Alex Wilhelm
Person
Alex Wilhelm is a journalist who writes about technology and startups. He is a co-host of This Week in Startups and is known for taking a data-focused, skeptical approach to technology coverage.
What Alex Wilhelm has said on podcasts
15 statements
Plaud is the first effective AI wearable and provides useful benefits.
“The first good AI wearable is how I think about Plaud. They cracked it. They actually got something together that people need to use and makes their life better.”
Open the episode · Justin Kan & Brian Chesky: The Rejections That Built Twitch and Airbnb | E2344Listen at 1:47
Major video games helped make gaming mainstream.
“FIFA and Madden and a lot of the games have really made gaming mainstream, COD, et cetera.”
Open the episode · Justin Kan & Brian Chesky: The Rejections That Built Twitch and Airbnb | E2344Listen at 7:58
Focusing on gaming produced an approximately billion-dollar outcome.
“And it did yield a roughly billion-dollar outcome, as you pointed out.”
Open the episode · Justin Kan & Brian Chesky: The Rejections That Built Twitch and Airbnb | E2344Listen at 9:03
AI enables startups to build, pivot, and test ideas faster.
“you can build faster now. You can pivot faster. You can try more ideas.”
Open the episode · Justin Kan & Brian Chesky: The Rejections That Built Twitch and Airbnb | E2344Listen at 18:27
Faster AI technology cycles reduce the time startups have to find footing.
“the cycles of tech are much faster now. So there's less time to grow slowly, to stagnate or whatever, because by the time you find your footing, you'll be dead 3 times over.”
Open the episode · Justin Kan & Brian Chesky: The Rejections That Built Twitch and Airbnb | E2344Listen at 20:59
AI customer service incurs meaningful compute costs.
“Serving customers has real costs. We are in a compute crunch and every CPU or GPU cycle that you consume has a real cost to it.”
Open the episode · Justin Kan & Brian Chesky: The Rejections That Built Twitch and Airbnb | E2344Listen at 33:01
Airbnb is valued at $92.5 billion because it became a large business.
“Airbnb is currently worth $92.5 billion. It's because it became a huge business.”
Open the episode · Justin Kan & Brian Chesky: The Rejections That Built Twitch and Airbnb | E2344Listen at 43:44
Founder grit matters more than recent startup traction to investors.
“the grit matters more than last week's traction.”
Open the episode · Justin Kan & Brian Chesky: The Rejections That Built Twitch and Airbnb | E2344Listen at 48:34
Attention capture will become a core founder competency.
“being able to stop the scroll is gonna become, I think, like a, a core competency of pretty much any founder.”
Open the episode · Justin Kan & Brian Chesky: The Rejections That Built Twitch and Airbnb | E2344Listen at 51:04
Voice AI can reproduce a person’s speech patterns from a short audio sample.
“We are seeing AI models in the voice category today advance to the point to which you can feed them a very small snippet of audio and ape someone's entire speech patterns.”
Open the episode · Justin Kan & Brian Chesky: The Rejections That Built Twitch and Airbnb | E2344Listen at 56:30
AI agents may reduce work hours within five years by taking on workloads.
“in 5 years, maybe we'll all work a little bit less because agents will take on so much of our workload that we have more spare time”
Open the episode · Justin Kan & Brian Chesky: The Rejections That Built Twitch and Airbnb | E2344Listen at 58:29
AI has increased work intensity and duration for many users.
“all it has done for a lot of people like ourselves is ratchet up the intensity and duration of work.”
Open the episode · Justin Kan & Brian Chesky: The Rejections That Built Twitch and Airbnb | E2344Listen at 58:56
AI will gradually erode some high-touch knowledge-work jobs and alter employment.
“we will see a slow erosion of previously high-touch labor categories that are in the knowledge work game that will change the employment system structure.”
Open the episode · Justin Kan & Brian Chesky: The Rejections That Built Twitch and Airbnb | E2344Listen at 1:03:47
AI will create more jobs long term while causing medium-term employment churn.
“more jobs net long term. Medium-term churn.”
Open the episode · Justin Kan & Brian Chesky: The Rejections That Built Twitch and Airbnb | E2344Listen at 1:04:06
Natural-language programming is enabling more hidden personal software creation.
“people are building a lot more out of sight.”
Open the episode · Justin Kan & Brian Chesky: The Rejections That Built Twitch and Airbnb | E2344Listen at 1:10:56
Statements are attributed to the speaker as said on the episode and reflect their view at the time, not PodLume's. They are not advice.
