Dara Ladjevardian, Delphi.ai: Creating AI digital clones for scaling human availability and mentorship

welcome to another founder wisdom pod we have darra lardan with us today he's co-founder at Deli Deli is a very cool company that I tested the other day uh it allows digital cloning so having a n Avatar of yourself whether it is for podcast for courses uh for any cells activities for early adopters that is so I'm here to talk about Dara and his background uh he

was at on deck that is in SF he was founded at Friday and a bunch of other startups so eager to get into it today this podcast is presented to you by ppar.com if you want to start your scale your own podcast Dara welcome to pod tell me a bit more about yourself and what you're up to nowadays Charles thanks for having me so as you said I'm the founder of deli and I've been in the AI space for about six years now after graduating I worked at a company called C3 AI for about two years and that's around when llm started to make their way to Twitter you started to see all these crazy llm demos and I was like something big is about to happen in this space so I left C3 and

started my first company which was called Friday it was an AI assistant for shopping and while I was working on Friday I was reading a book about my grandfather and I wanted to be able to get his advice because I was kind of lost as a solo founder I didn't really know what to do and so I created a clone of him using his book and kind of treated it as my own personal mentor and Friday got Acquired and after that startup I moved to Miami to work at open store but I started to really ideate on this uh thesis of letting people clone themselves and scale their availability so I met my co-founder at open store and we left to start Deli and now we serve hundreds of experts coaches creators influencers even CEOs

who want to clone themselves in order to scale their interaction scale their Communications some are using their clone to monetize their expertise so I can pause there and dig into any area there if you're interested yeah well your grandfa who was he in life so he was one of the largest businessmen in Iran prior to the revolution when the revolution happened he lost 99% of his wealth

and had to start all over here in the US so always someone that I kind of looked up to as uh you know a goalpost for what I want to achieve here in the US and he passed away so having this ability to be able to learn from him was obviously a very powerful experience what data did you feed the chat for that one because I would guess it was mostly like yeah not Digital Data yeah only at the time we didn't really have voice cloning so it was just text and we used uh the book that was written about him and so I I it was a back and forth chat now we have voice and we have video so I I only wish that I had higher quality videos of him because we

could you know bring the full thing back to life yeah I'm looking forward to chat with your granddad here it's quite exciting I also see South Africa in your profile so uh what brought you to the US I'm not from South Africa I I did a summer abroad in South Africa with a focus in data science and that's actually how I got into AI um there was an AI specific program in Cape Town that I enrolled in interesting and as an AI founder um with Friday tell me about like that acquisition and how that uh potentially changed your life because that one was only seven months so how does one get acquired in seven months yeah so when I left C3 I kind of told myself I'm gonna give myself eight months to work on

a startup and decide if this is the startup that I'm GNA work on for 10 years or if this is something that's more shortterm so I worked on Friday I came up with the idea by just like thinking about ideas it wasn't something I was passionate about it was just an idea and I also didn't have a co-founder so I think the the most important things to come from my experience on Friday is realizing that hey if I want to work on something for 10 years one I need to work on something that really really excites me and two I need to have a co-founder because you know I like working with people so by the time I got an acquisition I I was like okay I'm going to sell this and really focus on

on finding a co-founder and finding an idea that I'm really passionate about which is what I was able to do next and what was the complexity of uh building the algorithm behind all of that because you weren't the only one to have that idea but you seem to be the one at the Forefront in terms of execution and product deployment you mean for Deli right yeah so

it we are constantly improving because what we're really trying to do is capture how the human mind works and a book that I read when I was a freshman in college it's called how to create a mind by Ray kerswell and the whole book is literally about how to replicate the process of the human mind with computer code so that book really informed a lot of how

I've been thinking about the infrastructure for Deli and while we have been able to get to a certain level we're not even close to how good we could get so we're constantly working on improving how The Clone sounds like you how it speaks like you and how it also thinks like you as well you have quite uh prominent people on the platform Brandon Bard uh sahil leing

is the founder of gumroad Ryan Hoover founder of product hunt how do you get these people on so when we first started the company no one wanted to be on the platform because our UI was horrible our branding was horrible the tech wasn't very good and it's something that I learned when you're when when you're working on a product that aims to represent people people's identity people's

name people are very sensitive about that so you have to kind of one of our company values is treat the brand as you would treat your mother it is something that's very fragile and so by spending a lot of time on our branding on the actual Tech obviously and the design we were able to show people hey like this isn't just a one-off project on Twitter this

is something that we're trying to build for the long term and over time we were able to get people who previously were like no I'm not down and nowadays all these AI clones that I'm looking on the website included seld you literally take voice samples put them into text and put them in the uh AI clone yeah so we have Integrations with pretty much everything YouTube channels

podcasts books notion Google Drive social media and all that goes into the mind of the Clone and then for voice you know we just take audio samples and it learns how they speak and like I said we're going to be releasing video calling end of next month and it'll look something like this are you targeting podcasters nowadays podcasters are a good chunk of our customers but it's

pretty evenly distributed between podcasters coaches authors experts and business people interesting and in terms of G TM strategy how do you reach to those people up till now we haven't we really haven't spent any money on marketing it's been completely word of mouth and as I think about building you know a long-term company I think if we're not growing through word of mouth and our product isn't

good enough so we really have a plg approach to improving the product for our current customers to the point where they're excited about sharing it and our customers all have like 10,000 Plus followers so whenever they share their clone more people hear about Deli so it's kind of a organic marketing cycle so how do you separate work between you Sam and the engineering team yeah well I

think uh the CEO kind of has to be involved in every single detail in the company you have to care one of my favorite startup books is called build by Tony Pell and he and he talks about just being obsessed with every single detail from the 0 process I stopped coding about five months ago and now most of my work is product prioritization customer Outreach Partnerships and

uh writing product specs based on the feedback that I get from customers Sam is the CTO you know works on the Clone brain and managing all the other engineers in the company and then we also have a head of design and a head of Ops some people are um AB BS against clones and uh digital Avatar and I speak a to a lot of these because I do have this uh fantasy of having a chat Charles GPT running these podcast and yeah freeing my time filtering people as well and being the my best self pretty much all the time for example now I'm a bit tired I could probably run a better interview if I was my Charles GP team I think some people are like yo this is not human or this lacks uh

personalization um some people I feel they're more concerned emotionally speaking or do not see the value into it what do you have to say to those folks yeah I mean our our goal is not to replace human interaction this isn't an automation of the self it's an augmentation it's about providing access where there previously was not an obvious example is you know Brandon bashard the coach in

the world to have an in-person meeting with him is probably very very costly and most people cannot afford that and this kind of democratizes access to that kind of one-on-one conversation one-on-one mentorship and as you know blooms 2 Sigma states that the ability to get one-on-one mentorship or tutoring in a specific topic improves your ability to learn by two standard deviations so we think this as enabling

expertise and someone like you it's scaling your time and like you said prioritizing the people that you actually think will be meaningful to what you want to do so again we're we're we don't want this to be a deceiving platform uh every clone that's created has to be tied to the person it represents so we also don't want this to be like a parody platform or an

impersonation platform so would the future be uh Charles GPT talking with therea GPT to see if we're fits and eventually us meeting together once we know where're fit yeah definitely possible um and it we have a new scripting feature coming out in a couple of months where your clone technically could come to this Zoom call and ask a set of questions the way you would and it

would feel like a back and forth conversation historically like physical cloning was made illegal why do you think that is if I live more in the digital realm nowadays I have a digital clone of mine I guess some people would freak out out over this what do you think that is freak out over a digital clone or a physical clone both um they're the same though digital

physical um they're copies of you I live more on the internet than I live physically um so theorically um yeah I could freak out over this cloning is illegal in many country why is that yeah I mean physical cloning is when I think about it it's a little scary just if there's a physical embodiment of you I don't really see the value in that because what unless

you're in like the sex industry which we don't support um physical cloning digital cloning the benefit is you can talk to someone so you don't really need the physical essence of someone present where digital cloning again as long as you know you're talking to a clone and you don't think it's the human I think that's really where the scare is especially as you know with the election

coming this year and there's all this fear of like deep fakes of presidential candidates and false advertising false messaging and that's something you really want to protect against well before I replaced uh all my humans with uh AIS two years ago I had this fantasy to clone Charles and have little Charles in my office here uh they would be quite productive they would have grits they would

have IQ and they would get done more than most humans I guess that's the interest behind um physical cloning now on another AI philosophical uh tents what do you think the effect of having multiple uh AI virtual clone online uh could someone sort of get uh lost into that and uh the Deep fakes that we're seeing nowadays do you think there's dangers uh with that yeah I

think the internet is is just going to be just an abundance of AI generated content it's most things are PE people aren't going to take seriously because they're just going to be so many Bots and like endless photos you're already seeing this on Facebook just AI generate Bots that are just posting AI generated photos and so that's why we think it's going to be even more important

to either get content from a real person or from a clone that is verified from a person that is how you trust and at Dela we have like the verified orange check mark to show like this clone is associated with the person you can trust things that it is saying and I I think that trust and that verification of content is only going to be more important

you think my AI could get way smarter than I am and that would reduce my personal really rate if people spend time with me maybe I mean we had one person who uploaded a book to their clones brain that they hadn't read yet because they wanted to see how they would interpret the book so very possible because again you can it takes you maybe a day or a week to read a book and it would take your clone pretty much immediately to read the book and interpret it but the difference is like our clones aren't really agentic so they're not really going out there and taking actions right now they're just mainly optimized for conversation and learning and uh discussion on your side do you have a Council of Elders um not necessarily zck Elon

and gates in one room but maybe uh Founders that were at your level like I don't know early strip Founders to give you advice on your current on the current state of your startup well we were really lucky to raise from phenomenal investors uh Keith your boy from Founders fund who's now a coastal Ventures and Shaheen from Lux Capital uh and honestly a bunch of our other

investors have all been great sources for advice but you have a chat room with like the best of the best in you mean with clones or like the actual people yeah the Clones with clones that we have again we don't we don't allow clones of people we don't have permission so have I reached out to the founders of stripe and Brian tresky to be like hey uh I think a lot of people would love to have you as a mentor it'd be great to have you on the platform I have done that have they responded yet no but I'm gonna keep trying and why do you don't do um clones of people if their information is public are there laws against that or it's just like not looking good it's a part of our branding

we we we want to be the trusted platform we want to respect people's identity um so I think that's really important for us as we grow I like it I I sense some master class branding in there am I wrong in that there are definitely similarities in our companies you know both inspired in terms of democratizing access to expertise and mentorship and so there's definitely some overlap

what's next on the growth map for you this year you've raised money recently I believe was 2.4 um what else do you have on your top goals list yeah from a products perspective clone video calling is a big one um the scripting is also a big one so your clone can actually have a conversation with a specific outcome whether it's teaching or interview those are two really

big things I'm looking forward to and just working on improving the Clone brain and then from a goto Market perspective really trying to uh work with some of these big names that are known in like the different expert verticals one thing we are trying out which I'm really excited for is we're working with a couple of authors to release their books with a QR code of their

clone at the end of every chapter to kind of like ask you questions about whether you understood everything and I think that turns learning from a book from like a passive experience into an interactive and personalized experience you have quad meetings with KRA boy BAGI what kind of advice do they give you yeah we I I do have B monly meetings with Keith and um you know

Keith is kind of a a gen a product genius so he's he's always great with prioritization and um hiring so Keith has definitely helped me think better about how I should hire and also how I should prioritize because in a startup it's all about Focus it's all about what you say no to and that's really what takes you to that next level recently I never thought I'd

do so but I stopped reading books I read Wikipedia instead which in my opinion is so much more efficient if I get really passionate about one thing I might read an entire book on it so sort of a better filtering strategy and I find myself swapping between Wikipedia and chat GPT to get deeper on the questions because oddly enough Wikipedia doesn't have that feature yet um what

is your learning system like nowadays for me personally yeah business personal how did you learn so uh I used to be a big you know podcast listener and a book reader and since I started this company I really stopped consuming any content you know why I mean there there's certain books that I will read specifically when I'm trying to learn something for example I just read hooked

which is a book about how to build habit forming productss and that was like a useful book to me for me to understand a skill but I think in a startup the last thing you want is to be ingesting too much advice because then it's just gonna Cloud your vision and so I actually try not to like watch the news or or read people's Twitter threads or listen to podcasts because I'm afraid that I will be persuaded to doing something else I always want to be you know by the customers by the data and so I try not to consume too much information anymore that isn't relevant to Deli so what does your day-to-day look like as a Founder usually this is gonna sound very San Francisco Tech bro but I am a San Francisco

Tech bro I wake up at seven go to the gym uh meditate in the office by 8:30 team meetings product specs um maybe some Outreach maybe a little bit of code usually back by 9:30 and and we'll Journal a little bit we'll read a little bit and then we'll go to bed very Tech bro but um I certainly appreciate the focus uh you're very investable uh you might want to have a16z on your next cap table with their new seven billion dollar funds we are hoping to raise our series a at the end of this year it's just going to be a matter of can we build fast enough and can we grow fast enough and us usually that takes most of your time as the CEO uh do you wish an AI could take

charge of that not really I mean this is a part of the journey you know that the obstacle is the way this is uh this is it's like when you have a child and if you're not with your child in the early years of the of their growth they may grow up with some issues that they have to go to therapy for and so this this is the child years of deli and I have to be present as much as possible right um and investors are important in the case of Keith well he's giving you mentorship every now and then so that's very valuable as well guessing at this stage and how attractable it is to invest in your company then you can pick and choose the type of investors you want so it's quite

formidable um what's your vision for the company do you think in terms of years five years 10 years uh or just sole focus on one single Vision so I think when you start the company you should have a long-term vision and like that vision is there but then I try not to think too much about the vision and I just try to think about the next step because sometimes you can get too lost in like the the long-term vision and I know it's there um but right now I'm really just thinking about the next step thanks so much for today Dara where can people find out more about you yeah most active on Twitter Dar L and also check out Deli deli.

we're still trying to get the do domain because uh if you notice on our landing page we don't use the word AI once because I really don't see ourselves as an AI company we we're we're a people focused company and we're building a product that solves a problem and I personally think AI is going to be mostly commoditized in the next five years and it's going to

be as ubiquitous is saying like I use react in my in my project