Nir Zicherman and Mike Mignano launch Oboe, an AI-powered multimodal learning platform

room. Really quickly, let me tell you about audio customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. We have our next guest two-timer. We got Michael with the TVPN hat. Thank you. Great sign of respect.

I got to do my part, guys. Thanks for hopping on. I didn't I didn't have one of the hats. We will get you one. We'll get you one. One day one day near uh we were over subscribed actually. We I think we made what a couple hundred of them and uh uh not nearly enough. But thank you so much for hopping on the stream.

Uh let's uh let's just kick it off with some intros for those who are listening. Near take it away. Take it away. I'm Near Zickerman. Thanks a lot for having me. I'm the uh CEO and co-founder of Obo. And the other co-founder is my good friend Mike here. What's up guys? Great to be back.

Obviously, we've spoken uh a number of times. I'm uh one of the co-founders of OBO and also a partner at Lightseed. And Near and I had previously co-founded uh Anchor, which we sold to Spotify. No way. Putting the gang back together. I love it. Anyway, let's get let's get into the news.

So, so you guys launched uh are are you guys uh product? How are you position? Is it a bet? Yeah. Is it a beta? Is it is it is it thing GA? What's going on? Yeah. So, we're out there. OBO is uh is live to the world and it is the easiest way to learn anything. So, you come to our website, obo.

fyi, single prompt, we will magically create a course to teach anyone anything. Yep. When I say anything, I really mean anything. Mike and I were talking earlier. What was the example we had?

We had uh you could learn about how to cook pasta and you could learn about the quantum physics of why of how cooking pasta works if you wanted to. So truly a a broad range of of topics. Um and with OBO courses, we let you learn in a variety of different ways, right?

So you come in again, we magically create a course and it is made up of everything from the ability to read about the topic, short form, long form to listen to a podcast about it, two hosts like yourselves talking about whatever uh the topic, completely personalized to the user.

We have games, we have quizzes, a totally immersive experience to let you learn. Yeah.

Uh I saw a screenshot from uh none other than Martin Skrey saying this was very cool and it showed uh I mean it felt like a lot of the anchor DNA was in there in the sense of when I think about anchor it's like you have an MP3 and you need it on a lot of different and you need to instantiate it in many different ways.

distribution is is multi-platform and uh and and you have essentially like some sort of deep research project going on under collecting information organizing it with LLMs I'm sure but then instantiating it in a summary a deep dive uh an audio product so talk about the multimodality where you see that going in the near term when are we going to get uh video in here at some point I could imagine with V3 and some of the advances there eventually you'll be able to just like sit in on a 1-hour generated video lecture if that's what you want.

I don't know if anyone wants that long term, but uh where do you see all the different multimodalities going? I actually think a lot of people do want uh video. It's in the works. We are working on it. And to me, you know, I mean, people spend hours on YouTube. Yeah.

Constantly trying to learn and and you know, explore curiosities. The reality is people are online learning constantly. You just don't think about it as learning.

you know, you're on tons of different websites, tons of different apps, trying to like figure out understanding things in the news, understanding what you read, trying to get, you know, you're curious about things and you want to dig in. People do not learn in one path and they don't learn with one format.

So, a core philosophy of ours is if you're going to build a learning platform, you have to learn it the way that people actually learn. And the way that people actually learn is multimodal, right? It's immersive. Um, Mike, what do you what do you want to add?

Yeah, I mean look, I think the the the beauty of the multimodality is it lets people learn on their terms. You know, one of the reasons we started this company is we sort of looked at education. We looked at learning and we realized that the way people learn right now is too rigid. It's too one-sizefits-all, right?

You have higher education and traditional education teaching every single person on the planet the same thing in the same exact way. And that's just not how we all learn. We all learn in different ways. Some of us like to read. Some of us like to listen. Some of us like to watch Tik Tok.

Uh and so what we realized is we have this technology now that can personalize learning for anyone on the planet. And so it would be a shame to not actually do that and make the most personalized form of education ever before. How are you thinking about gamification?

I seem to remember uh you guys had badges in the first app and uh uh to kind of help someone get over the curve of actually distributing a show.

Um, uh, we're seeing, you know, the both like Resilience and the stocks all over the place with Duolingo, but it feels like Dolingo has done a great job of taking an education product and making it fun and and repetitive and maybe even a little addictive.

And it seems like that is a piece of the goal, but how do you think about the various trade-offs there? Uh, look, I think gamification is key. I think the main reason gamification is key and accessibility and making it fun is key is because learning is intimidating. Yeah.

Most people who want to learn something new, they look at how you do it and they just get intimidated and they turn away. And that's why so much of what we've built and what we'll continue to build is around making it really digestible, really peacemeal.

Like like Mike said, putting it in the control of the user so that they could decide how they want to navigate things. I think any course on OBO should be presented to a user today and in the future as you can do this. We're going to help guide you through it, right?

we're going to put enough tools in your hands so that you could be the one to guide the system and and let it know how to effectively teach you. How do you how are you guys thinking about solving for hallucinations if if if I if if you know if you can remember a teacher that taught you something and it was wrong.

It's like it just completely destroys the trust. Like you it's hard to you're like you said that this event happened in 1970 and it actually happened in 19. Yeah.

I mean what would what would we be as a 2025 AI startup without a multi- aent architecture right Near explain our multi- aent architecture let me let me tell you about our multi-agent architecture yeah look the big challenge in a lot of what we spent resources on over the last year building this thing was on how do you present to the user really highquality engaging content that is accurate extremely quickly because for this content to be lightweight and accessible it has to happen fast right so the way that this works under the hood is like this I I think the honestly the toughest challenge is an orchestration challenge.

It's how do you simultaneously have an agent generating you know the skeleton of the course and the references that it's going to pull in and the uh script for the audio and fact check all this stuff agents correcting other agents and all that happens within seconds of you generating a course and it's going to continue to get better.

uh look hallucinations I think are uh the reality is I I think right now people primarily learn through resources that are completely unchecked and so uh I think one of the biggest advantage that advantages that we want to invest in is making sure that when people come here they feel confident that they're getting the highest quality and the most accurate well congratulations on the launch I'm excited to try it out my challenge for you I don't know if either of you play the obo you need to use obo to learn to play the obo you need to dog food your own product next time we have you on the That's the goal.

I expect a solo on the obo obo solo. Obo solo. Let's make it happen. Congrats. I think it's a great idea. You should. Guys, let me just let me just say one more thing if you don't mind. I know you got another guest coming on. We are investing a lot of money in AI.

We've invested like what a trillion dollars at this point or something. It seems crazy to us that we have invested so much money into a technology that's going to make an alien life form that's actually smarter than us.

And so the whole purpose of this company is to actually use the artificial intelligence to make the humans smarter. That's what we're trying to do here. It's actually let's pour that investment back into human intelligence. All right. We're bringing human intelligence back. Organic intelligence. Farm to table.

That's right. Farmtotable intelligence. Uh I'm excited to check it out. It's ext you know we we cover like hundreds of topics a show. There's often times where we're coming into a show and we have like 10 minutes to prep on something that we know nothing about.

And I have a feeling that OBO is going to be a great solution for it. So, thank you guys for joining and and congrats on the launch. Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good rest of your day. Next up, we have I'm John. He's coming in from the restroom rating room. I'll tell you about eight. com.

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