Transcription
You're one of the top experts in the space at Google Ventures, top name in venture capital, Robin Hood, Whimo, Uber. In prior years, you kind of got away with investing in companies that were just moving quickly. Engineers or hackers who brought with them a capability that maybe other people didn't have. I think as these tools kind of democratize that capability, what becomes increasingly important is this notion of velocity, which also invokes a sense of direction. I'm curious where you would say we are in this AI super cycle. Everyone believes that there's a bubble and this and that in nature. What's your viewpoint?
I think what we're seeing now is something that extends beyond just incremental. And I think AI is kind of the the catalyst for that where you start to see 100,000x improvements. And so I would argue that we're on the cusp of a consumer renaissance.
Nice. KJ, thank you for coming on the pod today. I want to jump right in. Excited to talk about everything consumer and AI. You're one of the top experts in the space experience at Forerunner and also at at Google Ventures. And now you're a partner there and each week you actually write a column about consumer. So you are the perfect person to ask what is the current state of consumer and what is everyone missing?
Well, first, um, you're entirely too kind and, uh, I appreciate, uh, you inviting me onto the podcast. Um, and it's funny that you highlight the column. It's actually a really fun collaboration that we have with, um, one of our adviserss. His name is David Benjamin, who might be the only person I know who probably spends more time in the darkest corners of the internet than I do. And so, ends up being some really fun conversations. And so, yeah, those columns are are weekly musings, so to speak.
But yeah, to to answer your question, consumer AI. Um, I think the funny thing about consumer, especially when you ask a lot of other investors, is that it's been a bit of a bad word recently. Um, a lot of people have been spooked. A lot of people have missed a lot of bets. Um, even some of the bets that they've taken haven't necessarily panned out. And I would argue that the reason for that has a lot to do with just human nature. I think human beings are largely fixed. Like I don't I don't think we've evolved much in the last two years. I don't think we've evolved much in the last 50. I think what ends up happening is that the tools that we have available to us do change. And I think for a very long time the tools that we had were kind of good enough. Like if I needed to go from point A to point B, Uber was more than good. Um if I needed groceries delivered, Door Dash, Instacart was was was m was much more than satisfactory.
I think what we're seeing now is something that extends beyond just incremental and I think AI is kind of the the catalyst for that where you start to see a 100,000x improvements over existing consumer experiences and so I would argue that we're on the cusp of a consumer renaissance and I'm particularly excited about the new crop of companies that are being forged today that will be extremely meaningful in the years to come.
Wow. I want to just double click on the consumer renaissance. What does that fully look like? Is there like an example?
Yeah, consumer renaissance is a strong that's a strong word and today there's like a lot of mantras.
Totally. From all the columns that you've been doing that I want to jump into, but this mantra I I haven't heard about it. So tell me more about that.
Yeah, I think in a lot of ways the landscape is being reimagined and there's an abundance. I'm a former consultant. So I think in framework there there's an abundance of frameworks that you can kind of apply to the category. I think one fun one to dig into is democratization right so if you think about the different eras of technology I think technologies existed as a tool that democratized access for example to a lot of different things that were either prohibitively expensive or not within the realm of possibility for most people. Case in point, um, therapy, right? When you think about the first era of tech solving therapeutic needs, it largely looked like a phone book just put online, right? Where you had marketplaces that sought to broker a connection between a patient and a therapist. Over time, you started to see technologies kind of solve to some extent that therapeutic conditioning where they were able to either support a therapist in running their business or you know being some type of emotional groundedness um in the form of you know headsp space or something to that effect to support people through their medical journeys.
I think if I think about what AI stands to represent today, you can start to play around with AI therapists, right? where um you can have a therapeutic offering wrapped in an AI like experience. And what that solves for is being able to potentially democratize that access to a broader cohort of people who can't necessarily afford, you know, the $400 a visit that therapy usually involves or may not have schedules that align. So, you can start to think of, all right, I'm going through a crisis of some sort. I need support. It's 3:00 a.m. How do I kind of solve for that? and technology can show up in very different ways than has been the case previously.
Wow. Actually, you're skipping ahead on some of my notes here. I want to talk about AI and health. You actually in one of your other columns you wrote about AI should make us more human, not less human. So, I want to understand how we can leverage AI to have a deeper human experience. And then even maybe another quote that I read in one of your comments was that uh folks this might be a countercultural moment where we shift from optimize me which is like AI is very optimized focus to liberate me. Yeah. And this was like referring to some folks who might be starting meds today which is becoming like like very ubiquitous but they will want to get off of meds or whatever type of health things in the future. And like there's no real off-ramp right now. And so there is like a future that looks like I want AI to liberate me versus like optimize me.
Totally. I think AI to date has found a lot of success in productivity which is meaningful and especially in work context. Um you have a lot of talk about uh 10x 100x engineers which obviously is impressive and powerful and is changing almost the physics of various businesses. As a consumer investor and as a you know, an aspiring uh anthropologist, I'm interested in kind of the the cultural underpinnings of technology and what it can solve for. And I like to think of behaviors. I like to think of patterns. I like to think of being able to solve for the human experience. I think one of the realms or dimensions that I get particularly excited about is indeed healthcare because I think health care to date has been some version of emergency triage. Something goes horrendously wrong and you point to the healthare system to try to course correct. Sometimes it's too late. Sometimes it requires a ton of resources and I think it strips patients and people to some extent of their agency. I like the idea of using technology for folks to reclaim a bit of that agency and self-empower where you move from something that feels entirely reactive to something that feels way more proactive and there's like a guiding hand along the way to support you in your healthcare journey. Um, and so when I think about uh solutions like um Council Health, which falls within the GV portfolio, um, when I think about Aura, um, which was a company that I was involved in back when I I was living a previous life of Foreigner Ventures, I love the idea of being able to put technology into the hands of individuals and giving them the tools to be better equipped to solve for the their healthcare journey.
Wow. I want to since you brought up Aura, I do want to go into that place too. AI and hardware if you will right now.
Yeah. So you worked with Aura when you were at 4Runner. I'm curious and obviously like Aura many people I have my whoop on right now so apologies. Uh but I know a lot of people who wear Aura uh they recently just had some big announcements on revenue marks and just like dominating a market and I think they just came out with like a new version of the ring. I'm curious if you can share any details around just like that experience working with their team, that product and then consumer hardware in general.
Yeah, totally. So, um consumer hardware I think inspires the same level of caution that just consumer in general um where if you talk to investors everyone proclaims that hardware is hard and I think that's largely true, right? Like I think the facts do remain that often times margins aren't as attractive as software. Iterative cycles look very different. You have to manage manufacturing complexities. Um there's a long list of things that make hardware categorically difficult. That said, when it works, it can explode. And I think hardware is probably one of the places that's most likely to inspire joy and delight, especially if done well. And doing well oftentimes look like becoming an invisible natural extension of the human experience.
I think one of the things, and I can speak to Aura specifically, I think one of the things that team was largely successful at was almost reconciling two inherent tensions. On one hand, they made a device that felt so seamless, so non-obstructive, so natural. Um, it was it's a it's a ring on your finger. It looks like every other piece of jewelry. um it's tasteful and it was able to grant you superpowers in understanding your health, but at the same time they were able to balance that against it being kind of low-key like a quiet luxury, right? Like there was a lot of signaling associated with the ring in its early days. They did a really good job of collaborating with celebrities. And so when you walked when you saw the the Oscars or the Grammys and you noticed that Will Smith was wearing an aura ring, you kind of questioned to yourself it's like what's going on over there? and they were they were able to manage that tension uh very very well and as extension of that I think they were able to in a way that I haven't seen across a lot of other consumer brands born from the bay or born from the coast they managed to really quickly cross the chasm which is to say that they created a product that was appealing not just for tech bros and nerds hanging out in San Francisco you had folks like my mom who purchased a ring Um, anecdotally, it was wild to come home from New York and at the time I was living in the Bay. And so when I visited home, I was shocked to hear that my mom was asking about an aura ring. She had no idea that I was involved in any capacity. It was just something that fell onto her radar and she was thinking about a purchase decision. And I thought that was exciting because it it felt almost like the company that you saw act as a toddler kind of grow up into its mature years and come to into your house. Yeah. Right. Um it was almost the equivalent of having like a illustration on the fridge where it was like a stamp of approval that said that oh this could be a meaningfully large company because it was able to tackle a demographic that wasn't immediately obvious. Um, as it turns out, everyone sleeps and so the the TAM is immediately obvious, but um it was really interesting to see it um float out of some of the more normal places into places that I didn't expect.
Wow. Yeah, I I agree with the virtue signaling. Like I really start to understand other people if they're wearing a whoop. Yeah. Like I've started so many conversations or anytime I'm like talking to a founder or someone else from like a networking standpoint, I'll always ask them like, "How do you like your whoop? How do you like ordering?" Or to be honest is vice versa as well. So I can be in a conversation with somebody just stop and say like, "How do you like the whoop? What's the difference between a whoop and a all these different things." So I think some of the like hardware per se is now becoming similar to like wearing a certain type of watch, a certain type of blouse, certain type of fashion item. It's it's actually becoming like a story that you tell.
Yeah. Which is which I think is genius for Aura to like click in there because this is clearly not necessarily um a fashion statement.
It's a performance statement.
I mean, yeah, it's it's an opinion of sorts for sure. Aura ring was probably one of the first and still maybe one of the like handful of only things that could actually be like a interesting fashion statement but still be like a clear like health and even just like if you know you know type statement.
100%. And the way that it could sponsor a new type of conversation right prior to Aura I don't think it was that common for folks to ask about your health. Um, but they were able to kind of coin a conversation that started with what's your readiness score and have that conversation be at the forefront of most people's minds catalyzed by just a visual cue that says like on your finger was something special.
Yeah, I I totally agree. Now I want to talk about another weekly column that you did. Uh which was around transformation of education. Yeah. So in here I think there was a screenshot of a graph where it was like college tuition and inflation. College tuition had went up by almost 1,200% over like since 1980s and then inflation only went up 300%. So like college tuition is growing at 4x what we're probably getting paid in wages. So I'm curious like with college tuition being so high and you went to arguably the best college in the world. Yeah. At Harvard, what is AI going to do to transform education? Um, and then why is that important?
Yeah. So, I'll I'll paint the problem zone a little bit. Um, so yeah, what you highlighted is absolutely right in so much that college has become more and more expensive over the years. What's interesting is that the product hasn't gotten materially better. I can't say with absolute certainty that a college experience forged today is meaningfully different than that of 20 years ago. Certainly not to justify the cost. And I think there's a reality that's broken within the post-secary system that says for most people college is the unlock for a better opportunity. Right? There are tons of stats that seem to suggest that college unlocks different types of employment outcomes which then adjusts the trajectory of your life in terms of what you're able to make, how you're able to support your family, so on and so forth. But I think that that that linkage is actually quite broken, especially when you look at the stats that also suggest that one out of every two recent college graduates are undermployed, which is to say that they're either working part-time or they're working at the bottom of their degree, something that they didn't actually need a college degree to to land. Um, and I think it's largely because post-secondary degrees or colleges are optimized for credentials and certificates, uh, early employment opportunities are optimized for signaling, but neither are optimized for outcomes. And so it feels like an inherently broken situation, um, that doesn't seem like there's a quick or easy fix. And I recognize that I'm speaking from a place of slight privilege in so much that I I did go to Harvard and I credit that particular decision um to a lot of the opportunities I've been able to enjoy since then. But at the same time, I I can acknowledge that one, I can't argue that my education is meaningfully different than the next person if I were really to boil it down to brass tax. And then two, it feels weird that those unlocks came from a decision that was mostly forged when I was 14 and also recognizing that I was the, you know, beneficiary of an extraordinary amount of luck um in getting to where I'm at. So that feels also pretty broken.
And so I think the role that AI can play in all of this might come in two forms. I think the lighter touch opportunity is to to solve for the efficacy of education. And I think what I find interesting about AI is that I think it's the closest that we've gotten to true personalization where you can truly meet someone where they are um and unlock a whole new host of opportunities for them simply because you understand all of the context around a particular student. Whether it's giving them the attention that they need, understanding exactly what gaps in their knowledge base exist, being able to solve for those in particularly robust ways and meet their learning preferences and styles in very unique and personalized ways. I think AI stands to create a ton of opportunity there.
I think where things get kind of interesting is when I think about the linkage between I guess employment infrastructure and education. The two areas that I think have been really successful in the past have been engineering and consulting. Yeah. And and the reason why is because with consulting, anyone who's had any type of exposure to uh you know any form of consulting, whether through a friend or through your own experiences, I think people are pretty familiar with like the notion of a case study. And case studies are interesting because they almost directly simulate the professional experience that you're likely to embark on. And so you walk away with like some understanding of what the job is, what it means to be successful in the job. full context. Full context um that doesn't exist anywhere else, right? Like you can walk into any other role and not really know what it means to satisfy that role. Like unless you've had um employment in that role prior. So like if you decide that you want to become uh a social media analyst at a startup, you kind of don't know what that means until you are in the seat. And similarly for engineering, when people graduate, they walk away with uh an assortment of their own case studies. You can simply point to your git and that becomes an example of what it's like to to work in that industry, do those types of projects, work in that style. And so what I what I think is interesting and I would love to find a company that that does this pretty meaningfully is for AI to kind of help simulate professional experiences in other domains and disciplines and then use that as a way of students being able to lock down a portfolio of work that's relevant to whatever it is that they're that they want to pursue from an employment perspective.
Wow. That would be really interesting. I saw I'm not sure how much you've dug into Alpha School or heard about Alpha School.
I I I've done some some research. I've looked at some podcasts and websites and apparently like they're actually like scaling all across the US. But it seemed interesting of like if if folks don't know alpha school is two hours a day is like AI AI le and very customized to your child and then the rest of the school day is like that child working on public speaking uh running a business and doing all these different things that kind of like help scale the child super early in their career. like I I'm curious of how that turns out, but uh I'm I'm not sure if you had any any any thoughts or perspective, not necessarily fully owned Alpha School, but these new innovative ways to use AI, but also like real world experiences to to get kids to get to the next level.
Yeah. I mean, I think they're productive steps being taken in the right directions, and I'm excited to see what feels like a willingness to experiment. um in what could be new educational paradigms. I think what continues to also be interesting is trying to figure out how to forge a stronger link between education and this is specifically about post-secary but between education and employment outcomes where potential employers are also woven into the conversation, right? where they are able to recognize and qualify students or graduates based on the work that they produce and not necessarily just the label that they come with as a result of a college stamp on their resume. Um, so it goes back to the point that I was making before where I think a lot of employers overrotate on signal just because there's not really anything else to qualify against. And so if we can change that, I think that might unlock um a new way of thinking about employment opportunities for folks.
Wow. That would be really interesting. Shifting gears to another weekly column that you wrote. Uh AI too much. Yeah. AI and play. You wrote this article about the future of play. Yeah. I want to read the big oneliner from this one. This was give Build-A-Bear a brain, not just a heart. I'm curious. that was in the word play. The oneliners that you guys have in a lot of these articles are like very solid. I'm curious what you think uh the future play looks like specifically with AI. Maybe even in that article there was like a ton of companies. Yeah. That you had referenced and most of them had nothing to do with screens. So I'm curious like how does play change with AI without children or individuals using screens?
Totally. So I think that article touched two points um recognizing that there were two audiences to serve in the context of play. The first had a lot to do with children. Um and that was a reaction from some recent research that I came across that just highlighted how detrimental screens were to kids. um the the facts were staggering and at the same time it was interesting to note that millennial parents are spending upwards of $50 billion a year just trying to become better parents whether it's um enrichment programs or after school things just trying to give kids as many tools as possible to improve their lives and their adolescence. And so what was interesting to note was um there really hasn't been an AI moment for toys. Although it definitely seems that people are kind of chasing after the opportunity. Like if you attended CES earlier this year, it seemed like there are a lot of AI toys. Um which were effectively being able to install the capabilities of a chat GBT like experience into into plushies, which is kind of what I was referencing, a companion if you will.
Yeah. Um, and the thing here is the important thing to note is that this shouldn't be a substitute for actual human companionship. And I think there's a lot to learn amongst kids and being able to interact with others. But if it plays like a support role for parents and handled in a responsible fashion, I think there's something really interesting there. Especially if you lean into educational notes, especially if you lean into how uh kids can imagine and stoke that creativity, world build with their with their friend, with their partner, I think things get really interesting. And so there was one company in particular that I think I flagged in that article called Bondu, which is a smart plushy. and it features a companion app for parents who are able to effectively assert specific controls into the experience that a child would have with that plushy. And so if you belong to a multicultural household, you can you can simply uh instruct the plushy to only speak in Spanish on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Um, if you belong or subscribe to a particular religion, you can set up guard rails that say like, hey, this is the type of conversation that we'd like to have about religious topics. Make sure that that's invoked. Um, you can get really creative and I think obviously with kids, these guard rails are particularly important. Um, but it becomes a really fun way to invite a new educational paradigm into play and do so leveraging the the greatest technologies that I think we've seen in the last few years.
Wow. It it just reminds me of like permissions on like Netflix or something for your kids.
Yeah. Or even when I was growing up like make I was like, man, I can't watch this because my mom set these permissions. That's That's really interesting that that could go into toys. And I've seen Bondu. I think they're out of Founders Inc. if I was correct.
That might be right. Yeah. So, I saw some of their um there's been videos about them and apparently it's fairly controversial to put an AI companion into toys, but um people have been and it's I guess it's the same as doing AI school. Uh so, I'm curious where all this lands, but I think we get to transition to another AI idea, which is storytelling.
Yeah. arguably some of the like biggest opportunities in AI that have like at least been successful so far. Sora, Gibbli, Higsfield, Craya, uh, Nano, Banana, like all are basically storytelling. Runway ML, all these places are all storytelling. What's going on in storytelling? I know you have Cosmos, which I I've met Andy in passing. Um, and that's kind of like a really interesting way to think about Pinterest for the future. And then you also had Watch. I wanted to learn more about Watch.
Yeah. So, I'm curious how AI I mean AI has already changed storytelling, but what's your perspective of like why storytelling is so important with AI, how it changes? Any any companies you wanted to highlight?
Yeah, totally. And I guess to provide some context on those two portfolio companies. So, Cosmos has basically created a home for inspiration. They made it really easy for you to digitally save down the internet and create your own personal store of inspiration. Um, and so I think a lot of people do compare it to Pinterest, but I think the road ahead feels a little bit more interesting and dynamic, particularly as they start to they continue to leverage um AI in pretty interesting ways. And then with Watch Club, that was kind of born from a few different inspirations, not least of which was this micro drama craze that's happening in China, which by the way now exceeds the entirety of the Chinese box office. Mini movies.
Yeah. And so it's basically bite-size content um delivered through a mobile interface. And the idea is that you're watching 30 seconds to a minute at a time, but it's a content paradigm that people absolutely adore. Um, again, it's like it's exceeding literally the box office of China at the moment. And I think with a lot of the companies that you mentioned from Higsfield to Sora and more, I think a lot of the attention has been placed on content creation.
Yeah. The tools I guess.
100%. I think what continues to also be interesting is content consumption. And so with Watch Club, the the thesis there is to ask the question, what would it look like for Netflix and Reddit to be housed under one roof where you could as a audience member watch content and then in that same experience be able to have thoughtful, rich dialogues and conversations with the people who also care about that content. Because the reality is like most people think of content as a solo singleplayer experience. But if you sit down and think about it, most of what gets you pumped and excited about, you know, the latest Netflix feature or whatever, has a lot to do with the conversations you're going to have with friends, just like kicking it and shooting around. Um, what would it look like if you dimensionalized that experience and housed both of the the viewing, the consumption, the engagement into a singular surface?
Wow. Is is Watch Club doing is there like a specific way that they're doing it where like you can watch something with your friends comment and I'm curious. Yeah, feel free to run us through because I'm not sure if that was fully clear for the audience.
So, of course. Of course. And so, basically, you are in a position to play with a bunch of different social features as you're consuming the content itself. And so we're experimenting with polls, video debriefs, all these different types of functional elements that allow you to add on a social layer to the viewing experience. And so you can be communicating with friends, you can be communicating almost parasoially with a larger audience of people. Um, but it's all centered around the content that you're watching, which is designed in of itself to be really emotionally significant. So, I think one of the criticisms of the existing slate of micro dramas is that it's kind of trashy TV. In a lot of cases, it's a lot of, you know, my boss is a werewolf or something to that effect. And so, the the question we're trying to answer with watch club is like, what happens when you put actually emotionally sophisticated, highly dimensionalized content in front of people and give them the tools to inter interface with each other socially? What magic can happen?
Wow, that's I I like that. I did want to talk about Google Ventures in general. Like obviously you guys top name in venture capital, Robin Hood, Whimo, Uber. Even on the AI side, you have Harvey that's in the legal space, Open Evidence in the healthcare space. I even just saw flapping airplanes that you the new AI lab. So I'm curious how you guys think about looking what are characteristics if you will for typical founders and then what do you guys do post investment?
Yeah, good question. So I would say and we talk about this a lot internally. I think where we mostly landed is on this distinction that exists between speed and velocity. I think in prior years he kind of got away with investing in companies that were just moving quickly. I think what becomes particularly important in this era is this notion of velocity which also invokes a sense of direction. And so we try to find founders that have really strong points of view on where the puck is going and can build and act against that perspective. And so, um, when I think about all of the companies that you just listed and all the founders, you can listen to any of their podcast features, what have you, and their their vision is so clean and clear as to what the future looks like and how they plan on almost creating that future for people that it's hard not to back them. Um, and it becomes incredibly important. I think the prior eras of founders or where we found a lot of alpha was in engineers or hackers who brought with them a capability that maybe other people didn't have. They could code, they could build things from scratch. I think as these tools kind of democratize that capability, what becomes increasingly important is that sense of direction. Um, and so the two phenotypes that we tend to lock into are these folks that are either um AI architects who can leverage the best um stacks available or disciplinarians, not in a punitive sense, but like folks who have like high disciplinary IQ around the workflows um that they're trying to build for and can see very acutely where where things are trending.
Yeah. And then how do you guys support some of your founders post investment? I'm curious. You know, every VC has their spill.
Yeah. Yeah. Um I mean we will never claim uh to make or break a a business, right? like largely the success that comes with our portfolio companies is the responsibility and the credit of our founders. What we try to do is grease as many skids as possible um along that journey and then sometimes that comes in the form of the strategic support sometimes that's truth seeking sometimes that's uh talent strategy we have a bench of operational partners at GV who I kind of consider to be intellectual mercenaries that are just deployed into our startups to provide very specific tactical support but I end of the day, the the wins, the losses, everything in between um falls on our founders. Um and we try to be as thorough um of partners as possible along the way.
That's awesome. I also wanted to talk about the super cycle that we're in in general with AI. Like literally, I I was putting together, you know, the the Dunning Krueger effect where you like go really high. Yeah. And they call it the peak of Mount Stupid. And then you go into the J curve which is like the value of despair and then you eventually start to get smarter. I'm curious if like where you would say we are in this AI super cycle how you would describe that if it's visually or just like um just a voice over but Yeah. Um I got to love a good framework. Uh I guess again this is a former consultant in me but I love being able to apply frameworks to what whatever is happening at any given point in time. The one that I I find myself coming back to is this reference on the industrialization of technology by this economist Carla Perez which describes these tech cycles in almost 50-year increments and describes them in four phases that start with you know early adoption patterns um and pretty much culminates in these new industries that are forged.
I would say that what's interesting about the the environment we find ourselves in today is that it's a reminder that technology moves very quickly but adoption doesn't like I think our capabilities are moving in an unprecedented fashion but adoption is still not the lagard but it takes some it takes some time for these technologies to cement particularly across the broader zeicist um only one in three Americans have used chat GPT Right. Um, Amazon IPOed what, 25 years ago, and we have had e-commerce for decades, but only 20% of purchases still happen online. Um, we herald Elon Musk as an economic titan largely for what he's been able to do with companies like Tesla, but only one in 10 cars purchased today are EVs. And so it's a reminder that even though these these capabilities are moving so quickly, adoption still takes a while to hold. Um, and so I'm excited. I think we're in a very early phases. I think I'm excited to see what the future will continue to look like.
And that rolls perfectly into the next question is like every big consumer shift starts with a behavior change. Mh. You're talking about how we begrudgingly as humans change our behavior. Uh I'm curious if we're underestimating any changes that have happened and how big they might be already cuz clearly like the most simplest change is like now we have a PhD in our pocket. Yeah. Which Google we just had blue links in our pocket. So, I'm I'm curious if if some of the like small changes that we've made so far in behavior, are we underestimating how big they might indicate the future could be?
Yeah. I think as human beings, we naturally underestimate and overestimate. I don't think we're ever on the money. I think one of the things that feels underestimated in the context of all the things that we described is join delight. Honestly, like I think um again I think a lot of what we've prioritized as entrepreneurs, as investors, as folks who belong to the broader ecosystem is this idea of productivity, which plays a role and is particularly important, don't get me wrong. Um but when I think about the things that have moved the needle for people, it usually comes on the heels of that joy and delight. And I can't help but think about Apple and the way that they were able to present technology in such a way that it really inspired that type of feeling in people. And that was what pushed people along in some form of adoption curve. And I can't help but think that that's usually what ends up defining certain epochs and and how people move themselves along the adoption curve.
Yeah. Okay. I like that. Well, maybe we'll end on this point. We'll end on some founder advice.
Sure. So you're you're clearly the expert in the space. You've been able to articulate all the big winners, many of the big winners in the consumer space. If a founder was planning to take a leap, what are the things that they need to consider? Uh and then if there's any success stories of like some of the things that you think they should consider, uh please share those.
Yeah, I think it ultimately comes back to the point that we were making around velocity and having a point of view and opinion. And I think as a consumer founder, I think one of the special opportunities that you have is to almost build for yourself. And it's not to say that you as a founder should treat yourself as the sample, but it might be a really helpful place to start. And I think with that unlocks a natural intuition and uh an ability to move perhaps more quickly and even more importantly more confidently and what feels like the right sequence of steps to deliver a product uh to the market. And I think some of the more successful consumer founders that I've seen candidly were scratching their own itch. Right? with Andy at Cosmos, he ostensibly built a platform that he himself wanted, right? He he recognized that there weren't enough platforms out there that could house his store of inspiration and so he kind of built for himself and then later discovered that a lot of creatives, a lot of creatives, a lot of designers had similar needs and the product was able to expand from that. Henry, the founder of Watch Club, had a similar experience in which he was inspired by not only micro dramas, but this new this well, not new, but this this content program called Scum, which was this Norwegian soap drama that pioneered a new way of delivering content where instead of giving you an entire episode um on like a serialized weekly fashion, the idea is that it showed up in moments that kind of synced with moments happening in in the show. So, if there was an episode about an exam being taken at 100 p.m., that's when the episode was released. And so, as a viewer, you were able um to kind of put yourself or insert yourself into the experience. And Henry kind of wanted to, you know, expand upon that um and build for an itch that he found love and adoration and inspiration in and then built a product that supported that that need. Um, I think the list goes on as you start to think about all of the consumer winners of the last decade. You can often times find a founder who's just looking to solve a problem. Um, and so I think understanding that kernel of need, understanding in a pretty crystallized fashion how to support that need and if it happens to align with who you are as a person, I think that makes that product that much more special. feels like a really compelling place to start for a consumer founder.
Wow, we appreciate that. KJ, thank you for coming on to the pod.
Yeah, thanks for having me.