How the Smartest Founders Are Quietly Winning with AI

**Jason Lemkin** (0:00)
Now, to 1 is very likely in AI. You build an incredible tool that no one else can do. You can do a million in a week or two.

**Shaan Puri** (0:16)
Okay, so for this episode, what I'm thinking this is about is, this is sort of, and guys, this is gonna be generous to us, but what is the smart money doing with AI? And in betting and sports betting in Vegas, you always kinda wanna watch, what are the sharps doing? They tend to be just maybe 10 or 15% earlier to understanding things or to recognizing things. And so similarly, Jason, I wanted you to know, because you've been doing really interesting stuff with AI, both from investing, you're talking to startups that are using them, you're reading all the reports, but also you yourself built this AI tool. And so I wanna kind of get your reaction to a few of the different things. Can you first explain this AI experiment you did where you basically made a body double of yourself out of AI and what was the experiment and what did you learn?

**Jason Lemkin** (1:01)
Well, yeah, so Saastr has a lot of content as you guys know. We have 12 years of content. Some of it's out of date, right, for sure.

**Sam Parr** (1:08)
Saastr being, you're a previous founder who's exited multiple software companies. Now you're like the godfather of like Saastr because you have this blog and media company and events business called Saastr and you have a huge fund. So that's kind of the...

**Jason Lemkin** (1:20)
But probably most interestingly for like seeing the future a little bit is I have about 10,000 pieces of content I've written over the years, a lot of it which is not out of date and I update it personally. So about 10,000 pieces of content and then we have several thousand interviews like you guys do but with so many great folks, early ones with Darmesh, middle ones from Darmesh, Darmesh when HubSpot had just IPO, Darmesh the other day, Yamini last week, Brian Halligan over the years and we have all of it and our AI took everything I've written, every tweet I've ever done, every LinkedIn post, every Saastr video from every speaker for 12 years. Aaron Levy the week he went IPO for the first Saastr annual to last week when we were talking about AI, all of it ingested in this AI and so what I instantly saw was as soon as I would talk to this AI, it was much better than me. It was much better than me because I forget stuff.

**Sam Parr** (2:14)
How did you get that information in there?

**Jason Lemkin** (2:15)
You just hook up RSS, the feed for a blog, it can scrape the web which is pretty easy. Soon we'll be able to do other things like MCB, but it's just scraping APIs and RSS. It's really just scraping. You just give a URL.

**Shaan Puri** (2:28)
But did you use like Delphi or you built your own tool or what did you do?

**Jason Lemkin** (2:32)
I tried a couple of things and then I used Delphi and then, at first we had so much content, it was a little difficult to ingest it. So there is a little bit of work. Then I spend about 10 minutes a day training it, which we could talk about. So there is a little bit of maintenance involved, but it's better than me. And the thing I didn't get until I saw something that was hyper trained, like this is a lot of content, 20 million words, right? Very few mistakes, very few hallucinations, and the ability to connect things that I can't. I just don't remember. I don't remember what Sam and I said on the hustle on stage years ago versus when we did an MFM while versus today, but the AI knows it all.

**Shaan Puri** (3:11)
By the way, 20 million words is like 200 books worth of content. An average book, I think, is like 100,000 words. So 20 million words you're saying is you basically gave it 200 books of your own brain and the brains of other guests that have come on your show.

**Jason Lemkin** (3:26)
Yes.

**Shaan Puri** (3:26)
And your goal was to build, was it to build basically an advisor, an AI version of you that could be an advisor to a founder who wants to come and talk to you, ask questions, but you don't have enough time of the day to book calls? Was that the big idea here?

**Jason Lemkin** (3:38)
I just wanted to learn like you guys did. I just wanted to learn. I didn't think it would be as good as it was because I used other products and I've used other things and it wasn't as good as my digital AI was.