20VC: Why Cursor is Dead | An AI Tsunami is Coming & You Need to Prepare | Systems of Record Become Valueless Databases with Agents | Is This The End of Tech Private Equity with Jerry Murdock, Co-Founder of Insight Partners

18:09Harry Stebbings:We've spoken a lot about autonomous agents. When you have autonomous agents, do they make your systems of record valueless or do they make them much more valuable because they have existing distribution which they can incorporate those agents into and leverage? Which one? Well, it depends.

18:28Jerry Murdock:I'm an investor in Carta and have been for a long, long time. And that's a system of record of sorts for stocks. And it has a lot of potential. And I believe they're doing the right thing on all fronts. but if tokenization of stocks come and they use Carta, then Carta is going to be infinitely more valuable, right? Because they have the cap table, they can help manage the tokenization. However, if tokenization comes and they bypass Carta and a new system of records get built, then there's not much to say that that system of record is going to be worth much in the future. So it depends on execution of the Carta management team and their ability to go capture the trends that are coming forward.

19:12Jerry Murdock:If you were to look at a Salesforce today, which camp would you put it in? There's a lot of companies that sit on top of it, like Encino. There's dozens and dozens of companies that have built on top of the Salesforce system of record. So the real question is, let's look at their health. Let's see how they do. If those guys start getting knocked off one by one, and enough of them get knocked off that the underlying value of Salesforce becomes less, then you're going to say Salesforce is going to be worth less. But in the history of companies, Salesforce is like a Mount Everest, right? It's an 8 ,000 meter peak sitting there.

19:47Jerry Murdock:It's not going to melt overnight. That thing is going to be around for a long time. The question is, how valuable is it? And the way to look at it, that question, the way to analyze it, is how valuable are all those companies that build themselves on top of it? If those guys start going down, well, then you're going to see some issues.

20:07Harry Stebbings:Our job is to ascribe where we see value and where we think there will be more value. And the things where we used to ascribe value, revenue, growth rate, margin, have become transient slash questionable. So in that time, how do you think about where you ascribe value?

20:26Jerry Murdock:It depends on what the time frame is. If you look at most software companies that are out there, normally when a new technology comes, it sort of expands the market before it contracts. Because people are already in their momentum. They're doing what they're doing. I wouldn't expect to see normal software companies, to see software just fall off the radar. That's not going to happen. I think what happens is that people get fearful and prices change. And then the underlying quality of the business changes based on how well the management team adapts to the situation. You can imagine some companies that have system of records that have great context, but actually increase value if they're able to put that context to work with agents, with autonomous agents.

21:12Jerry Murdock:And then you have other people that, oh, they don't really adjust fast enough. They don't really understand what the new market's like. and then their system of record or their software declines because they haven't really moved fast enough. What we have with the tsunami happening is a wake-up call to move to higher ground. Don't get caught on the beach when the damn thing hits the beach. Move to higher ground. And that kind of adapting of your business,

21:39Harry Stebbings:some people will do it, some people won't. You said that move fast. You've been doing this a long time. I have shockingly been doing this 10 years now, which shows on my wrinkled face. Really, it does. But no, my question to you is we're seeing growth rates like we've never seen before. I mean, zero to 100 million in revenue quite frequently or semi-frequently in some of these cases. Is triple, triple, double, double dead? Have we completely had growth expectations blown out of the water?

22:08Jerry Murdock:Well, think about this. Right now, all software is eventually purchased by human beings. Software is going to be purchased or used by agents. And what's going to happen is an autonomous agent becomes an employee. You give it credentials, you give it identity, and then it's up to the agent to make the decision. You will review them like an employee and say, hey, what did you buy? What did you spend? What did you accomplish? And you will manage that autonomous agent just like an employee. You need to prepare for that. if whatever you got invested in, is that future going to be done and controlled by agents?

22:46Jerry Murdock:And am I in the right position for that or not?

22:49Harry Stebbings:How does the world change when you're not selling to people, but you're selling to agents? How does that interaction change, the interface? What changes when there's that core change in buyer?

23:00Jerry Murdock:First of all, it's never happened before. So it's happening now. My guess is the way pricing models will work better. And it's been in process for a few years. One of my companies, Docker, has been moving dramatically toward this as they move into AI, which is a consumption-based model. So if the agent has the access and has the authorization to use something, say a sandbox, you're just going to pay based on consumption. The sandbox is nothing more than you're buying memory or buying compute. And so you just open it up, it's free, start using it, and then you ultimately have to pay. And the agent will come and tell you, hey, we've reached our limit with the sandbox company here.

23:42Jerry Murdock:What do we need to do? And that's how it's going to work.

23:44Harry Stebbings:Going back to what we said earlier about bolt-on AI strategies, there's a lot of public SaaS companies, I don't want to name any of them, who are trying to move, not public actually, even kind of late private, who are trying to bolt on, who are trying to pivot. Does that work? How do you think about the bolt-on strategy as an effective strategy?

24:04Jerry Murdock:Look, I was just at the Olympics And there's a lot of people trying to win a gold medal and not many people do. And so, you know, you can try all you want, but you better be world class at what you're trying to do if you're going to get the medal.

24:19Harry Stebbings:I have the CEO of Monday.com on the show tomorrow. Yeah. When you think about the question, I'm not picking on Monday, but I'm saying the question of will enterprise software and will software just be entirely vibe coded, personalized, customized? How do you think about that? Because that is the kind of eradication of a lot of their market caps.

24:38Jerry Murdock:Well, first of all, autonomous agents, and it may take a year or longer for most enterprises to actually enable and be committed to autonomous agents, but they're going to write software faster, cheaper than any human being on the planet. They already are. And so, again, it's this thing of like, if you're making your software for autonomous agents and they have a reason to use it and it's valuable, great, you're going to do fine. But if you're not making your software for autonomous agents, you're going to be challenged in the future. Maybe it's six months, maybe a year, maybe 18 months, but you're going to be severely challenged if you still think human beings are going to buy your software.

25:23Harry Stebbings:And so we have agents buying software and we review their decisions. I didn't have to deal with sick leave. I didn't have to deal with entitled millennials. I sound incredibly old school, but this is the truth. As you know, are you worried about what happens to labor forces, given what you said, most importantly, being the speed of change is so fast? You know, I'm glad you brought that up.

25:43Jerry Murdock:We're about two and a half years from the next presidential election. I'm here to say that that is going to be a major issue on the next presidential election. It could decide the election. It'll be one of the most important things because there's no easy answer. There's no question that anyone that inputs data into a computer that does scheduling, that, you know, like an executive assistant or people doing marketing, those jobs are ultimately going to be better done by autonomous agents, white collar jobs. People have been saying that for years. I mean, this is nothing new. The question is, when was it going to happen?

26:20Jerry Murdock:And now with the advent of OpenClaw and NanoClaw and all the other autonomous agents that are coming, there are the direct threats. First of all, not to the people with the job. First of all, to the next person in line, the next junior developer you want to hire, the next executive assistant, the next marketing person. So the first thing you see is people stopping or slowing down hiring of white collar employees that input data and use a computer. That's the first thing. Second thing, depending on the speed at which these autonomous agents evolve, because there's a lot that they need to do. They've proven it exists that they can write code and they can do anything you want from a scheduling perspective for your life.

27:03Jerry Murdock:So they already can replace a human being. They will. I think that the job market's very uneven. I think the first companies that are going to go with this are going to be small, medium businesses, because they're the ones that, wow, one secretary makes a huge difference in their two, three, four person company. You don't need humans doing it. You've got the autonomous agent doing it. So I think we have to look at what's the speed at which the autonomous agents grow in three sectors, consumer, small business, and enterprise. My guess is enterprise is last. This whole AI revolution, they have been last.

27:43Jerry Murdock:They may catch up in a year or two. We'll see. That's going to be what I think ChatTPT and Google and Anthropic are absolutely going to be focused on is getting their own version of autonomous agents adopted by enterprises rapidly. When this happens, we're going to see dramatic change. And I think politically, the minimal viable income may become a reality or at least a ballot question in two and a half years.

28:12Harry Stebbings:What does that mean, a minimum viable income, UBI?

28:15Jerry Murdock:It means that, you know what, you're going to go and get effectively a certain amount of money guaranteed to you every month. And so that if you're a white collar person, they'll change the unemployment program because no administration is going to want to sit there and say, yeah, I've presided over 10, 15 % of the country unemployed. what they'll do is give an option to put them into a program and we'll retrain people to do something different, maybe to have a better quality of life. If you take the optimistic view, you know, those jobs that are going to be going away are not going to be jobs that gets you a vacation in Brazil anytime soon.

28:54Jerry Murdock:They're the jobs that are, you're suffering at every day, making a living and you're struggling as to whether you can pay your healthcare or not. And so maybe those people say, I'm going to move out of the city, move out of the suburb, and maybe I'm going to move back to the country and grow food. You know, I'm going to get this grant to do so. There's already innovative businesses in Wyoming where they're taking veterans and giving them branches to lease because now with technology, one or two people can run a massive branch instead of eight people. And so there's new things like that happening everywhere.

29:26Harry Stebbings:Does this labor displacement, does it help or hurt the Trump administration? Depends when it happens. In the next two years. I think we both agree that customer support we're already seeing, bookkeepers, legal, and coding would be the kind of four really vulnerable areas.

29:43Jerry Murdock:I think healthcare may hit that before the labor market hits it, because it's going to happen. We'll find out this fall. What's the impact of healthcare on the election? And if it's a big impact, then you can assume that labor will be a major impact on any administration.

30:00Harry Stebbings:When we think about the impact of agents on companies, I had Seb from Klarna on the show, and he said that at their peak, there were 7 ,000. By 2030, they're going to be less than 2 ,000. Is headcount a bug, not a feature now in companies?

30:15Jerry Murdock:you know look people never really talk about it but it's all about culture what's your culture if you're looking to have a culture of a players and steve jobs talked about this at apple you want how do you just continue to grow with a players you're going to have a hell of a lot more agents than people so it depends on what those 2 000 people are doing at clarna that are left what's their culture like with those 2 000 if they're all able to have a greater quality of life have more time with the kids, maybe it's an awesome win, you know, but I'm not there. I'm not him. So I can't comment.

30:48Harry Stebbings:Do you think we will have billion dollar single person companies? It's often said, do you think it's actually a realistic? Yeah, absolutely.

30:55Jerry Murdock:I mean, it's all about how smart is your agent? How smart are you to deploy the agents and how well are you willing to listen? I think the thing that's shocking is that autonomous agents work, that OpenClaw worked. And that's why so many developers are so passionate about OpenClaw, because it's something that's working on its own without having to be reviewed. It's an employee. You've gone from an assistant to actual employee. Think about that. That's major, major difference in life. And I think those kinds of changes are going to be really important to notice.

31:31Harry Stebbings:I am Orlando Bravo, and I'm sitting looking at my book, and I've got Anaplan. and I've got Cooper, and I'm not picking on him, but I'm picking on him. Right. How does it impact me? I need these assets to go out. They're 15 % to 20 % typical enterprise SaaS companies. What happens to traditional P tech in this environment?

31:52Jerry Murdock:Well, let's go back to 9-11. There was several of these traditional, now they're called, you know, something more sophisticated, private equity, but they were kind of buyout shops. Teddy Forsman, who I knew ran a great one, except in 2000, he went all in on telcos, virtual telcos. Then it was over for him after 9-11, done. No more Forsman Little. And so there'll be stories like that. I don't know about Bravo or anybody else, but there'll definitely be PE firms that end up like Forsman Little. And then there'll be other ones that had the right bets and did the right creativity. and they'll be bigger and better and more important than they were before.

32:35Life is basically a set of experiences you have

32:39Jerry Murdock:and the total sum of the decisions you make. Any of these firms is about the decisions you make. And now we're at a point in time when you need to review what your assumptions are and what decisions you're going to make going forward.

32:52Harry Stebbings:If you were to make a decision about where you would place a firm today, seeing the atmosphere and the landscape that you have, where would you choose your investing shop to be?

33:02Jerry Murdock:The problem is you've got an old man here who's going to want to have it up in the mountains in Aspen or in the Alps. That's my new thing. I'm not like Elon or Jensen that are going to do this for the rest of their life. I'm just doing this for impact. I can't even imagine going out there and doing it for the same reasons I did it years ago. It's like Bob Dylan got interviewed and they asked him, well, what was it like for you back in 1964 at Newport? He says, I don't even know who that guy was, you know, and I feel the same way. I don't even know what that guy was like back in 1995. It's moved on.

33:36Jerry Murdock:I was always into this business for the creative impact and to play a very small role on a team that was doing something meaningful. So I want to do that. That's going to be important. But it's just a matter of having the right amount of wisdom about how the change is going to impact people and how you're going to do it. I mean, VC firms should have their own autonomous agents. Everybody should. I mean, can you imagine the medical analytical work? Certainly the PE firms are all going to have autonomous agents analyzing markets, analyzing where the opportunity is. So if I was starting from scratch, the one thing I could imagine is having incredible data I could vet on a new opportunity for the white space for where these new AI companies are going to go and say, wow, the data says this guy's on the right market.

34:27Jerry Murdock:He just needs to execute. And then you evaluate not just the person, but the quality of how they use autonomous agents. That's going to be the deciding factor for venture capitalists and startups. We're going to be on the same level playing field. How well do we use autonomous agents in our job?

34:44Harry Stebbings:Going back to, I don't remember that and Bob Dylan and that. I think actually money makes people better investors. I've spoken to some of my most successful friends. And I say, has becoming rich made you a better investor? I'm intrigued to hear your answer. Have you become better the more money you've made?

35:01Jerry Murdock:Well, if we use money as a proxy for success, it's funny, you know, with some of our mediocre companies, we thought about swapping out the CEO. And it's like, well, the problem is it's a mediocre company. And anybody we would put in would have to already be worth, you know, a couple hundred million bucks. So why would they do it? And so you've forced to sort of limp along with the existing team because you're just not going to recruit someone better that wouldn't be successful. There's no validation unless they've made a lot of money. So number one, it's a proxy for success and success is the combination of experience and validation of when and how to make decisions.

35:41Jerry Murdock:For me, there's two components to every decision. there's the logic and the second is the intuition and you need the intuition and so the one thing that the autonomous agents aren't going to have is intuition not anytime soon and so we need people we need good intuition to make good decisions and without that component you're not going to succeed so in my humble opinion maybe I've got better intuition and that's the reason I've been more successful.

36:09Harry Stebbings:When's your intuition been most wrong and what did you learn from it? Good question.

36:16Jerry Murdock:The first thing is, how do you know it's really intuition and not wishful thinking? So that's the first thing I've learned over time that intuition was almost never wrong. But what I was wrong was me thinking it was intuition. It was nothing but wishful thinking.

36:34Harry Stebbings:When did you wishful think too

36:36Jerry Murdock:much. When I found an entrepreneur that I liked, it was smart, but maybe too comfortable. Maybe a person I liked as a human being more, and they weren't crazy enough. They weren't really driven enough. They didn't have that chip on their shoulder. They didn't have that obsession, you know, because, you know, you want to work with people you like. And so most of the people that I liked were the ones that let me down and let themselves down. It's the people that you struggle with that are a little sharp edge, that are a little aggressive, and that you may not like as people that are like, wow, okay, well, but they might be the ones that succeed.

37:14Jerry Murdock:And you have to find that core of humanity in them that you can like them and help them. But most of the

37:21Harry Stebbings:most successful people are going to be challenged socially. Peter Fantomons told me the best founders make you feel uncomfortable. And I think that's very true. Have you changed as an investor, to Jerry.

37:31Jerry Murdock:Yes. If you don't change, you die. Changing is what allows you to adapt to the world. I mean, the most interesting thing, if I look at feature stuff is Fei-Fei Lee's new startup about this visual representation of the world. I mean, what she's clearly articulated is that, you know, language is a very subpar descriptor of the world. It's just limited. So for autonomous agents, we need a new system where we can visually recognize the world to be able to have an objective view of reality for the autonomous agent. That's why we have poets, because we can't really describe the world in enough detail with language, but we can give you a feeling about it.

38:18Jerry Murdock:I think that what we have to do in the world is to definitely be aware that we have limitations in understanding it with language.

38:27Harry Stebbings:I think limitations is interesting, dude. I often reflect on regret. I love being in Europe. I have family. I make a lot of money in Europe, which is great. But I never tried to go to Hollywood as the actor. And I'm just wondering if I'll regret that. What would you say to me as a wise OG? You know, there's a great British actor I had lunch with once named

38:47Jerry Murdock:Kenneth Branagh. And he was reflecting on exactly that question. He said, he's made the Hollywood movies, but he's done a lot in theater, a lot with Shakespeare. And he said, you know, I could have been more like Olivier that went to Hollywood and did Hollywood films late in life, but I didn't. I chose a different path. And for Branagh, I think he was very happy he didn't move to Hollywood. He could have had that career. And he's 65, 66 now looking back and he's saying, yeah, I could have been that, but you know what? I'm really happy I didn't do that. So maybe you're like Kenneth Bronagh, you're going to be happy you didn't do to Hollywood.

39:24Jerry Murdock:I didn't. We started in New York. I've never left Aspen. I lived in New York part time. I never moved away from Aspen. Jeff and I found an insight in New York City, and I cover the West Coast because it was a lot quicker for me. But Jeff and I just lived on airplanes for the first 10 years, you know, and that's how we handled it. Back in the day, that was pretty revolutionary. Remember, Silicon Valley was all about people walking down the street. There was VCs that said, I don't invest in anything more than five miles from my office.

39:55Harry Stebbings:Dude, if you can't cycle there, it's not a deal. That was the thing, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

40:00Jerry Murdock:Yeah. I mean, look, you choose your life, you choose your path. You shouldn't regret it if you're getting what you want and you're growing as a person. The most important thing looking back is what have you learned about yourself? When I would talk to our younger partners, like you had Jeff Lieberman on your show and some of our other partners, I'd say, hey, guys, you know, it doesn't help to get super rich early like you have unless internally you have a sense of self and you're comfortable with the decisions you make. Because that's the key thing. You know, you can become super successful early, but you've got to internalize that success, recognize where the failures are.

40:39Jerry Murdock:If I have any wisdom at all, it's because I fucked up so much and I've learned from it.

40:44Harry Stebbings:I made money very young and I was also an alcoholic. And the combination of failing badly and passing out drunk many times and my mother being disappointed in the drunk son that she had actually showed me like what life's really about. I'm so grateful almost for failing and being like that.

41:02Jerry Murdock:Absolutely. You've got to go. Hunter Thompson was a writer that lived near the Aspen area who I used to love Hunter Thompson's works. He said, you really don't know the edge unless you go over it. And clearly you did. oh dude i've been over so many fucking times so knowing the edge harry that's what it's all about we've got to all go over the edge and hope to live to tell about it that's what gives you the sense of knowing that gives you joy in life and gives you a sense of ease and comfort as you move through it when did you go over the edge well i did a different kind at 19 i got accepted to United States International University in Nairobi, Kenya.

41:45Jerry Murdock:So 1977, I get on a plane, go to Europe, hitchhike around for a couple of months, and then I go spend six months in Africa. I spent weekends documenting traditional dances with the director of Bomas. I was out in the hinterland, and Kenya is the size of Texas with, you know, 13 major tribes with 76 individual clans and dialects, and we wanted to document it all. And going out and living with these people on the weekends was going over the edge. I mean, I ate things I'd never believed I'd eat again. I mean, I'd lived in little huts with goats.

42:21Harry Stebbings:You know, it was not a pretty sight. Dude, you've built a firm that many, and including me, would aspire to. I just want to understand some wisdom. Knowing all you know now, what strategy did you do with Insight or product did you do with Insight? That with the benefit of hindsight, you maybe wish you hadn't done. What did you learn?

42:40Jerry Murdock:Oh, that we hadn't done. In the early days of Insight, the big mistake, we hired some famous guy to start Insight Europe. And after six months, we shut it down. It was a mistake and a half. We were not mature enough to do that. And Europe was something, you know, we loved Europe early on. Fund One had an investment called SLP in Paris. Fund Two had a company called MetaQuattro in Spain that went public. That was a big win. And we did deals in Portugal. We did deals in the Czech Republic in the 90s. So we thought, oh, let's do a fund. Big mistake. Too much difference. Too much. We needed to stay in New York together.

43:22Jerry Murdock:We needed to focus. We needed to learn from each other. Having people in Europe was too challenging. That was a mistake that we made.

43:29Harry Stebbings:So I always say the product that we sell our LPs is the quality of our investment decisions. And that reduces with remote decision making. Do you agree or do you think that today remote decisions work just as well?

43:42Jerry Murdock:That's a function of the team. That's a function of who's involved and then a function of experience. You know, overall, if I were to invest in a company, I would be very suspicious of remote management because human beings today need it. As we move to autonomous agents and human beings, that's a good question. You know, that's a very good question. I don't know how the feature is going to play out, but in the past remotely managed situation. I know for me, because I didn't live in New York as a co-founder, it was really hard on my team for me to fly in, fly out, fly in, fly out. And because you have to make decisions remotely, you have to sit with an entrepreneur.

44:25Jerry Murdock:You're in San Francisco and you have to commit now. And you've got a whole team in New York. You know, it's really tough being that remote guy. If you're all local and you're all sitting in the same office, you got to make a decision tomorrow. It's a lot easier. So I would argue that remote decision making is very difficult.

44:45Harry Stebbings:You mentioned momentum and the importance of momentum in some ways. Critics have suggested that momentum was a challenge for the$20 billion fund and the speed with which it was deployed and the high prices. Just with the wisdom and experience you have, Jerry, I'm fascinated. How do you reflect on that fund?

45:04Jerry Murdock:One correlation you can look across all VC funds and look at their vintage, whether it's a 99 vintage or 2004, 2005 vintage. And the one correlation you can make to success was timing. If you did a fund in 2005, 2006, you were in great shape to take advantage of the mobile thing that started happening in 2008 when Steve Jobs got 10 million subscribers from AT &T. That's when mobile became real. So if you had an 05, 06 fund, you had a chance to get some of the best, most iconic companies. But if you started a fund in 2009, you're going to miss being early in Twitter. You're going to miss being early in Facebook.

45:50Jerry Murdock:You're going to miss being in Uber. You're going to miss all that. So timing is the most important thing, whether you're early stage or late stage. You can't apply it to just an overall general strategy. Depends on the timing of when you did the investment.

46:04Harry Stebbings:Do you think now is the best time ever to be starting a new fund? Absolutely the best time.

46:09Jerry Murdock:You're in a sea change. Humans are no longer going to be the decision makers about software. It's going to be autonomous agents. This sea change, this tsunami is so different than anything that's come in the past that people that embrace this new model can embrace it from scratch. right now can have a huge advantage over people that have been successful with older models that don't quite move fast enough because they're already rich they already made a lot of money it's hard to get old old dogs to move fast how do you feel about getting back in the game then

46:43Harry Stebbings:joe you're doing this show with me you're talking about auto organizations like seems like you're

46:49Jerry Murdock:an old dog moving quite fast here's the here's the secret here's the real secret i never left the game. I retired from inside. I retired from negotiating term sheets. I retired from board seats. I retired from internal investment committee meetings. I retired from having dinners with LPs and answering LP phone calls, but I didn't retire. I haven't done a single investment on my own that someone didn't bring me that I love and I trust. Every investment that I've done, which is over a hundred, has come from someone close to me and said, Jerry, I need your help to help me think about this thing. And through that process of trying to help someone else, I end up in it.

47:33Jerry Murdock:And that's been fun because it's an experience that you're not doing on your own. Your experience you're doing with people you care about.

47:41Harry Stebbings:Final one before we do a quick fire. Do you believe the future of venture is like the go big or go home we see andreason raise 15 we have insight a mega platform we have the mega platforms of gc and light speed is it go big or go home now that's the only way i played the game and i mean

47:58Jerry Murdock:i went big on my things you know when i invested in twitter in 2009 there was 30 something people no revenue my fund for like are you kidding me it was a it was a watershed moment that my partners allowed me to make that investment. What did you see? What I saw, and this is really interesting, like our early investments, the idea of Twitter, which I call the status update for the world, was so brilliant, so over the top. It was far better than anybody on the team's ability to execute against it. So I think Twitter could have been infinitely a more interesting company, but VCs got involved and created politics and they fired Jack Dorsey early and they created issues.

48:44Jerry Murdock:And the company was pretty messed up from that trauma of firing one of the founders. And at the same time, they were very excited and the community was growing. The community was helping it. And for me, I saw an incredible idea that wasn't easily replicated. And there was enough momentum to it that this was for me a no-brainer. And it was the bet that I put my entire reputation on the line. I got Jeff Horan and Devin Parekh to jump in with me on this, and I pushed really, really hard. We did that investment less than 30 days from the time I met the team and the time we closed. And it turned out to be a watershed investment for the company and got us into lots of things like consumer and things we weren't doing at the time.

49:31Jerry Murdock:That was just because the quality of that idea was insanely great. Did you ever have a trough in confidence? I was lucky because I was losing money every year I've been in this business. I failed. I was always, you know, balanced in that I knew I was going to fail. I knew it was going to be miserable, but I knew I was going to win some, you know, and we were fortunate to do what we did. You know, we were very, very fortunate, but failure to me was always part of my job and I had to just suck it up. And so there was nothing that came down the pipe that caused me to lose confidence because I'd been aching and dealing with it from day one.

50:12Harry Stebbings:Listen, I'm going to do a quick fire round with you. So Isaiah's short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. What advice would you give to a graduate entering the workforce today looking for a job for the first time?

50:24Jerry Murdock:I would have him go buy a Mac Mini, have an open claw, and go to the job interview with his open claw.

50:35Harry Stebbings:Who is the best sourcer? When they bring you a deal, you pay most attention to it.

50:42Jerry Murdock:Oh, that's easy. The partners at Insight, I mean, what we've really built is one of the great sourcing engines of the world. I mean, Mike Triplett, Jeff Lieberman, Devin, these guys all just were focused on sourcing and managing their teams. And to get through the gauntlet of insight, due diligence, and get to something that could be funded was a pretty big accomplishment. I think that those guys were the absolute best sourcers in the world.

51:09Harry Stebbings:Who is the single best picker that you know? Like, they see value where others don't.

51:14Jerry Murdock:I don't want to build egos up, but Peter Fenton, John Doerr early on, those guys were astounding at picking deals.

51:25Harry Stebbings:What is the single most memorable first founder meeting you've had? Oh, wow.

51:31Jerry Murdock:I had the founders of Truecaller in Sweden come to Aspen. I said, I'm not going to invest in them, but they took their last dollars to get a plane ticket to Aspen. And they came to me and it was this was written about in the information by Amir Afrati, the story about it. But basically, these guys were nice guys and I couldn't let them down. I didn't want I told him I don't want to invest, but I'll help you. And I ended up helping him and giving him some money and making it a successful company. And it went public a few years ago. And it was a great company for a number of years. But that's one I did not want to go into.

52:02Jerry Murdock:I didn't want to go to Sweden, but I liked the guys so much. And they came out asked me.

52:06Harry Stebbings:I said, OK, I got to do it. What's the difference between a used car salesman and a software salesman? The used car salesman knows that he's lying. I love it. You've got OpenAI, you've got Anthropic, and you've got Grok. Which would you most want to be in as an investor? It depends what stage you get me a shot in. I'm getting you a shot in OpenAI at 500, and I'm giving you Anthropic at 380. I'd take them both.

52:39Jerry Murdock:I take them both, but I think for me, it's open AI because they got 800 million people doing it. When you got 800 million people doing it, when you cross a billion, then you're there. Like, I'm not that big a Bitcoin fan. I'm big in a couple of crypto things. But until you get to a billion users, I'm suspicious of any consumer technology.

52:59Harry Stebbings:I get you. But do you not think Gemini and Google can still wipe the floor with the distribution advantage that they have? Dan-less and the speed that they're moving?

53:09Jerry Murdock:They can. And they are long-term better assets. They've got, if I have an autonomous agent business and I've got Gmail, you're going to have a phenomenal asset that OpenAI doesn't have. But the issue is who's got 800 million people getting to a billion first. I mean, look, you can say there's a billion users on their other properties like YouTube and things. But if you can convert OpenAI's chatbot to my own Jerry Murdoch autonomous agent from ChatTPT, which I think what Peter Steinbringer is going to do, you're going to have an insanely great business.

53:46Harry Stebbings:What do people not know about having money that they should know? Very easy answer.

53:52Jerry Murdock:Money does not come with instructions. What does that mean? Well, everything else you buy, you get, you know, you got a Rivian comes with instructions. You get an iPhone, it comes with instructions. Money doesn't come with instructions. So you need to learn to respect it. It's energy. Money is the equivalent of energy and you need to respect it. You know, you don't just leave the lights on at home and the air conditioner on your home all day long while you're gone. You respect energy. You treat it with respect and you use it for good and use it to make things happen. and you don't waste it foolishly being an idiot.

54:26Jerry Murdock:You don't want to go to Las Vegas and hand out$100 bills to just random people. Take that energy and do something great. I mean, I don't know, as Larry Page has said, if he had extra money, he'd just give it to Elon to let him build things to change the world. I think that if you've got money, you've got energy, you can give it to entrepreneurs. They'll do amazing things.

54:46Harry Stebbings:You had kids quite later in life. Yeah. You wish you'd had them earlier.

54:52Jerry Murdock:Well, you know, it's like if you've had a fantastic life, you look back and you say, it's already great. Why would I change it? You know, number one. Number two, that guy, when I was younger, he wasn't ready for kids. All he was doing was building a business. He was building insight.

55:08Harry Stebbings:Would it be possible to build insight if you'd had kids during?

55:11Jerry Murdock:I would have been divorced and a pretty sad character probably. Look, I mean, when Jeff and I were out to raise money and we were getting sand kicked in our face, He was 30. I was 35 or 36. We both had acne. I mean, somebody wanted to give us money. Me, that guy with kids, I can't imagine him. You know, I imagine he's a disaster. What was the breakout moment?

55:35Harry Stebbings:You said that, you know, sand kicked in face money, and then you raised$20 billion funds now in single moments. What was the breakout? Was it a Twitter? Was it a...

55:45Jerry Murdock:You know, it was the fact that we survived 9-11. I mean, if you want to know, Insight had incredible funds, you know, funds won these incredible successes. Fund one and two are still some of our best funds ever. And then fund three, our 99 fund was like all challenged and it did pretty well, all things considered. But the fact that we survived that, collapse, a lot of VC firms were zombies, walking dead, partners splitting up, people going different directions. We hung in there. We hung in there and survived.

56:17Harry Stebbings:that's the breakthrough moment what's the biggest parenting advice you give me now knowing what you

56:24Jerry Murdock:know as a papa i would say your kids are always always watching you so use that as an opportunity to be your best self put your heart first and be your best self every moment of the day that you

56:40Harry Stebbings:can with those kids final one what are you most excited for in the next 10 years jerry i like optimism we sit in this incredible moment in technology in terms of development adoption

56:50Jerry Murdock:what are you most excited for there was a movie in the 1950s called the long hot summer and the character big daddy was uh dying of cancer and at the end of the movie things were working out with the family and he says i feel like i'm gonna live forever and i think about autonomous agents and ai and maybe it's gonna help me live forever that's what i think i i actually do think it will increase

57:14Harry Stebbings:increase longevity significantly in the next 20 years. Do you agree?

57:19Jerry Murdock:Yeah, I mean, what I've heard is if you can live another five years, you're going to extend another five years. So if you're wherever state of health you're in today, if you make it five years, you're going to at least get five years in the back end.

57:32Harry Stebbings:Jerry, you're a star. Thank you so much for this.

57:34Jerry Murdock:It's great. And great catching up with you again, Harry.

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