The Next AI Wave Will Be Social, Not Solo

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. Dan Shipper goes in depth with Sarah Tavel, venture partner at the firm Benchmark. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Here’s a link to the episode transcript.

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Millions of users talk to ChatGPT every day—but none of them talk to each other. I’m one of them, and there’s no way for me to discover great prompts or share the ones that worked for me.

Sarah Tavel, venture partner at Benchmark, bets that the next generation of consumer AI apps will be built on this gap—by founders with product intuition.

As one of Pinterest’s earliest product managers, Tavel has witnessed a shift like this before. She saw Pinterest scale from six employees to 650, growing from a niche consumer tool into a beloved global community. In this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper and Tavel talk about why the founders who mold new technology into delightful user experiences, and recognize the power of social dynamics will win in consumer AI. Tavel also shares her taste in founders, those who are almost compulsively committed to building their companies, and how AI can improve decision-making processes in venture capital.

You can check out their full conversation here:

If you want a quick summary, here are some of the themes they touch on:

The future of AI belongs to great product thinkers (00:02:26)

I’m drawn to stories about early consumer technology because they have a way of quietly being absorbed into our lives, so much so that we often forget their companies’ messy beginnings. Tavel explains that early consumer tech breakthroughs are driven by technical teams who can wrestle immature infrastructure into something usable. Google is an example of a company whose success was rooted in its raw technical innovation.

As the underlying technology matures, though, the emphasis begins to shift. Tavel notes that companies like Facebook succeeded by prioritizing user experience. That shift continued with platforms like Pinterest and Instagram, whose founders weren’t engineers but exceptional product thinkers.

Today, she sees the same dynamic playing out in AI. Early tools like ChatGPT echo Google in their bare interface and depth of backend complexity. As the infrastructure becomes more stable, Tavel believes we’re entering a new paradigm, one where those with the “product intuition” to build great user experiences will win.

Turning prompting a LLM into a social experience (00:12:53)

After getting results back from a blood test, Tavel went to Reddit to find a prompt that would help her use an LLM to understand it and adjust her supplements. The experience helped her see a new opportunity: If someone were great at making prompts to understand health or other personal data, she would love to “follow them” to use their prompts. A product that supports this dynamic could get a lot of traction. 

Today, the onus is on the user to figure out ways to learn how best to prompt an LLM. Tavel imagines a future where learning from others—and easily sharing knowledge—becomes a more integrated part of the experience. This reminded me of investor Tomasz Tunguz’s essay “Social AI,” about the genius of Midjourney’s launch in Discord because it gave people a way to organically learn from each other.

How Tavel spots exceptional founders (00:24:10) 

Tavel’s taste in founders is people for whom building a company feels like a calling—or even an affliction. “It’s this rash that they just have to scratch and that’s gonna make them run through whatever walls that they have to,” she explains. She calls these founders “learning machines,” focused on what’s best for the company, and not what feeds their ego. 

When it comes to recognizing these founders, Tavel pays attention to how deeply they’ve thought about what they’re building. “I hate to say this,” she admits, but when someone says, “‘Oh, that’s a good question, I hadn’t thought about that’... that’s usually concerning.” If she’s only spent 30 or 60 minutes with a founder and is thinking of things they haven’t, it suggests they haven’t done the work. The founders who stand out are already in the weeds.

She recalls advice from Jeremy Levine at Bessemer: The best companies are “donut companies,” where “you go to the board meeting, you eat a donut, and then you leave because they don't really need you.”

Here’s a link to the episode transcript.

You can check out the episode on X, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Links are below:

• Watch on X
• Watch on YouTube
• Listen on Spotify (make sure to follow to help us rank!)
• Listen on Apple Podcasts

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