How I Invest with David Weisburd E210: How Startups Can Avoid Being Disrupted by OpenAI w/Eric Olson
Sep 8, 2025
Eric Olson, Co-founder & CEO of Consensus, shares his journey in building an AI-powered search engine for scientific research. He discusses how they scaled to 5 million users with a small team and raised significant funding. Olson highlights the importance of vertical focus over horizontal platforms and presents his 70/30 product development framework. He also dives into the competitive landscape of AI talent, stressing that execution speed and strategic innovation are key to creating a defensible business in this fast-paced market.
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Talent Wars Are Layered, Not Universal
- Frontier model researchers are a tiny, highly paid group focused on core model development, not application-layer startups.
- Olson argues application startups compete for classical software-plus-AI engineers, not the billion-dollar frontier talent pool.
Google Scholar Is Frozen In Time
- Google Scholar has been effectively frozen for two decades and remains a list-of-links interface optimized for keyword search.
- Olson highlights this stagnation as an opportunity for modern AI-native vertical search products.
Layer AI Over Papers, Then Add Workflows
- Use modern LLM-driven search to extract summaries, inline citations, tables, and visualizations on top of papers.
- Build post-search workflows (reference managers, deep dives, question threads) to capture user value beyond links.