How To Use AI In Your Startup

**Brad** (0:00)
We're talking about all this AI stuff, and it's all awesome, but the fundamental things that the founders still need to do to like enable the technology to produce value for customers are the same. And if you're not doing that, just switching your idea over to something that makes calls to OpenAI is not gonna change your fate as a startup.

**Pete** (0:17)
If you are building a cloud company, obviously you're going to use the cloud. Same thing with AI. It doesn't make sense for anyone creating a new company today to not leverage AI within their company.

**Gustav** (0:28)
Go to your friend who works in this, and go and sit next to them, and ask them how to do their job, and watch their screens, and you will get ideas right away. I'm very convinced that you only have to spend more than a few hours in front of their screens and see what of their repetitive tasks can be done better.

**Nicola** (0:51)
Welcome to another episode of Office Hours.

**Brad** (0:53)
I'm Brad, and this is Pete, and we're here with Gustav and Nicola. We've sat across the table from thousands of founders over the years digging into just about every question you can possibly imagine. And we wanna talk with you today about some of those things that have come up. We are in the age of AI. That can mean a lot of things though, and there's a lot of different directions you can go with that. So what are some of the ways that startups are taking advantage of the fact that there's so many new opportunities coming on board from LLMs?

**Nicola** (1:17)
If I were a founder today, what I would be asking myself is, what's going to be possible when all of these models become twice as good as they are today?

**Pete** (1:24)
So if you are a startup today in the old world of how you build a startup, should you pivot to AI? Should you see that going like, should you use AI?

**Brad** (1:34)
I have two answers to that. The strongman answer to that is that, no, you should not pivot to AI. You shouldn't do that just because it seems like a good idea. But yes, you should almost absolutely be working on something that's using LLMs at the heart of it today.

**Pete** (1:47)
What's an AI company anyway?

**Brad** (1:48)
Exactly. What does it even mean? I think anyone that's using LLMs either internally to make things more efficient, I've got a company that I worked with a few batches ago that's literally building an HOA management company. Just like straight up, we are an HOA management company.
We sell to condo boards, and then we do all the stuff for them. But they're using LLMs to make everything more efficient internally.

**Pete** (2:12)
You know that. People, if you are building a cloud company, obviously you're going to use the cloud. Same thing with AI. It doesn't make sense for anyone creating a new company today to not leverage AI within their company, right? That's exactly right.

**Nicola** (2:25)
And in the early 2010s, when a lot of software businesses started moving on to the cloud, there was this moment in time as a founder where there were just a lot of good ideas lying around because you had the opportunity to replace some legacy piece of software that was on-prem. And I think we're in a similar moment right now, where there's just a lot of good ideas, where you can take some existing piece of software and build it from scratch with AI and native part of that, and it's going to be much better.

**Brad** (2:55)
I've talked to the CEO of Workday about this, and he was previously at PeopleSoft, and just saw this 2000 or whenever like, okay, PeopleSoft is huge, but now the cloud is here, someone's going to build a whole new version of all the same stuff, just have it be based in the cloud, and it'll be better. And similar moment now for a lot of companies.

**Gustav** (3:13)
I think if I look back on my time, I arrived here in 2007, roughly the same time for you. When you start with the startups, the mobile wave had not happened yet. Like my first week of YC was Steve Jobs presenting the iPhone. And if you haven't lived through these cycles, it was hard for me to imagine what would happen from that week on. But our company was too early, like the apps didn't come until summer after, and the permissions that we needed didn't come until summer after that, 2009 But the following five years were just like, that period when all the interesting mobile companies were generally started. Like a lot of the stuff that we now use, and I remember in my match was Joe, and Joe sat next to me at a hackathon and was like, what are you working on? He's like, I'm building Facebook's first mobile app. You can now build apps for the iPhone. And it was like, oh, cool. That was my reaction. It wasn't like anything more than that. But if you look back, I realized we were right in the middle of the beginning of that cycle. And I think because I saw that, or we all saw that, we now see this. And a founder who didn't see any of the previous cycles that actually was real, that had a really big impact, they can't see the, they might not be able to see this cycle in the same way. Big companies generally are preceded by big technology shifts. And this one happened two years ago, and we're very increasingly getting more intense throughout every month. And whatever we saw in the beginning of last year, it's like we've moved much further already, and there's a lot more things you can build now that you couldn't build a year and a half ago.