Joshua Browder

Especially with the young founders, one has to really be careful to separate what you think is a good idea and what actually is a good business.

In my world, we live in such a place of jargon.

So I talk to some entrepreneurs and they can't describe what they're building in English.

So for example, they say, I'm building AI observability for the cloud infrastructure.

And I'm thinking, what does that even mean?

And then I talk to other entrepreneurs and they have a concrete problem, like we're helping OpenAI train their models and things like that.

And it makes more sense.

I was saying to my sister who is here with me, walking around this conference has taught me a valuable lesson, which is if I'm ever going to start a new company, I want to have a really crisp.com, like a one word.com because some of these names, they're like, you can't even pronounce them.

Yeah, but a famous VC, I think at the VC firm NFX, said the most important company decision is your name.

I'm not sure that's true, but it's definitely important.

Yeah.

Definitely.

Yes, I started because I got a huge number of tickets myself.

And I joke that if you start a company for yourself, you at least have one customer.

Mainly the government is not following their own rules with the signage.

And when I first launched in 2015, it was like a chat GPT interface.

And I'm actually speaking in a few hours and I've got a screenshot of that early demo.

And obviously the design is a lot worse, but it looks exactly like chat GPT.

And people were like saying back then, you're crazy.

No one wants to talk to a computer.