WaitWhat, the company behind Pioneers of AI, has existed for about nine years and produces three podcasts.
“We've been around for about nine years. We make three podcasts, this one and two others.”
Person
Rachel Ishikawa
1 episodes · 16 quoted claims
WaitWhat publishes about 200 episodes a year on video and audio, alongside website, social media and newsletter content.
“we publish about 200 episodes a year on video and audio, plus our website, social media, newsletters.”
WaitWhat holds the three-day Masters of Scale Summit each October in San Francisco.
“we hold this big three-day event called Masters of Scale Summit in October. It's in San Francisco.”
Rachel Ishikawa says WaitWhat has fewer than forty employees.
“for a company that's less than forty people, we definitely punch above our weight.”
WaitWhat cleared all schedules for three days and bought Claude seats for the entire company for its AI sprint.
“They cleared everybody's schedule for three days, signed us all up for Claude accounts, enough seats to cover the entire company”
WaitWhat is a fully remote company, so its AI sprint was run over Zoom.
“we're a fully remote company, so the sprint started the way all of our meetings do, which is on Zoom.”
Because Claude lacks a collaboration layer, WaitWhat sprint teams had one member screen-share while navigating Claude.
“there's no collaboration layer. So one team member had to screen share over Zoom as they navigated Claude on their own computer.”
Team Gatorade built a guest speaker engine to help WaitWhat find guests for its podcasts and live events.
“they were working on a guest speaker engine, a way to help us find cool guests for our podcasts and for live events.”
Team Gatorade used a voice-to-text tool to hold a natural conversation with Claude about the company's guest selection.
“They asked using a voice-to-text tool, so it's easier to have a natural conversation with Claude.”
WaitWhat leadership says its largest AI cost so far is seat licenses for tools like Claude and Replit, followed by token usage.
“the highest cost at this point is paying for seats to use tools like Claude and Replit. There's also the cost of tokens”
Rachel Ishikawa says Pioneers of AI currently has no associate producer, though not because of AI, and that she uses AI for some of that work.
“we used to have an associate producer for this podcast, and currently we don't. AI is not the reason why we don't have an AP right now”
The video team tested off-the-shelf AI tools but found each lacked something, such as audio transcription needed for podcasting.
“A lot showed promise, but there was always, like, one issue. So maybe the program didn't offer, you know, an audio transcription, which we really need when you're working with podcasting”
On the third day of the sprint, each of WaitWhat's twelve groups presented its findings to the company.
“At the end of day three of the sprint, each of the twelve groups presented their findings.”
A WaitWhat colleague named Taylor built a tool to monitor incoming applications and ticket sales for the Masters of Scale Summit.
“One of my coworkers, Taylor, built this really cool tool to monitor all of the incoming application and ticket sales for Masters of Scale Summit.”
After the sprint, WaitWhat's guest speaker engine was being merged into a larger speaker discovery app, with around thirty more AI ideas in the pipeline.
“the guest speaker engine from Team Gatorade is joining forces with this larger speaker discovery app. And there are even more AI ideas in the pipeline since the sprint ended. There's around thirty of them.”
WaitWhat's AI task force built a security AI agent named Warden to protect sensitive data such as ticket buyers' personal information.
“One thing the task force developed is this security AI agent. They call it Warden, as in the warden of a prison, and it helps keep everything secure.”