Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, has backed some of the most iconic consumer brands of the past two decades — from Warby Parker to Chime to Dollar Shave Club. In this conversation, she shares how great products (not marketing tricks) still win, why AI is unlocking a new kind of emotional relationship between consumers and technology, and what founders can learn from the messy creative stage we're in right now. She also breaks down how shifts in distribution, wellness, and digital behavior are reshaping what it means to build for real human needs.
Chapters: 00:00 - Intro 01:05 - What will the consumer AI wave look like? 04:54 - The ability to have memory 07:35 - Data personalization 08:58 - Voice as an unlock 11:07 - The messy creative stage of consumer AI 12:07 - How to nail distribution 14:58 - Don’t just do things for the sake of marketing 16:09 - Why the Dollar Shave Club ad worked so well 17:39 - What convinced Kirsten to invest in Dollar Shave Club 20:16 - What large companies are realizing for search, marketing 23:02 - How will we use different AI tools as consumers? 26:20 - Forerunner’s latest trend report on health, wellness, security 32:16 - How do you compete against ChatGPT? 33:52 - Advice for new founders
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 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?
Where are they going to come back to your product?
Where are they going to add another new thing into their already crowded lives?
If you have to strip everything away,
you don't have extra money or resources to do other things like nail your product.
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? 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 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 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, right? Yeah, it's astonishing.
And then, you know, the funniest story about that is, you know, if you spend time with Evan
Murakawa, 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...
Gary, haven't you learned after this, 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 AI 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 that we were just referencing
that people are really here for it. And part of it is, is that it's relatable. 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, you know, one of the reasons why it's been such a quick uptick from the consumer.
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. 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's, 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, the, 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 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.
O3 with reasoning is pretty impressive.
Yeah. Well, it's, it's definitely already doing it in the context of picking
backs 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, 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 in, is able to bring all of those things forward 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 in an interaction on the 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, 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, how will the experience be different? Like what, what's, you know, 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, we 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 an,
you know, a really new, new place, a new starting point.
So you've said your AI will actually unlock new apps by enabling data to live in a continuous
learning loop, you know, 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. And just like we do as
humans, but we just haven't done that in a, in a, 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, I've invested in that relationship. And I think that, you know, that becomes a key
to keeping loyalty with your users and having retention. 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,
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 soundbites 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 know, 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, that is an incredibly rich place to pursue that relationship from
that hasn't been possible before. So I think between it being like a more delightful experience,
it's also more rich, that can increase what the output of that would be too.
I started using ChatGPT explicitly for this. 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. 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...
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. It's much more engaging. I can think of a couple of times just with myself
feeling like I could 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, will 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've 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, 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 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. You know, so if you have to like strip everything away, you don't have extra money
or resources to do other things, like nail your product.
Often we run into founders who feel like they built the right product and then it's just a
challenge that, you know, 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, you know, 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 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 remember the time when everybody had 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 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 that creates a connection.
Once some version of that has been demonstrated in a dozen ways,
like 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.
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 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, 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 I actually have not bought,
I haven't shaved in a long time.
But I'm curious, business school textbook might say that
razors are actually probably a bit of a commodity.
Razors are 100% a commodity, 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 through people talking
and I was 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 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,
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.
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 them 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.
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 that was a novel change in a go-to-market strategy for a business.
And I mean, CPG is still sort of transforming.
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 a 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 then.
Everything is always evolving and changing, right?
I heard a really interesting 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.
I don't know what they call like that.
48% now.
Oh, wow.
Now I think that's everything on social 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,
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 clearly taken shape
and happened very often.
I mean, you and I have been like meeting with founders
who've 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 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 it's not.
That being said, things are...
The pickup is happening faster and faster.
I think getting back to where we were talking about earlier,
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 the change in search.
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.
Because they're all built on keywords
and people are showing up to do conversational search.
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 certainly one whose time has come.
Search across the spectrum is a huge opportunity.
So is the ad market.
Well, I mean, Fiji Saimo is the new CEO
of applications at chat GPT.
I believe she built the newsfeed for Facebook
and worked on fundamental pieces of monetization,
both for Facebook and for Instacart.
So I don't know, prognosticate,
what does this mean for open AI?
Should we be expecting ads in our chat results?
What I think it means,
it means exciting things for open AI
and probably for all of us as consumers of open AI,
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.
Yeah.
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?
Seemingly.
And then that means...
But I actually just don't think
that's the way the world works.
Okay, yeah.
Like, I guess we'll use some Google,
some perplexity, some chat GPT.
Well, so that's in the context of search, right?
And I think search is actually,
like, if you kind of look back
of like all the big categories,
the big tech leaders from each, you know, domain,
we can talk about that.
But like, I think Google, starting in search,
probably held the most dominance in a category,
in an activity than anybody else, right?
Because like, for instance, Amazon,
it's the juggernaut of retail.
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 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 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, you know, big platforms
that became areas for search.
Yeah, and it happens in, you know, Amazon.
I actually kind of use it as product search.
Like, I'm kind of disappointed
when something I want to buy isn't on Amazon.
I mean, I don't know what the status,
I knew it before,
but like, there is a large portion of shopping journeys
that start on Amazon.
Yeah.
Going back to ChatGPT,
I mean, will we have to pay for ads?
Or, you know, is it back to the SEO game?
What's going to happen to that whole game?
Do you have a sense?
Right now, I'm interested in playing it
from both of those, right?
Because we don't know.
Yeah.
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 two types of answers.
I think the FTC actually requires you
to 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.
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 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.
You're 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 finance and those things,
not like national security.
Yeah, of course.
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 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,
a history over time,
to be able to interpret that data.
Think about that being applied
in a health atmosphere is amazing.
Yeah. Can you imagine what's happening right now?
Everyone's getting a 150 IQ Jiminy Cricket
on their shoulder
that knows everything about them.
And then simultaneous to that,
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 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 order
and 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
what 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.
Like there are all these crazy stories of people
they could have Googled.
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 we think about the ability to have
almost like 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
and you do your blood test,
you get your blood draw.
And now you can go in
and you can ask the question
about your tendonitis 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 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 playground for these ideas,
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,
what space can two people
sitting in front of a computer
creating their own consumer product?
How do you compete?
What are sort of the ways forward there?
So I do think that ChatGPT
can be a great place for inspiration
to just kind of think about like,
okay, now I've got a different tool.
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 waiting for someone to wow me with that.
And 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, 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 like 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 a 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?
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 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.
Oh, Gary, thanks for having me.