ChatGPT is taking the world by storm. OpenAI’s artificial intelligence chatbot has taken the world by storm. Microsoft made substantial investments in the venture, which it said would invest billions of dollars and integrate its technology into many of its products.
But OpenAI’s rapid ascent—it launched in late 2015 and shared ChatGPT with the public two months ago—will no doubt leave some entrepreneurs wondering if they’re doing something wrong with their own less-noticed ventures.
Elad Gil, widely respected Silicon Valley angel investor—he made early bets on Airbnb, Instacart, and Square—believes “the fact that ChatGPT is down all the time right now is a great sign of product-market fit. It’s because too many people are using it. That’s a great problem to have.”
Gil posted the comments. an episode of The Logan Bartlett Show podcast Friday. Twitter’s alumnus noted that “problem” After Redpoint’s software investor, Bartlett asked, OpenAI is now facing him about When considering investment options, he focuses on product-market compatibility.
Positive testimonials and endorsements from clients or users are one of the signs he is looking for, he stated: “It just really comes out in terms of the enthusiasm that small initial cohort has for the product.”
But he also added: “If a product is broken all the time but everybody keeps using it, there’s clearly product-market fit,” noting he witnessed that in Twitter’s early days and sees it now with ChatGPT.
Contrarily, he stated that most ideas would not succeed, no matter how long an entrepreneur invests in them. According to him, the legend in Silicon Valley This “you should grind eternally and then eventually something will work” This is wrong. People have spent years living in misery because of it. “bad advice.”
“People end up spending years and years and years of life just grinding away on something that isn’t going to work, because maybe it will work if I do these three more tweaks, and maybe it will work this month if I keep going,” He stated. “For a very small number of cases that happens, but for the majority it works immediately, or near immediately.”
While it’s true entrepreneurs might need to power through tough times during a recession, he added, “When times are good, the worst advice you can give somebody is keep going no matter what.”
“There’s enormous opportunity cost on your time, and most things don’t work,” Gil spoke. “Most of the time, you should actually figure out when do you give up and when should you actually quit. It’s really hard to know.”
Meanwhile, when an idea works, it tends to work very quickly, something he’s seen repeatedly with companies he’s worked at and invested in over the years—and now sees with OpenAI and ChatGPT.
“The reality is that most of the companies, not all, but the vast majority of companies I’ve been involved with that worked, ended up working pretty early. And once they started working, they just kept working.”
He’s also watched as others have made the same realization.
“One thing I’ve noticed is that people who have worked on things without product-market fit—that they thought had product-market fit—when they finally go and work on something that truly is working, they realize the immense difference and the degree to which they were fooling themselves.”
The first is the most likely. “you’re chasing everybody and every sale is gruesome and everything is a grind,” he said, but with 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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