Using an AI co-pilot to kickstart your business

Nicholas Thorne is a partner at prehype, a venture development firm that helps large companies create startups by acting as an incubator.

He's also the founder of Audos, an AI co-pilot designed to assist entrepreneurs with tasks such as conducting customer interviews, creating slide decks, and potentially even investing in their ideas.

According to Nicholas, Audos can write code and identify freelancers, functioning as a virtual technical product manager for idea-stage entrepreneurs who are still shaping their business concepts.

“This co-pilot is very oriented toward helping people start at a smaller scale, with the view that AI can handle much of the functional work,” he said. “Entrepreneurship, especially at the early stage, is an extremely multidisciplinary task.”

He outlined Audos’ ideal user profiles, ranging from small business owners to corporate innovators, and explained how the platform leverages AI to handle various entrepreneurial tasks. He also discussed the investment opportunities he’s exploring and shared some of the resources he's using to deepen his understanding of AI.

Runtime: 25:39

Episode breakdown

(1:31) How Audos works, and who's using it.
(4:33) "It's just about trying to do the best thing you can to create more information with which you can make progress."
(9:12) Audos' ideal customer is a "conceptual stage" founder.
(11:40) Helping entrepreneurs "find and then nurture, and over time, exploit what we call 'founder-customer fit.'"
(15:36) Using AI to shorten the customer discovery process and speed time to market
(19:30) "I think you would probably consider it a family or suite of GPTs that are all trained in extremely specific jobs."
(22:00) What kinds of investment opportunities he’s looking for (and how to reach him)
(24:12) How Nicholas fills in the gaps in his AI knowledge