Ep 143: JD Ross on the New Invention Era & Building with AI in 2026

You can be so hard into AI to deliver a better experience that wasn't even possible a couple years ago. We're in an invention era again. The way you build a company completely changes. You found an open door. The company you're building right now is this amazing high-growth AI company. Not a single one of our full-time engineers right now writes code anymore. They do everything through codex, cloud code, or cursor. Tell us what you need and like, and we're going to ingest that into a self-learning loop of AI. Humans are tool builders and storytellers. Everything's new again. You can create not just a career, but entire new industries from scratch. JD Ross is one of my favorite entrepreneurs. He was the founder of Opendoor. He's now the founder of WithCoverage, which is one of the fastest growing AI companies I know. I first hired JD to be head of product at Adapar right out of college. Gosh, it must have been almost 15 years ago now. As JD will tell you, what's possible with AI is changing every week right now, literally changing core things about their business based on what's possible only two or three weeks ago. This is one of the most exciting times for builders. As JD says, we're all on the same page right now because all these things are newly possible and they're going to change a lot of the biggest industries in the world. Really fun to catch up with my friend JD about how to build in 2026 and what's possible in the world. Welcome to American Optimist. JD, thanks for joining us today. Happy to be here. Excited to do this. So JD, I was actually looking up your email ahead of this on the phone and it got from when you were 18, the trucking company that you had started in college. I remember we hired you out of college at Adapar. You were the head of product at Adapar. You founded Open Door with Keith, and now you're founder with Coverage. So you're a serial entrepreneur now, huh? I know. I've been following in your footsteps since I guess I was 18 years old, it turns out. And you're recently married. Congratulations. Thanks. It was a fun wedding, as you know. Very lucky. It turns out a good partner makes for a very easy and good life. You're a lucky guy. You got a lot of momentum in your life. And so the company you're building right now is this amazing high growth AI company. I want to talk about that. Let's talk about your background a little bit first though. Where'd you come from? Yeah. So I grew up in New York. My parents were both sort of the traditional, you know, Jewish upper middle class professionals. My dad was an accountant. My mom ran a small business in New York where she was renting wedding gowns. And so there was always this entrepreneurial spirit in the house where it was never like, oh, you work for a boss. There was never really any boss in the house that I never knew about. So I always knew I'd be starting something. Was your mom more entrepreneurial than your dad then? If she were in that and your dad was an accountant or your dad was an entrepreneurial accountant? My dad was basically in some ways, and he'll hate me if he watches this, sort of like a failed options trader. And so he started off, he graduated from Penn and he had a really successful run as a trader. And then I think he became kind of too contrarian and was sort of on the bear side of a very long bull market. A lot of really smart people are just very bearish for too long. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, yeah. Was it like a pessimist sounds smart, but optimist win or make money or something like that? Yeah. Yeah. Well he was, he was the bear and like, to the extent we had like bear posters on the wall growing up and things like that. And, uh, don't bet against America, JD. Stop betting against America. I think for the longest time, he kept trying to convince me that Amazon was gonna be like a terrible company. And I was, I just didn't buy it. Um, I saw the very smartest people I know are just consistently wrong on the pessimist side. It's true. Yeah. It's true. You got to watch out for that. And so he, he left that to become, I think he just likes the problem solving. And so he was an independent accountant, like doing the kind of more forensic things. Even today, he mostly works with sort of crypto, you know, founders and people like that, who are, you can get a little more interesting. Yeah. That's cool. And is your mom still working? Yeah. My mom, my mom's always been kind of an entrepreneur. Now she's, for the last 10 years, she's been doing sort of shades and things like that, interior for kind of high-end homes and brings like German shades into the market. Amazing. And so you went to school in the middle of the country. Yep. uh at wash you and then and then you got into trucking for a little bit at first what was that yeah so um i went to wash you which was great they were one of the few schools at the time that let you both study finance and computer science and i wasn't sure which direction i was going to go in um which is crazy to say now obviously like that's probably the most common double major you might even have today uh and at the school there was this kind of small trucking company that did moving in storage and i bought it from the kids who did it and we turned it into sort of this large institution, basically. I think they're now doing like 10 or $20 million a year in sales as a company, which is still there. And by the time I graduated, I think something like 10% of the college had worked for me, helping move things in and out. And as a VC, you probably respect this. It gives you good deal flow. If everyone who knows who you are, you get to meet some really interesting people. And this kid, Michael Carter... This is financial deal flow, not yeah yeah this was uh definitely financial deal okay got it i was i wish it was other deal flow i was pretty nerdy at the time yeah um but i met michael carter through that who worked with you for strive for college and funny he had this dinner we were at he was like don't work for i think it was a google recruiting dinner um and he was like don't work for google you have to work for joe and i was like okay nice of him yeah nice of him i'm glad glad glad you know i think he's actually around here somewhere. I haven't seen them in a long time. So you came to Adapar. You kind of quickly became head of product because it was a very young company, worked on the hard things there, learned a lot. And then you started Opendoor with Keith. The idea there, getting rid of realtors is the idea, which I guess there's been pretty good success there. We still have realtors though. Tell us a little bit about Opendoor. I think the basic idea of Opendoor was most homes are not like pieces of art. Most homes in the country are not like your home. they're sort of commodity. They're closer to like a standard skew than a kind of one-off thing. And so you can value them sight unseen much more accurately than someone who is not professional, shows up at the house, looks around and says, okay, square footage, whatever. And therefore, you could buy and sell them online and make that transaction digital. And people buy and sell cars digitally. People buy and sell everything digitally. Why not homes? And so for that sort of middle 80% of homes, the ones that are not unusual, we could make a better experience buying and selling. And I think people say like, oh, you know, self-service better or, you know, it's better to have a concierge. And I think the answer is people just want good service. And so you want to lean really hard into what is the best service. And so now with coverage, it's really about taking a very complex product. And it's not just having that really deep expert who knows everything about insurance and helps you understand risk and can help manage risk in your company. It's not about having AI and technology that automate and make everything really clean and good for you. It's what is the best actual outcome you can do? And it was the same thing at Opendoor. It was how can we make moving really, really easy and seamless? It's interesting because you'd think that with AI today, it'd be even easier to compete with realtors versus five years ago. When you guys first started, I thought it was 10 years ago now. Almost like probably 12 or 13. Yeah, it was more than 10 years ago when you started it. It's interesting because you'd think that Open Door would be able to work even better today with AI because you actually can emulate the concierge servers for some things. Is that true? I'm curious. Just stay on that for a second. It seems like you could have done even more with AI. Yeah, we were at the very beginning wave, I think, of where machine learning was being made accessible and made useful for the average person. Yeah, but you couldn't talk something about their home, though. Totally. And we couldn't get anywhere near the point where we were actually making the service side of it better. And so we relied on all these teams of people we had to train and re-talk through. And today, I think, you know, we brought in Kaz, who's unbelievable as a CEO. And I think he says it's the most AI-pilled company outside of the AI labs in the country. and it's because of this, right? Like you can internally and externally now lean in so hard into AI to deliver a better experience. It wasn't even possible a couple of years ago. The other thing, Open Door, so you guys were actually sometimes buying the homes because you knew that they were a commodity that you could then resell. And some people were skeptical of this, required a lot of money to buy the homes. Maybe there's, you could get stuck with a bunch of inventory. How do you guys think about that? I think like Open Door is a really hard business. One of our core values actually was we eat basis points for breakfast. like a basis point is one one hundredth of a percent. And so like everyone was constantly thinking about how can you optimize every last thing in order to make the business work? You know, I think one thing that AI is good at is introspection. It allows you to take large amounts of unstructured data and bring insights forward that allow you to make your business better. I think today as Kaz is going into that company, he's saying there's a million places where we can make this business better. Let's look at all of them And let's use AI at every level of the company, become experts at this to identify these opportunities and win. And then also become kind of that Amazon service, use everything we learned through that to build adjacent services and mortgage and title and all these other things that touch the customer over the lifecycle of owning a home. How can AI make all those better as well and then provide that to everybody? And OpenDoor has become a meme stock recently Yeah Which means people get really excited about some of these things they doing Like how should people think about this Obviously you not going to give investment advice but what are your thoughts There are worlds where this thing actually could become a much bigger company again? I think the funny thing about America is that we love speculation. And speculation actually creates real value. People think of speculation as this bad thing. But in this case, we got really lucky in that there was this meme stock moment for the company, which allowed us to hire and bring on talent that had forgotten about the company wouldn't have otherwise joined, which then actually creates real value. And so the meme stock, ironically, might actually create a real value transformation in the business with leaders like Kaz and others who've come in. Amazing. We're all impressed by what's possible. They're still rooting for it. You have moved on a couple different things and you're focused on with coverage now. This is your 100% focus? Oh yeah, 110. And so what is WithCoverage? Tell us about this. Yeah. So WithCoverage replaces the traditional insurance broker, the person who sells insurance policies to companies, to things like general liability, product recall, transit, cyber insurance, DNO. And we replace that person who gets paid by the carrier, a commission, to work with a company with a modern risk management team and digital platform. So think almost like the ramp for risk management. And how big a market is that? How How much money is paid to these salespeople for insurance? Yeah. I mean, well, trillions of dollars of insurance is transacted on every year. The insurance brokers themselves are, call it like 10 to 15% of that all in. 10 to 15% of the trillions is what they get paid. Across the world. There's like 200 to $400 billion of just kind of transaction fees. So it's $200 to $400 billion paid to these brokers a year, which is an insane amount of money. wouldn't they want to like band together and just like make it illegal for you to compete with them then so what's interesting about insurance brokerage is it's it's not like other kind of monopolistic businesses there's hundreds of thousands of agents who sort of like semi band together into these sort of feudal constructs like uh there's public companies like marsh or and are locked in which are ostensibly individual businesses but within them you have these sort of producers who own their book of business and protect that book even against each other. And so there's, there isn't this like organizational force to kind of band together against other agents because they're already competing against other agents. They're already all competing. Yeah. We're, we're just one more person coming in to compete and we're just trying to differentiate ourselves. And right now those big public companies, they don't trade at a very big multiple. Like they're, they're basically like there's a bunch of people working there. They're selling things and they're taking some piece of it. And it's right. I think it trades at like a few times revenue. Yeah, like 3 to 4x. Yeah. And so the margins are pretty low. Is the idea that with AI, the margins could be a lot higher there? How do you think about that? Yeah. So we think of it in kind of three buckets. One is like a third of their revenue upfront is just going to this producer who owns the relationship. We don't have producers. We are, in some ways, run more like a B2B SaaS company. And so we go directly to the customer and try to provide direct value by saying, hey, by using our system, our people and our software, you're going to save 10 to 30% on insurance. And we're going to cover the gaps that were left by your broker, who frankly was probably being a bit negligent with you. Well, relative to the most advanced possible AI and data system, you're going to have a much better solution for them, obviously. Exactly. And if you go to the website, there's like hundreds of testimonials from CFOs and GCs about why we do a great job. The second part is servicing, which is like everything from giving certificates of insurance to claims management to placing policies. These are all things that are like data entry jobs basically being done by, you know, 100, $200,000 a year people. in these companies, it's crazy. It's the worst possible use of their time. It's the worst possible use of customer value. And so there's instant margin expansion just by using AI to automate and build these agents that do more and more of that work. And so I think we're probably one of the few companies that have been profitable as we've grown in the last two years from scratch, proving that the value is there from the technology. And so it's kind of interesting, right? Because at Open Door, you're replacing realtors in a sense. And with coverage, you're effectively replacing insurance brokers. it seems like this is second one's easier than the first one. Why is that? I think it's easier because we get to be better insurance brokers instead of trying to like take you from one idea that you know to one you don't know, which is getting rid of this entire concept. I like this a lot for entrepreneurship. It's one of my favorite frameworks is that you have to do what you're already doing and just tweak it and make it better. My example I always give is St. Patrick. Have you heard this? No. So basically like St. Patrick converted Ireland in the fifth century to Christianity. and the way he did it is that my dad's side is mostly irish so i can talk about this maybe without offending too many people i'll probably offend everyone anyway but uh but basically like the irish at the time had all these like fairy spirits they would pray to and they had this sun god yeah and if you look at the irish cross it's like the sun god on top of you see in the circle on top of their cross yep and they feel like like my grandma would still pray to saint anthony when she lost something literally in like the 1990s and 2000s i'm sure they're still doing it today but that was like the equivalent of the fairy spirit you prayed to yeah so so basically they took everything they were doing and made it Catholic. Yeah. But it was, but it, but it's like, but it's still like very, very, so, and actually all these missionaries would go study under St. Patrick, how to do it. And you, and you'd spread these things by like not changing the fundamental frameworks they were using. You would just like make it part of Christianity. So it's just similarly, like you're not changing the frameworks, right? Yes. I'm like, please continue to use the exact brokerage experience you've had before. It just happens to be a lot better. And also under the hood, it's a completely different thing. Yeah. This is definitely going to offend everyone. We're going to leave it in a way, but it's fine. So this is true for everything. right it's true for you man humankind like we have ways of doing things we don't want to change them yeah even like i mean we keep going down the same path christmas is the same day as sort of the all the pagan festivals no of course they like shifted the day and then people argue about it and like by the way if you go back to early judaism it turns out there's all these other stories that we found like written on the egyptian stones from like 3 000 years or 2 000 years before early judaism yes like they were actually like the joseph story my name's joseph obviously the joseph story in judaism comes from something 2 000 years older that's the same freaking story so So it's like everyone's taking the things before them and then bringing them into their new framework. I'm a big... Humans are tool builders and storytellers. That's all we do. We're like, we can build this compounding knowledge and we can tell stories. And the stories are occurring over time and the tools just keep building. Yeah, you got to build on the existing frameworks. I think it's really important for entrepreneurs. You can't just start from a blank slate and just build something. You have to actually say, how does the world work today? And how do you harness those stories and those frameworks and then improve it, right? Yeah, mimetic truths stay true. Like people follow the same storylines over and over and over again. And you have to understand them and know where to jump in. It should probably disclose if we will in the episode, I'm obviously a proud early investor. And the last round, you let Sequoia and you let Keith Raboy from Coastal invest. And so you have a lot of momentum here. I think it's 500 enterprise customers. Tell us about where the business is. Yeah, we're over 700 now. You know, I think we started off in one vertical, which was kind of consumer brands. And we signed amazing companies like Chomps and Bombas and AteSleep, hundreds of brands that you probably know everything in Whole Foods at this point. And then we're like, okay, well, let's see if this is a real business. Let's start expanding. We launched hospitality, construction, technology, and we have an unbelievable roster now across all that. I mean, I hope I can say this because you probably allow it, but we started working with Steronic, who's an amazing business. Awesome. Um, and I think what we keep learning is that the, the, the toolkit of just bringing more raw horsepower to an industry that generally is like pretty established with people who don't really know what they're doing. They just know how to run the playbook. A lot of the sales guys, I think more of like traditional fraternity energy and not like deep substance energy. Right. Yeah. I think the, the joke, our head of risk told us when he first started, he said, insurance is where C students make a money. And I, uh, I appreciated that the honesty. I love America. So you students should be able to make a money, but these are good people for you to be competing against. Yes. Um, and in some ways, the reason we started the company is that, you know, as we built open door and many other companies, I had great tax advice. I had great legal advice and I never felt like the insurance person I worked with understood anything about our business. And we had to always over and over again, learn what this even was. And that made no sense to me. Let's talk about some of the engineering challenges. Let's talk about building with AI right now. I've been pretty excited. Like a lot of my smartest friends are actually really enjoying coding again because these things are getting so much better. Like what engineering team do you have? What kind of problems are you guys solving there? I think what's so fun right now, one, I like building again. And I was just talking to my engineering team. I just came back from New York where our office is. And our engineers, not a single one of our full-time engineers right now, writes code anymore. They do everything through codex, cloud code, or cursor. It's all, it's all agentic. I mean, it's all agent. And there, I mean, a lot of them are like managing lots of agents at once, right? Yeah. Yeah Cole runs our engineering team has like six agents that are running at once at all times just doing different kinds of projects When we create a new ticket in linear it automatically kicks off this thing that basically creates a dev environment which then tries to one-shot the solution and then creates a PR that we review. Like the whole way you build software is changing so quickly. And I think right now, like the cost of software is just asymptotically dropping to zero, of building new software, which means that the way you build a company completely changes. like we can now have an enterprise customer come up who says oh yeah this is so close but we actually need it for is x we can build x in one day ship it live and close that deal we did this last week that's amazing it's like a completely different way of even thinking no fortune 500 company right now i don't think works that way they always have these like three month and six month plans and we'll get back to you and we can't sell you because you don't have it yet like in the old days you were told i was told a lot because i'm too expensive like joe stop trying to yeah you can't do that. Stop trying to like make promises that are going to get in the way of our roadmap in the next 12 months. But, and they still probably don't want to do some promises because they probably still pretty hard, but certain promises you should go around and just do. You can just make it happen. I think even the job, historically, the job of product engineering and design, the sort of three-legged stool is that product was responsible for like the why and the prioritization. Design was responsible for the what, like what does it actually do and how does it work? And engineering owned the how, like how do we actually implement it? What's possible. And today, that's still kind of true, but the loop doesn't go from, let's come up with a hypothesis, let's build it, let's learn. It becomes more like, we're a group of wizards who are creating spells that the entire organization can use to make things better. And we're at the very early stages of this transition, where now most companies, including us, are just accelerating that loop of hypothesis, learn, deliver. But it's quickly becoming, hey, everyone in the company, tell us what you need and like and we're going to ingest that into a self-learning loop of ai and that's going to tell us what we should build and it's going to try and prototype it and we're going to use that to determine what to ship it's interesting it's almost like there should be like some kind of ai intelligence guided by your top product mind just to listen to everything going on and help you organize it right because that was always a hard part of the product job for me like i love the product job it's like the vision of what i think everyone wants but then there's like this 14 hour a day job of prioritizing everything you're hearing from everyone in the company and i feel like ai could be much better at that is that is that a little what you're saying like just everything you hear you should be using out to prioritize then just constantly trying to build stuff yeah if the job like in the past was writing now it's editing and shifting from being a writer to an editor is a very uh i think for some people they're thriving in it and some people are really shocked by it i mean what's the output difference right because it's not it's not some people are saying joe it's 100x it doesn't like seem to me like it's 100x yet like like like no as an example people like at a par is doing a lot with the ai now and there's a lot of people they're each managing tons of agents and there's you know several hundred engineers around the world um i mentioned this because we built this together a long time ago and you know you've probably invested almost two billion dollars now into the product right because it's like 16 years old this is what happens and it's definitely the case that like it wouldn't take that much money to build it now and like but the question is is it like 2x is it 10x i don't think it's 100x i don't think it's like 20 million dollars built out of par but but it might only be like two or three hundred million i i don't know like how should and and i think out of part because it's using ai to build more now it's like harder to catch right but it's like how should we think about this like all these sass companies the low-end ones got crushed last week right and like a lot of the the firms you probably saw that invest in low-end sass companies got crushed because in anthropics new stuff came out and everyone's scared they can rebuild it like like how are you thinking about how this is evolving there's so much in that i think one like anthropic open ai google they're all gonna in the same way that you probably don't want to build an email company while google is on its arise because they're gonna come and eat that like every one of these companies is looking at where are our tokens being used where's a lot of tokens being used great let's go after and like attack that surface you think you think so you think those companies are themselves are going to try to go build a bunch of the very most important so the most important areas 100 in the same way that Google would never let mesothelioma become its own. They're going to capture as much of that value as possible because it's the highest value keyword. That's actually different than what I've heard. Because I'm worried about the low-end SaaS companies. But maybe I should be worried about both the bottom half and the top 1% as well or something. I think it's a barbell thing. The large AI companies are going to eat the top end of value. And everyone in the middle is going to just commoditize or people who aren't even in the software business. In the next two or three years, this isn't true. But if you take the five-year view, kids who are in college today who come out and start working in a construction company or something are going to look at every problem they're paying for software and say, this doesn't do exactly what I need. And I can one-shot a much better version of this right now. All of those SaaS companies are worthless. And then they're going to go after the top too. I mean, why don't they go after you? How do you think about that? I think it's really important to understand what business you're in. And our business is, we are in many ways in the business of answering unknown unknowns for people who know it's really important, right? We're selling to CFOs, GCs, people who know that insurance is there for when something really bad happens. It covers them. They know that risk management is really important, right? They know that when someone falls in a factory or cuts their hand, that they need to deal with that and they want it to not happen in the first place. But that's not their full job. That's not their expertise. So you're going to be the trusted expert partner in the area of understanding their insurance and what works for them and how to get a better deal than they are now exactly so we help them manage risk and we help them save money and so when you think maybe stepping back maybe this is more for me than for you because i'm the venture capitalist and i'm investing in lots of things but i know i know you angel invest you think about it too like what are the categories of things that the model companies are going to eat versus not as it relates to this like is like obviously the model companies are pretty good at being experts yeah in a lot of things like how do you think about the modes here i mean the first one obviously is anything that's adjacent to software development they're like they've decided that they're going to war to win that and i think it's a really hard place to you have to be you're gonna be the very best in the world very best in the world i think i'm pretty bullish on cognition because i think scott and like these like 20 other like gold medal like olympiad winners like probably could do something that's very very valuable despite everyone going after it but if you don't have 20 other global gold medal physics and math leaders around you probably shouldn't be bothering to compete in that area you have to know that you're competing you have to like at least be aware that we are directly going to be at war with these companies for a long time and we're going to win or or maybe yeah and there's probably different territories they can each capture or something like this but they're going to try to win as much as they can yeah and then you know there's companies like harvey who are going in saying we're going to be the ones who win on professional service you know ai for legal or for accounting and things like that's a big big big area for to conquer yeah Yeah. And I think over time, I would be surprised if more of that doesn't get attacked by the large AI foundational companies. It is very interesting because some of these foundational companies are really good at doing the foundational research, but not enterprise stuff. Right. But I guess the question is, can they get good enterprise stuff? you know i think the crazy thing is how quickly this is all changing right and so in many ways we're all forecasting but if you look at claude co-work which came out you know two weeks ago and the types of spreadsheets and models that they're creating you're like oh this is actually like valuable good work like we we use this internally for simple things like logging into carrier portals to download documents and ingest them and do a whole thing like that didn't exist three weeks ago yeah it's crazy it's an entire entire area of our business that now is automated that zero people work on. It feels like most of the world is just not aware of how fast everything is going to change. What does this mean for business a year from now? I think right now, the ability to absorb and adopt the tools is going to be the limiting factor for years to come. And I think that the capabilities of these models is already so far ahead of our ability in most enterprises to just absorb and adopt change, that that is like the wave behind us. Right now, we have a system that, let's say we're doing like email drafting, for example, right? All of our, all the emails that we send are drafted by AI before we send them and a person reviews them and sends them out. If you switch that model from, let's say, you know, Sonnet to Opus, you know, Anthropics, middle model to their best model, do the evaluation set get better? If it does, don't do anything. Stop working on it. Just let the model, let the hundreds of billions of dollars of investment behind you push you forward. If it doesn't get better, that's actually a good sign that you can invest more in getting everything ready. Because right now, I think like the models are already so good that the constraining factor is actually your ability to provide them the context information to win. No, that's really fun. I'm actually spending a lot of time on the email workflow myself with this company, Thorne. I think you probably heard, but I'm obsessed with... It gave me a report yesterday. It handled like 120 of my emails for me with my team. I don't trust it by itself yet, but it like checks with the right person on the team. And then it like helps the team respond. You know I don know I think it all going to change This is such an important The API of business is email People think oh we going to replace the APIs these internal tools and get rid of ERPs This is what everyone's working through. This is where everyone actually does business. And so if you can control that layer, you become massively valuable. Are you worried about the spam? I'm really worried about the spam. Part of the reason I started to build Thorin is for my own productivity. But partly, I'm worried we're going to start getting crazy more spam. I'm always getting this myself. I'm sure you are too. Like you have to, for your business, reach out and like get on the radar of all these people. And like right now it's very easy and cheap to do that because you can like use AI before others on all these channels. I'm worried that all of us are going to get hit like crazy on every channel and it's going to drive us insane. And you're going to go back to like only letting your friends talk to you or something because it's because it's too much. It's inevitable. Everyone's coming in, right? It's inevitable. Look at what like 11 Labs put out yesterday with their new kind of voice agents that sound human that adapt to your tone. Oh, they're so good now. Everyone's going to be scamming everyone, by the way, with this too, right? This is like something I actually called a bunch of my relatives the last few days. And we're trying to warn them because, you know, like, because there will be people who try to call with my voice. It will sound totally realistic. It'll be urgent. They're going to need money from you. Like, do not give it to them. We, my wife and I have like a password. You have to have a password. Yeah. That's, you know, it's like some people are like, oh, just use the N word as a password. And I can't say it. I'm like, guys, I'm pretty sure the AI will figure it. Even people will figure that out too. Yeah. It's like there's no natural barriers here. It's going to be tough. And if you submit your password, if you say it in front of anything electronic, someone can capture it now. Man, I wish I could tell you our password. Yeah, don't tell me the password. It's much funnier. Yeah, no, I'm sure. And it's like, you do need some password, but even that's like breakable. Totally. This thing's scary. It's scary. It's going to get good. It's not good enough yet that you can't figure it out, obviously. Yeah. But every month now is improving, which is going to be a weird thing when it starts to trick everyone. We have this entire go-to-market motion of incredible people in Salt Lake City and around the area who just basically cold call people who own construction companies. This is like the Mormons in Utah are very good at cold calling. I love it. If you can sell God in Spanish, you can definitely sell insurance in English. You know, they're like, there's just a skill set built there that's unbelievable. And they're very good people. Amazing. Yeah. Like moral, trustworthy, hardworking. I have a lot of my finance back office stuff in Utah. Oh, there you go. Awesome. That's what you got to do. so i it's clear where the ai is going is that that works so if it works for humans it's going to work with ai and so you're going to get not one or two or five calls it's going to be ten thousand a hundred thousand turn it all off and everyone has to turn it all no one's gonna no one's gonna answer anymore and you're gonna have to have new systems and it shouldn't be that hard to build like a verified system and it's almost like if a friend recommends it you know it's real it's like a chain of trust where a friend can recommend it maybe you'll take it maybe if they pay to get to you, but that's annoying too because now you're talking to an AI that paid to get to you, put your cost really high. I don't know. What would your cost be for an AI to talk to you for a minute? Pretty high, right? Extremely high. My minutes are not worth that much, but a minute talking to an AI is extremely high. Exactly, exactly. It's like even more obnoxious, right? So it's like, it's going to be interesting. You know, they tried this, like Bology tried this like a decade ago and I was like, oh, I'll answer an email from a random person for $1,000. Right. And I got a few and I felt kind of guilty. I didn't really want to do it anymore because even just answering the email, like you feel guilty not doing more because they're paying you. Like, hey, turn this off. It's not even worth it. So it's a very hard thing to figure out. I do think people should not be able to call or email you without some kind of fee. I think it's the opt-in thing. I think what we already, today, like if someone just texts me without any context, it goes into like my spam box and I will never see it. So what I tell anyone who's introducing me is, hey, introduce me in a group thread. Just put us both in there. So then you're established as someone I know and it goes into my main inbox. And I think some version of that is clearly going to be this like double opt-in you know you can't reach me unless someone i know likes you i assume like google is working on something here for this because there's an obvious problem that they should they should be solving this man is getting pretty annoying and it's going to be tough because they're going to turn people like you guys off and you're going to need a new way and i guess what would be the way and you'd have to get a friend recommended i guess which is 90 of our business well there you go so it's already working for you now it's you know either double opt-in it's hey thanks for doing business with us do you have any friends they're like, yeah, we have eight of them. And we're like, great, let's host a nice dinner together and talk about anything besides insurance. And then we'll close them afterwards. No, that makes sense. So you've been part, JD, of building some really interesting companies. You're a really successful entrepreneur. This is a new one's growing really fast with coverage or hiring talent. What should young people or what should people with kids be doing to get ready to be builders basically and to be builders like you and the way the world works today? It's funny. My wife and I were just talking about this last night because we have a baby on the way And we're like, we have absolutely no idea what path to kind of help shepherd them down because so much is changing so fast. So all you can really do is just be like, do you have good values? Do you invest in good relationships with other people? Are you smart? Are you curious? Stay healthy and fit. Yeah, stay healthy and fit. Like the basics are always true and they're hard, right? Like everyone always wants complicated but easy instead of like simple but hard. I mean, it feels to me like the moral and ethical foundations are still just as important, if not more important. when the world starts going crazy. Like we're, we're going, we're really leading into tradition for our kids and we're teaching them in our case, teaching them Hebrew and we're teaching them Latin and we're teaching them the foundations and the values of Western civilization. I feel like, I feel like that's going to be even more important when the world starts going crazy to have this kind of anchors, you know? You need to have these anchors. And I think, look, even today, you talk to anyone who's in their sixties, who's had their full career, you know, at the tail end of their career. And they've all, everyone I talked to has had four or five different careers, even in that time. And so I think the adaptability of people is much higher already, even pre-AI than people get credit for. Everyone worries about all these jobs going away. I think the interesting thing is many jobs actually just become much more in demand, right? On engineering right now, I was happy to spend, call it $100,000 to build this feature. Now it costs $20,000. I don't want less engineers. I want 10 times as many engineers because I've actually, the set of features I would want for $20,000 is huge. Yeah, Jevin's paradox is that when something gets cheaper, you actually want a lot more of it. Way more. So I'm like massively, my demand for people who can actually build things and ask questions has gone through the roof. My demand for people who are going to do like customer support emails has fallen off the cliff. And so you want more creative, interesting dynamics, people basically. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. Like someone was telling me everyone wants to self-serve. And I was like, I don't think everyone wants self-serve. I think the reason people do self-serve is because it's actually better service than calling into these, you know, the humans are working with humans right now. but there's definitely something better than that. Like we've gone from bad customer service to okay. Self-serve that takes a lot of time, but you really just want your problem solved. Yeah. And I think we're moving towards a world where actually so many more of our problems just get solved for us like magic. I'm lucky because of my success to have, there's a lot of people who work for me who are very competent. And when something goes wrong, I pick up the phone and I call them and I, and I ask whether it's, whether it's my producer here for the podcast, whether it's like my guy who runs my family office, whether it's my lawyer on my team. And so I am used in my life to having like a whole list of, you know, 20 people I call and they're smart and dynamic. We talk about it and things happen. I feel like that's going to be available in some way to everyone else too, right? With, with AI getting as good as it is. Going back to your last question, which is like, what advice do you have for smart, for smart young people who are getting into business now? I think one of the best veins of opportunity always in business is take something rich people have that poor people don't have and figure out how to make it available for everyone. Yeah. And that's exactly what you're saying. So there's a lot of that coming. So JD, we started this podcast to push back against cynicism in our country, a lot of nihilism. What's the best case for an optimistic future with AI? Like what are you seeing that should inspire people to be positive? When I first started my career at Adapar, it was the beginning of this kind of first wave of technology where people who are really experienced and people who are coming out of college both had the same advantages and disadvantages when building on mobile, because there were no existing paradigms. Even things like pull to refresh weren't invented when we started at Adapar, right? Like really basic stuff. And this is the second time in my career where everyone's sort of kind of getting back to equal footing. And so young people who are just getting into their careers just starting are on equal ground with people like me, people like you who have spent 10, 20, 30 years building because we're in an invention era again. Yeah. Everything's new again. Everything's new again, which means that you can create not just a career, but entire new industries from scratch and become important. And like it opens opportunities that haven't existed in 10, 15 years. So I think my case for optimism is that, you know, everything is new and you get to just build and create the world you want to see exist. And I love that point because what you're saying is the returns to agency, the returns to optimism are very, very high right now. We should be careful not to be the pessimist spending against America. Yeah. Don't be my dad investing in the 80s, you know? Well, it sounds like Sharers must be very proud of you. So definitely raise an amazing son. I'm very lucky on that front and many others. Thanks, JD, for joining us. Thanks, Joe.