The Ledger, every show

“But the conclusion of all of that, I think, is that software engineering jobs of today, I think, will not exist in five or 10 years.”

“Like I could easily see the demand goes up 10 X or a hundred X, who knows, but I just think the AI is getting so good that you just won't have humans fulfilling that demand in anything but the most niche of niche cases.”

“I think we have a clear line of sight between where we are today and like improvements over the next three, six and 12 months. They're going to have quite stark consequences for software engineering, I think.”

“Yeah, 35,000 lines, and I wrote not a single one. And honestly, after about the first 5000 lines, I stopped even reading the code.”

“I think there will be demand for smart people who know how to wrangle these AI coding machines, and if we want to call those people software engineers, so be it. But I think the job is dramatically, dramatically different.”

“So getting to a 1,000,010 million, a hundred million of revenue with a software idea had is just happening faster and faster than ever.”

“And you could see hundreds of millions of people displaced, and the idea that they're going to retrain as in a different job, I think is going to be extremely painful. And I can see the societal impact and turmoil being very, very grave for 10 or 20 years as t…”

“Most people building application layer stuff in an AI say it's 80 to 90% traditional software with 10% AI.”

“And I had 96 no's in a row for that fundraise to try and do a flat round.”

“N-twenty-six has failed, Revolut's failed, Monzo's, the first go's failed”

“Get enough in three or four minutes, but it seems rude to finish the interview so quickly.”

“Shutting down continuity, our growth fund, has enabled to have a, enabled WIC to have a much more collaborative relationship with multi-stage VCs.”

“So YC has an investor database, which has 10,000 people in. I'm sure you're in there. We can perhaps look it up. And it has reviews from all of the YC founders that have taken investment from them, both on their process and what they would like to work with af…”

“And all YC companies have a huge amount of inbound investor interest, and before they book meetings, they will look each investor up in the database and see, I, have you treated found as well or have you not? And if you've not treated found as well, you're not…”

“The US has made like non-competes even less enforceable now. People, talent is going to jump between these places so quickly. So you discover an innovation at one place, and if weeks or months later, it's replicated everywhere else, I think.”

“And like, I don't think OpenAI is going to come and steamroll, like, the construction company, AI companies, because they're not going to deeply integrate into the processes and software that exists in each of those industries.”

“So I really believe everyone who works with a computer will have an AI co-pilot assistant thing in the next two or three years, whether you're like an oncologist or a law professor.”

“But I, I'd suggest, I think in In five years, for 99% of people, they're not touching their system prompt, but the system prompt is custom to them.”

“Last batch, that number was 25% of companies. So they use these tools for most of their code. Two batches ago, it was approximately zero percent.”

“And so I can see that happening in, in law, in medicine, as these kind of trade bodies act as gatekeepers to try and, almost like protectionist unions, trying to protect the jobs of their members.”

“So many industries like law or education or medicine that really were not big buyers of software in the past that are going to be transformed in the next five years.”

“I think we might see a shift towards more modular or service-based architecture where the LLM has clear API boundaries that it can work within while maintaining a consistent external interface Rather than these huge monorepos with massive interdependencies.”

“It was a sort of 40% down round. I think about 1.3 billion And we got a hundred million, and the company survived.”

“I've been talking to students for the last few days at our top universities, and the high status thing to do as a university CS undergrad is to go and work at Jane Street or Goldman Sachs or McKinsey.”

“YC has this interesting model where they make you do a, be a visiting partner for 18 months, which is The, like, the most brutal job interview I've ever done.”

“Each of the partners has access to the entire application pool, but if I read an application and I, I'm the first one to say, yes, that's mine, then I get to interview it. And if I interview it, and I'm the sole person who says, yes, we will invest, then it ge…”

“The vast, vast majority of YC companies end up raising their target anyway. Some might take a little longer than you expected, and some might go very fast. But something like 80 or 85% will raise their full, sort of, target amount, which might be two or three …”

“I've seen companies go from zero to like half a million or a million of revenue within the YC batch. With really, really big companies, like Fortune, 500 companies, and turn them into recurring contracts.”

“Absolutely not. I love it, but it ruined... It ruined my life in a way.”

“It was profitable.”

“He has been blacklisted from, he's tried to invest even after I left. And to their credit, the Monzo board have said, we're not working with you.”

“In the early days of Monzo, we were at -30 or -40 pounds per customer per year, and we scaled to half a million customers before we fixed them.”

“And here we are, 1.2 million customers, 99% through viral mechanics.”

“The very early Monzo product was so buggy that people used it because they believed in this mission that we kind of talked a lot about, but the actual product experience was kind of crappy, actually, and it didn't really work, and probably 10% of payments fail…”

“Well, I have to say, primarily amongst, it was 95% male, and 95% London so very, very skewed to a certain demographic but it was really powerful and kind of kickstarting that community, so just a lot of hard work.”

“So execs with that kind of scale-up experience is something I think you get a lot of in Silicon Valley, and really not a lot of in London yet.”

“I'm really, really excited about building out this marketplace of products from third parties on the Monzo platform to be a real control center, to let our customers manage all of their money wherever it sits within a single place.”

“In 90 minutes on a train journey with Claude Code, and in 90 minutes I set up hosting, I wrote new blogging software, and I migrated, like, 15 years of blog posts over to a new platform.”

“I'm not sure it's yet a competitive disadvantage, but I can imagine that becoming true in the next year or two as your tools get really, really good.”

“And if you are one of these people who are at the cutting edge of this, these tools, I think you have an advantage for several years, which will persist and enable you to frankly, to earn a lot of money to grow a great career.”

“Many product managers and designers are actually going straight to implementation of a new idea in code, rather than designing mockups in something like Figma, just because it's so quick.”

“We were burning a hundred million a year at the time.”

“Our revenue in the next week halved, went down by 50%.”

“But we got to a million customers with no advertising.”

“So then we spent the two years getting everyone to put their salary in, and now it's something like 60% of customers put their salary in.”

“I left at a hundred million revenue or so, and it's now almost 10 X that.”

“Yes, they, we more or less require everyone to relocate now to San Francisco in the dog patch where we have our office, and spend three to four months there.”

“The advice we've seen, or the trends we've seen over the last few years is that founders were getting way over diluted in their seed round. They're giving away 25 or 30% of their company at seed.”