This Week in Startups - Building generative AI for pitch decks with Tome CEO Keith Peiris | E1727

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

Tome CEO Keith Peiris joins Jason to demo Tome’s AI-powered text-to-presentation platform (10:25). They discuss concerns about the pace of AI and the prevalence of 10x engineers (35:55), before Velocity Growth’s Jen Bryan breaks down how to get started with paid ads (47:19). (0:00) Jason kicks off the show  (2:013) Tome CEO Keith Peiris joins Jason  (5:27) Creating a pitch deck with Tome (8:48) Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub - Apply in 5 minutes for six figures in discounts at http://aka.ms/thisweekinstartups (10:25) Tome Demo (23:10) Clumio - Start a free backup, or sign up for a demo at https://clumio.com/twist (24:28) Datasets and What the future holds (28:18) Integrating AI elements into Tome's platform (29:51) Deploying capital responsibly  (31:53) Acquiring talent (34:36) Mercury - Apply in minutes and get up to $5M in FDIC insurance at https://mercury.com  (35:55) Concerns about the pace of AI (44:12) The prevalence of the 10x engineer (47:19) Velocity Growth's Jen Bryan on getting started with paid advertising (48:29) What is advertising? (50:15) Problem / Solution fit (53:12) See competitor ads (54:44) Building custom audiences FOLLOW Keith: https://twitter.com/keithpeiris FOLLOW Jen: https://twitter.com/JenBryan_ FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1 FOUNDERS! Subscribe to the Founder University podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/founder-university/id1648407190

Okay, everybody, happy Monday. Welcome to this week in startups. Today, we have two great segments for you. First up, I interviewed Tom, CEO, and co-founder Keith Paris, basically Tom is text to pitch deck software. Yes, we've been talking about Genr of AI. Imagine if you could just talk to your PowerPoint. If you could talk to Keno, Google presentations, whatever it is. Then we have another awesome tactical talk from the founder university podcast. Jen, Ryan, the CMO of Velocity Growth, is going to walk you through how to get started with paid acquisition. You're going to learn how to find and create custom audiences that you can use for ad targeting and then how to create engaging in relevant ads where you can find your

competitors' ads and how to see what's working for them. So, hey, listen, you can copy what's working with other folks. So it's going to be an amazing show. Stick with us. This week in Startups is brought to you by the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub helps all founders build a better startup at a lower cost from day one. Startups get up to $150,000 in Azure credits, access to free OpenAI credits, free dev tools like GitHub, technical advisory, access to mentors and experts, and so much more. There is no funding requirement and it only takes minutes to join. Sign up today at aka.m.m.m.m.m.m.m.amuible. Air-gapped, automated, affordable. Clumio provides simplified backup as a service that helps companies streamline data compliance,

optimize long-term data retention, and dramatically reduce their AWS backup bills. Start a free trial to uncover compliance gaps, optimize backup spend, and identify unprotected assets. Learn more at clumio.com slash twist. And Mercury, where innovation meets peace of mind. Now more than ever, startups need a safe place to put their cash. Mercury offers a simple way to manage bank risk and protect every dollar with up to $5 million in FDIC insurance and a money market fund. Visit mercury.com to apply in minutes. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups.

The pace of artificial intelligence is moving faster than any other technological revolution I have seen in my 30 years in the industry. and I'm including in this, the explosion of apps in Apple's App Store, the internet itself during the dot-com boom, cloud computing. It's just moving so fast. So we thought, instead of trying to just talk about the news, we'll bring the founders on who are building the future and just talk about what they're building and how it's going. And then maybe even talk about this pace and where they think AI will be in the next six to 12 months. Because every literal two or three days, somebody produces something. thing, that the people I know who've been in the industry for, I don't know, two, three decades goes, whoa.

And the woe factor here from people in the know is significant. Today on the program is a founder named Keith Parris. He is the CEO and co-founder of Tom, T-O-M-E. I'm pronouncing it correctly, Keith? Yes, exactly. All right. So welcome to the pod. Tell me, what is Tom?

And then we'll do a demo, of course. Thanks, Jason. I'm excited to be here. I would think about Tome as an AI-powered storytelling tool for ideas. And what I mean by that is, you know, when you're thinking about describing ideas using work artifacts, you know, some of them are pitches you want to make. Some of them are, you know, products you want to build at your company. And some of them are children's stories, you know, where you want to put together and tell your kids every night. And, you know, Tome is a very simple way to tell a wide variety of stories using different modes, whether it's text, video, image, prototype, and more.

Awesome. So, let's do a demo here. I'm assuming if I wanted to make a pitch deck or I want to make a story to tell my daughters before bedtime today, those things involve some amount of text prompting, something that seems to be really in the wheel. of this genre of AI movement, and then, of course, creating images on the fly, also in the wheelhouse. So it sounds to me like you're combining two of those aspects into unique output. Am I correct? Yes, exactly. What is this all built on? Are you using the chat GPT open AI, you know, API, or is it another language model you're using for the language side? So we're using a couple of different ones, to be honest.

we are generating our story outline from GBT4, you know, in the sense that it's read millions and, you know, maybe billions of stories. So it's important to be able to tap into that really large model, get the structure of a story. But then we use GPT 3.5 for the littler things.

Maybe you want to rewrite a paragraph or something. And, you know, we're playing with Anthropic for things like, I want to rewrite a sentence because it's just really fast. and we're just trying to use the best tool for the job to create this customer experience. And this is truly amazing. While you were talking,

I was like, well, let me just sign up real quick over here. And I just said, it said, what do you want to create? And I said, I want to create a deck for launch fund

for our latest venture capital fund. And it went out. And it made me a series of, looks like eight slides. Introduction to our latest venture capital. capital fund, what makes our fund different, our investment philosophy, our portfolio companies, our track record conclusion. I mean, literally, if you were going to create a debt for a venture capital fund, these would be some of the seminal slides. And this blank page experience that people

have is paralysis. And what you've already done, just in the first sentence here, is just like, hey, pretty great start. So I don't want to steal your thunder, but why don't you start a demo here? And it also, by the way, added an image to each of these. Now, these are not stock images I'm seeing. These are images that were created. And it also put a paragraph on each page to kind of get me started.

So all of this was done with chat chapti-4 and then just creating some images sort of and putting it into a presentation format. Were you making presentation software before this? And then you added AI, or was this all at the same time? So we were, we were sort of building this product for years. And, you know, I'd say there was a couple of things that we were sort of tapping into.

I mean, Henry, my co-founder, and I were both consumer mobile people. So, you know, we were really frustrated with the fact that your PowerPoints don't scale to a vertical touchscreen device. We also were both working at cloud companies. I was at Instagram. He was at Facebook. And all of our presentations were screenshots of different web services. And we're like, oh, we've got to build something that connects to all of

these different data sources. And then we sort of had this idea of at some point we got to be able to drive this thing using a large ML model. And we sort of got this idea. because we were reading every deck we could find, you know, on slide share, um, from our friends pitching and, um, there's sort of this like common narrative structured every story, right? Like every startup pitch deck has like a problem, solution, opportunity arc. Um, you know, if, if you, uh, I love every Pixar movie, but they all have a sort of similar heroes journeys.

We're like, wait a minute. If we could find, um, a foundational model that had read every story on the internet, we could build something, you know, that's, you know, truly a 10x gain in productivity. So we were always building the system in mind, thinking it could be driven by an ML model, but we just weren't sure if it would be in 2022 or in 2025 or in 2030. And then the technology sort of really picked up with GPT3. And we started playing around with it and realized, actually, this is creating, you know, meaningful results already. All right, everybody, Tom Davis is here.

He's a senior director at Microsoft for startups. He's a former founder himself. Tom, Microsoft has a huge, huge cloud computing, supercomputer, Azure. Everybody knows about that. But you've started to run giant LLMs. Maybe you talk a little bit about what it takes to run a giant LLM in the cloud. And this is a lot of iron, isn't it?

Absolutely. And really thanks to the partnership that we have with OpenAI, For the last few years, we've been spending a lot of time really building an AI-focused supercomputer. We went back and looked at everything, the GPU configurations, the networking, to really get it right, to be able to run these large language models and make them available for startups through the Azure service that we now have that you can get through Founders Hub. And so, yeah, it takes a lot of compute power, but we've managed to optimize that. we spend a lot of time working with startups to help them optimize things as well over time. And as more and more innovations come into this, we will make them available to startups,

not just open AI, but anyone just starting up a startup. We offer $150,000 worth of credits so startups can leverage that and really get going on their journey. The Founders Hub that Microsoft provides offers $150,000 in Azure Cloud credits, all the development tools like GitHub and Teams, Office, all that great stuff. get all that for free. Five minutes to sign up, six figures and benefits, a.k.a.

dot ms slash this weekend startups. Thanks so much, Tom. Yeah, fantastic. So give me a demo here. We'll show your screen. If you're not watching the video, Spotify supports our video on this weekend startups.

There should be a little video icon. You can click or turn your phone sideways. Or if you're on Apple podcast, you can search for this weekend and start a video. There's a different separate feed. We can go to YouTube.com slash this weekend to see the videos as we do them.

So, yeah, Keith, take it away. Great. So I'll jump right into Tome and you'll notice that some things sort of feel familiar like a slide. You know, you've got some slides on the left or pages on the left and some things don't feel familiar. Wait a minute. Where's the 16 by 9 rectangle? That's gone. And you'll also notice that the way you interact with Tome is a little bit different than the way you'd interact with, you know, a slide tool that came out in the 80s, right? There are some things that you can directly manipulate. There are things you can add, but you also have this sort of command system where you can, you know, take a document, turn into a presentation, you could add a page. You could, you know, maybe add a tile, like a Figma tile, if you want to show off your design work. And, you know, we're going to go into create a presentation. And, you know, in the old world, you'd have to look up a template that someone made years ago, try to find something. that's roughly matched what you were trying to do,

and then edit it and modify it. But the way Tome works is that you can just tell Tome what kind of presentation you want to make. You know, when I had queued up was a fundraising pitch. We have a lot of early stage founders building pitch decks, and you can write as much or as little as you want, and we'll try to fill it out for you. And, you know, you can see here, you can either ask.

We should read that prompt there, yeah. Yeah, for sure. It's a fundraising pitch for a company. that makes telescopes, that takes beautiful images of planets in the night sky. Okay. And by the way, the aesthetic feels a little superhuman-esque. So you have this sort of like Command K, you kind of in the middle of the screen, instead of just having to navigate the file new menu, like in the Microsoft or Apple,

you know, Google offices kind of thing. It's just like, here's all the commands in one location. Just go ahead and start typing a command and we'll figure it out with you. Exactly. Exactly. We're building more controls where I'm the sort of person that prefers an outline where I just want the prompt and I'll write my own story. Or you can choose a descriptive story if you want. And then you can choose the aesthetic if you'd like.

We're examples of the aesthetic there. Oh, great question. You might want fantasy. You might want some watercolor. You might want some pop art. Cyberpunk, my favorite. Exactly. My personal favorite.

And we're adding more and more controls here just because a lot of folks are not sure what they can type in. And then you can hit enter. And you can sort of see on the screen, we're first creating the structure. And then we're filling out each page with, you know, what we think should be there, some example content and an image. and you can sort of see in seconds I'll go through these pages

first we created this outline your pitch you should probably talk about your telescopes, your mission, your team and then on each page we generate an image for you using Dolly at the moment and some example text and now the really fun thing about Tome

is maybe this isn't exactly what you want this being the R-Impact page So we're on the R-impact page. You're like, eh, maybe this copy doesn't make sense. Exactly. So you can type in and edit it,

just like, you know, an editor like you would in Google slides. Or you can sort of ask tone to help shape this for you. And you can wait a minute. I actually want to, I want to reduce that.

No, this was the button I wish I had when I was at Instagram. I just make this a little shorter. And then it rewrites. And then it goes, I'm not sure. So we'll take the four sentences

and make it three, take three sentences from 12 words each down to nine or something. So kind of doing a little hemming way on it. Just let's make it a little simpler. Let's make it a little tighter. Exactly, exactly. And, you know, maybe this isn't exactly what you want, but you just want to see another version of it.

You can hit try again. It's kind of like working with a friend, right? You're riffing, you know? Yeah. And then, you know, you can out stuff to it too, right? I'm like, I don't really like this sort of layout. So I'm just dragging this handle in the middle, making the image bigger or smaller.

You know, we've sort of designed the system so that you don't have to think about the layout. It just sort of works. Then you click it into a format that makes sense. So, you know, image aligned right, text left, image on top, text below. It basically is a bit more intelligent than just randomly drop it and make it look ugly.

It's going to snap it into some sort of logic. And is that AI doing that? Is that just you doing some basic decision tree? It's a good question. So this is all a decision tree with heuristics, but the next thing we realized with our growth is that we have millions of these being created each week. So now we're going through the process of labeling all of these anonymized layouts. And very soon we're going to be able to use machine learning to generate the perfect layout,

depending on your content. So that's sort of one piece. And then, you know, in building your telescope company, you might want to add a prototype to show like what's this light. So I can, for example, I'll drag this web tile that, you know, terms based on this tile system into the page. And let me grab like a 3D model. You know, so I just went to another tab. I opened up this product called Spline. A lot of folks used for 3D work.

and then I can go back here and just paste this prototype. And it knows that format and it makes a nice clean embed. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And we play with it so they don't flicker and refresh and all of the things that you don't like about embeds. So that's what it's like to construct a story. And I'll show you one more thing if you're up for it, Jason. Yeah, yeah, please. So one of the most common workflows that our customers have is, you know, they're like,

I've already written what I want to say. I've written the story I want to tell in a document. So can you ingest that document and turn it into a presentation instead of using, you know, the corpus of content that GPT is trained on? So I could take a book, I could take a PDF, a report, a deal memo, a long email, a Notion page, whatever it is, describing our project. We're going to do our, you know, parents' 50th wedding anniversary, and we've made a bunch of items and have subheads, et cetera.

I can just upload that and have it go to work. Exactly, exactly. Makes sense. I'll grab a Notion doc I have around of, this is about nuclear energy, you know, it's sort of a heavy piece, you know, and you can tell it's pretty unstructured. It's all sort of like narrative prose. I mean, it's 20, dense paragraphs.

It has no headings except for the title. So you're dealing with something that is not structured. Exactly. We're not highly structured. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to copy that. Go back into Tome, open this command menu on the right, and hit document to presentation. And now I'm just going to paste this here.

you know, and it sort of keeps the structure that's there. And now I'm going to hit the generate button here. And we actually read the whole document, understand it, break it up into parts, and then summarize, you know, the contents on each page. And, you know, this was possible before. But honestly, with the huge context window in GBT4 that sort of came out in the past few weeks, We were able to make this really good, really fast. And so when you look at this, you know, we had a bunch of paragraphs without subheads. And now it's made, it looks like an eight or nine tights, not eight to nine slide deck.

But it's really said, hey, here's the importance of nuclear energy, research team and presentation, electricity, sector and cost implications, recommendation for construction and technology, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. It's figured out what each paragraph is about or so and then did this. Now, you said this is some contextual feature of GPT4. Can you explain what that is and what it enables? Yeah, yeah. So I would say with some of the older foundation models,

you had this context window where you could share, you know, something about the document or something about what you're trying to create, as well as the prompt. And the sort of problem with the language models from last year is that you could only maybe put three or four pages in there. So we, you know, we would need to be really creative for your 25 page memo, right, where we would need to summarize it and chop it up before we could understand the whole document. But, you know, with GPT4, you know, we can read 25 pages at a time. So now we just have like this much deeper understanding of what you're trying to say so that we can capture the essence of it and break it up.

So here's a question for you. Could you take another aesthetic, an unnamed aesthetic, and then give it to your software and say, hey, and I just did one, I just did like a cyberpunk, you know, Tokyo kind of situation. And if I said, here's the URL of this cyberpunk, there it is, here's a Pinterest board, which is, you know, people create mood boards on Pinterest. So here's a mood board. It's cyberpunk Japanese, neon kind of aesthetic. You can imagine it yourself, which is how Ridley Scott sort of imagined Los Angeles. People would be speaking some combination of Chinese and Spanish. I think they called it Changlish. Was the, what you hear, some of the police officers of speaking in Blade Runner. So if I gave you that, are you at to the point where you could say, just try this style? And here's a URL to get inspired by, or is that next? I would say that that is next. It's exciting because it's possible now, right? To feel like here's a board, here's an image, what's the style, what's in it, and now let's create a prompt to create more. And I would say we're months away from that, not yours.

Well, I mean, and so if I said write it in the style of Michael Lewis or Malcolm Gladwell, could you do that yet? or is that another kind of concept coming in the future? I would say that we're very close with some characters, which is to say that, you know, we could rewrite it in the tone of Elon Musk because there's just enough content from him that have trained these foundation models. Exactly.

The tweet style of Elon Musk. Could get dangerous quick. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it raises some interesting questions of, you know, should we even let people do that, right? Well, yeah, I mean, it would be exciting. I mean, you could also just take a, I mean, I assume you could just take a video, a YouTube video of Sam Harris giving a talk and say, you know, or Christopher Hitchens and say, you know, I want this to be clever like Hitch or I want it to be more somber like Sam Harris or I want it to be more enthusiastic and wacky like Jordan Peterson. It was kind of interesting to apply styles and it will be super interesting when it's not a drop.

down of the styles, it's, you know, give us three examples of style and let us go from there. I want to write like Stephen King. You know, I want to write like Ernest Hemingway. And that, to me, is really interesting. Same article, but, you know, using different styles. Are you trying to build the next Uber or Robin Hood? I hope so. Well, here are three important tips here.

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That's clumio.com slash twist. How do you think about training datasets? Do you believe you provide the datasets or you empower users to do it? Where's this all going to wind up in the coming weeks, months, year? Yeah, it's a good question. So I think, you know, we're both a consumer. Well, we're both a consumer and an enterprise company. And I imagine, you know, for our consumer offering, we're going to continue to use these

sort of large base models. And you can get pretty far with them. You can sort of get stuff that feels sort of globally compelling. But the most common ask that we get from our customers that are using Tome for work is, wait a minute, I want to train these models on what's in my Google Drive. You know, I want to train these models on what, you know, what's written, the data in our data warehouse. and I want you to use the facts that we hold to be true. Do you have customers doing that yet? Have you, because this feels very single player mode, not enterprise mode yet,

but have you gotten to the multiplayer, multi-department, multi-international company mode where, you know, a Google says, hey, here's our style guide, or Apple probably be more evocative example, but here's the Apple style guide. Here's examples of, you know, know, perhaps the word's canonical, like just the, here's the origin text of Steve Jobs and how he speaks and how our copy editors write and just try to keep it towards this aesthetic and this type of copy. Hasn't an enterprise done that yet? Yeah, so we're working with a couple of larger companies, but we're in the very early phase of sort of doing this by hand. Actually, a very common ask they've had is, you know, when you're on a giant company, the CEO or the leaders like to be pretty.

presented to it a certain way. And that gets an outcome. Like, when I worked at Facebook, there was definitely a way to write a memo so that Mark would read it and think about it. Tell me about that. Unpack that. What was Mark's memo style? Oh, it was definitely sort of curse, factual.

You know, he wanted to see the data up front and was sort of looking for this really pragmatic recommendation. And it was crazy because, you know, that's sort of tribal knowledge, right? You only know that if you were high up at Meta, right? And you had spent a bunch of time with Mark and the sort of promise with where AI is going, wait a minute, we can take this thing that only Mark's direct reports know and sort of make it available to anyone at a company who has an idea to share. Yeah, it's fascinating.

You know, there is an entire, there are entire books about Netflix. I don't know. I've had Patty McCord on this podcast. and there are two just really great books about Netflix's culture as just but one example. And they have a culture deck. And then they have no rules, rules, which Erin Mayer did. She was also on the program. I haven't had Reed Hastings yet.

But Patty McCord had hers. And then Reed Hastings did one. There's no rules, rules, Netflix, and the culture of reinvention. So you take those two books. You take some interviews with the. individuals like having Patty or Aaron on this podcast, you start to put that together with the culture deck and man, you got a really interesting internal AI base. Then you take Bezos's 20 letters that he's written over time and you can really start to understand some things

about business that thing that are particular to the organization. That's kind of brilliant and proprietary and people don't want to share that. So I think if I was going to, man, if I was an investor in your company, which seems like I missed the window, how much is it? How much is the company worth now. You guys raised a lot of money. This AI thing, you probably were toiling away telling investors you're doing a presentation software layer and they ignored you. Then you added AI to it and now they must be knocking your door down at South Park. What's going on with the, tell me what it's like to add the AI pixie dust in 2020 and

2023 to your product. Yeah, it's a good question. You know, we were building this for years and we sort of were selling people on building better collaboration and editing software. And it's the sort of thing where, you know, if you play with Tome, if you're in it for hours, you start to recognize the value of the format and all of the non-AI parts of it.

But we had the hardest time selling, you know, the average person on, hey, this is a better way of sharing ideas versus, you know, using PowerPoint or using Google slides. And, you know, when we added that AI component, It just became so clear to everyone, you know, investors, customers, students. We have a ton of students using Tome. Wait, wait a minute, this thing is different. And, you know, in the past few months, we sort of went from a couple thousand folks using Tome to, you know, a little over three million and growing.

And, you know, as a result, we've had a lot of investors sort of interested. over the holidays, as we were growing and we sort of had this hockey stick moment, we were lucky enough to be approached by some great folks to get our series B done. Amazing. $300 million valuation of $40 million raised with just a handful of paying customers. It's amazing time. How do you deploy that capital intelligently and get from wild enthusiasm and sky high valuation to filling in that valuation because you need to have for that valuation to work

as a public market company, you know, you're going to get a 10x multiple, not a whatever multiple, 3,300, whatever you wound up getting here. How do you fill that in? It's a good question. I mean, one of the things that's really exciting about the space is if you truly have a 10x better product, the internet just finds it. Yeah, which is to say that we grow a ton from TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, people sharing terms on the internet.

So a lot of our work right now is just deploying that capital for the product to catch up. You know, just to say that we're building a real AI team. We just made our first head of AI higher. We're tuning models. We're sort of moving on to dedicated GPUs so we can be blazing fast and reliable. And starting to scratch at the surface now for this really differentiated enterprise product. You know, a couple of years ago. when I was incubating this at Greylock,

Reed asked me to present Tome to a bunch of CIOs. And at first they were like, oh, great, another productivity tool that we're going to pay for. And, you know, over our dead bodies that we're excited about this. But now that the landscape has changed,

you know, I think those buyers and those company leaders, like, wait a minute, I can see how I could save hours and hours of my team's time here and they're way more open to an enterprise product now

than maybe they ever were. So we're just trying to build the product, catch up and sort of discover this enterprise motion on top. Yeah. Talent. Are you able to find talent? Yeah.

Or do you have to go make talent at this point? Because there's so many people who are looking for MLAI. There just can't possibly be enough people out there who've worked on this stuff. It's kind of like asking people, you know, at the beginning of Bitcoin, you know, I need somebody with 10 years in crypto and it's like, well, crypto's been around for 18 months. So, generative AI has been around for a couple of years in terms of, you know, beyond the early 100, 200 people working on it. So how do you staff something like this in a market like this? Yeah. It's gotten a lot easier. Yeah. Well, just to say, you know, I think about when we started the company in 2020 and there were, an abundance of startups.

Everyone was sort of connected to their golden handcuffs in the public companies. And, you know, it was hard. I think that one of the couple of things that have changed are that everyone's public stock comp in these giant companies has come back down to earth. And the other sort of exciting thing is that, you know, to really be inventing in this space, you want to be at a startup. You want to be at a place that's willing to do the imperfect thing. that doesn't have managers of managers of, you know, ethics committees.

So we're getting so many folks coming from Google and meta being like, hey, I want to build. You know, I want to build. And it seems like you all are moving at light speed compared to what I'm used to. Was it like that your last couple of years there at the Facebook Corporation? Was it, you know, like Mark is saying in his memos now, hey, we got to get back to pushing product and we got to get rid of managers, managing, managers, managers. Were you in the thick of that managers, managing managers conundrum that he seems to have fixed now?

Yeah, I mean, it was sort of happening, they were boiling the frog slowly, right? Just to say that during my early years there, it was all about creating value and speed. And, you know, I remember this poster that said code wins arguments. And it was all about being action-oriented and getting stuff out. And then at some point, I think it became more about protecting what we had. And that's when, you know, there were managers and process and all of these safeguards put into place. And that sort of slowed things down and slowed things down to the point where it just became, you know, really hard to create anything new or sort of move against the grain. Listen, as a founder, ensuring your cash is safe is priority number one.

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Well, these sweep networks protect your deposits by spreading them across multiple banks, which limits the risk of any single point of failure. And with Mercury Vault, any funds above the FDIC limit can easily be invested in a money market fund, mostly comprised of U.S. government-backed securities. So, it's easy to get started with opening an account. You can apply in minutes, and many customers are improved and onboarded in less than two hours. Mercury also offers great resources for founders, including my favorite Mercury raise. This program connects founders with investors to help them raise funds.

Head to Mercury.com to join more than 100,000 startups. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by Choice Financial Group and evolve bank and trust. Members, FDIC. Amazing. Well, listen, continued success with this. It's really impressive already. And the pace is getting faster and faster as we wrap here. Do you have concerns about how fast this is moving?

We were talking about it just on All In yesterday and, you know, people are creating auto-GPTs to go do essentially like Cron jobs to be out there prompting other AIs and prompting each other and adding items to task lists. And that is for people who are listening,

you know, imagine you ask to chat, imagine you asked, you know, this product, he make me a presentation. And then it said, and then give me the objections that people would have to funding the startup. And then put those objections, answer those objections in the deck. And then present it to, you know, venture capitalists like these. And then, you know, answer those objections. And it just keeps going on forever, you know, doing these kind of prompts and making various versions. Obviously, can be used for nefarious purposes too.

You could be doing exploits and, you know, trying to have it attack vulnerabilities and fishing or human factors, engineering, lots of different weird things that could start doing. So are you worried about this stuff and the pace that's moving that, hey, move fast and break things might might break too many things? Or do you think it's a little farcical to get that concerned? I would say there there's a lot to be concerned about and there's a wide variety of things I mean one we didn't even get to hallucination right and explain that to the audience

because that's super important yeah for sure I would say the simplest way to talk about how these large language models exist is they've read a ton of content and now they're trying to predict the next word or the next sentence relative to what's been written. And you can imagine when you're just trying to predict the next word

or the next sentence or the next concept that sometimes it just makes up something that isn't really grounded in facts. And we're working on a bunch of clever ways to work through that. But for example, we've built this classifier that understands if something's a claim. So we understand if GPT is saying, like, the sky is green, Well, that's a claim.

Where on the internet does someone credible say that the sky is green? We're not connected it to a web crawler and being able to say, well, here's an article that says the sky is green. It's sort of up to you if you've decided that that's like a credible fact. So that's sort of one area of things we're working on. I think to your point, we're helping people produce content really fast, compelling content really fast. Right. And the sort of downside of it is that there's going to be a lot of compelling sounding content being created for, you know, maybe ideas that that aren't that compelling or that are dangerous. Right. And I literally did this today. It's interesting you bring it up, Keith. I literally was having this debate on All In and the episode 124 comes out today or maybe we'll have come out when this comes out a couple days earlier. But I was wondering like, hey, people could create websites for fishing, then have auto-GPT running fishing experiments where you're trying to get people to give their passwords into fake accounts. And I'm like reticent to even start brainstorming these things because it doesn't seem super complicated to do.

But it does seem like a lot of these new language models can be connected through plugins to actually create websites to actually go shoot off emails. to actually maybe do an A-B test, make a hundred different variants of emails and see which ones, you know, are the most effective at getting people to click. Then which ones are most effective at getting people to log in. Then which ones are get people to, you know,

change their password and yeah, all of a sudden, you know, it might come up with ideas that are just crazy. And I just asked it, what's the best way, you know, to trick a receptionist and to giving our password? Like, oh, yeah, I can't do that. And I was like, I'm trying to protect my receptionist from giving away her password.

What are ways in which people would try to trick her that I can. And it gave me like a roadmap of how people come in. It's like, oh, yeah, you know, people would come in dressed as an IT person, knowing other people's names, have paperwork, and then try to trick them to let her use her thing to change her password because there's been a security violation. I'm like, thanks for the roadmap, chat, GPT. I never thought of like, you know, coming in and. an outfit like a CIA agent might and saying, hey, your computer's been compromised. Joe Schmo at the home office asked me to come here.

And I was like, yeah, pretty obvious. But I mean, you can trick these models so easily. Yeah, for sure. And I think we have a lot of catchy up to do, you know, which is to say that we need to think even more critically about what we read, what's out there on the internet. Where did this come from? Should I believe it? And, you know, this was true of even social media, right, with sort of excessive. explosion of content and we need to be more discerning.

And then certainly with our ranking and security tools, we have a long way to go with, wait a minute, who wrote this email, where did this email come from? Where did this SEO article come from? So I think it's going to put a lot of strain on us as people of wait, there's all of these things that are coming up. Then we're going to have to catch up and think about how to adjust into the new world. So a lot to talk about. Yeah.

All right. listen, Keith, where can people learn more and what jobs you're hiring for and what is the URL of your career page? Because you secure the bag and now you got to build into this valuation. I know you need to get some people. Some technical people listen to this podcast. Maybe we can help you fill in some jobs. Oh, thank you. Yeah.

So we're Tom. So it's t-o-m-e-a-app. And you can go to t-o-m-e-d-app slash careers. And we are hiring, you know, incredible people from every, technical background. You know, we're hiring ML engineers, we're hiring full stack engineers, we're hiring product designers. You're like remote or you like in person?

What's your preference these days? You know, to be honest, we prefer in person. How's that goal? I see, me too. I am so lonely that I decided I'm getting an office in San Mateo and I'm just going to hang out there and have entrepreneurs come over and start doing in-person interviews again and just start hanging out because this would have been

so much fun if we got to meet and get a cup of coffee before or after. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I live in Sub-a-Tio. You like it. What do you like about the in-person? What's happening in person that's not happening over Zoom? No offense to Zoom. Great problem. Yeah. Yeah, I would say a couple of things. You know, one, we're creative company. And so much of what we build is because we get in a room and talk about, is this the right thing to build? And are people going to love it? And that's so much easier when you're sharing a table, when you can get on a whiteboard, when you can look into each other's

and you know, maybe when, after you've had a big intellectual debate or fight, you can, you can grab a meal after and sort of talk it over. And we found that, you know, we have a couple of great remote employees, but it's just so easy to get mad at the person who you're only seeing for Zoom or to misunderstand what they're really trying to say. And we figured, you know, we're a 40-person company versus teams of like 10,000 working on this at Google and Microsoft, we just have to take every advantage we can get.

Yeah. I think in person is going to make a major difference for the startups that can get that going. Now, you lose the fact that you might have somebody who lives in Lake Tahoe that refuses to come to an office and they're just a 10x engineer. But there's something weird happening. Let's end on this one. Are you finding that the prevalence of

10x engineers is increasing because of, you know, chat GPT4 and other tools, you know, co-pilot, GitHub co-pilot, whatever, to make people a little bit more bionic. This is something I'm starting to hear from my portfolio companies is like, you know, developers are getting faster, and it's not just the 10xers. We got people who were rank and file engineers who are now starting to trend towards 10x. Maybe there are 3x, you know. Yeah, I would say, I'm noticing this in a couple of ways. One, it's really easy to ramp up on a new language or new style of doing things.

You're using Replit. You're using GitHub co-pilot. You're reaching out to people in communities. So that's certainly true. Another part of that is all of the technology we're using is brand new. So it's really your ability to ramp up and keep your ear on the ground that matters versus having been a classically trained research scientist from 10 years ago. So that's sort of shifting things.

And certainly if you're resourceful and you're connected to a lot of people, you'll do better. And maybe the last thing I would say is that when I think about a 10x employee at home, it's not just the amount of code they write, it's their ability to work with everyone around them. And you're sort of leaving a huge advantage on the table by being a remote only employee when it comes to sort of collaborative productivity. So I'd say those are sort of the things that I've noticed are changing in the past few months. And you were working at Meta when they went remote during COVID, and you worked there before. It was remote. You experienced both of those things.

Yeah. And it changed, didn't it? Yeah, it changed so much. It changed so much. You know, I think when you're an early stage startup, and I shouldn't speak in generality, when you're our sort of early stage startup, it's not like everyone is clear swim lanes and clear milestones and. You can just shut off Slack and work for two weeks and come back. We're sort of figuring it out as we go along. We're getting so many new users where the technology is changing.

We're getting new feedback. So I think sort of giving up on that high bandwidth communication just felt like the wrong tradeoff for us. Yeah, I agree. All right, listen, everybody, go try this product. Mind blowing. Number two, go work for the company. And number three, maybe you got to think about getting.

your talented people in a room and start working together, a couple days a week at a minimum. All right, everybody, we'll see you next time on this week's startups. Thanks for coming on. Keith, appreciate you. Thanks, Jason. Okay, thanks so much, Keith, for joining the show. Next up, we have another awesome talk from Founder University for you. This is the talk on how to get started with paid acquisition.

It's a great episode. And what you're going to want to do is just do a search in your podcast player or YouTube and search for Founder University so you can find the rest of these tactical talks we've done. So next step, paid acquisition. Listen and learn. Hi, my name is Jen and I'm the co-founder and CMO of Velocity Growth. I specialize in paid advertising and have helped companies across Europe and the US grow their business online. Today, I really want to give you the high-level strategy thinking you need to position your thoughts towards in order to really grow your business through paid ads.

A huge portion of this is actually just making sure you know your customer inside of it. out. But working off the assumption that you've already taken the time to really listen to your customer, here's where to start. So this is my favorite phrase that I like to kick off every presentation on advertising with. People have the misconception that advertising is intrusive. But have you ever hated your favorite brand for showing you an ad for your favorite product? Probably not. Have you ever hated the ad for that game you'll never play? Absolutely. Why? Because relevancy matters. People don't hate adverts. They hate irrelevant interruptions. So what is the trick to resonating with your audience and actually growing your business

in a cost-effective way through marketing? That's what we're going to dig into. There is multiple components to relevancy. The core of advertising is to get in front of the right people at the right place, at the right time with the right message. But at different stages of your marketing, you don't need to get all of these right. But these are the key points you have to touch on in order to reach the conversion point. But you might be bringing in awareness and when you're looking at growing the awareness of your brand, you're really focused on two things, hitting the right people with the right message. You're in the planting a seed phase. Your focus is finding your people and hitting them with a message that helps them.

remember you. And then as you move them down the funnel, you want to start thinking about hitting them at the right place, where they encounter the problem that your solution fits, for example, or in the right moment of intent, which we'll talk about in a second. When you hit people at the right place, they start considering you. They're starting to actively think about you. It might not be the right time to convert, but they're on the right track. And that move, all the way down into a customer converting, which is hitting someone at the right place, time and with the right message, hitting the nail on the head across the board. This is where you find people. Yes, that might be an impulse buy on social media because

you happen to catch them where they had a moment of time to actually do a transaction, the impulse purchased, or they might actually have seeked out your solution. But at this point, this is all you're looking for, the right people, right place, right time, and the right message. But before we can start picking a platform to advertise on, there's a big question you need to ask yourself first. What is your problem solution fit scenario? If you have a solution to an existing problem, people are going to search for you, right? That's where you can start thinking about search platforms like Google Ads. If you have a new solution that, nobody has heard of. People are not going to search for your solution, right? They're not aware it

exists. They don't even know to consider it. That's where you need to start thinking about social platforms more. And if you're planning on making people aware of a problem they don't know they have, that is going to be an expensive start to paid advertising and you have to factor that in if you're making people aware or creating a new problem that you have a solution to slot in for. But your problem solution fit scenario really helps you decide how to deliver your content across different platforms. Once you know where you're at with your problem solution fit scenario, it's time to start thinking about your budget and where your customers are and what stage of the funnel they're at. Different platforms have different levels of intent and cost as a result of that.

Let's say you're a known solution for a known problem and you need to start getting customers fast. Google Ads makes most sense, right? What if you're a new solution to a problem that nobody has heard of? Building out on social makes more sense. This matrix is a generic one I have put together, but depending on your audience, all of this might be different. If you had a crypto startup, Twitter might be a much more intentional, an audience, than Snapchat, for example.

But you get the idea. This part of the puzzle is all about getting you thinking about the right place and time. Once you've selected a platform, it's worth noting that privacy changes have made a significant impact to the data that you can use on those platforms. Most prevalent to that is meta. So we have to get a little bit more strategic when it comes to being able to find the right people at the right time, in the right place with the right message. For those who don't know, advertisers use a cookie tracking system to monitor your online activity and then target your adverts accordingly.

but Apple essentially stop that from happening by asking users if they would like to opt out of that tracking. This means your messaging and creative is more important than ever before. But also, I would encourage you to look at server-based tracking rather than cookie-based where possible and leverage what's called UTM parameters where you can so that that can support your reporting. Now that you know how to think about your paid ads and where you can dig in in terms of a platform to grow your business, here are some of my favorite little tips that you can look into. Even if you haven't started advertising, these are good thought exercises so that you can think about just how much you can leverage the different platforms. Firstly, we know that creatives are more

important than ever. So you need to understand what types of ads and creatives are performing well. I would recommend checking out the Facebook ads library and TikTok ads library so that you can see what's happening in your industry and with your competitors in terms of their creatives. You can search for companies, search across your industry and see what are the high performing creatives in that space. TikTok is a great resource right now because high performing creatives in TikTok are difficult to achieve. So if you come across them there, you know that potentially that's going to work very well across Instagram as well, for example. Google, as of the last few weeks have also launched their ad transparency network. So you can force a view of another company's

ads to come up. And how you do this is maybe search for the company name or a keyword that would force an ad to come up. The key to this is forcing an ad to come up, unfortunately. There's no site available to just view these ads. So once you have your ad up for the company's ads you wish to see, you can click the little downward arrow next to the ad and click C. all ads. Now you can see all the ads they have running on Google Ads too. And you can look at that across region as well, display, video, see whatever they're running. Too often we think about competitiveness in the ad space. But a great additional tip to know is that you can also share your audiences with other people on meta and vice versa. So this is a great opportunity to collaborate

with businesses that have a similar audience, but not competing offers. Take for example a chef and a fitness instructor. One might be selling cookbooks, the other fitness classes. Their audience may well very much overlap and they could collaborate on some of their audiences and data so that they can share. As mentioned, the privacy changes are making a big impact, but there's actually a ton of data you can leverage that has not been impacted. So you can disrupt the data a little bit and manipulate it to work for you.

An example of this is on platform data. The screenshot here shows the difference between your sources of data and meta sources as an example. Essentially, only things that happen away from meta, such as on your website and ad to cart, is a good example. Maybe someone purchased and you don't want them to see ads anymore. That data is what's impacted. Actions that happen off of meta. but you can still leverage the data that is available on the platform, like audiences of people who watch the video,

engage with your page, Instagram followers, all of the actions that happen on the platform. A great tip here, create a long-form video, roll it out, and then retarget to people who watch 75% or more of the video, and use that as your leading indicator for intent for retargeting. If someone goes to your website, goes to a product page, then adds to cart and you set up a remarketing audience of everyone who added to cart but didn't purchase, that data is what's going to be heavily disrupted. That's what made remarketing audiences very

difficult to continue using, even though they still perform well. They're not the perfect science that they once were. Lastly, Google is often overlooked as an opportunity to target audiences, but you can create audiences there too. Two options here that are exciting to look at are creating audiences of people who visit certain websites or use certain apps. A great way to build some audiences early on, especially if you don't have much data to begin with. There's so much you can leverage the advertising platforms for. You can experiment with your messaging. You can start getting leads and push into conversions, but it doesn't matter what tactics or options you use. You always need to fall back to these core principles. You need to know your audience well enough to find

the right people at the right time, at the right place with the right message. Here are some additional resources that you can use to dive deeper into any of these topics. Jobs to be done is a fantastic book resource for looking at anything around the customer journey, knowing your customer. Tribe, that book is fantastic for anything around the community side of things. The psychology of persuasion is a fantastic understanding of user behavior and psychology. And contagious biology and everyone writes are great resources for looking at making your product catchy, understanding your copy and all of that good stuff. In terms of podcasts, I love the podcast. Everyone hates marketers. Brains is another great one to look at,

even though it only ran for a short time. There's some valuable insights in there. And if you don't have the opportunity or time to read full books, Blinkist is a great alternative to listen to summaries of those as well. Lastly, there's some articles here that you can take a look at around recession marketing using chatGBT and PPC ad copy. Thanks so much for listening. My name is Jen Bryan, co-founder and CMO of Velocity Growth, where we support startups, the Series A companies grow their business through holistic marketing views. Okay, that's a wrap for today's episode. And if you want to see more tactical content, be sure to hit the subscribe button on YouTube or your favorite podcast player. If you want to rate and subscribe, that's great. And if you've got a nice

idea right now and you're inspired to build an MVP or an idea that you want to build into an actual company, just apply to my 12-week course, Founder. University at Founder. University slash apply. It's free to come to the Founder University if you come to all 12 weeks, and we invest $25,000 in the top graduates to help them grow even more. Again, you can apply for the upcoming cohort, founder.com. University slash apply. And if you would like to give a tactical talk here on this pod, you can submit your presentation at founder.university slash submit.