Ian Silber: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Mercury. Radically different banking loved by over 300,000 entrepreneurs and now, with Command. I've been a customer of Mercury's for over six years. I have never once thought about leaving. Mercury is basically what happens when banking is built by product people, not by bankers. They make it so easy. Dare I say fun to send invoices, move money around, set up virtual cards for folks on my team. Does your bank have an API, a terminal native CLI, or an AI-ready MCP server? I don't think so. And just recently they launched Command, a conversational interface built directly into Mercury, which acts as your financial operator. I've been using Command to transfer money around to figure out what categories I've been spending the most money in, analyze my cash flows. And just today I used that to find out how much I've made from a specific sponsor over the past year, I just ask, "How much have I made from X over the past year?" 10 seconds later, I have an answer. It is so freaking cool. Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a FinTech company, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group in Column NA, members FDIC. So I asked a bunch of people that know you well what to talk to you about. And Joel Lewenstein, who happens to be the head of design at Anthropic is a good friend of yours, which I love. And he said what he imagines the hardest part of your job is, is balancing the needs of the existing billion monthly active users of ChatGPT with the need to innovate and push and iterate and invent. And so I'm just curious how you just think about that. How do you find that balance knowing you have to cater to both sides? That's a great question, and it's a really fun part of the way we work. I think that we have vastly different audiences. Really, really different. I've never worked in this kind of quite a spread. At Instagram, I spent eight years working at Instagram. We had a billion users or billions of users maybe. I don't actually know what they're at now, but it was a lot of people. But the product was pretty simple and it was sort of a couple ways that you could use it. We did think about creators and larger accounts that had special needs, but this is vastly different where you have someone who's using this to help them come up with a recipe to eat tonight or brainstorm their next haircut or something like that. And then there's somebody who's transforming the way they're doing farming for... helping to automate their farm in Japan or something. And it's just the broadest spectrum ever. Generally what we've seen is that we believe in this idea of this is sort of capability overhang where the product, vast majority of the people are getting a sliver of the true value that they could out of the model. That's not necessarily a bad thing. They're still getting tons of value. But we found that we make sure to focus on creating an extremely simple, streamlined experience for many, many people. And then we put all of the cutting edge stuff. We also make sure to give that and make sure that's really accessible for the people that care. The challenge of course is not necessarily over-indexing and putting something that people might not understand in front of a billion users. But generally what we've seen is we can experiment early with the people that really care. And that's where we have our desktop app and we have Codex. And now ChatGPT Work is stepping into a much broader audience, which we're really excited about. And eventually what we know, and we think about this a lot in design is things will truly become for billions of users when they don't have to think about a switch or a mode or anything like that. And so we know that eventually it has to kind of get distilled into that main experience. But it is a really fun thing to balance. And we have to think about people that are using this for free every day to people that are paying us hundreds of dollars and lots of different needs. It's just a matter of balancing. And as a designer, it does add a lot of complexity for sure to think... You really have to have empathy for every sort of different type of user, but it makes it fun for sure. That is such a mind-blowing point you're making about the spectrum of usage of ChatGPT and Codex. I didn't think about it that way. Has there been a product that has such a wide spectrum from just, "What's this rash on my finger," to building a Salesforce?…

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