Basis

“Speaking is just so much faster than writing things down, and in fact, when you try to write things down, you are Actually, essentially trying to summarize all the crazy thoughts in your head, and so that's why it takes a lot of time. And it's useful for your …”

“And you can like optimize, not just for getting the work done, but for making it easy for your reviewer to understand the decisions that you made. And that's obviously very true in software engineering, and it's actually true in, I think, most professions and …”

“Once you start getting to longer horizons where you're beyond the context window or you're getting to context rot, you need to kind of use in sort of brute force your reasoning to build out your environment. Whether that be with sub agents or compaction, we ta…”

“I think it is a mistake to throw out those learnings and say, you know, bitter lesson, throw out those learnings. We're just going to have the agents at runtime develop an entirely new way to do a tax return that is, you know, because bitter lesson, yada, yada…”

“So right now, at least the behavior judging is relatively expensive because it's a pretty advanced judge in that it is also an agent. It's not a judge in the traditional sense. It's literally an agent because it has to look at the trajectory.”

“So there's some activation state that by definition is going to be biased to that current trajectory. And so maybe for review, you want an uncorrelated trajectory, right? Where it's like a new box and it's just a smart.”

“If you build these kind of LLM intuitions and you combine them with, you know, maybe basic principles of, like, organizational design and management I think you start to get to maybe what is, like, the frontier of agent building.”

“It is actually both a spec and a rubric. We call this specs and there were some people who asked, isn't this a rubric? And it is, it's both. The reason it's both is because it is not just used to grade or potentially reward the agent. It's also used to align t…”

“Not thinking that an agent operating over 10 hours is a black box. It's not. It has a lot of data, and you're probably doing a disservice to your customers if you don't understand, like, how it's going about the work.”

“And that's why I think, you know, for true agent native companies especially in the future today, I think it's still quite early, but especially in the future, having a clear understanding of what your company canon is and organizing that in an ontology that m…”

“I think one thing, one skill that really matters is good systems thinking. And where does good systems thinking come from? It comes from people who have had to think about some abstraction, some system, something, and design it in such a way that it performs i…”

“Today we don't go directly into the weights. And primarily the reason we don't do that is because A lot of the advancements the models are having when it comes to orchestrating themselves yield far more performance gains than benefits you would have of like up…”

“I think that how long it will take to get swallowed up. I don't know exactly. You know, I think it's probably sub five years. I don't think it's sub two years. I think it's probably sub five years.”

“Technical moats are not real moats. Like, I, there's no portion of basis's long-term terminal value that stems from some, you know, secret RL trick we found that nobody else found.”

“My last company, which was called basis, you know, where I raised a hundred and forty million dollars and then it didn't work wound up giving, you know, deciding to kind of do what I think is the right thing, give all the money back.”

“With Basis my last company where I raised a hundred forty million and returned it I actually had less money after that in, in my bank account than when I started it, which is basically about three years of runway from my, like, Google and D.D. Shaw savings, ri…”

“So one startup based in San Francisco is called Basis, and they're using unlicensed but trained people in the community to basically serve as therapists.”