The AI Platform That Could Launch 10,000 Startups | Woz

AI code generation is happening now. This is our window. Let's start messing around and figuring out like where the opportunity is to build something big into this inflection. Building the first version of the app that you launch is like 1% of the work. What comes after that is 99%. Like how do you scale this up? How do you make sure it's reliable? How do you get all the certifications you need? Deal with regulation, all the Updates, bug fixing, everything that comes after it. We let them never have to worry about those things. And that's where

our WS will really succeed. Our goal at WS is for the businesses built on our platform to be as successful as possible. And so that means our incentives are totally aligned with our entrepreneurs to help provide them the best-in-class tools and services just as Shopify does for your e-commerce business. I think over 2 million stores At this point to be built on its platform. I'd say there's no shortage of people with great ideas and now we're giving them the ability to go execute on those visions. And so that's really exciting for us. I wonder like

if was went away like what would you guys do? Let's just say Microsoft came and gave you a hundred billion dollars and they gave you a non-compete. Part of the contract was you have to start a new business in the next 90 days to the Agentic podcast where we dive deep with the pioneer AI founders reimagining business and investors betting on them. We bring you the war stories, insights, and perspectives you won't hear anywhere else. I'm your host, George Banderion, the general partner of Untapped Ventures, a VC fund that invests in early stage AI startups.

Let's go. All right, welcome back to the Agentic Podcast. I'm your host, George Banderion, and today we have two Incredible guests with us, Ben Collins and Brad Eert, co-founders of W. If you haven't heard, W is a groundbreaking AI platform enabling anyone, technical or not, to build and scale web and mobile products, software businesses without any coding. think Shopify, but for launching fully operational software startups and very different than some of the other names you might be familiar with. So, I'd like to welcome Ben Collins, the founder and CEO. He's an MIT engineer turned Stanford

MBA, extensive experience scaling from tier tech startups, as well as the other co-founder, Brad Eert, the CTO, a seasoned entrepreneur with deep technical roots, previously with another startup that went through Y Combinator. And we'll talk a little bit about YC. With that said, welcome Ben and Brad. How are you guys? Awesome. Happy to be here. Thanks for having us. Thanks, George. Cool. Well, to kick off, let's Just pretend for a second that I'm a non-technical startup founder or or even an entrepreneur, right, of any small business owner. What can I do now with W that

I couldn't do before and that I can't do anywhere else with some of the other similar products? It's a great question and you know we're living in a pretty interesting time right um AI for code generation you know has never really existed before in a in a way like it does today and so what it means is Barriers for business building are you know dramatically lower than they've ever been in the past and you know what we do at W is we built an an AI platform that enables anyone to build really high quality best-in-class

uh customerf facing software applications web and mobile. Um the way we go about doing this is we start from robust building blocks uh rooted in industry best practice and then we plug in LLMs in very structured kind of constrained Areas where outputs are predictable and and reliable and by doing so we get to get a lot of the benefits of building with AI which are you know speed and cost and while maintaining kind of the reliability of like high quality handcrafted um software ware and so we're really really excited to uh to be building this

platform and most importantly to be helping you know hundreds and thousands and and hopefully tens of thousands of Um aspiring entrepreneurs to to build and scale businesses on our product. So just to understand that a little bit better, am I going in to uh put a prompt and get a fully functional product at the end or based on what I understand, right? You want them to understand a little bit about what they're doing and maybe have some designs, but as long as they have that, then you believe that was going to build the product better

from there on out. Is that right? Yeah, I think it's a it's a good question um around kind of our our product vision and there's a lot of tools out there in the market right now. Um if you're kind of paying attention to this space of AI code generation, no code tools, you you're probably familiar familiar with the likes of like a lovable or a bolt. Um and those are very much tools that a user learns to use, right? Um, and there's like it's a it's a whole new skill set um that you kind Of

have to to learn and you know and get better at over time through hours and hours of of practice. And you know, our vision is is very much that we don't want to to build another tool. Um, so what we're striving to do is to emulate the experience of an entrepreneur, a business owner talking in the room with their engineering leader, right? And so what we want to emulate is that discussion that's a really rich and deep discussion about kind of the root and Core of the business where uh the entrepreneur describes kind of kind

of the customers the use cases the key features where value is created and that our laws your engineering leader brings a lot of opinion um rooted in best practice and experience from building and scaling things to many many many users. Um, and so what we do is we bring that opinion and like kind of the output of that is a really high qual quality kind Of scalable customerready functional product. Okay, that's exciting. So, so yeah, it sounds like the vision's developed a little bit more since u my last understanding of it. So, so maybe initially

there's some designs required, but but really where you're at today and and where you're really going is is being able to um to talk with it where an entrepreneur can can just have a voice and or text conversation. Um was can talk back, help ask questions, guide the conversation and then the result is an MVP can test that and then a full functional product all the way to your main goal, right, which is this vision that is part of what had us excited to invest, which is like the Shopify for software businesses, right? So, can

you talk can you talk to us a little bit about that analogy? Yeah, for sure. I think yeah, like like You mentioned, like we think Shopify is a kind of a a great um example that kind of we're shaping our vision of laws after. Uh there's a lot of similarities as to what they did to bring kind of e-commerce online and accessible to the masses um and make a lot of new e-commerce businesses possible that that weren't before before possible. Um yeah, so look, if businesses run on laws, as you know, we're enabling them to

do, it puts us in a really advantaged Position to be able to layer on a lot of agentic uh tools and services to help you run your business. Our goal at WAS is for the businesses built on our platform to be as successful as possible. And so that means our incentives are totally aligned with our entrepreneurs to help provide them the best-in-class tools and services just as Shopify does for your e-commerce business. Right? There's this third party marketplace which is kind of Attracting um the best services that help amplify and grow those e-commerce businesses. And

our vision is to do very much the same both on like the sexy goto market stuff, right? That's the content creation. And that's to go, you know, whether it's AI creators and AI influencers or connecting you with like real influencers. And it's also kind of the more, you know, tactical boring back of house stuff, right? It's like AB testing. It's looking at a lot of Product analytics, customer analytics, um, you know, even eventually like accounting and things like this in the background. Yeah. Anyone who's ever launched sort of a real business uh software business knows

that sort of building the first version of the app that you launch is like 1% of the work. You know what comes after that is 99%. Like how do you scale this up? How do you make sure it's reliable? How do you get all the certifications you need? Uh Deal with regulation, do all the distribution, um all the updates, bug fixing, everything that comes after it. That's where we think the long-term um ability of people to be able to host and scale on our platform really gives us an advantage. We let them never have to

worry about those things and that's where our uh WS will really succeed. Yeah. Including when when users actually start using it and then you know you Find out that the way they want to use it is completely different than all those conversations you had with W or your Indian dev shop or expensive local dev shop or whatever. however you built it. So, you know, once people start using it and especially once you get paying customers onto it, you know, when your customers do, that's when they learn. So, what you're saying is, and again, like unlike

some of the others where the goal is to be like speed to an MVP, uh what you're focused on is really paying attention to, okay, once I get that first version up, then there's going to be a lot of changes and and so your system I'm going to I'm going to be able to continue to talk to was hey, you know, these five users complained that they couldn't find the search button. Move the search button here and stuff like that. Yeah, we want to be the long-term partner, right? Like The long-term partner instead of build,

you know, building a business or building a software app on a tool and then taking it off and kind of having to run that yourself as you scale. We want to be your long-term partner that you can you can trust. Just like if you're building a Shopify site, you know, you you stay on Shopify and they kind of help with everything that's needed to scale your business. Exactly. So, so I know once you guys launched as part of The recent by combinator winter cohort, uh you went public, you came out of stealth, you went public,

you got tens of thousands of weight list and a bunch of people going all the way through your process submitting their ideas and and you guys could only start with a handful for your kind of your alpha set. Um, so I'm kind of curious, Brad, uh, what what what has been the most interesting or impressive kind of real world apps that um, that you've guys have started to Focus on um, building for customers? I'll say just like that at a high level. I mean, we knew this going into this, but just getting so much interest,

so many people that spent, you know, 15, 30 minutes doing that, you know, to to a technical co-founder type of conversation that we have on our website like was just re, you know, uh, kind of reinvigorated Ben and I saying like there are even larger number of people that want to build things than we could Have ever imagined. Um, so there's no shortage of those folks out there and for we're kind of in a super um advantaged position right now where we can kind of choose the best ideas that come through and work with the

early customers as we build out more of the technical system. So I'll let I'll let Ben answer more about sort of the highlights of the best businesses he's seen, but there's been some amazing ones that have come through. I would echo Brad's point that like there's no shortage of people out there who either have existing businesses and want to add uh products to it or like have an idea to to launch a new product based business. So, um I think it's like honestly the most energizing and best part of our our job is that like

we get to go talk to those people and help them um actually like turn their vision into reality. It's probably what what I love most about about building this company. Um, to answer your question in more detail, like what are things that people are building and and why are they exciting? Um, you know, it's a lot of things that that you would that you would suspect. Uh, people want to build marketplaces for various products and services. Um people see some an example of a business that works and they want to recreate it for a particular

niche or a particular geography. Um people are offering a Course or a service and they want to augment it with AI um through an application. We're seeing a lot of that um from people in professional services. So, it's a lot of the things you would you would expect. Um, communities and social platforms for particular groups. Um, so yeah, really, really, really interesting, compelling businesses. Like, um, not only do people have is there no shortage of people with ideas, um, I'd say there's no shortage of People with great ideas. Um, and now we're giving them the

ability to go execute on those on those visions. And so that's really exciting for us. Okay. Well, well, we dove right in, but before we go any further, let's rewind a little bit. So, uh, let's hear a little bit about the origin story. What, what brought you guys together. Uh, from what I understand, you guys were roommates, right, at MIT back in the day? Yeah. So, so maybe so maybe kind of like Take us through how you guys met and how we got to this point. Yeah. No, like you like you mentioned, we we we

met um I think 12 going on 13 years ago. We were roommates at MIT. Um luckily we've upgraded our housing situation since then. I think we had uh six six guys living in a very small apartment. Um barely two and a half bedroom. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fond fond memories looking back, but happy to be where we are now. Um yeah, I mean I think you always when You when you think about starting a business, you're always, you know, thinking about who could be a potential partner and you want to find people who are really complimentary

to you, right? Uh a shared vision and and complimentary skill sets and I think um you know Brad and I compliment each other really nicely. So um you know when when timing kind of aligned it made sense for us to to team up and and start working on was Together. Um, but we've both taken different paths to get here and I think like like I said like I see us W is the culmination of like our experiences and plus the experiences of our team and we think you know that allows us to bring a a

unique angle and a unique vision um to market that other teams aren't doing. Um I think the I mean Brad you can tell your your founding story but um I mean it it would just became so clear to us about a year ago that AI code generation Was going to take off and George you you know you're talking to entrepreneurs all the time who who are building in this space but for us it was like holy crap this is the moment you have to start building here because this moment has never existed before and it's

going to be a a window that only exists for a certain amount of time. Um, and so we started rolling around in the mud for a couple months figuring out what was the right angle to build into it, right? Um, We started as thinking, okay, maybe we start a a venture studio and we start incubating a ton of ideas. Um, so we were talking to a bunch of founders to potentially like bring into a venture studio to build out our tech team and then basically run build a tech internal tech platform that could support you

know hopefully dozens and dozens of these AI enabled businesses. And you know the more entrepreneurs we talked to uh and the more the technology advanced We just realized like holy crap this opportunity is way way bigger than we can go after with a venture studio right so why don't we just build this you know horizontal enabling platform and open it up to the world and let entre you know thousands tens of thousands of entrepreneurs build on top of it. Um, so it wasn't like a light bulb flash. There was one moment where like this is

it was a lot of like AI code generation is happening now. This is our window. Let's Start messing around and figuring out like where the opportunity is to build something big into this inflection. Um and that was the process and and we eventually landed on W in sort of technological history where like a business like W is financially possible right like we are now at the point where customizing software is cheap enough that we can do it at real scale so you know uh enables that. So let me tell you my my side of the

story. Yeah, coming From the technical perspective here, you know, I I dropped out of my masters at MIT. I was the first employee at a startup building uh basically we were building a mobile app and we built that from scratch, everything that you needed to support that. Then when I started my last company, you know, there's a whole ton of other hardware and and radar stuff that happened behind the scenes, but we also had to build, you know, a mobile app, a web app, everything that Went behind that. Um, so we rebuilt the same thing

over and over again. And then when I got to, you know, a after I left my last company was looking uh kind of what I wanted to work on next. And people kept coming to me over and over again with, you know, ideas that they were trying to build. Um, and I just kept thinking like, you know, I've built this same system multiple times and it's it's at its core it's very reusable, but the problem is that like that top 20% of Work that is custom to each business like that is an insane amount of

work still. And now with the codegen tools like and then the ability of them to kind of take an example and take it further and customize it to a specific business. I thought this is the time when that is now possible. So you know building kind of a core 80% of a business in a super modular way with the same team that I've done it with over the last 10 years multiple times and Then applying the codegen on top of it. it was like wow this is now something that can truly scale and can truly

serve uh you know many many many different types of businesses with with almost unlimited customization. So like as these tools get better our broad the the broadness with which we can serve customers um just just grows. So it's it's kind of like an amazing time to be building this business. Yeah. No, that's really exciting and and I love that you guys went through that iteration of the venture studio incubator model and just realizing how yeah, we could probably help like five or 10 a year if we do it the old way or we can build

this agentic, you know, codegen system and h help 10,000 or a million a year or over our lifetime. Um, and so I think that's really exciting. So, so then let's talk about you you guys have become, you know, experts in this field that you're in and so but yet There's still a lot of confusion. So, I'd love for you guys to talk about some of the trends and terms that we see. You know, there's there's obviously aic, which is the name of this podcast, you know, for agentic AI, but yet we hear people using AI

agents even still to mean like a chatbot. Somebody builds a chatbot and they call that an agent, but people are confusing agent and agentic. Uh then now we have this new trend with vibe coding and I wasn't sure if what You were talking about talking with was if you would consider that vibe coding and how what is vibe coding and how that differs from like AI engineering uh for example. So yeah maybe kind of give us a an overview and define some of these terms and and and where was fits in. Yeah. So, uh, first

of all, I just say like I think vibe coding is like absolutely amazing that now someone who has never built something before can see something come To life in front of them. So, I think that's absolutely awesome that they can do that. The I think the problem arises and why we call what we do AI engineering is the code that becomes is vibe coded. you don't understand it, there's no way to take that code further than, you know, something that's super or temporary. Um, vibe coding is fun until you kind of have to vibe debug

or do vibe maintenance or all of those things That come afterwards. That's really where it becomes uh a pain. Take a step back and just say like what's the difference between vibe coding and like using and like AI augmented coding. I think that would be helpful context. Yeah, sure. So, there's a lot of videos you can see of people doing uh vibe coding, which is basically you go to one of the no code tools. You use cursor uh wind surf whatever it is and you basically say like build me this landing Page, you hit enter,

you pull out your phone, you start scrolling for 2 minutes while it does its thing. You look, doesn't work, you hit please fix, please fix, please fix. Right? And you kind of like are trying to understand what happens a little bit saying like, oh, this button doesn't work. Make it happen. Um, but it gets in these loops and it just generates a ton of like spaghetti code. Um, eventually you might get something that works or you might Have to kind of restart. Um, so I'd say that's what I would define as vibe coding. I'd say

AI engineering or AI augmented code generation is much more like changing with how we interact with the computer, but your mind is still what's what's dictating the logic of what's happening. So uh one of our engineers told me this the other day. his best analogy was for it was like back in the day you know you had to use punch cards to uh code with right so Like that was the modality with which you interacted with the machines and then we switched to typing and IDs and all of that stuff and now it's like all

right we can use the AI to be what writes the actual code but you as the human still need to be building that understanding like your understanding is what coding is like being the details of what is happening behind the scenes of exactly what you're instructing the computer to do. Um, so I think that is a AI augmented engineering. Um, and that is what we do. Like all of our engineers, they use all these tools super extensively. But every single line of code that is written by the AI is is directed by the human and

then reviewed by not only themselves but someone else. So as the engineer, you are still responsible for making sure that the code you write is high quality, maintainable, um, understandable, all of those all of those things. Gotcha. So, so you guys are and there's a lot of articles and and coming out where the VIP coding is is is not working out that great and uh and and I'm sure it'll mature and the tools will improve and and maybe the the market for that is like the easier like simple use cases, right? Where you just need

a more basic landing page and not maybe a fully functional mobile app with payments and stuff like that. And you're you're really going after like just like the Shopify business as a business. You know, I'm a skater in San Diego. I now want to start selling skateboards. I need a storefront. I need product. I need shipping. I need billing. I need taxes. Like, is a legit business. If it takes off and it's a multi-million dollar a year business, it's a real business of of I'm selling skateboards around the world. And Shopify has become my all-in-one

to help me with that business. And that's what you're trying To do for anybody that's trying to either build or add a web or mobile software component that is going to be a valuable component to their business, right? And generate um revenue, take revenue through there. Um and so so you guys are taking a different approach um which is um you're calling that AI engineering. And so I'm talking to the AI. I'm I'm still responsible to be the business person to say what I want built, why, how is the user going to use It, and

then the AI will build it for me. So, it's going to be more time upfront from me and more direction from me. Um um it may not make for a great YouTube video where I just throw out one sentence and it shoots out a a page or an app. Uh but in the end, you know, one of the sayings that I use is, you know, go slow to go fast, right? So, you know, I'm gonna go slow so I could build the app I need so then I could go fast scaling it out to hundreds

of thousands Of users potentially. Brad in his previous comments was talking about like how our engineers internally leverage AI. Okay. Um and not necessarily about how our our users interact with WS. Brad, how would you describe that process of like uh a user interacting with laws and like and you know where that falls between you know a no code tool engineering like traditional engineering by coding what would you describe that yeah I mean it's very Similar kind of what you said at the beginning like it is emulating the the experience of talking to a technical

co-founder right like as someone who's nontechnical the details of how it's implemented which database they use, you know, what the data model looks like. You know, what technologies are used under the hood, what languages, like frankly, you don't care, right? You just want it to work and you want it to be something you feel confident putting in Front of a customer and you know that if something breaks, someone is there who knows what what the system is to fix it, right? And so like that that I think is the experience we're trying to give our

our founders on our platform is using it as if they have an engineering team that they are directing what to do. So that makes sense. And then I guess continuing this discussion around you know no code tools and I I think I've heard you say that you know no code tools are can be a Race to the bottom. That's a kind of a bold statement I guess. you know, why do you think that traditional no code tools aren't um won't scale for real businesses and and what are the the true moes um the moes and

uh defensibility for AI kind of code gen tools? My high level thinking on this is that like if you're letting the LLM do basically the entire coding of a project, right? from scratch. It chooses what to do. It, you know, you're just Messaging with it back and forth. You put a little bit of sort of scaffolding to do web hosting or mobile app hosting, whatever, around it. Um, the differentiation you see between other companies who are doing basically the same thing just kind of goes down and down. As we've seen, there's like tons and tons

and tons of companies similar to the Lovable and Bolt that are being spun up kind of every day. Um, and the way I see it is like people right now go And test all of them, right? They spin off, they go to five different sites, they type in the same prompt, they hit go, and then they see which ones they like the most, and they take that one, and then they kind of repeat the process over and over again for each step that they do. So, it's a super interesting phenomenon. It's the same way with

kind of like the model providers right now. Like we switch to the best model provider, you know, every day, whichever One is the best at that given moment. It's kind of the same with these tools. there's really no um moat in sticking to them as you can, you know, you can take your code and move it to the next one or you can spin up a new project that's a copy of your old one and and maybe slightly better cuz the other team has figured something out. Um so it's a really interesting like how do

they create a moat? How do they build a real business that's sustainable as you know The LMS get better and it just becomes easier and easier to spin up a full copy of what they're doing. So that that's kind of my my thought on why I've said that I think it is a race to the bottom and there'll just be thousands of people doing the same things maybe slightly customized to tiny different niches but beyond that um unless they they build some serious uh tools to allow people to build real businesses I feel like it

is a race to The bottom on those tools. So if we play that out and and and take how you're doing things differently, right? So what what do you feel is the real impact that was could have if you're successful? I mean very similar to the way that Shopify today, 20 years after founding has enabled, you know, I think over two million stores at this point to be built on its platform. And that's two million businesses that the vast majority of which probably wouldn't have existed Before. you used to need to have a like a

founder on your team or someone super technical to build your e-commerce site for you, right? Like that was a skill set that was required to start one of these businesses. Shopify reduced that. We're doing kind of the same thing um for software businesses. Yeah. But I think I think the need today is like even more urgent, right? We're seeing clearly lowhanging fruit service industry jobs are being automated by AI Like that that is 100% happening right George I think you have some companies in your portfolio who are who are like playing a part in this

right you can think it's happening at at two ends it's happening at kind of the the lower cost uh labor end with like customer service type jobs and then it's happening at the higher end right because that's where c the willingness the pay is higher in legal and accounting and we're seeing just dozens and dozens of companies kind Of um focus in on these spaces and so what is that like let's just like play that trend out more jobs are performed more kind of traditional jobs or you know jobs that uh as we would describe

them today uh in 2025 are being performed by AI which means people need something to do Right. And so what our vision is is that instead of like default just thinking of okay I should go find a job and earn a wage by being an employee for you know a large Software company. It's like well why don't I try starting a software company and take on more of kind of an an owner entrepreneurial um mindset. And so a big part of our vision at WAS is like providing that on-ramp for people. There will be fewer

and fewer kind of traditional white collar service industry jobs. Let's create an on-ramp for those people to start their own businesses. And so like that's a big part of what we're doing at WAS. We're trying to remove those barriers and make business building as accessible as possible because like because we have to. there's a huge need for it that's you know exists today and like will only continue to grow as uh foundation models improve and AI and adoption you know permeates more industries. Yeah, I mean that's a really exciting vision and you know uh as

we've talked about in the past I'm part of a a number of different entrepreneurial Communities both inside the venture ecosystem and outside the venture ecosystem and you know what I call like traditional entrepreneurial circles the either the lifestyle lifestyle entrepreneurs or just the non- venture-backed ones that have built businesses the regular good good old-fashioned way without a single penny of venture they've built you know 1 10 million billion multi-billion dollar businesses just uh amazingly without any Outside capital. Um and in every one of those cases, there's just so many people that um want that have

ideas that have hired dev shops, have had bad experiences. The onshore guys are too expensive. The offshore guys are, you know, the quality is not there. Uh failed project. they've hired teams and you know you hire people but if you're not a developer typically you can't you don't know how to hire a good developer from a bad uh project management product Management is a key you know so I think I except for technical teams all other kinds of entrepreneurs really struggle with this but yet they have there's no shortage of ideas um and I like

what you're saying like there's basically going to be a lot of people that are going to be displaced because of AI and uh they're going to and I get asked this question a lot in my keynotes which is okay well you just painted a picture of how AI and its um complimentary and Converging technologies like robotics and others are going to displace millions tens of millions of jobs in the next decade u what how are we going to take care of these people and what you're saying is like well we're going to do our part

from WS is we're going to make it easy that you know if they have a good idea for a business it it's going to be maybe not as simple as one click but it's going to be as simple as get in there create an account over the course Of some short period start talking to W and let W build that out and it could either be a passion business it could just be um it could be an income business which is just meant to replace the income I lost from my full-time job or it could

be you know very fast scaling you know very profitable business. Um um but you're going to do your part. So that's all very exciting. Now like what do you guys see as the critical path to make this vision happen And and and kind of make the go-to platform for entrepreneurs worldwide? Like how Shopify became the go-to platform for e-commerce worldwide. Yeah, I think you kind of hinted at it in your in your explanation right there when you're describing like how complicated it is to actually get a product off the ground. Um, and that how many

more challenges there are beyond just building the technology, right? You kind of you you describe some of these, Right? It's kind of well, I'm not technical, so I don't even know the right I don't know who to hire. I don't know how to define this product in the right way. I don't know which vendors to use for what. Um, the people I could hire, well, the incentives don't really make sense because I'm paying them an an hourly rate to to deliver this. So, they have no incentive to like build the right thing the fastest. Um,

so it's all about creating the right incentives to Complement the ability to build the right technology. And I think that's really our aim, right? Our north star is for the businesses built on our platform to be as successful as they could possibly be. And I think, you know, our aim is that if we bit make was the place where your business has the highest likelihood of succeeding, um then we can succeed on this vision of kind of becoming this this next version of of an AI Shopify, uh if you might. Yeah. But There's but it's

a big it's it's a hard hard problem right uh it's a hard hard problem with a lot a lot of engineering required um and so that's why we see a lot more defensibility in it than kind of taking the other approach which Brad you know described earlier right which is why there are so many of these kind of prompt to landing page type companies that exist is that by taking that approach you're basically betting on the LLMs Right? And you're asking the LLM to Be the workhorse of your product. Um, and we're saying yes, absolutely.

LLMs are amazing. They'll be the workhorse, but you still have to build the carriage and build the road and build all the infrastructure around it so that that workhorse can get you to the best destination. Right. Well, that's why we invested in the preede. Uh, and uh, and that was before you got accepted into Y Combinator. Uh, and and so then, you know, you were in the Current, well, the recent Y Combinator winter cohort. You graduated in March with Demo Day. You had a very successful demo day and fund raise. So, let's talk about that.

you know, we have a lot of AI founders that are listening and and and there's a lot that I think um could be helpful to the next generation of founders. You know, YC is, you know, uh is one of the premier brands. It obviously is without, you know, bar none. It's the best accelerator program. It's the most coveted. Um it's the one that um you know, your likelihood of success goes up dramatically if you get into it and and all the stuff that we know. So, so why don't you maybe uh you know open up

the veil a little bit. Uh help us understand what that experience was like. I know it was great. You met a lot of great people. The YC people were great. The cohort's great. All the usual stuff. But I guess what, you know, give us like the interesting stuff like what Was one unforgettable lesson or moment um from that cohort? Yeah, I would just echo your point. I think like the data shows that if you're if you take part in YC your likelihood of you know a big outcome is significantly significantly higher. I think Brad has

a really interesting perspective as you know he's gone through the program twice. Um kind of like in its earlier days and now once it's much more I I suppose built out. Um Yeah they definitely improve a lot of their uh operational processes to make things work uh smoother. I told Ben this, but like when I did the last time, it was kind of like um this was in 2017, right? 2017. Yeah. There was basically like one lady and then like I think she had a like a couple people helping her that were in charge of

all the logistics of everything. So everything that was happening, you know, you get multiple emails from her scheduling all and Dealing with it. Now they have kind of software that organizes, you know, most of most of what happens. But like um they've gotten a lot better at at that kind of stuff. It is really interesting to see the difference the the different trends. I think YC as a whole has moved to companies that are seemingly earlier in their life cycle. Um so by the uh it's almost a different set of of funds that are doing

the fund the the investing at the end of of YC from when I did it before. Before it was kind of like the big multi-stage funds or the the biggest investors um or the most prolific investors in most of the YC companies. Uh, and now it seems like there's more like angels, smaller funds, YC focused funds. Um, and then obviously, you know, a few of the bigger ones still participate, but not at the same rate they used to. And I think that's just a just a change in how the uh companies Are being built. You

know, you can do a lot more with a lot less. You don't need as much capital right away. Founders are looking to give away less percentages of their companies. Um uh and then you know when they are ready that's when they kind of go you know 6 12 18 months after YC to kind of the bigger funds and ask for the those bigger rounds when they have more to show for it. That that's that's a really interesting observation. Um anything else uh interesting happened During the course of the court? We'll talk about the the demo

day and the investor meetings in a second, but anything else throughout the cohort that really stuck out to you guys or was a big surprise or like your biggest lesson learned from YC? I mean, there were there was, you know, so many incredible people come and speak and you have the chance to kind of ask questions and interact with them. So, I mean, go through a laundry list of of lessons People people shared. Um, you know, there's one thing our partner was Tom Bombfield. Um, I mean, and he's awesome. He, uh, you know, took a

chance on us and then was incredibly, you know, helpful throughout the throughout the program. There's one thing he always said, which is like you always have to be increasing your surface area for luck, for luck. um es and especially as a startup and I think inherently like this is a lesson you know uh and Everyone knows like we should always be increasing your service area uh for luck but it's just like even more and more important in the early stages of company building so I often uh you know find myself kind of reminding myself uh

to take that mindset like so like what does that mean to you or or how did he help us understand what that means and what we could do to maximize that. Yeah, sure. I mean, it means like show more to the world. Like even if 10 people think You're dumb, maybe you meet one person who becomes a customer, right? That's a really concrete example. Um, go talk go talk to 10x more customers because like you might get lucky and learn something, right? It's like you never know like you just need to put more out there

so that there's more surface area like the more surface area for WS out there uh the more chances that something really good happens. Got it. So So part of that is like the the the numbers game idea, right? Like more investor meetings, more customer discovery calls. Uh is that what he meant or did he mean more to it than that? I think how it translated for us and like the most meaningful thing was like putting our launch out there kind of more earlier than we were originally comfortable with um basically just to see what people

wanted and help us then direct our product development from that In in a more meaningful way. So like I think without Tom's advice we probably would not have done that. Yeah. Yeah. So like even as experienced founders, you know, like you have to get your MVP out sooner, but but sooner to you was not as soon as Tom would have would have liked. Yeah. And and and having done it, you're like, he was right. No, that makes a lot of sense. So then I think you guys took about um 80 investor meetings over a course

of a week or two Um in that uh time period around and after demo day. I mean that that's a pretty, you know, nuts amount. 80 investor meetings over like 10 to 14 days. What was that experience like? And what did you learn from from that? Yeah, I mean you learn a lot of different things. Like first of all, it's absolutely exhausting. like I mean I think we were we were doing you know 12 plus meetings a day for I don't know how many days in a row But like uh I saw a friend afterwards

and he's like you look like you you look like you've aged 10 years in a week like I feel like I feel like I've aged 10 years in a week. Um I mean you you learn a lot. Um you learn what resonates with people. you learn, you know, maybe how to improve your storytelling. I think you also learn that there's like a a line between kind of uh changing your narrative to fit what other people want to hear And telling the story that you really believe in firmly based off of the data, based off of

your experience, and based off your vision for the company. And like it's kind of counterintuitive and it's kind of like sales, right? Where uh if you double down like instead of bending to what people want to hear, if you double down on what you really believe in and what your experience has showed you, then like you'll find the investors that really believe in you and Want to double down on you as well. And I think that was an interesting learning, right? Like it's tempting after, you know, you go to five straight meetings and five straight

people said they're not interested. It's tempting in that sixth meeting to to tweak your narrative to be more like what they want to hear. But I think the right thing to do, at least the right thing for us was actually to like no, double down on what we believe in, on what the data is Telling us, on what our vision is, and like that will attract the right backers. And I I I totally agree. I think we were super lucky and that we had some early backers um yourself included who like who really believed in

the vision that we were selling. And then when we went to the Post YC investors, you know, a couple early on like we immediately Ben and I like they got it like they understood the vision we're going for. And it was pretty clear within the first, you know, 5 to 10 minutes of any pitch meeting whether this person we're talking to like truly gets the vision that we're going for. Um, and so, you know, having that behind us to say like, you know, all these other folks that don't get it are not our audience. That's

not who we're selling to. You know, we're we're selling to people that understand the vision and then showing them that we are the right folks to Build it. And that's that's who we have to go for and not change ourselves to to match any investors, you know, uh, preconceived notions of what we should be doing. Yeah, that that's really valuable advice. Um and and so with that you were able to uh have a very successful seed fund raise uh raised more than you uh expected even initially. Uh and you found uh your lead and so

um how did you go about ultimately choosing your lead? What what Did you see in them that you felt like they would be the best to lead you um through the next chapter? Yeah, that's a great question. Um, I think, yeah, just to preface, like you said, you know, we had a really successful time fundraising. I think ended up raising a bit more than we originally anticipated just because we were so excited about the quality of the investors and it was like, how could we not bring this person around the table And like bring their

expertise onto our team? Um, and so we ended up raising a bit more than than the original plan. Um, we haven't announced it yet, but but kind of happy to just talk through the process of how we found a lead and like why we decided to kind of go the more traditional priced round versus the kind of party round you often see at YC. Um, I think again it was kind of just a reflection of what I just described. Like when you have really high quality Investors and high quality people that want to be a

part of your team, like of course you want that. Um and so we were in we were just so impressed by our lead um by the speed at which they executed by the level of depth uh at which they were able to understand our business and our vision on a short time period and their track record. Um so has a track record of executing um both from a you know investor perspective but also from a business building perspective right The partners at the firm have taken public multiple companies and um you know that's our vision

and so it was just really exciting to to be able to bring those folks u team yeah I mean we also of course did a bunch of reference checks on on everyone that we were were getting on our cap table and our lead like hands down by far every person we talked to like glowing unbelievably glowing reviews um saying like that's the best person you could possibly work With type of reviews. So I mean it was almost a no-brainer like they were the right the right folks for us. That's awesome. That's great. Yeah, really happy

um really excited about having them uh part of the journey and helping lead. So well I I guess as we think about for the audience that's listening that might be a few steps uh behind you in their journey as an AI founder you know maybe in the ideation formation preede kind of Stages you know the AI field is moving so quickly and so um you know I want to know maybe some you know what's your biggest advice and lessons learned you like to share with founders But before that, I feel like because AI is moving

so fast, like the advice on what to do and what you're building is helpful, but I think just like figuring out what to build given how fast things are changing is is more important now, right? Or equally important. What are your Thoughts? You know, we talked a little bit about the landscape and how AI codegen and vibe coding and stuff is changing. You could have an entrepreneur like we're seeing record numbers of a ARR in 16 months, 12 months, 4 months, two months, like just numbers we've never seen before. Um, you know, there was the

the kid uh that had the AI tutor uh or sorry, the Cal AI, the calorie counting that was in multiple millions. And so, what are your thoughts on the Space? Like I I feel like Agentic got filled up pretty quickly. we're already looking at what's next. you know, I guess, you know, if if you guys had, you know, younger brothers or sisters or or if you were mentoring at, you know, speaking at MIT or or Stanford at your alma mater and and they're asking you, hey, we want to start a business in the next 6

to 12 months, what what's your advice on where you think the opportunity is first and then once they Pick a good opportunity space, you know, any general advice on how to be successful? Yeah, a a big piece of advice I give to younger entrepreneurs is like don't constrain yourself to going after a a venturebacked outcome right now. Like AI is so democratizing and reduce the cost to build that there are a lot a lot of businesses that can be built right now that don't necessarily require a lot of venture capital funding. Um and Like I

think that universe is massive. Right now is kind of a time where like yes, some of the lowhanging fruit are being consumed and have been consumed as you've kind of alluded to, but like it's a big world and there's a lot of opportunities where you could carve out a nice AI enabled kind of agentic business for yourself. Um you you kind of mentioned a few examples of these. Um that could be really really great outcomes. Um, so I think like There are if you just want to start a business, there are, you know, more than

enough opportunities to go start a successful AI enabled business. Maybe Brad wants to Brad if you have thoughts on that or like I'd be curious what you think are the best areas to build like venturebackable AI businesses. Yeah. So or even both, right? And I want to hear what you have to say, Brad. Like I wonder like if WA went away like what would you guys do? Right. you couldn't do anything was in this space. Uh let's just say uh Microsoft came and gave you $100 billion and they gave you a non-compete, right? But you

know, but they they part of the contract was you you have to start a new business in the next 90 days, right? Like let's make it real and tangible since you guys have really good insight into the space. You're not just like building in insurance or building in some side vertical. You're like in the Agentic software codegen layer. Yeah. Yeah. What do you guys think about that? Yeah. I mean, Ben and I, we have a bunch of a bunch of other ideas. You know, it's that's the hardest part of doing a startup is like you

need to focus, right? So, every day being in this world, you see some new place where you're like, "Wow, we could do that better or like we should invest in doing that better, but no, we have to focus, right?" So, there's tons of things that Come along like that. Um, I will say that we are still very much in the early days. You know, I think I saw this a couple days ago. Someone posted that like even if none of the models get better over the next 10 years, like the change in how we interact

with technology and a change in the world will still be insanely large. So like um if you look at that that just says that there are so many areas that are still ripe for someone to come in and build Big businesses in all of the you know the companies raising huge funds right now with huge crazy amounts of ARR like that is if it can go zero to you know 40 million ARR in X number of months it can also go 40 to zero in in that many number of months it's not as sticky as

as like you know you built this business over 10 years and solid reli viable customers. It's very much early days for all of these folks for this entire industry. So things are changing so Fast. And I'd say to like a new entrepreneur looking at it, it's think about what like if think about if AI does get better at certain pieces like what will it still not be able to do? And that I think Ben's analogy of like the roads, the bridges, um all the infrastructure around the horsedrawn carriage, which might become a Ferrari. Um that

stuff will still be needed for that Ferrari to drive. Um so like what does that look like? I think that that Is there. And then I'll just say like a lot of these businesses are pieces of the solution. And you know, I still think people hate having to use 10 different pieces to one solution. So some you know there'll be big companies built around doing the entire platform and the entire system end to end more verticalized AI if you want to call it that um as well. So I yeah there's a lot there's a lot

a lot of things to work on. You can add anything to that Ben or Yeah. No I mean I would echo everything Brad said. I said if you're I think the best the most you know broad piece of advice would be like start building something like you got to get your hands dirty because that's that's the way that you realize where are the needs where are the weak points which way is technology moving where is investment flowing right like you really just have to get your hands dirty you have to Start rolling around in the

mud trying to trying to build things figuring out what's working and what's not and like that's how you'll figure out what the right business to build this and that's what YC gives you. I mean the number of companies that came in with one idea and changed to another and then changed to another and are now doing great. You know that's what they do is like you just keep trying things until something works until you find it. And you can Only do that by being in there by seeing your tool being used by like understanding users

needs. That's how you can understand where to build. Yeah. So, so not just build something, but build something and put it in the hands of users and customers, get feedback and kind of go through that build, iterate, like learn cycle, right? Build, learn, iterate cycle. I don't know. I think it's just an incredible time to be building. I think it's an incredible Time to be investing in in new businesses is to have conversations like these. It's like every day we're learning um learning new angles, you know, running new thought experiments about like what the world's

going to look like in six months, nine months, 12 months. And I think the crazy thing is like we don't know. Um that's what's awesome about AI, right? And how it's different from previous generations of software Building. Like we were in a world that was very deterministic. You talked to a customer, you figured out what they needed, and you built it, and it worked. And AI is a little different, right? Like, okay, you invest in this new model, maybe you invest in kind of the environment and the structure for this model to be deployed in,

but then you have to like deploy it and let it loose and see how it see how it performs. And we don't know until you do that. And That's what like makes building in this time so exciting is because, you know, the proof's in the pudding. And we don't really know what's going to work until it starts working. I I couldn't agree with you anymore. It's a really exciting time. Uh it's hard to keep up at times, even as an investor that's on the leading edge of thought leadership, but that's what makes this fun uh

and exciting and it's a great journey that we're all on and it's just The start and you know, I'm looking forward to it. But this was a great conversation. Ben and Brad, I want to thank you. Uh I think it was really exciting. Uh we have a lot to look forward to with bringing uh more entrepreneurship in the future by letting entrepreneurs be able to build software products more easily using W. So I'm really excited about that. Thanks guys. That was that was awesome honestly. Yeah. Thanks George. Appreciate the time. It was a lot of

fun. Just want to say thank you to our listeners for tuning into this episode. If you found it valuable go ahead and share it with a friend. Hit like, hit subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes. because we have some really amazing guests coming up that I know you're going to love. And if you're an AI founder that's currently raising or planning on raising soon, we'd love to hear from you. You can pitch us via Our founder form which is in the show notes or you should be able to click below. We're actively

investing. And either way, until next time, keep reaching your untapped potential.