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David Shim is a serial entrepreneur and investor, formerly CEO of Foursquare and now founder of Read.ai, an AI meeting summarizer. David shares insights into Read.ai's origins, vision for AI co-pilots, and experiences building companies, plus his perspectives on the current AI hype cycle.
What you’ll learn
Explore how Read.ai started by using video and audio to gauge sentiment and engagement during meetings, in order to determine if they are a good use of time.
Learn why Read.ai moved away from real-time analytics to focus on post-meeting summaries, incorporating a unique narration layer that analyzes reactions to conversation.
Discover how Read.ai is leveraging its unique data and models to create a co-pilot that integrates across multiple platforms, providing users with relevant information and insights.
Understand David’s investment strategy, including why he prioritizes investing in venture funds run by smart people and supports founders he knows and trusts.
Hear David’s perspective on the AI landscape, including why he believes that agents are still in their early stages and that integrations will drive the next wave.
Takeaways
Hybrid work is the future, especially for senior employees, while early career professionals benefit more from in-person interactions due to enhanced mentorship and relationship-building opportunities.
Read.ai analyzes meetings using video and text to understand sentiment and engagement, providing a “narration layer” to transcripts by capturing reactions to spoken words.
Tapping into emotional reactions and engagement levels during meetings enhances the quality of AI-generated summaries, highlighting what truly resonates with participants rather than just transcribing words.
The company has seen rapid growth through a product-led approach, adding 25,000-30,000 net new users daily without spending on media, by focusing on solving clear problems.
Read.ai is evolving toward becoming a ubiquitous AI co-pilot by integrating across platforms (like Notion, JIRA, Slack), offering insights and optimizing workflows beyond meeting summaries.
To avoid over-reliance on LLMs, Read.ai uses its own proprietary models for 90% of its processing, leveraging LLMs primarily for the “last mile” of generating readable summaries.
AI-driven dubbing is revolutionizing global marketing, enabling companies to translate videos into multiple languages with native-sounding voices and lip-syncing in minutes.
David became the youngest licensed stockbroker in the nation at 17 by emancipating himself from his parents to gain legal trading rights, highlighting his entrepreneurial drive.
Viral quotes
"The ability to actually process that without just using the words was something that we said, I was like, this is going to be valuable."
"Meetings are natively multiplayer. You can't have a virtual meeting without more than one person, right?"
"All AI is draft AI. Like it gets into like 80% draft...but you can never like trust it to take it to the final version of it."
In this episode, we cover
(00:02) Introduction
(00:54) David Shim Introduction
(00:59) David joins the show from Seattle
(01:17) Remote, Hybrid, or In-office?
(03:39) Origin of Read AI
(08:42) Video and text analysis
(11:33) Customer Value
(14:50) Customer Acquisition
(20:05) Future of AI co-pilots
(22:59) Horizontal vs. Vertical approach
(24:55) Foundation models and pricing
(30:26) How Read AI is using AI
(34:09) The trend of AI agents
(37:17) Read AI vision for the future
(41:11) David's Investment strategy
(46:21) Youngest stockbroker in the nation
(50:59) What David is consuming
(52:38) Mentors that helped David
(54:13) Advice for founders and investors
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