The Neo Show: Founder Fridays #19: Justin Torre CEO, Helicone with Host Howie Xu & Axel Pilette

This is the Neo Show, where the minds shaping tomorrow speak today. Brought to you by Neo, the browser redefining what AI can do for you.

So why don't we just start with maybe a brief introduction for those who don't know you and what you're doing.

Yeah, I would love to. Hello everybody. My name is Justin. I'm one of the co-founders at Helicone. We're a YC company. If you guys know what that is, it's an accelerator over here in San Francisco. What we do is we help companies building on AI sort of observe and use intelligence. We're sort of building what we like to call a marketplace for intelligence today. So that's what we're doing with Helicone. I've been building this for about two and a half years. And I'm a builder at heart over here in San Francisco. Yeah. Thanks.

What is the pain point you're addressing for this?

Yeah. So, right now, if somebody is making a buying decision for, hey, what model do I need to go pick for some project, that's really the pain point. It's like you're going to go build some coding agent, some browser agent, or whatever it is, and you want to decide what model should I pick and what tools do I need to bundle that with? And Helicone is one of those one-stop shop places where you can just come here and get any model and a bunch of tools already pre-built.

Looks like Joseph asked a question. I don't know if you want to start fielding these yet.

Sure. Sure. We can cover that.

So why choose to work on AI infrastructure instead of end user products?

That's a great question. And I think one thing that I've always loved is I've always built for developers in the past. And I think one thing that as you're building a company, you want to try to pick a product and a domain, a user base that you're excited about. And we're just really excited about developers and we're really excited about enabling people to build cool things. But yeah, maybe in the future we'll do an end user product.

Hey Howie, I think you're muted or I can't hear.

We can hear you.

Muted.

So what is for developers? What is for end users? What are the interesting new end user products you have run into? I'm pretty sure you have used the Neo. I would love to get your take, but in general I'm also curious what are the interesting new AI end user products you have run into. Curious about it.

Yeah. So there's a lot that are our customers for sure. A lot of our customers are doing B2B SaaS and in that case I would consider that end user products. But there's browser agents, there's coding agents. I think one of the biggest ones, if we're talking about an end consumer, like who are the people actually using this, everyday people, it's companions. I think that's the number one use case for AI right now is AI companions. But that's more on the consumer side of things. But if we're talking business aspect, we see so many cool things. One of our largest customers is a company called QAWolf. They basically do quality assurance and they have replaced all of their, and not even replace but augmented all their testing to use AI. So let's say you have a test that runs in production and it's slightly flaky, you actually have AI go in and fix that test. It's really cool.

Yeah, there's a lot. Yeah, that's only a few. There's probably a dozen more and new ones come up every week. So I think there's one way to answer this, which is what we're really focused on is we're trying to serve businesses that are developing apps and we're trying to serve high growth AI native startups. And I would say if you zoom in on any of these competitors, they're always focusing on a different market. I would say our bread and butter is really the folks that have some traction on an AI app and they are just getting their first like 10,000 users or something like that. That's really our sweet spot where we're able to help those customers be very successful. Yeah.

So, yeah, I downloaded Neo last night and the onboarding experience was immaculate. I'm not even trying to gas it up too much here. It was genuinely so nice. I think the design, whoever is on your design team, they deserve so much praise. They've crushed it.

Of course. Yeah, I used it a bit. I think one thing that I'm looking for in these types of AI native browsers is more like automation. I know that there's obviously some issues with that. Like, Brave, notoriously, which is another browser out there, you got to be really careful because you can prompt inject and it's really dangerous to have automation on your browser. But there's got to be a way to do it in a secure way. But yeah, I asked Neo, I was like, 'Hey, can you open up Amazon and scroll through some reviews for me?' And it kind of refused to do it. So that's something I'm looking for, something like that.

Oh that's a great question. So I decided, well one, I always liked building stuff. So I don't know if anyone in the audience is like this but I always work on side projects and some of those side projects has turned into businesses in the past. But I was meeting with one friend and he was like, you know, I had no idea about VCs or how startups worked, but the way he pitched doing a startup to me was like, it's basically just working on your side project full-time and you're just getting rich people to pay for it. And I was like, that's interesting. That's such an interesting way to think about VC. It's like you get rich people to pay for you to work on your fun side project. And then with that lens, I was like, you know what? Actually, he kind of convinced me that's possible. And then I quit my job and I was like, let me just give myself 6 months to get funding. And then I applied to YC. And then the day before the interview, I dragged two of my friends into the interview. The interview lasted eight minutes. There's this Paul Graham essay on earnestness. So you should read it if you guys are interested in doing a startup. But I read that essay. I did the interview. It was supposed to be 15 minutes. They showed up late and left early. So I thought it went horrible. But I spoke the entire time. And yeah, and then that night we got a call and said we were in. And we replied with a completely different idea. We applied with distributed, we wanted to do decentralized GPU compute. So the idea was anyone can add a node to a server and then you can go and rent that node if you're a user. And that ended up not being super popular. So we ended up pivoting into Helicone.

Yeah. So if you're a technical founder and you have a technical co-founder, you're already in the top 1% of applicants. So you'd be surprised. One of my good friends, his name is Tommy, he would help review and sift out the applicants at YC. I met him through YC. So he talks a lot about this and very publicly as well. So I don't mind sharing any of this. So you'll be in the top 1% if you have a technical co-founder. But let's say if you don't have that, that's still fine. One thing they really look for is the founder dynamic. My co-founder was my best friend in college, which I think really helped a lot. We had a very long relationship. And they really do value that. They value your past relationship with your co-founder and they value co-founders. I do know people that have gotten in as solo founders. They usually are pretty exceptional or they have had some exceptional project. But I think one advice that I got was you want to treat YC as that's not the goal. Your goal is to build a successful company and if you just worry about doing that then everything else will follow.

So one piece of advice I got early was don't spend a long time on the application. I think I spent like 2 hours actually writing the whole app. I know some people spend days on it which is kind of crazy. Spend two hours writing it. Just get it out there but your main focus is to grow your company. Your company is going to be successful regardless of YC. And yeah, another thing too is just be really earnest. Blissfully earnest where they're like, 'Hey do you have any customers?' and you're like, 'No, I don't have any customers.' And then they're like, 'Why?' I think one thing that people tend to do is they try to explain themselves before getting to the punch line, which is usually because they're embarrassed, right? If you're embarrassed about where your traction is, if you're embarrassed about the team or what you've built, people try to explain, 'Oh, you know, we have this vision for one month.' It's like, no, just be earnest and say it. They know your product's shitty, otherwise, you know, it's an incubator, they know that you don't have customers or anything like that. So anyway, that was my long rant. I've thought a lot about this.

Yes, exactly. I think that's right. Yeah, if you fall in that bucket.