AI Hot Takes and Unusual Twitter Fundraising Strategies with Dan Siroker (Rewind AI)

 Absolutely. Um, So since you launched Rewind late last year, I think the company has seen a ton of early success. You've raised over $33 million, I believe at this point from great folks, Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Sam Altman, and of course us here at First Round. And rewind to me is such an interesting product because its fundamental aim is to improve human memory.

And so today I'd love to zoom in on the details, of how Rewind came to be, um, to how you're thinking about go to market and building a product that your customers love. And so to kick things off, Dan, I'd love if you could rewind to maybe your mid 20s or so when I think you started to experience hearing loss for the first time, now which is which I know is a big part of rewinds kind of origin story.

 Yeah well, I, I started to lose my hearing in my 20s. I have a genetic condition that caused that to happen. And at the time I was running my last startup, Optimizely. And I tried a hearing aid and it was magical, to lose a sense and gain it back again felt like gaining a superpower. And ever since that moment, I have been on a hunt for ways that technology can augment human capabilities and give us superpowers.

You know, the magic of losing your hearing and gaining it back again, wasn't just the fact that I could hear, which was awesome. It was realizing how bad my hearing had gotten over the many years before that. And so I felt there's a way to take that insight, that sort of secret into the world and apply it to other parts of our human capabilities.

That led me to memory. Memory is one of those things very similar to hearing that gradually gets worse as we get older. Most studies show that we forget about 90 percent of what happens after just one week. And so the inspiration for the company came out of this question. If there's a hearing aid for hearing and glasses for vision, what's the equivalent for memory?

And that's what started us on our journey.

 Amazing. so how does Rewind work exactly? And what is kind of unique about the approach that you are taking to an AI driven product? Maybe versus some of the other products out there.

 Yeah. Rewind is a truly personalized AI. So it captures everything you see, say, and hear. Stores it all locally on your devices. Today, we support Mac and iPhone and soon later this year, Windows. And by capturing everything you see, say, and hear, we're able to give you these amazing capabilities like you can ask rewind to write you an email to somebody, you know, asking to catch up and it uses the context of everything, all your experiences, interactions with them, to create, essentially a personalized, experience, that works great when you're integrating with large things models where you can ask it to do tasks for you, or it can be as simple as just rewinding time.

That's why the name of the company is rewind is that we let you rewind back and forth in your day, uh, some people describe this as opening an entirely new dimension of computing time. You know, If you think about it today, the way information is stored on your machine, it's bits that are stored into files, which is this weird kind of skeuomorphic concept from before computers.

But reality is, you know, we're constantly bombarded with new information. We're context switching more than ever. We've got information in lots of different silos, and we really want to make it so that you can capture all of that data, make it searchable, make it useful, and that's what Rewind does.

 So you mentioned this interesting stat that 90 percent of memories are forgotten within a week. What are the other ways that people solve this problem? And what makes Rewind kind of a unique solution here?

 You know, that's one way to think about it. If we all had perfect memory, what would be different about the world? Well, one thing would be different is that we wouldn't be chopping down trees, turning them into little rectangles called paper and taking a stick with ink at the end of it and writing things down.

You know that just if you think about it in that way, it seems ridiculous that the best way or most common way that we've thought of to remember is to write things down both physically on paper and digitally. Um, you know, If we didn't, if we had perfect memory, we wouldn't need to do that. So, you know, That is probably the most common alternative.

People writing things down, they take notes. What we found is that people start using Rewind and they get this amazing peace of mind knowing that anything they've experienced, they can go back to. It's mind insurance. You can go back to these things that you might want and for people who are knowledge workers, they're in lots of meetings back to back, they're, you're consuming lots of information, you never know what you're going to need later. That's the biggest downside to taking notes, is like, you need the foresight to know, what is it the thing I might want later? And, that's one of the things they get with Rewind, is they don't have to have that foresight. They just passively capture everything in a privacy sensitive way, it's stored locally, we don't have access to it, only you have access to it.

And if you need it, only if you need it, you can go back to it later.

 So when you were building the very first iteration of rewind, what did that look like and what were kind of the most difficult parts to get right?

 Before Rewind, we actually had another product that was in the same space trying to sort of solve this vision of giving humans superpowers and giving them perfect memory. It was called Scribe. It was a meeting bot. You know, we'd started this March 2020 and you know, the pandemic was happening and Zoom was taking off and we had this, you know, what we thought was a brilliant insight.

Ah, let's take Zoom meetings, the thing that we're all doing now, and use transcription, which has just become really good, and combine the two and offer a product. And we launched it, we were very excited about the uptake, and then it turned out every other day some new startup would pop up doing basically the same thing.

It's a very crowded space, lots of tools out there. And from that, we had this insight that if we could do what we were doing for Scribe, but all of the information you consume, not just zoom meetings, that would be really magical because often the thing that you're looking for when you're in this mode of racking your brain, trying to remember something it's usually trying to remember something that happened in a different channel or a different silo than you're thinking of.

You're searching your email vendor. If you've ever had this experience searching your email frantically, like. what was that note? What was that thing that Dan said or whatever? And it turns out it was a Slack message or a text message or you saw a Tweet. We're constantly consuming this information.

So something that could capture everything. And do it in a way that respects your privacy was really the insight that started Rewind. And it so, you know, co-occurred with Apple Silicon becoming really powerful and enabling this before Apple Silicon, you know, Rewind couldn't exist. So that was also very lucky in terms of the timing of the technology, the enabling technology to make this possible.

 Yeah. And I mean, in doing what you just described and doing it well, like at the level that users really demand, I mean, that's a huge product right there. That's huge scope. So did you think about these are the things that we really need in V1, these are the things that we're going to wait to do later?

 Yeah I'm, I'm a big believer in cutting scope and starting with something, you know, simple, easy to understand and really being ruthless in that, you know, I, I, I think there's this classic trade off in any engineering effort, which is between scope, quality and time. And I'd rather, you know, hold time.

Yeah, I'd rather hold time and quality as the kind of the goals and then cut scope ruthlessly to, uh, to achieve what we want.

So we started with, you know, some very basic goals. The first was to be imperceptible. Which is usually not a goal that people come up with when uh, when they build a product, but we want it to be so good that we could run in the background.

And you don't even notice that Rewind is running. And so that is, you know, it's, it's a hard problem to solve because what we're doing is kind of a sophisticated, we capture everything your screen is showing. We compress it, you know, 3000 times smaller so it stores, it can be stored locally. We do optical character recognition on every word that appears on your screen, and now, you know, we're doing transcription as well.

So, you know, to do all that in a way that doesn't hog system resources doesn't make your laptop overheat, was really goal number one, how to be imperceptible. And then everything we built on top of that was kind of a balloon squeeze. You know, how do we add a feature without compromising that goal of imperceptibility?

Um, and, and that's been the journey we've been on over the last uh, you know, few years is how do we keep adding to it and building more and more superpowers for people without being this sort of tax that, that feels like it's, it's hogging system resources.

 So when was the first kind of public launch of Rewind? I remember it being a good launch with like with a really compelling demo and people were pretty interested from the very beginning.

 yeah, we announced November 1st of last year, actually, it's crazy to think. We've been working on it sort of quietly um, from basically the December before. So just short, shy of a year, we've been working on it, really validating some of the key things. Like I said, the compression was critical. The imperceptibility was critical.

Um, and, and the quality was, it was really important. And so we launched, we announced uh, it totally blew us away. You know, We had been working on Scribe, which was doing well, it was growing, you know, it wasn't an obvious decision, by the way, to pivot from Scribe to Rewind, we were still, you know, internally we had actually written down five different strategies of which one was to persevere or Scribe.

One was this idea that we ended up calling Rewind, which wasn't, you know, even on the team, three out of my team members thought this was the worst of the five strategies to pursue. So it wasn't an obviously good idea. 

 How did, so how did you decide though? How did you decide? Which direction do we go? That's a tough decision with five people. 

 Yeah, it was definitely a tough decision. And at the end of the day, the main, factor was just my intuition. you know, What would I regret if we, if we persevered and, and failed. For me, the vision of giving humans perfect memory and beyond that, giving them superpowers, this felt very much the most in line with that.

And the rest were maybe better businesses or maybe less risky, but weren't as connected to the vision of what we're trying to do, um, you know, we were also very analytical and data driven. My last company was all about A/B testing. So, you know, I asked all our employees. I asked our investors. I surveyed them.

I asked them to stack rank them. We wrote up a whole notion doc with all of the trade offs and all of the ideas. And I actually think all five strategies could have been successful. You know, It's not like this is the one successful path to, you know, to building a product that works.

It's just, this is the one that I felt like, you know, given the balance of trade offs, was the likelihood, had the highest expected value of success. You know, it was riskier, uh, big risk was the fact that none of us knew how to build native Mac apps, uh, you know, that was something we, uh, we actually, I was, I was very surprised we we're able to learn and get quite good at and recruit people to join that were quite good at that. Um, but ultimately the market and the opportunity and the problem we're solving was so much more painful. And I think that was kind of the key insight for me. Scribe was kind of an, and all kinds of meeting bots are kind of nice to haves it's a vitamin, it's useful, you know. But like the idea that you could capture anything you've seen and never have to take notes again. That was a painkiller for some people. And that's partly, why this idea felt so much more worth pursuing.

 Yeah. Okay. So when you have that many people who are interested in your product, you know, from day one, like how do you manage that? Did you invite tens of thousands of people or a hundred thousand people into the product and they're all giving you feedback simultaneously? Or what, how did you guys manage that?

 Yeah. So we, we actually took a really uh, I, I think, useful approach. So we started, before even announcing it, we were manually onboarding people. So we were actually, we had a product, we were dog footing it ourselves. We had a list of folks that we, you know, my co-founder. Brett Bejcek he would sit with them for 15 minutes or 30 minutes, watch them go through the onboarding flow every step of the way that like didn't work or somebody was confused we'd go back and fix that. So we were pretty confident that the new user experience was magical. We wanted people to get a really fast time to value or time to magic, which is, the first magic people usually have is like, whoa, I can rewind my computer. I can go back to what I was just reading or what I was just doing.

And, um, we wanted to make that as likely to happen for as many people as possible. And then once we announced, we started getting this waitlist and we realized, you know, we saw this with Scribe as well, we had a waitlist that very quickly atrophies. Like, you know, people are excited, they sign up and then they quickly forget.

So we knew we had to get through this waitlist quickly. So we were doing uh, every week we're inviting a thousand people off the waitlist. We would look at the metrics on how people were onboarding. And then we felt, once we felt like, wow, this is actually something that can kind of self serve. We don't need to be there. For the most part, people get it. They're onboarded. And then we just, again, sort of made this leap of faith decision. You know, it's funny in hindsight, these things are so clearly the right thing. But in the moment you're like, are we ready? Should we unleash uh, the rest of the waitlist?

And I think it was probably. You know, only a month, like it was sometime in December where he just said, anyone can download it, you know, go for it. And uh, and it's only taken off from there.

 Wow. So was there any feedback you were getting from these early users, you know, a thousand new users a week that surprised you?

 Yeah, I mean, it's almost always user feedback surprises me because, the feedback you get very often, the things that they say they want in the product or a feature request. Maybe their feature or the solution they're proposing isn't the right thing, but they're almost always right about the problem.

They're trying to eliminate a problem in the product that we hadn't anticipated. You know, One major mistake we made early on was we assumed that people would be really comfortable with cloud transcription. We had done that with Scribe. We were familiar with cloud transcription. The product was entirely local, except for transcription.

Uh, and so when we uh, launched that, you know, we got some, the, um, All Things Tech podcast gave us some criticism on that. And we had heard from users that like, hey, I really, one of the things I love about Rewind is how privacy focused it was. But this one feature feels a little creepy, and so, again, we got lucky there with timing.

Whisper had just come out from OpenAI, and so we were able to go to all local transcription, which was another, you know, that's an insight that we, I had sort of assumed people would be comfortable with that, given that most things are already being transcribed with meeting bots. But uh, that was a lesson that we learned uh, the hard way.

 You mentioned this really interesting point that users are good at sort of identifying problems, not always great at suggesting what the solution will be. Do you have a way of thinking about that when you're building products? Like how much do I listen to the users versus when, when do I sort of ignore kind of what I'm hearing from users? 

 The way I think of it is kind of like the Midwit meme. Like, at some point you should just do the thing. If you, if you hear a user say a thing like a thousand times, just save yourself the time and agony of them having to write in that feedback. Just do the thing. Um, you know, so there's certain features that you should just, if they're easy enough, the effort is low, you should just do as, you know, the user is requesting.

My framework for this is is really useful, which is I view everything we do, I do, my times, uh, my team's time by the amount of impact it will have divided by the effort. And so I think of that as kind of a return on investment of our time. And I'm, I'm ruthlessly trying to prioritize my time, our team's time to really focus on that. So in that sense, the low hanging fruit, the things people just ask for that are low effort, you should just do.

The things that people are asking for that you have an incremental step toward understanding the impact. That's kind of next on my list. You know, the things that are clearly there's something here and we can make a, you know, dent toward progress on this problem that's being illuminated. I'm very in favor of it's often better just to do that than to debate should we do that? And then the hard stuff is things that are clearly hard problems are going to take more than, you know, a few days or a week of engineering time. And that's when you really have to ask yourself is the solution that, that they're asking for the right one? And I think, we view user research as a really critical part to our success, like really listening and honing in on the why's behind somebody's request.

What are the things that they're trying to solve? We have an incredible design team that they can take those why's, the problems you that's we're very problem oriented engineering and design team. It's not about, cool, sophisticated technology. It's like, what is the minimum effort, the best design, to solve the user's problem.

And if it happens to coincide with what their best guesses of what that is, awesome, they'll love it. Usually what we'll hear from users is, wow, that's even better than I've imagined was possible. Uh, you know, thank you for building the solution. It certainly solves a problem we had. And uh, you know, that's kind of we view as our job is like to take those problems, think about how technology and design. Console them uniquely well and um, and then ship them.

 Is there anything that you have to do kind of from a team perspective to get everyone to understand that way of prioritization and what the right problems are to solve? Like, how do you create that culture almost?

 I mean, we ship on average, you know, every engineer ships code to production every day on average, you know, like we are, we are very um, very focused on velocity. Uh, these aren't major changes, but we really view the work that we do in with this lens of the main thing is that the main thing should say the main thing. That's kind of the cultural mantra that I have for my time. It's the cultural mantra that I try to instill into the team. So, you know, the first, you know, couple of cultural things we do to instill this. Every engineer, when they start at Rewind, within 24 hours of starting, they ship to production.

It may not be a big feature, but like, it, it will validate that they have a dev environment set up. It tells them and tells us that, you know, they can ship to production. There isn't this kind of fear of, uh, you know, what would happen if I, if I broke something. Uh, it forces us to have the tooling infrastructure, continuous deployment in place that, that makes that possible, and then we, we really instill the sense of, part of our goal is to hear customers feedback and as quickly as we can incorporate it into making their product better. Um, so that's uh, you know, that's another kind of cultural mantra.

We have cultural values. We go to our, our, our website, we talk about these cultural values that break down into kind of impact and teamwork and a lot of our impact related cultural values are about prioritizing our time well, thinking about high impact versus the level of effort necessary to build something.

 Yeah. And it's really consistent with the thing you said before like, I'm, I'm not going to sacrifice quality. I'm not going to sacrifice speed. So if we need to, we'll cut scope. And it's a way of maintaining that bar in the product. So back on the product, and on sort of like the product marketing or the product positioning.

So you've got a product here that is fairly futuristic, I would say. And I don't think of it as like an existing product category. This is not like a new way to do X. It's a new product category. So how did you think about that and explaining the product and how early adopters would understand it and wrap their brains around it?

 It's a hard problem to solve. You know, I thought a lot about it. It would be great if we had an analog of this is X for Y, this is a DoorDash for cats or whatever, you know, something that people could understand. And I do think a lot of our success or failure, if we, we were, you know, fast forward uh, five years or 10 years from now, we'll come down to, can we tell the story of what we do well enough, that tiptoes between the concerns people have and gets them to that magical moment. Uh, you know, that's the beauty of our product is once we get somebody in the magical moment, you know, it's usually a tablet crash or an email that accidentally deleted or, uh, or just some workflow that we help to make much more efficient.

Once we get them there, we see in the data that they're kind of hooked. The problem is between first hearing about us, if somebody is hearing about us for the first time on this podcast and getting to that magical moment, we have to overcome a lot of these obstacles of I don't know, this feels creepy, why would I would capture everything I say and everything I see, you know, uh, it's a new behavior, any new behavior, regardless of whether it's creepy or not, or perceived as potentially dystopian. Any new behavior is hard. Everyone is kind of ingrained into their existing habits. And so I think part of telling the story of what we do, why we do it, why it matters is really critical.

So I can't say that we've sort of nailed it yet. You know, I think we were on to something and we certainly are attracting a certain subset of our, of the knowledge workers out there that, that find what we do is kind of a key, you know, painkiller for them, but there's still plenty of people who hear about us and they're like, I'm not sure if that's for me.

I hope over time that changes, you know, I hope we are as ubiquitous one day as a hearing aid for hearing or, or glasses for vision. But, um, but that only really depends on our ability to sort of wins over, win over the hearts and minds of people, uh, slowly over time.

 You know, we've talked a lot about the product. The, one of the very interesting things to me here, Dan, is that you are a second time founder. And I think everybody's heard of your first company Optimizely. So I'm curious what feels different about starting a company the second time around? Are there new standards, new behaviors, you know, things that you've learned?

 Boy, I have learned so many things. You know, I feel like now looking back at it, I'm kind of shocked at we got as far as we did with Optimizely, given my youth and inexperience and naivete. Um, you know, I would start with, focus. You know, the mantra I said earlier around the main thing is that the main thing should stay the main thing.

I was very bad at that at Optimizely. I was very attracted to the shiny new thing. Um, you know, we started off with a very clear focus. It was the product I wish we had in the Obama campaign in 2008, when I was the director of analytics to make it easy for anyone to do A/B testing. And that was a very clear focus for maybe the first three years of Optimizely.

But then we got very distracted by shiny new objects and I blame myself for that. I've just I'm, I'm, I'm very, uh, eternally optimistic, uh, about what technology can do. And, and I didn't realize my role as CEO in saying no and helping us focus and, and being decisive. That's the other thing I realized if I look back at Optimizely, the, the class of things, there's like one very clear pattern of things I regret the most and it follows this pattern. My gut says we should do A, somebody else thinks we should do B, and it turns out poorly. There are plenty of times we said, I should, we should do A, and it turns out poorly.

I don't remember any of them. The ones I remember are like these deep existential, my intuition says we're not doing the right thing. We end up doing something else, uh, because that person has 10 years of experience at, at Salesforce, or they're a board member, or they're somebody who's very smart and influential, and, um, and I didn't do the good enough job of embracing the inherent conflict in going with my gut and being decisive. And I was a little bit too hapless. You know, Paul Graham talks about the best founders are relentlessly resourceful. And the things I regret most are the moments I was hapless, where I didn't fight the good fight to go with my intuition.

And we ended up going down a different path and I regret it. So that, I'm definitely not making that mistake again, at Rewind I'm, I'm willing to- good example is the strategic choice to move toward what is Rewind versus Scribe, like that was not a consensus, clear decision. Uh, you know, could have lost some folks on the team for that decision, but I was willing to go with my intuition and, and that's the thing I didn't realize it optimizely is that you, once you've been doing something for 10 years, uh, which is I'd been doing an Optimizely, you gain an intuition that's like very hard to replace by an expert that you hire from the outside.

So, anyway, I'm not making that mistake again. There's so many other lessons I learned around hiring senior people. You know, today we have 20 people at Rewind. We had 450 and I feel like with 20 people, we're able to do more and execute faster and be more tightly aligned than and ship than we ever did at Optimizely.

And, you know, they say if you want to ship a project sooner, take people away, have fewer people. Uh, and so I definitely feel like there's some magic to that senior experience. People at Optimizely, a lot of people are doing the job that they were doing for the first time. And I didn't know any better.

And today we hire people who have done things before, who have experience. Uh, and we benefit tremendously from that experience because, you know, we avoid the mistakes of their past. So I could go on and on.

 Well, you've mentioned to me before, also the psychological challenges that, that come with being a second time founder that weren't there the first time you started your first company. What are some of the psych, what's the psychology of that or some of the mental challenges that you find yourself facing now? 

 Yeah, it starts with the sense of I, had some fear going into this company that it wouldn't live up to the last one, you know, and I had probably an irrationally high bar for even being able to talk about what I was working on. That, a first time founder doesn't have a first time founder just wants something to be successful. They almost don't care what it is. Uh, I, so this time I felt certainly in the beginning, given my prior experience, given that it might get some attention, uh, that I, I didn't want it to suck right off the bat and everything you do in the beginning sucks. You need to be willing to embrace that, uh, and start with that and not let it, you know, cause you to, to make something perfect uh, you know, and, and making that the enemy of good. You know, I see a lot of companies today that are ex Apple people who built amazing things and they go off and they spend years and years toiling away and never really ship anything. And, you know, I think they have this sense of like, it needs to be as good as the last thing they did.

And when you start from zero, it's never going to be that good. So that was definitely a big psychological thing. I had a, you know, you know, I'm very proud of Optimizely, but it's still growing and do you know, it's been acquired, but it's doing well. And, uh, but I also think that we never really fulfilled the true potential of what I thought Optimizely could be.

So I had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder too, starting Rewind. It's like, I want this to be the category defining company that Optimizely could have been, and uh, you know, I, I know it sounds silly because Optimizely did do well, but it's like the, it's rel- it's well relative to what it could have been. And that gap is what, that, that gives me energy and fuel and passion for this time around as well.

 Was there an operating principle or an approach that you took at Optimizely that really worked and that you absolutely wanted to do again at Rewind?

 Yeah. One of the operating principles we took in Optimizely was really trying to walk the walk when it comes to culture, not just talk the talk. Uh, I had, and you, you and I both were at Google for a while. Like Google has this sense of Googliness that you had to assess candidates by. But it always frustrated me that there was no clear definition of what Googliness meant, what it meant to be Googly.

And I actually found that it tended to, on occasion, become weaponized as kind of a way to, uh, sort of select out people who otherwise weren't a culture fit because they were different. Um, and so I, at minimum, at Optimizely, I decided when we were like 30 people. I at least wanted to walk the walk and have codified cultural values to find what a culture fit is.

And in every hard decision I have to make, use those cultural values. And every candidate we hire, everyone understands. So at least we're consistent. We may not be right, but we're consistent across different, people who we're hiring. 

 Yeah, we, we described them, we had an acronym called OPTIFY ownership, passion, trust, integrity, fearlessness, and transparency with a Y. So OPTIFY, and then, you know, I think everyone knew that acronym, but I don't know if everyone really understood the meaning and nuance of each thing. Um, and then this time around, you know, we have actually, uh, far more cultural values.

There's no handy, fancy, uh, acronym, but they're comprehensive. Everything we want anyone to do at Rewind is in line with these cultural values. Or put differently, when we do, we do quarterly 360s, which most startups don't do. When we do them, the criteria we evaluate each other, and I get evaluated on by my team, is our cultural values.

There's nothing else. There's no other thing that's your performance it is do you live up to the cultural values, the things we have defined, by definition, are the things we think will make us successful. So if we think those are the things that will make us successful, then assessing each of ourselves on how we're living up to those should be the key to unlocking company success and performance.

So that is definitely something I learned. But at Rewind, I think we've done an even better job at really making that like ingrained into the way we work every single day.

 What are, what are some of the most important ones at Rewind?

 A big one is impact. Just generally, that's the category and that includes things like prioritization, um, quality, not making perfect the enemy of good. Um, you know, we have a whole long list of things that are really about how we do our work. Um, and, and just as important as impact is, is a set of things around teamwork, uh, being supportive, creating a sense of belonging.

One of my cultural, my favorite cultural values came from my co founder, which is a cultural value of zest. Uh, and, and that means, ,you know, bringing passion and energy to everything you do. and, and zestful teammates are fun to work with. Uh, so every quarter people are evaluated on, on how zestful they are. 

yeah, that can mean different things. It doesn't mean that you're sort of a rah rah cheerleader. Some of our most zestful people are, you know, mild mannered, sort of quiet engineers who, you know, they'll add a little flare emoji to something, or they'll, they'll, they'll make a comment that just sort of gives everyone else collective energy.

Um, so that, that's, that's, uh, you know, that's why, that's one of the things I've learned a lot is how important that is and getting that right up front makes a hundred other decisions much easier. It just goes away. I don't have to be in the room for other decisions. If I know we're holding ourselves accountable to the cultural values that I think will make us successful.

 Okay, let's uh, shift gears a little, Dan. You know, I'm, I'm super interested just in the topic of product market fit and, and how founders go about that journey of finding product market fit. It's so hard. But it is the most important thing, you know, in the first few years of a startup, do you, do you have like a personal bar that you like to hit for product market fit or that makes you feel like we have it or we don't?

 For me, product market fit really comes down to a defined market that is highly retained of users who actually love what you do. It's not a nice to have for them. It is a painkiller, not a vitamin. Likely they're, they're referring others, you know, they're, it's, they love it so much that they can't help themselves, uh, from, from sharing it with the world.

Uh, we have that today for sure for a subset of users, you know, we have, there's a billion knowledge workers on this planet. We are not a fit for everyone today, but there's some subset of that 1 billion knowledge workers for whom they couldn't imagine living, uh, their life without a product like Rewind.

And so that is, you know, and I think people, you know, at least I certainly have wrestled with. we have product market fit or not? And when you use a broad definition of what your market is, you get kind of ambiguous signals like, you know, technically, you know of, of Marc Andreessen's, list of seven from his blog post long ago.

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Dan Siroker, co-founder of RewindAI and former CEO of Optimizely, joins First Round Partner Todd Jackson to discuss his AI predictions, chasing product-market fit and the unique trials of being a second-time founder.