The Innovation Civilization Podcast
00:25:37 · Waheed Nabeel, George Sivulka
[00:25:37] S0: Laws, basically. Yeah. [00:25:38] S1: Big power laws. There's a limited amount of consumption. And as art proliferates or as amount of software in the world proliferates, it doesn't mean that everyone's gonna be a billionaire. It just means that the competition will be better and the songs would hopefully be better. And there's all kinds of research on why probably you and I and most of the audience thinks that the songs today or the music today are terrible, and just because everyone thinks that the songs of their teenage years are the best songs. And Yeah. That there's a whole psychological reasoning behind that. But it it actually just means that, hey. We have more optionality, and more optionality allows us to capture a greater amount of the potential value from a given set of top at a given period of time. Yeah. [00:26:17] S0: So would you say creating moats, though, as a founder is much more tougher in this economy? And in that space where everybody... Like, software making is ubiquitous, what's the moat here? What do you keep? Is it, like, just taste, like you said? Or [00:26:32] S1: Yeah. I think that there's definitely gonna be a moat on taste. There's gonna be a moat on good ideas. I don't think technology was ever a moat. Technology is not the hard part of building a business. So a lot of, like, business founders that go out and try to find their tech cofounders, oh, tech is such a hard part. So no. That is not the case. Humans are the hard part, and I think that will continue to be the case.
00:26:32 · George Sivulka, Waheed Nabeel
[00:26:32] S1: Yeah. I think that there's definitely gonna be a moat on taste. There's gonna be a moat on good ideas. I don't think technology was ever a moat. Technology is not the hard part of building a business. So a lot of, like, business founders that go out and try to find their tech cofounders, oh, tech is such a hard part. So no. That is not the case. Humans are the hard part, and I think that will continue to be the case. [00:26:51] S0: Yeah. That's a good point, actually. That's a great point. So one of the questions actually, one of our listeners, Josh Godwin asked. So Josh is asking basically that you've got some goaded investors on your cap table. And there's Eric Schmidt. There's Peter Field. There's Jerry Yang. So it's fascinating to see how these tech titans are shaping the landscape. Given their diverse backgrounds, I'd be curious to know how their unique perspectives influenced the AI company's strategic direction. So what sort of impact do they have on your product road map, on your technical road map, on your vision?
00:26:51 · Waheed Nabeel, George Sivulka
[00:26:51] S0: Yeah. That's a good point, actually. That's a great point. So one of the questions actually, one of our listeners, Josh Godwin asked. So Josh is asking basically that you've got some goaded investors on your cap table. And there's Eric Schmidt. There's Peter Field. There's Jerry Yang. So it's fascinating to see how these tech titans are shaping the landscape. Given their diverse backgrounds, I'd be curious to know how their unique perspectives influenced the AI company's strategic direction. So what sort of impact do they have on your product road map, on your technical road map, on your vision? [00:27:29] S1: I think that at the end of the day, investors, especially at the stage of career as some of the folks that you've mentioned, it's less in the weeds and far more about what they represent and how they push you and how there's a dialectical tension between what you think and what they think and getting to the truth. And so there's a lot of wisdom, but I think that wisdom and maybe the push to be more contrarian, or the push to be different is actually what helps make me a better entrepreneur. But it's never a black or white, or hey, you should do this, or you shouldn't do this. It's almost always a dialogue and engaging with some of the best minds to ever do it. [00:28:05] S0: Do you have any examples that come to your mind of interactions which kinda shifted your perspective like that?
00:28:05 · Waheed Nabeel, George Sivulka
[00:28:05] S0: Do you have any examples that come to your mind of interactions which kinda shifted your perspective like that? [00:28:13] S1: Yeah. One of them was very early on, I had this idea that I would create one piece of software and then another piece of software to capture a market. And so I had to effectively do two miracles to come up with with an answer. Create two companies in order to have the market that I wanted to. And one of the folks that you mentioned sat me down and said, hey. Never build a company that requires two miracles to work. One is enough. And revise your go to market plan and your product plan so that you're not trying to do too many things or orchestrating a bunch of dominoes to fall. Keep your business as simple as possible. And the simpler that it is, the faster you'll be able to grow. Was a hard lesson. Yeah. It was good. [00:28:53] S0: So you mentioned about you're fusing LLMs and you're also using... You're basically building that multi agent kind of platform. So what sort of differentiates you from some of your competitors and especially in a world where kind of agents are getting better and better every day at just doing normal stuff, the kind of stuff that Hebiah might be doing. So generally, level of the agents when they could trip over with basic Excel formulas, now it can just do much better, basically. So what's the differentiator for Hebia here, basically, in that world?
00:28:53 · Waheed Nabeel, George Sivulka
[00:28:53] S0: So you mentioned about you're fusing LLMs and you're also using... You're basically building that multi agent kind of platform. So what sort of differentiates you from some of your competitors and especially in a world where kind of agents are getting better and better every day at just doing normal stuff, the kind of stuff that Hebiah might be doing. So generally, level of the agents when they could trip over with basic Excel formulas, now it can just do much better, basically. So what's the differentiator for Hebia here, basically, in that world? [00:29:34] S1: Yeah. I think that's a great question. And, yeah, I'd say that the the big differentiator for Hebia is the fact that we're building a very different paradigm to the operator agents or to the... What the foundation models are working on in terms of capabilities research. We're basically saying that the limitation to agentic applications is not just the ability for an AI to move a mouse around the screen or for the AI to call a tool, but really the ability for AI to, for example, retrieve information very accurately over massive amounts of documents, over unstructured and private data. And we're more of an applied AI reasoning lab towards information retrieval than just capabilities research. And as capabilities get better, actually, Hebbia improves at the same time, but we've built this fundamental substrate and orchestration and agentic layer that makes us so much better actually at at at doing tasks as the models improve.
00:29:34 · George Sivulka, Waheed Nabeel
[00:29:34] S1: Yeah. I think that's a great question. And, yeah, I'd say that the the big differentiator for Hebia is the fact that we're building a very different paradigm to the operator agents or to the... What the foundation models are working on in terms of capabilities research. We're basically saying that the limitation to agentic applications is not just the ability for an AI to move a mouse around the screen or for the AI to call a tool, but really the ability for AI to, for example, retrieve information very accurately over massive amounts of documents, over unstructured and private data. And we're more of an applied AI reasoning lab towards information retrieval than just capabilities research. And as capabilities get better, actually, Hebbia improves at the same time, but we've built this fundamental substrate and orchestration and agentic layer that makes us so much better actually at at at doing tasks as the models improve. [00:30:31] S0: Okay. That's interesting, basically. There's one interesting question, basically. What trend of development when it comes to AI do you think people are not paying enough attention to, but you think is important?