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"Speed should get you to somewhere that has more long-term advantages." - Decagon CEO Jesse Zhang (Jesse Zhang) At $4.5B-valued Decagon, speed is an advantage, not a moat. "If everyone is at the same starting line in the early days, it's just, how fast can you go?" Zhang tells... Upstarts Media. "We really pride ourselves on our go-to-market execution, but that's not a long-term differentiator." So why does Decagon win accounts like big banks, airlines and telcos over competitors? While rivals are "hedging across a bunch of different approaches," Decagon takes an opinionated approach to encouraging customers to iterate within the product, Zhang argues. "They're like, 'Okay, yeah, we believe in this,'" he says. Catch the full interview on The Upstarts Podcast (links below) 👀show more

Alex Konrad

88,877 subscribers

18,276 次观看 • 5 个月前 •via X (Twitter)

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"The pace of building has changed so quickly with AI. You have to give somewhere. And we gave for speed." Ashwin Sreenivas. Co-founder & President of Decagon. You'd be hard pressed to find another startup moving as ferociously as this one. Knuckle Up ↓ 00:00 Intro 02:10 How did Jesse and Ashwin decide what to work on at Decagon? 04:19 Why did they reject the top-down market-sizing approach? 13:16 What does Decagon give up to keep moving fast? 17:54 6 days in-office for founders, 5 for everyone else. 23:33 Why didn't Decagon hire a single employee until $1M in ARR? 27:12 How do you hire 450 people in three years without compromising quality? 31:20 Are Decagon engineers even writing code anymore? 35:08 How does the IC engineer role change with Claude Code and Cursor? 36:32 How does EPD leadership change in the AI era? 40:15 Two types of FDE, and which one do most AI companies actually need? 49:21 How will the human role at Decagon evolve over three years? 57:15 Why is Decagon building its own models with Decagon Labs? 1:00:50 What worries Ashwin most about Decagon today? 1:03:52 How does Ashwin manage his psyche while running this fast? 1:08:00 Hiccups in the startup journey. 1:09:50 Quickfire: overrated advice, AI products, books, red flags 1:12:43 What would Ashwin tell his younger self about Decagon's journey?

"The pace of building has changed so quickly with AI. You have to give somewhere. And we gave for speed." Ashwin Sreenivas. Co-founder & President of Decagon. You'd be hard pressed to find another startup moving as ferociously as this one. Knuckle Up ↓ 00:00 Intro 02:10 How did Jesse and Ashwin decide what to work on at Decagon? 04:19 Why did they reject the top-down market-sizing approach? 13:16 What does Decagon give up to keep moving fast? 17:54 6 days in-office for founders, 5 for everyone else. 23:33 Why didn't Decagon hire a single employee until $1M in ARR? 27:12 How do you hire 450 people in three years without compromising quality? 31:20 Are Decagon engineers even writing code anymore? 35:08 How does the IC engineer role change with Claude Code and Cursor? 36:32 How does EPD leadership change in the AI era? 40:15 Two types of FDE, and which one do most AI companies actually need? 49:21 How will the human role at Decagon evolve over three years? 57:15 Why is Decagon building its own models with Decagon Labs? 1:00:50 What worries Ashwin most about Decagon today? 1:03:52 How does Ashwin manage his psyche while running this fast? 1:08:00 Hiccups in the startup journey. 1:09:50 Quickfire: overrated advice, AI products, books, red flags 1:12:43 What would Ashwin tell his younger self about Decagon's journey?

Nakul Mandan

440,760 次观看 • 4 个月前

IN NEWS: Decagon raises a $131M Series C co-led by a16z and Accel. We asked Jesse Zhang about the benefits of using LLMs in customer service systems. "The nice thing about LLMs now is this level of nuance. You're able to create much more complex flows tailored to specific users." "We have customers that use us to process refunds, book flights, or reorder credit cards. "Before, you were in this dumb decision tree and you were just forced to go down a certain path."

IN NEWS: Decagon raises a $131M Series C co-led by a16z and Accel. We asked Jesse Zhang about the benefits of using LLMs in customer service systems. "The nice thing about LLMs now is this level of nuance. You're able to create much more complex flows tailored to specific users." "We have customers that use us to process refunds, book flights, or reorder credit cards. "Before, you were in this dumb decision tree and you were just forced to go down a certain path."

TBPN

25,719 次观看 • 1 年前

a16z's Anish Acharya says companies like Cursor and Decagon prove moats don't need to be designed, they can be discovered: "There's two important ideas. One is something Jesse Zhang from Decagon said, which I love, and that is moats are most often discovered, not designed." "It's really easy, and I've done this as a founder, to get in your own head about needing a business plan that survives scrutiny from MBAs and VCs... And for that team, they just started shipping and it developed over time." "Another great example is Cursor. They were criticized a lot for not having a moat, but it turned out that initially being a high NPS, high DAU product was really good. And over time they captured all the reasoning traces, they trained their own models... We know how that story plays out." "The other idea is that we seem to have forgotten that none of the classic moats are based on how hard it is to make the software. Most of us aren't building self-driving cars. So it's network effects, scale advantages, brand effects, proprietary data, or what was historically called a cornered resource." "Every moat from five years ago generally is still a good moat. We just need founders that have ambition in those directions. We need more multiplayer products. We need consumer social. We need products that get dramatically better the more you use them." Anish Acharya w/ Lenny Rachitsky

a16z

34,778 次观看 • 19 天前

.Decagon co-founder and CEO Jesse Zhang says enterprise open-source adoption is falling right now, and that's a sign of adoption rather than rejection: "Even though there's a lot of hype for open-source, the share of open-source inference is actually going down right now." "People are spinning up all these new use cases, and if you're spinning up new use cases, of course you're gonna use the frontier models until they're working." "Once it's at that point, they're heavily incentivized to use open-source because it's way cheaper and faster." "Enterprises have a lot of desire to move, but they can only do so many use cases at once. There is inertia there, and they have to go through all the model risk governance and all the security things." "I think it'll take time, but it will get there." Jesse Zhang

.Decagon co-founder and CEO Jesse Zhang says enterprise open-source adoption is falling right now, and that's a sign of adoption rather than rejection: "Even though there's a lot of hype for open-source, the share of open-source inference is actually going down right now." "People are spinning up all these new use cases, and if you're spinning up new use cases, of course you're gonna use the frontier models until they're working." "Once it's at that point, they're heavily incentivized to use open-source because it's way cheaper and faster." "Enterprises have a lot of desire to move, but they can only do so many use cases at once. There is inertia there, and they have to go through all the model risk governance and all the security things." "I think it'll take time, but it will get there." Jesse Zhang

a16z

36,749 次观看 • 2 个月前

My conversation with Jesse Zhang Decagon is building a customer service agent with AI, with plans for much more than that. It’s one of the more successful early AI applications, with tons of lessons for the rest of the market. I love how Jesse developed which problem to solve first, a set of lessons applicable to all entrepreneurs Enjoy Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 2:00 Competing in the AI Era 11:35 Finding Product-Market Fit 14:25 Anatomy of a Great Customer Interview 17:37 Everyone’s Wrong Until You Talk to Customers 19:25 AI Agents Replacing Human Labor 21:55 Why Customer Service 23:30 Coding vs. Customer Service 35:44 The Future of Voice and the Human UI 38:54 Why Voice-to-Voice Is So Hard 43:18 Learning from Customer Data 44:36 How CEOs Should Think About AI 47:06 The ROI of Coding and Productivity Tools 48:20 Every Brand Will Talk to You Through AI 56:00 Recruiting, Capital, and Demand 1:00:42 Investor Frenzy 1:22:17 The Long-Term Vision for Decagon 1:25:05 Kindest Thing

Patrick OShaughnessy

49,418 次观看 • 1 年前

Ansem explains why you need a long-term outlook in crypto “Crypto is so volatile that if you get too caught up in the day-to-day price action and you don't have a strong thesis on why this shit actually matters long-term, you're gonna get fucked over” “You're never gonna really make money in these markets. You're just not. It's because it's way too hard to trade them. It's too volatile” “So if you have like an extended picture, you can zoom out and you can DCA” “That's also I think why you should be able to sell on the way up at the top because you know how volatile this shit gets” “Like, okay, maybe in five to seven years it's just gonna be up infinite but this year it may go down 70%. So okay, maybe I'll take some profits”

Ansem explains why you need a long-term outlook in crypto “Crypto is so volatile that if you get too caught up in the day-to-day price action and you don't have a strong thesis on why this shit actually matters long-term, you're gonna get fucked over” “You're never gonna really make money in these markets. You're just not. It's because it's way too hard to trade them. It's too volatile” “So if you have like an extended picture, you can zoom out and you can DCA” “That's also I think why you should be able to sell on the way up at the top because you know how volatile this shit gets” “Like, okay, maybe in five to seven years it's just gonna be up infinite but this year it may go down 70%. So okay, maybe I'll take some profits”

Jack

35,772 次观看 • 3 个月前

BREAKING: Apoorv Agrawal (Apoorv Agrawal) of Altimeter Capital says there are "four seasons" in AI: "They're called OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, & Google." "So if you're a CIO, CEO, if you're about to make a multi-million, billion-dollar decision of which lab to build your intelligence on, plan for the climate, not for the weather." What does that mean? "That's multi-model routing. That's evals. That's thinking about post-train custom models." "You'll have a portion of your workloads going through open source, as Jesse Zhang from Decagon wrote very eloquently. A big portion of their volume goes through open source, ~90% now." "And then the frontier stuff, discovering new use cases, will always go through the most intelligent models." "Planning for that multi-model world, planning to not get stuck in one regime, is the climate."

BREAKING: Apoorv Agrawal (Apoorv Agrawal) of Altimeter Capital says there are "four seasons" in AI: "They're called OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, & Google." "So if you're a CIO, CEO, if you're about to make a multi-million, billion-dollar decision of which lab to build your intelligence on, plan for the climate, not for the weather." What does that mean? "That's multi-model routing. That's evals. That's thinking about post-train custom models." "You'll have a portion of your workloads going through open source, as Jesse Zhang from Decagon wrote very eloquently. A big portion of their volume goes through open source, ~90% now." "And then the frontier stuff, discovering new use cases, will always go through the most intelligent models." "Planning for that multi-model world, planning to not get stuck in one regime, is the climate."

Molly O’Shea

42,460 次观看 • 2 个月前

"I don't think you need to worry about internal morale based off of external things that you see on Twitter." -- Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg (Winston Weinberg) His advice for founders: Structure your startup so that every employee has a good pulse for customer satisfaction. It'll be a better barometer than whether you're getting love on social media. That's the case at Harvey, where Weinberg says employees can find it jarring that despite lots of hype and a $11B valuation, he still sends memos telling everyone to move faster. "As long as your customers are happy, that's all that matters." Catch the full interview on our latest episode of The Upstarts Podcast from Upstarts Media 👀

"I don't think you need to worry about internal morale based off of external things that you see on Twitter." -- Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg (Winston Weinberg) His advice for founders: Structure your startup so that every employee has a good pulse for customer satisfaction. It'll be a better barometer than whether you're getting love on social media. That's the case at Harvey, where Weinberg says employees can find it jarring that despite lots of hype and a $11B valuation, he still sends memos telling everyone to move faster. "As long as your customers are happy, that's all that matters." Catch the full interview on our latest episode of The Upstarts Podcast from Upstarts Media 👀

Alex Konrad

19,832 次观看 • 6 个月前

Sam Altman reveals Ultrafast, which delivers eight times the speed at six times the price “But sometimes you just want the highest intelligence at an absurdly fast speed. So today we're launching Ultrafast across the API, ChatGPT and Codex." "And we think you are really going to love this and not want to go back. Fast already gives you twice the speed at twice the price of standard, but Ultrafast takes that to eight times the speed at six times the price of standard. An incredible 300 tokens per second." "You know what? It's worth it. Let me show you, actually. So this is the same task side by side. We gave both models the same prompt. Create and launch a rocket with the devday colors. On the left here you have Ultrafast. On the right you have regular. You can see how much faster this builds." "The Ultrafast rocket is already taken off, and the regular rocket is not even close to being finished. There is nothing like this on the market today. You can use Ultrafast now with Astra, and soon we're going to offer it for 6.1 Sol as well.”

Sam Altman reveals Ultrafast, which delivers eight times the speed at six times the price “But sometimes you just want the highest intelligence at an absurdly fast speed. So today we're launching Ultrafast across the API, ChatGPT and Codex." "And we think you are really going to love this and not want to go back. Fast already gives you twice the speed at twice the price of standard, but Ultrafast takes that to eight times the speed at six times the price of standard. An incredible 300 tokens per second." "You know what? It's worth it. Let me show you, actually. So this is the same task side by side. We gave both models the same prompt. Create and launch a rocket with the devday colors. On the left here you have Ultrafast. On the right you have regular. You can see how much faster this builds." "The Ultrafast rocket is already taken off, and the regular rocket is not even close to being finished. There is nothing like this on the market today. You can use Ultrafast now with Astra, and soon we're going to offer it for 6.1 Sol as well.”

Fireside Alpha

23,313 次观看 • 5 天前

Last week, Flexport released an AI agent that can audit bills from shippers and truckers against the actual logs to ensure its customers are invoiced correctly. The product was just an idea 3 days before. "We probably pivoted 30% to 40% of our engineers now just to building agents," founder Ryan Petersen (Ryan Petersen) says. "There's way less planning than there used to be at Flexport in the roadmap. It used to be a one year strategic plan. Now you're like, ‘Alright, let's go see if you can make this work, come back to me two days later.' And it works, because of AI.” Catch the full interview on The Upstarts Podcast: YouTube: Apple: Spotify:

Last week, Flexport released an AI agent that can audit bills from shippers and truckers against the actual logs to ensure its customers are invoiced correctly. The product was just an idea 3 days before. "We probably pivoted 30% to 40% of our engineers now just to building agents," founder Ryan Petersen (Ryan Petersen) says. "There's way less planning than there used to be at Flexport in the roadmap. It used to be a one year strategic plan. Now you're like, ‘Alright, let's go see if you can make this work, come back to me two days later.' And it works, because of AI.” Catch the full interview on The Upstarts Podcast: YouTube: Apple: Spotify:

Alex Konrad

122,071 次观看 • 7 个月前

.Decagon co-founder and CTO Ashwin Sreenivas says the choice between expensive frontier models and cheaper, less capable ones is a false trade-off: "Even if you have a 'dumber model,' you can get it to higher performance on that specific task." "When we fine-tune smaller, dumber models, it's that they're just not as general purpose, but on the specific task we want them to do, they actually outperform the large, smart, state-of-the-art models." "So we end up getting all three things. It is better at the task, it is cheaper, and it is faster." Ashwin Sreenivas

.Decagon co-founder and CTO Ashwin Sreenivas says the choice between expensive frontier models and cheaper, less capable ones is a false trade-off: "Even if you have a 'dumber model,' you can get it to higher performance on that specific task." "When we fine-tune smaller, dumber models, it's that they're just not as general purpose, but on the specific task we want them to do, they actually outperform the large, smart, state-of-the-art models." "So we end up getting all three things. It is better at the task, it is cheaper, and it is faster." Ashwin Sreenivas

a16z

36,067 次观看 • 2 个月前

Marc Andreessen explains the 3 Necessities for Start-up Success: "The general criteria for a successful high-tech startup, in my view, you see different sort of rules of thumb from different people. But the three big things you always come back to are, is there a big market? And by the way, that comes in two parts. Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and sort of displace incumbents or do you believe there will be a new market that will be big? So big market. Is there a fundamental technology or economic change that causes you to basically justify having a new company? And that's really important. And the way I always think about that is, is there a 10X change happening in the technology landscape? Is something 10X faster or 10X cheaper or 10X better? And if it's not 10X, we as both VCs and entrepreneurs, we really have to ask ourselves like, is it really worth doing? Because it's really hard. I mean, it's really hard to start new companies. new companies generally shouldn't exist. Existing companies are usually pretty good at what they do. And so for a new company to exist, it not only has to like come in and go into business and bring a product to market, but it has to bring a product to market that's so much better than what already exists that it punches through the sort of status quo. And most customers in most markets are pretty happy buying from the current suppliers and so there has to be a real kind of edge on the thing and we look for that in either a technology change, usually a technology change or an economic change. which are often the same thing. And then the third is team. Is the team outstanding? And if you think about this as an entrepreneur, it becomes a question of the founding team. Some companies are solo founders and they can work, but generally most of us, like myself, we're human beings, we're mortal. You want to have a founding team of complementary skill sets. And so you want to have at least one super strong technologist, quite possibly more than one. Some of the best startups are actually more than one founding technologist and then it often helps to have somebody who's like a product or who's a market or sales person or has a sort of really good understanding of business on the team, certainly helps a lot. And so we sort of look at market, product, and team. And the reality is you need all three. I would say, interestingly, if you're going to compromise as an investor, if we're going to compromise on one of those, it would actually be the product. And the reason I say that is because a great market is a lot easier to make up for with iterative product execution than a poor market. Because the problem with a poor market, a small market, is even if you do a great job on the product, there just aren't that many customers. It's hard to ever get big."

Marc Andreessen explains the 3 Necessities for Start-up Success: "The general criteria for a successful high-tech startup, in my view, you see different sort of rules of thumb from different people. But the three big things you always come back to are, is there a big market? And by the way, that comes in two parts. Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and sort of displace incumbents or do you believe there will be a new market that will be big? So big market. Is there a fundamental technology or economic change that causes you to basically justify having a new company? And that's really important. And the way I always think about that is, is there a 10X change happening in the technology landscape? Is something 10X faster or 10X cheaper or 10X better? And if it's not 10X, we as both VCs and entrepreneurs, we really have to ask ourselves like, is it really worth doing? Because it's really hard. I mean, it's really hard to start new companies. new companies generally shouldn't exist. Existing companies are usually pretty good at what they do. And so for a new company to exist, it not only has to like come in and go into business and bring a product to market, but it has to bring a product to market that's so much better than what already exists that it punches through the sort of status quo. And most customers in most markets are pretty happy buying from the current suppliers and so there has to be a real kind of edge on the thing and we look for that in either a technology change, usually a technology change or an economic change. which are often the same thing. And then the third is team. Is the team outstanding? And if you think about this as an entrepreneur, it becomes a question of the founding team. Some companies are solo founders and they can work, but generally most of us, like myself, we're human beings, we're mortal. You want to have a founding team of complementary skill sets. And so you want to have at least one super strong technologist, quite possibly more than one. Some of the best startups are actually more than one founding technologist and then it often helps to have somebody who's like a product or who's a market or sales person or has a sort of really good understanding of business on the team, certainly helps a lot. And so we sort of look at market, product, and team. And the reality is you need all three. I would say, interestingly, if you're going to compromise as an investor, if we're going to compromise on one of those, it would actually be the product. And the reason I say that is because a great market is a lot easier to make up for with iterative product execution than a poor market. Because the problem with a poor market, a small market, is even if you do a great job on the product, there just aren't that many customers. It's hard to ever get big."

Founder Mode

39,005 次观看 • 8 个月前

Jesse Watters says he has a friend who is a veteran who is afraid they are going to fired because they are probationary employee at the Pentagon: Veterans should get priority. Because if you're going to go out there and kill enemies, put your life on the line, you should not be in the same category as people that are doing DEI

Jesse Watters says he has a friend who is a veteran who is afraid they are going to fired because they are probationary employee at the Pentagon: Veterans should get priority. Because if you're going to go out there and kill enemies, put your life on the line, you should not be in the same category as people that are doing DEI

Acyn

1,895,084 次观看 • 1 年前

ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski says that research is a head start and product ecosystem creates a moat: “The way we think about it, research is head start.” “We can give advantage to the customer earlier. And it's 6-12 month of advantage.” “You have research, product in parallel that extends that, but the thing that will really give that long-term value is the ecosystem that you create around, whether that's the brand and distribution, whether that's the collection of voices you can have, the collection of integrations you can build, the workflows that you can build.” Source: ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski on No Priors with sarah guo and Elad Gil

a16z

19,730 次观看 • 9 个月前

Sakuga Over The Years (February 2019) (part 1) KA: Weilin Zhang (張魏林), Hakuyu Go (伍柏諭) Anime: Mob Psycho 100 II (モブサイコ100 II) (episode 5) What happens when you have one of the most ambitious teams of young animators at the frontlines of an episode with a good schedule to execute their vision? Well you get what I think is Hakuyu Go’s best work as an episode director and what I think is one of the best looking anime episodes of all time in Mob season 2 episode 5. The episode is a full on sakuga fest but this is one of the two scenes I wanted to highlight. Like highlighting Kameda’s scene recently, the timing is a bit unfortunate with the recent things that Zhang has said, but I do think he is (not objectively THE best but) ONE OF the best animators of this generation and you can see that in 0:02 with the sheer level of volume control and fabric animation and some really wild effects. I’m not 100% sure where Zhang and Go’s parts are specifically but I think up to 0:14 is Zhang and the rest might be Go.

Sakuga Over The Years (February 2019) (part 1) KA: Weilin Zhang (張魏林), Hakuyu Go (伍柏諭) Anime: Mob Psycho 100 II (モブサイコ100 II) (episode 5) What happens when you have one of the most ambitious teams of young animators at the frontlines of an episode with a good schedule to execute their vision? Well you get what I think is Hakuyu Go’s best work as an episode director and what I think is one of the best looking anime episodes of all time in Mob season 2 episode 5. The episode is a full on sakuga fest but this is one of the two scenes I wanted to highlight. Like highlighting Kameda’s scene recently, the timing is a bit unfortunate with the recent things that Zhang has said, but I do think he is (not objectively THE best but) ONE OF the best animators of this generation and you can see that in 0:02 with the sheer level of volume control and fabric animation and some really wild effects. I’m not 100% sure where Zhang and Go’s parts are specifically but I think up to 0:14 is Zhang and the rest might be Go.

Harry Price

13,554 次观看 • 8 个月前

What is Tarek Mansour biggest execution regret in how he scaled Kalshi? "I was too product-driven for too long. I was always like ... it needs to grow really fast organically. Then we do more marketing and build a brand. I actually think you have to build both together. Brand, you have to learn it. It's a muscle, it is not something that you just turn on; it's something you have to embed in your company." Is build it and they will come total BS? Jack Zhang Vlad Tenev Paul Graham Kevin Busque Roy

Harry Stebbings

41,727 次观看 • 10 个月前

Aetherflux CEO Baiju Bhatt says starting a new company after co-founding Robinhood is "actually not that easy." "On the one hand, starting companies and doing things at early stages when they're not really figured out is kind of my happy place. At the same time, it's a brutal reminder of - when you're in the early stages of starting something, it's actually pretty damn hard." "You get better, but it doesn't actually get easier." "Not to throw shade at anybody out there that's building an enterprise SaaS company, but this is like: new company on absolute hard mode."

Aetherflux CEO Baiju Bhatt says starting a new company after co-founding Robinhood is "actually not that easy." "On the one hand, starting companies and doing things at early stages when they're not really figured out is kind of my happy place. At the same time, it's a brutal reminder of - when you're in the early stages of starting something, it's actually pretty damn hard." "You get better, but it doesn't actually get easier." "Not to throw shade at anybody out there that's building an enterprise SaaS company, but this is like: new company on absolute hard mode."

TBPN

24,046 次观看 • 8 个月前