Legendary Consumer VC Predicts The Future Of AI Products
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It's almost the first question we get asked from every new founder that we work with, which is like, tell me how so-and-so did this for marketing or what happened here? Yeah. And I always kind of have to preface and say, I've got good news and bad news for you, which is you've got to do everything. Why do they need your product? Why are they going to come back to your product? Why are they going to add another new thing into their already crowded lives? If you have to like strip everything away, you don't have extra money or resources to do other things like nail your product.

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Welcome to another episode of The Main Function. Today, I have Kirsten Green, the co-founder and managing partner of Forerunner Ventures. She's a legendary investor who's done all of the great consumer startups over the last 15, 20 years, really. So it's really a pleasure to have you here. To name a few, Chime, Fair, Hims and Hers, Warby Parker, and Dollar Shave Club. Kirsten, thanks for joining us. Thanks, Gary. It's a pleasure to be here.

Prior to jumping on here, we were talking about we want to see a lot more consumer AI. We're in the middle of an AI boom. What is the shape of that? Like, what do you think is going to happen? Why hasn't it happened quite yet? I think that it's inevitable and I think that it's starting to happen. It makes sense that it's on the horizon, given that first you have to have the infrastructure built. First, you have to have the technology formed. And then in business is typically and understandably the first step.

kind of call to action. It really runs off of competition. So someone starts a business as an outsider, an incumbent sees that someone's coming for part of their business, they respond, and competition goes from there. And on the consumer side, of course, you have competition once you have a marketplace built. But to get

things started, you really have to deliver something outstanding for the consumer. It has to be something that's meeting a need in a new way, and you have to draw them in and it has to make it their choice. So it takes a little more, I think, nuance and a little more warm-up time to get people to come around to that. One thing I would say about AI in particular is that I don't know that we've ever seen

something so readily adopted by consumers. I think the consumers are voting overwhelmingly that they're here for the advancements they're seeing in technology. You know, you just look at the chat GPT numbers and it's like really astounding how many hundreds of millions of people are logging on daily there. Yeah, I think maybe that's the best example of the fastest consumer launch maybe in the history of consumer launches. I think without a doubt. Yeah, it's astonishing. Yeah.

And then, you know, the funniest story about that is, you know, if you spend time with Evan Morikawa, the original PM for that, when they launched, it was a slog. It wasn't that easy to actually push it out into the world. Like a lot of people actually didn't want that to happen. Nothing is really that easy. That's right.

You know, the trick is making it look easy, but it's not, you know. That's right. Maybe that's one of the reasons why we're so excited. I mean, if opening eye can come out the gate with, you know, just this insane hockey stick, you know, where there's smoke, usually there's fire. There will be other new capabilities. I mean, I think, you know, first of all, I think it's shown us like we were just referencing that people are really here for it. And part of it is, is that it's relatable. Yeah.

it's actually even more natural to go online and ask a question than it is to just search a keyword. And so this novelty, which was a novelty to come online and be able to start having a conversation with technology in a way you hadn't before, is something we all do every day in our daily lives. So it was taking a behavior that is fundamental and now making it possible online. And I think that's one of the reasons why it's been such a quick uptick from the consumer perspective

I think one of the reasons it's so exciting for business and for entrepreneurs is that this is really a platform shift. This is more than just the advancements of technology. I think it sets like a whole new paradigm for what's possible. The way I kind of like simply think about it is, is that for the last,

Two cycles, let's call it the internet and mobile. We've moved from outcomes and attention into an area of relationships and affection. And I think that's much more dynamic and it's much more in the ordinary course of people's lives. So I think the adoption curve is going to be, is going to be really exciting. I think we just need to get the founders to start building.

Yeah, I always think about the movie Her where, you know, it is actually about a relationship between, you know, human and computer in that respect. But it feels much more like a human relationship. I feel like ChatGPT, even from its initial spectacular launch...

has continued to evolve, like the new memory is really powerful. The ability to have memory is obviously an underpinning to this idea of an emotional operating system. And I think that's, you know, that's the next level of development is to be able to create context, not just context in the moment from the data that you're sharing in a particular conversation or what's been

you know, stored because you've shared some piece of it, but that you get, that it gets built over time. The real crazy unlocks come from the ability to take that memory that builds over time and intuit it forward. I don't know that we've seen that yet, but it's coming. Yeah.

I mean, O3 with reasoning is pretty impressive. Yeah. Well, it's definitely already doing it in the context of picking facts up over time. I mean, online while it's researching. I'm thinking about, you know, you and I sit down today, we have this conversation. I go have conversation with three other people about a similar topic, but maybe we've

We push the envelope a little further on something. And then we come back six months later. And in the context of, you know, in the journey of six months, I've had many conversations. So have you. News has happened. And now the AI is, you know, getting is able to bring all of those things forward and

and sort of draw conclusions or draw ideas or questions from that body of work. That's something we do as humans, but we haven't had at all an interaction on a computer. I mean, maybe this is a bit of a debate right now. Like, you know, I personally almost expect there to be things that sort of rhyme with pre-AI consumer to come out and they'll just somehow be like,

supercharged by AI or by this relationship that maybe you have or a memory. Like, is that how you'd view it? Or are these things going to look radically different? I think one of the reasons that maybe it's taking time for things to brew before we sort of see something that really wows it is I do think it begs for people to go back to first principles and say that, like, if I now have the power to build a relationship through these digital means, then

how will the experience be different? Like what's the way you start to build that relationship? What's the way you influence that relationship? What's the way you engage with it? I imagine that like,

every category in some way can be reinvented. And I don't think you can look at like what it looks like today and just add AI onto it, add memory or add a bit of a deeper connection. We're seeing that now, right? And I think there's companies being built in that area that will probably thrive. But I think the ones that like,

we'll be talking about years and years from now are going to approach it from like a really new place, a new starting point. So you've said AI will actually unlock new apps by enabling data to live in a continuous learning loop, actual personalization. So

I mean, that's sort of actually a part of the relationship that you might have, right? I mean, that's what we're talking about, right? So I do think that data has long been talked about as a moat of sorts, but I think it's even more so in this area where you do have the continuous learning loop, where it's not just a data point that I share that then gets reflected back in a specific case. It's it building over time and the ability to take those collections of data points and move a conversation or a relationship forward.

just like we do as humans, but we just haven't done that in a digital setting. And imagine that once you start building that relationship, not only the power of what that can unlock in terms of the impact it might have on whatever context you're talking about, whether it's some aspect of your health, some aspect of your education, some aspect of your financial planning, some aspect of your social, it deepens it in a really meaningful way. The other side of that that gets that right is

I've invested in that relationship. And.

And I think that, you know, that becomes a key to keeping loyalty with your users and having retention. Yeah, that sounds right. And the possibility for that is even more meaningful than things we've seen before because you've moved from just a transaction into something that's a relationship. So back to the idea of voice, which I think is really important. Oh, yeah, I love voice. Right? So up until recently, almost all my interactions with my digital interfaces were typing things on a keyboard. And I think that even when I'm moving fast, I'm either...

writing with a lot of intention or I'm writing so fast that I'm putting out sound bites and not clear thoughts. As soon as you get to have voice, I think people take a lot more liberty with how they talk and you almost let ideas unfold and you peel back the onion in doing that. Now we've got voice that talks back to us digitally to prompt a conversation.

And to the extent that all of that becomes data that gets stored in the context of memory that gets used in the way we've been talking about, like that is an incredibly rich place to pursue that relationship from that we just, that hasn't been possible before. So I think between it being like a more delightful experience, it's also...

It's also more rich that can increase like what the output of that would be too. I started using ChatGPT explicitly for this. Yeah. Where if there's like a news article or a podcast that I don't have time to listen to, I don't just paste it and say summarize. Right.

It's I actually paste it and I say, summarize and also pull out the things that you think I would find really interesting. It knows that I'm into SF politics. It knows that I'm into making sure kids learn algebra and then whatever I'm putting in there, like it'll just pick out different parts of.

So, I mean, those are incredible conversation prompts. And then you can move from, if that's coming back to you in writing, you can move from there into a voice conversation about it. Which is huge. That's magical. Yeah. It's much more engaging. I can think of a couple of times just with myself feeling like I could pick

pick the phone out of my pocket and start to have a conversation about something I wanted to learn about. Or with my 15-year-old son, we sat down to talk about a topic that he was studying in school that I needed to refresh myself on. We brought ChatGPT into it.

And the conversation ended up being much richer and much longer because we had support in uncovering more insights. You say that we're like sort of in the messy creative stage of consumer AI. Talk to me more about that. It's a really fun place. I think you have to, you know, as a founder and as an investor, give yourself sort of a lot more freedom with how you approach stuff. It's that time period where we have new technology to play with. And you just ask like, what will, you know, we just talked about like, well, the next

iteration of experiences build off of the past or will they be all new? And I think they're going to be all new, but to get from where they have been to being something all new, you got to try so many different things until you have something that resonates with a large group of people and starts to become like the new way of doing things. All of these things are possible.

And the only way to really get to that big idea is to try a bunch of different things. So it does feel like I think you've got to shoot your shot, do some learnings with it. You know, the best teams will iterate from there. There's a lot of things to be explored on the path to that. So one of the key things about consumer often is just distribution. And I mean, you have funded some of the most well-distributed consumer brands. I mean...

Chime, being able to create a new bank from nothing. There must be some lessons from those experiences

Those experience, like building some of the more enduring consumer brands from nothing. Just seeing that. It's almost the first question we get asked from every new founder that we work with, which is like, tell me how so-and-so did this marketing or what happened here. Yeah. And I always kind of have to preface and say, I've got good news and bad news for you, which is you've got to do everything. You know, I think that in terms of just a channel or a distribution is just think about, you know, what is core fundamental, um,

value that you are coming to market with? What are the things you want somebody to associate your product with, the experience you have? And then be thoughtful about how do you articulate that in every single possible surface that you can go to, right? And be pretty dedicated and thoughtful about that. Don't just think you have a one-size-fits-all message.

One message resonates from a word of mouth. One message resonates on TikTok. One message resonates on an ad. It's very different. And so being thoughtful about that and doing all of them and having sort of that mosaic of those things working together is really what people have to do, which feels like an inadequate answer because somebody wants a hack.

But the root of all of that is, is that you have to build something that people actually need and that people actually like enough for those messages to mean something when they get it. So it sounds like the best marketing you're saying is your product. Is your product. There's no shortcut. Is your product. So if you have to strip everything away, you don't have extra money or resources to do other things, nail your product. Often we run into founders who...

feel like they built the right product. And then it's just a marketing challenge that the reason why people, it's not blowing up. There's no product market fit. Well, listen, if you have a great product and you are building into something that is a need, is more than a novelty, that is important to more than just a few people, it will get some traction.

It might not be at the scale you wish, you know, and that's when you get into that zone of like, okay, what are the different channels that are available to me? And what are the different tactics? The first tactic that I know everybody in our ecosystem likes to go to that I think is highly valuable is what sort of product marketing can you do? Like what about your product is

gets better because you bring other people into the experience. Maybe there's a network effect. So, you know, I think that is always going to be true. And the drivers of those network effects or the way that those get out into the world might evolve as like

the tech cycles evolve, you have to also do things that are authentic and additive to your product. And don't just do stuff for the sake of marketing, because I think consumers are savvy and they see through that. You can't market products. They're bad. So I mean, every time. So remember the time when everybody had a friends and family 20% off that worked for a little while because it was new. Like a lot of things work early because they're new. But

But for staying power, it doesn't work. It doesn't work for any one company for long periods of time. And it certainly doesn't work for the 30th entrant into the market, right? So I do think there's something to be said for being first, being early and first and talking about kind of getting people to start building in consumer AI. I think there is an advantage because you have more of a chance of surprising and delighting somebody, more of a chance of somebody saying, wow, I didn't know that was possible. And having that be part of that like magic moment

creates a connection. Once some version of that has been demonstrated in a dozen ways, it loses some of its luster. That can help you out of the gate. That's not enough for a long-term proposition, but it can be helpful. You can work it to your advantage. I think about a couple of the companies you mentioned, Warby Parker, Dollar Shave Club, they were beneficiaries of that.

At the time when Dollar Shave Club launched and the founder, Michael Dubin, had that incredible video, that was new. YouTube didn't, I mean, YouTube was big, but it didn't have that many marketing videos. And there weren't that many places to distribute it because social was still ramping up. And so that was a real novelty. And people were delighted by it and they shared it and it went around viral fast. That was never going to make the company. But that was a meaningful moment to start a step change and get into some business.

early scale. But by the time you were the Nth company doing something like that, you were just doing what you needed to do to be in the conversation, not to be that conversation. I'm still seeing new ads come out that use that talk track, that tonality as inspiration.

Yeah, I mean, it's very chummy and it doesn't feel like an ad. It feels like someone talking to the friend, actually. It's been done so many times now, but it was new and novel when it happened. But again, like, I didn't make an investment in that company because of the video, but that was certainly an effective go-to-market. I mean, that's an interesting example in that, like...

I actually have not bought, I haven't shaved in a long time. But I'm curious, like, you know, a business school textbook might say that razors are actually probably a bit of a commodity. Razors are 100% a commodity.

Yeah. Right. My story about investing early in Dollar Shave Club, I think, is one that always kind of makes me smile a little bit in that I had heard about the business sort of, you know, through people talking and I was like pretty dismissive of it in the context of that's a commodity product. And there's huge players playing in those spaces with locks on distribution and enormous marketing budgets. So, you know, probably other things to do. But this is a case of you meet the founder.

And you're like, you know what? That person is special. That person has a unique insight and they're meeting the moment with that unique insight, but their vision is something bigger than that. And I don't think Michael Dubin was building a razor company. I think he was tapping into a trend that was men being part, you know, there was a conversation online about personal care and beauty that was reaching men that had never reached men before. The idea that like,

Maybe you should use some face lotion. Maybe you should wash your face, other things. Like, I think that was a bigger trend that was underpinning this idea.

Shaving was a message to deliver that resonated because every guy knew how to shave. So if you could bring him in through that way and then start to kind of play into that conversation about the broader narrative. I think from a business model standpoint, what was really novel and what I look back on and think what we were investing in at the time was a shift in

So I just talked to you a little bit about the consumer shift, the demand shift. Then there was the technology shift. It was the social web. It was a whole new way for people to discover products, to have conversation, just to get ideas about what to buy and how to buy it. And so that led to a different way to launch a company. Instead of going into a retail store with a huge order that took you

nine months to prep for at scale, six months to get data from afterwards. You could put up a website and sell a few products, or you could put up a website and say you were going to sell a few products and understand the demand. So like that was a novel change in a go-to-market strategy for a business. And I mean, CPG is still sort of transforming. Like I remember working with the Instacart team and they came and asked, hey, do you have any idea how much money

Procter & Gamble spends both to get the data and to get placement in supermarkets. And I had no idea. And it's billions. It's like a giant percentage of their gross margin just gets plowed right back into things that you can just get on Instacart for much cheaper. It's like a far better value prop for CPG. Everything is always evolving and changing, right? I heard a really interesting story.

stat from a friend that works at one of the big CPG companies just this week, a few years ago, let's call it five years ago or so.

4% of their sales came from organic word of mouth. Oh, wow. What they call like that. 48% now. Oh, wow. Now I think that's everything on social and that's happening. So yes, there's big marketing budgets, but there's also all kinds of other unlocks. So that kind of fundamental shift, like what does that mean for their business model? And that's only happened in the last- In the last handful of years. I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was a data point they were looking at to see like, wow, this shift has-

you know, clearly taken shape and happened. I mean, you and I have been like meeting with founders who had been talking about that for 10 years or 15 years. And it's, isn't that fascinating that, well, I mean, I think that's one of the really exciting and privileged places of where, where we're working, where we're involved is you are seeing things early, right? I think we tend to kind of think like, Oh, this is already mass. Everybody knows it, but, but it's not that being said, things are happening.

The pickup is happening faster and faster. I think getting back to where we were talking about earlier, like the adoption of chat GPT, that is not just young people or people in certain cities. It is people in the middle of the country, in the middle of their life.

that are now showing like the change in search. You know, another interesting thing, and I don't think this is surprising, but just to say, talking to a lot of scaled brands and retailers in particular, that one of the first challenges that they're trying to address with new AI tools is search on their sites. Totally. Because they're all built on keywords. Oh, yeah. And people are showing up to...

do conversational search. Interesting. Yeah. So it's time to upgrade. It's time to upgrade. Yeah. Well, that sounds like a good idea. That sounds like a more B2B idea, but it's definitely like, you know, search across the spectrum is, is, is a huge opportunity. So is the ad market. Well, I mean, uh, Fiji Simo is the new CEO of applications at ChatGPT. Um,

I believe she built the newsfeed for Facebook and worked on fundamental pieces of monetization, both for Facebook and for Instacart.

I don't know, prognosticate, like, you know, what does this mean for OpenAI? Should we be expecting ads in our chat results? What I think it means, it means exciting things for OpenAI and probably for all of us as consumers of OpenAI, because I do think that, like you said, she's been involved in some of the most iconic products and made them better. And I think the fact that they're

hiring at that level of seniority to oversee the topic of applications obviously says that that matters immensely. I think the next question, you know, that gets begged to ask off of that is like, are we just going to do everything on chat GPT? I mean, seemingly. And then that, but I actually just don't think that's the way the world works. Okay. Yeah.

I guess we'll use some Google, some Perplexity, some ChatGPT. Well, so that's in the context of search, right? And I think search is actually, if you kind of look back of all the big categories, the big tech leaders from each domain, we can talk about that. But I think Google, starting in search, probably held the most power.

in an activity than anybody else, right? Because like for instance, Amazon, it's the juggernaut of retail, right?

Probably everybody in America has an Amazon account and shops on Amazon. We don't shop for everything on Amazon. We don't want to shop for everything on Amazon. So, you know, there is a cap, I think, to the market share that can happen there because I think that like there's, there's relevance in the long tail. There's relevance in specialty that by category and people want to have different kinds of experiences at the category level, uh,

in shopping too. You have other verticals pop up, right? I guess in search you did too because you had ubiquitous search on Google and then you got Yelp and you got big platforms that became

Yeah, and it happens in Amazon. I actually kind of use it as product search. I'm kind of disappointed when something I want to buy isn't on Amazon. I don't know what the stat is. I knew it before, but there is a large portion of shopping journeys that start on Amazon. Yeah. Going back to ChatGPT, will we have to pay for ads or is it back to the SEO game? What's going to happen to that whole game?

Right now, I'm interested in playing it from both of those, right? Because we don't know. But there's a reason to believe that both of those types of disciplines will find their way into our new interfaces. Yeah, that's wild. What's funny about AI models is I'd be curious if ChatGPT would ever make you pay to make it into the corpus that LLM...

pre-trains on. That might be a big complicated topic, right? Because does that compromise what you're putting out in your results? Right. I mean, I think safer to get to a place where you're like, well, we'll serve up maybe, maybe two types of answers. I think the FTC actually requires you to, uh,

call out sponsored links. They do. So if you look like that, that's how Instagram has been, right? You can't, you have to have some indication there that you're promoting a product or you're being paid to promote a product. Yeah. Maybe it's just premature to speculate. One funny question would be in ChatGPT, will we have the web search button right in that input box in a year from now? Or will it just be, you know, obvious that

the agent is smart enough, it'll know when it needs to search the web or not. Like today, it's sort of this broken part. Actually, my experience of it is it already does. Because it didn't have those capabilities when it first came out, it was sort of identified differently. And then they brought in, oh, we have real-time web here. So now we have a web search. You don't actually have to press the web search every time. Yeah, that's right. It started doing it automatically already. So let's talk about your...

latest trend report, two of the things that you pulled out and are really excited about, it's health and wellness and personal security. What are you seeing over there? Just to back up for a sec, we do the trend report every year. And really, we started just two years ago, publishing it was work we'd done all the time on an ongoing basis, but it seemed like something to share and get conversation going around. So this year, we did a bit of a deeper dive on

health and wellness and security. And when we say security, we mean everything from, we mean it like more in the context of securing your life, like having a stable career, a stable finances, those things, not like national security, security, right? Partly that trend popped up.

because we have, as a society, we've been through so much. And I think at this point, we've been through enough tough things in a short enough period of time that the right idea to pull forward is that's just how the world is now. Like it moves faster. There's more debates there and there's going to be more uncertainty out of that. So this idea of like, okay, what,

does security look like for me? How do I ensure that I'm going to live the life I want and flourish in a market that's evolving very fast around me? I think it's a vulnerability. People are showing us that they feel, and I think there's a real opportunity for tech and some of the invention that happens from founders to address some of those needs.

which is why we thought that topic was really interesting. And it actually like dovetails into health and wellness a lot, which is a trend that we've all been talking about for a long time. It's not a new trend, but it is a massive trend because it's gone from health, which has been largely a reactive trend

if you will, or reactive reality to wellness. So it's broadened in that and it's become proactive health. And that's happened. I think our hypothesis is it's happened because the healthcare system has let people down. So they have felt like we have to be more proactive with our own health. And that was enabled in the context of getting a lot more information so people could start to have awareness around what it meant to live a healthy life. And now we have lots of tools and products to support that.

And even though it's been a robust trend for, let's call it the last decade, there's still so much more that can be done. And I think there's probably a really good, across the spectrum, a really good evolution to come out of Gen AI and the integration there. It seems like it's a PhD and an MD in your pocket at any given moment, actually. I mean, I think that is the dream, right? So there are things...

called concierge doctor services that some people have. It is not something that's accessible to most people because there aren't enough humans to deliver that and the cost is prohibitive. But imagine things we've been talking about in this conversation with AI, the ability to share your personal data, to have that be context, to develop a track record, you know, a history over time, to be able to interpret that data. Think about that being applied in a healthcare

health atmosphere is amazing. Yeah, can you imagine what's happening right now? It's everyone's getting a, you know, 150 IQ Jiminy Cricket on their shoulder that knows everything about them. And then simultaneous to that, there's

They're getting a GLP-1 that lets them control their cravings. But one of the weirder things that's happening with GLP-1s, I'm sure you're tracking, is that it gives you unbelievable willpower. Like people who bite their nails, they stop biting their nails. Or like people who struggle with alcohol just because they go on a GLP-1. You take something that's such a big trend like that, and there are multiple second and third order impacts out of that.

So I think that while people are adopting more proactive measures around their health, they're unlocking new needs and new capabilities in that too. Yeah. Have you seen those social media posts about...

With ChatGPT, they just sort of explain their symptoms of their back pain or neck pain or things like that. And they literally just do what ChatGPT tells them to do and it fixes it. Or like tinnitus. There are all these crazy stories of people...

So I think this is a good example that kind of ties to what we were talking about earlier, which is like you can go on ChatGPT and you can ask a question. You can get a richer answer than you could ever gotten in the keyword search and the link search. It lacks the context of precisely who you are.

So, you know, we think about the ability to have almost like that, that search interface, if you will, for like all the major categories. So a destination for your health information, like maybe superpower is one of our investments. You go there, you have your health records brought in, you do an intake form on who you are, what your lifestyle is like, you hook up your aura ring to give your sleep data. You know, any number of ways you're working with Faye, you put your nutrition information in, you do your blood test, you get your

your blood draw and now you can go in and you can ask the question about your tendinitis or whatever and all of this context

is part of what answer you get back or what suggestion you get back to be better. I think that's magical and I think, you know, that's a step away from that concierge doctor. The things that are sort of unfolding right now, they're sort of happening inside the walled garden of ChatGPT. It's a great, like, playground for these ideas, right? To see what people are interested in, what's resonating, what the base capability set is. But I do think that for topics that are particularly important to people,

there is a lot to be said for a unique interface, you know, a unique interface that is more reflective of that particular topic. So what you would imagine in your dashboard to your health is different than what you'd imagine in your dashboard to your finances or your learning journey or your shopping. You must get asked this all the time, though. I mean, given ChatGPT is so dominant, like what space is

Can, you know, two people sitting in front of a computer creating their own consumer product, how do you compete? Like what are sort of the ways forward there? So I do think that ChatGPT can be a great place for inspiration to just, you know, kind of think about like, okay, now I've got a different tool. I've got, no matter what product you're building, you're going to be using these new tools, the new AI tools. What conversations are you having with that interface that you wouldn't have ever had before?

What new things are people, you know, curiosities people had or needs people had before, but technology wasn't playing a role in that, right? And then back away and say, okay, but if I know some element of this is possible and interesting to people, what would the best experience for this look

like. Right. And that gets back to that idea of just first principles thinking on like, I am building something new. I'm building with a new set of technologies that's going to keep progressing. Like what would a great starting point be? I mean, right now we're kind of probably most of us are in the zone of like, it's a chat bar and you can do a conversation. I think we can be better. You know, I'm, I'm waiting for someone to wow me with that. And I'm, I fully expect it to happen. I don't think everything needs to be a chat bar like that. And I think that's where, um,

you know, you have to be bold and getting back to that kind of messy creative stage, like put some stuff out there, experiment with some stuff, like try some different interfaces, because we don't want to be locked into interfaces that are either last generation or things that were basically designed for ubiquity. What other advice would you have? You know, a lot of the people who are watching, they're just starting out. And so, you know,

Are there any things that you're excited about or you would direct their attention to right now? Okay, so big picture, I feel like tech capabilities are going to move into this zone of emotional AI, like the emotional operating system. So I think things where you have an opportunity or a need to build a relationship are ripe for opportunity because I do think that

It's going to be hard, not impossible, but hard for existing platforms or existing experiences that weren't built with that to just roll that forward. So it feels like a good entry point.

I think there's a lot of hype and a lot of novelty right now. That's okay. It's the messy creative stage. But ultimately, like a stronger place to build a business on is like a need. Why do they need your product? Why are they going to come back to your product? Why are they going to switching costs for a product? Why are they going to add another new thing into their already crowded lives?

lives. Like, what problem are you solving? What couple of things are you consolidating? You know, those are sort of the basics, I think, that are always true about starting a new company. But I think you have a little more liberty now because you've got this new platform and this new paradigm to build into. Anything that you can build in the path of where these LLMs are going is probably worthwhile.

Right. So I wouldn't want to go against them. I would want to build into into that tailwind. And if you can do that, if you have a need, you can build into that tailwind and you're bold enough to think about a different type of experience to set a new stage or standard in a category. You'd get my attention for sure. Kirsten, thank you so much for spending time with us today. Thanks for having me.