Laura Modiano, Head of Founder Experience @ OpenAI on Building in the AI Era, and Why Anyone Can Now Create a Company

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to another episode of Riding Unicorns. Today we're sitting down with Laura Modiano. Laura's just taken on a very new, exciting role as, uh, head of Founder Experience, a new function at OpenAI designed to help startups build, grow and scale on their platform. So we're really excited to learn more about that and also just generally how the startup ecosystem can partner with OpenAI and what's going on in this whole AI space. So, Laura, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us in your new role. What can you tell us about what you're going to be doing and how you want the startup ecosystem to engage with you and OpenAI as a whole?

Speaker B: Of, uh, course. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me and for asking the questions. Taking a step back, I think how startups are building companies today, how founders go from I'm a developer and I'm building for myself versus I'm now solving for others and I'm taking the technology and building a company that I'm going out and fundraising for, scaling it, et cetera, is fundamentally different than it used to be in the SaaS world. And because founding a company and the startup journey has now evolved, we also have to evolve with them. And the way that we've always done business is great. However, there are gaps that have been created because the experience of building a company is now new. So we wanted to take a step back as a company and create the space to really start building alongside the builders at their pace and follow the way that people are building today. That means that we have to work with founders from day one, not from the day that they have raised funding and announced their funding, but really from the moment that they decide that they're not just building for themselves, but for others. And then we have to accompany them in every single step of the startup journey because those steps are compressed and the relationship that they have with us is no longer that of a, uh, vendor or a platform, but really an existential question of how does my product continue to update and stay at pace with technology and benefit from all that OpenAI has to offer. So if we really want to create a partnership platform and become a true partner that enables value creation in every step of the way, then we have to start thinking not as a company, but really as an experienced provider. There is developer experience, there's a go to market team, and we fill in the gap in between the two so that in every step, from the ones we're starting today all the way to the Founders that are scaling and are decacorns. What the founder experience looks like needs to be stitched up and we always need to be building every single day for them. That means that some things we will start, some things we will experiment with, but at every step we will build with founders in mind and based on their feedback and requests. So unlike every other company that decides what to bring out to the world, we want this to be a function that actively listens to founders, continuously listens to founders who are starting out, listens to founders that are growing and scaling so that we can build the right thing for the right audience at the right time and accompany them across every step.

Speaker A: Laura, I mean, it sounds like an amazing, incredibly exciting role. OpenAI wants to achieve a huge amount, already has, and we can come on to that. But what in that context that you've just set want to achieve with OpenAI over the next year or two.

Speaker B: First of all, I am, um, founder obsessed and I'm extremely lucky to be working in a team where everyone is founder obsessed. So the startups team that I was part of until now, everyone has either worked in a startup, founded a startup, invested in startups, so we have a very core startup DNA across the whole team. So we all measure our success and our ability to serve our audience and the builders that we work with in their ability to succeed. The number one and only metric that we have is are founders able to bring their companies to bear quickly with a technology that answers to their needs and are able to solve the use cases that they want for their users. So as long as we continuously have a flywheel that enables that and makes that possible for as many builders as possible, whether they're technical or not, with the tools that we have, whether it is through Codex or the API or any other products that we may have, we want people who want to service others to be serviced and taken care of. And we want that to be as painless, as easy as possible, and technically supported with technical resources from our side, as well as self serve resources, online resources, build hours, et cetera. That also means that because the volume of founders is growing and because the profile of founders and the way that you're building is changing, we need to have the right programs and the right resources at the right time because we understand that different profiles and Personas of founders are changing and hence we have to answer to that. We also as a team really want to be in the community so that we're creating continuously listening, because again, you need to hear what your users are saying. And you need to say to the platforms that you're working with what you need from them. You need to collect feedback and you need to give feedback. Because everyone's job, especially founders, is to continuously get better for their users, but also ask the providers to allow them and help them along the journey to get better. So as a company and a platform, what we want is to make sure that founders who are deciding to bring companies to the market are doing so as quickly, as efficiently and as capably as possible. Because we're building the right tools, the right models, the right feedback loops for them. And as long as startups are getting successful, then we are happy.

Speaker A: What does it mean in practice? Is it credits? Is IT engineering resource helping potential customers figure out where they can be using

Speaker B: all of the above? It's access to OpenAI and different teams within OpenAI. It's access to leadership for the top founders, it is different programs, it is credits, it is potentially marketing. We'll see what the things are. And I don't want to plant a flag in one thing because again, we want to be building this in public with builders and for builders. So depending on what kind of requests and needle moving opportunities we find, we want to be building that.

Speaker A: Laura Most new products will be built with some AI and they'll probably also include AI as an offering as part of their product suite for their customer. And there have been various terms like wrapper and just sort of piggybacking off this infrastructure that has kind of slightly tried to diminish the efforts of entrepreneurs who are building on top of infrastructure like OpenAI. What do you say to founders to sort of reassure them that this is actually the norm now and the models have had so much investment go into them that, you know, it probably isn't worth them thinking about building their own models. Uh, how do you reassure founders that want to use your infrastructure that that's the right step forwards?

Speaker B: So part of it is reassurance and part of it is just advice and worldview. First of all, on the reassurance side, where a we know that startup founders are the bleeding edge of technology and we build the intelligence layer, but it is the startups that build the AI applications and solutions that actually move how the technology is adopted and creating value and used within different enterprises or in the consumer side or healthcare or whatever it is in the right use cases. But for them to build what they want to build, the intelligence layer needs to be there. We know that the best builders out there are the startup founders. So we're extremely Proud and cognizant and focused on making sure that startups can be successful and can continue to push the boundary of what is possible with technology because they get obsessed with solving a problem. And that focus on single problems that actually move the needle for their users is what moves the whole of the economy forward. So we want them to continue to do that. That's the first thing. The second in terms of advice and how to build a startup, I think as capabilities have become more advanced, everyone who's using Codex can see that the ability to do automations and agentic capabilities and coding for personal use has jumped exponentially. So what you now can do for yourself is tremendous. So when you're building a company, you have to take a step back and see what someone can do for themselves versus what is an actual company, or as we used to say, what is a feature versus a company. And I think that we're moving to a world where we're no longer looking at unit economic improvement, but actual full value improvement. So we're not looking at creating automation or a uh, startup should not look to create an automation within a single step of a workflow. But how do you actually create a platform of service for a type of user that actually stitches again multiple value creation steps to make the whole experience of what it is that they're solving better? And again what they're doing is the flip of what we're doing, which is if you're a startup and you're trying to build a company, we want your experience of building a company to be all stitched up together and not to just offer simple things, but whole experiences.

Speaker A: Obviously your ambition is to build the best like, you know, startup platform, customer experience platform of any company that's been to suit like the fastest growing company ever. It has to be the best platform. But how are you building this? Are you using your own software internally, LLM only to like help filter uh, all of this information that you're getting from listening to customers and founders and you're helping you generate ideas of how you could use it.

Speaker B: Yes. So first of all you can go on founderxfeedback.com and actually anyone in the world can provide feedback. You can tell me what it is that you need from us, what impact it would have, what stage you're at, and any additional context. And we will listen, whoever you are. We don't need your email, we just want to know what it is that you need. What can we build, what can we unblock, what can we advance, what can we implement, what ideas you have. We want to listen from you, whoever you are, at any stage, because everyone has good ideas and we care deeply, deeply care about what people need. That's just one step. We're also obviously doing that with the founders we're currently working with. We're doing that within the community and the broader ecosystem. We're doing that with investors listening to what we're doing some of the top portfolio need. Because again, the experience of what a startup founder on day one needs, the day they decide to start a company is very different to someone who's scaling and is at a series A versus someone who's like at a series D and has multiple million of revenue and needs something very different. The second thing is, as we're working with startups as a whole, we work with different people within the company. We work with the founders, CEOs, CXOs, we work with the engineers, the developers, et cetera. And the different individuals also need different things. We want to make sure that as we work with the whole company, we're also always able to service what the founder needs so that they can continue to focus on innovation themselves.

Speaker A: And Laura, you were uh, previously part of the VC and startups team at aws. What did you learn from that experience that has now helped you with OpenAI?

Speaker B: Yeah, so first of all, I was very fortunate to have a couple different roles at aws, as I now have a couple of different roles at OpenAI. I started out in the healthcare and life science team because my background is in healthcare and life science. So I've worked in hospitals, I've worked in startups in healthcare, I've worked in the nhs. And it was really interesting to see how new companies in specific sectors versus when you go very broad build and what their needs are. It was also very interesting to see when I started at AWS during COVID working in healthcare startups, how different seasonality actually drives behavior and needs that are again seasonal or uh, responding to specific customer needs. So we understand very clearly that founders need to respond to use cases, market needs, et cetera. At the same time as I learned that I moved from healthcare to AI to gen AI, working with startups across all of Europe, working with investors in the U.S. this in here. And basically the same thing that I always tell founders is that there are things that are very specific to a company, but if you really want to have impact, then you have to abstract and find what is common across everyone, what always stays the same and does not change versus what continuously has to change because of current Dynamics. So what we know for startups, the same way that every startup needs to know for the people they're serving, is they will always want the latest technology, they will always want to have a great vendor platform relationship, they will always want to have access as early as possible, they will always need support and go to market and network access, they will always need to have a communication that goes back and forth and they will always need to be able to think, when I go from point A to point B and I have a milestone that I want to hit, how does my partner actually help me with that? That will always stay the same. Now, whether that is, you know, in my previous company or at OpenAI now, we always need to understand what really matters to the founders, for the founders themselves. They have to see for whatever vertical they're working on again, what stays the same and then what changes. So on. What changes for us right now is how quickly is the technology moving, what kind of technical support can we provide? Are there specific opportunities that have come up to the market right now? Are there regulatory or other dynamics that we need to be aware of? So for example, offering new things like zero data retention and how do we have EU data residency, et cetera. So we're always building with what stays the same and what is changing and how do we stay at pace with a change to continuously service the founders so that they can build for their users.

Speaker A: And um, you mentioned the kind of breakneck speed that founders are building at now. And we see that all the time. I mean and the sort of trope is that uh, the younger the founder, the faster they build. And you know, there's this whole generation of AI native founders who have grown up around it, know how to use the tools.

Speaker B: So what's really interesting is that obviously attention and taste are the two things that people now really call what emote is. And the younger founders are very native, not just in technology, but also in content and social media and the ability to talk about what they're doing. The other thing that they have, which you can see this as a good or a bad thing, but I think they have less fear and more risk appetite because there is no other option right now and I don't have an opportunity cost. So sometimes having a little bit of blinders to what else is happening around you is what allows you to move fast because you're not going in this analysis paralysis that, you know, I as a 39 year old professional would sometimes be prone to. So having that drive to just go and do sometimes is the push that you need for speed. I'm not saying it's always right, but it is a risk worth taking if you want to try and do something new.

Speaker A: Amazing, if any come to mind. What the most sort of surprising use cases are, uh, that you've seen people using OpenAI for either internally or among your customers.

Speaker B: I think what's interesting is how many non technical people are building actually quite technical things now. So I think it is now possible for anyone to do anything as long as they dedicate their time to it. And, and then the question goes back to you on how much do you care about being technical? How much of the process do you want to control and own versus do you want to have the tools do for you? So then when you're building, I think the question is, are you building something that has AI in the workflows? So are you using Codex or are you launching an AI application that uses the API as well? And both of them are very viable paths in my opinion, Having worked at OpenAI, I think if you're building an application that has AI in its core, and again, the relationship that you have with us is existential for your company rather than just strategic, then there's a lot more upside of how that can grow and continue to improve as the intelligence layer that we're offering to the market is also improving. And every single model, improvement and launch that we have will get you further and further ahead in your ability to service your customers. And that I think is quite magical because it means bringing really new things to the market. And that is true whether you're building in construction or in HR or in legal tech, or in fintech or in healthcare or in anything else that you might think of. So across the board there is so much potential and possibility, even in areas where SaaS did not have the capability to offer solutions. Which means that we're in a completely new era of what is possible with AI for startups and for the markets they service.

Speaker A: Yeah. And are you guys, I mean, we've had people on the podcast, we had Barney from Clio on, um, last week and obviously, you know, really successful company, hundreds of millions. He said that he's spending 30k a month, um, personally on credits and his whole management team is building internal tools. But you guys are the infra provider. Like, how are you guys being encouraged to use AI yourselves? Is that like a KPI for you?

Speaker B: Every single thing that I do, I now do with the help of Codex. It has completely changed my workflows and my life professionally. And frankly, Even personally in my personal life, it's brought a whole new experience for me as a mother. Uh, m. My daughter's 10 years old and we just play through Codex and play through building. So we guess we still do Legos and we still do puzzles and everything, but we also build games and we also build like anime character libraries because that's what she's into right now. And the ability to see that creative experience for her is just as exciting as me building a super cool dashboard to monitor a number of things for me, myself. So I use it as a, you know, the typical use case. So, chief of staff, so how do you look at your workflow, your workloads? Getting a lot of automations. So one thing that I do on a daily basis is so I have an automation in my Codex which says every Single day there's 10 people who are really important for me internally. And any Slack channel find any important announcements that they've had or anything that changes the conversations that I'm having externally and something that I should know and then give it to me in my Slack.

Speaker A: And Laurie, you said anyone can do anything. And I, uh, completely agree. And it does just take a bit of time to sort of persevere with a certain tool or get through that first hurdle. Where do you go to learn? Um, do you go and watch YouTube videos?

Speaker B: Honestly, no. So I ask Codex to teach me. So again, for example, I was building an application and then I needed to do a bunch of stuff in the terminal that I hadn't done before. I'm so impressed by our own Codex team because they ship every single Thursday. So we have Codex Thursdays and there's new stuff that gets launched every week. So now within Codex, you have, you know, you have your chats on one side, then you have the actual chat that's happening, but you can actually open a second chat and then have a separate conversation about the project that you're running. So for example, if something is not working or if you want to open the terminal, you can do everything within the one single desktop application. Application. So as I'm running a project, every time that something gets stuck, I'm asking questions about it, I'm learning from it, and then I'm getting the solution. Either seeing the code or looking at the terminal.

Speaker A: You guys have scaled insanely fast revenues, like the product as well, certainly the team. Tell us about some of the growing pains that you've experienced.

Speaker B: Personally, I've never worked in a company that I've loved working in more. I've never Worked in a company where I look forward to going to work and even like on the weekend I'm working because I get joy out of it. And especially now with the tools and how good they're getting. Like, I'm discovering things that are, like, fun, actually fun to do. And I do it with people that I genuinely respect, love, and have so much to learn from. I used to say, you know, you never want to be the smartest person in the room. You want to be in the middle so that there's always someone for you to learn from. And I feel like every day the team that I have in the broader company gives me the opportunity to learn something from every single person that I work with, whether they're junior or senior. So the fact that, uh, we all are on a constant learning journey from each other and from the market that is evolving and their needs are changing, our products are changing, means that we also get to learn so much from the founders that we work with and our customers. So we truly feel like we are responsible to bring the best models and the best service to market.

Speaker A: Just to wind that round to, you know, in any company, that's like doubling headcount every year.

Speaker B: I think the growth that we have follows also the growth of the market. So every new headcount that we add is coming at the same time as 100 new startups. It's no longer a startup here and there. It's really more companies coming to market. And we need to be able to service, again, the founders at every step. So I wouldn't say there's friction as much as there is opportunity. And we recognize that, again, we have to think of founders from day one. So when you think of founder experience, as I said earlier, I think there has been a gap that's been created in the market of, uh, what is a day one founder? What do you think about when you're just starting out? What is your need from the day you start to the day you've been funded? And given that that now looks very different than what it used to look like in the past, especially if you're alone, then how do you actually look to the platform that you're working with as a partner to. To support you in that journey and to make that process better and easier for you. So that is what I'm now focusing on. But I'm allowed to do that because as a team, we recognize that that is important. We also can do that and recognize that now because we have a big enough team where we have enough signal from the market and we're talking to each other, but we are very, very supportive of each other. The other thing that I've learned, and maybe this is my personal opinion, is that as a company grows, I recommend. This is Laura saying, not OpenAI saying, but I always recommend to hire with the expectation that your role will evolve and change as the needs of your customers evolve and change as well. So hire for your replacement. So a assume that as you grow, then you're going to bring more things to the market, so the relationship that you have with your users is going to change because more features, capabilities, et cetera are going to come in and maybe you're going to add more use cases, etc. So the scope of what you're offering is changing and hence every leader manager IC also has to work at pace with the product that they have. That means that wherever you start on day one or day X, if you look forward a year, year and a half, you should have evolved because the product has evolved, then some of your responsibilities are moving on to the people that you're managing. And if you're an ic, you're taking on more responsibility. And as you're growing, maybe you move from an IC to a manager, et cetera. So growth of the company should create the conditions for individual growth as well. And roughly half of what you're doing and your responsibilities when you started the job should move to the people underneath you, to delegation, so that they're growing and then you can go on to the next thing that matters to the users and that creates, you know, generational growth within the company and at the end of the day, that will create new titles, new roles, new functions, new ways of doing things.

Speaker A: Super interesting. And it's a great insight into how you've managed to grow the team so successfully. And so, Laura, I think you've done. You've done a bit of angel investing as well and obviously in your role you must have seen some really interesting companies. So we're going to move on to, uh, our. One of our final questions, which is our future unicorn prediction.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Is there a company that you've spotted that you think has a lot of potential in this new AI era?

Speaker B: So there's a company I really love right now called Perceptiq. They are based between Switzerland and the uk. The founder is Tillman Flock. Excel just led the round. They're an AI first operating system for Biopharma and then another one that I love, which is also an AI for science is Cusp AI, which NEA did their last Round. So both of these companies, I'm really excited in how they're using AI, especially for science and advanced what is possible to build in science and discovery.

Speaker A: And then, Laura, our final question, which is just a bit of fun to round up the show, is our dinner party guest game. So if you could have dinner with any three people, who would they be?

Speaker B: Ada Lovelace, who I almost named my daughter after she was an English mathematician, and it was at a time when women were not supposed to be great in mathematics. And yet her father recognized her talent and pushed her forward to it. And I believe she put in the groundwork for modern computers in place. So it would be a real honor to just hear from a woman who's been in sciences for so long. Then I would probably like to hear from Albert Einstein, because again, incredible history of discovery and science. And then I would invite my university philosophy professor to moderate the conversation because I learned so much from him. His name was Rob Devine. He taught me Western, uh, political thoughts, but in the most exciting, modern way. And I think mixing science and philosophy is a lot of what's going to drive discovery in the future. So I wish I could go back to those college days and the opportunity of having him and dinner with a scientist and a mathematician would be a joy.

Speaker A: Ada Lovelace was mentioned by Deepka Rana from North Zone. That's the only other person who also gets.

Speaker B: I love this.

Speaker A: Yeah, I particularly loved the conversation about, like, tools and building and going and learning anything and getting your hands, you know, being very hands on with a lot of this stuff. Because I think most people listening, it doesn't matter what role they're in. Whether a current founder want, uh, to be founder, uh, investor, or just working in tech, everyone is kind of itching to learn more and actually do things. And sometimes you just need to sort of separate from the core role that, uh, 60% of your core role and actually just go and do stuff. And I think people would have been really inspired by some of the stuff you said. So thank you so much for sharing that.

Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker A: That's it for this week. Thanks very much for listening. To stay up to date with the latest episodes, please follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. We also have a newsletter called Reading Unicorns, which is another great way to get every episode direct to your inbox. Please tell your friends about it and we'll see you on the next episode.