Nathan Labenz: belief

Transcript context

…I am seeing two things. One is I'm seeing the access getting a lot easier. So that democratization of access to data and access to insights is a big shift. The other thing that I'm seeing is the value that our customers get from data is increasing because you're able to very easily glean those insights by just describing what you want in natural language and then getting it. So the value you get from data is increasing. That just opens up new and new opportunities. You start using the data in ways that you haven't thought of before. One interesting study, one of our customers is SMP, they analyzed the earnings calls. to understand when CEOs are responding to analyst questions in either directly or indirectly, or if a question was already answered in the opening remarks or not, and using that as alpha to determine which stock to buy. So stuff like that becomes very easy to build and then new use cases open up. Yeah. That's an interesting metric. I've seen a bunch of stuff recently over the last, even just the last week. It was really the Venezuela moment where all of a sudden people were bragging about how they had created these AIs that monitor the prediction market platforms and were looking for early signal and trying to capitalize on that. That is going to be a really interesting phenomenon. How about in terms of just, actually, let me go a different direction. I'll do maybe a little lightning round to close us out. I have this sense that Right now we're in this kind of expansionary phase. I'm no astronomer, but my experience with platforms in the past and definitely experiences with the Meta platform, formerly known as Facebook, where it was like they came on the scene, they opened up a ton of stuff. Everybody could tap into all these data and social connections. And there was, for a moment, there was like an incredible flourishing of a ton of different ideas. And then after that supernova came the black hole and it was like, actually, we're going to close all this stuff back down. And a lot of that value that entrepreneurs created on the edges, experimenting with different ideas. The things that really mattered mostly ended up getting sucked back into the platform. And there wasn't nearly as much value created on the margins as it seemed like there was going to be. And I, I might be just over indexing on this. experience of having lived through this pattern once before. But I feel like the AI moment is set up for that to happen to a lot of people again, where, for example, just this week, ChatGPT launches medical version, which is great. I think that's going to be awesome for a ton of people. And the fact that I can now just connect my ChatGPT into an EMR instead of having to go laboriously copy and paste or find some other third party thing to do that kind of connector work for me, like the consumer surplus of that is going to be amazing. That's like my strongest belief is we will see high consumer surplus. But for the businesses, it seems like it does create a very tricky balance where you're like, I want to go do a bunch of cool stuff, but how do I know which of these things will be durable over time? How do I know I'm not just doing R&D for the next generation of the mega platforms that are ultimately going to eat my lunch? How do you guys think about where you want to place your bets, but what is going to get absorbed into the models? versus what, you know, only you can do over a longer period of time. Yeah, I think we are in a fortunate place because ultimately data is an incredibly important asset for all companies. That is what kind of defines and differentiates them. And that is not getting commoditized anytime soon. So as a data platform, we sit in that layer in between the application and the model, if you will. So the way we think about this is how do we help our customers build very high quality products that are catered towards their use cases, which is all powered by their data. And whether any of that can be subsumed by these other platforms, I am sure the shape of shapes of products will continue to evolve. I think we're still in the very early innings of huge transformation. But I also believe intelligence is a... Once these models are out there and there is enough competition and we're seeing enough competition, The dynamics seem to be playing in such a way that is all pro customers and consumers versus these mega platforms. So I do believe the competition will keep things in check, and the opportunity is so massive that that growing pie will also create lots of new opportunities.…

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