In this special episode, Henrik Werdelin and Nicholas Thorne join Jeremy Utley to talk about their new book Me, My Customer, and AI — and how entrepreneurs can compete in the age of AI. They discuss why entrepreneurship is becoming a necessity, the frameworks that guide their thinking, and how AI is reshaping what it means to be resourceful.
In a shift from the usual format, Henrik Werdelin steps into the guest seat—alongside Nicholas Thorne—for a live conversation with Jeremy Utley about their new book Me, My Customer, and AI. They explore what it takes for entrepreneurs to compete in the age of AI — from redefining resourcefulness to thinking like founders, even inside a job.
The discussion dives into the book’s central frameworks, including the Five Ps (powers, passions, possessions, positions, and potentials) and the “it sucks that…” approach to identifying real problems worth solving. Along the way, they reflect on how AI is changing the leap from idea to execution, why more people may need to think entrepreneurially, and the shift from operating to orchestrating.
They also share lessons from the writing process itself—how they tried to use AI, where it fell short, and why Me, My Customer, and AI ends when it does.
This episode isn’t just about launching a book. It’s about rediscovering agency, and the questions we all need to ask when starting something new.
Key Takeaways:
Book site: Me, My Customer and AI - The New Rules of Entrepreneurship
Buy the book: Amazon.com: Me, My Customer, and AI: The New Rules of Entrepreneurship
Audos: Audos
Audos Instagram: Direct • Instagram
Nicholas LinkedIn: Nicholas Thorne | LinkedIn
00:00 Intro: The Human Questions Behind AI
00:37 Personal Reflections on AI
01:26 The Book’s Unique Perspective
02:55 AI and Human Resourcefulness
05:46 Entrepreneurship in the AI Era
13:05 The Five Ps Framework
23:53 Identifying Real Problems
25:39 Why Identifying and Reframing Problems Matters
26:27 The Concept of “It Sucks That”
27:23 Historical Context and Practical Applications
28:22 The Role of Language in Problem-Solving
29:43 AI’s Influence on Writing and Creativity
31:47 Challenges and Limitations of AI in Writing
35:38 The Future of AI in Creative Processes
43:30 Entrepreneurial Skills for the Modern Era
48:26 Audience Interaction and Final Thoughts
📜 Read the transcript for this episode:
[00:00:00] Henrik Werdelin: The more that we do beyond the prompt, the more we talk to the world's leading experts about ai, it dawns on me that the questions that we are trying to get answers to are not about technology. They're about human. AI is such a kind of like invasive technology.
It, it's such a, a, technology that you kind of like use as a partner that
[00:00:25] Henrik Werdelin: a lot of the unknowns, are questions of how do we define what we want out of it? And for us to be able to define it, we have to figure out what do we want out of it.
Mm-hmm. And so I think
[00:00:35] Jeremy Utley: I thought it'd be fun to get started. I don't know if everybody knows this, but, uh, I, I, I'm one of the privileged few who spent a lot of time working deeply with you both. Um, and actually strangely, especially to listeners of Beyond the Prompt, it's probably. Interesting to learn. It's weird to me that now Hendrik and I spend more time together on beyond the prompt, because for a long time, Nick and I spent a lot more time together. Uh, there's a good stretch of time where Nick was more my primary collaborator.
Hendrik was the peripheral one, and then the market shift happened. Uh, all sorts of things happened. Here we are. Um, so anyway,
[00:01:11] Henrik Werdelin: I started, I I helped start, uh, Beyond the prompt only for that reason. It was just to get Nick kind of like massaged out of the relationship.
[00:01:19] Jeremy Utley: It was part of your evil plan.
. Um, I was a little surprised, I'll be honest.
I, in my mind when I know y'all are working on a book and, and when I see the title and things like this, like what jumps out at me most is ai. Um, and I have to say, I was expecting an AI book, so to speak. I I actually mentioned this to Rik yesterday after we recorded a podcast episode, but what I got was not a book about ai, it's a book about me and in, and then probably secondarily, it's not a book about ai, it's a book about my customer.
And then third, it's a book about ai. And, um, so kudos to you because I think there's a sense in which people are drawn to ai, but actually it's a very reflective book. , do, do I get the emphasis right when I say it's actually not an AI book, it's a, it's a me book. And how do you react to that thought?
[00:02:10] Henrik Werdelin: I, I think that is very true when you read it, um, and not, um, the more that we do beyond the prompt, the more we talk to the world's leading experts about ai, it dawns on me that the questions that we are trying to get answers to are not about technology. They're about human. Right. Like it's all about, AI is such a kind of like invasive technology.
It, it's such a, a, technology that you kind of like use as a partner that
[00:02:44] Henrik Werdelin: a lot of the unknowns, I think are, are questions of how do we define what we want out of it? And for us to be able to define it, we have to figure out what do we want out of it. Mm-hmm. And so I think in a roundabout way, it wasn't necessarily why we started that way, but as I reread the book now, I actually am happy about that because I think if we had like written a lot of like, and here's how you prompt to kinda like understand your problem better or here's how, like a lot of that would be dated like two seconds later.
Um, what I think AI does is that it allow us all now to be resourceful in a way that we were not resourceful before. It allows us to be entrepreneurs, um, now at a period of time where I think having people who solve problems in a scalable way are much needed. And so I think you're right. It's not about ai, but I think those of us who spend a lot of time in the AI world, I increasingly trying to figure out how do you create the dichotomy of humanity?
And the more that we understand who do we wanna serve and what is the problem that they have, then we can use AI throughout the whole process of building to make it easier to do so. Nick, do I do I did I talk Speak outta turn there. Do you agree with that?
[00:04:05] Nicholas Thorne: I think it's the nicest thing that anyone's ever said about the book to suggest that it goes in the me my, like that it goes in order of the title.
Not that it's an ai, like, you know, um. Buzzword thing, so that I'm, I'm mostly just reflecting on that. I, I guess I had imagined it as , or there was a time when there was a, in, in the spirit of going from a collection of essays to something, there was a time where at least I had imagined that maybe we would, it would, it would live at the, you know, that the book would kind of exist along the edges of the triangle, you know, that you would have a section almost about you and your customer and you'd have a section about your customer and ai and you'd have a section about yourself and ai.
And it was, it was kind of along those, you know, that those were the areas that at the intersections was where we might be able to kind of think and talk and do some work and advance the conversation. And, and so I think like that maybe it existed more at the nodes on of, instead of the edges. I'm, I'm kind of thoughtful about because may, maybe it just suggests the next bit of work and in particular, I guess I would offer that I, I think we need to probably do more work on.
The my customer to AI relationship, um, how much are is the average end customer of any new entrepreneurial thing? What is their perception of ai? How much are they bombarded by it? How much do they use it? How much do they even realize they're using it? Uh, really, that really shapes a lot of all the rest of it anyway.
And so I don't know that the thought process that I ar arrive at is like, do we need to do more work at, at where those different edges of the triangle are, are starting to interact more?
[00:05:43] Jeremy Utley: You, you could imagine a, a follow up or an expanded edition. You know, one, one thing that's striking me now even as we talk is what's not in this, uh, you know, sequence is two, two things.
My employer or my boss and what strikes me now, and we, we've got balloons for that, uh, realization. What strikes me about that actually, which is quite interesting, I was, I was having a conversation with a really good friend who's got a child in college who's studying computer science, which is like many families right now.
And they're bemoaning the fact that internship opportunities are scarcer than ever. He can't find a job. And I found myself saying to this friend, um. One of my favorite expressions is an inventor is never unemployed.
[00:06:32] Jeremy Utley: And you one might say, an entrepreneur is never unemployed.
[00:06:36] Jeremy Utley: And what I realize is, uh, I think a lot of, especially young folks, paradigm is the next thing I do is I get a boss.
The next thing I do is I get a job
[00:06:45] Jeremy Utley: and I wonder if this is an opportunity to shift the paradigm. The next thing you do is get a customer. And what I told him was, hire yourself. You should tell your son, stop looking for a job and hire yourself. And I don't know if you've thought about, you call it the, uh, you know, niching down from the roughly 50% of people who say they wanna start a business to the, you know, people who actually do, or from 60 to 10.
Um, what do you think about specifically young people? And the moment that we're in where the AI on the bottom of the page actually is ominous, is actually scary. How do you think about them?
[00:07:23] Nicholas Thorne: I think it's the main why now of, of the book that I think we're all, whether we have stats or data or just obs you know, anecdotal evidence to suggest that we think it's probably increasingly important that people come to grips with their own, like the
[00:07:38] Nicholas Thorne: going from the 60% who have had an idea to the 10% who do something about it.
I think, you know, making that leap used to be a nice to have, and I think of even our own work in 2010 to 2020 period as like, I definitely don't feel like I did go into work every day. I thought it was fun. I thought it was like intellectually interesting. I thought it was potentially financially
[00:07:57] Nicholas Thorne: rewarding, but I don't think, I thought it was like important for the world that we help more people start things other than like that on the margin.
I think that leads to people being feeling fulfilled and that's a good thing. But like, I think we're probably in a world or heading to a world where more people will be faced with the reality that this is their primary option. Um, , so I, I've certainly, I, I don't know if that's exactly what you're saying, but I'm, I feel that, and I think you see that, I think you see a lot of people who are un, un or underemployed, whether they realize it or not.
Mm-hmm. I think that's true for very young people. I think that's true for people, you know, coming into the middle of their career and realizing the opportunities are not quite what they thought they were. so I just think a lot of people are gonna have to start going from the question of like, who's, who's gonna employ me to, who's gonna be my customer?
Because I think we, the, the last job is you, maybe you can never be unemployed or whatever. That was a nice sentence that I, you know, inventors are never unemployed. Well, entrepreneurs are never unemployed, and we're headed to a world where like, everyone's gonna have to be un, you know, not unemployed, whatever the, the thing is there.
Um, I also just will add one interesting little tidbit to your, to the statistical reference and your point of like, be your own boss. You could easily, and actually the numbers I think are identical. Substitute the 60% have had an idea for a business, and we actually have debated this with 60% of people wanna be their own boss.
Um, I think the, the data is like legitimately identical almost. And um, I'm not sure the Venn diagram is 100% overlapping. I think they might be different motivations. Um, but I think the, the be your own boss thing is, fits a similar profile in terms of both like nice to have versus need to have. The, the way AI is shaping that and how ominous or not AI is in the mix of shaping this kind of conversation.
[00:09:38] Henrik Werdelin: I hadn't thought about it in the way that you phrased it, Jeremy, but I think that's very astute. Um, the two things that I thought about in that space is increasingly I look at organizational design and we obviously write about membrane organizations as a, kind of like a new concept that kinda like goes all the way through customers all the way to the supply chain.
Um,
[00:09:59] Henrik Werdelin: but if you look internally organization. Increasingly, the way that I compute it is that everything is a resource that you prompt that gives you an output. And that doesn't matter if that resource is a human one or is an AI one. Right. Right. And I just expect to have somewhat like of a high output when I do our prompt.
Yeah. And so if we are moving tactically towards a world where there is chief resource officers of companies and they're responsible for agents and humans, and the way that the organizational design and communication structure is organized is, you know, basically like a computer system with APIs, inputs and outputs.
Mm-hmm. Um, I think that's one thing that would lead people to need to understand and work more entrepreneurial even when they have a boss. Um, so I think that's one thing. The second thing is. You know, Jeremy, as we talked about yesterday after our recording of the podcast increase, like we had a whole podcast yesterday with a guy who runs the kind of strategy institute of BCG.
And I mean, in the same way it was an interview about ai, but it ended up being not about ai. Because what we are asking people to do now that they have these Ironman suit is to act like an entrepreneur when they have a job. It is to be more of a generalist. It is to have agency. It is to,
[00:11:27] Henrik Werdelin: you know, like understand what data they use, you know, like in or so suddenly, like the job is a less, as part of a sausage factory and it's more like a,
[00:11:37] Henrik Werdelin: a Navy SEAL
[00:11:38] Henrik Werdelin: that get deployed to solve a problem or an entrepreneur that's trying to build a company.
And so in that way I think you're, I think it's a very interesting point. It does not have a boss in the title,
[00:11:48] Henrik Werdelin: but that is because we are gonna live in a world, I think in our uptick that requires everybody to be more. Acting like an entrepreneur? Um, yeah, and you know, with ai,
[00:12:00] Jeremy Utley: you know, I don't know, I, I've just been reflecting even myself,
[00:12:04] Jeremy Utley: I don't know if it's because of my upbringing.
I grew up in the middle of the country, um, you know, to, uh, to parents who had very call it conventional jobs. Entrepreneurship wasn't on my radar as even a possibility until business school. Um, and so. I, I wonder, I don't, it's kinda an existential question, but how do we, you know, push it down the stack, so to speak, of viable career options?
[00:12:30] Jeremy Utley: It wasn't, I mean, literally I was in my thirties before I even knew it was a possibility. Um, so that's just kind of a existential thing I want to talk about. Uh, there's, there's kinda two frameworks that I think are worthwhile and I've got a bunch of notes from the book we can dive into if we want to.
But
[00:12:46] Jeremy Utley: two things that I would love for you to talk about in terms of me and my customer, because I think anybody who's listening to this show later especially, is probably,
[00:12:54] Jeremy Utley: they wanna know what are some very tangible things they could take away. And so in regards to me, I'd love for you to talk about the five P's and then in, in regards to my customer, I'd love for you to talk about, it sucks that, can we start with the five P's?
If you think about this first and foremost, being a self-discovery field guide, what are the five P's and how does an individual use them to start to guide their exploration?
[00:13:16] Henrik Werdelin: The five Ps of powers, passions, possessions, positions, and potentials, which took me a long time to read off, but Nick wrote that chapter. So Nick, this is squarely in your account.
[00:13:29] Nicholas Thorne: Can we, is this like a behind the, um, is this inside the, uh,
[00:13:32] Henrik Werdelin: I hated that prompt to start with and then I became kinda like the evangelist for it. So I went like full 180. I was like, this is dumb. Why Classic Steve Jobs
[00:13:41] Jeremy Utley: style? You know, Ron Johnson told me that he was, uh, he had a car ride with Steve Jobs
[00:13:47] Jeremy Utley: and he was talking about how they needed to reconfigure the entire kind of, uh, , the organizing principle of the organization , before the Apple store came out.
[00:13:57] Jeremy Utley: And he said Steve Vehemently argued with him, was yelling at him in the car, berating him in the car, all this stuff.
[00:14:03] Jeremy Utley: And then they get to the store and Steve Verbatim says the thing that Ron said in the car as the new strategy. And Ron's like, wait, what?
[00:14:11] Nicholas Thorne: I mean, obviously Henry and I have collaborated, uh, for. Whatever, 15 years now. So I think this is an actually very interesting, um, if as it were, as a quick aside, like, you know,
[00:14:22] Nicholas Thorne: insight into what it is to collaborate with someone for a long time. I don't think it's specific necessarily to ours, although maybe it is like, you know, there's, um, there's a funny thing when you, you know, someone well enough
[00:14:34] Nicholas Thorne: to be able to trust them with your first draft, but you also like, um, know that the first draft's not always going to like, resonate.
And sometimes it takes time. And sometimes, you know, like sometimes I guess maybe the comment I'm gonna make is for people who are as communicate as frequently as we do and who I think communicate well. Like, I, I generally think that I can say things and Henry, here's what I'm saying. Like, I, you know, that I'm struggling to find words, but, but he can kind of like parse through what I'm saying and I, I hope that roughly the same is true, vice versa.
There are still times where you're saying something and the other side's not really picking up the other end of the line. You know, it's like, it's just, you're just saying it and. And, uh, I'm not that like, committed to ideas. I guess I would, I, I don't think I am. I, I fashion myself as quite stubborn on a number of things, but ideas for one, I'm very happy to, like, if, if it comes out and people don't like it, I'm like, all right, whatever.
Um, so like, I, I don't get emotional about it, but, and this was one that we was, was actually just very practical because we had this issue, which is like, we were kind of going along in our own process of like, we'd already made this leap to say, hey, and this kind of leads to your next question of like, if you're trying to, if you're in the position of trying to come up with , a business that you could start, if you're like, I wanna start a company, I'm not really sure which one to start, I have an idea.
But typically we would think that it might be not a bad idea for you to like stress test your own idea, even with some other versions of your own. Like, what, what else could you work on? Just so you have like a menu of options, put yourself in a little bit of a better position of leverage. Well, like, we'd already made the step of saying, Hey, you, you certainly give yourself a big advantage to not be.
Anchored in a solution. By the way, I did this, I spent four years of my life like starting a company where we basically started with the solution ish and we then kind of like had to kind of, you know, riff around that.
[00:16:14] Nicholas Thorne: You just like limit your optionality a lot if you start with the solution. So the problem would be a better place.
It just like , the architecture of getting going
[00:16:23] Nicholas Thorne: benefits and is stronger and more resilient if you have like centered the architecture around the problem you're trying to solve.
[00:16:30] Nicholas Thorne: But very quickly you also realize, well like what if I got that part wrong and like, what's my personal relationship to it and why am I the right person to solve that problem?
And you start asking a bunch of questions if you kind of abstract that, which at least one answer to is well like, do you give a shit? Excuse me, about like the person or a group of people that you are trying to help. Do you have some insight into who they are? Do you speak their language? All these different things start to become the questions as to why even pick that problem.
And so that then became a, obviously a topic of like, you know, who are you and who is your customer? And , why are you even thinking about the problem to begin with? Why, why do you have any confidence that the problem is actually a real problem?
[00:17:08] Nicholas Thorne: And so it was kind of a natural, you know, extension of going from solution to problem to kind of customer that we had to end up in this debate about like, well, how do you even frame your own personal exposure to, um, the question of like, who should you help? do you wanna run? Do you wanna run through them? Largely we created these different frames of reference to try to think about like a way of understanding yourself. So we said powers, which I think is basically like, what are you good at? Um, you know, I worked on Wall Street.
I happened to be okay at the time at like financial modeling well, like maybe one of my capabilities is financial modeling. So maybe I could like help other people who either want to become financial modelers or who are also financial modelers. I have credibility with them and so maybe I can build product or service for them.
So that would be like an existing of a power. Uh, potential is kind of the opposite version of that is I'm going out of order. So I apologize. Henrik knows them better than I do at this point. Um. Potential is like, you know, what do you want to get better at? Um, so what are you at least like intrinsically motivated to get better at?
What are you studying? And if you could, if you are willing and able to study that, um, either and share your process or once you arrive at the answer to how to get better at it, like you could share that with other people, that might be a good way to find other people to help, is like, you know, who else wants to get better at that thing?
Um, and so that was another place where we felt you could kind of like look for, uh, founder, customer fit. You could look for kind of relationship. Uh, building opportunity, um, positions is kind of probably the most traditional one, which is just like, look at yourself and what roles you play in life, whether those be personal or professional.
And try to anchor your point of view on the, like who your sole customer is around that. So that's,
[00:18:47] Nicholas Thorne: I'm a dad. Uh, I'm a homeowner. I'm a, I'm a dog parent. But like, maybe importantly when you think about like a dog parent, um, and, and Henrik obviously can talk to this much more. Like,
[00:18:57] Nicholas Thorne: there's often like a little bit of nuance in how you view the role if you've played it.
You know, it's like, it's not, I'm not a dog owner. I'm a dog parent. It's a specific flavor of this thing. I'm looking for other people who view themselves in that capability, in that role. Um, uh, so that's position,
[00:19:13] Nicholas Thorne: uh, possessions is also kind of obvious. Another way of thinking about yourself is like, what are the things you own and invest time, effort, and money in?
And why? You know, like if you're a hobbyist, uh, you know, boat owner, well like that one way to think about who you are and who other people, um, that might be your sole customer is by what, what, what they kind of own or have kind of curated into their like primary kind of collection of, of, of things to own.
Maybe the other way of thinking about dog parents, the thinking they own a dog and they have sense of responsibility for this dog. And so maybe you can help other people who are like that. yeah. Making passions. Passions, yeah. So similar, the, I, I, I personally think that
[00:19:50] Nicholas Thorne: positions and possessions and passions are kind of the obvious ones, and they all interrelate, they're all often just different frames of reference on the same thing.
Like, I'm a guitar player, I own a guitar, I'm passionate about learning guitar. Those are all kind of, or whatever, like, maybe those are all just different ways of thinking about the same thing.
[00:20:05] Nicholas Thorne: if you have a lineup across all of these, you know, like I'm pretty good at the guitar.
Um, I, I am a guitarist, but I'm also really passionate about getting better at the guitar. You know, like all of those would be things that maybe you should really think hard about building something for other people who are, you know, in the guitar category.
[00:20:20] Jeremy Utley: Well, I think, I think just to make it, you know, actionable for anyone to realize, okay, these are frames of reference that I can collide with my own kind of question of what could I start, right?
Uh, anybody who's talked to me for more than you know, one single session knows. My second favorite quote about creativity is Arthur Kessler's.
[00:20:40] Jeremy Utley: Creativity is the collision of apparently unrelated frames of reference. And what you've done with the five Ps is you've given people. Unrelated frames of reference that they can collide with this question of what could I do?
Where should I start?
[00:20:54] Jeremy Utley: I feel like, by the way, this is imminently GPT able, right? You can imagine a five P's GPT, especially if somebody's got either custom instructions or history turned on.
[00:21:04] Jeremy Utley: Like wouldn't it be amazing if the GPT just knew, just could interrogate you and then know from your, from what Chad GBT knows about you
[00:21:11] Jeremy Utley: to make five recommendations based on what you already talked to me about.
Here are your five Ps five potential businesses that you could start. Right?
[00:21:19] Nicholas Thorne: And the only thing I'd add to that is I think it's also an interesting frame of reference, um, when you are, are kind of evaluating one of your own ideas. And so very often I would imagine that people would not apply that, that framework kind of working forward from the framework.
That's a great, same is probably true about the, it sucks that stuff often too. And I think Henrik can probably talk more to this. I think, you know, henrik's ideas often come in the form of like, what if we did a thing that does X? And um, like I think a lot of people I do that, but I, I, I observe it in someone I spend a lot of time with and, you know, and, and even though we've written,
[00:21:51] Nicholas Thorne: have spent so much time not being in solution mode, the idea is first version is often a solution.
Um, but baked into it, implicit in it is, is a problem statement and is a, is a founder, customer fit is an understanding of the, who the customer is and why they have the problem. And then, and then the solution is what kind of like gets articulated, you know? Um, and so sometimes these are also just useful frameworks for how do you take this thing that's nagging at you is in the back of your mind as an idea like, hey.
Um, I mean, I'm only looking at this rain boot behind me, you know, like we should ship mom's rain boots on a subscription because the kids grow out of them too quickly and they only wear them once because it only rains once for every six months and they get too big. So what if we did that? Like, that's a solution, but I, I already started to get at like who's the customer and, and what their problem is and whatever.
And so if you work backward, especially in the AI age, and you're gonna have to be clear with people as to why you're doing this. Everyone's gonna be able to make a copy of everything. Why you are uniquely Exactly. So why are you the person who's the best person to do that is gonna become a big part of the logic.
And so that's me. The absence of having back, you know, at least just extrapolated, uh, your own connection to it, I think you'll struggle. And so at least maybe if it's not something that you can move forward from, it is something I think could be a best framework for thinking about like, why am I interested in this?
[00:23:09] Jeremy Utley: Well, um, Nick, what you're doing is you're suggesting a second GPT. The first GPT is actually an idea generator. The the other a five P based idea generator. The other GPT is a five P based idea evaluator to give you frank and honest assessment of whether you are uniquely positioned to do the thing you're proposing based on your five Ps.
[00:23:29] Henrik Werdelin: Hey, Jeremy, what you then could do is you could take all the different tasks that an entrepreneur has to do to go from, I'd like to start something, but I know what to start until having an actual business. You could string them together. Imagine, and you might call them autos,
[00:23:44] Jeremy Utley: just 'cause it, just because it would be auto magical.
Is that what you're saying? Yeah, that's true. Exactly. Okay. What about it sucks that, so we talked about five Ps
[00:23:53] Jeremy Utley: and it being a great, uh, place for an individual to interrogate their own, uh, assets, for where to start, uh, an entrepreneurial journey. Why is the next thing it sucks that.
[00:24:08] Henrik Werdelin: It sucks. That was something that have, we've been working with all the way through the Pre-Hype days when we wanted to start something new and it was fed out of the insight that problems, uh, better to find than ideas. Because ideas are really just thesis statements against problems. And a problem is it's, it's difficult to just come up with a good idea
[00:24:32] Henrik Werdelin: from like initially, but it's, it's difficult to know if it's a good idea.
It's easier to know if something is a real problem or really felt problem because people are very good at articulating issues. Uh, and I think he started all the way back when, you know, I was traveling around the world and I would ask people. You know, like in sitting in the, in the plane, I would ask like, so, you know, ever thought about a business idea?
And people will clam out and you know, they'll give me their NDA, you know, whatever, right? And then you say, oh, interesting. Like what's one of, well what's a big business problem you're working on? Then people are like, you know, how long time do you have? And they'll kind of like articulate all these different problems.
And so we got obsessed about this I this kind of concept that
[00:25:16] Henrik Werdelin: if you could help people identify a real meaningful problem, then there's probably a good business somewhere at the end of that. , If you started with a problem, not the, with the idea, then you had more shots and goal. 'cause if the first attempt of solving the problem with the first idea didn't work, then you can always go back and you wouldn't have wasted all the work and the access to the customer and all that stuff.
'cause then you might just kind of like attempt it. You know, something else and thirdly, which kinda tied in with the five Ps is that for many people they don't realize until too late that they have to work on this thing for 10 years for it to be successful. And if you don't care about stuff then it's just very, it's a long time.
And so what I have met in my career was people who like had this probably even fine business, they just kind of hated working at their own business because the customer that would call them every day were just people. They didn't really give a shit about. And so a lot of these different things came together and we got obsessed about first, can you identify the problem?
And then second, can you reframe it? And then can you test yourself into figuring out which one of the ideas is the best thesis against it? The underlying idea of it sucks. That, is that it has to be a, something that requires a painkiller,
[00:26:34] Henrik Werdelin: not a vitamin pill. It needs to be something that people actually consider to be big enough for a problem to, to actually, you know, react to it.
So for example, if you show them an ad saying, don't you just hate when x,
[00:26:48] Henrik Werdelin: then it needed to be meaningful.
[00:26:50] Henrik Werdelin: And using that kind of like the, the loaded words of it sucks that instead of like, I find it to be an inconvenience win, then, um, then that kind of like, kind of just intuitively got into that mat lib format.
So that's the, the premise of it sucks that. We see we have it all the time. I even, I have it on my post-it notes. Right. You like we
[00:27:11] Henrik Werdelin: we're now as an organization, just trained in seeing, like when I see, hear people say something, I, you know,
[00:27:18] Henrik Werdelin: my eyes light up now because I'm like, oh, business opportunity.
[00:27:22] Jeremy Utley: Hmm.
You know, I mean, since the 1960s, I think Bob McKim started doing this, but at Stanford, he would assign early design students who wanted to,
[00:27:32] Jeremy Utley: uh, launch businesses. He would encourage them to keep bug lists, what do you call bug lists, right? Which are
[00:27:38] Jeremy Utley: lists of things that suck. You could say, you know, you might have an, it sucks that list, right?
[00:27:43] Jeremy Utley: Um, but what McKim knew, even in those very early days of the, you know, long before the D School proper came around, was a problem, is a necessary precondition to a solution. And if you wanna be the kind of person who generates solutions, you have to be the kind of person who notices problems. And so it sucks that, I think, really, it, it does a couple of things.
One, it keys people in on, you know, problems, uh, as, as kind of a anchor point. But then two, to Henry, to your point, the language itself really matters because it, it increases the likelihood of a worthy solution. Right. Nick, I'd love for you to say why you, you know, for the people who are prudish who don't like this phrase, it sucks that, what's the case for preserving slightly offensive language here?
[00:28:36] Nicholas Thorne: Uh, well for one, I was just in Bhutan and I was giving a lecture to a bunch of high school students and I was demoing autos. And I got to the part where we, where the, where autos as the, first AI agent that you interact with when you're trying to start something with autos does the, it sucks that thing.
And, uh, everyone starts giggling. And I'm, I wasn't really paying attention. I was like, what, what's everyone giggling about? What are we laughing about? And they're like, oh, the, you know, they're all like pointing at the word and I. It's kind of a jovial version of the point. I, I think it's visceral language, and I think that's what Henrik saying, we're going for you, you're trying to create a linguistic framework in which it just would feel wrong to fill in a, like, nice to have. Like, it doesn't suck that, um, you know, my coffee's not cold enough right now, or I don't like, you know, like you, you were trying to create a bias towards filling in the blank with something on the margin. Like just marginally more visceral, marginally more insightful, marginally more, you know, noise cutting.
And, um, I think that's the case part. And we, by the way, there's all sorts of interesting, I, I think we actually have chatted about this before, but I'll, I'll just add like once you apply these frameworks, and one of the very interesting parts about having written a book at the same time as we were writing prompting, so.
Roughly the same time we started writing this book is when we get access to GPT-3 and we're start writing prompting. And so much of the, the book was written almost, I'm not gonna say we were like super purposefully saying, oh, we're gonna be able to load this book into a model and see what it says. But we were certainly, you know, starting to become aware of like that prompting, like telling an AI how to talk, telling it what exercise to run, telling it what these things were, were were gonna be parts of our own ability to, to deliver our interests and expertise to other people.
And so we, we certainly spent more time thinking about like, what words do we use? And so this is a place where we, with our agent will, uh, people will say like, stop saying that. And the thing will say, it will try to explain why it's doing that back. But I think visceral language is probably only more important in a world where like average language is, you know, commoditized, right?
Um, it's like, it's one of the only places where you can try to use some sentences, used some words that, that matters. So the role of its sex, that has probably only become more important. , As we put some AI around our own tooling, because, um, I think it's a way to express perspective. It's a way to kind of like, you know, show what you believe to be true that maybe the average, you know, answer doesn't otherwise deliver.
[00:31:08] Jeremy Utley: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Where when average is easy, what you're always trying to do, you're effectively, in going back to Henrik's comment about everything is a prompt to an intelligent system. In so far as the, the book is a prompt to an intelligent human reading it.
[00:31:25] Jeremy Utley: , the elegance of it sucks.
That, which sounds paradoxical, but it's not. The elegance is it influences the thinking of the intelligence differently than what's mildly inconvenient. Right. And just like with, as, with as few tokens
[00:31:38] Nicholas Thorne: as possible.
[00:31:39] Jeremy Utley: Exactly. With as perfectly said. Okay. I have two questions that I want to try to get to before we open it up to the audience.
We'll, we'll see if we can or not.
[00:31:47] Jeremy Utley: Um, but one of the things that you addressed actually in the intro, uh, was did AI write the book? You know,
[00:31:54] Jeremy Utley: and, uh, you talked about how hey, we tried and, and, uh, I'd love for you to just talk briefly about. Not that you tried. I get that and everybody gets that. But I would love for you because, because you're such, knowledgeable and thoughtful collaborators to ai, I know the fact that you tried means something.
I'd love to know what you tried, actually, why it failed, and whether you think that will continue to be the case in the future.
[00:32:23] Nicholas Thorne: We basically tried to make it Airtable, uh, like a database and kind of like turn each row of the database into a paragraph ish and.
To like almost write a script that would take whatever the immediately prior, like , knew the outline of the book as we, as we kind of understood it at that time, knew the chapter it was working. Like, you know, if you imagine this like super, every row of the Airtable is a, is a piece of an outline.
So we like pre generate the outline. We could kind of like have like roman numeral one section A, you know, small Roman numeral one, you know, part one, paragraph one. And if we could just like, you know, break it roughly down as much as possible that maybe it could just like write the paragraph or at least the next sentence.
And um, and so just try to be very like, you know, systematic about the manufacturing of the paragraph, knowing that we had a bunch of source material to at least have like helped inform both the outline and maybe fill in a bunch of the gaps. Um.,
[00:33:22] Nicholas Thorne: I would observe that I a think that that would lead to a very like, mechanical feeling book if you, if you even achieved in a b, the context windows weren't as big, you know, a year and a half ago as they are today.
So maybe you'd have better
[00:33:34] Nicholas Thorne: luck today. But that was roughly a version of what we tried was , to use our own way of doing things, which is like, you know, no job is too big once you've cut it into enough pieces. And, and to just try to slice the number of pieces so finely that you were asking AI to do something like really pretty straightforward, which is like, I just need a paragraph about x, um, right
[00:33:54] Jeremy Utley: in the context that I've already provided.
Knowing what you know is gonna, like, knowing what you know, knowing
[00:33:58] Nicholas Thorne: where you are, like orienting you and knowing kind of what it is, and then hope that maybe you get a little bit of like, recursive kind of building as a back of that. Because as you start to kind of build momentum, like it, like it, it understands what to do next.
Like almost using the fact that we've. Created a source material to be like the introduction ish and maybe see where it would travel from there. And why do you think it failed? I think it failed at the time because A, I'm not sure that's how like a book really gets written. You know, like you can't just like go forward from one sentence and see what the next sentence.
Like there's some degree of like, um, planning involved with the overall art. I also just think it got lost frequently. And lastly, I think the key thing that like took the essays that we already had. And so what we really asking the AI to do and made 'em a book was the humanity of figuring out like, one, well how do you make this like legible across the board?
And two, what we were probably really shy on were case studies and I think asking a GPT for a bunch of case studies is a pretty quick way to like end up with the first Google result of like. You know, whatever, whatever you would've otherwise searched for. So we were probably trying not to just deal with like, you want an example of that style of entrepreneurship?
You need to look no further than you know, Joe Schmo who founded Coca-Cola. And you're like, oh yeah, you got a personal relationship with the Coca-Cola case study. Great. You know?
[00:35:23] Jeremy Utley: Okay, last question and then let's open up. Oh wait, can
[00:35:26] Nicholas Thorne: you, well, do we have time for, 'cause Henrik said you, you asked a bigger question, which, oh yeah.
Will that continue the case going forward? And I think that's, I, I, I'm not sure I know the answer to that, but I'm curious what Henrik's answer that is. I,
[00:35:35] Jeremy Utley: I wonder, but please, Henrik would love to hear.
[00:35:38] Henrik Werdelin: I think we're getting close to AI, being able to write a book, right? Like the, the question is not can it write it, it's, can it write something that is meaningful to a human?
And I think that is, is an area that we don't really have good terminology. For yet of what's happening and why that may or may not happen.
[00:36:03] Henrik Werdelin: When I do something amazing with ai, I turn around to Nicholas and go like, Hey, look what I just got the, you know what the model just did? I what? We just got there.
What I don't do is I don't go to the model and go, like, that was incredible what we just did. Like, let's just stop here for a moment and
[00:36:17] Henrik Werdelin: like, talk about what you just did there, man. Right? Like I,
[00:36:19] Henrik Werdelin: I, I just don't have that response, right? And, um, and so I, I think that there is something interesting in the human in the loop because I think that we have been trained for so many years as humans to connect to that.
So I think for most of us, that will really matter. And. And I think you could have like AI writing thousands book, but then I think a human would pick the one that is mostly interesting for their affinity group and they'll say, you should look at what this, you know, you should read this book. And so, yes, the AI might have written the words, but it got its relevancy for humans because a human picked and kind of contextualized it.
Um, but you go into Juno and you write a song now, like there are good songs now that I could put on my playlist just fine. I don't think necessarily like emotionally connected. Now that being said, we obviously now increasingly are reading stories with people who get like deep emotional connection to their AI bots.
so I think you'll have a subsection of people that will, uh, AI will write a book and it'll resonate a lot with them. I think for the majority of people, for the foreseeable future, we need the human, the loop.
[00:37:30] Jeremy Utley: So my last question involves, you know, one thing that Seinfeld talked about is leaving on a high note, I, that's like a phrase that he used, right? They stopped the show when everybody wanted more. Right. And that's kinda, I always think about that. I have to be honest with you, when I was on page 1 51, I'm reading, I'm just, I'm just like a normal guy on an airplane reading a book.
And I get to this section, what is it called? It's called, um, it says Summing up. And, you know, and I, I, I'm summing up this chapter of course, and I turn the page and it's, what's the next page? Afterward. I was like, wait, it's over. What? Mm-hmm. Why stop there? I'll preface this by saying
[00:38:21] Jeremy Utley: there's so much more to be said about ideation, about prototyping, about testing.
It is like it's, and by the way, there's still tons of pages after, call it the end of the book. So you won't fault me for thinking there was more. But why stop there?
[00:38:37] Henrik Werdelin: I mean like done is
[00:38:38] Jeremy Utley: better than perfect.
[00:38:40] Henrik Werdelin: Done is better than perfect. We ran out of time.
[00:38:43] Jeremy Utley: You just said that's it. That's, we just gotta shift the thing. I know ran out of
[00:38:47] Henrik Werdelin: time. I think we did and we also, like, at that time we started to rewrite the structure of the book a lot and you know, like as Nick was saying, we're thinking about different flows of it and so we did a bunch of different versions and then we were like, ugh.
[00:39:04] Henrik Werdelin: Um, and so I think, yeah, Nick.
[00:39:09] Nicholas Thorne: We did talk a lot about writing a second edition of this book because of how much of a hypothesis the book was, right. That this is not a book that like attempts to tell you what we've observed as much as like attempts to lay out some points of view about where maybe the world is going.
And so I think we got decent amount of comfort from ourselves generally, that this was like a first crack at a topic that we might come back to. So maybe, maybe what we were without having thought through that, what we were, what you were experiencing is the feeling that we'd be better off getting it out, having it, like not waiting for a bunch of these case studies to start to appear.
Not waiting for it to be figured out how to prototype with ai how to do these things because A, they would become obsolete quickly. But b, we didn't really know yet. I mean, um, and so I, I, at least personally when I hear that, I, I was worried you were gonna say the opposite thing, which is that you were like going and going and going, you're just like, man, this thing really ran outta steam.
Um, and so I, I guess I personally feel like that. Sounds great. If there are topics that you would love to hear about next, I would love to know what they are and maybe you can, um, share them or maybe we can get the fireflies note taker to send them what you just riffed off, because maybe that's the second edition.
[00:40:20] Jeremy Utley: Love it. Okay. So I want to, given the fact that so many folks have, um, uh, graciously given their time to be here live, I want to give folks a chance, if you have a question for the authors, would you like to come off mute and ask?
[00:40:36] Nicholas Thorne: Well, someone nicely comes up. Oh, good, Simon. Thank you.
[00:40:39] Jeremy Utley: Please, Simon, please.
[00:40:41] Simon: So many things you've said have made a lot of sense of the book bizarrely, and even your last question, Jeremy, because I think for me, when I was listening to it, a I, I love the framing of the five Ps. I thought that was very, it was another, it was a really lovely way of thinking about it because , the passion, purpose and the, the ones that cluster together, , you, that idea I've heard, but the way you put the other two in, I thought very elegant. Very elegant. But also, isn't this a story that hasn't yet really unfolded and so it's perfect that you ended where you ended, and it's perfect that you just said what you just said about that because, you know, in a few years time, we will know more. You know, we are, we are literally unfolding this, so I, I, I work with AI in, in software development, and actually Jeremy's asked me to talk next week about what I've been learning. I've been thinking, okay, so what have I learned in software development? Which is using agents to build software and not, I'm not talking vibe coding, I'm talking big code-based software.
What have I learned in there, which could be applied elsewhere? And then I've got groups of people that I'm kind of learning with as well. And I, I think we are all learning in this, in this process together. So I think it's really, really interesting that you, you ended where you ended. And I suppose, I don't know if I've got a question, but I just wanted to, to say that your book is , one of those books that's left me wanting to read it again and think about it again deeply.
Because I think you've thought about that's what comes across in the book is you've thought about this stuff very deeply and I now want to go and think about it deeply. I actually listened to the audio book while I was driving down to a party over the weekend and. I'm now reading the book. Um, and it's actually really an interesting experience.
Seeing the words, hearing you speak the words.
[00:42:42] Henrik Werdelin: Mm-hmm.
[00:42:42] Simon: And now seeing 'em on the page, and I'm having a different visceral, uh, visceral response. And as, and as a Brit I suppose, you know, it sucks that, you know, I'm like, I'm sorry I don't use language like that. And it made me, it made me wonder, it made me wonder why maybe there are less entrepreneurs in Britain than there are in America.
[00:43:03] Jeremy Utley: The Brits and the Bhutanese apparently. That's so good.
[00:43:06] Simon: I know. Henrik, I'm wondering what you think about that as a fellows. Well, as speaking as an ex European, but you know.
[00:43:13] Jeremy Utley: That's so good. That's so good. Um, I have one question that, that somebody sent me. I, I mentioned to a, to a community of mine that I was interviewing you guys, and I thought this was such a good question and Nick has had a heads up, so he should have an answer for it, but I, I thought this was fabulous.
Uh, Scott Walker says you describe the entrepreneur evolving from operator to orchestrator. What skills and daily practices do you think are most critical for founders to master in this new orchestration role?
[00:43:45] Nicholas Thorne: I did have a heads up and I, I found it to be a very interesting question to it, very eloquent, because I think it's probing. I think there's
[00:43:52] Henrik Werdelin: three things I'll, I'll go. I have a short one, I think, and then I think there's three things that we keep going back to that we think are deeply entrepreneurial traits, and it's basically agitation.
So making sure that you have a chip on your shoulder that makes you propel yourself forward, like having agency.
[00:44:08] Henrik Werdelin: And that is something I think that you can teach yourself to have more of. I would say second though, like having what we say, gravity. I think somebody put it out about being storytellers. I think having the ability to tell a story about what problem you want to solve and why , it creates gravity so it attracts people.
Customers, money, staff, you know, collaborators. Um, and then I think, , being resourceful, so , have the ability of do a lot with a little. So, uh, and I think with AI tools, obviously that is something you can have much more of. And so those three things, practicing
[00:44:41] Henrik Werdelin: uh, agitation, gravity, storytelling and, and resourcefulness is probably the three kind of components I think is an evergreen entrepreneurial pedigree.
[00:44:51] Jeremy Utley: Can I add one Henrik, just in the spirit of
[00:44:54] Jeremy Utley: something I think you and I were discussing yesterday, uh, and I have so many of these kinds of conversations, it's hard to remember, but I'm pretty sure you and I were talking about it,
[00:45:03] Jeremy Utley: but this idea of parallel. ING workflows. Hmm. So right now, so, you know, historically, if you've wanted to build a prototype, you know, the D school will tell people to use popsicle sticks and construction paper, and that's great.
But then if I say, if you say, now do it again. Like say it takes me 10 minutes, do it again. I now have to take an, like, I gotta, I have to manually use the scissors and, you know, and do it again. Right? Increasingly with tools like, say Rep for example,
[00:45:31] Jeremy Utley: you can create a higher resolution and there's, there's dangers to that as we discussed.
But you can create a higher resolution prototype
[00:45:39] Jeremy Utley: than you can create with your hands with construction paper. And now I would just say that the habit, Henry, to build on year three, a habit that I might recommend to Scott's question is. Do three , because these are non-deterministic models, you can take your same prompt to one rept window,
[00:45:56] Jeremy Utley: run it three times.
You're gonna get three different prototypes. And because they're non-deterministic, they're all gonna be slightly weirder and different in ways that you can't imagine. And it doesn't take, unlike the construction paper, second one, that takes another 10 minutes and the third one takes another 10 minutes, you can literally deploy them at the same time.
And then you're kind of toggling. Actually, the word that was coming to my mind when you were saying agitate and those other great words was toggle and orchestration. You know, I think of a, of a conductor,
[00:46:23] Jeremy Utley: they're attending to the flutes and then they're attending to the whatever, right? And orchestration implies there's multiple things I'm attending to.
And if there's not a multiple, you should just have that multiple mindset, right? Why not do three? If it's a prototype, great. If it's a problem statement, great, whatever it is, like a multiple kind of mindset I think is very important.
[00:46:45] Nicholas Thorne: Yeah, there's something I was struggling to kind of come up with the words for a bit, but I appreciate you did because the, the question really compares this, I'm not even, I guess we wrote it like this comparison or this contrast of orchestrator versus operator and I was having a hard thought.
I was like, man, like what, what, what do we really mean by that? I think you've hit a lot on what probably we mean by which is operator implies something quite linear. And I think probably we're headed towards a world where you know, if it is linear, it is, it is linear in massively parallelized form, if not to the point.
Therefore much more kind of networked, much more, you know, kind of multi one to many in its in its kind of appearance. And so I think that's probably a lot of what we see. Although I think probably the primary point we were trying to make there was just that back to Henrik's point of like everything is a prompt to an intelligent system.
If you imagine yourself that way, well then like, how do you behave? And one of them might be that the cost of getting that int intelligence system to do something is getting lower and lower and lower. So.
[00:47:40] Jeremy Utley: I think this is kind of fascinating. Um, I now
[00:47:45] Jeremy Utley: feel like it's a waste of agent credits if I don't prompt an agent to do something before I go to bed.
Because why not, right? Like, like I'm, I'm, I'm a, I'm, you know, traveling right now working with an organization and late at night this, you know, kind of, uh, big time leader asked me a really thorny question and either, I mean, my subconscious, you know, can work on it while I sleep. Why would I not deploy an agent to make progress?
Right? And I woke up this morning, Chad's BT agent had spent 48 minutes
[00:48:17] Jeremy Utley: creating a thousand word executive summary, a 10 page slide deck
[00:48:20] Jeremy Utley: and a CSV, like multiple CSVs of research in a data room. Why would I not like that? To me, it's like an example of orchestration
[00:48:28] Jeremy Utley: before you go to bed, get an agent to do something, you know, kind of a
[00:48:33] Henrik Werdelin: I think we should, uh, let people, uh, who's kind out to give us an hour, uh, let them go here on the top of the hour. So, Jeremy, do you have any, do you wanna, do you wanna
[00:48:41] Jeremy Utley: wrap the podcast episode? Henry? I want,
[00:48:43] Henrik Werdelin: I wanna wrap the podcast episode.
[00:48:45] Jeremy Utley: If you've enjoyed this episode, if you'd
[00:48:48] Henrik Werdelin: want say so, taggy, no. But I do wanna say thank you to everybody who showed up, uh, on, on this specific call because they were kind enough to pre-buy the book.
It does mean a lot to us, and so thank you so much. If you have one extra ask, it is to go and review the book on Amazon, which obviously be, uh, you know, massive for us. But,
[00:49:05] Henrik Werdelin: you know, we took a lot of time and, and it sounds like a few of you really enjoyed it. And so thank you so much for both reading the book and for showing up.
[00:49:12] Henrik Werdelin: And of course, Jeremy, who is our dear friend, but also such a good thought partner. And so thank you also for spending time with us and kind of as always, uh, make us, uh, sound a little bit smarter, , along the way. , So I think with that, thank you everybody. And then goodbye.
[00:49:29] Jeremy Utley: Thank you. Take care. Thank you.
Thank you Jeremy. My pleasure.