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…how much people will pay for that. They don't know either. Or, hey, you can now generate random graphics in your newsletter tool. You're like, okay… It's like vitamins versus painkillers, AI pricing. And it's specifically in this case, the painkillers are very strict, if we don't do it, a human's going to do it and we know exactly what they cost, and the vitamins don't have anything approximating that. So not only is it nice to have, it's like I don't even know what it's worth. I saw a while ago someone said when Studio Ghibli came out and everyone was using that, someone said, hey, the fiverr.com equivalent of all these things would've been trillions of dollars. You're like, right, but no one was ever going to spend that. So there's no sane way to actually talk about what actually happens here. I think it was Byrne Hobart who said that when you're tied to business outcome, that business outcome is usually done by humans. I think it's going to be really, really easy to make a business case for saying swap this over to AI. It's better, faster, cheaper. I think when your AI is not tied to business impact or is debatable in quality or whatever, I think you end up with these people who are just like, oh, let's just stick a tenner on the seat and see what happens. So it's like you can have a normal seat or an AI seat and then you're kind of like, I hope no one uses the AI too much. You're permitting yourself to build weak AI stuff if you do that because you're not pushing yourselves to say, hey, we need to articulate the value of each incremental usage here. Well, when you talk about this AI pricing dynamic, one thing that really strikes me is just how fast AI companies grow from a revenue perspective. So I just saw Mati from ElevenLabs. We actually had a great session at our customer event in London, but he tweeted that they've just passed 200 million in ARR and that's 2 years after founding it, maybe 3 years after founding. But in my day, businesses didn't do that. And it's really striking for me how somehow they seem to climb the revenue ramps much quicker. I know, I mean… You guys would Fin is another example… Yeah, for sure. We forecast like Fin will be 100 million probably early next year or whatever and back at… Yeah, from when? Starting from… I dunno, probably about two years, something like that. Yeah. So two years to 100million in ARR… When we started and probably when you guys started it was like that was the threshold to go public. Exactly. It used to take a long time to get to 100 million in ARR. It was like seven years. That's the simplest AI investing framework I've heard. I'll tell you why it's simple because you're going to make me write no checks. So I guess I'd say most of the AI companies I’ve invested in probably three or four. Three of the four I'd say. ve heard. I'll tell you why it's simple because you're going to make me write no checks. So I guess I'd say most of the AI companies I’ve invested in probably three or four. Three of the four I'd say. The only one I might quibble with there, I think, that's very good for staying out of trouble. And this is where I tend to push back when people are saying, oh, it's an AI bubble. It's like, I dunno, I think people are happy with the tokens they're buying. I think a lot of tokens are happening and just generally they seem to be delivering useful outcomes… because they're actually delivering value on the customer service side or people enjoy their Midjourney adventure, but people are getting value from the products. So it's a pushback that doesn't… I was going to push back on number four, which is positive unit margins because just aren't the underlying costs… Again, when you guys started Fin, it sounds like you were underwater… Yeah, we were losing money on it… But then just pretty quickly it right-sizes as you optimize it, and so couldn't one be too focused on the current implementation? Yeah, I mean this is a conversation we have internally with our CFO quite a bit actually because, we’re good, I can imagine it’d be the kind of thing a CFO would want to… Hey, Des, do you have five minutes? That's exactly, yeah, “quick chat.” I can't help but notice the team have done this preemptive loading or whatever. It's causing this shitload of money. So what's my counter? I guess I prefer it if the path towards profitability isn't just OpenAI is going to figure this out for me, right. An interesting way I'd say this, with Fin for example, obviously our profit goes up when we are firing less dead tokens. A dead token being we've generated an answer and it wasn't right, so we can't charge money for it. If you're, say, guessing the next line of code or tab to autocomplete the next line of code, if five of six of those is wrong, I don't know if you're ever going to get bailed out because you’re basing five-sixths of your costs is not something you can resell. So there's a questionnaire of how much of your tokens are actually generating a thing that a user wants independent of what you charge for as long as the user wants it. I think you're always in good condition, whereas if you're burning a million tokens to find one, and that one, you're never going to be able to recoup your costs or at least I'd love to see your telemetry to make sure that you actually have thought this true. I suspect you haven't. 45, that’s not bad. Yeah, I was very impressed by the multiple, clearly deliberate twenties. I mean we're definitely all different. A lot of key things we all agree on, Eoghan would be like a, first and foremost, he's a very strong CEO. He is very decisive and he is very brave, is the best way I could describe it. An interesting thing, when he returned to Intercom, one of the things he did was basically rebuild the culture, and one of the things he focused on was resilience and open-mindedness. People might be offended. sting thing, when he returned to Intercom, one of the things he did was basically rebuild the culture, and one of the things he focused on was resilience and open-mindedness. People might be offended. Yeah, of course. All of the things, all of the downsides you'd possibly guess are all there. I also think that there's no path to … there's no way. The phrase I've settled on when I look back, is, sometimes you have to go too far to know you've gone far enough. And we have an AI assistant in the product. Yeah, exactly. And we've updated our homepage and say we're AI first, so we're good. And I think you need to be willing, genuinely willing to make brave hard to undo bets. And I think you need obviously having this sort of moral authority of a founder and being CEO kind of gives you some of that, but still it's a huge decision to make. And I think I am much more of an, my default DNA is I'm more of an operator in the sense of, “All right, what are we doing? OK, well I'll make it work.” Whatever it is. And I think if it was a company of people like me, what you'd see is probably predictable, reliable, sustainable performance or whatever, but probably not enough actual, well, definitely not enough brave big swings, which is actually where you need to get to. You've now worked with so many different companies externally, you've seen a lot. What is predictive of success and what is predictive of failure? The biggest thing I'll always come back to when I'm talking to anyone who's trying to pitch me to invest, or me to induce John to invest, is it's always some version of: Do you have a real product that solves a real problem that really exists and people are really already trying to solve by paying money or time somewhere? It sounds so trivial, but you'll be shocked how many times you'll fail or you'll get some sort of jazz hands-type routine somewhere along the way where it's like, “Don't look too much at this, but just trust me.” The areas that I end up being blind to is the extremely market-expanding type things. As in if someone said to you, “Hey, all companies are going to have a chatroom and they're going to all hang out in an all day and have unproductive conversations, it's going to be big.” I'd be like, “Oh, I don't see it.” Whereas that’s how you would've missed out on Slack, or whatever. But I think I can almost hear from the what are you building and why and who's it for, and show me what the product does if it's not a real solution to a real problem, I'm kind of already out. Soho House.…

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