How to Build a Product No One Can Replace: 3 Key Strategies l Rewind AI, Dan Siroker
Summary
TLDRIn this insightful interview, Dan Stroker, Co-Founder and CEO of Rewind, shares his entrepreneurial journey from the Obama campaign's pioneering use of A/B testing to founding Optimizely and now Rewind. He candidly discusses the pivotal lessons learned, emphasizing the power of following one's intuition, creating new categories, and building trust through transparency. Stroker's vision for Rewind is to give humans 'superpowers' by transcending biological limitations and providing perfect memory recall. With a bold approach of publicly raising funds, he secured a $350 million valuation, exemplifying his belief in radical transparency to foster user trust.
Takeaways
- 📢 Dan Strocker, co-founder and CEO of Rewind, raised their Series A publicly, resulting in significant interest and a $350 million valuation.
- 💻 Rewind is an AI-powered tool designed to provide users with perfect memory by documenting everything they've seen, said, or heard.
- 📊 The company is experiencing rapid growth, with a 15% month-over-month increase in ARR, and has raised $33 million from notable investors.
- 💡 The initial motivation behind Rewind stemmed from Strocker's personal challenge with hearing loss and the transformative power of technology.
- 🔥 Transparency and public fundraising strategies have built trust with users and investors, fostering significant business growth.
- 👨💻 Strocker’s journey included working at Google and the Obama campaign, where he developed skills and a passion for data-driven decision making and A/B testing.
- 📝 Rewind started as 'Scribe', a tool for transcribing meetings, before evolving to encompass a broader vision of capturing life's moments.
- 🚀 The concept of building new categories rather than improving existing solutions drives Rewind's innovative approach.
- 📖 Strocker emphasizes the importance of focusing on real problems that people face, advocating for solutions that significantly improve or change behavior.
- 💧 Founders should work on problems they are deeply passionate about, as success in startups can mean working on the same issue for many years.
Q & A
What was Dan Stroker's motivation for starting Optimizely?
-Dan Stroker was inspired by his experience on the Obama campaign to start Optimizely. He wanted to build a product that would make it easy for anyone to do A/B testing, something he wished they had during the campaign.
What were the distinct phases of growth for Optimizely?
-The distinct phases of growth for Optimizely were: 1) Rapid growth from 2010 to 2013, reaching $7 million in ARR, 2) Uncontrolled growth in the team from 2013 to 2016, which Dan considers a mistake, and 3) Squandering their lead and Dan falling out of love with the business.
What was the most salient lesson Dan learned from his experience with Optimizely?
-The most salient lesson Dan learned was to have confidence in his conviction. He regrets the times when he went against his gut instinct and followed someone else's advice, which ultimately failed.
What was the inspiration behind Dan's current company, Rewind?
-The inspiration behind Rewind came from Dan's experience of regaining his hearing after getting a hearing aid. He realized how much he had been missing and was motivated to create technology that could augment human capabilities and give people 'superpowers' like perfect memory.
How did Rewind pivot from its initial product, Scribe?
-Rewind initially launched a product called Scribe that transcribed meetings. However, they learned that people wanted the ability to capture and remember more than just meetings, so they pivoted to the broader Rewind platform for capturing everything to provide a feeling of perfect memory.
What was the motivation behind Rewind publicly raising their Series A funding?
-Rewind publicly raised their Series A funding for two pragmatic reasons: 1) to build trust with users by being transparent about the company, and 2) to respond to the many investors reaching out who wanted to meet with them.
What advice does Dan give for creating a new product category?
-Dan advises focusing on the problem, not the solution. Obsess over a real problem that people are trying to solve in inept ways, rather than starting with a new technology and trying to find a problem to solve.
How does Dan recommend founders find a problem to build a business around?
-Dan recommends being honest about whether it's a real problem that people would change their behavior to solve, and choosing a problem that you care about and would be obsessed with solving for years, even if the initial attempt fails.
What is Dan's perspective on the role of AI in relation to human purpose?
-Dan believes that AI cannot replace human purpose, but should be used as an accelerant to help humans pursue their unique purposes more effectively. AI should augment human capabilities rather than replace them.
What is Dan's vision for the future success of Rewind?
-Dan's dream is for Rewind to become as ubiquitous as glasses or hearing aids, a tool that people cannot imagine living without once they experience the superpower of perfect memory that it provides.
Outlines
🚀 Rewind's Public Series A Fundraising and Journey
The founder of Rewind, Dan Stroker, discusses the unconventional decision to raise their Series A funding in public. He posted a 7-minute pitch video that gained significant traction, leading to 2 million views, numerous investment offers, and ultimately securing an amazing lead investor, NEA, at a $350 million valuation. This approach aimed to build trust with users and address potential privacy concerns. Stroker also reflects on his background, starting with his studies at Stanford, work at Google, and his role in the Obama campaign, where he learned the power of A/B testing, which inspired him to found Optimizely.
🌱 The Growth and Challenges of Optimizely
Stroker delves into the distinct phases of Optimizely's growth, from rapid early success to uncontrolled team expansion, which became a mistake. He admits to hiring too quickly without sufficient financial discipline, leading to inefficiencies and burnout. Stroker also reflects on the mistake of delegating too much and losing passion for the product side of the business. He emphasizes the importance of staying true to one's intuition and conviction as a founder, citing regrets from instances when he went against his gut instinct.
💡 The Inspiration Behind Rewind
Stroker shares the inspiration behind Rewind, which stemmed from his experience of regaining his hearing and realizing the limitations of human biology. This sparked a vision to use technology to augment human capabilities and provide "superpowers." Rewind's initial focus was on meeting transcription, but it pivoted to a broader approach of capturing and preserving everything to deliver the feeling of "Perfect Memory." Stroker emphasizes the importance of creating new categories rather than incremental improvements, based on solving genuine problems that people face.
🎯 Advice for Entrepreneurs Building New Categories
Stroker advises entrepreneurs interested in creating new categories to focus on the problem, not the solution. He suggests identifying genuine problems that people face and observing their workarounds or substitutes, which may signal an opportunity for a new category. Stroker emphasizes the importance of being passionate about the problem and willing to dedicate years to solving it, even if initial attempts fail. He also stresses building trust with early adopters through transparency and aligning with their interests.
🔑 Finding and Solving Meaningful Problems
Stroker provides advice for founders trying to find meaningful problems to build businesses around. He emphasizes the need to identify genuine pain points or "painkillers" rather than "vitamins" that offer minor improvements. Additionally, he suggests focusing on problems that align with personal passions and purposes, as solving them may require a long-term commitment. Stroker also highlights the potential of AI to augment human capabilities in pursuit of individual purposes, rather than replacing humans entirely.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Entrepreneurship
💡A/B testing
💡Product-market fit
💡Transparency
💡Purpose
💡Perfect memory
💡New category creation
💡Intuition
💡Passion
💡Augmentation
Highlights
We raised our series A in public by recording a 7-minute pitch deck video and posting it on social media, which garnered 2 million views, thousands of investment offers, and led to a $350 million valuation led by NEA.
The decision to go public with the fundraising was driven by a desire to build trust with users and address privacy concerns transparently, as well as efficiently handling the influx of investor interest.
After his research at Stanford on predicting the stock market, he spent a year working alone on his first startup idea, which taught him the importance of distribution and the challenges of being a solo founder.
Joining the Obama campaign in 2007 exposed him to the power of A/B testing and data-driven decision-making, which inspired him to start Optimizely to make A/B testing accessible to anyone.
A key lesson from Optimizely was the importance of having confidence in his convictions and intuitions as a founder, rather than regretting going against his gut in favor of others' suggestions.
The idea for Rewind stemmed from regaining his hearing and realizing how limited our biology is, sparking a vision to use technology to augment human capabilities and give people 'superpowers' like perfect memory.
Rewind represents a fundamentally new category of note-taking by passively capturing everything without effort, rather than the anachronistic practice of active note-taking rooted in trying to remember later.
His advice for creating new categories is to focus on the problem, not the solution, and obsess over understanding a real problem that people are trying to solve in broken ways today.
Building trust with users, especially early adopters, is critical for startups solving important problems, which transparency can help achieve.
He recommends not getting ahead of yourself with complex frameworks like flywheels, but focusing first on building a product that solves a real problem for people.
When identifying problems to solve, be honest about whether it's a real 'painkiller' problem you'd change your behavior for, and choose ones you'd be obsessed with pursuing for decades.
AI should be an accelerant that helps humans pursue their unique purpose, not a replacement, by augmenting tasks that don't contribute to that purpose.
The vision is for Rewind to become as ubiquitous as glasses or hearing aids, giving people the 'superpower' of perfect memory that they can't imagine living without.
At Optimizely, he made the mistake of uncontrolled team growth by not saying 'no' enough, which led to misalignment and squandering their early lead.
A key reason for Optimizely's success was making A/B testing easy for non-technical people by lowering the friction, which increased the chances of driving impact through testing.
Transcripts
so this April we did something kind of
crazy this was not a consensus good idea
when we discussed it internally which
was we raised our series a in public I
recorded like a 7-minute version of it
and I only I think I only did like my
third take and I just unedited put it up
there and it took off it really
resonated we got 2 million views on
social media thousands of offers to
invest hundreds of really qualified
meetings that came out of that and
ultimately an amazing lead investor in
Nea who led our series a at a $350
million valuation so it all started
actually with two really pragmatic
concerns
was I'm Dan stroker I'm the co-founder
and CEO of rewind at the beginning of my
career I studied computer science at
Stanford left Stanford to go started a
career at Google as an associate product
manager and in November 2007 joined the
Obama campaign that's inspired me to
start my first company optimizely which
We Grew From Z to $120 million annual
recurring Revenue 450 employees we sold
that company and that's when I started
rewind rewind is a personalized AI
powered by everything you've seen said
or heard heard our vision is to give
humans superpowers and we want to do
that by using technology to augment our
biological limitations and using tools
like rewind to give you Perfect Memory
uh we're growing 15% month over month in
terms of ARR today yeah so we've raised
$33 million from great investors their
very first investor was Sam ultman and I
pitched him on the vision for rewind and
within the first meeting he committed a
million dollars of his own funding the
next round was our seed round LED by
first round Capital another round by
Andre horoz and more recently our series
a was led by
Nea ultimately what seems like successes
were overnight successes but it required
a lot of pain uh to get there the first
idea and first company I actually
started was after I graduated from
Stanford my research at Stanford was on
predicting the stock market looking at
financial news so I actually started a
company I mean I don't know if I even
Incorporated but it was basically for a
year after I graduated by myself I
toiled away kind of building Cool Tech
and this is where I learned firsthand
like the importance of distribution it
was also really lonely working on your
own without a co-founder is very
challenging just the psychological ups
and downs so I actually spent a year
toiling away kind of on my own and then
the drive to do that came from Impact
you know that's always been the driver
bound entrepreneurship for me is how do
I have the biggest impact made me
realize wow I really should learn the
skills necessary to be a successful
entrepreneur so I had this kind of
misguided idea I'd get that from Google
so that's why I went to Google because I
thought that would help me learn skills
necessary to be successful as an
entrepreneur it was misguided because
most of what I learned at Google was how
to navigate Google you know 80% of the
things I learned was how to be
successful with Google 20% was
applicable you know how to work with
great Engineers how to cut scope how to
define and build great products but I
actually think the best thing I could
have done back then is joining an early
stage startup you know had I joined
Facebook at the time which was an early
stage startup or even Dropbox which you
know I would have learned so much more
what it takes to be successful as an
entrepreneur because that's what your
challenges are every day
in November of 2007 I was working at
Google and Barack Obama came to campus
at the time he was third in the polls
behind Hillary Clinton and John Edwards
and he had this vision for how to use
what we were doing at Google using
evidence and data and feedback and bring
that to the government and I remember
feeling really inspired in that talk the
last thing he said when he came to
Google was I want you to be involved
which is kind of a euphemism that
politicians say to encourage you to
donate to their campaign I took them
literally I actually flew on a planing
two weeks later uh to Chicago where the
campaign headquarters were and I just
said I'm I'm here as a volunteer what
can I do to help and that's what led to
this opportunity to do ab testing and
experimentation it's things I had seen
at Google but bringing it to the
campaign and ultimately that became a
job I quit my day job at Google moved to
Chicago and U was the director of
analytics for his campaign the role of
analytics in the campaign was entirely
new in 2008 and the reason why that was
possible was because Barack Obama was
third in the poll
the campaign manager David Pluff had
this mentality he described it as the
risk reward mentality he basically says
if we just did everything like every
other campaign we would end up just like
everyone expected third and so he had
this mindset of let's take some risks
let's do things differently than every
other campaign a good example in in 2007
when I joined that really made this
mentality something the campaign
embraced was We did an AB test and the
ab test was if you go to Barack
obama.com at the time the first thing
you'd see was this very presidential
looking photo of Barack Obama asking you
to sign up on the email list and we ran
an experiment comparing that in real
time to a really compelling video a
video we were excited about you we had
Snippets of his 2004 Democratic National
Convention speech we all thought that
was going to win we wanted to prove how
smart we were by using an AB test and
just kind of on a whim we also included
a few other pictures one picture we
included was a black and white photo of
Barack Obama with Michelle their two
kids very informal sitting kind of on
grass in in this black and white photo
and it turned out that last photo
dramatically overperformed compared to
the rest this photo actually did
surprisingly well it's the last photo
that some you know white- hair grizzled
political veteran would have picked but
you know in hindsight you look at it
well that kind of normalized him as a as
a likable guy it it sort of showed a
different angle to him as a candidate
and we did an analysis and actually that
one change alone led to an incremental
$40 million in donations from the email
addresses that we got from that page so
that's just one example of how using
data and ab testing really helped inform
the decisions we were making one big
lesson I learned from the Obama campaign
is the power of AB testing you know it's
it's not a new idea it's really just the
scientific method but it's applied to
the real world what ultimately inspired
me to start optimizely which was trying
to build a product I wish we had in the
Obama campaign to make it easy for
anybody to do ab testing at that time
the tools we used on the campaign and
those were that were available online
were very expensive they required a
developer to be part of the process and
so the Insight we had from the campaign
is like AB testing is a good idea it's
just hard so let's take a good idea and
make it easy and in some ways that's
been kind of the journey I've had on any
product I've tried to build is take
something that's a good idea at its at
its foundation and democratize it make
it possible for anybody to do so
optimizely at its start was really
trying to build a product I wish we had
in the Obama campaign to make it easy
for anyone to do ab testing the way it
worked was you took a snippit of
JavaScript that we would give you you
put it on your website uh that URL never
changes and then you could run AB test
directly in our visual editor this was a
breakthrough at the time because the
alternative was every time you wanted to
run a new Ab test you needed a developer
to be part of the process the early
hypothesis for optimizing was that most
valuable thing we could build was the
lowest friction way for non-technical
people to run a series of ab tests that
the hypothesis was if we did that we
lower the friction it would increase the
chance that somebody does an AB test and
then if they they do an AB test end up
having an impact and so it came from
from this very basic idea that if the
friction was high and the cost Implement
was high people just wouldn't do it and
if you don't do an AB test you're not
going to get the value and it seems
simple now in hindsight but in the
moment the Alternatives from companies
like Adobe required huge Professional
Services contracts really sophisticated
experiments you needed lots of multivar
tests to justify The Upfront cost of
doing these experiments and with
optimizing we flipped it on a Ted like
we didn't even actually support multivar
testing because we realized it's so much
easier for a marketer to run a series of
a tests and maybe some parallel AB tests
to learn incorporate the winner and move
on then sort of upfront create this huge
sophisticated experiment that's
impossible to get statistical
significance so that was the thesis that
we started with and it it really worked
well I mean that was the reason why
building a product you wish you had is
so powerful is that you have an
intuition your intuition is the product
you wish you had and this is exactly the
product I wish I had in the Obama
campaign to be able to very quickly run
these AB tests so the distinct phases in
optimizes growth I would describe as for
the 2010 to 2013 was really rapid growth
we were lucky to get product Market fit
very early 3 years 7 million in AR or
something like that and we raised our
series a led by Benchmark then that was
a $28 million series a then we raised a
series B not long after a $57 million
series B and then a series C just and so
we were just like growing growing
growing the next phase I would say from
probably 2013 to 2016 uncontrolled
growth in in the team I made the mistake
of it's one thing to to raise more money
than you need you can you should do that
if you couple that with the mistake of
spending more money than you need to
that's really bad and I think we got I I
didn't do a good enough job as CEO in
saying no hire these great you know ahe
of marketing who says oh I need a demand
gen person I need a field marketing I
need a events I'm like oh great like I
hired you to be the CMO so like go go
for it I didn't have the constraint of
lack of capital and then I didn't have
the discipline when we did have the
capital to really make sure we were
growing efficiently so I think we grew
far too quickly in terms of the team uh
we didn't need hundreds of people to do
what we're doing and that was a mistake
so I think we got too big too quickly in
terms of the team and then what happened
was when you get to hundreds of people
spending all of your time with sort of
getting people aligned and just getting
people to like March in the right
direction and I think that was also a
big missed opportunity we kind of
squandered the the lead we had we
weren't moving as quickly as we could I
personally was pretty burnt out I had
been doing optimizely uh for well over a
decade and in some ways after 3 or 4
years I kind of fell out of love with
the business you know we had actually
solved the problem we' set out to solve
which is building a product that made it
easy for anyone to do ab testing and I
made the mistake in my mindset at that
point to think that my job was to hire
people better than me Empower them
delegate to them and ultimately that
meant I spent a lot more of my time on
parts of the business I didn't love and
I ended up spending so much more of my
time in those parts of the business and
that just didn't give me as much energy
as the product side so most of my day
was things that drained my energy that
was something that I wish I had done
differently you know I looked at the
time I I saw folks like L cery at New
Relic who was famous for being this you
know public company CEO who still codes
and I should have done that I should
have modeled myself after him knowing
that that's not selfish at the time I
thought that' be selfish but what I
realized the bigger selfish thing would
be to fall out of love with the company
because when you do that it's so much
harder to attract great people to retain
them to inspire them and had I just been
more focused on problems I was actually
passionate about I think we ultimately
could have achieved much much greater
success I'm proud of the outcome I'm
proud that we sold it but it's only a
glimmer of what we could have done had I
still fa had still had the same passion
for the company 13 years in than I did 3
years
in the most Salient lesson I learned
from optimizely is is a pattern and this
is the pattern of things I regret most
and this is what the pattern looks like
my gut says we should do a somebody else
says we should do B we end up doing B
for all the good reasons it's a board
member who suggested or an executive
who've hired and then B doesn't turn out
well uh and those are the things I
regret most not because when I went with
my gut things didn't turn out well
that's happened plenty of times I just
don't remember any of it the things I
remember most are when I went against my
intuition I didn't have the confidence
and my conviction to argue for my
intuition and we ended up going down a
different path that ultimately failed
and that's where the biggest lesson I
learned was confidence in my conviction
I didn't realize that as a Founder you
have so many data points coming in you
from the engineering to customer voice
to sales to just the the market the
investors and that helps you form this
intuition that sometimes is really even
hard to articulate but when your gut
says you should do a and you really feel
like you should do a you're you're going
to regret doing B if it doesn't turn out
well so that's the lesson I've learned
and now with rewind I have much more
confidence in my conviction there are
plenty of times we do a and it doesn't
turn out well but most of those are
two-way doors most of those we can go
back and change laughter so I um I think
that's the lesson I learned more than
anything yeah so the first idea the very
first seed of what turned into rewind
was losing my hearing and when I try to
hearing nade there two things that
happened one I could hear again which
was amazing but an equally amazing thing
I realized in that exact moment was how
I didn't realize how bad my hearing had
gotten it's this simultaneous
realization of how great hearing is to
these examples like I remember I first
had in my ear and I like rub my shoulder
and be like that makes a sound I turn a
faucet on and be like amazed like that's
a sound there's a sound that's coming
from that and what that told me was
Clarity around what I think is a secret
which is that we all live our lives
limited by our own biology we all live
kind of like a horse with blinders on
like we don't even realize what we don't
have until you can feel it that moment
put me on this hunt now it took 10 years
to to bring it to life which is what are
other ways that technology can augment
human capabilities transcend these
limits that we have by our own biology
and give us superpowers so the
hypothesis when we started rewind was
that there are so many things in our
lives that we forget and that if we
could give the users the feeling of
Perfect Memory that that would kind of
change their mindset and they'd be
willing to you know record things
capture things for the benefit of having
the feeling of Perfect Memory we
actually started very narrowly we
started on meetings first product in the
first MVP we launched was actually
called scribe it was a bot that joins
meetings it transcribes the meeting lets
you actually go back and see your
recording of it we did that uh launched
that and learned a ton we were being
asked all the time to go beyond just
meetings boy I would love to be able to
remember other things not just the
meetings I'm in and that technology had
finally caught up to the vision so
that's when we pivoted from what was
scribe to what is now rewind mind um was
this sort of this simultaneous
Confluence of Hardware got good enough
Apple silicon in particular we learned
that people wanted this product we knew
that being able to capture everything
was far better than just meetings
because often what happens is you you
try to remember something and you might
remember a detail but you get the source
wrong that ability to be comprehensive
was kind of a thesis from the beginning
if we could be comprehensive then we
finally could deliver better on This
Promise of Perfect Memory so often
people think about starting a startup by
looking at different categories and
different markets and they think oh how
do I build a better mouse trap in
existing market and I think that's for
some people there are people for whom
optimizing incrementally making
something better is just how they're
wired personally I'm much more excited
about creating new categories because I
think there are so many things in our
lives today that technology can make
better and the ways to actually really
have a 10x or 100x Improvement is to
build something new not to build
something slightly better than before
rewind is an example of that it is a
fundamentally different way of
approaching the same problem and if you
think about what is like the most common
way today that people use to try to
remember the most common thing people do
to try to remember if you describe it it
will seem so anachronistic the entire
idea of note taking is all rooted in
this idea of trying to remember
something better and if you think about
it that way that you need foresight you
need to know what you might want to
remember later you need to be able to
search it you need to be able to
actually put effort into it our approach
is entirely different it's passive it's
capturing everything it does it without
being perceptible it does it in the
background that's a way to think about
it's like an entirely new category of
note taking although note taking is all
trying to solve the problem of
remembering better we wouldn't take
notes if we all had Perfect Memory if
you all had Perfect Memory you wouldn't
use rewind and so that way that's the
new category we're building is the
category of giving you Perfect Memory
the best advice I'd have for
entrepreneurs who want to start a new
category is to focus on the problem not
the solution it's very easy to fall in
love with some sophisticated new
technology like gbg4 came out okay cool
now what problem do I solve with it it
instead if you start with a problem if
you believe that there's a problem of
people don't have Perfect Memory then
that problem is something you can solve
by building entirely new categories so I
think you need to really obsess with a
problem really deeply understand the
problem try to look at the substitutes
like what do people do that's kind of
like weird and broken today like I said
no taking is kind of weird and broken
it's a it's an inkling that there is a
problem to be solved it's just the
status quo is so inept like if nobody
actually is piecing together products
that exist today to try to solve your
problem then it may not be a real
problem usually the signs of a new
market or a new category are people sort
of gluing together things that aren't
meant to be put together to to try to
solve the problem there's hodg poot sort
of duct tape and bailing wire to try to
solve something and the core of what
they're trying to solve is a job it's a
job to be done it's something they want
in the world to exist because they have
a problem and so that's I think my best
advice if you want us to create a new
category really think about the problem
and then let that lead the technology
not the other way
around so this April we did something
kind of crazy uh this was not a
consensus good idea when we discussed it
internally which was we raised our
series a in public took our pitch deck
uh I recorded like a 7-minute version of
it and I only I think I only did like my
third take and I just unedited put it up
there and it took off you know it really
resonated we got 2 million views on
social media thousands of offers to
invest hundreds of really qualified
meetings that came out of that and
ultimately an amazing lead investor in
Nea who led our series a at a $350
million valuation and so it all started
actually with two really pragmatic
concerns one was we had such an
opportunity to build trust with users by
being more transparent you know our
product is different it's new it's a new
category at first blush you sort of ask
okay well what happens to this data and
and people are concerned about privacy
well what about this company what if
Google comes by and buys this company
then all of a sudden I'm going to get
targeted with better ads and so we
really wanted to start with like how do
we build trust with users that we are a
going concern we're a business that's
going to be around for a while and then
simultaneously I was getting hundreds of
investors reaching out to want to meet
some of them very important luminaries I
just didn't want to like blow them all
off so okay let me just create a video
that I can send to all of them and while
I add it why I just put up on Twitter
and see if that actually gets trust from
users and that was kind of the two data
points that led us to actually
publishing it in hindsight like why did
we even do that we had three years of
Runway we didn't really need the funding
but we got from three years of Runway to
six years of Runway which is even better
right now we're growing 15% month over
month uh in in annual recurring revenue
and the primary source of that growth is
word of mouth I think building trust
with users especially as a startup is
critical users especially early adopters
they want to love your product they want
to love your business you probably are
solving problem that so that matters so
much to them but they also don't want to
get screwed they don't want their data
to be sold uh they know that startups
might get desperate and do things that
ultimately are not in their best
interest or their users's best interest
so if you can assuage those concerns by
being transparent that goes a long way
and every time I've done it every time
I've paid off uh every time I've made a
bet on transparency it's paid off so uh
you know we'll see maybe one day I'll
regret being so transparent but so far
it's it's worked really well so that was
sort of the recipe and there's so many
ways to build trust and there's so much
status quo like you no I doubt a you
know CEO of Fortune 500 company would
put their candid 360 feedback out there
if Tim Cook did that then great but if
Tim Cook can't do that and won't do that
then the one way I can beat him is by
doing it by being a startup that's
willing to take those kinds of risks I
think that sets us apart from the big
Tech
incumbents I I am a big fan of flywheels
what I would recommend especially early
stage startup CEOs is don't get obsessed
with the greatest flywheel and
Frameworks and make something people
want at the end of the day your job is
to build a product that people want it
solves a real problem for them and if
you're lucky enough to do that then you
can start thinking about over time how
do you build sustainable competitive
Advantage how do you build
differentiation so that even if a
competitor knew exactly what your
playbook is you could ultimately beat
them because you're building investing
into a flywheel gets better of looking
at companies like Amazon and say wow how
did Amazon get so big and you look at
you know Jeff Bezos famously talks about
investing in things that don't change
looking at how the world's going to be
the same in 5 years or 10 years uh will
people want more selection or less
selection more selection will they want
lower prices or higher prices lower
prices well they want faster delivery or
slower delivery and and so okay let's
build a flywheel around faster delivery
more selection lower prices that sounds
great you know they have this napkin
that's famous flywheel that Amazon has
but at the end of the day it started
with building a product people wanted
getting them books over the mail and
getting them the selection that they
couldn't get elsewhere and you need to
start there before you have the luxury
of thinking about flywheels and
sustainable advantage and I know I'm the
only I I've definitely made this mistake
before of like getting ahead of yourself
but you got to start with build a
product people
want yeah so the advice I'd give to
Founders trying to find a problem that
they can build a business around uh
starts from a couple of Dimensions first
really be honest with yourself is it a
problem is it a painkiller or a vitamin
you know there's a lot of things in our
life that are just small be solved
better with a pro product but you also
have to accept that like change is hard
people are stuck in their habits they're
used to doing the things they're doing
so anything you build needs to solve a
problem that's not just like a slly
better version of something that exists
but needs to M you know painful enough
problem that they're going to change
your behavior to use your product so
that's first is like really be honest
with yourself is this a problem and is
it a problem that you have you might
think it's a problem you have but like
be honest would you actually change your
behavior to use the product that you're
thinking about building the second is if
you focus on a problem you think about
the future of your focus on that problem
either what you're doing is a good idea
or a bad idea if it's a bad idea it'll
probably fail and you'll change ideas if
it's a good idea you might have have to
live with this problem for 10 years for
15 years or 20 years so make it a
problem you care about make it a problem
you might be obsessed with the way I
looked at it with rewind is the problem
of giving humans Perfect Memory is a
problem that I would want to spend the
rest of my life pursuing even if it
failed even if it wasn't successful I'd
rather be on my deathbed saying well at
least I tried to give humans Perfect
Memory and failed than not try to solve
that problem and I think if that lens is
something you use you end up actually
solving a real problem and if you're
successful which you should hope you are
you're still going to want to be around
in 3 or 5 or 10 years to make that
problem and that product and that
company as big as it possibly could be
so the one thing that AI can't replace
and in fact the one thing that AI should
all help us pursue is purpose that's one
thing that AI can't do AI can't give us
purpose and as humans that what's make
us uniquely human is our purpose why are
we here it may be to spend more time
with family it may be to create
something out of nothing and if AI can
be in service of your purpose that is an
accelerant that's a superpower it's not
a replacement it makes you better at
what you do to pursue your purpose and
if anything you do in your day that
doesn't help us pursue our own purpose
can be taken away and augmented with AI
then I think that's a good thing for
Humanity so our vision is to give humans
superpowers but if we're successful I
see rewind as being as ubiquitous as
glasses are for vision or hearing aids
are for hearing it's a tool that people
will try they'll use and then they think
to themselves how could I live life
without this uh and that's my dream our
hope is if we're successful people look
back to today kind of in shock at how we
lived Our Lives when there's so much
more technology could do for
them
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