Today on BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with the man who had the hardest sales job in Silicon Valley history: Zack Kass.
Before ChatGPT was a household name, it was just a research lab.
Zack was Head of Go-To-Market. He joined when OpenAI was around a hundred people doing two million in revenue.
His job? Sell human-level intelligence to Fortune 500 executives who didn't even know what a token was.
He built the playbook for Microsoft. For Coca-Cola. He turned a nonprofit lab into an eighty billion dollar superpower.
Then he walked away.
Zack, thanks a lot for being here!
TIMELINE
00:00:00 - 00:06:34 : Joining OpenAI as the first sales person
00:06:34 - 00:09:47 : The early GPT-3 wrapper ecosystem
00:09:47 - 00:11:03 : Strategy behind ChatGPT's development
00:11:03 - 00:16:45 : The chat interface decision and market response
00:16:45 - 00:21:04 : ChatGPT's explosive growth and company atmosphere
00:21:04 - 00:26:45 : Lessons from viral growth and Microsoft partnership
00:26:45 - 00:30:21 : Scaling challenges and the "bigger boat" moment
00:30:21 - 00:33:44 : Personal burnout and health crisis
00:33:44 - 00:37:29 : AI as humanity's last invention
00:37:29 - 00:45:21 : Technology, inequality, and policy failures
00:45:21 - 00:48:35 : Global AI competition and geopolitics
00:48:35 - 00:50:18 : AI's potential to solve major problems
00:50:18 - 00:54:33 : The next renaissance and education transformation
REFERENCES
- Sam Altman
- Brad Lightcap
- Lukas Biewald
- Chris Van Pelt
- John Maynard Keynes
- Elon Musk
- Jeff Bezos
- Koch brothers
- "The Next Renaissance: AI and the Expansion of Human Potential" by Zach Cass
- "Attention Is All You Need"
- Figure Eight
- Lilt
- Weights & Biases
- Scale AI
- Jasper
- Harvey
- Bain & Company
- Waymo
- Prenuvo
- DeepSeek
- OpenAI
- RLHF
- CRISPR
- Jevons paradox
- Jaws
