Founders in Arms Podcast
Founders in Arms
OpenAI’s New Model and Amazon’s In-Person Mandate
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OpenAI’s New Model and Amazon’s In-Person Mandate

Immad and Raj discuss the next evolution of AI and how remote work affects individuals and communities

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Transcript of our conversation:

Immad Akhund: 

- Hi everyone, welcome to the Founders In Arms podcast with me, Immad Akhund, Founder and CEO of Mercury.

Raj Suri:

- And I'm Raj Suri, Co-founder of several startups. It's been an eventful week already, Immad. What's grabbed your attention?

Immad Akhund: 

- This thing that has been most interesting, although weirdly hardly anyone's talking about it, is this new OpenAI model. I think it's called o1. You know, one of the things that I would often say and people would point to is like, oh, you know, these models can't do math. Like if you'd asked it four plus four, it was very confused and like, you know, these kind of basic kind of puzzles, LLMs are really struggling with it. You know, OpenAI has just gone completely after that problem. You know, you ask it a question and I pasted one earlier to you it was like, you know, "Take the number 555, add 5555 to it and multiply it by the day of the week where the millennium started." Which I think is like actually pretty hard. I think most people would really struggle at even figuring that out. But it nailed it first time. It took a little while, but there's just no way a year ago, like the answer back would've been like probably gibberish. So I think it's actually a big leap, and it has lots of kind of interesting implications. Did you have a chance to play with her?

Raj Suri:

- I haven't played with her yet, but I'm curious about this example. Like you don't think like Google could like solve this thing? Like which part do you think was a difficult part? Was that the day of the week at the beginning of the millennium?

Immad Akhund: 

- I think it required reasoning. I mean it's not hard for humans, but you have to go look up the, like know what a millennium is, know what, like how would you map a day for week to a number? Look those things up that then like know that this is my... I think it's all very easy for a human, but at least with LLMs, like I think it is new for them to be able to like actively reason mathematically and solve it. And I do think it opens up a set of extra applications for them to be able to do like a sequence of reasoning and thought that previously they were kind of restricted to just like, hey, summarize this or like kind of tell me about this like fact. Whereas reasoning I think is like a new kind of domain.

Raj Suri:

- Yeah. Where do you think the applications will be for that?

Immad Akhund: 

- Yeah, that part is the tricky one. I think it just takes a lot. It's very hard to just sit back and like imagine applications. So yeah, I was thinking about this. Okay, I was like at Mercury, where could you kind of apply some of this reasoning and yeah, maybe things like fraud where you could say okay, you know, based on this data, like you know, is this person potentially fraudulent? Or something like that. Is this transaction fraudulent? I mean it would take a while to like come up with the right data and it being fast enough that you could do it in real time. Potentially, there's like something there. I think the other thing I've seen is people have tried to kind of stitch together agents to do similar things. If you pick a constraint domain, like let's say legal work, you know, what people were doing previously is they'd take a legal document and then they'd say, you know, have one agent figure out like what is the confidentiality clause in this argument? Have another agent like go read the confidential clause and like map it to, you know, what are like potential terms in a confidentiality clause. I feel like some of that kinda agentic need is like less when you have a reasoning agent that does like multi-step reasoning. I mean a reasoning model does does multi-step reasoning. Like you've kind of taken care of like actually like do these five things and use five different agents to do it. But you can do it all in like one kind of reasoning step in an LLM, and there might be still be a reason to use like multiple agents to do things. But you know, a lot of the pitches I've heard recently have been off the form like, hey, we've got like five, six agents that are like different LLMs that are like fine tuned in different ways, and they like end up with like some result. And I feel like a lot of the moves that OpenAI and Anthropic have made over the last year has like yeah, firstly like prompt engineering was a big thing, whereas like more recent models, it doesn't matter as much, and I think like this move potentially like makes the need for complex agents to be like less so. I mean I think there's still probably applications for it.

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, that makes some sense. Like if it's able to break down a problem into multiple components and reason each one independently and then kind of tie it all together at the end, that's a level of thinking that's quite advanced. I think what I saw was that, you know, the standard metric they're using now is like what kind of like difficulty math problem we can solve like Olympiad level or you know, you know, PhD level kind of like math problem. Is that like the standard?

Immad Akhund: 

- Most of the benchmarks were like kind of like, it's very similar to exams, right? It's like, but I think the thing that I always question with that is like exams by definition are kind of contrived. It's like the question is space is constrained and the answer is like well defined, whereas the real life doesn't have that much exams in it or exam like problems in it. But yeah, I mean you have to somehow define intelligence and then like exam questions have been like the way it was like defined for humans. So it kind of made sense to define it like that for AI.

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, I'm going back to the applications piece is like we're building a chat app and you know, using AI as part of a chat to automatically answer questions or even proactively insert itself into a chat and say, hey, you know, you're talking about this and you're incorrect about this. Like, active fact checking, you know, and you know, things like that. I think, you know, AI could really actually help with, I think. You know, right now in Twitter, this Community Notes. You know, and Community Notes there... I'm on the program which I get to like vote on Community Notes. I don't if you're on that program-

Immad Akhund: 

- Oh you do? No. I'm not on that.

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know why I'm on it, but I'm on it so I get to like pick like which ones are accurate, which ones are not accurate and if it just feels to me like AI could do a much better job than humans.

Immad Akhund: 

- You think, you know, picking the accurate ones or do you think generating the Community Notes in the first place?

Raj Suri:

- Both. I think both because it, you know, it's not that hard to see if someone has made things up or not. Right? Do they have, you know, is there like a source and like, you know, is the source credible? You know, these things I think AI can do. I don't know why it's like a voting system with humans at this point, but that's what the way it is. It's still better than nothing. But it feels like AI should be able to do that pretty well.

Immad Akhund: 

- I think it depends what is in the Community Note. If it's like pointing out a logical flow in the tweet, like someone said something and then it's like a straw man or some other kind of bias or, some. You know, I think if that's something AI could spot, if it's like actually like hey, we need to go fact check this actual truth and use multiple sources, then you know, I think AI would've like a harder time at that. Like yeah, maybe not. I guess they can also look at multiple sources and give validity to once.

Raj Suri:

- Yeah; yeah. I mean, and nowadays in politics there's lots of crazy things, you know, being said that, you know, a simple Google search would help resolve, you know, and you know, I think this current system of Community Notes is like all these humans have to like vote and like, you know, there's like battles, there's obviously political tribes that get built up, you know, in Community Notes as well. Some people are like, no, no. You know, no note necessary. Some are, you know, note is necessary. So yeah, it's just interesting to see that. One company that's been growing pretty fast is Glean. You know, doing AI for enterprise and-

Immad Akhund: 

- Yeah, they just announced a 5 billion round or something like that.

Raj Suri:

- Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I hope to get Arvind on the podcast sometime. He is the founder and CEO and lives near me over here.

Immad Akhund: 

- 260 million raise on a 4.6 billion pre evaluation.

Raj Suri:

- Is it zero one or is it ‘O’ one?

Immad Akhund: 

- ‘O’ 1.

Raj Suri:

- ‘O’ one, yeah. I think this type of platform will be quite powerful for answering questions within organizations. Especially when you have a written culture. A lot of the data is available. You know, I think answering questions within complex organization and the bigger the organization, I would say the more valuable the AI, right? Because it's so hard to get information.

Immad Akhund: 

- You know, one thing interesting about AI is that LLMs are extremely smart as having like a very broad set of like knowledge, like way more than a human, right? Like you can go to OpenAI and ask it about like Hitler, or you can ask it about like Neanderthals and it has like this kind of deep, broad knowledge, and I think it's actually interesting in a company 'cause yeah, obviously if it's a five person company, there isn't like kinda a deep broad knowledge, but at something like Mercury, it's very hard to know about our new invoicing product and deeply know about kind of some risk decision that we made two years ago. And being able to kind of surface all of that very broad knowledge and then contextualize it is actually like, yeah, I think Glean is is a great application. We're actually gonna be trying it out at Mercury soon.

Raj Suri:

- Oh great.

Immad Akhund: 

- This kind of ties to something that, I dunno if you saw Jared Friedman, he tweeted this. He said the vertical AI is the new vertical SaaS. Do you see that?

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, I saw that.

Immad Akhund: 

- I thought that was like kind of an interesting point. A lot of the application layer of AI has been like in search of like, what is the defensible, long-term kind of business you can build here, right? Like we had everyone's like, oh maybe LLMs aren't defensible because there's gonna be five of them, and there's a race to the bottom. And then there was kinda this idea of GPT wrappers and you know, maybe they're not defensible. So I was wondering what your thoughts on whether we think like vertical AI, whether that is a defensible kind of long-term play for startups.

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, I mean having operated a vertical company for a long time, well over a decade, I think vertical businesses are generally can be very good, but you always run into some problems. So the advantage is actually for AI, it's actually I think a very good application because AI as a horizontal play is gonna be quite challenging 'cause you're competing against really open AI and all these big players now and open source. But customizing AI and you know, for a vertical, allows a startup to come in and build a lot of like very unique integrations and you know, into very unique wrappers. Like at Presto for example, like we did a lot of stuff around menus, restaurant menus, which was a big, you won't think it's that complicated, but it's actually super complicated. And like we had to build our own proprietary, you know, menu engine, which no other company could do. So like Google couldn't compete with us because we had these proprietary, you know, menu engines, and vertical startups actually really have an advantage over incumbents because they can focus on one area and build a lot of custom software. So I'm very bullish on vertical in general. The problem with vertical though is the market size. You have to be really correct on picking the right market. So one example of a company that did this really well is Veeva who went after pharma. And pharma turns out to be a very lucrative market. So they just did a CRM for pharma, right? CRMs are very boring technology. There's almost no technical innovation there, but they just tailored it for pharma, and they built like a 30 billion I think it is right now. I mean the 3 billion ARR, and they're, you know, they're the biggest vertical company I think in the world.

Immad Akhund: 

- You could say Shopify is a vertical company. No? Maybe that's a-

Raj Suri:

- I would say Shopify is horizontal because it helps all verticals.

Immad Akhund: 

- Yeah, that's good. At some point e-commerce was a vertical. I guess now it's the whole world. So maybe it's horizontal.

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, that's right.

Immad Akhund: 

- Wait, so what's the converse? Like what's an example of something that was like vertical SaaS, but limited by TAM?

Raj Suri:

- I think almost every vertical SaaS company is limited by TAM. So I'll give you some good examples, right? Like there's Procore which focuses on like, you know, construction, you know. So there's SaaS for construction. Toast, which is focusing on restaurant, you know-

Immad Akhund: 

- But I mean I guess by definition you're naming some pretty big companies. So like what's the... I'm saying like what was TAM restricted? Or like-

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, what you don't see is all the companies that don't get to that scale, right? So I can name companies, but like, you know, you wouldn't know them because they just never get to that-

Immad Akhund: 

- Maybe name the market rather than the company.

Raj Suri:

- Well, I mean the market, you know. I would know restaurants, right, is like a market... For example, I'll give you an example from Presto that we originally were serving casual dining restaurants with this tablet on the table so you can order and pay from. And we just ran outta customers at some point because there were just only so many big casual dining chains. Like there are only like 10 or 15 of them. So you do all this work developing a product for a market and then you just run out of space to grow and then you have to develop new products, and you have to keep innovating. So all these companies have to be multi-product companies.

Immad Akhund: 

- Yeah, I just invested in this company, in this Y Combinator batch. It's public so I assume they wouldn't mind me saying. It's called MDhub. They basically do vertical SaaS, AI company, for mental health clinicians and mental health practices. And it was really interesting 'cause you know, they're basically going very deep in mental health, like listening to the conversation that the physician has, summarizing it, doing a diagnosis, making it so the next time you come for your appointment, like it reminds you and says hey remember that, you know, this person has issues with the, I dunno husband or work or whatever. And I thought that was really interesting because like AI is clearly there and you couldn't do this without AI, but you know, it's not like the cost of the AI is very large. Like the, you know, the whole thing is all about kind of really customizing to your use case and like, you know, helping you build a very deep set of workflows around it. And then obviously, it's healthcare as well, so they have to be HIPAA compliant and there's like some level of kind of regulatory kinda restrictions in doing it. But once they're there, and they've done this across lots of things, there's lots of like network effects that you kind of build up around like understanding patients and you know, even recommending treatments and all of that kinda stuff. So I think that's like kind of the type of vertical AI SaaS that's really interesting where you can pick a vertical, go very deep, solve a real pain point 'cause these, you know, previously, these physicians spent like half their time writing up reports and like, you know, reading what's happened and things like that. So yeah, I wonder like what are other like really compelling examples like that where you can go fairly deep, and it's still a broad enough market?

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, I mean one company I invested in that just announced a raise today is Mercor AI. They just announced a raise with Benchmark and Peter Thiel and a bunch of others, there's 21 year olds out of Harvard and you know, Thiel Fellows basically. They dropped out to work on the company. So what they do is they use AI to identify top talent in India and pair them with companies hiring in the US and you know, the company's growing like crazy. You know, and they've really used AI to solve this problem of identifying top talent and then also automating a lot of the, you know, the problems that come around with recruiting. You know, like how do you connect the right company to the right candidate? And it turns out there's a lot of information online that helps people. You could identify good talent if you use the right information. And they have some really creative ways which unfortunately I can't disclose, but like, you know, to actually identify this, you know, this top talent.

Immad Akhund: 

- Yeah, that's kind of an interesting application. Yeah. Is the idea that you would hire someone in India that would move to the US or this is like remote town?

Raj Suri:

- I think it starts remote and then you can move afterwards and you know-

Immad Akhund: 

- Guess there's no reason it has to be India on an ongoing basis, right? Like it could be anywhere in the world.

Raj Suri:

- It could be anywhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. India just happens to be a very friendly market for talent and a lot of information online. So, you know, as opposed to China. With China, it would be very hard to do this.

Immad Akhund: 

- Yeah, maybe this is a good tie into our second topic around remote work. So Amazon recently announced that they're asking everyone to return to an office five days a week. I guess right now, I think almost every big company, every old big company is asking people to come to the office at least three days a week. Shopify's an exception actually. There's probably a few other big exceptions. Yeah, there was this trend in 2021 where everyone was talking about remote work as like the future. Mercury is actually still a remote work first company. We do have a couple of offices, but it is interesting to think like what is, yeah, is Mercury and Shopify and a few others kind of gonna be the rare exceptions where remote is still kind of the primary model or yeah. Or is this just like old companies that started pre Covid and like the future is remote? Like what's your take on that?

Raj Suri:

- Well, I was wondering if you had any big announcements to make today, man?

Immad Akhund: 

- I'm always in my office at home as people can see, so-

Raj Suri:

- Yeah. I'm gonna be back, yeah. When we see you doing the podcast from the office, I guess we'll know.

Immad Akhund: 

- I do have... I did set up a podcast office room, but we haven't used it yet.

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, okay. Okay; sounds good. How often do you go to the office?

Immad Akhund: 

- At least once a week. Sometimes we have like a whole team coming to visit and then I'm much more likely to kinda spend the whole week in the office.

Raj Suri:

- Nice. Yeah, I'm actually really surprised about Amazon going five days a week. It is very surprising to me. I mean, I actually came to the conclusion that hybrid or remote were the long-term solutions and only maybe like some hardcore like physical tech startups would come in the office every day, like robotics companies. I understand why robotics companies would want to be around their product every day, you know, or space tech or all these things. Like if you're working on building a physical good, you should be in the office. But I don't understand for Amazon why their corporate staff, you know, needs to be in the office, especially someone working on AWS or something like that, right? It doesn't make that much sense to me. And one thing I would be concerned of is for some of these tech execs, it's obviously not founder run anymore. Like are they getting too much, you know, religion about this idea of like, you know, we are only productive in the office, right?

Immad Akhund: 

- I mean I do think, you know, if we look at like all the things Mercury's had to do to create like a remote work culture, I think it only happened because we grew up in the remote world work. Like we do a lot of things, like we have every team fly in multiple times a year. We have like, you know, we encourage donuts, we do a virtual like all hands every week. We do a lot of things, and I'm still not sure, like everyone feels as connected as I would like. I just can imagine like a company like Amazon, you know, that like really scaled pre covid, they probably haven't done most of these things. And actually I've talked to companies, I'm like, I've talked to people who work at big companies and I'm like, oh, how often does your team get together in person? And they're like, never. There's no budget for it. And I'm like, okay, you can't, like, yeah, fine. Remote works great, but like you need to get together in person at least a few times a year. So I just think like these companies didn't necessarily adjust to the remote world work and the culture required for that. And I think because of that, their productivity is probably lower and there is probably like a reasonable aspect to them worrying about like whether people are actually working and things like that.

Raj Suri:

- What I'm shocked at is why hasn't Amazon adopted some of the things that you're doing and just like kind of adapted to this like new kind-

Immad Akhund: 

- It's just hard for big companies to change culture. I mean-

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, they got a new CEO. They got... I mean they've had enough experience now in this new dynamic. And also employees, I think, have also adapted, right? Like a lot of employees have figured out like a different work schedule. So now to ask them to change back, I mean when Apple... You know, I live near the Apple and Google campuses and when Apple went back to three days a week, I got a ton of complaints from like, you know, my neighbors who were Apple employees and stuff who were like, well, I don't want to go back, you know, and some ended up quitting Apple because of that. If you're talented and you have many options like... You don't need to go. And there are many companies offering as you know, like you guys do a remote environment or a hybrid environment. So I do think they're gonna give up something on the talent side. I think it's embarrassing though for Amazon, I would sell Amazon stock based on this. Yeah.

Immad Akhund: 

- There's an element of all of these companies overhired massively in the, not just in the last three years, in the last like five, six years. So I think there's also an element that they're like okay with losing like 10, 20% of people in making these moves. But there's a question of like, is it the most talented 10,20% of people they're losing, which obviously they wouldn't want? Or is it like the least committed of the 10,20 percent. Depends who you're losing, yeah.

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, I do think for remote companies, you have to have extremely high standards for talent and extremely, I'm sorry, extremely high standards for performance and extremely high standards for responsiveness and like presence. You know, like you can't be a remote company and then like people are checking out or not responding, you know, really at all hours of the day. If you don't increase that bar and you're not letting go of people proactively, remote doesn't work. The standard that I always use is everyone needs to love that person for that person to stay. If anyone's even like, you know, kind of ambivalent or there's, you know, few people who are ambivalent, there's real question if that person should stay. In remote, you can make a big impact as an employee I think.

Immad Akhund: 

- One thing I've noticed with startups is there's definitely like a, there's a bifurcation, there's like a set of startups that are like kind of really into in-person work and like that's what they're encouraging. And then there's a set of startups that are like, you know, hey, engineers are really hard to get. Let's get them in India, let's get them in... You know, who cares where they are? And it's a very stark split, and I actually like, it'll be interesting, and I should maybe go do this to look through like my portfolio and say, okay, you know, for the last like two, three years people who chose in-person versus the remote work. Like what is the difference in performance? I'm actually guessing it's not that correlated. I think both models can probably work, and it probably depends on your culture.

Raj Suri:

- And a lot depends on leader preference I think. Like if the leader wants to come in every day, then he's probably gonna make everyone come in every day.

Immad Akhund: 

- Well that's not necessarily true. I think for companies that were forced to go remote during Covid, I've talked to plenty of leaders and CEOs that are like, hey, I want to go in every day and no one's coming. And like, it's very hard for them to change the culture.

Raj Suri:

- But they'll try really hard, right? And you know, the other thing is I think there is a bifurcation in like people's, you know, family life and family preferences, you know, and like also where they are in their life, right? So younger people, I mean, you know, I enjoyed going to the office every day before having kids.

Immad Akhund: 

- A ton of our kind of, I guess younger employees, they end up moving to New York because New York has an office where everyone's like wants to be in the office. And I do think it's nice to provide like both. I actually went to an event where Mark Farrell was speaking yesterday. He's a candidate for San Francisco Mayor. He's apparently he's top of the polls right now. One interesting thing was like, he was like, oh, you know, San Francisco downtown is like dead, no one's there. You know, there's been a ton of shops that have shut down, and I do think for a city where, you know, a combination showing of remote work being so friendly and even when people are back in the office, it's only, you know, for me, like one or two days a week or for other people like two or three days a week, it kind of does empty the downtown or wherever the office area is. But actually, you know, what I've seen in San Francisco is there's way less people downtown, but all the surrounding areas are so much busier. Like if you go to the mall in Daly City, it is always specked out because like, no one's shopping downtown, but they still need to shop. And most people I think actually end up shopping on their days where they're working from home. It's so much easier to just like, jump in a car, go buy something from a mall than it is to, you know, pick up something when you go to the office. Like yeah, I was wondering whether like downtowns are just like dead in San Francisco is just like the first kinda symbol of that or whether like San Francisco has actually screwed up downtowns because of lack of safety.

Raj Suri:

- I think San Francisco's unique, honestly, because I think the culture, the hybrid culture and remote culture in the Bay Area, I think is much stronger than many other places from what I understand. You know, like having worked in some other industries, I've seen them, like people come to, you know... For example, the restaurant industry never left work even during Covid, right? They were there, right?

Immad Akhund: 

- Well you can't work from home.

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, well even the corporate staff, right? So like the corporate staff because they operate a physical business. So because, you know, we're in the tech industry, remote is an option, but if you're like making movies, you gotta be on set, right? So I think most other industries are pretty physical. There's not that many that can be remote even I think the finance industry in New York has come back.

Immad Akhund: 

- Yeah, finance industry pushed very hard to be in person. The idea being it's like all about mentorship and like-

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, I mean they're run on like, you know, inexperienced labor, right? Like they're like basically there's these kind of sweatshops on, you know, like university grads, like quant grads, right? So-

Immad Akhund: 

- It's kind of funny, I was actually talking, this is a bit of a divergent thing, but I was talking to a finance person, and they were telling me, you know, hey, when they were young, they had to like go in, you know, from like 8:00 AM, work until midnight and do that like every day over and over. And I asked them like, what do they actually do? And they said a lot of it was just waiting around for their, you know, partner whatever, to hand them work or like, for them to get a new contract or like get some feedback on something. So it's kind of funny. It's like, it's a good description of it to call it like a young, labor sweatshop. But it's funny because it's such a aspirational role. Like, you know, I remember being like going through college, going like, wow, I'd love to work in finance. Like, and I guess in the end I did work in finance, but yeah, investment banking was seen as so aspirational. But now I'm on the other side. It seems like an awful life. Like I don't understand how it's an aspirational role. Like why is it aspirational? It's just 'cause there's lots of money in it?

Raj Suri:

- It's 'cause of money. Yeah, I think it's the money and the fact that you're seeing people make money. It feels dynamic. It feels like you have to be smart to do it, I think.

Immad Akhund: 

- Yeah, exclusivity and money is probably like the main two things.

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, yeah. It felt like they hired the best people as well. So you wanted to be one of those. I did remember interviewing for a lot of jobs at trading desks, which I didn't get actually, but I remember the job being described, like it's a seven to seven job and like your first task in the morning is to get coffee for like the, you know, with the whatever it is.

Immad Akhund: 

- That's what I want, not aspirational.

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, yeah. But I didn't get it, you know, I wasn't good enough to get that job, so-

Immad Akhund: 

- I didn't get it either. So may maybe we are just like, maybe-

Raj Suri:

- We're not talented enough to get that one.

Immad Akhund: 

- Yeah, we're not talented enough. That's why we are dissing it because we are just not good enough for it.

Raj Suri:

- Right.

Immad Akhund: 

- Well, okay. So San Francisco's unique, but one of the things that Mark suggested, which I thought was a good idea, is we should just convert these downtown areas in San Francisco into 20% residential or something like that.

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, that makes sense.

Immad Akhund: 

- And that would actually like enliven them because then there'll be people there and you know, lots of people want to work right next to the office, live next to the office. So I think that's actually, and that's how New York does it. Like most of the New York neighborhoods have offices and residential, and it seems so obvious. San Francisco has so many problems that are so like obviously solvable. It's frustrating.

Raj Suri:

- I think so, yeah. And look, I think there's other uses for the space. One thing I'm always excited about is like, how do you use physical space more for like learning and entertainment? And you know, one of the many ideas I have on my backlog, which I'll, you know, I dunno if I'll ever have time to work on, but is like, you know, much better like indoor theme parks for kids. I think there's a lot more you can do than what we currently have. Our indoor playgrounds in the US are amongst the worst in the developed world. If you go to China and see their indoor playgrounds, they're way better.

Immad Akhund: 

- Was it you that told me about KidZania? I thought that was genius.

Raj Suri:

- KidZania is one of the ones. Yeah, so is that the... Like the kids can pretend to be like a different role, right?

Immad Akhund: 

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Raj Suri:

- Like they can do jobs? That's popular. I think it's a Japanese company who made that, right?

Immad Akhund: 

- Yeah. It's like, I think Tokyo is where it started, but apparently there's one in American in Santa Fe, which is kinda random.

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, they have them in London too. But those types of ideas, I mean, we're just scratching the surface. You know, Ron Shaich, the founder of Panera Bread, keeps talking about one concept he invested in, which is the Level99, which is like an adults indoor playground.

Immad Akhund: 

- Oh, that's fun.

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, it's super fun. You look at the videos, they're like, it's like obstacle courses, like competitions, it's like, it's fun things to do and really innovative stuff. Like they've built custom tech for this, and I just think we're just scratching the surface on what we could use this space for in downtowns. And it is gonna take a level of, you know, creativity and maybe San Francisco is not gonna figure it out first, but someone else will. And then, you know, we can import some of those ideas. Like, oh, Topgolf is an idea that's really taken off in the US which is like you go to an indoor thing and you play golf, right? And you know, you can have drinks and food. In London actually, there's these indoor things for every sport. Like there's an indoor darts thing, there's an indoor cricket thing.

Immad Akhund: 

- Yeah, but the weather's so bad there.

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, exactly.

Immad Akhund: 

- You have to do it all indoor.

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, so there's a lot more we could do in San Fran and-

Immad Akhund: 

- I like the idea of like inventing new sports as well, like pickleball. I don't actually know how new it is, but it's cool that we invented a sport and made it popular. I think maybe we could like actually go invent some like indoor sports and make them popular.

Raj Suri:

- Yeah, I think there's really a lot of creativity and so for entrepreneurs who maybe are not only working on tech, but just working on other things too, consumer products, there's definitely areas to... I looked at a company that's doing like a chain of ping pong halls, you know, and so there's opportunities there as well. America needs to get active, you know. These are great opportunities and if you're... You know, one thing that's always bothered me is adults who wanna have a good time together like there are not that many options. You watch a movie, you go to a restaurant, what else is there?

Immad Akhund: 

- Yeah, and the funny thing about movies is you can't even talk. You could have done it by yourself.

Raj Suri:

- And movies are dying. I mean like the theaters, a lot of theaters are closing down, which are kind of unfortunate, but not really because like we just shifted it to home. So going to the movie will be a more rare experience. Going to see a movie in a theater.

Immad Akhund: 

- Weirdly, the seats and the movie theater experience is getting better and better. Like you can like lie down now you got these grand seats. I mean the tickets cost like four types as much as they did a few years ago, but weirdly, the experience is actually really improving, which is like surprising to me given like potential slowdown. Okay, that was a meandering end to this podcast, but we should probably finish it off. Yeah, enjoyed the conversation, Rajat.

Raj Suri:

- Absolutely. Great chat, Immad. And make sure to follow us on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening, folks. Also join the Tribe group and feel free to share your feedback.

Immad Akhund: 

- Yep. See you all next week.

Discussion about this podcast

Founders in Arms Podcast
Founders in Arms
In this weekly series, fellow startup founders Immad Akhund (Mercury) and Rajat Suri (Presto, Lima, and Lyft) explore current events in the world of tech, startup, and policy, offering insights from their distinguished careers and an array of expert guests.