Welcome back to another episode of the Startup Therapy podcast.
This is Ryan Rutan, joined as always by my friend,
the founder and CEO of Startups.com, Will Schroeder.
Will, two years ago, if you wanted to start a
tech company, you needed at least three people.
You needed the product person, a developer, a marketer.
Today, you might not need any of them.
Yeah.
In a couple of years, you might not even be allowed
to hire them, right?
Yeah.
And that honestly freaks me out a little bit.
The very real possibility that the future of startups is one
person and a stack of AI is not as a backup plan, right?
Or, or a novel thing, but, but as the default.
And I'm gonna be honest with you, I love working with a team.
Yeah.
Some of the best moments of my career, and I know of yours,
have been being locked in a room with smart people arguing about
something really dumb until it became something brilliant.
So when I tell you I think the era of hiring people
might be ending, I'm not trying to sell you on it, I'm
processing it out loud with you here in the room, which is
I guess what this episode is.
It's terrifying.
And here's, here's what's interesting about our
purview, right, Ryan?
Like, we tend to forget- Yeah ... 'cause we do this stuff all day.
We see all the startups long before they become startups.
Like, even- Right ... like a venture firm doing Series A
deals, Series B deals, they see startups, like, three years in.
You know, depending when, when they get to that point-
Yeah ... where they're raising that kind of money.
Now, I'm not saying that they're not ahead of the curve.
They are, and they're paid to be.
But we get to see startups when it's still
an idea in their head.
Like, they, they haven't even gotten to the point
where the, the product is necessarily- Right
you know, raising or et cetera.
So we have an interesting purview of what I would say
is the zeitgeist of startups and, and founders as a whole.
And what we're seeing right now are founders, the conversation
going from, "Hey, I've got this great app idea. I gotta
find a developer, I gotta find a marketer" to- Yeah
"I don't need to find anybody." Right.
"I already built it, right?" Yeah.
"This weekend." Like, "I don't need those people." Now, we did
an- another episode, uh, not too long ago, Ryan, where we talked
about I don't need the capital.
Right.
And we talked about, you know, where VCs and their
role is, and said, "Who cares about those guys," right?
Well,
very, very linked to today's conversation, right?
Right.
That's what I mean.
This is the precursor to that.
Yeah.
Y- you know, what happens when we're entering a world, and we
are whether we like it or not- Yes ... where hiring people or
building a team is an option, and, and, and, uh, this is...
I'm gonna bury the lead on this one, maybe a downgrade, right?
Like, like- Yeah ... that's actually possible.
Fucking terrifying, right?
I, again- Right ... you said the same thing.
You and I are like, "Whoa,
dude."
This is happening really fast
Yeah.
I, I think that's the, the interesting thing is that,
like, this, this isn't just an ideology, right?
This isn't just can we do this?
This is economics meeting capability.
That's a great way to put it.
I've never heard it put that way.
That's real- really well structured.
The teams didn't get worse, right?
Yeah.
The alternative just got dramatically better.
Uh, but the other thing I think is gonna be super
interesting, and you, you just kinda hinted at it, which is,
like, the way you and I are thinking about this versus,
you know, somebody who's just starting out and building now.
There's a generational split coming, man.
Yeah.
We're, we're gonna have founders who came up with teams versus
founders who never had one in the first place, right?
You know, I actually- The second group's not even
gonna feel that loss.
It's, think about it in, in regards of, like, or relation
to work from home, right?
I was just gonna say the same exact shit, yep.
You and I had to go through- Absolutely ... a
process to get there.
Right.
But there were a lot of people whose first job was an interview
via Zoom, and then you- Yep ... start the next day in
your new office, Zoom, right?
That's it.
They don't know the difference.
There's folks getting damn near 30.
I was gonna, sorry, I was gonna build on that.
There, there are folks damn near 30 that have never stepped foot
in an office and never will,
in most cases.
Yeah, exactly.
It's, it's absolutely wild.
And, and I think anybody right now who's thinking, like, you
know, "AI will never replace people," I think they're either
lack the internet or they're, they're selling us something or
they haven't shipped a product in, like, at least, what?
12 to 18 months.
With this weird boat.
Now, I want the audience to understand this because you
get, kinda like when crypto was becoming a thing, you
get these zealots that talk about- Yep ... like, what the
future's gonna be and, and, and they're- Yeah, yeah ... so
sold on it, et cetera.
I wouldn't call us critics because w- we definitely
embrace the technology.
I love- 100% ... the technology.
But I'm equally terrified about it because every time- Oh,
yeah ... I, I ship something, I'm like, "What does that mean?"
Like, you know, what does that mean for the entire ecosystem
that was usually a part of that,
that isn't?
It's the rollercoaster feel, right?
It's the r- m- meaning, like, in the, in the
adrenaline sense, right?
Like, every time I'm building something and it just happens
to go exactly as I want to, like, there's this level
of, like, real excitement.
Yeah.
And then also as you, as you, as you o- go over the top
of that hill, like, there is a thrill, but there's
also a feeling that, like, literally and figuratively, the
bottom's dropping out, right?
Exactly.
And you just don't know, like, where does this actually stop?
And, and I gotta say, I don't just look at it as, hey,
you know, this is g- this is bad for people who are in
the startup ecosystem that, you know, would be employed
by a startup, et cetera.
Yep.
Selfishly, I'm looking at myself going, "Damn, dude,
the value that I introduce to the world on a-" Yeah
daily basis is getting both accelerated, because
what I can do is geometric- Yes ... and eroded- It's
so bizarre, isn't it?
... because what I used to do doesn't matter anymore.
Like- Yeah ... I used to get paid- Yeah ... so to
speak, I'm, I'm kind of u- a bit of a euphemism here,
but, like, I used to get paid to tell people how to
build a pitch deck, right?
Yep.
Well, now there's 100 ways to find out how
to build a pitch deck.
I'm not gonna get paid for that- Well, yeah ... much longer.
Now you can tell Claude how to build a pitch deck, and you can
give that to a, a thousand other people, and Claude can tell them
how to build their pitch deck.
In every language,
right?
Yep.
At every stage, in every currency.
Yeah.
Like, I mean, like, that's- Yep ... the geometric part, right?
Can we also pick the colors?
No, you cannot.
That absolutely has to be done by a human.
No one could- Right ... possibly automate font color selection.
Yeah.
Let's start from that.
Let's say that back in the day of, of, of yore, which
is, like, two years ago,
right?
Let's acknowledge the absurdity of that for a second, right?
2023 just became... Or was that, no, 2024 just became
the days of yore, right?
It's absolutely mind-boggling how fast this is moving.
But it really
is.
But I mean, but it really is.
Yeah.
So, so let's timestamp that for a minute, just
so the audience- Sure
can say, "Okay, this is how long ago we're talking about."
If you and I wanted to build a startup, we would, just like
you said, I mean, I'm using tech as an example, but it, it
varies per industry, uh, and we wanted to build a mobile app.
Uh, we find developer and we find marketer, right?
And so you've got product person, developer, marketer,
just as you mentioned.
And- Yep ... you know, there's, there's different
combinations, but that was typically the triumvirate
that everybody wound up with.
Like, back in the day when they were doing startup weekends,
it was always, like, the hacker, the hustler, and what
do they call the designer?
I don't remember.
Anyways, I'm sure it started with an H.
Point is, that was it.
Created a construct that everybody kind of agreed
with, things like co-founders.
"Hey, Ryan, you're an incredible developer. I'm a product
guy. I'm gonna give you half the, the company." Yeah.
For what?
To build something I can't build.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
Why in the hell- Would I do that today?
So stick on that, right?
Because, like, we, we look back at that w- with some longing,
and it's like, that three-person team wasn't a strategy, right?
It was a limitation.
And that's what's killing me, right.
Nobody actually wanted to give up 25% equity just so they
could have a chance at getting that product to market, right?
Right, right.
They just, they had to.
Right.
The find a technical co-founder was a hell of a plot line-
Yep ... for 25 years.
A very long time.
But it just ended.
It is an entry token.
Quietly.
Right.
And I
think most people haven't even noticed yet.
The developers have.
Yeah.
That's for sure.
So just two years ago, you needed these elements as,
again, your entry token to be able to get into this game.
If you didn't have developer, you didn't have product.
If you didn't have product, you have nothing, right?
Yeah.
I would argue that soon thereafter you needed
marketer to get you acquiring customers, et cetera.
And depending on who the person was, they had a certain set
of skills that allowed them to acquire through social
or through whatever means, you know, they were good at.
But your ability to both build and manage and have the
domain knowledge across all of those fields simultaneously-
Yeah ... w- was, by definition, usually gonna be pretty weak.
Yeah.
You and I are in a, a, an unusual position in that we
spent our last 30 years in our career doing tech, product, and
marketing all at the same time.
Yep.
Like, we actually grew up in that triumvirate, if you will.
That, yeah, exactly.
Um, and so it's unusual for us to have all those
skillsets, although I think, you know, you would agree, as
time went on and technology became, you know, much
deeper as far as a knowledge base, we couldn't keep up.
You know, we had to- No
kind of pick our lane.
I still remember, like, the last line of code I actually
tried to ship and gave up in frustration and handed
off to one of my devs.
Like- Yeah ... I remember that moment.
Yeah.
I, I stopped at JavaScript.
Yep.
That was around the time.
Yeah, it was.
I think it was ColdFusion, actually.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, that's a great product.
So anyway, we're in the spot now where those people
were going to get recruited.
They were going to get brought into, uh, startup teams.
They were going to- Yeah ... have a meaningful,
uh, seat at the table.
They were going to... You know, they were, "Hey,
if I don't agree with it, I'm not gonna build it.
So if I don't agree- Yep ... we don't have this disagreement,
things won't move forward." Now all of a sudden, like- Yeah
... Claude doesn't argue about shit.
No.
Like, just does what I say.
So stick on that for a second, Will.
Yeah.
So, so here's, here's, uh, just to keep some balance
this entire conversation, I want to bring up- Yeah
a, a counterpoint here, which is that, like, in some weird
way we could argue that equity dilution was a bit of a forcing
function for quality, right?
If you had to give up real ownership to get a co-founder
to build something- Yeah ... you had to actually convince him
the idea was good, and you had to decide whether you
wanted to give up that much equity to do that, right?
AI doesn't give a shit if your idea is good or not.
It's gonna build anyways.
Yeah, yeah.
Which, let's be honest, isn't necessarily an entirely a win.
It, mostly a win.
But- But m- lacking that pushback and lacking
that kind of additional friction and filter, it
can, can come at a cost.
There's this great quote, I think it's from Jay and
Silent Bob Strikes Back or something like that.
Okay.
And they're explaining the, what the internet is, right?
Oh, yes.
And they're saying, "The internet gave everybody in the
world an opportunity to use their voice, and as it turns
out, they chose to use it." Yes.
Like, this is AI.
This is them saying, "We've given everybody the ability to
build something, but we haven't decided whether it's any good."
Self-publishing did the same thing.
Yes.
Being able to publish your own stuff on the equivalent
of a- Yeah ... Spotify did the same thing.
You didn't have to be good because you had
the tools either way.
Right.
Whereas before, there was a filter function that society
kind of applied to you.
Yeah.
Now arguably, you could say that there was an
additional filter back then that wasn't necessarily
the best thing, which was the translation between the
person with the idea- Yeah
and the person with the technical skills
to do it, right?
So we've kinda traded one potential quality
barrier for another.
All of a sudden we get into this position where we don't
have to bring those people in.
I think that's important.
I think that's important- Yeah ... because-
Yeah
... have to and optional are b- are gonna be what this entire
conversation turns on, right?
Yeah.
The startup ecosystem was largely based on need.
Nobody hired 500 people because they needed more friends.
Maybe somebody did.
Right.
Right?
You've hired 500 people and created all that
liability 'cause you needed all of those people.
You needed it.
Right?
Yeah.
You needed that function.
I was talking to a founder the other night, and we were talking
about, you know, staffing plans.
And he was saying, "Hey, you know, I'm, I'm looking to staff
up to maybe a couple hundred people." And I said, "Why?" And
he said, "Well, I need people for, you know, it's on the
ground kind of stuff." Are you
starting a sports league, sir?
No, he, he had a very cogent reason for it, but it wasn't-
Yeah ... what it used to be.
It wasn't,
" I need- Isn't it funny- ... 200 developers to build anything"
... that that sounds exotic now?
Yeah.
Right?
Right, exactly.
Oh, wow, how avant-garde.
You're going to hire humans?
Humans.
Right?
How retro.
How quickly we got there.
But okay, so but let me build on that.
So but there's this new filter that didn't apply before- Yeah
which is, has gone, is about to go the other direction,
where it used to be, "Hey, I've got humans. Maybe AI might be
better." Now it's, "I've got AI. Will a human be better?"
Is- Right?
Yeah.
Is there a version of having a human that's, that,
that's better than this?
Yeah.
And ah, dude,
this gets dangerous.
This is a slippery slope.
It, it's tough, man.
I mean, let's, let's throw a couple things out there.
Yeah.
The pricing, you can't argue with that part.
Right.
You just can't.
Right.
$200 a month for output that used to cost us
200K a year in salary.
The, the math doesn't care about your feelings at all, right?
Yeah.
Like, the math is the math, and the math is clearly in favor
of the AI side of the equation.
Yeah, and, and so we look at, okay, how many things
are gonna go away from a have to have human, okay?
Yeah.
Let's start from where two years got us, so 2024 to 2026
when we're recording this.
In two years, I can build an MVP of just about anything.
Yep.
Right?
I'm not saying it'll scale.
I know there's a whole argument as like w- Take
a breath, it will, right?
Like- Yep ... but even that, which, Ryan, how many
startups were raising money or looking for co-founder
or whatever for just-
Just to try to stand up a basic website.
Yes, yes.
Kills me to know, like, this isn't a fair comparison,
but it's like when you see the medication come out
when it's too late to have saved some people, right?
It's like- That's an interesting... Yeah ... how
many startups withered on the vine that wouldn't have
simply because they couldn't get access to the basic
necessities of just being able to kinda show what this thing
might do- Right ... in a way that could have allowed it to
get some traction that would now be completely possible.
That's interesting, man.
I would- There's an entire project around just going
back to the old startup graveyards and being like,
"What could we refire with some AI?" Everything, right?
And, and look- Yeah.
And this isn't to say that just applying AI makes things
good or feasible or whatever.
No.
It's the fact that it's even an option.
Now, now- Yes ... I wanna take this back.
What we're talking about isn't necessarily, "Hey, let's take
a 200-person organization and make it a one-person
organization." Correct.
That happens.
But what we're talking about right now is the one-person
organization that doesn't need to grow past- Correct ... a
one-person organization, not because they chose not to, but
because they don't have to.
Well- And
that's what's crazy to me ... take that a step even further.
Yeah.
It's the one-person organization that wasn't ever going to
grow past that person, that wasn't ever going to release
the website, that wasn't ever gonna get enough traction to
be able to attract dollar one of investment or- Yep ... team
member number two, right?
Right, right.
There were so many of those out there because they were stuck
too far behind the idea curve.
Now they don't have to be.
Here's where I was saying earlier that, like, you
know, as a founder, I'm looking both directions.
I'm looking at the world in front of me and the
world behind me, right?
Yeah.
And when I look at the world behind me, like basically, like,
like where is the ground falling from below my feet, it's huh.
Like a couple years ago, if Ryan and I spent years and years
and years building a bespoke platform with a phenomenal
amount of knowledge around it called startups.com- ... that
was a moat that we had created that people couldn't cross.
Yep.
Like, you know, our competitors couldn't do the same thing,
and so we did it well.
Yeah.
And now I'm like, well, shit, now, like, literally
anybody could do that.
Now- Who's that sitting at my desk?
Yeah.
Oh, hi, Claude.
Yeah.
Exactly, right?
Now, again, it's not quite that simple.
I, I think when people say- Yeah ... "Oh, like AI is
gonna rebuild salesforce.com," it'll rebuild some stuff.
Salesforce.com- Right ... will probably be okay.
But again, I'm looking at it from the, shit, because
everybody can do stuff or get access to what I charged for
five seconds ago, they will.
And how do I stay two steps ahead of them?
Now, I look at this and I say, if we're talking about the
future of a one-person startup, what is clearly gonna get taken
off the table, being stuff that you're gonna pay money for?
Some things that come to mind, Ryan, uh, customer support.
Yeah.
I think customer support's deader than dead.
Right?
Don't get me wrong, I think it's valuable to talk to
a human upon escalation.
Yeah.
But I think an AI- But one ... that can do 90% of the job,
it can respond immediately, it can take you to where you
need to be, it can do- Yeah
uh, low-level resolution, et cetera, there's n-
like, a, a human is vastly inferior on that one.
Yeah.
Talking to a human was better than not talking to a human
when there was no other option than talking to a human.
Exactly.
Right?
It, sitting in a, in, in a queue to wait to talk to me
on the phone sucks, right?
We don't wanna talk to anybody.
We don't wanna fix the problem.
We never wanted to have the problem in the first place, so
the faster you remove whatever my issue is, whatever way that
you need to do that, is the best outcome for me as the user.
Y- My 45-minute calls to Dell customer support- Oh my God
never ended in- You remember the days ... man, I hope
this doesn't go away.
Oh.
Right?
My 45- Yeah ... minute wait on the IRS queue- Yeah ... to
be able to get some stupid piece of information
that I needed, right?
Yep.
I was never like, "Man, I hope they don't speed this up." Yeah.
Boy, I
hope
Bob answers the call again.
Yeah.
It's really nice talking to him.
The state of the union is so incredibly bad that, like, a-
anything is an improvement.
But the reason I'm bringing this one up is because those
were absolute givens that what we were gonna staff for, right?
Yeah.
We have more customers, we have more support, one for one.
Yep.
The other great thing about that, about that mechanism,
was that it was an on-ramp for an awful lot of people, right?
Yeah.
There was an awful lot of people that maybe didn't...
They weren't a developer, they weren't a designer or
whatever, but they could show up at a startup, get work right
away- Yeah ... just because they were smart enough and
they were cool enough, right?
You know?
Yep.
They, they could answer questions.
They could, yep.
Ton of value to that, by
the way.
They could check the boxes.
There is something to that, too, which is, like, when we
look back at, like, startup hiring as a whole, it is
very, very interesting, right?
In the sense that there were definitely people that got
shots that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten, and
that grew well outside that.
But there's also, like, the, the kind of the dirtier
secret side of it, which is that a lot of early-stage
employees aren't great.
Yeah.
Right?
That's not why they got hired.
For the long game.
They got hired because they were available.
AI's not out there just replacing A players
left and right, right?
It's, it's replacing- That's actually my
point.
Yeah.
I, I'm saying for an awful lot of people that, that were
C+ players- Yep ... there was always a home for them-
Yep ... because there was always work that the A+
players didn't wanna do.
The minor
minor
leagues.
Yeah.
Pretty much.
And, and- Yeah ... I look at that, and again, I wanna
point out, I look at that and going, "Damn, that's a problem
for an awful lot of people."
You know, I, I, I have- Yeah ... friends that are in that space,
you know, that, that are kind of like at risk at that level,
and I'm like, "I have no idea what they're gonna do."
And again, that concerns me.
This is, again, this is- Yeah ... this is a very
nuanced discussion because on the one hand we're saying,
"Holy shit, this is gonna be incredible, like, we're
gonna enable so many people."
I'm like, and this is the nature of AI, at the expense
of an awful lot of people.
I think I'm still, and maybe I'm wearing super thick
rose-colored glasses right now, but I think I'm trying to
take the view that we said the same thing when the internet
happened, and e-commerce happened, and, and, and.
That, a- and yes, it did.
There was, there was plenty of disruption.
It wasn't at the scale that anybody expected it to be.
It didn't create, you know, mass pandemonium.
There w- definitely was some upset.
I'm not saying people didn't get hurt, people did.
But then we recovered, and we grew well beyond where
we were at that point.
I'm still hopeful that this does the same thing.
Now, do I think there's a higher likelihood and a better
chance, more opportunity for there to be harm and damage
done just in terms of, like, humans not having jobs?
Yes, because that's literally what this is aimed at doing.
No doubt.
But o- on the other hand, like most things, it's
gonna create new problems.
Who solves problems?
People solve problems, startups solve problems, and so it's
gonna create this entire new ecosystem that we're gonna
have to go figure out, right?
If no one has income, what do we do?
Well, we gotta solve that, right?
Otherwise, the people who replace all the jobs with
AI have no economy to sell to anyways, right?
So it, it can only go so far before it breaks itself.
You know, something
that's
really
funny about everything we talk about here is
that none of it is new.
Everything you're dealing with right now has been done a
thousand times before you, which means the answer already exists.
You may just not know it, but that's okay.
That's kind of what we're here to do.
We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually
solve these problems all day long at groups.startups.com.
So if any of this sounds familiar, stop guessing
about what to do.
Let us just give you the answers to the test and be done with it.
Yeah, 100%.
Uh, i- it'll create as much demand as it will supply.
I do believe that.
But, but damn, it's, it's gnarly right now.
But going back to our point of this solo founder forever.
Yeah.
The reason we're talking about this stuff, about, you
know, how it's get, about to get geometrically worse or
better depending on how you look at it, is this is the
first time in history that not hiring for any of these
roles, support, developer, whatever, was even an option.
Yeah.
And what I'm saying is the rate that the technology is
improving, it gets to the point where, like, I can't
fathom in a year or two why you would hire a small
business accountant, right?
Yeah.
Given the fact that, uh, accounting, and I've been
a, a CFO for 25 years, so I understand a little about
it, but I'm by no means teaching courses on it.
But accounting is really comes down to I have raw transactions,
they're sitting in, in my bank account or credit card
statements or whatever, invoice system, and I have some corpus
of knowledge that understands- Mm-hmm ... how to process
raw transactions, right?
Yeah.
And turn them into pro forma income statements
or tax statements or anything like that.
The corpus of knowledge is well documented, right?
Yes.
There's, there's nothing new there, right?
Like, how numbers...
It's literally a named standard, right?
Kind
of figured that one out.
And how to process yours isn't that complex.
It's complex to you 'cause you don't know it.
I, I went through this process.
My point is that's a giant, like, bucket that
everyone's subscribed to.
Yep.
Like, even if you didn't hire your own developer, you had
somebody giving you counsel on accounting 'cause, 'cause it's
something- Yeah ... you didn't know and you needed help with.
Yep ... or payroll, or legal, or like, there was a
lot of places where it was a given that you were gonna
talk to a human, employ that person on a contract- Yeah
or one-off basis, and that's where your money was gonna go.
And now I'm like, uh-
Yeah.
There were so many of these industries that were
literally predicated on knowledge that was gatekept.
Not that it was unachievable knowledge.
It wasn't that it was unachievable knowledge.
Yeah.
It just wasn't worth quite enough to go and learn it rather
than just pay to have it done.
Yep.
Well, that just got flipped on its head.
It's crazy.
And so we could probably agree, if it's 2026 now,
that... And now I'm going way into the future,
like four years from now.
That by 2030- Whoa ... nearly every single thing that you
would've paid somebody to do right now mechanically,
there will be- Yeah ... an AI equivalent that is,
is as good, and, and, and I'm gonna use as...
We'll come back to as good in a second.
But in many cases, better.
I'll go to the customer support thing.
Yeah.
This isn't a quality thing.
This AI customer support is available 24/7, seven days a
week, and can process 1,000 people simultaneously, right?
Yeah.
There's no human equivalent that could possibly do that.
Right.
It knows every single thing that has ever been
said to your company.
It knows every single outcome.
Period.
It knows every single product.
It can run decisioning rules perfectly every single
time, like no call center on the planet could do.
And there will be no better human version of that, right?
It sucks.
Uh, again, this isn't me saying-
Yeah ... yay.
I'm saying
shit.
But it's, it's kind of unavoidable.
And the thing is, by the time somebody uses it as a
competitive advantage, everybody else has to start to use it.
It becomes a hygiene factor- 100% ... really, really
quickly, so you don't really have the choice.
And so like, even if you're like, "Nope, we're
gonna stick with humans.
We're gonna stick with humans for a while." J- I was just
picturing somebody pitching an investor in, in this, in
your future of 2030 and saying like, "And we're aiming for
12 employees." They're gonna look at you like you just
said, "And we're gonna try to get 12 horses," right?
Like what- Right.
... the fuck are you talking about?
So we get into this new world where we look at hiring a person
in the not too distant future, and even a little bit now- Yeah
... as a can versus I should.
Uh-huh.
I could hire this person.
Let's say, like money wasn't the issue, and
it's always the issue, but let's pretend it wasn't.
Will they add more than I could get with a tool
that does the same thing?
Now, obviously it depends on- Yeah ... on what
the role is, right?
But it brings us to the next point of this discussion,
which would be where is human value intrinsic?
You know- Yeah ... what are the things that startups
will reengage with humans?
I sound so... I feel like E- Elon Musk talking about, "We're
engaging with humans," right?
Um, will reengage with humans.
I'm interfacing with flesh again.
Here's what I would say at a high level.
There are certain things that are fundamentally
human that we as humans are particularly good at.
Yeah.
Communication, leadership, creativity, innovation,
et cetera, right?
These are things that are, uh, fundamentally and,
and authentically human.
And I think when you get more people in the room that can kind
of use the tool- But use those capabilities with the tool.
Yeah.
You wanna have the humans, you know, with those tools versus l-
you know, letting AI run amok.
Uh, where do you see it?
I think that there's all those little micro
interactions, right?
The, the micro decisions, the discussions, the arguments.
I'm a different person with other people in the room, right?
It brings out skillsets and capabilities that I
don't have when I'm just sitting around by myself.
There's a whole lot of things that don't manifest.
But I think that, like, at, just even at the, the most
basic level, a solo founder plus an AI doesn't get any of
that other voice introduced.
It... There's no micro decisions.
There's no pushback.
You get the decision maker and a yes machine, right?
Yeah.
Uh, uh, which, look, I'm, I'm sure at some point they will,
they will help to fix that within AI, and I think some
people are worried that, you know, AI won't be as, as clever
as a human, or won't be as attentive as a human, or won't
be as, as aware as a human.
That's not the risk that I see, right?
Yeah.
I, I don't think that the risk is that AI is wrong.
I think the risk is actually that AI is just
super agreeable, right?
A team disagrees with you, and that's actually the
feature of the team, right?
Yeah, right.
That's, a big part of it is having that pushback
to kinda metal test the, the, the stuff that you're
thinking through, right?
Let me build on that, Ryan.
Yeah.
So pushback and disagree would be one of them, but the other
part of it is just refine.
So it's not like, "Hey, I don't agree with what you're saying."
"Hey, that's a really cool idea.
What if we also did this, this, and this?" I'm using
disagree in that- Right?
No, I know.
I know ... in that same way, right?
Which is like more so just like, yeah, the refinement,
the inputs that w- don't come from an AI, right?
Whenever we go down this path, whenever we talk about, like,
you know, w- where that human intuition and everything is,
is more valuable, there is a part of me in the back of my
mind that's being like, "Nah, that's an algorithm," right?
Like, I'm like- Yeah.
And, and again, I, again, I turn into, like, Elon Musk
all of a sudden, right?
But, like- ... I look at that and I think to myself,
"I get it. I understand that I can run an algorithm that
replicates what Will might say, but it just still isn't
Will." And again, I know this is the, the, the fundamental
question of humanity in, in AI.
Yeah.
But when it comes to building a startup, I get the sense that
the solo f- founder will feel like they're missing something.
There's just, one, it's lonely as hell to do this, right?
Yeah.
But I also think, like, here, actually, you know,
never really thought about this until just now.
All day long, I have exactly two screens on my monitor.
On the left I have Claude.
Yeah.
On the right I have Slack, right?
Yeah.
computer, human.
And they're both prompts, right?
They're both literally text boxes that I type
into to get answers.
I'm not, you know, trying to dumb our conversations between
us, uh- Yep ... down, but, like, just the form factor-
They're both text inputs
looks awfully identical.
Yep Right?
Your, your, your, your command line in both case.
Yeah.
Exactly.
But l- let me stick with that, 'cause again, I, I... until
I just said it, it didn't really occur to me, like, how
parallel those universes are.
When I talk to Claude, and I'm building software, and I'm doing
all that's good stuff, right?
I know Claude is gonna come back to me with domain knowledge,
but not really an opinion.
Now, it may come back with a recommendation- Yeah ... right?
Like, "Hey- Right ... the structure should be tailwind
versus something else." Okay, sure, whatever, right?
You probably know better than I do.
But it's not gonna come back and saying, "This would
look way cooler," right?
Yeah.
Now, it could.
It'd be making that up.
It'd be, you know, whatever.
But when I talk to you or I talk to our creative director,
I talk to our CTO, whatever, and they have that response,
like, "Oh, damn, that would be really sweet," I know it's true.
Yeah.
Does that make sense?
It does.
Uh, like, even, uh, think about little pieces of feedback
like, I'm gonna go to the negative side of feedback,
where it was like, "Yeah, there's something a little off.
I'm not exactly sure what it is," right?
That's exactly the kind of thing, where it's like
there's an intuition there.
There's a feeling that AI's never gonna be able to catch.
I can go back to moments in time where, like, those little
feelings were like, "Ah, something feels off," or, "Hmm,
you know, I don't like that and I don't, can't really, you know,
tell you why now, but I'm gonna keep thinking about it and we'll
eventually come up with it."
Those, those moments are really important.
Let's build on that, because I, again, I think that's the
core of what we're saying.
Let's back up and say if you were a purist on the AI
side, you would say- Yeah ... humans are an algorithm.
Humans are fundamentally a computer that, that, uh, are
pre-programmed with memories and everything else like that.
Yep.
A- and they're running the algorithm.
Which is true, and it's called personality.
Yeah.
Right?
If it can be computed, it will be computed, and it
will be replicated, right?
That there is cyber Will, there's cyber Ryan,
and that will exist.
And I- Right ... 100% believe that, right?
I, I actually do believe that.
However, without going, like, too Terminator on this, I do
think there, there's a human side that, number one, and
this is important, that we are all going to gravitate toward
in the same way we're feeling this right now with work from
home, uh, having displaced- Yep ... the interactions
you were having at work.
I don't ever- Yeah
wanna go into the office again, but I really miss my friends.
You
know what's funny?
Just for two seconds.
Yeah.
I just read something today that said- is the
work from home era over?
Yeah.
And I was thinking, do they just mean is work over?
Because who the hell is going back to an office if
they're letting everyone go?
Like, what office are you going back to or with, with which job?
I was like, did I accidentally hit somebody's archive
from eight years ago?
Like, what is this?
I just couldn't believe that was somebody's question today.
Like, that, yes, uh, sure, fine.
And I'm sure there's places where it does, but I think
it touches on a core point.
I think as we strip away our humanity, we feel empty.
I've yet to hear anybody say- Yeah ... Tinder is so
much better because I don't have to talk to people.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, like you have to talk through messages or whatever.
Yeah.
Everyone always says the same thing, whether it's Tinder
or Zoom or, like, whatever technology abstract- social
media that abstracts us- Yeah
from humans.
It always starts with the same premise, which is you're gonna
have so much more access to a potential mate or to social
media- Yeah ... you know, to news, whatever, and it always
ends the same, which is you're- Yeah ... lonely and depressed.
More isolation.
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
A- a- and I think- Yeah ... that's the human condition.
I think that, you know, if we look at a generation
coming up to the workforce now that are 20 to 30, and
there's this general malaise.
Now, it's been exacerbated because they've taken the
humanity out of every aspect of their lives- Yeah ... you know,
through social
media and everything else like
that.
So fast-forward 10 years.
Does it become a thing whereas like, "Who's that behind
you on the, in the camera?" He's like, "Oh, that's Bob."
"Oh, what's Bob do there?" "He's our person." Yeah.
He's like a dog.
We just have him around 'cause he makes us feel better, right?
Yeah.
I notice when he's around my heart rate goes down.
You know, it's like all the things that a pet does for you.
Where like at some point, like how many years out is hiring
an employee- My emotional support human ... yeah, my
emotional support human.
But when does it become a status symbol, right?
Like buying a mechanical watch, uh, an expensive mechanical
watch when you know your phone can tell time better.
When does an employee become the status symbol thing?
They're like, "Yeah, we hired a, we hired a, a, a, a- I think, so
this is, this a little off track, but I
think it, uh, ties in.
I genuinely believe that over the next few years, and you're
already starting to see it, organic, meaning human, will
be- Yeah ... a luxury item.
And I think in the same way that you have a concierge
at a hotel that, like, you know, like, makes you feel
welcome, I think- Yeah
people will reintroduce and repromote.
We're doing it now by the way- 100% ... at startups.com.
Stay at Hilton, now featuring human-answered telephones.
No, I'm telling you, man.
They're like, "Hello." I think we're gonna see it.
I think you're gonna see a massive swing at an emotional
level of people going back to, "This is all bullshit, man."
Like, I can say this now.
I will spend, not today, but on a given day, 14 hours straight
on some days- Yep ... in front of my monitor, and thank
God I have a wife and kids that are in my house, right?
That will, like, like, make me have human interaction, because
if they were not here, I would go days without seeing- Yeah
a human, right?
Human.
Yeah.
Like, in a couple hours, uh, I'm gonna go see
a bunch of my friends.
We've got a founder dinner.
You, you've been to the, uh, this one before.
Nice.
And they're great folks.
Actually, it's a bunch of folks that listen to this show, so
guys, I'll see you in a minute.
I have to go to that, and I mean that in the right way because-
Like, that is a scheduled time where I see humans.
How fucking sad is that, right?
Yeah.
I mean, like, if you look at- Yeah ... like the trajectory,
that used to be my every day, and now it's a scheduled event.
I'm telling you, man, this thing's gonna rubber band.
It kinda sorta has to, right?
At some point we do have to go back- Yeah ... to
the other direction.
I mean, just think about how often we see this, Will.
Just our little microcosm.
Think how often we see this, which is just founders coming
to us wanting a co-founder, and when we really dig into why-
Yep ... it wasn't a technology need, it wasn't funding, it
wasn't... It w- they were just lonely and scared of being
alone while building this thing.
Oh, yeah.
They just wanted another person there.
I always used to say the same thing about marriage.
And, and again, I'm, I'm not knocking marriage.
You and I have been married to our spouses- Yep ... for
almost the same period of time, over 15 years.
I would say that if it wasn't for loneliness, most marriages
wouldn't exist, right?
Yeah.
Like, the fundamental of companionship is
what drives marriage.
And I always think marriage is hilarious as
an institution because there's no version of it.
There's one version.
Right.
You're married, and that's it.
Yeah.
There's no, like, lease to own or, you know,
a kind of- You can't correct ... alternate option.
Yeah.
Right?
There's no three-year contract or something.
Probably should be, but there isn't.
And, and I say that because we're willing to, to sign up for
the only contract without much consideration of, of any other
option 'cause we're lonely, man.
We love somebody, and that's wonderful.
But I think for a lot of people, you see people who've
stayed married for a long time, you know, they've
fallen out of love, but they don't wanna be lonely.
And I think that's a strong statement, man.
I think that this is fundamentally a lonely
journey even when there's 200 people in the building.
Now there's no one in the building.
That's for sure.
No, it's, it's unimaginable, right?
Yeah.
A- a- and we're starting to see s- we're starting
to see some of it already.
Like, y- you know, there's people who are out there
building and building and building and building and
building, and their, their heads are like... To me, the
pre-seed space has gotten kind of bizarre all of a sudden.
Like, it's really quiet.
Not in the sense that nobody's doing anything.
People are doing a lot of stuff, but there's not much
noise around it, right?
The, the s- pre-seed used to kick up a ton of dust 'cause
they were out trying to get any kind of attention they could
so they could get a little bit of money so they could start
to build stuff so they could start to cobble together the
resource to build something.
Now they're just heads down in a room by themselves
cranking stuff out.
Which, on one hand, I love, and on the other hand, we
sort of kinda know what the costs of some of that stuff
are in the long term, right?
Losing humanity in this entire thing is definitely
not where we want it to go.
But on the other hand, like, we can't pretend we still
need teams when we don't.
That's what's messing with me.
So, like, think about it like this.
In the not too distant future, we're gonna be able to say,
"Hey, this person would be a great addition to my team, but
here's person and here's AI." Now, when we stack the two next
to each other, AI costs next to nothing, so that's never gonna
be taken off the table, right?
Right.
There's no version where a human's gonna go down
to $400 a month, right?
Or less, right?
Not in this country, or not, not in the United States, but,
uh- Yeah ... regardless, right?
The second part of it is AI is going to run without management.
I don't mean management from the standpoint that I don't
have to oversee it and make sure it's, it's running rules.
I mean, it's not just angry today.
It's not bitter about the decisions we've been making
lately or, you know, all this, you know, emotional,
uh, baggage that comes with every person you hire.
Th- there's no question mark as to what AI's gonna give me.
Now, a couple things- Yeah ... you know, like the output
could be a little bit of a black box, but when you hire
somebody, uh, well, you're going off a resume, right?
That means nothing.
Everybody's resume's fake, right?
Yeah.
Like, I mean, I don't know how hard this person's
actually gonna work.
I don't know what they actually know.
I don't know how agreeable they're gonna be.
These are all things that I just used to have
to deal with, right?
Now I don't have to deal with any of them.
Don't
have to.
No.
Now here's the
point.
Here's the setup.
But I have to agree that all of those question marks
and cost and everything else like that, and limitations-
Yeah ... are worth more than doing it through AI.
That's a tough sell, man.
That's a tough sell.
I'm saying even if I wanted the human, the math, I don't
just mean numerically, probably won't check out more often than
not, which makes it very- Yeah
difficult to build a team.
Yeah.
And I think, again, like, as you start to look around and you see
everybody else starting to race to the bottom and try to create
competitive advantage from this, at least in the short term you
don't really have that much of a choice, if you wanna stay
competitive, right, if you want to be able to continue to exist.
And so I, I think that's the other thing that's, that's
really bizarre about this is it isn't really a choice.
It isn't really.
Like, it looks like a choice.
Like, oh, I'll just, I choose to keep hiring people.
You're also probably kinda choosing to not be around
long enough to pay them very meaningful salaries, right?
Like, well- Right ... here is your third paycheck,
and with that, we're out of money, and so w- we're done.
And so it leaves founders in a really weird position where
it's not really a choice.
I mean, the choice is do I want to have a chance at
succeeding or not, and if I- Right ... and if I do, I have
to think about head count in a very, very different way.
It's also typically your biggest expense by far,
and consequentially your biggest liability, right?
Yeah.
So it's not like, oh, by the way, I'm gonna get
Netflix and Hulu and, and both costs don't matter and,
like, you know, whatever.
This is, like, the number one thing that makes or breaks
every single company, right?
Like, there's very few companies, unless you're, like,
a manufacturer or something like that, that have a part of,
of, of their income statement that's bigger than salaries.
So the weight- of this decision is massive.
And again, unlike we're gonna lease four more vans for
our delivery service, right?
Yeah.
Vans are just vans.
These are people.
They've got emotions, they've got families, they've got
lives, they've got opinions.
What you're bringing on isn't just a unit of production, it's
a unit of frustration, like you call what it is, right?
Think about, you know, we've been around for
15 years as a company.
Think about all the characters we've had over the years.
I know.
You immediately laugh, right?
And long-term friends that would fit into this, it's, you
know, it's all over the map, but they're all characters, right?
Yeah.
Here's what I'm saying.
We hired for the function, but that's not all that we got.
Yeah, correct.
We hired a salesperson, but that's not all we got.
Yeah.
We got a person that could sell, but the amount of
weight that came with that, the amount of baggage-
Yeah ... the amount of headache, the amount of distraction,
the amount of everything.
That
we also played some hockey with some of them, you know,
there's, there's- Yeah, yeah.
No, and, and
look, this isn't a knock on anyone.
I, you know, I- Yeah ... I would put myself at the
top of that category of personality to deal with and
the weight and everything.
I get it.
It's nature of humans.
But what I'm saying is that baggage, you know, those
personalities, the quirks, the complaints, the, like,
everything else like that, when you don't have to have it...
Here's an example.
Ryan, how many times have you committed a line of code so
far and no one complained about what, the decision you made?
All of them.
Like- All of them.
Yeah ... 100% of the time, right?
What version are you like, "You know what I'd really like?
Is somebody to bitch and moan about this the entire time."
Yeah.
I need that.
Come on, man.
That, that is actually, that is the fuel of my soul.
Yeah, right, right.
And so, at some point, if you're growing up on I ship
code and no one complains- Yeah ... and all of a sudden
you bring someone on and now they're complaining while
doing the same thing you were doing five minutes ago- Yeah
there's no version where you're like, "Man, I'm glad I'm
paying 200 times what I w- I was paying yesterday for that-
Right ... same outcome," right?
And it makes it difficult.
Here's what I would say.
You know, if we're looking at pros and cons, the pros, this
is, uh, as it relates to, you know, uh, building up staff,
whatever, is that you build some culture, you build some fabric.
I would argue you're paying a massive premium for it,
but those things do matter.
If I look back at the things that I miss from work from home,
and I'm sure you would agree, I miss being around my friends.
I miss it.
Yeah.
And while we do Zooms, and chats, and whatever,
that's the equivalent of knowing- Quite the same
people on social media.
You post updates and quips, but it's not the same thing.
We have kind of a unique situation there too,
Will, which is that we started in person, right?
Right.
Like, most of our team has been with us long enough
that they were in an office with us at some point.
Correct.
Right?
Right.
And so I think that is exacerbated even worse, and
so, like, we're talking from kind of with a half a deck
of cards here because we haven't even fully experienced
what that's like, right?
When it's a remote interaction with a person you have
literally never met in person- You bet ... your entire life.
That's very different.
You bet.
And there's a trust that's built and things like that.
Yeah.
Right?
So I think that the human element is gonna transform
from a, "I'm here because I have a capability you
couldn't have five minutes ago," and it's- Yeah
"I'm here because as a human I offer a dynamic, a
vector that's missing, that you feel- Yeah ... that you
need more of." And dude, it might just be companionship.
Might be the same reason people get married, right?
It might be.
That's what I was saying, Bob the office pet, right?
Right, right.
And while that's weird, I don't think it's that inconceivable.
I'll take it back to the, the work from home.
Sure.
There's a lot of people, uh, managers- Yeah ... that
insist on keeping everyone in the office, not because they
actually believe the work can't get done, 'cause they
don't wanna go home, right?
Yeah.
I mean, dude, I don't wanna undersell this for a second.
I know an awful lot of CEOs, right?
Because that's just my job, and I have a awful lot of very
candid conversations, and the ones that are all stalwarts
about you have to come into the office all have a very
specific situation that makes it- Yeah ... so there's a reason
they wanna come into the office.
They want to be in the office.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, I'm not saying it's bad necessarily.
Right.
I'm saying it's not out of nowhere.
Like, I have an- Yeah ... amazing home life.
Like, my wife and kids are just freaking amazing.
Zero friction.
But if that were not the case, if my wife were up my ass all
the time and my kids were just- Yeah ... uh, psychopaths, I'd
wanna get the fuck out, right?
I'd be like, "Hell yeah, we're having an office,
and everybody has to come because I do," right?
So I guess what I'm saying is I think that what's gonna
push people outside, you know, the, the army of one,
the team of one, is going to be a thirst for humanity,
like that lack of connection.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And I think that's gonna take some time because I think- Yeah
that's one of those hungers that has to build up a little bit.
I- it's one of those things where we can say that now and
we can intellectualize it, but I think until we've actually
experienced it and gone like, "Damn, yeah, this is really,
really lonely. Yeah, I am now shipping stuff all by myself,
haven't had to talk to a human in, in two weeks, and oh my
God, I haven't talked to a human in two weeks," right?
At some point- People all the time now.
Yeah ... that, that bill starts to come due.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how long
that actually takes.
And I gotta say this, like personally, I think a startup
that's made up of lots of people, lots of voices, lots
of personality is really what a startup is meant to be in
the same way I feel like that's what a community is meant
to be, what a family- Yeah
is meant to be, et cetera.
It's this fabric and this tapestry of all these voices.
But the truth is not all those voices that used to get
grandfathered in in the past just because they were the
only person that could write code or the only person who
knew accounting are getting an automatic Willy Wonka
ticket to the table anymore.
Right.
And I think for a lot of startups, for a lot of founders,
we're gonna be in a position f- for the first time that
team of one is the default.
Team of one, like, is how people build companies.
Yeah.
And it will be a, both a luxury and a hard decision
to add humans to this community, to this tapestry.
I think that's a difficult future, but I don't think
there's any question whatsoever that that is the future that
we're all looking at right now.
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