Building a Generative AI Startup to $10M+ with a Virtual Team: Chris Lu, CEO of Copy.ai (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Series A is the last financing round?

Chris Lu: That’s been our last financing.

Sramana Mitra: Talk about your virtual team. You’ve chosen to move to Houston and build a virtual team.

Chris Lu: We believe that good talent can live anywhere, especially during and after the pandemic. We started hiring remotely. That means we can hire across the entire United States.

Sramana Mitra: I run a virtual company as well.

Chris Lu: We even have a person from the Philippines as well, so we’re a global team.

Sramana Mitra: There is no resistance from investors on virtual teams. That has been a very helpful development. I’ve been running virtual since 2010. Virtual companies were not as popular in the beginning. After COVID, there’s no problem.

Chris Lu: There were probably a few successes before COVID.

Sramana Mitra: There are a number of great case studies of great virtual companies. I’m thrilled that you’re doing one. How many paid customers do you have?

Chris Lu: We have 20,000 to 30,000 paid customers.

Sramana Mitra: Are there trends on customer profiles?

Chris Lu: Most of them are small businesses. We have been picking up on the enterprise side as well.

Sramana Mitra: What do you see happening as ChatGPT evolves and picks up steam in terms of their capabilities?

Chris Lu: It’s very exciting stuff. It’s going to improve the pace of technological progress. Work is going to be transformed significantly in the next two years. It’s going to unlock so much. We think that humans will shift from the information economy to a creative economy. You’re only limited by your ideas. If you have an idea, AI can help you execute it.

Sramana Mitra: My take is that all these domains that have their own domain-specific vocabularies and workflows require what you are doing within your domain. There’s an opportunity for building a small or large startup around being the frontend within a particular domain to whichever generative AI platform is on the backend.

Chris Lu: Yes, definitely. We’re still at the very beginning. As a matter of fact, the industry has been moving so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. When it’s hard to keep up, it means that a lot of the ideas that people have might not be fully thought through. What may not be possible today might be possible tomorrow.

Sramana Mitra: I was just talking to an AI company. He has experience in the mechanical design industry. I actually did a turnaround in mechanical design as well. We were talking about the opportunity. For the front end and domain knowledge, the mechanical design industry has its own domain-specific requirements.

That’s a very interesting cusp where you can build a business. All kinds of ideas that are in different domains are interesting business ideas to build on top of OpenAI as a core platform.

Chris Lu: Very exciting stuff.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a Generative AI Startup to $10M+ with a Virtual Team: Chris Lu, CEO of Copy.ai
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