Jesse Zhang, founder of Decagon AI, shares insights on building AI-powered customer service agents in the most competitive era of technology. The conversation explores the intense culture required to compete against formidable opponents, drawing parallels between math competition backgrounds and successful company building. Zhang discusses their systematic approach to customer discovery, the technical challenges of voice AI, and why customer service emerged as the ideal AI application. Topics include talent wars in AI, the balance between using foundation models versus building proprietary systems, forward-deployed engineering myths, and scaling enterprise AI solutions. Zhang also reflects on competitive company culture, margin considerations, and the future of conversational AI as a unified brand interface. #AI #CustomerService #Startups #Decagon #ArtificialIntelligence #TechEntrepreneurship #CompanyBuilding #VoiceAI #EnterpriseAI #TechCompetition #aiagents #elevenlabs Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 2:00 Competing in the AI Era 11:35 Finding Product-Market Fit 14:25 Anatomy of a Great Customer Interview 17:37 Everyone’s Wrong Until You Talk to Customers 19:25 AI Agents Replacing Human Labor 21:55 Why Customer Service 23:30 Coding vs. Customer Service 35:44 The Future of Voice and the Human UI 38:54 Why Voice-to-Voice Is So Hard 43:18 Learning from Customer Data 44:36 How CEOs Should Think About AI 47:06 The ROI of Coding and Productivity Tools 48:20 Every Brand Will Talk to You Through AI 56:00 Recruiting, Capital, and Demand 1:00:42 Investor Frenzy 1:22:17 The Long-Term Vision for Decagon 1:25:05 Kindest Thing Presented by Ramp: https://ramp.com/business-cards?utm_s Sponsored by AlphaSense and Ridgeline: https://www.alpha-sense.com/invest/ https://www.ridgelineapps.com/ ****** Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc