Venture Europe: Entrepreneurship | Technology | Venture Capital | Eu/Acc
00:24:04 · Calin Fabri, James Cadwallader
[00:24:04] S1: Gentic payments, which is one thing. [00:24:05] S0: Like, if I come in with a thesis, then you're, like, limiting the pool of founders that you can work with. Because, like, you know, maybe Dylan hates the idea of fintech. Yeah. So it's better to go in as, a blank slate and just be like, hey, I'm just looking for a cofounder. Maybe I can just can work on things that you find interesting, or you could work on things that I find interesting. So, yeah, the long story short is we ran through a bunch of ideas. We were looking at lithium mining. We were looking at [00:24:29] S1: Lithium mining. [00:24:30] S0: Yeah. Because Dylan has a background at Uber. He was doing a lot of geospatial work. Right. So we were looking at, like, what applications, like, you know, commercial application of good geospatial product. Yep. And we started exploring lithium mining, but never really landed anywhere there. We got quite deep on this idea of agentic payments Yeah. Which now there's actually a few, like Sounds like a great idea. Yeah. Yeah. There's like... But I think that was a timing thing. Right. The the place where we've rubbed up against was like, hang on a second. How many people... This is 2024. Mhmm. How many people are actually using agents? Right. You could argue what we were trying to build for or the idea in 2024 was basically built for what's happening right now Yeah. Just at this moment, only over the last eight weeks. Like a bank [00:25:16] S1: like a bank for agents.
00:25:17 · James Cadwallader
[00:25:17] S0: Yeah. Instinct, Muse, Grokbat, Dots. These things are are just coming to life now. Yeah. And I think, yeah, this timing thing is so important. Like, we were basically too early. And I don't think we had the perfect founder market fit. I don't have a fintech background, neither does Dylan. So, yeah, we landed on ProFound. Yep. The idea being like, hey. In the future, every business on the planet will care deeply about how AI talks about their brand, products, services. So agents become the new customer. Yep. So if you're the CMO of Nike Yep. How does ChatGPT, how does Gemini, how does Grok talk about your running sneaker? And then the second idea, which is maybe sort of less potent, but is just as important is like, okay. Cool. Well, we can show you what ChatGPT says about the Nike running sneaker, but what what do you do about it? Right. So we had this idea that you wouldn't need human beings sat at a computer looking at analytics. You'd have an agent that we call AI marketer AIM that goes through the data, surfaces opportunities, can build the marketing for you. So now ProFound, skip forward two years. Yeah. We've raised, like, $350,000,000 from Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Coastal Ventures, Lightspeed. We're, like, 400 people across. We're headquartered in New York, offices in London, San Francisco, Buenos Aires. We're opening an office in SF. We work with a third of the Fortune 100. So, yeah, some of the biggest brands on the planet. Right. It's hard to name them because they don't always have logo rights, but, like, Comcast, Estee Lauder, Ram, Walmart. What was, like, the the first product? The first product was just like, hey. How do you show up?
00:27:04 · Calin Fabri, James Cadwallader
[00:27:04] S1: How do you show up? Yeah. And then, like, like, how do you go from that? [00:27:08] S0: What does chat... If I ask a thousand questions to chat and Gemini and Grok about the new Nike AlphaFly Yep. And I say, how much does it cost? Or is it better than the Adidas version? Or what's the best running sneaker? Just open ended. Right. What gets outputted by the models? [00:27:25] S1: And then, like, the action would be, let's say, okay, you need to create more content that gets labeled, so then you kinda change how the product is seen, or was the action [00:27:38] S0: Well, the action is, like, once you understand where the answer is coming from Right. You know, are you producing enough content? Because, basically, what's happening in the background is I ask ChatGPT a question, and it's sending an agent to the Nike website, to a third party blog, to a review site, to Reddit, to get that information. ChatGPT hasn't worn the the alpha fly. Right? It doesn't know Yep. Intrinsically. And it uses the web to to build its responses. So your new job as a marketer at Nike is to build a 100 x more marketing, and it can't be swapped. It has to be high quality, you know, non commodity Yep. Content that the model hasn't been trained on already. Yep. So you have to create, like, a lots of original content that is aimed entirely for an agent to consume Mhmm. And then publish, distribute that across the Internet, and then monitor it and see how it performs. If it does well, do more of it. If it doesn't do well, do less of it.
00:27:38 · James Cadwallader, Calin Fabri
[00:27:38] S0: Well, the action is, like, once you understand where the answer is coming from Right. You know, are you producing enough content? Because, basically, what's happening in the background is I ask ChatGPT a question, and it's sending an agent to the Nike website, to a third party blog, to a review site, to Reddit, to get that information. ChatGPT hasn't worn the the alpha fly. Right? It doesn't know Yep. Intrinsically. And it uses the web to to build its responses. So your new job as a marketer at Nike is to build a 100 x more marketing, and it can't be swapped. It has to be high quality, you know, non commodity Yep. Content that the model hasn't been trained on already. Yep. So you have to create, like, a lots of original content that is aimed entirely for an agent to consume Mhmm. And then publish, distribute that across the Internet, and then monitor it and see how it performs. If it does well, do more of it. If it doesn't do well, do less of it. [00:28:34] S1: So so how does marketing look like, I don't know, in five years? Maybe ten years is too much, and based on what Anthropic said, like, we are at risk of not surviving. But what does what does marketing look like like in five years?
00:28:34 · Calin Fabri, James Cadwallader
[00:28:34] S1: So so how does marketing look like, I don't know, in five years? Maybe ten years is too much, and based on what Anthropic said, like, we are at risk of not surviving. But what does what does marketing look like like in five years? [00:28:46] S0: I think very similar to, like... It's weird to me, you know, you have vertical AI companies across, like, legal, accounting, customers... Customer support. But, like, why would you not... Why would a marketer's role not change in the same way that an engineer's role? Like, a software engineer's role now. Yep. If you look at the sub... We have, you know, nearly a 100 software engineers are a bit... In our company. They are not sitting there manually writing code. They are orchestrators. They have agents that are doing all the coding for marketers are gonna sit there and, like, write a blog post and, like, it it it is is unfathomable. That future is unfathomable to me. I don't see that future existing. So marketers are gonna work with agents to build great marketing. The the emphasis there is on the word great. Yeah. Not slop. No. Like like, lizard brain thinking is like, oh, I'm gonna use AI to do my marketing. Therefore, it will be slop. I'd say slop is a skill issue. Slop is a is a function of you not know... You not knowing how to use the tool that is AI. Yep. So, yeah, like, marketers are gonna use AI to build their marketing, and they're gonna do that inside of ProFound.
00:28:46 · James Cadwallader, Calin Fabri
[00:28:46] S0: I think very similar to, like... It's weird to me, you know, you have vertical AI companies across, like, legal, accounting, customers... Customer support. But, like, why would you not... Why would a marketer's role not change in the same way that an engineer's role? Like, a software engineer's role now. Yep. If you look at the sub... We have, you know, nearly a 100 software engineers are a bit... In our company. They are not sitting there manually writing code. They are orchestrators. They have agents that are doing all the coding for marketers are gonna sit there and, like, write a blog post and, like, it it it is is unfathomable. That future is unfathomable to me. I don't see that future existing. So marketers are gonna work with agents to build great marketing. The the emphasis there is on the word great. Yeah. Not slop. No. Like like, lizard brain thinking is like, oh, I'm gonna use AI to do my marketing. Therefore, it will be slop. I'd say slop is a skill issue. Slop is a is a function of you not know... You not knowing how to use the tool that is AI. Yep. So, yeah, like, marketers are gonna use AI to build their marketing, and they're gonna do that inside of ProFound. [00:29:58] S1: Yeah. I I I don't know if you saw this GIF, but there is this... There is someone that watches a monkey trying to push, like, a nail. [00:30:07] S0: Yeah. [00:30:07] S1: You know? And Yeah. David Attenborough. Yeah. [00:30:09] S0: I know I know that meme. Yeah.