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Hiten Show

Hiten Show

By: Hiten Shah
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 Deeply researched case studies that help you learn how real companies grow, adapt, and win. No agenda. No BS. No hype.

www.hiten.showHiten Shah Economics
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  • Why Tesla will win the $500B robotaxi race

    Why Tesla will win the $500B robotaxi race
    Aug 27 2025
    Hey,Waymo looks like the winner in self-driving.It’s fully autonomous. Ultra-precise. Barely crashes.But Waymo’s success is an illusion.And Tesla is set to leapfrog them.Not by building the best tech, but by deploying it the smartest.Waymo is expanding city by city.Its cars are packed with sensors. Each road is pre-mapped.It’s safe, but slow and expensive.Tesla is moving much faster.They’ve already shipped over 500,000 semi-autonomous cars globally.Those vehicles are collecting billions of real-world miles, training a system that learns on the fly.No lidar. No pre-mapping. Just cameras, neural nets, and fast iteration.Tesla sends out new software every few weeks.The goal?One update that turns millions of Teslas into robotaxis overnight.Elon says they’re 2–3 years from making that happen.But the deeper story isn’t just about Tesla’s strategy.It’s the pattern — the same playbook Elon’s used for rockets, electric vehicles, AI, and now robotaxis.Four founder lessons from Elon’s approach:* Solve problems in the right order: Elon always seems to ask: What’s the one constraint that, if solved, makes everything else easier? With self-driving, Elon didn’t start with full autonomy. He started by solving the real blocker: distribution. Deploy semi-autonomous cars first, then farm real-world training data at scale to improve the product.* Find the non-obvious solution to the obvious problem: If everyone agrees on an approach, Elon will almost always do the opposite. At SpaceX, the big barrier was cost. Most people assumed the solution was better spacecraft. But Elon bet on reusable rockets instead — and changed the economics of space entirely.* Build for tomorrow’s constraints: Elon doesn’t care about being right today. He cares about being right in the end. With EVs, he didn’t listen to early skeptics and wait for battery breakthroughs or charging networks. He built an electric sports car people wanted — then let infrastructure follow demand.* Turn users into advocates: This is a similar play to Airbnb and Uber: Build something people love and profit from, and they’ll fight to protect it. Elon’s version? He wants your Tesla to become your side hustle, earning money as a robotaxi while you sleep. Owners won't just want autonomy — they'll lobby for it.Tesla’s robotaxi plan might be Elon’s biggest bet yet, and the one that proves the pattern works at global scale.I break down the full strategy here:Chapters(00:35) Why Waymo seems unstoppable(01:46) Tesla’s dropout advantage(02:38) How Tesla hacked the liability problem(03:20) The four-move checkmate to autonomy(04:28) Your Tesla’s secret side hustle(05:38) Elon’s genius failure formulaTranscriptTesla has got a massive problem with its self-driving tech, but no one is talking about what happens when they fix this issue because Waymo success is an illusion. And Tesla is on track to leapfrog them with a strategy to deploy a fleet of Robotaxis in every city around the world, all within the next three years made possible by Elon's playbook. That's continuously defied the odds and skeptics.First, let me introduce you to who everyone thinks is the market leader. Imagine you're in downtown San Francisco, you open an app, tap a button, and a car glides up. No driver, just empty seats waiting for you. That's Waymo. It started inside Google back in 2009. Today it's also live in cities like Austin and Phoenix.Each car is a rolling super sensor, 29 cameras plus lidar and radar. It fires millions of laser pulses every second to build a 3D model of the street. It can see shapes, judge distances, and track movement faster than any human.But the real magic isn't the hardware, it's the prem mapping. Before a single passenger steps in Waymo vans have already driven those same roads hundreds of times, recording every traffic light, curb, and road marking. When a Waymo robot taxi hits the road, it's not just reacting, it's cross-checking live data against a blueprint. It's like deja vu for robots. The results are hard to argue with. Waymo has only been at fault in one crash since launch. It's now handling 250,000 rides per week on paper. Waymo looks like it's already won the race, but the question isn't does it work? It's how fast can they take this global? That's where things get interesting.In the opposite corner, there's Tesla, no lidar, no radar. Just nine cameras worth a thousand dollars. Instead of custom mapping cities,Tesla's cars, figure it out on the fly. It's like dropping someone in Rome and telling them to drive. Tesla calls it vision-based ai.It's a system relying only on cameras and neural nets to interpret the world. Unlike Waymo's cautious rollout, Tesla ships over there updates to users every few weeks. All while collecting billions of miles of real world footage.At first glance, Waymo's Tech looks superior. Cameras have less rain than lidar. They struggle in rain fog or at night. To be fair, this isn't apples to ...
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    7 mins
  • Duolingo has an AI problem

    Duolingo has an AI problem
    Aug 5 2025
    Duolingo was one of the most beloved brands in tech.But in 2025, a leaked memo exposed the company’s true AI strategy: automate education. The backlash was instant. Reddit turned. TikToks went viral. Loyal users walked away from thousand-day streaks.This is the inside story of Duolingo's unraveling: how a brand built on personality and playfulness lost user trust overnight, alienated its community, and put years of brand equity at risk all while selling a different story to investors.Chapters(0:00) Why Duolingo users started quitting(0:42) AI as a teaching tool or a threat to quality?(1:12) When Duolingo went all-in on AI(2:07) The memo that kickstarted Duolingo’s downfall(2:57) From viral love to viral hate(3:17) Duolingo’s off-brand response(3:52) The scramble to win users back(4:12) What every founder (and brand) can learnTranscriptIn May, 2025, Duolingo users started quitting. I quit Duolingo. We are watching the live downfall of Duolingo.Tiktoks went viral. The Reddit community turned on them all because of a memo posted by the CEO AI is really positive for our business.In this video, I'll break down what happens when a consumer brand tells one story to users and another to investor.How that tension backfired for Duolingo and what not to do during a PR crisis. Guys, Duolingo’s downfall is here.You already know this, but Duolingo was one of the most loved brands in tech since 2012. They've worked to create a cult following the green owl, the memes, the passive aggressive streak reminders.It felt chaotic. Funny, personal, but internally, the company was moving in a different direction. By 2020. Duolingo was integrating AI first with Bird Brain, then GPT-3, but they kept it quiet in public.They still leaned on the owl, their human experts, and a tone that made the app feel alive. This was a contradiction on the outside playfulness, community, personality on the inside, automation scale, efficiency.It raised a tricky question for Duolingo. How do they scale using AI without breaking the brand? While selling a story investors wanted to hear by 2023, the shift was harder to Miss.Duolingo launched Max Duolingo Max powered by GPT-4. It offered AI role play instant explanations and personalized feedback inside the company.Some called it Duolingo ChatGPT moment. The stock tripled within a year and the messaging change. Its tagline became AI and Education make a great duo. Duolingo worked with OpenAI for years. The same year, the New Yorker profiled, CEO Luis von Ahn. He said replacing teachers is a worthwhile trade off.Then came the rollout in April, 2025. Duolingo released 148 new courses built with generative AI. von Ahn said our first a hundred courses took about 12 years. The next 150 took just one. The internal roadmap shifted towards full stack automation from lesson content to gamified features with AI led characters, but users started to suspect a drop in quality.Recently, things have gotten so bad. Then came the memo. In May, 2025, von Ahn on wrote a post that made the company's direction clear, automate everything. It was the first time Duolingo had said it out loud. One line stood out, humans won't get us there. The memo detailed what AI first meant In practice, headcount would only grow if AI couldn't do the job.New hires and existing teams would be evaluated on how well they used AI. More jobs would be cut, support would be handled by chatbots. None of this was a pivot. It was a strategy, months in motion. It was just never shared. Publicly, the goal was to scale personalized education, but to many users, it felt like the soul had been stripped out.Alan, are you spending on infrastructure, content? Where's the money going? I'm demanding Answers from the CEO. Duolingo set out to optimize the backend, but what they were really changing was the front end, their brand, and it didn't go unnoticed. The response was instant. Reddit threads called the new content AI slop full of mistakes on TikTok.Users said the app felt like a robot pretending to care. Videos tagged Duolingo AI racked up over 10 million views in days, most of them negative. Even LinkedIn piled on. Some users walked away from streets they'd kept for over a thousand days. After users turned, Duolingo pulled back. The company known for chaos and humor went quiet.First, they deleted comments. Next, they temporarily wiped their TikTok and Instagram feeds yours of brand voice gone. Then von Ahn went on a podcast and added fuel to the fire. He said, I'm not sure that there's anything that computers can't really teach you. I think speculating schools would mostly exist for childcare.While AI handled the teaching to users, it sounded like the company had stopped listening. So Duolingo resumed posting only this time with carefully worded lines. Community feedback is valued and humans are still in the loop. Then at the end of May von Ahn walks some of it back. Our employees are what make Duolingo so amazing.So we're gonna continue having...
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    5 mins
  • Why $10,000 MRR is closer than you think...

    Why $10,000 MRR is closer than you think...
    Sep 13 2024

    Today I'm talking with Tim, the founder of Saasco, about his biggest challenge: How to go-to-market. During our chat, I spot a common trap that Tim's fallen into - and it’s one that keeps many founders from hitting $10K in Monthly Recurring Revenue. Let's find out what it is and how to beat it.




    Timestamps:


    (00:00) What’s going to come up on my call


    (01:15) 5 things to know about Tim & Saasco


    (01:33) Focusing on value, not price


    (03:39) Rethinking Saasco’s positioning


    (07:19) The art of product sequencing


    (10:21) Finding the right design partners


    (13:10) Aligning business goals with customer needs


    (16:04) Next steps for Tim & Saasco


    (17:35) The key takeaway




    Where to find Hiten


    • Twitter/X: https://x.com/hnshah
    • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hnshah/




    Where to find Tim


    • Twitter/X: https://x.com/timscullin


    • Website: https://saasco.com/


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    Disclaimer: Hiten Shah's "The Hiten Show" episodes are provided for general information purposes only and do not constitute business, financial, or other professional advice. Audience members should not act upon the content or information found here without first seeking appropriate advice from an accountant, financial planner, lawyer, or other professional.



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.hiten.show
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    19 mins
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