Grant Lee: preference

Transcript context

…This is a really cool framework for how to think about what it takes to build a successful wrapper company that is... I don't know, I'll keep using that term. I don't know if it's [inaudible 01:22:09], but just some ideas don't work. These model companies are launching their own products here and there. So, what I love about what you're describing here is almost like a heuristic that'll tell you if there's an opportunity/how to be successful as a GPT "wrapper company." I'm putting in air quotes. It sounded like maybe there's three here. But talk about just if you think about the bullet points of what you need to do to build a successful business on top of existing models. I mean, I think the most important thing is before we even talk about the technology, so we're skipping to the part where you're trying to apply the most interesting models or technology to solve some problem. Start with solving the problem you actually care about. I think it's very tempting right now to chase shiny objects, like a founder might be able to gain some initial traction by literally being that GPT wrapper and solving any sort of problem. And you start to see some traction and then you just go with that. But before you do that, you should think about, "Is this a problem I can invest five to 10 years into actually solving? Do I care deeply enough about it?" Because if you can't, you're never going to go... actually think about overcoming the variety of different hurdles, whether it's other startups or other incumbent tools that are trying to start doing the same thing. And so for us, we go back to... We've started this company because we really care about helping change the way people communicate their ideas. We really feel like this idea of visual communication, visual storytelling matters. It helps elevate everybody and it gives people much more opportunity to do the things that in the past if you weren't great at making slides, your ideas might've died, and someone else that was able to actually articulate their ideas better ended up winning the deal or winning the favor of their manager or their boss. And so we felt like that was the wrong, that didn't feel right, and so could we help democratize visual storytelling, visual communication? That was sort of our north star. And then you go back into thinking, "Okay, every step of the way, what are the tools and technology I can apply to help solve that and actually move the average person closer to that long-term vision of ours?" And of course, AI has been, again, this gift where yes, you can apply that to solving this job. You can also apply that AI to many different jobs. Figure out what is the problem you care deeply enough to go deep, because going back to this sort of idea, you need to own the sort of end-to-end workflow. A customer needs to have... You want your product to live in their brain somewhere where when they think about, "Hey, I have to create a presentation." They come to you as the default tool. And the moment they start creating it to the moment they ship it and send it to their boss, that end-to-end experience needs to feel magical, needs to feel great. And I don't think you can really do that unless it's actually a workflow you either know deeply yourself or you care deeply to actually help solve for somebody else. So, some of the elements I'm hearing here is, one, is just like actually really care about solving this problem, not come from, "Oh wow, this cool thing happened and it worked. Wow, maybe I could sell this thing to people." Because you may end up having to work on this thing for 10, 20 years.…

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