Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:12:17 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:12:17] S0: I want to talk a little bit about a great example. And so your own data shows how real this is. You had a single ChatGPT update that pushed IKEA's visibility up by 19% while sending Travelocity and Priceline down. And I think the point of that is these huge LLMs, the ones we are all living on, they're updating hourly, daily, weekly. And a single shift in one of those platforms can dramatically change visibility for some of these big brands. Talk a little bit about and obviously for IKEA to get a 19% boost while its competitors dropped quickly, That's a pretty big problem if you're running revenue and marketing for these big companies. Elaborate a little bit of how big that problem can be. Because that's what ProFound's solving. [00:13:06] S1: Yeah, each of the models will give you completely different responses. So there's this fragmentation that didn't exist in the world of search or SEO. But more than that, it's also just the, this whole term, GEO is plagued by the fact that it rhymes with SEO. Because the rhyming is kind of where the similarities end to an extent. [00:13:34] S0: It's well said, by the way. You're like, it sounds the same. It's not at all. Yeah. Like how Chat
00:13:34 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:13:34] S0: It's well said, by the way. You're like, it sounds the same. It's not at all. Yeah. Like how Chat [00:13:40] S1: talks about your brand products and services is frankly just a function of all the marketing that exists on the internet. And today, Chat, we use 65 websites to answer the question about a showerhead. I genuinely believe in the next three to five years, that will be six fifty websites, maybe 6,500 websites. It will just crawl the web as Moore's Law kicks in and the cost of compute goes down. [00:14:10] S0: It'll consume everything. [00:14:11] S1: It'll just consume everything. [00:14:12] S0: It'll consume everything. [00:14:13] S1: And the reality, I'm kind of tangent, this doesn't answer your question. Yeah, the model's shift around a lot, to answer your question. And you need to understand what's going, hence the analytics part of our platform. But the bigger... Yeah. That's the tip of the iceberg. The bigger issue that this is creating is that as as agents become the primary user of the Internet and pursue orders of magnitude 100x, maybe 1000x more content on the internet than humans ever did, marketing teams globally are going to need to create orders of magnitude more marketing. [00:14:52] S0: You're, I mean, you're like, you have to keep up with that
00:14:52 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:14:52] S0: You're, I mean, you're like, you have to keep up with that [00:14:56] S1: consumption. And there's two ways to do that. You either hire 100x more team members, or you use agents to do the, to help you do the work, to leverage the existing team that you have. And that the premise of Profound. That is the whole idea. That we take those analytics and we take all of the data analytics and we pipe it in and you pull in a context becomes super important. This is the stage three. Once the CMO agrees, okay, thanks, ProFound. I know what's going on and I know why. And I agree that I'm going to create more marketing using your platform, using ProFound agents. The next big concern is, well, how do I ensure it's not slow?
00:15:38 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:15:38] S0: Yeah, how do you make sure it's not a bunch of garbage? Before we go there, because I want to come back there, I want to take a minute and just ask a question, which is your team at ProFound, which is almost 400 people, obviously, your growth has been astronomical from a 3,500,000 seed to now multibillion dollar valuations recently. How do you keep up? How does your team and let me ask this question really clearly. These huge LLMs are at war with one another, to put it bluntly. They are all Anthropic and OpenAI and Gemini. And everyone is building as fast as they can at a breakneck speed that honestly we haven't seen in tech in my career. You live outside of that world because you're not sitting inside any of those companies. And you have to keep up with their speed and their changes and their edits because your product thrives by doing so. How does that work? How do you think about your tech and product teams and how they think in order to be able to keep up at that pace?
00:16:39 · James Cadwallader, Alexa von Tobel
[00:16:39] S1: I think there's a pragmatic response to that question and then a sort of philosophical. To start with the pragmatic, we collect from different data sources and triangulate. We survey the models, so if you ask the models, they give you an answer. So we survey the models at scale. We also connect to our customers' own websites to gather first party data at the CDN level, which is super valuable because you're able to see, once you connect to a CDN, you're able to understand when your pages are being cited by these AI models. And then the third is we built a very large consumer panel of real user interactions. We spent a tonne of capital and time and energy building together this big consumer panel of real user interactions with AI that grows every month. Think of it like a big market research. [00:17:31] S0: Great, and that becomes a power slap Yeah, [00:17:33] S1: billions of real user prompts, real user conversations. We collect the prompt and the response. [00:17:38] S0: Oh, that's so interesting. That's like almost a new Reddit entirely in some ways that you have internally.
00:17:38 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:17:38] S0: Oh, that's so interesting. That's like almost a new Reddit entirely in some ways that you have internally. [00:17:43] S1: Yeah. Don't own the data sources. We license from multiple vendors. Like the most well known source of consumer marketing data is like Nielsen. They invented the idea of, you know, consumer research basically like a hundred years ago or something. Yep. But now in 2026, there's there's so many of these that exist. So we've gone and aggregated all of them into one big patchwork quilt quilted one big consumer panel of real user interactions with AI, and that's super valuable. So those three data sources allow us to stay on top of what's going on with the models and the consumer interactions and how that's changing. But maybe to the more philosophical point of, like, how do our team stay ahead? I think that's cultural. And I'd say, yeah, we have... You know, I always say, like, violent aggression. [00:18:36] S0: I'm like, I know what you mean by that exactly. [00:18:39] S1: Yeah. We we we... You know, I I want... I I try to be the team that you wouldn't wanna compete against. I think about that often. I think about, you know, if I were a competitor looking in, how would I feel? And I wanna make them feel as bad as [00:18:54] S0: possible Terrified.