Founders in Arms
00:56:44 · Rajat Suri, S6, Immad Akhund, Jean-Denis Greze
[00:56:44] S1: My bad. [00:56:46] S6: So we are building into agentically limit space, and you said, like, stable coins and all those stuff. Uh-huh. Right? So so I'm just, like, get... Like, getting a sense. Like, I believe, like, agents are gonna be the... Within, like, five years, agents will be spending money for us. Right? And in terms of cross border payments. Let's say your agent hired someone in Thailand or Vietnam, and your agent want to pay them. How they can do that? [00:57:14] S0: Alright. So the the question is, my agent hire someone in Thailand, how are they gonna pay them? Yeah. It's definitely gonna be stable points. I I guess I'm, like, a little skeptical. My agent's hiring someone in Thailand. What what is the person in Thailand doing for my agent? [00:57:32] S6: Anything. Like, nowadays, you have lots like, startups popping up, bounty startups. Right? They enable you to just hire anyone to get the jobs done and wherever, like, the cheapest you can get. So your agent will, let's say, recruit someone [00:57:46] S1: who is [00:57:46] S0: So there's, a rent to human type thing [00:57:48] S1: that goes [00:57:48] S0: to it. [00:57:49] S2: Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
00:57:49 · Jean-Denis Greze, Immad Akhund, Rajat Suri, Felix
[00:57:49] S2: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, [00:57:50] S0: in my... I I... At least right now, that behavior is, like, not that common. I would think, like, Bounty or whoever this person is being found probably will have, like, a payment system built into it, and I would probably not interact with stablecoin, my agent wouldn't. They would just go sign up and pay with the card. And whatever bank does will maybe involve stablecoins or not. But I don't know if my agent needs to be stablecoin away in that situation. Do you have a different take? [00:58:19] S2: I think the world likes centralization because it likes to hold entities accountable for things. So, yeah, you know, there are lot of reasons why very powerful interests would wanna keep some controls over exactly the scenario that you're listing in. So I think, yeah, you have a marketplace, and they're registered in the country, and they work with, you know, Visa and pay in, payout, and everyone's happy. [00:58:43] S0: I do think there's probably gonna be some use cases where, like, stable points do or especially in international context, but I think that would tend to be niche. [00:58:55] S1: Over there on the left. [00:58:56] S7: Yeah. I have a... My name is Felix. I have a question for Jean. So you mentioned that Town, of course, is going after markets like your recruiters as many people. Towards that vision... From now towards that vision, what what do you see would be the massive roadblock for you, and then how are you seeing those roadblocks and unblocking those roadblocks ahead
00:59:15 · Jean-Denis Greze
[00:59:15] S2: of you? Yeah. I mean, there's lots of reasons why it could fail. Right? I mean, things I stress out about are whenever the models get better and our competitors get better, we have to get better too. So there's, like, a... There's flat cost to building an AI, like, a horizontal AI company. So whenever, you know, whenever OpenAI has a new feature, we have to be capabilities competitive. So I think that's one thing. It's very costly when you're starting to do that. I think number two, the market's gonna be playing really quickly, and so we need to keep hyper growing so that we are part of the discussion and get to scale quickly. Because I think in the past, if you're a startup, you might have years before incumbents could start to be product competitive with you, and now you have weeks to months. And so speed, like, you know, the reason we're fundraising how we do is because applying dollars to grow faster is absolutely critical. Like, we have to hit critical mass. Number three is we need more network effects. So our product is pretty good, actually, network effects within companies. It has a decent amount of word-of-mouth virality, but whatever we can do to build up the network effects faster, like, on the order of months, is absolutely critical. So we have one feature, which I won't say which one it is, but it's, like, highly network effect and has a very high rate of the person on the other side being like, wow. I want that. And just, like, pushing on that as hard as possible. And if we don't if we don't build the network effect before we're just in a distribution war against better players that are gonna go after our markets, then it's kinda game over or, you know, get acquired by somebody. And then there's like... I think right now we are counter positioned for some things nicely. Like, we're counter positioned against Muse because we're for work, and we have a bunch of theater practices that work for work. And we're counter positions against the labs on this idea that if you're a business, you kind of don't want... You want someone to be neutral to the models for the long term, like that is to your advantage. And it is possible, like you mentioned, GrokBot, using both... There's... It's always possible that your counter positioning goes away. And then, obviously, there's... It's still a world where we have start up competitors.
01:01:32 · Jean-Denis Greze, Felix, Immad Akhund, Rajat Suri
So, like, my current goal is to be the only start up that is funded in the space. So that is us versus established player, but, you know, we have more winning to do to get there. So those are all things that I think about that could kill us, and, you know, there's probably a 100 more. [01:01:49] S7: The speed to scale... Scaling the network effects like that that the [01:01:52] S2: building software. I mean, that's the... You said it very well earlier. Like, the cost of building software has gone way down. That's... What that actually means is that product advantage in the market is worth much less than it used to be. And so you have to have brand network effects, other things, process power, something else that gets people who wanna use your product. You have to establish those things so much faster. But if you can, you can still be big, but you don't have, like, five years to do it. You have six months, nine months to to get there. So [01:02:28] S0: First, in the early days, how [01:02:29] S1: do you guys cut through the noise? [01:02:31] S0: I guess, for Mercury, it would be early days, but then for for Town and and for Tribe. So the question is, in the early days, how do we cut through [01:02:38] S1: the noise? You're talking about, [01:02:39] S0: like, marketing noise or what kind of noise? Yeah. I mean, here, there's there's gonna be, like, a system app popping 11. Right? There's gonna be chat apps that's AI based. Right? And then probably early days, there's a lot of deal banks as [01:02:50] S1: well. Well,
01:02:50 · Rajat Suri, Immad Akhund, Jean-Denis Greze
[01:02:50] S1: well. Well, [01:02:53] S0: thankfully, launched in 2019, and the world was not so crazy. So there was not really any good business new bank for a long time after we launched. So I think, actually, Jean is probably the best one to answer this. [01:03:09] S2: I don't think we've won enough to answer it. I was... It's funny that... Not funny, but you're not quite answering the question, but I... You know, if you ask me, someone's gonna start a bank in 2019, I [01:03:21] S0: would be like, what are [01:03:22] S2: you doing? Like, you know, there's lots of banks out there. If Chase is a very capable company with great interest.
01:03:22 · Jean-Denis Greze, Immad Akhund
[01:03:22] S2: you doing? Like, you know, there's lots of banks out there. If Chase is a very capable company with great interest. [01:03:28] S0: And and I would... I guess, as a as a maybe, like, a more direct thing because, you know, even if there wasn't that many new banks, that would do businesses, there were one other banks. And, also, you you still have to win people's attention. Like, you have to, like, do something that'd okay. I think it kinda ties to broad market, but, I guess, In my experience with Mercury and Mercury's company, we also had product market then towards the end. Like, when you really have strong product market then, like, the market is pulling you, and, actually, like, you don't have to work that hard to go through the noise, which isn't, like, a very fulfilling answer as a founder. I'm just saying, like, make something good. But, like, it is kinda... At least my reality has been, like, you make something compellingly good enough, and then, like, the... For the first year, we grew, and we had to do nothing to grow. Like, we just had to, like, keep up with the scale, and we grew, like, 40% a month. So it's not really fulfilling answer because, like, you can't make that happen necessarily. But, like, at least my experience with SMB and all consumer is, like, when you have product market fit, like, you you... Like, the product itself is, like, the thing that's getting through the noise. [01:04:41] S2: And then you can