Ep 159: Aaron Cannon Is Building the Leading AI Customer Research Platform; It's About to Upend a $140B Industry

**Aaron Cannon** (0:00)
People actually share things with AI that they won't share with a person. Outset is what we call an AI moderated research tool. The research underlies everything that we interact with in the world. There are billions of surveys done a year, and they are the lowest quality data you could imagine. You can have AI get the depth of that interview, but you can scale it infinitely. It's such an obvious opportunity to be smarter.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:21)
I think you had 8X revenue last year.

**Aaron Cannon** (0:23)
This is an insane amount of growth.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:25)
How did you get Microsoft, Nestle, Google, Uber?

**Aaron Cannon** (0:27)
This is the killer application for insights and research with AI, period.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:41)
Aaron Cannon is a founder at Outset. We backed him at 8VC last year. He drew 8X last year. It's one of the highest growth AI companies we're involved in. This is a really fun one because he's doing things that are only possible now thanks to AI. Over a hundred major companies are using him to interview tens of thousands of people to learn more about their product. The world over the next decades, gonna change, we're gonna have real time feedback from everyone about how everything should work. It changes how all companies are gonna work. Not just big ones, but small ones as well. I'm planning on using their product after talking to them here today. Excited for you guys to learn more. Welcome to American Optimist, really excited to have Aaron Cannon here, the founder of Outset and my partner, Jack Moshkovich. Jack, thank you for being here too.

**Jack Moshkovich** (1:18)
Thanks for having us.

**Joe Lonsdale** (1:18)
All right, Aaron, you spent a big chunk of your career as a builder all over the valley before, and you decided to take a big swing and create Outset. Like, why do you do this?

**Aaron Cannon** (1:25)
Yeah, great question. So I spent a bunch of my career kind of building stuff and being in the industry. I came from the world of research and insights and understanding customers. Then I went on to work at a number of tech companies to build stuff, but I never started my own thing until later. And yeah, like, there's an archetype in Silicon Valley that I'm not.
There's the 20-year-old kind of naïve, you know, dropout founder type, and I'm old compared to that. And I think the way to start a company until actually I had a kid, and that was like a... I kind of reset my mentality about my career. There was something interesting to me about like, you know, are you working for someone else? Are you going and doing your own thing in the world? And I thought that was really... I don't know. I got reinvigorated by that. And it happened that right as I was having that kind of a mental shift, large language models started coming out. So this was back in 2022
And that's where it felt like there was going to be a huge change to everything. And we started kind of... I started thinking about it. So eventually, I just took the swing, which I was just going to... Like, I think being the older archetype of founder is like... There are some, you know, obviously, there's some upsides of being the younger type. There is, you have a certain... Like, you're naive about the world. That can be really valuable. At the same time, like, having a little bit more experience under my belt, like, it also, you know, we sell to the biggest enterprises in the world. There is something, like, really helpful about walking into a room and being taken seriously, having credibility, being able to speak to executives when I've sat in their shoes. And so there's a real kind of advantage to that too.

**Joe Lonsdale** (3:03)
You actually know what they need to know about their customers to get their job done really deeply. And you can do it from having done it before.

**Aaron Cannon** (3:08)
That's right.

**Joe Lonsdale** (3:09)
So how did you and Michael connect to side abilities together? Like he has a pretty unexpected background of his own firefighting and...

**Aaron Cannon** (3:14)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Michael and I worked together at a previous company where I was the VP of product. He was the tech lead. He was the best engineer at the company. And interestingly, like after we, you know, he left that company and he had done the Fire Academy when he was younger. He has really interesting background where he had gotten really passionate about that. And so after that company, he went off to be a professional firefighter.