The Exchanges

Q Were you content after you sold your first company? You were like, 22, 23.

A Well, content is the right word. I wasn't happy. Uh, so I was content for a moment of time. I was 22. Um, I never had much, much success with, with women, uh, because I was a computer geek and back then computers was not the coolest thing, uh, in the world. And, um, you know, so I, I was like, okay, well now I've got all this money and, uh, you know, this, this was my worldview. I can go out in nightclubs and I'm going to be the cool guy. Um, and I had fun for a while. I'll tell you that. But, um, it also was incredibly, um, hollowing because, um, you know, I realized that these girls, uh, weren't with me because of me and they were with me because, you know, I had status. And I was able to use money to buy status, uh, and be a cool guy for a small moment of time. And so, um, that taught me a lot, right? And, and actually, you know, I kind of walked away for over a year, not doing anything at all, um, and just sort of deeply reflecting on life, uh, what I wanted to do, because for me, you know, I had a magic, um, number. Which was ten million. If I got that number, I would retire. That was the goal. And I was thinking to myself.

AI assessment note: “Well, content is the right word. I wasn't happy.”

Q because they also had it. So I'm very curious. Do you feel different? Um, and what I mean by that is, like, as you've grown from, you know, a kid in the projects, even if you had early success, to now being, you know, one of the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet, which I know, don't do the face, but it's an undeniable fact, like, do you feel different?

A I think yes and no. Um, so I, I feel different in, in the same way a 40 year old would feel different than a 10 year old would do. I feel different in, um, I'm a product of all the experiences of my life, and obviously I've been incredibly fortunate to, uh, I was counting the other day, I've been to like a 130 countries or something in my life. I've seen so many cultures, so many people, I have friends all over the world. All of that has shaped me into who I am. Um, I don't feel different because innately many of the things, the drive, the long-termness, the obsession, the, um, uh, This sort of willingness on the paradox of winning on the one hand, but then also trying to truly find a win-win, um, and work with people to try to find a win-win, which is really important to me.

AI assessment note: “I think yes and no. Um, so I, I feel different in”

Q Ok, so, how do you generate more power then?

A So, there are Really two distinct things to think about here. There's generation, and then there's transmission and distribution, right? So generation is, is where the new electrons come from, right? Solar, wind, gas, coal, geothermal, hydroelectric. There's tons of different ways to fusion, fission. There's a bunch of different ways to generate energy, and then you have to move it, right? And poles and wires move energy through space, and batteries move energy through time. The grid is a system by which the transmission distribution happens, and it's built for the peak, so it's massively oversized, which means that you have a bunch of inefficiency, and that it's not being used all the time. It's not being highly utilized, and when you have a system that runs at low utilization, it makes the system very expensive. Batteries allow you to increase the utilization of that system, because you can charge them when demand is really low, and you can discharge them when demand is really high, and so you can take, you know, the curve of demand, and you can Flatten it. And therefore, you can lower the total delivered cost because the capacity factor, as it's called in the industry, or the utilization has gone up. So with our current product set today focused on battery storage, we're not making more electricity. We're just using it more efficiently to drive the cost down.

AI assessment note: “we're not making more electricity. We're just using it more efficiently”

Q So, so when we go back to this idea that you said earlier, where it's like, hey, you know, some of these other traits that other venture people, you know, don't like in founders, I love, I'm very attracted to them. Going back to the founder of NewBank, did he have those founder traits?

A He had a, a combination of smarts, drive, clarity of thought, toughness, goodness, judgment, Mature way behind, way, way beyond his years, his, his years. Look, um, here's what I have to tell you. We interview people And Mike Moritz had a great line, called them half pagers or full pagers. You interview someone, you write a half page, there's nothing else to write. You're, you're there, 30 minutes, you look and you watch, God, I can't believe, you know, I'm done. And then you have people that you look at, you watch, and it's an hour has gone by and you can't believe it. And David was one of them. And I remember talking to him, the hour flew by, and it was clear to me that We love this person, and he tells the story to show you how Sequoia works. I said, yeah, there's somebody else that wants you to meet. He makes it to his car, and his phone rang, and it was Mike Moritz. He didn't make it out of the parking lot. That's how fast we moved. We pulled him right back in, and Mike met him, and within two minutes, Mike and I knew that we were going to hire this kid, and I had interviewed 10, 15 people from Brazil. They all looked the same. There were all these super smart, fine, wonderful, Uh, guys and girls, they all went in consulting, because that, that's how you self-select in these, in these new markets. That's, I, I saw it in India, uh, and so on. Uh, but they all looked the sam…

AI assessment note: “He had a, a combination of smarts, drive, clarity of thought, toughness”

Q And then, like, Be so judicious about what I add back. Like, how do you think about that when you're building products?

A It's even more on our minds now than it used to be, and it was always on our mind. Our initial spiel, our tagline, was less software. When we launched Basecamp back in 2004, it was often contrasted with Microsoft Project and other kind of enterprise-y, heavy tools, and our pitch was always It's really good, but one of the reasons why it's really good is it's just less. There are fewer features, there's less to learn, there's less to teach, there's just less, and we focus on making the few things it does do, do very well. Now, In this new age where using agents and AI has made it so much easier to implement things, it becomes that much harder to stick to those principles because we used to be granted these constraints simply by the fact that it took a long time to build things. And especially in the early days of Basecamp, for example, we built the entire first version on me having 10 hours per week, not per day, per week. To build it. That is an enormous constraint on how you could do anything because you can waste 10 hours really quickly just chasing things around or focusing on the non-essentials if we wanted to get that product out. And we got it out in 380 hours. And the reason I remember this was at the time I was a contractor for Thursday signals. Jason had hired me at 15 dollars an hour. When I was in Copenhagen, Denmark, and he was in Chicago. And by the way, I got paid…

AI assessment note: “Our initial spiel, our tagline, was less software.”

Q Ok, so I read, Jay-Z's like, I read the book, and I'll just avoid doing that, and then he came into the game independent, I think he, the, the, the founding of Rockefeller. So he got it, and he got it back in, what, 96? How the hell are you still telling the story in 2000?

A Hold on, wait, what's that matter? You know, Jay got it, Because he was turned down. Record companies wouldn't sign him. A guy that talented, they wouldn't sign him. He had no choice but to go independent. He figured it out, and then when he got independent, he obviously figured it out. Master P figured it out. Cash Money figured it out to a certain extent, because there's different versions of this. There's different versions of guys figuring it out, like, there's a figuring it out where you like, I own the whole fucking thing, it's mine, and you're my partner, and I pay you a percentage, right? Then there's a version of it like, look, I'm not gonna allow one contract to hold everybody, which was Wu Tang's thing. The RZA had a record deal, and it didn't work. Then he came back. And invented this thing called Wu-Tang, and he made sure that he did not sign what he had signed prior, uh, when he was Prince Rakeem, an artist.

AI assessment note: “Hold on, wait, what's that matter? You know, Jay got it, Because he was turned down.”

Q when he's 25. He talked about insanely great products when he was Dying Insanity Great products. You want to make Insanity Great products? Then you come with me. Well, you knew what was important to him. And I feel, I don't know if you guys do this internally, but I've talked to, you know, Alex and Daniel and you a bunch. I feel your organizing principle is time well spent.

A If you look at what we focus on and what we optimize for, you have a strategic lens, then you have sort of a A business lens and an emotional lens. So the strategic lens is really that we saw a long time ago that the biggest challenge in the world is going to be distribution. You know, when, when the iPhone came out, it felt like distribution was free. People went to the app store every day and looked for like, you know, what's the top charting free and paid app. That, that stopped working. There was a lot of distribution through Facebook with all the install ads that all went away. So from a strategic point of view, When we were going into podcasts, which was like the first, second product we did, we looked at that and said, okay, again, it's all a trade-off. We could do a separate app. It would be easier for us as an org, because we can divide the org, and people can run in parallel, and so forth. But is that the biggest problem, to design the experience? Or is the biggest problem actually getting distribution? And then we looked at, in the App Store, and I think there was maybe, um, it was probably Probably 10, but at least seven really good podcast apps in there, like Overcast and all of these apps. And when we looked at their usage, I think Apple podcast was still like 98 and a half percent. So like the problem wasn't that there wasn't a good enough podcast product. The pr…

AI assessment note: “If you look at what we focus on and what we optimize for”

Q lot of co-founder conflict. And it's very obvious that, especially when you're a missionary, you weren't like, oh, I just want to like start, you know, one grocery store. So people Eat healthier and better food. You're like, we're going to change the way that the country eats. And that was a very distinct philosophical mismatch from some of your early co-founders. Can you talk a little bit about that?

A I mean, the first one, we started it up, it was kind of like, I thought it'd be fun. We weren't trying to change the way America eats. We just wanted to open up a small natural food store in a safer way. And actually, the good part of the book is dedicated to the early days because I think many entrepreneurs, They remember the early startup part of the business very well, and then they remember the last few years, and then there's the period in between they don't think about. One of the good things about writing a memoir is like, I got to rethink it all, relive it all. And, um, yeah, my original founders, co-founders, particularly one, Mark, He just wanted to make a lot of money, and the very first store, the very first Whole Foods Market was very profitable, and even though the flood knocked it back, we got back on our feet, and it was just very profitable, and he said, we don't really need to do anything else. We've got it made. Let's just not screw it up. It's like, well, I don't want to do just one store. I want to open up more stores, and he went along with that, but those new stores started slow, had to grow into it, and so there even came a time where we were losing money again, and he was Very angry about it. He says, you've, you've, you've blown it. And I said, no, these stores are going to be fine. They're going to grow. We wait and see. But he didn't have the patienc…

AI assessment note: “my original founders, co-founders, particularly one, Mark, He just wanted to make a lot of money”

Q I'm having conversations, because we talk all the time, I had no idea Where this conversation was going, and it went in places like I learned stuff about you that I did not know. And so I really appreciate you saying yes to me and coming kicking and screaming on. I want to end by turning it around on you. What is the kindest thing someone's ever done for you?

A One is, uh, they're related. So I'll tell them in order. The first was I had a cousin. I come from an Irish Catholic family where when you go to the family reunion, you get a sheet that looks like one of those maps from the nineties where you just have to like keep unfolding it because there's just so goddamn many people. And so I have, um, I have cousins who are technically my like third or fourth cousins that feel in my family more like a first cousin. One of my third cousins was a guy named Tim O'Shaughnessy, and when I, I was a bad student in high school. I was like a very good student as a, as a young kid. I went to this giant high school in, ah, in Connecticut, like, 4000 students, and I just partied way too hard and didn't get good grades and didn't take it seriously, and so I, there was a day, ah, I remember it very distinctly. I was at a friend's house, having stayed up too late the night before, and my dad called me and said, hey, you know, you should, you should probably come home. There's a whole bunch of very small envelopes here from colleges. So I actually got, I got rejected from every college I applied to. Uh, the first time I applied to colleges, and I got all the rejection letters on the same day. It was a bad day. Um, so then I reapplied to some other schools. I, I had wanted to go to the University of Notre Dame, and I called them and I said, uh, where are …

AI assessment note: “One is, uh, they're related. So I'll tell them in order.”

Q What can you tell me about your relationship with Michael Crichton?

A Certain people have touched my life in a very unique way. Um, Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen in 99 put me on their board, and I never met either of them, and they had the confidence in me to go into a business that I told them I knew nothing about. I mean, I had some experience in tech from 92 with my Andy Grove Intel CAA deal, meeting Gates in 93, but You know, nothing like they did. They grew up in Silicon Valley. That was a huge, ah, life change for me. Michael Crichton was one of these guys that, at the beginning, I just needed to sign as a client to be on the roster, and after two or three meetings, I just said, my God, this man is so special. He was not just intelligent to a degree I'd never seen at that time. This is 1979. He was thoughtful. He was Ahead of everybody in his thinking. He was talking about computers in the early eighties. He was an Apple fellow when it was, no one knew what the hell that was. He traveled extensively and wrote articles about it, but kept notes on everything he did. And he loved art. He wrote the definitive textbook on Jasper Johns. To this day, it's the definitive book. And I talked to him every day of my life, seven days a week. Seven days a week. And if I didn't talk to him, It was odd, and I missed it. I would talk to him no matter where I was. I could be in Japan. I could be in Europe. I could be in New York. Didn't make any differenc…

AI assessment note: “And I talked to him every day of my life, seven days a week.”

Q And because of Daniel's advice, just like, stay away from the circus, like, the people that show up at these things, they don't, they aren't doing any work, they're just there to distract, like, you don't have to do it. And so then I get all these emails and invitations, like, come to this thing, and I open it up, and I see your face everywhere. What are you doing?

A No, I usually try to do two per, two to three per quarter, usually conferences or events. Um, but in our case, it's a little bit different because for a lot of the people that are usually on the conferences, they are partners or prospecting partners or clients. So, so it, it is usually a great way of forcing function of having them in one place and trying to figure out how we build together. That's the benefit of the breadth of the work we do that a lot of, especially on the conversational agents work. That applies to most of the businesses of how they think about communicating with their customers, how they are thinking about changing customer journey. So, so a lot of the, the, the events are, are a great, great way for us to, to, to, to, to catch time with a lot of the, the people that we work with.

AI assessment note: “I usually try to do two per, two to three per quarter”

Q What are you like? Not sleeping? Are you like?

A Well, I mean, the entire Uber thing was like a lack of sleep, you know, so it wasn't like this was a new lack of sleep thing. It was just, I mean, it was a new thing, but lack of sleep generally was a thing just because I had a global business that was really intense and, and very game theory oriented in the ways that I'm describing, which means it was always on and crazy weird things happen in cars at night. So, like, the first time I got woken up in the middle of the night because there was a, a drive-by shooting from an Uber. You know what I mean? Like, that's not good. The, the thing is, is that what happens in a city happens in an Uber.

AI assessment note: “the entire Uber thing was like a lack of sleep, you know”

Q this obsession when you're a thirteen-year-old kid about being obsessed with food, But now you have restaurants, maybe higher status. There's like celebrity restauranteurs or celebrity chefs. So I can't help but wonder if like the people that you see coming into this are doing it. You said, you know, for their, their motivations and why they're doing it are completely different than yours. Do you see that as well?

A Yeah. I mean, I think that To your point, what we were talking about, right? My generation, myself and my partners, Rich and Mario, like, when we came in and started coming up with our own restaurants, right, you know what I mean? That was kind of the last generation of, you know, of people that were doing this solely based on blind passion for this business It was the only thing that, you know, we could imagine doing. And, you know, it's the type of thing that, you know, if you love this business, it is, you know, by, you know, by math, like the hardest business you could go into. But if you love it, and if you're passionate about it, And you study it, and you do the work that's necessary, which is critical. You have a chance of being successful, and you have a chance of creating really special places that you're proud of and that you love sharing with people. And that's truly the essence of hospitality, right? You know, we love to bring people together and serve them great food and have, you know, make people happy and have them have a great time and leave with a big smile on their face, and we, that brings us great joy. I think that for better or worse, what's happened is that with the rise of social media, with the rise of, you know, Instagram, TikTok, et cetera, It did two things, right? You know, so two things happened. First, you had food TV going back 20 years, right? A…

AI assessment note: “That was kind of the last generation of, you know, of people that were doing this”

Q At what age did you discover it? Is it right at the beginning when you're starting this in your twenties?

A Yeah, I mean, I mean, even raising money the first time. I mean, think, think about this for a second. I'm out raising money, even with my friends and family. I'm raising money. I have six months of experience working in a natural food store. I have absolutely no business background. I'd worked jobs and stuff, but I'd never really been a management. I, I didn't take any business classes when I was at the university. I didn't know much about business, and these people were willing to trust their money to this young kid and his girlfriend, um, simply on my enthusiasm. Really, at the end of the day, I was so excited I more or less said, I know this is going to work. Trust me. And they did, and it did work. I think Jobs called it the reality, or somebody said about Steve, he had a reality distortion field. Yes. I think I, I identified with that. I think most persuasive entrepreneurs, charismatic entrepreneurs have a reality distortion fields. They're able to get people to spend their normal skepticism, and for a moment, they let them into their vision, and they, they, they catch a little bit. Maybe they don't get the vision, but they see the, The passion. I think you've talked about, ah, how passion is infectious. I think entrepreneurs are generally passionate, and they sell others on their dream. I would say that, I think I said in the book that, um, entrepreneurs are a little bit…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I mean, I mean, even raising money the first time.”

Q Well, say more about that. What do you, can you not do today in the way you run your organization that you hope AI can change in the future?

A I think there's, um, like always you want the information from the, the, the kind of the, the person working as closely to the problem. So let's say you're developing a product you want to work. You want to speak with the engineer that actually develops that product rather than their manager. If it's a client conversation, similar, you want to understand what is that client saying from the person on the ground, rather the manager is summarizing that information and giving that to you. And I think that that information flow will change with AI where You will have access to everything that's happening in a better granularity than you could ever have before, because it summarizes that back and back and forth. Second, I think that In general, roughly at 11 labs, most people will have close to 10 direct reports. It's a pretty, pretty wide set, which helps us build that small team approach that we, that we have. And that too only works if you, if you can amplify a lot of what's happening across all the teams, all the people that you, that you work with, um, to summarize information of what's happening in their teams, how they're performing, what are some of the gaps, That definitely helps, and helps shift it from reactive to proactive, I think, too. But what I mean by this is, frequently in the past, I think you would rely on, on, on specific individuals surfacing the information to …

AI assessment note: “that information flow will change with AI where You will have access to everything”

Q Explain a situation where you realized That you shouldn't go after that opportunity. Could you give me an example of what you're just, you're describing?

A The, um, example would, I'll go to slightly different spaces. One is, On for, for a long time, the, um, and I think it's still true. The ideal version in the audio space is, um, if you've created a marketing campaign is how that combines with a lot of the image and video work to deliver a better content. Two years ago, we would have first tried to see whether we can help people create effectively lip dubbing or avatars for, um, for, for their content. So let's say you switch from one language to another, you need to move the lips. Or let's say you want to narrate something, you create an avatar. That was roughly two years ago. A lot of the models that existed on that site just weren't good enough, and deploying a product in the space would be such a defocus and such a shift for the company that it didn't have the audio as a superpower. It still had a bottleneck of the quality of avatars, quality of a lot of them.

AI assessment note: “deploying a product in the space would be such a defocus”

Q On how to get feedback? I don't know if this is, this is the art you were talking about, but shit sandwich is like compliment, which you add the negative feedback, and then another compliment. That's why they call it the shit sandwich.

A Yeah, well, I don't know how to do that. If anything, the mistake I make is I'm too direct. I remember, ah, there was a venture guy, Jim Breyer. I heard him turning down an investment once, and I said, oh my god, the, the founders are gonna walk away from this thinking he won the freaking lottery. And I don't know how to do that, and I, I was always admirers of how he could do that. And, ah, Yeah, I'm more direct. I hear people talking on the phone for 20 minutes, 30 minutes. My conversations are three, four, three, four minutes at most. You know, hi, what do you need? This and that. Done. Ok, yes, I got it. Alright, I'll let you know.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, well, I don't know how to do that. If anything, the mistake I make is I'm too direct.”

Q So how do you go about trying to explain that to them? Like, how do you just make it obvious? Do you just do it through product demonstrations? Yeah.

A I mean, it's like with everything else, you, um, you, you, you do product demonstrations, you show what the capabilities are. We've done this a lot with drones and then, and, and to honestly, everyone's credit, people do get it. I mean, it's like, like people complain about procurement is so slow and, and governments are so slow. Yes. But then when they do get it, it goes very fast. Like the, the, the large, um, striking contracts that happened, happened really quickly. Um, with political support, with, um, support of the procurement agency, and, and they went through all in record time. And now, if anything, I think that the companies, you know, are really under pressure to deliver all of this stuff really fast. So, it's like, we, we, we all complained about it in the past, but it's a bit of a legacy problem. I think, um, procurement has got faster, and, and the realization that these things have to happen is happening faster too. And, and, you know, there will be big, um, autonomous hydrogen programs in Europe as well now. Two years ago, there was nothing. Even one year ago, there was nothing, but it's now happening.

AI assessment note: “you do product demonstrations, you show what the capabilities are. We've done this a lot”

Q to find ways to offset, and that was the original idea. Like, he discovered Apache Corporation, which winds up being this massive oil and gas company, because of the work that he was doing in tax Planning and accounting for relatively small businesses. I feel there is some kind of connection between your first company and your second that I'm trying to get to. Am I just wrong on this?

A So I don't think it was that direct necessarily. One thing that I've always felt with everything I ended up doing is I think is that I ended up doing something slightly different to maybe what the mainstream was. And part of the reasons I've never felt kind of part of the group of the peer group, like I never as a biologist and I did a lot of biology and I loved it, but I never really felt like I was like part of the biology group, and that made it a little bit easier to do different things. That's why I ended up just doing software and simulation rather than go out into the field and watch animals and, um, dissect animals. I never liked that stuff. I wanted to do something slightly different stuff. With gaming, I also never felt part of the gaming group and culture the same way, and as a result, I think we ended up doing quite different games that I remember, like, the pricing for our games was very different to anyone else's.

AI assessment note: “So I don't think it was that direct necessarily.”

Q Why? Because so many people, there's a billion people using your products on a weekly basis?

A And each time we get a new level of model, we put it out in the world. And we see what, you know, what works, what doesn't work, where people need us to relax the guardrails because they have good things they want to use it for, where we have alignment failures, where we have safety systems failures. ChatGPT has only been out, like, less than four years. A billion people use it. And sensitive, important stuff. And the fact that we can deliver something that is broadly considered safe, of course there's issues with it. Like, in that short of a time frame with such a powerful technology, I think there is no way we could have done that in Ivory Tower. And You know, this is how I believe you build good, safe, robust, useful technology and products, and I think is a great, a great learning of Y Combinator. And it would have seemed to most of the AI safety people, you know, totally impossible to get to this stage and still have the level of safety guarantees we have. Now, I do think it gets harder from here, but I don't think you're going to solve it by disconnecting yourself from reality.

AI assessment note: “there is no way we could have done that in Ivory Tower.”

Q Can you give us an example of what happened in China then?

A I mean, China was like amazing, but very difficult and in some ways impossible to predict. Let's go to China. Sounds like fun. It was a, it was a super awesome adventure because what happened was, is I was like, sounds cool. And I got, it was 2000, probably 2013 or early 13. Uber started in 2010. So it was still early crew. And I got a crew of folks, like super OG guys, and we stayed in an apartment in China for a week or two, a week and a half, two weeks, something like that, and met with everybody we could. It's actually when I first met Wan Shing, uh, at Meizuan, actually. Um, and he told me I was crazy. Don't do it. It's the worst idea ever.

AI assessment note: “we stayed in an apartment in China for a week or two... and met with everybody”

Q elite, and a few of these people have been on the show, for example, and I've talked to them in private about you. So, It's an unlikely story. I happen to know this because we spent a bunch of time together over the last year and a half, but can you explain, ok, you go to college, what do you think you were gonna do when you were in school?

A I did not know what to do. You and I have talked about friends of ours who've known maybe from an early age that they wanted to go in a certain direction. I did not know, and I think because the thing that I'm doing actually has not existed until I started doing it, and there are many other things like this out there that don't exist until someone starts doing it, so I think there's a lesson there, but what I really was forced to do and then enjoyed doing was some version of super duper reading the room, And then figuring out how to become and speak as someone that the room would accept. And as a kid moving around and always being the weird kid with the weird accent and the weird clothes, it's a, it's a forced almost survival mechanism. I'll tell you a story about Uh, in Norway in a second, how I learned this, and when I got to Canada, I actually learned English from a book called English. It literally was like a green and blue book. I could, I could picture it. It looked like a Greyhound bus seat type of design called English. I read it, and I was like Neo waking up from the Matrix. I was like, I know English. I thought I knew English. I actually did not, because English, there's like the book English, and then there's the how people actually use it English. So while I was In college, I did an interview with BCG or something that the career office funnels you towards, and than…

AI assessment note: “I did not know what to do.”

Q and bring more voices Stories and ideas to every corner of the world. Deal is trusted by over 40,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.com forward slash Senra. That is deal.com forward slash Senra. So we talked about the opportunity cost of your time, and picking which project to dedicate your attention to, your resources to. Why did you choose to do this?

A I think music is a critical component going forward in the new internet era, particularly with AI. We've seen it, what's going on with Suno and Udio, where they're taking IP that other people own, even 10 seconds of it, and Constructing custom-made songs. Music is never going away. I think the, um, advent of Daniel X Spotify, which he developed in a garage in Sweden, in Stockholm, is a game changer, and I think that music's at the foundation of so many things that are digitally based from games to movies, television, AI, All of the image capturing that's done. Don't you find it fascinating that on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, almost everything you see, someone chooses music to go behind it? It's part of our culture worldwide, not, it's not country by country. There's a common denominator of British and American music around the world, and it's a door opener. It's a, it's something everyone can hear and relate to, even if they don't speak the same language. So, I love the idea. I love the bills financing capability. I love Lucian's management and talent expertise, and I like the fact that I grew up in that business. My first job was in the music business. Started a music division at CA that to this day is the tops. I think it's a lot of complementary factors. Whether we get it or not, I have no idea. It's frankly up to one shareholder, and that's one family that controls 28% …

AI assessment note: “I think music is a critical component going forward in the new internet era”

Q How do you think they view company building differently than somebody that's, say, 10 years older than them?

A I think they look at our charts very differently. I think they look at functions very differently. They don't think the, the orchard structure that we inherited and that we grew up with, I don't think it applies anymore in the same way they did. Humans are key center, and they will be for as long as we're alive in, in, in our generation, in our lifetime. But orchards and the way they organize people, Completely different, and you can see it. They are self-organizing, and I, I love studying this because one of my mentors is Dee Hawk, the founder of Visa, and I spent with him almost 10 or 12 years visiting him and, and talking to him, and he's, he's a creator of the chaotic organization. He is the believer that you should never organize, the best expression of humans are in the, Intersection between chaos and order. If you're too orderly, you don't innovate. If you're too chaotic, you don't communicate, and you break. So chaotic is the right place to be. They're actually doing, these kids are doing a great job by pure nature of how they were trained and wired with this era of technology to be in the epicenter of chaotic. So that's how they're working, and that's what's different about them.

AI assessment note: “I think they look at our charts very differently. I think they look at functions”

Q a month or two ago. You're sitting to my right. I look at, you're wearing, like, ramp, uh, merch, and I, like, grab your, your, your sleeve because I wanted to read what was on it. It says, we win when our customers win. So I believe that to be true. So how do you align the incentives of your company with your customers to make sure that stays true?

A It's one of our six values, and a lot of companies have this idea they want to have values, everyone has, my elementary school had values, right? Um, and, um, what I didn't like about values at my elementary school, you know, I'm sorry if any administrators listening to it, there was like, 20 of them, and like, I couldn't remember any of them, right? And what we tried to do at the very start of the company was ask, like, what are the thing, the very few things that all of us really agree with, and if we don't all strongly feel this and agree with this, like, it's a nice idea, You can go pursue it, but it's like not an actual value, right? And so one of the top level things we wanted to do at the start of the company was set a goal that explicitly measured for the products that we put out there. Could we measure how many dollars are our customers spending? And how many did we block? How many dollars did we prevent from going out Of their company. How many hours do they spend doing expenses or closing their books or paying bills or moving funds to earn higher yield? And so we both, it's part of why we connect, right, to a company's accounting software to have kind of a source of truth, ah, it's part of why we move funds, and then we explicitly create measurements on how many, like how many dollars did we block, how many expense reports did we automate, all that. And then all we d…

AI assessment note: “we explicitly create measurements on how many, like how many dollars did we block”

Q Yeah, no, I don't, I think it's impossible. I have, I know your personality type, like there's just, it's just impossible for you not to do this. What is like, let's get into Devin. What is like winning with Devin look like to you?

A So again, you know, we're hyper competitive, but also, you know, the other thing about us is like, we all had kind of started our own companies before this. So our founding team is, it was a pretty big founding team. It was nine people. And most of us had already founded our own companies before we had done different things. It was true for a lot of the early team. And we've always thought about this as like, this is the big one. And so like, we want to go for it all, you know, we want to be a, a generational business. Like we want to build a hyperscaler and we want to go and do that. And like, maybe we'll succeed, maybe we won't, I don't know. But like, that's what we're going after. And, and I think to me, what that means In our field, um, in building software is like, you know, people sometimes use the term like coding agents or like, you know, like AI programming or something. I, I always like, you know, I, I was here that I think a little bit about like, well, we're not always, I mean, we're not gonna be interacting with code for that much longer, you know, or programs might not be the right, like level of abstraction, but I think what is always true probably is that it will be the human computer interface. And so what I mean by that is like, Like, the way that we think about Devon, if we're successful, is Devon is the way that humans can tell their computers what to do. B…

AI assessment note: “Devon is the way that humans can tell their computers what to do.”

Q Had you met Jay before in person or no?

A I'd seen him before, but like, we didn't know each other like that, and I didn't give a fuck, and neither did he. And he come to the office. I'm at Sony at the time, and they're like, so we speak on the phone, and he's like, we're coming to see you right now. I'm like, great, I'm at Five 50 Madison. And they come upstairs, and I'm sure that, I didn't even notice at the time, they thought, oh, we're going upstairs, and he's probably gonna have some guys, and there's gonna be like a, you know, some face-off or some version of that. I guess. They came upstairs, I let them upstairs, you know, front desk, let them up, they come upstairs, and I'm by myself barefoot. And I'm like, and you've seen their face. And I'm like, listen, I don't want to have an argument about anything about Anything that doesn't involve big houses. They just start laughing. I'm like, you know, some big houses involved. This is a stupid conversation. And then like literally after.

AI assessment note: “I'd seen him before, but like, we didn't know each other like that”

Q about a podcast, but you were taking it. You could read it though. Before, right? It was like stripping out all like the crazy shit that happens on X or the people fighting over politics. And it's just like that. What are the people I care about? What are they talking about? It's not going to induce me, like not going to raise my cortisol levels or make me sad.

A So I literally asked my agent, uh, filter for rage bait, filter for, for click bait, uh, filter for, uh, you know, politics. I just asked, this is the kind of user control that you can have now that very few people Understand that you can have yet, and it's too complicated, but you can have all that control. So what, what I think is most people kind of know what they want, but you know, you get captured in the moment. You know, it's like you, you want something and then someone puts candy in front of you, you're going to take that candy. So what is interesting is, can you give people the chance to decide their own future ahead of time? This is the idea behind like the taste profile and behind these agents. Like I'm not better than anyone else. I get captured all the time. So, so my specific pet peeve is road rage. I'm so fascinated by it. I just go down dark holes of road rage because it's the weirdest thing. Like these supposedly, you know, fully normal, smart people, they waste their entire lives and go to jail.

AI assessment note: “So I literally asked my agent, uh, filter for rage bait, filter for, for click bait”

Q People like you and I will probably want more control, but like you're of seven hundred million users, like what percentage of them do you actually think? I feel like people just want you to do it for them.

A No, you're not wrong. I think there's, everything in the world is sort of a power law, right? Of whether it's music listening, some people listen a little, and then some people listen extremely much. Everything is a power law. But I think what is interesting, what Spotify's gained from, if you look at playlisting, for example, some people playlist a lot. Most people have one playlist. Maybe they're liked songs, maybe two playlists, you know, some indie favorites. Some people have, like, hundreds of playlists. So sort of the story of Spotify and why we got good at personalization and recommendation in the first place was that we had like, I don't know, ten billion user playlists, which is people carefully saying this track goes well with this track goes well with this track. It's an incredibly valuable data set, but to your point, it was heavily skewed. It was a few use, not a few millions, but not hundreds of millions that did a lot of work that benefited the others. Those people saying these tracks go well together meant that the others who weren't that into music, they didn't keep up with the new With the new releases of the back catalog, they got amazing recommendations from the work of these people. And so I think that's going to be true here as well. And, and in fact, I know it is true. We see some people engaging a lot, talking to Spotify all the time saying, no, that's w…

AI assessment note: “No, you're not wrong. I think there's, everything in the world is sort of a power law”

Q And I think to your point, everyone gets there and every philosopher in history got there. The question is just like, how late in life do you get there? I think you got there a lot earlier than it took me. Some people never get there.

A It took me 32 years to find my path and another five and a half of fucking struggling until it actually like could sustain me. And then now it's like, I wake up every day. It's like, I have no doubts about what I'm doing. I was like, I'm going to build, again, I'm mining these old books of somebody who did something amazing for Ideas and insights that we can push down to the next generation of entrepreneurs and having conversations like this, where we talked before, I was like, I was like, oh, you know, you, you, you asked this perfect question for your audience. It's like, I'm having these conversations selfishly, because I just know there's, there's ten million Davids listening to this, that have the same interests, that want to know what is in, you said you're 50, you've been working at, you sold your first startup, then you work, you have such a singular life experience. This is what me and Daniel were talking about earlier. Like, who the hell sells their startup, works at a big company for 18 years, then becomes CEO.

AI assessment note: “It took me 32 years to find my path and another five and a half”