Meet Our Member: David – AI Entrepreneur and Digital Nomad

Meet one of our members, David Riha! He’s a Czech tech entrepreneur and co-founder of an innovative AI platform that’s making waves in the industry. 

 How would you describe yourself in one sentence without mentioning your nationality, job, beliefs or other typical identifiers?

I’m a person that enjoys living life to the fullest, connecting with people and finding joy and happiness wherever I can, and making the world a better place.

 Where are you from?

I’m from here, from the Czech Republic originally, but I’m lately spending most time in Bali and coming here mostly for summer.

How did you discover Locus Workspace?

I came here for the first time a year ago. I was living in Prague at the time, and I was looking for digital nomads or people who work remotely. I wanted to meet Czech people because I didn’t have many friends in Prague, so I came here for one day. The goal was to meet Czech people, so it wasn’t that easy and I actually didn’t choose to come here every day, but I found it on Google Maps. I knew about this place and knew that it’s a nice place to work. This year I came because I needed a place to focus on work. It wasn’t so much about meeting people, so I decided to come here to do work and it turns out I’ve also met a lot of people. It’s been a really nice experience.

 What made you decide to stay here?

I think it’s mostly about much better work efficiency. If I work at home, I spend all day doing tasks that here I can finish in like 3 hours. At home I can sit on the couch, do a little bit of work, then go shopping, then come back and do a little bit more work, get lunch—I do many different things other than just work. But if I come here, there aren’t many options other than just to sit and get the work done. So I feel when I come here I do much more work, and since I started coming here, the work I do in a day or in a week is much more than if I would do it at home. I also get more free time because I finish work faster here.

It’s also nice to have people around me that I already know. We can go to lunch together or get beer together, so it’s definitely nice to work in some kind of community and have familiar faces here. It doesn’t help with work, but it helps with having a good feeling.

 What’s your favorite part of working at Locus?

I think it’s the focus. I sit down and just focus. I don’t even see what other people are doing because I’m really deep in the work. Sometimes I just sit and work, and 2 hours later I realize that everybody already left and I’m the last person working here, because I just wasn’t paying attention to anything other than work. So I think that’s my favorite thing—I can really focus here. There are no distractions. In the main zone, people mostly don’t talk to anybody, so it’s just a focused environment and it helps me do a lot of work.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on?

That’s definitely Buddy.fm, because I had multiple startups in the past, but this is the first that actually works and has a lot of traction. We have a lot of clients, users love it, and it’s just a big success. The startups I did before—I think there were 3 of them—I always worked on for a few years, but in the end they turned out not to be profitable. But this project is really making change in the market, making change in the world, making people’s lives better, and it’s a great opportunity to build something like that in the AI era. It’s going pretty well.

 Tell us more about Buddy.FM

The story is like this—we’re 3 co-founders and two of them came up with the idea together. I was the tech founder that they reached out to build this thing. The idea was to build some kind of AI friend that’s here for you and remembers everything about you, can help you with whatever struggles you have in life and be your “buddy” in life. So that’s how it started.

First we created Buddy.fm, which stands for friend and mentor. It’s an AI persona that guides you through life and remembers everything about you, and it talks to you like a person, not like a tool. So that’s the main difference from ChatGPT or Claude—it’s like talking to a person actually. When people try it, they often say it’s much better than any AI they’ve ever talked to because it’s very personal and talks like a human.

On top of that we built Buddy Pro, which is a platform for creating AI experts. If you have some kind of expertise, you can create your own “buddy” by uploading your knowledge and building an AI that has all the knowledge you have. Then you can create your own product, give it your own name, sell it under your brand to people who want your expertise and it can help them with specific things that you’re teaching.

Let’s say you’re helping people train their dogs when they misbehave. You can take all this information that you have—upload books, YouTube videos, online courses, whatever—and create your own AI, which is very personal and human-like. People can consult with it on how to train their dogs and they can talk to it 24/7. If you want to talk to a dog trainer, you can only do it when you have a booked hour, but with this AI you can talk 24/7. Also, AI can talk to many people at once, so it’s a scalable way of spreading that expertise, and it really helps a lot of people in practice to advance in various fields. Any kind of expert can create their own AIs and sell them to clients, and then it helps clients with whatever problems they have.

 What is your vision for the future of Buddy.fm?

The goal is to continue developing this platform and dominate a big part of the global market of AI experts. Right now there is no such product as what we’re building. There are a few competitors, but they don’t have such deep personalized and empathetic AI as the one we’re building.

In a few years we want to get more international clients and provide this platform to the world’s best experts in many different fields and give them the opportunity to build their own AI experts. We already did this in the Czech market in the past few months, because we didn’t start selling in the global market yet—that’s coming this week actually. We’re starting to sell on the global market, but in the Czech market we already dominate the AI expert market. There are already around 250 experts building their own AI experts, some of them already did very successful campaigns where they sold annual subscriptions to hundreds of users, and a lot of people are already using AI experts and are happy with it. So the future is becoming the main platform for creating expert AI in the world.

 What are your thoughts on the AI boom we’ve seen in recent years? How do you think it’ll impact and change the IT professional landscape?

I think it’s coming insanely fast, it’s changing really fast and nobody’s ready for what’s happening and what’s going to happen. We feel like, OK, ChatGPT came here a few years ago, now we know how it works, we use it every day, but that’s not the end. It’s developing much faster and the number of companies that are building on top of AI now is huge, and they are still in the beginning, because it takes some time to build a company based on new technology.

So in the next few years the growth of AI is going to be exponential and I think we really don’t see what’s going to happen. Lots of people can lose their jobs, but also lots of people can find new ways to start a business or build whatever they want to build, because AI is just going to make it all so much easier. I think there’s going to be huge progress in technology and that’s going to change everything in 5 to 10 years. We’ll have a pretty much different world that will have different rules.

 Do you think AI could ever rise against people and try to destroy humankind?

That’s a pretty good question and I really can’t answer, because I don’t know if it might happen. But the best we can do is try to avoid it. If AI is gonna progress, we can’t stop it—it’s inevitable, it’s going to get better, it’s going to get smarter than us. So the question is can we actually make it safe, and is it even possible to make it safe, and if it’s possible we should try to do that. But I don’t really have an opinion on whether it’s going to try to fight with us. It could happen, I hope it won’t, but I have no idea. That’s a super hard prediction, so I don’t know, we’ll see.

 What inspires you?

That’s a tough question. Traveling inspires me. I started traveling in 2021 and I spent a total of 2 or 3 years abroad, just moving around. Every time I go to some new place and stay for a few months, then come back, I feel like I’ve changed—I came back a different person. So that’s something that inspires me and gives me a new perspective on things.

Also, technologies inspire me. AI is giving new opportunities for building new things, coming with new ideas, and it’s also giving me inspiration. If I don’t have inspiration, I talk to AI and it gives me inspiration, so AI really inspires me.

 Do you have any hobbies?

I dance bachata when I have time. I haven’t done it for 2 months now, I think, because I’m super busy with Buddy.fm. I also sing. I used to have a rock band in the past. I like karaoke or singing with guitar. I like caving—going into caves to explore them, but I didn’t do that for quite some time, because in Bali there aren’t many caves and if there are caves, they are usually full of bats, spiders or cockroaches. I have been to one and it was a rough experience.

One of my hobbies is connecting people, so I like building communities. I built a community of Czech people in Bali and also here in Prague I’m building a community of Czech nomads that spend summer in Prague but travel during the year. So basically I’m connecting people and then trying to travel with people that I connected with, and giving all Czech people, all Czech digital nomads, a community that they can travel with. We don’t always travel together, we just all live in the same place in Bali and we meet many times weekly. It’s specifically a Czech and Slovak community, so we can speak our languages abroad. We also meet international people, but our WhatsApp group is specifically for Czech and Slovak speaking people.

 One movie, one book and one song you’d recommend to everyone

My favorite movie is Interstellar. That’s such an amazing story. I like technology, I like the future, and I like space travel, so that’s my movie.

I don’t read many books. When I have some kind of problem I find a book that focuses on the problem and solve the problem by reading the book, but that’s not that often. I would say maybe “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck”. That’s a good one that helps you not care too much about things.

There’s a good song by one Czech singer, Ben Cristovao, and it’s called “Sweet Chili”. When you’re in a bad mood you just play this song and it puts you in a good mood, because it’s about when the world doesn’t work the way you want, something is wrong, something is bad, you just play this song. I like this song. When I’m depressed or something bad happens, it always helps.

 Any interesting facts about you?

I have traveled to 27 countries in my life.