20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF

24:23We already saw Apple actually talk a lot about their own chips. You know, one of my favorite tech essays that I find myself referring to all the time is that, you know, Joel Spolski thing on commoditize your complements. And, you know, that's what's happening in AI right now. Everyone is saying like, what are the complements to what I'm doing? And how do I commoditize them? It's interesting, like, the reviews of Nvidia's model are pretty mixed to put it mildly. I think you'll certainly see people trying to figure out, like, which layers of the stack do you need to own? And, you know, what do you have to commoditize in order to, like, really protect your core business?

24:56Maybe we'll always say this, but it really feels to me like we're gonna learn so much in the next 12 months You know like to me the key question that until we resolve We're all just guessing is sort of how good are the GPT 5 -era models if they're like Wildly better if it's as big a gap between four and five as it was between three and four That is a very different world from if it really feels like we're eking out these tiny improvements Despite having invested truly colossal amounts of money. What do you think would be a needle moving shift? I think the one that people are talking most about, which makes sense to me is just agency.

25:29I mean, like, GPT -3 wasn't good enough really to do anything remotely agenteic. People have obviously built agents on GPT -4, but you know, people doing that have said like, you can build great demos. You run it 100 times, you pit the best one, it looks amazing, but robustness is very, very huge problem and they're not reliable. But I think if GPT -5 were good enough that you could get much, much more reliable agents, I think that would feel like a qualitative change that was really impressive. Do you think the world is ready for an agentic, capable model to be unleashed? Not one that, like, many millions of instances can be run and they can operate at, like, nearly human level.

26:07No, I don't think that's what GPT -5 will be, but like one of the features I'm really interested in right now is I think we'll get really good agents in the next five years. And I think if you look at parts of the economy where we already have a lot of automation is pretty clear that that requires a lot of infrastructure, requires protocols for agents to interact. I think we're going to need that for AI agents. We're going to need to build great infrastructure to maximize the economic value of these agents. I'm so what does great infrastructure mean to mass -mouse? Well, let me give you an example.

26:39There are an area of the economy where there's already a lot of autonomous agencies, high frequency trading. Intrating, a lot of the work is now done by, I think you can only describe as autonomous agents, but we don't let them just go wild and pull their broker. And I mean, for ZeeCe, but if you look at the complexity of the infrastructure, we've built the edge. And it's a rules -based system, no? And the rules are quite, by the rules of very objective, when X meets Y, then do Z. Yeah, so I'm certainly not saying that we can just copy what we have, but I think it gives you, to me, it's like an intuition builder that let's say we're going to send out lots of agents to do economically valuable work.

27:14We need to govern things like, how do they interact with each other? What are the rules for that? How do you handle the edge cases? How do you observe what they're doing? How do you govern what they're doing? How do you get and keep to the rules? And so it strikes me that whoever builds the protocol that for key slices of the economy actually allows agents to come together and do business together, that's going to be an extraordinarily valuable company. Should government be the ones to do that? I think government should set the standards, but I just don't think government has a great track record of building important scalable software.

27:46And that's an independent company that would be wanting to setting that for you. So I think it's like it's the equivalent of building an operating system or a protocol. It's basically saying if you want agents to transact with each other, we provide the tooling that allows you to observe that, govern that, turn them off when they're not working, handle the edge cases, but imagine that a large chunk of the economy of the next decade it ends up being transacted by autonomous agents. I don't think they're gonna interact in the way that humans interact. There's gonna have to be infrastructure that allows them to interact and whoever owns that infrastructure and that's gonna be a huge asset.

28:19We're sitting in London, you mentioned about the kind of town in the north that you're from. Bradford. Bradford. Last one, Axon. There you go. I'm really worried about like knowledge and equality actually. And I think we sit here and we know all these things. Dude, a million people in the UK of 65 million have any idea what we're talking about. Maybe less. Do you not think this is going to create an ever -increasing cosm in wealth and inequality? I think one of the good things is people benefit from technology even when they don't understand it. I think that's like one of the big lessons in the history of the last 200 years of capitalism is that technology is the engine of prosperity and people whose jobs involve very little technology today make a whole lot more than the ancestors 200 years ago and have a much better quality life because of the benefits that technology brings.

29:04I do think it's true that so far, And the broad trend is that technology is what I guess economists call skills biased. It benefits people with more skills more than it benefits people with fewer skills. That is a big challenge for governments, also probably a big opportunity for entrepreneurs. But I think in general, the story of technology is an extraordinarily positive one. I'm not saying that people who shouldn't, including policymakers, look at this and say right, how do we plan for this world? Where relatively few people understand this, but it's a huge factor in everyone's lives. but I worry about that because I worry that you start to get the instinct of like maybe we should try and slow it down Maybe we should try and stop it.

29:43Do you think the fears of oh, we're gonna be regulated to oblivion and you're able to regulate ourselves as we generally have done is over Reaching my view would be and I think you see this already I didn't vote for Brexit broadly. I'm not a fan But it might probably the first issue where I'm like, huh I mean, if there are some benefits to this, it's just looking at the difference in approaches to AI regulation. I mean, I do think the EUA act is a mistake. My basic model of how that legislation gets rid is like a bunch of old dudes sitting in Brussels and saying, let's imagine everything that could go wrong.

30:13Okay, you're not allowed to do that. What's the biggest problem with the EUA act? Basically this, that it basically tries to anticipate the future, labels a bunch of things high risk and creates an enormous burden for companies trying to innovate in those areas. I think actually this is an area where the UK has done a lot better job than Europe, where we're not regulating too oblivion. In fact, on AI, the UK has less regulation than any other country that has a significant AI industry. So right now, there is no specific AI regulation in the UK. So if you're building AI in Europe, the UK is the best place to build.

30:46I strongly believe that. And that's because of the regulatory benefit. I think that's one of the factors. I think the other is just the extraordinary talent base. If you go back to the thing we start this conversation talking about, let's say I'm right that there's going to be like strong return to ideas, to new ideas over the next few years. I think it's very likely that of people in Europe who might have those ideas, they're disproportionately in the UK. Do you think so? And you think they will stay in the UK? Let's say you really believe that you could build, as I framed it, and you quoted like an anthropic or open -eye -eye scale company in terms of ambition.

31:17I actually think one of your biggest challenges building that in the Bay Area today would be building and retaining the AI I researched talent the next time. And people always talk about hiring, much less often do about retention. But the packages that Sam Altman will offer to your best people, the minute you get your first demo, it's really hard. In London, it's much more plausible that you build a truly world class research team and keep them together for long enough to really see the impact. And you're like, here in London, we have DeepMind, we have the London Office of Anth, we have the European Office of Anth, the European Office of OpenAI, We have wave, we have Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, UCL.

31:55Why are we so fucking negative then? I don't know, I'm gonna do a spoiler. I know one of the questions you're gonna ask later is what do you believe that people around you don't? And I thought a lot about this, and I was like, oh, maybe I can say something about AI. And I realized the thing I really believe that almost no one believes is, I think the UK can go back to being pretty much the richest country in the world, but Captain, I really truly believe that. I think we can be at least as rich as the United States on a per -head basis. I think we've chosen not to be, and we just need to choose to be.

32:20We should be the obvious place in the world to build and scale technology companies that we can be. So what is that rate limiting factor? I think the big things are actually levers that we can choose to pull. You know, one of the things that I found just like really dispiriting when I was working in government last year was that I was an enormous privilege, but I got to go and meet Sachin Adela and Andy Jassy and you know, these people and negotiate with them on this summit. And you know, I was mainly talking about AI policy, But obviously they wanted to talk about the full tech agenda with the UK.

32:52And the number one issue that these companies had, and I'm really not exaggerating, was we want to invest billions and billions of dollars to build compute infrastructure in the UK and your local county councils in the middle of nowhere keep vetoing our data centres because they obscure a view from a railway bridge. That is a choice we have made as a country to not let the most sophisticated companies in the world, invest in sophisticated technology infrastructure in the UK. They want to. So all we have to do is decide that we want them to. How do we do that then? Do we just over all county councils?

33:26Well, no, there are various ways you can do it. Parliament can legislate to make data centers that there's a category of infrastructure project that doesn't get to be overridden locally, that like National Government can say, this is a priority. We can choose to do this. I don't want to make it sound simple. It's hard, and it will annoy the hell out of a lot of people. But, you know, planning is one, energy is the other. You know, I've spoken again, like, kind of with last year when I was working in government, you know, I've spoken to people that wanted to build enormous costas of GPUs in the UK and couldn't because of the limitations of our electricity grid.

33:58So what do they say then? Should we give up? We don't need to give up. These are all levers that the government can pull. Do you think a Labour government will pull them? Well, you know, if you read the Labour manifesto, They say that they're committed to growth in the normal and priority and they talk about things like planning They talk about things like compute infrastructure. So we'll see there is a window of time where this country has to decide What it wants its future to be my very good friend in her goth wrote this great essay very pressionally Actually now five years ago called AI nationalism where he talked about like if you believe That AI is the defining technology of you know our generation which I do then at some point countries will have to decide whether they want to be AI makers or AI takers.

34:42And if you're an AI taker, it doesn't mean that your country won't use AI. It just means you'll be shipping dollars to California to use California models on California and compute. We don't have to choose that. We can choose a different future and we have to decide. Or we can have beautiful views from railway bridges. It's so funny to hear the positivity. It's inspiring to hear you because I literally I just sit with other entrepreneurs and other VCs and everyone just fucking gets the sucks in London. But it's so funny, right? Because, you know, as you said, we're sitting here in London. And I would say, you know, weaving three miles of where we are, you have a top three global AI lab, arguably the one with the Broadest Research Agenda Deep Mind.

35:21So if I'm right, the ideas will matter, then deep minds, you know, right up there. You have probably the top embodied AI company, private company in the world in Wave. You have like probably the best life sciences cluster. In certainly in Europe, You've got, I'm super biased, it's on the chair, but you've got probably the most radical government R &D funding agency in the world in RIA. We know how to do this stuff already. We've just got to believe it now. What about people who say, ah, but the liquidity markets are shit. LSE is useless. There's not enough of a buy book. Big institutions aren't understanding enough.

35:55How do you think about that? I think they're right. The way I see it is, this is really a question about who benefits. It's not actually a question about whether we can build. What I mean by that is I would love it that when a 20 VC company or an EF company goes public, that the pools of capital that own that company are my mom and dad's West York's retention fund. Right now, that's not what's gonna happen because they're gonna IPO in places that the shareholders are probably American, it's a Vanguard and BlackRock, right? And honestly, for you and me, and for the entrepreneurs, who cares? It's all cash.

36:31But again, from a UK -like long -term growth perspective, I believe that so much of our growth, if we make it happen, will come from entrepreneurship, big advances in science and technology. I think frankly, capital markets are very efficient. Good things will raise capital. The question is who's capital? And I think from a UK PLC perspective, we should want it to be that it's pension funds, you know, with UK pensions, UK savers that are benefiting from that. So that's a big problem. What would you say to UK pension funds who are listening? Well, we were joking before. I've raised more money in an other Michigan than I have in London and I won't name the name of the pension fund, but one of my biggest investors is a state pension fund in Michigan.

37:11And they were one of the first pension funds that we pitched. So I still came out of it being like, these are the people we should be pitching. And the scheme in Michigan is $70 billion pension plan. And I remember coming to pitch a comparably sized plan in the UK and saying to them, what have you done in venture capital? And they said, we've heard of venture capital. But their allocation of venture was zero. And I just think that if private companies, if the most ambitious entrepreneurs are saying that they want to keep their companies private for longer, you know, if they IPO at all, they want to do it when the companies are extremely mature, then most of the benefits from growth will come to pulls capital that invests in venture.

37:51And if UK pension funds aren't doing that, how do they expect to be able to return to meet their promises to their pensions? I didn't know the answer to that, but I think that's what I would worry about. One final thing we do just a bit on founders, because I think it's such an important part, is just like the future of like modern combat and how AI changes that one of the most exciting companies coming out of Europe, I think is Helsinki and Toulston, one of the best entrepreneurs in Europe. My, certainly my best angel investment so far. That was a very lucky break. Well done. He is exceptional.

38:20He is true. The business is incredible. How does AI change the future of warfare? And you agree with Alex Wang that it is more powerful than nuclear weapons? That is a very Alex thing to say. I don't think AI today is more powerful than nuclear weapons. I don't think GPT 4 is... Have you tried perplexity? Well, have you tried a hydrogen bomb? I would say as a slight side note, I think nuclear war is really underrated as a thing to worry about. If you've not read it already and if you read it, haven't read it already, the best book I've read this year by some distance is Nuclear War, colon, a scenario by this amazing American journalist, Annie Jacobson, and she describes it as a nonfiction thriller.

39:03And what she does is basically just walk through step by step what would happen if a rogue country launched an attempted attack on the United States and all the things that could go wrong and lead to disaster. And it's chilling. I don't think I've ever had an experience with a book before where I had to keep taking breaks because I was like, whoa. But you know, she didn't make this up. She went and she spent thousands of hours interviewing the top people in nuclear security in the US and you know, like, former Soviet people. And it's an extremely compelling book. So like nuclear war underrated.

39:38But to answer your question, I think AI changes everything in the future of war. I think that if you look at what do soldiers do, how do we think about their value and how do we think about the harm that comes to them? When you look at a future where you can deploy thousands of autonomous AI drones into the mountains of Afghanistan and the Taliban have machine guns, I think it seems like a pretty unfair fight. An open question, I hope you'll listen, my senders their views. I think it's really an interesting question. How does AI change the relative power of offensive and defensive weapons. It's certainly plausible to tell a story how being able to build cheap, smart drones, benefits rogue actors, non -state actors a lot more than it benefits states.

40:27If you have very large, important assets that you don't want to be attacked, like aircraft carriers, you can make the argument that the ability to deploy very, very inexpensive, but pretty smart, explosive drones is really asymmetric. There's not much in aircraft I've carried can do about that. One of the reasons I'm very interested in defensive technologies is I think we're gonna have to think about problems like that and get ahead of them. I think there are a lot of scenarios where it's not obvious it actually benefits the current established powers. You're more excited or you're more nervous about the times I had.

40:58You know, one thing that I'm just very aware of as an investor is I think cyber security as a category is gonna be more important than ever. But we could completely have a world of deep face. There's so many things that I do worry about. And I don't mean to be negative, No, no, no, no. But I am so when you think about the future of your children. So I think probably like the worst idea in the world that it's acceptable to hold in polite company is like degrowth. Like the idea that like oh you know like the real problem in the world is like too many people too much staff too much consumption we should shrink populations we should shrink the economy I could not hate that idea more.

41:31All human progress has come from growth. I want to see technological progress I want to see people building amazing things and as using more clean energy to do more amazing things. I don't think that it's therefore inevitable that all technological progress automatically leads to great outcomes. I think you just have to look at nuclear weapons to see that, yeah, so far we've done pretty well, but there's some pretty terrifying stories about near -misses. Russian, relatively junior soldiers ignoring false alarms that look like incoming strikes and as a result saving the world. That's not to say that tech progress inevitably leads to disaster.

42:06I don't believe that at all. But I do think it matters in what order tech is built and I think it matters who builds it I think technology is ultimately like values later and so when I look to the future I see like paths to the most amazing futures as you probably tell from the discussion about UK I find it very easy to be optimistic But I think the only way we get to those futures is if we prevent very powerful capabilities nuclear weapons, for example, fall into the hands of people that would do as harm. And so, you know, one of the reasons I've really pivoted my time within, yeah, after working on defensive technologies is, I think there's an amazing commercial opportunity there.

42:45But I also think it's what the world needs. We need to build the technologies that mean that the negative consequences of the technologies we build, I'm it to get, not by banning them, but by building great defensive capabilities. Do we need to also invest in our offensive capabilities? Because, you know, I speak to a lot of investors, like, we can optimize the kill chain and look at this and I'm like, you fucking BCG analyst, speaking about kill chains. You know shit about kill chains. Well, I think our generation, if I'm allowed to put myself in the same generation as you, Harry, I think there is a real risk of complacency for us that we have grown up in a world of relative peace where basically wasn't really any geopolitical threat to our value system.

43:26It's clearly no longer true. I think we absolutely need to think about How do we make sure that we have the power to defend our values and our way of life? And I don't think it's a given. We are going to discuss founders. Okay. That was incredible. And you're like, you know, I didn't think Neat Clear Wars actually, that in probably, I mean, fuck it. I'm not. Breathe the book, Harry. You're going to love it. I'm going to read the book. So my question to you on, and actually, I suppose Charlie's on last night and he actually gave me this one, he said, and how much of a great founding team is the individual ability of the founders versus the synergies between those founders.

44:02This is something I've changed my mind on. I actually think more and more. The synergies matter, but ultimately, I do think entrepreneurship is one of the paths that most relies on the peak performance of the highest performer. So there are some walks of life where what really matters is average performance. You know, like, how well do you do the median day? And there are other walks of life where it's like, how well do you do it your very best? You need people in every company who are in the form of category who can day in, day out, turn out excellence. Let's use housing as an example you already brought up.

44:40You also just need the peak performance, the best day from the top town in the company to be truly exceptional. And so like, yeah, synergies do matter, but probably the best predictor is how good is the best person at that best. I think the other truth is that very, very, very few teams stay together for the long, long time, and that negates the importance of the synergies in the long time. So I think that's true, and I think a lot of that is about self -discovery. As you know, a lot of the time when that happens, it's actually about those founders learning what they really want. You know, I think one thing I've learned, having now followed hundreds of founders from kind of often before they even knew they wanted to start a company, how are the time like, especially first -time founders?

45:24Just can't really predict what that's going to be like. This is very hard for most people, and actually I don't think that the best founders, the ones who predict best what it's going to be like. I think they just take it as it comes. But I think a lot of the time when founders don't work out in companies that do, it's that one of them realizes this really wasn't, or at least the bit that's to come is not for them. Do you think everyone has the ability to be an entrepreneur? No. I think entrepreneurship is best to think of it as like, there's nothing like medicine, but in the same way that I don't think everyone should be a doctor or could be a doctor, I think you should think of entrepreneurship as like a high -skill, extremely high -skill profile.

46:01You know, I'm the sort of person that's inclined to want to read like the academic literature on something and on the basis that surely, like, with something we know and we can, you know, there's some alpha in line. I was in general, the academic literature on entrepreneurship is not helpful for either entrepreneurs or VCs. Might be interesting, but there's no like, alpha in it. The paper I think about all the time called forced entrepreneurs, what it looks at is in certain markets, when there's a recession, the dominant employers of high -skilled people, high -few people. Obviously, example in the UK is financial crisis, the bank's higher -few bankers.

46:34And unsurprisingly, in those periods where the level of hiring of kind of highly skilled individuals into finance falls, more people start companies. That's kind of like probably quite obvious. Everyone would sort of intuit that. What's non -intuitive, and in fact, I think maybe even counter -intuitive, is that not only do those people in start companies, they do on average better than the median person who was a starting company in a year without that recession. In other words, the forced entrepreneurs, the ones that go into it because the bank stop hiring do better than the people that chose the previous year.

47:08They realize this like on the verge of being like rude and controversial is that in most ecosystems, it is not by default the very most talented and ambitious people that become founders. It probably is in the Bay Area. The reason that I think there's a huge opportunity in the UK and in Europe and in India where we work is that you can find those truly exceptional people and they, it's not obvious. It's much harder in the Bay Area in a way because there's so many more opportunities for investors to meet those people. But the point I want to make is even today in the UK, even with all the progress has been over the last decade in the ecosystem.

47:44I would say the most aspirational job for a Cambridge computer science grad is to go work at JN Street, be a trader. I think that's the number one job. How much do you earn as a trader at JN Street? I watching amounts, even for you, Harry. It's pretty extraordinary. Like a million bucks. A year one. Yeah. But like, by the time you're a few years in, if you're good, many, many multiples of that. So this is the point about this paper. is what it shows is talent is somewhat flungible. It's really tempting for those of us that live and breathe the industry to be like, there are founders, there are non -founders.

48:15But actually what there is is this talent and this ambition. And if that talent ambition is applied to a trading, then there's people be great traders. If that talent ambition is applied to entrepreneurship, there's people be great founders. And this is the secret of the Bay Area. Like why do Silicon Valley work? Because the most ambitious and talented people in that area come founders. If the same thing happened in the UK, in Europe, in India, would have very similar outcomes. So what is different about those ecosystems? Because there are, I'm sorry if it being naive, there are Jane Streets equivalent in the US who will put, I'm sure, the same package is down.

48:45But the ambitious people there say, no, I'm gonna start a company and the ambitious people here say, sign me up. I think it's like just the belief capital. You know, like there is this sense that like, if you're a Cambridge computer science grad, five years out, probably the richest person you know is the one that went to Jane Streets five years ago. That's probably not true in the Bay Area. And so like there's just - It's read Hoffman, or - Right, yeah. No, but I mean, even your peer. Sure, someone who's sold to drop off - Yeah, yeah, exactly. 200 million million, and then seven percent. And so just, but that's still not true here.

49:16That's the bit I think we still need to see change. But we've waited long enough, Matt, and we've had exits like Magic Pony and in between - Which is why it's a lot better than it was. It's a lot better than it was. And when I started visiting university campuses properly, when I was nice, I started AF. I think it was in period of less 60 % of computer science grads went into finance. That number is not that anymore. I actually don't know what the number is, but I would be surprised if it was like a fraction of that number. It's just changing. I thought one thing there that we were seeing was a movement away from pure focus around money.

49:44For sure. And, you know, I'm sort of deliberately being sort of reductive about it to money. And clearly, part of the reason why actually really exceptional people do start companies in the UK is exactly that. Like, yeah, I'm sure they could go work at Genstri or wherever, but they want to do something. Whenever, you know, I'm in a conversation where We've offered someone a place, yeah, and they've gone off of from Game Street or similar. I'm like, yeah, you could be an extremely highly paid crossword puzzle solver, which is sort of how I think about Genre Street playing a zero sum game or you can change people's lives.

50:19It's up to you. And actually a lot of people, exactly as you say, are not just like maximizing next year's income. That's where it comes from. My point though is that it's less at the individual level. I'm saying at the system level, our biggest challenge I think in Europe is still talent allocation. Can I ask you, what did EF get most wrong in your assumptions on talent? You know, one of the challenges of this business and you may feel the same is that the fee bat loops are so long. And so, you know, you do something, you observe a short term metric like, do there is a seed round, do there is a series A?

50:53And then years later, you find out whether the company's any good. And so I think one of the things we got wrong was just overreacted to short term data early on. So in the first couple of years we largely funded people who were straight out of university. And then as the brand grew and the Chareco grew we got more and more applicants who were like in the sort of like 30s. We're like wow this is great. We're able to like move up the experience curve. And of course the problem was they were more experienced but they weren't the very best 30 year olds. One of the things that I think we made a mistake on is that as we scaled and particularly as Alice and I stopped making every selection decision, you got into the thing where it's very hard if you're new to what we do to compare the CV of like a 31 year old who's actually good but not exceptional and a 21 year old who's exceptional that has no experience and choose the 21 year old but you actually should choose the 21 year old.

51:46What's the graduation rate? So we have two phases to what we do so I've ever phase where it's basically common sea. We put you in a room with what we hope is like a really exceptional peer group of people that are equally ambitious, equally talented and say like, you know, take 10 weeks to figure out if there's something that you really want to work on or someone you really want to work with. And if there is, awesome, like let's do the next bit. And you know, that bits the sort of unique beer vf, it's like not like an accelerator, it's really like about peer group curation. And so like, let's say for every hundred people that join at that stage, something like 80 of them will pair up with someone and come up with an idea that they're excited about.

52:28But we then do a cut where we say like, do you really wanna spend the next 10 years of your life doing that? And do we really think that's the best use of your time? And so we cut about half at that point. What's the most common reason you cut there? Everyone who joins us has like a huge opportunity cost. Right, we're very lucky to have thousands and thousands of applicants to be able to pay really great people And so like I just think like the worst thing we could do is say like yeah do that do that for the next 10 years I don't feel guilty at all about people who want to see whether they should be found or they come and they find out it's not for them I was fine.

53:00They go back and get it up The only people I would ever feel guilty about is people that come and spend seven years of their life doing something That could never be big enough to fulfill their ambitions And so probably at that stage, we'd say we'd like to fund about half of the combinations that have come up. These are teams that are 10 weeks old. You know, we now put in 250K at that stage and I would say of those, typically like two, three quarters would raise the seed round. Dude, I want to move into a quick fight because like I told you, I'm going to do it. Let's do it. Okay, so let's start off with which fans from best to do most respect and learn from.

53:33But I was going to say Charlie Songhurst and you've already name checked him. I think he's also an angel. Yeah, but he's probably deployed more capital than most seed funds I would say every year. He could easily put a wrap around it and he would be a fund. The reason I would say Charlie is like, I think Charlie has two things that I think he is very plausibly the best at in the world. One is, I think he's just a great talent spotter. I think he's just really able to see the best version of every founder that he meets and decide how good that is. If you go back to my idea that they're actually what matters is the peak performance from the peak person.

54:13Like Charlie has an incredible way of like very rapidly building a model of like how good is this person of their best? That's an exceptional thing to me. Because he invests so early, that's just like an amazing thing to be able to do. The other thing he does better than anyone else I know, he pitches back to the founder, the most ambitious version of the idea they've just pitched him. He's just exceptionally good at that. and he learns so much from how the founder responds. A lot of people in Europe, and you know, Charlie and Vest are on the world, but you know, one of the things that he and I just cost a lot is part of the reason it's hard to do investing here is that often by the time you meet founders, they've conditioned themselves to like reduce the ambition in the pitch because they're just being so used to people being like, well, that's not very realistic.

54:53So what Charlie will do is he'll pitch back to you. He did, you know, he was one of the first investors in the effort. He'll pitch back to you like what it could actually be. I think he's basically saying like, does that excite you? Do you say like, yes, finally! Someone who gets it, or do you flinch? And I think it's an incredible skill. What was the most contrarian or unorthodox advice you would have for founders? You can start a company with a stranger. You know, I think a lot of the conventional wisdom on who you should start companies with is just survivorship bias. Just that historically, it was almost impossible to start a company with a stranger.

55:24So the only people that the venture community saw were people who founded companies with people they know for a long time. And therefore, you know, of course it looks like that's the only way to do it. What if you changed your mind on it in the last 12 months? 12 months ago, if I'd been on here, I would have told you, it's too late to build an EGI company. Like that ship sailed, there's going to be like three or four of them that already exist. I now think the most ambitious founders today should seriously consider whether that's what they can do. Children give you a glimpse of a second life if not an eternal one.

55:54What do you biggest Athens on Fatherhood, mate? So I've got two little buys, one six and one is three and three quarters, as he very proudly says. I do think Fatherhood has been for me a real sort of exercise in humanity. One of the advantages of founding something is at least at work, people sort of listen to you. And you sort of earned in the sense that you started it, but it's sort of on a day to day better, it's somewhat unarmed. Kids do not care. My sons have no like, oh well, Maybe just means I'm a bad dad, but there's no sense in which, like, oh, well dad's talking. So, like, he must be right.

56:29And I don't want to sugarcoat it. I think fatherhood is really hard a lot of the time. What's the hardest part? The hardest part is that there are no shortcuts. Like, these are humans, and if you want to have a great relationship with them, if you want to be a great dad, you have to invest in that in exactly the same way you'd invest in a relationship or a friendship. And early on, they're less fun than your friends, frankly. A lot of people seem to like, maybe I'm not very good, but like, it's this thing where you truly love them in this very deep way. It's hard work to invest very deeply in this sort of relationship where, you know, whenever I travel, which is a lot, I sort of have this idealized fantasy of when I come home and they're going to be like, daddy, and we're going to have this like and the conversation about where I've been, and what I've seen, and instead it's like, yeah, basically, it's like, I've put on the floor and I'm gonna scream because I wanted a green bowl and you give me a pink bowl, and it's hard, it's not this linear journey, but what's amazing is it does compound.

57:40So many of the best things in life. and the moments when you realize you've built enough trust that they can find something, something that's could have been going around that little mines and they're not almost not being sure about how to articulate it and then they say it's usually in the market, it's like when they're going to sleep, going to bed and just like wow it's really totally worth it. One of the most special things that you can do, Matt, you've been interviewed many times by many different mediocre or shit media outlets or journalists. The question I wanted to ask is what question you never asked that you feel you should be asked more.

58:13Very few people ask me why I like writing a immersive murder mystery games, but they should. Why do you like writing immersive murder mystery games? Most of us have this itch that is very hard to scrap, which is to be in these completely alien in the environments where we get to be someone else and do something else in a way where no one is in charge. If you look at things like Secret Cinema and how popular that's being, I kind of feel like it's really interesting, people are dressing up and doing the thing, but it kind of like you dress up, you watch the film. I think most people, how an itch, see like what would it be like to actually have to like know through this scenario, but with no consequences?

58:58I've written a series of historical murder mystery games where you don't know, it's not predetermined and who or if anyone will be killed. There's 12 characters, you each have a set of goals and relationships and the evening just unfolds and you decide what happens. And I love playing them, I love writing them. I think it's this sort of human itch that there are a few ways to scratch. And I just like some of the most fun that I think you can have. You can see them on my website, Harry. See the next, Jennifer. I have been listening to Creator Economy as a life and wealth in the universe. It's lucrative, I can tell you.

59:29There you go, Mr. Beast, watch out. Matt, I've loved it. that's we've gone from Newt the award to, you know, AI, supremacy, you've been amazing. So thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me, I just been great fun. I have to say, for me doing this show now, it is so special when you have a show like that. As I said at the beginning, I've known Matt for close to eight years, and so to be able to have that conversation and still have our relationship, it means a huge amount to me. If you want to watch the episode, you can of course watch it on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 20VC.

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