START: Neal Patel, Founder, Comedian, Artificially Unintelligent Tech Comedy: “Tech stand up comedy shows”

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You can't do a joke about the Jira board at a normal comedy club. The audience won't know what the Jira board is, and explaining it kills the laugh before you get to it.

Neal Patel wanted to do that set anyway.

For years he worked two jobs, software engineer during the day and stand-up three or four nights a week in New York clubs at night.

Plenty of the comedians he ran into were also in tech. Backstage they'd trade jokes about tech, about Jira, and all the little things that only people in the industry found funny, and none of it really worked once they stepped in front of a normal comedy audience.

So in 2024 he built the room that didn't exist yet.

Artificially Unintelligent puts engineers, PMs, founders, CEOs, and VCs who happen to be experienced comedians on the same bill as comics you've seen on Netflix, Hulu, HBO, NPR, Comedy Central, and in The New York Times. Hundreds and hundreds of people signed up for the first one.

Ask him how the audience got that big that fast and he'll tell you he hates the question, because the honest answer is that he doesn't know.

What he does know: put on a really good event with really cool people, invest heavily in design and branding so nobody files it under "another open mic," and never spend a single dollar on advertising or marketing. The rooms fill with founders, senior operators, cracked engineers, heads of finance, and operators from across the startup ecosystem. Open bar, themed drinks, designed end to end.

Keeping the shows free is part of the philosophy, and sponsors are what make that possible. Neal would rather take one sponsor check than twenty bucks each from 200 people.

Which gets at why he thinks the first open mic isn't the hard one. You go up convinced you're the funniest person alive, nobody laughs, and that's survivable. The second one is where it gets decided, because that's when you have to choose whether you're doing it again. He kept choosing it.

Artificially Unintelligent now runs regularly in New York with shows in San Francisco, and Neal wants to spend more time in Los Angeles and Chicago too.

🎙️ Neal Patel, Founder, Producer, Comedian, Artificially Unintelligent Tech Comedy, on START

1:25 — Doing stand-up for years, and engineering for even longer
1:53 — Meeting other comedians who also worked in tech
2:09 — Wanting to tell jokes straight off the Jira board
2:17 — Launching the first Artificially Unintelligent show in 2024
2:21 — Hundreds and hundreds of people signed up for the first show
3:24 — Never spending a single dime on advertising or marketing
4:37 — Why he'd rather take one sponsor check than twenty bucks from 200 different people
6:12 — Why the first open mic is easy—and the second is the hardest
7:56 — Using an AI transcriber to capture joke ideas in real time
8:37 — Why Artificially Unintelligent doesn't have a newsletter
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