How I Invest with David Weisburd
00:26:21 · Chaz Englander, David Weisburd
[00:26:21] S1: If I would say to you areas that frustrate you, that you feel are inefficient but you don't necessarily know how and where to apply artificial intelligence? Like, what are the things that springs to mind? [00:26:33] S0: I think video production, editing the first part of our... The podcast. So we have an editor that does a bunch of fancy stuff, but just like the pure editing, the platforms have... Haven't been able to do that. In terms of thinking strategically, like mapping guests, mapping outreach, all of that, that would be a a a big help. Also, obviously, on the asset management side, figuring out which companies we would want to, like, what should be on our target list, mapping the network of how to get to those people and how to get to those companies. These are the things that really take a lot of man hours. [00:27:05] S1: Okay. Excited now. So that's great. And then what I always ask as well is to what extent across those, I'm particularly interested in the kind of more prospecting one as you think about, the managers. What tools of a tool have you used to kind of think about or look at that overall use case?
00:27:05 · Chaz Englander, David Weisburd
[00:27:05] S1: Okay. Excited now. So that's great. And then what I always ask as well is to what extent across those, I'm particularly interested in the kind of more prospecting one as you think about, the managers. What tools of a tool have you used to kind of think about or look at that overall use case? [00:27:21] S0: We're old school. We talk to a lot of other GPs, figure out which companies they like. We don't have a great process for prospecting. We're very much reactive in terms of the conversations that we have. I'd love to be much more proactive. So the answer is we don't really have a process for that outside of just gathering information old fashioned way, meetings, Zoom meetings, in person meetings, and building relationships with co investors. [00:27:43] S1: And then my last question is how do you get the feedback loop of, the areas or the nuggets of things that your listeners are interested in other than people You're asking for [00:27:52] S0: my secret sauce. So I'll I'll give you I'll give you some secret sauce. So we get analytics from the audio, but the richest analytics we actually get from YouTube. And what I started to do about two months ago is we have the retention curves. I take the retention curve, I upload that to AI, I take the transcript, I upload that to AI, and I have it give me feedback in terms of like where did people drop off. So we kinda do this recursive improvement.
00:28:17 · Chaz Englander
[00:28:17] S1: Yeah. Nice. Nice. Well, and then what we try and do if I was working with you as a customer is like, we try and at least kind of whiteboard out, it wouldn't be as quick as this, we would whiteboard out a couple of use cases and try and get feedback on them in real time. Mainly because I think that's what kind of gets both the creative juices flowing of what's possible but directionally where we think AI is good at. So the things that were springing to mind as you speaking by the way are things like, okay well in the comments on YouTube, how are we thinking about categorizing those comments, right? And how are we then thinking about the different nuggets of content off the back of that? So by way of example, have you thought about if I said to you, you could have a workflow that the second that a video is published, it's monitoring those comments. So it's actually a workflow that's connected to that video, and it's in real time grabbing those comments and it's categorizing them, with a view that it's consistently updating this output, sort of summarizing where it feels that thematically, everyone is interested in, or or the main areas of interest.
00:29:12 · David Weisburd
[00:29:12] S0: Where my mind went, the two really leverage points for us on the podcast side, it's actually the guest. The guest is 80%. If I have Ben Horowitz, Cliff Asness, Balaji Shrinivasan, if they come on the podcast, yes, the conversation could be good or bad, but you're more or less know how it's gonna do. So guest booking and how do you get to the the re... Mapping the relationship graph because I'm connected to pretty much everybody, just a matter of, like, how to trace that. And then the same thing on on the company side, on the investment side, like, company should we be talking to? So the relationship graph is kind of where I went to, which is how do we get information of what the best companies are and how do we get who we should have on the podcast and then mapping to them through the social networks?
00:29:50 · Chaz Englander, David Weisburd
[00:29:50] S1: Obviously, we regularly connect, you know, pretty the most part of our customers are connecting our product into their, you know, CRM, for example. So, you know, clearly anything, you know, in the CRM, you know, we can tap into. But I think there's a lot of work to be done, you know, your exact point, it reminds me kind of when the business was started around one of our first use cases is, you know, we wanted to understand that relationship instantly. If there's a mutual connect with, you know, we're looking at opportunities and there's a mutual connect with the management team. We're looking at fund, you know, someone as the GP, etcetera. Whatever it might be, that's very much untapped. We're looking at bringing on a product team to specifically focus on that area and that's mainly just because our customers are slowly moving in the direction of, you know, keepies, LPs, etcetera. So I think in general, I think it's gonna be quite popular. [00:30:35] S0: One of my oldest friend, John Sung Kim, he started Five nine as a public company, and he all... He hammered this into me. He always hammered into me, you have to be close to cash. Companies die because they're not close to the cash. And when I think... That's why my mind went to, well, what's driving our revenue? Advertising and more deals. So what should we be solving? Guess and more deals. That... That's kind of why my head just immediately went to sourcing, I guess, on both sides.
00:30:35 · David Weisburd, Chaz Englander
[00:30:35] S0: One of my oldest friend, John Sung Kim, he started Five nine as a public company, and he all... He hammered this into me. He always hammered into me, you have to be close to cash. Companies die because they're not close to the cash. And when I think... That's why my mind went to, well, what's driving our revenue? Advertising and more deals. So what should we be solving? Guess and more deals. That... That's kind of why my head just immediately went to sourcing, I guess, on both sides. [00:31:01] S1: One of them Y Combinator mottos, which I think was, Michael Seibel that said it most was, you know, the idea of a a growing business is just don't die, which basically just means, like, don't run out of cash. So I'm very aligned with that. [00:31:14] S0: If you could go back to when you were just starting your first company, your first YC backed company, and you could give yourself only one piece of timeless advice, what would that advice be? [00:31:24] S1: Definitely perseverance. You know, I've mentioned this. We're on the Y Combinator podcast recently, and I said this on there. Not blind perseverance, but perseverance. I think if something makes sense to you and you are passionate about it and it makes sense in itself, you should probably continue doing that thing and persevere at all costs. I think across all the companies, there's ups and downs. These economic cycles are going... If if believe in something, I think the key is to just persevere.