I interviewed at Character.ai last month. I got an offer. It was Staff+ offer 200K+ base and 2M+ RSU. The team looks talented. But the product looks basic. Tried chatting with their bots. Apart from generating a few memes, there isn't a utility. The company has value, but it isn't worth $6B. I am an ex-Googler, so, I have a fair bit of second-degree connections inside. I learned from those connections that some shenanigans are going on. The company is spending a lot on "manufacturing" traction. I was in Google when Google offered $6B for Groupon. 10 years later, the market cap of Groupon is $300M! This looks like Groupon 2.0 to me. https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-talks-invest-ai-startup-characterai-sources-2023-11-10/ #Google #AIHype
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We are in the peak of AI boom, not sure how far it’ll go but do you think they hype gonna last long enough for such company to survive? GenAI seems like recent Web3 hype to me, everyone trying to force use cases, even if it’s not working.
What are the force use cases that aren’t working? Chatgpt isn’t working?
There is a hype but its not comparable at all to web3
Agreed. They will have to justify that valuation through enterprise products, as a consumer product this is just a fad.
I have worked in both B2B and B2C startups. It is very rare for a company to excel at pivoting from one to another. Not impossible but hard. Further, I am not sure enterprises want fake managers as much as people want fake gf.
you don’t sound like you understand startups? manufacturing traction is what you do. it’s why you spend VC money instead of bootstrapping. you buy growth and thus displace any would be competitors. as long as marginal cash flow is trending positive or you can project a positive margin it’s all good. generally speaking you need a certain size market to become profitable and you spend spend spend to acquire that market. that said, nearly all AI businesses are a disaster. they are all living the fantasy of the hype cycle. of course there’s another kind of manufacturing traction which is financial fraud. i doubt that’s what you mean since the first kind is de riguer
I meant the second type. Or something between the two.
I'm wondering if such companies like character.ai are good to transition to ai as swe? Maybe others thay could be easier to get into even though the pay might be lesser?
If you used Path in 2012 to transition to social media. It might or might not have worked depending on your timing.
What role did you interview with? Standard SWE or MLE?
MLE (staff)
Primary use case is romantic chatting with a bot. Some users even call it gf/bf. Company tries to hide this from public. But that’s the only thing got traction so far.
@tollroad aren't they worth $1B? Or did they recently raise
That’s interesting insight for sure. Did you mean 2M+ worth of stock options at the current valuation? Hard to say what that would be actually worth if and when they go public?
WhatsApp was $19B for 400M MAU. Character.ai has to hit at least 100M MAU to justify a $6B valuation. Do you know anyone who uses Character.ai? Tech geeks don't use it. Soccer moms don't use it. Who will use it for it to hit 100M MAU?
Well yes I get your point but what I was asking was in your offer letter I don’t think they would’ve said 2M RSU but rather some number of stock options right? And at 6B valuation it’s worth $2M but if the valuation crashes like you’re saying then it might be way less