Tim Doyle

SVP International & Hims&Hers

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

This is great.

[Down Round @downroundpod]

What the hell is Wikipedia? @rgcooke joined us live to answer that question and to talk his new book The Last Best Place on the Internet. https://t.co/bkdgL0WvMO

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

@tysondrake @jacob_posel Rocket internet dna

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

@tysondrake Over the whole history of the biz maybe like 3 or 4.

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

This video is awesome. The takeaway though is not I must hire someone who can replicate this.

The half life of new growth tactics alpha is shorter than ever.

The really rare talent is those that can look at the way channels and content are moving and design the next system

[Bin Liu @liu8in]

I’ll hire you tomorrow if you can build UGC content campaigns like Hector

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

@tobi @nickcrocker Different generations though no? Tobi from a previous era of builders, not really a hype video, distribution above all else, seed stage secondary new gen builder.

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

@pranavpiyush Yeah I think we will see some bifurcation between perceived commodities and perceived quality or taste based goods, agents going to destroy value in the former.

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

I hope this point about subsidising product quality is true but I just haven’t seen any evidence of it yet.

It seems to be that agents are working more like the “I’m feeling lucky” Google search result, embedding an SEO advantage, and likely one consumers are going to trust even more because it’s presented as an answer rather than a set of options.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy:

• Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies.

• How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be.

• In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good!

• It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.)

• A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to).

• Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big.

• Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions.

Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

@TaylorHoliday Massively depends on prompt. Good for cheapest, best seems to overweight third party trust signals and then best for me is massively skewed to small context.

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

@stevehind Still just an SEO game and also not really how people prompt. Feature stuffing and fake credentials. people will also just prompt best and cheapest and I don’t think that’s getting much value. Then when you go for “best for me” it massively overweights small amounts of context

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

@SmallTimeVC Yeah I agree with the point in the context of removal of friction, waste, and then outright theft. But quality seems like a step further away.

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

@kylem_org would love to chat about this if you're up for it?

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

@codyschneider Hey Cody, find your stuff really interesting, would love to chat. Send me a DM.

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

@HERMESINVEST1 @himshouse Wait until you see what we have cooking

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

@theTanz54 @AndrewDudum Soon!

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

@OrangeBlossom9 Yep through Juniper at the moment and soon through Hers.

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

Men’s health has changed a lot in the seven years since we founded Pilot.

There was a widespread belief that men did not care about their health, and that solving for discretion and convenience was the only way to reach them.

That world has changed. Men care more, expect more and understand that the investments they make in their health pay off in how they feel, how they look and how they perform.

Today, Pilot becomes Hims, and we’re raising our ambition to meet the needs of Australian men through personalised preventative care.

I co-founded Eucalyptus on the belief that healthcare’s biggest opportunity isn’t the hospital—it’s everything that happens before you need one. That’s the same belief we’re taking into this next phase of growth.

Current Pilot customers will keep the local care team they already trust. They’re now part of a platform serving millions of men worldwide.

I’m proud of what we’ve built and excited for what’s next: https://t.co/fK4DTiPESP

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

@swcm1315 @AndrewDudum Give us 3-4 months!

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

@larmbrust @stevehind Mmm I reckon I might know a bit more about this than you think.

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

@stevehind Oh I get it they make every dose for an individual script, lol, zero chance this doesn’t get sued, what a waste of capex.

[Tim Doyle @_Timdoyle]

@stevehind How does this not get sued by Lilly in 4 seconds?