Venture Europe: Entrepreneurship | Technology | Venture Capital | Eu/Acc
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.
00:30:09 · James Cadwallader, Calin Fabri
[00:30:09] S0: I know I know that meme. Yeah. [00:30:10] S1: So, like, the the comparison, like, with someone actually now typing code. And I also saw recently, it was like DHH, David Heinemeier Hansen, and he had a talk at the opening in Austin for Ruby on Rails. Okay. So so he compares the the moment that we live right now with the advent of the camera. His grand grandfather was an artist, so only royalty... Only if you were, like, royalty, you could have, like, a painting of your family. But then the camera came, and everyone could have a painting, you know, of your family. Also, now, like, with with AI, like, why why would you type? Of course, it takes a couple of iterations to your point, like, not to have the slop, but you can get there with skill.