Ravi Gupta
speaker
157 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Ravi Gupta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think that the AI interaction most of us have is Apple's an amazing company, but the Apple intelligence summary of your text message is the most absurd. It's a terrible experience, right? And it's truly like laughable. It's more used for comedy than it is used for like actual value right now.
And that's the interaction that most of us are having with this thing versus that wow experience for me of, oh my gosh, I actually know a lot more about this company now. And I would have never known this in this time period. That's real work. So the biggest change is like trying to have it help me with real work.
That is a good question and a very hard question. I think that when we say the AI is much better than we think, I think practically speaking, it means that it is way better. And this is a stolen insight from a friend of mine, but it is better at figuring out hard to figure out patterns than we would give it credit for. Do you see what I'm saying?
It finds patterns in ways that wouldn't be obvious and it finds them ridiculously quickly. So you can be more ambitious and like where there might be a pattern that's not obvious. Its ability to discern that is different.
So maybe an example would be if you give it some framework, it can give you good acquisition ideas for the company because it can identify ways to optimize for the question you have. I want to improve my distribution and I'm in this space. It will find companies that are in a similar space that have tons of customers that might be a nice tuck in or a transformational acquisition.
So I guess one thing would be, where can the AI help me being more ambitious about thinking about what it could do? And so maybe practically speaking, Patrick, I wrote this in the blog, I think going through role by role and figuring out what does that job actually do inside my company for a customer? And if I replaced it with... a really, really, really well-prompted AI, could it do it?
And I think that you have companies that are vertical agent-oriented companies all over the place right now. You have it in customer service, you have it in SDRs, you have it in marketing. There's companies that are popping up, frankly, on the marketing side right now, going through each one and saying, okay, which one of those could be replaced or augmented by AI today?
And then this is a really important one. What about in six months? Paul Graham had this tweet that you and I both saw, which was the people that are really bleeding edge in AI, you should be building things that don't quite work right now with the models and are way too expensive. Because what do you know?
You know that the model is going to get much better in the next three or six months, and you know it's going to get way cheaper at a hundredth of the price or whatever. So I think maybe role by role, can AI do it now? Can AI do it in six months? That's probably one exercise that I'd try to go through for like disruptability of my company with somebody else.
The second thing that I'd probably be thinking about is ability to be the AI strategy for another company. Let's assume most companies are not going to be able to do this themselves. Can I be their answer to be the foot in the future? That to me is like an absolutely gold insight if your company has that possibility.
If you can promise your customers the world is changing really quickly, we are your way to deal with that. That is incredibly valuable, I think, because all of a sudden you have infinite ability to move out of one spot into more because the AI will continue to be better and better.
And then I think the third thing, and this is not exactly answering your question, but I do think this is a big deal related to like companies that are going to struggle. I think anything that reduces your agility in any way, anything that prevents you from adapting or changing is 100x more painful than it's ever been before.
is discussed on the Microsoft earnings call two years ago. And now look at what's discussed on the Microsoft earnings call. It's like, we're going to spend $100 billion on CapEx. We are doing everything related to AI. He doesn't care what he said on that earnings call. All he cares is what is happening going forward.
I think that so many companies are held hostage by what they said to their team or what they said on an earnings call or what they said is going to happen. And this willingness or this desire to be consistent with their past selves is preventing them embracing the biggest technological change that we've probably seen in our lifetimes.
So you and I have been talking about how there's this meme that's sort of starting to arise of like small companies. Small team meme. Small team me. Yeah, small team me. And I think that Dharmesh from HubSpot talked about this of SMB doesn't stand for small and medium businesses anymore. It stands for small and mighty businesses.
So if you start with this premise, maybe small is even better than we thought. Maybe small is even more of an advantage than we thought. The question is why? And I think that there's a lot of hidden costs to having a lot of people. We've all talked about in the past, well, coordinating amongst them. Okay, that seems like a hidden cost.
And then there's all the other things that we've talked about in the past. If you have a lot of people, you would spend a lot of time interviewing and hiring. You also spend a lot of time putting people on pips. You spend a lot of time discussing all those very specific things.
I think the bigger picture zoom out that I believe is sort of like how much of your time is spent dealing with employees in a way that doesn't actually help your customer? What percentage of your day, if you're a CEO or a founder or a leader, is spent on things that your customer cares about? And I think that number is vanishingly and astonishingly small for a lot of people.
This is why I think sometimes you'll hear CEOs be like, I don't even like my job, because they don't actually spend that much time doing stuff for the customers. And I do think that that exponentially goes up the more people you have, or it has the risk of exponentially going up the more people you have. I have a friend who runs an organization that's like 400 people.
And he was telling me that he had to let go of like 20 people last year. And he's like, it's taken up the most crazy amount of time of setting up how he does the layoff, figuring out how to talk to each of those people. What is the severance package for each of those people? How does he talk to the people that stay?
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