The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:54:07 · Harry Stebbings, Alex Mashrabov
[00:54:07] S1: the team members. I get in trouble for this, but I think there's no shortcut to hard work. The harder I work, the luckier I get. I meet more founders. I find more great companies. I do more shows. I have more success. Do you buy the bullshit of The Balance and, oh, it's okay. You can leave at five and be home for bath time and crush it? [00:54:28] S0: This is a good question. So look, obviously being an immigrant, I always have to prove that I belong, right? I feel like now people accept, people recognize that Hixfield is probably a top 10 application AI companies by revenue and probably number one. But I think when it comes to hard work, the people whom we know in common, we talked about, let's say, Peter Sellis, legend in consumer space, obviously Jack. I spent decent amount of time with them and the other product leaders at Stamp. Like, the density of product talent at Stamp was unprecedented. All of them work really hard. All of them are smart. Like, none of them just checks emails four or five hours a day and calls it work. Each of them is deeply rooted into their recent trends in product, product design, activation. They know data really well. So yeah, I don't believe that there is any shortcut to hard work. [00:55:24] S1: Three hours a week with your wife. I don't know about you, dude. Mine would dump me for three hours a week. How do you make marriage work on three hours a week?
00:55:24 · Harry Stebbings, Alex Mashrabov
[00:55:24] S1: Three hours a week with your wife. I don't know about you, dude. Mine would dump me for three hours a week. How do you make marriage work on three hours a week? [00:55:35] S0: Yeah. Look, I'm very grateful for my wife for being patient. Know, it's also very different if that's Asian culture. It's just kinda more natural to try to do sacrifices for each other, sort of, and I'm deeply... Obviously deeply grateful her for supporting me. But, like, sometimes at this scale, I get invited to parties. I always send her and don't show up myself. I don't know if I piss people off, but this happens very frequently. So wait. Wait. You say yes, and [00:56:03] S1: then she goes. Yeah. [00:56:04] S0: I say maybe we both can come together. Then there is always some urgent fire last minutes, and my wife just goes, you know? What fire [00:56:13] S1: was most urgent? What was the... Oh, fuck. Yeah. Look.
00:56:13 · Harry Stebbings, Alex Mashrabov
[00:56:13] S1: was most urgent? What was the... Oh, fuck. Yeah. Look. [00:56:17] S0: I think, obviously, for all the things which we touch based earlier, whenever we are not very good in communicating the features or we felt like... I mean, now it's like team of 40, so now the life is way better. But early days, obviously, I was involved in all the fires. I think recently, all the types of attacks on AI companies, it's crazy. It's like LLMs are being used to hack companies. It's like new types of LLMs to do some frauds, basically bots using credits and then doing auto refunds, all of that. Since I have kind of machine learning background myself, data science background, I still can move a needle substantially when it comes to statistics and data. So yeah, I have to be involved somehow. But these LLMs, they amplify many types of behaviors, including various types of attacks and fraud, but we have to fight against that. [00:57:11] S1: We're gonna do a quick fire round. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. What have you changed your mind on most in the last twelve months? [00:57:20] S0: Oh, I was thinking that HubSpot is gonna get obsolete. Everyone is gonna build their own CRM. But when... Especially when we hire and scale B2B go to market, seems just having familiar interface matters a lot. [00:57:32] S1: Wow. I would still say they're gonna get fucked. You think that just stickiness is there with SMBs? [00:57:38] S0: Yeah. I I I do think so. And especially I see that when I hire go to market talents.
00:57:38 · Alex Mashrabov, Harry Stebbings
[00:57:38] S0: Yeah. I I I do think so. And especially I see that when I hire go to market talents. [00:57:42] S1: Wow. Why? What is it about hiring them that makes you think that they're so used to it? [00:57:46] S0: I mean, people who are very good in understanding customers and talking to customers, they may not just simply accept new interface so quickly. And just having HubSpot as a system of records, being able, if there is any mismatch going, able to just understand where the data flow went wrong. I think that's just still very valuable, like the familiarity. What do you believe today that everyone else thinks is fucking crazy? I mean, look, I think people just still don't fully appreciate that most of the content on social media is gonna be AI generated. There are gonna be some shows, like, obviously, yours, where it's, like, authentic contents. It's gonna be ten fifty x higher CPM, whatever, than AI generated contents. So it's gonna be way less in terms of content created by... But it's gonna create way more value than AI generated content. But even when I look into your content specifically, you made multiple very successful Shorts, millions of views, better than anyone else in this space, and you do a lot of overlay. While the content is authentic, I think we should do better jobs so that you use Higgs Field at least for the overlay on top of existing videos.
00:57:46 · Alex Mashrabov, Harry Stebbings
[00:57:46] S0: I mean, people who are very good in understanding customers and talking to customers, they may not just simply accept new interface so quickly. And just having HubSpot as a system of records, being able, if there is any mismatch going, able to just understand where the data flow went wrong. I think that's just still very valuable, like the familiarity. What do you believe today that everyone else thinks is fucking crazy? I mean, look, I think people just still don't fully appreciate that most of the content on social media is gonna be AI generated. There are gonna be some shows, like, obviously, yours, where it's, like, authentic contents. It's gonna be ten fifty x higher CPM, whatever, than AI generated contents. So it's gonna be way less in terms of content created by... But it's gonna create way more value than AI generated content. But even when I look into your content specifically, you made multiple very successful Shorts, millions of views, better than anyone else in this space, and you do a lot of overlay. While the content is authentic, I think we should do better jobs so that you use Higgs Field at least for the overlay on top of existing videos. [00:58:56] S1: Dude, I would love that. I mean, again, they take three hours. So people don't know this. I spend two hours a day just doing Instagram now. We decided that Instagram short form was gonna be a big new push for us. Two hours a day just for me. I write the scripts and then I record them. And then it's two people, six hours per one for those three.
00:58:56 · Harry Stebbings, Alex Mashrabov
[00:58:56] S1: Dude, I would love that. I mean, again, they take three hours. So people don't know this. I spend two hours a day just doing Instagram now. We decided that Instagram short form was gonna be a big new push for us. Two hours a day just for me. I write the scripts and then I record them. And then it's two people, six hours per one for those three. [00:59:15] S0: And that's extremely smart of you. You know, like, going back to some of the topics is, like, clipping is, like, a huge topic, and that's like has its own upsides and downsides. But obviously everyone sees this opportunity to win, to build massive top of funnel, like hundreds of millions of views with short form content, as long as you can have downstream monetization or value creation like you do. [00:59:39] S1: Totally agree with you. What job today does not exist that will be big in five years? [00:59:46] S0: Okay, so in five years, people, especially in our space, creative directors, they are gonna be talking to computers and generating stories real time and video. And AI is gonna help to create multiple variations. Today, there is no word to really describe that because there is also... There are scriptwriters, then screenwriters, like those who are gonna break it down shot by shot. Then there are people who do that storyboarding. Then there is person who oversees all of that, like movie director and so on. So there are so many parts of that, but eventually taste is gonna matter a lot and just having stories to tell. And there is no word to describe it today.