00:19:20 · George Bonaci
[00:19:20] S0: I feel exactly the same way. I I was on a con... Or I was on a phone call with a friend yesterday who's who's doing this. And he was like, man, how do you get more than like seven or eight concurrent projects at once that you're managing? Like, how do you keep that straight in your head? Do you have a tool or something? I was like, like, no. That's the same problem. It's like, how how do... Can you really multitask on seven things at once? Like, all the... To your point, it has given people superpowers, but really I think this is a symptom or maybe an indicator of how early we are to like this paradigm shift. I can't imagine one or two years from now, we're going to be having the same conversation. It's probably... We're going to either have like some crazy like orchestrators or the models are going to get so good, the harnesses are gonna get so good that they can kind of orchestrate themselves. Like, I don't actually know what shape the solution is going to take, but this is I think a temporary problem because... Actually it's a temporary problem and probably a symptom of the much larger thing, which is this technology is is so new that we have not captured even like a a small percentage of the potential impact that it's going to have. I saw a great tweet. I can't take credit for this, but I saw a great tweet somewhere comparing this to the the .the.com boom. I think like during the .com boom, everyone knew the internet was gonna be huge. Like, no one debated that, but they didn't know in what form it was going to be huge. I think like people thought that everyone was gonna have their own personal website and communicate through their own personal website and like turned out to not be true. Like aggregators like really took over. I think it's probably similar here. Like everyone knows AI is gonna be huge. It already is. But in what final form it takes and, like, what is the the steady state we approach and how people yet leverage it and what impact it has for companies and individuals, I think is is very TBD.
00:20:54 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:20:54] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Same. Like, as you mentioned, like, with the Internet era, like, the social network and all this this kind of, like, social apps, a lot of people are trying to understand, like, what is gonna be happening with AI in a similar way. So it's gonna be interesting to see. I wanna switch a little bit on the on the topic because we're talking about, like, AI a lot, and I wanna go, you know, like, towards hiring because I think, like, hiring has changed dramatically with AI. Like, I personally hired, like, hundreds of people, like, in the last years, but I feel like the level, especially, you know, for business cases, etcetera, like a presentation, whenever you want people to work on something, because everyone's using AI nowadays, it's very hard to actually, you know, like see, you know, the the top performing one, or actually, like, you can see, like, some people who don't make any effort, and it's, like, pure AI slop, etcetera. But I do feel like the bar is is raising whenever, but I also feel like people lack a lot of critical thinking. So what's your view when it comes to hiring? And do you also struggle to find people who use AI and also understand what they're doing and not just give you like a 20 pages Notion doc that looks great on paper, but that's actually meaningless and not helpful at all?
00:22:16 · George Bonaci
[00:22:16] S0: It's a great question. So a couple answers, but I mean, maybe maybe to answer on like the trend of AI slop. Shorter docs are better. Like, one... I think very rarely do you need anything more than, a one pager. If you can't fit it on a one pager, then you probably don't have good clarity of thought. And I think the tendency we're kind of seeing is, like, what is AI? AI is not going to increase the information density of, like, what you're prompting it to do. So if I have some thoughts in my head and I prompt the AI to write a doc on it, it could write it in one page or it could write it in 40 pages, but that's not going to change like the actual amount of useful information in it. It's just changing the information density. And so like in general, I actually think it's a pretty good rule of thumb where you you can use AI as a sparring... When it comes to writing, you can use AI as a sparring partner. You can use it to collect information. You can use it to do research. You could use it to even like set up experiments, but you probably shouldn't use it to like write for you if the audience is a human being. It can maybe help you edit, but like I wouldn't do that. Number one, I think it breaks the social contract between human beings as well. Like, I haven't seen many people talk about this, but I do think there is a bit of a social contract where if like a human being is spending time on something, then another human being feels obligated to at least give it some attention. And if you're not spending time on it, then like, why would you feel obligated to give it any attention? That is true like with total strangers receiving an email. Like if it's just like a... Like this is pre AI as well. It's the same problem. It's like, this is a copy of... Blatantly copy and pasted email. Like, you screwed up the HubSpot token and it says like, hi, first name. It's like, I'm not going to read that. It's the exact same thing. It's just really, really amplified with like AI slops. So anyway, that's that's my answer to that. To answer like your first part though on hiring, I I do think that's the most important part. You need to be hiring people that frankly... I think the laziest heuristic are are they builders? Because if you're able to build something, can think from first principles, you can understand the opportunities, you can get things done.
00:23:58 · George Bonaci, Guillaume Moubeche
Like, all of those are really, really important. The... By far the best interviews that that I have are ones where we're talking about something or some situational question and and the person goes like, let let let me just show you. Can I show you? Can I just like screen share? It's like, that's that's funny right there. [00:24:12] S1: And then [00:24:12] S0: you can go into such level of details. Like, yes, please show me. Like, let's get specific. Those type of people generally do very, very well in general. But I think especially with AI, because they're going to tinker, they're going to understand the potential and the limitations of the technology. Like they themselves are critical thinkers, so they're going to have very high information density in how they communicate. So they're probably less likely to just spin up a 40 page Notion doc with a one sentence prompt, but at least that's that's how I would think about it.
00:24:38 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:24:38] S1: Yeah. I agree 100%. I think like if you ask people interview questions and it gets too much about, you know, like, presenting something that they could do with AI, it's a bit annoying. However, if you ask them, like, what's one of the toughest problem you've solved recently? And you try to dig in, you see usually a lot more, and if they have built a project, like, even better. To your point, I was... I wanted to go back a little bit, like, on on on AI and how it's evolving. Because for me, you know, when you look at ChatGPT at first, you had, you know, all these tutorials about, like, prompt engineering, and everyone was setting course about this and trying to make money on it, but it felt even like it was gonna be like a new job, and people were hiring prompt engineer at, I don't know, like 500 k per year or something like this. And eventually, it totally disappeared because it was like a bug and not a feature. I feel like for the the models, like, it's the same whenever you you look at the the quality of intelligence that you select. What do you think is gonna change a lot in AI, like, and also with agents in the coming years that we're not seeing right now?
00:25:46 · George Bonaci
[00:25:46] S0: It's a good question. I think we all kind of see the end state, but how we get there is is very is very uncertain. Yeah. Kinda going back to like my Internet example from earlier. I can share with you what I what I think at least. I think that most people's roles that are very dependent on high trust relationships or creativity, like deep deep like subject matter expertise that does not have a clear optimization function. Those are going to stay like with people. I think everything else, the actual tactical work of like clicking buttons in a platform or whatever it might be, gets commoditized with AI. So if that's the case, it's like most people's jobs, and I obviously think about this like a lot more for for marketing than other rules, but it's probably applicable. So then most people's jobs become like, how do you find an edge? How do you find an advantage? How do you be creative? How do I build a personal relationship with someone? I think that's probably actually the work that most people want to be doing. I don't think there's anyone on my team where I'm just like, hey, go do the same task in a platform clicking the same series of buttons every day for like the next three years. They'd be like, yeah, sounds great. Like, no one wants to be doing like the tasks. They want to be like doing like intellectually interesting work. And so I think that's what AI frees up a lot. Going back to the idea that it really just like amplifies the the amount of information that you give it. I think it also like amplifies whatever creativity you may have or amplifies whatever reach you might wanna get with tactics that you had an idea about. So it's a giant force force multiplier. It's a it's a giant lever. So I think everyone's roles change, but exactly how they change, I can't quite say. I all... I was one of the folks that thought it's like, okay, we'll build like this agent operator function and they're gonna build a bunch of automations and then people can move on and do something completely different. And it turns out that like, yes, you can do that. But that doesn't mean that like, oh, the person that's running paid search all of a sudden can go and do like paid social. It means like, oh, now I can do this long tail of crazy stuff that I was never going to prioritize within paid search and they can just go deeper and deeper and deeper.