Sari Azout
speaker
92 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Sari Azout’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And essentially it's this like art cafe where basically like they, it's a super cool brand. They partner with brands like Glossier and like to do brand activations. But essentially like, They have like pottery, you know, like figure drawing, like painting, all sorts of like crafty things. Their tagline is amazing. I think it's something like, be brave enough to be terrible.
So it tries to appeal to the amateurs, really. But the problem is, it's not scalable. It's a business that has real estate, and they have one location. I think they're venture-backed. But I think that this, like you could do this like a business in a box where you essentially partner with local artists, Etsy sellers, whatever, arm them with the supplies, the educational stuff.
Like even like, I don't know, you could probably like do it at like restaurants during off hours or like homes or whatever, but like... I think you could build a modern, cool consumer brand around like people doing stuff with their hands.
If you look at the space, there's like Michaels and like, even just like Color Me Mine is I think the like brick and mortar, like they're all dated and like boring. And I just think that the status symbol in an AI age is like, you know, it's just going to be like, I disconnected from the information flow and I like did something with my hands.
Like offline is the new luxury. And what do you do with that?
Yeah. But I, yeah, I just really feel like And even thinking about doing stuff with your hands, if you think about the industrial revolution, what that did is it automated a lot of physical labor. But what AI is doing is it's automating a lot of white collar jobs.
And so I think a lot of trade jobs, where there used to be a lot of stigma around you don't want to do trade jobs, it's not perceived as a status job, it's actually going to be the opposite. Plumbers, electricians, these people are making a lot more money and their jobs are a lot more safe. than your average junior copywriter working in an agency in New York City.
So I just, I don't know, I feel like we're just on the cusp of this, the status, what has status is changing. And doing things with your hands, doing things away from your computer, that has status. And so I think the craft thing is a leisure thing. But I really do think... And I see that, like, certainly in Miami. People, like, it's so hard to find, like, tradesmen. It's so expensive.
Construction costs are through the roof. And I always think about whether you could apply the business model of Lambda School. If you, like, remember... where it's like zero tuition, you know, like train these people, but then you make a cut of like their revenue once you find them a job.
Like what if you build like a modern brand around like tradesmen, but like, I don't know, just like elevate the status of it. Cause there's like real money in these jobs and there's a huge shortage. Most of the people in these trades jobs are actually retiring in a couple of years. It's a huge problem actually.
I think so. I think there's like an opportunity to be like, choose a vertical. whether it's like painting, landscaping, plumbing, electricians, like, I don't know, like woodworking, whatever. Train these people, find them jobs, and then get a cut of like their income. But I think like the, like you have to build a compelling brand that elevates the status of these things.
That's where I think a lot of these businesses operate like fax machines, like 1985 type stuff. So I think there's a lot of vertical SaaS. But like you said, it's a huge idea. If I was just getting started, I would literally find somebody to license these people, find companies that are actually hiring instead of them doing this freelance to start. I think it's a huge idea.
And I also think it's one that tech people don't touch this stuff. But I think a lot of the ideas that I have that are more like in the heart of tech, like they're just going to be less valuable when an AI can do that.
Yeah, somebody posted on Twitter last night, what happens, how do people choose one software over the other in a world where AI can do absolutely everything? And I don't know, my take on it is, my answer was founder worldview. I genuinely think that the motivation and the vision and the intention behind something is something you can't fake.
It's a little bit woo-woo, it's a little bit wishy-washy, but I think that's how people make decisions. it matters. Like, why are you building this? Like, I don't think people, like humans are not like rational. Like we were talking Econ 11, you know, like people make decisions based on emotions. And I don't know. I think it's like far less utilitarian than people.
Okay. So here's something I've learned building Sublime is, I think there's two types of founders, broadly speaking. I think there's founders that operate less like business executives and more like artists. They have a creative vision and they're manifesting it and they're not really solving a problem. They're just manifesting a creative vision. And the kind of like,
counter point to that is like founders that are iterating and validating and like, you know, here's a hypothesis and I'm going to tweak it and like iteratively get to product market fit. And I definitely think I'm the former, like Sublime is the former.
It's, you know, in some ways, like I had this idea fully formed in my head about like building a Sublime internet and I had to kind of work backwards. to reverse engineer that idea because the reality is that most people don't care about their mission. They care about what can you do for them today.
And so I've sort of been in that process of like, how do you take that big vision and like piecemeal it into specific value props. But I say that because I think that, you know, like Sublime for me is like the missionary thing. It's like the multi-decade project. It's going to like take me decades, but it's like the moat is so profound.
But I think there's a huge opportunity to do the opposite of that, which is do one thing, do it well. And I have two ideas, one of which I'm building, the other of which I would build if somebody in this podcast wants to help. But essentially, or actually maybe, let me frame it with an anecdote that I think is fantastic. So Akio Morita was the designer for the Sony Walkman.
Showing 21–40 of 92 · page 2 of 5
← Previous
Next →