The Venture Capitalist Who Finds the Best AI Products—Before They Win - Ep. 45 with Nabeel Hyatt
AI and I22 Tammi 2025

The Venture Capitalist Who Finds the Best AI Products—Before They Win - Ep. 45 with Nabeel Hyatt

Nabeel Hyatt is looking for the “Japanese toilets” of AI—products that delight users in unexpected ways.

As a partner at Spark Capital, that investment philosophy has paid off. Despite making only 1-2 investments a year, he’s picked some of the biggest winners in AI so far: Descript, Cruise, and Granola.

We spent an hour unpacking:

How much “leash” top products give to AI agents—and why that matters

How he spots remarkable AI products

Why “sensitivity” is one of the most important traits of top founders

The huge opportunities for AI products to help users explore new “possibility spaces”

How Nabeel is actually using AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and AI code editor Windsurf in his life

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe

Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper


Timestamps:

Introduction: 00:01:32

Why Nabeel doesn’t invest in more than two companies per year: 00:01:50

Why the words you use to describe your business matter: 00:06:49

What a product with soul looks like: 00:13:45

Patterns in the remarkable founders Nabeel has invested in: 00:16:48

How Nabeel evaluates popular coding agents: 00:24:12

AI has broadened the horizons of what Nabeel can do: 00:32:29

How funding models are changing as AI makes it cheaper to build software: 00:36:28

Nabeel’s framework for when to trust an LLM: 00:45:43

Guide AI to provide context (and not just quick answers): 00:55:39

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Nabeel Hyatt: @nabeel, https://nabeelhyatt.com/

Spark Capital: https://www.sparkcapital.com/

The piece Chris Pedregal wrote for Every: How to Build a Truly Useful AI Product

Chris Pedregal on AI & I: 🎧 The Secret to Building Sticky AI Products

The AI tools Nabeel talks about: Windsurf, Wordware


Jaksot(99)

How AI Startups Can Win With Better Strategy - Ep. 50 with Mike Maples

How AI Startups Can Win With Better Strategy - Ep. 50 with Mike Maples

Our sponsor for this episode is Microsoft. Want seamless collaboration without the cost? Microsoft Teams offers a robust free plan for individuals that delivers unlimited chat, 60-minute video meeting...

5 Maalis 20251h 2min

He Built an AI Audience Simulator. It’s the Future of Customer Research. - Ep. 49 with Michael Taylor

He Built an AI Audience Simulator. It’s the Future of Customer Research. - Ep. 49 with Michael Taylor

Michael Taylor has perfected the art of getting AI to speak in tongues. He’s taught it to mimic the voices of your customers—so you can see how they would respond before you ship.Michael is the creato...

26 Helmi 20251h 6min

How Nat Eliason Made $200,000 in a Week Teaching AI - Ep. 48

How Nat Eliason Made $200,000 in a Week Teaching AI - Ep. 48

Nat Eliason’s career arc is borderline absurd—but it works. In the last five years, he ran an SEO agency, got into crypto, made $600,000 from a course on the note-taking toolRoam Research, flipped rea...

12 Helmi 202559min

Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch on What Comes After Coding - Ep. 47

Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch on What Comes After Coding - Ep. 47

Guillermo Rauch is one of the most prolific coders of this generation.  But he doesn’t think of himself as a coder anymore.  Coding, he says, is a specific skill that AI is becoming great at. Instead,...

5 Helmi 202556min

How to Prepare for AGI According to Reid Hoffman - Ep. 46

How to Prepare for AGI According to Reid Hoffman - Ep. 46

AGI is coming. Reid Hoffman just wrote the book on how to prepare. According to Reid, every major tech breakthrough (the written word, the printing press, the telephone) triggered mass fear. But, cont...

29 Tammi 20251h 9min

An Inside Look at Building an Email Client in 3 Months - Ep. 44 with Kieran Klaassen, Brandon Gell

An Inside Look at Building an Email Client in 3 Months - Ep. 44 with Kieran Klaassen, Brandon Gell

Building an email client used to take many years and millions of dollars. But Every’s Kieran Klaassen built Cora—a totally new way to manage your inbox with AI—in just 3 months. He even shipped the or...

15 Tammi 20251h 15min

How AI Will Change Science Forever - Ep. 43 with Alice Albrecht

How AI Will Change Science Forever - Ep. 43 with Alice Albrecht

AI is going to change science forever. Small scale studies will give way to large scale open data gathering efforts. We’ll shift from seeking broad general theories to making contextual predictions i...

18 Joulu 20241h