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- 5 Startup Advantages in AI
Hello there, happy unicorns.
Most startups don’t succeed, never mind achieve unicorn status.
Today we’re going to dig into some strategic insights from Pete Flint - a guy who has successfully built two separate unicorns, Trulia and lastminute.com (and gone on to invest in several more as a partner at NFX).
I’ve been a fan of NFX’s blog for a long time.
Their mantra is “See what others do not.”
Awesome call to action.
NFX freely shares some of the most valuable reflections on today’s startup ecosystem.
I recently came across a cool lecture by Pete on the 5 key paths to startup disruption with AI:
Pete Flint - The Startup Advantage in AI
Exploit incumbent business model conflicts
Move faster than slow, encumbered industries
Be radically (100x) better, not just incrementally better
Unlock value from unstructured data
Create breakthrough user experiences
Pete Flint’s 5 Key Paths to Domination with AI
1. Exploit incumbent business model conflicts
Google Search has been around forever, but let’s face it:
There’s an inherent conflict between providing useful answers and their need for people to click on ads.
Because they are disincentivized to disrupt their own cash cow, ChatGPT was able to come along and offer a radically new way to retrieve a single answer.
Google has struggled to offer a competing solution, and is hindered from going all in because they depend on an imperfect retrieval of information that necessitates clicking on ads.
Fortunately, “shopping around” isn’t going away soon, but a lot of informational queries have moved to LLMs.
2. Move faster than slow, encumbered industries
Many companies are still dealing with TPS reports and paper trails.
Pete suggests targeting industries that are traditional, slow-moving and lack digital savvy.
Some examples: construction, legal, manufacturing
These industries often lack a dominant digital incumbent.
Startups can move fast to digitize and disrupt these industries with AI while the incumbents are still figuring out whether to let employees access ChatGPT.
3. Be radically (100x) better
What I love about this approach is that it forces you to think differently.
Most businesses and people fall into incremental thinking, which is a fancy way of saying make what you already do a little bit better.
But without stepping back and rephrasing the problem, you’ll rarely have breakthrough insights.
So asking yourself - “How can I make this 100x better (with AI)?” is a great thought exercise.
Most of us rarely stop to think what something would look like if it were 100x better.
That’s a great place to start.
4. Unlock value from unstructured data
Traditional software is deterministic and rule-based.
AI excels at processing and extracting insights from vast amounts of unstructured data.
Examples of unstructured data include images, video, sensor data, text, biological data
Unstructured data is growing exponentially (e.g., genomic sequencing data) and many industries are already sitting on untapped troves of this stuff (e.g., manufacturing, healthcare)
Startups can unlock immense value by using AI to structure and analyze this data
Opportunities exist where unstructured data is underutilized, especially in high-value domains like drug discovery, biology and industrial IoT.
5. Create breakthrough user experiences
According to Pete, analytical founders often underestimate the importance of user experience (UX).
Yet some of the biggest companies have emerged in part due to their superior UX:
ChatGPT’s simple conversational interface
Google’s search interface
Facebook’s UI vs MySpace
Uber’s mobile app ride-hailing experience
AI can now power new forms of interaction, such as voice, chat and movement.
Startups should rethink UX from first principles to look for groundbreaking opportunities to apply AI.
Avoid simply tacking AI on to existing UX conventions.
ChatGPT proved how quickly a useful AI UX can disrupt incumbents.
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What’s great about these insights from Pete are that they recommend ways to create value by making stuff better, or making better stuff.
AI can be truly transformative and it’s a mistake to simply try and enhance the way you’ve always done things and not reconsider the entire problem / solution from first principles.
About Pete Flint
Here’s a quick rundown of Pete’s bona fides, which I’ve assembled effortlessly with my custom AI generation tools:
Pete Flint is a British internet entrepreneur and investor who has founded two billion-dollar businesses. He earned degrees in physics from Oxford University and an MBA from Stanford. Early in his career, Flint was part of the founding team at lastminute.com, a leading European online travel company that scaled to 2,000 employees and went public before being acquired for over $1 billion.
In 2005, Flint founded the online real estate platform Trulia while attending Stanford. He served as Trulia's CEO and chairman, raising over $250 million in funding and leading the company through an IPO in 2012. In 2014, Trulia merged with rival Zillow in a $3.5 billion deal to create the largest real estate technology company.
Since 2016, Flint has been a managing partner at NFX, a major early-stage venture capital firm he co-founded that focuses on investing in network effect businesses. He is recognized as one of the most successful British entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.
Pete Flint Lecture
That’s it for today.
I hope this helps you in your growth journey.
-Brian
PS - Check out a post I wrote a while back on NFX’s idea of finding the fast moving water in the startup world.
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