Eric Yuan is the founder and CEO of Zoom. Reid Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn. Both are luminary LPs at Village Global. They joined Village GP Ben Casnocha to discuss the future of AI agents, digital twins in the workplace, selling AI to enterprise, and what it takes to build companies that endure.
Takeaways:
- Digital twins will handle meetings you're unsure about attending. Your AI can join internal meetings, summarize key points, and alert you only when your presence becomes critical. This frees you to focus on what truly matters.
- External AI interactions are coming too. Eventually, digital twins could negotiate contracts, discuss pricing, and handle preliminary conversations before humans finalize agreements.
- Enterprise customers want partners, not just products. When selling AI to enterprise, become a trusted guide through anxiety-ridden territory. Trust matters as much as features, especially when customers feel behind.
- Make customers part of your innovation cycle. Get enterprise customers deploying early, even partially. The unique data they generate becomes your moat that competitors can't replicate.
- Focus on vertical markets with domain expertise. Generic horizontal AI products are vulnerable to big players who can give similar tools away for free. Build where deep domain knowledge creates defensibility.
- Hypergrowth hides problems. Rapid revenue growth can mask fundamental issues in your product and operations. The best scenario is growing fast while proactively fixing hidden problems, but that's extremely hard.
- Theory of the game matters more than current metrics. Companies aren't valuable in a year; they're valuable in ten years and beyond. Have a clear theory for how your initial traction compounds into long-term value.
- Be honest with yourself about durability. Rapid early success doesn't automatically mean you have a long-term strategy. Understand what's driving growth and whether those factors will last.
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