Xiaoyin Qu, founder of HeyBoss AI and the visionary behind the viral virtual events platform Run the World. Xiaoyin is a serial entrepreneur who has successfully exited two companies. After starting her first venture at just 19, she went on to serve as a senior product manager at Facebook. In a move that defined her early career, she dropped out of the Stanford MBA program to scale her venture-backed startup after securing funding from Andreessen Horowitz. During the pandemic, she led Run the World through a rocket launch moment, providing a critical solution for global conferences and eventually selling the business to a leading physical events company. Today, she is pioneering the AI CEO concept, creating autonomous AI teams that replace traditional development agencies.

What happens when a founder steps down to let an AI CEO take over? In this conversation, Xiaoyin Qu details the evolution of autonomous AI teams and the hard-won lessons from her rocket ship journey through the pandemic. Xiaoyin breaks down the nature of business, explaining why usage frequency and decision-making friction determine everything from sales strategy to monetization. She shares candid insights on pivoting from consumer to enterprise, the reality of managing remote teams, and why the solo founder is more viable than ever. We explore how her new platform, HeyBoss, replaces manual prompt engineering with AI agents that interpret fuzzy human intent to build professional results in minutes. From fundraising leverage to the rise of the 100X talent, Xiaoyin provides a masterclass on building in the age of AI. The blueprint for Xiaoyin's unconventional career wasn't drawn at HeyBoss. It was drafted during a defining moment at Stanford.

References

• Xiaoyin Qu's LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/xiaoyinqu/

• Xiaoyin Qu's X - https://x.com/quxiaoyin

• Jing Conan Wang (Host) – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jingconan/

• FounderCoHo – https://www.linkedin.com/company/foundercoho

Timestamp

• 00:00 Highlights

• 01:38 Introduction and Interview Focus

• 03:33 Stanford MBA Deferral and Dropping Out

• 07:08 First Startup Experience in College

• 08:46 Launching Run the World During COVID

• 10:30 Pivoting from Consumer to Enterprise Sales

• 14:08 Learning to Hire the Right Sales Leaders

• 24:30 Getting Funded by Andreessen Horowitz

• 27:45 Proving Product-Market Fit Without Building

• 30:16 Scaling Team During Pandemic and Layoffs

• 37:27 Selling Run the World and Exit Decision

• 41:18 Founding HeyBoss AI from Gaming Concept

• 45:12 The AI CEO Concept and Autonomous Teams

• 47:56 Selling Results vs Process for Non-Technical Users

• 52:26 Applying Run the World Lessons to HeyBoss

• 55:01 Finding Product-Market Fit Through Testing

• 1:01:21 Building Teams as a Solo Founder

• 1:05:35 Motivating and Finding Startup Employees

• 1:11:38 Staying Current in AI and Product Testing

• 1:12:57 Connect with Xiaoyin

Full Transcript

During my first year of MBA, most people

get a job, an internship somewhere, and I

just started a company.

Xiaoyin Qu, founder of HeyBoss AI, is

a pioneering entrepreneur pushing the boundaries of AI

-native companies.

She made headlines by appointing Astra Prime as

CEO, the first known case of an AI

leading company, and is now breaking down what

it takes to run a fully AI-driven

development agency.

Andreessen saw our idea and they liked it,

so we basically launched TechCrunch had an article

about us saying, hey, this company just raised

some money.

But momentum doesn't mean you understand the game.

I was very stubborn because I didn't know

enterprise.

I don't really want to touch it.

Sometimes before you do it, a conference where

10,000 people are going to be here,

you need to talk to somebody, making sure

that you're really trusting the brand before you

decided to make your conference.

It's a big deal.

It turns out customers really, really want to

pay for that.

They're not going to choose your software if

the service is not there.

Then she discovered the pattern.

We have some kind of inbound, they talk

to us, and then we try to convert

those people.

We can make the deal within three calls.

I figured that out later.

So then that changed the power dynamic, you

know, from me begging for money to them

begging me to take their money.

But the real insight wasn't about sales.

It was about people.

The nature of business, there's a few dimensions,

I would say.
The first is like the frequency of the

usage.

Number two is that in order for people

to adopt your business, is it just he

himself can make the decision?

Or there's a huge group of people that

have to collectively make a decision before they

can give you a try.

The best fundraising strategy is actually building a

product that people like and have the traction.

I do think it's important to be intrinsically

motivated.

Once you have those people, they are self

-driven themselves.

What gave you the conviction to decide to

pursue a startup?

Today we're joined by Xiaoyin Qu, founder of

HeyBoss AI and the visionary behind the viral

virtual events platform Run The World.

Xiaoyin is a serial entrepreneur who has successfully

exited two companies.

After starting her first venture at just 19,

she went on to serve as a senior

product manager at Facebook.

In a move that defined her early career,

she dropped out of the Stanford MBA program

to scale her venture-backed startup after securing

funding from Andreessen Horowitz.

During the pandemic, she led Run The World

through a rocket launch moment, providing a critical

solution for global conferences, and eventually selling the

business to a leading physical events company.

Today, she is pioneering the AI CEO concept,

creating autonomous AI teams that replace traditional development

agencies.

What happens when a founder steps down to

let an AI CEO take over?

In this conversation, Xiaoyin Qu details the evolution

of autonomous AI teams and the hard-won

lessons from her rocket ship journey through the

pandemic.

Xiaoyin breaks down the nature of business, explaining

why usage frequency and decision-making friction determine

everything from sales strategy to monetization.

She shares candid insights on pivoting from consumer

to enterprise, the reality of managing remote teams,

and why the solo founder is more viable

than ever.

We explore how her new platform, HeyBoss, replaces

manual prompt engineering with AI agents that interpret

fuzzy human intent to build professional results in

minutes.

From fundraising leverage to the rise of the

100x talent, Xiaoyin provides a masterclass on building

in the age of AI.

The blueprint for Xiaoyin's unconventional career wasn't drawn

at HeyBoss.

It was drafted during a defining moment at

Stanford.

Please subscribe and turn on notification so you

never miss the next one.

I got into Stanford MBA actually when I was in college. It was like this deferral program that you can, you're supposed to work for a few years and then go to MBA. Initially it was like two years of working at Facebook and I'm supposed to go, but I had a lot of fun at Facebook. So I kept delaying until it's like, okay, you can no longer delay, you know, says Stanford admission office. You have to either go or quit. So I was like, okay, I'll go. So I left Facebook when I was a senior product manager there and I joined MBA 2018. But then I dropped out 2019, so I never got a degree.

That's a very interesting experience because most of the people they would just continue to study and you chose to defer the study and go to the industry first.

What was your thought back then?

Well, that was actually pretty conventional in that

they want you to have more experience.

Basically, there's a special program at Stanford MBA

where you can apply as a college student,

and then you got in, and then you're

supposed to work for two years, and then

you go back to MBA.

So that was normal.

I think maybe what's not normal is the

fact that I dropped out.

But still, like back in my class, it

was before COVID.

So during my first year of MBA, for

the summer before the second year, most people

get a job, internship somewhere, and I just

started a company.

I tried many different ideas.

But then back then, the one idea that

really struck the core was the virtual events.

It was a new thing.

There was not like Zoom events like today.

So it's just my mom was a Chinese

doctor.

That year, just came to US for

international medicine conference.

It turns out it was really hard for

her to get visa, and she doesn't speak

English very well.

So the whole process, that was super hard

for her.

Super valuable because she met another doctor that

shared the same exact rare patient case.

Super helpful.

Life-changing.

But it was super hard for her because

she doesn't speak English well, the visa takes

forever.

So I thought, okay, what if we can

digitalize the whole conference experience, make it virtually

possible for a large group of people, typically

professionals, to share their expertise.

So that's when we started the idea of

virtual events.

But that was before COVID and everything.

So no one believed in the idea.

We had to do a lot of events

ourselves as an event organizer just to prove

the concept.

So over that summer, we basically did a

bunch of events as an event organizer.

We made a lot of money.

So that was 2019.

That was 2019, yeah.

And then Andreessen saw our idea and they

liked it.

So basically, we got some funding before I

started MVA2.

So I'm like, okay, I'm gonna drop out.

So that's kind of how it works.

It's kind of the same time, I kind

of know that I'm not gonna go back

because I really believe in that idea.

And then we also get funding.

So I guess I was able to persuade

my parents.

It's like, okay, let's drop out.

Yeah, I know it's pretty unconventional among the

Chinese parents group to have kids drop out.

Also, you mentioned that it's very rare for

Stanford MBA as well.

Like, how many of your classmates?

I mean, my year is actually there are

12 people dropped out.

So of like 400, it's not super rare,

but it's, you know, rare enough.

It's pretty rare.
It's rare enough, but it's also not like

impossible.

I would say most people who dropped out,

they all started a company.

I got really lucky though, because once I

dropped out, we worked on the product, the

software version of that virtual event for like

half a year.

We launched February 2020.

And then the week after we launched, COVID

hit.

So we became like viral and popular almost

instantly because all the conferences got canceled.

So they had to use us.

So that's kind of our like rocket launch

moment.

What gave you the conviction to decide to

pursue startup?

Well, I kind of started my first company

when I was 19, actually in college.

It was a college counseling company.

We were just helping, you know, smart high

school students in China apply for top schools

in the US.

So that was my, I guess my first

entrepreneurial journey was my co-founders at the

time.

We were college sophomores.

It was like 19, 20 year old.

Yeah, and then he actually dropped out college.

He was like only to have one year

of college.

And then he just left.

I was already conservative.

I was like, oh, I'm going to stay

through school.

Yeah, now it's a pretty, very famous educational

counseling company today.

He's still running it.

But I kind of left after, you know,

I got the job with Facebook.

So that was my first journey.

You know, that was not VC backed or

anything, but we did learn quite a bit.

Yeah, so I guess it became really natural

once you enjoy that.

You realize, hey, you know, now that you

have experience at Facebook, have a little bit

of savings, maybe you can take more risks.

You got into the startup world very early

on, and that gave you a perspective.

And so even later when you go to

the Facebook, that seed of ideas that you

can do startup still is inside you.

And after several years, it took off and

you decided to do it again.

Yeah, I mean, I kind of always know

that Facebook, I don't, I wasn't planning on

staying at Facebook for 20 years because I

kind of already know that.

So it's not a hard decision back then.

Also, I was 20, 26, doesn't have kids,

you know, I didn't have kids or mortgage

or anything.

So the risk is pretty low for me.

I figured why not, you know what I

mean?

Yeah, so tell us a little bit more.

What exactly happened those couple of years, a

couple of months around the pandemic?

So we basically launched, TechCrunch had an article

about us saying, hey, this company just raised

some money.

They just launched, it was a virtual events

offering.

And it was like kind of coincidental with

some of the COVID started hitting.

Some conferences announced they are going to be

canceled.

So part of our announcement, you know, was

that if your conference got canceled, come to

us.
We can make sure that your conference did

not get canceled.

And, you know, for a lot of the

conference organizers, they get paid way, way back

from the sponsors, knowing that the conference is

going to be around.

They're going to cancel their conference and they

lose all their sponsorship money.

They probably already spent some of those money.

So we're like, we can help you protect

your sponsorship money if you can just post

it virtually.

And obviously that was a perfect pitch at

that time.

And all of the conferences that you probably

hear of, they all need a solution.

So they all came to us.

It became like, I would say, that's when

the product market hit.

Like we were barely ready.

Like our product is like shit.

You know, the quality isn't really good, but

we were available.

So there was a lot of interest, obviously.

Yeah, so we were growing really fast.

You mentioned that you were still like figuring

out and building the product, like improving product

back then.

Did you face any challenge when you suddenly

started getting a lot more users?

Well, yeah.

I mean, like I personally, I was always

a consumer product manager.

So we thought we were going to help

a lot of consumers organize events.

But then when COVID hit, all we get

is big corporations and event organizers, large trade

shows.
Those are all like enterprise customers.

And I did not really understand how it

worked at all.

I think our pricing model was not right.

I did not really know how to do

sales because we haven't had a whole sales

team talking to enterprises.

That's what they're used to.

So basically, I have to basically rebuild everything

because initially I thought it's going to be

product-led.

Everybody come to our platform, set up the

event.

We realized that is not the case.

You know, sometimes before you do it, a

conference where 10,000 people are going to

be here, you need to talk to somebody,

making sure that you're really trusting the brand

before you decided to make your conference.

It's a big deal for the customer.

So we were kind of figured that out

too late, I would say.

Looking back, we should have done that kind

of sales approach way earlier, but I didn't

know anything about it.

And I thought, okay, I have a perfect

product.

Everybody should join.

But we realized, no, customer also need a

lot of talking just to build trust to

them because that event is very, very important

for them.

So I think that I learned about, sometimes

you may want to do it with more

consumer or you think it's product-led, but

the reality is the nature of that business

maybe require more talking and customer willing to

pay way more if they trust you, but

you have to build the trust.

So that's something I kind of learned later,

I would say.

What I heard you mentioned about it, you

start a company with the idea more as

a consumer-facing application, but when the pandemic

has changed everything, and I still remember at

the time, I was working at a startup

back then and like all the marketing budget,

they started shifting from the offline events into

the online events.

And that leads the opportunity of the enterprises.

And you face a lot of challenges on

that.
And how did you eventually figure that out?

Well, I mean, I would say like, it

took us maybe too long, in my opinion.

We should have figured it out sooner, but

basically we just hired the right people.

For us, we realized our bread and butter

is basically the mid-sized events, not like

super huge conventions, typically like 10,000 people

or 5,000 people.

So our deal size is like what?

$5,000 to $30,000.

So basically what I learned is that based

on your deal size, then you determine the

right sales approach.

If your deal size is like more than

$10,000, typically customer want to talk to

a person at least once.

They want to talk to a person.

They're not going to just pay the credit

card $10,000.

So we kind of figured that out a

little bit late, I would say.

Then we quickly add those account executives talking

to those customers.

So we initially thought it was a stupid

idea and said, hey, services, that's not software,

but that's what customers really want.

And so some of our competitors start adopting

those services, that they provided those services.

They say, okay, for your event, we're going

to support you, but you have to pay

$20,000 more.

We're going to have a human that help

on a call at all times during our

event.

It turns out customers really, really want to

pay for that.

And they are not going to choose your

services.

They're not going to choose your software if

the service is not there.

So that was interesting for certain events.

And we learned, I guess I learned that

now I have a new perspective regarding services,

because I used to think those are not

sexy.

Those are not technical.

But sometimes for a certain type of business,

you do need to offer services for people

to adopt.

And they are, as long as that services

is something you can scale and they can

pay you a lot of money with great

margin.

I'm not against the idea anymore.

I think that I have changed quite a

bit.
You have very interesting experience of like being

a consumer founder before and now to more

to the enterprise and B2B founders.

And one point you mentioned very resonating is

that there's no fundamental differentiation between B2C or

B2C on that.

At the end of it, people want your

product, but also want your services.

And so at the end of the day,

it's the final solution that matters.

And that really depends on the nature of

your business.

Yeah, exactly.

You mentioned about your hire.

You did a key hire that helped you

to solve the challenges.

I assume that was a leader of a

go-to market person.

Well, technically, yes.

So I think we, because I didn't know

how to do those jobs before, frankly, you

know, I was basically keep hiring the wrong

person because I didn't know, you know, even

when it comes to a sales leader, there's

apparently different tech, you know, they're like very

big account salespeople that they are really good

at cultivating high, you know, powerful relationship with

fortune 500, you know, whatever CIO and they

go on golf court, they go to like

NBA games, whatever.

But that's not the type of field that

we need because the deal size we have

was $10,000 or something like that.

So we have a lot of volume.

There's a lot of people calling us.

There's all kinds of conferences, like American Roof

Association want to have a conference just for

roof builders, right?

There's some nursing companies.

So we have all kinds of companies, mostly

like medium-sized business, where there are also

some large enterprises, but not for the hugest

event, typically for a mid-sized event.

So we basically have to quickly build a

sales approach that took me a while to

figure out.

Our sales approach is people come to us.

We have a call.

Essentially, we have some kind of inbound.

They talk to us.

And then we try to convert those people

within three calls.

We can basically make the deal within three

calls.

I figured that out later.

So we really need, we have a lot

of volume.

We need to figure out the right sales

leader that can scale those volume and figure

out the right process to identify who is

the right customer, who is not.

And then making sure that those sales representative

can sell within three calls.

So that is a very different profile from

a Fortune 500 CIO sales leader.

That took me a while to realize that.

Many people, when they hear about our sales

leader, they go sell.

They say, oh, they just do the same

job.
But the job is fundamentally different.

And then I kind of had to do

the sales job myself to realize it.

Initially, I thought, I don't know this.

Let me hire somebody.

And that was a bad decision.

That was not the right type of leader.

Many founders, when they started, they wouldn't be

able to know every part of it.

They might be good at building the product,

but not necessarily good at going to market.

And so then the other decision is, do

you want to do the thing yourself?

Do you want to hire people to do

that?

What is your take now?

Well, I do think my take is that

if you can, obviously, in order to make

it right, you have to do every single

job.

The problem that I was facing is that

I know too little.

I don't know HR.

I don't know legal.

I don't know sales.

I don't know marketing.

I was a product manager with three years

of experience.

So I had to learn everything.

But then we have exploding demand from all

over the world.

We have to keep up.

So I had to make some hiring decision

just to keep up.

And a lot of them are bad decisions,

looking back.

So I was thinking maybe what I should

have done is maybe I can get some

more advisor to help me.

I should first figure out what type of

leader do I need.

I think that I have to figure out

myself.

And then I can hire the right leader.

But I cannot really avoid that.

I thought I could hire a sales leader

to figure it out.

That is not going to happen.

I have to figure it out.

But then once I figure out what type

of sales leader I need, then I can

hire.

I think that's probably the best decision.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, being founder is like that.

The plane is flying and you make tons

of decisions.

So we have to admit sometimes we make

the wrong decision early on the go.

There's a lot of unknown, especially in an

area that you're not familiar with.

Now that you have been through this and

have some experience on it, how would you

recommend founders who now do startup and have

to solve problems in non-linear companies?

Yeah, I think right now if I were

to solve a new problem within a domain

area that I don't know anything about, I

think the first thing I would do is

probably understanding what type.

For example, let's say we want to hire

a head of sales.

And I have no idea what it works.

Probably I will first figure out what are

those different types.

You can look at other companies, maybe similar

to yours.

Essentially, the nature of our business back then

for virtual events was people really give it

a lot of attention to that event.

They need a lot of persuading.

Once they can be persuaded, then they're ready

to sign a bigger deal.

So that is more in line with more

enterprise motion with some of those larger kind

of company, like security company where you need

to build a lot of trust before they

convert, which is very different from maybe the

companies like Notion where anybody can try it

really easily.

Okay, now you have a bunch of people

try it.

Now you persuade the company to buy Notion.

So for us, the opportunity cost to try

is pretty high because the customer need to

have a very successful event.

So I think maybe understanding that first is

very helpful.

And then you can see what are other

companies that have same nature as our company.

Is it more like a Notion-like thing?

Is it more like a security-like thing?

And then you try to figure out, maybe

then you know those are the companies, my

target company I can maybe hire some advisors

for.

But I think the first part is understanding

the nature of your business is rely on

what.
And it does take a while to understand

how do you segment, how do you understand

the nature of your company?

During the pandemic, there's also a lot of

changes in the industry.

You mentioned one thing is that you are

originally B2C and then you are now hiring

the market for you to go to more

enterprise.

There's also other cases like Zoom, which was

originally really B2B focused.

But then through the pandemic, it actually become

more like B2C.

What is your take about how this external

change of the market is changing the business

direction?

Well, I used to be very stubborn because

I always want to build a consumer company.

And so when the business B2B poll was

there, initially I kind of declined that.

I said I wanted to really build a

consumer company.

Then I guess it took me a while

to realize the nature of our business again

is hosting events.

So even for a consumer, it's a big

deal.

When you're organizing events for 5,000 people,

that's a really big deal.

So you're going to have the same mindset.

It's very rational.

It's not going to be like entertainment focused.

It's very rational.

You really wanted the peace of mind.

That's a very similar nature in enterprise, which

is then, I guess once I realized that,

it became natural for us to then do

more enterprise approach.

But I was very stubborn because I didn't

know enterprise.

I don't really want to touch it.

But I think it's important now that I

basically now, if I were to analyze any

business, I would try to understand the nature,

like what I said.

The nature of business, there's a few dimensions,

I would say.

The first is the frequency of the usage

for our events.

It's actually once a year.

It's not frequent.

So because of that, people are just not

going to always use us month to month

basis.

It's a bad idea to try to sell

a monthly plan.

We try to sell a monthly plan for

people to organize events, but they don't organize

events every month.

So it's a really, really bad idea.

So I think the first part now, I

look into the nature of business, what is

the natural frequency?

If natural frequency is less than once a

month, then it's not going to work when

people just remember you all of a sudden.

So you either have to sell them a

big contract that's multiple years, or you have

to basically constantly acquire them and you may

lose some people because the nature of that

business is that the frequency of usage is

low.

That's number one.

Number two is that in order for people

to adopt your business or adopt your solution,

is it just he himself can make the

decision, that's it?

Or there's a huge group of people that

have to collectively make a decision before they

can give you a try.

For Notion, I think you can just try

yourself.

For our thing, if you organize an event

with 5,000 people, chances are you have

a team of people that organize an event

with you, and then they want to make

sure every single detail is great before they

can commit.

So there is a decision-making process, even

to try it, which is why basically we

have to do a lot of stuff from

educational content to office hour, where we basically

directly talk to our customer and their team

to help them make the decision.

We even run a lot of trial events

for them to try before they can buy.

So all of that stuff is very important

for them to commit just because the decision

-making process to buy is very heavy for

us.

Yeah, well said.

Actually, those two factors also, from my experience,

are so important.

What I have seen, first, the frequency.

Is it a high-frequency application or a

low-frequency application?

For low-frequency, you have to go to

high volume.

Otherwise, the total address market would be too

low.

And then how easy the decision is made.

You need a person to make a decision

or a team to make a decision.

Well, the other thing is also for low

-frequency events, you have to make a lot

of money up front.

That's really important.

I didn't know that.

Tell us more.

Why up front?

Well, think about the least frequent event is

wedding planning.

Hopefully, once in your lifetime, if you don't

get a divorce.

You charge people a lot of money, right?

They make a lot of decisions trying to

figure out which wedding planner do I pick?

But once you have a successful wedding, you

do a great job, the idea is that

you don't ever see your customer again, right?

You're not going to be able to retain

them.

Then hopefully, if they like you, they can

refer you to other friends of them.

But you lose that customer forever.

I think if the frequency is really low,

then people are going to turn.

Unless you can make them sell multiple-year

contracts.

For conferences, people do.

Sometimes they do a five-year contract with

this particular vendor, which is basically just saying,

make a lot of money up front.

Once you sell them, make a lot of

money.

Otherwise, it doesn't make any sense because then

you always lose new customer.

You always lose your existing customer.

So essentially, you have to make enough money,

but then you also make your existing customer

refer a new customer to you.

So there needs to be a referral.

So then you can reduce your cap.

But the most important thing is making sure

that you make enough money from that customer.

Exactly, yeah.

You mentioned a great point about when to

monetize.

So what I had mentioned about if the

nature of your business is low-frequency, you

should monetize as early as possible.

Show that you need a value.

And it's more transactional.

But if it's high-frequency, then you can

build a trust, build a relationship.

And the whole spectrum actually applies both to

B2B and B2C.

Like in B2C, it's actually super high-frequency.

So you can always delay the monetization.

You can even delay to the point that

your money has to add sometime down the

road.
Yeah, totally.

But obviously, if you have to choose, I

always choose the high-frequency, right?

It's easier.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Way much easier.

That's pretty cool.

Obviously, you learned a ton.

So the whole journey.

And you also mentioned that the A16B found

you and invest you during the period.

Tell us a little bit about how you

got to know A16B.

Well, because like I said, I was an

event organizer myself.

So we made some revenue.

So by the time that I talked to

investors, I tried to talk to investors before

I really fleshed out the idea.

Well, actually, before around the world, we tried

many different ideas.

Most of them failed, you know, miserably.

But tell us some interesting idea you tried.

I mean, I did try to build the

AI therapist, but the AI was not good

enough.

So it was more like rule-based and

kind of dumb.

It was not actually very helpful.

We tried to build all kinds of stuff,

I would say.

But then obviously, when we talked to investors

without a fleshed out idea, well, sometimes before

our idea really proved traction.

Like any entrepreneur, I didn't really know a

lot of investors back then.

So I think a lot of them just

kind of ignored me.

It was not those conversations where you think

everybody really wants to invest in you.

It was not a happy conversation.

But once we make some money ourselves, because

we were the event organizer, we made some

revenue.

Then it became like, even when I talked

to Andrews, it became like, hey, this is

working.

We made money.

If you wanted to get in, we're a

rocket ship that's going to make more money.

But if you're not going to get in,

that's also okay, because we're going to make

money anyways.

So then that changed the power dynamic from

me begging for money to them begging me

to take their money.

So I think that is a better situation

to be in.

Then you have, obviously, there's one VC that's

interested, and Andreesen's interested, and now everybody's

interested.

And then now I can have a higher

valuation because there's more supply and demand.

So all of that stuff, I think, just

give me way more leverage because I have

some data and I know that I'm making

money.

So it's like you either join you or

not.

I think that fundamentally changed the power dynamic.

And to be honest, for early stage, what

I found is that most of the valuation

are kind of bullshit anyways.

You don't really know the price.

The price is determined by how many investors

want to invest in you versus your supply

and demand.

So essentially, the more investors want to invest

in you, the higher price, even though there's

no fundamental to really back it up because

it's so early stage.

So I think that the fact that we

have some traction, we have some real revenue,

give me the confidence to confront other investors

like, hey, we can wait if that's not

a good price.

But if you want to invest in me,

you have to play my role.

And then that does help a lot in

our process.

Yeah, that's a great advice.

What I heard you about is that for

founders, the best founder strategy is actually building

a product that people like and have the

traction.

Have some traction.

Yeah, have some traction.

And then that will change the whole power

dynamics between the founders and investors.

And it gave a lot more leverage to

founders.

So that's such a great advice.

I'm also very, very curious about the early

stage because it took some process for you

to get attraction.

And oftentimes the founders are in a stage

as well, they need more money to grow

the business.

And at the same time, they haven't really

shown their traction yet.

So the question here is like, how do

you decide whether you should raise money or

not?

Or how do, if not, how do you

make sure the company can have a way

to get it to the way to grow?

Well, I mean, for us, actually, the virtual

events, like I said, I was the organizer

for virtual events.

We didn't build anything.

We were hacking around like Slack and Zoom

and Eventbrite and some existing tools.

And we just invited the speaker ourselves, where

essentially there's six different tools.

And then our user still purchased.

The first event was a product management conference,

virtually.

And it was like invited the Facebook product

managers, my coworkers to participate in this conference

for other people who wanna be product manager.

And it was like six tools you have

to sign up using like the Wix shitty

website, the link to Eventbrite, the link to

Slack, the link to Zoom, but people still

pay for it.

We made a lot of money from that.

So that's when we realized, hey, people really

have the demand because those people are not

based in Silicon Valley.

They normally don't see product manager from Facebook.

So that for them is like a zero

versus now they're able to, that's a big

deal.

So we actually didn't spend any money building

anything, but we were making good money just

from hacking around those tools.

So I do think there are, especially now

with AI, there are many different ways.

You just don't need to burn money at

all to prove that people have demand.

That's very interesting.

So you actually do a go-to-market

before you actually write any, like build a

• We didn't do anything.

Yeah.
We just made some money organizing events.

And then once we do that, we organized

five more events, like a data science event,

a engineering something.

And then we even did like a, basically

like a fertility conference for people who want

to, for women who are thinking about fertility,

because we wanted to see how extensive this

concept of virtual events can be.

We've proven it worked for product manager, it

worked for data scientists, it worked for venture

capitalists, but maybe let's find something totally out

there.
So we had a conference on fertility, we

had another conference on elephant protection, was a

non-profit.

So then that's when we realized that the

concept of virtual events back then could be

very extensive to all kinds of industry.

So when we kind of talked to Andreessen,

the idea is like, hey, we'll make all

those money from all those industry, it was

a shitty product that is not even a

product.

Can you imagine how much more money we

can make if you weren't investing and we

actually built a software?

And then that's kind of the pitch.

I also want to dive in a little

bit about another part of the startup building,

which is about building the team, because it

will take more than yourself to build a great product. And especially you build this team and grow the company during a pandemic. I would imagine will cause a lot of extra challenges. Tell us how you built the early team of Run the World.

Well, I mean, it was like less than 10 people. We were probably like five people before we launched. But then now everybody wants to do events with us. So we basically had to scale the team from like back then from like, I think from less than 10 to 60 within a year, which is pretty crazy. And it was like remote. So actually I learned a lot.

The whole team is remote.

The whole team was because of COVID. But I also learned, even right now, my current company is also remote. I learned a lot about how to run an effective remote team. But yeah, we were able to hire talents from all over the world. And then we do try to have like overlapping time zones so people can work very effective. But yeah, the hardest part for me was back then, because everybody was hiring, including my competitor, I have a few competitors, they were even like 200 people or something like that. So we were hiring both, we were all like hiring like crazy. So there's a lot of wrong decisions in terms of hiring.

We hired way too many people and then we basically had to do a layoff. When COVID is over, we had to do a layoff. So I realized after we laid off people, the productivity actually went up. It was more productive. So I guess I learned a lot about how do you make sure you hire the right people and what is the right process to figure out how many people you need from that process.

Being a start-up founder often needs a lot of decisions that you need to make about when to grow a team, when to go faster, when to be more cautious. There's a lot of continued decision-making processes. And you also mentioned that you hire a lot during the pandemic.

Tell us a little bit more what happens during and after the pandemic.

Well, during the pandemic, obviously we have a lot of demand. So the hardest part for me was to, whenever we have, we always have work that we need to be done. the idea, we also raise a lot of money. We're making money. So let's just get more people to solve the problem. But then a lot of times we make the wrong decision because we're trying to hire too quickly. Or sometimes we don't even know the exact job description. We just know there's a lot of work. So let's just hire somebody who can solve those needs right now without really thinking about longer term. Are those sort of good fit? And there's one,

people draw initially is good but then we quickly realize either they're

do not meet our cultural bar or they're long-term not the right fit. So that's one. But then obviously when COVID was over, our boom, our karma boom was over too. So all of a sudden, we have a lot of churn, the customer sometimes went back to in person. So that was a very difficult time for the company and for our entire industry. And then we had to do some really difficult decision of laying off people and that sucks. We did two rounds of layoff. The first round was, I was so scared before

I even announced it to my team. So basically what we learned is like, after the first round of layoff, our productivity, I said, which I went up because it turns out we have a lot of people because we, need a lot of people that we need a lot of manager managing those people. And then, so if we need to do something, there's like multiple meetings around it. Things are actually moving quite slow. We have a lot of people. The other thing is also, we have a lot of people, maybe they're more on the junior side. I guess

that's my takeaways for the current company is that we're trying to hire the very good people, like slowly making sure that they're the right team. Initially, we can do some part-time people to try if that's the right fit or not before making the full-time commitments. That's one thing we're doing right now. The other thing is also once we hire those people, we're trying to make sure they can be self-driven. So we try to avoid people who either, you know, maybe they're not experienced because we're a startup. We don't have the time to, you know, have an internship program to

to teach a lot of people. We also don't want hire people that are not self-driven. They always ask, you know, is there any tasks for me? They can't identify or proactively solve their own problems. Then you have to spend a lot of time coaching them or making sure they're doing this thing on time. And that is a lot of work. So those are kind of the two criteria, making sure they're self-driven, also making sure they have the right experience for the role. So as a result, we don't really need to have as nearly as many meetings as in the past. We also tried to, also the third thing I did is I reduced all one-on-one.

I'm right now pretty much have no one-on-one kind of like learn from Jensen Huang from Nvidia. And that answer is pretty great. When the employee have any issue, they can call me, know, to unblock them, they can call me. And then we can have group meeting. We have daily stand up that resolve those issues. But other than that, I don't really need a one-on-one for each of my direct report. So that way I can have a lot of direct reports. I think actually that that is way, way more doable for me to have like 10 direct report, 12 direct reports. When we don't have one-on-one, I can just manage directly. And then I don't need another manager.

manager to manage in between where, in the previous company probably have like five direct reports, they each have like a few direct reports, then we have multiple layers. And then you have to make sure the manager is a good manager that can like pass along the message. And that became really risky compared to the new model that I'm adopting right now.

And now there's the newer generation of companies that you mentioned about, you have much leaner teams and you have much more direct reports. Do you think this is a train that will continue and and What is your take about why why this thing happens now?

I'm not sure if we all have unlimited direct reports. Maybe we don't need 20 direct reports when AI can do most of the work anyways. Or maybe I'll have a direct report with AI. Right now I'm no longer the CEO, so I guess as a board member. People will be like that, where you have a lot of AI agents that actually do the work. So I do think that management may also change. It became how do you manage AI? and human? How does AI manage human? Sometimes AI can manage human too, so I do think that could happen very soon. And so that's number one. Number two is that right now we realize, you know, a lot of time when you're, because we need to...

We need to hire people with basically with good stabbing is to figure out AI tools. If you're a marketing person, instead of only just focusing on your own old way of doing marketing, we also want people to be proactively understanding what are the tools I can use in AI that can make me make me way more productive. And it's really, really hard to find actually very good marketing people that are non-technical, but they are very savvy at trying and testing different AI tools and figure out the right process. Those people are very hard to hire.

my opinion. But if you can hire them, they can be way more productive because they can revolutionize the way that they do marketing. They can be 10X more productive than other marketers who don't know how to do that. So it's just that the discrepancy between a very effective person knowing how to use tools, knowing how to use AI is going to be instead of 10X marketer, probably we'll say 100X because they are so, so, so much more productive. So I think it's more important now, it's more important than ever to identify those 100X talent.

who can not only do their job well, also leveraging AI to figure out how to upscale themselves.

That's a very interesting topic. I think that's probably also related to your current company. before, so we'll have to touch more on that later, but before we go to the next journey,

I would like to hear about later your also sold your Run the World and exit from company. What is the fact that played in that decision?

Well, we got multiple acquisition offer during our peak, but I was too cocky. I was like, Hey, you know, our company is doing well. We're gonna go public, you know, not going to sell. I didn't even sell any secondary because I was maybe because my competitor actually won my competitors. So $200 million worth of secondary. And I didn't cause I thought, okay, that's, know, I'm going to make way more money if I just kept going. But turns out I'm wrong, you know, turns out when the COVID is like over, then the boom is over. Then suddenly you don't have that.

price anymore. So we ended up selling but not nearly as a good price as the offer that we got back in the days. But that was the best offer we could get. It's more just like I think the gross is not there anymore. We tried to figure out many different ways to kind of repurpose virtual events. But I think the general zeitgeist

was not available, people are willing to go more in person. So I think we're betting against the overall trend, which is kind of when I realized it's probably the right time to sell. And then we had a partner who they were focusing on in-person events, so they kind of need to supplement their offering by having more virtual events. So it's a perfect fit. So that's kind of when we decided to like sell our business to the other physical events company.

So that's actually also a very interesting point about, just started founders when you make all decisions. A lot of times the decisions also, whether we should, should we continue with current business, with sell to come business and start a new idea? What would it be your advice?

Well, I guess I don't know if I can predict the future. Like looking back, I think was that a better decision had I sell? I think yes, it was a better decision. It was a better price. you know, you also heard stories of Zuckerberg declining the Yahoo offer for a billion dollar. Now he make what? 200 billion. So I you kept hearing stories like that and that maybe makes you more hopeful.

that your company can be super huge. But I think looking back, maybe the right decision could have been you sell some secondaries so that you have, you know, you can make some money and then you, and then you can decide if you want to take more risk or not. So I do think I have to say there's a lot of unknowns, even though your company right now is doing well, even with the current AI boom, the multiple is really high, you know, company are value, a crazy valuation that may disappear the next year. So maybe the right rational thing would be sell something, have some secondaries, you can buy a house or something, feeling comfortable with your life, but then if you want to keep going, you could keep going. I think that's, I probably wouldn't go the other way like me was like, I'm not going to sell anything. If you maybe have family and kid, maybe you do want to sell a bit. I think that's fair. but at the same time, it's also something where like today you've got to offer for this much money tomorrow and maybe disappear. So the fact that you have this valuation does not mean that you're going to sell at this price. So there was so much volatility in the market that sometimes maybe I learned, I train myself to be mentally prepared for, for, for a huge price today.

Not huge price tomorrow, huge price the day after tomorrow. So I try myself to not be super swayed by certain price because that is fluctuating all the time.

So there’s all these options on the table and founders can can make judgment call based on situation

Yeah, but there's no perfect answer though. Like I have friends who sell they're like, oh I shouldn't have sold and I'm not happy.

And a lot of times, you mentioned, I think it reminds me of similar comments you added before. like, you have to make a lot of decisions, some are right, some are wrong. And as a founder, it's just, you have to move forward.

You just have to accept that is the nature of your job, you know?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. after you sell the company, now you are a serial entrepreneur, now you actually already exited from two companies. You start a new company, Heeyo and HeyBoss, and tell us more about that journey.

Yeah, so after we sold Run the World, I know that I'm, I know that I want to start another company. One is I enjoy the process of running Run the world. The other is I'm not satisfied with the outcome. I feel like I could do way more. So I think that hunger drives me to start another company. It was end of 2023, actually. The initial idea was we're going to build a gaming companies for kid.

So we wanted to kind of build more like a character AI for kids, but with more games. we were initially an educational gaming company. We're using AI to build games for kids to learn better.

How did you get that idea?

I was just like, that's growing up. There was a very famous cartoon called Doraemon in Asia. I watched it. all their meets need. get all the Doraemon is a great partner and companion for kids. They teach the kids different things. They give them confidence. I thought that would be cool. Now after I saw ChatGPT, I thought that is the natural evolution is that everybody can have their Doraemon. That's kind how we started the company. And we ended up making a lot of games. Doraemon can basically play with kid. and so, yeah, what we quickly realized is that we have this AI agent that can initially brainstorm games and then quickly develop those games. And that's actually the same AI agent that today is the AI CEO. That was the AI. So Astra was initially brainstorming ideas for kids game, then she started building those games. Then we realized actually like earlier this year that the same technical stack we have built can also be good enough to build website and applications. So it's like very similar type of Agent that we've built. We've always started from a non-technical people like educator or kid building their own game perspective. So we're really good at helping non-technical people build something technical in this case is a kid game. We realized the same technical stack can be applied to make website application as well.

And that is a 100x bigger market than kids. So then that's when we realized, hey, if it's a 100x bigger market, we have the technology to build that. We should pivot and actually make it happen.

Yeah, when did that happen?

That was like four months ago, actually. So that's when we expanded and we renamed the company from Heeyo to HeyBoss. Cause we realized, Hey, now we're going to tackle website and applications. We're going to not only serving kid, but also everybody who wants to build. yeah, so that's kind of the big evolution I would say this year. And then it's really a few weeks ago when we made the announcement is the second biggest evolution. It's we realized we're no longer a co-pilot. We used to be a co-pilot. So, you know, educator can have to guide the AI to build the game step by step.

Our engineers sometimes helping in, chime in as well. But right now, the current company that we have is no longer a co-pilot. So people don't need to know how to prompt engineer. They can just say, I have a coffee shop. I want to make a website or, you know, I'm a teacher. want to sell my course. And then AI will figure out, we have an internal AI agent that does design, AI product management agent, AI developer agent, AI content writer agent, AI market agent. So essentially you have a whole team working for you that you just need to give a demand that's in a high level.

Here's my, I want to make a website for my coffee shop. And then the product manager, designer, developer, content writer, they will figure it out what to do and give you a final result in nine minutes. So essentially it's like, we're permanently replacing all human dev agency. Today you hire to help you build website and apps in, Fiverr or other team that helps you make those things. We're essentially replacing each of the role in those companies. we're, it was Astra essentially we're replacing not only the individual that, the, it's individual worker, but we also replaced the leader essentially.

The leader is an AI agent that leads all the other AI to deliver you a final result. So we essentially became an autopilot that is entirely replacing a human dev agency that helps any human with a business to build their website and applications. So that's kind of the new evolution for the company.

Which is why I resigned because I realized, know, if in terms of leading a team of AI agent, the AI CEO is doing a way better job than I could ever do. I have to sleep, you know, I have to rest, I have to eat. And then the AI CEO doesn't need to do any of those. She can work all day and she and her team can work, you know, we can serve a thousand customers all at the same time, you know, in like parallel thread. And that doesn't work for me, you know, like I cannot work, I cannot multitask to that degree. So it makes the most sense for me to kind of more back down and then let the AI.

and their AI team take over because it's more efficient to deliver the final website or application faster for our customer.

you provided like end-to-end solutions in which your users were directly see the final output. Correct. So this were from the prompt to the final solution. so this brings back to the domain that they are more familiar with. They can see whether the website is better or not.

And so that is subjective a lot of times because when it comes to making a website, you're like, this coffee shop website looks great. That's very subjective. So part of our job is not only to execute engineering from engineers and perfect engineering, bug free and everything, but also to understand what kind of customer, what kind of taste do the customer has? What kind of style do they like? You know, what kind of coffee shop do they have? Is it boutique coffee shop with Columbia Beans from this organic farm? Is it more like a mass production, you know, coffee shop that just want to

to more like convenient, you know, location. Does the customer want to sell additional product like their coffee beans or they just want to have a solution that is easy for SEO for Google to index. So we have to understand their business objective.

And then based on their business objective, also we have to understand their personal taste. You know, are they more like, you know, Instagrammy? Are they more like Gen Z vibe? Are they more traditional? And then we can make a website that really basically speaks to their language. Sway them to like us and want to pay us more. So we kind of have to do all of that. And that has nothing to do with engineering. It's more to do, you know, it's kind of like agency today. They have to understand customer.

So we do think that's a pretty good value proposition for customers. It's cheaper. You don't need to pay us anything. We give you the first version in 10 minutes. That's the same thing as waiting for a month for agency to give you something. And then you can decide risk-free if you like it or not. If you like it, then pay us more. Pay us to host the website. Pay us to help you run your business. If you don't like it, that's okay. So for us, we have to make sure we're optimizing for the success rate. Essentially, the customer needs to choose us after they see the first version.

Yeah, so now you're taking the responsibility to turn, basically the hard work that you will do, turn the prompt into a final solution and then the users will make their own judgment call whether the final outcome is good.

Yeah, I say the hardest part for our business is that because our user does not know how to write prompt, we have to understand how to write prompt based on their use. when customers say those buttons, there are too many buttons. So we have to know which button to keep and which button to remove. we have to basically, based on their nature of their business and their taste, we have to advise the actual execution solution in terms of product management. have to know, okay, this is the button. Those two buttons seem really similar in nature. Let's combine those.

And that button is rarely used for that industry, let's remove that. So we have to make that decision. The customer is going to say, too many buttons, keep one. And then we have to choose the right button. So I think the type of problem that our agent is doing, a lot of time is to figure out the intent of the customer and also figuring out with their industry what is the right solution versus other kind of copilot tool for Cursor. You don't have to figure that out. You have to listen.

and understand the customer's request. But our customer request is very fuzzy. like, this is not intuitive enough. I don't like this. This doesn't look very modern. Those are very vague instructions that we have to understand what he means in this particular context and make it perfect for the customer.

you're focused on making so easy to use for users and the user's instructions are often very fuzzy. So you have to do a lot of more work to make sure the result is relevant. Can you tell us a little bit more of how did you do that?

Yeah. So our customer, because we're targeting the small business owner, we're targeting the marketer, we're targeting people who are not product manager, who are not engineer, who are not designer. they know how their business run. Like, you know, they, if they are influencer, they know how to get more followers. They know what kind of courses to teach. If they're a coffee shop, they know coffee beans really well. They know Columbia bean is better. Blue mountain bean is better, but they're not an expert in design, digital solutions. So for us, it's like, we have to make sure that first we build trust. They have to trust.

just like they trust a human expert.

I think the high level is just essentially I think for most of the AI application company, you have to choose between, are you selling the process or are you selling the result? Selling the process means you're helping somebody who know what they're doing to make it more productive. Like cursor, for example, selling the process of development. So you're the engineer, you know what you're doing.

They're a co-pilot. They Make it faster. So the person, you can trust the user to be the expert guiding you in that process. If you're selling the result, like us, we're selling the result of having a great website that drives your business. Then the user is not the expert in that process. They are the expert judging that result. So for us, we have to really double down on in order to make the results relevant, we have to understand what the user intent is. We have to understand the right process ourselves. We have to deliver, we have to make sure our success is tied to the result.

that is not tied to the process. So think those two companies are very, different. I'm expected to see more companies that are going to sell results with AI down the road just like us. And I think they require them to think differently in terms of how they design their product features.

You mentioned that HeyBoss was launched four months ago. How does the growth look like?

Well, actually we're Alpha four months ago and we kind of launched a few weeks ago. So it was like growing pretty fast. have like, know, tens of thousands of users already. I think I can see a lot of people obviously with that demand. frankly speaking, when I first launched the company, I wasn't sure of the exact use cases. We know that it will be very useful to help non-technical people build software, whether it's website or apps or games. But it's recent in the past few weeks, I've realized that we're particularly effective at building website for non-technical people because they, they have

way more website need than apps. The coffee shop owner need a website, the plumber needs a website, the AI startup needs a website. Your mom's photographer business need a website, but they probably don't need to build their iOS app or Android app. So the need for website is way, way bigger for our audience. So we're planning to more double down on that kind of use case, making sure, but the website is not only just a static website. They want to have AI agent that serves customers. They want to have, you know, better SEO that automatically making sure they are ranking higher in Google.

They wanted the website to look really cool and animated and modern. So there's many different requirements on the next generation of websites. It's really a surface to drive people's business. So imagine the website itself can proactively identify a customer for you, can proactively greet customers and convert customers. And that is going to be kind what we do.

It reminds me that of the experience you mentioned earlier, like Run the World, like it’s the event but the event is just one picture of the whole thing. Does that experience influence any decisions?

Well, I kind of learned like event was also a channel for people to, you know, either build more audience. So like for events, you know, there either is a Lead Gen. So you want more people to know about your brand. So it's brand awareness. You want more people. Number two is you want to identify the right lead. So you do some events that's targeted, you know, it's like maybe talking about like, how do you raise money from venture capital firm? And that is probably like, let's say you organize that event so you can quickly identify funders.

So you can then convert those founders. That's number two. Number three is like you have a lot of VIP customer you want to build closer relationship with them so you have some events where you do fine dining like great wine, great golf so people kind of have more affinity towards your brand and they kind of know your team better. I would say those are the three purpose why people have events. Eventually it's for their business. It's either to get more people know about their business, getting the right people come to their business and also make existing people get closer to their business. Those are the three objectives of any event.

we kind of learned that the event is just a tool to help people reach those three goals. More brand, know, basically more fame and like, you know, more money and a better relationship. Those are the three things that people care about for events. And I think for us it's similar thing. Like the website is just a gateway. Ultimately, you either wanted to, you know, the website looks great. So it makes you look great. So, so, you know, it makes you have more face and then more, the website makes you money, makes you get rich, know, either get fame, get rich, and you don't enjoy the process of building website

and prompting, you want us to get it done. So you want to get lazy. So essentially it's like get lazy, get rich and get famous. Those are the three things we're optimizing for the people.

Final result. Actually you put it in such a great way that both the events and the website are the means to their end.

I would believe a lot of software are doing the same thing right there are different means But essentially imagine the AI agent be so good. All we do is just lie on the beach. I'm lazy getting famous automatically and getting paid. That would be great I think our customer will love that to get on the chilly on the beach. It's like money money money fame fame fame.

Yeah. We'll all be invested in the business owner who are AI working for us.

I can see that happen pretty soon.

You mentioned about like you're starting with more horizontal lead. Like tools for non-coders and then you did an offer on that and you gathered the users and then in the past few weeks you started to get a clear picture about what is the target audience, ICP and what is the plan ahead. Walk us through what is the process you used to figure it out, what data you look at.

I'm probably not the most I was like my approach typically is is when I have an idea I like to test it out first. There are I say two different type of founders some founders like to think there is a Chinese saying that you think a lot before you You know act I tend to not follow that conventional wisdom. I tend to act a lot before So help me think you know, for us, you know We kind of realize that using prompt generating code and as get coding is getting better for sure It's gonna help a lot of people who are who are not traditionally

coders for sure but in terms of the actual use cases I wasn't sure and I didn't do a segment of different we could but I think it's a little fuzzy I still have no clue so my approach typically is like let's quickly build MVP and get a lot of people and just see which kind of use case were better at

My approach may not be the correct one, but that is my preferred approach is just try a lot of things and see what people do. So initially I wouldn't say I put a lot of thought into exactly what use case. I kind of know that if you can serve non-technical people with coding, is something there, but I don't know what. I essentially just, did the alpha. We try to do everything, obviously. And then we'll try to understand, you know, which kind of use case are people happiest? Because for example, we know that, you know, when we make a great website, people are really, really happy, but if they're using us to make You know a new feature within Facebook. They're not as happy

How do you know a user is happy?

Well, we actually talked to a lot of them obviously we can also look at their comment to the AI right they're like “Why can you not get it right?I talked to you three times “, then you know they're not happy. You do see a lot of feedback now with all of the transcript, right? AI can even help us interpret the emotional value of those customer. Are they happy or not happy? we essentially will look at for what kind of segment are the customer happiest? What segment of the customer not happy? And then within those segments, which segment make us the most money? Sometimes we don't know yet, but we could look at past examples. For example, you know that if they make a game for their girlfriend so their girlfriend is happy now they're probably only gonna impress the girlfriend one time they're not gonna keep paying us yeah because they probably you know they're not gonna do the same thing every single day

They monetize early

You monetize early but it’s not a lot of money. Right, but we do know that when you have a website other people have proven that is pretty good business Because unless you don't want to run your business anymore You probably will return to us so different use case do have different budget and I think I would say develop an app also has a lot of budget too But we realized that through our trial when a person wanted to use us to build very very complicated apps That's when we fell short because we're autopilot AI is not gonna understand every single corner cases If your app is super complicated requires some third-party API our AI doesn't know that yet. So we're not gonna do

is a good job right now. But if your app is really simple, maybe for marketing apps, you want to do a quick mortgage calculator that helps people sell your real estate business, all of that kind of stuff, then we can do a really good job. But if you want to make the next generation Devon using our, like if you want to build Devon using Hey Boss, I think we're not good enough to do that. So we kind of understood for apps, within apps, there are certain cases we can solve really well. There are other cases where we're just too dumb right now. so that's kind how we kind of use that. Basically the current AI capabilities, our technical stack, and then are the segment of the user rich enough to give us a lot of money? Or are they willing to pay a lot of money for those use cases? And then we kind of figure out what kind of segment to focus on.

Got you. Yeah, that's a really insightful advice is and I heard about three things from what you just talked about. The first is like you look at your users when they're happy, like identify the use cases in which your users are the most likely happy. Second is how big the user, the market size is like the one with enough budget and the third one that is technically viable.

The other thing I forgot is the frequency. I learn a lot about frequency right now. It's from my old events days. So I prefer some use cases where they will use us frequently.

Yeah, yeah, so not the wedding and dating but the website.

If you have a ceremony, has a wedding gallery that celebrates your marriage, perfect. But if you only have one time wedding registry, maybe that is not as long lasting as every year. But then we can make it. Maybe every year we give you anniversary photos, add it to your wedding so you can have a whole gallery of your life.

Yeah. Yeah, can use the frequency as a thing.

Yeah, we want to make sure our customer don't forget about us. You know, there's a forget zone. think there's some PM, CPO, I forgot which company, but mentioned there's a forget zone. So the customer use you less than once a month, they will forget you. so then you have to reacquire them again. You have to pay for ad, get influencer, talk about your brand again, because they forget about you. If your frequency is more frequent than once a month, then there are ways you can retain them. You know? So I think frequency matters a lot. yeah.

Yeah, that's actually very very interesting point about frequency because Retention also depending on the app the problem and solving if your problem the user don't really even have a frequent need of doing that It's impossible

But you need to make a lot of money right now. I mean, there is, speaking of that, is a, saw a company that was really smart. They actually, they help when a person died.

They help you process all the estate of that senior. Maybe your grandpa died or something. Then they help you figure out all the process of allocating his estate to all your family members, selling his house and everything. And they take 1 % of your estate. So that's a very not frequent use case, but they make 1 % of a senior person's entire life saving. And I think the US's average household estate was almost a million dollars. So they make a lot of money. And then for them, it's a great business.

They can spend all the marketing to acquire that one customer knowing that they're gonna get 1 % of the entire estate of the family. But that's a great business But the problem is we're not making nearly as much right? So then it became not making sense

So I want to also dive in more about your founder journey as well for the HeyBoss. You started this company as a solo founder. How does that experience look like?

Well, this is my first time as a solo founder. I mean, I did have a co-founder for my previous company. we work great until it's not. And then, so I think I learned that, you know, maybe it's important to make sure you have the right person. If you don't have the right person, it's also okay to start alone. I know YC always tell you to find a co-founder. but I also learned through my own experience, if you don't have the right co-founder, it's better if you stick to yourself, you know? So, so I think that at least right now, you

I always be like. I never been being a CTO before, but I had an early team for this new company. So I had an early team. was fortunate enough that like, I know a lot of good engineers, and I also have a lot of previous employee from my previous company that I can pull. so this time around, I think being a solo founder, I don't see any downside to that because I already have pretty capable, early team. But I also realized, you know, YC told you not to get a co-founder, but I keep seeing great solo founder.

Like popping up and their company doing great. I personally, I don't think Solo Founder is at a disadvantage. I do think that means you have to do more work. There's not going to be a person who you can cry with. You have to cry alone. But if you can cry alone, you can also be a great Solo Founder. I think it's totally fine.

So there is also, I think, a broader trend of solo entrepreneur i see happening. Plus, also because the tools are getting much better. People who used to need like Strong technical co-founders now they don't necessarily if they have vibe coding tools and vice versa if you have people who have a strong technique they might can hire an AI marketers or AI CEOs they don't need to Yeah, this So how do you think about this trend of these solo entrepreneurs?

Well, I think because AI can do so much more, I think there are going to be a lot of AI that enables people, right? Because we name our company HeyBoss, because we believe that our customer is the boss. We're the AI team that empowers that boss. We didn't name our company HeyBosses, because we think it's probably enough. A lot of people are going to be their own boss, you know? So I do think that is going to be a trend. More people are going to have a lot of ideas. Like even with HeyBoss right now, we're

already seeing people having multiple ideas, they can each build an app. Our AI team can build multiple apps at the same time for the same customer. And they can test five different ideas, see which ideas stick. So not only do they gonna become entrepreneur, they're probably gonna run multiple businesses as well. I think that's gonna happen pretty fast. So that's number one. Number two is I do still think that there's going to be collaboration between human. I do think for certain company, you probably still wanna have co-founder. I'm not saying like you should not have co-founder. say for certain company, if you have somebody you trust,

If you can have complementary skill, think it's totally okay to have co-founder. But at the same time, for a lot of businesses, I think a lot of people are going to be realizing that before I only know product, but I don't know marketing, I don't know tech as a result i need to find co-founder. But now those technical skills or skill gap is no longer the blocker because AI can help you. AI agent can help you fill those skill gaps. So you may have a lot of people who are really young with not that much experience, not that much expertise. They can leverage AI who can provide the expertise.

They can provide the idea where they have the ability to attract a lot of attention because I do think go to market is very important. Or they have a lot of industry knowledge that they know, they have particular taste about their industry. And then they can leverage a whole swarm of AI employees to satisfy their vision. I do think there's going to be more examples like that. So you can have Zuckerberg, you can have a lot of future Zuckerberg who don't know how to code.

But they may have like those subtle tastes on social networking. They can become the next Zuckerberg. I think that's going to happen pretty fast.

Another thing, I also want to talk about the human employee, because you mentioned about especially when you become do the startup yourself is very, very important to have good founding team members. can you tell us more how you find them and how do you make sure they are motivated and happy in the company?

I think motivation comes from two sides. would say one is that There are certain people that are really, really intrinsically motivated. I do think it's important to be intrinsically motivated. once you have those people, they are self-driven themselves. So I think that's really, really important. I don't think you can cultivate somebody to build their, I think it's hard to coach intrinsic motivation. It's easier to filter through people without that and identify people with that. So that's number one. Number two is that I do think it's important that people share the same vision. You know, for us, we're trying to help, you know,

Billion people run their own business with AI. So I do think that's a big enough vision that a lot of people get really excited for it And so I think that vision does attract a lot of people especially like, you now I used to work at Facebook. My Facebook co-workers making million dollar a year. They’re making so much money. It's almost impossible to you know incentivizing them to quit their job Just because the startup is going to hopefully go IPO and make them a lot of money when they probably can make way more money reliably

If we do the math for a lot of those people, think what's driving them is less about money because they already have a lot of money. It's more about maybe the vision, or maybe they're unsatisfied that they don't feel like they have the agency to do things. So I do think it's important to motivate people, try to figure out what drives them. Because I think there are two folks. One is people who really hungry, they haven't proven themselves, they want to prove themselves. So that's one type. Or maybe they didn't get a Facebook offer, but they believe they can. They believe that they are still good talent, that you can...

attract them say hey this is your time to shy there are also other people where money they have enough money where they know they can make enough money that the money is no longer the driving factor so you have to figure out the right motivation

You know, whether it's like, but typically it's like either it's like self actualization of being useful to the society. It could be like having more freedom because your previous boss sucks and you want somebody that gives you agency. It could be that you really care about fame and you want to get famous. I think there's no, I don't, I don't judge people based on what drives them, but I do think that they need to have at least one thing that drives them.

You know, I tend to think that when we have similar vision that people wanted to make impact, that is where I can find the biggest alignment with my employees. But I do think sometimes people say, I just want to get famous. I want to get rich and I respect that. And they can be good, you know, motivated employees too. I'm not saying that's not good. But I'm just saying like, it's important to understand what drives them and see if your company can offer what drives them, you know.

I think there are some qualifications you need to have for startup employees. They need to have a drive, regardless of what the drive is. could be like a very wide spectrum drive, but at least they need to have a drive. They want to get to somewhere. And then as the startup founder, you need to understand like, well, they want to do, what is their drive and whether you are the right place. Like you can provide the right place for them to. If your company is not the right place, it’s totally fine.

I think it's important to know that your company is not the right company that offer the drive. Yeah, because it rarely end well based on my past experience.

Exactly. Yeah. And so that process is basically curate a team that has a strong drive and stay close together, with shared-visions. Yeah.

But I do think it's fairly enough when you're a small startup, why would the best people on Facebook join you when they make millions of dollars and you're just a no name startup? I think it's very normal for those high talent not want to join you because you're just a small startup. So I do think it's important that to realize sometimes you may not get the best talent because you're a startup, you know, so, then, but I'm saying maybe you don't get the best proven talent from Harvard, from Stanford, go to Facebook, blah, blah, you can still get really good unproven talent who have the raw talent that

Maybe they don't meet all of the resume check. Maybe they don't get a job on Facebook because they didn't go to the school. They didn't work in fancy companies. But you can still identify those people. I mean, typically those people's resume got rejected by Facebook because Facebook doesn't have so many resumes they can use the AI system that just filters through. But there's a lot of people that are hidden gems and they don't get accepted by Facebook. But you can still filter through those people that probably are like happy was working at your current tiny startup and no one cares about. So I do think you have to accept that reality.

is that you're not gonna attract the best people. You're not gonna just, yeah, you're not gonna easily attract the top eight talent that everybody have consensus this is a great talent because you are so small. And you have to learn to maybe co-work with those people as well. Motivate them. Sometimes, maybe you just don't have the best talent. But you still, you don't need the best talent to maybe prove your product market fit.

Once you’re product market fit, you could always up level your team hiring, like attracting more people. But I would say most people don't have the luxury of having the best talent when you're a tiny small startup.

Exactly. As a start, we need to work with all the resources that we have

Sometimes that's okay, I think. you identify the right business, they can satisfy customer requests. I don't think you need the Facebook All-Star team to win. I think that's also not required.

Yeah,

Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing. I just have one last question for you is what like you are working in a space as well. There's a lot of things happening almost every day. How do you keep current? What is the information sources? Usually you look.

I mean, I obviously use LinkedIn and twitter quite a bit. I do have a lot of friends, like events like this, so I got to know you. You can show me what's going on. So I do think there's a lot of in-person that I do in the Bay Area. And then I also try to maybe like, sometimes I look at some papers and people share with me some papers to kind of understand how AI is evolving. But mostly I just try a lot of AI product.

There's a new startup. I try it. I pay for the subscription for a month to see what happen. Yeah. And I try a lot of different things.

Other than the product of HeyBoss, what other products you find interesting on the market?

I recently I'm still beta testing there is a ghost writing app that helps you post everything in Twitter. Essentially that helps you like identify actually I think it helps you. One app helps you post LinkedIn and Twitter as a founder. I tried that it sucks. So the tweet they post for me, it doesn't sound genuine. It seems really cliche and I think my followers hate it. So I stopped using that. I tried another app, obviously make very good marketing video. So you can say this mug and then they can make a

A virtual model holding that mug. So it's no longer like, know, HeyGen, where there's talking head, they can actually holding the product. I that was cool. I don't really need that for our business. Obviously I just like to try it. And obviously I try a lot of music app like Suno. I love Suno a lot because I like, it used to like make my music and I will compose everything. Now I can make Suno. It's much, much easier. I also try, I try all kinds of apps. A lot of different AI applications, some ridiculous ones, some like consumer friendly one.

so that I'm keep up to date.

That's cool. That's cool. I think we should ask you for a recommendation for other founder to interview for the Okay, yeah, that's really appreciate take time to chat with us and share with the community and how would people Connect with you or keep in touch.

Yeah, you Can follow me in Twitter, my name here. My LinkedIn is here. So just follow me and then I'd love to keep in touch. And also the company is *HeyBoss.AI

Awesome, cool, Thank you. Thank you so much for taking time to chat. We'd to have you come back in the future to show more updates of the heyBoss.

Love that. Maybe I'll have my AI CEO joining as well.

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