AI Startups vs. Corporations: A Competitive Edge

Everyone told Vicente Silveira that his startup—a GPT wrapper—would fail. 

Instead, one year later, it’s thriving—with about 500,000 registered users, nearly 3,000 paying subscribers, and over 2 million conversations in the GPT store. 

Vicente is the cofounder and CEO of AI PDF, a tool that can help you summarize, chat with, and organize your PDF files. When OpenAI allowed users to upload PDFs to ChatGPT, the consensus was that his startup, and all the other GPT wrappers out there, were toast. 

Some of his competitors even shut shop, but Vicente believed they could still create value for users as a specialized tool. The AI PDF team kept building. 

A year later, AI PDF is one of the most popular AI-powered PDF readers in the world—and they did it all with a five-person team, and a friends and family round. 

I sat down with Vicente to understand, in granular detail, the success of AI PDF. We get into:

• Why staying small and specialized is a bigger advantage than you think

• The power of building with your early adopters

• Why lean startups are better positioned than frontier AI companies to create radical solutions 

• When a growing startup should think about raising venture capital

• The emerging role of ‘AI managers’ who will be responsible for overseeing AI agents 

We even demo an agent integrated into AI PDF, prompting it to analyze recent articles from my column Chain of Thought and write a bulleted list of the core thesis statements.

This is a must-watch for small teams building profitable companies at the bleeding edge of AI. 

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Timestamps:

• Introduction: (00:00:35)

• AI PDF’s story begins with an email to OpenAI’s Greg Brockman: (00:02:58)

• Why users choose AI PDF over ChatGPT: (00:05:41)

• How to compete—and thrive—as a GPT wrapper: (00:06:58)

• Why building with early adopters is key: (00:20:49)

• Being small and specialized is your biggest advantage: (00:27:53)

• When should AI startups raise capital: (00:31:47)

• The emerging role of humans who will manage AI agents: (00:34:53)

• Why AI is different from other tech revolutions: (00:45:25)
• A live demo of an agent integrated into AI PDF: (00:54:01)