Nabeel Hyatt is looking for the “Japanese toilets” of AI—products that delight users in unexpected ways.
As a partner at Spark Capital, that investment philosophy has paid off. Despite making only 1-2 investments a year, he’s picked some of the biggest winners in AI so far: Descript, Cruise, and Granola.
We spent an hour unpacking:
How much “leash” top products give to AI agents—and why that matters
How he spots remarkable AI products
Why “sensitivity” is one of the most important traits of top founders
The huge opportunities for AI products to help users explore new “possibility spaces”
How Nabeel is actually using AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and AI code editor Windsurf in his life
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Episode start
00:01:32 - Introduction
00:01:50 - Why Nabeel doesn't invest in more than two companies per year
00:06:49 - Why the words you use to describe your business matter
00:13:45 - What a product with soul looks like
00:16:48 - Patterns in the remarkable founders Nabeel has invested in
00:24:12 - How Nabeel evaluates popular coding agents
00:32:29 - AI has broadened the horizons of what Nabeel can do
00:36:28 - How funding models are changing as AI makes it cheaper to build software
00:45:43 - Nabeel's framework for when to trust an LLM
00:55:39 - Guide AI to provide context (and not just quick answers)
