Mike Krieger: prediction

Transcript context

…Super interesting. So kind of along those lines, a question that a lot of AI founders have is just like, "Where's a safe space for me to play where the foundational model companies are going to come squash me?" So I asked Kevin Weil this and he had an answer and I noticed looking back at that conversation, he mentioned Windsurf a lot. He was like, "Wow, this kid really loves Windsurf." And then a week later they bought Windsurf. So it all makes sense now. So I guess the question just is, where do you think AI founders should play where they are least likely to get squashed by folks like OpenAI and Anthropic? And also, are you guys going to buy Cursor? I don't think we're going to buy Cursor. Cursor is very big, but we love working with them. A few thoughts on this, and it's a question I've gotten. We like to do these kind of founder days with whether it's Menlo Ventures who have about investors and [inaudible 00:48:06]. It's like we've done YC, we've done these founder days, and it's like the question that is on a lot of these founders minds, understandably so. I think things that are going to, I can't promise this as a five to 10 year thing, but at least one to three years, things that feel defensible or durable. One is understanding of a particular market. I spend a bunch of time with the Harvey folks and they showed me some of their UI. I was like, "What is this thing?" And they're like, "Oh, this is a really specific flow that lawyers do, "and you never would've come up with it from scratch and you could argue about whether it's the optimal way they get done things done, but it is the way that they get things done and here's how AI can help with that. And so differentiated industry knowledge, biotech, I'm excited to go and partner with a bunch of companies that are doing good stuff around AI and biotech and we can supply the models and some applied AI to help make those models go well. And I've been dreaming about at what point does live equipment all get an MCP and that you can then drive using Claude. There's all these cool things to be done there. I don't think we're going to be the company to go build the intent solution for labs, but I want that company to exist and I want to partner with it. Domains like legal, again, healthcare, I think there's a lot of very specific compliance and things. These are things that necessarily sound sexy out the gate, but there are very large companies to go and be built there. So that's number one. Paired with that is differentiated go to market, which is the relationship that you have with those companies, right? Do you know your customer at those companies? One of our product leads, Michael is always talking about don't just know the company you're selling to, but know the person you're selling to at the company. Are you selling to the engineering department? Because trying to pick which AILM to build on top of or API to build on top of. Let's go talk to them. Is it the CIOs? The CTOs? Is it the CFO? Is it general counsel? So under a company's deep understanding of who they're selling to is the other piece too. What's interesting there is it's probably hard to build that empathy in a three-month accelerator, but you maybe can start having that first conversation and build that out time or maybe you came from that world or you're co-founding somebody who came from that world. Then the last one is like there's tremendous power in distribution and reach to being ChatGPT and having hundreds of millions or billions of users. ou're co-founding somebody who came from that world. Then the last one is like there's tremendous power in distribution and reach to being ChatGPT and having hundreds of millions or billions of users. There's also people have an assumption about how to use things and so I get excited about startups that will get started that have a completely different take on what the form factor is by which we interface with AI. And I haven't seen that many of them yet. I wanted to see more of them. I think more of them will get created with some things like our new models, but the reason that that's an interesting space to occupy is do something that feels very advanced user, very power user, very weird and out there at the beginning, but could become huge if the models make that easy. And it's hard for existing incumbents to adapt to because people already have an existing assumption about how to use their products or how to adapt to them. So those are my answers. I don't envy them. I would probably be asking those questions if I was starting a company in the AI space. Maybe that's part of the reason why I wanted to join a company rather than start one. But I still think that there are, and maybe here's fourth, don't underestimate how much you can think and work like a startup and feel like it's you against the world. It's existential that you go solve that problem and that you go build it. It sounds a little cliche, but it's like it's all we had at Instagram. We were two guys and we were like, "Let's see what we can do in an Artifact." We were six people for most of that time and every day felt like it's existential that we get this right, we need to win. And you can't replicate that and you can't instill that with OKRs. You just have to feel it. And that is a way of working rather than a area of building, but it's a continued advantage if you can harness it.…

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