How His Company Almost Died — and Came Back

For an elementary schooler, I'd say Delphi is like a magic talking brain. That can answer your questions anytime. For our customers, we just say it's an always on version of you that can handle repetitive questions. I'd explain Delphi as an adaptive, always on digital profile that captures and scales your expertise. AI is not the main character. The human is. Other companies are trying to automate humans. We're saying no. AI is best in the power of the individual where you own your data, you own your identity, and AI is being used to scale you and augment you. If you paint a piece of art, that's an artifact of your mind that people can experience. If you write a book. It's an artifact of your mind that people can experience by reading. And now with Delphi, you have a new artifact of your mind that people can experience through conversation there. There was one time last year where we got banned from OpenAI and Anthropic I think, I actually thought the company was gonna die. And we were done. But we found a lot of clever ways to get back up and eventually get unbound. Our bet is that humans actually matter more in a post a GI world because we're gonna crave things that are real. You have AI that has beaten the best chess player in the world, but you still watch human chess players, TikTok and , all these things are like smoking a cigarette on an airplane used to be where it's like, oh, we used to do that. That's crazy.

Today I'm sitting down with Dara, CEO, and co-founder of Delphi.

This is the platform that turns experts into digital minds that can scale one-on-one conversations.

Dara, thanks for joining.

Yeah,I've been in the AI space since 2014 and started my first company in 2021 when, I first got access to the GBT three developer list and I was like, oh my God, this is gonna change the world. And during the time I was a solo founder. Didn't really have any mentors, but was reading a book about my grandfather and really wanted to get his advice on what I was doing.

So I created a digital version of him that I could talk to and learn from. And that experience just got me really interested in how we access other people. you can read books, you can s. Gim a person's personal website. There's no way to ask someone a question to truly understand what they know and how they think about things. And so Delphi lets people create a digital version of their mind as a way to almost like always on a MA, allows people to ask them questions when they're not in the room, learn about their perspective.

And yeah, we've been at it for three years now.

It's different from reading a book, isn't it?

Yeah, it's Interactive Knowledge transfer. A book is Passive Knowledge Transfer. This is Interactive knowledge Transfer where it's immediate to your

questions and it's personalized to you.

Maybe this is the future, but I would love to know do you have any New Year resolution?

I think for myself, we're in a ver. As an AI

company, you can be pulled in a lot of directions. people wanna use your product for all these different things. And my resolution is to just say no to everything and just continue to only do what we're doing. because I think as a company you can just be, people wanna use your product for use cases that it's not intended for. And it can be tempting, especially if it's someone famous to be like, okay, I'm gonna do this. But I think it's really important as a company to

just really

focus and be okay saying no.

I feel you're facing a lot more temptation than you know, an an average AI founder, because you're talking with the celebrities , right?

So many temptations. and it's, it was

initially hard to say no, but I think I've grown the muscle

now.

Can you give an example?

Well, I think, you'll have a famous person who will be like, you need to build this custom app and it needs to, generate videos for the user and it needs to,call them through a phone number at home.

And we can all do these things separately, but we can't be building these custom workflows for people. Like the product works the way

it is, And either you're happy with it

or you're

not.

Right. that's one of the hardest thing, being a founder

Especially in AI because a lot of people have not conceptualized this technology before. So it's causing people to have more ideas than, pre ai. If, just a regular software

company starts, you know what a software company is, you're

not gonna project your ideas

onto them.

There is a gap, isn't it? it sparks our imagination. Everything should be possible,

possible. Everything's possible. Exactly. and eventually, like in five years, there will have been a lot of companies to satiate your curiosity, and then it starts to become the norm. It's no longer this novel new

technology where you know the world

is, is your oyster.

What do you say to them

I think I just say, Hey, this is what we're focused on. you can connect all your data. We create a high fidelity version of your mind that understands what you know and how you think, and you can allow other people to learn from you and talk to you,

whether for free or you wanna

monetize it.

so you can have what you want. Maybe in the next few years, somebody else will build

it.

Yeah, I was just like, we'll get around to that. Eventually though, there are people who will try to create anime characters or fake characters with Delphi, and that's one where we're just like, we are human only, human verified, no fake characters. That's never gonna be us. You

should go to another platform.

this is something that really helps our audience to understand what you're building, can you,

how would you explain what Delphi does to an schooler? and what about a college student and a professional?

Yeah, I think for elementary school, imagine if you could have Taylor Swift in your pocket all the time answering 24 7 personalized to you. and I think for a college student, I think product marketing, there's a lot of ways to talk about Delphi, and I've learned over time the things that like makes sense.

College students, like digital office hours,24 7 office hours for the person that you wanna

access or learn from. Um.

I love this explanation.

So that we've slowly learned the more concise ways to talk about

digital mind that

knows everything about

you.

Yes. What about professionals or maybe your potential customer?

Yeah. For our customers, we just say it's an always on version of you that can handle repetitive questions.

So we don't even use

ai. We just talk about the utility.

Hmm, Great contrast between three different

layers.

what is the name Delphi coming from?

So the oracle, in Delphi, in Greek history was the place you would go to when you wanted to learn about your future. And With, and we call it Delphi, not Delphi, but just, it sounds cooler, you can turn your mind into an oracle that other people can ask questions of. So I think there's just been a lot of, inspiration from Greek history with our company.

our office rooms are called Athens and Sparta,

so That's kinda where the name comes

it kind of, cones to this sharing of wisdom, from the experts. This is a modern way of interpreting that,

Yeah. And even in, in ancient Greek times as well, mentorship and apprenticeship was so important. having someone that can teach you their ways, and then, I think that's really what Delphi is about, being

able to learn from someone who's been there before. Yeah.

I would love to learn from the best of the best directly.

Do you think this will affect education in the future?

I mean, I think AI is gonna affect education, not just Delphi. My hope with Delphi is, AI is promising kind of general expertise. Of the masses where Delphi is saying no, human expertise is still important.

We value things that come from lived experience. It's the reason that you may follow someone on Twitter, or you may read a book, even though a Wikipedia page on the topic still exists, that you know it's grounded human experience where you can hear specific perspective versus generalized

intelligence.

How does that democratize this learning experience?

Yeah, I think the experience with my grandfather, it's not that he said anything that was necessarily eye-opening, it was the fact that I heard it from someone who had achieved the success that I want to achieve. And so I think being able to access or learn from someone that has been in your shoes and. Is where you want to be, adds a layer of trust and confidence in the information that you're getting,

that you actually are more willing to

take

action.

someone who's done it and who you trust.

Yes,

I gather your, grandfather is also an entrepreneur, who had significant success.

He, was one of the largest business owners in Iran before the Revolution. worked in textiles, detergents oil, but then he lost every, he had 30,000 employees at his peak. He lost everything during the revolution. came to this country with nothing. yeah, he

amazing entrepreneur in his time.

It's more than just the success, maybe also the resilience part you are also learning from him.

Definitely the resilience, how he treated

other people, uh, all of the above.

I assume when people, average people including myself, hear the idea of AI Clone , it's still like science fiction And the first reaction is like Black mirror or kind of dystopian or a little bit creepy, right? how do you actually want people to think about this?

I mean, we move away from the word clone. We actually move

away from the word ai, like I think the whole ethos of our company is that AI is not the main character. The human is. Other companies are trying to automate humans. We're saying, no, AI is best in the power of the individual. Where you own your data, you own your identity, and AI is being used to scale you and augment you, and it's not replacing you.

It's not a conscious being. It's just a new kind of artifact of your mind that people can experience. If you paint a piece of art, that's an artifact of your mind that people can experience. If you write a book, it's an artifact of your mind that people can experience by reading. And now with Delphi, you have a new artifact of your mind that people can experience through conversation.

That's fascinating. It'sMore than that though. It's also an interactive experience, which means it can, give me something that doesn't, you know, if nobody asked this question before, then it could be something new,

Yes. the whole idea is not just capturing what you know, but how you reason, so it can be maybe predictive

of what you might do in these new situations.

in our last call I think you mentioned the comparison between Delphi being something that to let people access what you know versus LinkedIn, like what you've done on a resume. I didn't think of the comparison between the two. Can you unpack that a little bit?

Yeah, I think

on LinkedIn, the way we evaluate

people or try to learn about someone. Is, we go, we see where they went to school, we see where they've worked, and you can search based on those things as well. But ultimately, I think some of the best relationships we have in our life and the people that you look up to aren't really just based on what they've done. It's how they think about the world, what they know, their experiences, their values.

That's what made my, like all the people that I look up to, it's not just that they're successful, there's a lot of successful people out there, but how they did it, what the, what is the way they did it. And those are not things that a LinkedIn profile can really show. Where Adelphi profile shows what you know and how you think and allows people to

explore

further based on their curiosity.

um, I mean, I can interview an employee just based on their Delphi, profile Is that really reliable? Is that a use case?

Yes. No, I speak to people's Delphi if I'm gonna meet them before A lot of candidates who apply for Delphi will speak to mine. And the great thing is when we hop on a call, they're not asking the questions, that we ask over and over again,

and the conversation is actually a lot more in depth.

I did I did talk with your Delphi.

For an elementary schooler, I'd say Delphi is like a magic talking brain. That can answer your questions anytime.

So it's very interesting

can you tell me who should use this?

you know , you have Arnold Schwarzenegger, you have a lot of the celebrities. If I look at your explore page, I don't feel I qualify.

I think we have two kinds of users. One is, the Arnold Schwarzeneggers, the Jay. Shes, the people who have a lot of content and they have, people are learning from them actively. And Delphi is a tool of leverage. Where they can scale themselves in this new way and even, monetize their expertise. And then the majority of our users are actually the high inbound professional that maybe they get inbound. People are asking them questions, whether it's about their business, whether it's follow up questions from online content, and now they have a page they can send people to ask my Delphi, I may not be able to answer an email, you may not wanna search through all of my content. Ask my Delphi if you wanna learn about me before our meeting, after our meeting, after you interact with me online. So these could be founders, investors, consultants,

domain experts, content

creators.

So the first, uh, top use case is people who are having a lot of inbound, maybe some influencer.

Never repeat yourself again. it doesn't have to be just an influencer. It's anyone who posts online that is, could be, again, a founder, an investor, someone who needs to hire, someone who needs to, talk to a bunch of candidates,

someone who needs to talk to a bunch of customers.

Are you one of those?

yes.

I'm a

definitely my own user.

It's very, very, very good.

What are you using? Who's using your phi? And what are they talking to you about?

Delphi is my main profile. I'll post on Twitter if it goes viral. If anyone, you know wants to ask a question, they go to my Delphi customers, talk to my Delphi potential customers, talk to my Delphi, people who wanna work for our company. Talk to my Delphi journalist who. Maybe don't have time to get on a call with me.

They'll interview my Delphi. And so it allows me to scale my leverage and then also be notified of the people that I should actually hop on a call with. because our,

you, know, incentives are mutually aligned,

Do you, um, sift through that data? I I gotta believe that's very rich data.

I don't even have to sift through it. It

will proactively recommend,

uh, based on what it knows about me.

okay. So it will based on like a hundred or maybe 10,000 people talked with you in the past week, who's potentially you, leads

Yeah. Who are the best people?

Leads? Customers are just like interesting

people that would be

good to meet.

Ah, that's very interesting. That's a great use case. Uh, it could be a sales gen tool, part of the sales gen, you know,

uh,

Totally.

Yeah. That's very interesting. I'm discovering new use cases at first glance, I feel like I have to be a celebrity to use this.

Yeah, and that's part of the, we're doing a rebrand because I think these big experts that we brought into the platform, you know, that is the obvious first use case with every startup there's a wedge. and these are the people that have the most knowledge, but. Ultimately it's similar. It's like an always on availability and whether that always on availability is for like your followers or in your audience, or it's for your customers or leads.

Same use case, different

audience.

how are you different from like, character AI or like story file? Um, what do you think? Like technically or philosophically, how are you different?

I mean, I think character AI allows people to create characters for

entertainment. it's not really utility, I would say Delphi is utility and it's verified and Human First Story file, I'm not too familiar with. I think they're focused on like legacy. again, I view Delphi as like a personal profile and a utility, a new destination for the human being. And our focus is really on like verified

human intelligence and representing the

mind.

How do you verify the intelligence? What does that mean?

Uh, verified as in, you know, sign up with LinkedIn or

submit a photo of you holding your id.

So it's

so, you know, anyone, any Delphi you see,is owned by the person. It's not fake.

and that's

kind of where you get the trust from.

So I cannot create a Dell five for somebody

No, you cannot. And then in terms of intelligence, every Delphi you talk to is trained on a subset of data that is curated by the owner.

It's

not just open internet.

So it's a fine tuned model for understanding the owner,

Yes.

Got it. Uh, is there any surprising use cases that you've seen? customer service and

I view Delphi the same way that you might view a personal website. You have a personal website, and you can think about your personal

website as a form of customer service. It's where people get to learn about you. You can view it as a form of sales gen, but ultimately it is. The

representation of you when you're not in the

room. What that results in is, you know, leads support, but it's representation. and that's

the main use case we wanna settle around.

I love that analogy. So, if I were to build, my own website, I can also have an embedded component of Delphi, of myself. So that anybody can talk with me directly as well, and you will supply that data to me to gimme insights.

Who, what kind of insights can I have?

It'll tell you interesting people trending topics and questions, and it'll notify you when it doesn't know how to answer a question. So you'll see where the gaps are and you can actually hop

into conversation and answer

that question

yourself.

I feel like I'm very tempted to use one now. Like just really, what is the new business card these days? Right?

Exactly.That's, a great way to frame it. it's almost like the

new business card.

I'm curious, how does that work and how should we present ourselves in a very, very, uh, succinct and also very, memorable way?

Right.

you mentioned last time about mind architecture, so I'm, you know, curious what does it really mean?

Like, technically

Yeah, I mean, I think in 2014 I read a

book called How to Create A Mind by Ray Kurzwell,

where he said that one day AI would be able to recreate someone's mind patterns. And he talks about the, that the mind is a hierarchy of pattern recognizers. And so in 2021. As I was playing around with LLMs, you realize an LLM is a pattern recognizer, it recognizes the patterns and words, and it produces an output based on those patterns. And so the mind is almost like a hierarchy of LLMs working together if you can represent the mind in the right way.

And so for us, we, yes, you can fine tune a model, but the problem with fine tuning models is you lose explainability and you lose control. Where I think if you're representing a human, explainability and control is really important because this is all about trust.

This is the difference between us and chat between, and Claude is like, this is how the, this human mind works. Uh, so I think the architecture of the data is really important.

And so we are developing a temporal knowledge graph. Which is good because the mind is temporal. It changes over time. You need to be able to track how someone's beliefs and opinions change over time and

the recency bias of new things. And, the knowledge graph has different primitives like events, entities, heuristics, and how those things are connected. Help it learn how it behaves in different conversations. and then we have an agent that knows how to traverse

and use that mind in conversation.

So you are doing a knowledge graph based retrieval, uh, mechanism. Like, you know, the grounded retrieval, like rag systems, retrieval, augmented generation. Okay.

'cause there's a generation component, right? Do you feel when it's generating an answer to a new question, is your results still representing the person, the owner, him, or herself?

So we have, two settings. When it's on strict, it will only answer questions that it knows the answer to directly and otherwise it will say, I don't know. Then we have adaptive where it will answer the question. If you have data where it can infer what you might say in a new situation, and we're building evals for that right now. And an example would be. If someone were to ask my Delphi, I am a lobbyist, how can I use your product? I have no data

around lobbying. But you know, given that it knows how I speak about Delphi for other professions, it might be able to infer what I might

say for that profession.

how do you set up the evaluation? Do you contact the owner and say, can you verify this is what you're gonna say?

Well, I

think right now with evals, we're actually just creating data sets. we're creating a lot of data sets on what does it mean to reason what are, uh, it's really a heuristic like you have, if I put in a piece of data that shows how I think a podcaster should use Delphi, there is almost a heuristic there of like how I map profession to Delphi use case and take that

heuristic and apply it to

something new.

Hmm. And then that's the baseline. I mean, you can always do more, a lot of stuff you can goes into the eval piece, right? And you can get as sophisticated as you want depending on your metrics and what you wanna achieve

Um, if I were to make a clone of myself, what do I need to give you as input?

Well now with onboarding, you sign up with LinkedIn, we find everything about you online or almost everything. So we'll already find some data about you and then you can add more if you want. You can add. Podcast, YouTube Notion, Google Drive. We have this interviewer feature as well that will ask you questions about any topic that you want

to embed expertise

in.

Mm-hmm. How long does it take?

It takes any time, depending on how much content you have, it could take anywhere

from

15 minutes to one hour

That's not that long, including the interview time.

Yeah, the interview time is pretty fast. The interviewer time is very fast. The thing that probably takes the longest right now is YouTube, because YouTube ingestion, you transcribe, you diarize the speakers. Same with podcasts.

Those are the, probably the

two that take the longest.

So if I I have like more than a hundred videos and if I just pass that to you, Am I not consuming a lot of your, your tokens?Am I gonna be a high cost,

we've

cost

optimized, not too worried about

that.

Really? How do you do that?

a lot of iteration and seeing what's out there in the market and how we can use caching and, model routing

to make

sure costs are, are down.

Yeah. I mean, we can go with the YouTube transcript, right? that's the first batch, so that it doesn't go through a, a transcription model and

It's actually

better for us to just take the YouTube videos directly because then we can get

Really?

Yeah. It it, it's better if we do that.

Oh, I didn't know that. I thought you were just going after like layers of approach, getting from YouTube API first, and then,

you know. Interesting. I know the quality from them is not very good. Yeah.

if you're using LOM in along the pipeline, there is the classic problem of hallucination.

Can you tell us a little bit more about, you know, your opinion on this and how bad can it be? What's the risk for the user?

mean, this was the first thing we really had to care about because no one's gonna use our product if they're afraid it's gonna make them look bad. humans care a lot about their reputation, how they are perceived. Delphi cannot work without solving this problem. So for the first two years we had kind of solved it.

We didn't really have evals. It was more like we tested it a lot and we couldn't really find ways to break it. Now we're finally doing evals. and like I said, on the strictness setting, when it's strict and you ask a question like, what are your

political stances on X, Y, Z, it will say, I don't know, but let's talk about Delphi so it can like intelligently weave it back to what it knows about

and avoid the things it doesn't

want to talk about.

do you think, tragedy, GBT or Claude and are not doing as good a job? this is high stake for you. Right? Less of a high stake for them.

I think it's not as high

stakes for Cha Chue and Claude, to be honest,

because they risk like the

beauty of those products is that you can talk about anything There There are no rules. And I think that's actually one of its, that's not a bug, it's a feature and so. By spending too much on hallucinations, I think that they could potentially worsen the product. perplexity,

obviously this is very important for 'cause they're the fact

engine.

would you say that you are the best company that tackling hallucination? 'cause this is high stake for you.

I wouldn't make the claim that we are the best company yet, but we need to be the best company. We want to be the best company. And so soon we'll have, our

benchmarks

for evals and hopefully we can release that.

And then we can tell everybody that we are the best company.

Yeah. I'm, kind of your evangelist now, so I'm part of your company.

I'm writing

that

down.

'cause this is a big topic everywhere, across all industries,

right? Agents making decisions for

people, and you're representing people. There's their voice, what they're

saying, right?

I remember last time you also mentioned, uh, something interesting. You said you are very, you know, bearish on consumer video, interactions. I was really surprised. I thought people want to have video chat.

I don't think so, and it's either two reasons. One, the state of technology is not good enough and we've seen this. We used to have video. I think it's like a cool shiny object, like people will try it once. But they don't come back because once the novelty wears off, you start to pay attention to the weird little quirks and it becomes a little creepy. And specifically for us, voice is very popular in Texas. Popular when you see the video, it almost when doesn't leave room for imagination anymore. And I think human, leaving room for imagination with AI tools is important because. You almost have to suspend disbelief for a bit where video does the opposite. So maybe we get to a world where video is so realistic that you can't even tell. even then, I think there will be some weird psychological doubt in the mind of consumers, that they wanna sit there, see their own face, and also see the

face of a fake character. I.

it's, it's hard. It's really hard for me to imagine, but if I think from the book's perspective, like our book analogy, right? I'm looking at a book. There's a lot of room for imagination and now you're making the book talking back to me. I still have the room for imagination, but, but if you're thinking

the book becomes the person

There's no

and then starting, Yeah,

there's no more guessing.

Yeah. it does sound a little bit weird, What do you think of the Star Wars, maybe the holographic imaging, so it's not a reality, but it's a little bit realistic with the image. What do you think of that

Yeah, I mean, I think that's entertainment. So like Delphi's utility where you know the holograms and character ai. This is around entertainment, and I think that's where we see the division. Should we invest in this technology? Is there a utility behind it? No, it's actually just shiny

objects and maybe good marketing moment, Angelina:

maybe not high utility

I can tell you're a very disciplined founder, like no shiny features. It must be

hard.

only through trial and error that I've learned that shiny features are

the way to AC

company's death.

Oh my goodness. This is so hard as you said, for AI projects, right? AI products, everybody has a hundred ideas. And those ideas compound

Yeah, I mean, since the beginning of the company, all people wanna talk about when they want talk about Delphi is, Hey, you should do this, you should do this, you should do this, you should do this. And I'm just like,

you gotta let it all go.

What else did you learn while building this?

I learned. yeah, probably the number one thing is what I told you. Focus is the most important thing and. People have ideas with technology that sound good in theory, but in practice they just don't actually work. Like one other thing that I feel very strongly about, which is probably the most recommended idea we've gotten to Delphi,

is you should build a business around legacy.

People are going to pay to bring their grandparents back to life, and it's gonna be amazing and. One, I just think it's a horrible strategy for a company because you don't wanna be a company that's associated with monetizing grief, where, if you stop

paying us, you're

gonna lose your grandfather. That's

just horrible,

like horrible.so yeah, I think that's an example of an idea That sounds like it's a great idea in theory, but I actually don't think people will pay for it and they'll hate your company. another is just how with certain ideas. Most people are just gonna think it's a bad idea, and that's actually not a bad thing. There's a book called Crossing the Chasm where it talks about, you know, the technological adoption curve and how you have people who really get it in the early days. And then there are groups of people who only get it once people they trust start to use it. It starts to become a domino effect. And by starting with these high status people, slowly more people are starting to see, oh, Delphi is something that I can use.

And we're still at a point where a lot of people think our company is weird and they don't understand it. And I've just seen so many people change sides, and I think it's just a matter of time and

patience that you just gotta let it play out.

Hmm. do you stand right now on the curve of the chasing chasm?

I think we are. In the middle of crossing the chasm, actually crossing the chasm to the mass market right now where we have like a bunch of proven use cases, a lot of people still think it's like an only an influencer tool, even though there are people that are not using it as like they're not influencers. So I think part of that is gonna be like simplifying onboarding and

updating the brand of our company.

Can you say, uh, one more time? What's your top three use cases?

Yeah, I think

I would actually just say it's one use case, which is just always on availability, handling repetitive questions.

You've probably seen a lot of, uh, conversations between users and, uh, they're phi. Um, but PHI isn't just like a chat g PT as we talked about. It's not a just a chat bot. It represent the real person. do you see users behave differently than they would with chat GBT?

you know, how you chat with chat GBT and how you chat with somebody? Delphi, does that behavior

differ?

People are more respectful for sure. I mean, this is an entity of the person. Then you have people who are like trolls on social media. it's very similar to social media behavior where, you can comment something really mean on a truth, uh, and people still see it's you or, you're more thoughtful of your response, though I do think some consumers have said they like talking to the Delphi of the person because they feel more comfortable asking dumb questions that they wouldn't have, uh, felt comfortable

asking with the actual person. Yeah,

Right. Yeah, that's a good point. I would I would feel the same way. Like going to a conference and if Elon Musk is there and I wanna ask question, I would never raise my

I

would never, yeah,

okay. Good to know that you wouldn't either.

I want to though, but maybe you should, you should get his, uh, Delphi.

yeah. That's the plan one

day

One. Okay. Not yet.

You're in the Bay Area,

Bay Area.

Yeah.

so you're less than six degrees away

from him. Good luck.

We'll get him at the right time. I think, uh, with people like Elon, you only really

got one

shot, so we wanna make sure it's the right

timing.

that makes sense. now you sound like my CMO, my CMO says exactly the same

Yeah.

Yeah. This company, we have one shot. We gotta get it.

the right time.

when you're talking to users, potential, uh, customers, is there any objection that you hear a lot?

Totally. All the time.

they'll say, what happens to my data? Am I giving away my likeness? Which no, like we've opted out of all data sharing. We don't train models on your data. Uh, you own your data.

They'll say, what if it hallucinates and makes me look bad? That's probably like the biggest thing we need to overcome, where like, I'm very confident in our product. and you could tell someone as much as possible,

Hey, Of the million permutations of questions someone could ask, you're gonna be good.

How do we teach that in a very short amount of time? It's difficult. And then number three is, is kinda the crossing the chasm thing. Like people can't quite see how to use it until they see other people using it.

And it was, LinkedIn had a very similar situation, the early days of LinkedIn, what do I use this profile for? what even is this? Why do I need to share this? They had the same exact problems, that we're overcoming right now, and it just happens through memetic. Like once enough people are using the product in a certain way, then only then do the mass majority of people change their mind about

something and they're okay

starting to use it.

as a new category, I mean, you're different and it does have a, CodeStar

problem,

right.

do you envision yourself, you might become a network. Uh, you know, just like LinkedIn or even Marketplace in the future,

Yeah, I mean, I,

replace

I

think,

different.

No, no, I don't think we're planning to replace LinkedIn. 'cause I think there are two different kinds of network. LinkedIn is a professional network where the

nodes are connected by who you know and who you've shared work experiences with. Where Delphi is a knowledge-based network where the nodes are actually connected by similarity of thought or similarity of knowledge, or someone's knowledge actually filling a gap in your own mind.

So it's a different kind of network.

As you scale, you face this problem. Right? right now, I see a lot of celebrities there and I'm interested in this person who's expert in this area, I'm gonna go chat with. This person, try it out, right? But as you scale and you have millions of people on your platform, how am I gonna know who I can talk with?

that's the magic of the knowledge base network where you have a Delphi, you have a digital mind, and based on that, we can say,

here are five people who think similarly to you. Here are five people who can help you achieve your goals. Here are five people whose opinions actually contradict your own, and we think it would be good for you

to explore the other viewpoint.

Yeah.

So you will do some recommendation as well.

I think it's the only way

to

to manage the thing.

Are you doing it right now?

no, we got, I think, we're not gonna focus too much on the network until probably like March or

April of next

year.

this is great add on, like later on, as you scale, right? Yeah.

and if you recommend somebody I can chat with, I'll learn new things. Maybe I'm gonna reach out to them on LinkedIn directly, a

real person.

I, I think

LinkedIn, if anything, could be

complimentary to Delphi.

That's the reason you're not replacing LinkedIn, although I kind of hate LinkedIn these days.

Yeah.

Uh, so much noise. do you think you'll have ads day too early?

Too early to tell. I mean, I again wanna do what's

best for the user experience.

is there a darkest day building this?

Oh, so many. I don't, I'm trying to see if I can talk about any of them. I think what there, there was one time last year where we got banned. From Open AI and Anthropic, and that was a tough day because I thought the company was literally over. So it's just like everything in the product is breaking. I can't get in contact with anyone from OpenAI and Anthropic we're done because we helped a political figure create a digital version of themselves, which is against the terms of use of a lot of these companies.

I think, now we don't support political figures. That was tough. I actually thought the company was gonna die and we were done. but we found a lot of clever ways to get back up and eventually

get unbound

from those platforms.

it's unexpected, isn't it?

It's expected, I mean, at at this point, you know, it happens one time and you're like, oh, I hope this doesn't happen again. Then it happens another, and then it happens

another, and you're like, actually, this is actually the

norm and this

is gonna happen many more times.

But you're prepared.

Yeah. Now I'm prepared as you know, knock on

wood.

Yeah. Knock on wood. Okay. Good luck for the new year, by the way.

And last time you mentioned you have something new launching around this time. Do you wanna share.

we'll be launching our free tier soon, not now, but probably end of January. so this new onboarding thing I talked about where anyone can sign up with LinkedIn, we find everything about you, and now you have a new, beautiful profile

that, uh, can show What you know.

What does free tier

mean?

You can set it up for

free. So right now you can only use Delphi if you're paying. And now we have a free tier where anyone who has knowledge to share and they wanna set up one of these profiles, uh, they can, which you should

link my profile so people know like what a

profile looks like. Um,

they get that one

up.

Yes, I will do that. And you are just limiting the usage.

Uh, training, data usage integrations, like a lot of the enterprise paid tiers are like, I wanna add it on my website. I want intelligent analytics.

Mm-hmm.

a full CRM,

you know, all these like additional

things.

um, I had a question, sorry, I lost that one. I'll ask the tougher question now. during our prep call, you mentioned something that stuck with me. You mentioned about Delphi, uh,

how Delphi exists in a post a GI world. You wanna share more about that?

Yeah, so I think there's a thesis that. We're operating on that. If it's not true, then Delphi might not work out, but the thesis is, you know, you project ahead. AI is, so smart, really fast, pretty much free, and there's an abundance of access and information you can get anything you want in the world.

What ends up happening is, in my opinion. Humans become the scarce resource, humans become the things that we actually start to appreciate things with lived experiences. And so our bet is that humans actually matter more in a post a GI world because we're gonna crave things that are real, for the next five, 10 years, maybe their shiny object syndrome and novelty of all

these deep DeepFakes and AI generated videos.

But at a certain point, the content becomes so much that you're like. I don't even know what to do anymore. there's too many things to consume. There's too many options. Can someone just tell me what to do? Someone who's actually lived it before, can they tell me what to do? And you see this with chess right now, for example, or in boxing, you have robots that box.

But

it's not as engaging as seeing humans that box. You have AI that has beaten the best chess player in the world, but you still watch human

chess players things with lived experience.

I, resonate greatly with that thought. we've seen musicians like robot violin players, you know, it's fun to watch them one time and I don't care about them. If my daughter does it, I'm gonna watch it. If she, even though how crappy she is, It's still amazing to me I feel it's more of a, a role model thing.

'cause we're the living thing. I'm living my life and I want role models. I wanna see other people achieving and having the discipline, having the resilience, not from a robot. They beat us, but so what? Right.

I think there's an unspoken, like almost spiritual connection that we have with other humans, and there's no way to quantify it. But you know, when a real human does something, there's a different almost contract

that is being made.

we don't have that data to feed into any AI either. Right. And what is that data?

Which

data?

The data you're talking about, it's like a,

The,

the unquantified? Yeah. I don't know. It's, it's

a,

What is it?

it's a combination of. Almost like evolution, like we 300,000 years of e evolution, we have been in communities, we've taken

care of our family members, we've made friends, we've made relationships. this is primal in our nature. And technology can change super fast.

But you know, that

primal instinct, I don't think changes.

Hmm. How's our life gonna change? I mean, I'm a bit of an idealist, so you know, in my world. TikTok and all these things are like smoking a cigarette on an airplane used to be where it's oh, we used to do that. That's crazy. And that's the optimist point of view. The negative point of view is actually, social media algorithms get so good

and people get hooked and,

if generation Alpha is already getting hooked, then how are they gonna know to raise their kids any differently?

I'm an idealist.

I will hope for the optimistic side of

things.

Me too. I hope for the optimistic side of things as well. already, I can tell you I don't know how to raise my, daughter in a different way 'cause she has access to so much more than how we grow up. Okay.

Yeah,

So it's so different and hard.

It's hard.

Um, do you think it's possible that one day just AI just get so good that anyone can set up something like a clone similar to your with a few, you know, a few simple prompts, like let's say Chad Bt does it.

I mean, I think our, it's very similar to the argument of like pre ai, if you start this company, Facebook or Google, they're gonna, they're gonna beat it. And I think that's why focus is so important. Which is like, let's obsess over what does it mean to have a human mind? let's make that useful and then let's build a big enough network such that it's like a distribution mode where, LinkedIn has not been able to

be disrupted because they built such a strong network. Angelina:

and so I think if we're able to build a similar

kind of

network, then I'm not too

worried.

Okay. I'm looking forward to learn more from your platform. 'cause I feel you are gonna have a lot. The content is constructed in totally different ways, which is very interesting to me. The way, you know, we historically learn is from university, from schools, from books, from watching YouTube channels, right?

It's very d. From interactive, uh, interaction with with a, with like a wise object, a wise human being.

We'll see, I think you know, before ai, there's Bloom's two Sigma, which shows that having a private tutor improves your ability to learn by two standard deviations. So it's like a positive thing.

But then there are more recent studies that are like kids who have been using chat GBT through college are actually not as well off because they haven't been forced to think harder. so I think we'll

see whether it's net positive or

negative.

that's a fair point Uh, point I feel like it takes a curious mind and the human nature to really continuous tumor.

How do you teach

curiosity? I think that's probably the thing you wanna

think

hard. Yes, yes. Good point.

Do you have Steven Bartlett on your platform?

Not yet,

but

hopefully soon.

My role model, so I would love

He's awesome.

He's great.

Awesome. Right.

Um, are you hiring by the way?

We are, infrastructure engineer, design engineer and

consumer GTM.

what kind of profile do you think would be a fit for you, for your team?

so culturally high level, I think, every single person in the company who works here has moved to San Francisco for the company. everyone's very passionate. So I think someone who is like passionate about what they do is a common factor. Someone who's creative infrastructure engineer is obvious.

they can build scalable infrastructure systems.

Design engineer is pretty much a designer that can code

Hmm.

GTM is

someone who has scaled markets and networks.

so those are the three that we're looking for.

where can people find you? Whether they want to, create their own Delphi or join your team or just learn

more.

Yeah, so, uh, delphi.ai/dra is where you can

ask my

I'll

share that link.

Um, and then I post a lot on

X-D-A-R-A-L, A DJE.

Hmm. I noticed that you don't post as much on LinkedIn.

Not as much, Not

as

Not as much. Yes,

I am starting a traditional closing question. So if you were to remember a book for a 20-year-old or 40-year-old, or a 60-year-old, what would they be and why?

a book that each age needs.

Yes, but you don't have to, if you don't have three books to recommend, that's fine Whatever you can think of. I would love to have some, you know, new book list.

I think a 20-year-old, this is probably like cliche, the Almanac of Naval Ravikant. I read that I think at 22 or whenever it came out. And it was so good, it, so many Good life principles in that book

for young people. Um,

How old were you when you read it?

I think like 23.

Oh, so you were,

And I, I studied that book. So I think rather than reading a lot of books, I think find a couple books that you study. A book that I read recently that I've been studying is called Antifragile by Nasim Taleb. Phenomenal book. Like there are books that come across that just have such unique ideas, truly original thought. and anti-fragile is all about anti-fragility, is about getting stronger during stress. How can you become someone. Or your company or systems, you could build systems that actually benefit from chaos. And chaos is the natural

order of things. Like I said, there's always gonna be these

crazy hard moments in the company.

How can you get stronger for them?

Yeah.

Do you have one tip you can share with me?

it's more of a mindset where if you reflect on all of the hardest things of your life. You think about the period after and who you became as a result. I would say most of the time you're like, wow, I really grew as a person. So this is actually just learning. it's like going to the gym, but for your mind so that the next time you experience something hard, you're already used to the 50 pound weight and

now you can handle the 60 pound weights.

I feel people don't share a lot of those. You know, The misery of going through something once they pass it, people start having a rosy glass on the pass. 'cause most of founders won't Tell me you know, what's the hardest time, how hard it was. It was, they all feel it was.

I think it's good to recognize it because

then it makes you more confident about

future ones.

Awesome. Thank you so much for your book recommendation. I'll write them down and I'll get a chance to, to read them as well and really enjoy chatting with you today, Dara. Thank you so Um, Yes. and I'll share all the information that you gave me

to the audience.

If they're interested in joining your team, they'll reach

out.

Thank you so much. This was

fun.