Founders can find ideas by reaching a field's frontier

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:00:03

   No, you have to blame the company. The thing that's crazy to me, so I'm looking up this open router company, and I find the personalities and the founding experience more interesting oftentimes than the actual technology. And it's crazy to think, when the average person thinks of AI, they think, how do I just make a fun chat person that I could talk to? Or how do I just do this small, trivial task that helps me?

2. 1:00:28

   But then there's this other group of people that say, well, there's these huge $100 billion companies that need X done. I'm going to make that. And finding those problems that those huge $100 billion companies have is likely just as hard as making a chatbot or some smaller thing. But it's so interesting to notice these problems. For example, Cloudflare. I think about Cloudflare because I'm like, I didn't even know, when I learned what Cloudflare was, I was like, I don't know what a CMN, what do they do?

3. 1:00:59

   CDN. Yeah, I was like, I don't even know what CDN means. How do you even know what that means, let alone enough to invent a solution? Or when you think of Palantir, you're like, how did the founders of Palantir even come to the conclusion that organizing data is the way to solve terrorist attacks? because it's easy to understand why people would buy that. I will help prevent terrorist attacks or I will save you money.

4. 1:01:24

   But to even notice that there's these huge problems that these massive companies even have, that's an art that I'm in awe of that these guys have. Paul Graham has this great essay called Great Work or How to Do Great Work. And in it, he describes this exact thing. What he says is, he says many things. It's like a very, very long essay. it took me like three days to like chew through this thing. But one of the things he talks about is you want to get to the frontier of whatever domain you're in.

5. 1:01:52

   So for example, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't have to be like super high tech. Like maybe you're just in electronic music. You're really into EDM and making songs. Well, at the beginning, when you're a beginner, you're thinking about yourself being like close to the center of the circle. You're kind of where the mass is, the center of mass. and your goal through your curiosity and through your hard work and through your experimentation, just doing lots of stuff, you're going to move from the center of mass where most people have basic understanding of something.

6. 1:02:27

   You'll move out to the frontier. So you move to the edge of the circle. And when you're in the center of mass, the edge of the circle looks smooth. It just seems like people got it all figured out. That the people that are out there, the companies that are out there seem to be doing their thing. the world has a nice circular shape to it. It's one smooth line. But when you get closer, you realize it's actually quite jagged and there's lots of gaps that are in that frontier.

7. 1:02:51

   And then he says, basically, your job is to get to the frontier of knowledge, meaning like you know so much about electronic music. You actually have used all the different tools. You understand, you know, you've made hundreds of bad songs. You've been to the conference where all the artists are at. You've talked to the companies that build the tools behind the thing you're at. You've understood what they're doing.

8. 1:03:11

   And when you notice what's missing, your job then as an entrepreneur is just to bridge that gap. Like wherever there was a little gap in the circle, fill it in. And so that's like something like OpenRouter. If you're inside one of these tech companies and your AI bill is going through the roof and you're like, oh, this is annoying. Like, why are we paying OpenAI so much money? Why are we paying Anthropics so much money?

9. 1:03:31

   Well, it's because when Sally in marketing wants marketing copy, we're just using this like very expensive model to write the caption for our Instagram post. We don't need that. But maybe when our R&D team is doing this really heavy-duty endeavor about video compression, we do need to be using the top model. Okay, well, how am I going to train everybody to do this? What if I didn't have to train? What if I created a little router in the middle?

10. 1:03:56

    I send the task there. Oh, that's cool. It uses its judgment to decide which model to use. Um, and you would notice that because you're inside these companies seeing how, seeing, you know, one of the pain points that you have, and you say, well, if we have this problem where our AI bill keeps going up and we don't want to stop using AI, we just want to use it more efficiently. Wait, every company in the world is going to have this problem. And then you build the company off it. By the way, the guy who did OpenRouter also built OpenSea.