How SuperMe is Building the Professional Network for the AI Era
with Casey Winters — Cofounder & CEO
Casey Winters is building SuperMe, an AI-native professional network that connects users with AI avatars of professional thought leaders. The growth veteran on starting from zero again.
In this episode
- After starting his career at Apartments.com in 2005, Casey had immediate success but was told he was an odd “product and marketing hybrid” who needed to pick a lane. But Casey wanted to keep working at the intersection of product and marketing, so he decided to join GrubHub as their first growth hire in 2008.
- Over the last two decades, Casey helped define the emerging growth profession, holding product and growth leadership roles at Pinterest and Eventbrite, serving as a Growth Advisor in Residence at Greylock, and advising category-leading tech companies like AirBnB, Reddit, Thumbtack, Canva, Figma, and Faire.
- In April 2024, Casey teamed up with former Pinterest colleague Ludo Antonov to cofound SuperMe, which is building the professional network for the AI era with a platform that ingests blog posts, podcasts, and other content from top experts to build AI avatars capable of providing highly specialized knowledge and expertise.
- Casey and Ludo have built SuperMe as an AI native startup from the beginning. This means everyone they hire is expected to operate like an engineer, with the ability to contribute directly to the codebase. It has also had profound implications on their product development process, which looks significantly different than a traditional SaaS startup given how rapidly LLMs are evolving.
- AI is not only changing how technology products are built but how they grow. One of the growth loops Casey is most excited about is embedding SuperMe into other AI products, so that its AI avatars can automatically be called as “tools” when users have questions that these avatars are uniquely positioned to answer.
- SuperMe’s competitive advantage vs. ChatGPT and Claude is based on quality over quantity. By curating knowledge from the top 1% of experts in each field, and continuously improving responses based on feedback loops between its AI avatars and users, Casey believes that SuperMe can deliver significantly better results vs. horizontal LLMs that base their responses on lower quality inputs.