:00:00 I got to be real with you. I didn't think I'd be making this episode of the podcast. But I just watched almost 60 minutes of Sam Altman up on stage. And he launched a few things that I think are going to make people in aggregate billions of dollars. And I don't think that's a stretch. I think that there were 20 launches, feature launches today. But I think there was probably three or four that are so big that I think the people who figure out how to use those features and to grab a slice of those billions of dollars of transactions that are going to be

Starting point is 00:00:37 happening within the chat cheap T platform. I think they're going to be able to create some really, really big businesses. So I had to come on here and just break it down for you. You know, if you're new here, my name is Greg Eisenberg. I'm the host of the Startup Ideas podcast. I started and sold three venture back companies. I was an advisor to Reddit, TikTok. And I come on here because I think that this is an incredible time to be building your ideas. And I think that in the AJAI, you can use tools like this to go and do that. So by the end of this episode, you're going to learn about the most important things that happen today that Sam Altman launched at Dev Day 2026. I'm going to give you some ideas and some frameworks for thinking about how you could come up with your own ideas so that you can grab a slice of that pie. And I'm just going to cut through the noise.

Starting point is 00:01:27 So by the end of it, I'm just going to really focus on for people interested in building businesses, making money around AI. This is the episode for you. So, you know, yes, like I said, there are 20 plus launches, feature launches today. The most important ones to me, the ones I think are the most interesting, and I think maybe for you, is. Let's start with Dots. So we have to talk about Dots. Dots is the personal agent platform. And it's their answer to Muse by META and their answer to instinct. And what's really cool about it is they now have this front door where you're going to have access to the 1.2 billion weekly active users. That's what Sam Altman said today.

Starting point is 00:02:34 So, you know, people are going to go and use their personal agent platform dots and they're going to be asking questions, right? They're going to say, I need this permit fixed or I have this request or, you know, I'm looking for a restaurant that, you know, serves this. And chat GPT is going to understand that job. And your plugin that you have made, which is essentially like a mini app, is going to get selected for the work. and we're going to talk about ways to surface that, but they've basically announced that plugins, they're doubling down on plugins. I think Sam said something around like, you know,

Starting point is 00:03:15 they, he didn't say, you know, verbatim that it's, like, plugins were a failure. He didn't say that. But he did say, like, something to the degree, I'm paraphrasing that they had some, like, mixed reviews on plugins. They're now doubling down on plugins. And I believe Sam that he,

Starting point is 00:03:33 He's going to like make plugins a thing. And he's going to try to make ChatGBTGBT the app ecosystem for AI. So they're, and that's a huge announcement of today. And we're going to talk about some of the things. We'll go deeper on that. So your business, you want your business to go in like fix the customer's request, file the permit, you know, if it's an, you know, an example of like a permit company. And then you're going to want to do the.

Starting point is 00:04:03 So this is the new app ecosystem. You need to drill this into your brain. You have to figure out how you could focus on the right customer. ChatGPT is going to understand the job. So they're going to do that. You're going to have to create the right plugin that does the right thing and actually creates a growth result. Because if you can do that, you know, you can be hired before the customer knows your name. You can have access to the 1.2 billion weekly active users. And we're talking about, like, you know, I said in the intro, like billions of dollars of transactions. I'm even being conservative. Like, I don't think it's crazy to say that in 10, 15, 20 years, that there's trillions of dollars of transaction volume happening within personal agent platforms. But let's be conservative and say that there are billions of dollars that will be, you know, in transaction volume. So now that that's, that we understand that, let's go back to Dev Day's website.

Starting point is 00:05:08 So you can see, here's their personal agent platform. The other thing that they announced today is Decision to API. I did a video, I think it was last week on Jev. And this is their answer to Jev. So you saw

Starting point is 00:05:23 their answer to Muse. This is their answer to Jev. Decisions API enables real-time decision-making by focusing Luna's intelligence on a specific set of user-defined questions with finite, pre-defined answers. So developers supply context using text or images, and they get back answers they can use to classify content,

Starting point is 00:05:44 route requests, or choose an agent's next action. So it's in limited preview today. Excited to play around with it. I've been hooked on Jev. Hooked on Jev. I think there's a bunch of use cases for Jev that are, you know, people are not talking about. it's underserved.

Starting point is 00:06:04 You know, one that I think is really interesting is just, you know, UI design. How do you use essentially, Jev is a Decisions API. How do you use a Decisions API to get you the most highly converted, converting, you know, app store screenshots or direct response websites and apps, things like that? So there's a ton of opportunity there. question here is will open AI's decision API be worse as good or better than Jev TBD we will find out really soon but I think it's worth paying attention to the other big launch of today that I think is really interesting is the agent's API is now with computer use so the agents API now supports computer use so developers

Starting point is 00:06:54 can build agents that interact with software to complete task it also brings Codex's multi-agent capabilities, tool search, tool calling, and context compaction into your application. OpenAI runs the underlying infrastructure so your team can focus on building applications. This, I've talked about this before around like, you know, vertical harnesses. You can see here, Open AI. It's a managed Konex harness. So, you know, if you have, you know, great data, if you have a great brand, if you understand a vertical better than other people, you know, there's this huge opportunity to build apps. And that's why I would be playing with the Agent API today. Like go and figure out, you know, what you can be building, how you can extend yourself, extend your business to this world. And this is just like a new surface area. It's like thinking about how you can create AI native apps. And it's just, I think there's a lot here. I don't think a lot of people are doing it. And obviously that excites me.

Starting point is 00:08:02 The other like low-key, huge announcements, I don't even know if it's, I don't even know if it's on this page. That's how low-key it is. But when I saw it, it sort of blew my mind. But basically, you can now sign in with your chat DBT login and use your token. your token allowance and on those websites. This is going to open up thousands of business opportunities in the same way that when Facebook launched their login, it opened up thousands of business opportunities and actually created many billions, billion dollar companies. Think about,

Starting point is 00:08:47 you know, Yelp as an example. I remember when Yelp came out, it was basically, and you know, you can go check out what their early product look like. Multi-billion dollar company that was basically log in with your Facebook and you're going to see local reviews and reviews that your friends have given. And it had that Facebook graph so it allowed you to do more. Now, where do I see the opportunity? We're going to go into depth into this in a bit. But where I see the opportunity with sign in with chat, TBT is now you can create

Starting point is 00:09:22 a free app. You don't charge people. So you get your top of the funnel becomes bigger. It's connect with your chat GPT. And then you can upsell them to other products and services from there. That is a huge, huge, huge thing. Let's go back here. Here's my word dump of chat GPT login. I, you know, I think a lot of people look at AI apps and they're like, do I really want to spend $20 or $30 a month for another AI app? It's like, no. You can just sign in with chat cheap. and start using the plan you already have. So I think a lot of people, you know, if you're smart, you create your core app free and then you charge for advanced features.

Starting point is 00:10:03 So you can charge for like enterprise stuff. You can charge for sharing with your team. You can charge for like more data. But now you have this opportunity to create the core app for free. In the past, you couldn't create the core app for free because you were paying for inference, right? but now you can just focus on your business building the distribution, building the brand, getting the data sets, obviously getting those people from the brand into the app, get them to use the app, and when they start seeing value, upsell them to other things.

Starting point is 00:10:38 A few ideas around, you know, what you can do with the login, an agent that cleans architectural CAD files, a researcher that monitors one specific scientific field, a Shopify catalog cleanup desktop app, a video production tool built around one repeatable editing workflow, a contract review tool for one type of franchise agreement. Basically, what's the opportunity? These tiny AI categories that weren't viable, weren't economically viable, today as of today, are. So you want to build these products that are too niche to become, you know, major AI, open AI features. But, you know, you, you, you have enough of an audience that you can charge, you know, something for upselling and for that

Starting point is 00:11:33 workflow. So I think this is a really big deal. And I'm really excited about it. Like, my mind is going absolutely, I can't stop thinking about it, actually. And now we can't focus on selling workflows, right? Yeah, sell workflows instead of tokens. So, you know, if you're ideating, if you want to build a business in the sedentic age, you know, what's some proprietary information that you have? A specialist workflow, access to outside systems, collaboration and auditability, a network of human or suppliers, a measurable business result. These are the things you can focus on, and we don't need to really focus on tokens. And I think you're also just going to get a lot more users of your app.

Starting point is 00:12:22 You get their emails. You might get their phone numbers. And then you could email them. You can sell ads in those emails. There's just so much more that you can do now that I think it's really, really interesting. I wanted to just talk about the mental model I have of this new world where we have Decisions API. We have login with chat, GPT, we have dots.

Starting point is 00:12:46 we have the agents API. How am I thinking about building a business in this world? To me, it's this four-step framework, trigger, decision, action, and feedback. So there's going to be a trigger, an invoice becomes due, the inventory runs low, or it's tax time. Like something happens such that I'm going to chat GPT and I'm asking for some help or it does it autonomously. Then there's a decision. So chat TPT is like, okay, what should I do next? then there's an action.

Starting point is 00:13:19 So there's a correct, there's a submit, there's an ability for an application to do something. And then there's feedback. You know, was it approved, was it rejected? And I think that the strongest businesses are going to own two of three. So they're going to own trigger. They're going to own action and feedback. So when you're thinking and you're brainstorming around what you can be building, I would be focused on those three things.

Starting point is 00:13:46 I wanted to give you a couple ideas just to get your creative juices flowing around, okay, what other businesses could you build now that Sam Altman and OpenAI team have launched this? One is like a real world API. So in a world where you're going to have millions of people basically going to dots and asking it for stuff, some of those stuff are going to be digital. But some of them, some of those are going to be digital. Some of them are going to be structured jobs. So if you can figure out a way to get vetted specialists in the real world, I think that that's a huge opportunity. So like permanent expeditors, custom brokers,

Starting point is 00:14:32 and then you make a transaction fee. So I think my point is there's all this stuff happening in the physical real world. A lot of people are going to be focusing on the digital stuff. How can you create real world, work APIs in specific niches that you can connect dots or connect chat chbt to real world workers who can finish the last mile of the transaction. Huge opportunity throwing it out there. The second is who's going to build the analytics and optimization layer for agent discovery. So I'm not the only one who's thinking about building plugins right now.

Starting point is 00:15:18 At this very moment, there's probably thousands of companies thinking about how the hell do I get surface within dots? Not just dots. How do I get surface within Muse? How do I get service within, you know, Gemini, Google's platform? I think it's called Spark. There's all these personal agent platforms, instinct. There's all these platforms, Grockbot. How do you get your plugin surface?

Starting point is 00:15:45 Some of these have plug-in, some of them don't. But I think eventually they all will. If you can create like an analytics platform that shows that he actually have it here, that generates realistic indirect prompts, which measures which plugin gets selected, which tracks activation share by customer intent, which finds metadata and tool definition problems which measures whether invocation turns into completion, test every plugin update, there's a huge opportunity here. In the same way that in the web era, you had huge companies, Mix panel came out, Amplitude came out, Google Analytics was a huge product. I think there's tons of

Starting point is 00:16:30 analytics products that are going to come out around helping you be seen. And you're, you actually saw that with AEO, GE. I mean, I think Profound raised at like a two billion dollar valuation or billion dollar valuation. Some absurd, you know, large amount. I mean, you know, they deserve it. They're generating a ton of buzz and revenue and they're solving a real problem. My point is who's going to be the profound for this personal agent era? Huge opportunity. I hope someone takes that. So I'll end with they obviously launched other stuff. They've obviously launched GPT 6.1 sole, which was huge, which is obviously a major upgrade to GPT6. But we kind of expected that.

Starting point is 00:17:20 They obviously launched UltraFast, which now, which is amazing, by the way. If you haven't tried UltraFAS, it's absolutely amazing. You know, you're going to love it. It's just way faster. Of course, it's a lot more tokens, but like, of course they launched this. And they obviously launch private intelligence, which, I think a lot of companies are scared to use Frontier AI because their data isn't really protected. So I'm not surprised that they're doing things like that and doing stuff like Codex Security Cloud.

Starting point is 00:17:53 But I think the point of this whole episode was there's a few main features, decision API, agents API, the login with chat chbtee and dots that I think if you're listening to this, you're a founder or you're someone who wants to build a company, wants to bet on yourself, that's going to be huge. So, yeah, and they also launched the spaces, which is basically their version of having cloud slides and docs, and you can bring your AI agent to work with it. So, yeah, it's cool, and it's going to help make people more productive. But for people listening to this, for my people, for the idea junkies, the people who, like, want to build businesses. I thought this would be most interesting to you.

Starting point is 00:18:43 Hope it was. Let me know if it was. I read every single comment, YouTube comment. I reply to a lot of them too. And have a creative day and I'll see you next time.

The Startup Ideas Podcast - OpenAI DevDay: Dots, Agents & $100B Opportunities

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