The Intersection of Faith and Technology

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  Speaker 1:
  Hi everyone. My name is Ed Tsai. I am a managing partner at Alumni Ventures. We’re here at the Intersection of Faith and Technology webinar. I’m very pleased and honored to have Bobby Grunwald, the founder and CEO of YouVersion, as our special guest today. As a reminder, everyone else is off camera and on mute, and we will have a Q&A after our discussion. You can also send questions into the chat box and we’ll be aiming to answer those.

  Next slide. Just a few housekeeping items. This presentation is for informational purposes only. It’s not financial advice, not an offer to buy or sell securities, and so please speak with your financial advisor for investment decisions.

  Next slide.

  Agenda today. This is one of the most exciting webinars, in my opinion, that I’ve hosted at AV just because Bobby has this amazing story. I was able to meet Bobby about a month plus ago at an event hosted by a mutual friend, Henry Kaner. It was a monthly event called Inklings, and Bobby just gave a great sharing of his origin story—origin story of YouVersion. I had heard about his entrepreneurial endeavors before, but also YouVersion—as, if people don’t know, it’s been downloaded 700 million times. It’s one of the biggest apps in the world, and Bobby and his team were there from the start of the launch of the iPhone. And so I think there’s a lot of great perspective that Bobby will be able to share on this, and so really excited about that.

  Second thing, and I shared this with Bobby personally, my dad was a very religious person, religious man. He unfortunately had a stroke a number of years ago and I shared with Bobby how we used the YouVersion app on a tablet in the audio mode where it would auto-forward the content and speak in Mandarin Chinese. And so that was very helpful for him. These kinds of small, thoughtful product features in technology, I think, have a very big impact on people’s lives. That was just one example, but there’s millions of lives being impacted by Bobby, so I think that’ll be really great to hear some of these stories as well.

  So, next slide. Just a few intro slides for our backdrop. Alumni Ventures—we’re the largest venture firm for individual investors in the U.S. We serve individual investors, providing them access to venture capital. We’re also the number one most active venture firm in the U.S. in 2022 and 2023. We now have raised over $1.3 billion, have 1,300 portfolio companies, and a large number of venture investors and full-time employees. So our goal is to give access to this asset class to individuals like yourself online.

  Next slide. I happen to be a managing partner of our AI fund and a number of other funds like Westwood Ventures. It’s a way for people to get access to venture capital. It’s a really interesting time right now in the market—seeing so many AI innovations: junior developer, automated junior developer called Devin. We’ve seen companies do technology that lets you create a video from a prompt, and so there’s a lot of exciting stuff that we’re seeing in AI now. Our fund happens to be actually recently closed, but if you’re still interested in investing, we can try and make some room. You can email my colleague Graham at [email protected].

  Next slide.

  A little bit about YouVersion, just to set a backdrop for Bobby and just how big it is. There were 6.7 billion Bible app opens in 2023, over 700 million—nearly 750 million—cumulative downloads across their portfolio of apps. It’s Bible apps in over 3,000 languages, and they’re really addressing key things for people: love, peace, hope, healing, and anxiety. I think it would be interesting to hear from Bobby some of the things that are important to people right now too.

  One final thing to note: YouVersion is a nonprofit. It’s not here to make money. We’re not here fundraising for them to make money. It’s all nonprofit, but it’s just amazing—180 people that Bobby’s managing, 2,000 volunteers—and hopefully maybe some of the people here on the call can consider joining as well.

  But with that, I’d like to introduce Bobby. Next slide.

  So Bobby, yeah, again, it’s great to have you here. Bobby is the pastor and innovation leader at Life.Church. He’s also CEO and founder of YouVersion. There’s a number of other fun things about Bobby on this slide. He was an entrepreneur multiple times over before starting YouVersion, and maybe that’s the first place where we can begin. Bobby, if you could just share with us your origin story and the origin story of YouVersion.

  Speaker 2:
  Sure, Ed. Thanks for the opportunity—honored to be here with all of you. And yeah, I didn’t intend to be doing what I’m doing today and didn’t anticipate that this would be the path I’d be on, but it’s the journey that God’s had me on. So I started in college studying finance. I thought I’d probably be doing what some of you guys are doing as a career path. In fact, that was the direction I was headed back in the mid-1990s, but had an opportunity to be an entrepreneur.

  I’d never grown up in an environment where I had models of entrepreneurship. My parents were great, but they weren’t entrepreneurs and I didn’t have models to aspire to. But I took a job at a local car dealership in the back office during college, and that led to just an opportunity. I kind of nosed into a conversation of someone proposing building a website, and just for a challenge, I offered to build the website.

  I didn’t know how to build a website back in 1995, and there weren’t books on it, so I just talked to some people I knew to figure it out and ultimately ended up building the car dealership website. But we built a site called hondaparts.com and sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in parts and accessories every month through this website. The owner of the car dealership came and asked me what I planned on doing in life, and before I had a chance to answer, he told me that whatever it is I did, he wanted to invest in it. So I had an investor before I had an idea or a pitch even.

  So I felt like that was an opportunity I should step into, and that’s how I became an entrepreneur. I put together a business plan for a web hosting company, and this was pretty early on—early 1996—and there were very few web hosting companies that were focused on web hosting globally. Our first customer was from Germany, and we had customers from 33 countries.

  It’s one of those dorm room stories where we had absolutely no idea what we were doing, and it was growing quickly. Sold it in 1998 and then started another company that was just a large online content company focused around wrestling, and we had the largest community of people that were fans of wrestling. We had an office up in New York City and sold it to a company that Goldman took public in December of 1999. And so that was what I thought I must be designed to do—start companies and sell ’em. It felt like—I was 23 years old at the time and had had a couple of not huge successes, but by my standards they were pretty big successes.

  Speaker 1:
  At 23 years old and already, I mean really two companies—one for your boss, the Honda parts—and also the wrestling-related one.

  Speaker 2:
  So we had a couple of early successes. And of course, we managed to also sell it in December of ’99, which is right before the dot-com bust. And so we were kind of out of the market when the market crashed, and timing ended up being awesome.

  But instead of starting another company, which is what I planned to do, I just really felt like my path was to kind of get engaged in serving at my church in a stronger capacity than I had before. My church, at the time—we loved our church—but it was very low-tech. There was nothing technology-oriented about the church at all. And so I never even really connected the need to leverage technology in faith or in the church. The two worlds just seemed disconnected in my head.

  But fortunately, one of the pastors at the church just read about the sale of my company and thought, I wonder if there’s a way that we could use my experience in business and in technology—in particular—in the context of how we do ministry as a church. And so that began to get me thinking.

  I began to volunteer in other capacities at the church and ultimately felt pretty clearly that I was supposed to step into a role to actually join the team and be on the staff of the church, which happened in 2001. Honestly, at that time, I thought that that would probably last maybe a couple years, because up to that point in my life, I had kind of an 18-month cycle on almost everything that I did. And so I sort of felt like that probably would be a season that would have its moment and I would move to something different. But instead it’s been—what is that—23 years? Almost 23 years that I’ve been here on the team at the church.

  My role today and role over that time has been a bit like an entrepreneur-in-residence at a church. That’s maybe a way to describe it. I kind of take the problems that we have or the things we’re trying to accomplish or the missional aspirations that we have and just say, okay, how can we build ideas and businesses—or in this case a not-for-profit structure—around these ideas to go out and create new approaches to how we solve these problems?

  There’s other responsibilities of course that I have in the mix of all of it, but the notable one that we’re here talking about today is the YouVersion Bible app. That started in 2006.

  To kind of get to the origin story of it—I was in the O’Hare Airport in Chicago in a long TSA security line for whatever reason in October of 2006. In the long TSA security line, I’m kind of asking myself this question: I wonder if there’s a way to use technology to help me read the Bible more consistently.

  I was what I would have considered a below-average Bible reader, meaning I aspired to just have it more integrated into my daily life and in terms of just really understanding it, studying it, but I did not have that rhythm in reality. And so I thought maybe there’s a way to leverage technology to do that.

  The initial idea was for a website. This kind of predated app stores and apps as we know them today because it was late 2006. So the idea was for a website. The website had some novel features—or at least we felt like they were novel features—and I had no idea what we were getting into just with that simple idea.

  But I came up with the name YouVersion in the airport that day because it related to the initial concept. I registered the domain name youversion.com before I got on the plane that day. Then went through a process of kind of filtering the idea through some others, kind of a standard process I have for ideas, and then decided we would go ahead and try it.

  This was in a season where, as a church, we didn’t really have any financial margin—or very little—and so there wasn’t a budget or a big investment that was made in starting the website. It was really more like, how do I lead or cast vision for it and lead people that contribute their time and energy and resources into helping build the website?

  We ran into obstacle after obstacle. Had to license the Bible text, which was a new thing for me. I had no idea that the Bible was actually owned by people. Makes complete sense, but at the time, that’s how ignorant I was. And so we managed to get that—or at least get a step toward that direction.

  Speaker 2:
  And we launched the website in September of 2007. It had 20,000 people that visited in the first three months, which we felt great about—the interest in the website—but we could tell our retention was terrible. And we were using it ourselves only because we created the website and not because it naturally kind of helped how we engaged with scripture. It wasn’t even working for us.

  And so, I’m not afraid to start things and stop things, even when we put a lot of time and energy into it. So by December, just a few months later, I was processing shutting it down and wanting to learn from the failure. And that process of going through and saying, okay, what did we learn from the failure, led us to try putting it on a mobile device because we just felt like that might make a difference in terms of its proximity to our lives.

  So we redesigned the website to display on a BlackBerry—that was the kind of predominant device at that point in time—and that was profound. Early 2008, we saw the traffic going up to the website, retention from people that were using BlackBerrys. It almost became a BlackBerry-only website in terms of just the usage.

  And Steve Jobs, of course, announced the App Store and the ability to develop apps for the iPhone right around that same time. And we thought, well, we should try to build a Bible app based on the success we’re seeing of this mobile website. So that was kind of how it started. We had no idea how to build an app. Had a 19-year-old on our team that loved Apple, and it was kind of a nights-and-weekends project for us. And a few months later, we submitted to Apple in June of 2008.

  App Store launched in July in the U.S. in 2008. And so the Bible app—we were fortunate—was one of the first couple hundred free apps that were available on the day that the App Store launched. And so we had no idea what to expect. Saw 83,000 people install it on the first weekend, which for us blew our minds. And then we’ve been on this journey since that point for the last, I guess it would be almost 16 years, and it’s been awesome.

  We put together a huge coalition of partners, and we literally have thousands of partners globally that provide us either Bible text in different languages. We have over 3,000 versions of the Bible in over 2,000 languages.

  We’ve been non-commercial—not just not-for-profit—but there’s actually no ads. There’s no commercial kind of activity that we do in the app. So we don’t sell anything, we don’t sell data, we don’t do anything that people might presume you would to generate revenue from it.

  There’s some thinking behind why we do that. We’re not against those things in terms of just as a general principle. I’m a business guy at heart, so I completely understand all of that. We just felt like it was important for this particular venture that we’re doing to be not-for-profit, non-commercial in how we approach it. It kind of makes it really a Switzerland of neutrality for all these partners that are contributing their content. That’s not our endgame—to profit off of their content.

  So we’re supported by donations, and that means we have small donors, major donors—and last year, it was about 238,000 people that donated to support what we do. And that number grew from 100,000 the prior year. So we’ve had a pretty big growth ramp in terms of our support.

  But yeah, the 83,000 have grown now. I think the stat you were sharing might’ve been at the end of last year. Now it’s 700 and almost 75 million unique devices. And the velocity of growth is at its highest point since the very, very, very beginning. Meaning, we’re seeing our biggest years of growth, our biggest momentum, biggest growth of daily active users. All of that’s happened in the last few months. In fact, our biggest DAU day ever was Easter—last Sunday—which you might presume to be the case, but it’s not necessarily the case that it’s always been that way year over year, every year.

  So we’re just in a really big season of growth right now, and we’re fortunate. We don’t really even feel like this is ours. We feel like it’s something we’re stewarding on behalf of the global church because there’s such a big coalition of partners that kind of make it possible.

  Speaker 1:
  Yeah. Great. That was great sharing. I think a couple of interesting points you mentioned—I mean, this started just in an airport line. It started in the airport line—700 million-plus Bible-downloaded app. So there’s inspiration in things that we’re hearing. Maybe next time someone’s buying a burger—who knows—global influence and life-changing things happen there.

  I think I wanted to ask one or two quick questions back on the story. I think a lot of us here on the webinar maybe are in startups or considering joining startups or have different things that they’re thinking of doing—could be a project. How did you have the perseverance to say, “Hey, let’s try something new”? Both face the—I don’t know if you call it failure—but it didn’t work out. And you’re able to have an honest review of it, say, “Hey, there’s no product-market fit,” if you will, of that first website. “Hey, let’s try this mobile app.” What was that process like—to stop, pause, and reorganize the team for a new vision?

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah, no, I’d definitely not be telling the truth if I made it sound like it was really easy, because I’m not immune to feeling the same way everybody else feels, which is when you pour yourself into something. In that case, I was asking people to donate their time and energy. So that’s even a bigger ask, right, than just like, “Here’s the check, I’ll have you do this work for me.” I’m really asking them to believe in a vision. And so I’m putting my equity—my personal sort of reputation and equity—on the line by saying, “Trust me, this is going to be a great thing.”

  And so after a year of doing that and getting people to contribute to make it possible to build this website—yeah, it’s not easy when you realize that it failed or that it’s not working.

  I think for me, and I think for a lot of people, the fear of failure is not the fear that keeps you from starting something. It sounds like you’ve got several people that are in startups on the call, and you guys live in a culture in Silicon Valley where starting stuff is kind of a thing—that a lot of people are excited about starting things.

  I think the fear of failure is more represented when you’re unwilling to stop something that’s not working versus the fear that keeps you from starting. And so that’s, I think, where you really have to face it, because that’s when there’s an acknowledgment. If you don’t acknowledge that it’s failed, then you can just keep pretending and nursing it along and hoping that two more iterations will be what it takes to get through it.

  And so that’s a tough kind of discernment though—to figure out when is it time to stop it, and when is it time to just keep iterating. We could tell at that point in time that just the fundamental idea itself was not right, was not working, and wasn’t effective. And it was only after acknowledging that it failed and planning to shut it down that I feel like we were really actually able to honestly process why it failed.

  So that’s, I think, one of the key ingredients. If you sort of say, “Well, it’s not working—let’s think of ideas,” and let’s think of different ideas, you might not be willing to put on the table the big idea and say, “This is the thing that didn’t work,” because it’s too threatening to the vision or whatever it might be.

  So I think you have to make sure you can get to a place where everything’s on the table. And it was when that was the case that we basically abandoned that initial concept. And even though we said we redesigned the website to work on a mobile app—or excuse me, on a mobile phone—the reality of it was it was just a different product. I mean, that wasn’t just an iteration, it was different altogether.

  Now, the great thing about the journey was we actually had the Bible license—

  Speaker 1:
  All that in place.

  Speaker 2:
  We had that. That work would’ve been foundational to be able to try the mobile website. So we did benefit from the first set of effort that went into it. It wasn’t like it just started from zero at the end. But the only way that that idea came about was because we were willing to acknowledge that it failed.

  Speaker 1:
  Yeah, good. Well, wanted to transition to maybe the topic of faith and technology—this intersection. It feels like you’ve done it very well. Your team’s done it very well. How do you approach developing such a large product in a faith context? And how should one think about engagement or the goals of the app—daily use? Or is it community? What’s your framework and where do you see that going or changing in the next few years?

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah, I mean, I don’t really see it too differently than probably the startups that are on the call or the processes that you guys look for when you’re investing. But we’re obviously starting with the problem that we’re trying to solve. We’re trying to make sure we understand and know the audience that we’re serving.

  In my case, it started with trying to solve the problem for one. And then when I was able to successfully feel like I solved it for me, I knew there were people that were like me. So I wasn’t just one of one, but I was one of many.

  And it takes consistent effort for us to continue to remind ourselves of who the audience is that we’re serving. So we’re not serving—we have people all, at this point—we have people from all walks of life that are using the app, but the core audience we’re serving are still people that—they’re not necessarily hostile to scripture, but they also are not experts either.

  Speaker 2:
  And if they’re highly engaged in the Bible in some other format, that’s fine. I’m sure they can use our app—that’s not really the audience that we’re after. We’re really after the people that say, “I wonder if there’s something in that book or something that’s in that content that could be helpful and help me through this situation I’m dealing with in life.” We have so many felt needs that people have that are coming to the app, and they don’t know where to begin. The Bible’s oftentimes intimidating for them. “Help me understand what this means” is a common question—where they’re trying to just understand the meaning behind it.

  And so we’re like, okay, how do we create on-ramps to scripture? How do we help people find the passages that are relevant for the needs that they have and what they’re going through, and realize that we’re really just trying? That’s kind of some of the core problems we’re trying to solve. And as we think about the user experience, that’s what we’re focused on.

  From a KPI perspective, we call it a transformation funnel, but it basically looks very similar to, I’m sure, many things that you guys have seen and use. Obviously, someone can’t be impacted by our app unless they install it or unless they have the app. So it starts, of course, with the number of unique devices that installed it.

  And then we go to being known. We want the ability to—the users can use our app anonymously—but we actually desire to have a relationship with them. And so that gives us the ability to talk to the user outside the app, extend outside of just the framework that’s there. So for us, it’s a free account registered user metric. That’s about 185 million right now, the number of unique registered users we have, and that grows by a couple million a month.

  So that’s kind of our framework. But then as you go further, all the way down deep in the funnel, the metric that we really look at the most is a DAU-plus-four metric. So you have daily active users, you’ve got the DAU, but then the DAU-plus-four is really a seven-day trailing metric that says that this individual person actually used the app four or more times in the last seven days.

  And the reason that that’s significant is that there’s been third-party research—not our research—that indicated there’s a high correlation between people that have Bible engagement four or more times per week and all sorts of different outcomes that probably most of us, whether we’re a Christian or not a Christian, would actually agree are good outcomes. So: decrease in addiction, decrease in divorce rates, drunkenness—just things that are human behaviors. We find there’s a high correlation to improvements in all of those metrics with just having scripture be a part of your life four or more times per week.

  So that’s actually the bottom-of-our-funnel focal point that we try to design around. So if you use our app, you’ll see things that are encouraging weekly engagement. We’re not just trying to have you come back next week or see you at church or whatever. It’s all focused on daily habit formation. We’re trying to make it something that is constructed in a way that is designed for that type of metric.

  Speaker 1:
  Great. Well, amazing growth and obviously life impact. What’s been the key to some of this recent growth? I know there’s sort of a lite version of YouVersion for hard-to-access areas, or is it new countries? New design?

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah, so I think honestly, we had an inflection point a couple of years ago, and that’s what we’re seeing today as the result of this real shift. Prior to that—if you take the first 14 years—we had growth. And then in the last five of those 14 years, the growth would have been top-line single-digit growth in terms of that KPI funnel I was just mentioning.

  And I think we kind of settled into a mode of just saying, okay, it had grown really quickly and now it had somehow matured. And we were just now in this slower—it was growing but kind of closer to flat, closer to a little bit of growth type mode. And I just felt super uncomfortable with it. It was like this growing discomfort that I had.

  My role was partially focused on the app. I had other responsibilities, and so I always oversaw it, but I was not engaged in the day-to-day leadership of it. So I just looked at all that and said, I don’t want to fast-forward 10 years from now and feel like we’ve squandered one of the greatest opportunities to impact people’s lives. And by coasting—I just sort of felt like we were—it’s effectively coasting.

  We were getting accolades. The numbers are so big that people were still saying, “Oh, this is amazing, I can’t believe it. There’s not anything like it,” or whatever. And if we weren’t careful, we would believe those things. But in reality, I knew that there’s a huge need and a huge opportunity we weren’t tapping into.

  So what it was going to require though is a lot of changes. And one of those changes I felt like is—we had to invest a lot more money into it. We were at a threshold of really maintenance, effectively. We would never have said that at the time, but that was, in retrospect, kind of the zone we were in. And it wasn’t a tiny amount of money, but I felt like we needed to move our annual run rate of what we’re investing in it into something that’s a nine-figure sum annually, so that we’re properly investing in stewarding a resource or an asset of this size. And at that point, it was much lower than that.

  So we were going to take some risk. We had nobody on our team that actually worked on revenue, because we didn’t need to. It wasn’t even a concern. So we were going to hire some world-class people to join our team. I knew we needed a more robust leadership team. My role was going to have to change and be the CEO and be engaged—not just be the founder that was less engaged.

  And so all those things changed a couple of years ago, and we really began to drive toward these KPIs and make the investments that we needed to make. And so we then saw triple-digit growth the next year. It went from single-digit growth to triple-digit growth a year later. And so now that’s kind of the course that we’re on.

  We really feel like it’s possible for us, on the top-line metric, to see 2 billion additional devices in the next 10 years—that’s kind of our current plan. It’s going to take about $1.1 billion of investment in the next 10 years, but we’re committed to it, and we’re going to raise it and figure out how to make that happen.

  And then down the funnel, we want to get to where we have—that bottom metric is about 100 million—in terms of the daily active plus four number that we’re talking about. So that’s our kind of pathway forward. I actually think it could be faster than that. I seriously think that that’s still not enough, and that we can do much better. But it’s a framework that we’re starting with. It’s gotten all the pieces moving in the right direction, and so we’ve started to build out the team, and we’ve seen the resources go up tremendously on the financial side.

  So anyway, that’s what changed.

  Speaker 1:
  I love the story—being hands-on and taking risk and being demanding for more or having an expectation or vision for more. Now, as we have the final few minutes and whatnot, I’d love to jump into AI. This is a big topic. A lot of people are aware of the big changes that AI is bringing. People can use ChatGPT, ask about things that are in the spiritual life—but then there’s also some trepidation.

  I saw a video from the BBC on AI and religion, and there’s a rabbi noting, “Hey, we wouldn’t want machines to be in control of what we do.” How do you see—or how can—AI be leveraged for our spiritual lives? And then how do you see—and is YouVersion currently planning and even testing or executing on—adapting AI into the YouVersion family?

  Speaker 2:
  Sure. First of all, it’s a really exciting time that we live in, and that’s the way that I see all these things—I see it as huge opportunities. It’s important for me to say that because some people’s outlook on these things really shapes the way that they process and think about it.

  I’ll answer it in a couple parts. One is sort of super practical and somewhat pedestrian for probably the people that are on this call. But we obviously are looking at the recent developments in AI as it can help accelerate our velocity in terms of just the way we work—everything from helping our engineers as they code, to multiplying our engineers with AI, to—just even today I was in a meeting and we’re using some of the writing tools for our copywriters and all that to kind of help accelerate their workflow a little bit.

  And one example is—they were just sharing, I can’t remember the name of the tool—but we’re able to put in our brand voice and all the information about the way we talk and our brand speaks. And then anybody that’s writing copy or emails or things that are just going out, even to partners or vendors, can actually run their copy through this third-party tool, and it just makes sure that it has our brand voice and that it’s consistent.

  So just a tiny example—but before, they might throw it over to our comms team, and they’re editing the content and sending it back to them, and it’s another workflow. So this is one whole category that we’re super intent on making sure that we’re maximizing the opportunity, which is an ongoing thing, as I think everybody understands. Which means it’s not like, “Where’s it at today?” And then literally, has it changed tomorrow or has it changed next week? So it’s kind of a constant process.

  So—I don’t even think we’ve announced it to the team yet—but we’re basically going to stand up a small team that’s going to go through the organization and make sure that we are maximizing that to its fullest. Because I think we’ve been doing it in a sort of “every man for themselves” kind of approach right now, where everybody’s just out exploring it, but we’re not getting enough cross-learning from it. And the changes are happening fast enough that we want to try to benefit more holistically.

  Speaker 1:
  Organizing a team to keep track—“Hey, here are the best practices.” “Hey, are you guys leveraging?” “Hey, did you know this team is using it this way?”

  Speaker 2:
  Absolutely—just like our internal transformation team that’s going around and making sure that we’re maximized in our approach. And that’ll probably be a constant—certainly through this season that we’re in right now.

  And then, in terms of the end user—the product-facing features, which I think are the most interesting—one of the questions I mentioned earlier, that’s the common question that people have about the Bible is: “Help me understand what this means,” or “Help me understand relevant scripture based on me telling you my problem or me explaining what I’m going through,” and us being able to discern what they mean to be able to answer the question, “What does this mean?”

  So for our future product roadmap—our product vision—there’s sort of four pillars for us. One pillar is personalization. No surprise. Nothing profound there, except obviously AI brings a completely different dimension to how personalization—how we can experience it. But it’s hard to serve as many people as we serve and do it without there being a personalized experience.

  Speaker 2:
  I mean, we can’t have a one-size-fits-all sort of experience on content or user experience. There’s nothing—again, nothing profound there. “Daily” is another one of our constructs—I already mentioned that earlier. So it’s basically: personalization, daily, community, and partners.

  We do what we do through partnership. We’re very much a B2B platform as well as a B2C platform, in that our content comes from thousands of partners. We don’t have very many “Netflix originals.” The content is actually being produced by our partners. And so we are a content delivery platform for mission fulfillment for those ministries that use our platform—not just ministries, but for-profit organizations that also use our platform—but their content is very relevant to our audience.

  So, to get back to the personalization side, we want to be able to effectively use AI to answer that question: “Help me understand what the Bible means” or “What this part of the Bible means as I’m reading it.”

  And there’s a lot of nuance. There’s a little bit of complexity that is important because people that use our app come from a wide range of backgrounds, and we represent what we would call “the whole church”—meaning it’s Catholic, Pentecostal, Protestant—just all these different groups. Even though they’re Christians, they’re under a pretty big tent. And the distinctions between those groups are oftentimes small theological distinctions. There’s usually really big things that are completely in agreement, but then there are these small theological distinctions.

  So answering these questions can be tricky because you kind of need to be able to answer the best you can from the perspective—or be able to be as transparent as possible about the perspective you’re bringing to the way the question is being answered.

  Right now, we have a team that’s helping us evaluate all of the known tools and known platforms that are out there and the capabilities of being able to do this with some parameters that we think are super important. And absent a solution, we’re on a path to basically build our own—but we’re wide open to there being a solution that solves it for us.

  But the parameters that are really important to us are that the sources used to train a large language model—we’re completely transparent about what those sources are, and that we have some theological governance over the sources that are used. So it’s not just throwing a mix of everything in there and hoping the right things come out, but rather having some care about the way that it is—because we want to be fully transparent.

  And that’s one of our other parameters: both the fact that this is AI answering the question and that this is where—or how—the AI was trained to be able to answer it.

  And so our hope and goal and plan—as we’ve been prototyping several things internally—is to ultimately build a model that has open access for other ministries, so we could do it with the level of care, and everyone feels like it’s trusted or confident and can trust it. Transparent on the process we took—that we went through and everything—but then giving essentially free access or open access to ministries that want to be able to leverage it, because we think it could be a really powerful use case for the technology.

  There are problems with all of this. There’s risk to all of it. So some of it is just—as we venture into it—we’re going to be willing to take some risks. We’re just going to try to figure out, okay, what are the guardrails, and how do I manage that as we move forward?

  It’s not the simplest task. But again, there’s even been bigger problems to solve. So we don’t think it’s the largest problem. It just happens to be one that’s not really easy.

  Speaker 1:
  Yeah. Thank you. Now I want to invite people to ask questions. Feel free to put some questions in the chat and we will start asking some questions.

  Maybe one more question for Bobby: How do you see it—I remember you mentioned before this concept called the Kingdom LLM—and maybe it has aspects… I know there’s a site, Perplex… I use Perplexity. I use ChatGPT. I use Perplex. I like Perplexity because it kind of sources the things that are going on. How do you see either the UI or UX for the future YouVersion? Is it there’s a main app and—hey—here’s another window? Or maybe—I don’t know—if a young Bobby somewhere out there is going to make just a window, and they’ll use both. How do you think?

  Speaker 2:
  So I think it’s a good question. I mean, I don’t know the answer—the short answer—to the question of what the market and what the users will want. We can make some assumptions.

  I mean, I know kind of the entry point for the technology in our current platform will likely be starting with our Bible reader because it’s one of the most used functions in the app—and specifically the verse action picker, which is what happens when you tap or select a verse. If we can know your intent is to learn more about a passage, that’s kind of a relatively safe entry point for the technology. So we can start with a: “Tell me about Galatians 2:20,” and begin kind of a whole conversation thread that you’ll have with the AI that is pointing you both to resources as well as giving you information—and citing the sources of that information.

  But to your question, our approach in general to the market—I mean, our vision is God’s Word to everyone, everywhere, every day. That’s the vision statement. So because it’s so encompassing, we’re looking for sort of slot-in products that we feel like hit demographics, or countries, or languages, or devices even that we’re maybe less capable of hitting with our main app.

  And that led to—you referenced it earlier, but I didn’t mention—we have… it’s a family-of-apps approach. So we have the Bible App. We have the Bible App for Kids, which is designed for two-to-five-year-olds. A completely different experience—it’s like a video game or a Disney app or something—and it’s designed.

  And then we have Bible App Lite, which is specifically designed for areas of the world where the devices have much less memory and more connectivity challenges. So it is an entirely offline experience. And so that product is kind of a slot-in for that specific device and device demographic.

  And so—to tie that back to what you just asked—it’s very possible that we would say, “Hey, listen, there’s an opportunity for a different user experience front end to this technology,” and we might launch it as a separate product or a separate app. And certainly, we would probably test things like that and see what the response is—and based on the signal we get, we may accelerate the rollout of it.

  So I definitely see a future where we might have five, ten, twenty apps that kind of all serve different segments. And then our user account—or our profile—becomes the connecting glue between those things so people can move interchangeably between them or prefer one interface over the other.

  Speaker 1:
  I’ll pull some questions from our audience. One was—let’s see here—how do we protect the accuracy of scriptures when AI has a mind of its own? Some people are concerned: “Hey, what if the AI is feeding me not-good stuff, and how do I have to test it?” Or: “There’s the YouVersion one,” and maybe—I don’t know—if you share your platform and suddenly these seminaries or denominations can have their version of the YouVersion LLM. How do you think about that?

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah, so slightly different ways to answer that question. It relates to the scripture itself.

  The care at which Bible translation work is done—and goes back to kind of the original text—is a process that we don’t do ourselves, but it’s a very guarded process to make sure that there’s thoughtfulness in terms of how Bible translations are done whenever it’s added into a new language.

  And there are some uses of AI in that process that they’re experimenting with, but only a certain number of languages are particularly useful to use AI with—on some of the remaining languages that haven’t been translated. But there’s definitely a lot of research and work going into it.

  But usually, even in those scenarios, it’s more AI-assisted, and there’s human editing going on. The final product you get is going to be scripture.

  So once something is like—this is a viable translation that’s been carefully done—it is a problem right now that AI is probably already being used…

  Speaker 2:
  It is—I guess even with ChatGPT—you could say, “Summarize this book of the Bible for me,” or “Share this in a different language.” So now the AI is actually doing the translation, or the AI is actually presenting it as scripture.

  In our context, we will always present scripture as scripture, so you’ll know that this is actually the original scripture source. It will never be an AI quoting of scripture or summarizing of scripture—or, I mean, I guess summarizing could happen—but you’ll be clear that it’s a summarization and not actually the scripture itself. So that’s just sort of a presentation thing.

  But it is a great concern right now, and some of the Bible translation people are concerned that people are going to present translations of scripture that are AI-generated and haven’t gone through that careful, thoughtful approach. That’s one of the things that we’re going to guard carefully in terms of brand perception, brand understanding—that when we say we have 3,000 versions of the Bible in over 2,000 languages, each one of those versions was translated with care and diligence and followed a process.

  In some ways, that’s what we think some of the trends are right now. Scripture predated all of this AI content. The Bible existed for hundreds of years—thousands of years, really—prior to all this. And there’s a hunger, actually, for realness and truth and authenticity that is a counterbalance to some of the environment people are growing up in right now, where the amount of unreal or fabricated or created or AI-generated content is eclipsing all of history’s content.

  So it’s going to actually make the content that we have more valuable—because it’s more rare—but it predates all of this. So we want to make sure that in the midst of all this, we don’t do something that undermines that.

  One really significant value prop is that we’ve actually worked really hard to assemble this catalog of content that predates even the internet, for that matter—along with all of the user-generated content and all of the AI content.

  So I think some of it’s just how it gets presented. It is a concern though. I mean, it’s really easy to make something look very believable. Even when I asked ChatGPT who Bobby Grunwald was, months ago, it came back with a list of all the details about my life that it picked up—I’m sure—from Wikipedia and a bunch of places. It talked about awards that I had and included that I was Time magazine’s most influential—one of Time magazine’s most influential people in 2019, which is a completely fabricated lie. There’s no even correlation. My name’s not a common name, so it’s not like I was confused with some other Bobby Grunwald that was out there.

  So it’s concerning when 98% of it is completely accurate, and 2% of it’s completely false. These are the things that we have to be really careful with as we use the technology and express it that way.

  So some of it’s just going to be how we show what is answering what: “This is scripture—AI did not generate that.” “This is an AI response or a summary or an analysis that was derived from other sources that were not just scripture,” and we want to make sure that people know.

  Speaker 1:
  Now I’ll be sensitive on time—maybe one or two more questions, if you have time. You mentioned a family of apps. What’s kind of brewing in terms of some of the ideas? I saw there was an app that had simulated voices of famous people reading—one was actually reading the Bible. There’s another app, a company I saw at Y Combinator—they’re doing, or they could do, pictures based on words. So you feed in some pictures—maybe almost like a generative AI picture Bible. There’s other stuff doing automated voice syncing to things. What are kind of these maybe fun next apps that you’re thinking about?

  Speaker 2:
  So every one of those three things that you mentioned are things that we’ve kind of experimented with. So I don’t know that anything is ready for a product release or that we plan on releasing. The synthetic voice thing was definitely something that we’ve done quite a few laps on—testing, wanting to do it. Of course, very transparently, we would say it’s a synthetic voice—we would not try to play it off as something different.

  But the main reason for it is that audio is such an important feature in the app. And in some contexts, audio is a critical feature—for where people have literacy issues, which is a big part of the world.

  The challenge is, because there’s not really a good commercial marketplace for long-form audio like the Bible, that creates some challenges. There’s not much investment going into new audio. There used to be when you would buy a whole pack of CDs that were produced—you’d pay $200 or something for the entire Bible on CD. Once things went digital, there’s really not a great marketplace for that type of content.

  So the consequence is: little investment upstream in creating new audio Bibles. Which means this is sort of a perfect use case of where I think they’ve done well—synthetic voices could be super helpful. Also helping people hear their own voice—not literally, but more culturally, in terms of dialects and accents and all of that—as options. It’s just too expensive to do that with actual audio recordings.

  So I think that’s an example of probably a somewhat low-hanging fruit use case that the technology’s finally caught up to a quality level that is, I think, very acceptable. We do that right now with our plans—if you listen to any of our… We don’t do it for the scripture itself because of some licensing things we have to step through to do that. But on the plans or the devotional content, all of our devotional content has audio available for it. It’s either the actual recording of the person who did the devotional, or it’s the synthetic voice. So those are examples of where we’re using it.

  Speaker 1:
  Okay, great. Any final words, Bobby? Anything you want to share with the audience—either on the YouVersion or a way of thinking about faith and AI and technology that people should consider?

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really important discussions that people have. I think the ethical and transparent use of the technology is obviously something that’s really important to us—you’ve heard me talk about that numerous times. I think it’s important in general—not just for what we do, but for others as well.

  So I would encourage the ongoing dialogue and discussion and challenge. I think that you guys are in a space—whether you’re the startups that are working on it or the VCs that are funding it—to help bring some self-regulation to the way that people are approaching that, and some responsibility too. But I do think that that’s a good challenge for people to have.

  As far as YouVersion and the Bible are concerned, I do want to frame that there is something unique happening right now with an interest in scripture—an interest in the Bible. We have the data to show and indicate that trend line is happening. And it’s not just the increased investment we’re making and all those metrics—there’s kind of a disproportionate global interest.

  I saw one question related to what parts of the globe is it growing the most in. Definitely, the Global South is the fastest growing area. But we saw just a year ago—Europe had really substantial growth. And some of it could be correlated to Ukraine, and just when there’s that type of event going on nearby, it does drive interest or concern.

  But there’s even things beyond that—kind of unexplained. I mean, momentum that’s a little bit hard to explain on just a normal timeline or natural timeline.

  I do think some of it relates to what I was just alluding to earlier—about people craving things that are authentic and real, and looking for the Bible as a source of truth when you’re not sure what truth looks like in today’s context.

  So I think this is a unique opportunity for what we do. But there is a narrative that’s just completely false—that no one reads the Bible anymore, or that we have a generation of people that no longer care about scripture. Those data points are almost like a joke to me, just because we have—next year we’ll reach a billion devices, and we’ll have somewhere around five or six trillion data points that indicate that that’s actually not the case.

  I mean, we don’t force anybody to download our app—and we definitely don’t force anybody to open it. So it’s one of these things where there’s clearly engagement, interest in it. And we’re one example—we’re not certainly the only example. It’s just, we can, I think, show the data that indicates that there’s a lot happening that’s exciting.

  So anyway, thank you for the opportunity though—it’s great. And hopefully you guys will have a lot of success in your funding and whatever startups are represented. It’s always fun for me to watch new things get birthed.

  Speaker 1:
  Yeah, thank you, Bobby. And where’s the best way— I know some people had some YouVersion suggestions or product requests (I have a few of my own). What’s the best way for people to reach you? LinkedIn?

  Speaker 2:
  Probably LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s probably the best approach, so if you can go and connect with me on LinkedIn and drop a question there. I have my team help me filter through those a lot, but that’s not a bad place to go.

  Speaker 1:
  Awesome. Thank you so much, Bobby. Great to have you on here—and thanks so much.