ChatGPT Is the New Excel

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Hello, and happy Sunday! The best thing to come out of the first week of the Summer Olympics in Paris (other than the outré opening ceremony) might have been the steampunk vs. tech founder sharpshooters.We'll be watching during week two.—Kate Lee

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Knowledge base

"The Great AI Unbundling" by Dan Shipper/Chain of Thought: Excel spawned the B2B SaaS revolution—now AI chatbots are poised to similarly catalyze a new market. Just as Excel's generativity led to niche workflows that became standalone apps, Dan believes that ChatGPT and Claude are creating opportunities for the next wave of startups. Read this if you want to spot the next big AI startup opportunity hiding in plain sight (hint: It's probably in your chat history).

📼 On Friday, Dan got access to ChatGPT’s new Advanced Voice Mode feature. You can watch his review on YouTube. Look out for a longer piece later this week.

🔏 "The Art of the AI Pivot" by Jason Shen: Gamma was a struggling startup whose users faced the classic “blank page problem.” When the company embraced AI, it became a 3-million-user juggernaut in just three months. This case study in pivoting demonstrates the importance of catching the right tech wave at the perfect moment. Read this to learn how to turn your startup's biggest weakness into its greatest strength—and why the best business ideas often come from solving your own frustrations.

🎧 "How a Top Podcaster Rides the AI Wave" by Dan Shipper/Chain of Thought: Nathaniel Whittemore, host of The AI Daily Brief podcast, details his AI-powered workflow with Dan on the latest episode of AI & I. He shares a wealth of practical tips, like curating news with X bookmarks and generating eye-catching thumbnails with Midjourney. Listen to or watch this episode if you want to better curate your own information stream or level up your content creation. Subscribers have access to the full episode transcript.

"Inside the Pod: Momentum Is the Key to Productivity" by Rhea Purohit/Chain of Thought: Ever wished you could build a website with an absolute minimal amount of effort? Nick Dobos's Grimoire, the top-ranked custom GPT for programming, makes it possible with just two words. This coding assistant uses momentum and fantasy-themed hotkeys to keep you productive. Read this if you want to learn how to use AI to code faster, ship projects instantly, and programming from scratch. 

“Tinder Is Way More Important Than You Think” by Evan Armstrong/Napkin Math: Tinder isn't just for hookups—as it turns out, it's a vital cog in the U.S. economic machine. With birth rates plummeting and young workers becoming scarce, online dating might just be our secret weapon for population growth. (It’s also how Evan met his wife.) Read this for a look at how your next match could save Social Security (and why we desperately need a better dating app).

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Data mining 

MetaAI’s unexpected power users. If you had to guess where in the world Meta was finding the highest utilization of its Meta AI product—an AI assistant—where would it be? If you guessed “India,” you’d be correct. During the company’s second-quarter earnings call, its chief financial officer said, “People have used Meta AI for billions of queries since we first introduced it. We're seeing particularly promising signs on WhatsApp in terms of retention and engagement, which has coincided with India becoming our largest market for Meta AI usage.” [Emphasis added] India is already Meta’s largest install base by far, and it’s not even close:

India has almost twice as many Facebook users as the United States, driven mostly by WhatsApp—which also happens to be the primary delivery mechanism for Meta AI. Not only is WhatsApp powering India’s (extremely rapid) on-ramp to the internet, the country is one of the few large developing nations expected to grow over the next few decades. If China was the last quarter-century’s “new market to conquer,” India is very likely to be the next, and Meta’s substantial foothold ought to be the envy of its peers. To be fair, the quarterly revenue of $389 million from WhatsApp Business (its enterprise platform) and Payments is a rounding error for a company generating $38 billion in advertising, but the company did go out of its way to note 73 percent year-over-year growth. Even if that growth slows to 50 percent, it won’t be long before Meta’s beachhead in India becomes the crown jewel of its growth story—and its AI growth story as well.—Moses Sternstein  

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Keyword extraction

Jason Shen, founder and executive coach who wrote about a company that successfully pivoted with AI, shared one good read: 

🖇 “An Interview With AMD CEO Lisa Su About Solving Hard Problems” by Ben Thompson/Stratechery: “Nvidia gets all the love these days, but AMD stock has 30-xed since Lisa Su ascended to chief executive a decade ago. The conversation is a great exploration of the psychology of a strategic, highly technical leader who appears to have a sense of humor, too—particularly her lessons from working on [Sony’s] PlayStation and shadowing IBM's [former CEO] Lou Gerstner, and her thoughts about competing with her first-cousin-once-removed (Jensen Huang).” 

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Alignment 

Your new BFF. There's a new friend in town, and it's called...friend? It's a digital AI companion that you wear on your chest like a pendant and speak to like an old pal. Just wait until it starts giving you dating advice—suddenly you're living in a Black Mirror episode titled "Swipe Left for Skynet." In all seriousness, it does have potential. Loneliness is an epidemic, and a reason why is the erosion of social skills. Millions of people are desperate for connection but lacking the tools to make it happen. That's where AI friends could genuinely make a difference: an always-available, judgment-free conversation partner, like a personal trainer for your social development. You can practice small talk, work on your conversational timing, and maybe even rehearse those painful social scenarios—all without the fear of real-world consequences. We might just be on the brink of a social revolution, one where AI doesn't replace human connection, but instead becomes the training wheels that help us rediscover it.—Ashwin Sharma

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Sentiment analysis

Dan’s piece about the great AI unbundling drew a contrary view:

“I liked this post a lot, and especially the introduction about JTBD [job to be done]. But I don’t think it’s true. Software startups have a moat partly because building a team of designers and engineers to create and maintain a product is hard. But increasingly, you don’t need to do that anymore; AI can write code and build products, too. This democratization means that everyone gets to be a SaaS founder. But rather than paying by subscription for a fixed set of polished features, the ‘products’ will be one-off, single-use, disposable software that’s good enough—and free. ‘It’s different this time’ because foundation models are very different from the stuff of which VisiCalc was made. (Probably I’m both wrong and right about this: The niches in which SaaS work will get tougher, but they’ll still be around.)”—An AI startup founder

Want to chat? DM Dan or Evan on X.

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Collaborative filtering

Start your engines. There are many "one-way-door" decisions founders, CEOs, and engineering leaders are likely to encounter on the journey to scale. Jessica Popp, longtime chief technical officer and Bessemer Ventures advisor, shares insights and frameworks on hiring internationally, bringing on new leaders, and navigating other big areas of consideration for growing engineering and product teams from one to 50 and beyond.

Are your employees automating 80 percent of their repetitive tasks? If the answer to that question is “no,” you’re behind. Every can help. 

We work with organizations of all sizes—startups, PE firms, nonprofits, and corporations—to uncover where ChatGPT and custom AI solutions can be incorporated into your work. Our process:

1. We conduct a month-long research project and interview members of your team across departments, from C-suite to individual contributors.
2. We share our findings in our proprietary platform, where you can discover all the GPTs your team needs, use cases they can solve with ChatGPT and AI, and a custom-made curriculum broken down by department. You can interrogate our report and our interviews using AI to ask your employees your own questions.
3. We train your organization on using ChatGPT and so they can build their own AI products, focusing on departmental-level use cases. Our trainings solve the real problems your employees face so that by the end of our engagement, they have both tangible prompts and GPTs they can use in their daily work as well as the knowledge to make more and improve those already made.

Incorporating AI into everything your business does is critical not just to keep up, but to get ahead. By the end of this process with Every, your team members will be ChatGPT and AI power users—guaranteed. If you’re interested, email Dan at dan.shipper@every.to with the name of your organization and a few details about the project.

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Hallucination

What if the wheel of death were an Apple pie?

That’s all for this week! Be sure to follow Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.