problem, and so that's obviously what we have tried to solve with HQ.
“Yeah, and are you seeing companies becoming AI native?”
I actually, you know, like obviously I feel like the answer is yes, like one, one, whatever
I asked that, but this, this past weekend, I met up with a friend of mine who's a YouTuber, and I just randomly brought up AI to him, and he's telling me that like from what he sees, you know, among call it normies, not us, you know, podcasts, listeners or people like elsewhere, he said that more normies are like very anti-AI, and so I wonder if that's trickling its way into the business world outside of our bubble, I can curious what you're
seeing. Yeah, I haven't seen businesses that are fully AI native and enabled, unless they're very recently found the businesses, or you have, you can have majority AI enablement, but that has to come from an extremely strong CEO found to figure, I'm always surprised by the lack of AI proficiency that I still see.
The tools are gotten easy and gotten more powerful, so it's easy to be good with AI, but
you don't see, I'm still surprised. It's of my circles, I try, when I try, when I socialize with friends, I try not to talk about AI, it's my only one time that I can, but it's obviously not possible, but yeah, I haven't seen that same penetration outside of the like, Twitter see a day I live with in.
Yeah, but not together, that sphere is mostly found as CEO types, you know, like, even within their companies, it's not the same, it's not, it's not, it's just the people at the top that are really trying to push it because they're the ones who experience the ROI from it. Yeah, I feel like too, like, that is, yeah, that's actually probably what I've seen
to. There's usually a few people in the org who are super AI-pilled, and they're trying to bring everybody else with them, and kind of get the org set up. Okay, I want to go into your backstory a little bit, so you were, you were in engineering, and then you sort of made your way into the marketing sphere, or the kind of like the
tech sphere, then, you know, and I feel like you were journey with AI probably involved in curious, like, what, what did you think you were getting into at the beginning versus
“like, where did it evolve to, and like, how did you guys get to HQ?”
Um, I mean, my AI journey started very early. I was, um, I was doing a basically an AI machine learning master's degree when I graduated right before a chat GPT was launched, and so I was already in the machine learning space. I got to job as a software engineer and data scientist at an e-com logistics company, and I was helping them build basic forecasting models, like sales forecasting models to help
forecast demand within the warehouses, and then chat GPT was launched, and I basically just quit my job instantly. I was like, I think I saw the writing on the wall, but soon, and because I saw how powerful this was, and so I literally instantly quit my job and try to study AI company, um, and I was trying to build an AI logistics company for e-commerce, which is very different
to where I am now, but it just wasn't that powerful back then, and I think you could
always see where it was going, but it wasn't quite there.
And then, in a roundabout way, I got connected to coming thread collective with Taylor Holiday. He kind of took me in, took me under his wing, and I worked at them for a while. And again, like, we always had these super ambitious visions of what we could do and what we were trying to do.
Um, and we, if I were always waiting for the next model to release, like, again, now we're going to be able to do it. Now, we're going to be able to do it. And then that actually happened, like around December last year, that actually happened with, like, the Opus 4/7 Opus 4/8 launch, and then we had this amazing moment where
we were able to just do everything we wanted to do, build what we wanted to build, um, and I kind of just want crazy just doing as much as I possibly could. The way that HQ came about was Corey Epstein, who, um, who I was connected with again, also through the same, like Twitter world, him and I had been in touch for a while. He had actually created this personal tool called HQ at the time.
It wasn't a team tool. It wasn't a company tool. It was his way of being able to manage AI, personally, more efficiently and more effectively. And he had started converting all of his friends onto it. So that's how he got me onto HQ.
And I was like, Corey, this is sick, but this needs to be a different tool, this needs to be for companies. This would be so much more powerful if all this contest could be shared across companies.
“And that's how we teamed up co-founded this company and now that's how we have HQ.”
And now it just feels like we're able to do whatever we want, like it's just, it's unbelievable