This Week in Startups - Uber's leadership lessons, AI's disruption, and the power of solo founders with Josh Mohrer | E1911

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters. Go to LinkedIn.com/TWIST to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website! Go to Squarespace.com/TWIST for a free trial. When you’re ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Northwest Registered Agent. When starting your business, it's important to use a service that will actually help you. Northwest Registered Agent is that service. They'll form your company fast, give you the documents you need to open a business bank account, and even provide you with mail scanning and a business address to keep your personal privacy intact. Visit http://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist to get a 60% discount on your next LLC. * Todays show: Josh Mohrer, the solo founder building Wave App joins Jason. The two dive into Josh’s time during the early Uber NY days (1:17), solo entrepreneurship in tech (19:59), and more! Josh then showcases the Wave App in action (27:10) and delves into its intricate development journey (32:26). * Timestamps: (0:00) Josh Mohrer joins Jason (1:17) Early Uber NY days, Travis Kalanick's leadership, and Uber NY's regulatory challenges (12:42) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at https://linkedin.com/twist (19:59) Solo entrepreneurship in tech, enabled by AI advancements (26:15) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://Squarespace.com/twist (27:10) Josh demos Wave App and delves into its development journey (40:45) Northwest Registered Agent - Get a 60% discount on your next LLC at http://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist (41:39) Future of work, AI in daily life, and generational tech shifts * Check out: https://waveapp.ai * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Follow Josh: X: https://twitter.com/joshmohrer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshmohrer * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (12:42) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at https://linkedin.com/twist (26:15) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://Squarespace.com/twist (40:45) Northwest Registered Agent - Get a 60% discount on your next LLC at http://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist * Great 2023 interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

This whole thing is, I've done all of it, and I have a lot of pride in that. And part of this of thinking that this is even feasible and really why I reached out is that you have talked about this of like era of the solopreneur. And it could be, you know, there are always brilliant engineered types who would then dabble in the marketing side and put together their own thing. I don't think there's a lot of examples of a marketing or like business side exec. Growth exact. Yeah, doing the code.

No, this is going to be the revolution. This Week in Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Post your first job for free at LinkedIn.com slash Twist. Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you are ready to launch, use offer code Twist to save 10% off

your first purchase of a website or domain. And Northwest Registered Agent will form your company fast, give you the documents you need to open a business bank account, and more. Visit Northwest Registeredagent.com slash Twist to get a 60% discount on your next LLC. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week and startups. We have an incredible show for you today.

I met Josh Moore, gosh, 15 years ago. go maybe when he was the first, I believe, GM of Uber in New York City, which was in the first five cities, I think Travis launched and the team over there. He's moved on and become an angel investor, run a syndicate, and today we're going to talk about his new AI startup, which is inspired by this meme that's been going around. Who's going to build the first unicorn with one or two employees? Welcome to the program, Josh. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. Yeah. So you were the first GM of New York City, correct?

Yeah. So Travis expanded outside of San Francisco. New York was the first spot. And how that would typically work when they were expanding is launchers would go to a city and sort of set up the basic thing there, get the first few drivers, get the first few riders, set up some infrastructure and then hire a GM. I was actually, I was in there within the first. year, there was a team of three who were brought on right before me, and it didn't really work out, and all three of them left, and they hired a fresh group of three at the end of 2011, and I was the GM from that point on. And I heard, I don't know if this is true, so I'm not trying to take any credit here, but at some point, Travis had told me the Chicago, L.A. and New York heads had all seen him on

this week in startups, that famous episode from 12 or 13 years ago that you can watch. Now, is that true? Did you see the This Week in Startups episode? And that's how you became aware? My awareness of Uber was actually, so I used it when they really first launched here, which was like, you know, spring, summer 2011. I tried it out. I thought it was cool.

At the time, I was in an e-commerce marketing and ops role. I had a bunch of those over the years. And frankly, I just tried Uber and thought it was really neat. And actually, the first time I tried using it was for an airport run at like 4 a.m. or so. And it actually didn't work. I tried to request a car. There were no vehicles available. I didn't think much of it.

But later that day, I got a note from them saying, hey, we saw you tried to use Uber and it didn't work. You know, here's 10 bucks for the next time. Even though that feels like a typical like interaction now, at the time, it did not feel typical at all. It was like sort of, it was sort of amazing. I was like, how did you, I didn't even use your, I just opened the app. I looked. I didn't see any cars.

I didn't use it. So that was cool. It's like, okay, there's something interesting here. And then a friend of mine, you know, five months later was like, hey, they're looking for a GM. The job listing was really excited. It was like unlimited SUV rides. You'll ride around like a European diplomat. And it was just like at that point, I think like startup equity, you know, employee equity, all that stuff was really not on my radar.

Like I wasn't really educated on that. I was more after something that I knew I would enjoy. I was very interested in an opportunity to sort of be the head of. something of kind of like a startup within a startup. And it just sounded like something I would really love coming into work every day. And that is what it was. And so

when I applied, I didn't know who Travis was. I knew who Ryan Graves was. When I got to San Francisco, I met Travis, of course. And that night like in the, you know, like after that experience, I looked him up and tried to learn everything I could about him. And that is when I saw. Ah,

you do your due diligence. Got it. You know, what I found about Travis is, that, you know, right away I got to know him. I've probably spoken to him on the phone, you know, while I was in the role there, we probably had 100 phone calls over the five years, maybe a little more. Zero of them were scheduled. This is a guy who is so dialed in on the details of everything under him. You know, so there was that aspect of his leadership and also that he really encouraged me to be me and be myself and kind of lean into the way I am. and kind of my intensity

and the way I go about doing things. He made me feel really good about that. And so it was a really, really amazing experience. So even though he wasn't totally on my radar when I got there, he was my boss and we spoke all the time and it was a real pleasure. So a lot has been made about his management style and this distributed management style. So putting aside, press nonsense, but just looking at from the inside, this distributed leadership architecture that he set up, which I think,

most people would probably think he's doing a cloud kitchens right now. Who knows, since he doesn't talk about it and it's very much under the radar. But maybe you can talk about how the edges and individuals had a lot of autonomy. And then just generally, what was his management style like? Yeah, it was in some ways like remote before there was remote because most of the employees at Uber were not in the San Francisco office. You know, the New York was like a hub. I mean, we had a big office by the end, but it grew more slowly than Uber globally. And so it always had a tight feel.

And so I think maintaining the startup feeling on the city level was part of it. And really finding a GM in each place who can be like mini CEO is the way he would talk about it at the time and really represent him and represent Uber when he couldn't be there. So a big part of the job, particularly after the first little while was dealing with regulators, dealing with the press, a lot of kind of local things. So I think it took a lot of trust. They spent a lot of time finding the right person. I would like to think that in New York, they probably had a lot of options. I think in Minneapolis, they probably have fewer. As we sort of went down to the smaller cities, it became harder and harder to find those people.

But the GM crew, I think, because it was really the best they could find in every city, made for a pretty special group. And the folks that I'm still in touch with from Uber, many of them were GMs alongside me in those early days. Yeah. So we'll get to your new app in just a moment. Let's ask one or two more questions. New York was one of the most vibrant and challenging markets, if my memory serves me correctly.

And I remember one day talking to Travis because I see the headline. De Blasio is going to cat the number of Uber's. And I said, hey, D.K., what are we going to do here? And he said, oh, wait for it. And he sent me like a screenshot of something. and it was DuBlasio's phone number. Yeah, the DeBosio view, right?

The DeBlazio view. So explain, and DeBlazio, I think it turned out worst mayor in New York history since Dinkins, and that's a pretty low benchmark to hit. I love talking to New Yorkers. Well, no, I mean, DeBlasio was an incompetent fool, you know. You know who you're talking to. Explain the de Blasio relationship and explain your reaction

and where did this idea come from? And when Travis says, hey, I'm assuming Travis came up with this idea or whoever came up with it, you are the GM. Did you come up with that idea? And then how did this go over internally, externally take us to that moment? Yeah. So if I'm just going to, I just want to set the scene. I'll spend like less than a minute on this.

But what you have to go about over New York, both in the beginning and still now, is that it runs actually a fundamentally different business than what Uber does now everywhere else, which I would call like ride sharing. ride sharing being, I have excess capacity in my car a few hours a day or a few hours a week or really whenever I want and I'll turn on the app and it'll be great. In New York, that system doesn't actually exist. It is the black car system set up by Ed Koch, who was mayor before Dickens. And this was in the 1980s where, you know, taxis were great for Manhattan, but they needed a system that would work both for kind of executives who wanted pickups at their office, but also folks. like us, who grew up in the boroughs. And so Uber has always operated within an infrastructure and a rule system that has existed for decades.

It was not. It never tried to do the ride sharing, which was the true innovation of Uber. It never tried that in New York. So as a result, from the very beginning, we were kind of, you know, at least from the regulators standpoint, we were kind of like good little kids who filled out all the forms right and were kind of more responsive to them, maybe than the average car base owner that was sort of operating in that system at the time. So it was never the regulators that had a problem. It was the politicians. So there was a few different attempts. De Blasio's first attempt was in like early

2015 to try to pass rules that said the city had a right to review app updates. Right. Like that's a crazy one. We definitely don't want them to look at code. You know, eventually they sort of figured out the way to do it was to limit the growth of supply. So not let any new drivers join the taxi limousine system that would then join Uber. And so it was sort of saying no more supply. And the challenge with this is that it's actually a death sentence, but it's very hard to make people out in the world understand that. So at this point, we're getting 25,000 new riders every week. We're loading 1,000 new drivers every week.

Like, we are really going for it. And this law comes out, this is roughly a proposed law in July of 2015 saying, no more new cars. And I think to the casual observer that was like, okay, well, what's the big deal about that? You'll just sort of not at, you have a great business already. It's already quite large. We'll just, you'll just stop adding cars for a bit. The sort of nuanced people didn't get, and I'll get to the thing that you asked about in a second, is it actually, if you reduce supply, the system becomes unreliable and no one will,

will want to use it anymore. Like, we have to add supply to keep up with demand. So the winning, you know, and we did a bunch of things. We tried to explain it in all different ways. The winning idea came from someone on the comms team who was stationed in New York. And her idea was to have a de Blasio view. So at this point in the app, you'd sort of have a little slider at the bottom that you would choose Uber X, Uber Black, whatever.

And there was one for DeBlazio. And you would go to the DeBlazio. And all the cars on the map would disappear. and it would say ETA 15 minutes because we sort of just not the ETAs at that point were like two minutes and that is actually what would happen. It would make a lot of surge pricing.

The price would go up. ETAs would go down. It would make the system unreliable and the whole premise of Uber is a reliable ride at that time. And so it was a big deal and it was like 21 days in July that were probably the most intense of my working life.

And it was like going on CNBC every day talking to the like newspapers every day, getting them on board. And it was not just me. There was like 50 people who worked really hard to get this done. And I think we just made the case and we won. Like they pulled it back. They would end up returning in 2018 under a different type of Uber with no Travis, with no me, with no, a lot of people. And then they would actually get through some version of those rules. But in the three years between those, I mean, it's a game change. I think they probably 10xed in those three years. So, you know. Okay, let me cut to the chase right now because I know you're busy and everyone is

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Terms and conditions do apply. When you look at the recent performance, the question was always, can Uber ever be profitable? Is it always going to be unprofitable? And you're smiling. I'm smiling because in the beginning, people don't know. The Lincoln Town car business was wildly profitable. Uber X, well, we're going down market. We're trying to get more people to download the app.

Yeah, so there were some incentives. And yeah, you're in a dog fight to get driver. So, yeah, you want to give me an extra hundred bucks if they hit X number of rides. But it was very clear that once the habit was formed, it didn't matter if an Uber was $8, 9, 10, or $11 to 90 whatever percent of consumers, yeah? I think that's right. I mean, I'm obviously so happy for the folks there now and for Dara and for anyone smart enough to still be holding shares, which, admittedly, I am not.

But yeah, yeah, I mean, I think they kind of worked it out. and it's really wonderful to see. And I use Uber a lot here, and it's great. It works great. And I don't notice the few bucks. And a lot of, you know, here, the unit economics, even though we call it UberX, because it's that licensed scheme that I talked about earlier and not ride share and Uber is not doing their excess insurance umbrella because it's not ride chair and the drivers are by and large full-time guys, the union economics are very different in New York. And like New York has always been a pretty good business.

just like structurally. But in the ride share places where the competition with Lyft and others was particularly, you know, aggressive, it wasn't making much money. I think it was always sort of like structurally this can make money. We are choosing not to now. So I never really believed that like it'll never be profitable. It's like there's profit on every ride. It is how Uber chooses to spend that that will change the direction.

Yeah, it was just so weird to see journalists pile on and just even CNBC talking as I remember I was on with Deirdrabosa or something at some point. I said to Deirdre, they did a billion rides. This is when we were at a billion rides a year or something. I said, did a billion rides, lost a billion dollars, whatever it is, or, you know, lost four billion dollars. You do two billion rides next year. You raise the price is $2.

All of a sudden, you know, this thing is going to be a money printing machine. And, of course, here we are. They raised the prices, you know, whatever, 20, 30 percent. You get the economies to scale, and here we are. And then Lyft, of course, you know, being incompetent. You know, it was always the greatest gift I think Uber ever had. Yeah, I mean, they weren't always incompetent. And I don't pay attention that much, but I read, like, headlines about a misspeak on an earnings call, like, that sent the stock soaring and then back down to Earth.

Like, that's, like, pretty much. And perhaps indicative of general things going on there, but I really have no idea. Yeah, no, I just, I, and then finally, search pricing. You see it's coming to Wendy's? I did see that. Finally, you can get a chicken sandwich for twice as much, but not wait in line. I mean, I don't know if you've seen this, but they're like in buses in New York, on the side of buses, it'll be like, this bus never has search pricing. And like in taxis, the taxi screens will say never have search pricing.

It like became such a flashpoint. And I think like, you know, I think we probably could have done a better job explaining it. I think what someone said to me, the problem with you Uber people is you think everyone has a degree in math and economics. And I think like there is some degree of that. to that. We were talking to people the way we wanted to be spoken to. And I think, particularly in those very early years, you know, New Year's Eve, we would do like a math equation on the thing and people were drunk and they're like, you, or guys, I don't know what you're talking about, but I'm going to do it and then get charged a couple hundred bucks or something they thought would cost

$20. Like, you can understand why people were pissed. And I think it took a couple of years iterating. But I do think, particularly when it would just show you the rate in in the beginning, this ride will cost $80. Do you want it? That's probably the end point. That's the best way to do it. Yeah. But it's a thing that people just weren't used to, but are used to it, whether they realize it or not in things like airfare and hotels and restaurants on Valentine's Day and all these sorts of things. And Taylorless Swift tickets. And Stubhubbh generally. I don't think I bought a ticket at face value despite my best

efforts in years. I mean, it's perma. It's right now we're on perma surge pricing for tickets. That cartel has just destroyed it all. You know, it's... Are your kids into Olivia Rodrigo? No, they're not particularly into any specific artists, but... I mean, it was impossible to get tickets for that. Yeah, my 14-year-olds really into Billy Joel. So it's like my favorite artist growing up, or one of them, Dyer Shraith, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan. Every month, he's doing a kick at the garden.

I know, and he's going to end his thing in July, I think, so I'm going to try to take her to one of the final shows. Definitely should. If anybody in my audience knows Billy Joel or his, like, nonprofit or something, I got to do, like, a couple of donations a year anyway. Somebody put me in touch with that. I would just love to introduce him to my daughter and be a hero. and just say thank you to him for 30 seconds, take a quick selfie and get the hell out of there. But maybe I could, you know, donate to his...

He's got to have a charity for something. I thought you've gotten good dad stuff over the years, like, for the kids. They probably think you're all right, you know? My daughters think I'm cool. Yeah, they also make fun at me because of the podcast. They're like, oh, you're doing your podcast. Right. And so I started doing a daddy daughter podcast by two eight-year-olds.

Yeah, it's pretty funny. If you can find the daddy-daughter podcast, there's one episode. out on Spotify right now. But I haven't tweeted it or anything. I just put it out there. I'll tell my kids that or I'll be buying a second and third, you know, microphone pretty sad. You know what?

My philosophy of the debt for the daddy daughter podcast was to just take out my phone, put on the voice recorder, and then ask them about one topic, school, being twins, food, whatever. And then I just hold the iPhone towards whoever's talking. And I'm just like training them to not talk over, talk over each other. And it's great. All right. Listen, you are watching this AI.

craziness happened. You've worked at one of the great startups in history. And you decide, I want to create my own startup, but I want to do it with this, I want to actually write the code or be the developer, and you email me, and I was like, well, that's rad. Yeah, build the product yourself. Cool.

So why don't you tell us a little bit about your philosophy of building this startup wave and AI not taking app? And I'll just show it us. Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, I've always been developer adjacent. No one's ever paid me to code before, but working at startups, particularly in like e-commerce, not like a little bit at Uber, but mostly the other jobs that I've kind of done over the years.

I've been near engineers. And I think I've always had a bit of like Enj envy. And the reason for that is I always felt like they are the ones with their hands on the thing, doing the thing. And particularly in startups and there's not that many people and everyone is rather self-driven, there's decision making there about what to build, how to build it, that I always have kind of envied. Like, I can weigh in.

I can write a memo, whatever, but actually doing it, you know, is a different thing. And so I've taken a bunch of, like, you know, Udeme classes, like YouTube things over the years. And I've had little, like, little increments of getting somewhere, but really never actually getting there. It's a cliche, but when Chad ChbT, the very first one, the sort of original in like November 2020 came out, the first thing I started doing is asking questions about the code. like, hey, I'm trying to make a website in Next.js. How does this work? And found that it was a very, it really worked well for me as like a question and answer. How does this work? How do I do it? And it'll answer right away. A bunch of questions I was probably asking to engineers that I worked

with, you know, maybe one a day or one a week. Now I can do like one a minute and just start like really mainlining information. And not only that, but I also found that it actually could help me write the code itself. Like not just teach me, but actually pair with me and I can kind of guide it, you know, like engineering is taking a problem and breaking it up into the tiniest increments and solving each increment and putting it together and you have it. And so it was sort of like, okay, this thing can help me like build magical things. And so I'll put a pin in that, you know, for for one second, like around this time, you know, AI, it's a big AI moment.

I was kind of like into deep learning and learning about that five or 10 years ago. And I always sort of thought it would like, they'll never actually call this A. AI, it's deep. But anyway, like, AI is the thing. In this AI era, I found there's sort of all these demos coming out all the time. Very cool demos. But there's many of them or most of them are either web-based or they're sort of demo-ish in nature, like install this Docker container and then run this like Python script and then it'll do the magic thing.

There's like all these ways to like very sort of artificially generate the like magic in an environment. But like, I believe that. that life's most important moments happen away from your desk, and that most normals are not at a computer all day, and they're not on Twitter and reading about AI and trying the demos. And it's like, what is the AI that my 70-year-old dad is going to use, you know? And so there is no, and similarly, there's no shortage of ways, even then, but especially now, there's no shortage of ways to record your Zoom and record your meet

and record your, you know, hangout and teams and all this. But like just very little for the real world that's more than just, a demo, a proof of content. I'm like, what would it look like if I made an audio recording app and just, like, got feedback and just started adding features that people say and sort of intuiting things like, huh, it seems like if I do all the, like, transcription on the phone, it'll take too long. Like, what do I do?

Like, oh, servers, like, I didn't really know about that. Like, I knew the word, but I didn't really know how it worked. Oh, cloud functions. I'll learn how to do that. And so it's sort of been like a walkabout of trying to figure stuff out. with brute force. I have two kids. I have a semi-busy life with them.

I love working remotely. And so the idea is like, okay, like, wouldn't it be fun to just see how far can I get this on my own? Before, you know,

without hiring, you know, I could easily drive this off the rails, hire a bunch of people, maybe raise money, maybe not, like do a whole thing. But like,

what about just like tying my hands and like just saying, I'll only do what I can do personally? And so I made a few different little, like, mini apps, and this is the one that people were interested in. I think the real clicking point for me was when my dad brought it to a doctor's appointment and recorded it and then got a summary of what was discussed. And that was much deeper, just in the moment, things happen and it's good to record. And so, yeah, it was like, okay, let me do audio recording. And then I added phone call. So you can kind of like make a phone call through the app and it records the phone call.

Or maybe I'll import podcasts. I can improve you into the app and get a summary there. Like, okay, people want to share out of the app. How should we do it? We'll share it a notion and we'll share to like a web URL. And it just sort of like, really just kind of having a good time. And I like to say like skyscrapers look like holes in the ground for a very long time. And then suddenly they start to shoot up.

And not that this will be a skyscraper, but I have found like it started really small. And people in my life were like, oh, it's Josh's little like retirement project. I was like, well, actually, like I'm taking this really seriously. and I'm working full time on it. And people who live with me know that I'm like going Josh Moore style on this. Like I'm just turning it up to 12 and like hammering on this until it's good enough. And found some friends who would humor me and like tried and just sort of polish and rebuild and rebuild until it kind of works.

And now it's the subscriber volume is like roughly doubling every month. It's really kind of insane and the most exciting thing I think I've ever done, even more than Uber. because it's like it's just me. It's like me versus the world and I have all these customers. And if they chat in the app, it goes to my phone. It's just like a very, there is for the first time nothing standing between me and consumers of the thing that I'm building. And that is for me at this point in my life, a very good feeling and something that I'm really enjoying. Martin Scorescence makes gorgeous movies.

Squarespace makes gorgeous websites. So it's not really a shocker. that Squarespace convinced Scorsese to direct their recent Super Bowl ad, which you can see on the video right now, or you can go ahead and Google it or look for it on YouTube. Squarespace is known for helping people build beautiful websites, but it's become so much more than that. Now you can build or sell anything, and your Squarespace experience is powered by AI. Squarespace AI can instantly generate content for website text, email campaigns, and more.

Think about how much time that's going to save you. Squarespace also recently extended its biosites platform, you know, those link and and biosites, they've always been pretty boring, but now you can build them beautifully with Squarespace. Yes, biosites. So here's your call to action. Check out Squarespace.com slash twist to get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash twist to get 10% off your first website or domain purchase at Squarespace.com slash twist. Let's demo it. Let's take a look at your belt here. Yeah. And if you're listening at home and not seeing the video, basically you're looking at a screen that says all recordings, all waves, and each row is sort of like

in a traditional Apple style with summary. So I'll just start to record. And this could be I am doing a brain dumb or I'm in a meeting. I actually, in preparation for this podcast, I was taking a walk somewhere and I recorded about 10 minutes of myself giving my bio. And then at the end got a summary of that and sent it over to you guys. So I've been speaking for about, it'll be almost about 30 seconds. If you're watching the video, you see like a, like, a, like,

like an indicator or wave that there is sound coming out. And when I'm done, I'll just press stop and it'll transcribe this in the cloud rather quickly. And then it will summarize it. And so there is the transcription right there. And then we'll probably have a summary in about 10 or 15 seconds. This will be like GBT4 style. So it's up. The speaker discusses their use of a recording feature possibly within an app or device or capture their thoughts or conductive brain.

The summary goes on a bit. It's on the screen now if you want to check out. the video. But, you know, that was a 20 second. And then I can listen to it. I can share it either in a URL or a notion or I can do some changes to the format or I could even change the language. Let's say, I want to send this to someone in, you know, in Italian. It'll reprocess the summary and transcription in it, you know, in Italian. So, you know, what are people using this for? It is a lot of meetings, meetings not on Zoom, but sort of in their office. I have a guy recording all his sermons at church.

So here is the summary that I just did a second ago in, it's in a talia now, if that's useful. So that's it. And basically just to give you some sense. Phone call idea seems like the killer one. Is that what people are buying it for? Because I know sometimes you want to record a call and, you know, you just want to make a quick phone call, record it and share it.

And then obviously, depending on the state you're in. could be two-party consent, could be one-party consent. I remember in New York as a journalist, I believe it was one-party consent, so we could record calls without a problem. Yeah, I mean, we're talking to people. Yeah, and look, it should go without saying that anyone using this anywhere should be, be aware of the local laws, and it is not intended to be a secret. So for recording phone calls, you know, you can't actually, like, in the phone app,

if you're using the phone app on your iPhone, there isn't actually a way to record a phone call. So what this does is it's a redirect. First, you basically verify your phone number so that we know that it's you. And then you make a call through the app. And what that does is it calls you first, you pick up, and it says, now connecting. And it called the other recipient with your phone number as the ID. So to them, it feels like a normal phone call. And to you, they redirect.

The phone feature is a big one. It's not most of the action. I think it's poorly marketed. and frankly, a bit clunky. People will make a phone call and then press the red button, like, and why not? Like, the red button is right there. So there's like... And then they'll stop the call by hitting the red button.

That's right. It all kind of screwed up. So, you know, I'm doing roughly at this point about 15,000 minutes a day. And I'd say, you know, 500 of them are phone minutes. And that's, so it's still pretty small, but it is growing as a segment faster than the overall thing. So it's sort of like when we started UberX, like, you know, we're still, we still love the main Uber, but we introduced something new

because people might want to try that. And then, you know, you could put it into folders and there's all sorts of settings you can do and all this. And that's it. And you got 200 people to pay for this already, and you're at 100,000 in ARR already. So, yeah, that's when I pinged you last week. So I'm actually at 130 ARR now

and I have about 500 paid subscribers. It is roughly doubling every month. So the numbers are feeling fun and silly. almost able to cover your salary. I mean, a couple more doublings and you hired a developer. Or if you are using non-US developers, you've already hired two or three. So congratulations. You know, to be honest, of all the parts of it, and again, I came up in a marketing and

ops background. I started selling on eBay in 1998 from a computer at my high school in a computer science seminar that I wasn't paying attention to. So I sort of like right turned when I was on the computer engineer path and sort of right turned into marketing. But I think this actually might be where I'm going to be for the long haul. So I don't know that I'm going to hire someone. I have so far every bit of code, like this whole thing is I've done all of it.

And I have a lot of pride in that. And part of this of thinking that this is even feasible and really why I reached out is that you have talked about this of like. Yeah, many times. Era of the Solopreneur. And it could be, you know, there were always brilliant engineer types who would then dabble in the marketing side and put together their own thing. I don't think there's a lot of examples of a marketing or like business side exec.

Growth exact. Yeah, doing the code. No, this is going to be the revolution is if a business person doesn't have to find the developer, they can, you know, and this did happen with Figma, envision, balsamic before that, you know, you'd have a business person learn how to make mockups. Then they learn to make clickable mockups. Then they, you know, did Webflow or Balsamic. bubble, you know, whatever, and they learned how to do a no-code solution.

And now, hey, here we are dipping into actual code. And in your estimation, how many months have you been coding with this? So I started, I showed the first demo to someone who gave me real positive feedback. I'll never forget at the end of April. Perfect. So you're 10 months in. In the 10 months, how have the co-pilots advanced, if at all? And what do you see in terms of, you know, things you tried to do 10 months ago that maybe did or didn't work?

and they might be working now or just how refined they are. I don't know if you're using Replit or GitHub copilot. What are you using as a stack? And then how has it advanced? Yeah. So, I mean, I think there's this idea that like AI will flow like electricity. And that metaphor did not resonate with me until the last couple of years because it really, that is actually the perfect metaphor.

And it does blow like electricity. So it's in the chat apps, but it's also now wired into your VS code. There's a GitHub version. There's the just the standard LLM from OpenAI that kind of feeds in. There's all these good ways to do it. So I think one big change is both the models have gotten better. I started doing this on GBT 3.5, and there have been a few different iterations of GPT4. The longer windows, like you being able to put more information into the chat or into whatever you're using is a big one.

That actually makes this app possible. I could drop two hours or three hours or four hours of spoken audio as language. into the thing and it'll work, whereas before it have to, like, chunk it up. So there have been a bunch of improvements on the models themselves. And as you pointed out, you know, it's better. The electricity is flowing more now.

So it's in your VS code. It's in your, it's really everywhere. It's in my email. It's in the app. So now it's starting to get to all the places. And, you know, it does make things easier. But I think that's sort of the vision. It's not like you're going to wake up

and the robot is going to make you eggs for breakfast, it's more that AI can touch your life in a hundred different ways and make it marginally easier. And really, that is how computers have been for years and decades. But it's the step of that. It's just like, it being everywhere, it guessing the next word, it's spell checking you. Now it's summarizing your email and your body. I don't know you saw Raul from Superhuman what he released yesterday, but now he's got Superhuman free writing replies to your emails as they come in. So when you open your email box, it says, oh, hey, Josh, we'd love for you to do a keynote at, you know, whatever conference, web developer conference, 24.

And it has interested, not interested, tell me more or something. And so you hit like, interested. It's like, oh, that sounds great. But it's doing it based on how you've responded to those previous emails before. So it's now created in LLM. So if you frequently say, you know what, I only do paid speaking gigs, please talk to Jamie Kalakanis, my brother. who manages that for me,

you know, he's C-Ced above, it will do that. Right. It's awesome. So here we go. And did you see the note yesterday about which company was it that did a... Oh, yeah, it was Clorna? Explain that. I mean, you know, I think that's a one of the original ideas that I didn't do because I wanted to do Wave

was to try to, so it was pretty obvious. Like, customer support is such a, it's been an obvious use case since the beginning. but you would expect big companies to work it out before small ones. One idea was like, do an agent on top of Shopify. And I had something working where you could chat with it like, where's my order? It's like, which of these orders that are you talking about? Like that you placed over the last year, like this, you know,

giving it enough information that it could do that. And then I just sort of like doing this instead. But I think the customer support one totally. Like it's going to be so many questions are just repeats. like, is just the art of answering the same 30 things again and again, but with fresh energy. And I think, you know, that's a layup for this stuff, I think. According to the statistics, it was getting the AI-based customer support was getting higher ratings than the humans. And the calls went from like 11 minutes to three.

So not only was it replacing the humans, it was doing a better job and solving people's problems in less time. It's like, it always spells right. It's awake all the time. So I'm going to be moved like wave right now. If you chat sport in the app, it goes to me. It does push notification on my phone or it like rings on my computer. And that's been invaluable because talking to people is how I know about bugs and about what

they want. But there will be a point where the system that I use has an AI version where it looks at everything you've ever said and it starts to generate answers. And you could build up some actions like reprocess a recording. I could give it that sort of. that ability. But I'm going to do that because I would much rather pay, you know, intercom, a dollar, a ticket than hire someone, not just because the quality might be better, but because it's just low drama, you know, like it's just, it's a simpler thing.

I don't, I think part of the moment for me in my life and the it's that I'm, that I'm scratching, and I know most people don't operate this way, but it's like, there is something truly liberating about depending on no one. Totally. I love the teams that I've built. I've loved I've loved working with folks and I know I'll do that again. But for this moment in my life, it's a, it's a perfect fit to just go solo. And that even means support.

So it'll be me or the robots, I think, for a while. I think that was Joe Rogan's like original thing he loved about doing his podcast. He said, I do my podcast with one person. I just turn on the cameras. I record it. I don't edit it. So he specifically was like, we're just not going to edit this thing. We're just going to publish it as it.

You like it. You don't. I'm going to read the ads live. Done. I mean, of course, it's gotten more sophisticated. Yeah, and I think, you know, to your point, you know, this is not a big trend yet, but I do kind of think you'll see more artisanship on the internet. You know, I think you need big companies for certain things, but I think the ability to kind of home grow something, put it out into the world with a small group of people. It's just never been easier.

And not just AI, but all the tooling for building things is better. Like, it's easier to make apps. This wasn't the first time in my life. I thought, boy, I'd like to learn how to make apps. Like, I tried in 2009 way too hard. Way too hard. I tried in 2015, getting better, but still couldn't do it. And now I'm doing it now.

And part of that, it's not just the AI. It's that the frameworks and the tooling and the languages and documentation and the communities on the internet that work with that stuff have exploded. So the search is also easier to find people doing this, you know. Something that's kind of cool, like engineering world changes fast. you know, the way you might write an iPhone app will change year to year, the different sort of inputs there. So the AI models don't always have a very good grasp on that because they're, you know, they might have only learned up to last April and things that happened since then.

But there's a community of people who do this stuff for real and getting involved with that has been really fun too, just like being in the engineer world and kind of... Where do you hang out with those folks online? Is it discords? Is it Stack Overflow? Is it Hackernus? It's Twitter. I mean, I've read Hacker News for years, but it's mostly Twitter. I mean, like YouTube a bit too, but it's mostly Twitter. And I was saying to my wife yesterday, it's a little bit like getting into a really awesome show at season five.

So you're watching season one and two. You don't have to wait for season three. It's already out there. It's season four. And so like the things, you know, different technologies that have come out over the last couple of years, I had the times run into problems that those technologies solve and enough to wait. I'm like, I have this problem. And they're like, oh, yes.

this thing that like the React people released this year will fix that. I'm like, excellent. So it's like I'm in super fast mode with that, which is exciting. Starting a business used to be a pain. You needed a lawyer. There were in fees. It was a mess. Now with Northwest registered agent, it only takes 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Northwest provides everything you need to start and maintain your business. Every LLC, corporation or nonprofit that Northwest Forms comes equipped with registered agent service, a business address, a website, and hosting, email, a phone number, and this is all covered by Northwest's privacy by default. Again, your full business identity

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Let's call it in three years, three years' time. We'll be able to do what you're doing right now. I think the numbers might still be small, but each person who does it can do more. I mean, I think what it's important, I don't want to leave anyone with the impression that we're at a spot now or frankly that I think we'll ever be a spot where to just say like, make me an app that does these things and it outputs a perfect thing. Like, that's not, there's a whole bunch of reasons why that is technically unlikely. It's more about dividing the thing into a million parts and having it solve each part. But I think it's certainly a force multiplier. It's, for me, it's been a zero to one because I wasn't an engineer and I suppose now I am.

So the number will go up. I think if you're a great engineer, it can make you a lot better. Yeah, make you a hero, a superhero, yeah, for sure. I think chat GPT, LLMs generally, which are sort of like you could think of them as like fully synthesized views of the internet. You know, you're not necessarily going to learn something that you couldn't learn on a webpage if you read and had tons of time. So it just really makes learning generally more, you know, easier.

I was doing some ice skating and my kid was like, who invented ice skating? I don't know. What did dads do before Chat Chepti? I got this from you too. I put it on in the car the other day. Yes. For people who don't know what we're talking about here is chat GPT4's app has a conversation mode. And then the iPhone 15 has a smart button on the side here where you're an action button.

I don't know what they call it. But anyway, you can map that button to something. I mapped it to open up ChatGPT4 and open up the voice dialogue. So when my phone is in the cradle while I'm driving safely on autopilot in my model Y, I can just press that button. It comes up and then I start talking to it. And for history, it's unbelievable to sit there with your daughters and talk about history. Perfect.

Where did ice skating come from? Like, great. There's actually a bunch of really good stories about that and you can learn anything. And so that's magic. You know, my seven-year-old will say they just, can you look it up on that? You know, just sort of look it up, but taking for granted that that's a thing. but this is like even one level beyond that. It's like, let's just ask.

You and I are part of the generation that remembers the time before Internet. So when you were born in 1980 or so, I'm guessing, which year? 1982. So you're born in 82. That's when Dialup started, 300, 1,200-bodemes. And so when you were 10 years old in 1992, Dial-up was in full swing, five bucks an hour, three bucks an hour. And then you remember the Internet when you were 15 or 20 happened.

but you do remember the time before that, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, shows that are set that are on at a certain time. You know, having four channels to watch. I don't have cable, just like CBS, NBC, Fox ABC, that's it. You know, going to the video store. Buying CDs, buying like records and cassette tapes. Magazines.

Yeah, magazines. Having a magazine subscription. It's a whole different thing. And I think it's a more exciting time. I'm glad my kids can have this. Here, think about this. Then there was Gen Z and millennials. They only remember the online world.

Now there's our kids who will only remember AI, right? The chat GPT generation, Generation GPT. This generation, I'm going to name them Generation AI. Gen. A.I. This is Gen. A.I. The generation.

I have now dubbed it that, and that's how it will be. So the Gen. A.I. generation. they are only going to know talking to LLMs, having it write their papers, having it format data for them. I mean, it's just their minds are going to be different.

They're just going to be formed in a different way that talking to a computer and working in collaboration with a computer, it's not like us working with a hammer and a nail. For them, it's going to be like working with a robot next to them. And then they'll be the next generation, it'll be generation robot. And that generation, the C3PO generation, they're going to be insane because they're going to have optimists, you know, Elon or Humane's robot. And they're going to grow up with one of them in their house.

Now, that's going to take another 15 years, 10 or 15 years. But that will happen. And then imagine you grew up with a robot. Yeah. You know, before my older daughter was born in 2014, I used to say as sort of as a joke, like she'll never learn how to drive and she'll never go to college. Like those will be two things that, you know, the cars will drive and the college will be on YouTube, you know, or something. something like that. And the reality is, as she is about 10, like, I think she probably will both have a driver's license and go to college. So things play out maybe slower than I thought,

but I do think at some time scale, like driving, certainly not, maybe a little sooner for you guys than out here, but like the driving thing seems like pretty much a done deal. But people still go to universities to learn things, at least for now. And so, yeah, I don't know. But I absolutely agree. Like, it's a totally different thing. And it reframes what you have to know. Do I have to remember history? Like, are all the, you know, is it the same to be able to look something up? Is that as good as knowing something? Maybe. It sort of just reframes that. Like, my kids learn math, a lot of it. And they, and they, and like reading is a focus in their school. But, you know, when my fourth grader writes an essay, like, she has a school laptop and writes in Google Docs,

and her teachers turn off spell check and grammar check when they're writing and then they turn it back on after and read like comments, they write comments in line. Like, boy, that's different. I mean, that's really different. And it's great because it's more in line with the world. So I, you know, I think they should have, they should let the kids work on their computer. Sounds like a great strategy there. And then I believe all the testing that occurs and all the paper writing should occur in a proctored room

with pens and papers. Just so your brain can kind of do both things. Like, I remember we had computers towards the, you know, in high school and then in college, but I took a mechanical drawing class. And I love mechanical drawing. You had all these different tools. You had a drafting desk and you pin your paper to it and you had grid paper. It's a rat.

And my brain is still like loves that concept, right? So it's kind of like painting. or, you know, cooking or whatever. Yeah, sure, you could have your, you know, we have a gadget that makes like an egg sandwich. It's pretty hilarious. You put like two English muffins into this like stackable thing.

Girls love it. But you can also learn how to make a perfect omelet, French omelet. Like teach your kids how to make a French omelet perfect. Josh, amazing. Where can people download this and give you a couple shackles for it and keep your progress going? You can find it in the app store if you search for Wave AI.

Wave AI. Now, not raising. funding, wouldn't have anything to do with the funding? I don't think so. Yeah, no, I mean, I don't take a salary. I'm just kind of trying to grow this because I can. I think taking funding means, well, I'll just leave on the last note. One of the magic elements of working alone is that the bar for success is just practically speaking much lower. Like, for example, if I, if I, I sort of socialized to friends like, if I can get this to 100K MRR, like monthly recurring revenue, I would feel that as such an outsized success,

it would more than cover my life. For venture scale, that's like, that's a failure. So it's sort of like, I'm keeping the bar low for myself because I don't want to work with other people. For now, I want to do this alone. And so it's, yeah, and the website is waveapp.a.i, though it's going to be wave.com, probably by the time this is out. Oh, you know, before this comes out, get a dot-tech domain.

That's the new hotness. Is it? Dot tech. You should take a look at it because I just got a couple of good domain for $12. bucks. And that kid who was making that little robot rabbit device that took over CES, he was on the pod. He's using a .tech. A lot of people are starting to

grab those. Yeah, dot AI has been a huge... Forget it, those have all been. I get 10 people emailing me a month asking me to buy their dot AI collections. And I'm like, yeah, not for me. Interesting. I'm a dot com guy, but I'll settle for dot co. I mean, I have inside.com. I own 20.com for a while. I sold that there. You have some serious domainage, you know?

I have actually, the one I really want to develop is annotated. So I had this idea about creating an annotation standard. And when we were doing Engadgeton these things, like people would write comments, but I was like, you know, I want to be able to highlight a sentence at the New York Times or on Engadgett, write mouse click, and then put a comment there and have it live on the webpage for other people who have the notebook pad on. And then I want to be able to share it. So I grab the sentence from the New York Times. I annotate it and then it makes a landing page, you know, like a little bitly kind of thing. And it just says, here, I took that paragraph and then I write my comment under it, and then I can share that with people. So I'm just taking a small portion of something, or I take a YouTube video or a clip.

So I take a clip from Larry David, and I say, I really like the lighting of this shot. And then I say, I just give me like seconds, 27 to 45. And you know, you set it up so it can only take 10 seconds of the video. That's a really cool idea, man. Are you busy? Yeah, I'm pretty busy. You know, the lifestyle business, the billion dollar lifestyle business, it's here. I think your tip of the spear.

My friend Phil Kaplan, I don't know if you know Phil who did Distro Kid and before that Friot Company, very famous guy. I used Distro Kid. I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a used. So Distro Kid is the, is the billion dollar solo founder that nobody knows about. So it's been done already, I think, by him.

But, you know, these, this idea is going to be there. And I think this is like the future of employment is make something bespoke and amazing. Like, maybe you like sourdough bread, right? I'm just picking something crazy. and you make an app for sourdough bread. Now, I would never fund an app as an investor for sourdough bread. That's not going to get to a billion dollars in revenue.

That's not going to be Uber or Robin or a com. But the sourdough bread app could have 100,000 members easily around the world who are obsessed with sourdough and bread making and charge $10,000 a month, 10,000 people. I don't know. How many kids you get? That's really how the internet should work. That's like the promise of the internet, I think. It's being able to just do your thing, get out there, get the distribution.

No, my bread baking app. You couldn't get a developer to work on it. But if you are the baker and you learn how to code and now you've got this bread baking app, and it's $100 a year, $10 a month, man, there's $10,000 people who sign up for that. And it's going to make a lot more than your bakery. And the bread will probably be better than what you get at the supermarket. 100%. It's an exciting time.

And I appreciate it. It's an exciting time. Great time to be alive. All right, brother, I'll talk to you soon. and everybody go download the app and play with it, give them some customer support requests. Oh, the one I have for you.

Yes, please. Anthony at Squarespace, created a note-taking app that I loved, was addicted to for a long time. You would open the note-taking app. You'd type your note, and you'd swipe up,

and the note would disappear. There was nothing in the app. The app was just empty. It was a piece of paper. And then it would email you whatever you wrote in it. That's pretty good. It was pretty genius.

So with yours, is if imagine if every time you saved it, it emailed you, the transcript and everything, now you got it in your email, or it put it into a Slack room, boom, with your notes, or made a Notion page automatically. You said you had Notion integration or Coda integration? You can share a notion.

It does all the like formatting, which is actually not easy, but I... No, it should be automatic. So you mean just like every single one just go to it? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. It should just put it into Notion. You tell it which group you want to put it in, and it, or it just makes its own wave AI one and just, whoop.

Right now you have a choice of making your own. But the idea of having things automatically share every time is a good idea. I don't do that yet. That's a good one. Because then if I put it there, then I get all the features of Notion for free. Or in my case, I love Cota too. So we use both of those. I suggest looking at Cota too.

It's equally as good. And they each have different specialities. But man, if it went to both places, now I've got two backups. And I can edit them. I can share them. And then there's all kinds of features there, you know, like database features or whatever I could use. So take ass job.

This is the moment that I relish being alone because if I had a bunch of people, there be a discussion. Should we do the Jason idea about the email? Oh, like, let's write a memo about it. Let's talk about it for a while. Let's think of it. Let's debate. Oh, you don't want to do it.

This is like, should I do it? I'm going to do it. And that's it. I mean, the notion thing is and Koda, those two apps are all the kids in college. My understanding is are using these now. So they kind of create their own personal space and they just keep all their shit in there. It's really interesting.

And then they added AI to all those. And so, yeah, it's pretty cool. All right, everybody, we'll see you next time on this week in Startups. If you want to see our AI demos, including this one, this week in Startups.com slash AI every Monday. Sandeep Madra and I do our AI thing.

And listen, if you listen to this show for so long and you got to the end of this, go write a goddamn review on Apple podcast, Spotify, any of those places, or put a comment on the, YouTube, give me a thumbs up, subscribe, all that stuff. I haven't begged for that in about 11 years on this podcast, but I'm supposed to. So here's your insert begging for likes and whatever.

See you all next time. Bye-bye.