The Ledger, every show

“I think you'll trust your agent to decide what data to share with other people without you intervening in five years.”

“As opposed to having humans in your compliance and security team over time, label data and decide what goes where and what can be accessed. I think we'll just start to trust LLMs to do that.”

“I feel that the relationship of many tech employees to their tech employer is the same as like a French citizen to the French government, which is like the employer shall provide all the big problems in life. Or the fall or the, you know, the fault of the empl…”

“Rippling's building like the next work day and they've taken like, oh, this company does HR analytics. We'll like copy 90% of their good features and we'll make an integrated version that works with your employee directory. Oh, you want to do like global billi…”

“So I would say I am bearish on Salesforce ability to stay number one over the next decade.”

“Sixty billion? I'm short.”

“You want to know, the truth is I know what I'm building is a top three priority at Google and Apple, like in the next 12 months. Not a top 10 priority, like a top three priority.”

“The answer there for every startup that I know outside of a very few. Is, yeah, it's, well, we're hoping the price, we're hoping the cost curve makes it efficient in 18 to 24 months, right? In the meantime, you're subsidizing in part, right? Because that's wha…”

“I think some people just won't want to touch it because of brand. And it's like, that's just inevitable. And it's, you know, that's just a thing that they're going to have to deal with forever.”

“One, they're not a cloud company. They're just not, it's just not their DNA. They don't know how to do cloud.”

“But I think it's going to be good, but it's going to feel not nearly as powerful as Town or GrokBot. Like it's not even going to be there in terms of its capabilities, but it'll be on your phone. It'll be convenient. You'll be able to like enable more data wit…”

“We've passed the point where humans will read every line of code. That is never happening again.”

“It's a dangerous way to think about it, because if you think about it as like, they use more tokens every month that's successful. What if they're using the tokens in a way where the ROI is less clear to them? Meaning they don't realize that they're using toke…”

“What I don't know is if it tops out, and that's, I think, the risk for something like 11 Labs, meaning, like, we just get voices good enough, and then you can get it. I can put, you know, open weight models on base 10 and get it, but it just doesn't feel like …”

“And the problem with the frontier is, I have zero pricing power at the frontier. And I mean, I think this is what happened to Cursor, right, at the end. It's like, you can have huge market share and customers love you and everything, but if you're paying your …”

“I have seen deals where it's like, I invested like 200 and then the announcement is at 500. And then what you learn is that like, you know, they raised sixty five million and like five millions at 500 and the other 60 is like 200 or 300, right? There's a whole…”

“Personally, I don't think it's ethical. I don't think it's ethical towards employees. You know, most of all, if you're not, I mean, maybe when you hire someone, you tell them for sure. Because it's like the dilution wasn't that number one. It's not where most …”

“I think if we can get about ten million people paying for the product, we can get to that.”

“So I'm a big believer that actually the economy around assistance will be paid for.”

“I mean, the run rate's at least 75 K per employee, per engineer.”

“AI means that suddenly that engineer can generate more than they could have before. So maybe before they could only generate a 150 K of revenue. Maybe now they can generate two 50 K of revenue. So suddenly AI makes you hire the incremental person, right? One m…”

“Like, I don't think I would be a good manager for a 20 person team anymore. I was when I joined Plaid, but I'm like so out of, that was six and a half years ago, like I've lost all those muscles.”

“There's an exodus from New York to SF that's happening. And from, I'm not saying Miami, but from other places where, where people went and it's around AI because the zeitgeist is here.”

“It is much easier for you to get a promo. It is much easier for you to look good if you're willing to do those things, because the average now is, is truly going into this like, you know, 40 hour week kind of thing.”

“Well, so I know a few truly great people who I think are, have the right viewpoint and are really good at motivating and delegating, meaning they create the structure for success, like the North star, the product roadmap, and then they're able to motivate othe…”

“I think for the existing startups, what you''ve got to look at is it probably isn''t going to be UX and there''s probably going to be consolidation because we''ve over verticalized things by going after every like bit of the software with a slightly better UX …”

“Product market fit isn't a binary thing. Like you don't have product market fit or not have product market fit. You have degrees of product market fit, right?”

“For Gong, I know I, we like them because they make the team more efficient, but we're also aren't hiring more salespeople and their model is seed based, and so they're not going to see as much intrinsic growth from all these companies not hiring as many salesp…”

“Grokbot's really cool. It's awesome, but it's a power user product. It's not a mainstream product.”

“The big players are not, they're not going to innovate their way there. They will copy their way there, but they have to copy someone who's been successful in the first place at building a mainstream product.”

“I think no one has figured out multi-user, multi-player AI today. Like, I think that's the thing that will be the moat.”

“Each human will have one, two, maybe three entry points into the digital space, because I don't think you'll want to be like, oh, I'm doing sales. Let me use the Salesforce agent. Oh, I'm doing project management. Let me use the linear agent. Oh, I'm doing thi…”

“I think the LLMs will make many fewer of these mistakes than humans pretty quickly.”

“The way I think about our stack is there is the part of the stack that deals with the user interface, like the feel and the personality. And there it is harder for me to just route Wildly, because I need consistency of the experience that is sometimes hard to …”

“I can improve our cogs by moving to open weight, but it doesn't give me much product advantage. It doesn't make my product work better.”

“I don't find it crazy, honestly. Like I think when I was at Plaid and we were competing with talent for like Stripe, that felt like no harder than what I'm doing now.”

“You can build now at the speed of machines, but you can only learn at the speed of humans.”

“I mean, you know, look, it's a blue ocean market, right? You gotta understand. Like I never, when we go to most customers, they've not heard of anything. It's blue ocean because people, people are using ChatGPT as a Google enhancer. Like that's the market.”

“I think what we do and generate, we generate revenue, right? From companies, right, that are using us for work with network effects around multiple team members working on it. Like, their product doesn't do any of that. Maybe that is part of their strategy. I …”

“I think a person on X that uses these products is not actually product market fit. Meaning that those are not the mainstream users and you have to keep that in mind.”

“Oh well, I just define them as someone who pays me every month. If they keep paying me, no, I'm serious. I'm serious, right? If they keep paying me, I've done my job, right?”

“And when I do those things, I save time and time is worth money. But on the business side, when I create something that generates value for the business, They make more money and then they want more of that thing.”

“The payment rate for us on acquisition is like more than 15% of users who try the product end up paying for it, which is extremely high for PLG, because the value delivered relative to what they were getting out of ChatGPT is just huge.”

“I think their suggestions are, I think their suggestions are just like plain bad, to be honest, but they didn't even have suggestions until a few months ago.”

“But what I've learned is like on the business side, They also don't like it if you don't charge them because they don't know how much it's going to cost one day. They want to know how much it's going to cost one day. You can't sell to a 500 person company and …”

“A person that I trust that's great on my team, like great on my team. They tell me this other person is like one of the best people that I ever worked with. And then I'm going to make that person like spend eight hours doing stupid whiteboard interview or like…”

“My overarching thesis is that a lot of people things On a lot of people matters, how you level, how you title, how you comp how you organize your org, like your manager to IC ratio, remote hybrid. It's like, pick a thing, pick one of the three options on the m…”

“Highly creative, fast moving work where you're not sure what the requirements are and where your customers are local, meaning where you can go and talk to your customers by like walking over to their office. So this is like historical new company, new startup …”