Taste Is The New Moat | Why Customer Obsession Wins in the AI Era

Conor Bronsdon 0:06 Welcome back to Chain of Thought, everyone. I am your host, Conor Bronson. And today, we are thrilled to have Bharat Vasant on the show. He is the founder and CEO at Intangible. Bharat, welcome to the show. Thanks, Conan. Excited to be here. Yeah. I am loving your background. Anyone who's not watching on YouTube right now is missing out. It's a sunny day there, and we've got a a very fun background for you. So, definitely, if you're listening on your podcasting app of choice, that's great. But, you know, you should really check out the Galileo YouTube where every episode of this comes out

Conor Bronsdon 0:37 and where you can explore so much more about Bharat's journey from founder to VC, back to founder, again, intangible, or as he likes to refer to it, he is a recovering VC. And to kick things off, I wanna dive into what drove him back into founder mode. What was that specific spark or observation about the current AI landscape that convinced you that now was the time to build intangible

Bharat Vasan 1:00 and dive back in? Well, first, thank you. Excited to be here. I've been listener of the pod for a long time, so this is special for me. What brought me back to being a founder here? I think the number one thing was it's a very exciting time to be alive in technology. And what I mean by that is, you know, we've lived through many platform shifts when it was packaged goods software, and then, you know, the Internet came along, and then there was SaaS, and there was containerization,

Bharat Vasan 1:31 and AI is honestly changing hardware and software, and so the kinds of things you can build if you're a builder type are going to be pretty unique, pretty special. And one of my beliefs is that the best way to do it is to actually do it, and that's kinda how you learn in these early messy phases where, you know, it's not exactly clear how it works. It's not really clear how it'll get fleshed out. And in a few years, all that will be, you know, clean and sanitized and, you know, it'll evolve on a more predictable path. But right now, it feels like we're living through the very early days of the Internet.

Bharat Vasan 2:11 And I was in college when, you know, I came to this country from India, and I'd only heard of America, and I don't my exposure was mostly pop culture. So it was like an like a a child in India that was a, you know, a phenomenon of American pop culture. And the first time I came here, I remember just having access to the Internet and Telnet and FTP and stuff that people don't use anymore. And even though it was super niche,

Bharat Vasan 2:36 right, like, your, like, your hunger to be like, oh my god. This could be my conduit to the whole world It was just so exciting. And AI AI has that same vibe, you know, whether it's giving billions of people access to collective knowledge throughout the world or, in my space at least, you know, you're trying to create films, movies, games, thing people just do to entertain each other.

Bharat Vasan 3:01 It feels like another desktop publishing revolution is what my cofounder would call it, where it expands the human pool of creativity because now everyone can unleash that, and and that is pretty cool.

Conor Bronsdon 3:13 Yeah. I think we see a lot of skeptics push back and say, oh, so much of what's being generated is slop. And I think that ignores how much of any person's creative process is fine tuning and figuring out what the right things to build are, and we've made it so much easier to just build a quick MVP and get it out there. Now does that mean we have a lot of things coming out that aren't fully finished products? Sure.

Conor Bronsdon 3:39 But as we've seen in these last twenty years of the Internet era, we have this idea of building in public, and we are very much enabling everyone in the world potentially to create AI generated content and code and to bring their ideas into reality or at least into digital reality so far. What do you see as the evolving role of human creativity and human generated content as this

Conor Bronsdon 4:07 inference revolution is occurring?

Bharat Vasan 4:09 I see it as making it more accessible. Right? I I always think anytime so as far as creative tools go, as long as there have been tools, every time you know, I think the benefit of technology is it makes things easier, and it makes it more accessible. The Internet made knowledge more accessible. Google made, you know, the Internet more searchable. So every wave of technology that comes builds on top of something that came before and expands everyone's access to that pool of knowledge.

Bharat Vasan 4:38 And when I think about human created content, you know, I I think about the fact that human beings fundamentally do it because it's fun. Right? And it's a play is a really important part of our species, and so this notion that human beings are gonna get completely displaced because production of the content gets easier, in my mind, is misreading the situation.

Bharat Vasan 4:59 And I think one reason people misread that is because it takes so much effort to make a game or a movie at this point in time. You know, it's hundreds of people, many years, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars. GTA might cost as much as a billion dollars. You know, these are very, very large numbers, and they just feel so inaccessible. Like, you have to be a Christopher Nolan or a David Cameron or sorry, a James Cameron or, you know, an EA to make these big things.

Bharat Vasan 5:28 And every so many years, that clock gets reset in technology. And I think what's interesting right now is the film and game spaces are a little bit beaten down. You know, the agency space a little bit as well only because production sucks up so much of the time. There's very little time to do the fun part. What's fun about this piece of content? You know? It can be workshop. It can be build different iteration.

Bharat Vasan 5:52 It's kinda like, no. We need to green light an idea. It's rush, rush, rush production. Movie didn't work. Oh my god. Panic. Go back. Try it again with something else. And my hope my hope with AI is it rebalances that equation so you get more time to let the idea bake because creativity is is not this linear process. It's a lot of exploration, just kinda like, you know, improv comedy.

Bharat Vasan 6:14 And the AI allows people to explore those paths more rapidly. And so, hopefully, what we get out of this is better content. More ideation, more experimentation. More ideation, more experimentation, more talent being discovered. Where's the next field bird gonna come from? You know, because these are the tools that become accessible to them. And I would say that's happened throughout. You know, when the, you know, the Handycam came out and you could have a camera in the palm of your hand, that was a big deal. When phones had a camera come in you know, going to smartphones had a camera come in, that changed the game.

Bharat Vasan 6:47 And I think we're just seeing that next wave, you know, that next evolution of, like, if you can if you've got good taste and you've got concepts and you're willing to work at your craft, you can become a mister beast too. Right? And many years ago, that would have been hard to do. You have to have a network deal. You have to have producers. You have an have agency involved.

Bharat Vasan 7:07 You wouldn't be a guy in North Carolina who just works at this craft so hard, and then he has a distribution platform like YouTube that gets so big that that becomes the thing that he broadcasts on. And I think the this wave of AI is gonna invent new things like that that change the space that you can't even anticipate right now. So if the marginal cost of

Conor Bronsdon 7:27 digital creation, whether that's writing code or creating content, is trending towards zero, as I know you and others believe it's going to in this new era, what will the second order impacts be for our audience and for everyone who's seeking to build companies or create

Bharat Vasan 7:45 today? I think it's gonna be about taste and distribution. Like, do you have the taste to create content for a particular type of audience, and can you find distribution? So I do believe marginal cost of writing code is gonna go to zero, and the marginal cost of creating content is gonna go to zero as well. So in a world where you can create as much content, you know, as

Bharat Vasan 8:06 people can consume, the question becomes how do people even differentiate between that? How do they even discover your content? And, you know, what you've seen with, you know, vibe coding to some degree on Twitter, some other places is, you know, people just putting their idea out there on a distribution platform. Right? And telling their story, in public, and eventually it grows a user base that goes, oh, that's really, really cool. I wanna support this person. Mister Beast is a great example of that phenomenon.

Bharat Vasan 8:34 And I think this AI revolution is gonna bring other creators to the fore, and whether it's YouTube or some new new distribution thing that comes in, you know, out there, I think taste and distribution are really gonna drive adoption. And I think one thing that that people building companies and, you know, this is my advice to founders out there, take it for what it's worth, is think carefully about what you wanna represent in a world that is flat.

Bharat Vasan 9:01 You know, where distribution, you know, everyone has it, but your goal is to be crisp enough, compelling enough to communicate to an audience that goes, oh, that's, you know, that's my tribe. That's my that's my people. Whether you're building a podcast or a company yeah. No. Salesforce is still Salesforce. What do they do? They're all about sales. Right? And they'll include AI. They'll include whatever the new flavor of technology is coming, but what do you use Salesforce for? It's sales.

Bharat Vasan 9:29 And, surely, there'll be better tools that come out, but Salesforce brand is about one thing, and Apple's brand used to be about one thing. And I think as you think about building these software companies, the brand is the thing that that translates the most to people, and figuring out how to make it relatable to people or find it compelling to people is actually really hard. And it's a language problem. It's a zeitgeist problem. It's a what's the product problem.

Bharat Vasan 9:55 And every founder needs to be balancing those three things, whereas I think most, you know, founders feel like, you know, if you just make a product and put it out there, it'll somehow work. But what you actually see is sometimes that works, but often startups are about bending the world to this thing that you wanna come alive, and the world doesn't owe you followership.

Bharat Vasan 10:17 And so you've gotta generate that followership by talking about it and talking about it crisply and why it matters. And that generates the energy that people go, you know what? Sure. I'll give it a try. Oh, wow. This really is cool. Oh, you know, I didn't like it last week, but they shipped this, and now it's really fun. And I gave them some feedback. They did something about it. All of those things play into kinda how the company is perceived, and that's when you go from building a product to building a company as a founder. Yeah. I've thought about this idea for a long time as an individual in my career of trying

Conor Bronsdon 10:51 to treat my career and how I approach it as if I were a company of one. And, okay, like, who do I need to sell to? How do I market? What kind of product am I building with my own personal differentiation? And it kind of dovetails nicely with this idea of, you know, what's your personal brand? Right? That's something we've heard from every LinkedIn creator for a long time.

Conor Bronsdon 11:14 And you've suggested, and I think very accurately, that software companies, because of the reduced cost of creation of software and content, are essentially becoming brands and taste makers where we need to have great distribution, we need to have great differentiation, and you need to have taste to establish this and and strategy. So what does it mean to be a brand,

Bharat Vasan 11:39 whether as an individual content creator or as a company in this new era? Well, it depends on what part of the stack you're in. You know? I think, you know, NVIDIA's brand is about we have the best AI chips, and our promise is we'll have the most innovative stuff. Things that, you know, Intel has left by the wayside and let them claim, but you have a few new chip companies like Grok and others that are coming up. In this new AI era, I think about it as they're chipmakers. Right? They're putting their the foundries. They're putting them you know, they're making the things that basically are the the the metal that power this revolution.

Bharat Vasan 12:14 Then there are the infrastructure providers providers. Right? The a dub the AWSs, the Google clouds of the world that are basically the layer on top of that on top of which you can actually build. Then there's model companies, right, the OpenAI's of the world, and then there are application companies. I think the interesting thing if you say like this is a, you know, if you're building an application company, I think brands matter. I think brand matters all the way up and down the stack, but I think it especially matters at the application layer.

Bharat Vasan 12:42 And I think the more you get to building silicon, right, like you've got foundries, there's much more of a moat, there's a lot more forgiveness. I'm not saying you should take it lightly, but I'm saying there's a little bit more of a moat. Whereas in the application space, there's no loyalty. Right? You're building in public. Your product's no good. People can just easily turn off a few product. And so,

Bharat Vasan 13:04 you know, asking your audience, cultivating your community to give you a little bit of the benefit of the doubt as you continue to build this very ambitious thing that serves them, and them believing that you will actually do that and you actually showing that they're gonna do that ends up becoming the relationship between you and an audience, and that compounds over time. And that's kinda how I think about it for my company. Right? We're not building this product for ourselves.

Bharat Vasan 13:30 We love using the product, but we're not the audience. If it doesn't work for users, you've gotta spend every week, every hour sitting and looking at it and going, why don't they use it? What makes sense? It's not their job to tell me what's wrong with my positioning or why the product doesn't work for them. I've gotta go through and figure out all of that stuff. I think one nice thing about

Bharat Vasan 13:51 this new era we're building in company is AI can help with all that stuff internally, and then you can start to refine what you wanna mean within this space. I also think fundamentally, fast can build more ambitious companies in this day and age. Definitely agree. Coming out of VC and moving to becoming a founder, like, you know, I think one thing becoming a a venture capitalist gives you a lens for is

Bharat Vasan 14:15 how big a company needs to be to generate returns for a fund. And, you know, man, you know, when my first startup, you know, I had an exit. Again, that was life changing kind of event for me. You know, a 100,000,000 was I was like, it was a lot you know, it was a big exit. It was a lot of money. And now most venture investors are looking at it saying, hey. Listen. Valuations have gone up, but we hope in the AI space,

Bharat Vasan 14:42 there's, you know, a $10,000,000,000 exit. And, yes, maybe I'm paying a little bit more, but every company that's taking VC money, I think their VCs are in hoping you're like a fund returner, right, which is, you know, your company sells whatever percentage they own, 20%. Yeah. It returns all the fund. They're hoping for something that is gonna do, you know, five x, 10 x the fund size that they have.

Bharat Vasan 15:06 And I just felt like if you're gonna build a company and you're gonna take venture capital, let's focus on something that is that big. And I can't think of a a bigger opportunity than catering to human creativity or building new productivity just given the sort of functionality, the kind of, you know, productivity gain that AI is gonna unleash in all of us.

Conor Bronsdon 15:30 I wanna talk more about this idea of unleashing creativity and kind of dive into the details of what does this mean for incumbents who have established distribution versus startups who have taste and vision. But you've brought up a really good point that we should dig into first, which is, you know, having been on both sides of the table as a founder and a VC,

Conor Bronsdon 15:52 what's your current assessment of the venture capital landscape for AI startups? It sounds like what you're hearing is VCs are seeking those outsized returns and are willing to pay that premium because they believe in this idea of, hey. You can build a bigger company faster

Bharat Vasan 16:08 and and maybe more broadly, based off of the tooling that's being established with AI. Well, I think the VC business is really interesting right now. I think, you know, the Zurp era, the free capital spawned a lot of allocation into the space. I think the lack of exits has caused a lot of people who did pull money into this space to pull back a little bit. I also think it's a craft business, it doesn't scale as well as people thought. And so if you're going to be in the venture business,

Bharat Vasan 16:38 you're either gonna be a really big fund, right, and you're gonna be able to index many of the opportunities in the market. So, you know, you're gonna see most of the market, you're gonna place a lot of bets, some of them will work out, you you accept slightly lower returns in exchange for not missing out on the five or 10 companies that are market making in any given year.

Bharat Vasan 17:02 On the other side of it, you've got the craft business, you know, the way venture capital used to be, and that business is a sort of a lone wolf business, you know, where you have to be a really good picker, you have to have some advantage network, some advantage source of deal flow, and you have some thesis whether it's about the founding team or the future, and you tend to be quite a lot. Right? And you can actually win those deals.

Bharat Vasan 17:30 And that business has changed a lot as well just because the number of funds out there. It's brutally competitive. It's still pretty hard, I would say, to raise unless you're an AI. And I think in AI, one reason every you know, there's so much interest is because people don't feel like this is a trend for a few years. You know, it's not like the VR space or anything where everyone piles into, but, like, you know, everyone's not gonna walk around wearing VR devices.

Bharat Vasan 17:55 But AI is one of those few technologies, but because it's not just hard software, it's human eyed robots helping you at home using some of the same algorithms that, you know, full self driving in Tesla was able to do. And so the implications for that kind of technology and what it could do for everything from human longevity to chores to population aging, like really big structural things that help the economy grow

Bharat Vasan 18:19 are just truly profound. And so if you're a VC, you're thinking, listen. I'm gonna invest in the company. I really like the founding team. I really like this idea. I think there's gonna be a great business over here, but, man, I'm just getting less ownership or, you know, I'm like, I I don't have as much of it as I'd like. And you've gotta weigh that against just not having any of it, right, or missing out one of those deals. And that's sort of the tortured space that, you know, investors live in right now, which is, am I paying too much for this deal and owning too little of it versus am I missing out completely? Am I investing in the wrong thing? So I know a lot of people think VC is a cushy job, and, you know, maybe it was when every company was going public and it was easy to make money in SaaS, but all of those safe harbors within VC

Bharat Vasan 19:04 have really started to disappear over the last three years. And with the end of free money, you know, from the Fed, I think it's really, really, you know, returned that business to what it should have been, which is, you know, very specific focus on a very specific strategy that that investor is executing in the market. It's still easier than being an, you know, an actual operator, I will say, as a founder,

Bharat Vasan 19:28 But it's not an easy business. It just takes a really long time to find out if you're wrong. That's the one thing about the VC business that it's just different from founders. You know? It's very hard to to hide the fact that you haven't built a great product and, you know, your users are trading off or whatever it is. And I think investing is different because you do get these ten year funds, and and you're investing them over three years, and it takes anywhere between seven and fifteen years to see any returns.

Bharat Vasan 19:55 So imagine you and I have jobs where it's like, you know, it's seven years before anyone figures out it for any good. And we're farther from the bare metal, so we're not getting the immediate customer feedback.

Conor Bronsdon 20:05 Exactly. What about on the founder side? What actionable advice would you give to other founders who are also navigating the fundraising process with this new environment that's been established over the last couple of years and specifically the AI boom environment?

Bharat Vasan 20:22 Depends on what your business is and why you got into it in the first place. I would first and foremost say this is my third venture backed startup. You know, my first two were acquired. So, you know, I started this company because I had a space I really liked, right, which is the media and entertainment space. I have a cofounder that I deeply respect and really like being in business with, going to work every day. We have a team that's really, really great. Then I have investors in my cap table who are great and are not drama.

Bharat Vasan 20:54 Right? And so for me, a lot of those pieces came to fit. And everything else about it, you still gotta do the work. You know? As as YC says, like, you've gotta make, you know, something that people love, and that is all about digging trenches. And if you don't like digging trenches, then I suggest you don't become a founder in this market or any other market because it's not this high concept that gives it to you. I think some some founders certainly end up becoming better storytellers

Bharat Vasan 21:21 than other founders, but it doesn't take away the pain of like, okay. You know, we're trying this out. Nobody responded to my product. What part of it doesn't work? It's a very, very creative enterprise. Like, what should we try differently? And the speed at which you uncover and turn over those cards is really, really important. So I don't know that my advice to founders in the AI space

Bharat Vasan 21:43 it's certainly easier if you have an AI startup, by the way. I I will say that. But, you know, e even if you didn't, I would say the speed at which you can ship clarifies for you whether you have a business or not, and it clarifies for the world and other investors whether you have a business or not. And so my religion at every startup has always been ship as quickly as you can. It's okay if it doesn't work because if it doesn't work, you learn something. And if it does work, you learn something.

Bharat Vasan 22:10 But not shipping, you get to live in your little bubble and vision of what it's gonna be five years from now, ten years from now. And it's really easy as a founder to fool yourself because your team doesn't wanna hear the bad news. You don't wanna hear the bad news. You have this huge bias around it's going to work. Right? And I think the you know, as Andy Grove said, like, only the paranoid survives. So maybe that's not the right philosophy for every founder, but it's it's been helpful to me. Like, you know, the moment you're like, oh, that's it. It's really exciting. Oh, that's it. That's who we need. These people love our product. We found our little tribe. How do I find more people in that community?

Bharat Vasan 22:48 How do I build more stuff for them is just such an exciting moment. And that clarifies, by the way, everything about your culture, who you hire, how you go to market, what features you build. You know, everything becomes so much easier when you get that moment. But most founders gets between, you know, the idea and that product market fit phase. I think I read a stat something like only 15%

Bharat Vasan 23:13 of companies are getting to series a. Maybe it's 30%, but it's a pretty it's a pretty low number. There are lots of seed stage startups getting funded, but fewer of them are making it to the series a. And I think that's a reflection of, you know, the AI boom. People are willing to write small checks into a large number of companies, but then it's not really clear. So I I always think one round ahead to

Bharat Vasan 23:37 where does my company need to be in order to receive that funding or be profitable? Basically, I gotta be default alive.

Conor Bronsdon 23:46 Yeah. I I think I've definitely heard that phrase default alive from from other great founders, and I think it's also interesting to look at the impacts that AI is having on the relationship between incumbents and startups, where it's so much easier to get started with a startup now, where it's like, yeah, I can vibe code an app in an afternoon and have a demo, and I can maybe go out and start pitching.

Conor Bronsdon 24:08 But this also means that major incumbents who have established distribution, who have established communities, can much more rapidly adapt in certain areas. How do you see the current move of, hey. It's easier to code. It's easier to write. It's easier to create, or at least at the basic levels, even if getting from, you know, 80 to a 100% may still be very hard,

Conor Bronsdon 24:31 impacting both the incumbents who threaten startups and the startups who are attempting to carve out new niches?

Bharat Vasan 24:39 That's a great question. I I it's probably easier than ever before to start a company, and any good idea is gonna get copied. Yes. And I think the difference between the companies that sort of get through this uncanny valley of like, you know, we have a good idea to we have a company with customers that's a real business that's, you know, generating profit or at least is fundable by the world.

Bharat Vasan 25:05 I think the big difference is they discover something that is uniquely theirs. Like, mister Beast discovered, like, you know, there was this whole other way to produce content, relate to an audience, and build it out. It's not like there weren't YouTubers before that, but he had a vision that was just bigger than everybody else. And he had the ability and the skills, and he put in the time and the effort to build it.

Bharat Vasan 25:28 And so I do think AI is a vertical technology. It's just like the Internet being, you know, incorporated into all software. That's gonna happen with all of the incumbents, and they will have distribution. But incumbents are have a bunch of disadvantages. And, again, I worked at a big company, then went to start my own company, so I have some lens of this. One, they're slow.

Bharat Vasan 25:51 Speed is the advantage of every startup. You have nothing that you're so attached to in the world, whereas if you ever worked at a big company, you know, the product that you have, the p and l you have, the public reporting, the review cycles, you know, the HR cycles you've got to go to replace talent or recruit any talent. Like everything about a big company is slow. So in other words, it's it's very big and it can crush you, but it's very, very slow moving. So one advantage a startup has is speed.

Bharat Vasan 26:21 I think the second advantage a startup had is just creativity. Right? There are things that you can capture for a new generation of users that the last generation of companies wasn't really focused on. But for exam and and can be in super boring spaces too or spaces that you know, because those users really care about it. You know, as an example, there's a tool many of us use in startup land for

Bharat Vasan 26:44 our bug tracking feature request, like just how development work gets done. It's called linear. Right? And linear does pretty much the same thing that, you know, Jira did. And before Jira, there were other tools that did it. Shortcuts and other ones doing it now. Yeah. Yeah. And so you get fresher takes in the world, and they build something that's so insanely great. You're just like, you know, if I'm gonna start something today, that's what I'm gonna be on. Right? I'm not going back to the old way. So there's always a new generation of people. You know, Canva and fig Figma were the same way. Right? Like, Illustrator existed before. Photoshop existed before.

Bharat Vasan 27:20 But when Melanie Perkins, you know, the founder of Canva, came to the Valley, she met with every VC, and they told her, like, this is probably not a big market. Market. You know, Canva is orders a bigger a magnitude bigger than Sigma, which is based right here in San Francisco. And it's really because she had an insight that the rest of the market simply overlooked,

Bharat Vasan 27:41 and you would be surprised at the number of times that happens both in startup land and with big company. So the second advantage is some key insight you have that the world, for whatever reason, is like, yeah. That's really not a thing. Like Airbnb. Yeah. Sleeping in strangers' beds at home, not a thing. Getting into strangers' cars, like, you know, that's not really a thing. And so the market systematically

Bharat Vasan 28:01 underestimates these things until it worked, and then everyone piles into it, but it's a little too late. So the second thing is I would say insight. And the third thing I would say with really big companies is, I don't know the best way to say it is sometimes, you know, it's like it's you've you've been a Lannister for so long, you forget how to fight or something.

Bharat Vasan 28:25 Yeah. Right? The walls are really high. Everyone's really rich. Like, you know, life is really comfortable. You got people waiting on you. You're manning a post on the wall. Yeah. Yeah. You're not talking about the White Walkers in the wall, and it's really, really cold, and you're trying to find food. And that's kinda what founders have. They have that, you know, that that hunger, that, you know, that little dog in them, which is like, I gotta figure out how to make this thing work

Bharat Vasan 28:47 every single day. You know, if I as as a founder, if me and Charles don't get out of bed and we're moving things forward, I'm not saying our our team doesn't do that. Our whole team is like that. We're you know, like an entirely but the culture is very different from you know, when I worked at a big company, if I got up and I didn't do anything, I took a week off, two weeks off, a month off.

Bharat Vasan 29:07 It wouldn't be out of because, you know, the business has revenue. It's profitable. Like, you're not you as a person are not gonna break a business. Right? And I think startups are, like, a little bit like pirates. They're like, they got into this leaky boat with a bunch of fires burning on board, and, like, you're off looking for treasure. And, like, you know, most likely you won't find it, but eventually you hope to upgrade to something a little bit bigger and then bigger and then hope someday you end up like the US Navy, right, with the sailors standing on the deck and it's aircraft carrier. But in the beginning, it's just a boat with usually like you know one to three people as founders

Bharat Vasan 29:41 just rowing away and then be like well you know there's gonna be treasure over there, let's go check it out, or we have this vision and literally nobody should follow a bunch of pirates, but it's also where all the good stuff comes from. Something new comes into the world.

Conor Bronsdon 29:55 Yeah. And I think another aspect of this idea around insights too is that even if you have the insight, if you don't execute on it, if you don't Yeah. Create a differentiation, if you don't establish taste around it as you brought up earlier, and you aren't relentless about it, it's so easy to fail. As you mentioned, there are so many competitors that will clone you today. And

Conor Bronsdon 30:20 if you rest on your laurels, it's very easy to fall back there. So while it's both easier to start a startup, I also think it's becoming hyper competitive. And every startup has that hits any sort of success has multiple clones. And so any, you know, taking your foot off the gas too much as as some folks may have learned to do at larger companies will, you know, leave you open to these pirates to come rate you. And

Conor Bronsdon 30:47 you've been talking, I think, throughout this interview so far around this idea of approaching the new paradigm of AI building, and building for this new AI era. And I know that you've set some rules as well for brand marketing and how to approach it, particularly for software companies in this new area era when a startup trying to cut through the noise may theoretically have someone copycatting its features very next week at unprecedented speed.

Conor Bronsdon 31:19 How do you act differently in this extremely agile, fast paced, AI enabled era?

Bharat Vasan 31:26 Gosh. That's a good question, man. I think the first thing is there's multiple paths to victory. Right? Like the people who are the loudest on Twitter aren't the ones crushing it. There's somewhere, you know for every one of those, there's probably 20 founders who found some niche that they can tackle, they're building a large business, you'll hear about them like many years down the line,

Bharat Vasan 31:50 because right now like they're not the noisy ones on Twitter. So I think the first thing is just doing the work, right, at the brand level, at the relating to a user level, figuring out if it's actually working and just really being customer obsessed is really, actually really hard. Because as a founder, you have VCs, you have conferences, you have all the stuff that sort of distracts you. It's designed to distract you.

Bharat Vasan 32:17 And one big piece of advice I have, it's not brand. Your brand is gonna be built if your startup is successful. And I think too many people get into it because they can get to the NFL. And they don't realize getting to the NFL is different level of competition. Every round you raise isn't more glory. It's more pressure to Right. Perform at an even higher level. And and

Bharat Vasan 32:40 investor dollars are not some sanguine type of thing. They're expecting a return out of them. And so this is a long winded answer. Right? But but your question was, how do people go about building a brand? My advice to founders would be, one, do the work and be relentless about it. Just customer obsessed. Be creative about it. It's not just about the grind. It's like, you know, how do I communicate differently? Even if it's the same customer, how do I do this differently? What makes it relatable?

Bharat Vasan 33:09 But nothing solves for hours spent with customers as opposed to conferences, VC parties, whatever. I think the second thing is if you can get good at language and AI is leveling that a little bit, figure out what's the best way in which you can communicate your vision. It is very, hard for startups to cut through the noise when the founder has a great idea, but they don't have a cofounder

Bharat Vasan 33:32 who, you know, has that gift of language to translate that for the world. And, you know, this is why I like two founder systems, you know, because there's at least two of you and you have a way to bounce ideas off of you. So I think language, figuring out what format you communicate the best, how do you best put the message out there. Because the thing you can change about it is yourself.

Bharat Vasan 33:54 Right? Like, you're the limiting factor. You are who you are. You do the things you do well. And so figuring out how what modes you communicate well, I think, is the second piece of advice. And the third thing is I would say take some risks. I think, you know, people it's like a frog boiling type of thing. You come out of a big company or, you know, I believe you've had a failed startup. Like, you don't know what that age is like where you're like, never again.

Bharat Vasan 34:17 And so you just start taking risks that don't feel, you know, like, oh, what's gonna happen to my brand? Like, nothing's gonna happen to your brand. Nobody like, nobody knows you exist. Like, nobody knows that my company exists. It's a really big world. And so take the advantage of this time to take some creative risks and see if that cuts through the noise. Those are probably the three things, and I think founders tend to be very conservative about those. They either don't put in the word

Bharat Vasan 34:42 or they end up being too conservative on the message, and then it doesn't cut through a noise where it's a pretty noisy world. And this isn't new, by the way. You know? Jobs said this at Apple. It's a noisy world, and actually the hardest thing to do is simplify and make your company about one thing. Focus, clarity. Focus, clarity, and it takes a lot of effort to polish a company down to, like, one thing.

Bharat Vasan 35:06 Because when you start, you have, like, a million ideas, and then you see your competitors, and you're like, oh, maybe you we should be doing that. Oh, the VCs want this, and I need to raise my next round. Maybe our story should have some of this. And what that does is it confuses the brand around you know, are you this, are you that, and there's not enough fidelity around it. So

Bharat Vasan 35:24 that's probably my number one thing, believe in what you're trying to do over the long run and focus on that one thing and have the data from users kinda be your north star as opposed to all of the noise in startup land. Always make your customers' beer taste better. Right.

Conor Bronsdon 35:41 And I know that this layers of distractions that can occur, these can really take builders off track, whether that's, as you pointed out, the narrative that's being pushed to raise that next round or conferences, something else, it can leave startups in a position where maybe they get commoditized, where they're not actually out innovating their competitors,

Conor Bronsdon 36:10 And everyone seems to be building similar rappers, similar agents in some of these areas. How do you think founders today should be avoiding

Bharat Vasan 36:20 this trap and building something that's truly defensible, as you put it earlier? I think shipping clarifies. The number one thing I found helpful to me is if you have a thesis, you ship it, and then you get to see if it works. Or I should say differently, you can see what parts of it worked, what parts of it didn't work. Right? And I think people imagine this is one big event. You do your open beta or you close beta, and then this huge thing happens.

Bharat Vasan 36:47 I think with startups, it's more like you have hundreds of these things that, you know, happen every you know, over time, and then you get very very good in your judgment about oh this is the thing, you've built a lot of conviction. When the gap between those ship periods is pretty long, you just have too little data, you live in your own head, know everyone's got a roadmap, everyone's got this future they want to build, But I think, you know, shipping, I would say, clarifies

Bharat Vasan 37:12 because it tells you exactly where you stand. And then you're and if you know where you stand, you can do something about it. I've always said startups are not a test of intelligence, by the way. If startups were a test of intelligence, this all the smartest people would be doing startups. Right? Like, no startups would ever be founded by anyone except the smartest people. But what you find

Bharat Vasan 37:34 to start a business, to have it be successful, it's a test of resilience and creativity and persistence and all of the stuff that you know, and it turns out like 90% of people whether you play a sport or you do start up, they just don't have what it takes to get up every single day and, you know, and grind away. Right? With no reward. You're working on your craft,

Bharat Vasan 37:57 and the work itself has to be reward enough. And I just don't think this isn't like a criticism of matters. It's like like most human beings don't have that. What person would wanna if you could have a great job that pays you really well at a tech company or any other company and you could have vacations and you got a family and kids, you know, why would you wanna work Memorial Day and, like, Sunday and Saturday and schedule meetings and have this just be normal? And everyone's looking at you like, why are you guys doing this? You don't

Bharat Vasan 38:25 get paid that much. Like, you don't even know if it's gonna work. And so it's really not a test of intelligence. If if we were smart, we would just not do it. But you've gotta want something so badly that, like, you know, the best people to build it is you, and you wanna, you know, recruit other people to your cause. So I I always think about it as, like, it's a little bit of a cult, like, a little bit of a a mission, a little bit of religion you're creating.

Bharat Vasan 38:51 We're like, this is the thing we're gonna do, guys. And when we do, it's gonna be awesome. And by by the way, that pirate analogy still holds. Right? There's always, like you know, there's always some Jack Sparrow who's like, god. It's gonna be amazing. What's gonna get there? There's gonna be treasure. Right? And just imagine how awesome it's gonna be, but that works, you know, with getting people

Bharat Vasan 39:10 to you know, they're I think Steve Jobs said, when you ask for help around something compelling in the world, you will find the help. People will come out of the woodwork to support your particular thing. You just don't know where it is. But you've gotta keep at it every single day until that message gets through. And so, you know, that's my whole thing. I don't think there's, like, one answer for how a startup becomes successful or one type of founder.

Bharat Vasan 39:37 I don't think there's any point worrying about competition. I heard Paul Graham say, like, you know, the thing that startups enjoy is the same thing airplanes in the sky enjoy, which is it turns out there's a lot of air separating all these airplanes. There's plenty of room to support many different types of companies. And sitting in your Twitter feed or your LinkedIn feed and be like, oh my god. This thing shipped yesterday. It's gonna destroy us.

Bharat Vasan 40:00 It's a moment of panic, but it mean it's a blip in the grand scheme of things. You don't know how they're really doing. You don't know how hard they're working. You you don't know what's wrong with their company. So I think shipping always clarifies because users tell you, yeah, I like it, but I don't love it. And you're like, cool. What can I do to fix that? How do I get people to love my product?

Bharat Vasan 40:20 And, you know, there's that moment where, like, you get those little bits of encouragement, long plateaus of nothing happens. And then one day you're like, oh my god. This really worked. That's crazy. And in sports, it's like that. If you've ever played sports, like, you know you know, I was a tennis player. It's like, it takes hitting a lot of hitting against the ball to get your forehand, and you work in your backhand, and you work in your smash, and your volleys.

Bharat Vasan 40:43 But if you like it and you really wanna learn, you know, your sport, and it's true for any other sport or music or anything else, it just takes a while to to master it. So, you know, for folks that wanna master this and wanna be in the grind, it it actually is kinda fun. And when you're doing something in AI, you have the knowledge of knowing, look. It's all new. Yeah. Like, I have the same advantage some, know, 20 year old kid, 15 year old, you know, kid does as someone who's 50 years old and has education, but the it it's just a matter of we're all navigating the same market, it's all new.

Conor Bronsdon 41:17 And we're all being enabled to ship faster, whether that's writing that extra LinkedIn post, building your next feature, whatever else it might be. There is an opportunity to leverage AI to help us ship faster. Seems to clarify for me that, okay, great. We have to constantly be shipping. You have to constantly trying things. You have to be taking that data back in, iterating, experimenting as we've talked about throughout the episode.

Conor Bronsdon 41:41 But how do I build that resiliency of taking on that grind, and how do I build that, I guess, cultural optimism into the DNA of my AI company as I as I build it? What do I need to do to ensure that not only am I obsessed over it as a founder, but also everyone I'm bringing on board is joining me in that obsession and wants to solve customer problems and is excited and fired up to do that? How do I get them to work on that beforehand?

Bharat Vasan 42:09 I think it's really hard. I think the first thing is, you know, you lead by example, so you you've gotta be willing to do it. And so, first of all, I would say being a founder is not the right answer for everyone. In fact, I would say it's not the right answer for most people, just like being a pro basketball player. It's not the right answer, you know, for me, for most people.

Bharat Vasan 42:28 And so I don't mean to suggest founders are in a different category. It's just that they're optimized for a different thing. They're optimized for, like, you know, we're just in the grass while the elephants are fighting, and some people are better for running things at Google scale, right, than a founder might be at that that stage. I think one, you've gotta be interested in the problem long run. I think two, you've gotta be

Bharat Vasan 42:51 wanting to be in business. And I would say not just like, you know, you can work with someone, but it helps if you admire someone. Like, I really admire my cofounder, and that keeps me wanting to do better. Right? And he has the same level of things as those mutual admiration society of like, oh my god. It's so cool. Because that's all you have, this little when you start, it's just like two of you. It's so cool that I get to work with this person. Maybe you can build something great. It's like you're starting your little pride.

Bharat Vasan 43:17 Right? You gotta be excited about the little things, and if you're not, then it just becomes, oh, we're just gonna add more engineers. We're gonna add more people. That will all come, but you've gotta want to work with people around you. Same thing with investors. I think third is you gotta want you gotta like your customers. I think one thing I learned across companies as an investor and even my first couple of things is think my second startup, which was, like, in the smart home business,

Bharat Vasan 43:44 it was like it was a we're building smart locks. Right? And it's a company called August. Super cool. Loved it as a customer. I don't know if I ever woke up a day as a kid and went like you know, I love gadgets, which is why I got into it. But I don't know that as, you know, like, 12 year old, 15 year old Barat could go, oh, man. I wanna be in the lock business someday.

Bharat Vasan 44:05 It was just never like a thought he had. Like, oh, man. I'm gonna be in the video game business, you know, someday, and that that came true for me. I worked with EA for many years. And so you've really gotta like your customers. That's who that's who you should be spending the most time with. And I think when you don't have that affinity right? If you love payroll, it's fine. You just gotta love working on payroll for the you know, for your customers. Not everyone does. But when you don't,

Bharat Vasan 44:27 it sort of becomes like an intellectual problem. Right? Like, oh, the product manager will work on it. The engineer works on it, but you're not setting that tone of everyone ought to care about this. Like, Parker Conrad at Grippling is great at this. Like, that bad guy cares about benefits and, like, payroll and all of these little details so much that everyone that works at the company just knows that they have to care about it at least

Bharat Vasan 44:49 somewhere close to the ballpark because the CEO is reading customer support ticket. Jamie at Ring, you know, the doorbell company, you know, the camera company, Jamie had like his email on all of the Ring boxes for a very long time. So, you know, when your CEO takes customer support seriously at that level, it leaves no excuse for the rest of the organization because they're not focused on some project meeting they went to. They're they're they're getting emailed every single day about and Bezos had the same thing in Amazon. So, you know, I I think that does set the tone. And I think the last thing I would say, decide what kind of business you wanna be in. There are plenty of businesses

Bharat Vasan 45:26 that don't require taking venture capital. And, you know, venture capital is really rocket fuel. Right? It is meant for rockets. It meant like, if you take it, the assumption is you're a rocket, you're gonna go to space. Like, you're gonna fly high up in the air. But most businesses are not venture capital businesses. So it's just helpful to figure out, you know, this is a lifestyle business, which in in in the AI age, you might actually be able to create entire lifestyle businesses,

Bharat Vasan 45:53 you know, that pay your bill for the rest of life. You can have a very good life managing a ton of people, and you can learn a few skills and keep evolving it. You saw some of that in the SaaS days, but I think you're gonna see a lot more of it in this AI age. You're gonna see it from all parts of the world. But venture capital is this pressure to grow if, like, we're trying to build a 5,000,000,000, $10,000,000,000 business. So if you're that type of founder and that's your capital base, you've gotta realize that that's the game you've gotten yourself into.

Bharat Vasan 46:20 And you've gotta figure out how to build that type of company, attract those types of people, and generate that type of outcome. So I do think capital puts that pressure on you, so be careful as you go through these rounds of what you're seeing in your data and also just be honest about do I really wanna build that scale of company, or am I happy with something much, much smaller?

Conor Bronsdon 46:46 And it sounds like, 16 year old Bharat may have been really excited about the idea of you building a company that is enabling creativity in three d Yeah. And art. And as we talked about earlier with this idea of, you know, inference and coding and writing all becoming so much easier to access for everyone on the world and easier to get started with, I can tell you're fired up about this idea of,

Conor Bronsdon 47:14 hey. Let's help collaboration for film, for games, whatever else we're building, become so much easier with intangible. And I I do very much see you taking those lessons too from Canva and Figma, which they clearly did around, this huge creative market as well. I'm I'm excited about

Bharat Vasan 47:32 technology expanding that creative envelope for people. And and I think the one of the reasons I resonate so strongly with it is, you know, I grew up in India. There wasn't a lot of import export type of stuff. So but I had two sets of LEGOs. One was like a space LEGO, and then I think one was like a construction LEGO. And as a kid, that's that's all we could afford, and I forget who'd given it to us. I would create all of these things with the LEGOs.

Bharat Vasan 47:58 Right? And as an introvert, like, you spend a lot of time, like, building things and constructing things about how the future is gonna be. You see that technology has done that for successive generations of kids and builders. Right? Like, kids are building on roadblocks right now, and those kids are gonna grow up and become engineers or build something cool and interesting and different.

Bharat Vasan 48:17 And I do think these cultural influences have a huge impact on the future, and I'm very excited about AI being able to orchestrate things that were previously very complex. Like those Lego blocks, right, the fact that they fit exactly right and it was that easy, and then you had time and you figured out how to create a building, and you're like, well, I'm gonna a tree or a space station.

Bharat Vasan 48:40 But you were just figuring things out, and it was just fun. And so my hope is, you know, someday, you're sitting in you have the same resources that a James Cameron or Christopher Nolan or the world's best game makers do, and, you know, there's expert, and you you're sitting in a room, you're like, you know, should we do the cinematography this way? You know, what about a drone shot over here? Wouldn't it be cool if the car jumped over this bridge? And you're just telling stories.

Bharat Vasan 49:03 Right? And you're able to create something, and you're able to put it out in the world, and people go, oh, that's really, really cool. And even if it it's not, you know, it's not for, like, commercial appeal, it's just fun. Even if it's just for your group of friends, even if it's, you know, something fun for your parents or your family you did or something you showed off at, you know, Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas.

Bharat Vasan 49:24 Those are, like, the little moments where I'm like, you know, it's not about some big corporate thing where you're producing big commercials and stuff. It might actually bring the fun back to those micro moments. And so I'm very excited about the fact that, there are all of these models out there right now, right, at least in my space. So what Intangible does is we're building the world's simplest three d creative tool to communicate better with all of these AI models that have incredible power,

Bharat Vasan 49:50 but you've gotta communicate with them through typing. So imagine you had, like, the world's most, you know, gifted cinematographers, production crew, lighting people, whatever it is, and you have Christopher Nolan, like famous director on the other side. And the only way he can communicate with them is by text. He's gotta do an entire movie by text. Move the camera to the left. I want this. And then they you know, it takes a few minutes, and then he you know, it shows up, and he's like, no. No. No. That's not quite right.

Bharat Vasan 50:19 And that's kind of the state of art right now, you know, with with ChatGPT and tools like that, at least in the media space. Right? If it's just text based reasoning, research, totally makes sense that text is the right interface and, you know, prompting is the best thing. You want the thing that's in your head as a human being to be the thing that you see on the screen, and text is just not the right way of doing that. So the promise for Intangible,

Bharat Vasan 50:43 at least, is can we build something that allows human beings to get the vision that's in their head to a machine which, you know, is orders of magnitude more powerful and can give it to you, but it can translate that if all you're doing is texting it little bits of context. And if you can simply show it, you know, in three d in this interactive world, this is what I mean, and even if you do a rough sketch of it, it can take it and run

Bharat Vasan 51:09 and create a whole production grade environment. Right? And that's that speed and control that you want in these early stages. And I think of Legos like that. It's speed and control. I can control every little piece of it, but it's also really, really fast to put things together. And the more you do it, the more it builds your confidence. And I feel like that's what Canva did. That's what Figma did. So in this world of, you know,

Bharat Vasan 51:31 models that are starting to do film and games and, you know, campaign commercials and all this stuff, is some way to create virtual cinematographers and other people that you can have conversations with. And you can get good at this craft if that's something you're excited about. I'm I love it. I'm super excited to see what you build with Intangible,

Conor Bronsdon 51:51 and everyone can check it out at intangible.ai and request early access. Plus, make sure you follow Bharat on LinkedIn where he shares a ton of incredible insights. Bharat, is there anywhere else that our audience should be going to check you out and follow the work that's being done in Intangible? Twitter as well.

Bharat Vasan 52:07 And, yeah, if people are curious about it, curious about the space, happy to tell you more, at least my point of view,

Conor Bronsdon 52:14 and thank you for having me on. Yeah. Thanks for coming to share your point of view with our listeners. It's been a fantastic conversation. Everyone who is listening, make sure you keep up with the latest AI news and expertise from folks like Bharat here on the podcast by subscribing in your podcasting feed. Let's say maybe you're on YouTube, maybe you're on Spotify,

Conor Bronsdon 52:34 maybe you're on Apple Podcasts, you're consuming this. Hey, a like goes a long way. A comment goes a long way. A rating or review goes a long way to helping us get more incredible guests like Bharat and so many more that you've hopefully listened to here with Chain of Thought. Thank you all for tuning in, and we'll see you next week. Bharat, thanks again for coming on the show. It's been fantastic having you.