good morning. When I read about the expected work style of Gen Z and the impact of generating AI on jobs, I think about serial entrepreneur Adam Khakhar. I've known him ever since he was in Brooklyn Tech and my son launched a streetwear brand called Pureneyc. This is the generation that was raised Shark Tanksocial media, and distributed commerce. Khakhar also had the Ed-Tech app of the time and co-founded a quantitative hedge fund.
Today, 25-year-old Khakhar sold Khakhar (the latest startup FlashDocs to Hebia last month. The idea came when he spent two years in his doctoral program in machine learning at NYU. “I was writing about these technologies, so I didn't want to see the world change around me,” he told me recently. “I wanted to make something myself.”
He met veteran entrepreneur Morten Brune at a VC dinner and together they decided to solve the challenge of combining text into a slide deck using charts, images and graphics that can be adjusted to fit the company's brand guidelines.
Working in Khakhar's Manhattan apartment, the two created an Application Programming Interface (API) to turn AI prompts into branded slide decks in seconds. They sold their first subscription almost immediately for $800 a month. “I was able to develop the demo overnight, but it took me a few weeks to create something that's easy to use,” says Khakhar. “I was able to fully automate marketing capabilities, front engineering and other roles using AI tools. It was scary and exciting at the same time.”
By the time they sold to Hebia about a year later, they gathered dozens of enterprise clients, including Amazon. The duo became co-head of Hebia's API and artifacts, gaining access to an engineering team of about 30 people. “AI tools are really good for quick start,” he said. “If you want to scale tens of thousands to one million slide decks a day, you can't really have a vibe.”
Lesson 1: AI will allow more two more companies to flourish and expand. (I just had dinner with Philip Chow, CEO of Humanitas.ai. He says that he and CTO Aravindh Ravisankar are focused on pursuing “impact, asset-lit greenfield opportunities that would not exist without AI.”)
Lesson 2: As Khakhar states, do not amortize Gen Z.
Contact the CEO daily from Diane Brady at Diane.brady@fortune.com
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CEO Daily has been edited and edited by Joey Abrams and Jim Edwards.
