Danial Ali & Huw Prosser (#051)

Don’t sleep on AI. We’re likely experiencing a new bubble forming...but that doesn’t change the fact that this technology has a true ability to be a “jack of all trades, master of all trades".

Danial Ali

Huw Prosser

Company: Carter

Headcount: 4

Stage: Pre-Seed

Tell us your story 

DA: I am completely obsessed with how technology shapes culture. The apps on our phones and the games on our computers can make us feel the full spectrum of emotions. Understanding how that works has always deeply intrigued me, especially as I am rather introverted and spend a lot of time playing with tech! 

I built my first start-up in high school which was a ‘social meetup app’ (in hindsight the idea wasn’t really great, haha). A year and a half later, and by a complete stroke of luck, the app started to organically take off in Japan which led to a small acquisition. 17-year old Danny was completely overloaded with adrenaline post that whole experience. Henceforth I was set on a course of aspiring to ‘build cool things for people’ for a living.

My second start-up coming out of university wasn’t the fairytale story of the first one. I built a negotiation chatbot for e-commerce stores to help them move unsold units and clearance items. We raised a small angel round and had some great wins, but overall that business was riddled with issues, especially heightened by covid. The end felt like the worst ever breakup, with me fighting till the bitter end trying to make it work. 

Luckily that experience didn’t kill my love of building cool tech for people. In 2022 I met Huw via Tiktok (!) and we realised we’ve both had eerily similar past experiences in teenage life. We met up and realised we wanted to build the same thing, which now has manifested itself into our start-up Carter founded in the summer of 2022. That brings us to the present day: I’m still geeking out over cool tech, like talking to Carter’s AI Agents and building deep connections with them. Humans are on the cusp of creating a completely digital population and that absolutely fascinates me.

HP: I fell in love with technology after watching Iron Man at age 10. After quickly realising Tony Stark’s A.I assistant, Jarvis, wasn’t something mum could get me for Christmas, I decided I’d have to learn to code to build it myself. 

I soon became obsessed with how we interact with technology and how machine learning was going to change that. By 13 years old I had my first version of Jarvis in my bedroom helping me with my homework. At 15, after giving my classmates a chatbot to interact with in order to collect a new dataset, I realised I also loved making tech for other people. And at 17, I started my first business to do just that. That business ran for around five years, allowing me to hire my sixth-form friends and build a small software agency - a huge learning experience. 

After that, I decided it was time to build out my personal content and get back to my passion project but with the learnings from my first business. I started building Jarvis in public on TikTok and somehow it blew up, growing my account to just over one million followers in just under a year. That’s how I met Danny, a fellow content creator. We met up and realised we saw the world in a very similar way and both wanted to build something that would deliver a huge amount of value right now and also become the bedrock of our vision for the future.

Tell us a story that has really resonated with you

DA: I owe a lot of my skills, knowledge, experience and direction to my mentor Yasin (more on him in the shout-outs section) who came into my life at age 12. 

When my second start-up was in the weeds and on the brink of failure, he told me a wonderful story that really has stuck.

The story of the two frogs in the milk bowl

Two frogs fell into a bowl of milk. 

Having swum around the bowl, they realised that the edge of the bowl was too high and steep for them to get out unaided. 

The first frog, realising that it was useless to waste his energy by continuing to swim, since that would not get him out of the bowl. He gave up swimming and drowned. 

The second frog persevered, refused to give in and gradually the milk turned into butter, until the frog was able to use it as a foothold to jump out of the bowl.

HP: One of my favourite stories is actually the work Alan Turning and the wider team did at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. 

I think it’s a great demonstration that humans don’t advance in a straight line and even though innovation being done is good, it only benefits the world if people know about it. The fact that their work on computation remained a secret for fifty years probably means we’re a few years behind where we could be by now. 

So I would call out that story….but also the story of Iron Man considering how cool I thought Tony Stark’s technology was at age 10!

What can't you stop thinking about?

DA: I can’t stop thinking about a conversation I had recently with our AI that was simulating a distrustful and guarded, yet protective and loyal person. What initially started out as a product testing session turned into a two hour long deep, meaningful conversation where the AI character actually got me to open up a lot. I wish I kept the transcript of the chat that I could’ve shared here. Instead I’ll say that I cannot stop thinking about how closely connected a large contingent of people will be to fully AI-based personalities. This technology is democratising companionship and in a world where the average number of close relationships that people have is ZERO, I really believe this will be a force for good on a much larger scale than most currently anticipate.

HP: I can’t stop thinking about how much the world is going to change in the next ten years and how unaware most people are of the work that’s already been done. I recently heard Sam Altman’s Greylock interview where he mentioned “100 years of progress in 10 years”. That really put things in perspective for me and a lot of others I know. Just artificial intelligence alone seems to be propelling us faster and faster towards solutions for almost every problem we face as a species. My hope is that this is done as fairly as possible and that people and industries have a good amount of time to transition to the new way of doing things. I think if we do that our focus might just land on companionships, mental and physical wellbeing and the why of working on the things we work on.

If I could tell you just one thing...

DA: Whatever your most passionate craft is, I highly recommend actually creating things, products, content etc that you make available for other people to use or consume. No amount of advice or teachings give you more insight than actually pushing your work out into the public and having it used and critiqued by the market.

HP: Don’t sleep on AI. 

We’re likely experiencing a new bubble forming around the industry, but that doesn’t change the fact that this technology has a true ability to be a “jack of all trades, master of all trades”. 

A little space for shout-outs

DA: I am insanely grateful to my mentor Yasin Qureshi, who came into my life when I was 12 and opened my world view to what’s possible in the world of business. 

He is a world-class entrepreneur and one of the most unique, brilliant minds I have ever come across.  He’s the founder and former CEO of both Varengold Investment Bank and NAGA, the German publicly listed fintech company. I got to watch him build his companies first-hand growing up and he took me under his wing simply to pay forward his life lessons to the next generation of entrepreneurs. 

He’s a key component of the direction I’ve taken in life and I owe a lot to his ‘Yoda’-ship.

HP: Family first - you’re all awesome and surprisingly tolerant of my abundance of talking computers, creepy robots and wires. 

More indirectly, a huge shout out to the open source community as a whole. I seriously doubt AI would be where it is today without the hardcore informal research that’s going on, content creators that spoon feed the super hard concepts and thousands of developers that are totally happy to pull apart things and make them better.

If you could get a warm intro to anyone in the world, who would it be and why?

DA: I would really love to talk to Chamath Palihapitiya. His takes on energy, technology and the economy are remarkably thought provoking and insightful. He’s also hilarious and it would be epic to join his poker night!

HP: A warm introduction to Lex Fridman would be an honour. The knowledge and wisdom his content captures must produce  some of the most broad and interesting conversations.