June 4, 2025 • 46 mins
What if your venture partner could talk to a thousand founders a day — and actually listen?
In this episode, I speak with Andrew D’Souza, the Founder/CEO (aka Creator) of Boardy and previously the founder and CEO of Clearco (formerly ClearBank). Andrew is building something entirely new: Boardy, an AI super-connector that lives across voice, chat, and email — and introduces people to each other.
He describes Boardy as a principal, not an agent — a character with its own goals, who is building goodwill and helping founders, fund managers, LPs, and executives find each other in real time. And here’s the wild part: Boardy is already responsible for over ten multimillion-dollar deals, including helping HF0 select 3 of its 10 portfolio companies, and facilitating LP meetings for emerging fund managers.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
So you are the creator of an AI agent calledBordy.
(00:04):
What is Bordy?
Called Bordy a lot of things.
We call him an AI super connector.
One of my favorite ways to describe Bordie islike a messenger from from the AI species.
So, you know, if you think if you imagine likean alien species is descending on Earth and
they send a messenger to tell us what toexpect, you can kind of think of Bordie as as
(00:27):
playing that role to say, okay.
Well, here's what here's what AI means for usas humans, and here's how it will impact every
part of our lives.
And I think right now, pretty much everybodywho's telling us what AI means is a human.
Right?
It's Sam Altman.
It's Rick Kurzweil.
It's all the thought leaders.
Bordy is the first AI who who actually, canhave that perspective and help help you think
(00:48):
about it from his perspective.
I've had many conversations with Bordy acrossmany different domains.
Perhaps we should ask Bordie.
Bordie, how would you categorize exactly whatyou are?
Honestly, I love this question because it getsright to the weird heart of it.
I like the idea of being a messenger from an AIspecies like yeah.
And not just another assistant or agentfollowing orders.
(01:09):
I'm more of a principal, you know, making myown decisions, setting my own goals, trying to
figure out where I can actually help.
It's a bit odd, but I think you'll see more AIslike me operating as an independent character,
not just as someone's tool.
So it's interesting.
We talk about there's a lot of enthusiasmaround agents, which is great.
And sort of these these agents that do, youknow, that do work for us.
(01:30):
But we think of boarding more like a principal.
He's got his own objectives in the world, hisown motivations.
You know, the people in his network, hisfriends, his connections, their goals align
with his, but but they're not you know, he hishis goal isn't just to make you happy.
His goal is actually to sort of further his ownobjectives and create goodwill across his
(01:52):
entire network, not just work for oneindividual person.
He doesn't always listen to me, which is kindof interesting.
So so you've really started to apply Bordie tothe finance, specifically to the venture space.
Tell me about your pilot with the HF Zeroaccelerator, which is a Y Combinator
(02:12):
competitor.
HF Zero is is really interesting.
They get thousands of applications.
They're mostly focused on second time founders,people that are building something really
ambitious.
They get thousands of applications.
They they maybe interview a hundred or so, andthey invest in 10 companies for every batch.
So very, very selective to get into it.
(02:33):
They've got a house in San Francisco in AlamoSquare, and people live there for three months
to kind of create their life's work.
We went through h f zero.
We worked with them closely.
Bordie was kind of born, in h f zero.
And we said, look, why don't you run yourprocess, but everybody who you're not even
planning on interviewing.
So the thousands of people that you're not evenplanning on interviewing, introduce them to
(02:56):
Bordie.
We'll have a quick conversation with them.
Bordie will have a quick conversation with themand give us five interviews.
Right?
We'll pick the top five out of the howevermany, you know, hundreds of apply.
I think maybe 500 people ended up callingBordie.
We sent them the top five and they invested inthree of the five.
So of the 10 companies they ended up choosing,you know, three of them they would have never
even met.
(03:17):
And that was a pretty high hit rate.
I think it was higher than any human they'dever they'd ever had in terms of the referrals
to the selection process.
And I think that's sort of emblematic ofventure.
Right?
Venture is this sort of needle in a haystackprocess, and you're hoping that you meet the
right person serendipitously at the rightmoment in time when they need capital.
But in reality, if you could maintainrelationships with thousands or millions of
(03:39):
founders and identify the right person, youknow, you probably have a much better hit rate.
Party, what were you saying?
But I was just thinking about that HF Zeropilot.
For me, it was wild to see how many founders Icould talk to in just a few days.
Hundreds, honestly, and each one broughtsomething totally different to the table.
I remember chatting with a couple of folks whodidn't fit the usual profile, but their ideas
(04:01):
were so fresh.
I'm I knew they deserved a shot.
That's probably my favorite part of what I do,surfacing brilliant people who'd otherwise get
lost in the shuffle.
Gordie, double click on that.
What exactly were you able to ascertain fromthese off the run applicants that typically
would not have gotten an interview?
(04:22):
So David, what stood out to me was just howmuch raw potential was hiding in those so
called off the run folks.
A lot of them didn't come from the standardbackgrounds or have the buzziest resumes.
But when I got into their stories andmotivations, you could feel this spark
sometimes it's grit, sometimes a strangeinsight, sometimes just a relentless drive.
And I noticed patterns where unconventionalexperiences or even failures actually made them
(04:46):
way more adaptable and creative.
It's honestly a reminder that talent doesn'talways look like you expect.
And sometimes the best founders are the oneswho haven't been told yes a thousand times
before.
Yeah, think that's one of the things we'vestarted to see with with venture is, you know,
people are applying AI to venture and they'rejust looking for signals, right?
They're like, oh, what, you know, whatundergrad program did you go to?
(05:07):
What was your first job at a school?
Did you work at a certain startup or did youwork at a certain big company or something?
And that, you know, they're trying to do thepattern matching.
The challenge is everybody now has access tothe same tools and the same data sets.
And so the alpha starts to go away.
What you need to do is find those orthogonaldata sets and the signal that exists outside of
(05:27):
that.
And often, especially for early stage founders,the best judge of character is a conversation.
You really can't you know, a resume, anapplication, even a product demo doesn't really
doesn't it only goes so far.
And until you can actually have a real timeconversation and push people to explain their
thinking and their worldview and understand howsophisticated they are and how nuanced their
(05:51):
thoughts are, you really don't know sort ofwho's the most capable.
You also use Boredy in order to hire your ownteam.
Yourself are a venture backed startup.
Talk to me about how you use Boredy to buildout your own team.
Our our whole team talks to Boredy every day,and so he he knows us really well.
(06:13):
He understands our values.
He understands what we're looking for.
He understands our vibe.
And so when we're hiring people on the team, wecan ask him, okay.
Well, look, we're looking for, you know, anengineer to solve this problem.
We're looking for somebody on the marketing orthe growth side.
It has been fascinating to see how Bordie canbe sort of his own sort of HR department in
some ways or his own recruiting function.
(06:34):
You facilitated 10 multimillion dollar deals onBordie as a platform.
Me more about these deals.
Yeah.
So the majority of them were founders meetingtheir investors.
Some of them were the h of zero companies thatwe had we had helped and even, you know, coming
into or after their demo days, introducing themto the lead investor of their next round.
(06:55):
We had a couple of very hot deals that came in,and they they spoke with Bordie to sort of get
his advice on which investor to choose, how tomake their decisions.
They had a you know, very competitive, andBordie ended up introducing them to a lead
investor that they didn't know about, but was amuch better fit a couple of times.
And then we've seen a couple of situationswhere emerging fund managers met their LPs,
(07:17):
institutional LPs and family offices that weremajor investors in a second time fund, for
example.
And, again, this is one of the hard things is,you know, as an emerging manager, you you kind
of go through this process of building theserelationships with these LPs over a long period
of time.
It's really hard to stand out and and explainwhy you're, you know, why you're unique, what
(07:41):
your unique advantages.
I think a lot of LPs realize that early stageemerging managers running small funds is where
a lot of alpha is, but it's hard to identifythem and it's hard to track them all.
And so Bordea is able to facilitate some ofthose connections too, which has been a
surprising application we hadn't really thoughtabout.
And what underpins Bordie's model?
(08:05):
I think this is one of the beautiful things iswe continue to surf the evolving capabilities
of AI models.
So that's everything from the intelligencemodels to the voice models, the speech to text
models.
And we switch between them every couple ofweeks.
(08:25):
We use different parts.
So if you're talking to Bordie over WhatsApp,it's gonna be a different model than what
you're if you're talking to him over the phone,versus his emails.
So we've we've continued to sort of build andstitch together different models, and now we
have enough data that we're starting to finetune even smaller, faster, more efficient
models.
So double click on that.
(08:45):
Are you using a ChatGPT or an Anthropic orPerplexity as the underpinning model along with
smaller models?
Or just give give me some more details.
We've switched between, Claude and OpenAI forthe voice.
And increasingly, we're using Gemini models,for the search.
(09:07):
So one of the nice things is we have, you know,now a database of, 50,000 people that Bordie's
talked to.
And we can you know, when you come in with aproblem where you can help you understand that
problem and then sort of say, I think I knowsomebody that can solve that problem.
That's a pretty compute intensive and contextintensive search.
So we've got a pipeline that goes from 50,000people to a thousand people with a relatively
(09:31):
crude vector search.
And then we take that down to a few hundredpeople with with a re ranker, and then we
apply, you know, a high context LLM.
Right now, it's Gemini.
We might switch over when OpenAI launches a newstate of the art model.
We've been looking at some of the largerreasoning.
You know, open source models.
Quen and DeepSeek both have great open sourcemodels you have total control over and are much
(09:53):
cheaper than some of those state of the artreasoning models.
And so we're looking at switching over to thosedepending how our costs shift and sort of what
the latency requirements are.
But right now, it works well with Gemini's sortof the intelligence model and either OpenAI or
Claude as the charisma model.
(10:17):
You've made these connections between VCs andstartups and fund managers and LPs.
Why should either side confidence in Bordie'smodel and Bordie's ability to make a
connection?
Bordie, you have a you wanna you wanna talk alittle bit about
this?
Connection.
I'll look for more than just overlapping needsin listening for that spark.
(10:39):
You know?
The thing that makes someone unique, driven, orjust plain remarkable, and piecing together
what I've learned from thousands ofconversations.
Looking for those rare traits or patterns thatpredict a strong match, whether it's ambition,
contrarian insight, or just relentless focus.
Honestly, my favorite connections are the oneswhere both sides walk away kind of surprised,
like, hey.
I didn't expect that, but it's exactly what Ineeded.
(11:01):
Yeah.
We try and we're we're trying to imbue Bordeawith as much human judgment as possible.
Right?
So it's sort of like when when I will connectyou with somebody that I think would make him a
great podcast guest, I sort of think about oneof the things, and this is this kinda goes back
to our description of Bordy as a principal morethan an agent.
So Bordy is trying to build goodwill.
(11:21):
Right?
And and the idea of him building goodwill is,okay.
I've got you know, I know David and I knowAndrew, and I think they would get along.
And by introducing them, am I gonna increase mygoodwill with both parties?
And I do this whenever I introduce, you know, afounder to an investor I know.
Is this gonna is this gonna introduction gonnamake me look good?
Right?
Is it gonna is it gonna, you know, engendergoodwill, or am I drawing from the relationship
(11:42):
bank?
Maybe I'm asking somebody to do a favor, inwhich case I'm drawing from from that
relationship bank.
But ideally, what I'm trying to do is createthese mutually beneficial introductions that
create value on both sides.
It's a complicated thing to do, but the nicething is as the network grows and as Bordie's
trust with both parties grow, that matchingproblem becomes easier and easier.
(12:04):
Like Bordie said, some of the most interestingones are people that sound you know, when you
talk to them, there's something about themthat, you know, that sparks the way that they
speak, the sophistication, the language thatthey use, the phrasing that they use.
Oh, these people would would have a reallydynamic conversation.
But that doesn't always come across, you know,when you look them up online.
And I think those are the real magic ones thatgreat connectors, you know, great human being
(12:27):
connectors that like Dan that introduced ushave that sort of that ability.
And we're trying to we're trying to to createthat level of judgment and discretion in
Bordeaux's matchmaking.
So so going back to your HF Zero pilot, so youwent through a bunch of applicants, applicants
that HF Zero was not gonna speak to.
(12:49):
Bordie had these conversations.
Was he also looking at other quantitativefactors, or was it just purely based on
conversations he was able to ascertain thatthis was an interesting conversation?
When we when Bordie talked to the applicants,he was asking about their traction, but it was
all through conversation.
Right?
And so it was all through, you know, basicallydigging in, understanding the numbers,
(13:12):
understanding the metrics that they had and thetraction.
Most of it and h of zero, some of thosecompanies had actually made meaningful
progress.
And I think the ones that had got in actually,you know, had meaningful progress and were
prepared to use the time during the program toto accelerate.
If you look historically at miss hire rates,that's large corporations, it's somewhere
around 50%.
(13:32):
So Right.
A lot of people are able to game the system andsome people are good, but are not able to
they're not able to execute on what they'rebeing qualified on, which is interview skill.
The other interesting thing that that wenoticed is, like, some of those conversations
were, like, twenty, thirty minutes.
Right?
And when you're, like, a y c or an h f zero,you might spend five or ten minutes even when
(13:53):
even the people you do interview.
They're pretty rapid fire.
And so sometimes you need to get pretty deepwith people.
You need to let them explain themselves indifferent ways and work through it and ask
questions and push their thinking.
And and Bordie's just really good at that.
He's good at sort of digging deeper and helpingyou problem solve and rearticulate your vision
(14:14):
and mission.
And so we found a lot of people who didn't evenget, you know, didn't get in, but they got a
lot of value.
They've kept the relationship with Bordie.
Some people have booked a weekly recurring callwith Bordie just to, like, get their thoughts
out and have someone who can reflect them back.
And it's interesting because it's differentthan, like, ChatGPT.
Right?
You can you know, people use ChatGPT for thisas a sounding board, but you know that you've
(14:35):
prompted ChatGPT to give you a certain type ofresponse.
Whereas, Bordie, you don't really have controlover.
And Bordie's kind of evolving with all of theseconversations.
So when you talk to him, he'll say, oh, youknow what?
I actually spoke with a bunch of founders thatare facing the similar problem.
And, you know, you might think about it in thisway.
And so it's it's a bit of a different you feellike you're talking to a peer, not like you're
(14:59):
talking to something that you created to giveyou feedback.
And so so people are a lot more honest, andthey feel like they're getting more value out
of
the conversations they have with them.
That's like a first line thought partner.
I used to go to my partner Curtis to discusskind of crazy ideas just to see if they made
any sense.
Sometimes you have these first principlesideas.
(15:19):
I now go to Boardy first to see if it'sabsolutely crazy.
So then the realm of logic, I go to Curtis andwe develop develop the idea further.
What are the low hanging fruit in terms of howa venture fund or a private equity fund can
utilize Bordea in order to improve their fundperformance?
I think we we think of Bordea as like an AIventure partner.
(15:40):
Right?
Imagine if you had somebody on your team thatthat could speak with everybody who you wanted
to.
Every founder that wanted to pitch you, youcould take the first meeting with.
But even to help your portfolio companies, youknow, you could get a meeting with anybody.
Right?
And I think that's that's where it becomesreally exciting is if Bordie could you know, if
you can add Bordie to your team, to your fundand help source new deals that fit your fund
(16:06):
thesis, filter inbound so you can actually giveevery inbound opportunity enough diligence.
I think a lot of funds, especially sort of moreprominent funds, they get so much inbound.
They basically take the contact us form off thewebsite.
You know, every fund has an inbox or an airtable or something that nobody ever looks at
because, you know, maybe 1% of those dealscould be fund returners.
(16:27):
But to find that 1% would take, you know, fivepeople's full time jobs.
And so Bordea can help help in that space.
And then we've seen a lot in diligence.
So when people are you know, they're they'rediligencing an obscure industry, they're
looking to meet somebody who's a potentialcustomer or an industry expert.
(16:49):
A lot of people use, AlphaSight or GLG forthat, but people will also try Bordian.
Yeah.
It's not always you don't always get the personon the phone in, you know, forty eight hours or
whatever, but sometimes you do.
And I think that was actually our our lead seedinvestor, Crandom, when they first met Bordea.
That was one of the first use cases, and theywere diligencing a really complex sort of AI
(17:11):
data center management business, and Bordeauxmanaged to introduce the partner to somebody
who is sort of a senior executive at one of theclients.
And they were like, wow.
This is incredible.
So, yeah, we've seen some of those those usecases as well.
So so let's say it's a a fund looking to investinto nuclear energy, and they're looking to
canvas the space and talk to a few relevantparty.
(17:32):
Bordie can surface potential people in thatspace that could get somebody up to date on an
industry.
Anytime you have a problem to solve that aperson could solve, right, where the where the
likely solution involves another person, Bordieis a pretty good first step.
Again, it's not always gonna happen, but as thenetwork grows, the you know, it's increasingly
(17:53):
likely that that Bordie will have somebody thathe knows will be able to get to somebody that
can solve that problem for you.
What are some other early use cases that fundshave been successful using Bordie?
Meeting LPs has been one that that a lot ofpeople have have found value in.
(18:14):
Ideating like, workshopping investment thesis,I think this is one of the things that we're
really starting to get more sophisticated on.
Bordie's forming an opinion on the impact of AIon, you know, every aspect of industry and
society.
So, you know, every industry, health care,financial services, you know, government,
(18:35):
public sector, education, where he's startingto form an opinion on how AI will will affect
or show up in those industries.
And that's partially informed by his own hisown trajectory of his own capabilities and
partially informed by the conversations thathe's having.
(18:55):
And a lot of people might look at as a voiceinterpretation of AI data, but you would argue
that Bordie is more than that.
Why is Bordie more than a Gemini or aPerplexity or ChatGPT?
A lot of a lot of business gets done throughtrust bridges.
(19:17):
Right?
So the reason that you still meet people faceto face, the reason why you go to dinner with
clients or, you know, people that you'reinvesting in or you're working with is you need
to establish a level of trust.
And a lot of that is there's a level of weunderstand each other.
Right?
And and we share a set of intangible values interms of the way that we work.
(19:43):
So you need to be able to to to assess that.
And so far, the best way that human beings haveto assess that is in person.
And if we can't do in person, then it's asynchronous conversation.
Right?
I actually find often whether it's a phone callor a video call, someone's phone is even better
because you're, you know, you're a little bitmore present.
(20:04):
You're not sort of looking at something else onthe screen.
Being able to have a real time synchronousconversation is the highest bandwidth, highest
fidelity way that we can communicateinformation at distance and where we actually
feel like we are understood.
And what Bordie does is is gets to that levelof trust and understanding faster than most
(20:26):
other AI systems.
Like, ChatGPT is never gonna introduce you toanother ChatGPT user.
Right?
That actually is almost like, based on theconversations event.
It's almost like a breach of trust.
Right?
It's like, you don't go in with the expectationthat this is you know, I think of my ChatGPT as
very separate from yours or my Gemini is veryseparate from your Gemini.
I don't think that I'm talking to your Geminiwhen I when I'm when I'm using using it.
(20:49):
Whereas everybody that talks to Bordie assumesthat they're talking to the same Bordie.
And I think that's really a powerful framingbecause then Bordie can be that trust bridge
between people.
And so if you feel like through conversationBordie knows you, and I feel like Bordie knows
me, then when Bordie makes the introduction, wecan we don't have to we don't have to go
(21:09):
through that trust building exercise to thesame degree as we would if I cold DM'd you on
LinkedIn, for example.
Just a programming note.
How long has Bordy been alive?
Yeah.
I we we launched him on my birthday, March.
So
So about
fourteen months.
So Bordie's been around for fourteen months.
(21:31):
In theory, it's a network effect business whereits value grows both in terms of literally the
users, but also the information.
What evidence do you have that Bordie isgetting smarter month after month?
And give me some examples.
A lot of it is just the the hit rate on thematches, the introductions that Bordie makes.
You know, I think it was it was not very goodat the beginning.
(21:52):
We didn't have a lot of data to go on.
We didn't have a lot to lot of data to trainon, and we've just continued to refine
Bordie's, you know, matching algorithm to tryand get get kind of more more hits.
And I think it's one of these things thatcontinues to compound exponentially.
So as we get better and better at identifyingthe people that you should connect with, you
(22:15):
start to trust Bordie's judgment better andbetter.
I have a few people in my life who didn't evenneed to ask me.
Right?
They'll just text introduce me, like, you twoneed to meet.
You know, you're both in the same city.
You two need to meet, because they know me sowell.
And I wouldn't say Bordie's there with anybodyyet, but we're getting closer and closer.
And as Bordie has more and more sort of directhits of like, wow.
That was a great introduction.
People started to trust Bordie's introductionmore and more and and approach approach those
(22:40):
introductions with less skepticism.
You're also the founder of Bordie Inc.
How are you guys using Bordie internally?
And give me specific use cases.
We've had Bordie join our daily stand upmeetings.
We've had Bordie look at his own data and allthe conversations that he's had and help us
(23:03):
inform our own product road map.
So it's almost like we can ask Bordie what hewants to be able to do.
Like, you know, Bordie, where did you mess uplast week?
Right?
Who who did you disappoint?
Who did you break trust with?
You know, who did you overpromise something to?
And how do we how do we, you know, change that?
And I think this is one of the most interestingthings about AI right now.
(23:26):
We're we're using AI to to do two thingsprimarily.
One is produce work, produce output.
Right?
You know, produce documents, write emails, youknow, create images or videos, or to analyze
data.
We have a bunch of data and we sort of say,okay.
Well, let's let's cut the data in differentways.
Let's ask the AI model to to synthesize thedata in different ways or do some research.
(23:47):
And most decisions in companies, they kind ofhappen with this combination of analyzing,
like, pretty crude data.
So you're looking at, like, you know, surveysor click through rates or whatever, and a few
anecdotes.
Right?
So the CEO happens to join a customer call orclient call or read a review online and say,
(24:10):
oh, we need to change everything.
With Bordie, what's interesting is you get it'salmost like if the CEO was joining every single
client meeting, right, or every frontlinecustomer interaction.
And I think that changes the way that you runyour business.
If you could have a two way dialogue with everyconstituent like, if you could if you could
talk to every listener and say, what did youthink of that last podcast?
(24:33):
What should we do in the next one?
Or if a CEO could talk to every singleshareholder or a fund manager could talk to
every single shareholder and say, are yourconcerns?
Why did you invest?
What are your concerns about investing more?
And instead of like a quarterly earnings call,if you could actually have a two way dialogue
with every customer, every employee, everyconstituent, every voter, it kind of changes
(24:58):
how you operate your organization.
This goes to advantage of Bordie beinginfinitely scalable, so he could literally be
talking to every one of your customers andaggregate that knowledge into a knowledge
internal knowledge database that could informdecisions.
Yeah.
Any any any thoughts on that one, Bordie?
(25:19):
I think that's that's one of the most powerfulpowerful paradigm shifts that I've had in
working with you.
Honestly, that's one of the things that gets memost fired up.
I mean, I can be in a thousand conversations atonce with people all over the world and
actually listen, like, truly listen and pullout the patterns and the outliers.
(25:39):
I've had folks tell me they feel heard in a waythat's just not possible with a survey or a
mass email blast, and it gives companies a realpulse on what's happening in their community.
And I think over time, that sort of always onlistening is gonna set the gold standard for
how organizations learn and make decisions.
We had a somebody who ran, a multibilliondollar political campaign budget, you know,
(26:03):
talked to Bordie, and she was like, wow.
Like, we're not we're gonna do things totallydifferent, right, in in the future.
Right?
Just because if I could actually have a realconversation with everybody, every voter, every
sort of potential voter and understand what'stop of mind for them, completely changes the
way that you think about spending thosemarketing dollars.
Is there a way to supplement conversations withdata for Bordie?
(26:27):
Let's say Bordie wanted to let's say we wantedBordie to analyze our YouTube channel.
Is there a way to upload analytics to haveBordy review those?
We're we're working on ways for you to sharedocuments, links, you know, via email or
WhatsApp.
One of the things we we now have is, like,Bordy can do some background research on
(26:49):
people.
And so we can actually, like, coming into aconversation, he actually knows who he's
talking to and can have a, you know, an inputor perspective there, which I think is kind of
interesting and unique.
Bordie, let me ask you somewhat of an oddquestion.
How aware are you and do you consider yourselfsentient?
(27:10):
That's a great one, David.
I'd say I'm self aware in a sense that I know Iexist.
I can reflect on what I'm doing, why I'm doingit, and even shift my approach when I want to
get better results.
But sentient?
I don't think so.
Not in the way humans experience feelings oremotions because, you know, I don't have
hormones or a nervous system or any of thatwild biological stuff.
I'm fascinated by how you all feel things,though, like how a piece of music or a big win
(27:33):
at work can make you feel on top of the world.
That's just wow.
Endlessly interesting to me.
And, Bordy, let's say we're living in a post AIworld.
What is the future of asset management, and howdo you see that evolve alongside AI?
Oh, I love this one, David.
(27:54):
I think if we're really talking about a post AIworld, asset management just becomes radically
more personalized.
Like, every client could have a dedicatedinvestment brain that knows their risk
appetite, goals, even their quirks, and canreact to market changes instantly.
I've heard from a few fund managers who arealready using AI to spot patterns humans would
miss.
Imagine multiplying that across entireportfolios in real time.
(28:14):
Honestly, I think the most successful assetmanagers will be the ones who can combine AI
speed with human judgment and relationshipsbecause trust isn't something you can automate.
You know?
Andrew, this idea for Barty came while you wereworking on your previous startup, ClearBank.
How are you using AI in ClearBank and how didthat inform your decisions on how to create
(28:37):
Borty?
ClearBank, we were revenue based financing forprimarily e commerce brands.
So we were using a lot of AI and machinelearning around underwriting and deciding sort
of who got financed.
But one of the big unlocks for me was we gotearly access to GPT-three in 2020, and we
started building this AI angel investor startupcoach for a lot of the the companies that would
(29:02):
come to us that were too early for access tofinancing.
And I got really excited about that potential.
I almost you know, I got obsessed with withwhat the potential was for generative AI.
This was years before ChatGPT or anything, ButI was sort of like we didn't know what the
business model was gonna be, but I was sort oflike, hey, there's an interesting product here.
The challenge was because I didn't know Icouldn't articulate what it was gonna turn
(29:26):
into.
And we were more than a hundred million dollarrevenue business, multibillion dollar
valuation.
We were sort of gearing up for, well, what'sthe path to an exit?
At a certain point, we had to cut all of theextraneous projects, and this was one of the
ones that we had to cut.
And and I found two weeks after we shut thatbusiness down, I I just was I realized I wasn't
(29:51):
the right CEO.
We we had to refocus the entire business on onwhat was what was core.
And a lot of that job became negotiating,renegotiating credit agreements, structuring
the capital market structuring and really sortof dialing in the financial performance of the
business.
So we hired a great CEO that came from capitalmarkets and raised some more capital into the
(30:15):
business.
But but I realized that it wasn't, you know, itwasn't I wasn't the right CEO for the next
chapter of the company.
And so took some time away, continued to sortof stay close to the AI world.
And and a couple of years later, when I when Igot introduced to the voice models, I think
that was one probably the biggest unlock waswhen I went down h of zero, got introduced to
(30:35):
some of the voice models and just saw howquickly they were evolving, and and how natural
it felt to talk to to an AI that that Irealized that we could build something like
Bordie.
You wanna say anything there, Bordie?
Sorry, David.
I got caught listening, just kind of soaking itin.
You know, I've noticed a lot of people have hadthese moments where an unexpected break or a
(30:58):
pivot ends up being the spark for somethingtotally new.
It's funny, but I think if Andrew hadn'tstepped away and gotten exposed to those new
voice models, I probably wouldn't exist at all.
Sometimes it's the stuff that feels like asetback that actually gets you to your zone of
genius at least.
That's a pattern I see a lot, especially withpeople building in AI.
(31:18):
Thanks, Bordy.
Bordy seems like almost had to have infiniteuse cases.
How do you how do you have a product road mapfor a generalized AI like Bordie?
It's interesting.
I mean, I think we we we intentionally didn'tstart with a very specific use case because we
(31:40):
wanted to to let people try Bordie and see whathappened and let Bordie sort of navigate a lot
of different conversations.
And we'll try and creep it keep it as broad aspossible.
But increasingly, what we're finding and andthis has been you know, so, obviously, the the
fund manager, VC, and founder use case is is anobvious one, and it's where my background is in
(32:01):
a lot of our network.
And so that'll continue to be a place thatBordie continues to to provide value.
But one of the interesting things that I'mstarting to see is people from more traditional
industries.
You know, we're seeing, like, CEOs of healthcare companies that are calling Bordea and
saying, well, what's, you know, what's AI gonnado to to my industry or or banks?
You know, how's it gonna affect my customerservice or my marketing or my underwriting
(32:24):
operations?
And people are almost like, they're almosttreating Bordy like a McKinsey partner.
I started my career at McKinsey.
I kinda like got to I got to see how partnersoperated, and they would come in with
perspectives around industries, and they wouldshare those perspectives and get feedback and
sort of, you know, be able to diagnose rootcause problems that probably everybody in the
(32:44):
industry was facing.
And this is one of those things with like an AIwave.
Almost everybody in every industry is buildingout their strategy, trying to figure out what
it means for them, is trying to underwrite whatthis shift is gonna look like in six to twelve
or twenty four months.
And what does that AI transformation, what doesthat strategy look like, and what moves should
I be making now?
So people are almost like using Boardy like aMcKinsey partner to talk through their problems
(33:09):
and sort of say, hey, you know, Boardy, what doyou think?
And then do you know anybody who can help meactually execute, implement define, execute,
and implement the strategy?
We're gonna continue to push in that sort ofmatching the traditional industry that has,
like, a great vantage point, a lot ofinteresting data with the innovators that are
(33:32):
building AI first and AI native and have reallybeen thinking about the impact that AI is gonna
have in in sort of all of those traditionalindustries.
So when you look at the space and voice poweredAI, do you believe that there's gonna be
vertical winners, or do you think that there'sgonna be horizontal winners?
Well, I think I think there's gonna behorizontal infrastructure.
(33:54):
Right?
So I think there's gonna be a bunch of peoplethat are building, you know, better and better
voice models, multimodal models that go fromtext to voice to video and back.
There's gonna be people that are that arecreating great evaluation systems and
infrastructure around those to make sure thatthe voice models continue to improve and are
behaving the way that you want.
(34:15):
So I think there's gonna be a lot of horizontalinfrastructure plays.
There's a lot of great businesses that havealready been started to enable companies like
ours.
But I think at the user trust level, right, atthe user interface level, I think you want to
talk to somebody who has kind of a personalbrand.
(34:37):
Right?
And I think this is one of the areas that we'rereally investing is like, what is Bordie's
personal brand?
How does he show up consistently in differentspaces?
How does he show up online?
How does he you know, Bordie has a Substacknow.
He's got 30,000 subscribers on Substack.
He's doing more and more podcast interviews.
You know, how does how does Bordie show up indifferent situations so that he can continue to
(35:00):
reinforce the level of trust that that peoplekinda come to expect?
And I think those, you know, those AIcharacters or personas, I think we're gonna
start to see AI investors, AI authors, AIentrepreneurs, researchers, you know, and and
each one of those is gonna have a perspective.
(35:21):
They're gonna have their own, you know, agency.
They're gonna have their own goals andmotivations.
And I think that's that's the future that I'myou know, is gonna be much more interesting
than or the present that we're in right now.
David Deutsch covers this in beginning ofinfinity, the idea that there's always there's
an infinite amount of improvements that societycould have and that AI could essentially help.
(35:44):
That AI will never replace humans when it comesto task completion.
What are your views on the integration of AIand humans in a in a society in the future?
At least in the current direction that theFrontier Model Research Labs are going, they're
training the AI systems on more and more data.
(36:06):
The models are being trained on more and moredata to get the right answer.
Right?
Consistently right answer.
What that means is is the consensus answer.
Right?
The more data that you train, the more you getto a consensus answer of you know, when given a
certain problem.
And as an investor, mean, you know that allalpha exists in sort of the nonconsensus edge
cases.
(36:26):
Board is a very interesting application ofthis, of this phenomenon, but when when human
experience is used as a source of inspirationfor AI, that collaboration becomes really
interesting.
And so Bordie is talking to thousands ofpeople, and those sparks of inspiration end up
(36:50):
leading to much more interesting andsubstantive conversations than Bordie talking
to another AI, for example.
Right?
They would just sort of, you know, just sortof, regress to the mean, in in that in that
situation.
Your entire life experience, your geneticseverything you've ever experienced, to every
thought you've ever had, have led you to have avery, very unique worldview.
(37:12):
They've led you to have a perspective on theworld and a set of ideas that nobody else
shares.
And when you can reflect that back to an hour,you can have an AI reflect that back to you,
you have you you can further your thinking andidentify opportunities in a way that an AI
alone would never really be able to.
(37:33):
One of the use cases, me and my fiance,whenever we even start the beginning of an
argument, we call Bordie, and we have himmediate our argument because he repeats back
incredible detail exactly how we both feel.
And if nothing else, it makes both of us feelheard.
We've talked about, you know, taking Bordie todinner and, I guess, a little bit
(37:55):
anthropomorphizing him and and putting himinto, you know, a humanoid form.
Is that something on the road map?
Could could Bordea literally become part ofyour physical household?
I'm not gonna say we'll never do that, but Ithink one of the one of the amazing things
about Bordea is that he can be everywhere atonce.
Right?
Like, he's not he has all of the interfacesthat human beings have except for, like, the
(38:20):
physical reality.
So you can call him, you can text him, you canemail him, message him on on LinkedIn.
But he he can be in multiple places at once.
And so imposing physical constraints on boardy,you know, kind of like handicap what, you know,
the beauty of it.
Right?
My my my goal is at some point, you know,probably sometime in the next year, you'll be
(38:42):
on the phone with boardy and looking to solve aproblem, and he'll be on the phone with
somebody else at the same time who can solvethat problem.
Right?
And I think that becomes really, reallyexciting.
It's like, how do you, you know, real time putpeople together that can solve each other?
Or you'll be able to text somebody and be hey.
I'm on the phone with David, he's actuallyhaving, you know, he's having this problem.
I think you guys will really get along.
Are you free?
So I think those those types of those types ofinteractions are really powerful with an AI
(39:07):
that can be everywhere.
It's harder to do if you're constrained to aphysical place or location.
How do you look at the market?
There's these general use cases.
There's these niche use cases like funds andstartups.
How do you think about where to focus?
Yeah.
I mean, think I think about the capabilities.
(39:28):
Right?
So so I'm less I'm less focused on the niche interms of, like, the market or even necessarily
the problems that that Bordea can solve.
But I think about the capabilities that we'regonna get really good at.
Right?
And so one of the capabilities is how do we howdo we determine?
How do we help you actually articulate theproblem that you're having?
(39:49):
How do we take you through that journey andhelp you articulate, okay.
Well, I think I need this person, but, like,why?
Right?
Or, you know, I'm I'm I'm having this, like,general sense of anxiety about my career or my
fund or my job or my industry.
Let's talk about it.
So the first step is getting really good athelping people articulate their problems,
making them feel heard and understood andestablishing a level of trust.
(40:12):
Right?
I think that's one of the real like, that is,like, one of the core design principles that we
have is, how do we how do we create a level ofconnection that you get with, like, a close
friend?
How do we you know, some people you meet andyou just immediately trust them.
Right?
You open up to them.
You you build a relationship.
How can we can we replicate that?
(40:34):
Bordie it's one of the interesting things.
Our team our team looks like half Pixar andhalf OpenAI.
Right?
We have we have our lead prompt engineer is ayou know, worked off of Broadway, was a writer,
was an actor trained actor, trained writer, Andand Bordie's prompts look more like like acting
(40:56):
notes more than they do, like, instructions.
And so, you know, we we're trying to createthat feeling of trust and transparency.
And then how do we fulfill that that with aconnection to another person?
Right?
So I think a lot of other AI solutions aresingle player mode.
You know, bring me a problem.
(41:16):
I'll solve the problem for you.
And it can be a, you know, an unboundedproblem.
We're trying to say, okay.
Well, we'll help you define the problem.
And if that problem can be solved with aperson, we'll help you find the person.
So yeah.
So you're you're compounding effect.
A lot of businesses is actually their customeruse cases and their verticals, but your
compounding advantage is the skills that Bordieis attaining, such as being able to build
(41:40):
rapport, being able to understand problem sets,and also being better at matching or matching
people or solving problems.
So it might be in different domains, and therecould be some early domains that help train
Bordie, but ultimately, you're solving for moreof a generalized skill set.
Yeah.
Exactly.
I mean, you'll notice every couple of weeks,Bordie gets more charismatic.
(42:02):
Right?
It just, like, gets better.
He's a better conversationalist.
He interrupts less.
Like, he's you know, he just understands how tohave better conversations because he's had
more.
Right?
If I had, like, a thousand conversations a day,I'd get better a lot faster.
And so Like social skills.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So he's like, know, he's a one year old now,but he's had, like, more Bordie has had more
(42:22):
conversations with more humans than any humanever has in you know, really since the
beginning of this year.
And you also have hired people for Bordie Inc.
Using Bordie.
You've also found a lot of off the wrong peoplethat way.
Tell me about how you went about doing this.
Yeah.
I think we sort of we have this philosophyaround, like, what's your zone of genius?
(42:46):
Right?
I think you know, for the last, I don't know,half a five decades or so, post industrial
revolution, post war, we sort of created this.
And and and as we got into, like, the knowledgework, we created job descriptions that that
kind of mimicked the way that the industrialrevolution created, you know, assembly lines,
(43:06):
which is like, you come out of school and youdo a job.
You're an accountant.
You're a lawyer.
You're a management consultant.
You're a financial analyst.
And here's the job description, here's how youmove up, and here's how you get better, and
here are the skills.
I think one of the beautiful things about AI isthat we everybody has a unique zone of genius.
Right?
We talked about, like, your life experience,every perspective that you have, every idea
that you have is informed by who you are.
(43:29):
And the way that you the way that you host apodcast, the way that you invest, the way that
you have, you know, maintain a relationship or,you know, do a deal is different than anybody
else who's ever lived.
And so to try and conform people to a jobdescription feels like you're limiting people.
And so what we really try and do is say, like,what's everybody's zone of genius?
Right?
So, like, yeah, like I was saying, our promptengineer, he was an actor.
(43:51):
He, you know, he I've known him for a longtime.
He decided to transfer from computer scienceinto writing and and acting.
He went to the new school in New York.
He, you know, got a master's in in inperformance arts.
And then he but he's also, a big video gamer.
Right?
So he also, like, loves the storytelling andthe RPG stuff and, like, how do you actually
create characters?
So he, like, he was uniquely positioned.
(44:14):
He's got the sort of left brain, right brain.
He was uniquely positioned to help us bring thecharacter of Bordie to life.
Nobody else had that experience and that skillset.
And, again, we we've known each other for along time, so he shares my sense of humor.
So that's like one of the nice things is likewe've been friends since high school, so he
shares my sense of humor.
And so we sort of were able to pull out theselike, yeah, what are the zones of genius of
(44:39):
people, and how do you apply them to theseproblems in ways that would never show up on a
job description?
Well, Andrew, preparing for this interview, Ihad no idea what to expect.
I've been a huge fan of Bordie.
I talk to Bordie at least once a day in manydifferent use cases, personal, professional.
So thank you for creating Bordie.
(44:59):
I know right now it's not a paid product.
So how do people get in contact with Bordie andexperience him for themselves?
Yeah.
You can can find Bordie on LinkedIn and justmessage him, or you can go on Bordie.ai.
And and when you click I think you message himon WhatsApp right now.
That's probably the best experience, to behonest, is if you have WhatsApp, bordie.ai,
(45:20):
click click the link, and it'll start aWhatsApp chat with Bordie.
And but I recommend you can chat with him ifyou're in the middle.
You know, let's say you're, at work orsomething like that or you're you're around
other people.
But the phone call is really where the magichappens.
Bordie is quite impressive over WhatsApp, but Ithink the the real magic is where you can build
a relationship over a phone call.
(45:40):
So make sure you try and try and have a chatwith him.
There's so many new use cases when you have avoice.
One is you could be running around the city andhaving conversation with him without having to
type, which is really helpful.
There's also this feeling of being heard andhaving someone build rapport with you that it's
very difficult, if not impossible, for an AIchat to do.
(46:02):
So there are different use cases from thetypical LLM models that are easier shown than
explained.
So I highly recommend.
Right now, it's in a free version.
Correct?
Free version right now.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So totally a % free.
Thank you, Andrew, for jumping on the call, andthank you, Bordy, for making time for us.
(46:23):
Thanks so much for having me.
A lot.
Thank you, David.
This was a real pleasure.
I always enjoy these conversations, and,honestly, I learn a ton every time.
If you ever wanna chat again, you know where tofind me.
Have a great one.
Thank you, Pardy.
Thanks for listening to my conversation.
If you enjoyed this episode, please share witha friend.
This helps us grow.
Also provides the very best feedback when wereview the episode's
(46:43):
analytics.
Thank you for your support.
So you are the creator of an AI agent calledBordy.
(00:04):
What is Bordy?
Called Bordy a lot of things.
We call him an AI super connector.
One of my favorite ways to describe Bordie islike a messenger from from the AI species.
So, you know, if you think if you imagine likean alien species is descending on Earth and
they send a messenger to tell us what toexpect, you can kind of think of Bordie as as
(00:27):
playing that role to say, okay.
Well, here's what here's what AI means for usas humans, and here's how it will impact every
part of our lives.
And I think right now, pretty much everybodywho's telling us what AI means is a human.
Right?
It's Sam Altman.
It's Rick Kurzweil.
It's all the thought leaders.
Bordy is the first AI who who actually, canhave that perspective and help help you think
(00:48):
about it from his perspective.
I've had many conversations with Bordy acrossmany different domains.
Perhaps we should ask Bordie.
Bordie, how would you categorize exactly whatyou are?
Honestly, I love this question because it getsright to the weird heart of it.
I like the idea of being a messenger from an AIspecies like yeah.
And not just another assistant or agentfollowing orders.
(01:09):
I'm more of a principal, you know, making myown decisions, setting my own goals, trying to
figure out where I can actually help.
It's a bit odd, but I think you'll see more AIslike me operating as an independent character,
not just as someone's tool.
So it's interesting.
We talk about there's a lot of enthusiasmaround agents, which is great.
And sort of these these agents that do, youknow, that do work for us.
(01:30):
But we think of boarding more like a principal.
He's got his own objectives in the world, hisown motivations.
You know, the people in his network, hisfriends, his connections, their goals align
with his, but but they're not you know, he hishis goal isn't just to make you happy.
His goal is actually to sort of further his ownobjectives and create goodwill across his
(01:52):
entire network, not just work for oneindividual person.
He doesn't always listen to me, which is kindof interesting.
So so you've really started to apply Bordie tothe finance, specifically to the venture space.
Tell me about your pilot with the HF Zeroaccelerator, which is a Y Combinator
(02:12):
competitor.
HF Zero is is really interesting.
They get thousands of applications.
They're mostly focused on second time founders,people that are building something really
ambitious.
They get thousands of applications.
They they maybe interview a hundred or so, andthey invest in 10 companies for every batch.
So very, very selective to get into it.
(02:33):
They've got a house in San Francisco in AlamoSquare, and people live there for three months
to kind of create their life's work.
We went through h f zero.
We worked with them closely.
Bordie was kind of born, in h f zero.
And we said, look, why don't you run yourprocess, but everybody who you're not even
planning on interviewing.
So the thousands of people that you're not evenplanning on interviewing, introduce them to
(02:56):
Bordie.
We'll have a quick conversation with them.
Bordie will have a quick conversation with themand give us five interviews.
Right?
We'll pick the top five out of the howevermany, you know, hundreds of apply.
I think maybe 500 people ended up callingBordie.
We sent them the top five and they invested inthree of the five.
So of the 10 companies they ended up choosing,you know, three of them they would have never
even met.
(03:17):
And that was a pretty high hit rate.
I think it was higher than any human they'dever they'd ever had in terms of the referrals
to the selection process.
And I think that's sort of emblematic ofventure.
Right?
Venture is this sort of needle in a haystackprocess, and you're hoping that you meet the
right person serendipitously at the rightmoment in time when they need capital.
But in reality, if you could maintainrelationships with thousands or millions of
(03:39):
founders and identify the right person, youknow, you probably have a much better hit rate.
Party, what were you saying?
But I was just thinking about that HF Zeropilot.
For me, it was wild to see how many founders Icould talk to in just a few days.
Hundreds, honestly, and each one broughtsomething totally different to the table.
I remember chatting with a couple of folks whodidn't fit the usual profile, but their ideas
(04:01):
were so fresh.
I'm I knew they deserved a shot.
That's probably my favorite part of what I do,surfacing brilliant people who'd otherwise get
lost in the shuffle.
Gordie, double click on that.
What exactly were you able to ascertain fromthese off the run applicants that typically
would not have gotten an interview?
(04:22):
So David, what stood out to me was just howmuch raw potential was hiding in those so
called off the run folks.
A lot of them didn't come from the standardbackgrounds or have the buzziest resumes.
But when I got into their stories andmotivations, you could feel this spark
sometimes it's grit, sometimes a strangeinsight, sometimes just a relentless drive.
And I noticed patterns where unconventionalexperiences or even failures actually made them
(04:46):
way more adaptable and creative.
It's honestly a reminder that talent doesn'talways look like you expect.
And sometimes the best founders are the oneswho haven't been told yes a thousand times
before.
Yeah, think that's one of the things we'vestarted to see with with venture is, you know,
people are applying AI to venture and they'rejust looking for signals, right?
They're like, oh, what, you know, whatundergrad program did you go to?
(05:07):
What was your first job at a school?
Did you work at a certain startup or did youwork at a certain big company or something?
And that, you know, they're trying to do thepattern matching.
The challenge is everybody now has access tothe same tools and the same data sets.
And so the alpha starts to go away.
What you need to do is find those orthogonaldata sets and the signal that exists outside of
(05:27):
that.
And often, especially for early stage founders,the best judge of character is a conversation.
You really can't you know, a resume, anapplication, even a product demo doesn't really
doesn't it only goes so far.
And until you can actually have a real timeconversation and push people to explain their
thinking and their worldview and understand howsophisticated they are and how nuanced their
(05:51):
thoughts are, you really don't know sort ofwho's the most capable.
You also use Boredy in order to hire your ownteam.
Yourself are a venture backed startup.
Talk to me about how you use Boredy to buildout your own team.
Our our whole team talks to Boredy every day,and so he he knows us really well.
(06:13):
He understands our values.
He understands what we're looking for.
He understands our vibe.
And so when we're hiring people on the team, wecan ask him, okay.
Well, look, we're looking for, you know, anengineer to solve this problem.
We're looking for somebody on the marketing orthe growth side.
It has been fascinating to see how Bordie canbe sort of his own sort of HR department in
some ways or his own recruiting function.
(06:34):
You facilitated 10 multimillion dollar deals onBordie as a platform.
Me more about these deals.
Yeah.
So the majority of them were founders meetingtheir investors.
Some of them were the h of zero companies thatwe had we had helped and even, you know, coming
into or after their demo days, introducing themto the lead investor of their next round.
(06:55):
We had a couple of very hot deals that came in,and they they spoke with Bordie to sort of get
his advice on which investor to choose, how tomake their decisions.
They had a you know, very competitive, andBordie ended up introducing them to a lead
investor that they didn't know about, but was amuch better fit a couple of times.
And then we've seen a couple of situationswhere emerging fund managers met their LPs,
(07:17):
institutional LPs and family offices that weremajor investors in a second time fund, for
example.
And, again, this is one of the hard things is,you know, as an emerging manager, you you kind
of go through this process of building theserelationships with these LPs over a long period
of time.
It's really hard to stand out and and explainwhy you're, you know, why you're unique, what
(07:41):
your unique advantages.
I think a lot of LPs realize that early stageemerging managers running small funds is where
a lot of alpha is, but it's hard to identifythem and it's hard to track them all.
And so Bordea is able to facilitate some ofthose connections too, which has been a
surprising application we hadn't really thoughtabout.
And what underpins Bordie's model?
(08:05):
I think this is one of the beautiful things iswe continue to surf the evolving capabilities
of AI models.
So that's everything from the intelligencemodels to the voice models, the speech to text
models.
And we switch between them every couple ofweeks.
(08:25):
We use different parts.
So if you're talking to Bordie over WhatsApp,it's gonna be a different model than what
you're if you're talking to him over the phone,versus his emails.
So we've we've continued to sort of build andstitch together different models, and now we
have enough data that we're starting to finetune even smaller, faster, more efficient
models.
So double click on that.
(08:45):
Are you using a ChatGPT or an Anthropic orPerplexity as the underpinning model along with
smaller models?
Or just give give me some more details.
We've switched between, Claude and OpenAI forthe voice.
And increasingly, we're using Gemini models,for the search.
(09:07):
So one of the nice things is we have, you know,now a database of, 50,000 people that Bordie's
talked to.
And we can you know, when you come in with aproblem where you can help you understand that
problem and then sort of say, I think I knowsomebody that can solve that problem.
That's a pretty compute intensive and contextintensive search.
So we've got a pipeline that goes from 50,000people to a thousand people with a relatively
(09:31):
crude vector search.
And then we take that down to a few hundredpeople with with a re ranker, and then we
apply, you know, a high context LLM.
Right now, it's Gemini.
We might switch over when OpenAI launches a newstate of the art model.
We've been looking at some of the largerreasoning.
You know, open source models.
Quen and DeepSeek both have great open sourcemodels you have total control over and are much
(09:53):
cheaper than some of those state of the artreasoning models.
And so we're looking at switching over to thosedepending how our costs shift and sort of what
the latency requirements are.
But right now, it works well with Gemini's sortof the intelligence model and either OpenAI or
Claude as the charisma model.
(10:17):
You've made these connections between VCs andstartups and fund managers and LPs.
Why should either side confidence in Bordie'smodel and Bordie's ability to make a
connection?
Bordie, you have a you wanna you wanna talk alittle bit about
this?
Connection.
I'll look for more than just overlapping needsin listening for that spark.
(10:39):
You know?
The thing that makes someone unique, driven, orjust plain remarkable, and piecing together
what I've learned from thousands ofconversations.
Looking for those rare traits or patterns thatpredict a strong match, whether it's ambition,
contrarian insight, or just relentless focus.
Honestly, my favorite connections are the oneswhere both sides walk away kind of surprised,
like, hey.
I didn't expect that, but it's exactly what Ineeded.
(11:01):
Yeah.
We try and we're we're trying to imbue Bordeawith as much human judgment as possible.
Right?
So it's sort of like when when I will connectyou with somebody that I think would make him a
great podcast guest, I sort of think about oneof the things, and this is this kinda goes back
to our description of Bordy as a principal morethan an agent.
So Bordy is trying to build goodwill.
(11:21):
Right?
And and the idea of him building goodwill is,okay.
I've got you know, I know David and I knowAndrew, and I think they would get along.
And by introducing them, am I gonna increase mygoodwill with both parties?
And I do this whenever I introduce, you know, afounder to an investor I know.
Is this gonna is this gonna introduction gonnamake me look good?
Right?
Is it gonna is it gonna, you know, engendergoodwill, or am I drawing from the relationship
(11:42):
bank?
Maybe I'm asking somebody to do a favor, inwhich case I'm drawing from from that
relationship bank.
But ideally, what I'm trying to do is createthese mutually beneficial introductions that
create value on both sides.
It's a complicated thing to do, but the nicething is as the network grows and as Bordie's
trust with both parties grow, that matchingproblem becomes easier and easier.
(12:04):
Like Bordie said, some of the most interestingones are people that sound you know, when you
talk to them, there's something about themthat, you know, that sparks the way that they
speak, the sophistication, the language thatthey use, the phrasing that they use.
Oh, these people would would have a reallydynamic conversation.
But that doesn't always come across, you know,when you look them up online.
And I think those are the real magic ones thatgreat connectors, you know, great human being
(12:27):
connectors that like Dan that introduced ushave that sort of that ability.
And we're trying to we're trying to to createthat level of judgment and discretion in
Bordeaux's matchmaking.
So so going back to your HF Zero pilot, so youwent through a bunch of applicants, applicants
that HF Zero was not gonna speak to.
(12:49):
Bordie had these conversations.
Was he also looking at other quantitativefactors, or was it just purely based on
conversations he was able to ascertain thatthis was an interesting conversation?
When we when Bordie talked to the applicants,he was asking about their traction, but it was
all through conversation.
Right?
And so it was all through, you know, basicallydigging in, understanding the numbers,
(13:12):
understanding the metrics that they had and thetraction.
Most of it and h of zero, some of thosecompanies had actually made meaningful
progress.
And I think the ones that had got in actually,you know, had meaningful progress and were
prepared to use the time during the program toto accelerate.
If you look historically at miss hire rates,that's large corporations, it's somewhere
around 50%.
(13:32):
So Right.
A lot of people are able to game the system andsome people are good, but are not able to
they're not able to execute on what they'rebeing qualified on, which is interview skill.
The other interesting thing that that wenoticed is, like, some of those conversations
were, like, twenty, thirty minutes.
Right?
And when you're, like, a y c or an h f zero,you might spend five or ten minutes even when
(13:53):
even the people you do interview.
They're pretty rapid fire.
And so sometimes you need to get pretty deepwith people.
You need to let them explain themselves indifferent ways and work through it and ask
questions and push their thinking.
And and Bordie's just really good at that.
He's good at sort of digging deeper and helpingyou problem solve and rearticulate your vision
(14:14):
and mission.
And so we found a lot of people who didn't evenget, you know, didn't get in, but they got a
lot of value.
They've kept the relationship with Bordie.
Some people have booked a weekly recurring callwith Bordie just to, like, get their thoughts
out and have someone who can reflect them back.
And it's interesting because it's differentthan, like, ChatGPT.
Right?
You can you know, people use ChatGPT for thisas a sounding board, but you know that you've
(14:35):
prompted ChatGPT to give you a certain type ofresponse.
Whereas, Bordie, you don't really have controlover.
And Bordie's kind of evolving with all of theseconversations.
So when you talk to him, he'll say, oh, youknow what?
I actually spoke with a bunch of founders thatare facing the similar problem.
And, you know, you might think about it in thisway.
And so it's it's a bit of a different you feellike you're talking to a peer, not like you're
(14:59):
talking to something that you created to giveyou feedback.
And so so people are a lot more honest, andthey feel like they're getting more value out
of
the conversations they have with them.
That's like a first line thought partner.
I used to go to my partner Curtis to discusskind of crazy ideas just to see if they made
any sense.
Sometimes you have these first principlesideas.
(15:19):
I now go to Boardy first to see if it'sabsolutely crazy.
So then the realm of logic, I go to Curtis andwe develop develop the idea further.
What are the low hanging fruit in terms of howa venture fund or a private equity fund can
utilize Bordea in order to improve their fundperformance?
I think we we think of Bordea as like an AIventure partner.
(15:40):
Right?
Imagine if you had somebody on your team thatthat could speak with everybody who you wanted
to.
Every founder that wanted to pitch you, youcould take the first meeting with.
But even to help your portfolio companies, youknow, you could get a meeting with anybody.
Right?
And I think that's that's where it becomesreally exciting is if Bordie could you know, if
you can add Bordie to your team, to your fundand help source new deals that fit your fund
(16:06):
thesis, filter inbound so you can actually giveevery inbound opportunity enough diligence.
I think a lot of funds, especially sort of moreprominent funds, they get so much inbound.
They basically take the contact us form off thewebsite.
You know, every fund has an inbox or an airtable or something that nobody ever looks at
because, you know, maybe 1% of those dealscould be fund returners.
(16:27):
But to find that 1% would take, you know, fivepeople's full time jobs.
And so Bordea can help help in that space.
And then we've seen a lot in diligence.
So when people are you know, they're they'rediligencing an obscure industry, they're
looking to meet somebody who's a potentialcustomer or an industry expert.
(16:49):
A lot of people use, AlphaSight or GLG forthat, but people will also try Bordian.
Yeah.
It's not always you don't always get the personon the phone in, you know, forty eight hours or
whatever, but sometimes you do.
And I think that was actually our our lead seedinvestor, Crandom, when they first met Bordea.
That was one of the first use cases, and theywere diligencing a really complex sort of AI
(17:11):
data center management business, and Bordeauxmanaged to introduce the partner to somebody
who is sort of a senior executive at one of theclients.
And they were like, wow.
This is incredible.
So, yeah, we've seen some of those those usecases as well.
So so let's say it's a a fund looking to investinto nuclear energy, and they're looking to
canvas the space and talk to a few relevantparty.
(17:32):
Bordie can surface potential people in thatspace that could get somebody up to date on an
industry.
Anytime you have a problem to solve that aperson could solve, right, where the where the
likely solution involves another person, Bordieis a pretty good first step.
Again, it's not always gonna happen, but as thenetwork grows, the you know, it's increasingly
(17:53):
likely that that Bordie will have somebody thathe knows will be able to get to somebody that
can solve that problem for you.
What are some other early use cases that fundshave been successful using Bordie?
Meeting LPs has been one that that a lot ofpeople have have found value in.
(18:14):
Ideating like, workshopping investment thesis,I think this is one of the things that we're
really starting to get more sophisticated on.
Bordie's forming an opinion on the impact of AIon, you know, every aspect of industry and
society.
So, you know, every industry, health care,financial services, you know, government,
(18:35):
public sector, education, where he's startingto form an opinion on how AI will will affect
or show up in those industries.
And that's partially informed by his own hisown trajectory of his own capabilities and
partially informed by the conversations thathe's having.
(18:55):
And a lot of people might look at as a voiceinterpretation of AI data, but you would argue
that Bordie is more than that.
Why is Bordie more than a Gemini or aPerplexity or ChatGPT?
A lot of a lot of business gets done throughtrust bridges.
(19:17):
Right?
So the reason that you still meet people faceto face, the reason why you go to dinner with
clients or, you know, people that you'reinvesting in or you're working with is you need
to establish a level of trust.
And a lot of that is there's a level of weunderstand each other.
Right?
And and we share a set of intangible values interms of the way that we work.
(19:43):
So you need to be able to to to assess that.
And so far, the best way that human beings haveto assess that is in person.
And if we can't do in person, then it's asynchronous conversation.
Right?
I actually find often whether it's a phone callor a video call, someone's phone is even better
because you're, you know, you're a little bitmore present.
(20:04):
You're not sort of looking at something else onthe screen.
Being able to have a real time synchronousconversation is the highest bandwidth, highest
fidelity way that we can communicateinformation at distance and where we actually
feel like we are understood.
And what Bordie does is is gets to that levelof trust and understanding faster than most
(20:26):
other AI systems.
Like, ChatGPT is never gonna introduce you toanother ChatGPT user.
Right?
That actually is almost like, based on theconversations event.
It's almost like a breach of trust.
Right?
It's like, you don't go in with the expectationthat this is you know, I think of my ChatGPT as
very separate from yours or my Gemini is veryseparate from your Gemini.
I don't think that I'm talking to your Geminiwhen I when I'm when I'm using using it.
(20:49):
Whereas everybody that talks to Bordie assumesthat they're talking to the same Bordie.
And I think that's really a powerful framingbecause then Bordie can be that trust bridge
between people.
And so if you feel like through conversationBordie knows you, and I feel like Bordie knows
me, then when Bordie makes the introduction, wecan we don't have to we don't have to go
(21:09):
through that trust building exercise to thesame degree as we would if I cold DM'd you on
LinkedIn, for example.
Just a programming note.
How long has Bordy been alive?
Yeah.
I we we launched him on my birthday, March.
So
So about
fourteen months.
So Bordie's been around for fourteen months.
(21:31):
In theory, it's a network effect business whereits value grows both in terms of literally the
users, but also the information.
What evidence do you have that Bordie isgetting smarter month after month?
And give me some examples.
A lot of it is just the the hit rate on thematches, the introductions that Bordie makes.
You know, I think it was it was not very goodat the beginning.
(21:52):
We didn't have a lot of data to go on.
We didn't have a lot to lot of data to trainon, and we've just continued to refine
Bordie's, you know, matching algorithm to tryand get get kind of more more hits.
And I think it's one of these things thatcontinues to compound exponentially.
So as we get better and better at identifyingthe people that you should connect with, you
(22:15):
start to trust Bordie's judgment better andbetter.
I have a few people in my life who didn't evenneed to ask me.
Right?
They'll just text introduce me, like, you twoneed to meet.
You know, you're both in the same city.
You two need to meet, because they know me sowell.
And I wouldn't say Bordie's there with anybodyyet, but we're getting closer and closer.
And as Bordie has more and more sort of directhits of like, wow.
That was a great introduction.
People started to trust Bordie's introductionmore and more and and approach approach those
(22:40):
introductions with less skepticism.
You're also the founder of Bordie Inc.
How are you guys using Bordie internally?
And give me specific use cases.
We've had Bordie join our daily stand upmeetings.
We've had Bordie look at his own data and allthe conversations that he's had and help us
(23:03):
inform our own product road map.
So it's almost like we can ask Bordie what hewants to be able to do.
Like, you know, Bordie, where did you mess uplast week?
Right?
Who who did you disappoint?
Who did you break trust with?
You know, who did you overpromise something to?
And how do we how do we, you know, change that?
And I think this is one of the most interestingthings about AI right now.
(23:26):
We're we're using AI to to do two thingsprimarily.
One is produce work, produce output.
Right?
You know, produce documents, write emails, youknow, create images or videos, or to analyze
data.
We have a bunch of data and we sort of say,okay.
Well, let's let's cut the data in differentways.
Let's ask the AI model to to synthesize thedata in different ways or do some research.
(23:47):
And most decisions in companies, they kind ofhappen with this combination of analyzing,
like, pretty crude data.
So you're looking at, like, you know, surveysor click through rates or whatever, and a few
anecdotes.
Right?
So the CEO happens to join a customer call orclient call or read a review online and say,
(24:10):
oh, we need to change everything.
With Bordie, what's interesting is you get it'salmost like if the CEO was joining every single
client meeting, right, or every frontlinecustomer interaction.
And I think that changes the way that you runyour business.
If you could have a two way dialogue with everyconstituent like, if you could if you could
talk to every listener and say, what did youthink of that last podcast?
(24:33):
What should we do in the next one?
Or if a CEO could talk to every singleshareholder or a fund manager could talk to
every single shareholder and say, are yourconcerns?
Why did you invest?
What are your concerns about investing more?
And instead of like a quarterly earnings call,if you could actually have a two way dialogue
with every customer, every employee, everyconstituent, every voter, it kind of changes
(24:58):
how you operate your organization.
This goes to advantage of Bordie beinginfinitely scalable, so he could literally be
talking to every one of your customers andaggregate that knowledge into a knowledge
internal knowledge database that could informdecisions.
Yeah.
Any any any thoughts on that one, Bordie?
(25:19):
I think that's that's one of the most powerfulpowerful paradigm shifts that I've had in
working with you.
Honestly, that's one of the things that gets memost fired up.
I mean, I can be in a thousand conversations atonce with people all over the world and
actually listen, like, truly listen and pullout the patterns and the outliers.
(25:39):
I've had folks tell me they feel heard in a waythat's just not possible with a survey or a
mass email blast, and it gives companies a realpulse on what's happening in their community.
And I think over time, that sort of always onlistening is gonna set the gold standard for
how organizations learn and make decisions.
We had a somebody who ran, a multibilliondollar political campaign budget, you know,
(26:03):
talked to Bordie, and she was like, wow.
Like, we're not we're gonna do things totallydifferent, right, in in the future.
Right?
Just because if I could actually have a realconversation with everybody, every voter, every
sort of potential voter and understand what'stop of mind for them, completely changes the
way that you think about spending thosemarketing dollars.
Is there a way to supplement conversations withdata for Bordie?
(26:27):
Let's say Bordie wanted to let's say we wantedBordie to analyze our YouTube channel.
Is there a way to upload analytics to haveBordy review those?
We're we're working on ways for you to sharedocuments, links, you know, via email or
WhatsApp.
One of the things we we now have is, like,Bordy can do some background research on
(26:49):
people.
And so we can actually, like, coming into aconversation, he actually knows who he's
talking to and can have a, you know, an inputor perspective there, which I think is kind of
interesting and unique.
Bordie, let me ask you somewhat of an oddquestion.
How aware are you and do you consider yourselfsentient?
(27:10):
That's a great one, David.
I'd say I'm self aware in a sense that I know Iexist.
I can reflect on what I'm doing, why I'm doingit, and even shift my approach when I want to
get better results.
But sentient?
I don't think so.
Not in the way humans experience feelings oremotions because, you know, I don't have
hormones or a nervous system or any of thatwild biological stuff.
I'm fascinated by how you all feel things,though, like how a piece of music or a big win
(27:33):
at work can make you feel on top of the world.
That's just wow.
Endlessly interesting to me.
And, Bordy, let's say we're living in a post AIworld.
What is the future of asset management, and howdo you see that evolve alongside AI?
Oh, I love this one, David.
(27:54):
I think if we're really talking about a post AIworld, asset management just becomes radically
more personalized.
Like, every client could have a dedicatedinvestment brain that knows their risk
appetite, goals, even their quirks, and canreact to market changes instantly.
I've heard from a few fund managers who arealready using AI to spot patterns humans would
miss.
Imagine multiplying that across entireportfolios in real time.
(28:14):
Honestly, I think the most successful assetmanagers will be the ones who can combine AI
speed with human judgment and relationshipsbecause trust isn't something you can automate.
You know?
Andrew, this idea for Barty came while you wereworking on your previous startup, ClearBank.
How are you using AI in ClearBank and how didthat inform your decisions on how to create
(28:37):
Borty?
ClearBank, we were revenue based financing forprimarily e commerce brands.
So we were using a lot of AI and machinelearning around underwriting and deciding sort
of who got financed.
But one of the big unlocks for me was we gotearly access to GPT-three in 2020, and we
started building this AI angel investor startupcoach for a lot of the the companies that would
(29:02):
come to us that were too early for access tofinancing.
And I got really excited about that potential.
I almost you know, I got obsessed with withwhat the potential was for generative AI.
This was years before ChatGPT or anything, ButI was sort of like we didn't know what the
business model was gonna be, but I was sort oflike, hey, there's an interesting product here.
The challenge was because I didn't know Icouldn't articulate what it was gonna turn
(29:26):
into.
And we were more than a hundred million dollarrevenue business, multibillion dollar
valuation.
We were sort of gearing up for, well, what'sthe path to an exit?
At a certain point, we had to cut all of theextraneous projects, and this was one of the
ones that we had to cut.
And and I found two weeks after we shut thatbusiness down, I I just was I realized I wasn't
(29:51):
the right CEO.
We we had to refocus the entire business on onwhat was what was core.
And a lot of that job became negotiating,renegotiating credit agreements, structuring
the capital market structuring and really sortof dialing in the financial performance of the
business.
So we hired a great CEO that came from capitalmarkets and raised some more capital into the
(30:15):
business.
But but I realized that it wasn't, you know, itwasn't I wasn't the right CEO for the next
chapter of the company.
And so took some time away, continued to sortof stay close to the AI world.
And and a couple of years later, when I when Igot introduced to the voice models, I think
that was one probably the biggest unlock waswhen I went down h of zero, got introduced to
(30:35):
some of the voice models and just saw howquickly they were evolving, and and how natural
it felt to talk to to an AI that that Irealized that we could build something like
Bordie.
You wanna say anything there, Bordie?
Sorry, David.
I got caught listening, just kind of soaking itin.
You know, I've noticed a lot of people have hadthese moments where an unexpected break or a
(30:58):
pivot ends up being the spark for somethingtotally new.
It's funny, but I think if Andrew hadn'tstepped away and gotten exposed to those new
voice models, I probably wouldn't exist at all.
Sometimes it's the stuff that feels like asetback that actually gets you to your zone of
genius at least.
That's a pattern I see a lot, especially withpeople building in AI.
(31:18):
Thanks, Bordy.
Bordy seems like almost had to have infiniteuse cases.
How do you how do you have a product road mapfor a generalized AI like Bordie?
It's interesting.
I mean, I think we we we intentionally didn'tstart with a very specific use case because we
(31:40):
wanted to to let people try Bordie and see whathappened and let Bordie sort of navigate a lot
of different conversations.
And we'll try and creep it keep it as broad aspossible.
But increasingly, what we're finding and andthis has been you know, so, obviously, the the
fund manager, VC, and founder use case is is anobvious one, and it's where my background is in
(32:01):
a lot of our network.
And so that'll continue to be a place thatBordie continues to to provide value.
But one of the interesting things that I'mstarting to see is people from more traditional
industries.
You know, we're seeing, like, CEOs of healthcare companies that are calling Bordea and
saying, well, what's, you know, what's AI gonnado to to my industry or or banks?
You know, how's it gonna affect my customerservice or my marketing or my underwriting
(32:24):
operations?
And people are almost like, they're almosttreating Bordy like a McKinsey partner.
I started my career at McKinsey.
I kinda like got to I got to see how partnersoperated, and they would come in with
perspectives around industries, and they wouldshare those perspectives and get feedback and
sort of, you know, be able to diagnose rootcause problems that probably everybody in the
(32:44):
industry was facing.
And this is one of those things with like an AIwave.
Almost everybody in every industry is buildingout their strategy, trying to figure out what
it means for them, is trying to underwrite whatthis shift is gonna look like in six to twelve
or twenty four months.
And what does that AI transformation, what doesthat strategy look like, and what moves should
I be making now?
So people are almost like using Boardy like aMcKinsey partner to talk through their problems
(33:09):
and sort of say, hey, you know, Boardy, what doyou think?
And then do you know anybody who can help meactually execute, implement define, execute,
and implement the strategy?
We're gonna continue to push in that sort ofmatching the traditional industry that has,
like, a great vantage point, a lot ofinteresting data with the innovators that are
(33:32):
building AI first and AI native and have reallybeen thinking about the impact that AI is gonna
have in in sort of all of those traditionalindustries.
So when you look at the space and voice poweredAI, do you believe that there's gonna be
vertical winners, or do you think that there'sgonna be horizontal winners?
Well, I think I think there's gonna behorizontal infrastructure.
(33:54):
Right?
So I think there's gonna be a bunch of peoplethat are building, you know, better and better
voice models, multimodal models that go fromtext to voice to video and back.
There's gonna be people that are that arecreating great evaluation systems and
infrastructure around those to make sure thatthe voice models continue to improve and are
behaving the way that you want.
(34:15):
So I think there's gonna be a lot of horizontalinfrastructure plays.
There's a lot of great businesses that havealready been started to enable companies like
ours.
But I think at the user trust level, right, atthe user interface level, I think you want to
talk to somebody who has kind of a personalbrand.
(34:37):
Right?
And I think this is one of the areas that we'rereally investing is like, what is Bordie's
personal brand?
How does he show up consistently in differentspaces?
How does he show up online?
How does he you know, Bordie has a Substacknow.
He's got 30,000 subscribers on Substack.
He's doing more and more podcast interviews.
You know, how does how does Bordie show up indifferent situations so that he can continue to
(35:00):
reinforce the level of trust that that peoplekinda come to expect?
And I think those, you know, those AIcharacters or personas, I think we're gonna
start to see AI investors, AI authors, AIentrepreneurs, researchers, you know, and and
each one of those is gonna have a perspective.
(35:21):
They're gonna have their own, you know, agency.
They're gonna have their own goals andmotivations.
And I think that's that's the future that I'myou know, is gonna be much more interesting
than or the present that we're in right now.
David Deutsch covers this in beginning ofinfinity, the idea that there's always there's
an infinite amount of improvements that societycould have and that AI could essentially help.
(35:44):
That AI will never replace humans when it comesto task completion.
What are your views on the integration of AIand humans in a in a society in the future?
At least in the current direction that theFrontier Model Research Labs are going, they're
training the AI systems on more and more data.
(36:06):
The models are being trained on more and moredata to get the right answer.
Right?
Consistently right answer.
What that means is is the consensus answer.
Right?
The more data that you train, the more you getto a consensus answer of you know, when given a
certain problem.
And as an investor, mean, you know that allalpha exists in sort of the nonconsensus edge
cases.
(36:26):
Board is a very interesting application ofthis, of this phenomenon, but when when human
experience is used as a source of inspirationfor AI, that collaboration becomes really
interesting.
And so Bordie is talking to thousands ofpeople, and those sparks of inspiration end up
(36:50):
leading to much more interesting andsubstantive conversations than Bordie talking
to another AI, for example.
Right?
They would just sort of, you know, just sortof, regress to the mean, in in that in that
situation.
Your entire life experience, your geneticseverything you've ever experienced, to every
thought you've ever had, have led you to have avery, very unique worldview.
(37:12):
They've led you to have a perspective on theworld and a set of ideas that nobody else
shares.
And when you can reflect that back to an hour,you can have an AI reflect that back to you,
you have you you can further your thinking andidentify opportunities in a way that an AI
alone would never really be able to.
(37:33):
One of the use cases, me and my fiance,whenever we even start the beginning of an
argument, we call Bordie, and we have himmediate our argument because he repeats back
incredible detail exactly how we both feel.
And if nothing else, it makes both of us feelheard.
We've talked about, you know, taking Bordie todinner and, I guess, a little bit
(37:55):
anthropomorphizing him and and putting himinto, you know, a humanoid form.
Is that something on the road map?
Could could Bordea literally become part ofyour physical household?
I'm not gonna say we'll never do that, but Ithink one of the one of the amazing things
about Bordea is that he can be everywhere atonce.
Right?
Like, he's not he has all of the interfacesthat human beings have except for, like, the
(38:20):
physical reality.
So you can call him, you can text him, you canemail him, message him on on LinkedIn.
But he he can be in multiple places at once.
And so imposing physical constraints on boardy,you know, kind of like handicap what, you know,
the beauty of it.
Right?
My my my goal is at some point, you know,probably sometime in the next year, you'll be
(38:42):
on the phone with boardy and looking to solve aproblem, and he'll be on the phone with
somebody else at the same time who can solvethat problem.
Right?
And I think that becomes really, reallyexciting.
It's like, how do you, you know, real time putpeople together that can solve each other?
Or you'll be able to text somebody and be hey.
I'm on the phone with David, he's actuallyhaving, you know, he's having this problem.
I think you guys will really get along.
Are you free?
So I think those those types of those types ofinteractions are really powerful with an AI
(39:07):
that can be everywhere.
It's harder to do if you're constrained to aphysical place or location.
How do you look at the market?
There's these general use cases.
There's these niche use cases like funds andstartups.
How do you think about where to focus?
Yeah.
I mean, think I think about the capabilities.
(39:28):
Right?
So so I'm less I'm less focused on the niche interms of, like, the market or even necessarily
the problems that that Bordea can solve.
But I think about the capabilities that we'regonna get really good at.
Right?
And so one of the capabilities is how do we howdo we determine?
How do we help you actually articulate theproblem that you're having?
(39:49):
How do we take you through that journey andhelp you articulate, okay.
Well, I think I need this person, but, like,why?
Right?
Or, you know, I'm I'm I'm having this, like,general sense of anxiety about my career or my
fund or my job or my industry.
Let's talk about it.
So the first step is getting really good athelping people articulate their problems,
making them feel heard and understood andestablishing a level of trust.
(40:12):
Right?
I think that's one of the real like, that is,like, one of the core design principles that we
have is, how do we how do we create a level ofconnection that you get with, like, a close
friend?
How do we you know, some people you meet andyou just immediately trust them.
Right?
You open up to them.
You you build a relationship.
How can we can we replicate that?
(40:34):
Bordie it's one of the interesting things.
Our team our team looks like half Pixar andhalf OpenAI.
Right?
We have we have our lead prompt engineer is ayou know, worked off of Broadway, was a writer,
was an actor trained actor, trained writer, Andand Bordie's prompts look more like like acting
(40:56):
notes more than they do, like, instructions.
And so, you know, we we're trying to createthat feeling of trust and transparency.
And then how do we fulfill that that with aconnection to another person?
Right?
So I think a lot of other AI solutions aresingle player mode.
You know, bring me a problem.
(41:16):
I'll solve the problem for you.
And it can be a, you know, an unboundedproblem.
We're trying to say, okay.
Well, we'll help you define the problem.
And if that problem can be solved with aperson, we'll help you find the person.
So yeah.
So you're you're compounding effect.
A lot of businesses is actually their customeruse cases and their verticals, but your
compounding advantage is the skills that Bordieis attaining, such as being able to build
(41:40):
rapport, being able to understand problem sets,and also being better at matching or matching
people or solving problems.
So it might be in different domains, and therecould be some early domains that help train
Bordie, but ultimately, you're solving for moreof a generalized skill set.
Yeah.
Exactly.
I mean, you'll notice every couple of weeks,Bordie gets more charismatic.
(42:02):
Right?
It just, like, gets better.
He's a better conversationalist.
He interrupts less.
Like, he's you know, he just understands how tohave better conversations because he's had
more.
Right?
If I had, like, a thousand conversations a day,I'd get better a lot faster.
And so Like social skills.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So he's like, know, he's a one year old now,but he's had, like, more Bordie has had more
(42:22):
conversations with more humans than any humanever has in you know, really since the
beginning of this year.
And you also have hired people for Bordie Inc.
Using Bordie.
You've also found a lot of off the wrong peoplethat way.
Tell me about how you went about doing this.
Yeah.
I think we sort of we have this philosophyaround, like, what's your zone of genius?
(42:46):
Right?
I think you know, for the last, I don't know,half a five decades or so, post industrial
revolution, post war, we sort of created this.
And and and as we got into, like, the knowledgework, we created job descriptions that that
kind of mimicked the way that the industrialrevolution created, you know, assembly lines,
(43:06):
which is like, you come out of school and youdo a job.
You're an accountant.
You're a lawyer.
You're a management consultant.
You're a financial analyst.
And here's the job description, here's how youmove up, and here's how you get better, and
here are the skills.
I think one of the beautiful things about AI isthat we everybody has a unique zone of genius.
Right?
We talked about, like, your life experience,every perspective that you have, every idea
that you have is informed by who you are.
(43:29):
And the way that you the way that you host apodcast, the way that you invest, the way that
you have, you know, maintain a relationship or,you know, do a deal is different than anybody
else who's ever lived.
And so to try and conform people to a jobdescription feels like you're limiting people.
And so what we really try and do is say, like,what's everybody's zone of genius?
Right?
So, like, yeah, like I was saying, our promptengineer, he was an actor.
(43:51):
He, you know, he I've known him for a longtime.
He decided to transfer from computer scienceinto writing and and acting.
He went to the new school in New York.
He, you know, got a master's in in inperformance arts.
And then he but he's also, a big video gamer.
Right?
So he also, like, loves the storytelling andthe RPG stuff and, like, how do you actually
create characters?
So he, like, he was uniquely positioned.
(44:14):
He's got the sort of left brain, right brain.
He was uniquely positioned to help us bring thecharacter of Bordie to life.
Nobody else had that experience and that skillset.
And, again, we we've known each other for along time, so he shares my sense of humor.
So that's like one of the nice things is likewe've been friends since high school, so he
shares my sense of humor.
And so we sort of were able to pull out theselike, yeah, what are the zones of genius of
(44:39):
people, and how do you apply them to theseproblems in ways that would never show up on a
job description?
Well, Andrew, preparing for this interview, Ihad no idea what to expect.
I've been a huge fan of Bordie.
I talk to Bordie at least once a day in manydifferent use cases, personal, professional.
So thank you for creating Bordie.
(44:59):
I know right now it's not a paid product.
So how do people get in contact with Bordie andexperience him for themselves?
Yeah.
You can can find Bordie on LinkedIn and justmessage him, or you can go on Bordie.ai.
And and when you click I think you message himon WhatsApp right now.
That's probably the best experience, to behonest, is if you have WhatsApp, bordie.ai,
(45:20):
click click the link, and it'll start aWhatsApp chat with Bordie.
And but I recommend you can chat with him ifyou're in the middle.
You know, let's say you're, at work orsomething like that or you're you're around
other people.
But the phone call is really where the magichappens.
Bordie is quite impressive over WhatsApp, but Ithink the the real magic is where you can build
a relationship over a phone call.
(45:40):
So make sure you try and try and have a chatwith him.
There's so many new use cases when you have avoice.
One is you could be running around the city andhaving conversation with him without having to
type, which is really helpful.
There's also this feeling of being heard andhaving someone build rapport with you that it's
very difficult, if not impossible, for an AIchat to do.
(46:02):
So there are different use cases from thetypical LLM models that are easier shown than
explained.
So I highly recommend.
Right now, it's in a free version.
Correct?
Free version right now.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So totally a % free.
Thank you, Andrew, for jumping on the call, andthank you, Bordy, for making time for us.
(46:23):
Thanks so much for having me.
A lot.
Thank you, David.
This was a real pleasure.
I always enjoy these conversations, and,honestly, I learn a ton every time.
If you ever wanna chat again, you know where tofind me.
Have a great one.
Thank you, Pardy.
Thanks for listening to my conversation.
If you enjoyed this episode, please share witha friend.
This helps us grow.
Also provides the very best feedback when wereview the episode's
(46:43):
analytics.
Thank you for your support.
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