AI Reshapes the Product Development Cycle

Machine-generated transcript from the episode video, cleaned for punctuation and names. Speaker labels are not included.

[0:05] Hey there, it's your host Rick Koleta and thanks for tuning in to the GTM Vault Podcast. Today we have a very special guest, Mr. Mike Soylu, who will be talking about Adaptive Computer, his new company. So if you're interested in learning how AI is transforming the way we build digital products and the profound implication for product development and marketing, this podcast is for you. Mike shares his perspectives on the past decade's changes, the current AI landscape, and what the future holds as AI becomes mainstream. Mike, thanks so much for being here. Yeah, it's great to be here, Rick. Thank you for having me on the CL. I'm super excited to talk to you about both AI and also GTM strategy and marketing, all things growth. Yeah, we go way back and I just love talking about these things, and hopefully we can create some interesting

[1:09] content for people, to inspire people. So looking forward to it. Yeah, of course. Mike, how have you seen the landscape change over the past decade? Remember you were running Pisano, the marketing for Pisano. Maybe if you can talk to us a little bit about the changes that you're observing. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I started Pisano back in 2013 with three other co-founders, and Pisano is a customer experience management platform. We provide cloud software for primarily enterprise customers like banks and insurance companies, large chains of supermarkets and things like that. And it's a very traditional kind of cloud software. Back then, was that 10 years ago? Back then cloud was super new. Not having to own servers was super new and super

[2:13] exciting, and also just the web being more accessible through mobile and just networking. So we were kind of riding that wave and it was really an exciting time to make digital products. And now we have a similar kind of wave, similar to the cloud revolution, let's call it, with AI, which is just amazing. And it just unlocks a bunch of different kinds of opportunities and possibilities to do with digital stuff. So it is very similar in very different ways. Yeah, every decade or so these major leaps in technology come about that chose totally change the way we operate, right? And it seems like AI is one of those. Yeah. And specifically your new company, Adaptive Computer, I believe is working on creating a new interface and the new

[3:17] operational way of going about building apps, right? Can you talk to us a little bit about Adaptive Computer and what you guys are building? Yeah, yeah. So I guess the idea behind Adaptive Computer is the idea that basically today everything is software. Everything runs on software. So you have a factory somewhere, it runs on software. You have a car that runs on software. So software is this thing that is basically the base layer of our daily lives everywhere. So we think AI can do a lot here to make software both more accessible, cheaper, and just kind of, we can open up the world of software to more and more people using AI. So I would say the main idea behind, main belief behind the company is the importance of software. And that's, I would say, the base layer. On top of that, we

[4:20] we're imagining a world where computers, the main thing when we think software is computers and phones, right? For at least these products, what would a world where these products can adapt to you look like? So imagine a fitness tracking app you love to use, but there's this one little thing about the app that you wish was slightly different, or you wish there was some sort of different feature, or it had some sharing features or things like that. Currently, because software is modelistic and it's just kind of set in stone when you're using it, you don't really have that opportunity that much. We're kind of thinking how can we make that a reality using AI. Otherwise you would have to, traditionally, you would have to have a team, you would have to have a bunch of money, you would have to know a bunch of people, and then you'd have to get them to do those changes for you. But today with AI, we can kind of, it seems like we can actually

[5:25] change that. So that's, I would say, the higher level of the idea behind Adaptive Computer. Yeah, so that's basically it. And we just want to create a full stack platform where people can build apps and share apps, remix apps, and just really democratize and open up that world to everyday people. And yeah, we're pretty early on in the journey. We started the company earlier this year, still in 2024, so we're making good progress. I've had a chance to play around with your MVP and it totally blew me away. It's just a new way of doing things. I mean, prompt engineering is becoming the way to build the app. What are your thoughts on this shift in building apps, and at what rate do you think it will gain mainstream adoption?

[6:28] Yeah, I think it's one of the most interesting things about, I would say, the AI, let's call it movement or trend. It's been really pasted, I feel like. I didn't know a single thing about LLMs two or three years ago, and now everybody's working on these. So I think it's been crazy adoption. You can just look at some of the numbers from companies like OpenAI. I think currently the last number I saw was upwards of 90% of Fortune 500 is on OpenAI ChatGPT or their API. So I think it's been wild. The adoption has been wild. It doesn't seem like it's going to slow down. And when this adoption starts to happen like this, of course, for products, for product development, for marketing, you're just going to see it really being incorporated in all those parts. It's

[7:31] pretty exciting. You lived in Singapore, you lived in Turkey. Can you talk to us about the global adoption compared to, say, US adoption? Do you think it takes longer for certain technologies to gain adoption in some countries, and what factors do you see influencing this rate of adoption? Yeah, certainly. Usually Silicon Valley is where it starts and everybody kind of follows suit. But I think the cool thing about AI, of course, currently we're still early on, so you don't see massive adoption in countries that are not so developed. But I think that's going to change pretty quickly, because the fundamental model works pretty well, because it's basically energy based. AI, as everybody knows, uses a lot of energy, electricity, to run. And usually what we see

[8:34] in developing countries, energy prices are very kind of paired with people's incomes and GDP. So I think it's not going to be as difficult as it used to be for other technologies like mobile phones to make this a worldwide adopted thing. So I think it's going to get pretty popular everywhere. And I think it's going to be really important that it spends through developing countries, because these countries are the ones that will gain the most benefit from this. Because language barriers get removed, skill gaps get closed. It's a really transformational piece of technology for people that actually really need it. So I think it's good. Some people are afraid that AI will take their jobs, and then another perspective is it'll enable people to upskill. What's your perspective on that? Yeah, I think it's

[9:38] it's going to be a bit of both. You will have certain types of jobs being less and less sought after, I would say, just because it's similar to every piece of technology that replaces some jobs but creates more. I think it'll be similar to that. It's hard to tell which exact jobs those will be and what they will look like. I think there's definitely going to be a number of skills that will be replaced by artificial intelligence, but I think that's going to be tiny in comparison to the expansion of the pie. So similar with, the classic example is YouTube, right? No one thought that there would be YouTubers 10 years ago or 20 years ago, but now MrBeast is like a billion company. So there's going to be a lot of the expansion of the pie there. And just even if you circle back to software

[10:42] development, what just came out of new software being created is going to be such a valuable driver, like a huge productivity driver, that I think it's going to be like a hockey stick growth. I mean, it is already a hockey stick growth when you compare to the early 1900s, but I think we're just going up on that trajectory. I tend to look into history and see what happened before, when cars were invented, when refrigerators were invented. All those examples are very similar, in my opinion. In Silicon Valley we talk about 10x engineers. Lately I've been hearing that AI will create a new wave of 100x engineers. What is your perspective on that? I agree, I agree. I think it's not only 100x engineers, but I think it will make 10x or 100x engineers for non-technical people, which is, I think,

[11:46] the big unlock there. I think it really makes it easier, because I would say one big issue with software and engineering, there's a bunch of different kinds of engineering so I won't comment on those, but for software specifically, it is surprising how actually programming is simple, but the entry barrier and reasoning about pieces of text on a black screen is the hard part, right? It's like trying to figure out, why am I doing this? What does it mean? What is a register? What is a memory? What's the CPU? All those concepts around software, I feel that makes a lot of people not want to deal with it. But I think with AI you get to abstract away all those complexities and you can just have a normal conversation and be an engineer. As long as you have the ideas, you have some sort of thing that you want to solve, that's basically engineering. So I think that's going to be, we're going to have

[12:49] the already great engineers be even greater engineers, and people that just never even thought of it being great engineers. And your current company, Adaptive Computer, is paving the way for this, right, in regards to building apps. Can you talk to us a little bit about some of the early use cases on the platform? Yeah, we're still pretty early, but we have a small group of users, friends and family and whatnot, that are kind of playing around with the software. And they've had some, it's been a wide range of things people imagine they can do. When we say, hey, this is a bot that writes software for you and deploys it and takes care of all the infrastructure, people are like, interesting, can it do my spreadsheets for me in this way? Or can it do a polling app for my poker nights, or whatever? There's a whole wide range of

[13:52] things people, I feel like they should be able to deal with this sort of software. So for us it's really cool to see that being so varied. It would be okay, but we would, I guess, be a little bit bummed if everybody wanted to build a CRM or something, which, I mean, sure, people will build CRMs on the platform, but it's nice that it's such a variety, it kind of inspires people to do wild things. So another funny example is my co-founder Dennis is working on his personal website on the platform. So he's building a personal website for himself and he had this crazy idea about making it as a command line terminal. So you land on the web page and then you have a command line, like a computer command line, and then you can browse through the pages through the cab. It's super nerdy, but it's just very creative. Seeing people do these sorts of

[14:55] things on the platform is really exciting for us. That's great, that's great. I had a chance to build two apps on your platform, and it's really exciting to see how you can literally automate so many tasks through those apps. And yeah, it saves you a lot of time. So is there any other, is there any specific vertical you guys are focusing on with your go to market? Yeah, yeah. In terms of go to market, we have, I would say, two main categories that we think will benefit a lot from this sort of software. One is what we call kind of the Retool use case, where you have companies that have internal processes around data cleanup, or pulling stuff from DBs and presenting them in passwords, or running certain internal processes for HR, or any operational thing. People

[15:58] will tend to use flexible app building tools for this sort of thing. No code tools, they're called. I think that category, as a go to market, is a great one for us, because we believe we can really 10x that experience for people and really make a difference. So that's, I would say, one of the big ones. And another one is kind of the Shopify use case, where you're an entrepreneur, you have some stuff that you want to sell online, you don't want to deal with building a website and dragging and dropping stuff around and all that stuff. You just want to be like, hey, I just want a store, these are my products, go figure out how I set up monetization, how I set up everything else. So I think those two are areas where we can kind of go after and really delight people and just make it super easy, and just

[17:00] removing complexity. Because people don't want to deal with the platforms and all the technical aspects of things. People just want to get their, they want to work on their pottery, they don't want to deal with PES and stuff. Right. So I think it can be really good for those people. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You guys raised a sizable pre-seed investment. Can you talk to us a little bit about the expenses involved in building in this space, in the space? Yeah, I would say the main expense is currently, it's actually getting really much better, but running these AI models are fairly expensive compared to any other kind of cloud service that you would pay for. Say a database is maybe a thousand times cheaper to run than running an LLM on the cloud. So that is one of the big things to

[18:04] kind of think about. Especially in our case, we don't do a lot of training, model training, but if you're doing model training, you need a really sizable amount of capital to get started. It's kind of different than traditionally it would be, the headshop would be the main driver of cost, especially with experienced people, which usually it's a good idea to get experienced people when you're early on, like a seed stage. But yeah, now it's a little bit different in terms of, it's almost like hiring artificial intelligence to do these things. So it's still cheaper, but it's still quite a good amount. When can we expect to join, for you guys to launch? When can we access your website, or is it open to the public currently? Currently it's closed. We are planning on doing a kind of waitlisted launch around later this summer. That's our goal, and try to figure

[19:08] out what the usage patterns are like, and then make sure everything is robust and everything works, and then slowly open it up for tomorrow people, probably towards the end of this year. So yeah, that's the plan. It seems like, I'm usually pretty optimistic with my cling, but it seems like that one we're going to be able to do. It's going to be very exciting to get this in the hands of more people, so we're very hyped about that. You have a unique URL. Will that stay the same, or are you planning to change it? URL will be the same. We have another domain, so we might swap it out with another domain, but we'll see. That decision hasn't been made yet. Gotcha, gotcha. Cool. Mike, you lived in different countries, you built tech companies in different countries, you moved to Silicon Valley two years ago, I

[20:12] believe, right? Can you talk to us a little bit about some of the differences you saw living here and the benefits? Is it really worth it? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think San Francisco, Silicon Valley is a truly different kind of place if you're into technology. I would say if you're not into technology, there are better places, probably. But if you're in technology, the amount of talent here and the amount of excitement here is just amazing. You go to a bar and you have a conversation with someone, they're either in AI, either they're in some crypto, or all the buzzwords. But it's really exciting to be around people like that, and it really helps you kind of think bigger. I think here in San Francisco we tend to think about the wild idea, and in other parts of the world, I would say people are more, are not willing to take those risks, and probably

[21:14] they're not allowed to take those risks. That's also one of the nice things about living here, is the culture just accepts that when you're shooting for the fences, then you kind of will fail. So that's a part of the process. So that's really nice. And also just having people around you and companies that, it's always nicer to have in-person meetings, in my opinion. So for us, these model providers, we use their APIs like OpenAI and page, and it's really nice to be able to go and get coffee with our person there and talk about what we need from them and things like that. Having that proximity is also really good for business, in my opinion. So it is a place to be, I would say, if you're in tech, and if you can, definitely be here. Yeah. Any advice for first-time founders? As a serial entrepreneur, you've

[22:19] raised capital from investors over the years, you've grown your company. I think Pisano was maybe seventy person headcount at the point you left. And now with the new AI wave, I see more and more companies emerging, especially in the Bay Area. What would be your words of advice to a first-time startup founder? Yeah, I would say the best advice I can think of is just try not to hesitate and kind of just do it. It's a very cliche thing to say, but I think nobody really knows how to build companies when it's their first time. So I think trying to gain some experience and kind of waiting to take that step, I think if you truly want to become an entrepreneur, I think there's no point in doing that. You just go for it. And then especially in places where there's entrepreneurship

[23:21] culture, you somehow find a way and it works out in the end. So I think I would just say that if you feel like you're waiting for something, oh, just go for it. Awesome. Thanks so much, Mike. Really appreciate you being on the pod, and that sums it up for another episode of the GTM Vault Podcast. Was fun. Nice.