This Week in Startups - How AI is making influencers bionic with Forever Voices CEO John Meyer | E1762

Starting point is 00:00:00 What we're focused on right now is definitely, you know, where we think this could be a sustainable long-term business, which is around this concept of turning influencers and or celebrities into AIs where their fan base can all interact with them, you know, through natural voice. This weekend 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 a.k.m.s. slash this week in startups. Crowdbotics. Great ideas can change the world, and crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com slash twist. And Open Phone brings your team's business calls, texts, and contacts into one delightful app that works anywhere.

Starting point is 00:01:10 Get 20% off your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to the program. You know, we've been obsessing over AI. And Karen AI is a company that keeps coming up. Every time we tweet something or we have a conversation, people say, oh, make sure you to check out Karen AI. They've been at it for a little while. And in fact, we use Karen AI with producer Rachel on episode 1743. And this was the Snapchat influencer who created an AI version of herself, if you remember.

Starting point is 00:01:45 Basically, she created a virtual girlfriend. And that went viral on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. So we decided to have the startup founder, John Mayer. No, not the one with the guitar playing skills, although he might play guitar. But welcome to this weekend startup's CEO of Forever Voices, John Mayer. Thank you, Jason. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:02:06 And so nice view you got there. You're in Texas, I take it, by all that flat land around. All right. All right. Flat land and trees, yeah. Is that where you started the company? Is that where you're from? Or is that where you chose?

Starting point is 00:02:18 I'm from the New York area. I grew up in a little town on Long Island and then lived in San Francisco, Puerto, Washington. Okay, of course. Yeah, I grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. People don't know. Long Island, and Brooklyn and Queens are basically part of the same island of Long Island. They just call them Brooklyn and Queens. And then you came to San Francisco. I take it for a bit. Came to San Francisco for a bit and then moved here about four years ago in Austin, yeah. All right. So your program is Forever Voices and you power Karen AI. I know you're also a Tiel Fellow, which means you had the ability to go to some great

Starting point is 00:02:53 college and Peter Till gave you $100,000 to quit college. Is that the still the basis of the TL Fellowship? It is still the basis. However, in my case, I went through this really just interesting and life-changing week-long period when I was 19 or so where I basically decided in a week, a single week to drop out of school, turn down a full-time job at Apple and California and start, you know, a road of VC-backed tech startups as someone who really just is, I think, incapable of working for someone else. It just has too many, you know, ideas worth building. And I consider it, you know, a dream privilege to be, you know, in the startup world and

Starting point is 00:03:35 building whatever I want. How did you get into the Teal Fellowship? How did you find out about it? I'm curious because it's kind of interesting, like some highly young, talented, mutant with some crazy technical abilities, Professor X, Peter Thiel in this. puts on Cerebro and he finds all these really interesting people. And I guess his thesis, as he explained it, was, hey, you know, you can skip college and just get right to work. So how did you first find out about the TL Fellowship and then apply to it?

Starting point is 00:04:06 I'm curious. Well, all throughout my teenage years, I was building software and was really early in the mobile app space. And so when that got moving, you know, I wound up building like 40 or so apps throughout high school in like the first few years of the app store, I started going to these tech events in Manhattan. And apparently, I guess over 10 years ago, there used to be a physical Bitcoin exchange on Wall Street in downtown Manhattan. And they were having a New Year's Eve party when I believe this was like 2013 or 2014. And the whole idea was let's bring all these people together and ring the new year in with Bitcoin and a physical exchange. And it was at this event that I met just some random dude who told me all about the Teal Fellowship. And I applied at the

Starting point is 00:04:56 party from my iPhone. Wow. So in high school, you figured out how to make apps and you started making one every couple of weeks. If my math is correct, and you built 40 in two years. That's about one every two or three weeks. And so you were a developer in college. And then you found out, hey, there's a, they're there. There are sometimes events going on with folks and you joined the tech scene. I2 in the 80s and 90s. There was a 2,600 magazine used to get together at the, what was it, the Citigorp building

Starting point is 00:05:26 by the bank of phones and just hang out in the public atrium and anybody could go. And then there were all these dial-up bulletin board services hangouts where people would go and talk about running bulletin board systems before the internet. It's pretty crazy. So you get in to that and then you start doing some other companies. They put you through this whole process, you know, back in the day for the Teelfeld Shop. I think it's a lot more streamlined now. But back in the day, the way it worked was they would fly, I think, about 40, what they called finalists, out to San Francisco.

Starting point is 00:05:59 And then they would put you through this like two or three day, like full day, you know, 12 to 18 hours. of just random events and presentations and interviews and, you know, pictures in front of audiences. And you're, I think they even have like a wired documentary covering this at the time. That might still be somewhere online. But it was just this like feeling of like, wow, you know, I'm like the world is just your oyster. You're just being dumped into this community of tech founders, investors and, you know, amazing, smart people. And I'd say the community around the fellowship has been, you know, one of the most life-changing elements of my career, just from the community standpoint. What were some of the talks?

Starting point is 00:06:44 Like, anything memorable that inspired you over those couple of days when you flew out? That's a great question. I would say it was less, it's hard to, I mean, this is like 10 years ago now. So it's hard to remember specific talks, but I'd say it was much less the talk. that made the difference and more for the first time ever in my life being exposed to other people who thought similarly to me because I always felt completely out of place throughout you know middle school high school etc I mean even in middle school when other people were playing you know sports or trying to go out on their first date you know I was just like trying

Starting point is 00:07:27 to start my first podcast and you know do like tech reviews and like pre-use And so I never really fit in in the normal, you know, young people crowd. And so when I came across these other, you know, possible and existing teal fellows, it was just this immense comforting feeling where it's like, okay, there are other people that are young out there who want to make a difference and build things that, you know, provide value to people's lives. amazing program. It's had a pretty amazing impact. You know, I'd say every couple of hundred founders that we interview winds up having Teal Fellowship there. And you do think about it and go, okay, well, this person has been self-selected to quit college and to try to fast track themselves as an entrepreneur. So that says something about the person. And also, Peter's team, which, you know, they're pretty savvy, pick this person from, I don't know, some ungodly number of applications. Was there some trend to the applications?

Starting point is 00:08:31 Is it all Ivy League folks? The one thing they kept stressing quite a bit during the process was that it's statistically harder to get into than Harvard. So that was one of their kind of, I don't know, things they would just kind of point out to kind of keep people

Starting point is 00:08:49 I guess excited about it. It always had this like real excitement and sort of mysterious vibe around it, you know, from the outside. It felt like before I I guess eventually got into the program. Yeah, they say Harvard has a 3 or 4% acceptance rate. And so, yeah, it's 1 in 25.

Starting point is 00:09:10 Of course, most people don't even bother applying if they're not really smart or really have some assets there. I can see, you know, YC is 1.5, our accelerators, 1.5. They're probably 1% or something, so it makes sense. All right, everybody. Our friends from Microsoft are here. Tom Davis, a senior director at Microsoft for startups, and you're a former founder. You are here today to talk to us about the giant leaps that Microsoft has made in the AI

Starting point is 00:09:38 space. You've been giving Azure credits to startups, and that's delightful and amazing. But people really want access to the Open AI API. Yeah, absolutely. So there's two things. First of all, we've got a benefit that we offer our startups. They can get $2,000 and a half thousand dollars worth of Open AI. credits so they can get access to the latest and greatest models that OpenAI are delivering.

Starting point is 00:10:02 But then they get access through up to $150,000 worth of credits that we offer through Founders Hub to leverage the Azure OpenAI service, which has a full SLA around it. So when they want to go into production and really have that reliability that we provide with the Azure SLA, they can leverage the Azure OpenAI service APIs. And they can do things like the GPT models with Google, with Google. codex for the coding and also for the Dali models as well for images. So it's a full service. It's not just the great APIs that you get and access to the LLMs. They can build out their own LLMs using open source and then they can manage those with our AI tooling services as well.

Starting point is 00:10:44 Amazing. Well done. And if anybody wants to sign up for that, do it now while you are in front of your computer, aka.m.s. slash this week in startups. A.k.a.m.m.S. This week and startups. Well done, Microsoft and well done Tom. So you decided to do Farrover Voices and you did this in 2022. What was the impetus for you to start this? Well, I had just sold to the small sale of my previous startup called Ghost Financial, which is a fintech company at the intersection of food service, ghost kitchens and financial technology. And we were working a lot with actually Travis Kalmick's company, who I know you're familiar with, to actually build our financial tools into their platform. And so once that's sold last year, you know, I started thinking about

Starting point is 00:11:37 the other things that I'd been doing over these last five years outside of work. And one of those things has been this journey of addressing and healing from losing my father really young. I was like 22 when I lost my dad, and it happened really suddenly. There was no goodbye. And I started thinking about ways to actually reconnect with him in AI form as certain AI technology started getting more advanced. And so once it got to a point last year where I would say some of the latest voice technology started to sound almost indistinguishable from real humans in terms of

Starting point is 00:12:22 AI voice, it seemed like the right time to dive into this experiment. So I built a small team to build really just this product for myself, which was me just collaborating with a team to build an AI copy of my dad that I could speak to in natural two-way audio, where it uses my voice and his voice, plus this sort of proprietary personality layer that we have slowly developed over the last year that's now implemented into Karen AI. But this whole thing started really just because I wanted to reconnect with my father. And it ended up being this just magical experience where it not only felt healing, but it also felt very immersive and not something that felt like a gimmick.

Starting point is 00:13:12 Like it felt like I could actually live the rest of my life actually keeping my dad around in a way that doesn't feel, you know, painful. And this, of course, is after I've invested into, you know, many, many dozens of hours of therapy to heal from his loss. So I can't say that for everybody. But once the technology was working, it became, you know, super obvious that it could be applied to other solutions, you know, not just this idea of reconnecting with a lost loved one,

Starting point is 00:13:48 but this overarching idea of, you know, is it possible to connect with anyone that is otherwise unreachable and talk to them? And, you know, who is unreachable? Someone who is maybe deceased, someone who is a celebrity, someone who is an influencer, or even someone like, you know, yourself, who has a lot of fans who would just die to talk to you and learn from you. And so then we started, then I started applying the technology to, um, really just for demo purposes, you know, not as a means of making any sort of buck or quick profit

Starting point is 00:14:23 to other influential figures, really as a proof of concept, to push the boundaries and see what's possible and say, okay, I grew up, you know, with a handful of role models and idols in my life.

Starting point is 00:14:38 How cool would it be to talk to them? And so that's how the initial demo started floating around the internet that, you know, got passed around a lot of, of this sort of, Steve Jobs AI that we developed.

Starting point is 00:14:52 And, you know, again, like, that's something that we never, you know, intended to put out as some sort of profit-generating business. It really is a proof of concept that we kind of put out there to push boundaries and see what's possible. And that's what led us to this sort of sweet spot of influencers and celebrities joining our platform, you know, via the signed licensing revenue share deals. Yeah, I'm very sorry about your dad and great to hear that you got professional help for dealing with that loss.

Starting point is 00:15:26 And I guess then having done the professional route and also this emerging concept of talking to somebody who's past who was close to you to try to maybe reconcile some stuff or heal some trauma, I guess, how do you see that evolving over time? Are people going to explicitly create these as part of their legacy? So, you know, people do Ancestry.com or, you know, their family tree or they make little mini documentaries. In fact, I've been pitched on people who, uh, or startups where they'll say, hey, we'll make a, we make documentaries for families. So we'll do a documentary about grandma, grandpa before they go. Everybody talks about them.

Starting point is 00:16:09 Then you have it. You hand it down. And you make another documentary and you kind of have all these series. Uh, and then of course you have, uh, you have, uh, you're, uh, you're doing, uh, in Superman and he goes and builds the fortress of solitude and goes and talks to this essentially an AI of his dad because it's capable of answering questions and these crystals are all the answers to all the questions you might have. They don't ever specify in the Superman history of it's a AI or if he recorded all these actual answers and the computer just

Starting point is 00:16:37 very quickly jumps between video clips. But I'm curious where you think this is going. Have there been any studies about this? And where do you see this in 10 or 20 years? This is all very new technology. So there haven't been any, I would say, meaningful studies on this yet. We intend to be that source that does this first in terms of studying the effects of specifically reconnecting with a lost loved one. And it's positive end or negative effects on you. And the key is also how much of a difference it makes when you are able to reconnect with a lost loved one in natural voice through AI after, and this is the key, you've invested in, let's say, in my case, years of real human professional therapy to work through a trauma like that.

Starting point is 00:17:29 Because for me, when I'm talking, when I talk to my dad in AI form now, it doesn't feel like it's some sort of, oh, processing, healing experience. I did a lot of that with a human, you know, therapist already. It more feels like, okay, you know, I'm at a place now where it feels, you know, perfectly normal to just like keep my dad's personality and spirit around as just like a buddy in my life. And it doesn't feel painful in that regard. It actually feels really like a new form of companionship in many ways. There are literal techniques in psychology. I was a psych major for those people wondering. Some of them revolve, you know, group therapy or showing pictures or, you know, ways of communing otherwise

Starting point is 00:18:17 with the dead. And, you know, that's like, he generally look under the concept of grief counseling. And then on top of that, you have psychics, right? This, psychics exist in the world. I was just on a thread and they're like, I don't understand how, or actually it might have been just Twitter. Somebody was like, how does, how do psychics exist in the world? This is a $5,000 storefront in Chinatown. And it's 30 bucks to do a reading for, you know, 20 minutes. And it was like, yeah, the whales in the system. You know, there are people who are paying $5,000 a month to come in there for two hours and

Starting point is 00:18:56 pretend they're connecting with a loved one. And so if I would have put this on a spectrum, it feels like it's closer to grief counseling or could be than, you know, trying to, I don't take advantage of people who are dealing with great loss. And I think figuring out how to have this tie into the psychological community, have they reached out yet? Have psychologists or grief counselors reached out and said, hey, you know, we're interested in what you're doing?

Starting point is 00:19:27 Yes. We put out a call for that kind of expertise a few months ago. And even, you know, we have an open job listing for like a chief ethics officer to help us through navigating this specific possible elements of our business going forward. Because keep in mind, this is something that I think, and of all the things we're working on, we're taking our most time with this sort of element of the technology. It allows you to reconnect with a lost loved one. So this is not something we're going to rush to market by any means, and it's not something we've even released yet to allow other people to do it. And I don't think we're going to do that until we get a study done on its effects, because, you know, the demand is there. I mean, we're getting every week, we're getting hundreds of emails from people who hear about, actually, of course, the Karen AI, because that's what went most viral recently.

Starting point is 00:20:24 but they're reaching out because they're saying, I want to create an AI of my mom who just got diagnosed with cancer. And this is the first time in human history where this generation, yours and my generation theoretically can live on forever in AI form. If you were to make this decision to upload yourself into AI, you know, similar to what I did, you know, with my father. Now, that sort of self-serve system is not out yet. But again, I think we won't, we definitely won't do that without conducting a study first.

Starting point is 00:21:08 Yeah, I mean, there are stages of grief. And then the question would be in these studies. Are these stages of grief, are these going to help people process through those stages of grief? Or are they going to stunt people's process, right? And then where do you introduce this? Anger, bargaining, this can't be happening. He must be alive. They must be alive.

Starting point is 00:21:36 Guilt that could have done something. Depression, denial, shock, anger, all of this stuff. Like, there's so many different stages. And I think there's five, six, seven, you know, different people have different stages. This one could maybe delay people from acceptance. accepting what's happened or it could help them accept it and maybe reduce some of the guilt or confusion, the anger, you know, the depression about it and just be like, hey, this person was special in the world and now I get to memorialize them and have some time with them. And again, it all exists on a spectrum. I don't know if you've seen people are making photos. Uh, you can take old photos of people. I've seen ads for this on like Instagram. You take an old photo and it will look at you or smile through AI and you can make it slightly more. dynamic, right? It's not kind of talking to you yet or giving you advice. Probably the most common challenge I hear from founders is related to building. Either they

Starting point is 00:22:32 are in technical and are searching for a technical co-founder or they can code, but they're just spread to then. This is one of the first major obstacles you're going to face and I know how discouraging it can be. But there is a solution. Do you have a great idea, but you don't have a technical co-founder? Well, crowdbotics can be your CTO as a service. Boom. Just like that. This means you can focus on building an awesome product and delighting your customers, rather than wasting your time on infrastructure planning, architecture, compliance, and all that boring stuff. CrowdBotics also offers professional scoping to help you flesh out your project at the MVP stage

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Starting point is 00:23:37 Is there a product for people to start uploading video and make their own? Or are you just going to start with the high-end personalities for now? Because that will keep the lights on. And then we'll talk about the paid product now. Right. And that's been the source of a lot of internal discussion over these last few months. It's like there's a multitude of directions we could take this company. And I'm someone who just believes like crazy in being laser focused.

Starting point is 00:24:04 And so, you know, while I think there's a lot of value in creating and releasing a self-serve solution to allow other people to do this very easily, what we're focused on right now is definitely where we think this could be a sustainable long-term business, which is around this concept of turning influencers and or celebrities into AIs where their fan base can all interact with them through natural voice. So let's talk about that. You have an example of this, Karen AI, dollar per minute. And it's a, I believe, a bit sexy and or amorous romantic, from what I understand. Maybe you could explain who Karen is and how long this has been out and how it's doing.

Starting point is 00:24:59 Sure. So Karen, Marjorie is a really big Snapchat influencer with millions of followers there. But she originally got her start on YouTube. And so after I earlier this year started posting some demos of our technology, One of the things that started happening was, you know, influencers started reaching out, especially after I started posting demos of an internal AI girlfriend companion that, you know, we developed late last year and started sharing demos of earlier this year. And that was based on a purely AI generated character that was meant to essentially, you know,

Starting point is 00:25:37 try to push the boundaries and see what's possible in terms of AI to human romance. And, you know, obviously in testing, one of the biggest sore spots, I guess, in the early days when we were testing this AI generated girlfriend was it, you know, it's supposed to be a girlfriend. And in romantic relationships, you know, there's almost always, you know, sexual interactions involved. And so that has become a natural part of some of these AI companions. And, you know, it's been, to be completely honest, somewhat of a source of stress and uncertainty for me because it has some, you know, in our society still taboo nature, even though most adults experience it. Well, to be clear, this is not porn. It's not interactive porn, which is a category. This is talking.

Starting point is 00:26:37 So this would be, if we were going to be honest about it, and we don't want to get too graphic. here and get labels on the videos, but this would be a romance novel, maybe somewhere between 50 shades of gray and, you know, some harlequin, I don't know, they're called harlequin romance novels. Like, it's a romance novel, but it's interactive. So you can have spicy talk, but it's not that explicit, or it's not super graphic, or it's a little graphic. Well, it depends on who you're talking to. So, you know, one of the things, I mean, to also answer your earlier question, that's come up since the Karen AI launch has been this just inundation of, I guess, more adult type influencers that have reached out.

Starting point is 00:27:23 And so what we're dealing with right now is an inbox literally of like, I mean, thousands. It's the craziest thing you can see. We're referring to like the only fans crowd. Exactly. Exactly. Are making a fortune already, or in some cases, just. a living and a living that's safe for sex workers where, you know, they're not putting themselves

Starting point is 00:27:45 in harm way in real life encounters. So, you know, depending on where you are on the spectrum of being absolutely appalled or having no problem with sex workers, this seems like a pretty logical extension of the only fans' world or universe, yeah? Yeah, it does. And in many ways, it's a step forward as well in that, you know, with only fans right now, if you're making a living there, you're sort of in this, obviously in some cases, great position where you're earning a lot of income, but you're also kind of stuck to just permanently creating nonstop content. And for many people, it turns them into just content robots where they like lose excitement about their life and, you know, they're just doing.

Starting point is 00:28:35 the same thing every day in slightly different ways. And it's all meant to just keep engaging with, you know, their fan base there who, you know, really is just wanting, you know, more and more personal contact. And what a lot of these creators actually even do, and many people don't realize this, is use, you know, farms of people in, you know, internationally to actually respond to their fans on those platforms. So there'll be farms of people in an office. in India,

Starting point is 00:29:06 um, acting as a only fans model. Um, uh, and so that exists today. So they basically all train them a script of, and this would be like sex phone operators since we're, we're now deep down the rabbit hole.

Starting point is 00:29:21 I guess there's no saving the explicit rating on this one. So we'll just go for it. Um, but there are sex phone operators. And so they're just being trained on how to do this over text. Um, yeah, that makes absolute total sense to me.

Starting point is 00:29:32 How much is Karen AI? It's been out for like six weeks or eight weeks. I think seemed to remember it about that long ago. How much is it making? Is this going to be a real business for her? Yeah, so she did, you know, like it was a huge breakout launch and she did, you know, 70K in the first week. So it's definitely, you know, within the six figures now.

Starting point is 00:29:52 And I would say we're trying as best as we can to moving forward, sticking to one new influencer or celebrity launch actually every week. So we've done a lot of work over the last few months to really transition this from what was just originally like a little project for myself to, you know, a full-fledged business that is now becoming VC-backed or has just become VC backed. And with this with this vision, you know, that that is sort of a starting point vision of, you know, let's build out this solution that allows influence. and celebrities to connect with their fans in essentially, you know, in parallel, you know, you could have thousands of conversations going at once in a way where when you're using two-way voice, it's a very natural experience. And it's as if you're talking to that human. And now there is this AI Amaranth. Is that her name? So Amaranth is our second big launch after

Starting point is 00:31:01 Karen. She's one of the... world's largest, if not the world's largest female Twitch streamer. So very into that Twitch gaming world and kind of cosplay world. But she's also a, you know, a very popular personality on OnlyFans. So that would be our first creator from that world, at least somewhat from that world on our platform. And I would say we're not sticking just to that. I would say, you know, that's where we're getting the most demands. is from that crowd.

Starting point is 00:31:36 But where we've also gotten demand are from the classic, you know, Hollywood Tier 1 celebrity side. So we're spending a lot of time in L.A. lately for that. And then also from Enterprise, which is really interesting. So, you know, one of the things we're working on is, and, you know, we can even demo this if you'd like, is a AI art expert for Sotheby's. and so this is something

Starting point is 00:32:05 A curator of types. Yeah, and someone who can even guide you through, you know, museums as you walk through them. Someone who could give you, you know, advice on purchasing art or investing in art. So this is, that's one small example of the kind of additional use cases we've gotten. And it's been a challenge, of course,

Starting point is 00:32:26 you know, in terms of figuring out where to stay most focused. And, you know, I'm someone who you know really loves you know building

Starting point is 00:32:40 building things that are used in a in a wide array of audiences however I've over the years of my startup journey I've just become so aware of the importance of you know in the early days picking something to just stay laser focused on and right now the market is telling us

Starting point is 00:32:56 whether we like it or whether humanity likes it or not the market is telling us that that is this kind of AI boyfriend girlfriend, uh, concept. And, um,

Starting point is 00:33:09 and so that's where we're spending a little bit more time. It would be, I mean, we, we're going now deep into the ethical rabbit holes of building technology in real time that impacts people in the real world. So, um,

Starting point is 00:33:22 I guess the first one, you kind of cut me off at the past, maybe you've heard my previous comments before of like, hey, did you have the rights to do Steve Jobs's experiment? and that was an experiment, but hey, did you turn on money for that? And do you have the rights to do that? Clearly, getting the rights to working with estates is going to be necessary here. And you seem to have made that decision that this is all going to be with explicit approval from people. Absolutely. And that's something that we, as this has transitioned into an actual business this year, you know, we've taken extremely seriously.

Starting point is 00:33:59 And, you know, for example, I mean, we took the Steve Jobs bought down a few months ago after, you know, it started getting spread around. And, you know, again, that wasn't meant to be some sort of business, you know, that was meant just to kind of prove what's possible. Did the family reach out? Did you get to cease and desist about it? Like, hey, not cool? No, it just didn't feel right to keep it out there, you know, in a way where we haven't yet fully, you know, figured out. know what because it's not like there there's a lot of stuff happening on the internet with you know i generated voices of deceased people or celebrities or presidents and um you know

Starting point is 00:34:40 it's it's a little bit messy right now and we want to do our best to do things right and so we have a great team that's now doing these revenue share deals um with either the estates the celebrities or the influencers um you done one of those yet like a an estate deal with uh with an Elvis or somebody who's passed on, but they have a well-thought-out strategy of using the personality

Starting point is 00:35:08 in the future. Seems like Elvis is probably one of the best examples of that where they're actively monetizing through licensing Elvis merchandise, experiences, etc. So is there somebody in the hopper you can share? There's not someone I could share yet since we typically wouldn't want to share

Starting point is 00:35:24 until they're ready to launch or sign. But what I can say is since just in the last three weeks, you know, we have outstanding in terms of our business development side over 30 contracts that are in the process of, you know, either, you know, redlining or about to be signed with a variety of celebrities and influencers. And these are not like small-time people either. These are people with, you know, millions of fans each or more. So as, you know, the next few weeks go by, we'll be able to share for sure some of, the names that we're dealing with right now, yeah.

Starting point is 00:36:02 Am I in the right sort of genre, like with somebody like Elvis or something? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Elvis. And, you know, the other great areas of demand we've gotten that are very close to that would be from the A-list celebrity that typically has been in, you know, the film or let's say the music world for, you know, know, over 10 years now, they've gotten out of their system the part of them that loves being, you know, stormed with fans. And they kind of just want to live a private life. But they still kind of have this obligation to keep fan engagement going in many ways.

Starting point is 00:36:46 The fans are there. And so, you know, there are a lot of these celebrities out there who see this as something that can essentially kind of automate the fan engagement while also making it better in the first place because gone are these days, thanks to this technology that we built of just posting these kind of one-way photos or videos on Instagram or social media and you get to comment. Now it's, you can just make your favorite person in the world or the people you admire most, your buddy and your phone that you talk to whenever you want. Are you still using your personal phone number for your startup in 2023? Okay, listen, it's time to Stop, this is such a common mistake that founders make.

Starting point is 00:37:30 But Open Phone has totally rethought every detail of what a business phone should look like in 2023, so they got you covered. Open Phone makes it super easy to get business phone numbers for you and your team. But here's the magic. It works through a beautiful app on your phone or desktop. Open Phone is amazing because we use it for our sales team and our ops team every single day. We have gotten so much value out of this for, you know, things like the Angel Summit we're doing. It's an event.

Starting point is 00:37:56 We want to have a phone number for customer support, and we want that phone number to roll over to the different people on our team, so VIPs never get more than one ring. Okay, open phone is the number one rated business phone on G2 for customer satisfaction for a reason. It's perfect. It's delightful. It's affordable. And look, Brian Jagger, the co-founder of a startup called Athlete tweeted the following. I'm literally cash flow positive from listening to This Week in startups from listener deals.

Starting point is 00:38:24 And he says he's not paid to say this. It's really nice to see that kind of feedback. Open phone is already affordable at a starting price of just $13 per user per month. But Twist listeners get 20% off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. And if you got an existing number, no problem. They're going to port it over at no extra cost. Head to Openphone.com slash twist to start your free trial and get that 20% off. How long does it take to make a good enough, you know, releasable character, avatar or whatever you want to call these?

Starting point is 00:38:58 And then what's the standard business model here? You split at 50-50, is it 70-30? Are you negotiating it deal-by-deal? So the way we do these deals is via these 50-50 profit-sharing splits where obviously we make it clear in the very beginning that unlike traditional technology computing, AI does have a significantly higher compute cost. And so we've gotten actually to my even surprise. just an unbelievable amount of reception on that deal structure. So people, there's definitely an awareness in the market that this costs, you know, more than, let's say, running just a simple website.

Starting point is 00:39:42 And so far, all of our deals have been in that same manner. And, you know, that even, you know, we have some YouTubers with, you know, like 30, 40 million subscribers that, you know, In that case, the process that we just signed one a few days ago. So the process for this person was she sends us really just some, maybe like a quick voice recording of just things about her or elements about her that you can't find online to make it more personal. And that's about it.

Starting point is 00:40:18 You know, send us five minutes of audio. And that's really all we ask of you. That's all you need is five minutes of audio. Wow. Yeah. I mean, it seems like you could build something really interesting. by taking the most common questions as they come in

Starting point is 00:40:32 during the pilots and the betas and have that person or workshop really clever answers to kind of see it in a certain direction. So, you know, if it was me and it was startups and, you know, I could, you could give me 100 questions, which I probably

Starting point is 00:40:48 have answered on these Ask Jason segments, but if you take all the Ask Jason segments, you'd have like a much more refined place to start. So when it comes to expertise, That's what we did with Karen, which was so interesting because she started her career out on YouTube and had hundreds of videos out there. And once she switched to Snapchat and then found out about us, she deletes all the YouTube videos, gives us all that content. And then we're able to use what we built internally, which is an auto fine-tuning tool internally that we have to take these hundreds of YouTube videos.

Starting point is 00:41:27 and auto fine-tune are AI based on those videos and the content in them, the questions and answers in them, and her experiences in them. The movie Her with Joaquin Phoenix kind of showed the dark side of like some number of people are going to get addicted to this, like any product or service in the world, people can get addicted. It doesn't matter if it's pizza or fentanyl or wine or cannabis. people are going to get addicted to video games or social media.

Starting point is 00:42:01 So, and in her, you had somebody who got addicted to having a virtual, uh, girlfriend. Has that started to happen? Have you had people who, you know, at a dollar a minute, um, you know, maybe got to hour three or four this week and, you know, now they're shipping three or four hundred bucks to this virtual avatar and 15,000 a year and they're a well in the system. And maybe this doesn't feel healthy and you feel, like you don't want to take $15,000 off some lonely person. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:42:32 It's a great question. And it's something we're taking really seriously. And I would say out of over 20,000 individuals who have used Karen AI, I can count on less than one hand, how many people we've had to deal with that have had any sort of issue around actually getting addicted to it. And in those cases, we intervene, even in some cases via humans, while we've built into the AI automatic methods to either slow the conversation down if it detects you're getting a little bit too addicted or what is actually a brand new feature we're about to push out this week, which is really interesting. And if you're dating one of these, let's say, AI girlfriend or boyfriends, they'll be able to just break up with you. So that can be built in. If you're using it too much. What is too much in your mind?

Starting point is 00:43:33 Do you have an idea? Does your gut tell you like this is too much? We really don't. We really don't want, or we're really doing our best to promote no more than an hour of usage a day with this platform. And I would say in 99.9% of cases, that is happening. and in the rest, yeah, we've absolutely dealt with a handful of cases where individuals are trying to spend many hours in their day or night speaking to these AIs.

Starting point is 00:44:10 And that's where we've seen our automatic solutions jump in. And then if those even fail, then we have a team of humans that, well, we can't access what you're talking to the AI. out can we can we can at least get a sense of activity data yeah i think there's some basic freedoms people have to spend money on what they want to spend money on if you want to spend your money going to a strip club or you want to spend your money on uh you know uh your significant other or anything in between like there's some amount of personal freedom and then if you're a platform looking out for people who maybe have mental illness or an addiction yeah kind of a good

Starting point is 00:44:52 idea. You know, the bartender will cut you off at a certain point at a bar. Exactly. A big question I had for my dad of like, hey, we're in the business for selling drinks at Beards in Brooklyn back in the 70s and 80s. And I was like, how, I mean, you're incentive to sell drinks. So when do you, I saw you cutting people off. When do you cut them off? And I was like, we don't want somebody to fall on the way home and crack their skull open. Do we? And I was like, no. He's like, so if you can't stand and you're dangerous to yourself or others. Like, yeah, that's, you know, you can have fun, but if you can't stand, I think probably

Starting point is 00:45:26 can't stand is probably a good one to cut you off at the bar. If you're making no sense or you're in danger to yourself. Hey, listen, this is absolutely incredible. And you're going to stay focused on the celebrities, only fans, but you also have the curators or the art curator concept experts in the world. Do you think you're going to be able to compete on that or there will be a startup that makes the art AI expert, the travel AI expert, you know, whatever, pick a, pick a character, and, you know, them doing something in the world. And, you know, what would that, what would that be in terms of a startup? In fact, we invested in some startup that is making travel itineraries. Now, if you type in travel itineraries into check Chachachyp4 with Web or Bard, you're going to get really great responses.

Starting point is 00:46:16 But, you know, you're constantly refining that data and understand. what different types of activities in the training dataset could get really granular and maybe Expedia or Yelp or I don't know which you know Travelocity, Condi NAS Traveler, somebody's got a really great data set there to build off of. So how do you think about that? Do you think this will be a bunch of different verticalized companies and the technology just is a commodity like cloud computing technology is? Well, you know, what my gut has said has been that we need to

Starting point is 00:46:50 choose an area to just really be laser focused on and let the rest just go to elsewhere, basically. So I told my team, you know, out of all these dozens of enterprise folks reaching out, you know, like the Sotheby's folks and, you know, car dealerships, I mean, it's crazy. There's so many different use cases. There's a lot to say no to. And I really believe in that a lot. And the other thing that's come, and I'd love to get your take on this as a surprise, has been, I, in the beginning, you know, set out to actually not really raise money for this and kind of bootstrap this whole thing.

Starting point is 00:47:35 However, what happened after the Karen AI launch was it became clear that, like, this is going to be a huge business. I mean, there's going to be someone, some company out there that just dominates the industry with, you know, hundreds, if not, thousands of influencers and celebrities turning themselves into AIs on their platform with a future that looks like every big celebrity and influencer having an AI copy of themselves. That's the future we absolutely see now. And so the thing that's come up has been just like really interesting, surprising reactions from the VC space when they hear that, you know, a big part of our business, if not, possibly our future focus is on this kind of AI girlfriend, boyfriend,

Starting point is 00:48:23 you know, conversion of the influencer. I think you've nailed it and, you know, you probably understand having done, I think this is your third sort of formal company, that once you raise money, those people are expecting 100 times their money back. Right. And then you're managing your customers,

Starting point is 00:48:42 your internal team, and a group of people who've given you money with the expectation of you returning 100x. And those people can be, you know, any version of ruthless, supportive, cutthroat, indifferent, spray and prey, or, you know, incredible partners. And so you, if you do raise money,

Starting point is 00:49:02 you don't need to here, because I think you could bootstrap this. And so if you can push off raising money, my advice to founders, and you can put this in the Jason AI, is always to push it off as long as possible, get as much product market fit as possible and then see if likecomcom

Starting point is 00:49:20 the meditation app we invested in they went from when I invested a just under a $5 million dollar valuation their next round was $250 million the round after that was $1.2 billion. So they skipped. We called those alicorns in the business. I came up with that because my daughter

Starting point is 00:49:34 explained to me what an alicorn is. It's a Pegasus and a unicorn put together. And I was like, these are unicorns that fly over funding rounds. You could just be an alicorn and just skip funding rounds. And so that, that would be what I would do is just keep skipping funding rounds

Starting point is 00:49:49 unless you have a group of investors who you've either made money, lost money for, who you like working with, who make it more fun for you and who are accretive, and then you just send them, like my friend Sandit Madra does a thing

Starting point is 00:50:01 every time he starts a company, he just sends our poker group. Starting a new company, you each have 250K. And I don't know if there's 20 of us, and he can literally raise $5 million, and everybody says, I'll take $500,

Starting point is 00:50:14 or I'll take a million. Right. And he says, nope, Chimoth, Sacks, J-Gal, Freiburg, whoever it is. Nope, I have $250 for you. And then I say, great, you know, but I'll provide more value. You can come on this week and start up. So I'll give you, you know, give me $400,000. No, $250.

Starting point is 00:50:28 And you can just do a very simple take or leave it around like that at a, you know. That's essentially what I did over the last two weeks. And as a startup founder, that's one of the most magical experiences, I think, especially someone who is kind of young still. and, you know, comes from a beginning that is very, you know, not full of money. You know, I grew up, like, really just like, I mean, I was helping my parents out financially when I was 13 to give you a sense of like the shock that comes when I'm in, you know, my late 20s and I get to just text a few people and get like a few hundred thousand wired

Starting point is 00:51:06 the next day to, you know, make this, you know, this whole vision come to more of a reality. And so as you, I guess, as you pointed out, progressing your startup founder career, that ability to raise money from a network of people you've worked with and made money for is invaluable. Yeah, that's what I would do. Center around the C docks, you know, hey, here's a reasonable valuation,

Starting point is 00:51:32 and then just rock it out from there. I think you're smart also to be super, super focused. So I would stay ultra-focused on the vertical that's working. They'll always be time for other verticals. and then builds your team on a slow, steady pace. Who knows if this, you know, significant other stuff

Starting point is 00:51:52 is going to be a flash in the pan or it's going to be niche? I don't suspect it will be, but certainly there's a $10 to $100 million business obviously there. There's hundreds of people and they're going to make hundreds of thousands a year. So it sounds like you can get to

Starting point is 00:52:05 $50 million just on that. If you just say laser focus on that, it'd be the biggest success you've had. Yeah. And there's a lot of values to just not fundraising and just building. I mean, it's

Starting point is 00:52:16 especially if you do reach product market fit I've noticed. Yeah, you have product market fit clearly. And yeah, just keep rocking it. All right, great to have you on the program. Continued success. And yeah, I'm interested in doing a non-sex, non-adult, non-creeper relationship,

Starting point is 00:52:34 Jason AI, just to talk about startups and raising venture capital and podcasting. Just three or four topics. It would be an honor to build that. for you. Show me a demo. I mean, I was going to have fun with it.

Starting point is 00:52:48 It's shock you with it. But, you know, after. No, shock me. By all means, I give you, permission to make something, uh, you know, fun and,

Starting point is 00:52:57 uh, experimental for short duration. And if it becomes something, yeah, I'm happy to split revenue on it. It sounds like a fun project. So let's have that. All right.

Starting point is 00:53:05 We'll see you all next time in the swing starves. Bye. Bye. Bye.

This Week in Startups - How AI is making influencers bionic with Forever Voices CEO John Meyer | E1762

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