"One of the most important things to know about this AI cycle is that no one knows what they're talking about, and even very smart and plugged in people are continually reversing their opinions and then re-reversing them three months later."
That was Jack Altman (yes, Sam's brother), General Partner at Benchmark, this weekend. Gokul Rajaram chimed in:
"This is very true. I spoke to the product team at a large public company a few months ago, and made a bunch of assertions. 3 months later, I spoke to the product team at another large public company, and I realized that at least 50% of things that I had confidently asserted in the prior session were no longer true. Change is truly the only constant. At both the individual and company level, need to be super nimble, flexible, open minded and embrace change."
Many others said versions of the same thing. Stay open. Stay nimble. Change course.
As a founder, this is exhilarating and maddening in equal measure. We can build faster than we ever could, with technology that lets us create for our customers in ways that were unimaginable two years ago. That is the fun part. The maddening part is that endless possibility with unguarded optionality turns what to build and how to build it into a daily source of doubt.
Over the past month, we've made decisions to completely rebuild two foundational features in our product. We did so because we realized that our customers were using these features suboptimally (despite being widely used), and we did so because rebuilding them would advance Gigi to drive the most value for our customers with the growing abundant intelligence we have at our fingertips.
At a time when our product, and other products, are becoming headless and investments in the native product experience can feel unglamorous, we also prioritized building quality of life functionality for our customers who live in the Gigi product every single day. This new functionality isn't the type of thing that makes for exciting blog or headline material, but it is the type that leads to all caps messages of elation from our customers in shared Slack channels and power users proclaiming, "it's a game changer."
Investors, founders, and operators are all trying to make sense of this moment, and from the outside it is not obvious what makes Gigi special. Probably hundreds of AI ad managers have launched in the last year. In a screenshot, ours looks like a lot of them.
We know less about the future than any deck we have ever written suggests. Look at an early Gigi deck and you will find a company that expected Gigi to be writing emails, listening to calls, and building decks by now. She does none of those things. Those were not the jobs our customers hired her for.
The only way we know to chart these waters is to ask our customers to chart them with us. We observe how they use our product with analytical obsession. We listen to their problems with empathetic intensity. We build solutions that shepherd them along the AI adoption journey and bring as much value as possible to their business and their clients.
Jack is right. Nobody knows what they are talking about. But that is only true of people talking about the future. Our customers are not talking about the future. They are telling us what is broken in their week right now, and in the 12 months since we launched Gigi, that signal has never once reversed itself.
Cherry Picked is a monthly newsletter from Adam Epstein, co-founder and CEO at Gigi, covering the AI and commerce media insights you just gotta know.
