Assembled co-founder John Wang on building a AI native support system for enterprises

In this episode, I sit down with John Wang, the co-founder of Assembled, to explore how AI is revolutionizing customer support.

Having transitioned from a Stripe engineer to an AI startup founder, John shares his unique insights into the evolution of support tools. We delve into how these tools have shifted from being mere cost centers to becoming strategic assets that enhance customer experiences. John and I discuss the impact of AI on support volumes and staffing, highlighting how integration is reshaping the landscape. He emphasizes the importance of talent density and assembling high-caliber teams to drive success in the tech industry. Through his experiences, John provides practical insights into AI's current capabilities and limitations in support operations.

We also explore the strategic considerations for future AI support ecosystems. John shares his thoughts on the role of support in driving revenue and customer satisfaction, and how AI can orchestrate with human support agents to create a seamless experience. His perspective on building high-performing support organizations offers valuable lessons for anyone looking to innovate in this space.

Every episode, I bring in a guest with a unique point of view on a critical matter, phenomenon, or business trend—someone who can help us see things differently. Season two will host a series of guests from early-stage investing, as well as builders, founders, and product managers.

For more information on the podcast series, see here.

To find the previous episodes of Differentiated Understanding, see here.

Chapters

00:00 The Journey from Stripe to Assembled

02:25 Understanding the Importance of Customer Support

05:29 Lessons Learned from Stripe

10:25 AI in Customer Support: Current State and Future

16:04 The Economic Impact of Support Operations

18:25 The Role of AI in Transforming Support Jobs

24:30 The Future of Support Organizations

26:58 Guardrails Against Fraud in AI Support

32:42 Navigating the AI Ecosystem

38:00 The Value of Long-Term Commitment in Careers

AI-generated transcript

Grace Shao (00:00)

Hey, John, thank you so much for joining us. I just recorded your bio already. It’s extremely impressive. And you’ve done quite a, you’ve had quite a few different roles now as the co-founder of assembled, right? To start, can you just tell us about your story? Like what inspired you to leave Stripe, you know, go into, you know, right now what you guys are doing, which is a software for people who run customer service support operations. You know, now you guys are pivoting into AI as well, or at least leaning into AI. Tell us about all of this.

John Wang (00:28)

Yeah, great question. When we, well, when my co-founders and I started, we were all at Stripe. We worked on a bunch of different things at Stripe. And one of the last things that my two other co-founders worked on was a support tool, an internal support tool. And I remember pretty clearly that they were making a bunch of headway. It was really, really cool. And...

They had gone to this really, really high up person and product. And this person was basically like, why are you guys wasting your time on this? Like you guys are kind of like, you’ve been at Stripe for so long, you know all these things and you’re doing support. Like I’ve got this really cool Bitcoin project that I would love for you to work on instead. And I remember my co-founder coming to me and being like, hey, like pretty bummed this is what happened.

And then I was like, wait, you just saved Stripe, you know, quite a few million dollars, increased customer satisfaction by 40%. And still they don’t understand the value of this. And that’s when we were like, hey, ⁓ there’s something here where there’s a market opportunity. So that’s what got us really, really excited about support. We were doing it at Stripe. We knew it was an undervalued place. We didn’t see any very good tools out there to do support well.

And so we decided to go build something really, really great in the support space and just like make transform and elevate support is our mission. Yeah.

Grace Shao (01:50)

Do you think it was just that stripe was too rich? They were just, and they just didn’t care about saving a couple million dollars? Or do you think it was actually a blind spot for people?

John Wang (01:59)

I think Stripe was definitely very rich at the time. think it was also a blind, it was a combination, right? Because most people, you think of support, you think of it as just a cost center. And I think recently that started to change in the sense that like, hey, this is actually a really important part of your business. But for a lot of companies, like if you look at FinTech, if you look at like a lot of health tech companies, their entire product is their relationship with their customers.

And so support’s actually really, really important for that. And I think a lot of people underappreciated that for quite a while. And now I think people are starting to understand again, hey, if you piss off your customers every time they come and talk to you, that’s not going to be a very good thing. You better be a monopoly. Otherwise, you know, they might not be coming back.

Grace Shao (02:46)

Yeah, definitely. I think I want to kind of lean into that later in our conversation as well. It’s like people are trying to replace support and customer service AI first. But if anything, it’s not the best experience when you’re frustrated with a product and you keep on getting a robot, right? But I want to kind of talk more about your experience at Stripe. You were there quite early. What do you think it taught you, you know, as a very early employee at such a successful startup now?

if even considered still startup and then like what were things that you think you learned there lessons even if soft skills that you kind of took away to to your current role like as a founder.

John Wang (03:21)

Yeah, it’s a great question. You know, it’s really funny actually. I just met up with someone where, so when I was starting out of college, I had applied for all these jobs. I was able to get a lot of them, except for this one company that I really, really wanted to go to. It was called Meteor Development Group. They built open source software. In college, I had built open source software at Ruby on Rails.

I was really big in that community. was like, wow, it’d be awesome to go and make this something I do day to day. And I didn’t get the job. I was really bummed about it. And then I was like, I’ll just fall back on my second here, which is Stripe. And Stripe was the obvious second choice because just the people were really, good. And now like 10 years later, I like think about that and I’m like, the business model is really important.

because Meteor was not a good business. Like open source frameworks is not a good business, but Stripe, really boring. Honestly, it’s just like payments. You process payments, you go talk to Visa. You literally have to like, we had a server in the server room that would send like a specific file with specific tabs and spaces in order to get it out to Visa. Really boring. Really, really core infrastructure too.

And so like the big overarching thing that I learned was like one, business model is unbelievably important because if you can just make a good product when the kind of like market is there and when there’s a really big need, then this can scale like unbelievably fast. Two was the people. I remember talking actually to a few people, Greg Brockman was maybe the second or third person I talked to.

who’s now the co-founder of OpenAI. And I remember just talking to him and being like, wow, this person is so, so smart. This is awesome. And I would talk to kind of like, I would go to the lunchroom and be talking to people at Stripe. that was just, people were talking about all sorts of things. And I think like talent density was a really, really big part of like what made Stripe successful. And

It wasn’t any one thing over time. was one…

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