The Ledger, every show

“Yeah, the best investors benchmark and recent, they will invest less than their supposed minimums for the right company.”

“With 20 people today, I feel like we're having a greater impact and ship faster than we ever could with a 120 people and software engineers at Optimizely.”

“One of the benefits side, unintended side benefits of the round we raised I do think kind of made everyone else's job. Who's a founder trying to compete with us much, much harder because first of all, we had hundreds of investors.”

“We raised it a three hundred fifty million dollar valuation with 700 K and ARR.”

“There's whole categories of companies that are going to be cat, you know, Category defining independent successful big public multi-billion dollar companies that are just applications of large language models in a specific domain for a specific user with a gre…”

“I think a lot of jobs will be gone in 10 years, but they'll likely be replaced with new ones. I think that's probably an obvious Conclusion. I think on the order of probably 50% of work will go away. It would be fundamentally changed.”

“Eventually, you know, I don't think it will necessarily replace engineers, but it'll certainly augment them. You'll have plenty of, you know, half the work that an engineering team does will be done by AGI, and half will be done by humans, and the human stuff …”

“Every meeting at Optimizely, the notes from that meeting, including the board meeting we had last week, get sent to the entire company.”

“I have 10 years I put into my last company and I can recognize that really Only three or four things that we did made the difference in the success or failure of the company.”

“We're building a hardware, we're building a wearable, If I can solve the same problems I want to solve without them, all for it. I'd be happy to do that. Hardware is hard. It's expensive. It's painful. I would happily give up hardware if I could solve the prob…”

“Doomers plus regulatory capture, I could see creating a world in which a lot of AI innovation is, is stalled.”

“We got well over you know, we got millions of views over a thousand offers to invest, many from really great investors, and I spent the next week in meetings with folks.”

“We had 20 offers at a billion dollars or more but 20 out of a thousand is pretty small.”

“When I was there early on, a lot of people valued. You got promoted by the sophistication of your technology, not by the problem it actually solves for a customer.”

“They just passively capture everything in a privacy sensitive way. It's stored locally. We don't have access to it. Only you have access to it.”

“I do think things like white collar knowledge work that is high paid, lawyers being one of them, is probably a good area. I think anything where today people are paying a lot of money and people are being paid by the hour that a machine could do as better, in …”

“In fact, we didn't, we had. 20 offers or more of a billion dollar valuation. We turned down.”

“And the way I see, you know, the next few years playing out is that in, in markets where there is a best of breed product that is a delightful product that practitioners and departments will decide to use and evangelize for, as long as those products integrate…”

“The caliber of person that I can hire today is far, far better than the person I could have hired, you know, when I started optimizing. So I do think that's a huge factor as well. You can hire much better if you, and certainly if your first company did okay, d…”

“They're often buyers at the IPO. They're not sellers.”

“NEA is known to have 15 year fund life cycles as opposed to the traditional 10. Very often they're buyers at the IPO. They're not sellers.”

“And because the good news is we have six years of runway. We've got plenty of time to live up to the big valuation.”

“Rewind is a truly personalized AI. So it captures everything you see, say, and hear, stores it all locally on your devices.”

“And it's so, you know, co occurred with Apple Silicon becoming really powerful and enabling this before Apple Silicon, you know, rewind couldn't exist.”

“You know, we ship on average, you know, every engineer ships code production every day on average.”

“Every engineer, when they start at Rewind, within 24 hours of starting, they ship to production.”

“Every org chart at Optimizely, the manager's at the bottom of the org chart, not at the top of the org chart.”

“So in 2012, ah, we became the number one most adopted website optimization platform in the world. We actually had Obama And Romney using us extensively, which is great.”

“We didn't have features that people assumed were, ah, must haves, things like multivariate testing. We didn't have that for a year and a half.”

“They've seen 70% of the decision gets made before sales person is involved. So they use Optimizely. They've got a team of hundreds of people doing A-B testing, optimization every single day that don't require developers to be involved in the process.”

“But Starbucks, you know, Starbucks.com, a guy there who's in charge of optimization and conversion for Starbucks.com, had that experience, and he saw forgiveness, not permission to put, you know, to run our product. For 79 dollars a month, he put our A-B testi…”

“Peter Fenton, when I asked for references on him at the time, he was this amazing luminary. I asked him for references. He gave me 12 founders and CEOs, their phone number, their email. He didn't even introduce me, just to just reach out. And then I got this g…”

“You know, I still, when I talk about optimizing, I like to say I reached a hundred twenty million in ARR and 450 employees.”

“We capture everything your screen is showing. We compress it, you know, 3000 times smaller, so it stores, it can be stored locally. We do optical character recognition on every word that appears on your screen. And now, you know, we're doing transcription as w…”

“Technically by Rahul's framework of, you know, it's greater than 40% of people, very disappointed if they can all use your product. Yeah, we exceed that threshold”

“I interviewed the first hundred people at Optimizely, and that means I also interviewed probably the other, you know 209 hundred, whatever people that we didn't hire.”