Greg Isenberg’s Step-By-Step Blueprint To Building A Successful AI Business

Greg Isenberg (0:01)

I'll give you and folks listening the playbook of if I was starting an AI company, here's how I would do it.

Matt Wolfe (0:18)

Hey, welcome to The Next Wave Podcast. My name is Matt Wolfe. I'm here with my cohost, Nathan Lands, and we've got an excellent show for you today.

So in the AI world, you've probably heard a lot that AI businesses have no moat. It's really, really difficult to create a new business in the world of AI when everybody can create similar businesses. Well, on today's show, we've got Greg Isenberg, and Greg has a completely different idea about how this is all gonna play out. In fact, he gave us a step-by-step roadmap, a playbook on how you can build a successful business in this current world of AI. So let's go ahead and just dive in with Greg now.

Nathan Lands (0:57)

Greg Isenberg, thanks for joining us here today.

Greg Isenberg (0:59)

Had a dream coming true.

Matt Wolfe (1:01)

This is gonna be fun. I mean, right now we're in this era where AI is sort of taking over all of the news cycles and everything has AI baked into it, even all the products that don't seem like they need AI have AI baked into them. And you're doing some amazing stuff with AI so it seems like a good fit for you to be one of our first early guests on this show and talk about where all of this is headed.

Greg Isenberg (1:23)

The interesting thing about AI is everyone from your barber to Jeff Bezos is interested in AI.

Nathan Lands (1:30)

Yeah.

Greg Isenberg (1:31)

I recently got a haircut and my barber just kept asking me about different AI tools that he was using, he wanted my feedback on it. And what Nathan and I actually have in common is I think I tweeted something about AI and he tweeted something about AI and then within 24 hours, Jeff Bezos both followed us on Twitter.

Nathan Lands (1:49)

And then Matt also got followed off of that.

Matt Wolfe (1:51)

Yeah, we're all in an exclusive Jeff Bezos Follows Us Club now.

Nathan Lands (1:55)

So we got to finally message him and actually get him to come on or do something with all of us.

Greg Isenberg (1:59)

That's right.

Matt Wolfe (2:00)

So Greg, how do you see the holding company concept? How do you decide what companies to either invest in or build with this whole narrative that these AI companies don't have a moat, knowing that almost any company out there can use some of these existing resources to build the same software you're building, how is the approach to what companies to invest in or build?

Greg Isenberg (2:24)

So there's this narrative that if you're building on top of Open AI. Chat GPT, you're this wrapper that you have no moat and therefore you haven't built any value. And I think it's wrong. I think it's wrong. Because if you think of Chat GPT and Open AI what is it, it's basically an amalgamation of the craziest amount of worldwide data in one place. It's incredible. It's like a trillion times the great library in Alexandria, maybe even more.

And I think that what people don't get is, you know what's another little startup that is a thin wrapper around the world's information? It's Google. Google doesn't create any of the content. They are a wrapper around the internet, but they point people to pages within the internet.

And it's the greatest business model of all time. Even today, it's a trillion dollar company. If you look at their financial statements, a huge chunk of their business still comes from Google search. I also think that there's this great unbundling of chat GBT that is happening. Now, what unbundling is, there's a great quote, I think Jim Barksdale said it. There's two ways to make money. You're either unbundling or you're bundling.

And what that means is, what does unbundling mean? Unbundling means, if you look at Craigslist, Craigslist was a marketplace for everything. You had the ability to post a job. That became indeed.com. You had the ability to find a mate. That became Tinder and what Match is doing. Basically, on the internet, you can't really be everything to everyone.

So there's going to be a huge opportunity to look at what are the different use cases on the horizontal platforms like ChatGPT and what OpenAI is doing and basically think about, how could I apply a community first approach?

Create what you might call as a thin wrapper. But what I call is, this is dope. I don't have to rebuild everything from scratch.