Des Traynor is a Co-Founder of Intercom, and has built and led many teams within the company, including Product, Marketing, and Customer Support. Today Des leads all Intercom’s R&D efforts, and parts of Intercom’s marketing.
In Today's Episode with Des We Discuss:
1. From Consultancy to Founding a Unicorn:
- What was the founding a-ha moment for Des and the team with Intercom?
- Why does Des believe that most startup advice is BS and outdated in 5 years?
- What does Des know now that he wishes he had known when he started?
2. LLMs: The World is Not Equal:
- What does Des mean when he says the world of LLMs is not equal?
- How do the different LLMs very in quality, price and speciality?
- Does Des agree with Alex @ Nabla, "the best companies in the future will work with many LLMs at the same time and switch between them for different things"?
- To what extent does Des believe LLMs will be commoditised and it will be a race to the bottom?
- Would Des be a buyer of OpenAI at a $90BN price? Why not?
3. How to Survive in a World of OpenAI:
- What two simple questions will determine if Open AI will kill your existing business?
- What 3 criteria will determine if there is a new business to be built on top of OpenAI?
- What is the different between a thin layer on top of an LLM and a thick wrapper with real value?
- Which traditional incumbents are most vulnerable? What should they do in this new world?
- How long does it take for incumbents to really be impacted?
4. The Titans of Tech: Who Wins:
- Why does Des believe that Apple could be a massive winner in the next wave of AI?
- Why does Des believe that Google have not been impressive and failed to keep pace?
- Why does Des think OpenAI should be wary of Amazon? What could they do to threaten them?
- What opportunity does Facebook have here? How could Instagram and Whatsapp win?
5. Startup and Investing 101:
- Why does Des believe that every founder should write a blog post per week?
- Why does Des believe that most B2B marketing sucks? What makes great B2B marketing?
- What are Des' biggest lessons from the Hopin journey?
- How has Des' angel investing changed in the last year with the rise of AI?
