The Ledger, every show

“And this scaled up to a point where it was like a quarter of all Craigslist service volume, all these auto posts from Thumbtack pros. And then, you know, not surprisingly, we got a cease and desist that told us we should stop this and we'd been banned from Cra…”

“It's gonna become ubiquitous. People are, there's gonna be billions of people learning to delegate to a machine assistant”

“At Thumbtack, there was a moment, you may remember this, a decade ago, where I woke up, and I had a message from someone on our team in the Philippines, and it said, Thumbtack does not exist on the internet. I was like, what? And I went to Google, you type in …”

“I measured free testosterone before and after, and it was 10% higher.”

“Yeah, I mean, it's a moving target, obviously, is gonna get increasingly more capable, and our view is it's like self-driving cars, where it's not self-driving overnight, it's you drive the Tesla at first, And then there's assisted steering and braking, and th…”

“The person who built this internally has been using it, the majority of his delegations are now machine-generated.”

“This is a place that AI is obviously going to automate, and it will be very powerful, or it's at the end of each week. It just tells you, here's what you prioritized. Are those actually your goals?”

“I'd say, you know, one of the biggest, I don't know if I called a mistake at Thumbtack because I love my founders, but it's something I wouldn't recommend others do, is we had four co-founders, and one was technical, he left after like two years, and then the …”

“Athena started fully bootstrapped, human-only, scaled to a thousand people, no outside capital”

“The human assistant will focus more on project management and high-level work and really be that, like, caretaker, the empathy, that partner. And the machine will increasingly do the more rote, mechanical, administrative stuff.”

“You know, Athena, we have 50,000 assistants apply per month, and we put them through a huge battery of tests, and we hire like one in 300.”

“Google capital came to us and said, we're interested in investing. We weren't fundraising and we said, okay, we'll talk to you. And five days later, they gave us a term sheet for a hundred million dollars.”

“And I went to, you know, Google analytics and our traffic had not fallen by 10 or 20%, but a hundred, zero. And we were de-indexed. We were completely removed from Google.”

“This woman in the Philippines named Mikan beat the Americans and everyone else, not just on price, but on quality. She was a better English proofreader than Americans.”

“Last year there was about five hundred billion dollars invested in venture capital, one or two percent of that came from active founders. Most of it came from institutional VCs”

“And so she went from individual contributor to a manager of five and 10 proofreaders to then eventually a general manager of a team of a few hundred To eventually the head of our team in the Philippines managing over a thousand people.”