The Exchanges

Q What is it like working with SUMA? It's a real hospital?

A It's a real hospital. It's a, it's a real hospital in Akron, Ohio, and you know, I, I gotta hand it to Hemant. The, the, the beauty of GC and I think Hemant is we are so ambitious, and they are not content being a VC firm that makes just great returns for LPs by investing in a Series A, And, you know, the two or three companies that matter every year getting into the rounds, they really want to bend the universe. And part of that means going to Akron, Ohio, buying a system that was on track to go bankrupt in, in the next couple of years and transforming it with AI. There are a lot of people that would be more than happy to, you know, sell tools to the miners and make a lot of money doing that. I think it takes a special person and a special organization to say, no, we're, we're actually going to go direct. And we're going to show the world that you can build a better hospital, and you can build a better health system, and you can do it today. You don't have to wait around and just make your money on software. Uh, we had RFK Jr. visit the hospital last week, and we, we hosted him there, and it was an amazing visit, showing him the transformation with ambient documentation on ComerStack, with ADOC, which is a, an imaging-based company that's essentially automating a lot of the scan process. Um, and, and so we, you know, one of the things that we've, we've noticed at SUMA is, The,…

AI assessment note: “It's a real hospital in Akron, Ohio, and you know, I, I gotta hand”

Q What's the biggest takeaway, lesson, or challenge that you've had through those processes?

A The, I think the number one learning in M&A is there's a lot of people that think M&A is about finding the perfect asset or acquiring the perfect asset and diligencing every, you know, making sure that it's pristine. Pristine assets are usually You know, there's no, there's no price disparity. There's no advantage that you can take of, of a, you know, of a pristine asset. Um, most M&A, and I think most good M&A, there are skeletons. There are things that you have to internalize that are not working in the company, and be okay with that because you have the other pieces that will make it work. You know, in the case of Augmedics, uh, great distribution, great legacy relationships, but the pace of innovation wasn't there, and they didn't have a software engineering team that was iterating every week. Uh, or in some cases every day, which is what you need in, in, in the age of LLMs. And when we brought that in, I mean, it just, it created so much value at HCA. It created so much value at Sutter. It's created so much value at our other, these other health system partners. Um, and, and so, but we have to be okay with the fact that it was suboptimal in some ways, and we were going to plug those things out and make a quick change. I'd say number two is you have to be very ruthless about stating what the culture of the combined business is. You can't, I think this idea of you acquire co…

AI assessment note: “the number one learning in M&A is there's a lot of people that think”

Q And thanks for taking the time out of the sprint to do this. I know it might sound redundant talking about the size of the market today, but it is astronomical. It is crazy. So could you talk about the size of the mag seven when they IPO versus today, the AI leaders and their size? It's a wild comparison.

A Yeah. Um, So the biggest of the Mag-Seven was Meta in 2012, IPO'd around a hundred billion dollars. All of the predecessors had IPO'd in the nineties, you know, in the 10 to fifty billion dollar range, which for that time was very large. But today you look, um, OpenAI's most recent round was 800 plus billion dollars. Um, SpaceX is most recent, you know, when they did the transaction with XAI was 1.25 trillion dollars. Um, Anthropix last round was, you know, high 300 of billions. Um, it's rumored to be significantly higher their next round. And so the fact that you now have Private companies that are breaking into pretty much the top 25 in the world before they even go public. It's an unprecedented time, but I think that's what makes AI so exciting, is that you have these private companies that are capturing so much value and so much growth while staying private, and I think that that is like nothing we've ever seen before.

AI assessment note: “So the biggest of the Mag-Seven was Meta in 2012, IPO'd around a hundred billion”

Q In our interview with Thomas, he was talking about the bank teller and how that actually evolved. It didn't really actually decrease any jobs. There were just more jobs spread out. Um, so that's always a hot topic. So in talking about market dynamics, you have this framework of sellers of shortage versus buyers of shortage. Can you break that down? Who's winning and, and what's kind of the explanation?

A Yeah. So we try to simplify sellers and buyers A shortage in the concept of you have semiconductor companies, you have power, you have memory, infrastructure, everything where, um, you have a fixed amount of capacity and you have greater demand, and that greater demand is driving price increases, margin expansion, and when price is the main lever of your revenue growth and you have fixed costs, your operating profit actually go up multiples of what your price increases or your revenue is growing at, and so we've seen companies that have been able to increase their earnings Three, four, five, six, seven X, just in a matter of a year or two. Companies that would have been plus or minus a certain range for, you know, 1020 years. And so, um, these shortages, which are critical to AI, right, whether it's memory, hard drives, like their shortage to kind of the development of AI, have driven significant earnings power, and the market is rewarding that set of earnings. What the market is not rewarding, and not rewarding as much, is the, the companies that are buying That shortage. And so that would be the companies that are putting the capex into the ground. And so if you look at the multiples of Microsoft, of Amazon, of Meta, they've actually all compressed in the last couple of years because their capex is going up. And if you just think about it, if memory pricing goes up a hundred …

AI assessment note: “we try to simplify sellers and buyers A shortage in the concept of”

Q So, who was involved in, like, what was the actual process?

A So it started as each of us writes. We have a research team within Contrary. So I run the research team. We have an editor, we have a research associate, and we have basically a small army of research fellows that are more people who are working in the industry. They're engineers. They're working in investing, whatever it might be. But in order to get exposure on the writing side, they will come and write with us about things they're interested in. So we have this massive army. So over the years, there have been a lot of contributors to that, that, uh, project. I have been sort of the main driving force in trying to, in trying to get it across the finish line, um, and then in terms of process, it started out very much as, like, me just consuming everything there was. Reading every Anderil blog post that they've ever put out, every press release, listening to dozens of interviews with each of the individual founding members, and all kinds of different reports, and white papers, and, and stuff like that. Reading several books, eventually, once we get into the deeper military history, then it's It's not enough to watch a YouTube video. You actually have to go back and read the literature. And so a lot of it was just immersing myself in a ton of the underlying resources. Then the team collaboration really came from, okay, how do you take this mountain of context and structure it in…

AI assessment note: “We have an editor, we have a research associate... in terms of process, it started out”

Q Turing helps top companies realize AI that's more capable, more adaptable, and more effective. With Turing, discover how AI can accelerate your business growth. To learn more, visit Turing.com slash sorcery. Spelt S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. That's Turing.com slash sorcery. I think there are certainly some misconceptions around drones and applications, so could you just share more about what you focus on at Skydio and how it differentiates between this boom in defense?

A So drones are like, it's a very general purpose technology. I mean, it's like computers, right? Computers show up all over the place for all different kinds of things. We are super focused on flying sensor platforms, and our biggest, fastest growing businesses are in the civilian sector. They're not in defense. We work with US military. We're super proud of that work. Our products are doing amazing things there, and that business is, is great and growing. But the thing that I think is much less seen and appreciated Is this kind of critical infrastructure you work? You know, an energy utility just doing persistent inspection with drones and proactively finding issues where they can spot a defect in one of their, like, conductors and fix it before it blows up and causes an outage, or in the worst case, causes a fire. The alternative is having a person climb that pole or flying a manned helicopter down there, which is very dangerous and expensive. And so, it's, it's awesome work to get to be a part of, and, and part of the fun for me is just getting in there and learning about these industries, and the people that do this work on a daily basis are special. The one that I think is going to get more and more visible is law enforcement and public safety. Having drones respond to nine one one calls flying out of docks. That's happening. Skydio drones are in most major cities respondin…

AI assessment note: “our biggest, fastest growing businesses are in the civilian sector. They're not in defense.”

Q Could you share how the product has expanded over time and their different use cases?

A So for the first 10 years of the company, we were basically solely focused on trying to build a really good medium-sized quadcopter, which is the most versatile kind of workhorse drone, and then for the last six, seven years, focused on doing that in the context of a dock, so it can fly remotely and autonomously. So we've been very narrow for most of the life of the company, but we're now at a point where that product is really working at scale, X-Ten and dock for X-Ten. And the core technology that sits behind it has gotten very mature. All the hardware, the cameras, the compute, the sensors, all the low-level firmware to run these things, then the core autonomy system that has, at this point, been exposed and built on hundreds of thousands, millions of flights, and all the, the little learnings that go into that. So now we're in a position to use that core technology to apply it to different form factors and use cases, and that's where the indoor drone comes into place, because a lot of Dangerous work happens indoors. It's where the fixed wing drone that can cover much longer ranges comes into play. And it's a very exciting, fun time to basically like take these mature technology building blocks and be able to pretty quickly assemble them into a fundamentally new capability. And then we're also in the great position that our customers are asking us for these things. Like, you…

AI assessment note: “use that core technology to apply it to different form factors and use cases”

Q and get back to building. Visit deel.com slash sorcery. That's deel.com slash s-o-u-r-c-e-r-y. Enterprise AI runs on Merge, the AI infra platform for integrations, agent tooling, and model orchestration, so your teams ship product, not plumbing. Mistral, Dropbox, and Drada already trust Merge in production. Start building at merge.dev. Your biggest competitor is China. So could you talk about how that's evolved with DJI, and what is that like, honestly?

A Yeah, so we have, we have the great joy, and we've had it for the last 12 years, of being the U.S. underdog against the best of Chinese industry, early state-sponsored Chinese industry. It's great. You know, I, I think, I think competition is generally great. It pushes us to be better. In the case of DJI, we have some interesting history. So we, we actually met them in 2014, so we were a seed stage company. We had, had just, ah, basically gotten started, and they found out about us and, and basically pretty quickly became interested in, in acquiring the company. And through that process, we met their leadership. We visited China, Shenzhen, ultimately decided not to do it. The main reason we decided not to do it was because we felt like they didn't really understand the importance of autonomy and how much that was going to change who could use drones and how they could use them. We felt like it was really important. And, you know, we believed in our ability to execute against it. So our strategy has, has not been to try to kind of like Copy what the Chinese drone companies are doing. I mean, DJI is incredibly impressive from a technology standpoint, especially on the hardware, but we've really focused on building these end to end solution capable solutions that use autonomy and flying robots to solve problems, uh, that, that customers couldn't get any other way. I mean, I think …

AI assessment note: “In the case of DJI, we have some interesting history. So we, we actually met them in 2014”

Q Wow. So in terms of the funding side of Exowatt, how much have you raised to date and who are your investors?

A Yeah, we've been super fortunate to have the best investors back the company. So as I mentioned, we launched it from a venture studio called Atomic. Uh, they initially gave us the pre-seed funding, if you will. And then in 2024, we came out of stealth and we launched our, uh, raise our seed round, which was led by Catherine Boylett, Andreessen, and Sam Altman. Um, and, uh, then, uh, later that year, about six months later, we raised our series A, Um, and that was led by Felicis and, uh, and then AD-N-D and MVP. So in total, we've raised about a hundred and forty million dollars, um, over the last two years, and it's been great. I mean, we've got tons of great investors with, uh, tons of knowledge about the industry and also very deep pockets to help us scale the business. Uh, but if we think about how do we take this to the next level and, and, and how do we deploy multi-gigawatts, uh, scale projects, We'll need even more funding. And so we're going to be, uh, making some announcements on that front very soon as well.

AI assessment note: “in total, we've raised about a hundred and forty million dollars”

Q What countries are you not working in? You guys have extreme global reach.

A We're not working in China. China's the only country that I think we probably won't be in maybe ever, but certainly anytime soon. Um, sometimes people say that's because we do defense work. That's part of it. Um, sometimes they say, well, you know, IP restrictions. That's, that's part of it. Um, but yeah, all of that combined equals we don't have, you know, we don't, we don't have a presence in China, but everywhere else we do, and most of the areas of the world, we already have some presence. Our most recent kind of expansion has been Australia. Uh, we opened also in India and UK offices last year, about 18 sites globally. Um, I think as we kind of look at the future, you know, Australia could be one of those, you know, countries where we're doing driverless trucks, and we're doing a bunch of different, you know, ports, and suddenly you had that full connection happening, where that, that efficiency is unlocked in a real way. Um, but, uh, I think what I want to really do, and if we, if we can do it, it's a little bit of our goal, Is once we get into automating, you know, parts of ports, then we could go to a LatAm country, and, uh, we don't have anything in Latin America right now, so maybe a Brazil, or enter that region through mining, and so you can see we're kind of hopscotching like a board game throughout, throughout the planet. I think probably the furthest out is Africa…

AI assessment note: “We're not working in China. China's the only country that I think we probably won't be in”

Q Film, gaming, sci-fi has always kind of been The place to go to, to imagine the future. Like it's, it's all about imagination. So when you built out Roblox and as you build out the future of Roblox, what are your personal inspirations and where do you pull from that kind of stuff? Is it certain movies? Is it sci-fi? Where are you getting your inspiration?

A I love sci-fi movies. I like the ones that are the most realistic, actually. So, um, it's really hard, I think, to make a good realistic sci-fi movie. I was trying to get my kids to watch 2001, a space odyssey. Like it's so slow, it goes whatever, but it holds up so well today. Just like, oh my gosh, I can't believe they made that in the sixties and seventies. So I do take a little inspiration from the realism of that. And it's, it's interesting that the HAL computer in that movie is actually, was viewed at the time of that movie as just like unbelievable, and now I think that's pretty much a solved problem. I think the, um, the example I think for sci-fi that I believe will happen is any kind of holodeck or simulated environment type thing. So Star Trek, they use the holodeck all the time. They go in there, Communicate with the holodecks, see other people in that feels completely realistic, and I think that's where we're going with our technology. We've said publicly, like, there's still a lot of work to do here to have 10,000 people, photorealistic, simulation of a rock concert, looks like film, you're with your friends, you can dance, or you can chat, so that's, that's where we see this going, and that, I think that really ends up being not just a gaming technology, uh, communication, entertainment, uh, co-working type technology.

AI assessment note: “I was trying to get my kids to watch 2001, a space odyssey.”

Q at your very cool property on West Adams in LA, and when I was talking to you beforehand, she and you were both talking about how you got allocation in the companies and essentially won them over because you have such tight partnerships and ways to do strategic things. So can you walk through some of the ways that you're strategically a value add, actually like a value add investor?

A Before I speak specifically about the value add, The best value add is no value add. My opinion is that you want long-term passive capital, which is what the best capital is. Second best is that is that then you add, you add value. So, so, um, we have two million customers. We actually did some data enrichment. So now we know like a lot about the customers. And so, um, and so we did, we've done a bunch of partnerships. Like the one that was most successful is ramp. We went out to our, we actually only went to half to half our customers, went out to a million customers and, and ramp. It was sort of perfect because it was sort of well known, but not, hadn't really hit the public awareness about a year ago. And, um, and we said, look, we invested in ramp. One of the ways that we, we underwrite companies is we use the companies at, at, at Fundrise. And so like literally every one of our Team members has a ramp card and there's like, oh my God, so much better. It's so much better than Amex. It's like crazy. And we just went out to our customers and said, we use this product. We're not getting paid to say this. We're invested in this company. Genuinely is the best product. And I think we were the most successful ramp partnership ever.

AI assessment note: “Like the one that was most successful is ramp. We went out to... a million customers”

Q And then on the family offices point, family offices are taking off. They're becoming a new hype wave. They're, they're all over the place, but you're saying single family offices are very difficult. Why is that? And why should people avoid doing that as a first step?

A Um, I mean, the allure is cool. I have my own family office, but you know, what are you trying to accomplish? So if, if what you're trying to accomplish is have someone help you a little bit with your sort of financial reporting and all that's, you can call that a family office. I guess the definition of family office is very broad, so it could include all sorts of things. But if you're trying to build a multi-asset class portfolio, global multi-asset class portfolio, you're going to hire a bunch of these sort of professional investors I mentioned. I don't know, you need five, six, seven of them, different asset classes. You've got, you know, you've got fixed income, obviously, stocks, which are, you know, more straightforward, I'd say, but then you've got venture capital, private equity, real estate and real assets, credit, and all these things are specialties that require people. So how are you going to do that and pay these people, uh, if your balance sheet isn't very big? And I mean, billions, right? Otherwise, the compensation you're paying to this team is eating up Whatever benefit you might be getting, right? The other challenge I found is that family offices have real trouble retaining the talent because, you know, you hire someone, they're ambitious, they have a career path. The, the principle of the family is signing up really to be a manager of an asset management co…

AI assessment note: “compensation you're paying to this team is eating up Whatever benefit you might be getting”

Q What role did the Reddit communities play in this process?

A Well, so one of the reasons to go public is I wanted our, our users who have a sense of ownership over Reddit, a deep sense of ownership that they've earned, right? Everything interesting about Reddit is created by our users. I wanted them to be able to actually be owners of Reddit. And so part of, part of our IPO was doing one of the largest directed share programs ever to let users buy into the IPO at the IPO price at 34 dollars. In a normal IPO, what would happen is the retail investors, they invest at the first trade. So if there's a pop, it would be higher. So we popped to 47 dollars. That would normally be their price. But we're like, we want the users to be able to buy in at the same price that the IPO investors get. And my only regret is not getting more users into that program. We actually had capacity to do a lot more, um, The, what we were fighting, and I, I learned some lessons here. Uh, we had within the last year of, during our IPO, we got in a big fight with our user base over the API, API access. So a lot of the users were mad at us and then didn't invest in the IPO. And because of the quiet period, you can't really say anything. You can't sell the stock. And there's good reasons for that, obviously. Um, So there was a, a negative sentiment among our users. So we did get a lot in. Every user who came into our DSP, we fulfilled their full order, and I just wish w…

AI assessment note: “part of our IPO was doing one of the largest directed share programs ever”

Q That's pretty good. Great. And what was it? It was When you joined in 2015, you're at twelve million in revenue. So you went from twelve million in revenue in 2015, rejoined, to 2025 of 2.2 billion. Did you think that was going to happen?

A In 2015, I didn't, I did not think that was going to happen because I didn't think more than maybe a week ahead. We were so in the present then. So in the present, just trying to save the company, turn the company around. So, no, I did not think that was gonna happen. Um, and, you know, we, we found our, it took a while to find our voice on the business side. Turns out, I mean, turns out ads is great. Ads, um, as a business model, this is coming from the person. I told you, I didn't like ads. Um, Add scales. So it's, it's a business model that scales with usage. So it's very healthy there. Um, and it turns out it's a business model that's aligned with just what people talk about, which is what Reddit is. And so, uh, there's a natural fit. Um, I think one of the most important things we did. So my partner in running Reddit is Jen Wong. She joined us. She's our COO. She joined us in 2018. And. One of the biggest decisions we made around then was we were going to invest in our own ad tech. So our own ad server, our own tracking, our own measurement, all of this. We were small to do that. Um, and we moved off of programmatic. So most websites or platforms smaller than Reddit will use some ad network. Um, so if somebody else sells your ads for you, you just basically, and you, and you split it. So you give them the inventory, they sell it, you take a rev share. We said, as a matter …

AI assessment note: “In 2015, I didn't, I did not think that was going to happen”

Q That's really cool. Um, another underrated thing I learned when I was doing some research on you. So you have acquisitions as a pretty big part and component of the business. I was surprised with how many acquisitions you've done to date. So what is the strategy there?

A Um, I think M&A is a core muscle. I think companies that don't know how to do M&A's, um, have problem scaling. So it was always very important for us to bring that core competence inside of the business, and we're lucky enough that some of our executives actually have done it multiple times in the past. The way we think about M&A is very straightforward, right? Like, either we are looking specifically in our markets at companies in our space that have just not been able to scale the way we have, But have really good talent and have, like, amazing customer base and, you know, the revenue, uh, is decent where it makes sense for us to bring them in and just, like, be able to bring the customer base and work with them. So pure acquisition on that front. And the other part, which is kind of sad and happy at the same time, but it was a big realization for me, is as we get to seven years in, I'm still very, very hungry to build, but the seven years of knowledge that I built around payroll and HR, It's a little hard for me to build the depth that I have there on new products. So if you think about like performance review or ATS or compensation management, which are like very important key topics in HR, for example, it's just really hard to get the depth of knowledge that I would have had if I was starting a company just in compensation management today. And the value of bringing people…

AI assessment note: “The way we think about M&A is very straightforward, right? Like, either we are looking”

Q What is the most underrated company you've invested in?

A The most underappreciated company in America right now is Flock Safety. Uh, Garrett Langley should be a national hero. They got a lot of positive press attention in December around the Brown and MIT case. Their camera helped solve and find, you know, the, the criminal. When we look at it though, that's just like a normal day in Flock's life. Flock solves over 2800 cases every day. That's 15% of reported crime in America. And so, like, there's a lot of, oh, like, is tech doing good in the world? AI, is it good for humanity? Like, Flock is an incredible example, like, one I'm so proud, proud of, and like, we need Flock. If we want to eliminate crime in America, We need to deter criminals from doing bad things, right? Like we don't want bad guys to think they can get away with it. 50% of murders are unsolved in America. We need flock to be deployed and eliminate all crime.

AI assessment note: “The most underappreciated company in America right now is Flock Safety.”

Q How did Andreessen originally invest into 11 and then how did you Come in with the growth fund. What was the process?

A Yeah, it's a great representation of what we were talking about before. Um, Jennifer, Brian, and Justine on our early stage team, uh, got to know Maddie, swooped in, um, led the Series A, um, involved a, you know, flight over to London to get the, you know, term she had signed, all those fun, fun things. Um, but they maintained a really special relationship with Maddie, um, We led or co-led the A, B, and C. Um, the A and B, our early stage team did, uh, we co-led the, the C last year and our big participants in this round. Um, it's one where we got to know Maddie, uh, through the B, um, stayed close to him throughout the year, watched his progress, tried to be helpful. We engaged our operating team a lot there too. Um, our, like, revenue operations team plugged in. This is a company that has, like, Grown in record time. And what, what's unique about it relative to a lot of companies is they have this like beautiful organic consumer business that like people look at 11 Labs and they're like, oh, how many like consumers, prosumers, influencers are going to use this? Like it's going to run out of, uh, room on the consumer side. It continues to like hum. It's amazing and, and highly organic. The enterprise business Like has also been beautiful, and it's like very rare to have like a great consumer business and a great enterprise business. Fast forward to today, the enterprise busin…

AI assessment note: “Jennifer, Brian, and Justine on our early stage team... led the Series A”

Q Why did you choose Kalshi over Polymarket? Did you look at Polymarket too?

A I, uh, am familiar with both companies. It would be hard to study the space and not be. When you look at Kalshi, um, and their origins with Tarek and Luana, it's hard to find two more resilient founders. They were getting punched in the face for four years and told no. And they took the Difficult, but let's say more responsible path towards getting licenses, being the first CFTC regulated prediction market. And as like, we reflect on why that was important to us. Like, I think a lot of what we saw in them stem from our investment in Coinbase and them taking a regulatory first approach. Um, taking a regulatory first approach builds trust with consumers, regulators, partners. And so, if you fast forward for Kalshi's journey, They have the most consumers and users today. That wasn't always the case, and I can talk about that in a minute. Um, they were first to get regulatory approval. They have Robinhood and Coinbase as partners, CNN, CNBC as partners. These are like real mature organizations that are entrusting Kalshi. You can't get those types of relationships unless you play by the rules. When we made our investment, uh, Calci was number two in reported volume, um, and, uh, you know, we, we take great pride in backing market leaders, and so when someone's in a number two position, we have to have a really strong thesis. A lot of that stems to what I just said about Tarek and Lu…

AI assessment note: “they took the Difficult, but let's say more responsible path towards getting licenses”

Q I'm just so curious from a cultural standpoint. So you're head of IR, but I've also heard everybody here has multiple hats. So what other roles do you have? And is that like, what is it like working here now under CAS and that transition?

A It's been pretty incredible. Yeah. So depending on the day, it's investor relations. I kind of came up doing capital markets, a little bit of corporate development, some finance and strategy really just kind of depends on, uh, the task for the day. I think what's been really remarkable and what Kaz has honestly, like, taught me is that we're all probably a little more capable than we sometimes give ourselves credit for. So when Kaz came in, he joined at the end of September, and we did our Q-three earnings call just a couple weeks later. And, you know, before Kaz, we had done things pretty much, you know, by the books. We had the, the boring, just, you know, dial an audio call. It was, you know, a shareholder letter with, like, very, like, basic script. Kaz came in and day one was like, guys, we're doing video live stream. I want to stream it on Robinhood, which we were the first company to actually stream our earnings on Robinhood, other than Robinhood themselves. You know, we're getting rid of the shareholder letter. We are going to do say Q and A. And it was like, what it was like, I would have thought that we could do one of those every quarter. And like that, that was like the most that we could do, but Kaz set a high target and said, Hey Judd, I know that, you know, This sounds like a lot, but I know you guys can do it. And sure enough, you know, we got to production. It …

AI assessment note: “depending on the day, it's investor relations. I kind of came up doing capital markets”

Q From your time at Shopify, what were the biggest lessons you learned there from Toby?

A Uh, first of all, Toby is one of one. Um, like there's a reason why everyone says he is the founder other founders like. He's one of one. Let's just, like, I think there's no, it's hard to exaggerate that. Um, the thing I deeply appreciated by Toby is he had found words for ideas that are hard to describe. Let me give you, like, the one that I think is incredibly important. Um, there is an idea in finance called a discount rate. I went to business school and they say there's only three rules you learn in business school. Money is good. More money is better. Money now is better than money later. Those are the three rules of business school. Um, so everyone has this intuition about discount rates, i.e. if you give me a hundred dollars today, that's better than a hundred dollars tomorrow. But unfortunately, everyone has a wrong intuition about it. People apply too large a discount rate to future. So what ends up happening is people very frequently sell future growth at a massive discount for today's stock price. And the result of that, by the way, very objectively is PayPal. Like over and over again, that company made all the wrong decisions because they cared more about today than 10 years from now. And guess what? It is now 10 years from now, and the company's in deep trouble. I realize that most public company CEOs also don't talk this openly about other public companies, but i…

AI assessment note: “Toby had this very wonderful mentality of, um, applying essentially a zero discount rate”

Q For people who might not know what a BCI is or what BCI is, could you explain what that is?

A Oh yeah, sure. Uh, so it's a brain computer interface. So something that, uh, directly inputs and outputs information into your brain and connects to your neurons. So the most famous example is obviously, um, Neuralink, uh, from Elon. And what Neuralink is doing is having this robot that is inserting these threads into your brain and They're, they're able to do a lot of really cool things with that, so they can, uh, you know, they can give someone who was not able to move, uh, his arms for a very long time, uh, now able to control the cursor and use a computer again, etc. So, um, that, that has been like a standard application, but, and, and there's more ideas, you know, uh, making blind people see again, or at least, Approximately, uh, science and Max Hodak have been working on that, which I think is also super cool. So, but that's a, that's a general idea. The general idea is like BCIs are all kinds of systems that can directly interface with the brain. And the long-term goal is that you get to much higher bandwidth than what we can do with a keyboard. Yeah, that's, that's, I guess that's cool.

AI assessment note: “so it's a brain computer interface. So something that, uh, directly inputs and outputs”

Q I have to ask, like, what is both of yours day-to-day like? Like, what time do you wake up? What time do you go to bed? How do you manage all the different projects?

A Yeah, I would say it's very different, uh, depending on traveling, but my most, like, consistent schedule, uh, would be when I'm in, you know, in training boxing, um, and, you know, I'll wake up at 10 a.m., um, be in the gym at 12:30, but in the morning I, I meditate, get in the ice bath, Um, I sit outside in my backyard. The, my chef brings me over breakfast. I start jamming on the phone, getting like any early morning, uh, texts out of the way, um, getting things coordinated for the day, and then drive over to the gym. Usually that's, that could be 20 rounds of sparring, whatever. Um, Maybe some strength and conditioning after that. Come home. Lunch. Recovery. Hyperbaric. Red light. All the different things. More. Um, another ice bath. Then I will jump on calls for like one to two hours depending on the day in between the trainings. Take a nap as fast as possible. Um, one hour nap. Wake up. And it's my second practice, um, at 7:30 p.m., and then, yeah, probably, like, going to the track, running five miles, whatever it might be. It could be another boxing session, um, and then, yeah, come home, keep jamming. That's probably when I work with my content team at night, because they all live right near me, and so, Uh, just focus on the content side of things and then probably watch a movie and go to sleep.

AI assessment note: “I'll wake up at 10 a.m., um, be in the gym at 12:30”

Q That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Um, well, I want to ask this question. So we went over like, You know, what you look for in investments and all that kind of stuff, but I want to know what informs you, and who is someone that you admire most, and what have you learned from them?

A I think somebody I admire the most is probably, like, Arvind that glean. I'll tell you the reasons I admire him. Number one, I, I think, like, I love, like, I love the Japanese philosophy of, you know, respect your craft. You do work because that's what people do. Um, you don't do work to win. You don't do work to be number one. You don't do work to have a high ego about what you do. Um, and I think in a weird way, amongst people I've worked with, Arvind absolutely embodies that. Um, he told me something which made no sense at the time, and I'm like, of course he would say that, um, to, uh, in the early days, and it stuck with me, and he said, Didi, don't complain about hard work. Hard work is a gift. And if you wake up where you are doing the job that you do, and you can work hard, you don't know how lucky you have it. Most people can't do that. Um, and at the time I'm like, you're the, you're the boss. Of course you would say that. Um, but he also works despite having, you know, a paper net worth of multi billions of dollars. He works more than almost anybody I know at that level. He has no joy in ego stuff, events, podcasts. He hates them. I know he hates them. Like he goes to them because he has to, because he's a CEO in the face of the company. He doesn't like that stuff. He doesn't buy flamboyant things. He drives shitty cars. He lives in a house that, you know, we joke t…

AI assessment note: “I think somebody I admire the most is probably, like, Arvind that glean.”

Q That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Um, well, I want to ask this question. So we went over like, You know, what you look for in investments and all that kind of stuff, but I want to know what informs you, and who is someone that you admire most, and what have you learned from them?

A I think somebody I admire the most is probably, like, Arvind that glean. I'll tell you the reasons I admire him. Number one, I, I think, like, I love, like, I love the Japanese philosophy of, you know, respect your craft. You do work because that's what people do. Um, you don't do work to win. You don't do work to be number one. You don't do work to have a high ego about what you do. Um, and I think in a weird way, amongst people I've worked with, Arvind absolutely embodies that. Um, he told me something which made no sense at the time, and I'm like, of course he would say that, um, to, uh, in the early days, and it stuck with me, and he said, Didi, don't complain about hard work. Hard work is a gift. And if you wake up where you are doing the job that you do, and you can work hard, you don't know how lucky you have it. Most people can't do that. Um, and at the time I'm like, you're the, you're the boss. Of course you would say that. Um, but he also works despite having, you know, a paper net worth of multi billions of dollars. He works more than almost anybody I know at that level. He has no joy in ego stuff, events, podcasts. He hates them. I know he hates them. Like he goes to them because he has to, because he's a CEO in the face of the company. He doesn't like that stuff. He doesn't buy flamboyant things. He drives shitty cars. He lives in a house that, you know, we joke t…

AI assessment note: “somebody I admire the most is probably, like, Arvind that glean.”

Q That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Um, well, I want to ask this question. So we went over like, You know, what you look for in investments and all that kind of stuff, but I want to know what informs you, and who is someone that you admire most, and what have you learned from them?

A I think somebody I admire the most is probably, like, Arvind that glean. I'll tell you the reasons I admire him. Number one, I, I think, like, I love, like, I love the Japanese philosophy of, you know, respect your craft. You do work because that's what people do. Um, you don't do work to win. You don't do work to be number one. You don't do work to have a high ego about what you do. Um, and I think in a weird way, amongst people I've worked with, Arvind absolutely embodies that. Um, he told me something which made no sense at the time, and I'm like, of course he would say that, um, to, uh, in the early days, and it stuck with me, and he said, Didi, don't complain about hard work. Hard work is a gift. And if you wake up where you are doing the job that you do, and you can work hard, you don't know how lucky you have it. Most people can't do that. Um, and at the time I'm like, you're the, you're the boss. Of course you would say that. Um, but he also works despite having, you know, a paper net worth of multi billions of dollars. He works more than almost anybody I know at that level. He has no joy in ego stuff, events, podcasts. He hates them. I know he hates them. Like he goes to them because he has to, because he's a CEO in the face of the company. He doesn't like that stuff. He doesn't buy flamboyant things. He drives shitty cars. He lives in a house that, you know, we joke t…

AI assessment note: “somebody I admire the most is probably, like, Arvind that glean.”

Q always frame this because Brex is all about performance. Spending smarter, moving faster. The intelligent as fuck. I'm sorry. Intelligent agentic finance platform. So core component that I believe with performance is all about who you surround yourself with or who you are, you admire, who you look up to. So who is that for you? Is there anybody, especially as you go through a huge life milestone like this?

A Yeah. I would say, I think there are sort of two buckets, right? There's the, You know, the sort of aspirational folks that, you know, the more you learn about the way they see the world, the more you can build a little bit of a mental model of who they are. Uh, I think for me, the, the people that I think are pretty tremendous at this, uh, Steve Jobs for me is a very clear one, uh, of transcending, you know, where technology ends and where Art, human connection starts. I think that's a very special combo. Um, I would say the second one is, uh, I'm a big fan of Charlie Munger. I think he has this very visceral way of, uh, understanding and, and, and sort of exploiting reality. Um, and it was very useful. A lot of the mental models that he has over the past two and a half years at Brex. Um, and, uh, and, you know, I think, I think there's a lot of companies that I admire. I mean, I think You know, Brian from Airbnb. It's fantastic. Tony from DoorDash. Uh, I learned a lot from a lot of these folks. Um, but, but, you know, when, when I think into sort of who are the people that I actually spend a lot of time with day to day, uh, that were incredibly inspiring. Um, I would say, uh, Victor Lozarty, who was a benchmark and now is running and running and crushing his own fund. Uh, he's been on my board since day one. He was our, one of our first early investors. He's Brazilian. Um, Li…

AI assessment note: “I think there are sort of two buckets, right? There's the, You know, the sort of aspirational folks”

Q treasury, and FDIC protection into one powerful account. You can send and receive money globally at lightning speeds, get 20 times the standard FDIC coverage through their partner banks, and even high yield from day one. With same day and even same hour liquidity, access your funds So of, of those things, I also want to talk about Starlink. Could you break down that business for people who don't know?

A Starlink is an incredible business. You know, it's right now, Kind of the first wave of Starlink was providing consumer internet from space, primarily in rural areas. So the way it works in simple terms is you launch a rocket. The rocket, like the initial V-one had about 60 Starlink satellites per launch. So you have these satellites in the sky that, you know, we've now kind of gone to two or three generations past that. So you have, we now have about 9000 satellites in space. These satellites can talk to each other using laser links, so they're passing huge amounts of data, you know, terribus per second, back and forth in the constellation, and then you have this giant space infrastructure, and then on the ground people have user terminals, which is just a little dish that's 10 inches wide or 12 inches wide or so, that It's what's called a phased ray antenna, and it's basically a bunch of radio waves that you can steer to, um, basically lock onto a satellite and move from one satellite to the next as, you know, every 20 seconds or so as a satellite is moving out of view. Um, all right, and So basically all it takes is these ground stations, sorry, these ground terminals at your house, or on your car, or whatever, or on an airplane now. You have these satellites in the sky. Data is moving from satellites to the ground, and in space, and we kind of built the equivalent of all th…

AI assessment note: “Kind of the first wave of Starlink was providing consumer internet from space”

Q Coming into this role as CEO, you've been here almost over two years now. What has been the biggest surprise for you leading through one of the most volatile environments?

A I'm very pleasantly surprised by how quickly, ah, a pretty large team in dozens of countries has adapted to a very new environment of operating. Two years ago, AI wasn't nice to have, but no one thought that it would affect their day-to-day life. And yet, what we expect, for example, from, I expect our sales team to be able to show off Snowflake Intelligence, ideally on their phone, every single day. That was not something that I thought would happen all that quickly. Similarly, solution engineers went from people that clicked things on screen And maybe wrote a SQL query or two, to actually being really good and proficient with coding agents in order to deploy actual problem, you know, solutions to problems for our customers. Similarly, our engineers have gone from, we are a database company, we make 24 month plans. Database companies love making long plans, to, I guess we'll figure out what we do next week, and act week on week. I think That's been a very pleasant surprise for what I said, what I said started as a database company. Companies don't change that quickly, but I think the company has transformed itself very, very quickly. It doesn't come easy. It is, it is hard, but I think that's been very positive.

AI assessment note: “I'm very pleasantly surprised by how quickly, ah, a pretty large team in dozens”

Q I'm really curious, like, because we're in such a competitive environment, you, you alluded to this a bit, like culturally, it's totally different in, even from like the beginning of last year. So how do you keep the teams motivated and kind of, uh, able to weather the storm with you as it, as it changes so much?

A You have to embrace change. And, um, you also have to find people. There are a class of people that thrive under change. You have to make sure that they are in positions of being able to have an impact. When we wanted to roll our coding agents, for example, to our solutions team, we identified 35, forty-odd people that were naturally inclined to want to go learn, to want to go tinker. You hold them as exemplars to the rest of the team and, ah, help spread the message, help spread change through. Winning over iconic people with extra effort makes a huge difference. I joke to people that I could scream from the rooftops to all my engineers about how they really need to use coding agents. It's not going to have that much impact. They're going to go like, what does he know about software engineering? On the other hand, Benoit, our iconic founder, fell in love with coding agents. And Benoit is a truly religious figure. When he believes in something, trust me, you're going to hear about it. And every engineer that he met heard about the impact that these coding agents had on Benvo's own day-to-day work. That had a huge impact. So you also need to be strategic about who do you have representing change. And the more you can have naturally influential people represent change, the easier it's going to go.

AI assessment note: “You hold them as exemplars to the rest of the team and, ah, help spread”