This Week in Startups - OpenAI taps Jony Ive for “iPhone for AI," FTC/Amazon + Roam Around CEO Shie Gabbai | E1820

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Supergut is the only nutrition brand clinically-proven to improve digestion, balance blood sugar, sustain energy, and manage weight. Save 25% on their delicious shakes, bars, and prebiotic mix at https://Supergut.com with code TWIST. Catalog. Stop wasting time and money with expensive design firms and unreliable freelancers! Get fast, 3-day turnarounds for a flat monthly fee with Catalog! Get $1200 off right now at https://trycatalog.com/twist Codecademy. Build the future you want to see with Codecademy. Codecademy Pro helps you learn everything you’ll need to shape what comes next in the tech space. Try it free for 14 days. Visit https://codecademy.com/TWiST * Today's show: Jason kicks off the show by discussing the reported talks between OpenAI, Jony Ive, and Masayoshi Son to build the "iPhone of AI” (1:17), and the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon (9:45). Then, Roam Around CEO Shie Gabbai joins Jason to discuss the journey of doing a travel startup in the AI space (20:53), and much more! * Time stamps: (0:00) Jason kicks off the show (1:17) OpenAI in advanced talks with Jony Ive and Masayoshi Son, aiming to Raise $1 Billion for the "iPhone of AI” (8:13) Supergut - Get 25% off with code TWIST at https://supergut.com (9:45) The FTC and 17 states have brought an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon and Lina Khan's agenda (13:48) Quick recap of Lina Khan’s results so far as FTC chair and the tactics used in the Amazon lawsuit (19:24) Catalog - Get $1200 off right now at https://trycatalog.com/twist (20:53) Roam Around CEO Shie Gabbai joins Jason (23:51) Shie demos Roam Around and explains the driving idea behind the app (27:23) The emergence of multimodal LLMs and other technological advancements (31:46) Business model, additional product features, and the path ahead (37:01) Codecademy - Try Codecademy Pro FREE for 14 days at http://codecademy.com/TWiST (38:21) The B2B side of AI and the travel industry's tension with Google * Follow Shie: https://twitter.com/Shie_eth Check out Roam Around: https://www.roamaround.io * Read LAUNCH Fund 4 Deal Memo: https://www.launch.co/four Apply for Funding: https://www.launch.co/apply Buy ANGEL: https://www.angelthebook.com Great recent interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland, PrayingForExits, Jenny Lefcourt Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow Jason: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

This is crazy. It's a crazy concept. I'm not saying she's crazy. What I'm saying is it's a very bold, audacious way of looking at the world. I would say it's also a little bit narcissistic that you, Lena Khan, are going to be able to predict future harm. I know I'm super humble having been in the industry for 25 years and invested in 400 companies. I can tell you that she cannot predict the future. Nobody can. This weekend startups is brought to you by SuperGut is the only nutrition brand clinically proven to improve digestion, balance blood sugar, sustain energy, and manage weight. Save 25% on their delicious shakes, bars, and prebiotic mix at supergut.com with code Twist. Catalog. Stop wasting time and money with expensive design firms and unreliable freelancers. Get fast, three-day turnarounds for a flat monthly fee with catalog. Get $1,200 off right now at trycatalog.com slash twist.

And Codecademy. Build the future you want to see with Codecademy. CodeCademy Pro helps you learn everything you'll need to shape what comes next in the tech space. Try it free for 14 days. Visit codacademy.com slash twist. All right, everybody, some quick news here at the top of the show before I do an interview with Rome AI, one of our great incubator investments. OpenAI made a lot of news this week. First, there's There's news that Open AI is an advanced talk with Johnny I of Apple fame and Masayoshi son from SoftBank to raise a billion dollars to build the iPhone of AI. I don't know if this would be a form factor of an iPhone, if I'm being honest. I would find it very surprising if Johnny I've wanted to come back and just do an iPhone. I think this will be some very interesting wearable. And this is the interpretation by the Financial Times, by the way, who broke the story.

If you don't know, Johnny Ive, when he left Apple started a firm called Love From. It's, you know, like a design firm. He's done a couple projects. He's obviously a genius and was Steve Jobs' partner in crime. And so they've had some brainstorming sessions, Sam Waltman and Johnny Ive, according to the FT. It's very early stages. And Mossa would lead a billion dollar seed round according to the reporting. and I think multiple outlets have talked about this. It's unclear if this would be a new company or it would be an Open AI project or where this would sit.

It sounds to me like this would be part of the Sam Altman collection of companies and I think they would probably make it its own company and then just give it access to Open AI stack but you never know. They could do anything now because in our second story, Open AI is discussing a secondary share sale

that would value the company at $80 or $90 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. That's 3x. The valuation from earlier this year, which was $30 billion, which was stunning. It seems like Open AI wants to sell a couple of hundred million dollars in shares, and that they're on track to do a billion in revenue in 2023. A billion in revenue is pretty extraordinary because the product costs $20 a month. That's $240 a year. And if you had a million people using the product, that would be $200,000.

40 million. If they had 4 million people paying for accounts, that would be a billion dollars-ish, right? And so let's just break that down for a second. There's 100 million people signed up, I think, for OpenAI's product, chat GPT4.

If 4% converted, that would be a very large number, but it is possible that they could be generating something in that range. And of course, there's the API. So maybe half their billion dollars in revenue, if that's in fact true, which I wouldn't be, it would be shocking,

but it wouldn't be unexpected that they were trending towards that because the product is so helpful. So many startups are using it. So keep in mind, though, that Open AI is 49% owned by Microsoft. And then Sam says he hasn't owned any shares personally, but he controls the nonprofit. Anyway, this would be a big gain for Microsoft once again. Microsoft has made some big gains from their investments over time.

And sounds really interesting. interesting. The multimodal mode, which launched from OpenAI that we talked about with Sunny earlier in the week, would make it very believable that they have something here, and that something might be the ability to use glasses, audio. So I could see this being anything from sunglasses to something like the personal communicator on Star Trek that you put on your vest, like a clip on, to your jacket, we press it and you talk to it and then, you know, AirPods. So, you know, the possibilities here are endless. It could be something on your arm. So imagine if you had something on your arm that was a display, something in your ears, and then a pair of glasses. You know, you have like some really

interesting wearable because if it's multimodal, well, you might want to hear some answers. You might want to see some answers in your glasses because you're doing an activity. And you might want to tap on your wrist here if you were wearing like a bracelet. So if you look online at wearerable, About 10, 15 years ago, there was a huge wearables moment in startups, but the technology wasn't ready because AI didn't exist. And really, you need a keyboard, right? It was, it's hard enough to use your iPhone typing on that keyboard. The keyboard's gotten better. It does guess your words a little bit better. But generally speaking, people, generally speaking, people are not writing long emails on their phones. It's just starting to be the case that maybe doing a voice

to text is starting to work. I know I use voice to text. If I'm driving, I can send a text message, or I will have Siri read me text messages when I'm driving or walking. So all of this put together is I think now is the time. And so this sounds like a great idea. This is a very interesting thing. Is it a coincidence that all of this Open AI news dropped in the same week? You got the iPhone for AI with Masa and Johnny Ive. That's really interesting. Open AI launching multimodal and Open AI discussing a secondary share. All of that together, to me, sounds like a massive Mossa push. I'm not saying Mesa's the leak here.

But, you know, he likes to make bets on number one. Uber, WeWork, DoorDash, all of that. And an Open AI, Johnny I of CoLab is like, yeah, that's just like peak Silicon Valley. And Mossa being the backer of it is insane. I mean, we're talking about like this is building a super team. It sounds like a super band, right? like David Lee Roth with slash with Robert Plant. Or, you know, Chris Bosch and Dwayne Wade and LeBron taking their talents to Miami.

This is an absolute super team. Masa loves a big swing. He would love to put a billion dollars into this project and have it have a 1% chance or a 5% chance. And, you know, hey, listen, Mossa just had that big liquidity event with Arms IPO. That's got to take a little edge off. and maybe Mossa's, you know, getting frisky again. And, uh, yeah, I'm here for it. I like it. I like an exciting dynamic space.

To me, this is huge, huge, you know, it's like bringing the X-Men and, uh, the Avengers and the Fantastic Four back together. It's going to be great and great for technology, great for consumers and great for for this podcast where we talk about all these things. So, uh, really interesting moment in time. Well, we'll keep track on all this. And of course, remember Mondays are this week in AI with Sunday. deep madras. So everybody's talking about how

all in is a great episode and they look forward to it and it's event viewing. Everybody's not saying Mondays on this weekend startups are event viewing. Life is more fun with Masa in the mix. Life is a lot more fun when Masa is in the mix. That is 100% true. You have heard me talk about my weight loss journey and the role that Supergut has played in it.

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And she was put in place by the Biden administration, which hates big tech, as we know. And Kahn is, of course, the youngest FTC chair. in the history. She's only 32 years old, or she was only 32 years old when she was elected to the position. I think about two years ago, so she's probably 34 now. Yeah, so she's been a long time critic of Amazon. She hates it. When she was at Yale school, Con wrote a very notorious paper, Amazon's antitrust paradox. And basically, you know, she wants to change the typical benchmark for antitrust. Does this harm the consumer? And she argued that Amazon should not get a pass on its monopolistic practices because it delights consumers.

Anybody who uses Amazon is delighted. So, Lena Kahn got a lot of attention for saying, no, that shouldn't be the test. Consumer harm should not be the test. She wants to change the law and she wants the law to be. And her view is we should protect consumers in the future. As if she is some clairvoyant and she can predict the future and she can ensure that there is not future harm, right? This is crazy. It's a crazy concept. I'm not saying she's crazy. What I'm saying is it's a very bold, audacious way of looking at the world. I would say it's also a little bit

narcissistic that you, Lena Khan, are going to be able to predict future harm. I know, I'm super humble having been in the industry for 25 years and invested in 400 companies. I can tell you that she cannot predict the future. Nobody can. The second, anybody thinks they can figure out how they're going to define future harm, and they think they're a precog from, you know, minority report, if you've seen the movie, you know, it's just, it's the height of arrogance. I think we want to protect consumers, but the idea that you're going to be able to predict that Amazon's going to beat Google or Google's going to beat Microsoft or Microsoft is going to beat Apple, you know, none of us know. Now, I like the idea of going after tactics. To be clear, I think that

this lawsuit has got a lot of tactical stuff in it. So even though Lena Khan's philosophy has been, you know, future harm, and I'll just quote her here, we cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon's dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output, she wrote. She thinks instead regulators should look at how companies like Amazon use low prices to undercut rivals on their way to controlling,

you know, all this critical infrastructure, right? and okay, great, I think that's interesting. But again, it comes with this, you know, um, arrogance that you'll be able to predict the future, which you will not. And, uh, of course, we can make arguments all of us all day long about who's going to win AR. Is it going to be Google's glasses?

Is it going to be Oculus? Is Google going to release a new version of Google Glass? Is it going to be Microsoft? Who knows? The idea that Amazon won cloud computing and it wasn't Microsoft or Oracle. call that one cloud computer or Google is crazy, right? Nobody knows who's going to win. Lena Kahn's a bit of a loser in terms of her track record here, and I think she's a loser by design. She said she wanted to be much more bold and lose a bunch of times in order to win big,

right? So she wants to take bigger, bigger swings. She wants to attack tech companies. She wants to stop them. That's the agenda here. You can debate it all you want, but She said that. She wants to take bigger swings and get bigger results. She wants more shots on goal. So just a quick recap, the FTC sued meta and lost over their acquisition of a VR app maker within unlimited. The FTC's argument,

meta, having two beat saber-like products would give them an unfair advantage in the VR space. The FTC lost. They've got an antitrust lawsuit of Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions that occurred a decade ago. I mean, people kind of expect the FTC will lose this. You never know.

FTC versus Illumina, they lost, but it's technically ongoing. It's a biotech company that they blocked the acquisition of. And then the FTC versus Microsoft, they lost this. Technically, it's ongoing, but the FTC lost this case famously against Microsoft to stop the $69 billion. Activision Blizzard, they lost the case against Microsoft to stop the $69 billion acquisition. So, you know, the FTC is appealing all this stuff.

It is maybe if you are a fan of breaking up big tech and stopping their ascension, I guess that it's noble that she's trying. I've said that we should really be looking at the tactic. So let's take a look at the Amazon suit here and what they're alleging. They're using, this is what they're alleging in the suit, that they're using anti-discounting measures that punishes, merchants for offering lower prices elsewhere. So if Amazon sees that, I don't know,

some provider of cables like Anchor, if they see them offering lower price goods elsewhere, they can bury the sellers far down in search results, which is basically the same as killing them. So they're on the platform, but they don't get seen. So they want to stop discounts off Amazon so that Amazon has the lowest price. By the way, I think a lot of distributors negotiate for this

like Walmart and Target. And then they say they're using the market control to keep prices artificially high and lock sellers into its platform, which then harms rivals. And the way they claim this is happening is that they are controlling the competitors' prices, effectively raising them for consumers

by controlling the buy box on their site. If a product is offered for less on another site, Amazon reviews the buy box button, etc. and then coercing sellers on Amazon by forcing them to use their fulfillment service. I've heard this is actually true. And, you know, if these things are true and proven, these could be very easy sanctions. And I bet you Amazon will do exactly what Microsoft did, which is cut them off at the past,

basically change how search works, change how fulfillment works. You know, just make little tweaks. If you remember, Activision, there was a question. Would, you know, Microsoft allow Activision to be on other platforms? not have exclusives for Xbox, their platform. And they basically said they're going to do that. So the most charitable interpretation of Lena Khan's success is that by her rattling sabers and following these lawsuits that she's getting tech to behave better,

and that might actually be a pretty good legacy. She might lose the cases so she loses these battles, but maybe she wins the war because people start on a tactical level allowing a fairer marketplace, right? She did do that with the Activision case. She got Satya Nadella to guarantee for 10 years that Call of Duty would be on other platforms. So, you know, in some ways, even though she's racking up the L's, she might be racking up a lot of little Ws, right? Other things that they're claiming is that Amazon degraded customer experience by replacing organic search results with paid ads. Well, we all see that when we use the service, but does it, I don't,

don't understand that that's illegal. I mean, you can say the same thing about Google. You do a flight search on Google or product search on Google. It's all paid ads. And, you know, the Amazon, of course, disputes all this, quotes from Amazon's rebuttal. We fundamentally disagree with the FTC's allegations, which are in many cases wrong or misleading, and with the overarching and with their overreaching and misguided approach to antitrust, which would harm consumers, hurt independent businesses and upend longstanding and well-considered doctrine. So I think, pull all this together.

You know, there's plenty of rebuttals. And I think this might be a turning point for Lena Kahn because, you know, it's been underwhelming what she's done here. But she could be making progress on scaring big tech. And, you know, just maybe the saber rattling will get people to behave better because they don't want to

be in her crosshairs. So on that case, maybe that's her big strategy. I don't know. She's been invited to come on the all-in pockets. She certainly invited to come here on this week in startups. But, you know, I don't know that she wants to sit in for a hard discussion with hard questions. I think she'd probably like to do interviews only with anti-tech journalists, which there are many for her to choose from. But my prediction right now is that Lena Khan loses the Amazon antitrust case. and I think she's going to lose it badly. And I think Amazon is going to fight. And Amazon will just tweak their model.

So I think this era of antitrust is going to fail in terms of the lawsuits. But I think she'll win in terms of getting people to behave better tactically. So mixed bag for Lena Kahn. And next up on the program, roam around. Stick with us. When I see a startup that's got bad design, it's hard for me to take it seriously. in today's day and age. Why? Because having great design, having world-class design, it's kind of table stakes today with consumers, with employees, with partners, and of course, with investors.

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executives in that space. We had a really thoughtful discussion. I spoke at it and a lot of the discussion was on how AI language models, etc., are going to impact the travel industry. My big observation was, I think a society is going to become more wealthy because people are going to work less, three, four day work weeks, because AI is going to do a lot of the heavy lifting, which means there'll be more time to travel. That being said, the travel industry is going to change dramatically because the model that we currently use of using Google and making documents and bookmarks and maybe using a bunch of different Google flights, kayak, Expedia, et cetera, to look at grids and sort through our choices is going to change forever.

How is it going to change? I believe it will change because of startups like roam around. Rom around attended our launch accelerator in April of this year, 2023, and they were part of launch accelerators 28th class. And they have a very simple idea, which is itineraries for travel can be done by AI. really well. And the product proves that out with me today is

Shy Goodbye, the CEO of Romaround. Welcome to the program, Shy. Thanks for having me. How appropriate during Skip Week. Yeah. Did you go to the conference this week or are you know of Skift, I guess? Yeah, I know of Skip pretty well. I mean, they're obviously mammoths in the industry.

They've also interviewed us back in March. I've been in close contact with Justin and obviously I've been following. We're fought and his journey for months and years. Raphat worked for me back in the day at Silicon O'Nover in the 90s, and I'm a small investor in Skift, which is just a great data source if you're in the travel industry.

So I thought I'd have you on and then just maybe show your product and talk about the progress. And then, you know, there are some big issues here about who's going to win travel and how will travel change? And then why should you even exist if there's these incredible language models everywhere and just the journey of doing a startup in the AI space. So maybe we just start with a quick demo.

If you're watching this, great. If you're not watching it, we'll do sportscasting and explain what happens. We'll describe what's happening on the screen. You can always use Spotify, which has our videos. If you are listening to This Week in Startups, there's a button or you can turn the screen and see the video. Or you can go to YouTube and just type in This Week in Startups and you'll find our channel. Hit the subscribe button, hit the bell.

You get an alert every day or two when we either go live or, or or we have a new show posted. So go ahead, shy. There's your app. And it says roamaround.io is the URL. And I just typed in two days in Barcelona. So you typed into this chat interface, two days in Barcelona and then describe what we say.

So rather than spending hours or weeks planning a trip, you just type in two days in Barcelona. We create a complete and actionable itinerary. And what I mean about actionable is that you could actually book it right then and there. If it's not perfect, you can iterate it. So you can say it's our anniversary and we'll recommend

romantic beach walks, hot air balloons, et cetera. From there, you could also say something like at a beach day and we'll recommend day three in Costa Brava.

And then once it's perfect, you can say translate it to Spanish. It'll translate it. And then you can quickly share it via SMS, email, WhatsApp, whatever. Great. And so these itineraries

and the AI maybe talk a little bit about what is the difference between using chat GPT or Bard to do this and using Romaround? What's the best pitch for why people will use Romaround versus Google's Bard or just the native chat GPT interface? Totally. So there's a few things that play here. Number one is if you were to go to, let's say, Bard or ChatGPT and say, I'm going to Costa Brava, it would say, while you're there, you should definitely go for a bike ride. Well, now you have to actually start researching what's a good, a place to rent bikes. Are they going to scam me? Are they highly rated? Are they in stock for the day

that I'm actually traveling? What we do is we do that for you, where before we show you something, we've already queried all our API providers and ensured that they're in stock highly rated. And within one clicks, you no longer have to start researching. Within one click, we take you to a provider that's highly rated and you can book it right then and there. So that's number one. Fantastic. Yeah. The second thing is when it comes to to data cutoff and hallucinations. So the way we actually work is when you say two days in Barcelona, what we first do is we actually start querying all of our points of interest providers,

TripAdvisor, get your guide, etc. We get a wish list of the top 100 things to do in that city. And then, and only then, do we query chat ChbT and say, of these 100 things, create a compelling itinerary for me. And so what that does is two things. Number one is it solves the hallucination issue. So a funny story is before we implemented this little fix, if you were to say I'm going to Tucson, Arizona, it would say, while you're there, you should check out the Pearl Harbor

Museum. Yeah. The reason it hallucinated that is because the ship was called the USS Arizona. Right? So because we limit it to the things that we know are in that city and in stock, we solve the hallucination issue. And then the other thing is, is we solve the data cutoff issue. So we're not going to query restaurants that have been closed for two years since September 2021, like Chachibati. We query, let's say, open table. We say, what's in stock or what's available for reservation

on these dates? And only then do we include it in the itineraries. So when you're doing verticalized AI, whether it's travel or it was medicine or it's legal, there is a lot of nuance. to what data you're going to query and then what you're going to advise and what you're going to send back to the user. We saw this week multimodal come out from OpenAI, which basically means you could take a picture of something and then get text back or vice versa.

Obviously, we use text right now, but we don't get images back. And then Bard, Google's product now includes Google Flights, for example, and your Gmail, etc. So maybe you could talk a little bit about what you think those two advancements will bring for roam around. Totally. And then another one actually is the meta-AI glasses, right?

So combining meta-AI glasses plus the multimodal, right? You can already see a walking tour taking place here, right? Taking shape, right? So you're walking through- Explain how about my work. We're in Barcelona and what happens, yeah. Yeah, so you're in Barcelona. You're wearing the glasses.

You see Sagrada Familia. And you're like, okay, this is an incredible building. What's going on here? You take the images. You feed that to chat GPT. You feed that to roam around. You say, you are this all-knowing travel advisor. What am I looking at here?

And what's the context here? And so it'll tell you it's this famous architect in Spain. It's been in construction for, you know, 100 years. And for another 200 years from now, it can tell you all of these things. And then going to Google. Bart, I think, like, the most interesting thing is Gmail and calendar. So one thing right now, we're in, like, the discovery phase, right? You have to prompt roam around to say, hey, I'm going to Barcelona.

It's more interesting that it could say something along the lines of, hey, I know you and your wife have been meaning to go to Barcelona. I see that you have an open week in July. I have all of these places that you've already bookmarked on Instagram. Um, this is an itinerary. Do you want me to book for you? And it's where things are interesting. Hey, this is a great weekend to go because, uh, I see your calendar's open and, uh, travel costs are down. And it's before the peak season. So the costs are going to be lower. And this hotel's got this great thing. So it's almost like having not just a travel agent,

but a travel agent plus your personal, you know, admin, if you had an executive assistant, acting in concert to optimize. And then it could even learn over time what your preferences are, hey, you like to walk because it has information on how many steps you did, or you told it you like to walk, or it knows you like to do active things.

So it says, hey, you can go kite surfing in this area on the coast of Spain. So this has got unlimited potential, and it feels quite disruptive to me. Totally. And we're already laying the groundwork for that. So in the example that I gave you, it says it's our anniversary.

Right. So now we know when your anniversary is. So next year we can say, hey, we saw that you booked this on your anniversary. Do you want to maybe check out this on your next year's anniversary? Or if you were to iterate the itinerary and say, recommend vegetarian restaurants. Okay, well, now we know that you're a vegetarian, right? And so, like, what you're saying is correct. Is this all-knowing travel agent that's a personal admin for you? And it sounds kind of like far fetch, but think about, you know, 50 years ago, who had chauffeurs? right it was the ultra wealthy the powerful businessman right um and now everyone with the click of a button have a personal driver right so yeah that was the promise of uber yeah exactly and you don't have to tell the driver where you're going you don't have to reach into your pocket it's a personal chauffeur and so the idea is just as uber brought chauffeurs to the masses we're hoping to put a travel agent in everyone's pocket yeah and it's even more than a travel agent because this is like I said before, they understand some things about you that maybe even a travel agent wouldn't be able to query. And you could even, I think, when I was speaking at this travel conference,

talking about how I think experiences are such a big part of travel today and that, you know, explaining how you want to feel after your vacation, do you want to feel inspired, do you want to feel like you learn something? Do you want to feel exhilarated? You know, for me, I want to learn some new, I learned how to play pickleball and I learned how to efoil on my last vacation. It was a lot of fun for me. You know, I got to experience deep powder skiing in Japan last year. All of these things are peak experiences. So I'm curious if you've given thought to, hey, I have this amount of money. I've got $5,000. I've got 10 days. I want to feel renewed, refreshed, you know, equanimity and exhilaration from some activities. Now explain to me what I should do. Have you thought about

that working backwards from an emotional state and with other criteria? Yeah, I mean, what you're describing is something along the lines of like in our roadmap, it would closely align to like the personalities. So we did it in a way that we don't want any friction before we show you the itinerary. Right now we're still proving ourselves. So a lot of these other, let's say, travel planners, before you actually jump into the itinerary, they're asking you all of these questions. And what you see is that people are bouncing.

People are falling out of the funnel, right? because you're adding too much friction. So for us, it's like we're too. And then we show, we prove ourselves and say this is a really great itinerary. And then from there, you can iterate it as much as you want. You can say, I'm traveling with the family. I want to go shopping or I want to feel exhilarated. I want to do extreme sports.

But first, we want to prove ourselves and then earn that right to actually delight you. And so the initial business model here is you get an affiliate fee. There's all these affiliates in travel, Travel is right next to e-commerce as the number one and two affiliate opportunities. Every time somebody books a flight, you can make a couple of bucks, books a hotel, you can make tens of dollars per night, books and activity. You can make single-digit dollars, I think. So that's the affiliate. So our bread and butter is actually activities.

Hotels, you do earn money on flights. You earn almost nothing. Nothing, that's right here. But on activities, right now we're making 8%. on each activity. Our median activity is $265. So, right. Yeah.

So, but we're actually moving towards a model that will give us 20%. But you would have to have a direct relationship because the, of the people who provide the affiliates, those activity marketplaces take 25% take rate typically. You get eight points of that 25 for bringing somebody. If you did it yourself and you went direct, you had the kiteboarding relationship directly. You can then ask them for 20%, which is 20% less than the 25%.

that the majors take. Exactly. So that's stage one. Stage one is the 8%, stage one and a half is the 20%, right? Stage two is what we're actually doing right now is we're shifting into the enterprise. We can talk about that in a second,

but stage three is actually AI model as a model, right? So or as a service. And so the idea is right now we have millions of interactions, millions of itineraries, millions of clicks, thousands of conversions. And so we're able to train our model and say, this is a good itinerary, this is a bad itinerary. And so we're going to be fine-tuning our model

such that in the future travel startup isn't going to be using, let's say, GPT4. They'll be using GPT4-Romeroand, right? And we'll be selling them our API keys. Got it. And I'm curious knowing what you know, and we'll get into the B2B side of this in a minute, how are the different platforms

that you can use shaping up. Obviously, Facebook has their open source one. If you want Hugging Face, there's a ton, and there's Falcon from the UAE, and there's a barred, and there's going to be a lot of providers here. Is chat GPT4 just far and away the best one to work with,

or are you starting to see parity across the different services that are available? And what's your take, if we're sitting here two, three, four years from now, will these language models be generally commodified and just like you could store something on Google Cloud? you can easily store it on Rackspace or, you know, any other cloud provider.

How do you see the shaping up? Yeah, so just to be clear, like, we never intend to create our own model, right? We'll be forking or fine-tuning one of the larger players, but we don't want to be competing with Sam Altman, right? That's not our game. In regards to what's the strongest model, it probably changed since the start of this conversation, like three or four times. But when we started and like the multiple times that we've tested, GPT4 is the strongest model for our use case. Not just because it's the,

it's the one that is strongest in terms of output, but also in terms of like the infrastructure, right? They were the first mover and therefore you start seeing all these plugins, right? So in order to do what we discussed earlier of this like proactive, uh, booking, uh, AI agent, you need the infrastructure.

You need these APIs to be tying in together. That isn't to say that. that meta and Google aren't going to have that. Of course, they will. And they have the advantage of also the user profiles. And so once they actually start releasing that, we'll be really interested, because that's where we could really create this bespoke itineries at scale that we're really interested in.

But in our first tests, GPT was by far the best. Everybody knows. Technology is moving at a blistering pace, but code can. Academy's goal is to help you stay a step ahead. So whether you have some experience or your brand new to coding, Codecademy offers everything you need to build the tech career you want. Gain specialized skills in artificial intelligence, full-stack engineering, data science, cybersecurity, and more.

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And once you get the job, you can work toward your next promotion with guided skills paths. So start your free trial today. Visit codecademy.com slash twist to try Codecademy pro free for 14 days. That's CODE C-A-D-E-M-Y.com slash twist. Codecademy.com slash twist. I met with all these business to business companies and I, by a show of hands in this room full of 500 people, I said, how many people use chat ch pt in the last week? And like two out of three hands raised. It was pretty amazing. Then I asked how many people used Bard's connection to Google flights, which came out last week, and two people raised their

hands. So it is the case that I think the travel companies, you know, they're very busy running their businesses, a very challenged environment, maybe there's a recession coming, who knows, the consumers don't have money right now, where they're starting to run out, and the revenge travel of the last three years is kind of over post-COVID. They need help. So on a business to business side, what's your strategy here? Because hotels and Airbnb providers and activity providers, they don't have developers sitting around, they don't have startup energy, they may not have the cycles to do AI in travel. So how do you work with them?

And what's the business to business plan here for white labeling, what Rome around does? Yeah. So it's actually interesting that you bring up Google because the travel industry. as a whole has a love-hate relationship with Google, right? More hate than love? You'll have to ask, and I'm sure it depends, and I'll try to stay politically correct, right? Well, well, so I can actually, like,

I would love to share just like one quick slide here, right? Sure, go ahead. Because I think it's like, it's pretty telling. Okay. So an interesting thing happened, right? We were minding our own business and joining the consumer side of things, and hotels and airlines actually started reaching out to us. DMOs as well.

And we're like, why is this the case? What was that last piece? You said DMOs? Yeah, so it's like like destination marketing organization. So it's like visit Miami, right? So it's like the city. The economic city travel group. It's economic council, tourism, yeah, all those different folks. Yeah, come to Barcelona group.

Yeah. Exactly. So they're reaching out to us and we're trying to figure out why that's the case. And so it turns out that it's because the OTAs have commoditized airlines to the point where airline brands or hotel brands are just a footnote on the user's journey. So consider how you currently interact with your airline. They say, okay, here's your boarding pass. Then you go enjoy your entire vacation. And they say, okay, here's your baggage, right?

And so going back to Google, it's pretty telling that Google gives more real estate. to emissions than to brand. Think about like the dynamics at play here, right? So here is North Atlantic Airways. Their name has been truncated and Google has highlighted in green 11% emissions. So I think that that shows you what the dynamics are here, right? Like Google spends more energy for lack of better term, virtue signaling

than they do for highlighting the brands, right? Yeah, they don't care about the brands. they care about the click and the money they will make from the click, right? That is their mission. And I guess arguably their mission is to satisfy the user. Of course, if the user gets a perfect answer, then they don't click around, which is the great paradox of Google's business model. If they give you an answer, then maybe you don't click on an ad. And so there's a natural tension there. Right. And I think it's like it's even more surprising. since like, you know, you're, you're an eco-friendly person, right?

Can you really contextualize what 431 kilograms? Yeah, like literally going through the amount of CO2 and airline is using is the most silly thing for consumers to contend with. Like, they can have no impact on this. This is ridiculous, right? Like literally no person in the world is looking at the amount of CO2 that their airplane takes and then making the choice based on that. It's the peak virtue signaling nonsense.

I mean, it's nice to have. Don't get me wrong. But that would be the equivalent of telling me like my hamburger, CO2 emissions and then I'm not going to eat the hamburger at Shake Shack. Like, there's other ways for me to make a better contribution to society. And the point isn't that they're showing this information. It's useful to some people, I guess. But they're doing it in lieu of the brands. And so that shows you maybe why there's this tension between airlines and.

and OTAs such as Google, right? So essentially, it comes as no surprise that airline loyalty keeps degrading. This is actually from Skift maybe two or three days ago. And so what we're doing to combat this is the same product that is the roam around product that's been enjoyed by millions of users. We're actually white labeling it for all hotels and as well airlines. So imagine. Yeah, this is going to be a home run.

We had an investment in this space that didn't work out, but it was using humans to be an outsourced concierge. And obviously, the humans were a big part of the expense. And part of the reason it didn't work out training and finding humans, but this is an incredible one because if the hotels in Brooklyn, you just need to know that area. If it's in Arizona, this is so brilliant. Great job. Exactly. And so it's like, imagine you're saying, like the airline is not just telling you like your baggage is here. It's also telling you, okay, your reservation at this restaurant is now.

What's the dress code? This is the dress code. Okay. And don't forget your tour is tomorrow. So you're interacting with the airlines brand throughout your trip. It's no longer just a footnote. It's no longer just a pipe. You're actually interacting and reinforcing the brand throughout the trip.

And so this is what it looks like. It's the exact same roam around, but without our brand. It looks great. Yeah. Great job. So for anybody who's running a hotel, if you want to, do this. How can they email you and get this for their brand or anybody who owns it? Yeah. So enterprise.roamaround.io, it's 24-7 concierge, your brand, your fonts, your logos,

your voice, and most importantly, no code, right? Give them your email. What's it, what's your email? So that they can email you and you can close to the day. So it's shy at roamaround.io. S-H-I-E at romaround.io. Yeah, listen, I'm an investor in the company. I'm trying to get you a couple of customers. I want to move any friction from it. What a great idea. I think, you know, the, you know, both of the businesses are interesting. The B2B business is fascinating because you don't have to bring the customers. They have the customers already and you can get the value to the customers and they're not going to build it anyway. It gives them a competitive advantage and it would fall into the win, win, win, the customer wins, the hotel wins and you win. So what a great idea. And it gives them an advantage because direct booking is amazing for these hotels. I was, had lunch with a very, very, very, very, very famous hotel magnet. And they were just talking about their relationship with hotels.com, Expedia, etc. And what percentage they take versus direct.

And all of these hotels are trying to get people to book direct because they don't have to give that 20% or whatever. They're forking over to these travel agencies. And they're just trying to get everybody in the habit of going direct. And this would increase the chances of people going direct because you get this great value. Yeah. So if you're ever an end user and your hotel is helping. you plan your entire vacation is constantly being reinforced throughout your trip. The next time you're planning a trip, you're most likely going to be going back to that hotel. That's providing

you so much value. That's the idea. Fantastic. Awesome. Well, listen, it's so great to be in business with you. Congratulations. You did really well in the accelerator. Everybody loved your idea. I love your idea. We've invested, I think, twice in the company. And you've gotten some other investment. So stay focused and, you know, really delight both of your customers, that enterprise customer, you have to delight them. And you got to ultimately just absolutely delight, save time, save money, and delight those end customers. And you're well on your way to doing that. The reason we loved investing in your company was we saw you had product velocity. You really have been making roam around better and better every time we see the product. So congratulations. Everybody check out

roamaround.io or enterprise.romaround.com, depending on which bucket you fall in. too and we'll see you all next time on this week in startups bye bye