Investor Elad Gil’s next moves

0:00People always say, "Oh, when's the first billion dollar single person company?" That was Minecraft. That was over a decade ago. You invested in everything from notion, open door, pager duty, Andre, Airbnb. Basically, everything software is AI. It's going to put the power of building things in the hands of millions of people who couldn't do it before. It's

0:18already doing that. What are you seeing today that's exciting for the future? I got with me El Gil, a guy with two first names and an incredible freaking track record. The next thing presented by Zapier, the AI automation company. What are some of the big ones in your in your arsenal? Yeah, let's see. Uh definitely Andrew, Airbnb, Coinbase, uh Instacart, Stripe, uh Square, um uh a little bit of SpaceX, um Open AI, Perplexity, a couple other things, Cognition. Um,

0:56yeah. By the way, we could keep going on and on and on. We could do the whole thing with just us listing this. And when I asked you before we got started, [laughter] can you give me a moment when you knew you made it, can you tell people what you said to me? I hadn't felt like I made it yet. So,

1:09you know, why not? It's a couple things. One is um it depends on if I made it, right? Like I feel like I'm in a point in my career where I can finally start doing interesting things. Uh because there's enough leverage to do it. But I think fundamentally made it could mean what's the impact you're having on the world. Um, it could mean uh what have you built

1:25or done that's important or relevant. Um, it could mean financial success. It could mean familial success. It could mean all sorts of things. And I think part of it is I feel like there's a lot of stuff to do and there's so much ahead that has to happen. Um, so I definitely don't feel like I've made it from from all those perspectives. And then um, you know, it's interesting. You look at somebody like Elon Musk and you're like, "What an inspiring figure and look at all the stuff he's done." And I know founders who are very successful who look at him and they're like, "I've done

1:57nothing compared to this guy. I have to keep going." And so I think it's all kind of relative, right? Like a lot of my friends have done extremely well. They've built major companies. And because you're surrounded by people who've done so much, you feel like I haven't done enough. Yeah. Well, I've always I've never felt like I've done enough. So I remember I was like 16 and I was having like an existential crisis of like I'm 16, I haven't done anything yet. What's going on? I've ruined my life, you know, and so I think it's a personality trait partially and then partially is you see these really cool things that people are

2:25doing and you're like I want to do more, right? Like Patrick from Stripe started ARC, a biology institute, like one of the first new major biology institutions in decades that's doing really interesting things, right? Or um Brian Armstrong started a new anti-aging company or you know so you you see what people are doing. you see what Elon Musk is doing, you know, and so it's very inspiring to try and build more for society, do more for people, think big, you know, I think it's important to so I don't I, you know, I don't feel like

2:54I've I can rust and go and whatever. By the way, speaking of big, was the information right when they said that you're raising $2 billion? Uh, we haven't announced anything on the on the funds or anything like that. Okay. And I asked you before, can we please announce some kind of news? And you said, "No, Andrew. I got nothing for

3:12you." Well, I don't have anything that interesting. I think um you know, there's some things that we're moving towards, like our our hope is to announce our first sort of statue of monument soon. We've been working on a project to do that for like societal beauty, like art and society at large scale. And so, um there's some

3:27stuff getting pretty close there. There's a few things that we funded that, um haven't announced their rounds yet. So, you know, there'll be things like that. so that you know there's a bunch of stuff going on, but I don't think there's anything I can really talk about yet. But I'm happy to chat again if you'll ever have me. And you know, I'll have you on every single freaking day. I'll come over to your house with a whiskey. The two of us are going to have such a great time. [laughter]

3:49Um, all right. Here's the thing, though. Everything you do seems so big right now, frankly, not just right now, always, that I'm wondering how people who are at that toy stage can relate to you. And I was talking to you before we got started about how Paul Graham said, "Look to people who are creating toys. That's the future. And we look at people who created these little things that almost seemed like they were features on somebody else's thing and then they ended up becoming big companies. And I'm wondering where the toys are today that will become that

4:16big. What do you think about that? I think there's two ways to interpret what he said. One way is to say look at the people who are tinkering with interesting things and those things often become really big. And that was the early microcomputer revolution that things turned into PCs was just hobbyists in the 70s. Um, you could argue that GPT1 and two kind of felt toy-like even though there were these clear scaling laws behind it, right? But they couldn't do that much, but it's super interesting, right? Um, so there's all sorts of toys or people working at the frontier. There's a second way to interpret work on toys, which is

4:44basically if you look at the consumer internet wave, those things truly felt like toys. You know, Twitter was like text your friends, like literally you could only text. Or, you know, Airbnb was like crash on somebody's couch and pay money for it. you know, originally was literally like um it was called the air bed and breakfast because it was literally, you know, mattresses that the founders would inflate so they could have people stay with them during design conferences and monetize it, right? So, I think that era of consumer internet has moved on and you don't show up with to to when you're selling like a SAS product with

5:17something that's a toy, right? You show up with something that's fully baked or that works well or that solves some use case. Often the best things people will use even because they're broken, right? Because they need the product so badly. So I think that that's separate. But I think that toy phase at least in the context of um products that most people are building today doesn't quite exist anymore in part because the consumer stuff doesn't exist anymore. But I could make an argument that almost any really early model before you really scale it feels like a toy, right? Like a material sciences model, a physics model,

5:46whatever it may be, isn't going to do like amazing stuff, but it'll give you a hint or glimpse of the future. That's very different from like are hobbyists working on interesting things, you know, or are you building something that people just use because like Twitter, it felt such a need despite being so simple at the time, right? And I I think that

6:02era has shifted for a lot of things. We're building things for space like SpaceX and rockets, drones for defense, um you know, nuclear reactors, like those those things don't tend to feel like toys early on. What about this though? I keep seeing people create interesting web apps using clawed code. It's it's built. It looks beautiful. they could expand it. Is that basically hope hopeless never going to go anywhere or is it just going to be one of these smaller projects that will always stay small? Where where did that I think I think some of those things definitely grow and blow up and change and and etc. Um and so again it depends

6:37on what you mean by toy, right? Um that I would consider a toy. I've like I talked to a real estate broker who hated being a real estate broker because a lot of his time had to had to be spent making phone calls and he goes, "I don't want to do that, but you know what? I can actually create an automation that

6:51will make phone calls for me. Phenomenal. He did that. Yeah. And and now he's creating software that does that for for realtors, which is amazing. Yeah. And I don't view that as toilet. I just view that as like experimenting, building for yourself, um, etc. Toyike to me means, hey, it's silly or people kind of denigrate it or they think it's dumb. But I'm sure when

7:09he showed it to his friends. Well, I see. Maybe the definition is different. What do you think? Yeah, even um you know back to Twitter, it was like here's a really sloppy looking site and here's a short code and you can you know the 140 character limit is because that's all that could fit into an SMS. It wasn't because they were thinking of like the gravity or something. Um and then it kind of stuck as a feature for a really long time, much longer than it should have, right? Because it was an accident of just SMSes having character limits. Um, so I think there's almost like this um I think it depends on then

7:42what you mean by toy if it's like hey I'm gonna build something really quick and simple and dirty and honestly that was all the vibe coding stuff like there used to be these really bad demos on GPT3 of hey look I'm going to type in some stuff and make a really shitty UI for me and now we have lovable and replet and Figma and KA and all these companies like providing by coding and so you know that that felt toile back then but everybody I knew was like

8:04oh wow if these models got much better. This is going to be amazing. But is are are these apps that are being built on the platforms you just mentioned? Do you where do you see that business? The business that I'm wondering about is the person who has a problem like that realtor who comes up with a solution for himself who then will be able to sell it to others. I feel like that in many ways maybe is not

8:25playing at the level that you are. You're playing at the big leagues and this is maybe too small for you. But uh no, I think those small things sometimes become giant things. And I think people often underestimate total addressable market or the number of people want something or and so um you know many great things have very humble origins and I think that continues to be the case and so I don't I actually think um through things like all the different coding models and you know cloud code or open AI or cognition or like it's going to put the power of building things in the hands of millions of

9:02people who couldn't do it before. It's already doing that and I think a subset of that will turn into really amazing huge things or huge companies and even 15 years ago or whatever uh Minecraft and originally was like three people right it was tiny people always say oh when's the first billion dollar single person company that was Minecraft right and that was that was over a decade ago so even then individuals could do really big things but you had somebody who's a you know um very obsessed with building this one thing or the technical capabilities to do it. And now those technical capabilities are expanding dramatically, which means

9:37dramatically more people could could build the next Minecraft in the future. And if more people are building the next Minecraft or the next HubSpot or the next all of these things, are they all going to end up being much smaller players because there is so much competition now and so many people tinkering and creating. Where do you see

9:54it going? I think the biggest things in the world are only getting bigger, right? if you and there's more aggregation than less and there's a long tale of stuff that can get much bigger than it used to be able to get and part of that is we've moved to global liquidity on the internet where we went from you know 10 million users to 100 million users to billions and billions of users and so suddenly you have this global market that can really accelerate adoption right open anthropic and others are the fastest companies to10 billion in revenue basically ever right um and the market caps if you go

10:27back 15 years The biggest market cap in the world I think was Exxon and it was like 400 billion, right? And now we have market caps 10 times that size, which nobody ever expected. There's eight companies now worth over a trillion dollars each, which back then nobody would have thought was even possible. I remember talking to like, oh yeah, maybe something will someday be a $5 billion

10:45company. What a giant outcome, right? Um, but the biggest things have gotten way bigger, right? And so Microsoft is way bigger than we thought. Google's way bigger than we thought it would be. Meta, etc., Nvidia. Um, so if anything, value is aggregated up much more than anybody expected. And the question is, does that continue or not? And I don't see why it doesn't continue. But it also means that a thousand flowers can bloom and instead of being a $100 million company, they could be a $500 million company. Like I

11:12think everything grows behind it. I still have not found an AI company that's never mind a one person $1 billion company to interview. I haven't even seen it at like one person hundred million. Maybe one person $50 million company. I got one. he won't come on here and do an interview. Are you seeing

11:28these and maybe I'm missing them? I'm not seeing a lot of them, but that's also um one could argue that in Silicon Valley, which is still a lot of the activity or in tech or whatever you want to call it, Silicon Valley is a place, but I was thinking of it as a concept. Um uh people tend to get on the venture train too much or on the let's raise money train, right? And so definitionally, they raise money, they hire people, they don't really bootstrap much. Um, and one could argue outside of Silicon Valley, people raise too little money. There's too little access to capital. And so often the ideas end up

12:00smaller than they should be because people try to get profitable right away. They they aren't very aggressive. And so to some extent, one could argue Silicon Valley is arbing builders into environments where they're fueled with capital and hopefully they get much bigger than they would in other domains or areas, regions. But the flip side also happens where companies will blow or grow faster than they should in many cases or could and or they'll mispric things because they don't really think about their pricing power, right? When you know if you charge a lot up front. I remember talking to um I think it was Olivia from Data Dog or something like that. They

12:35basically said we always charged a lot for our products because we worried about profitability. [snorts] And so they ended up as these cash gushers, right? Um and that's because very early on they price discipline. they wanted to make money off of what they were doing, etc. And too few people do that in Silicon Valley. But too many people do that outside of Silicon Valley. So, I don't know that there's a right answer there. All right. Here's where I have

12:56seen interesting and exciting things. These service providers who are running dev shops essentially Alex Lieberman from uh Morning Brew now has one called 10X. I interviewed a local guy here who's got PressW. They're getting businesses to pay them to basically create AI software and they use AI to create it. And so it's super fast and

13:16they could they could charge lower. You're in that space kind of, right? You and Jared Kushner. Yeah. So our respective firms um helped set up this company called Brinkco which is a um company which basically builds it has both a common platform that is like data infra and evals and a bunch of other stuff for people to use and then on top of that it builds vertical specific apps for uh extremely large enterprise um or other very large institutions to basically use and adopt AI rapidly against a subset of specific vertical use cases. And so, you know, that's been a very fun thing to, you know, kind of

13:56um help build over time and to incubate and to have me and my team involved with. Is it just introducing like ideas? Are you building software for them? Are you helping them buy software? How does it work? It's uh building stuff. Yeah, it's basically asking what are um things that would be very high high ROI to implement. what would what what would create good returns for these customers and what can be done in an expedient manner based on what we've built to date so that that way we have some you know a set of modules that we're using that we've already built there's a platform that we've already built and so how do

14:30we rapidly accelerate something so that we can show very fast success and then once we show success we can add the next thing within a vertical and build against that may take a little bit longer but now they trust us they know us you know we may have access to data or other things that can be used to sort of implement these other things with the idea that that basic fundamental module tool can be customized and cross sold to other customers in the same vertical

14:50over time. Can you give me a specific example? Yeah, an example would be and um I'll have to double check if we can run this uh because I don't remember if it's public or not. Um but I'll give you an example. Um an example would be uh you know we built a uh permitting approval

15:05flow for a a government. So basically anytime you as a builder would show up, you'd submit plans, you'd submit documentation, etc. and you'd be waiting for a permit to get approval and as you were sitting waiting for the permit, you were basically losing money on the project, right? Because you've already bought the land, you've already

15:22designed it, you're ready to go. And so if it takes three to six months to get approval, that's just three to six months of lost time and money. Um, and we basically took a few months of manual review and we condensed it into like an hour and then it still goes for manual review, but we've prepackaged everything. We point out the the the risks, I should say. By we I mean the company right has done this um and then that's something that can be sold to other governments around permit permitting approval for the specific use case because it understands architectural diagrams and other things but the same type of workflow could also

15:55work for other types of permits in a government context. So that'd be an example. Perfect example. And this wouldn't have been possible before without AI. It is now. People are understanding that this type of big leap is is available so they're willing to take a conversation with you and see how they could implement internally. Um do you think this is the future of software? I mean as long as they're getting permitting software created for them, why not create a CRM? How many people have you and I heard who hate their CRM, but they just kind of accept it or they keep adjusting and squeezing and paying tons

16:26of money while they're making all these adjustments to to their CRM. What do you think? Yeah, I think there's a lot coming in terms of um you know, building on top of existing systems of record like a CRM or or things like that. And the big question is at what point do some of these sorts of systems displace CRM or displace ERP or

16:47displace a lot of these kind of systems? And I don't know I don't know the answer to that. I mean to some extent these things are kind of fancy databases. Right. Right. With some UI built on them. But all of SAS is you know people always talk about AI as or AI apps as oh you're just building a wrapper around you know GPT or whatever. And SAS is just building a wrapper around a SQL database if you

17:09want to trivialize it. Right. Right. But it really isn't. Right. it's a workflow and it's it's how do you actually uh build the product and what do you integrate against and all the rest of it as the cost of building new software drops or the speed to building it drops dramatically we should assume that there's going to be dramatically more customization but that customization again is probably around a common set of platforms because the platforms bootstrap you into the ability to do things you don't rewrite a database from scratch you use SQL right or Postgrass or what you know whatever you want to use um so I think it's going

17:39to be the same for some of these things where eventually there'll be some commonalities and the question is are some of those platforms the existing CRM the existing ERPs etc and the fact that they actually become less relevant with software with this new type of AI development could be argued either way you could say they're going to become way less relevant because it's really easy to add a database and rebuild all the serum customization you care about or the other argument is to say well it's a common store of data we already know how it works it already integrates a bunch of stuff we'll just ignore it

18:10Maybe we negotiate pricing way down, but we'll build a bunch of apps on top of it because it's already our system of record and always has it already has a bunch of crap in it and so we'll just keep using it. And I don't know which way that goes. All right, maybe that's a bad example because that is the database and essentially you do need some kind of

18:26database somewhere. What about the other tools? Landing page software, you can just create that use just chat into cloud code, right? Using in your terminal and you ask for what you want. You can send screenshots of what works for you. You end up with the code, you deploy it, you're fine. you don't need landing page software, right? And then maybe the CRM is is the database of record. But essentially what I'm trying to what I'm trying to puzzle out with you is is the era of software that's off the shelf dead? Did we go from software that's literally off the shelf at Staples on a CD that you bring home to

19:00software that's on the web that you download to your computer to software that just exists on the web to now no longer software that exists on the web. Software in your imagination and no one's going to pay for it. What do you think? I think it's going to persist or some subset of stuff will persist. Obviously, some will get eaten away by AI. But if something works and it's already been um battle tested for security and a bunch of other stuff and it integrates with a bunch of things. Um if it's cheap enough, you'll just keep using it. Like why even spend time on it or worry about

19:27it, right? So part of it also comes down to like what's your relative cost of something and how much do they charge you and how how ownorous is it to replace it? And if you replace it, are there other dependencies? And eventually, you know, your coding agent will be able to deal with some of those dependencies. But is that the highest value thing for your coding agency to do? This is why internal tools often aren't don't get have giant teams of companies, right? It's because they want to deploy those engineers against

19:51product development, right? Right. The bigger fish to fry. And then they realize, oh, we really need internal tools. We need internal tooling team. And sometimes those are amazing people. And sometimes the people aren't as strong because the really strong people want to work on product. Right? The coding agent thing may be similar in that you may only want to deploy them

20:06against the things that are highest ROI. You're going to have some limited budget for what you're doing. Okay. And the question is, is it rebuilding the landing page software or is it doing something else? And it's going to depend on the customer and the context and what it's worth and all the rest of it. Andrew managed your resources to oversee

20:21those agents. All right. So, Ryan Carson, he goes, "Andrew, I'm not using any standard ERP. My email software is something that I've created. It sends out custom messages at each phase of the drip campaign to the person. And I'm having I forget what his chatbot's name is. I'm having Rosie, I think it is, write all these and it's incredibly effective. In the future, everyone's going to do it. You're thinking that, you know what, maybe in the future everyone's going to do it, but they're not going to be like Ryan who's like vibe coding this thing or somehow he's coding it. You're you're saying there will be a software provider

20:49that does it. It'll be the new mail Mailchimp. If you're if you have that idea, don't give up on it and say it's going to be eaten away by vibe coding software and people will create it themselves. Create that software. There's a future in that. Am I understanding you right? Yeah. I mean, he may create the next Mailchimp, right? I don't know. So, that that's the question is um you know, where does where does innovation come from and where does scale come from? And in general, what you find I mean this happens all the time, right? Where say you do have an internal tools team building something for you? This this

21:17happened with a company that I helped out with quite early called Brain Trust where um you know they basically provide like a eval suite for enterprise amongst a bunch of other stuff, right? They have sort of a a series of products now. So what they kind of started with was um can we help make eval really easy as you adopt LLM so that you can change the model and you can see what are how do those changes propagate in terms of performance relative to some test set that you have and um and you know a lot of companies are using them now uh in terms of sort of the leading companies

21:46that have adopted AI and I think that um that was a good example where I help them with early customer calls and we call a customer and um those customers would often say things like um oh yeah I already have an internal team working on this we don't need it and then they call back three months later and they'd say actually we really need this our internal team the resources should go to something else this is important to us but it's not our secret sauce and not just that you're now I'm making up the number 50 people and all of them are working on this one problem and you're covering the

22:17whole surface area in ways we never will and our three engineers should just be deployed somewhere else and we should just start using this software instead right and so I think there's a lot of examples like that back to is it really worth your time to go and figure it out and all the nuances and all the use cases and all the lines of code and all the customization and all the performance and the cross platform nature of it and cross cloud nature and how you inter interrogate different data sources you know all that stuff like why go do that yourself so brain trust I think is a good example of this future

22:46you're you're making me feel a lot more optimistic I I thought maybe you were knocking me down with this whole vision of toys not being possible you have to have a rocket ship or else it's nothing now I'm seeing okay it is possible there is poss there is a v a world where someone vibe codes something today makes it more sophisticated tomorrow adjusts it and then they live and a customer keeps paying them monthly for it. You do

23:08see still see that. Oh yeah 100%. Okay. What about this then? I think the big shift though, yes, that um is a little bit under discussed is and it's increasingly discussed now is we're shifting from a world where you're buying monthly packages or you're buying seats for certain types of software and you're effectively buying units of labor, right? That's this agentic shift and that I think is really interesting and it also means that certain TAMs are much bigger than you think, right? So Decagon uh where I'm an investor is a good example of this where they basically do customer support related um you know software or agents

23:45and um that's a good example where you know effectively if you start paying something on for something on a metered basis or how many emails you're or whatever it may be you're effectively paying for units of labor right you're converting something that used to be per seat SAS like a zenesk and you're converting into how do I actually help customer support agents reply to things that scale much faster because the AI is effectively helping them do the responses, right? You're shifting labor sources in some sense over to more and more AI. And that's going to happen throughout the whole services world and services economy. And that to me is a really fundamental shift

24:20because that that's software eating into other parts of the economy that it didn't used to exist in specifically people. uh well uh specifically certain types of highly repetitive uh language centric jobs. Okay. You know, I have one other thing that I'm that I'm going to circle back on. What if the future of software for businesses is not anymore buying software like on a monthly per seat basis or per agent basis? What if it's hiring someone like Alex Liverman's company to create the software for you and it's no longer your team getting diverted, but it doesn't cost them that much because maybe his company is doing this for three other businesses. And so

25:01instead of buying not the Ryan Ryan Carson is creating a a divorce software because his sister went through this tough divorce. So he's got a divorce AI. But if he were going to productize this email marketing customized solution, maybe people wouldn't sign up to that. Maybe they would say, "I like that. Hey, Alex, build the same thing for me." And

25:22then Alex builds it for five businesses. He keeps adjusting and he keeps improving it based on what he's learning. And is that the future? Well, it sounds like he's just repeated building repeatable software then I don't what's the difference? Where's the line? Is it five customers versus a thousand? Is it right? You know, why doesn't he just start selling that to everyone? So, you know, it it just

25:42sounds like a different size customer. Now, if you look at certain types of industries, government, certain really big institutions, etc. They always did this. They're still doing it, right? The um if it was the FBI or CIA or somebody spent like $80 million to build an ATS. They hired a third-party consulting firm here with Accenture, Deote, someone

26:02built them an ATS for like $80 million. They could have just bought Greenhouse or in a more recent era Ashb or something, right? I see. And so that's always existed that you have these big these people who are willing to pay the ability to create software faster isn't didn't change all that. And by the way, I'm I'm pushing back because I like your optimistic point of view. You're basically saying there's a lot more opportunity here than I saw. But I'm saying it's both. I'm saying it's both. I'm not I'm not saying it's a monolithic world. I think there there's a world where people will buy certain

26:31things that are repeatable, have have big surface area, etc. And then there's going to be all sorts of stuff that people make, custom, bespoke, vibe coded, etc. or whatever. You know, the long-term I mean the long-term substantiation of vibe coding is really good code built by agents alone, right? With some human oversight, but much less than exists today. Um, and so at some point that isn't even vibe coding, right? because vibe coding almost has this negative connotation of it being kind of a bit more loosey- goosey, right? Um, [snorts] and so absolutely all that's going to come and all that's going to happen. That doesn't mean software goes away. Uh, but it does

27:06mean that there's going to be way more custom stuff. There's going to be way more creators. There's going to be way more people building stuff. And I think that's great. That's good for the world. Okay. I asked you a couple of days ago. I said, "Hey, do you want to just share your screen and show me something cool that you're working on?" You go, "I don't know that. I don't have time for

27:22that. I didn't think you'd have that response. I thought you'd go, Andrew, I cannot wait for you to see this thing that I'm working on. Do you have something that if you had a little more time, you would you just would be ripping out of your skin to show me? What do you What are

27:34you doing that's like that? I mean, there's a bunch of stuff that uh I'm involved with that I think are really cool, interesting things. And you can tell me. One thing that um I my team have been working on is um taking uh working with OpenAI and Anthropic and um 11 and a few other folks on taking uh the world's most important books and using machine translation to translate them into languages that represent over 80% of humanity. Um creating audio versions of that in every language that's supported and basically just providing it as a pre resource on the internet. And so we're calling that Alexandria after the, you

28:13know, great library of Alexandria. And so that'd be an example of something that we've been working on where we're using all the tooling and all the rest of it. And then there's kind of more day-to-day stuff like, you know, using cloud code or code work for different things or using cognition. You know, we we started using cognition in different ways quite early on. We've been doing really interesting things with like open AI and deep research and you know, so like what what are you personally doing that are you doing any of this on your

28:35laptop? Yeah. like what what are you personally doing that this is so exciting that you can't wait to bring me like if I was sitting in your office you go to come see this? Well, I mean a lot of what I've been doing is like scraping and interpreting data in different ways for different areas. Um I started doing this I mean I guess I started doing this a long time

28:52ago. Uh but there's a couple things that I'll show you maybe in a month or two when it'll be a little bit more baked. But I've been doing a lot of um kind of go scrape this information and let's start interrogating it. And that's been really interesting. And you know, one example of something that I I looked into um is uh ADHD data and diagnosis and um what's shifted because we basically went from a world where uh ADHD was something like one in you know thousands and thousands of people to now it's about 3% of the population in kids gets diagnosed with ADHD. And so the question is what caused

29:27that shift? And you can start knocking out factors that are claimed as the culprits. Parental age actually isn't that much of a factor. like a bunch of stuff that's claimed to be the driver of all this stuff isn't. Yes. Um and the punch line is really it's a shift in um incentives and then it's a shift in and incentives would be things like hey if you have ADHD you get an extra two hours on the test or whatever in school. Um on uh and as a teacher you get rewarded for hey you're helping

29:53neurodyiverse populations or whatever. Um but it also includes um uh a shift in how diagnosis is defined, a shift in terms of who can provide the diagnosis. So in the state of New Jersey, it's something like 60% of ADHD diagnoses in kids actually have never uh the kids have never taken any form of test. It's just somebody deciding that they have it like a teacher just saying, "Oh, I think you have ADHD." And then

30:16they're classified that way. Uh so there's a lot of these sort of societal level drivers that are happening that are unrelated to, you know, the actual spectrum there. Um, and so when you're doing this stuff, when you're doing this yourself, what are you doing? What are you doing it yourself in? Like if I were to look at your laptop, what would I see you messing around with on your free time to

30:35do that? Yeah, it's a mixture of uh claude, open deep research, Gemini, deep research. It really depends on what model is available at the time and what sort of tooling I need and do I need certain things graphed or interrogated in different ways or do I need You're asking it, go get me this data, tell me and then you're starting to ask it questions. When you say interrogating, it's just you're telling it to get the data and you're asking it to to analyze. the data in some cases clean it in certain ways. It's a bunch of stuff. Normalize these tables relative to each other. I mean, all the

30:59stuff that you'd normally would be a little bit more painful to do. So, I do love that you're doing the Alexandria project. I really feel like what's happening in tech is that there's we've taken our eye off of the helping humanity ball and we've kind of used it as an excuse for everything we're doing. Trust me, whatever I'm doing is going to save the world. And you'd given this this uh interview where you said past I forget what it was, business leaders, however you described them, they used to build monuments. They used to actually like support the local arts. You would walk around and you would be somehow

31:32enveloped in a thing that they created. And yes, you might have known them as the entrepreneur who built the trains, but they're also the people who are creating the park that you're sitting in. And we have not done that in in tech. And I like that you're doing the monument. I sent you an article to show you how you should be pissing people off and feel comfortable because even the pyramid at um at the Louv did that and I

31:51think that that's the way to go. But I I especially think you've got this ability in tech beyond monuments that is even more imp even more important. Well, yeah. I think maybe what happened is um there's an era where people thought the way to have societal impact through capital at least is through foundations. And so all these various foundations got set up and one could argue a subset of them have done great work and then a subset of them have potentially been detrimental to society in all sorts of ways in terms of the programs they pushed or promoted or you know kind of called for. Um and what got lost

32:25as part of that where so much money and energy went into societal change and social engineering and you know trying to change the way our society works instead of saying how do we think about public beauty or how do we think about art or how do you know and so it's just um it's almost like we had a mimemetic shift in where capital got allocated relative to society related projects and I would argue some of it was incredibly well-intentioned capital that had the opposite effect of what it wanted to you could see that in education or a few other areas where the capital wasn't always constructive um and potentially

32:56was quite destructive um and then you you that almost drained I think effort away from art the arts and one could argue that could be the mindset of the people involved you know tech people really value education while maybe people who are in finance in New York are exposed to and have art as something that they focus on more and so there's also been a shift of well it's like a shift in societal um outcomes and uh the background interests of those cultures relative to each other are different, right? Tech people are different from finance people in all sorts of ways. Um, okay. How would if if you were looking

33:31at all these amazing tools that are created right now to create other other tools and businesses and you were starting out today. I know you hate these type I don't know that you hate these types of questions. I hate these types of questions and I especially hate to to impose it on you because you're somebody who's such a big thinker, right? Rocket ships, how do you get people to live longer? But at the same time, I'm curious about how you see the world. And I want to see that understanding by seeing this little example. If you had all this, what what

33:59would you start? What would you build? How would you think about the fresh new idea to get into? Yeah, it's it's hard to answer that because there's a lot that I think should be built right now. And so and and there's a wide range of stuff. I mean, it's everything from new foundation models for materials like what periodic is doing for physics for a variety of areas. So, I think there's a whole like set of models that nobody's built yet or that I should say people are building, but it's very early that I think could be incredibly impactful and interesting and just like cool, you know, like it'd be super interesting to

34:30reinterpret physics through the lens of like a, you know, a model or a modern sort of architecture model. Um, so I think stuff like that's super interesting. I think if you go up a layer or two, there's so many things to do on the application side. Again, I think it was a real dur of consumer products and there's a ton to build

34:49there in all sorts of interesting ways. Actually, um me and somebody on my team ran this program at Stanford probably about two years ago, maybe a little bit more now, three years ago, where I think GPT4 had just come out and we said um we'll give you free uh compute. We don't want anything in exchange. We just want you to run experiments and build cool consumer stuff. And we had about a dozen teams from Stamford go through it. It was all undergrads and grad students and CS and AI and they and we'd have like a weekly check-in and so it was a big investment of time which was like we'll check in,

35:23we'll help you with what you're building, we'll give you free compute and free model access and let's just see what you come up with. And so I I just think there's so much stuff to do. Um it's such an exciting era, you know, you're also incubating. How do you find the ideas that you want to incubate? Is it in this would be cool in the world or here's a problem that I see and I need

35:43to solve it? It really depends. Um you know I think it's a big range. I think often it's hey we've come across this problem sometimes by accident and should we do something against it. Um you know we've considered and I say we because like I have a a group of people I work with now. Um uh considered should we go and buy a company and then transform it with AI but I mean at scale right? Is there something really big that you should work with because they already have all the customers, they have the baseline platform and really um they haven't layered in AI and can you grow the market dramatically or

36:18the use cases dramatically by adding certain things. So I think there's everything from like incubate and get things started and up and running and all the rest. Uh which is which was Brinkco and Brain Trust and a few other companies over time on through to um do you buy a a really late stage thing that's I mean it's a public company and you try and um shift some of the focus of that company. So there just there just so much and then there's there's foundation models right that we talked about. What's an example of a publicly traded company that you could buy with and improve with AI that you decided not

36:54to? I mean, I don't want to say anything that we've specifically looked at. How about one that you're not just to give me a sense of what how you look at the world? Let's say one could look at what um Warner Brothers. No, that's that's pretty big. New York Times, publicly traded company, can't really buy them because of the way their stock

37:11set up. Okay. Yeah. Um, you know, a good example, and one could argue Nana's been doing this on the travel side, is you could imagine buying certain types of travel agencies or other folks and then revamping a lot of what they do, everything. And again, Nvana has done some of this customer success and support. They've publicly talked about revamping with AI. Um, you know, how you actually deliver services to people changes. How you think about trip planning changes. Like, a lot of stuff shifts if you view it through an

37:40AI lens. Interesting. Okay. All right. All right, I see where you're going with this. All right, let me close out with this. We've been we've been talking a lot about today. What's tomorrow? Like, I loved how you found AI as the place to to invest in because you'd read the papers, you'd met some people. I especially love how you decided that you're going to invest in um that once Google got out of the military, right? They were out of servicing the military, you said, "Somebody in here is doing something

38:07smart and doesn't have a place to do it. I'm going to go talk to them." What are you seeing today? That's exciting for the future. Yeah. You know, the honest truth is when you look at these technology waves, they are nonobvious until they're obvious and then everybody starts looking for the non-obvious thing again. But the obvious

38:26thing is what you should do. Okay. And so I think for a good example of that would be everybody proclaimed that social products were over like four times, right? First there was the wave of like um the really early social wave was like MySpace and Friendster and Multiply and all these companies and then Facebook became the really big thing and then Twitter happened two years later. I guess LinkedIn happened a couple years before and then right around after Twitter happened everybody said okay social's largely saturated and then suddenly you had Instagram and you had Pinterest and you had Snap and you had people like it's over and then you

38:59had Tik Tok and you had you know it just keeps going in some and then now I think it's kind of more done right until there's some AIcentric thing or whatever u but it took a while it took like a decade right SAS took a decade to really see itself through fintech took a decade I think AI is going to take a decade and for the next decade plus there's going to be really really interesting things happening and um you know there's other areas that I think are interesting. I think energy is interesting. I think you know defense is still interesting. You know I think there's a variety of areas

39:26that are still interesting but AI will continue to be interesting for a long time. So and I get it you're saying look Andrew stop looking beyond AI. We're not even a decade into this thing. It's super exciting. It's the early days. It's the early early days. Well, I mean, I'm also doing I continue to do uh some things in space and defense and you know, yeah, different forms of American resiliency and all this stuff, but you know, I've been looking at energy for a while now. You know, years and years of looking at it, not doing much, but every once in a while there's

39:57something interesting. Um, but I think fun, I've done crypto before, like years and years ago, although I haven't done anything recently. So, I think um there's just these waves and some of the waves are really interesting for a long period of time. Some of them kind of collapse after some some moment and the big companies come out of it and you're done. AI is one of those that's going to go for a long time because basically

40:18everything software is AI. Tell me, can you reveal one thing that you're working on that you're so excited about that you shouldn't talk about but you can't even help talking about it. Maybe it doesn't have to be the most biggest secret. Come on, this is Silicon Valley. Nothing's a secret. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I I do want to get a sense of what you're working on that

40:32you're I I like to see your passion. What are you passionate about that you're working on in AI now? Yeah, it's a mix of um again looking at some of these other types of foundation models besides language like what it's um you know there's there's bio, there's chemistry, there's material, there's physics, there's like all these

40:50different categories, right? Okay. Um so I think some things like that are really interesting. Um there's looking at uh you know things at the application layer. We talked about consumer, we talked about um you know rollups, we talked about services transformation, we talked about vertical applications. Like it's all that stuff like it doesn't change. It's

41:11the same stuff. What do you see consumer that's exciting? It doesn't seem to me like you I don't know. I felt like maybe at the beginning that you weren't as excited about it and I don't see you in consumer tech much. What do you see in consumer that's exciting? Yeah. Um I used to do consumer tech. It was, you know, I invested in Airbnb and Instacart and a bunch of stuff quite early and then I worked at Twitter for a

41:30while. I sold a company to them. Mh. Um, but then I think there was a gap where there wasn't that much and um, you know, one could I think a lot of the kind of proumery things are are a mix of consumer and professional use cases. So early midjourney was both of those things, right? You do it for fun and for

41:45art, but you also use it professionally. Perplexity is that way. Open AI is that way. Um, you know, I think I think there's a lot of blurring. Um, you know, my hope is that we see more and more companies tackling big problems. I mean, you know, there's stuff around email, there's stuff around productivity, there's stuff around personal agents,

42:05there's, you know, there's a lot to do. Now, the question is, does a big company do it or does a startup do it? And that's the hard thing with consumer right now because the difference between now and 15 years ago is there's a handful of companies with such large distribution that they're the natural homes to do new things because even if they're five years late, they can just cross-ell it, right? And that's often what happens, right? In the early days of a startup, you're competing with other startups. In the later days of a startup, you're

42:33competing with incumbents. And so the question is when do incumbents wake up? Is there a gap that's big enough that between the incumbent waking up and you're working on something, you can actually get it done to enough scale that you survive? That maybe it's so small that they just don't care about it and then eventually

42:50it's too late for them to care about it. Yeah. And the the the too small may still be quite large, right? If you think about these companies, if you're a 1 to4 trillion dollar market cap company, you need a line of business that's I don't know 51020 billion in revenue eventually to move that number at all

43:07for you. And that means that something that looks like it's a couple hundred million isn't that interesting. And so you're going to miss stuff that looks like a couple hundred million is really $20 billion in revenue, right? And that's the that's the shift that um that's the that's the kind of loophole you need to find as a founder if you're if you're building something that an incumbent

43:27should be doing. I had an entrepreneurship professor who told us to think like Mao. He said Mao didn't just march on uh on the capital. He went to the little hillsides, the countryides. He went and he built up his people there. He preached he he built up his his forces and then once he was big enough, he could take over the whole country. And what most people do is say, "Here's the biggest thing. let me just

43:47go after that because then I'll be king. Yeah, usually need some weird wedge in like uh Vinod Kosa has a good saying that your market entry strategy is different from your market disruption strategy. And I think that's very true like what's the wedge in and sometimes it's head-on and sometimes it's more adjacent to the side and most of the time it's probably

44:04more adjacent. All right. I like this conversation. I feel like we've only scratched the surface of friendliness and happy which I kind of like because I've listened to you a lot on your podcast and other people's podcasts. You're a very serious and very big and very intimidating person. And I like the happy go-lucky part of you, the this the optimist part that I get to see. Um, all right. Let let me close out with a fun thing. What do you do for fun? What do you do when

44:27you're not? Yeah. Yeah, it's a variety of things. Um, you know, love hiking, working out, uh, yoga, um, travel, you know, it's kind of standard stuff. All right. Thanks so much for doing this interview. I feel like we need you, Ty. appreciate it. I I appreciate it. I was I was going to come up with something like really fascinating and fun for you to do, but I don't I don't think you're a kite flying type of person. Not a kite flying. What is it

44:52called? A kite surfing person. No, I'm not. It's too much. It's too much gear. Too much overhead. You have to even a skier. Are you snowboard? I snowboard. All right. Snowboard. Yeah. Not very well, but I snowboard. Yeah. Thanks, brother. Congratulations. I'm looking forward to talking with you again. Hopefully in person with a

45:09whiskey. Yeah, sounds good. Thanks.