How do you get from “that’s just the way it is” to “that’s just the way it was”?
People's initial reactions to Airbnb when it first came out were one of skepticism and confusion. This was the case for my friend Andre in 2009 when he heard about the startup that was renting out living room spaces. It was hard for him to understand the concept. Chesky & co. had identified a gap in the market that they could fill with the help of new technologies (cloud computing, mobile, & big data to name a few). However, before the inflection point, people didn’t even recognize excess living space as a market gap.
This is happening again. Last week Nick, Dan, and I attended OpenAI Day in OpenAI's Mission District office. We heard Zack Kass discuss AI's Cambrian explosion and the opportunities for startups it presents. We witnessed large language model (LLM) demos of GPT-3 and GPT-4, which supported our view that these tools will expose unrecognized gaps in markets, including ours.
What do you need to identify one of these gaps when new technologies, like LLMs, emerge? You need a unique point of view (POV) about your market.
Storied believes that talking out loud is the best way to get to a first draft of amazing business writing. This wasn't true a year ago, but with the power of language models, it is now.
Speaking is a powerful tool that allows us to focus on one thing at a time (single threaded as we like to say) and be emotionally aware of what we are writing. This clarity facilitates not just clear writing, but clear communication. Speaking allows us to move more quickly, too. We can speak faster than we can write; 150 words per minute versus an average of 40 words per minute. In fact, one of our investors told us that last weekend he created a 7,500 word essay (first draft) in 2 hours using a voice-to-writing methodology. There’s an inflection point here.
LLMs may marginally improve traditional pen-and-paper writing processes, but they will also help us realize methods that simply weren’t possible before. Airbnb and Salesforce are just two examples of companies that took a unique perspective that helped them fill a previously unrecognizable gap in their market. Storied is another…
In hindsight, Airbnb and Salesforce had points of view about their markets that were unique for their time and historical level of technology. Their conviction took us from that’s just the way it is to that’s just the way it was. Hindsight is… yes, 20/20.
LLMs are still in their infancy and have some shortcomings. In fact, while driving to OpenAI Day, we laughed and laughed as we read some of the recent headlines about Bing + chatGPT. OpenAI’s speakers reminded us several times last week that the rate of advancement in the coming months will be swift. Buckle up and get ready to build fast, they indicated. Storied is a platform that is leveraging the power of LLMs to help people create first drafts of amazing business writing. We are currently running a beta program and invite you to sign up at bestoried.ai to join us on this journey!
