20VC: Reid Hoffman on Foundation Models: Who Wins & How Do Incumbents Respond | The Inflection AI Deal: How it Went Down | Why Trump is a Threat to Democracy | The Future of TikTok | Lessons from Sam Altman, Brian Chesky and the OpenAI Board

25:06The answer is both differently. So, and I'm not trying to wheeze a lot of a question. Look, if you're saying what really matters is is like the driving function here will be the billion dollar compute run to make this model. It will be very difficult for startups to do that. Even in this more modern global venture capital where startups can raise billions of dollars, if it's a billion dollars per compute run before you've got your revenue really working in a way that you can predict where that becomes very valuable, that becomes very difficult to finance. So, that's all large companies. That's Google, Microsoft, or kind of their partners, open AI, other folks.

25:47But that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of room for startups. Startups can do all kinds of things. They might build smaller models. They might build models in different ways. They also might use the frontier models through APIs, but they can do things they can take on markets because any company can only take on like a couple of markets really in a serious way. So there's a lot of markets that Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc., don't get to. And so it's like, okay, startups are opportunity there. And what if you were creating something you took a risk in getting there, whereas people thought you were crazy, like for example, think about early Airbnb where people said, that's nuts, no one's gonna ever rent a room from some other human being.

26:24And you say, no, no, we'd take a risk and we get there. And when you're right, you've created a very valuable business. It's interesting, you said there about kind of the cash required and the speed required and the income that's kind of happening now. I had so many people ask the question, if you would rewrite blitz scaling today, Knowing all you know now. What would you change? That's interesting. Blood scaling is still applicable. Chris and I have written about this little bit in Blitz capital, but the Blitz scaling creation of the future, it's like you're doing capital raises that literally the general received wisdom is that looks totally insane.

26:58And you have to have that in your toolset something. So that was, for example, what Sam Alpman was doing with OpenAI. Where you go, wait, you're gonna put billions of dollars into this 501c3 effort that doesn't really have a direct commercial goal in order to build this stuff because this scale application of compute with this small focus theme is going to create something that's going to be an Archimedeon leverage exchange world. Okay, right? Sounds good. Yes, sounds good. I mean, like for example, the very first open AI Microsoft deal was, you know, Satya and Kevin Scott brought to the Microsoft board.

27:33We want to put a billion dollars into the investment in this vehicle from a 5103 that doesn't really have any particular plans at making its equity worth anything. And we can't demonstrate any valuable product right now that's useful, but we have conviction that it should, and there's what we should be doing. That must be a tough board of approval. Oh, sure. And I love that. Yes, do we can we do two billion? Are the best founders the best fundraisers? You need to be able to fundraise as a founder. So you have to have that in your skill set. There are some fundraisers who are not particularly good founders, especially when they're you know quasi -forage -alent.

28:09Ah, that many truly great founders who aren't great fundraisers. Interesting, when you look across, you name them, just intrigued. No, it's a little bit like what you were sailing and bloodscaling. This is the thing that standard studies of business don't really track, which is when you think you might be successful at scale, and you still have tons of risk. You go generally speaking within the software world and maybe even the hardware and much others, raise a ton of capital and start spending it on the presumption you will be successful even though your probability might be 20 % or 30 % and to do that you must be a great fundraiser.

28:46Do you think competition is good for companies? We spoke about the foundation model there, and it just intense competition, the income, it's intense, it's competition good. At least some competition is essential. I think very few companies pull their selves into a coherent shape and deliver in a focused way without some scope of competition. There's exceptions. But like for example, Google Brain invents the kind of transformer and publishes it and it's kind of bouncing around as kind of a research project and it takes open AI developing at scaling it and releasing it as Chatchee BT for Google to go on red alert and go, oh my god, we should be doing this too.

29:25I always whenever I'm investing, I always love composition, but it has to be like shitty incumbents. I don't want it when there's 20 procurement companies who fund it by Sakura and Benjamin Graham. He's never in between. The successful entrepreneurial things, generally speaking, is you outpatient competitions. When you have a lot of ferocious competition, that is challenging. But you've actually put your thumb on something that most entrepreneurs don't really fully recognize, which is, to some degree, it's the most valuable market you can against bad competition. Yes. I speak to Alps often and they say to me, why are you in Europe?

30:00And I say, well, Warren Buffett once said, the secret success in business is wheat competition. Yes. And so I chose to be a European venture capitalist. Exactly. Exactly. I'm sure your European friends love to hear that. I don't have any. Honestly, I lost some years ago. Okay, I do have to ask you, when you think back to your time with OpenAI and on the board, But what do you want to do with your biggest takeaways? How do you impact your mindset? Well, one of the things that was very interesting and I think Sam doesn't get enough credit for this, Sam was very much wanted to have a board that was separate governance from himself.

30:37A lot of founders tend to set up as, no, the board is my rubber stamp vehicle. I'm in control, I'm doing this stuff. And part of that, for example, was when Elon had announced to the company that he was leaving and not financing it anymore and you know, Sam called me and I said, look, I'll cover the salaries and any asses made for you on the board. And I said, yes, I'll join the board. And so then he said, well, you come to a fireside chat because the company does, you know, only a few people here know you, well, you do that. I was like, sure, of course, you know, they should get to know me and we should have mutual trust.

31:04And literally, one of the questions that Sam asked me that he hadn't prepared before is we were sitting in this entire company meeting. And he says, so what happens if I'm not doing my job well? And I'm like, well, I would work with you to try to improve it. So, no, well, what happens if I keep not doing my job well? I'm like, okay, well then I would fire you. It is like, okay, great. I'm like, you just asked me in front of the whole company, will I fire you? No, it's like, well that is a little strange. It's the only time I've ever been asked this question. In any of my boards in front of a company thing, but it's reflecting what Sam has always been trying to do with the open AI board, which is it's a genuine independent governance board.

31:42People don't realize with all of what I thought was the the set of mistakes around the November debacle, that one of the positive attributes that that was because Sam had made an effort to say this is a separate governance board. Now I think he was making too much of a AI safety, who are the most AI safety people who make sure they're on the board. Some of those people should of course be on the board. But you also need to have good board knowledge, good knowledge about what are the kinds of things that a scaling company and a scaling organization. because by the way, it's a chaotic mess. That's part of what Blitzkailing is about.

32:18And what things do you kind of go, okay, that's fine. And what things you learn from and which things are important. You said that kind of things go wrong and it's Blitzkailing. You know, you've got a scarlet, you're handsome. Not funny, actually. I feel the same. You've got the super alignment team leaving, you've got the equity problem. I mean, there's Blitzkailing and there's kind of like, also, I hate people that like throw to Martyrs in the back. I can't even imagine the intense stress and workload. But that is just a question of what 9 a week is a little. Well, look, that in a week is a lot, but by the way, you know, having done this at PayPal, having done this at LinkedIn, having done this at Airbnb, having done it like all of this stuff, it's always a chaotic hot mess.

33:00Is it? Yes. Sometimes a lot of it happens in one week and sometimes it's different. The real question is how do you learn and adapt? Like how do you go, okay, that was a screw up. Now let's fix it and let's be better. Who was the best at learning and adapting? When you look at those halt masses. Huh, well, all of those are very good examples of ones that have done it very well because look at the, look at where the companies have become and what they've done. I would say, I don't know if I could say best, there were different problems. I mean, we had at PayPal, we had eBay trying to shut us down, and that was where all our volume was.

33:33We had at Airbnb, they had this very early, like, trust and safety thing, where a person had stolen a credit card and literally totally trashed a place, right? Like had a kind of like a drug party, you know, binge leaving the place and not quite the equivalent of flaming ruins, but kind of physically totally trashed. And so what do you do? Because you need trust in a marketplace. So each of these things had a different emergency that you were like, all hands on deck, we have to solve this and we're dead if we don't. What do you do and shit hits fun? You're very calm. collected individual. Well, so for me at PayPal, that was my primary job.

34:13To be the calm collected individual. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I was like the go -saw this problem. There was a lot of go -saw this problem. I was like, go make sure eBay can't kick us off their platform. Okay. Oh my gosh. I'm so excited to do this. To choose day. Yes. Tuesday morning. Should be done by Tuesday morning. Help us launch Japan was another PayPal one. The lawyers were coming back week by week with a longer list of, here's all the criminal penalties and all the things that if we launch PayPal in Japan, no executives could land there because they'd get arrested and so are you like? So literally Peter came to me and said, the lawyers are screwing this up, figure out if we can launch Japan and kill it if we can't but otherwise get us launched.

34:53And I was like, okay, we figured out and we launched four weeks later. What was Peter's biggest strength? He's the biggest weakness. Oh, look super smart. I'd say his biggest strength is a willingness to be contrarian based on first principles and an absolute maximization of speed. Can we have this done by the end of the day? But you know that kind of thing and I think his biggest weakness is probably thinking that that's the only way you play the game. Often the way. Yes. When we look at a lot of things, when you look at Airbnb, it was like I cannot imagine someone being in my home ridiculous.

35:27putting your credit card details on the internet. I cannot imagine that ridiculous. What do you think we are saying today? I cannot imagine that ridiculous. The Nintendo time, it's like, duh, I'm going to Barcelona, of course I'm going to Airbnb it. Or of course I'm going to put my credit. Yes. Well, one of them is, I think even shorter than that, every single person who has a smartphone will have one or more personal agents, personal AI agents, that is their agent, but it is like there for them. And on a whole range of things, Like, not just where should I go for a restaurant meal, you know, tonight, or, hey, I have this odd conversation with this person at work.

36:03Can you help me talk about it? To, hey, I'm writing an essay on this. Can you critique this and get me more information? But just a whole range of things. Like, for example, I have this, I have this skin legion, you know, should I be concerned about this? Every person today will have an agent that they interact with and consult with every day multiple times. is integrations, not the gold mine, never for the future, which is like you need the integration into Apple Fitness into your banking account. Yes. And by the way, this is part of the whole realm of data. Is that now when you tell people, oh, we're going to have to integrate all this data.

36:38They go, oh my god, and they feel like it's a lack of a loss of control. That's frequently what they mean by loss of privacy is a loss of control. And actually, in fact, as you begin to realize of, actually, in fact, like if I had a a bio -signs monitor that would tell me and tell a doctor if I had somebody like, for example, I would love to know if it's like, oh, you might be 15 minutes away from a heart attack. That would be very valuable knowledge, no, and I would like it to escalate to the ambulance shows up. Like it's almost like you think it was like a support version of minority report.

37:11Like the ambulance shows up and you're like, why are you here? Oh, we're here for you, but we're about 10 minutes early, we can wait. Okay, so everyone has a personal AI agent. I always think that we overestimated option in one of the cycles and underestimated in 10. Exactly. You agree that's the case here? 1000%. Right. So people think, oh, it's all going to be different this year, all going to be different next year. And it's like a next year is going to look a lot like this year. But as you compound year by year and as you get certain phase shift changes, then all of a sudden, the world looks entirely different.

37:39I mean, for example, consider how just driving over here through London, I was reflecting on two thirds of the people I saw on the street were looking at their phone doing something within. Think about what like 20 years ago if you had portrayed that this at all, that's the Jetsons, that's the city of the future. It's like no, it's right here. And what they're doing on that. Yes. It's more like, you know, I look back at like, you know, your grandfather, your grandparents, and they were like, right, a lesser, wait two days for a response. Yes. And we'd message it's like done in the second. Exactly.

38:07A friend of mine said we will in the future vote for algorithms to run countries not for people. Haha. No. And part of that reason is because if you look at what the AI revolution is, it's as shift from we program the computer and obviously we're still programming it, but as opposed to programming knowledge into it, we're giving it a learning algorithm. The learning algorithm then goes through a whole set of training sequences to become a cognitively sophisticated device. That particular quote presumes that the algorithm is something like that as it were as coherent, that you kind of look at the algorithm and actually in fact what we want is a really robust learning system that has learned a lot of really great things has incorporated a lot of human feedback into that and is making good actions and judgments based on that.

38:58And by the way, that's what we hope for from our leaders, whether they're leaders in politics, leaders in investing, leaders in entrepreneurship, leaders in academia, leaders in journalism. was that kind of, we are learning machines that have learned good judgment in these questions. Do you think we dramatically overestimate the concerns around AGI? Broadly yes for the following reason. The problem that I have with these critics is that the real issue is AI is a human amplifier, right? So it's part of the thesis that I've been going out and trying to get people to understand is actually in fact it's a human amplifier for a large number of years.

39:34I don't know if a large number of years is 10 or 500 or whatever, but it's a human employer. And amplifying bad people too is the question. So whether it's a terrorist, a criminal, a rogue state. And so he go, oh, the robots are coming. It's like, well, I'm a lot less worried that the robots are coming than Putin is coming with his AI enablement. Right? So let's focus on the bad humans and what's happening there. And then pay attention some to the science fiction side. While we're on kind of the world around us, I have many on the show and I ask them because I'm a naive Brit sitting in London.

40:06And I say, U .S. relations, how do you think this plays out? And every single person so far has said it's inevitable that Trump will win. So I'm glad to say that every single person so far is wrong. I think part of the reason they're saying that is, the American electorate right now hasn't really fully remembered the corruption and incompetencies of Trump. They're like, oh, the world is kind of a fragile place. I'm unhappy with how there's all this global conflict. You know, I'm unhappy with the tragedy that's going on in Gaza, a stack of things. Because of the huge stimulus thing from COVID, prices have gone up and I'm unhappy that there's been an inflation of prices, I have some agitation and completely legitimately agitation.

40:48So they're like, well, I can't agitate it, Biden's president, I'm agitated. When people start remembering that Donald Trump agitated for an insurrection that killed police officers, he was convicted by a jury that said, not only did you do sexual assault, but you slandered about it in a jury thing. And they start, like, it's a jury that can be used. That can be, when they begin to remember that, they will begin to get much more negative. So it isn't that it's a... I have estimating the knowledge of the American populace. I hope not. I think there is real work ahead of us to remind people about what a Chernobyl Trump is.

41:29But I think if we successfully remind them and then also by the way, you know Biden has passed more bipartisan legislation than any president in decades. He has done stuff for the climate. He's done stuff on inflation reduction He has helped assemble the world on Ukraine. Do you concede though that essentially by voting for Biden? You just vote for a very good administration around him because of course, but by vote for any president You're voting for sure, but there's normally a leader and Biden We put Biden selects his staff. We have had a whole history of presidents where the staff is what does everything.

42:08And he is the person who's like, look, I've had a two hour lunch with Biden. Like it's very popular to say, well, he's, you know, he's not cognitively with it. In a two hour conversation, he was asking questions about AI. He was explaining stuff that was going on in nuanced detail in Israel. You know, he was kind of saying, look, this is what I care about. Your average worker and this is what we need to be doing. and how can you technology industry be helping the average worker? Look, it was a two hour bus conversation. He's good. That is not what I normally have on the show. So it's nice to have a different opinion.

42:38Do you think that actually when we look at some of the problems that you mentioned, do we think that AI does more to harm or to help income inequality moving forwards? There's almost a little bit of implicature in the question that income equality is the most important feature. I think that AI will raise incomes both for working class people and for middle class people and for wealthier people. I think it will raise incomes across all of them. So therefore, I'm actually quite positive on that. I can make arguments for how AI provides productivity increases and is positive on each of these levels.

43:15Now, there's some jobs when we'll just want the AI only to be doing it versus the human. So for example, driving, we actually want AI's driving because they don't get drunk, they don't get tired, they have a lot more sensors to pay attention to the world around them, like they can have LiDAR and infrared, so they can see the kid who is running out from behind the park car or as a human can't. There's all kinds of reasons why we would want that. In each of these cases, like for example, if you look at one of Greyhawk's portfolio companies, Cresta, the study of which people in the customer service were most benefited by early AI, and it was the entry level people, was the people coming in and learning the job much more quickly.

43:59And that's a pattern that you can see across this. So I think it's beneficial across the entire thing. Now, the inequality question, I think a much more fraught question for the following reason, which is, I don't know of any human society organization where we don't run on the basis of inequality, right? Like better investor, worse investor, better entrepreneur, worse entrepreneur, better business, worse, getting into college, et cetera, we run our entire human society runs on inequality, even places ostensibly communist who's in charge, who gives give other people orders, et cetera. Like human beings are tribal creatures.

44:38So we have inequality inherently in the system and we try to orient it so that people can through hard work and talents and everything else rise up as much. And I think that equality of opportunity and equality of ability to make amazing things of themselves like you with 20 BC is a really, really good thing. But the end result is inequality. And then you say, well, what, how much inequality is too much? Well, obviously there's an answer to how much inequality is too much when it's like, well, I now am the autocratic ruler, like say I'm Putin and I say half of the country belongs to, oh, I own and belongs to me.

45:12and everyone has to do what I say or I kill them. Okay, that would be a problem. And so there's problems, but it's like, for example, we'll say, well, but a CEO shouldn't make more than 20 times what the entry level. And it's like, where do you get your magic number? Well, it's also like then it just breeds like the most ridiculous stock compensation which led to the most extremely worst situation. Yeah, I want equality of opportunity. I want massive economic opportunity. I want ability to do your best work and express your talent. And I think AI can do all of that. Does it benefit more wealthy people or more working class people?

45:44I think we wanted to benefit both massively. One of my biggest worries is actually regulation. Obviously being in Europe is one of our biggest skills. I'm terrified actually that we're just going to regulate every element to the point of not being able to progress in the way that it could. It's not a legitimate risk. It's not always a definite risk. I mean, this is one of the reasons why the vast majority of stuff that I talk about technology and AI is we will have much better tools to make much better things for human beings and society in the future. Let's make sure we get there to building those tools.

46:15So, for example, your average press person, your average government official will say, what's the most important thing in AI? We make sure that those big tech companies don't dominate with the AI. That's the most important thing. I was like, well, that's interesting. I think your most important job is I have a line of sight to a medical tutor, a medical assistant, probably better than your average general practitioner on every smartphone. Don't you think your actual job is how do you get done on every one smartphone that every single person in your country, maybe in the world, has potential access to good medical advice?

46:49It may not be perfect medical advice. When you think that's your top job, or how about a tutor for any age of a human being in any subject? Wouldn't having access to all of that for every child that you have in your company, wouldn't that be your top job? So, actually, when you look at the balance sheet of the country, if you can actually impact the health care budget or the education budget by 5%. Yes. Oh my gosh. That's the orientation and that's the blind spot from the press and the blind spot from the dialogue. But you think the political system is educated enough to be able to make regulatory decisions that will take that stance?

47:24When you talk to the right smart people, the answer is yes. And so, for example, in Europe recently, could you see in some of it, Macron, he's been doing a good job here. Yeah. And so the White House executive order, very good. The UK AI safety institute, leading in the world, like really, really good, helping the US, etc. So, we have some glimmers of light. It was interesting actually, speaking of the UK AI safety, it was Mr. Clifford, loved Mr. Clifford. And he said a brilliant question, which was, what should be the AI strategy of medium sized countries, which no US country is doing it best?

47:58So I would say medium sized countries, the basic answer is don't try to just replicate everything. Don't try to try to say, we are going to have our own GPD form model or whatever the current time slice of it and that will be our own Bangladeshy kind of version of this. Because in just like for example, say, well, you're going to have your own OS for your phone, you're going to have your own OS for the computer. It's like, no, that doesn't make sense. But it does make sense as I say, OK, given that these technology trends are happening, and that is an important, you know, the way that I describe artificial intelligence in an economic sense is it's a steam engine of the mind.

48:35It has, just as the steam engine gave us physical superpowers, the AI gives us mental superpowers and will have a cognitive industrial revolution across this entire, and it'll be much faster. This is one of the things that's like, ooh, a little further ago, much faster than the Industrial Revolution because of the speed that it can spread throughout the world because we have the internet and mobile and a globally connected world. So when you're a Indonesia or something else, you say, okay, well, we know that the tech companies are building these things. We know that these things are possible with open source models.

49:05How do I most help my citizens? How do I most help my industry and my people participate in this? And then be making those moves. And so, for example, you don't say, well, I'm going to build my own supercomputer. It's like, well, how do I get the right access from the hyperscalers to good compute that helps my industry and helps my citizens? How can I kind of nudge them to say, I want you to provide systems and services that fit my cultural values in here and make that possibly work? So I think it's just like a startup developer. You say, well, I'm not necessarily going to build my own frontier model, but I'm going to build upon these platforms that are being constructed.

49:43And that was the reason I was using your mobile platform and a PC platform. I'm going to build upon the platforms being constructed for things that help my society. Do you come to specific ones then? We're going to do a really cool, re -day life. You mentioned light dawns earlier. I'm so sorry for the bass question. Should it be banned? Is it a threat to US democracy? I don't think that it is an unusual threat to US democracy. Although I do think the key question is is, you know, China bands, Western, you know, kind of social media and other companies with it. So I think it's not an unfair thing to say, hey, look, if you're banning ours, we can ban yours.

50:20I think it's, I think that's the baseline of the kind of the fairness side. Now, that being said, part of the Chinese approach to these things is they view that all of their companies essentially work for their governments. Now, they think that's true of the West too, they don't realize no action. In fact, we operate differently. Like Google does not work for the US government. Microsoft does not work for the US government. There's ways you're accountable by law, but they have to go through a legal process for that kind of thing. And so given that legal process doesn't exist within China, one worries about what security vulnerabilities and other things that happens because the companies don't have the kind of autonomy that our companies have.

50:59that they have where, for example, they consume and say, no, we're not going to respond to this this, you know, or this request in government because we think that's an illegal order, which you can't really do in China. So that kind of thing does prevent present a possible concern and risk. I don't have any data that suggests that they're doing anything right now in it, but it's possible. And so you want to, you want to close down that possibility. Now, you know, What the US government proposed was to say, get to a form of governance that is not the Chinese form of governance that is within the Western, so the vesting is a version of that.

51:38Like if they became a, if US TikTok by dance became a public company, government launched on, you know, the NASDAQ or something else, that would give it the kind of governance that would say, okay, great. We understand that the governance is by, you know, kind of public rule of law, not potentially corruptible by a government that doesn't have that public rule on. That's a good place to be. What do you think happens? Well, I think likely, and I have no inside information here, I think bite dance waits for the election because they presume that Trump could get bought off by investors since he's a coin -operated person in his entire life, not just as in his presidency.

52:18It's not. He did a great dominoes piece throughout that. And he's he no, no, it's from the 90s. It's pretty, it's pretty very good. Yes, but he is completely coin operating. Yeah, right. And so self coin operated, like, you know, it's a some degree it's like that Churchill line. It's not insulting that he's for sale. It's that he's for sale for so cheap. Have you met him? Ah, no. And, you know, it'd be difficult given that the harm that I think he's doing to the country in the world is I think he's amongst the greatest ills that is made of huge negative damage in the world. Final one, then we can do, Read AI.

52:56Obviously, you've known Facebook and Mark for a long time. I think he's probably one of the most underrated, underappreciated people in tech. When you look at his corner of the H100 market, it's just like astonishing insights. And he got killed for it in public markets. How do you think about that when you look at it now and reflect on that? There's two different questions there. So one, Zuckerberg is one of the best meta strategists. I deliberately pun on meta, but meta strategist, like, kind of, what is the game we're playing of any technology leader on the planet? Like I learned from my mom that he's super good.

53:29But in fact, one of the things I have to do is I have to send him the speech that I just did in Peruja because I was referring to Carthago de Lendeste, and I hadn't realized that was actually one of the things he put on his t -shirt and all the rest until I saw a picture recently. So, he's a really great meta strategist, and I think his serious gender appreciated for that. Now, in the question of public markets, I think part of what you have to do is you have to build communication and credibility over time with public markets where they go, okay, you haven't surprised us. You may have made a new announcement, but you've been kind of building towards it.

54:02And so they tend to react when you say, well, look, we're doing really well, but our profitability is going to go down because we're going to invest in all this stuff. They go, ah, like we don't understand how they're present. And so that the surprise response is a negative response. I think obviously the public market should have responded differently because I think he is a great Metastratagest and his turn into AI is going to matter fundamentally here is 100 % correct. I also love his like brand change. Yes. Yes. Now we're gonna do it very different So I'm gonna get a read AI and then how do you want to do this?

54:34Do you want me to ask you you can answer it first and then watch what you want to watch first? Why don't we watch first just because then I'll both put my answer and my commentary on the Read AI answer together. Here we go. Yes, what have you changed your mind on most? I can hand it to you and you can hit play. Absolutely. I've changed my mind on how fast generative AI is advancing. I initially thought significant breakthroughs in creative fields would take longer, but AI tools have rapidly evolved in writing, art, and music. So on this one, it's funny. It's almost like you get accused Read AI of being like the wise person with the elephant And because it's an AI, it's like, what I most change in my honor is AI and how it's accelerating.

55:17And it's like, nope, actually I haven't changed my mind on AI stuff in the last 12 months one year. I would say that my answer to this question would be that it's almost much more of the response to AI. And I think I'm confident that this will still happen. But like trying to get people to see the positive sides, like it's like, look, most people like, oh my God, why are we willing to say, I saw if it's dangerous, like risk discourse, risk discourse, like look, we have amazing things in front of us, and that's why it's worth navigating the risk. And the slowness by which persuading journalists, academics, other people to say, hey, look, by the way, your discourse around AI is like the discourse when the printing press was launched.

56:01People would say, the spread's misinformation. You're like, okay, by the way, the printing press was a good thing. You might have noticed. So let's think about what could possibly go right and the slowness by which they're getting to what could possibly go right I'm I think we need to have this kind of propensity to be negative in a lot of ways humanity Okay, so we're gonna go for biggest misconception of the net is 10 years. Okay, here we go The biggest misconception is that AI will completely replace human jobs in reality AI will augment human capabilities Transforming jobs and creating new opportunities.

56:36We can't even imagine yet So I broadly agree with this one, but I do think that what people kind of presume is that with a massive increase in cognitive capability that that will just kind of create, you know, since we're in Britain a bunch of people on the dole. And actually, in fact, I think what I think is transforming a lot of jobs. And just as we discussed learning how to do prompts and learning how to do it, that will be an essential tool like, for example, if you ask people to say, most jobs require some for some facility to do with reading. And so, yes, you'll have to be able to use these tools in some useful way.

57:10But I think there will be lots of new and interesting human jobs. What job do we not have to say that do you think we will have in 10 years' time? Well, I think we'll have a whole swath of jobs that are in the kind of prompt engineering AI research assistant directors. Okay, let's go for biggest business influence. on me. My prediction will be, we'll get this one wrong, but we'll see. Okay, that's the only case. Because, by the way, as I told you, I hadn't listened to you predict this. Yeah, I don't know actually what it will say. I have a little of zero idea, and it's one of the reasons why I'm surprised.

57:45Yes. And so part of what we decided in doing this fun thing is I literally have not listened to any of these answers before, right here, right now. I'd say, Saksana Dela. His leadership at Microsoft, focusing on empathy, innovation, and a growth mindset has profoundly influenced my views on leadership and culture. Especially as I've watched him successfully navigate rapid technological changes while fostering an inclusive and innovative environment. It's not bad. It was much better than I was expecting. It's better than those VCs I interviewed. Incredible to read AI. So points to that. Look, Sautya has been...

58:22probably the thing I've most learned from Sautya has been, and how do you do cultural transformation of massive scale organizations? And he has demonstrated that that is doable and possible in ways that I don't know if anyone ever has before. How does he do? Part of the benefit is he comes to Microsoft as an outsider insider. His whole career was through Microsoft, but he was in charge of Bing. He was in charge of Azure. He was the one who was launching the new strange projects versus the person sitting on top of office. That gave him both this kind of outsider insider perspective, which was, okay, I understand what is great about Microsoft, and I also understand how Microsoft needs to grow and evolve.

59:04And those two things together have made him amazing in this transformation. And he's willing to take really bold risks. Like, for example, it's like, I'm going to go put a billion dollars into a 501 C3 on a partnership thing with OpenAI. like he does these these bets that are super smart even though I think the vast majority of public companies CEOs would never make that bet. What's the boldest bet you've made that didn't pay off? Oh, what's immediately coming to mind as some investments that that didn't work out? I think I'm not going to call them out because it's it seems ungentlemanly as a as a partner in But there are a couple of investments that I've made that I thought this is going to be great and huge and was completely fumbled.

59:50What did you get wrong? They're different. In one case, it was the people. In another case, it was the difficulty of the market. Part of the thing that you learn as you get more experience in VCs is that sometimes markets are just wrong. Like difficult. Now, here's one that I got wrong initially that will be fun to share. We were talking about bad competition being the central thing. So I think I was one of the first couple people that Elon Musk pitched SpaceX to. And I literally kind of laughed at him thinking, because by the way, to my defense, his pitch was, I'm going to be the first person to send life to Mars because I'm going to send a turtle to Mars.

1:00:27And you're like, that's not a business. That was the pitch. Right, good. Good. Do you have a slide too? Exactly. There's another slide. And there was a fool in the room, but the fool wasn't Elon. The fool was me. The thing that I learned from watching Elon's rocket success, pun intended, was that if an industry has had decades of technological innovation that are not reflected in the market, because the structure of the market locks in this anti -innovation kind of oligarchy, it's hard because there's something that's locking it in. But if you can break it, it's huge. Elon is one of those people who takes the whole concrete wall down with him when he's going through it.

1:01:08So if someone can do that, it can be really good. And that was an instance of a mistake, because I should have said, yes, I will invest in this. And now, of course, I've updated to when I think it's somebody who could take on the structural change of a market because the technology has already been built, then I will consider investing in things. So all of the thought to lost by me was asking anyway, do you think David Saxon Keith for Boya undeciding that potential by being full -time venture investors? Look, I think they're both very smart. There's a deep value in allocating capital to the kinds of products and services and companies that could be transformations of the world.

1:01:43Maybe there's other things that would better like being entrepreneurs or being CEOs or other things, but I think it's a real contribution. Keith told me I had to ask about ABMB the night before you made the decision, told me about that two -hour conversation with Keith and how did that go down. So obviously Keith super smart. He's worked for me twice once a PayPal once at LinkedIn I provided him his instrumental reference for working at square and you know sack of other things I called Keith because he he had worked with the founders Longer and earlier and I just literally met them a couple days before and was you know kind of sorting through the You know questions of what are the questions that a smart person might have once they've sat with this project for more than a couple of days and And have you got answers to those questions?

1:02:29How do you think about it? Which is the what I do on every investment that I do. And Keith was quite helpful to my making my decision because he's like, look, I've met them, I've talked to them, they're smart, they're first principal thinkers, they're not hiding any skeletons in the closet. You know, helpful. Yes, that is, as you know, as an investor, extremely helpful, because you're like, oh, I met them three days ago, It seems very exciting. Right, let's, and I want to offer them a term sheet right now. And so all of that was quite good, which is, you know, the reason I invested in and joined the board.

1:03:04And I was trying to persuade Keith to get a little bit more closely involved too. And I think he was a happy investor, but wasn't Keith said he said one line to you. And he said, if that's true, I'm in. Maybe it's something along the lines of that it actually has, that the marketplace demonstrates the network effects that we expect to have. Okay, so we're going for biggest mistake you see first time founders make. Oh, back to retail. Oh, here we go. Yes. First time founders often don't iterate quickly enough based on customer feedback. Rapid iteration and adaptability are key to finding product market fit and achieving sustainable growth.

1:03:42That's interesting. Not bad. Not bad. It is definitely one of the major failure points. Right. because the over -belief that your vision is the one perfect vision versus getting data. Now, part of the thing where that's a little limited is part of what I suggest the founders is that they should always be getting, trying to get disproving data to their investment thesis on their business and on their product. But even by going around and asking smart people, like saying, what do you think of my product service? What do you think will go wrong with my business? and aggregating. That doesn't mean that everyone who gives you something is right.

1:04:19Maybe most of them are irrelevant, trivial, wrong. But when you begin to hear the pattern of it, that's the way you go, oh, I need to adjust. And you might even learn that you need to adjust before you've launched your product. The other thing I see biggest difference in the second time found is the second time found is bait distribution into everything that's in the way that they build the camp table, the way that they craft their ICP. Everything is distributions. Yes. That would be another classic one is distribution, especially in mobile internet software is more important than quality of product.

1:04:50Yes. Do you think that, because my worry is, in Cumbans in a world of AI win, because they have distribution of volunteers, and so even if that product is worse, then specialty providers who start ups, it doesn't matter if you're a medical transcription company, bundled in with Microsoft product suite, that's just going to get the phone transfer. Yeah, so look, that's always the challenge in the startups, and it's one of the reasons why the internet has been much better for entrepreneurs than mobile ecosystems, because the mobile ecosystems are controlled by solitary providers in ways that the internet is not, and that's why we've seen a lot more generativity on the internet than mobile ecosystems.

1:05:27Read AI. So we've got here. Why will you be in 10 years? Interesting. This is going to be a talking to Read AI. Sending Read AI to these 20 DC videos. Yeah, I'm going to just get him to do that. Yes, right. In 10 years, I'll be leading an AI -driven public health initiative to predict and combat pandemics and pioneering AI education sisters to reduce global inequality. I'll be shaping international AI ethics regulations and involved in space exploration projects using AI to support humanity's expansion to other planets. So read AI will certainly be doing that because that's not the setting read AI to all those things.

1:06:04We're going to be very big. One of the space income inequality. The length down climate change. Yeah, that was just one week. That's exactly. So where will you be attending this? So are you happy now? Yes, part of the earlier questions of like, I'm a student of decision making. So I'm always looking back on decisions I have made. And it isn't that I necessarily remake them, but how would I learn to make decisions better in the future in everything I'm doing? And so, and that's the reason I wouldn't, like I just don't know if I'd say, well, what I make that decision differently, what I end up in a different life path that would be better than the one I'm in.

1:06:41I thought it was interesting they went eat all was into you. They said like, you know, are you happy? And he said, I think most people think they want to be me. But actually they wouldn't. I thought it was a kind of harrowing my face. Yeah. No, I can't look. I think he is driven. And by the way, anyone who achieves that much amazing success is driven. And by the way, that level of drivenness is very stressful. You have to go with that stress and Jensen said something similar, you know Would you advise people to be entrepreneurs and he was like oh my god, it's so hard. Yeah, I didn't love that Yeah, he was just like we should lower our expectations Yeah, you know make us more resilient.

1:07:15No, no, no, no, no, keep your expectations and by the way I think in retrospect he said no, no, I'd still do it again Like I think after he thought about it more. He was like okay. No, no, no So where do you actually want to be? Well, I think the part of the read AI answer that's absolutely correct is how do I help not just industry, but society and globally could system realize the human amplification benefits of AI. And some of that's public policy, but how can we have a new golden era of humanity? Just as the last chapter in Rebouk and Promptu, my speeches in Bologna and Proogia about Homo Techné, we evolve ourselves through technology, how do we have that grand step forward as humanity?

1:07:55That is what I would like to be continuing to contribute. In 10 years, maybe I'm doing that more as a thinker, as an advisor, then as a board member investor, inventor, although maybe it's all of the above. Can I ask you a final slightly weird one? Is there a question that you don't get asked that you think you should be asked for? What are the things that I love and have learned about the Silicon Valley approach to building the next world, the future world. And what are the things that I think Silicon Valley still needs to learn? If you were to answer that question, who do you want to answer?

1:08:32So on the first, I have learned so much by just by the fortuity of having gone to Stanford and learned about software entrepreneurship. I never would have gone and sought out Silicon Valley. It was literally, oops, I'm a student at Stanford and a bunch of my friends have started doing this and I've started paying attention and said, Hey, that's cool. Let me go do that. There's a ton. One, every scale problem that you think of 30 to 80 % of the solution is technology. So criminal justice, economic justice, medical, climate change, that having an orientation of how do we deploy technology to help that scale problem?

1:09:09Because technology changes the possibility curve, changes the cost curve, etc. So how do we do that? And Silicon Valley is one of the most intense places in the world of how do we organize corporations and organizations and startups to tackle new technological problems? How do we take risk, allocate initial early capital on the seed? How do we evaluate it or we grow it? How do we build networks and teams around it? How do we have an entire entrepreneurial network within Silicon Valley where the co -opitation of it is very important, right? Because both competing and cooperating, like, you know, the classic kind of theories, no, no, you should compete and you should talk to each other.

1:09:47There's like, no, no, you should talk to each other all the time. And you should compete intensely, right? Is kind of the angle on this. And that whole approach to how do we solve problems? And you know, the classic aphorism is to a hammer. Everything looks like a nail, but it is amazing hammer. And it works on a lot of things, not everything, but a lot of things. So that's what I'd say is the things that I've learned from Silicon Valley. And obviously there's a whole bunch of entrepreneurial lessons, like your distribution strategy for a software thing is more important than your product. And then on the things that Silicon Valley needs to learn, by nature, you know, the whole like, hey, where pirates, where disruptors is like, hey, we're building this new thing, just trust us.

1:10:29It's like, look, now technology is really centrally part of the fabric of human life. You can't just have your engagement with the world be, hey, I'm going to go build something and it's going to totally change your life and just trust us. You'll like it when we give it to you. You need to be in conversation more. You need to be in conversation more whether it's through the press or through direct whether it's with government and saying Here's our theory about how the world should be here's how we're operating here's our intent Here's the things that we're doing it doesn't have to be revealing your secret product plans But in explicit kind of sense of here is how we're trying to be in the mix of society and these are the things that we care about So that people can be in dialogue when they say well actually in fact this part of it like for example whether you're a phone provider or a social network, we care about what you're doing with kids, and we don't think you're being smart yet about what you're doing with kids.

1:11:18And we'd like you to tell us more about how you're navigating like mental health issues or peer pressure, the fact that kids bullying at school can follow them home in these things. What are you doing to help with that? Right, because that really matters to us. As an example, and being in dialogue about that, we're no longer just the pirates and disruptors, we are part of the genetics of what happens in society and we need to take with power comes responsibility we need to take responsibility that and the minimum beginning and responsibility is dialogue. You are the master of social networks and you spotted a network effect before 99 .9 point 9 % of everyone in the world.

1:11:53Everyone thinks TikToks are social network. It's a paid machine in the early days. To what extent is TikTok a social network or actually a case It's a very effective paid marketing. Well, it was a genius invention that came about of necessity because the Chinese government didn't want to have any social networks with more than 500 followers. So how do you drop out the whole following mechanism and still get a high scale people are producing content, individuals, and individuals are consuming content, and how do you make that happen? Because the way that social networks like LinkedIn and others made this happen is through, I have a graph.

1:12:29I have a graph of LinkedIn connections. I have a graph of followers, et cetera. And they couldn't do it that way. They couldn't do followers all on YouTube. So what they did is they paid for so much content to be created, but then that created a scale effect in the entire thing because TikTok watches you the moment that you launch the app. How many seconds did you spend on this? Did you swipe on this, et cetera? And it's learning about you to the next thing because it's matching you to the flow of current content in this stuff. Now, it's a social network, you know, as much as there's individuals who are creating stuff that's being consumed by other individuals.

1:13:06But it's not a social network in that I'm connected to my friend Harry on LinkedIn. I've loved it. Thank you so much for doing it in person. This has been Stutcher Joy to Do. It has been an absolute pleasure and I look forward to the next. But before we leave you today, we're all trying to grow our businesses here. So let's be real for a second. We all know that your website shouldn't be this static asset. It should be a dynamic part of your strategy that really drives conversions. That's Marketing 101, but here's a number for you. 54 % of leaders say web updates take too long. That's over half of you listening right now, and that's where webflow comes in.

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