ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. OpenAI’s artificial intelligence chatbot has captured the imagination of the world and attracted a huge investment from Microsoft, which said this month it plans to sink billions into the venture and integrate the technology into various products.
But OpenAI’s rapid ascent — it launched in late 2015 and shared ChatGPT with the public two months ago — is sure to make some entrepreneurs wonder if they’re doing something wrong with their neglected venture.
Elad Gil, a respected Silicon Valley angel investor—he made early bets on Airbnb, Instacart, and Square—believes “the fact that ChatGPT is down all the time now is a good sign of the product-market. It’s because too many people are using it. It’s a big problem to have
Gil made a comment in the episode of The Logan Bartlett Show the podcast is there. The Google and Twitter alum noted the “problems” OpenAI faces after Bartlett, a software investor at VC firm Redpoint, asked about his thoughts on product-market fit when considering investment.
One sign he is looking for is positive testimonials from customers and users, he says: “It really comes out about the enthusiasm that exists in the small initial group for the product.”
But also, he added, “If a product breaks all the time, but everyone continues to use it, there must be something that fits the product market,” he said he witnessed that at the beginning of Twitter and now sees it with ChatGPT.
On the flip side, he said, many ideas just won’t take off, no matter how much time the entrepreneur sinks into them. He said that in Silicon Valley that “you have to grind forever and eventually something will work” is wrong, because people have wasted years because of “bad advice”.
“People end up spending years and years of their lives just grinding on things that will never work, because maybe it will work if I do these three tweaks, and maybe it will work this month if I keep going ,” he said. “For some cases that happens, but for the majority it can be immediate, or close to immediate.”
Although it’s true that entrepreneurs may have to deal with tough times during the recession, he added, “When times are good, the worst advice you can give people is to keep going no matter what.”
“There’s a huge opportunity cost in your time, and most of them don’t work,” says Gil. “Sometimes, you have to know when to give up and when to stop. It’s hard to know.”
Meanwhile, when an idea works, it tends to work very quickly, which has been seen repeatedly with companies we have worked with and invested in over the years—and now we see it with OpenAI and ChatGPT.
“The reality is that most companies, not all, but most of the companies I’ve worked for, end up working pretty early. And once they start working, they keep working.
He also observed when others had made similar realizations.
“One thing I’ve noticed is that people who have been working on things that don’t fit the product market—that they think are product market fit—when they finally go and work on something that actually works, they realize the big difference and the same level of lie to yourself.”
In the first case, “you’re chasing everybody and every sale is horrible and everything is difficult,” he says, but in the latter, it’s, “‘Hey, people keep calling me.’ So this transition, and until it happens you don’t know what it feels like.
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