Every AI Founder Should Be Asking These Questions

**Jordan Fisher** (0:00)
Welcome to this talk. I'm extremely confused. I think maybe more confused than I've ever been in my entire life. Probably, definitely more confused than I've ever been in my entire life. And I want to talk about that, because I think, I don't know, when you're confused, that's the start of something interesting. If you're trained as a scientist, that's like the thing you want to pay most attention to, is that moment where you're confused. Like, oh, this is interesting, I don't know what's about to happen. I've been in technology for like my whole life, and I feel like I've always had this advantage, where it's like, oh, I understand what's happening. I actually kind of think I know what's going to happen over the next five or 10 years, and I've used that to my advantage. Like, I've planned my career around it, I've founded companies around it. You know, I've kind of gotten ahead of the trend, and gotten involved at the right time in a lot of different places, and that's like really been great for me. I no longer feel that way though, like, I can't see five years into the future, I can see like three weeks or less, and I really still know what's going to happen. So, I want to have a series of questions that hopefully help me figure out what's going on. Maybe it'll help you all figure out what's going on. Maybe not. Not all questions are useful. But I think asking good questions is extremely important to running a startup, running a research team, running your life, whatever you're doing, I think we all need to like stop sometimes and just ask questions. But I think the moment in time that we're going through right now with AI is like extremely challenging, and fast, and if there is ever a time to stop and ask questions, it's probably right now. All views are my own, obviously. I think we're like required to say that. My day job is running a alignment research team at Anthropic. I've also been through YC, I've done multiple startups in my life. So maybe my perspective on like AI plus startups is useful for all if you're thinking about startup life or AI life. Okay, that's enough of a preamble.
Let's jump in. This is sort of like the main question that I want to ask. Everything's changing. How should that impact everything about my life? Honestly, like should you even start a startup? Like it's a big question. But let's assume that you're starting a startup or you're running a startup already. How should it impact your strategy? How should it impact your product? How should it impact how you're building your team? Like these are big open questions. And I think AI is probably going to change how you answer them today and probably differently tomorrow. And there's like this kind of paradox that I've seen throughout my career, running startups and talking to startup founders. Everyone always tells you focus is everything. Like that's the advantage that startups have. Focus, focus, focus. Big companies can't focus. That's why you can outcompete them and run circles around them. But despite the fact that focus is everything, the other truth of running a startup is you have to focus on everything. Like it's your job to think about hiring and fundraising and product and strategy and go to market and just like everything, right? And then all of a sudden in the middle of like a product launch, someone on your team quits and someone else threatens to quit. And it's just like it's madness and it's happening all the time. This is just an extreme paradox. But I think it kind of makes founders suitable to this biggest question that we're all facing as a society, which is what's going to happen with AI and what should we be doing? Because founders are the people that have to just answer every single question always. So I think it's a good positioning. There's been sort of like common, quote unquote common just like in the last six months, best practices, like what do you think about AI for your product? And people say like, oh, you should like think about what happens over the next six months. Think about what the next foundation models are going to be able to do and make sure you're planning your product, anticipating what those capabilities are going to do. Don't like plan for the capabilities of today. I think it's like extremely valid advice. You should definitely take it seriously. But I want to like up the ante a little bit and say, actually, you should be planning two years in advance because it's extremely likely that we will have AGI in the next few years. Maybe it's not two, maybe it's three, right? But I think you should be planning your company and your strategy around this fact, right? And like there's extreme uncertainty, right? So don't like take it too seriously. Don't have like literally a two-year plan. But if you're not thinking a little bit about how this is going to change everything from hiring to marketing to go to market, etc., I don't think you're doing your job as a founder. Okay, so that's really the theme here today. I want to go through a series of questions and take this lens of AGI arriving and also just take the lens of like what's changing near-term in AI over the next six months. I think there's been a lot of conversations around like, oh, actually the impact of AI is going to be slower than we think. And the reason is that big companies suck and they have to like, they take a lot of time to buy things, right? They don't realize the trend. And then the enterprise sales cycle is really slow. So all the Fortune 500 companies are just going to take years and years to like digest all the SaaS products that you all might want to be building. And I think that's actually extremely near-sighted. Because what's going to happen, I think, open question is, the buy side, the enterprises, they're going to get armed with AGI or strong agents over the next couple of years as well, right? And that's not just via the SaaS products that they might be building. It'll just be natively inside. Their teams are going to be using the next versions of LLMs to make buying decisions, right? And to figure out how to accelerate their adoption cycle. The force of AI is not just on this product revolution that the startups are building. It's also on the buy side, right? And I think this is like an interesting, weird thing about AI is that it's going to rise. You know, the water rises and all ships rise with it. It's not just the startups. The incumbents benefit from AI too. And I think we're seeing that in other places too, where large enterprises sometimes aren't even going out and buying software from SaaS providers anymore. They're like, I can just throw two people at Cloud Code and they'll build it and it'll be dedicated to the capabilities that I need for my organization. So buy side is going to be evolving really quickly. And I think it's an open question. What does that mean? Right. I think another angle on this is, you know, when you have AI powered outbound sales, we think about what that is going to do to the marketplace. But there's going to be this in this buy side too of like receiving those sale calls from AIs and trying to parse what's going on. So the dynamics aren't really clear how it's going to play out. This is a kind of related question. Like is software going to fully commoditize? Is it even going to make sense to run a SaaS provider in like two years or three years? Or is it like going to be the case that enterprises really do just build all their software in house because it's just one, you know, one prompt to cloud code, the next gen version of cloud code, right? And actually we just need in-house product managers and they're going to do everything for you. Like that's one real outcome. That could happen to consumer side too. Like maybe consumers eventually are just like not downloading apps anymore. They're just building apps on demand for themselves. They don't even think about it that way. Like they don't even think about them as apps anymore. It's just, yeah, I want my phone to do something for me. I ask it and yeah, it made an app for me, sure. What's the point of downloading an app at this point? So that's one outcome. But I think another outcome actually is the opposite. It's like maybe all of this automation on generating code makes it easier to just raise the quality bar extremely high. And sure, you can make like the equivalent of today's apps very easily just by prompting, but can you make an exceptional app tomorrow, the equivalent of a great team that's working with AI to raise the bar?