20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com

25:03Eventually, they could create electricity. They can move steam boats and so on. And you just used it more and more. And so the price of coal actually went up instead. And so I think the analogy here is that, yes, I like to cost the marginal cost of intelligence keeps going down. but that just means we're going to use it more and more places. What do you think we don't use it today, or don't even think to use it today, where we will be using it? A two areas where I think almost every person also agrees on the planet that it's not about the jobs, but about the outcomes, and that's research and medicine.

25:32Most people don't say, I want more PhD students like in the world. They just want the cool things that PhD students develop. And most people don't say, I want more jobs in healthcare. They just want cheaper, faster, better healthcare. care. And so I think those are two beautiful areas that still were they haven't had their Chatchy VT moment. And I'll maybe mention one more, which is AI and economics. I'm writing this book right now. We've had this paper in 2018, I think, called the AI economist. And the field of economics hasn't had their Chatchy VT moment yet, because it's such an old, slow -moving field.

26:06They don't have archive papers. They don't have conferences where you publish every couple of months. And so we actually built this two -level reinforcement learning model where you had an AI economist and you had a bunch of intelligent agents that were just maximizing their own utilities and they're adapting to different taxation schemes and tariffs and subsidies and so on. And you basically could now ask this model, the system, what's the most efficient taxation and subsidization scheme for maximizing this objective that I'm giving you? And people can disagree on what the objectives are. One reasonable one was productivity multiplied with equality.

26:43And then that system could simulate billions and billions of years of taxation and subsidization schemes until you basically would find the optimal brackets and whatnot. And just imagine how many millions of lives were lost to humanity trying to figure those things out. Instead, we could ask an AI to give us some advice on what would be the actual best setup if you have certain set of goals. You wouldn't have to try out a massive tear of change in the world. You could just ask an AI model first to simulate it for you. That is an underrated area of AI. That's fascinating. I've never heard about that before.

27:21That paper, we did that work at Salesforce and the science marketing. You realize, even science, you think, oh, it's just like, someone has a Urika moment and then because of that, they become super famous and everyone loves that idea. here, science is also a human system and you have to do brand and marketing, like something that DeepMine and London here does incredibly well. Their science marketing is probably the best in the world. And so that paper never quite had its moment in the sun yet. One thing I worry about is like the excitement around robotics. I find that robotics have not had their chat GPT moment on the foundation models side.

27:55How do you think about robotics is having their chat GPT moment or lack of yet and maybe excitement or lack of excitement that you have towards it moving forward. That is a great question. I think that tricky bit in robotics is that the part of Y -Chatchubit had this amazing moment is that it's so general. You can just ask it anything. So the equivalent to the generality of a Chatchubit is a humanoid. But the humanoid don't work really well yet. The problem is when robotics, like the cost, right, you only want to build specific types of robots when there's a highly scalable process. And now, once there's a highly scalable process, the humanoid form factor is not the most optimal factor.

28:36If you have a highly scalable process is in the fields and agriculture. You don't want a bunch of humanoid robots hunching over and weeding. No, you just get a friggin massive tractor with a bunch of lasers and thousands of little arms and spray cannons. And then you just either zap the weeds away. You don't have them hand plucked by a humanoid robot. And so for almost every process that is highly repeatable, there's a better, more quickly evolved, new hardware form than five fingers on two arms. And so, and so humanoid only was in case of ambiguity. In ambiguity and where you have a massive scale of many different tasks in environments that were custom built for people, where maybe the speed and efficiency doesn't matter as much and so on.

29:24Like just take like even for consumer, right? You have a dishwasher. You don't like imagine you could have a humanoid doing the dishes But it would be so much less efficient than a dishwasher would be and so maybe humanoids I love them unfortunately Excitement in the future isn't a zero -sum game. I can love Custom -made robots. I can still be excited about humanoids as well And then why would what's the bull case to be excited about humanoids then because I just listened to you there And I'm like it's a completely rational right and fair paint the bull case I think the bull case is at home like when it actually the speed doesn't matter But there's just a whole host of many different tasks So you can have a Roomba and the Roomba will do one thing better than a humanoid You can't have a dishwasher and will do that thing better than a humanoid But if you now also have like 50 other things sort my socks and do this and open the door and get a package from outside Put it inside and like 50 or a hundred other little tasks None of which you actually have to at scale massively every day all the time so the custom robot form factor doesn't make sense.

30:26Then I think humanoids can be helpful and if they're quiet enough and the task execution is quite enough, you can have them work slowly all night, right? You have a party and you wake up and the whole place is clean again. Now the problem is that that is, it's like these cluttered environments that are all different, there's no standardization, that's really, really hard for AI. Also, the dexterity that's required within the hands to know about picking up a glass and how much tension to put on it versus not breaking it to plumpe pillows, jeeps as it sounds. Yeah. I was speaking to one founder of Nathan, but so far away from that.

30:58It's similar to what we see and what we have seen with like radiology, for instance. It's very easy to build one radiology classifier for one thing and make that better than a human, but then there's this very long tail of things. And so you need a lot of money and a lot of resources and a lot of data to see the long tail of all things in radiology before you could actually automate a radiology process fully from end to end and get it fully FDA certified and so on. And in household robotics, you have the same very long tail. It's so interesting. It's almost like the opposite of our lens where like the technology is ready and it's actually human adoption is the thing that's stopping it versus like robotics, which is like actually the adoption, I think would be that to have a cleaner in every household, but actually it's the technology that's blocking the adult.

31:42Still, it's still a lot of hard work and very interesting research. And more and more development, I think Facebook, Meta, had open source, some new finger tips also that had some pressure sensors and stuff. And you'd have to incorporate data. I think it's doable now. It's just a lot of work. I've had guests on the show before talk about different medical discoveries. And my mother's got a mask you mentioned about biology. Do you think that we will find the solution to some of the biggest medical problems in the next 10 years through some of the discussion that we found already? Yes. That is one of several chapters in my book or about that.

32:21I think that's one of the most exciting part of AI. That AI will change. In many ways, science, I think, has been stuck in understanding the micro really, really well, but has not yet found a tool to understand complex systems really well. Like, we know every neuron and how every single neuron in your brain works. Just from first principles, you can take one out and you see it has all the synapses and you can compare and then you see, okay, there's inputs, outputs and this, out fires. But then when you put a bunch of them together and suddenly you have intelligence, like no one understands sort of these thresholds, these complex systems emerging and having these emergent properties.

33:00And you know, why is that when the brain is slightly bigger and has enough neurons and the right setup now all of a sudden you have true human intelligence versus much less strong animal intelligence, but they can have better visual intelligence, but not language intelligence and all these different things. These emerging properties, the same with microbiome in our gut. We understand how one bacterium does, but then you put them all together. No one can really tell you why certain foods will create a skin issue or change your mood and things like that and how it all connects your microbe. People literally do poop transplants because we don't understand and sometimes they work and work magically well and cure actual diseases for people because now they have better got microbiome.

33:45And so I think there's so much complexity and AI is the perfect tool to tackle that kind of complexity because we can now have similar things, we understand how one neuron works, but when you have enough of them, you scale it up enough, all of a sudden you can have a conversation and people think it's a human being on the other side. Right. And so AI is a perfect tool. Medicines the perfect application for that. Why are you most concerned about AI? Job changes are brutal in the moment. There will add a lot of pressure on social systems. I think the long term, I'm an optimist, but short term, you've got to have good social systems and help people with a path in this new AI future as their jobs change and fall away.

34:22The modern day ludites of like our illustrators, right? Because it used to be that you can charge $500 for an illustration. And if you cared about just seeing illustrations as art and you want to see as much art as possible in the world You're excited about having I now create Ghibli and all other kinds of beautiful illustrations But if that was your life's income and you spend years honing that skill and now that skill is just not worth it anymore And it's cost five cents or less to make the illustration you hate the technology right and this is understandable now Of course just like the past day luteids We're all appreciate having a t -shirt and everyone even in Africa can have as many t -shirts as they want and it's very cheap and we like most humanity likes the outcomes, but most people don't like it when they get paid by the hour for those outcomes.

35:04And so that is a negative downside that I think it's on to governments to help their people not to block the technology and enforce not using it, but actually use it and use the proceeds and help people to learn new kinds of skills. Everyone always says, well, you know, we've always had this before you've got the agricultural revolution, you've got like, bunny PCs into entering workforces in the 90s. That took actually multi decades. It took long, long time periods to actually move physical machinery into large farms and still a lot of cases there isn't in some parts of the world. Same with PCs, it took a decade actually for PCs to fully be.

35:38This is a software update, so the speed of transition is completely different. Yes and no. It is a software update, but you'd be surprised and we talked about this a little bit earlier. The adoption is not as fast as you think. It takes people to change their process. It takes them some time. I don't think it'll happen as quickly as people think. There's still, I think 60 % of all adults in the US have never talked to a chat model, like at all. And that's the US. I can just go to Europe, I'm sure that is even higher. Do you think in the future we will choose which model we use? I find this okay, we are choosing the model when we're putting in a prompt.

36:11It's like taking your car to the car mechanic and being like, I want that span and not that span. It's like, no, you'll just get given the best model for that specific prompt and request, no? Yeah, yeah. So it's actually something that we we have shipped internally and I think it'll come out in a week or two on you .com Like to just automate that orchestration completely away and only the power users who really want to can double click into the interface and then choose which model to use. Find that absolutely bizarre 100 % staying on that. They're like, what is the right solution for government?

36:41Everyone says UBI. This will lead to mass unemployment in in funding the short term and retraining is hard. Retraining is hard. I used to be a big fan of UBI and I thought that seems like a fair thing to do and I think you have to One acknowledge that everything falls in some normal distribution I think that we have to teach kids a drive to want to create something like to actually have desires To make improvements to the world In fact, I think one of the biggest civilization area unlocks would be to all agree that that entropy or darkness in the universe is the enemy and that we should spread consciousness into the universe.

37:22If we can all agree that's the goal, then we can always be motivated to do more of that to spread intelligence and intelligent entities into the universe. That would be beautiful. But swimming back in, I think the problem is that while most people complain about their jobs, it does give them meaning. It does give them meaning to be a valuable part of society and to have earned something that they can then give to their family, to their kids, and so on. And so I think UBI will take that meaning away. And we're already in a meeting crisis with the technology and society that we have set up for ourselves in many places.

37:55And I think that will just exacerbate it. Do you think it's being like meaning? Do you think we will have AI friends in a more significant way that we have human friends? I think we will have more significant AI friends, but I hope it's not more significant than our friendships with people. And you believe that we'll have like the AI companion? You know, I've been an investor in like a replica like many, many years ago. To me, you can find beautiful examples where people just say, look, I used to journal. Now I write into this thing and sometimes it asks me questions back and it makes me feel like someone, someone cares.

38:29Think about your best friend. If they kept coming into you every single day with all their little problems, you know, like that problem didn't cross my threshold of being relevant enough for you to tell me about it. You know, like, but some people have like that desire to just tell other people about their problems all the time. And very few people have the time and capacity and emotional capacity to hear that all the time every day. But so I think it's a perfectly fine use case for people to work through their problems just like they used to write a diary. So if you were advising a 19 year old or a 21 year old coming out of university with school about where they should focus to prevent themselves bluntly being in a position where they have to retrain.

39:08Where would that be? It's similar but different like because in high school, after you finish high school, you can still study it for a couple of years. So that's a big difference. Once you're already out of college, it's like it's much harder. But knowing computer science is incredibly important. Like knowing how to program is incredibly important. Why do you say that with the commodalization a lot of low level programming? For the same reason why we're speaking English and like I could have stayed in Germany and never learned English. And then every time you say something, I, you know, for a while, I would type it in and then hear it.

39:42And then like every, you know, two minutes would have like some useful bit of information going back and forth. Or eventually I'm going to have just like a full bottle fish in my ear. And it will translate it hopefully fairly well and get the connotations and maybe capture my voice. And maybe that technology is like like fully there in five years or so, like so good, so cheap, so prevalent that everyone will just travel with it and everything. I think even then it'll be useful for some people to know some languages. But do we need to translate as much? No, actually in my masters I was studying Chinese back in Germany, I just fell in love at that time with statistical machine learning pattern recognition and statistics and what we now call AI and like realize like that is a more useful way to spend my time than learning five more languages, which is beautiful for me, but not useful for humanity.

40:31And so I do think that will fall away, but programming isn't just about programming itself and being like an IT or being a programmer or a developer or so on. It's also about a different way of thinking, and it's a different way of understanding the world that you're in. And so if you have an understanding of that, then it feels less like magic, and you are more empowered to actually contribute to that world. So I think that's important. Even if you want to study law, medicine, chemistry, or whatever, you should combine it with computer science because all of these fields are going to change over the next couple of decades.

41:06How do engineering teams and that structure change over the next couple of decades? I think the biggest problem and biggest worry I have is that the entry level jobs right now are more and more automatable. And so you hopefully have companies that have a long enough time horizon such that they're willing to train people even though an AI could do the job because they're either cheap enough or like they just have a long -term view on the world. And then by the time they are senior enough, hopefully I hasn't automated that senior job also. And then they can be in that senior role and then manage all the AI agents because they understand the processes.

41:42Turns out if you've never done something, it's much harder to manage someone to do it for you. Same with like vibe coding, right? It's super fun. It's awesome. I just posted this really funny video, this comedian about vibe coding. But if you don't know how to program at all, you're also not going to be as good of a vibe coder. There's just certain things, like complexity theory. You just say, oh, do this sorting for me, or do this, you know, like if you don't know how sorting algorithms work and how fast they could be, like make it fast and make it fast. And sometimes there are certain complexity, theoretical upper bounds of how fast sorting algorithms can be.

42:16And you're just telling it that it'll go to jail if it doesn't do it faster, like, is not gonna make it any faster. And so it's useful to understand that you also have seen that even LMS benefit in their general reasoning skills when they know and have seen programming as training data. And I think that's true for people too. So will engineering teams be smaller? I think so. I think a lot of teams will be more efficient, will be managers of AI, I think all the boring bits of all work. I think one of the ways to think about future work is one, will all become managers of AI. Number two, managing is hard.

42:46And so we have to train people to it. What that means is like in the future, every time you do a job like a dozen, two dozen times, you're gonna be like, wait, why hasn't the AI now taken that over from me? Why do I still have to do this repeatable boring thing? I personally hate repeatable boring things, so I'm all for it. But that is a mindset shift that schools don't teach yet. And that will take a generation of kids to have to grow up in this mindset. We see this kind of continuous battle between windsurf and karsa. And a lot of people say that there's actually very little switching costs between moving between the two.

43:20How do you think about that and how that marketplace out? Yeah, and Codium, I wish I could have invested in Cursor. One of the founders was actually an intern at U .com and I would have loved to invest, but yeah, so and then Codium I fortunately was able to invest in. Was he Berlin? Yeah, he was very, very smart. I really tried to keep him at U .com and stuff. He went from intern to, I think, CEO. Of course, and so yeah, really important. Why did you want? Why did you not follow his money? Well, I'd run a trying and bass when he started. I tried. Did some other investors were like, oh, well, they had an even closer relationship with him.

43:53Busters. They had investors. Okay. I'm happy for him. So yeah, there is very little switching costs. Same as true for LMS in the consumer world, right? They're not. None of them are that amazing yet. None of them do enough personalization yet. Now where there is a lot of switching costs is if you have company internal data or you have unique data assets. How can send all A for you in terms of giving very, very private data to you? Well, traditionally, it might be held on prem that none of us bought security, that none of us bought privacy. How much of an actual barrier is that? It's a huge barrier.

44:24LMs are garbage and garbage out to a large degree. So if you have a search model or an index and you ask, like, what's new with Trump? And that search index brings back pages from like six years ago. So the LM will tell you wrong and outdated things about that query. So the search is kind of the often forgotten infrastructure layer for LMs. And so companies are rightfully concerned about privacy and all of that. That's why we have zero data retention. We have agreements that we don't train any model on company internal data. That's how you get into enterprise. Do you think we are seeing the biggest corporate misbehavior from this generation taking ChatGbt and putting company data in it?

45:09They shouldn't. They should stop doing that if they have done it in the past. Do you know what they're saying? I think a lot of people are doing it, but we also know now we have customers who are like, okay, like we want to know exactly which models are accessible and have these security requirements and so on. And that's where you really can't be like a great consumer company and a great enterprise like company at the same time, it's very, very hard, and we're focused on that enterprise, and make sure that the security's there, the trust is there, the accuracy of the answers there, the ability to say, I don't know, is there.

45:41All of these things are important aspects. So what extent is cash and the weight of cash a weapon in this market? In terms of like startups? Like, is cash a moat for Al Al Am's and for companies in this market? It can be, but we have seen some companies now that had raised hundreds of millions of dollars and still died. We're going to see a correction. When companies are trading 180X, they're AR and they don't have a real moat and like there's just switching costs as close to zero to go to deep sea or something else. You see some retention numbers on deep sea. I have not. They're pretty shit. I'm not surprised.

46:20No one's staying with deep sea. I'm not surprised. And so it's actually, is that very valuable? Does not prove that the ultimate value in this market is consumer brought. In some ways, I think AI has gotten so exciting for so many people that the start of world is going back to the basics. It's just like when there were 100 photo sharing apps and only one Instagram and maybe a flicker and so on, no pun intended flicker, I think we'll see something similar in AI. It just goes back to is your branding good, your marketing, your sales, your distribution. and then of course a lot of the technology things, but those get commoditized more and more, just like sharing photos was a fairly commodity capability, but a lot of little subtle details were better for Instagram.

47:03Now that's consumer. In consumer, you usually end up in monopoly or do -oply situations, enterprises a very different world. So what extent do you think we see ChatGbT and OpenAI moving kill a ton of different, more consumer -facing apps? So we looked at a company recently, and they were in the, basically picture creation space for fashion. So you take a picture of a model in a t -shirt and it'll do it in all the t -shirts in this Q line. Yeah. Yeah Open -Ai just really saw the other day. There's 10 of them that just died background remover. 10 just died To what extent will we see open -Ai killer generation of companies of this material?

47:39I actually don't think they're all gonna just die overnight like think about speech recognition It's very commodity. There's tons of open source speech recognition like algorithms you can download and so on there's still several companies that make millions and like tens or even hundreds of millions of revenue doing speed tracking conditions just perfectly. That lasts a little bit. Like you don't just throw like a full feature length movie and make it in this new style like with chat chavity like companies are going to want to have custom solutions for them. And even like that fashion thing, I think there's a space where you take the picture and and it's just integrated in your camera, in your workflow, you can change the skew, you can change the model's hair color and every little pixel is just perfect so you can put it on a big billboard.

48:27I think there will still be specialized companies that go and do deeper things. Then you could do if you knew how to use it all yourself and you're really clever and you are an early adopter. What do you think is the biggest misconception that people have today around AI and ALA LAMS? I think the biggest misconception is that we have sort of by modal like back and white when things are often in some gray in between. Like some people think it's going to take off over all the jobs. And then because it's so brilliant, like overnight, like everything we've gone and then like the next night it'll kill us all, right?

48:59Like it's just like this extreme optimism that then can sometimes also switch into extreme like pessimistic optimism of like, oh, the technology is so good and becomes fully self aware and conscious that it will then obviously want to kill us all. So there's like the commiss conception on that side. then there's a misconception to still, and I see this in Germany still, there's still people like, ah, you know, two years ago was crypto this year's AI, like maybe we'll just go away. And like that's also a huge misconception that still exists in the world. It's hard for you and I to imagine as we live sort of in a bubble, but I see it when I travel.

49:30Do you see with this advancement, we have escaped Moore's law in terms of all speed of progression? Is Moore's law ever -escapable? Of course. And like, you know, I think parallelism has helped the ton, like, and Nvidia shows us that, Yeah, we might not double the number of transistors or whatever every 18 months, but like we may have more parallel ones. And then there's still the the black horse of quantum, which may, you know, a lot of announcements unclear if they're like how real they all are, but like that will also be a major shift when it finally does happen, but it might still take 5, 10, 15 years.

50:01What would be the most significant changes the result from quantum development in a way that we would like to see? I mean, there's the obvious one that we don't want to see, which is like all the passwords need to be reencrypted and changed and all the data that it has been leaked, but is encrypted might get decrypted and hence like people know what's in some things of the past that they had hacked but couldn't really decipher yet or decrypt. So I think on the positive side, what I'm really excited about is getting quantum computers to a scale where we can simulate a cell. We can right now like really, really accurately only simulate like a few hundred atoms at best and how they really truly interact with one another.

50:43And like, neural nets can approximate, there's a lot of cool things where we can hack simulations, but to, from real first principles, like really deeply model physics and chemistry that is complex and eventually biology, like that will be such a massive unlock because in AI, anything you can simulate, AI can solve every problem that domain. Like, you can simulate Go or Chess, like, you can simulate a computer game because it's in the computer and you can play around with it. Obviously, AI is going to solve that at some point. None of those results were that surprising to me, though they, again, amazing marketing and agrazing, actually doing it, right?

51:18It's really hard, but it's not that surprising. But what we can't simulate most of the interesting things in the world, such as a cell. But once you can simulate a cell and multiple cells and organisms, all of a sudden AI can try billions of different things on how to cure that cancer, how to cure MS, how to cure all all the bacteria and viruses and like all these different things, like it will be such a massive unlock to be able to simulate those things with quantum computers and maybe also one more with normal computers. Dude, I would love to quick forward. I've patted you with different questions literally from every different spectrum.

51:52And I'm still thinking about the negative quantum trends in what kids need to do, but yeah, well, let's do a quick run. What did you believe that you now no longer believe? Like I said, I think a big one for me was this sort of skepticism about the future. I'll tell you a story. Like one of the co -founders of OpenAI and I started a bet and I think seven years ago or so, where he said, we'll have AGI in like nine or 10 years. And I was like, I mean, I'll work hard on research to make my prediction be wrong, but I really don't think we will. This was at like an AI conference and we're both like still more junior than we are now.

52:28And he had this like really strong belief and you know, they worked on robotic hands and they're like another step towards AGI. And I'm like, I mean, it was a cool robotics project. They worked on Dota game playing and open AI. And I'm like, that's a cool RL project. And they're like, another step towards AGI. And then, you know, they saw like our prompt engineering paper, which they cited, and like that NLP route was a more legit step towards AGI than the previous things. But long story short, we did this bet. And in the bet, he has to win. I think it ends in 2027. So three things have to be true.

52:59We have to have a personal robot that cleans the whole house the way my cleaning team does and it needs to be purchasable, like for reasonable amounts of money, it needs to solve the millennium math problem and it needs to like translate a book perfectly so that the actual author would be like that should be my official translation. All three have to be true for him to win the bet and I will probably still win my thousand dollar bet but he became a billionaire in the process of proving me wrong and so that kind of shows you you have to just have the constructive optimism and that was probably something that a belief I changed.

53:32It's just like, even if you don't think it can be quite possible, you should try to make the most audacious goals and set the most audacious goals for yourself and then basically work on pragmatic milestones towards those goals. Open AI at 300, anthropic at 60 or grog at 50, which would you most invest in? Can I choose none? I mean, open source puts a lot of pressure on it. It's really, how do you think about the distribution of value between close or snow principles? Do you know, I think it follows the latest of Linux? Like if you're really sophisticated, you can use the open source more and more.

54:08And as the open source models have caught up, it's just very hard to say, this is like super unique technology. It just becomes like, you know, for a while in technology, like having a really good database was really powerful. And indeed, there was like, there's an Oracle now. And so if you're really, really crazy large scale, then you might still use an Oracle. But for a lot of other folks, they can just use simpler, other smaller databases. And you have that wild horse of... Do you think they will? It's like you said that the final 10 % for speech recognition. Which is like, yeah, they can do what they don't.

54:40Yeah, I think, again, it's very different for consumer. Opening high actually has a massive number of consumers. And that's super, super powerful. And so, yeah. All of them have advantages. SON -3 .7 is actually the best model for a lot of things, especially in coding and engineering, and so on. Like you said, it's a little bit unclear to me. I personally, which is, I also just love investing in early stage where you can have 1 ,000 X's and so on. I just don't see 1 ,000 X's for those companies. Do you care about money? I don't. Has that always been the case? It has been always the case. Yeah, I was like, I was an academic for a long time.

55:13I want to be a professor. I want to do research. I missed the research also now still. I now have to, I realize at some point you have to care about money because money is one of the best indicators of impact and allows you to do epic cool things, but I don't intrinsically care about it. How do you think about defining or measuring success for yourself? I think a lot of it boils down to sort of how much positive impact you've had in the world that matters enough so that people in the future will still remember it. Is there an element of ego to that? about being remembered as the creator of. It's undeniable, like in some ways it's beautiful if you do it, but the difference here for me at least is that I'm okay just being remembered by the people that know.

55:59Like most people have no idea who invented penicillin and most people can't name the people who invented the cure for their cancer, because they're just like some doctor gave it to me and I got this medication out, right? But the people in the know know, and that would be good enough. What trait are you slightly ashamed of but has contributed to your success? I do get quite extreme too if I get into into a zone and then like everything is kind of a nuisance and And then you just get like just really intense about something. You get me. No. I'm also happily married So that helps not being lonely, but yeah, I don't I don't need people all the time around me In fact, I'm an introvert.

56:37I enjoy I have like sometimes events at my my place of like hundreds of people and like I enjoy that a lot. I get sort of there's an activation energy and then you're like, all right, I'm now in this mode, but afterwards I'm like, I don't have to see anyone for like another month now. The final one, when you look forward to the next 10 years, what are you most excited for that you think is realistic and we will see happen? Improving longevity is like one of those AI plus bio -correlaries or follows. That is just really exciting and I think longevity is massively underrated and there are a lot of people who are snarky and say, Oh yeah, whatever, I don't care.

57:14I want it. Like, all people say that until it's a few days before they're dead and they're in pain and they're like, fuck, I wish I was a little bit healthier, you know, beforehand. And was that really worth it to like drink all the time, not sleep enough and so on. So I am trying to be better about it personally. What do you do that you'd most like to stop doing? Most like to like not sleep enough. What's your sleep schedule? I'm traveling right now, so it's all screwed up. And that's like, that's actually one of the worst parts of traveling now. I was like, it's just messes with your sleep. Actually, I stopped drinking last year, also for longevity reasons.

57:47And life is like 20 % less fun, especially in some evenings and so on, but it is better. But I realized actually after not drinking anymore, that the majority of times when I felt bad in the morning traveling wasn't actually from alcohol. It's just from sleep deprivation and shitty sleep schedules. So I feel just as bad. I totally get you. Final one, final one, I promise. the magic he wants is in the actions you are avoiding. What actions are you avoiding? I like whenever I see something that I should be doing, I try to write it down and then I try to work towards it. So I'd like to think I don't avoid many actions.

58:25But I guess when it comes to longevity, like every night I wake up in the morning and I was like, I should have gone to bed earlier last night and I would probably feel better right now. So maybe that's the thing. Is the EU fucking itself AI regulation? Unfortunately, the EU has shot itself in the foot. A lot of different kinds of regulation, and in particular, AI regulation, destroying a fledgling ecosystem that could never get off the ground. What should we be doing that we're not doing? What would you do if you were in charge? A lot of things. I would make computer science, mandatory subject in all schools.

58:56A very sought -after minor for almost every major in college. I would help people and excite people more. It's also a marketing thing to some degree and just mindset shift for people to start their own companies because every person that cares about Outcomes and outputs loves AI. It's only the people who think of How to make money in terms of our spent that might not like AI and so Giving trying to do some marketing for the populist to have that mindset shift of like I can make outputs I can be an owner and an creator and then and possibly start a sovereign well fund so that you can just participate in all the upside of amazing AI technology worldwide, not just like sovereign well fund that only invests internally inside the country, but also externally.

59:44I'd make it easier for large enterprises to buy small startups. Also, maybe get some tech benefits or something for it because there's a lot of not invented humanity in large European companies. And so you just don't have as much of that ecosystem. I would reduce the barriers to go public. So did you have even more benefits for startups and have, you know, they're basically two exit routes, right? Either get acquired or you go public for VCs in the ecosystem. And so you'll get more VC if both routes work out better. I'll stop there. But I'm going to ask that question a lot. I try to be helpful when people ask me that question.

1:00:22Dude, thank you so much for putting up with me. Completely just pampering around. Like, as I said, I have these quite home schedules, and then I'm like, fuck it, let's just go for it. You've been fantastic, so thank you so much. It's always a pleasure talking to you, man. That was so much fun to have Rich in the studio there, and if you wanna see the full episode, you can find it on Spotify by searching for 20VC. But before we leave you today, Secure Frame Empower's businesses to build trust with customers by simplifying information security and compliance through AI and automation. Thousands of fast -growing businesses, including Nasdaq, Angel List, Doodle and Coda.

1:00:57Trust Secureframe to expedite their compliance journey for global security and privacy standards, such as Sokto and ISO 27001. CMMC, NIST, Standards and more. Bad by top tier investors and corporations like Google and Cliner Perkins, the company is among Forbes' list of the top 100 startup employers for 2024. Cheetu's best software awards for higher satisfaction products and a recipient of the 2024 cyber security excellence awards. Something I definitely never got in school myself. Learn more today at Secureframe .com. And speaking of trust and intelligence, let me tell you about Harmonic. Did you know that half of the 27 companies started last year by OpenAI alumni are still in stealth?

1:01:39I discovered this on Harmonic, the complete start -up database used by Excel, Insight Menlo, and hundreds of other leading VCs, as well as go -to -market teams from the likes of notion, and Brexit and Google to find the best startups and founders even in stealth. Few things annoy me more than missing a round where we know the founder and should have led the round. But now this is a problem of the past. Harmonic maps everyone your team has ever met, emailed or connected with to the source of truth for startups. So when that company that was just a little too early suddenly gains traction, you won't be too late.

1:02:13Or when you find the perfect company for your thesis or product, you'll know that Sarah just happens to know their CTO. How does Sarah know everyone? Who knows? She's a genius. Learn how VCs and GTM teams find the best startups, six months ahead of the competition on harmonic .ai. And while harmonic helps you stay ahead of the curve in startup investing, what if your phone could help you do the same with your wallet? We spent nearly half of our waking lives glued to our phones, upwards of 50 hours every week, recently one company transforming this reality stood out so much I personally became a shareholder, mode mobile.

1:02:48Mode mobile created the earn phone, a smartphone that pays you for daily activities. Instead of big tech profiting billions from our attention, mode returns over 325 million directly to users through earnings and savings. Mode's revenue surged an incredible 32 ,000 % in 3 years, recognized by Deloitte as 2023's fastest growing software company in North America. And here's why I'm excited. Moad's equity offerings have raised over 30 million from 20 ,000 plus retail investors. One of 2025's standout public raises, you can now join me as a shareholder with as little as $1 ,000 at invest .modemobile .com, Ford slash 20VC for a limited time, unlock up to 100 % bonus shares and a free earn phone, email us for investor brief at 20VC at modemobile .com or check out invest .modemobile .com, Ford slash 20VC.

1:03:39As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode coming on Monday with the founder of Dave, the most incredible turnaround in the public markets. They went from over a billion dollars to a 50 million dollar market cap. The turnaround story on Monday.