Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:36:40 · S1, Shawn Wang
[00:36:40] S1: Oh, yes. Maintain that. It's self self maintaining. [00:36:42] S0: Yeah. And a lot of it is... And this is why I would say, like, mid tier SaaS. You are not Salesforce. You are not Google. You are not AWS. You're not this like mission critical 99.999 uptime thing. Right? You are just like a database where people type in their thing and they get that something out. Yes. So, yeah. Okay. It goes down for a day, like whatever. And you can fix it in a day. Right. Right. And there's a lot of coding agents where, like, I I think I I would argue, I would take that downtime for... In exchange for, like, I can customize. Yes. I can customize anything. It's amazing, you know? And and so my team is so much more productive. You know, I actually put this in the episode in Kill My Sass. One of the favorite features, let's say I have... So for example, for AIE code, my my next conference next month, I have 1,000 submissions and I have 25 seats. Okay? I have to go to 1,000 people to get 25. And in the current SaaS that we use for that piece of software, we have to click one by one by one by one by one. Every screen click click click click click click. And so in the kill my SaaS competition, one of our contestants just changed everything so that you can sort of reorder in one table. This view doesn't exist in that Sass. Okay. To... In order to get this view, we have to request for [00:37:56] S1: six months. But And they just clone it, [00:37:58] S0: they just You just request whatever you want. Yeah. And like, yeah, now I can do it, and I can see everything in one go.
00:37:58 · Shawn Wang, S1
[00:37:58] S0: they just You just request whatever you want. Yeah. And like, yeah, now I can do it, and I can see everything in one go. [00:38:03] S1: Yeah. Okay. [00:38:05] S0: That's so quick. So I I am... For listening... You know, if you're thinking that this is a stupid example, it is. I'm simplifying for audio. [00:38:15] S1: I mean, I I find out that the top one winner is someone who can manage all the split players, lineups, and that... That's a pretty [00:38:22] S0: useful tool. It's good UX. They are testing it from the point of point of view of humans. And I think that there is a lot of difference between the average submission and the top submission. Yeah. So that is true that today, in 2026, if you're a business owner and you decide to hire the youngest kid with, like... You know, that looks vaguely technical to, hey. If I quote this SaaS for me, please, maybe they're not gonna do so well because they don't have any training, but just give it one year. Watch a lot of AIE videos. [00:38:51] S1: And then you'll pick on it. There's a skill level. Right? [00:38:54] S0: Like, a lot of it is slob, and you don't want to use slob. Right? Your your employees deserve better. You deserve better. And actually sometimes buying from tried and tested SaaS is going to be better. It is going to be better. But for us, we want to be AI forward as a company. We will be more cutting edge.
00:38:54 · Shawn Wang, S1
[00:38:54] S0: Like, a lot of it is slob, and you don't want to use slob. Right? Your your employees deserve better. You deserve better. And actually sometimes buying from tried and tested SaaS is going to be better. It is going to be better. But for us, we want to be AI forward as a company. We will be more cutting edge. [00:39:12] S1: Yeah. And one last thing to follow-up here because I... You just said in the podcast that you have AI judge, and actually judges... The judge of the AI was quite different from the the winners that you picked by your team. [00:39:26] S0: Wow. You really listened to the podcast. [00:39:27] S1: Oh, yeah. Because I'm interested about the whole process. [00:39:30] S0: So Yeah. Yeah. [00:39:30] S1: I just wonder why. [00:39:31] S0: Oh, yeah. So that was, partially on purpose and partially not the goal of the judge. The judge was purely, did you submit a valid submission? Right? Did you qualify? [00:39:43] S1: Uh-huh. [00:39:44] S0: But the judge was not aimed for, is this the best among the whole cohort? [00:39:48] S1: Oh, okay. [00:39:48] S0: Right? Then, obviously, there's a difference. Okay. [00:39:50] S1: So so it's not for your your purpose or your team's, like, conference purpose to pick which is more useful rather than just [00:39:58] S0: Because we didn't know what we wanted. So I cannot make an AI judge for for things that I don't know what I want. Okay. But once I see 70 different examples [00:40:06] S1: And then you're gonna Obviously, want That is the one. Okay. Yeah.
00:40:06 · S1, Shawn Wang
[00:40:06] S1: And then you're gonna Obviously, want That is the one. Okay. Yeah. [00:40:09] S0: That is all. And by the way, fun fact, the Latent Space logo, if you you see the logo for this podcast in this room outside here Okay. That was through a website called ninety nine Designs, which is very interesting. Are you familiar with this? No. Okay. When you want a new logo, when you want any design, whatever, you pick from like, you have... Maybe you ask your friend for like, hey, who's who's good at design? And they give you three names. And you pick one of the three names, and then they give you a logo, and that's it. Yeah. 99 designs, you put up a contest, and it got 400 different ideas for a logo. And then I award a prize to the the logo that we got, which is... It's a very good logo. Yeah. Yeah. It's so much better. Right? You want diversity in ideas. So actually, this idea of, like, do contests and [00:40:55] S1: Oh, have to say. Yeah. [00:40:57] S0: I can do because I'm an influencer. Yeah. Most people cannot do because they don't have the audience. [00:41:01] S1: Okay.
00:41:02 · Shawn Wang
[00:41:02] S0: But I think that there is such a thing... 99designs is a very good business because there's many designers... It actually doesn't take that much to create a design, right, you just need... It's more about the quality of the idea than the amount of work. So you just need high quality ideas, and and, like, you just need to be able to to spray over to a lot of different contests. And so ninety nine designs is like that, and I think there could be a lot of 99 designs for SaaS, which is something I'm thinking about. You know what I mean? Like, basically I had to create a 99 designs for myself, for saying, here's the $40,000 SAS, here's the specs, here's the judging criteria, here's the blah, blah, blah, even right down to like, here's how we pay you money when you win, everything had to be worked out by me. But would I pay some other person to do all this for me so that I just tell them what I want and I get 70 different versions and I pick one? Oh, that for admin for me. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So there should be a 99 designs for for SAS and for cloning all these things. Because as... Again, as a business owner, I honestly, I'm only doing this because it's good content. It's a podcast, you're interested in all these things. But, like, if I didn't have a podcast, I probably wouldn't do it. It's a lot of work. We took, like, two months to eval everything, partially because I'm busy, but also it's just, it's a lot of eval. Like, this five rules for this particular SaaS, because it's about like organizer, speaker, attendee, sponsor, vendor, they all have to agree on what the conference organization looks like. Yeah. So you have to create an account for each of the... In order to test, you have to create account for each of things, and you have to do some data entry here, and you change accounts, and do something, and you read and data entry here, and you change, change, change, change, And so that's why it's like complicated. That's why... But that's what the mid tier SaaS is. That's why I pay $40,000.50 for this, because I don't wanna do it. But now that you can, it's a very fun job and problem to do.
00:42:54 · S1, Shawn Wang
[00:42:54] S1: Yeah, sure. Yeah. I mean, it's a good experiment. And because we are also running conference in China as well, like also over thousand attendance before, so I can tackle you so much [00:43:05] S0: a lot. But then, like, think about the rest. Right? So I used to pay Calendly. Do you guys have Calendly? [00:43:11] S1: I don't, but... But you know [00:43:12] S0: what I mean? Like, a booking link, like, that's how we that's how we got to this meeting. Yeah. Calendly is like a $1,313,000,000,000 dollar business. Yeah. And, you can buy pool Calendly. [00:43:21] S1: Yes. I know. Of course. [00:43:22] S0: I I have I have my own. I have I have two versions. [00:43:25] S1: You you already come your own, like, make your own [00:43:27] S0: Calendly. Yes. Yeah. I I have my own Calendly. I have my own Google Drive. I have my own GitHub. I'm serious. I have my own Dropbox. Oh my god. I have my own Slack. All of this is because I have money and I can... I I have people and I can I can assign them to do things? But I do think that you can build software for yourself, for audience of one or audience of one company. Mhmm. And and that's okay. Mhmm. And the the the fact that you can do that now is something that has never existed before for any business owner Yeah. Which is amazing. [00:44:00] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Great. Great. Great. Yeah. [00:44:02] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You do some investing. Right? And then you're you're... You've you've raised money. [00:44:06] S1: Uh-huh.