Worldbuilders: Building Digital Minds and Why Humans Still Matter | Dara Ladjevardian (Delphi)

I want to invent something that was not possible before. I'm interested in creating something new. And no one wanted our product. It was really painful. But then, like, we had our first, like, big believer, Brendon Burchard, this coach with a million followers. And he was kind of our evangelist. And a lot of other people heard about Delphi. More people came, more people came. At every stage you're finding— you're refining product market fit and new user groups. I'm glad I went through that because I'm almost like it's supposed to feel like that for every user group. There's one version of you that gives up and pivots and the amount of companies companies that have tried Delphi's idea that pivot 4 months later because it's really painful to make work is so many. So I'm just like, you just have to continue, right? And like survive.

My guest today is Dara Ladjevardian, the co-founder and CEO of Delphi. Delphi is redefining how knowledge is shared by creating a new medium for human communication. Interactive digital minds that allow you to scale your presence and allow others to learn from the best. Dara and I first met when he was building his first company, and we later strategized on how to leverage human psychology to build Delphi. In this episode, we talk about why human connection is still so important in this age of AI, how Dara knew he had to go all in on Delphi, and what principles guide him. Enjoy the show. Hey Dara, how are you?

It's me. I'm great. How are you?

I'm great. I'm great. Hoi Saxa.

Great to be here in the same city. Hoi Saxa.

Yes, sir. I want to bring it back to the beginning, which is our beginning. I literally remember being on the phone with you. It was the middle of COVID You were tinkering on ideas. I think I had reached out to you because there's not many people from Georgetown that are in startups. And I remember being impressed by you and just wanted to get to know you. And you told me about the e-commerce idea that you're working on at the time, Friday.

Friday.

I'd actually love to hear a little bit about like, what was the decision to go after Friday? To stop, to join OpenStore, to then leave and start Delphi. Like, I'd love to understand what was going through your head in those really, like, pivotal moments.

It was a very nonlinear path. I was working at C3 AI as a forward-deployed engineer, and before it was cool, before it was cool. I mean, this was like really unsexy AI. It was like predictive maintenance for oil rigs, or, you know, turning text on papers into PDFs. So like, not as sexy, but I got early access to the GPT-4 GPT-3 developer list. And, you know, I was— there was like a community of people on Twitter that were building experiments. Jordan Singer, you know, a couple of people. And there was some like hype. And at the time, everyone was obsessed with crypto. So crypto and American Dynamism were the hot things in tech, and LLMs were kind of like the weird, like, what is that?

I can tell you it was not a main topic of discussion in our firm at the time, but American Dynamism were.

Yeah. I mean, I was tempted. I joined On Deck Catalyst to kind of figure out what I wanted to do next. And I definitely had shiny object syndrome. I'm like, All my friends are making so much money in crypto, right? Like, should I be joining Olympus DAO or any of these other things?

Yes.

Yeah. But I decided to just like start building things and tinkering. And one of those first things, I was on Uber Eats and the UX of Uber Eats is not great. I was like, I wish I could just like buy anything with a text. I wish I could just text something. So for the On Deck Hackathon, we built Friday, which was literally that, you know, connected to Uber Eats, Amazon, and Walmart where you could text a phone number and it would buy, buy whatever for you.

Right.

And it went kind of viral on Twitter. And at the time, I mistook virality for success, which is not a mistake people should make. But it kind of kickstarted my journey. I was like, I should start this company.

Did it give you enough signal to say, hey, actually choosing LLMs instead of these other catalysts to build upon is interesting?

Yeah, yeah. It was like, I think like when you first get into startups, external validation has a role. And like, at the time for me, I had like quit my job. I had no money. I slept out of my car for a week. So I was like, mentally really anxious. And I— this got a lot of virality. I was like, I'm gonna start this company. So I was super focused on Friday and was talking to users. Was very lonely at the time. You know, I didn't really know many people in the tech area. I didn't really have any mentor.

You're working at this big company, not this like inner circle startup.

I wasn't in the scene. I wasn't the guy who was like going to happy hours like a lot of people do these days. And I remember my dad had been pushing me to read a book about my grandfather for so long, because my grandfather was like this titan in Iran before the revolution, had 30,000 employees at his peak. And it was during this time I was like, you know what? I was super stressed and I was like, maybe I can find like a little bit of wisdom in someone who's like my family. And so I read his book and I loved it, not just because he was like a legend, but it was very much about his principles. And I wanted to be able to ask him like, how could I apply these principles to my own, to your founding, to my own founding journey in AI. He was like in textiles and oils. He had had a stroke, so I couldn't ask him directly myself. But there was a book that kickstarted my career in tech, and it was called How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil. And in this book, he says that the mind is a hierarchy of pattern recognizers where a pattern recognizer takes an input and produces an output. And if you can stitch a bunch together, you can recreate the mind, right?

Like a token.

Yeah, like a token. LLMs.

Yeah.

Prompt. Output. And I was like, I can do this with my grandfather, right? So I started doing a bunch of research. You know, there's people who created like a polygram bot.

This was like while you were still—

while I was still working on Friday. Yeah.

Yeah.

And I ended up creating a digital version of my grandfather, use it for advice. I actually was so excited about this idea that I almost, almost ditched Friday and I built this thing called Helix at the Next On Deck hackathon. Okay.

Got it. Hackathons were a good forcing function to like get to go from idea to—

this weekend I'm just going to build this.

Yeah.

Got a lot of hate on Twitter for that one. People were like, this is immoral, this is stupid. It was also very expensive. So I was like, I'm not going to start this company. I'm just going to continue working on Friday. Couple of months into Friday, I had like minor PMF with parents, like people who were using it to buy like paper towels, staples.

Busy.

It's so busy. But I was like, I don't care about this idea at all. Like, I'm so not passionate and like, I'm thinking about this other idea.

Well, one had like real, a real emotional connection and real emotional value for you versus, oh, this is an interesting technology catalyst I can build upon. Yeah. Which is of course important for startups. But, you know, I ask a lot about the why.

Like, why do you do the late Saturday nights?

You're right.

Like you're thinking about the right, right.

Especially in this day and age when like the cost of software is going to zero. To me, motivation matters more than anything. Like, why will you go through the near-death moment? Well, why will you shatter through the glass ceilings? You need to have that emotional—

you need the fire. Yeah. And so I had gotten an acquisition offer from a YC company, but they wanted me to come work for them. And I was like, I don't— I don't want to do that. So I shopped it around.

Was that because, like, you knew you wanted to be an entrepreneur, that you didn't want to be a— you didn't want a boss necessarily?

I had a very specific idea of what I needed to do next. I wanted to go work somewhere where I would find a co-founder. So the culture needed to be like a talent magnet. Yeah. But the number one thing was actually I wanted to have a mentor. I wanted to learn from someone who was like really respected and the best. And you want to see what great looks like. I want to see what great looks like. I can actually get a mentor. And so found a buyer for Friday who just wanted to buy the asset versus me. And I found Open Store. Keeter Boy was the founder. Again, I didn't care much about e-commerce, but like they were interested in me because I had worked on Friday. Yeah. And I ended up moving to Miami to work for Keith so I could learn as much as I possibly could. And, you know, 6 months into working at Open Store, I had built a bot of Tony Fadell, um, because we were reading Build in our book club. And I was like, this is a lot cheaper than last time. And there's like a new paper on Twitter every week. And a learning lesson from Keith where he says he only invests in companies where the majority of people laugh at him. I was like, maybe the fact that everyone was sending me death threats is actually why I should double-click into this idea. It's a new category.

Yeah. Why is it so visceral?

Yeah, it's a new category. Like Airbnb, Uber, like every category that was new, people thought was weird. By the time people think it's normal, by the time there's a market map, it's too late. Absolutely. So I was like, I got really motivated by Keith's mentality of looking at the world. I was like, oh, like this is something new and I like, it's up to me to will it into existence. So a month before ChatGPT came out, Left OpenStore, started Delphi.

Great timing.

Great timing.

When it comes— I'd love to double-click on that sort of, you know, the— what ends up becoming these mainstream consumer applications, marketplace, etc. Do get— you do get sort of weird looks in the beginning, or—

We still get weird looks.

Yeah, you still get weird looks to this day. Like, why do you think that is? Like, why do people actually have that sort of visceral reaction at, you know, an adverse visceral reaction? Why do you think that is?

I think all these things where people have an adverse visceral reaction involves some sort of social layer. You are being perceived in another way, or you're interacting with someone like Uber, you're getting in a stranger's car. Instagram, posting photos online, how cringe. YouTube, posting videos online. You're creating a new kind of social contract, and people are very anxious about their reputation and self-conscious. But then if you just try to simulate what it must have been like, to move from a society where we only shared knowledge by speaking to each other to like, I'm reading someone's thoughts.

Yeah, why wouldn't I just go talk?

That's so inauthentic, right? Like, why would I read someone's thoughts? Why would I listen to someone's thoughts? And you almost can imagine that people had the same reaction and then it became normalized. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's interesting. Something else that you mentioned when you're even starting Friday and, you know, focusing on GPT-3, like, what— how did you know not to go into those other areas you mentioned, whether it was crypto or American— American dynamism? Was it that, hey, there's just way too many people focused on this and so, you know, there's no— there's no secrets to be earned?

No.

Was it the emotional connection to realizing, wait, actually these language models, I can actually do something that has an emotional tie to something I've been thinking about, like, you know, with your grandfather.

Yeah.

I'm curious, like, how you knew to make that decision.

It was kind of by accident. Like, you know, when I left C3, I actually applied to YC with a co-founder at the time. We were building anomaly detection systems for satellites. So it was literally American dynamism. He moved to Hawaii. Okay. So I was like, okay, this idea isn't going to work. And like, I also know nothing about satellites. I need to find experts. And then I then built a token tracker, a bot that joined every single Discord channel and would track how often a token was being mentioned. I wanted to make some money. I lost a ton of money. And then I was like, You know what? Crypto is not my thing. I'm going to lose a lot of money in this space. American dynamism. I just don't have the network.

Yeah.

LLMs I can build. Like, I'm building this pretty fast.

Yeah. And you were a forward deployed engineer, which—

forward deployed engineer. I built like a bot that allowed me to buy crypto through text. I built a bot that connected my neurocity device to order Uber Eats whenever I felt the sentiment of hungry. So I was like, LLMs allow you to just build all these really cool things.

Yeah. In a way that's actually useful and meaningful.

Yeah.

Yeah. Interesting. And, you know, when it came to, I guess, like even leaving C3, right, you're serving these enterprise customers as a forward-deployed engineer working with some of those industries that you mentioned. Why build a consumer product?

I just think it's more fun. I, I think there's like such thing as founder market fit and like I'm kind of a creative in a way. I also like, like to move very fast. I think the thing at C3 that I didn't love was just like the slow cycles, bureaucracy. You don't really get to be creative. You're solving someone else's problem. And I remember in On Deck, you write your goals at the beginning, and one of the goals that I had is I want to invent something that was not possible before. Like, I literally wrote that down. Like, I want— I'm interested in creating something new. And I think that's like a double-edged sword of mine where I've always wanted to do something that was different, which puts me down the path of most resistance, right? And like hardship. But that's just I think kind of how I am.

Yeah. No, that idea of like building something new is something that I think a lot about here at Worldbuild, which is, you know, I think a lot of the applications in AI are very skeuomorphic, right? It's very much the beer-drinking app version of the iPhone apps, right? It's not— what I think is more compelling is post-skeuomorphic. It's you start first with the nuance of these models. Like, what can we uniquely do today with models that was literally not possible before to create these new experiences and workflows? How has that evolved since, you know, sort of day zero at Delphi to today, you know, within, within the acceleration is what I call it that we're in now.

I mean, it's funny because when I reflect on day zero at Delphi, it feels like we're in a different reality.

Like it, I don't know about you, it just feels like we've jumped dimensions and like, well, I remember literally talking to you that, you know, the first time we're getting started jamming on the memo and to, you know, to get to today. Yeah, totally feels a different time, but different time.

And a lot of things have changed. There've been like a lot of distractions, a lot of shiny objects. I think with a company like Delphi, especially when you're building during a time when things are changing so fast, you want to anchor on the things that are not going to change. Like that has kind of been my north compass. You know, people trying to pull us into like building an agent assistant or people trying to pull us into like building Claude bot, right?

Right. Same thing today. It's like the hot thing.

It's like, okay, what is not going to change? Humans are going to exist. They're going to need representation. Humans care about what other humans have to say. Let's anchor on those things and see how AI can help us solve this problem versus anchor our entire company around the technology.

Yeah. When did that become clear to you? Because in the beginning, right, it started as, hey, let's tinker on this technology to then actually wait a second, here's the company that we want to build and this technology will propel us forward, not vice versa.

Well, it was kind of around the problem of access. You know, I didn't want to start a company around like death tech and legacy. So I think that thing like monetizing grief is kind of dark. But my grandfather was like, How do we access other human beings? I've like never had mentors my whole life and now I can learn from these people. But then Character AI came out and I was like, hmm, Character AI is going to have issues because it's like all fake.

It's a bunch of characters.

So like, okay, for Delphi to win, we actually need to build a product that incentivizes people to create digital versions of themselves. Why would someone do that? They want to represent themselves the same way someone creates a LinkedIn profile or a resume or writes a book. They want to scale their knowledge.

Absolutely.

So that was kind of the idea maze where it's like, okay, first First, let's go consumer. But actually, if you're thinking long-term, we need to create the incentives first to collect the data and get people bought in.

Yeah. And interestingly, maybe this will get a little specific, but we had talked about, hey, relationships are at the top of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. This is something that we spoke about when you were working on your early memo, and we jammed on that creatively. But interestingly, there is almost like two paths of Delphi, right? One was the more character companion. Digital clones, relationships, right, path versus the more utility, utilitarian path around helping a, you know, helping me scale my audience, my reach, but then also helping someone, you know, learn something new. Are those two different paths? Like, how did you think about that?

The way I make decisions usually is like, what's— what leads to the biggest outcome? And usually what is the hardest? Unfortunately, the first path probably would have been easier, but like, I think commoditized, you can like make self-help bots. And like when knowledge is commoditized, what you can't really compete with is trust and like owning the identity layer. And so by like creating the utility of having a Delphi, we actually end up doing the first thing in the long term because we end up getting like all the best people you could possibly want to learn from the world and it's verified. So, you know, it's them, you trust them more, and then we can recommend you the best people and it can help you that way. Yeah.

So is it an active bet of Delphi that you think IP you know, in this case, individual IP will still continue to be very important even in the age of AI. Yeah, I think there's something—

what can't get commoditized, like real things, real estate, but people. And people have, uh, like Delphi is like a verified version of you, right? When all these social media platforms have deepfakes and bots, like we want Delphi to be the place where you know who said what and I know it's true.

But do you think like AI breaks IP or Do you think IP will always, you know, have importance? And in this case for Delphi, right, IP is the individual's IP, right? In other cases it's, you know, we've seen, you know, Disney go after folks, right? Like, just curious to get your thoughts on this because I think you do touch, you know, again, individual IP, maybe not, you know, uh, a creative studio, but perhaps you could scale that one day. Yeah.

I mean, I think about IP right now. IP is something that is like a rare where I think IP grows into like perspective. Um, like, you, you care about what certain people have to say. You follow people on Twitter even though you could probably learn everything you possibly could learn on ChatGPT. Like, we're having this podcast because there's another human. So it's almost, uh, not that I'm like owning my IP and then I'm gonna sell it, but like, this is just a digital version of me that you know is true. This is like how I want to be perceived in the world.

And so the humanity of it, the human connection, still matters.

That's our bet. Yeah, that is kind of the bare case of Delphi is we don't care about humans anymore. That's when people ask you like, what's— what's— why does Delphi fail? And it's like, Delphi fails if end up in a world where we're just talking to ChatGPT and we're just talking to Claude, and we actually don't care what anyone else has to say. We don't meet each other. We're not curious about each other. I don't think that's going to happen if you just look at, like, human psychology and habits over time. Um, but I'm an optimist, so we shall see.

Yeah, well, it's interesting, right? Like, even if relationships are at the top of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the fidelity of those relationships are still important. So, you know, I think you're You know, from what it sounds like, it's, you know, maybe a similar bet to some of the companion apps, but you're much higher fidelity than a made-up character in that, hey, this is someone that I look up to. This is someone that I respect. This is someone that I want to learn from.

Or meet.

Or meet.

Delphi is how humans represent themselves, but also how people meet. Like eventually, you know, Delphi talking to Delphi.

Sure.

This is the person who thinks most similarly to you. Um, but I think the insight with my grandfather is an important one. It's not that his clone said anything to me that was so profound that helped me. It was the fact that it came from someone that I trusted and I was more likely to absorb it and adopt it.

Mm-hmm.

Because I could have read that information anywhere. Yeah. It could have been like in a self-help book, but like hearing information from someone you know and trust, I don't know, it had a bigger impact on me. And so I think similarly mentors or people have impact on each other. Mm-hmm.

We talked a little bit about this sort of like adverse visceral reaction to new consumer platforms in their early days. What's like the positive version of that when someone uses Delphi for the first time, whether it's, uh, someone who's trying to create a digital mind of themselves or, you know, a customer? What, what's the, what's the visceral reaction that you want to induce?

I think for, uh, for the person who is creating a Delphi, it's almost like never repeat yourself again and only spend time on things that matter. Um, so examples is, you know, you talk to someone's Delphi before you meet with them and you're like, they already kind of know everything about you and you can just talk about new things or like all the people who want to get your time and pick your brain. You don't want to ghost them. You don't want to have FOMO, so you can still help them and you'll be notified of someone interesting so you can help more people and scale yourself without like feeling that like, oh, my calendar or, you know, I feel bad and you can kind of focus on the people that matter. And then for the consumer, it's just access that wasn't there before. I think ChatGPT is teaching people to expect information through conversation. And Delphi allows you to do that with people and allows you to get perspective from those who have been in your shoes before. So you don't have to repeat their mistakes. Right.

Interestingly, yeah, the consumer behavior is being led by something that's in the hands of close to a billion people.

Yes. Same with the dot-com era. Dot-com era taught us to read information on the internet. Then you had the creator economy and blogs, right? So like the pendulum swings from new form of consuming information to consuming information by human verified.

Mm-hmm.

Locations.

Right. Fascinating. As Delphi has evolved from a product perspective, how important was it to get to that sort of visceral reaction? Like, is that something you were sort of targeting, or like, what was the North Star from a product perspective?

I'm really stubborn. I don't know if I, if I necessarily did it the right way. Like, for the first year of the company, it was all like intuition-based product and just like, this is what I want to build. And no one wanted our product. It was really painful. Probably should have pivoted, probably should have been a lot more data-driven. But then like we had our first like big believer, Brendon Burchard, this coach with a million followers, and he was kind of our evangelist. And a lot of other people heard about Delphi. More people came, more people came, new kinds of people started to get utility out of it. And so it just kind of happened through sheer will and persistence. And, you know, at every stage you're finding— you're refining product-market fit and new user groups. And like, I'm glad I went through that because I'm almost like it's supposed to feel like that for every user group. There's one version of you that gives up and pivots. And the amount of companies that have tried Delphi's idea that pivot 4 months later because it's really painful to make work is so many. So I'm just like, you just have to continue, right? And like survive.

You have to survive. Yeah, that's, you know, there are these like different archetypes of founders that I look for. I think the survivor is one, the maverick is another, the worldbuilder is another. Worldbuilding is something that you've taken on from the beginning. What inspires you as you're building Delphi's world? Like, who are you inspired by? What inspires you? You said you're creative, right?

I try to—

and sorry, where do you look for inspiration as well?

That's a good question. I, to be honest, I try not to look for inspiration. Keith has a favorite quote from Margaret Thatcher. Say what you will about Margaret Thatcher, but it's like, I don't read the newspapers. I don't want them to change my mind. And I feel like the worst decisions I've made have come from like me listening to a podcast with like a more successful founder or a VC or reading Twitter and changing my mind and going towards the norm where like my only advantage as a founder in Silicon Valley is doing things my way. Obviously you got to layer it with data. Like I think data is really important and this is what Tony Fadell's entire book is about, matching intuition with data. But I try to lead through intuition and then kind of like iterate based on feedback. And I think the world of Delphi, when you're creating a new category, it's like the future is not determined. You get to choose how it manifests.

Have there been any— you mentioned those, those ideas of things that you didn't go after. Have there been sort of like micro pivots within the journey so far?

Like the—

I call them the lowercase p pivots, right? Like not the pivot that you read about in the news or not the pivot that, you know, changes the entire company entirely, but these micro pivots that lead you into new directions.

Yeah, they were kind of for— I mean, it was, it was almost like the long-term vision was always there. The how is like bumpy. And so initially our— we were building like the consumer platform that was kind of like Character AI, build clones of people, right?

And we called it Clones.

We called it Clones. We got cease and desist. I had this huge realization. I was like, oh, Delphi needs to be a beloved brand. We need to be a beloved brand because people are trusting us with their data. They're trusting us to represent them. We need to be like, wow, Delphi aspiration.

It's a new modality, right?

Yeah, it's a new—

what we talked about it against the or the visceral, adverse visceral reaction people have to new consumer platforms. Like, you have to really, like, make it comfortable for them to use. Totally.

I mean, we're fighting against human psychology here. So, like, okay, focus on utility. Get rid of the word clones. Let's focus on people who already have a lot of trust, because one of the ways you get trust as a startup is borrowing other people's, other people's trust. And so creators, experts, people with large followings, that's how Delphi, through osmosis, adopted trust and, and kind of became—

solve for the cold start.

Yeah, solve for the cold start. You work with the people. Our business right now is a barbell approach where on one side we work with all of these like big creators. On the other side, we're focused on like the free tier use case of, you know, professional CEO creates a Delphi. So you're always on Front Door. Someone wants to pick your brain, talk to you before meeting you.

You create— I think I mentioned my cousin who's a dentist in London, and he has a podcast. He does courses all around the world for the very specific type of dentistry that he does, which I won't get into because it goes over my head, but we were chatting and he's like, oh, I made this, I made this digital mind of myself. And I'm looking at him like, you made a Delphi?

Let's go.

And it was just fascinating that it touched this, you know, dentist in London, right, who's not Arnold Schwarzenegger, who's not, you know, these celebrities that you have on the platform. But it's a new step in this creator economy, which, you know, I think still has like a bad— maybe not bad, but like a negative connotation associated with it. But like, it's actually led to I think like deep value, whether it's through the Patreons of the world, whether it's through YouTube.

Totally.

Like, yeah. Like, how do you think about the creator economy today?

Like, some of our users don't like to be called creators. Sure. Like experts, business owners. Like anyone is an expert or is an expert in something. We all know something. And, you know, you can argue that because of AI, everyone's going to be like a solopreneur and like building their own niche and building their own thing. So I don't know if long term, like Delphi is a creator company. I think we're just like a human company and some humans are creators, some humans are experts. Some humans are professionals.

Maybe to switch gears a little bit. You know, I believe like we're in this like acceleration period, like we're in the acceleration now. Yes. And if you don't get the Marvel reference, go watch, go watch The Avengers: Endgame. What do you think comes next for Delphi? Like, are there— how do you take advantage of this acceleration?

I mean, there's kind of two sides to this. One is you got to stay grounded. You got to stay grounded or else you're going to build all these features. You know, everyone's asking us to build MTP and like build all these things and, You know, what you say no to is as important as to what you say yes to. And I could be wrong in that. You see like Lovable building every product ever. And like a lot of these companies, I could be wrong. Maybe that's the right way to go. But for Delphi specifically, it's just like, I want to be the best in the world in like one thing. It's one thing. And so the models help us build better architecture, evals cheaper. So we don't need to worry about like, like pricing, for example, we're not pricing on usage.

We don't want to benefit from the cost curve. Yeah.

And also like we want to, We don't want to block usage. That's the whole purpose of the platform. Um, so it allows us to think more ambitiously about the product roadmap. Uh, I think for us, like, we want to make it easy, really easy to create a Delphi, trust a Delphi, get value from that Delphi. And once people are sharing Delphi links more often, the product grows through PLG. And once enough people have a Delphi, we have a network of human minds where, you know, you can find the best person in the world for whatever you're looking for. And there's a lot of use cases on top of human search that you can build.

And you mentioned Delphi is talking to each other.

Yeah.

Is that something that's already happening today? Is that something— not yet.

Yeah, that's where we want to go. You know, your Delphi talks to other Delphis and says, this is the most interesting insights from this person. This is someone you should probably continue the conversation with. This is someone you should meet with in real life.

So it truly is a human connection company.

Yeah. Human connection and insight. Right.

I think in many ways, like, it increases the access, right, for, for a— that could be the new sort of entrepreneur. Who needs to connect with or almost like you could get into like the matchmaking world as well.

Totally. Not dating.

We don't—

not dating.

Yeah. But from a work perspective, right? Yeah.

I mean, I think the internet made the world so big, like it used to just be your town and then it became 6 billion people.

Yeah.

And I think the promise of AI is it actually makes it small again. You don't have to have like the optionality crisis of, oh my God, there's so many opportunities out there. And like, no, these are the best opportunities. Yeah, it's find the needle in the haystack, right?

Interesting. Yeah. The 10, 10 blue links. Instead of like you going out and like needing to go click through each of those links to figure it out yourself, you're now getting like an answer.

Yeah.

How do you think about that? Like, you know, in some ways I enjoy like the rabbit hole digging of like the 10 blue links versus just getting the answer. Sometimes curious, like what's your sort of hypothesis there?

Well, I think as a VC, that's kind of like your job. Yeah, it's like some people love to go down the rabbit hole, but like, I don't know about you, but there's just been an explosion in content. It's hard. Like I used to check Twitter every day and now I almost have like a visceral reaction to Twitter because —people have reverse engineered the algorithm and launch videos every day. It's almost like, "No, I can't do it, but I'm sure there's something that I would like. I'm sure there's a podcast, a blog, a person that I'm missing out on." But Twitter is unusable as a discovery platform anymore, at least for me. Right.

Yeah, there's actually almost too much content. Like I said, I can't keep up with my bookmarks anymore.

I have a little bit of FOMO, because I'm like, "There must—" 3 years ago, there was a Twitter post that led me to hiring someone. There was a Twitter post that made me to actually meeting one of my best friends. I don't want to miss out on those things.

That may have been how I found you, either that or LinkedIn. It's probably Twitter. Yeah, I've met like many great people through Twitter. Yeah. Or used to, at least. Yeah, exactly. What do you think is like the most long-tail use case of Delphi 5 years from now that like, you know, you're not necessarily planning for, but that you could see happening?

Ah, man, the initial purpose of social networks was to like find people and insights, and now it's like the endless dopamine feed, right? I'm hoping that the endless dopamine feed is kind of like cigarettes on airplanes where that's not a thing we do anymore. And it goes back to like finding insights in people. And I think if Delphi is successful, that's the platform where people do it.

You know, as Delphi progresses from a product perspective, but also a customer perspective, you know, I think something that a lot of people are thinking about is, wow, like what, what if the models end up subsuming a lot of the value that I'm creating? As they get more capable. Where do you think Delphi will, will start and stop versus the model providers?

I mean, I think eventually we will train our own models. Like, eventually. It just doesn't make sense right now because, like, every year it gets cheaper to do that. And, like, we want to be the best in representing the mind. So our, like, research problem is how do you represent the human mind? It's a data architecture problem. It's an eval problem. It's a retrieval problem. So it's, it's architecture. And I guess people are calling it harness these days, but it's like harness is just a word for how you store and use the data. So yeah, I think we try to focus on architecture and, you know, as AI gets better and better, you know, the things you can't compete with are network effects, trust, identity, normalizing a new social behavior. I think two companies that did this very well are Calendly and Loom. You have better products than both of those companies, but like those companies normalize the behavior of sending those links. And once you— when you normalize a new social behavior, you kind of become synonymous with it.

Is that sort of what it takes to build a successful consumer product? Like, I mean, you know, you get bigger booms in consumer products, but you also get far— you also get a lot more, you know, sort of bus versus enterprise. Yeah.

I mean, I think we're taking a slightly different approach. Some consumer products will just go straight for the network. I believe that the network is more enduring when the individual unit has utility. So if you think about Clubhouse or BeReal, you know, it was reliant on the network that will exist. Yeah. Where Delphi is single player. Right. But because it's single player, it will be more enduring when there's a network.

There's a real utility around it. Yeah. That utility then leads to the network. Yeah. People that get onboarded because the network also gets single player utility. Yeah. And so that's a sort of reinforcing effect there.

Exactly.

Yeah. Interesting. You know, as you scale Delphi, as you go from the handful of, you know, celebrities, creators to the long tail, I'm curious, like, how does the everyday person use Delphi?

Yeah, I mean, then the, the, the big creators is kind of obvious, you know, they use books and courses to scale themselves and now they can scale themselves in a way that they would be if they're in the same room. Right.

For them it's a new modality for an existing behavior.

Yeah. Yeah. And I would argue it's the same for the individual. You know, when I, uh, when you meet someone, how do you, how do you learn about them? You look at their LinkedIn profile, you look at their resume, you look at their personal website. And so Delphi, the way people are using it is before meeting, talk to my Delphi. It'll handle the repetitive questions and we can talk about deeper or hey, like I'm super busy right now. You can start here with my Delphi. It can pretty much answer any of the questions that you have. And like, it might sound offensive at first, but we actually find is consumers like it because when you're talking to something that doesn't have a 30-minute cutoff, you actually are more comfortable asking more questions. And, you know, I'll be notified whether we should hop on a call. So like for me specifically, a journalist who's about to write a piece on Delphi or an engineer or a VC or, you know, someone that my mind finds that I would find interesting. It's a qualification and like a screen in a way.

And so someone's Delphi would be doing that for them. Yeah. And you can set up, you set that up basically.

Yeah. Whether you're a VC or a founder. Um, and then also for people who just like post online, Substack, Beehive, there's just a new ICP of a consumer who won't read anymore. They won't listen to podcasts and they have just low attention span, but they're still curious in what was there. Yeah. And so Delphi just allows them to engage with the content in a new way.

You get the banter of, you know, sort of voice assistant. Yeah, but it's actually information gathering, that thing that you would have read on the podcast. Exactly.

It's, it's banter and personalized to you. Ideally, over time, the more Delphi you talk to, we know like the specific parts of the podcast that are really interesting to you. Yeah.

So how is it set up then?

Yeah, I mean, we find everything about you online. You can connect your socials, Notion. But if you don't have any data, we have this interviewer that will ask you questions about yourself to create— create the mind. Your mind. Yeah.

And the mind gets sort of deeper and deeper over time.

Yeah. With more usage. There's breadth and depth. Yeah. I mean, like, you can go— mine's super deep in Delphi, not as deep in, like, my personal life. I see. You could add if you wanted to. Sure.

And, you know, when let's say I was to, you know, interview your Delphi here instead of you, would you be— how do you think about sort of like the hallucinations, right? Like how do you ensure that, hey, I can trust this Delphi to speak on my behalf on this podcast? You should do it.

I have full faith as a test. This was kind of the first problem we had to solve. You know, everyone's big fear— our platform is fully reliant on trust. Break the trust, everything breaks. Mm-hmm. And so people's fear, what if it says something wrong? What if someone takes a screenshot and, you know, sends it to the press or roasts me on Twitter? And that was kind of like the first thing we had to solve, um, or else no one would adopt our product. So we have like very strict guardrails. We have a strict mode where it will only say things it's trained on. Mm-hmm. You can customize what it says when it doesn't know, and you'll be notified every time. So you can actually go in and see and like improve it if you want to.

Is there like a hand-on, hand-off effect where like, let's say Delphi is is speaking with someone interesting, like, could you get a notification and then you hop in instead of your Delphi?

Yeah. Yeah. So you can set these alerts for like, you know, again, journalists. Yeah. Higher. Right.

And then you can say, hey, this is not my Delphi. This is Dara Ladjevardian.

Yeah, exactly. Text me. Text.

Yeah. And can you do that through the platform?

Yeah. You can do it through the platform.

Yeah. Very cool. Well, it's been great. I think like, you know, one thing that I'd love to end the conversation on is really really like to understand, like, what is the world that you're trying to build uniquely? Like, you know, what are you trying to prove?

What's the world you're trying to build? Well, I think from a macro perspective, given our thesis is a world where humans still matter, like Delphi kind of makes humans the main characters again, where AI is the main character right now. We put AI in the hands of the human and you get to use your Delphi to find the best opportunities. And in this world, where, you know, yes, you can get information from ChatGPT, but like, how do we maintain a human world is like, we learn from each other. Mm-hmm. We share perspectives. We see both sides of the spectrum, um, opinions, and we find the best people. We create human connection. Say what you will about AI friends. I'm not gonna make a comment, but I think the best future is where we have real friends. Mm-hmm. Um, so I think that's kind of the world we're building. Yes. From a category perspective, I view Delphi as a new kind of artifact of your mind. The same way a song is, an art piece is, the same way a podcast is. It's a new form of media that's interactive, and it's not dystopian. It's just a new way of experiencing you and accessing you, and so that you can spend your time with the people that actually matter.

Yeah, love it. Well, thanks. Thanks again, Dara Ladjevardian. Thanks for having me. Hey, this is Ben Casnocha, co-founder of Village Global. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Village Global Podcast, where we go deep on all the biggest topics in tech. If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. You can check us out on Spotify, Apple, wherever you get your podcasts. We'd love to see you for the next one.