Brian Balfour: evaluation

Transcript context

…The smile curve, just to people who don't know what that is, is essentially retention goes up over time, it goes down a little bit, and then you come back to it and you use it more. Yeah, that's right, and it's usually the result of some type of network of factor or something else, and it's an early indicator that that platform is on a trajectory to hit escape velocity. The third piece is that, and they haven't really hidden these, but there's all sorts of signals that they're about to launch a third-party platform. They've been hiring for a bunch of roles. I've seen multiple postings on product manager engineering roles, all that kind of stuff for, quote, unquote, "agent platform" and all those pieces. It feels pretty inevitable that one of these players will need to launch a third-party platform in order to serve all the possible use cases on these tools. There's going to be some value exchange, which is like, hey, for your agent to be effective, you probably need access to the context and memory and distribution, so there'll be some value which is, "Integrate to us and we'll give you those three things which is going to drive more users and more usage," and we're going to go through the steps of the cycle. You can already see this. They're starting to form preferred partnerships with some of the bigger players, which paves the way for smaller third-party players. It lends credibility to the platform. It's like, well, if HubSpot and XYZ are doing it, then I should probably do it, too. It's like that type of mentality. But that's why I think out of all of these platforms, ChatGPT has the best shot right now. And then, a bunch of folks are always like, "Well, what about Claude? I really like Claude. I use Claude." Well, the problem with that is I think ChatGPT at this point has at least a 10x difference on MAU. If you're a developer and you're comparing those two platforms and you're looking at it and you're like, "Well, ChatPT has 10x the number of users and better retention engagement," it's like, what's the logical choice of which one you're going to prioritize your scarce resources on? Those are just some of the reasons that my prediction is on ChatGPT. In the blog post that I wrote about this, I actually then played my own devil's advocate and said, "Okay, here are some reasons why it might not be ChatGPT," but I think we're in that part of the cycle. That's my prediction. I might be wrong in the prediction of ChatGPT, but I really think, I feel very confident we're going to see this cycle play out again. Two follow-up questions here. One is, what would be the backup if it's not ChatGPT? It sounds like it might be Gemini or Google?…

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