Brainstorming $10M AI Business Ideas w/ the Airtable Founder

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, my friend, I recorded one of my favorite types of episodes. My friend, Howie, started a company called Airtable. They're worth around $10 billion, so he has seen it all. He knows what's going on in the world of AI, and he has an amazing perspective. And for this episode, I asked him a very simple question, which is if he were 21 again today or he didn't have Airtable, what companies or business ideas would he want to work on? And he came with seven, seven different ideas that he would work on today. And so if you are looking for a different business idea or you're an AI nerd, which a lot of us are right now, you're gonna love this episode.
Tell me about live shopping with AI avatars.

**Howie Liu** (0:45)
I personally think this is a really interesting area. I mean, you think about live shopping, which is a huge thing in Asia. I mean, there's probably tens of billions, if not $100 billion plus GMV in commerce, dollars that are getting transacted through live shopping. This is basically where you have an influencer go and peddle a product.

**Sam Parr** (1:04)
Is this on Instagram? I mean, I pay attention a little bit to Asia, but is there a website I can go to to see this right now?

**Howie Liu** (1:09)
There's actually a big chunk of Tmoo that is powered by this and definitely TikTok. TikTok has a huge amount of these influencers that basically go and there's actually a shop tab that you can even click on. You see these products and it's a person basically describing the benefits of the product. Think about influencer marketing, like taking to the extreme where you just watch people peddling products and you click it, you buy and there's actually one company that's doing really well in the US called Whatnot and it actually started.

**Sam Parr** (1:43)
Oh yeah, I like Whatnot.

**Howie Liu** (1:45)
Yeah, exactly. And what's cool about it is there's so much personality to the content. In a way, it's almost like watching Twitch. It's not just about the actual product. It's about seeing this person talk about this product and maybe it's a really cool new shoe from Nike or a vintage shoe and they're talking about their own experience with it and childhood experiences with the Jordan brand or whatever. And so it comes to this really interactive experience. My pitch for this idea is basically, well obviously, you can have really rich, engaging experiences in the very near future with avatars. And if you go to heygen.com, it's a great avatar product. It's the easiest, fastest, self-serve avatar product out there.

**Sam Parr** (2:29)
Are you an investor in these guys?

**Howie Liu** (2:31)
I am an investor in HeyGen and I really like the team there. And they just built the best, easiest to use avatar product. That was kind of their claim to fame. They have basically pre-made avatars. So these are like trained on or effectively created from like real human actors that they've licensed from. So you can use one of their pre-made avatars or you can create your own. I think of this as like a really fundamental capability. Like you think about all the things you can do with avatars, sending a sales video where you're pitching each target customer in a personal way. Right. So a CEO sending a thank you note via video to every single attendee of our last event, that kind of thing. In this case, like I think applying the avatar concept to live shopping, where you can now have this one on one interaction with, and it could be a celebrity. Like maybe you get some some like real influencers to sign on to this. And, you know, it's like Kim Kardashian type who's actually like represented in avatar form and each person shopping gets to have a one on one interaction with her about skimps. And, you know, the skimps products that they want to try out.

**Sam Parr** (3:38)
Are you guys using any of this at Airtable?

**Howie Liu** (3:41)
We actually do have an internal setup where it's all powered by Airtable. We use our own Airtable web agents to go in and research different target customers. We've learned a lot about them. And then we can actually generate customized email pitches for each of them. So right now it's just email, but we are experimenting with with more of the video stuff. We actually have a setup internally where we can now generate an avatar video powered by HeyGen automatically from content in a row of Airtable. So it could be a list of different event attendees. And that use case I just described, I may actually do it for thank you notes for different events that I host in the future. If I host a dinner with some of our customers, I could actually now go and automate creating a video that looks like it's me. And I would probably be upfront about it and say, hey, here's an avatar version of Howie saying thank you for coming. And the novelty of it itself actually would tickle people's fancy.