The Ledger, every show

“So this may be just me, but I very much see AI as a tool, not a product. And so it's a technology. It's like your database. It's like Memcash back in the day, and so because of that, I don't think it'll change how people price in specific industries. Like, if …”

“I bet Apple can and will. And so if you project forward five years, if they get to the point where they can run a sufficiently large LLM on your iPhone, then OpenAI is out of the picture. You don't even need to hit their servers. It's just on your phone.”

“Runaway climate change is less than 10 years out.”

“Ah, so I would say actually, on a good light, AI won't replace many jobs, I think, actually. It'll drive productivity, not replacement, and it'll be like other technologies that have come out, like phones didn't replace people, now you just use them and you ca…”

“I certainly think we will, and this may not be a popular position, Obviously, opening eyes, charging ahead, sort of leading the way right now. I think the market forces at work mean there's just immense energy to have an open source equivalent. Meta appears to…”

“I bet Apple can and will, and so if you project forward five years, if they get to the point where they can run a sufficiently large LLM on your iPhone, then OpenAI is out of the picture. Don't even need to hit their servers. It's just on your phone.”

“They've just punted Gemini into Q one, which tells me it's not doing very well.”

“I view OpenAI probably evolving more into an infrastructure company like AWS.”

“What very few people I think are paying attention to is Apple, because again, they control the silicon. Imagine they're able to pioneer small models that run on device, and then they do custom silicon to make them run. The performance could be outlandish.”

“I certainly think we will. And this may not be a popular position. Obviously, opening eyes, charging ahead, sort of leading the way right now. I think the market forces at work I mean, there's just immense energy to have an open source equivalent. Meta appears…”

“So the closed may win in terms of having the most advanced model, but I think the Apple versus Android comparison is exactly accurate. So you're going to have something proprietary that might be best because it can be fully vertically integrated. They have, th…”

“Startups are gonna get killed because they're very thin wrappers.”

“It's really important to me that people view this as a technology. It is like your MySQL database. MySQL was very popular 20 years ago, right? Like it was super cool what it could do. And it's still cool, but if you try to go raise money on you've built a form…”

“A lot of them are basically holding at their 20, 21 valuation whenever the last round they raised was, and it's nowhere close to the reality.”

“And when a developer, sorry, when a developer started using it, they actually put it in their app and we broke their build in the nicest way possible so that every other engineer on their team would find out about Crashlytics and then start using it.”

“My sense is there'll be a very common popular open source sort of base LLM and then tools to allow folks to fine tune it easily.”

“I would doubt if opening eye goes and builds like an ocean competitor or an HR or Salesforce competitor or so on, they probably want to stay at the more generic level”

“Like, yes, there'll be a lot of consulting to help enterprises adopt AI, and the products won't be that great, and they won't really make that much of a difference.”

“And so I actually think the adoption curve here will be radically faster and industries will be disrupted probably way quicker than prior tech waves just because of the barriers are so low.”

“I don't think it'll change how people price in specific industries. Like if your market does per seat pricing, that'll probably stay. If your business and product does consumption pricing, that'll probably stay.”

“So I had the opportunity to take some money off the table in a deal. So I got a three X return, right? Returned cash in the bank, three X return on paper. It's gone on to do another 10 to 15 X, but I'm worried that valuation's fake. I don't think it'll ever re…”

“A lot of valuations will still crash from here dramatically. And there's probably going to be huge layoffs going into Q one, Q two as well.”

“What'll be really interesting is the number of companies that raised and have sort of struggled through 20, 23, but now we're down to six months or so of cash. I think next year could be very tough because they're not all going to be able to raise follow on ro…”

“It was yeah, it wasn't 38. It was over a hundred, well over a hundred.”

“So at Crashlytics, we took an incredibly cash-constrained approach, because we were conscious, honestly, of the challenges of the developer tool space. And so for that company, we only ever raised six million in funding. We only ever spent three million of it.…”

“And so I think the key differentiator here is yes, we've raised thirty three million. We aren't spending it. The big mistake people make is they scale their burn sort of in proportion to their raise. And we haven't. We've kept our team super small and lean. We…”

“So for the two, two and a half months that we were going through these acquisition discussions, we built basically nothing.”

“Today Crashlytics is on five or six billion MAU, roughly every active smartphone on earth.”

“And look at Apple Silicon, right? They've done an amazing job. Like, yes, they're fast, but instead of pushing the bounds on pure compute, they're pushing the bounds on energy efficiency, which for Apple's use case is critical.”

“And so I think there will be a lot of really interesting R and D on how do you make these models maybe smaller and perform it in certain use cases.”

“And so I think this will go in the same direction. And like you'll, you'll have very clear guidelines around how the companies use the data for model training and it's off limits and so on. And sort of that trust will be overcome.”

“It's very clear the top models are memory bound as well as CPU bound. So you can't just make the CPUs, the GPUs faster. You need to increase memory bandwidth in sort of on par with that.”

“You're seeing Reddit, Twitter, et cetera, shut off APIs, put in more strict rate limits, et cetera. And so the whole world is starting to lock down data, which was counter to the trends over the past 20 years, when everything was being pushed more and more ope…”

“A lot of folks, you're right, are trapped in companies with high valuations where their options are likely underwater.”

“And that's probably the counterforce is all of these big companies who raised huge rounds in 20, 21 have high salaries. And if you switch, you'll get more equity, but way less cash. And so that's probably keeping folks where they are.”

“Like QuickBooks has had an 80% market share since 1992.”

“We have those three meetings, and then nothing else on the calendar, and everything else is ad hoc, and so I'd say our average meeting length is probably five to seven minutes.”

“For the skill side, we have used basically a take-home work sample, a take-home challenge that we use for every single role.”

“And if you look on the, at the data, the average round takes six to four to six months to close.”

“So today Crashlytics is installed on well, well over a billion devices. We're on substantially every active mobile device on earth.”

“Our team had not only has tripled, but only one person has left in that time.”

“Particularly at Twitter, we need to get stats, SIG data, which always took two to three weeks.”

“We scaled from zero to three hundred million phones in 12 months.”

“Twitter was a podcasting startup. Slack was a game. YouTube was a dating website.”

“We ended up going from zero to three hundred million devices within the first 12 months.”

“So without question and Creo failed the re like the reason we went and got acquired by box was because we didn't have the distribution we needed to raise an a round and we didn't spend that focus.”

“We have let one person go in the life of the company, but it's just one.”

“Ken Kosienda's book, Creative Selection, I think it came out a couple years ago or so. My time I spent at Apple actually overlaps with the period he covers in the book, and the book is stunningly accurate in how it portrays how Apple designed and shipped produ…”