Bittensor’s Rise, Meta’s Llama Goes Cloud, & AI Now Writes Your Code | E2119

25:42And I was like, well, I'm going to, into that. I'm going to compare this to like the startups I'm seeing in Silicon Valley and abroad and everywhere else. And they just didn't make any sense. And there were two or three, I was like, these are really smart guys. There's less typos and they're actually making something that might work. But like this idea that a decentralized Uber or a decentralized Google or a decentralized Twitter is going to, or decentralized Facebook is going to beat all those things. I was like, Like that's not possible or not probable, but probably more not possible because if you're going to stay on somebody's couch, like you probably want a company with a board and insurance to be responsible for that, right?

26:22Like that's like way too high stakes for people to want to use. And listen, maybe I'll turn out to be wrong, but what I like about this project you've identified is it seems like there's real entrepreneurs there, which is great. And it seems like they're building actual products and services with utility from, in some cases, companies that exist in the real world, that have a board of directors, that have a domiciled location. And that was always the screaming red flags in crypto. This company's not domiciled anywhere. There's some non-profit foundation in Panama. But most of that, I mean, yes.

26:59I totally get what you're saying. Yeah. The flip side of that is that that environment was created by Gary Gensler, who forced these companies out of the United States. Yes. There was no other way to operate. Sure. Right. So. But operating in the shadows also gave them the advantage of just absconding with the money. And that is also true. There was a lot of bad stuff. I mean, I'm not denying that. So what do you think now about what Trump has done so far with crypto? You know, when you saw the meme coin stuff like that, obviously seemed like they were writing SEC code around, you know, the Trump meme coin to kind of maybe, you know, not to basically retroactively give Trump a pass.

27:38Am I right about that one? I actually disagree with you on that. Okay. But I do agree with you that what Trump did with his meme coin was crass. It was not something that we in crypto liked. Why? Our stomachs all fell because we don't like, the ones of us who have been in this for a long time and who believe in it, we love Ethereum, we love DeFi, the centralized finance. We love Bitcoin. We think this world should exist. We think Gary Gansley should not have been. so predatory on the environment. And we fought hard, right? And suffered for a long time in some cases, right? Some people went to jail.

28:13So it felt like it's a grift. Yes. And when Trump did what he did, it just felt like a gut punch. It didn't feel good at all. It felt like betrayal, right? Got it. It didn't feel good. What about stablecoins? There's like a stablecoin act. This is all going very low under the radar while we talk about sending people to CECOT or the tariff war. It seems like Howard Lutnick's got a deep relationship with Tether, or Cantor Fitzgerald does. And there's this new Stablecoin Act coming out. Is there a chance that Tether, which is used for, according to 60 Minutes and Congress and all those hearings, used for really dark stuff in the world, terrorists, human traffickers, allegedly are using it, or maybe confirmed, and they've been banned from these states.

28:59Is that going to become a legit thing? Yeah, I think it will. I mean, and just to back up, yes, Tether has been used for those, I'm sure has been used for crimes. So it was United States dollars in briefcases, right? Of course, yeah. By a much larger margin, right? Yeah. You think so by a much larger margin today? Do you think people are using, if we were to look at it, that historically is correct because Tether hasn't existed, but today, like the average criminal? Yeah, I actually looked at, I don't remember the stats offhand, but it was something like 5 % of all cash is for illicit business.

29:30Okay, yeah. Tether is mostly used for, you know, to basically store your crypto in a wallet so you don't have to deal with a bank, right? Like with Mt. Gox, before Tether, you had to wire money to Japan. Right. And that took like a week and maybe it got there, maybe it didn't. Yes. It was hard. And, you know, with Tether, you're just like, oh, blip, my Tether's over there now and I can buy the coins. By most guesses, cryptocurrency is being used for between$40 and$50 billion of illicit transactions per year. that would be a magnitude less than U.S. dollars. Hey everybody, it's 2025 and AI is officially everywhere from medicine to self-driving cars.

30:08If AI hasn't hit your industry yet, well, you know it's coming fast. But AI needs serious computing power. So how do you stay competitive without breaking the bank? And what if you could cut your cloud bill in half? That's right, 50%. Well, it's time to upgrade to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI as we call it in the industry. OCI is blazing fast, and it's a secure platform designed to handle everything your startup needs, including your infrastructure, databases, apps, and of course, AI and machine learning. And what about all these savings? Well, compared to other cloud providers, OCI costs 50 % less for compute and 80 % less for networking.

30:47And that's some serious savings. Thousands of businesses have already upgraded to OCI, including Vodafone, Thomson Reuters, and Suno AI, who we had in the pod last year. So here's your call to action. Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI for new US customers with a minimum financial commitment. But act fast. This offer ends March 31st. So see if your company qualifies at oracle.com slash twist. That's oracle.com slash TWIST. What else do we have on the docket today? I want to stay on the AI training compute front, Jason. There was some big news from Meta this week at their first ever LamaCon, which was an event dedicated to their open source AI models.

31:28They announced that they're going to partner with Grok with a Q and Cerebrus, both Twist 500 companies, to offer essentially their models as a hosted service. And when two of our Twist 500 companies get name checked at the same time, it's pretty exciting. Both companies are shouting about this. They're very proud of it. And I think it just goes to show that, one, Meta needs an AI business model, Jason, but also, too, that it's not all going to pool in NVIDIA's pockets long term. Now, I don't know how this will stack up against what they're working on with BitTensor, but certainly there are a lot of people out there who want traditional AI inference compute.

32:01And so it's cool to see two companies that are still private, still smaller, get tapped. And I do think this should help Cerebus go public, Jason. Okay, this is super interesting. Obviously, Groq, G-R-O-Q, is not Groq from Elon. It's Grok from Chamath, and it's Tensor chips. These are inference chips. So Meta does not currently have a cloud computing offering for founders, right? They make their own, obviously, data centers, but they're not in competition with AWS. And if what I'm hearing is correct here, Meta is saying we're going to take Llama, their open source project and they're going to have it hosted with compute from Grok and Cerebris.

32:49Is Cerebris a data center company or a chip company? Cerebris is a chip company. They are big with G42 and they filed to go public but remember their IPO was so single company revenue that it was a little dicey. So now, if that does happen, does this mean is the actual story here that Meta is going to compete with AWS? To a degree. I mean, you can host LLAMA models around, you know, you can run LLAMA, I think, on AWS or on Azure or GCP, but now they're going to offer their own kind of homegrown solution, if you will, with these partners. So Meta is now, in a way, competing with everyone else. Yes.

33:25In cloud computing, it's a slice of cloud computing. So then if they do just that slice, they're probably going to be obligated to offer some storage or some transit. This could be the start of them creating an AWS competitor. That's actually the real news here. is this could be their wedge. Now, they have a great excuse, Mark. They could just say, well, we want to have the freshest, best version of Llama available because we want the project to win. Maybe they offer it at a discount. Maybe they offer it as a loss. They could price dump this. What do you think here, Mark? What, Alex, what? Sorry, I don't think, sorry, I doubt it's a deep disagreement, but then probably not, Jason, because the information reported that Meta had actually reached out to Alphabet and Microsoft.

34:05Should I get them to subsidize the money they were putting into Llama? So I doubt they can actually take more of a loss here. I think this is a way to recoup some of their investment, not to further subsidize their market share. Well, I mean, if you want your model to win and you've got tons of cash laying around, you could buy back your stock. You could build infrastructure and take a loss on it. And they could lose, I mean, they're losing, what, 10 billion a year on VR. I mean, they could lose 20 billion a year on this, make it free. the big loser here, Mark, might be OpenAI. What if this is available for less than OpenAI charges for their compute?

34:46What are your thoughts here of Meta's open source sort of strategy and standing up hosted compute? Yeah, I mean, this is exactly what Shutes and Targon do, right? So they take these open source models and stand them up and make them available for quite a bit less than you can get on AWS. Yeah. So, you know, I think the overall trend is that AI goes towards zero in terms of cost, right? Wow. And I think that through various mechanisms and various interacting market forces, some of them from BitTensor, some of them from the open source community, which is very dangerous for open AI, right? Like they're incinerating hundreds of billions a year.

35:26Yeah. Right? So how is that sustainable in the face of that kind of thing? Single digit billions a year, I think. Sorry, single digit billions. Single digit. The company's worth hundreds of billions. Yeah, this is good cleanup. All right. let's keep moving here. I want to talk a little bit about how much code is being written by AI. Alex, there's some news from Cursor and Lightrun and from Sundar and from Satya on exactly how much code is being written by AI now. This is a trend that I think we saw coming, but maybe not at the velocity it's coming. I don't know. Cue it up here. So I'm very impressed by a couple of numbers.

36:04So during Google's earnings report, Alphabet's earnings report, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that right now, over 30 % of code that is committed from the company now comes from an AI source. Also at Lomacon, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said that right now, 20 to 30 % of the code that the company puts out is written by AI. Now, this is pretty big news. I think no one thought we'd get to this fast, but Cursor is very, very proud of how much of it's, how much of how much code it's putting out. So the CEO said over on X that Kursler today writes about a billion lines of accepted code per day.

36:38And he put that up against a global number of several billion lines per day. People were a little skeptical of that figure, but it just goes to show how fast this is moving. Jason, I think once we see companies like Lightrun, which we talked about, I think on Monday, really kind of turn the AI snake back on its own tail and begin to have AI improve AI generated code, we're going to get to 80, 90 % within probably 18 months. Yeah, this is pretty amazing. And I think it's going to be great for humanity because the bottleneck for startups has been a moving target over time. When startups and PC revolution, server revolution, there were hardware constraints.

37:17We had an incredible constraint of the memory of the computer. We had constraints of the storage of the computer, 15 floppy disks to run it. that everything was too slow, it was too hard to even load up a word processor. You know, if you saved a large file, it was even like the quality of the file get corrupted. Like we had really crazy issues. Then we went to another phase where the bandwidth was the issue. Hey, how do we move this stuff around? Then it became standing up servers. So if you were starting a company in the late 90s in the Web 1.0 era when Mark and I started, you had to raise three, four, five million.

37:53You had to take 18 months, 24 months to build your product and stand up your data center. Now you can build your startup in three weeks, use somebody else's data center. So what has been the blocker the last 10 years, last 20 years? The blocker has been developers. I can't find a developer was what we heard for the last 10 years from founders. I think what we're going to hear now is because you don't need five developers to get your project out the door, you need one. And that one is getting 30 % faster a year. maybe your startup ultimately, instead of needing 30 developers, needs five. Maybe in order to start, you need one developer, not five, right?

38:32You know, like, this is a magnitude change and I think it's going to mean we're going to make every piece of software that hasn't been made yet will get made. What else do we got on the docket? I want to run something by you, Jason. There's a venture capitalist, Charles Hudson from Precursor Ventures. Yeah, he's great. Yeah, everyone knows Charles. He did a post over on Substack, But he says that he's noticed that the combination of AI-generated cold outreach to VCs is pushing people back towards human-driven warm intros and referrals. This was very interesting to me. I can't imagine handing off my VC outreach to AI, but I'm curious how founders can take advantage of this to win more in 2025.

39:11I've always believed it's a numbers game, you know, in terms of raising capital, especially at the early days, because you are selling the promise, right? But even though it's a numbers game, because there's so many, we just talked about there's 400 funds formed a year. So there's 1 ,200 funds active at any one point in time, maybe 1 ,500 because they tend to have a four-year lifecycle of primary investing. So let's say there's 1 ,500 firm funds. They probably have six people working at each. You're getting to 5 ,000 to 10 ,000 active investors with check writing ability. Somewhere in that group, 10 % of them will want to invest in your company.

39:505 % of them. It's a numbers game in that if it was 10%, you might be talking about 500 qualified targets, 1 ,000 qualified targets. Then you have to look at, okay, they do invest in my vertical. I'm in marketplaces. I'm in military. Okay, of those, which ones invest at my stage? Seed rounds, pre-seed, series A, series B. Now you have to parse that list. And then you have to start a real sales process of going to them. The problem is because of databases like Crunchbase and other ones that exist, sometimes the founder will get overzealous and they will send too many emails and that upsets people.

40:31And that's where you get VCs complaining, like, I am not doing medical devices. I don't invest in pizzerias. So what you want to do is make a nice big list. and then you want to really understand on that list, have they invested in companies adjacent to yours? Do they only invest in certain regions? So it is a numbers game, but you have to also curate that number. So it's very easy to get to a list of, I would say you should have, you know, in your seed round, there should be probably at the top level 200 firms that you've identified would actually invest in your company. And then you should see of those 200, how many can you get a warm intro to?

41:11And then how many do you need to do a cold intro to? And then you should be very thoughtful when you send that email, instead of trying to do it as quick as possible, go slow. Which is, if you were to meet somebody at a party, and you were a real estate broker, you wouldn't be like, are you selling your home or buying a new home anytime soon? You'd be like, oh, where do your kids go to school? Oh yeah, no, I'm over here. And you kind of warm up the lead. So you want to warm up the leads. We have a great video from Alexis Ohanian about the perfect cold email. Here we go. If you want to just throw to that real quick.

41:43It's on the From the Feed section. This was shared a few weeks ago. I've had it in the docket in case we ever got to talk about it. This is such a great example. It's only one minute of video, and I feel like he lays out exactly how to write the best cold email you've ever heard. Tips for cold emailing. I love a good cold email that is to the point. It is no longer than like three or four sentences. It very clearly upfront states who you are and why you're real. Basically what value you have to provide to the person that you're reaching out to. And then makes a very specific request. And says thanks.

42:20That's it. I mean, upfront you want to demonstrate value. Why am I going to spend another 30 seconds reading this email? And then immediately follow up with the request. And ideally be offering first instead of asking. But if you are asking for something first, there better be a good why. The best cold emails are deeply, deeply empathetic to the person you're emailing. You've taken the time to understand who they are, what they're about, what they like. One of the easiest ways to mess it up is by not doing that work, getting their name wrong, putting 20 paragraphs into an email, keep it tight, demonstrate value up front, make your clear ask.

42:52That's it, good luck, good exercise. Get used for the rejection too. Yeah, he's nailing it there. You gotta be concise to the point, make sure you don't spell the person's name wrong. I always tell people like, gosh, if you want, it's so easy with a VC who is publicly active to just say, I saw you on This Week in Startups, or you had this tweet, it really resonated with me because I'm building something inspired by that tweet. Boom. And then all of a sudden, you've created some commonality, some common ground, and then you get to the ask. We're raising our seed round. I also think a chart, if you have, I like leading with what's strong.

43:31So a chart is the strongest thing in the world for VCs because we like up and to the right. We like things that are going to grow. So we've had our product in market for seven weeks. We've grown on average 18 % week over week. We're doubling every three to four weeks. And here's a link to our app. And here's a link to our deck. Would love to, if you're interested, would love to do a quick follow-up meeting. I always added something extra, which was happy to meet anytime. I know you're in Palo Alto. So anytime, you know, Saturday, Sunday, 7 a.m. to midnight, anytime I can meet you for 15 minutes, happy to go where you are.

44:11So you're actually even putting out there like you're a dogged, rabid person who will meet anytime, anywhere if you want to do an introductory call. And yeah, I also love sometimes people ask me a question. What do you think of this design? Yeah. That kind of like, oh, okay. Yeah, maybe I'll give you actually some feedback. Go ahead, Mark. There's something that you used to say at Mahalo a lot that really made me focus a lot more on this. And, you know, the video talks about clarity, right? Getting to the point. Yeah. You used to say to people, you know, answer the question. You'd ask someone a question.

44:41They wouldn't answer the question. They'd like give you 50 paragraphs. Literally, that's my life. All the context. People always want to give you context. I never really thought about how often people don't answer the question and how rare clarity is. and you kind of, you know, tuned my brain to that a lot more than it had been. All right. We have an office hours. We're going to get you our office hours now. Let's do it. Yes, we are. Okay. All right. So the company in question is Layer Next. The co-founder and CEO is Boudicca Madam. Now Layer Next, if you don't know, is taking the world of business intelligence to the next level using AI to get all that structured and unstructured corporate data.

45:17That way you can figure out what to do next, Jason, and not just look entirely in the rear view mirror. Let's talk to Layer Next. All right. How are you, sir? Nice to see you. How are you doing? Tell us what's going on with Layer Next. What's challenging? What are the wins? What are the fails? Layer Next is a strategic business intelligence platform. And we are helping CFO to generate strategies to grow their business or increase efficiencies. The challenge is right now with the business onboarding. Because every customer has a different data set. We are especially going for these mid-market companies in the manufacturing and transportation and logistics.

46:00The problem is their data is not AI ready. So we have to do a lot of upfront work in order to make our system work with their data. That's the challenge. So you have AI that goes in, looks at a CFO's data from their company, and then gives them some strategic intelligence. an example of intelligence or strategy that you've given to a CFO, what would you say is the best example of a wow moment a CFO had when you deployed LayerNext at their company and against their datasets? What was the biggest wow moment? So we had one customer. He wanted to understand whether we want to hire more salespeople or not.

46:47Okay, yeah. So then we analyze how much salespeople they have today, how much sales they're making today, and also the cash flow. So then AI generating strategies. If you add the one sales agent, this could be the revenue. Then how much is your margin would be? Those are the wow, yeah. So this is a great idea, but it's hard. And so some ideas are hard. What's hard about this idea? Well, what one CFO wants to solve might be very different than another CFO. If you don't have salespeople, well, and you have retailers, you have a different task to do here. And as you mentioned, there's different stages.

47:30Some companies don't have a CFO. Then companies have an outsourced CFO. Then you hire your first CFO. Then you have a public market CFO. You have a real range of different stages of companies you have different goals and then also you're trying to tell them things actionable items that maybe they're not even aware so that would be like doing a blood test with superpower and it comes back to you and says hey uh and you're doing superpower uh getting your blood drawn so you just signed up maybe they say to you oh you're vitamin d now you would never say to them i need to take a vitamin d test so they take all the tests so this business you probably do any vitamin because you're not outside enough.

48:11This is your problem. You have disparate systems and you have insights you can give them that they may not even know they need. So the value of this product is hard for them to know. And so what you probably have to do is figure out what is the most, which group of CFOs are going to have the most wow moments and get the most value from your product. If it's people with sales teams, you'll know that because Salesforce exists, HubSpot exists. If it's people with retailers, maybe they use SAP, who knows? Maybe they use NetSuite. So I think you have to plan to flag early on, define an ideal customer profile, narrow the focus down to, hey, this product, Snowflake, NetSuite is the industry standard.

49:01These people have money to spend and we can help them. So Ikigai, do you know that? Ikigai. Ikigai? Yeah. Pull up the Ikigai chart. I'm going to show you something that might blow your mind. Ikigai, have you heard of this before? I don't know. Okay. Ikigai is a Japanese philosophy. What are you good at? What does the world need? What are people willing to pay for it? And there's other circles. People have made all kinds of different spins on it, but somebody is going to pull up the Ikigai chart. I got it. Okay, here we go. So we'll look at this for a second. And I just want you to slow down. We're not talking about your startup here.

49:37We're talking about life. So we have what you love. Okay, you love data, don't you? Okay, what the world needs. Analysis of that data to get insights. What are you good at? You're good at making that software and will people pay for it, right? Somewhere in here is your ikigai of your startup. What software the world uses for data? It's going to be HubSpot. It's going to be NetSuite, et cetera. What do they love? They love saving money. They love making money. What are you good at? You're good at telling them how to save money, how to make money, how to avoid maybe one of your value propositions to how to avoid tax issues in the future or how to save money on taxes.

50:20It could be all of those things. And would people pay for it? Well, there'll be overlapping circles here. So ikigai, I-K-I-G-A-I, is a way for a human being to look at the world and say, what should I do with my life? What's my purpose? Ikigai for startups is a new concept that I'm just debuting here right now for the first time, but it came to my mind, which is ikigai for startups is who are these customers? What do they covet? And what can you do with them, right? So what would you say for that company that got the wow moment and it provided great value for them, do you think they'd be willing to pay for that?

51:02Or is that like a one-time insight? Or is that a reoccurring insight? I'm curious. It's a reoccurring. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. Because you have to monitor the salespeople. Sure. Yeah. So you found something. What data? Where was the data held that you were able to make this insight? Where did you get the data from? They have the salesforce. They have the salesforce and they're pumping the data to the data warehouse. every night. Okay, so they have Salesforce is where the data resides. Did you cross-reference it with any other data? They have the accounting system. It's a legacy accounting system.

51:32Oh, so you had the legacy accounting system. Do you know what name of that is? It's not QuickBooks or something? Yeah, for us, it's a transparent. I guess Oracle NetSuite or something. Perfect. Data coming direct to the warehouse and we access the data from the warehouse. So while you're figuring out your ideal customer profile, you're going to have to figure out how many people have Salesforce and this accounting thing, and maybe start with that group. Now you have identified a subset. Maybe in the future, you want to go in and take every piece of data from every system and give this magical, here's how to run your business.

52:07It's almost like a shadow CEO, a shadow CFO advising people. It's like a clone, right? You've got this perfect clone that's out there working as an agent 24 hours a day, trying to figure this stuff out. But maybe we start and say, you know what? There's enough people with sales teams and sales data and customer engagement data that we could just go in and tackle that first. So you have a feature you can say to people, hey, you got Salesforce. You have over 50 salespeople. We can really help you figure out how to make decisions in your sales group. Then you say to the marketing group, hey, we know your CAC.

52:47We know where you're spending money. We can help you spend money more efficiently to then get it into the sales group. Then you say, okay, now we're going to work with our accounts and our tax people. We can tell you how to save money internationally, figuring out your tax status and where to put these sales, et cetera. But you start with one, then you build the adjacencies. Does that make sense? I think it makes sense, yeah. So we get a lot of custom. Some people, it's the early stage of the data journey, data maturity journey. So we are in the waiting list still. That makes sense to me. Yeah.

53:21I mean, the good news also is, and most VCs will not say this, because they really want you to scale and not build custom software, right? Because custom software is custom and it's not repeatable. But if you did some client engagements where they needed your help with some service-y kind of stuff and it was custom-y and it was bespoke, if that bespoke work gets you a lighthouse customer, I'm going to say, go ahead and do it. If that bespoke custom work for them and consulting, if they're paying for it and it makes your product better and more scalable for the next customer and you own the IP for that stuff, I'm going to say, go ahead and do it because this is going to be years of you grinding it out to get this data and normalize it.

54:10And if you can make a little bit of money along the way to keep the lights on and have to raise less money from VCs, that can be good too because you keep more of your equity. Now, a VC would tell you, don't do that. Build the platform. We'll give you the money. We get your equity. But it's a way for you to not do it. Mark, you have any thoughts here and advice? But I think you've got enough to go on here. Let's try to define that ideal customer profile. And then I want you to also bear hug them. Did I ever talk to you about the bear hug strategy? Yeah, we learned from the accelerator program.

54:42Got it. Okay. Okay. So just for people who are listening, the bear hug strategy is when you're trying to find these lighthouse customers, the one who shine this beacon of light that other customers follow, oh, we got this company that's got a lot of salespeople in it, or it's IBM, and IBM uses Salesforce, and IBM's got this glow, or it's KPMG. KPMG's got all these salespeople all over the world selling audits or whatever, and we now have them as our lighthouse customers. So Ernst & Young and other groups might follow their lead. If you can get one of those and then you can embed yourself at their office so they have this problem, they got data problems.

55:21You say, hey, you know what? We want you to be our Lighthouse customer. You're super upfront with them. Would it be possible for us to get like a war room, a conference room at your office? And we just come there five days a week, four days a week. We work with your team. We clean up this data. We give you insights and we'll do this consulting arrangement or we'll do it for free. but now you're sitting with them and then other opportunities emerge. And those other opportunities could inform you. Like these could be circles you didn't, in your ikigai, didn't anticipate emerging. So I like the idea of like getting really close to a couple of people who love your product and learning from them.

55:58And you'd learn so much being embedded in that way. There's things you can't pick up just on a phone call or resume people don't know about themselves and their own business that you'd pick up being in their face all day. If you were HannaVision or you were the Red Camera Company or one of these, it would be the equivalent of saying, like, I make these incredible cameras. You're making a movie or a television show. Can we send a couple of technicians to hang out on set with you and answer any questions you have? And, you know, when you keep dropping the thing because the handles don't work well and, you know, they keep slipping out of people's hands, we're going to make a grip that doesn't fall out.

56:35and you gain some incredible knowledge. So great job and we wish you great success. Thank you very much. I mean, maybe we'll do one Reddit rapid response. Oh, okay. We got a few of those. We got a few of those. You were hanging out. So Jason was hanging out on the r slash anti-work subreddit. Yes, capitalist in the anti-work subreddit. Jason, do you show up? I can imagine your head exploding. I have been, we've been working on return to office for our company, you know, and have a certain philosophy. Extremely high performers can be remote, but some jobs need to be in person. So we've been slowly working on this, getting back to in office.

57:15And I guess because I was researching ActiveTrack, which is like productivity software, and we have to lock all our computers down, I started, I think the way I stumbled upon anti-work was people were talking about ActiveTrack in there, which is tracking software that you put on your corporate laptop. And it watches everything you do all day. Watches everything you do. But it's really for a finance company also to secure your laptop. Right. They don't like downloading the database, sharing it with people who shouldn't be seeing what's in there. So, you know, anyway, people were talking about ActiveTrack on there and I saw this thread and it just resonated with me.

57:52So maybe you could queue up the person, Lon. From user Electric Horsepower, they're asking why the big push to return to office? I get a sense that the majority of domestic employers want everyone to return to office. I understand that leases on buildings need to be maximized, but is there anything other than money that would make a company have all of its employees come back to the office? Yeah. Yeah. So I just thought I would explain to them what are some of the other reasons that people are actually doing this and the why. And a little bit of my philosophy. So maybe you could just read a little bit of my response.

58:25If there's typos or things in there, please feel free. I usually leave my typos in now. Like Grammarly tries to correct my typos. I'll clean up egregious ones, but I leave a couple of typos in so people know it's real. People know it's not AI. It's you. So Jason wrote, I wrote a couple of podcasts all in this week at startups and a venture capital firm, launch of out of university. Over the past year, we started a return to work for everyone, but EHPs, extremely high performers who live outside of Austin. We did it because one, we're in a competitive space and being in person makes us faster at everything.

58:56Two, energy level intensity and pace is different. Three, after four years of working for home, people had lost their intensity. The culture had disappeared. Four, after starting to meet with founders in person again, it was a huge advantage. Five, on the margin, we had 10 to 20 percent of folks abusing work from home, which you figured out via ActiveTrack. Great software for teams of high performers because it exposes folks who are phoning it in or abusing the system. However, that's just one data point important to keep in mind. And finally, creativity. When folks are in creative meetings in person, they bring their A game, but when they're on Zoom, they could get distracted, they could disappear or whatever.

59:33And then you filled it out with some other important, you know, personal sort of information said happy to do an AMA. Yeah. So thoughts on my response? I think you're correct. I actually chimed in and responded to this comment myself. And I was, I was very skeptical. I was, I loved working from home. I thought that was like the dream. Yes. Like I can hang out in my PJs all day, just at my computer. I don't have to commute. Yes. And I enjoyed it for a while, but after several years, I think exactly what you said about being distracted, losing some of the intensity and focus. And I'm, I like to work.

1:00:07I don't, you know, I know you're a worker for sure. Hard worker. Yeah. I'm not somebody who's like, naturally like, eh, I don't want to do that. I'm going to hang out for an hour. But even I found that after a while, it's very easy to get distracted when you're in your house, when you're never face to face with your coworkers, when everybody is just like a little line of text on your chat app, instead of being in your face, you just lose that personal connection. And when you're in an office with other people, they're your peers and your co-workers. You raise your own game to keep up with all of them.

1:00:38You don't do that when you're at home. You set your own energy level and everybody kind of has to come to you. It just slowly atrophies. I know it did for me. If you are a young person, I think, and you've been doing this for a while and you're convinced it's some crazy capitalist and they're forcing you to come to work. It's actually in your benefit. I think not socializing with people is making a generation of very weird people. I've been talking to some parents who have kids older than us who lost their entire college years or lost their high school years to the COVID lockdown. So they literally lost graduation of college or graduation of high school.

1:01:19You should demand as a young person to be in office and to be near the locus of power and to be mentored and to be professionally developed. You should be demanding that. You're getting ripped off. Alex and I came up at a time, you know, me a little bit earlier, where we were in rooms with editors, reading our work out loud, telling us we sucked, telling us how to be better. We got to watch other people do the job. And we had people model it first. And the professional development that's happening on when we have our Monday editorial meeting for Foundry University, which I've been at two or three of them.

1:01:53I mean, the learning, the feedback I'm getting back from people is like, whoa, that is like the best part of the job. I mean, your first couple of jobs, you don't know how to be a good employee yet. You haven't done it. It's your first couple of jobs. And yeah, I can't imagine starting my career in a work from home. Like I was doing it after a decade of being in an office every day, being told exactly what to do. I can't imagine just starting your career from that. I want to double clear on something Jason said, though. Being near the locus of power is the real hack here. People talk about mentorship and culture and all of that to some degree.

1:02:27But if you want your career to accelerate, what you want is time with the SVP or the CEO or whatever. And they're never going to have time for you on Slack. But you can find them in the office. You can make you guys collide and then get to know them, leave or that. I mean, if you're ambitious, I don't think promotes for you. If you are an individual contributor who has a defined role and you're very good at it, sure. But I mean, for everyone else who's not bad, I mean, it's kind of for senior status employees, I feel. I think at this point, if you're like a extremely high performer in a specific vertical with a very tight skill set, with a tight arrangement, you're going to do X, Y, and Z.

1:03:02Perfect. I'm trying to be the return to office armistice person. Right. Which is, somebody asked me, kindly hear a young person, I'm going to New York, I'm going to a wedding. I don't want to use one of my vacation days. I'll work really hard remote, but I don't want to go see New York. I've been to New York a million times. I don't like the city. I was like, well, that's a bit of an insult. I'm from there, but I get it. I was like, I kind of get it. Shout out to Maddie. And Maddie was like, can I work remote one day? She doesn't want to spend any time in New York. I was devastated. I was like, I'll give you 10 things to do.

1:03:34It doesn't even sleep. But I think she wants to save the day. All right. Hey, listen. Or a proper vacation. You know what I said to her? You're a high performer. Certainly fine. Just let the team know if you need to take a remote day. At least go to Cass's Deli or something like that. I mean. there's some Chinatown get some peaking duck that's what I go for a walk in Central Park I haven't had lunch yet and it's killing me for Alex Wilhelm the amazing Alex Wilhelm he's at Alex on Twitter cautious optimism go give him the hundy get his insights every day on his newsletter Mark Jeffrey from Hash Rate the pod search for Hash Rate right now pause our pod go to Hash Rate and sign up and learn and you'll be a little out of your depth but you'll catch up pretty quickly and Lon Harris.

1:04:21He's at Lon's. You're at Mark Jeffrey on the X. You're active. You're a Trump supporter. Yep. You have Trump dedication syndrome. T-D-S. Lon and Alex have Trump derangement syndrome. You have Trump dedication syndrome. And I call balls and strikes. See you all next time. Bye-bye.

1:04:49Thank you.