Delphi CEO on digital clones that scale personal expertise — coaches and authors generating 7-figure revenues

Bye. Uh, next up we have Dra from Deli coming in the studio. I think we got maybe who knows it. Will it be the real D? Yeah, I was about to say, is this a clone? Give it to us straight. It's a clone. It's a clone. What's our safe word, D? What's our safe word? Just kidding. Um, what's going on? News. News.

How's it going? It's great. Welcome to the stream. It's great to see you. We We invited you on many months ago. I did. But you were you were cooking too busy in the kitchen in the trenches. Um well, do you have some news? John's got the hammer ready. Ready. We do have some news.

Today we announced our series A with Sequoa. Let's go. How much? Boom. 16 million. But luckily, you guys are early investors. Early investors. Fantastic. Proud. We love to see it. uh give us marked up by by our friends over at Sequoia. Yeah, give us the state of the union.

Uh how would you uh how are you pitching the product these days? Yeah, so Deli lets people create a digital version of their mind to scale their expertise and you can kind of think about it like a new form of media.

If you write a book or create a blog post or create a YouTube video, you can reach millions of people, but it lacks the personalization of one-on-one conversation. So now your mind, which usually has a cap, can be in multiple places at a time in the way that you would be in conversation.

And so that kind of spans across many different verticals. We have coaches using it to scale their client practice. We have authors using it to make their books accessible in interactive way. We have CEOs scaling themselves internally in their companies.

And we have some people using this as like an interactive resume or LinkedIn. Uh how are you thinking about the economic model? I I take me through what's what's happening now.

But uh we had this interesting discussion with Derek Thompson, the the author of Abundance, and he was saying uh paradoxically his TV hits sold more books for the book that he was selling than the long podcasts.

Because if he goes on a podcast and he does two hours of content, people are like, "Okay, I got enough abundance. I don't need to read the book because I got the whole Joe Rogan or the or the Lex Freedman deep dive. " But if he does a threeinut hit on NBC or ABC, uh, people are like, "Oh, that was interesting.

I'd love to dive into that book. " So, I can imagine there's this situation where if I'm an author or thought leader or something and I set up a deli clone and someone interacts with it for five hours a day, like they that's a good substitute for the rest of my content. And so, I'd want to monetize that to the max.

So, I want to hear about monetization now and where it's going. Yeah. So, we have some people monetizing their deli and making multiple seven figures in revenue. And this is like in Oh, that's a lot. And and the the consumer phone calls with these deli can span up to six hours. 6 hours on the phone.

Six hours, but you're choosing your own adventure. So, course completion rate is at an all-time low. All of our course creators are like, "It's a course winner. People's attention spans are declining. They want more guidance. " Course interesting. Monetizing your deli directly is an option.

But alternatively, a lot of people make it for free and it increases the strength of the parasocial relationship between the user and the creator and they actually end up wanting to buy their products even more.

Or even one step further, analytics dashboard in the last week give me the most profitable opportunities given the conversations my audience is having, content ideas, products, people I should prioritize. So the analytics actually ends up being very valuable. That's awesome. Um, yeah.

What what what is the next year look like you guys? I mean I I I feel like I have so much context on the business. Uh um but but what what does the next year look like for you? I feel like you guys have had competitors already kind of come and go. Um how are you think uh how are you thinking about the market?

Um and uh what are you guys going to be focused on?

Yeah, I mean when we started the company, you know, the first year things were just not working and most people uh would pivot away, but I think when you're building a product where people have to trust you with their data and likeness, quality and brand and trust are super super important.

So I think past that first year, we got that quality and trust. Now we have thousands of customers who have created a digital mind of themselves. And the next step is how do we bring on the next million people?

How do we make it easy for someone who isn't Tony Robbins to create a digital mind and actually get value from it? And the the common use case we see is twofold.

One is a new kind of personal website for the internet where if someone wants to pick your brain, they can talk to your deli and it's going to notify you if you should talk with them in person and a lot of people actually end up talking to themselves. So that's on the consumer side and on the actual creator side.

So people are monetizing their deli, but what the consumers actually want is guidance. So the next version of a course or a book isn't just like open-ended conversation with the author, but rather more of a guided experience towards a specific goal, which we call a journey. That's awesome.

And uh the beauty of Deli is as the models get better, context windows get longer, Deli's product experience get better. Is that right? Yeah. And the service area with the product experience is kind of three-fold.

One is our digital mind architecture which we're actually trying to capture your mind and worldview and how that changes over time. Two is the actual experience for creating your mind, getting the insights, monetizing it. And then there's the consumer experience for calling, messaging, and video calling. That's great.

What um uh what what does success look like over the next year? I I I know you're very ambitious. you've already onboarded, you know, massive number of uh kind of A-listers from different categories. What what are you looking to prove over the next 12 months? I think twofold.

Uh we want multiple Deli millionaires making money uh versus just a couple. It's like a new field of monetizing your expertise. And we want 100,000 to a million people using their deli as their personal page on the internet. I think that'd be a very good outcome.

Uh, talk to me about some of the weirder potential deli that you could potentially interact with in the future. Uh, character AI for a while would let you talk to Joseph Stalin. I tried to debate Stalin on the merits of capitalism versus communism. And the the model that they rolled out was kind of too rfed.

So, it kept saying that communism was bad. And I was like, I don't think Stalin would be making those points. This feels like an American.

But uh have you thought about offering uh a product for historical figures or talk to your late grandmother or historical records or like talk to your dog or some other sort of like persona that's kind of outside of just an individual creator wanting to offer their knowledge?

Yeah, I think our main focus is people scaling themselves and we have some historical figures on our website as a demo like Socrates and others. We don't allow people to create a digital version of anyone who's not themselves or that they don't have permission.

So, we couldn't do Steve Jobs right now unless we have like the Steve Jobs Foundation's permission. Interesting. And in terms of legacy, you guys know the idea of the company was inspired by me wanting to talk to my grandfather.

And I think pretty early on, we decided we didn't want to be associated as a company that's trying to profit off of grief. So, I think best world is eventually we can just have a free tier for people to do that with their parents and grandparents.

And that's not really a business model for us, but rather just like a good thing people want to remember their families. Yeah. How do you how do you think about um just like data capture and and creating the the training data for these individual clones?

I think um we're in a unique situation and that we we uh record 3 to four hours of live video content a day. But a lot of people are saying like it's not enough. Yeah. A lot of people they really need to go to eight hours so that it can always be on while they sleep as well. Yeah.

BCI just pipe it directly in 2x they need 48 hours a day. Yeah.

Uh but yeah, data capture what what what are the what are the richest sources of of content that actually the other thing that like an interesting challenge is you know people have certain views that they want expressed online and then other views that you could capture that they don't want expressed online right so if you wanted to if a if an investor you know wanted to uh clone themselves they might want to talk positively about certain companies and not share their real views on other companies that they may or may not be invested in.

So I feel like it's a hard challenge to figure out what information should actually be made public and and actually trained on. Yeah, representing a human being in every facet of their life is is very difficult. But uh we have a couple ways we thought about this in terms of data sources.

YouTube, social media, notion, Google drive uh and it creates feed so that it stays up to date whenever you have a new tweet or a new YouTube video. It just updates itself.

And for those who don't have a lot of data, we have this mind quality score that tells you how good your mind is at representing you and can ask you questions to incentivize data entry to make it better. And then like you said, who you are at work is different than who you are with your friends.

You may behave differently. You may share different information. So now we have this ability uh to separate different versions of your mind that has different access to data. Right now you have to manually do that.

So I I have one for eventually my great grandkids that has more intimate DAR data, but ideally it can be an intelligent and it knows what you would say depending on who the person is. That makes sense. How are you thinking about working with the underlying labs?

I know you've had some problems historically uh with with different vendors, but what what's your updated thinking? Are you guys leveraging open- source in a big way these days or or have you found um good ground with with uh some of the core labs? Yeah, we're kind of both.

We have some of the core labs, we have open source.

Um given our experience in the past, we are trying to get to a world where we are fully model agnostic and the true architecture and innovation that we're focused on is what what is that representation of the mind that can be such that your mind and my mind you can look at them and they're clearly two different entities and the models we use on top of that can be agnostic.

Makes sense. Um I want to know about like the the the different like touch points here that you could potentially go after. I remember there's this do you remember this trend where uh social media influencers would be like I leaked my phone number. Do you remember this? Yeah. Or they'd be like text me community. com.

Was that community. com? Yeah. Yeah. And so there's a world where somebody that like I I think that was basically just like injust point for something that was essentially like a mailing list for promotion and it was like text me and then you'll be opted into my email blasts.

Um, but you could imagine that being a an interaction point for essentially I mean you get to be an influencer at scale.

There might be it's almost like customer service and you're interacting with basically like an FAQ like hey I I you know I want to know where to get a TBPN hat like can you tell me and and just being able to DM your personal profile on X and interact with that or text you.

Um that's one kind of modality that people could interact with. Uh there's also like the big social media companies could put a button there that allows you to chat with that user directly. And so um how do you see the market playing out? What are you worried about?

How are you counterpositioning against the different uh players or different Yeah, I remember I remember the exact day that Meta launched uh digital clones in their own way.

Uh and I think Dar went through the cycle that every entrepreneur does when they get uh when somebody else you know attacks their One, all the VCs text you, "Have you seen this? Have you seen this? " Yeah. Step two, just enraged.

Uh, step three, realize that, you know, it's not actually going to end you and and it just validates your pre-existing and your business might grow faster because because more people are aware that this is a thing and they might want a better version of it. But yes, uh, yeah, just general understanding the marketplace.

Yeah, I think there were a couple core decisions we made early on that have set us up for success. One is that while most big companies and AI companies kind of are using your data to try to create AGI because that's where 99% of their revenue is going to come from in the future, we're saying you own your data.

You own your digital identity. We're not training models on it. Um, and that has actually gotten us a ton of customers, people who want to own their data and they don't want these big model companies to rip them off.

Number two is we think if you're going to go out of the way to create a really good digital version of yourself, it should work everywhere.

So a lot of big tech companies are walled gardens like it's it's only in those platforms where Deli you can create your digital mind SMS, WhatsApp, Zoom, Slack, Discord, Telegram, all these different sources and it's a central source of of that. And then three, I I just think that it's such a new habit.

Deli isn't really meant to be deceptive. Like it doesn't reply to emails for you or respond to DMs. It's more of just like a new form factor of consuming someone's content.

So on Instagram, it's a platform that promotes people who are very aesthetically pleasing where Deli promotes people who are pleasing for very different reasons. And so it's just a different incentive structure in terms of the network and who gets up to the top. Totally. What are you guys hiring for? Yeah.

What does it take to earn $100 million at Deli? Yeah. Are you guys hiring for any AI research researchers? Any nine figure signing bonuses? not training any foundation models right now, but we are looking for AI people and a lot of design engineers. I think uh the interface for the n mind needs to be beautiful.

We're honoring human beings and people need to feel special when they're creating their digital mind eventually when we have the consumer platform that we call the modern-day library of Alexandria that every mind is going to be on today and 500 years from now. It needs to be beautiful. So, design and design engineering.

Well, we'd love to recommend Figma and Linear for you and your team if you're not already using them. They are sponsors of this show. how they make it possible. Check them out. I don't think you heard it here first. It's a name brand in the Sequoia backed world.

Uh, congratulations to I I know this round happened a while ago, but congratulations to you and Spencer and the whole team. How much was it? Hit it again, John. There we go. Production team's getting better. They can cut to the gong cam when the gong when the gong hit happens. Let's hear it for the production team.

It's great to see you, Dra. Congratulations on the milestone. Come back when there's more news. Come back on when you have more news. We'll talk soon. You're the man. Cheers. Uh, in other news, friend of the show, Bos, not really a friend, but yet we hope he will be a friend.

We covered his uh beautiful profile of his house in the mansion section. He followed us. So, we're gonna get him on the show soon. We got to make it happen. I'm the biggest fan of this guy. Uh he posted that the MetaQuest 3S Xbox edition is now available. Everything you love about Quest and Xbox in one sweet package.

It's sleek. It's awesome. And it's limited edition. And you know what else? I already ordered one. It's coming to the studio. There we go. Yeah, I'm very excited. And And so I I mean it doesn't seem like this is like the next what we said. This is a real risk factor. Sean's gaming addiction. I'm not addicted to alcohol.

I'm not addicted to gambling. I'm addicted to video games. Seriously, if I ever go down a real bender, I will take too because I've never seen you play video games. Oh, yeah. The entire time we've been in the show, I haven't logged an hour of video games. I haven't played them in a long time.

But you get me the GTA 6 drops. I'm just ripping this thing off. We might be using the Deli here in my We got to go live. Yeah. But I have been uh so so this is not the Quest 4.

This is not a a a proper hardware iteration where we're getting the screen from the Apple Vision Pro pulled in, which I think will be in the next version, which will be a major major development because there will truly be no screen door effect.

And you will like like the resolution will be remarkable because that's what the Apple Vision Pro did so well. That technical hardware now exists in the world. Meta's clearly going to go get that and bake that into the next Quest 4. But, uh, the Quest 3S has already been a pretty solid product.

But what they're doing here is they're leaning into video games that are not VR specifically. And I think that this is 100% the correct move. Because so much of VR content is this chicken and egg problem. No game developer wants to go and spend I mean, how long have they been working on GTA 6? Like a decade.

Like, and it's cost them like a billion dollars. No one wants to do that if no one has the VR headsets. No one no one wants to buy the VR headsets if there's no GTA 6 on it. So, what do you do?

Well, with Meta Xbox, you get GTA 6 on the Xbox and you just play it on a big screen in VR and you're able to sit on your couch and instead of having to mess with a projector that might be a few thousand dollar or a TV that's a couple thousand bucks.

You throw on this headset that's a couple hundred and you get the movie theater experience in your apartment, on a train, on a plane, wherever you are, you'll be able to