The Ledger, every show

“Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.”

“China is competing with open weights and open training data, and the U.S. Is largely and majority focused on closed weights, closed data. That means that the majority of the world, think of it as the Belt and Road Initiative, are going to use Chinese models an…”

“Things like tanks of which we're now building a whole bunch more, even stronger tanks here in America, don't make any sense in a world where a two kilogram payload from a well-armed drone can destroy the tank. It's called the kill ratio, and that drone costs r…”

“So now what has happened is there's been this view that you should bring your whole self to work. And now we're being forced to crawl that back because your whole self is maybe not what we want in work.”

“The Chinese work-life balance consists of nine, nine, six, which is nine a.m. To nine p.m. Six days a week. By the way, the Chinese have clarified that this is illegal. However, they all do it.”

“They're not pursuing crazy AGI strategies. Partly because of the hardware limitations that you've put in place, but partly because the depth of their capital markets don't exist. They can't raise, based on a wing and a prey, or a hundred million dollars, or a …”

“I don't agree with the three years, but I do agree that it'll be maybe six or seven years.”

“Not yet. I'm, I've funded a number of startups which claim to be close to it, but of course these are startups and you never know, which tells me it's five, 10 years.”

“So now what has happened is there's been this view that you should bring your whole self to work, and now we're being forced to crawl that back because your whole self is maybe not what we want in work.”

“Hire the smartest people you possibly can and put up with them, right? And we all understand what that means, right? But you really need them for competitive advantage.”

“The number is 80% of the management team will turn over in a turnaround.”

“The other thing I learned, and this is from Lou Gerstner, Who said, who had written a whole book on this, and his IBM turnaround, he said, you only have six to nine months to change the culture of a company before you're stuck with it.”

“And glue people are very nice people who sit between functions and help either side, but don't themselves add a lot of value. And I thought, these are nice people, but we don't really need them. We can have these groups talking directly.”

“I am not in favor of essentially working at home. I, and the reason, I mean, many of you guys all work at home to some degree, but your careers are already established. But think about a 20 something who has to learn how the world works.”

“The rough way in which war will evolve is first things will have to be very, very mobile and very much not in fixed places. This takes out most of the military infrastructure that exists in the world.”

“If you look at the Maguro and some other boats that the Ukrainians used, They have essentially used USVs to destroy the Russian fleet in the Black Sea.”

“The answer is simple. Hire the smartest people you possibly can and put up with them. Right. And we all understand what that means. Right. But you really need them for competitive advantage.”

“I was absolutely convinced that this would bankrupt the company. And I was so convinced that I ordered a cash restriction period Where the only thing that you could do was spend money on Friday mornings at 10. You had to come to my office and you had to convin…”

“What it really served as Was a check and balance on the power of the engineering management over the subject. So if an employee is under pressure, the manager says, you've got to work harder. You've got to give me everything you have. That employee can legitim…”

“I think that the way robot war, essentially, drone war will occur is there will be these destructive waves, but eventually humans are going to have to cross a line. They're going to have to invade.”

“The number is 80% of the management team will turn over in a turnaround.”

“The reality, of course, hit on the first day, because I was presented with different numbers for revenue for the quarter than I'd been told when I was interviewing.”

“We made the decision to purchase YouTube in about 10 days, right? Incredibly historic decision because we were ready.”

“Persistence is the single biggest predictor of future success, and so we would look for persistence. And the second thing was curiosity. What do you care about? The combination of persistence and curiosity is a very good predictor of employee success in a know…”

“So with the engineering story is that we stayed, we actually liked each other so much that he stayed as my office mate until we were a public company where I couldn't violate the various SEC laws.”

“I think a fair statement is that the founders built the company in the image of what they saw at the Stanford Graduate School.”

“Many, many initiatives in the company have come out of 20% time ideas. Much of the mapping work, many of the search ideas, many of the advertising Many of now the AI work have come from people working and practicing in new areas.”