00:21:05 · Sebastian Johnson, Eric Landau
[00:21:05] S0: my experience with the AI tools, like, even, like, OpenClaw, you know, using it or, like, the experience of seeing it being used Yeah. Versus setting it up for myself. I did it, and I was like, well, I kind of actually don't know what to do with it. Right. Right. It's so cool, I can see the potential Yeah. But I'm not seeing the immediate, I'm gonna use it to do these 10 things right now. [00:21:23] S1: Yeah. I I think one of the biggest bottlenecks actually that we have in AI is just a human imagination because we don't know what we can do. It's like, you give someone from the '17 hundreds, a television. Like, they're... They they don't even know where the on button is. Yeah. They... Oh, they don't know, like, what what to do with it, or you give a tool that, we just don't have, like, the the full, yeah, the full visibility of, like, all the different use cases and and ways of... And that will take time for us to just absorb them and, like, put them into our our day to day life, and that's probably the slowest part of AI adoption. And then there's...
00:21:23 · Eric Landau, Sebastian Johnson
[00:21:23] S1: Yeah. I I think one of the biggest bottlenecks actually that we have in AI is just a human imagination because we don't know what we can do. It's like, you give someone from the '17 hundreds, a television. Like, they're... They they don't even know where the on button is. Yeah. They... Oh, they don't know, like, what what to do with it, or you give a tool that, we just don't have, like, the the full, yeah, the full visibility of, like, all the different use cases and and ways of... And that will take time for us to just absorb them and, like, put them into our our day to day life, and that's probably the slowest part of AI adoption. And then there's... [00:21:58] S0: I think there's a really interesting gap that's going on, like, whereas in in software, the the classic y c advice was, like, build something that people want. Yeah. And now we're get... We're into this place where people are not aware of the, including myself, the the abilities or the capabilities of the technology. Yeah. So when they're saying things that they want, it doesn't match up with the actual technology that's available to you. And that's what I feel like. It's like I'm talking to these agents, and I'm like Right. What can you do? Yeah. Yeah. It's like the the old Henry Ford quote, which is like, I built something... If I gave people what they want That's right. I'd give them faster horses. And we're at that moment where [00:22:27] S1: it's like,
00:22:27 · Eric Landau, Sebastian Johnson
[00:22:27] S1: it's like, [00:22:28] S0: we need the gap to close between the technical ability and the most possible versus the needs and the emotional stuff that we know versus the ability. [00:22:38] S1: Yeah. I I... Maybe you could adjust the quote to build something people will want. Exactly. Right. I think the the key is as well, like, to that is, you have, like, a very strong focus on problems. Yeah. And that's always been the useful anchor for us is, even when talking to customers is, actually, don't even tell us the solution you want. Just tell us the problem that you have. Because if we know the problem, then we can find the best solution to that problem, and the problems won't go away. Those are very, very sticky. So these AI tools, sometimes I see, hammers without a nail where, the problem isn't really manifest, but the the tool is cool. And I'm not... I'm pretty bearish on those exam... But for, the tools where it's solving a real problem, people just haven't realized that it solves it, that's where, you know, there there will be, like, more adoption. [00:23:26] S0: Nice. Alright. I wanna do some quick fire. What is your personal favorite AI tool that you either use in your professional or your personal life?
00:23:26 · Sebastian Johnson, Eric Landau
[00:23:26] S0: Nice. Alright. I wanna do some quick fire. What is your personal favorite AI tool that you either use in your professional or your personal life? [00:23:36] S1: Personal favorite AI tool. I am... So I I use ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. I'm now getting, like, more, more aligned towards Claude more than anything. I I see that that's the one that I come to the the most often, and I use it for a lot of... A kind of personal scripting, like, pulling data and information from different sources, putting them to dashboards. And, I used to have to kind of go through a few iterations before it did the right thing. [00:24:09] S0: Yeah. [00:24:09] S1: So I'd say, oh, it doesn't work or, like, this package is wrong. And now you can basically one shot it, and it gets you the information that you need, just from, you know, from the first time. [00:24:19] S0: Yeah. It's amazing. In the future, five, ten years, twenty years from now, do you see open source or closer... Closed source LLMs winning or being used the most?
00:24:19 · Sebastian Johnson, Eric Landau
[00:24:19] S0: Yeah. It's amazing. In the future, five, ten years, twenty years from now, do you see open source or closer... Closed source LLMs winning or being used the most? [00:24:28] S1: There will be both. And again, like, the the world of the future is not... I don't think it's one monolithic singular AI. I think it's, hundreds of thousands, not millions of AIs, all in different shapes and sizes. So the... There's gonna be this AI proliferation similar to, like, a human population, and some of them will be, closed source and API driven and kind of run-in a big data center. Some will be open source and run on, you know, physical embodied devices. I I I think that there's going to be a lot of room for multiple different types of of winners in the space and not just one... Like, I don't think it's a two horse race essentially. However, I I do see that, this exponential, like, throwing of money and compute into an open source model seems a little bit untenable that, unless you can, like, capture a good amount of revenue. So I think open source will probably carve out into different niches where it adds value versus just trying to play the the scaling game forever. [00:25:32] S0: Got it. Okay. That's interesting. As a CEO founder, what's your favorite to least favorite? Selling, building, raising. Raising is definitely least favorite. [00:25:43] S1: But but but... And then followed by selling, and building is is by far the favorite.
00:25:43 · Eric Landau, Sebastian Johnson
[00:25:43] S1: But but but... And then followed by selling, and building is is by far the favorite. [00:25:49] S0: It's your favorite? Okay. When when you've been on the raising journey, you know, this is series c now. Yeah. What has been the biggest pushback that you've had across either the different rounds or more recently? [00:25:58] S1: Yeah. It's funny because we we raised our series c, and we hadn't touched our series b money. So we were still we were still working on money that we had raised from 2021. Yeah. That was when we did our seed round. And one of the unexpected pushbacks that I got was, why haven't you burned more money? And I was like, oh, that's interesting. I I wasn't expecting that, like, our cash efficiency would be like an objection, but that was something that that came up, quite a bit in the series c, funny enough, is that we, according to investors, like, we should have been throwing more money, at things rather than, being cash efficient. [00:26:33] S0: And are you changing that now that you've got even more cash? Are you thinking, actually, we do need to be more aggressive maybe on margins or on expansion?