Wait, can this Yale dropout beat Apple ?

Martin it's like an AI agent you can call Martin over the phone you can have Martin call your friends and talk to them over the phone what was the process like getting into y I went to sort of like a competitive school so we all like worked pretty hard why did you decide to drop off I was pretty bored of my classes by the end and I really wanted to do something bigger and Do It full time do you believe in a decade from now we'll be completely handsfree the movie Her in that movie like everyone's only using audio what's an advice you would give to 20-year-old founder you need to build your confidence and your faith for me the best way to build it [Music] was today on the show we have Dawson Chen his company is called TR Martin but if youve seen Iron Man and you you might have seen Jarvis in that movie he's building the real life version of that in reality so I'm really excited to have you on the show Dawson how are you doing today I'm doing great yeah thanks for having me can you give a little intro about you what you were doing before how old are you and what are you working on now I'm Dawson I'm 20 and before starting Martin I was a student at Yale last summer I dropped out to start Martin with some friends and since then for the past year we've been just doing a lot of product work and trying to make it basically a better Siri with a large language model and deeper Integrations it's a lot of product work and uh we recently did some launches that we're really happy about and we want to share it with as many people as we can now Martin in simple words it's like an AI agent where you can talk to it if I tell it to send an email to someone or send a text to someone it'll actually do it a lot of times we try it with Siri but it doesn't do it the problem with Siri is it's very shallowly integrated with a bunch of Apple products what we want to do is integrate with all of your productivity apps and do really deep Integrations so for example when we integrate with phone like your phone calling you can call Martin over the phone you can have Martin call your friends and talk to them over the phone and you can have them call strangers and and and ask them questions or like book a reservation stuff like that so for each integration we do we try to make it really deep for calendar we make it so that you can view add edit and delete events just with like voice commands because so text Martin to delete or add events and you can have Martin text your contacts and schedule full events with them so every inspiration we do is super deep and we also aren't limited to one platform so we have like Apple calendar and Google Calendar and we have like Gmail and Outlook coming up and you can not only text Martin you can also speak to him in our interface you can call him and you can WhatsApp him and you can email him so we try to be really well integrated and that's sort of our specialty that's really amazing how did you come up with the name Martin Martin is like the name of my robotics Mentor in high school and we sort of really liked his voice so the Martin voice is somewhat based on his voice okay before Martin like what were you doing is this your first ever software product or you buil something else before I grew up hacking together a bunch of websites and apps in middle school and high school with just my friends we built a bunch of software for a school like a bell schedule that you could like track your classes on and then in college I built a lot of side projects so one was called campus guide it was basically like Airbnb for college tours so you could like book a tour with a college student and they would meet you on campus and then give you a full tour for like $45 an hour I also launched this like social app called flick you would get assigned a new friend within your a mile of your location every morning and then you have to take a photo with that friend in the next 24 hours that's really good it's like breaking all the social anxiety yeah it was like something I wanted during school all I wanted was like hang out with friends and like make some money on the side so like both of these products were built for myself also cuz I only went to school for one year I was like pretty bored of my classes by the end and I really wanted to do something bigger and like do it fulltime so that was like the perfect opportunity to start Martin what was the process like getting into Yale did your past projects play a role or was it mainly just like giving sat or I'm not sure if my like hacker projects really played a role I went to sort of like a competitive School in the Bay Area so we all like worked pretty hard and we did a lot of like yeah just a lot of like academic stuff you're in Yale and do you find it boring do you find it useful like why did you decide to drop out cuz most people are dying to getting to universities like that I really enjoyed my one year at Yale but I feel like by the end I felt just like a dire need for more Adventure I feel like first semester of college for anyone is like this huge like Adventure but then somehow really quickly it became kind of dull I could sort of imagine my next three years in college and what that would feel like a lot of recruiting and a lot of classes and sort of the same things over and over again and I wanted something new and when I came home from college like last summer after my freshman year I was like telling everyone like I'm going to drop out I'm going to drop out I just like need some sort of excuse to drop out and then uh when we got funded for the startup it was sort of a no-brainer for me I want to get into your thought process of coming up with an idea for Martin were you like scratching your own itch was this something that you were thinking about for a long time like how did you decide to do it well I've been a Siri power user for a long time that's rare by the way everyone who I talk to like never even use Siri to do like half the things that I use it for throughout my high school I think I was like really frustrated with how bad it is but I still used it because I just like I love voice as an interface and I find it really cool that was sort of like the start of the idea we like while there's this large language model thing now this was one year ago so it's still pretty new and it seemed like a great opportunity to push the state-of-the-art forward a little bit and there were a lot of better voice models like better text to speech and better speech to text so we thought like why don't we just like change these things together like no one has really done a good job of it and then integrated with as many things as possible we were also frustrated that Siri is like really Limited in its number of Integrations like all I can really do is help you move through your iPhone a little bit faster but it doesn't have your email it doesn't have your Google calendar it doesn't have like the ability to have full conversations with other people it doesn't have like slack or Trello or notion any of these things and Martin right now it's IOS and Android both we're not on Android yet but we have like for iOS users we try to give them like Google products and Apple products and Microsoft products for the Integrations so right now the action items are more like make a phone call or play the podcast or call this person text that person set a reminder the two main categories that we've started in are scheduling and Communications so scheduling is like reminders and then managing your Google calendar and your Apple calendar and then communication ties into that pretty well because the biggest communication use case is have Martin text someone on your behalf and coordinate back back and forth to that person so you can give Martin like a mission and then he'll reach out to this person in your contacts from his own phone number and then he can talk back and forth with that person to like coordinate the thing and then during that like conversation he has access to your calendars that connects really well with our schedule and use case so those are the two main ones right now and we're just about to launch phone calling actually we launched like a beta version yesterday but we're going to push out like having Martin call other people on your behalf very soon so this is sort of like tying together the last part of our like Communications MVP after this we're going to work more on email things so we're going to make Martin like able to coordinate and communicate over email in addition to texting and phone calling and then soon after that I think we will eventually get into this like not taking SL like documents information management like area which will include like slack and Google Docs Integrations so what's the business model is it like chat GPC where you pay $20 a month and pretty much this voice assistant is active all the time we're still pretty early in our like exploration of the business model but right now we charge $30 a month with like a free trial do you believe like in a decade from now it'll be like will'll be completely handsfree with just just talking do you think that's going to happen or no I don't think like visual interfaces are going anywhere I think audio has been like really poorly done in the past decade it definitely become like a lot better you know like the movie her like in that movie like everyone's only using audio and I find that a little hard to believe because there's some things that it's just so much better if you're like typing if you're coding I'd much rather type and like speak my code so I think that's why we're not just voice you can text Martin Via SMS via WhatsApp also email Martin depending on the scenario like let's say you got an email with like 10 upcoming like events 10 like Zoom calls there's a convention coming up and there are 10 events during the day if you get that in an email you can just forward it to Martin and say put it put this all on my calendar and remind me 5 minutes before each event and he'll like set up 20 events 20 calendar events and like 20 reminders for you all in one email if you were to do that with voice it would take forever that's amazing so what's the ultimate like Vision with Martin like where do you want to go with it I mean the dream is basically the same dream that I think Siri and Bixby and like Google Assistant all set out with which is to make like a personal and a proactive AI assistant and I think the key to that is like great Integrations with everything like the assistant needs to be able to use your own productivity apps as good as like a virtual assistant like a real person and then it needs to know you as well as a virtual assistant would like know all your preferences personal proactive and then well integrated I think if you have these two things you can make like a dream personal assistant and then that would just be like Jarvis there's this General myth that voice assistants are usually listening to you when you're not talking to them you know like how people say oh Amazon knew what I want what I want to buy and now it's recommending to me do you think that's a myth cuz you're an engineer so you probably understand that question much better well some of them like like Siri has to listen for hey Siri so it must be listening at all times if you say Hey Siri like your phone's off it'll turn on so in this case will we be saying hey Martin right now we we kept Martin it doesn't listen when it's off you have to open the app or we have shortcut setup so you can like we have one shortcut which is you can double tap the back of your phone and then Martin will turn on or there's one where like you can also hold down the action button if you have an iPhone 15 and it'll turn on Martin you can set up a shortcut that's like Hey Siri get me Martin and then Martin will show up so we you don't listen unless you activated him with some some action that's super cool have you read anything that or watched anything that like was life-changing I me what definitely inspired me was reading a bunch of Paul gram essays when I was at Yale like that's what made me want to apply to YC I just started reading like his entire blog and like every single essay was so good especially from back in like 4 2010 and how did you get into YC yeah we we did YC last summer I mean the YC application's pretty short I feel like anyone can apply to YC and it's the same process for everyone you just apply and you have one interview what's an advice you would give to 20-year-old founder in a university right now who wants to start a new startup I think college is like primarily the place where you like go and find your identity in addition to like sort of like people you want to be around I certainly got more of that out of college than any other like academic thing it is quite evident to me that when you are in college you become the average of like your friend group in college so don't make up your mind too quickly about like who you want to be because you think like something's too hard to achieve the thing I hear the most frequently from my peers who want to start a startup is they think they're ready or I think they need like five or 10 more years to be ready everyone has their own like internal clock of when they feel ready and you need to build your confidence and your faith somehow and for me the best way to build it was to like launch some projects I launched my like campus tours website and my social app and then I read some hogr messes and I think that gave me all the confidence that I needed everyone go to try martin.com and try the product and you'll be amazed yeah I think the best way to experience Martin and to experience what we've made is just try it out I mean there's like so many things you can do with the product and I think if you're interested in like productivity and like you've always wanted a Jarvis like I had like growing up it's a really magical product to try yeah and let me know any feedback just let Martin to ping me