Kip (4:21)

Good morning. Morning, Destroyers.

Kieran Flanagan (4:23)

Great news.

Kip (4:24)

I need a diligence talk on everything there is to know about space agriculture by Thursday. This Thursday?

Kieran Flanagan (4:30)

Thursday's in two days.

Kip (4:32)

How is that great news? Don't worry. Let's just start a cubby shout out.

Kieran Flanagan (4:38)

To Descript, who I think spawned a bunch of copycat type product marketing videos. This is actually a good video. I'm not dissing the video, I like it. But there's a lot of similarities in the way people are doing these kind of videos and what the script started. What's Cubby?

Kip (4:52)

Only the best tool ever. Just find PDFs, podcasts, MP3s, MP4s, YouTube videos, tweet threads, articles and files from your computer on whatever you're researching and drop it in, Cubby. Cubby transcribes and combines them into a killer doc. Cubby, can I marry you?

Kieran Flanagan (5:10)

All right, so what's it doing? It's actually allowing you to build a context window basically for an AI agent based upon anything you want to put into a single folder. So if you, hey, I want to research this topic and I want to put a bunch of podcasts in there and it can transcribe them for you. A bunch of documents, whatever it may be, that's really building a context window for an AI agent. And then you can actually have that AI agent talk to you about all the things that are in there. Let's run it a little bit more because it has some other kind of use cases. But if you're like me and you are constantly leaving lots of tabs open and you have all of these different podcasts you want to consume and all of these other things you want to consume. What AI really helps you do is it's like an accelerated learning tool where you can put all of the things in one place and you can extract the information you need on a singular topic because the AI is digesting all of that information and then giving you the core things that you need to know. Now it has some additional features. I'm like, maybe simplifying what it does, but that's one of the core use cases. I remember Naval saying something about vertical.

Steph Smith (6:01)

Farming, but I'd have to search the.

Kieran Flanagan (6:03)

50 hours of podcast to find it.

Kip (6:05)

No worries. Just ask Cubby's AI assistant to find it for you.

Kieran Flanagan (6:08)

There you go. So I like that, like you can actually add a bunch of podcasts and then find some of the things you want within those podcasts. I will say the one thing when I started looking at tools like this is I wonder how they survive the integration that Google has in things like Google Drive. And so for me, I think this is a really cool tool. But now I'm just starting to use Google Gemini because Google Gemini has access to all my Google Drive and so I just put everything in Google Drive and I can just query Gemini for anything I want that's in my Google Drive. And for the podcast use case Gemini Flash, Google's latest model. If you want to retrieve any information about a podcast like go and say what can you tell me about the latest podcast episode? For marketing against the Grain, it will pull the latest YouTube video and you can actually query it about that video right within the chat panel. So again, not actually this is still a cool tool, but there are some of these big conglomerates that are integrated in AI everywhere. And it does make me wonder around how these kind of point solutions will compete against the conglomerates like Google.

Kip (7:06)

This TED talk is great, but the dorky professor spends most of her time complaining about her mother. No problem, just select the 5 minute sheet coherent and Cubby will only use that.

Kieran Flanagan (7:16)

That's pretty cool, right? You can actually add in content and take the parts that you actually want to have the AI aggregate with the rest of the content. So there's a ton of cool things here in Cubby. I think it's a really good tool for anyone who wants to have different repositories on different topics. And the AI can actually aggregate all that together. It can actually give you all of the important information you need. This is one of the core things that AI does a great job of. It's like we all are unstructured data makers. We have unstructured data everywhere. I have incredible operating models around how to run large teams. But I'm also pretty disorganized in the background. And so AI for me helps me take all of my unstructured data and it pulls it all together for me and can actually give me the things that I need so I can be much more productive. So that's number two. Cubby, you can go sign up for the waiting list or you can get an invite and and go try out that app. So I'm just going to go back to the list to show you. These were get work done. We talked about whisper flow. I call it Flow. We talked about Cubby. There's some other ones that are interesting in here. Like Granola is a notetaker app. There's a ton of notetaker apps. Granola I've heard good things about it, but basically being able to transcribe meetings into notes, I think you should be using some sort of tool to be able to do that. I do find that OpenAI's latest model, if I just record the meeting, get transcription and put it into OpenAI, ChatGPT's latest model, it gives me the best meeting notes of any tool that I've used. But it's a little bit of a process, whereas these things do it automatically. Gamma allows you to make like decks and docs and websites. So it's pretty good. Go try it out. Adobe, obviously, is a huge company. It's a ton of AI features. Quora, there's a ton of email assistant tools. Again, I have started to just use Gemini integrated into my Google Drive and G suite a lot. And so that does a lot of this stuff for me. And we'll get into maybe, you know, we talked about Dharmesh's platform, Agent AI, and so there's a bunch of these. But like, Dharmesh's platform is the one that I use, Agent AI. It's super cool. I want to get into build an audience. And so one of the things we talked a lot about in the podcast is like, okay, well, AI is taken from us because it's taken organic traffic. I think over time it will take and disrupt paid advertising traffic. What has it given us to grow our audience? And so these are some of the best tools that A16 and Z think that it's providing us to help our audience. And I want to cover a couple, but I will say what you'll notice is these are tools that can help you grow an audience if you are already a really experienced and great content creator. That's the point I would make about these tools, is if you have already some expertise in creating content, it can help you be more productive. But if you are someone who wants to start to grow an audience and you're still learning the skills and trying to figure out how to grow your audience, I don't actually think these tools are going to be that useful. But let's get into some examples. Let's start with Delphi. AI basically allows you to clone yourself. So again, if you have expertise already, it allows you to create a clone and people can go to that clone and have a conversation with it. Right? So again, if you are not an expert in the space, it's not actually that helpful. It's not really helpful if you're trying to build your expertise and build your audience. Okay, so if I Go to discover, you'll see all of the people that they have signed up. So I can go and talk to any of these people. So again, it's a way that you can actually give more value to your audience. I think there is a real good question to be asked around. Do people really want to talk to the AI clone of yourself or do they want to talk to you? I think that over time AI is going to replace our want and needs for educational content where we don't really care about who's delivering that educational content. We just want the facts, we just want the information. But we will start to gravitate more and more towards individuals where we really care about a topic, where we really want their point of views, where we really want to hear from them. And I do wonder if we will want to talk to an AI clone or we'll want to talk to that person. But at the moment it is a kind of cool way of being able to talk to people. And those clones are trained on their expertise. You're getting like a one to one conversation. And to show you an example, we will dive into our great friend Brian Halligan, the co founder at HubSpot, partner over at Sequoia, an all around incredible human being. And Brian is one of the very few people on this planet, along with Dharmesh, that has grown a company of the size of HubSpot. And so what I want to talk to Brian about is hey, like I'm a SaaS company, I'm stuck at 10 million ARR and I want to try to grow to 30 million ARR. And so Brian gives me some pretty good feedback and I can dive in here more with him. So I get like access to Brian's expertise. I can click on these links. What this is kind of cool is again, this really is beneficial if you are already a content creator that has a ton of content because it creates these little links and I can go in and dive more in and around where Brian has talked about these subjects. So this is trained on all of the content we have that Brian has created and then it creates these little referral links that I can go learn more from Brian. So I do think it's a really great way to learn more from someone that you really value their expertise. You know, you're not going to get a one on one conversation with Brian. Very few people are going to be able to get a one on one conversation with Brian. But in this way I feel like I can get access to all of the things that Brian's created and have a somewhat conversation with him. So that's Delphi. A good way to grow your audience. If you are already an expert within a space.

Brian Halligan (12:24)

Hey, it's Kip. If you listen to this podcast, you know how much I love keeping up with the latest and greatest in technology. But very few podcasts actually give you a dose of the future. The A16Z podcast is the exception. It's hosted by our friend and frequent guest Steph Smith. The chart topping show brings on movers with a track record of being both early and right. Like Apple co founder Steve Wozniak, or the CISOs of OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind. Even the very first CTO of the CIA. From the science and the supply of GLP1s to drone delivery to the economics of deepfakes, go ahead and eavesdrop on the future. Check out the A16Z podcast. Wherever you get your podcasts.

Kieran Flanagan (13:15)

Let'S dive into the next tool. Okay, the next tool is heygen. Everyone has really heard of heygen. We covered it a bunch of times in the podcast. The example people have seen is like how you clone yourself. I did a whole course, actually I cloned myself and delivered the course through my AI clone. And most people got really confused. Was it me or not? Because back then the version of hey JN was not good with hand movements and so I kept my hands really still and I actually had people who know me email me back and said, are you okay? You seem a bit down. In the video that I've just watched from you, I was teaching people how to do AI through my AI avatar kind of meta. And I was like, yeah, that's an AI clone of myself. And they were like, oh, that makes total sense. So I thought people thought AI clones are kind of like emotionless, kind of monotone. And so people thought I was having maybe some sort of breakdown. Heygen has got much better. So if you do create a clone of yourself, you can actually move your hands around. It's much, much better with motion. But I wanted to quickly cover some of the things they've got done in the labs and make a quick point again about like how I think about this for audience growth and do I think it's valuable or not? I think hey Jen, cloning yourself is very similar to Delphi, right? If you actually have an audience, you have deep expertise, you can create a version of yourself and you can create video content much, much quicker. Short form video for social in particular, using your avatar will work pretty well. So that's a really Good use case for hey Jin. If you are someone with an audience, you do have deep expertise, you've figured out how to create great content, then you can use HeyGen to accelerate that and be more productive and get more coverage via the avatar. If you are still learning the skills to do that, you really have to learn how to create content for these things to be valuable. It does have a lab section and it does have some new features that they are trialing. So I'm going to show you one of them. And the reason I'm showing you this is because I want to make a quick point around personality LED content. This is not to Duncan Haejin. These are lab features. The thing I really believe is AI is going to really do two things for us in terms of audience growth over the next like 12 months, right? It already has. In 2024, it's going to take away a lot more of our informational content, which is when someone wants some information, some educational content, AI is going to be a much way to get that right. It's much quicker, it's easy to get. We've seen it through the AI assistants and it's going to help people who already have audiences and deep expertise to have some of these tools to create avatars of themselves and kind of increase the amount of output, increase the amount of coverage that they get. These other tools which are trying to help create like influential content. And I think if influential content is either podcast or video, where the personality really matters, AI is a long, long way from being able to disrupt that, what I call personality LED content. I think personality led content is one of the best skills you can learn as a marketer to keep yourself defensible from AI. So let me show you a quick example of this. All right, so this basically has taken one of their new features and it allows you to create a kind of video podcast from a text based blog post. So let's quickly show you this in action thing to watch out for here as we play the next 20 seconds is how much disdain the female co host has for anything the male co host says. Just look at her face and mannerisms.

Steph Smith (16:20)

So have you noticed how AI is kind of, well, taking over content marketing lately? It's like everywhere I've seen that.

Kip (16:31)

But is it really making that big of a difference?

Kieran Flanagan (16:33)

Is it really making that big of a difference? Pout.

Steph Smith (16:36)

Definitely. I mean like 46% of marketers are using AI for producing content.

Kip (16:43)

Really?

Steph Smith (16:43)

That's almost half.

Kieran Flanagan (16:44)

Whoa, that's huge. So how exactly is AI helping with email how exactly is it helping with emails, you idiot?

Steph Smith (16:51)

Starters. Timing optimization. AI can figure out the best time to send emails when people are most likely to open.

Kieran Flanagan (16:58)

I love the look she's given him.

Steph Smith (16:59)

It's like having a crystal ball.

Kieran Flanagan (17:01)

Ha ha. All right. You know, I do wonder what happened to Pumi's twos. Obviously something's gone awry. Maybe whatever it may be, she's not enjoying what he's saying.

Kip (17:09)

Crystal ball for marketing. But does that really make a difference?

Steph Smith (17:13)

Oh, absolutely.

Kieran Flanagan (17:14)

All right. Again, this is a beta feature. This is not one of the core features that people use heygen for. Most people are using it for the avatar or the ability to localize content, which is incredible for this is a beta feature. But the reason I show this is to show you how far AI is away from actually being able to deliver on personality LED content. Like content that really is where the personality and the basically influential content, the way I think about it is like the actual personality of the person is as important as the content being delivered. And so these kind of audience growth tools are not helping with that. I think most of them help when you already have deep expertise and you can create something to expand your reach. Let's just go through a couple of the others really quick. And so more clones. This one is specifically for short form content. It's a startup called Argil. I don't know if that's named right. So let's just have a quick look to see what this looks like. Hi, I'm Blue and this is my AI clone speaking. I've just uploaded a two minute video of myself and now I can create studio. So basically, you know, clone short from video. Again, really need to already have audience. Tease, spectrum tease. And I think these tools are kind of interesting. And the last one I'll just really, really quickly show you because people already know this tool Opus. So people have used this. Basically Opus takes long form content and then divides into short form videos. Here's an example from Lex Freeman. Food poisoning on the plane. And so literally when the plane landed, I went straight into an ambulance, into a hospital overnight. The manager picked me up and I showed up. You get the point. So the thing I would say, and I do think a lot about for these AI tools is what happens is they're going to create the average version of the thing. And because everyone will be able to create the average version, you then need to put a lot of time and effort to create the version that gets more attention. So these are kind of old table stakes. Like I have a piece of long form video, I'll use an AI tool, cut it up in short form and maybe I get some views in those. But they're not going to set the world alight. Like if you actually go back and watch the episode with Jenny Hoyas, she has spent three years to master how to create short form videos. And so an AI tool is not going to be able to give you that. Right? And so you're going to get average results because you're going to have an average templatized video. That is the truth. And so there's some interesting ones in grow your audience, but there's nothing that I think is going to set your world alight. The next one I want to get into is how to build things. I'm just giving you one quick tool that you might want to play around with. Because now we're all coders, right? I was a coder, not a very good one. My background, everyone knows computer science, developer, bad developer, then became a marketer. But there's a ton of great agents and I've used for the most part Claude. I've been demoing Claude. I use Claude all the time. Use Claude for everything. But I wanted to actually show Replit. Replit is like my mind blowing. Their AI agent is incredible. They're an incredible tool. And this really is an example of why we're all going to have personalized software. And actually personalized software is going to start to disrupt the core category of software in and of itself. And let me give you a quick example. So I'm sitting there watching a little bit of TV and talking to my partner and we're like, hey, we need to start to get better scheduling. We have a 10 month old and really every hour matters. And we kind of use Google Calendar, but it's not exactly what we want. And so I'm like, well, why don't I just build something for us? And so I built this scheduler and basically it allows us to, you know, it's not fully finished, but we have like two side by side days that go from 6am to 8pm that's what happens parents. And you can basically now add anything that I have in that time slot. And then because we do a lot of things together when we want to play with our little daughter, we can merge this, we can mark it as completed. But now we can see side by side what we're doing each and every hour. And so we can better plan our day, we can give each other breaks, things like that. And so this is an example of like, well, I don't need a tool with all of the features. I just need some that are bespoke to me. And so now with Relet, AI Agent and some of these other tools, you can actually build real products for yourself, but you can build real tools for your, you know, customers that I think free tools become much more of the marketing playbook. So Replit is an incredible tool. I really recommend getting to using it, building something. It is so much fun as well. The next one is Notebook LLM. It is an incredible tool. KIP already did the episode. We're going to come back to do a full episode on this because they've added a ton of functionality and a ton of features and I can't cover it all in one video. It is so good. I use Notebook LLM all the time. I basically hook it up to all of my different folders that I need to use within work. And it's like really cool. I can go in here, I can create briefing docs. I can basically ask it to create a little podcast featuring all of the work that I have going on within that topic. I can basically create an audio overview. It basically allows you to create a study style guide and any kind of content you put into the folder. I'm skipping through it here really fast because there's a full episode we'll do on this. It's a really great tool. If it's not one that you've started to use yet, I would start to use it. Stay tuned to the podcast and we'll do a full episode on it. The last one I wanted to cover, which I thought was kind of cool and I can do it really fast, is this one called Napkin AI. It's Napkin AI is another image generator, but very different. It generates business images, not kind of consumer images. And so it actually, for example, will take my latest LinkedIn post and then it will create a variety of different, like, images that I can add into that post. And I found it really good for creating things that would actually be much more suitable for business content. Like a lot of the ones that you're looking at. Image generators are great for consumer, but this is really great for, like, business. And so this one shows you. I talked about the AI process where AI would take over all of our B2B buying needs. And it creates all these different varieties of images I can use in that app. And so that is some of the tools that I covered, some of the ones you can start to use. Of course, if you stay tuned to the podcast, you'll get way, way more apps as we're launching anything that we think is cool. More kind of B2B apps as well. And you'll get a full episode of Notebook LLM. I couldn't cover it in this because this video's gone very, very long and there's tons of incredible features. That is your 2024 unwrapped list from a16Z with some of the ones that I went on call out. Stay tuned to the podcast if you want to know everything you need to know about AI in 2025, and I'll see you on the next episode.