Tobias "Tobi" Konitzer

And if you look at most companies out there, particularly with the emergence of generative AI, one of the ways or very early things that most companies, many companies build is something like a chatbot.

Because it's so obvious, right?

You can build a chatbot that is powered by Gen AI.

And I always, I scoff at that a little bit.

Why?

Because for most companies, it's actually completely orthogonal to the product offering, right?

So I'm a car marketplace.

And my first investment in AI is to build something that is entirely orthogonal for my product.

So that's not the mistake that we wanted to repeat here.

But now we face the second big question, which is, okay, you have this thing that you want to build.

Maybe you just build a new product and you call it Toby's Brilliant Autonomous Marketing Decisioning Agent.

Now, as you can tell, I'm not a product marketer, obviously, because hopefully nobody calls it that.

But you build this product and you go to a dark room and you bring all the smart people, hire the PhDs, not just me, but hire more PhDs.

And you gravitate towards building this thing and writing the, I'm going to use one mathematical term, writing the Bayesian reinforcement learning models on the whiteboard.

You feel really good about yourself.

And I've been there in my career, by the way.

My last venture raised about $6 million, hired all the smart people, built the product in a vacuum.

And then we did, of course, we're smart people, so we knew that the market wanted exactly what we had built, right?

No, nobody wanted what we built.

So I've really reworked the way that I'm thinking about tackling these big problems, how to infuse AI into product.