"If all you're doing is narrating what ChatGPT can do because ChatGPT is good at output, you will not have a job, you will not get paid well, you will not get promoted, and you will be a grunt for the rest of your life that will get marginalized by ChatGPT because it can produce output 24/7 at any time of the day and in any volume. Your life got harder because before ChatGPT came out, you had a normal job where, as long as you put in effort, you'd be recognized as an A player, and if you didn't, you'd be penalized. In today's world, if you put in effort, you still get rewarded, but if you don't and all you do is repeat what ChatGPT is doing, you will get an above-average score." - Jeremy Au, Host of BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast


"What's happening is that AI companies are starting to buy out these services companies because they're replacing those humans with robots. So to you who's picking up the phone, it's still a service because you're getting service in that sense. But from an economic perspective, if they're able to take a call center that only had 5% profitability, and if they're able to fire 90% of the workers over the next five years as people quit, et cetera, then the profit margin can grow from 5% all the way to 85%, and then it will look like a technology business." - Jeremy Au, Host of BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast


"A great marketer, somebody's a visionary, can go on stage and speak very well. We were just joking recently that some of the great speakers on marketing actually have a reputation for being terrible marketers. They're very good at being public speakers, and they can talk about marketing as a skill set, maybe as good teachers, but they're actually not good marketers in the sense that they don't understand the market, they don't listen to the market, their ego is big. You will be measured by the output, but that's actually less valuable than you being able to listen to yourself and other people and synthesize that opinion." - Jeremy Au, Host of BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast

Jeremy Au breaks down why most startups fail and what it really takes to succeed in the AI age. He explains the six patterns of startup failure, the tricky economics of service businesses, and why AI will wipe out average workers. He also explores how caring about a problem gives founders their edge and why listening, not output, is the real marker of a great marketer or executive.

00:59 Startup Failure Is the Default: Jeremy explains that failure is the norm in startups and outlines six common patterns including false starts, speed traps, bad luck, and weak founding teams.

03:30 Service Startups Need Tech to Scale: He shares how AI and automation can transform service businesses like call centers into high-margin ventures by replacing labor with scalable technology.

07:00 GPT Raised the Bar: Repeating what AI can do is not enough. The gap between average and exceptional performance has narrowed and effort alone is no longer a differentiator.

09:39 Founder Problem Fit Drives Impact: Success is easier when people work on problems they care about. Founder problem fit is just as important as product market fit.

(00:57) Jeremy Au: We wanna define failure as an (01:00) economic failure of the company, not a failure of the person, not a failure of the technology, but making sure that we understand that from our perspective, the most clear is that the early returns are not there for the early investors.

(01:11) And so we talk about that because the base case, if you choose to be a founder, if you choose to join a startup as a marketing executive, a finance person, or a partner, if you become a vc, investing in startups, the normal case, your day-to-day is dealing with failure. Your day to day, 90% of your time is dealing with companies that will fail.

(01:33) They'll fail to achieve that home run return from your perspective. Just like an Olympic athlete. Not all the athletes are gonna get gold, and not all years will they get a gold. But if they work and become an Olympic athlete for 10, 20 years, they may eventually nurture an athlete.

(01:46) They will become a gold winner at Olympics. And so startup failure. There are six clusters that are important. Good idea bad partners is one. Two is false starts. They start out with the wrong (02:00) product market fit because they never analyzed the market. We thought about false positives, which is they start out with a good idea.

(02:05) They tested early, but they overly extrapolated and grew too aggressively on a weak idea. And then lastly, speed trap, which is they grow too fast. they create their own competition. We talk about bad macro luck. Sometimes bad things can happen. You can get bad luck in the business world.

(02:22) And lastly, of course, we talk about the cascading miracles. These are your miracle moonshot startups that need multiple things to happen in a row, but it just doesn't work out right because execution, because it's too hard, whatever it is. These are the six types of failure, and if you can remember that as a heuristic, like what Noah said, then you'll be able to think about what needs to happen so they can help avoid these failure patterns as well.

(02:44) And so about regulatory affairs, where all happy companies are different. Each one earns a monopoly by solving unique problem. All field companies are the same. They failed to escape competition. And this was spoken by Peter Thiel, who was the founder of PayPal and Palantir. (03:00) And he has been able to articulate this.

(03:03) I think there's a good way for you to think about it in terms of competition.

(03:06) Do you see startups different from service businesses? So we have defined startups as any company that is newly formed, which is the most expensive version of explaining what a startup is. So you could be a startup that's doing services, for example, they're not mutually exclusive The question we're saying is, other startups are able to create a home run mechanic of generating a hundred million dollars of revenue within 10 years.

(03:30) So if you believe that you can create a services business , and you can create a hundred to 200, or $300 million of revenue within, you know, 10 years, then we will call you a home run miracle startup. That is worth VC investment. The tricky part is that services historically have been difficult to achieve because they need a significant technology layer to break past.

(03:51) The rules of gravity. So what I mean by that is services, let's say, is a barber, right? So historically I need to cut your hair (04:00) by manually, right? So if you think about it, the margins for that generally are low because you pay for a human for it. And then to scale it up is very difficult because you're train many barbers and maybe people to get it happen to manage that.

(04:12) So the services business can have a hundred million dollars of revenue, but most of the profitability is very low. if you are able to say, create a robot that cut hair without, I'm just saying humans, so technically you're providing a service, but the economics behind it are like robot or capital efficient.

(04:31) Then you can measure a situation where even though it's a services startup. He actually can generate a billion dollar outcome. And so I was in a meeting last week, and so the meeting that we had was saying that in the Philippines there are many BPO, Business Process Outsourcing. They also have many call centers and these are service businesses historically,

(04:49) where they help Sony or Singapore Airlines or DBS do those customer service transactions. What's happening is that AI companies are starting to buy out these services companies (05:00) because they're replacing those humans with robots. So to you, who's picking up the phone? It's still a service because you know you're getting service in that sense.

(05:08) But from a economic perspective, if they're able to take a call center that only had 5% profitability, and if they're able to fire 90% of the workers over the next five years as people quit, et cetera, then the profit margin can grow. You know, 5% all the way to 85%, right? And then it will look like a technology business.

(05:28) Palantir, you can argue as a services business. They did services for the Department of Defense in America. And then as they built board services and consulting services, they created products out of each one of those and started selling that as well. it is quite common actually, for some startups to use consulting as a way of product discovery to service customers and then figure out a more profitable structure for that.

(05:49) So I'm gonna go into the next stage. Career advice. I wanna talk to you about marketing a lot of folks think about marketing as a form of activity, In other words, my job is to run ads.

(05:59) (06:00) do budgeting for how much ads we should do. You know, it is about speaking, it's about taking action. And what I wanna really encourage folks to be thinking about is that. Actually the, the mark of a great business executive and marketer is whether you understand the market, which is a function of listening.

(06:14) And so a lot of folks will say, wow, a great marketer, somebody's a visionary, can go on stage, can. speak very well. we were just joking recently that, some of the great speakers in marketing, actually have a reputation for being terrible marketers. This is very good at being public speakers, but, and they can talk about marketing as a skillset.

(06:30) Maybe they're good teacher, but they're actually not good marketers in the sense that they don't understand the market. They don't listen to market. Their ego is big. Right? And so what I'm trying to say here is that You will be measured by the output, right? Whatever it is that's actually less valuable than you being able to listen to yourself. And other people and synthesize their opinion.

(06:53) if all you're doing is narrating what check GPT can do, because check GPT is good at output, You'll not have a job. You'll (07:00) not get paid well, you'll not get promoted. You'll not become an executive. COO CEO or head of department. You'll be a grunt for the rest of your life that will get marginalized.

(07:11) By check GPT because check GPT can produce output 24 7 at any time of the day and any volume infinitely.

(07:19) your life got harder because all of you before chat GPT came out had a normal job. But as long as you put in effort, you'll be recognized as an A player. And if you didn't put in effort, you'll get penalized and punished.

(07:31) in today's world, if you put in effort, you still get reward. But if you don't put in effort and all you do is repeat what your GPT is doing, you'll get an above average score. So the difference between an above average score and a rock star, that gap has deferred shrank. Does it make sense? And, and if you were just repeating what your GPT done, there's an engineer going after your job.

(07:53) Because it'll just automate you. So my warning to you is you have to think about this carefully because you are the early (08:00) beneficiaries of this. You can use your GPT, so you get to better serve the externalities of it. But once everybody starts using this on an industrial scale, then. We don't need to have this job in Singapore or America or wherever it is.

(08:12) It can just be a whole bunch of bots using crypto to pay each other to do your job, right? And so I've seen those startups that say our vision is to fire 80% of your workforce so that you can empower and pay the top 20% more. if you're not part of the top 20% of your job, your job is going to get.

(08:27) So what I'm trying to say here is that you need to understand the market. You need to be able to understand and synthesize and listen and integrate and reflect on those lessons that you have, because that's the only thing you control is yourself. You don't control check GPT, check GPT Controls check GPT.

(08:43) You are a user typing commands and training the data. You are an output function for them and a source of training data. The second thing I wanna talk to you is that in your career, you'll be thinking about two types of problems. The first type of problem is about founder (09:00) market.

(09:00) Fit, which is your problem. And the second is the problem. Market fit Market fit is very obvious, right? Which is they're gonna be working and then you're doing some promotion for some school that you wanna build, whatever it is. And you're like, do people want this? Do people not want this? And so obviously it builds what I previously mentioned, which is that if you're able to pay attention, listen to market, listen to people's lessons and integrate them, then you'll be able to build market fit.

(09:21) You'll be able to build good products that are not stupid. They'll not get killed by the market and you'll be able to make money. problem market fit is key and as Noah said, the lean canvas is a great way for you to figure out that product market fit in your careers. think about the founder problem fit, but are you solving the problem that you are best fit for?

(09:39) Because if you don't like the problem, if you are not very happy doing a finance job, A happy worker using check GPT will be far superior to you because you're not happy in a job, you're not incentivized. And if you are an unhappy worker in a career that you don't like using check GPT, you'll get replaced because you're (10:00) just not gonna be good at a job.

(10:01) Right. And so I really wanna challenge you is that one of the best things about being a founder, I'm not saying that you should be a founder, but one of the best things about being a founder joining a startup is you get to work on the problems you care about, the missions you care about. For myself, I get to work at Lucid, which is a cancer company, and my perspective is I get to work on a problem where if I do my job right, nobody has to die from cancer anymore.

(10:21) That's a world I wanna build because I have lost loved ones from cancer. it's a horrible disease. One in three of us will eventually have cancer as a lifetime risk, so that's something that I care about. Founders who care about a problem are able to have a David visit go live because they care.

(10:38) Because in the Goliath companies, they're filled with people who don't care. Collect a paycheck, nine to five, get it done. See you on Monday. But as a founder, you are powerful. Davids fighting Goliath because you care about the problem, that's why you see founders are very passionate about their jobs because they get to choose the problems they didn't wanna choose.

(10:56) No matter how crazy or wrong it is, they choose to work on a problem they care about. (11:00) I really challenge all of you to think about it from a career perspective try to work on a problem you care about. Even if you're going to finance, that's okay, but find a problem within finance that you actually care about, because if you can do that, then you can keep your job.

(11:10) Thank you for listening to Brave. If you enjoyed this episode, please share the podcast with your friends and colleagues. We would also appreciate you leaving a rating or review. Head over to www.bravese.com for member content, resources, and community. Stay well and stay brave.