Yesterday I published the Podcast 104 Robert Vis Bird Box video to get the content out fast, within a post that introduced the plan for Podcast 104, Robert Vis’ letter to his shareholders, and Paul Sweeney’s review of the letter. Podcast 104: TADSummit Innovators, Robert Vis on Bird Box.
This post provides a summary of the video content of the full video (80 min video), and its importance to the industry. I also created a version focused on Bird’s Business in a Box (33 min video).
Full Podcast Video (80 mins)
Shorter (33 min) Video focused on Bird Box Offer, service available in February 2025
Last week Robert shared in a letter to shareholders on the progress they’ve made. Bird is creating a world where businesses can focus on their core purpose, free from the friction of disparate systems and processes. The chaos of a hundred apps will give way to the simplicity of one intelligent platform.
[0.30] We open with a strange character on the podcast from Mar-a-Lago gathering Greenland, Canada, Panama, and Bird. Robert asks if he’s being gathered to solve the efficiency drive of the US governments. He has a great offer.
[1:30] Johnny asks a direct question of Robert about his view on all the free speech / expression discussions. Robert is surprised by the controversy in Europe on this topic, suggesting perhaps there’s a bit of jealousy.
The space extends from only reading curated news, through to reading everything that gets posted on X (previously Twitter). Robert is on the side of forming your own opinion.
[3:00] Johnny brings up the crazy times we live in, citing a Newsmax article about aliens. That almost had him believing the story, until the UFO expert admitted would be happy to be Trump’s Alien liaison. As an example of the risks in reviewing all content. <editor comment, people believe they see all sorts of things, but such observations must be taken with a pinch of salt>.
[5:30] Anyway, back to the topic at hand, Bird Box. Robert explains how his experience with enterprise SaaS drove him to solve a complexity problem. For the first 7 years of Bird, they adopted more enterprise SaaS. But the more they adopted, the more complex operations became from all the different services.
All the SaaS were similar in architecture: database, (CRUD) operations for creating and managing persistent data, and the app/UI. 3.5 years ago they set about solving the problem in a unified way, Business in a Box was born, AKA Bird Box. The advent of AI accelerated the transition. <editor comment, in some ways I see Clerk Chat and Bird on similar paths in mashing up SaaS and AI.>
[8:30] Bird Box customers are provisioned across their three stacks of Grow, Manage, and Automate. This is covered in Robert’s letter to shareholders. The AI model(s) used is up to the enterprise. Bird’s history in infrastructure meant they treat the AI model as a modular component.
[10:00} Bird is now running on Bird Box. They finally stopped using Jira (project management tool). Bird Box will be on general release in February.
Last year Bird announced Bird Marketing and Bird CRM, and they achieved $70M ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue). Proving disparate business functions can be unified into a single, AI-first platform.
[12:00] Johnny brings up Braze as a potential competitor. In my opinion they are more focused on customer engagement, and more SaaS with AI optimization. Than the broader vision of Bird, which is across all enterprise applications. Bird is competing will all enterprise SaaS.
Johnny pushes on where is the focus of competition, Robert highlights its SFDC (SalesForce Dot Com). The differentiation is integration of the apps.
[14:00} Robert shared that he used Enterprise Ready to build out the enterprise SaaS Bird Box required to implement. That are built on their customer data platform (CDP), with sovereign data requirements, e.g. can run on premise. This enables Bird Box to address large enterprise, not just the traditional SMB (Small Medium Business) of a start-up.
[15:30] We then jump over to Paul Sweeney. Robert’s letter to shareholders showed to Paul, Bird is doing something big. An AI-first company, that is NOT verticalizing, it’s a business platform. Their Agentic architecture removes the need to verticalize. At this point Robert didn’t want to agree, as it gives the big picture away. But he did anyway.
Robert’s vision is we will live in an autonomous world, with autonomous enterprises, and Bird will become an autonomous company. Their agentic network is built to make that possible. Within workflows, say accounts payable, the division between agent and human tasks is today 30:70, but that will quickly shift to 70:30, and in time move to 100:00; autonomy.
[21:30] Robert brings in robotics as part of the autonomy. Initially in high value economies. Using Amazon as an example, that its robots now cost $4:50 an hour, there is no case for humans to be packing your boxes. To survive, Bird must lead the shift to autonomy, as individual SaaS like Docusign will no longer survive in an autonomous enterprise.
[23:30] Paul then extends the autonomy discussion into autonomous finance. That is creating hyper personalized loans and payment schedules. Which can then reduce some of the more negative functions, like late payments and fines, collapsing the model. And also enabling finance services to be extended in new ways.
[31:30] The discussion moves onto the limits around protecting consumers and its ethics, e.g. in giving a child a job in a factory to avoid the child taking high risk work. We bring the discussion away from that dark place to how open banking empowers consumers to get the best advice and financial recommendations.
This bring up the importance of transparency, chain of responsibilities, and regulations. Finding the balance is importance and challenging. In Europe the bias is towards regulation, which could be limiting its reach as in technology / software 70% of revenues are made by US companies. So for example Facebook could decide not to provide services in a region due to the burden of regulation.
[37:30] Johnny brings the discussion back to SFDC. Asking why Bird is not like SFDC. Robert goes back to the unified service of Bird in a Box. SFDC is traditional SaaS. Bird is unifying and automating the SaaS model. The robotics angle is for high value economies due to the convergence of the automation and robotics trajectories. Your car is a robot when in autonomous driving mode.
[40:00] Paul thinks Stripe is a better analogy than SFDC. Robert highlights Bird has 1100 to 1200 APIs. The vision is a unified app, not lots of SaaS. So Stripe is too constrained an example. An hour before the podcast Bird finally switched off Jira, project management now runs on Bird. Customers through Slack groups can work with Bird on bug reports and feature requests.
[45:00] Johnny asks how Robert was able to make this shift in his business given he’d already raised $1B. In the limit it comes down to the control Robert retains over the business. But also stimulating the shift is an AI-first company’s margin is such that the multiple could be more like Fintech. Plus Bird’s investors are very supportive, and Robert expects them to be in for the long run.
[53:00] Bird’s path is proving the platform, so it doesn’t look like a surprise IPO in 2025. Rather 2-3 years growing the business, proving the model, and likely extending into robotics. With the IPO to then drive the addition of robotics to the business.
[56:00] Johnny discovered buying shares from an existing investor in Bird will be challenging. So suggests he can bring the US government doge contracts, so there is a deal on the table where Johnny can get some stock. Johnny has Robert do the doge pitch later.
[58:00] Paul shared the importance to Webio of building their own AI model. He was interesting in how Bird viewed AI models. Robert sees it as an over-hyped foundational technology. Which reminds me of the work on zero human agent contact centers. They can be built on OpenAI, or on UltraVox (open source). So Bird uses an abstraction layer to mix and match LLMs as required, and is circumspect on the value long term value given the number of open source projects.
[1:03:00] The discussion then moves onto cross customer data. Bird’s design principle is the customer’s data remains within the customer’s control.
[1:07:00] As proof that Robert is hardcore he gives without preparation a pitch for US government doge contract using Bird.
[1:11:00] We then discuss whether Robert is pro-business, pro-capitalism, or pro-trump. With Robert still coming out as partially pro-Trump citing several reasons.
[1:15:30] Johnny moved the discussion onto RCS. Robert is still pro, but concerned with the carrier delays, and the rise of WhatsApp in the US. Encryption is not seen as an issue to drive WhatsApp adoption.
Bottom line, Bird Box is going to be big, it’s what happens when SaaS and AI are mashed up, removing the complexity, and heralding the rise of the autonomous enterprise.
