The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:14:30 · Ed Elson, Gabe Stengel
[00:14:30] S1: Are you concerned at all that AI is becoming too powerful? I'm I'm sure you get this question all the time, but this is the ultimate AI doomer question. What are your thoughts about AI doomerism versus accelerationism? [00:14:44] S2: Yeah. I was actually getting... I was getting dinner with my dad a while ago, maybe a year and a half ago, and I fully panicked. I was like, dad, AI is coming. You don't understand because you don't understand how technology works. But it's coming, and it's scary. And I'm not sure why I'm scared, but I'm just I'm just viscerally scared. It feels like a disrupting thing. [00:15:03] S1: Because of the work that you were doing or because of the conversations people were having? [00:15:06] S2: Like Just all of the above. Right? Like, I mean, it's something that lives in the collective consciousness of folks in in our world is this idea of AI. Right? People have read science fiction. They've gone to the movie. They've seen Terminator. It's a scary thing to think about. I am not that scared anymore, and I'm not that scared for a number of reasons. One is artificial general intelligence just feels farther off to me than I think it felt a year ago. Yeah. And even if it wasn't that far off, I've, you know, adjusted the way I think about what AGI is actually gonna provide. And I'm excited for it, but, I mean, it's it's... That's above my pay rate. [00:15:43] S1: I wanna talk about your your career. So you you were working in investment banking for about two years, and then you decided to start a company. Why?
00:15:43 · Ed Elson, Gabe Stengel
[00:15:43] S1: I wanna talk about your your career. So you you were working in investment banking for about two years, and then you decided to start a company. Why? [00:15:54] S2: Yeah. I always wanted to start a company. I think that's, you know, a result of of overconfidence and and not wanting to work for for other people. But I mean, even back when I was, I think, a sophomore in college, you know, a buddy of mine and me tried to create a a pitch deck preparation tool for investment bankers back then. And we actually went into the Credit Suisse offices and met with like a, you know, someone who led North American investment banking, and obviously, we were kinda laughed out of there. We couldn't do anything. But it's been on [00:16:25] S1: True all of you. [00:16:26] S2: They're like, literally, who [00:16:27] S1: let you in here? [00:16:28] S2: Like, I'm already bad. But I've been thinking about it for a while. And I mean, I I loved my time at Lazard, and I learned so much, and I had amazing mentors. Mhmm. And I thought that LLMs and generative AI was gonna change everything, and I wanted to be able to work on it in the way that I thought was gonna be most productive and interesting. And I love to build things. Like, I am interested in creating products every day and thinking about the buttons to put in and the interactions and what it should look like, and that's what I'm passionate about.
00:16:28 · Gabe Stengel, Ed Elson
[00:16:28] S2: Like, I'm already bad. But I've been thinking about it for a while. And I mean, I I loved my time at Lazard, and I learned so much, and I had amazing mentors. Mhmm. And I thought that LLMs and generative AI was gonna change everything, and I wanted to be able to work on it in the way that I thought was gonna be most productive and interesting. And I love to build things. Like, I am interested in creating products every day and thinking about the buttons to put in and the interactions and what it should look like, and that's what I'm passionate about. [00:16:56] S1: I remember when you started this company, you barely used the word AI. I mean, I... It was... I I mean, you told me it was a it was a... What what did you call it? A natural language A [00:17:09] S2: natural language interface Yeah. For financial data. Which just doesn't... I mean We were [00:17:14] S1: so scared
00:17:14 · Ed Elson, Gabe Stengel
[00:17:14] S1: so scared [00:17:16] S2: of using AI as like a buzzword. And mind you, when we started Rogo, it was pre chat GPT. And actually, we prototype Rogo using very anachronistic NLP, natural language processing techniques called, like, context free grammars. But when we were starting Rogo, we didn't wanna feel like we were just, you know, tying into some buzzword y trend and we were, you know, hopping on the back of this big shift. I mean, we wanted to seem legit. I think that was a mistake. You should use these terms. They're powerful terms and, like, we are an AI tool. Why were we doing all this, you know, verbal gymnastics to not say AI? Because we were, like, kinda self conscious and, like, thought we were, like, holier than thou. That was dumb. [00:17:56] S1: But it worked. I mean, you you raised $2,000,000 in your pre seed round. And now here you are. You're at a million dollars in revenue. I mean, what do you think your investors liked about you? I'm sure it made you appear I think so. More specialized.
00:17:56 · Ed Elson, Gabe Stengel
[00:17:56] S1: But it worked. I mean, you you raised $2,000,000 in your pre seed round. And now here you are. You're at a million dollars in revenue. I mean, what do you think your investors liked about you? I'm sure it made you appear I think so. More specialized. [00:18:10] S2: At the deck. The deck is worth it's a whole another episode of this just to look at how bad that deck is. It is one of the worst fundraising decks of all time. Kevin Ryan, let our pre seed. Kevin Ryan is an enormously successful entrepreneur. He's a titan of New York City VC and entrepreneurship. Started MongoDB, Gilt, Business Insider, Zola, and so on. I think Kevin just thought, these guys know finance. These guys know technology. I'm gonna bet on them. I'm gonna bet that they can build a tool that actually disrupts financial services. And I think that's what it was. [00:18:41] S1: And what do you think you did right that made him believe that you were the guys to do it? Because I'm sure there are thousands of startup guys around the country saying, I'm gonna build the AI for finance. Yeah. AI for whatever it is. You kind of hit the jackpot. You're now the AI for finance guy. What do you think he actually saw in you?
00:19:00 · Gabe Stengel
[00:19:00] S2: I mean, at at Lazard, I had a really interesting role. I was working on both m and a work, financial services work, but also on their data groups team. This team called LDAG, Lazard Data Analytics Group led by David Wang. He's super smart. And so I got to see what it was like to work at the intersection of technology and financial services at a firm with very cutting edge technology and data science and AI capabilities. And I think that was an incredibly unique background. And that was only possible because, you know, I'd been I'd been I'd come there after having worked in software engineering and quantitative trading and writing my thesis at Princeton on AI for econometrics analysis and financial statistics. I think that the story made sense to Kevin. And when you're a guy like Kevin, you're looking for a story that makes sense. Right? You you wanna believe that Gabe Stengel is gonna change financial services, that he's gonna be the next Bloomberg. You wanna you wanna fit the pieces to that narrative, and I think the pieces were there. And I was just tremendously lucky. I mean, John, my cofounder, and I were just... And Tomas were just incredibly lucky to have all been in the right place at the right time, interested in the right things, and, you know, having said the right words and meeting the right people.