#56 Nik Shevchenko — The Russian genius building AI necklaces for the masses (future $1B company)

Nick.

Yeah.

What is that that you are wearing around your neck?

This is a KGB recording device. Just kidding. So yeah, this is a friend necklace. You just put it on your neck, go about your day. It will transcribe all your conversations into summaries, corrective feedback, and insights. Gives you information about people you talk to, What do you talk to them about? Call to actions, items, calendar invitations, and much more.

All right. So for the listeners, I got to be honest. I'm wearing mine too. So I already knew what it was. Nick sent me the AI Friend, I guess a month ago or so to check out. And I've been loving it. I was a little bit nervous about wearing, you know, an AI kind of recording device, but I've been loving it, especially for going on walks with my wife, having conversations about my business with friends. Also, as a ghostwriter, talking with clients, I no longer really have to take notes if we're meeting up for coffee in person. I can literally just turn on the AI Friend and the transcription is amazing. I've been really loving it, man. So I want to learn more. How did you get started building the AI Friend? And yeah, what's your story? How'd you get started?

Sure. Sure. So it all started, I think, roughly maybe 4 months ago. I saw a bunch of people advertising, using AI necklaces. There was Rewind that launched. There was another company that also did it. And they all kind of promised, you know, like, You could buy the device and, you know, just like it will be like cool, you know, it will work, it will bring you value, but no one actually shit. So like there were no devices you could actually buy and get delivered like next week. And I really wanted this device for myself. I got super sad, super angry that, you know, you cannot get it right now, even though it's like super obvious feature. You just like build like a goddamn microphone with a battery and a small board and put it all the context on your phone. So I just decided to build one myself. And we went on a hackathon. I think it was a Mistral hackathon at that time. Yes, that was happening in a Ceph, in like what was the office? It was like Cerebral Valley organizing it and stuff. And yeah, we just built it in 2 days and launched. People loved it. And you know, from day 1, pretty much you could build one yourself within like a day. Now you can even buy it and it will be delivered next week. So yeah, that's kind of it, the story.

Yeah, I remember seeing you launch and just being blown away how fast you built it because I did order a Rewind Limitless pendant, uh, 6 months ago. I've never gotten it. And, um, you know, that's a big company that makes millions and you're one dude, uh, who was able to ship faster. I actually, uh, after I got my AI friend from you and started wearing it, I emailed Limitless to get the refund. I still haven't even heard back. So, hey, dude, fuck you. They're bad customer support and shipping velocity is your opportunity, man. Which is, you know, I'm very bullish on what you're doing. So especially seeing, hey, like you did it for, you're doing it for a fair price. You're shipping fast. Our communication—

fully open source.

Yeah, our communication via DMs, you've been very thorough when you were giving advice for me to— or when you were giving me direction on how to use it and stuff. Also, let's talk a little bit about the product. So I put mine on a gold chain. It's my grandpa's old gold chain. So, yeah, and it just feels good. It's— I love the glow when you have it on, the little glow. I feel like Iron Man. You're kind of taking on a couple of giants, or maybe not giants, but you're just, you know, the David and Goliath story. I feel like here of AI pendants. So are you nervous at all? Like, how much coffee are you drinking? What's the deal here? How are you doing this?

Yeah. Firstly, man, thank you so much for all your compliments. You're just too nice to me, honestly. I'm just like a random Russian guy in San Francisco who is like launching open source projects. That's pretty much it. But anyways, firstly, it's not just me. I do have a co-founder who is actually sitting like right there right now, like right there in that corner of the office. You probably don't see him, but he is there. His name is Joan. And yeah, it's actually like two of us right now building this for the people. And how we are doing this, you know, just like by putting a lot of work and by just making things happen. The culture of what we are trying to achieve is speed over everything. So I just try to prioritize speed all the time, which is why unfortunately the device that you are wearing right now might not be looking like, you know, the most amazing in the world design and stuff, but at least it's something that you already are wearing, right? Compared to like something that was advertised a year ago and still like not out there. So by prioritizing speed over everything, we just ship fast and we are super perfectly fine. And I think it's pretty much fair that, you know, we claim that, you know, no one is shipping because, you know, and I think it's also very helpful to them because I don't think it's like really cool when you advertise something and don't, you know, actually ship. And I think we're helping them by, you know, just pushing them to do it faster. Because I would love to see what our competitors are doing. I would love to try their products. I would love to, you know, wear it for myself and see if it's actually even better than ours. And I think it will be super cool. So yeah, but I still didn't get to try it out. Unfortunately, that's the problem.

So yeah, dude, competition's good for everyone. So I love that. I would say, you know, I bet you're 100% right. It does kind of feel like you're moving so fast that, you know, it's just two people like moving super fast and having a small team can be really beneficial. So let me give an example, kind of tangential. The other night, my wife and I turn on Netflix and we see this new movie come out, and it's maybe not that new, but it came out 2024. It's Kevin Hart is stealing an NFT. Like, that is the movie. And you're like, okay, this is Hollywood. They're like 3 years late. Maybe 2021, if that came out, it was like, All right, that's whatever. But now it's like, because it's Hollywood, such a big budget, everybody takes forever. Like the movie's just coming out and it's like, all right, well, you know, there was all this content, you missed it, right? So there's something beautiful about a small, fast team. I really think that. Can you tell me a little bit more about the open source aspect? So For the listeners, open source was big in the news this week with the Llama launch from Meta. Can you tell me just a little bit about your philosophy around open source AI and open source projects?

I think open source is super important because this is the technology that is very dangerous. You literally have access to everything, almost everything that happens inside of the person's life. And I think it's crucial that the device like this is open source, which is why we do it open source. There are other alternatives that advertise like cloud, like productive, you know, like secure cloud, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you never actually know what is happening in the cloud, which is why, you know, I'm just like super keen on just having everything locally on your phone, no cloud. We don't even have like the server right now. Just only for one feature, which is plugins, where we just list the list of plugins, but like everything else is stored on your phone. And I just think it's super important. Not only that, but when I mentioned that we are a 2-people team, I actually lied a little bit. And I want to get back to that. We have the whole open source community behind our shoulders. And I really, really appreciate everyone who is contributing because they do help. They give feedback. They sometimes build really cool plugins for us. They also contribute on the main features as well. And it's really, really beneficial to the product and to the customers and to everything. So I just love open source. I think it's like super important, both for the type of the product we are building and both for the speed of the product as well. So yeah.

That's amazing. It really goes with Product Hunt philosophy as well, like Supabase, open source product that people absolutely love. I feel like when it comes to open source, the community is the most important thing. If you don't have a community of developers who are all around it, you've got nothing, right? So it's pretty cool. I'm curious, what— tell me more about plugins, because I think when I first got it, there weren't any plugins, and now I look through and there's just a bunch of plugins. I honestly haven't gotten the chance to test them out too much. So what are these plugins? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

For the context, I'll just show to people. Plugins are like these custom things that you can enable in the app. And yeah, right now there is like already a lot of them. There is like 30 or more. And there is even more that are not yet approved that we are just checking. There is plugins for everything, you know, starting from conversation summary, which is default to like, I know you can even enable plugin as a boyfriend that will just be an AI companion for you. You can enable a plugin that will give you personalized startup feedback like Elon Musk or Paul Graham. You can enable plugin like a psychologist that will help you to go through your life. You can enable plugins that will connect to Notion, to News APIs, to any other tool API that currently exists in the world. And I think that's the best part about our product actually, because since we are open source, we have a huge community of 3,000 developers in Discord. People just, you know, can customize the product however they want. Some people want, you know, this way, some people want that way. And we are super happy about it. We want this product to be like to suit the need for every potential user. And I hope that, look, maybe by next year when we'll have another chat with you, there'll be thousands of plugins because this is one of our priorities.

Dude, that is actually what I was just about to ask you about. So the reason why I was so bullish on the AI trend is because, you know, as somebody who writes a lot of content on the internet, I like to kind of write like I talk. I like to literally, sometimes I will do voice to text and just talk and then, you know, write it. And that's why I love the AI Friend because it has the real transcript, right? It actually has the transcript. I can literally copy and paste and turn it into tweets. And now you're saying there's plugins, like I can, you know, take the AI Friend transcript, throw it into Zapier, get it over to Typefully, which is a Twitter scheduler, like, right? And you already are able to have the drafts in there. Oh man. That is a dream come true. Like, dude, I go on—

Yeah, that's a great idea.

I can't wait to set that up. I'll need your help on that. But I go on so many walks with friends where we're like tossing around all these ideas. And it's so hard to remember everything. And there's so much content in there, you know, like, I'm excited to get all these hidden gems. I'm really stoked.

Yes, yes, true. And open source community, thank you a lot for doing that. That's pretty much only because of them. If not them, plugins wouldn't exist. At least— especially so many plugins. So yeah. Thank you, folks.

I want to talk a little bit about hardware. So how did you go about sourcing the hardware, building the actual, you know, AI friends? Like, how did you even do that? I think like a lot of software people like myself are scared to even try anything with hardware. It's, dude, the real world's scary. It's a lot easier to just kind of type.

How did you do that? Yeah, actually, this is one main piece of advice that I got from the past 5 months is that I never did any hardware 4 months prior in my life. And if you want to learn how to do hardware, the best place for you will be to start from contributing to open source hardware project. That's it. Basically what happened with me is I went and I wanted to build this thing, but I couldn't because like I'm not super hardware technical and stuff. So I was like, okay, maybe I will do it later. And then there was a project that was called Adeos that was kind of like the first open source wearable, I think. So they, yeah, it was done by my great friend Adam. And they launched that and I started helping them. I built docs for them. I like even changed, like modified, I changed like a lot of things for them. And eventually I was like, you know, why don't we just either like, you know, create, because I wanted to create like our own. That one was having like a bigger design. It was like, you know, like this, you know, it was not very like wearable. And, you know, it also had like some other flaws. And stuff. So just like wanted to launch something that is like much smaller that you actually can wear on your neck. So we decided to like go on a hackathon and launch it there. And then eventually we just like that community, they just merged with us. So they are now the biggest AI necklace. Like now is also a part of Friend and very excited to work with Adam who is helping me like every week, you know, with advices and stuff. And like updating docs and so on and so forth. So yeah, my main piece of advice to cut things short, go and contribute to open source hardware projects. There are not so many, but this is the best place for you to start. And this is how you will be able to build your own things. This is how I started. I helped others, then I built my own and here we are. So yeah, that's kind of it.

Dude, I love that. But let's talk specifically. How did you find the actual like hardware, you know what I'm saying? It's like, do you guys have a lab? Like, did you 3D print stuff?

Yeah. Yeah.

How did you do that?

So for that, actually, the funny part is I just tried like 5 things and like one of them worked pretty much. So firstly, yeah, we just tried like a few different boards. We tried like, you know, first we tried Raspberry Pi, then we tried like Arduino Nano, ESP Nano. Then ESP, S3, and then eventually we tried like our chip, which was just like a super low power chip. And it's basically the best alternative because it can work on a very small charge for like quite a lot of time, like, you know, multiple days on one single charge. I mean, you know by yourself, right? You charge it like once on full and you can like go multiple days with this. And yeah, that's, it started to work and we just stopped on that and just built on that. Um, the card supplier for us right now is the cool company called Seed Studio that produce very small boards like these in China, uh, using the, uh, the, um, NRF52840 chip. And we just found them on the internet and we just ordered from them and we became friends. And they actually now built these friends for us as well. So they're one of our manufacturers as well. So yeah, that's, that's kind of it.

Nice, man. Yo, I gotta show you something real quick.

Sure, sure, man. I'd love to. I'd love to see it.

It's pretty funny. So this is the first time I'm talking publicly about this. I've been inspired by the hardware community to try to build stuff in the real world. But, you know, I write a lot of funny stuff. I, you know, want to build funny stuff, right? And so one day, I had this idea, I was like, imagine if you had a fanny pack for your cashews and your nuts and you could call it a nut sack. So, bro, wait, so you created like, you, you built, I, I, I went through Alibaba and I specified everything that I needed. I literally had this drawing that I gave this person on the other end in Alibaba and you know, it literally says my nut sack on here. And so this is prototype one. It's a little big. I think it's a little too big, but this is the one. So I'll let you know. I got to get the next version a little smaller, but I can't wait to walk around New York and just eat pistachios out of my nutsack. So very excited. Oh, that's so cool, Dan. Thank you. I realize, like, I was so scared of doing anything in the real world, like hardware or, you know, CPG, like real products.

Yes.

And, you know, it's like anything else where you just got to start. And for me, that meant going on Alibaba and just having, you know, messaging a bunch of suppliers. And it was a lot. It was probably like a few hours of messaging with this one supplier. Like they needed so many specifications. It was actually crazy. I was like, you were literally just making a nutsack fanny pack. And they're asking all these questions. So it's fun. Yeah. Yeah.

So I'm so excited you showed it to me as like one of the, you know, the first person. And like, you know, if you're just, I think you should launch it on Product Hunter. I want to be your hunter if that's possible.

I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I got to get B2 and then I think definitely going to try to get it to blow up on Twitter. Hopefully for the people watching this, they, uh, you know, maybe want to pre-order some nut sacks. It'd be, uh, I gotta walk around. I would walk around SF with your nut sack on. Amazing. Amazing.

Yeah, that's the most, you know, the most SF thing to do, honestly. The most SF thing.

So yeah, honestly, honestly. So, um, where in SF are you guys? And, uh, how are you, how are you like in the SF life? Are you, do you go to a lot of tech events? Like, what's kind of like your life there?

Yeah, we are based in Solna. This is where our office is. I also live in Nob Hill. My co-founder lives in AGI House. And probably people don't really know what is that. I will need some clarification, I guess. There's like two default payment points, I would say, in itself. So it's pretty much like almost the center of the city. And in terms of do we go to events? Yes, we actually super events oriented. In fact, we try to go to like every possible hackathon and we give people the devices for free to hack on during the hackathon. And at the end of the hackathons, we also like give rewards to the winners as well. So people give them tens of them if they build like at least anything valuable for the open source community. So far we have done two of them. We're also hosting our own hackathon this Saturday in San Francisco. which will be in AJ House. Um, there'll be like a lot of people, like more than 100, uh, cool, um, software builders. Um, and, uh, yeah, I think it will be very exciting. We'll bring the necklaces. We'll also bring smart glasses there as well, um, which we haven't shown to anyone yet, real ones. And, uh, yeah, I think it'll be super exciting. So yeah, stay put, basically.

What's the deal with these smart glasses? Are you bringing, are you finally, are you bringing that to life? What's, what's going on there?

Yeah, yeah. I kind of launched it on Twitter like a month ago, but didn't really, you know, like write any code for that since, because, you know, try to make this product great first. But we also want to kind of like push the smart glasses a little bit better. What is the deal about smart glasses? It's pretty much, actually, I can like, if you give me like 1 or 2 minutes, I can like show it to you. It's just downstairs. But in short, you just put it— you can convert any glasses into smart glasses by putting like a small recording camera right here. It's like a clip that goes here. And it just, it does the same that the necklace does with audio, but also with video. So it's 10 times more powerful basically, because we consume 10 times more content with our eyes versus our ears. Yeah, so it remembers people's faces. It will remember you know, like, you know, how you work. It will remember, you know, where did you leave your keys. It will like help you to understand, is this food healthy or no? It will help you to remember people's names, which I honestly forget quite often. I'm sorry to everyone whose name I forgot and many, many more things. So yeah, excited to build it. Wow.

That, oh man, I can't wait to get my hands on one of those. That's crazy. Yes.

Yes.

Cool. I am curious. Have you thought about kind of the privacy implications around here and do you have any best practices? I think for me, like, you know, I, my practice using it is like I ask my wife and my friend, it's just like, hey, cool if I put it on, like, you know, it's, it's, you know, cool if I turn it on and if I'm going on a walk with a friend, like, you know, I, they're totally cool with it. Um, I feel like, you know, it's, it's really, uh, it's just a tool. Like for me it's just been a tool for like, thinking and working better.

Yes. Yes.

So I hope people listening to this know, like, yeah, that I think the privacy thing is a little overblown personally. But yes, I don't know what your thoughts are.

Yeah, I think privacy is super important, actually, which is why we are, you know, we make it like super, super clear that, you know, the device is recording. So basically, you know, there's a line that you can see. And by law, it's also legal because there's such a thing called implied consent. So when you— this is what like Matt and Ray-Ban did, for example, they show you the light. So it's like obvious that it's recording. Same way as here, you're wearing like the necklace that has like the light, like obviously, you know, it's recording. So you don't have to worry about the law, at least in California and most of the states as well. And I do hope— I actually don't really hope, I know this for sure, that as more people will be wearing this like next year and the year after that, I think at least like 50% of the people, at least in the Bay Area, will wear like some kind of a necklace. It will just be like much more socially accepted. To me, for the past 2 months of wearing this, no one had like absolutely any problem. Like, you know, if I was recording, people were just like, hey, what are you doing? Yeah, I'm recording. I'm transcribing to every stage. Like, okay, fine, cool. If people don't want to transcribe, they just don't have to talk to me because my brain works in the same way, right? I will remember what you say. This also will remember what you say. If you don't want me to remember what you say, don't talk to me, basically. That's kind of super simple rule. So yeah, and I try to just have my device always like here so that people can see it all the time. So yeah, I like that.

I definitely like that. I feel like, um, I, I, it's just so helpful. Also, I feel like AI note takers are so common in video for work and But not in real life. Exactly. Exactly. Like AI note takers are in every video chat I'm in now. Um, and so, you know, like Riverside, the platform we're using right now is, is going to be taking notes afterwards and stuff. So it's everywhere. It just hasn't really progressed into work. Uh, into real life work. Um, something I think is interesting that you guys, maybe there's some content here. Andy Warhol, the artist, he used to walk around with a tape recorder all the time and just talk about his ideas. You know, like this dude was one of the most prolific artists, you know, fantastic businessman. And he would just walk around with a tape recorder and just talk about all his ideas. It's a very like Lindy thing to do. You know, it's a very natural thing. And I think, yeah, I think I hope people embrace it. I hope people give it a try because I've been enjoying it a lot.

Yeah.

So yeah. Yeah. I'm excited.

It just brings like so much value and now that it's obvious that human paradigm will shift and people will just be like super fine with this. They're already fine. But I think it will just be like socially accepted even in countries where it is not socially accepted yet. So yeah, that's my take.

Yeah. And something else as well is like, it seems very cyberpunk and it seems like you're, you know, way too connected, but by wearing it, you're actually more connected in the present in a way because you're not thinking, will I forget this? You're not thinking, oh, I need to write this down. Like you're just having a conversation and it feels a lot more natural. Like, you know, when I'm on a walk with my wife, I'm not thinking up a tweet. I just, I'm like, oh, I'll do it later. It's already recording. Right. Um, I, I really, I don't know. I think it's actually like a digital minimalism tool in a way because you know, you're actually being on your computer last or your phone.

And did you know, did you know that people spend like on average like crazy amount of time on their phones? It's like 8 hours per day basically on the phone. Like, you know, using your phone. It's crazy on the phone screen. It's like so much. You can just think like 8 hours, like what the hell? And that's what we want to fix. Like we don't, we want people to be more present. We want them to spend time with their wives, with their kids, with their friends. You know, just like talk and don't worry and like have an alternative version because our brain is not super efficient for stuff like that. So you, you can have alternative version of your brain that is like right here on your phone, fully local, always accessible to you, giving you practically recommendations. That's the eventual goal that we are trying to achieve. And fast forward, I don't think this is the best, the best way to achieve that is the necklace nor smart glasses. And that's the brain-computer interface, which we eventually will do. But that will take like us at least half a year. So stay put. But yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll watch it and it will be very exciting.

What is the breakthrough? Can you reveal it?

Brain-computer interface. Sorry. It's like a thing that's just like you're wearing your— Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Oh my God.

So it would kind of— that's crazy. And would it record what you're saying or is it something about waves or what's going on there?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the goal for that will be just to synchronize it with your brain. Just like, so you have memories inside here and you will have the same memories synced with the device as well. Uh, it's gonna take some time because it's very hard to achieve, but this is eventually what we are going to do.

Yes. That is an ambitious goal. That is crazy, man.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Wow. That's wild. Um, yeah. Are you, how are you, uh, I'm curious, um, kind of funding this project, um, and, and this kind of research, man. Like, this is amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, so we did a Kickstarter, like, we sold like 1,000 units. And we just keep selling and people just want our devices like so much that they just buy it and this is how we pay for stuff pretty much. We also did raise like a very small round from friends, like $100K, a little bit more, but still. And we will probably raise a new round soon just because we can move faster, we can ship like more products as well. I think it will also be like very small, but super soon, yes.

Well, you better let me in on that round.

That's all I'm saying. Oh, okay. Absolutely. And yeah, but my kind of like focus is just to ship products and sell them because this way you can like ship faster and it pushes you to ship faster and also pushes you to make greater products rather than when you like raise a lot of money and you don't ship for like years. I don't like that. Um, so yeah, that's not how it works. Yeah.

You're going the complete opposite of the Humane route, which I think is fantastic because they took how many years? Like 6 years and $100 million and crashed and burned.

I think it was more.

Yeah.

Yeah. It might've been more.

It's really quite a horror story. And, uh, I love how you guys are going the exact opposite.

Oh, on the third—

On the third. Imagine how many of these babies you could have shipped with $130 million.

Yeah, it's crazy.

Insane.

I feel like— Humane?

Yeah, sorry, go. No, I was going to say, I feel like Humane kind of hurt the reputation of the AI wearable. And hopefully, you know, it could kind of be static or salvage.

Yeah, unfortunately true. I do think that they will deliver though. I do. Like, even though they send me cease and desist, even though they never respond to me anywhere, even though, you know, they like literally like try to like destroy us as well. I really like what they do. I wish them a huge success. I think they will succeed because they are a great team. I think they build a very cool hardware project. And like hardware stuff. And it's really much, much more simple to build software, honestly. So I think they are going to make it, as well as like Rabbit as well. But yeah, we didn't really touch Rabbit, so I'm not going to like elaborate on that yet during this conversation. But I also do think that they will like ship a lot of cool things for people to use and stuff, because it's much simpler to do software rather than hardware. So that's my take.

Yes. Why didn't Humane send you a cease and desist?

Oh, well, we use like a lot of very similar stuff on our website, such as like we use the term AI pin, for example, and it's like copyrighted by them. And there's like 40 pages of like same stuff that we, that was like super similar to the Humane project. And yeah, like that's, that's, that's, I think they just like wanted us to like not have anything similar to like pins or anything like that. So yeah.

Well, I think the AI necklace is better than a pin actually. It's, uh, yeah, it's pretty solid.

Uh, Jason, sorry, I dropped you for a second. Yeah, I'm here. Yes.

Yeah. I was just saying, I think the AI necklace is better than an AR pin anyways.

Yeah, definitely much, much easier to use. Now, like to put somewhere like a lot more people wear. Yeah.

Yeah, a lot more people wear necklaces than pins. Yeah.

Yes. Yes.

Just for reference. Um, also the rabbit, dude. I got a rabbit and it's a very weird product. I don't know what to do with that thing. Like, I really don't. I'm trying to like, I was trying to find use cases and I, I wrote this viral thread about, uh, you know, all the silly things that I did with it. Like it's a great coffee stand. Like, what do I do with this thing?

I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately right now. Yeah. It's probably not the most useful. But I definitely think it will be more useful in the future. So yeah, really hope they will get to that point.

I hope so too. It can't get less useful. So I hope so. Dude, this was a fantastic conversation. I'm excited for your launch tomorrow. And yeah, thank you so much for building this product, for shipping it fast and getting it in the hands of people. I really, I appreciate it. Excited. And like I said, when you guys are raising your next round, hit me up.

All right. One, thank you so much for inviting me. A little bit to elaborate on the launch because we didn't really mention it during the call. We are launching on Product Hunt tomorrow with a standalone app that can work without the device. You can just connect the app to any other device that you have. So very excited to launch it tomorrow on Product Hunt. And yeah, we'll see you all on our Product Hunt page. And thank you all for inviting me. It was so much fun.