The Ledger, every show

“I think that survival of humanity depends on a successful AI, because at some point, if you have, you know, 60% of your population that's in a demographic where you don't have enough people to take care of them, like that, that could cause a lot of human suffe…”

“What do they say? Praise in public and criticize in private. I fundamentally disagree with that notion. I think what you have to do is establish enough trust among the team so that you are comfortable critiquing and debating in public. But when you're in priva…”

“Is, if you're just a rapper around Broadcom, Then you've got a monopoly that's gonna be a very predatory one. And so, one of the big reasons where Cisco is super relevant is you don't just have a Broadcom world with people just wrapping Broadcom, that their sy…”

“I mean, we just had our first product that we think we will be in the next two weeks, 100% written with AI.”

“Like so far we've trained these models with, you know human generated data publicly available on the internet, but we are running out of human generated data publicly available on the internet to train the models.”

“We will have original insights generated that don't exist in the human corpus of knowledge. And we will have the physical world get augmented to language where capacity is augmented to humans.”

“Timing trumps market, market trumps team, team trumps product, product trumps brand, brand trumps distribution. You don't have all six. You don't win.”

“I think we're grossly underestimating the build-out. I think there's gonna be much more needed than what we are. Putting the you know, projections towards.”

“I think the first ChatGPT take on competitive is always better than what my, any product marketing person comes up by themselves.”

“I'd say the big shift and what I would urge startups to do is don't build thin wrappers around models that are other people's models. I think the combination of a model working very closely with the product and the model getting better as there's feedback in t…”

“No one wins by playing catch up. Right? And so the asymmetry of coming at it from a different angle and being at least an order of magnitude better is something that you have to continue to keep pushing at and be the biggest skeptic. Because most people will t…”

“So if you have an incumbent that's already in the market that, that's entrenched pretty well a large company will typically try to say, okay, I'm going to go out and build something for the greenfield with an entire platform. But the reality is the market's no…”

“Today, probably an agent works autonomously for 20 minutes. In the next six months, it'll work autonomously for maybe, you know, two hours, or 10 hours, and then it'll work for two months, and then two quarters, and then two years.”

“For about a six, seven year period, we had just stopped innovating, and I just don't think it was that that productive for us, and then getting back out to innovation right now. For example, past 18 months, we've probably done more innovation than the previous…”

“One of the things that Cisco is really amazing at is it's a very compassionate culture. One of the things that Cisco is not that great at, because of the fact that it's a very compassionate culture, is we might not actually have very direct conversations somet…”

“I think actually infra from a market size as well as a scale perspective is more like a hundred to a thousand X, not 10 X in in infrastructure scale. Like you will find probably two to three orders of magnitude.”

“And the one lesson I've learned in that is when someone owns more than 20% share in the market and you don't integrate with them, you're just excluding yourself from the market. You're actually not doing anything to displace that vendor.”

“My perspective has always been that the absence of scale is way harder than scale.”

“Any job I've taken since I've been working with her, it's always, it's a combined deal. Like if we don't have two offers, we don't go.”

“When you feel like you need a PhD to understand what someone's saying, chances are it ain't going to be a mega trend because by definition, a mega trend is it's going to impact a large population of the world. And if the thing is too complicated, chances are, …”

“When I got this new job to run all product for Cisco, there's zero chance I would have been able to do it if AI wasn't there. Because I didn't know anything about so many domains that we were in. And I had to get an accelerated, you know training course within…”

“Stamina trumps intellect. I feel like it's very important to have smart people, but you can become smart if you have curiosity and hunger and staying power and persistence. And so I think that trait of like learning to learn and constantly being hungry and hav…”

“Because there's not enough power singularly in one location, data centers are being built where the power is available rather than power being brought to where the data centers are.”

“So, we've got 25,000 engineers. I'm hoping that we can get at least two or three X productivity within a very short amount of time within the next year.”

“Yeah, the obvious one is we miss the cloud wave.”

“I think large companies are very good with running many experiments. What they're bad at is doubling down on an experiment works.”

“Don't delegate the storytelling to anyone in the company. You go do it yourself because you need one voice. And it doesn't mean that I'm the best presenter in the world. But if one person doesn't tell the end-to-end story who actually owns it, you start to fra…”

“And then you have to look back and say, where is AI constrained? Right now. It's constrained in power, it's constrained on compute, it's constrained on the net, on the network.”

“Like one of the best things we've done in the past five years is we've completely opened up to our competitors and like, for example, Microsoft Teams is a huge competitor for us. And we partnered with them and have them run on natively on our devices. Hundreds…”

“Number three is Team. And oftentimes people will say, well, this team trump market. I actually think market always trumps team.”

“What most people think in large companies is large companies don't experiment. That is in fact, not true. Large companies experiment a lot. What large companies don't do is when an experiment works, They don't go all in and double down. They try to keep hedgin…”

“And every company is going to differentiate based on their own proprietary enterprise data being used to train the models, synthetic data and machine data, which is where the most amount of growth is.”

“The biggest reason he's successful is he has an enormous amount of staying power in the game.”

“Typically like harder problems have a higher likelihood of success because the harder problems are the ones that attract better people to that problem and business is a team sport. And if you attract people to the problems that are hard and important enough to…”

“It's like in everything that you do in work, you have to just understand the formula that there's going to be 30% of the stuff that you do at work that you're just going to hate.”

“This is, like, the combination of the build-out of the internet, the space race, and the Manhattan Project all put into one, where there's a geopolitical implication of it, there's an economic implication, there's a national security implication, and then ther…”

“We just launched a new piece of silicon as well as a new chip and a system for scale across networking, where you might have two data centers that act as a logical data center that could be up to eight, 900 kilometers apart.”

“China actually doesn't make two nanometer chips, they make, you know, seven nanometer chips.”

“And so I also feel like the way that networking will evolve is Rather than it being a training infrastructure that then gets applied to inferencing, you might have inferencing native infrastructure that gets built over time.”

“When a company gets large, you get very good at the math of the business, but you've kind of lost the soul of the business, which is, are you innovating at a very impatient velocity?”

“In a large company, best idea wins happens very seldom. You know, so you have to make sure you fight that, that urge to say rank wins. It's like the best idea has to win.”

“I feel like we are probably 70% of the way there now at Cisco, where everyone originates by thinking about what's the product and how are we going to add value?”

“The one thing that definitively does not work as a formula is saying, I'm in a tech space, And I'm gonna cash cow this business and not innovate, and I think I'm gonna do great. Like, that never plays out in the long term”

“Because I think the models are going to get smaller and more bespoke.”

“Why are we not in business to consumer tech at Cisco? Right? Like why, why are we not going out and building things that are very, very B to C? Because I don't think we have a distribution channel that actually is within our DNA. I don't think that we've got p…”

“And the thing that I learned about infrastructure is you don't always get the glory, but you always get the blame.”

“We have 90,000 employees. 43,000 watched the stream.”

“I used to stutter when I started working at Sizzler, and Sizzler is what allowed me to break out of my shell and not stutter, because, you know, something changed in my brain. I'm like, I have to entertain people, and if I don't, then they're not going to give…”