Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Would you go to a single person and ask them about multiple of your ideas at once?

Or would you target it more like one idea to one person?

So maybe go in detail through one of these conversations so that others maybe could benefit from what you've learned.

So what is the order of the questions?

Like how would you structure those conversations to get the most information possible?

Do you remember the highest number anyone said for how much they'd be willing to pay for something in one of these ideation sessions?

As you neared the end of that process and settled on what Decagon does, which maybe probably is the right time to ask you to describe in detail what it is.

What was like the final closing?

Like, where did the conviction come from?

Like, oh, this is clearly the thing after this discovery process.

Say more about the comment you made about, in hindsight, it's clear why this was the key problem.

Can you compare it to coding?

It seems like these are the two areas where it's blindingly obvious that it's useful to customers and you can build great businesses around it.

Just look at the revenue curves.

Yours, Sierra's, obviously like cursor, cognition, etc.

So it's a really interesting conclusion, which is try to augment the very highest talent or replace the most replaceable end of the spectrum.

That's a really interesting conclusion.

I want to talk about what you've begun to learn about how to do that second thing well.

So if others out there wanted to start a company or invest in a company that was doing sort of that end of the spectrum, eating its way in, as you described, what have you learned are the key things to like the setup process with a given company to increase the likelihood that you can replace a lot of the low hanging fruit for types of customer service calls or types of what used to be human to human interaction and can now be handled by AI on one end of the spectrum?

Is there a way to think about this?