ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. OpenAI’s AI chatbot captured imaginations around the world and attracted massive investment from them Microsoftthat said this month It plans to pour billions into the project and integrate its technology into a wide range of its products.
But The rapid rise of OpenAI– It was launched in late 2015 and ChatGPT shared it with the public a couple of months ago – no doubt some entrepreneurs are wondering if they are doing something wrong with their projects that no one noticed.
Elad Gil, a widely respected angel investor in Silicon Valley — made early bets on it AirbnbInstacart, and Square – think, “The fact that ChatGPT is down all the time right now is a great sign of the product’s market fit. It’s because so many people are using it. That’s a big deal.”
Jill made comments on episode of the The Logan Bartlett Show Friday podcast. alum The Google And Twitter He pointed to the “problem” OpenAI faces after asking Bartlett, a software investor at Redpoint, how he thinks about product-market fit when considering investments.
He said one of the signs he looks for is positive testimonials from customers and users: “It really comes in terms of the enthusiasm that the initial small batch has for the product.”
But he also added, “If a product breaks all the time but everyone keeps using it, there’s clearly a product-to-market fit,” noting that he saw that in the early days of Twitter and now sees it with ChatGPT.
On the flip side, he said, many ideas simply won’t take off, no matter how much time an entrepreneur puts into it. He said that the tradition in Silicon Valley that “you have to grind forever and then eventually something will work out” is wrong, noting that people wasted years of their lives on such “bad advice”.
“People end up spending years and years and years of life walking away from something that won’t work, because maybe it will work if you make those three other tweaks, and maybe it will work this month if you keep working,” he said. “For a very small number of cases it does happen, but for the majority it works right away, or soon immediately.”
While true entrepreneurs may need power through tough times during a recession, he added, “When times are good, the worst advice you can give someone is to keep going no matter what.”
“There’s a huge opportunity cost to your time, and most things don’t work,” Gill said. “Most of the time, you should actually know when to give up and when you should actually quit. It’s really hard to know.”
Meanwhile, when an idea works, it tends to run very quickly, something he’s seen time and time again with companies he’s worked in and invested in over the years – and he’s seeing it now with OpenAI and ChatGPT.
“The reality is that most companies, not all, but the vast majority of companies that I’ve been involved with have worked in, end up in business early. And once they’re in business, they’re in business.”
He also watched as others achieved the same realization.
“One of the things I’ve noticed is that people who’ve worked on things that don’t fit product-to-market—that they thought were product-market fit—when they finally go and work on something that really works, they realize the huge difference and that they’ve been fooling themselves.”
In the former case, it’s, “You’re chasing everyone and every sale is horrible and everything’s crunched,” but in the latter, it’s a case of, “Hey, people keep calling me.” And so it’s this transition, and until that happens, you don’t realize what that really feels like.”
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