Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:30:57 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:30:57] S0: That's really well said. [00:30:58] S1: Like you don't know how to use AI to build quality marketing. So if you think the solution is to abandon generative AI and do it by hand, I mean, you can take that approach, but just understand that there are very talented people out there that are using AI in way more sophisticated ways. Like the reason it's slop is probably [00:31:17] S0: That is incredible. I fully appreciate your point, which is it is not to abandon AI. If it feels like slop, it's because it was misused. It's using improperly. [00:31:27] S1: Yeah, you put in a two line prompt and hoped for the best. And then wondered why that generic AI created generic marketing. So context is the antidote to slop. And what we see is, I mean, this really speaks to the vision for the evals that I'm talking about. That is just the most extreme version of context. It's you are trying to inject your brand voice, your values, your organizational structure, your permissioning, like understanding where the human should review, where the human should approve. All of these tenants are what we're seeing companies in ProFound do now. Have context manager, which is a dynamic understanding of everything about your brand, product, services, competitive landscape, market. And all of that is piped into a harness so that when you type in the one line prompt saying, have we write a blog? It's pulling from all of that context layer to build a blog that sounds like you.
00:32:27 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:32:27] S0: And actually, just to go a step further, what you're really saying is that magic of marketing, that we all it really is IQ and creativity and insight and having an incredible awareness of what's happening around us in the world and finding that one got milk ad that stood out to the point where we all know it, AI can do that and better than us. If we fast forward five years, is marketing going to get crazier? If we think about the things that grab attention right now, and is good marketing, it's content. It's an ad. It's uniqueness. It's compelling differences where you're like, oh, wow. I mean, the Geico Gecko. I think about that all the time. I'm like, well, it's so random, but we all know about it. The most random thing if you had ever asked me to come up with that, I wouldn't have. But somebody did, and it broke out. Do you think we'll see more outlandish marketing to be able to, in a world of 100x agentic AI content? Will that be necessary to stand out, was my question.
00:33:36 · James Cadwallader, Alexa von Tobel
[00:33:36] S1: What we're gonna see from my prediction of what we'll see is a bifurcation that starts to take place where we have very agentic marketing, everything we've been speaking about. High volume, super fast agentic content that is orchestrated by a marketing engineer who is plumbing in all of this content and doing this new form of marketing. And then at the other end of the barbell, we will see very human marketing that becomes more and more important at the time. We're spending a ton of money on billboards. Billboards, events, dinners, all of these things start to matter more in that world. [00:34:19] S0: I couldn't agree with you more. That is brilliantly said. You recently announced $180,000,000 Series D at almost $2,000,000,000 valuation. Congrats, first of You're absolutely killing it. And as a fellow New Yorker, I'm thrilled for you. What are you most excited about? If we look forward to the next few years, what's getting you out of bed with an extra spring in your staff? [00:34:44] S1: Working with smart people. Have ProFound Labs, applied AI, the applied research that we're doing now is really exciting. Getting to partner with businesses like Mercor and Fireworks and building the first marketing benchmark. And really, yeah, really being able to rethink this category through the lens of abundant intelligence and how we can apply this abundant intelligence to one of the most important industries on the planet is super fun. Yeah, we had a meeting this morning, and yeah, I think every vertical in industry will birth a giant- new car.
00:34:44 · James Cadwallader, Alexa von Tobel
[00:34:44] S1: Working with smart people. Have ProFound Labs, applied AI, the applied research that we're doing now is really exciting. Getting to partner with businesses like Mercor and Fireworks and building the first marketing benchmark. And really, yeah, really being able to rethink this category through the lens of abundant intelligence and how we can apply this abundant intelligence to one of the most important industries on the planet is super fun. Yeah, we had a meeting this morning, and yeah, I think every vertical in industry will birth a giant- new car. [00:35:35] S0: Yeah, I see it absolutely clear. I see you as the next Salesforce. That's very, very clear. And also not only because you're doing something that's really hard and you're the fastest growing first mover with already the hardest companies to get, but you'll see everything that's on the fringe. You'll be a front row seat to seeing what happens around you. [00:35:57] S1: Yeah, mean, we're super inspired by Salesforce and Adobe. Know, they had this platform shift with cloud, and they were able to build giant businesses by that platform shift. I think this platform shift is arguably bigger. I mean, probably indisputably bigger than the shift to cloud. And I think, yeah, we have that opportunity and it's like down to us to execute. Think that, yeah, I I don't wanna over glaze Rand, but I'm very inspired by their ability to attract the best talent in the world to work on that problem. Think is the sort of slept on miracle of that business. [00:36:34] S0: I agree.
00:36:34 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:36:34] S0: I agree. [00:36:35] S1: And Karim did there was like nothing shy of a miracle. Like how do you attract these IOI, IMO geniuses to come and work on that idea versus, you know, build God at OpenAI. What we are doing is we are attracting that talent into our business to work on applying AI to the category of marketing. And I think if we can... Everything is downstream from that talent. [00:37:00] S0: Yep. We have only a few minutes. I have 100 more questions I want to ask you, but I'm going to make sure we focus on a few. Because you talked about something so interesting, which was that the future of social platforms become biozones for human data. And that's a big idea. Say more. So future of social platforms become biozones for human data.
00:37:27 · James Cadwallader
[00:37:27] S1: The labs are going in this world where they accidentally, well, in this world where it becomes very difficult for publishers to monetize their content because of that disintermediation. And maybe that doesn't emerge. There's lots of deals happening with publishers and labs, but there's also just a type of content that we take for granted that exists on the internet. Like Leila's flower blog that she did out of, she wanted to... Most people create stuff and push it to the internet for two reasons, status and money. And when it's an agent visiting Leida's flower blog to get the answer, you lack, there's no benefit status and you don't make any money because advertisers aren't paying to show ads to agents. So, you know, maybe for the fat head, like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, you know, the big players, there could be a path through by doing deals with the labs. This like beautiful, abundant long tail of the internet, I think might struggle in this new world because what's the point in publishing that website anymore. So that all of that human exchange has to go somewhere. And I think it it, if you squint, you can start to see that, okay. Well, maybe that will be the role of social media. This bio zone we're referring to is that later, we'll publish a flower blog on x, for example. And, you know, she'll get rewarded by an X if the post goes super viral. So she has that financial opportunity. And there's also just status. People like, yeah, people we crave praise from our fellow humans. And that will, I think that the role of social media will be very important to block bots and agents from accessing that, from partaking in the conversation. It has to stay very human.