Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:55:54 · Shawn Wang, S1
[00:55:54] S0: There's a bunch of ways to to survey this or to tackle this. The the most important thing to recognize is that if you are... You you have something smart and, like, you think it's valuable and you're global number one, really, like, you're world best at one thing. Like, that's the most important thing. So everything else is... I always call it. Right? Like, you have the long. Okay. I will help you with the but, like, you have the long. That's the... You know? And most people don't have the long. Mhmm. Right? So, like, that's that's good. Mhmm. I think that there are some percentage of people who don't even have the lung, and they think they have the lung, and, like, then this, like, okay. It's like a arrogance, eco thing. Right? But let's assume that you are... Generally have a very good product. And I think the the important thing actually here is that you should not treat marketing as the last mile of, like, hey, I did everything, it is the last night before the blog post, can you review my blog post and change it? There's nothing I can do. Like, already did everything. But if you involve marketing earlier in the process, right down to, like, before it's really built or specced out, like, what what is the way we're gonna pitch, what part of the segment of the market we're gonna go, then you have more GTM built into the product in the first place. Mhmm. And I think that a lot of engineer or or researcher defined audiences don't have that GTM brain that early. They usually put it all the way at the end. [00:57:17] S1: They're After...
00:57:17 · S1, Shawn Wang
[00:57:17] S1: They're After... [00:57:17] S0: Yeah. They're the most junior part of the company is this GTM organization. It's like some interns or, like, some 22 year old person who is, like, running social media. No. Like, actually try to be serious about your... The... Who... What customer is supposed to use this thing and how... Where do they hang out? What problems do they face? What words do they use to describe their problems? And how is their life gonna be better after they see your your thing? Right. And so very simple things. Most researcher, engineer, founders have not thought about this, but if they have a GTM partner, I think that that is often very useful. I think the other thing that I... And then it comes to more to develop developer tools. I find a lot of Chinese founders are robotics. Right. And robotics is also a very interesting space because it is much longer time horizon and still very early days. Right? Like, how come all of these Chinese robotics founders, all do full laundry? [00:58:14] S1: Mhmm. [00:58:14] S0: Right? Like, Unitree is the best. And at least... Like, but there's still... Unitree is still doing unit three things. And Yes. I would like them to see things that you never expect a unit three to ever do. But right now, you know, the the the thing that they just launched this week, they're doing kung fu moves. [00:58:31] S1: Kung fu. Yeah.
00:58:31 · S1, Shawn Wang
[00:58:31] S1: Kung fu. Yeah. [00:58:32] S0: But, like, okay. I've seen that before. You know, like, show me something that I haven't seen, and then then I'm really good to pay attention. You know, I think that's that's something that is hard to show in robotics. But I think with models, you can do that still because it's still so early days. And with innovative, like, products ideas for, like, for consumer experiences, you can do that. So I think to show the demo, I think, is very important, which is why, again, obviously, TypeSafe is, like, very recent, but also very good. It is not the... Diogo did not come out with the Doom demo, but the Doom demo is what everyone talks about. Doom demo is done by DevRel, like GTM. And that that is that is something that just is a core principle in marketing, which is show, don't tell. Right? Like, show me this thing having the benefits, but don't tell me in bullet points what this Don't give me a slide presentation PowerPoint that tells me all these things. Just show me. [00:59:28] S1: And maybe just a follow-up is about the taste, because everyone is talking about the taste, and then I think go to market and building the product also needs the taste. [00:59:38] S0: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's probably Actually, very [00:59:41] S1: I just have... Becoming little bit hard for me to define what a taste is because the investors talk about. So I just wonder in your view, like, how do you define the taste seen from those engineers or even founders?
00:59:41 · S1, Shawn Wang
[00:59:41] S1: I just have... Becoming little bit hard for me to define what a taste is because the investors talk about. So I just wonder in your view, like, how do you define the taste seen from those engineers or even founders? [00:59:52] S0: Okay. I can define taste in a way that is not helpful. Taste is something where you are able to... Out of a large set of possibilities, you're able to narrow it down quickly, cheaply Uh-huh. To the set of possibilities that when you look back, is immediately obvious is good. So when you when you're at the start, you look out, there's a thousand different things I can possibly do. Which one do I choose? Right? Yeah. The brute force... You can brute force. You can try 1,000 of them, and then you find a good one. But a tasteful person can say, yeah, obviously these are bad. I I don't... I cannot explain it. I cannot explain it. But obviously these are bad. This one looks... This this too looks interesting. Mhmm. And then at the end of the journey, they'll pick one, and you look back and you're like, well, that is... Yeah. What do you mean we're considering the other nine ninety nine? Obviously, this is the correct one. There's many versions, applications of this, but the one that's coming to mind right now is the iPhone, where for a long time, the smartphone had a keyboard, And it took Steve Jobs to say, no. We will do whatever it takes to have touch screen, a virtualized screen, because it look... Needs to look like a screen that's a flat slab. [01:01:05] S1: Mhmm.
01:01:05 · S1, Shawn Wang
[01:01:05] S1: Mhmm. [01:01:05] S0: And that took ten years to R and D, because there was a company called General Magic that tried to do this and failed, but like, obviously now every phone in the world looks like this. That is taste. In 1990, when people were starting to have smartphones, you could do a number... A huge number of things, but it takes the the person with taste to say like, yeah, this is what we want, and I'm gonna say no to everything else. And my first phone I shipped was gonna be this. If [01:01:32] S1: you're looking back at all those AI products, could you share an example that you think you find it has taste? [01:01:40] S0: I actually think that everything that Cursor does has a lot of taste because they were first to the VS Code thing before it's... And now they're they're doing Crock Pot, which is like a good taste thing. Because like now now, like, OpenAI has to, like, copy them and what have you. And, Claude has to copy them, which is like, you know you have taste when other people copy the thing that you just shipped. [01:01:59] S1: Yeah.
01:01:59 · S1, Shawn Wang
[01:01:59] S1: Yeah. [01:01:59] S0: The interesting way, you know, to go below the labs, I think it's interesting to think about, like, the more boring kind of problems that people solve. Legora, you know, in the legal field, they have this sort of, like, document review process that's, like, massively parallel. Yeah. And, like, once you see that, you're like, I don't wanna do my work anywhere else. I I I have to do it in Legora. Mhmm. And, like, again, like, anyone could have come up with it. Anyway, these ideas are cheap. Yeah. But you didn't do it. Yeah. Legora did it. And so someone at Legora has that taste of, like, we will define this billion possible things we can do. We will just define this products that that becomes the way that people do their work. [01:02:43] S1: Yeah. I think coming to an end, and I think probably we have talked about AIEi arriving in Shanghai, like two weeks later. I just wonder, you know, what do you hope to see or to learn from the builders or develop their... What kind of topics actually are you most [01:03:00] S0: interested It's tough because it's more of a differential for me. I want to see how very different Shanghai is from San Francisco, because I think San Francisco has a b two p SaaS bubble, but Shanghai, you you guys use ComfyUI UI? We don't use it here. [01:03:18] S1: Okay. [01:03:19] S0: We like our Canva, we like our fal AI. Yeah. Don't use don't use ComfyUI. Like, ComfyUI is more of like a open source tool. And it's it's same same for OpenClaw. OpenClaw had more traction here than Comfy, but OpenClaw was really traction here.