The Exchanges

Q How many employees did you have at Grok when you did the partnership with the video?

A About 450, but it was more difficult to manage than a typical group of 450. So in the military, depending on your rank, you are allowed to, um, to have a certain number of people reporting into you. And the higher your rank, the more you can have as an officer. But when you're, when you have scientists reporting to you, the number is actually much smaller, like dramatically smaller. Because I had such a creative organization, it was much harder to manage them. The problems manifested. And so it probably was more like managing a group of 5000 people than it was 450 in many ways. In other ways, it was like managing an even smaller group because innovations would just happen on their own. But, like, The better the people, the harder they are to manage.

AI assessment note: “About 450, but it was more difficult to manage than a typical group of 450.”

Q bias and applying it to not only the talent, but also these meetings you're having in product. Uh, in product design and, uh, things that would make your product better is actually really important. You mentioned before that you learned from an episode of Founders on Michael Jordan, uh, one way to do this, where he would challenge his teammates to bets. Why was that an interesting idea to you?

A When I heard your episode on Michael Jordan, I was thinking like, yeah, so he is very intentionally throwing his keys over the fence, so he has to go fetch them. What he's doing is Michael Jordan, he, he's a very sort of aggressive competitor. Where he would make bets on everything. Like, could you throw a quarter and hit a target closer or something like that? Just weird stuff like that. And he would just nonstop do it. Most people are afraid to sort of taunt someone else, a competitor, because if they lose, they're going to feel really, really bad. Remember, that loss bias is heavy. Like, if I'm like, we're going to go play basketball, I'm like, I'm going to wipe the floor with you. And then I lose. That's humiliating, right? What I suspect Michael Jordan was doing was he was very intentionally taunting the other players so that a loss would be humiliating to force himself to perform at superhuman levels. He was just doing it over and over again. Most people are so afraid of putting themselves out there and suffering the negative outcome that they won't get their hopes up. They will actually, um, keep, keep their sights much lower. But entrepreneurs, They start a company and they're like, of course I'm gonna be successful. I'm gonna tell everyone. I'm gonna go raise money. I'm gonna put my reputation on the line, and I'm gonna be forced to perform.

AI assessment note: “taunting the other players so that a loss would be humiliating to force himself to perform”

Q I'm glad you mentioned the thing about questions, because I have a series of quotes that I've saved from you, and I love your tweets, by the way. So you said, success in the information age was about being able to answer questions. Success in the AI age will be about being able to ask the right questions. Can you expand on that?

A Yeah, and, and this also goes towards a shift of going, people are moving from being ICs or individual contributors to all being leaders, but leaders of AI. And what really good leaders do is they don't do the work themselves. They don't have the answer themselves. They're just asking the question. They're just, you know, considering everything they're hearing, and then they ask the question that no one else asked, or everyone is thinking, but is afraid to ask. So with AI, because it can go off and solve all of these problems for you, it can do the research report. Like the question that you ask determines what you get, and that determines the output. From information age, like we were all trained To just answer questions. Like, that's what school's about. Remember this. Remember that. Remember this. With AI, you just ask AI. It knows. You just have to think of the right question. It's a fundamental shift.

AI assessment note: “the question that you ask determines what you get, and that determines the output.”

Q Why is telling people what to do unnatural to you?

A I work through questions. I like to, I like to set high level direction. So for me, my leadership style was come up with a goal that was so, it took me a while to get there, but come up with a goal that was so simple that I could put it on a challenge coin and give it to everyone. So everyone at Grok had a challenge coin that said, twenty-five million tokens per second and had a little graph of it going up, and everyone knew that was the thing to do. And it's sort of like when you ask, um, an agent, an AI agent, what, you know, to do something, the fewer constraints you give it, The more freedom it has to solve your problem. And so I liked to work with incredibly creative people who would come back with surprises. Say that part again. Say that part again. This is important. The fewer constraints? The fewer constraints that you give someone, the more freedom they have to solve the problem, and the more freedom they have to surprise you with the solution. So if you want to run a highly, highly creative and innovative organization, then what you really want to do is minimize the number of constraints, but you also have to give them the things that matter. If you Aren't able to very crisply distill what you're trying to accomplish, then either you're going to over constrain or under constrain the people. When you're trying to do something as a founder, you are inherently trying to …

AI assessment note: “The fewer constraints that you give someone, the more freedom they have to solve”

Q I'm going to go on a tangent just for a second, then we'll come back to this. I talked to a lot of founders about this recently, but they're, The whole point is, like, when agents are making payments, the amount of payments that are being going to be made is going to skyrocket. Do you have any, like, insight into that?

A Yeah, I think it's still early, and one of the limiters is payments aren't really built for this yet, but if you can make micropayments, the number of payments is going to skyrocket. Like, I did a little hobby project, and for the hobby project, I needed a couple of different phone numbers so I could have a bunch of different agents on with me on, um, Signal and WhatsApp. I had to go to Twilio, and I had to, like, I had to, like, prove I was a human in order to get the number and all this stuff, and it was just this big pain to get it done. If, on the other hand, I could have just done, if I had allocated a budget to the AI, and it could have just, you know, used that budget, they would have spent it, and I would never know, and it would just been within the budget.

AI assessment note: “if you can make micropayments, the number of payments is going to skyrocket.”

Q And why don't you have a driver's license?

A Cause I don't feel the need to drive and I'd rather think. I don't need to control driving. I want to control thinking. I want to focus. I want to be on my phone. I want to be doing something useful. And that's been the case since I was, you know, 19 years old. And so I'm happy to delegate things in a way that others are not. So one of the things that's different about my leadership is when I hire people, I hire very autonomous people who often go off and execute on their own, and they would be terrible in most corporate environments. But also I can't hire the same kinds of people. And that was true to me. Had I, you know, gone the other way, I wouldn't have been very successful. If other people go this way, they're not gonna be successful. Then again, there are a lot of things that are very similar, which is most of the best Silicon Valley leaders, they lead from a place of inspiring their people as opposed to, um, trying to, to get people to be afraid. But that is a form of leadership. There are plenty of leaders out there who are successful because they cause people to become afraid. And so you just have to pick the form of leadership that works for you, but also when you're picking where you're going to work early in your career, you should probably work somewhere where you're going to learn the lessons that are good for you. If you're more of a kind of person who can show …

AI assessment note: “Cause I don't feel the need to drive and I'd rather think.”