Databricks' Record Raise, TikTok goes to the Supreme Court, and all about the Grammarly-Coda Deal | E2063

27:30And I'll just tell it to you straight. That's the beauty contest here. If you think that men pick women because of beauty, let's just say you think that that's how men pick mates. Okay, we can debate it if you want or not. In that dating scenario, are they going to say to you, I don't want to date you because you're ugly, or I don't think you're attractive? Or are they going to just say, I'll just respond and I'll move on? Which is more comfortable to do? That's what VCs do. we take the approach we say to founders we have other investments that we have to prioritize that and we just leave it at that but we would love to get an update from you if they ask us we'll give them more details but i just brought it up internally for our firm launch again should we be giving founders more details of why we're not investing or not and i have switched my philosophy back and forth back and forth because once you give founders hey we're not investing because of the margins and because of the growth rate and because of the team we know they say well you're wrong and they argue with you and then you have another email to do that's why the best ones say we have other investments we need to prioritize or this isn't a fit for me i do want to do a quick news update though on tiktok just so everyone knows we've been talking a little bit about tiktok and its legal travails so the ban is in january January 19th, right?

28:54Isn't it? January 19th. It's coming. We're about a month away. We're 30 days away from this. And TikTok's done. Well, so, on December 13th, the DC Court of Appeals said no to them asking for an injunction against the law. Then on the 16th, TikTok filed, dear God, Supreme Court, please come help us. We don't have any time left. Today, the Supreme Court said no to their request for an emergency injunction. But what they did was they've squeezed an entire Supreme Court petition in between now and january 19th so it's gonna be yes so wow the supreme court doesn't usually do that right aren't they usually like slow yeah so slow yeah but i the commentary that i saw that made the most sense to me is that they're compressing this so that way the current doj and the current kind of like set of government that brought this bill and passed it yes are going to be the ones defending it which makes i think reasonable sense so very quickly everybody's gonna be an administration changed the new administration might have different feelings about this the old administration should get to dispatch justice here as they see fit or the court should and so they just want to yeah wrap this up before yeah it gets nixed or there's a transition of people i guess i guess that seems like a good idea i think it's reasonable and then the trouble then can do it whatever they want congress can pass a different law you know they can they can they can go back to the drawing table but oh right we live in a democracy there's a laws and there's a process for passing these laws yes it turns out there is a process we don't use it very often anymore but we do have one that is in reserve in case we ever decide to legislate as a nation.

30:22Quickly, opening briefs, December 27th, right after Christmas, we'll get the big notes from the government and TikTok, and then essentially oral arguments January 10th. So this is going to be bang, bang, bang, we're going for it. No Christmas for people working at the law firms of TikTok or the DOJ. You got work to do. No skiing for that group. Jason, this is going to be the biggest... No, what? No. Oh, okay. Look, if someone wants to pay me what they're going to pay those lawyers to work over Christmas. I think this is literally the best Christmas ever. For the lawyers involved. Those families are like, guess what?

30:56Christmas is in February, wherever you want it to be. Yeah, exactly. Pick a continent. We'll do it there. We're there. That's what's going on. Everyone, we have our eyes on it. We'll bring you the briefs when they come out. It's going to be a big deal. It's going to be politically charged. Very interesting. And it'll help determine kind of where things go. But Jason. Divest. I retain my position. Divest, divest, divest. I'm still on that team. Too powerful for the Chinese to have this tool. Yes. Or any country to have this tool, I'll be honest. Especially in our nation. All right. You didn't start your company to run payroll, did you?

31:30Of course not. We all know that. Gusto is here to help. Gusto is going to help you run your payroll and handle all your benefits, onboarding, and HR all in one place. The market agrees. 300 ,000 businesses trust Gusto today, and you can too. As your startup scales, Gusto is going to grow with you. You got state and federal taxes handled for your staff around the country. Gusto does all that. And hey, maybe it's finally time for you to offer a 401k plan for your team, right? Gusto's got you on that. And you might need to get your compliance sorted, right? Well, three out of four employers say Gusto helps them be government compliant.

32:10And even better gusto is simple easy to use software so you can focus on what matters building your startup so here's your quick call to action do you want all gusto has to offer with no hidden fees well how about a discount try gusto and get three months free gusto.com twist that's g-u-s-t-o.com twist all right so coming up next we have a guest that i'm very excited about because jason it is rare that I talk to someone who runs not one product that I use day in and day out, but two. And so I want to welcome Shashir Mehrotra to the show. He is the former CEO of Coda and now also the incoming CEO of Grammarly because news broke this week that Grammarly and Coda have decided to become one entity.

32:57They are merger acquiring one another. And so we have him here. Shashir, hey, how you doing? Hey, I'm doing great. I think technically I'm still CEO of Coda. It closes in Okay. Sure. Good. Nice to see you. As you know, I love Coda. Coda has changed our company. We use Coda for so many interesting projects internally that you're aware of, but that I have told you you're not allowed to tell people about. We were going to do a case study on some of the stuff. I know. I just, you know what? It's like my secret weapon. We do really interesting projects here. Now, the Twist 500 is a public one, but we built this Twist 500 database here on Coda.

33:35What I love about Coda is as a workspace and a tool, it's kind of like the Wikipedia plus a database plus Google Docs plus, plus, plus, plus Zapier. But we still use Zapier with it because it complements it quite nicely for a lot of the things we're doing. But man, I love the program. Twist 500 is the public-facing thing we're doing where we're putting the top 500 private companies, which we're going to include your merged company. So congratulations, you're in the Twist 500 as a merged entity. But also Grammarly, I love because as you in a 20-person company like we are slightly more, there's usually two or three really great writers and they become, so it's me, Alex, and Jackie are the best writers in the company, I think.

34:17And people come to us and say, hey, we wrote copy. Hey, I got this memo. Hey, we got an LP update. And we read it. I pay. not only for everybody to have Coda, but I pay for everybody to have Grammarly because Grammarly has helped everybody in the company go from being a bad, okay, or good writer to a good, great, or excellent writer. So I love both products, but tell us what happened here. Why are these two companies coming together? Because they seem like maybe they're different products, but we know that SaaS has headwinds. You both raised a ton of money,$200,$300 million dollars each. So why are these two companies being put together?

34:52Is it a sign of weakness, a sign of strength, a little bit of both, a way to consolidate and to be more efficient? What's the background? How did this all come together? Yeah. First off, thanks for the glowing review of both products. And I won't reveal all your secret code of use cases. Thank you. Someday, someday I'll convince you to let the world know. Maybe we don't have to do that today. Yeah. I'm super excited about this where we, as you mentioned, we announced yesterday, um coda and grammarly are coming together uh i've personally been like you a deep uh personal user of grammarly for years uh i was actually an early investor in grammarly as well so i followed along the business um uh as well and uh you know it's been a huge fan and i don't think i saw it as an obvious pairing either uh but then we got asked to get together we have a common investor uh who put us together and said, you know, you guys, sorry, you know, amazing person and, and great connector and so on.

35:54And he said, you know, you guys don't realize it, but I've sat through both of your discussions and you're actually headed to the same place. And it was kind of surprising, but we took a day, we sat down and we literally took each other's vision memos for the next year and just went through them line by line. We compared some of the, some of the, the, the mocks and graphics. We compared some of the, the, the observations and realized coming from two completely different places, but actually headed to the same spot. And the end of that meeting was basically, are we going to each try to go kind of build each other's approaches or are we going to do this together?

36:26And it was just obvious we should do it together. So that's the, what is the joint vision? If you were to describe it, because I use Grammarly as an editor, when I'm writing an important piece, I will write in Grammarly, but I have it installed on everything. So if I do a tweet, it's going to, on my desktop, at least Grammarly. Grammarly keyboard, a little bit clunky, needs a little bit of work. I'll give you my notes privately on that because it doesn't do a good job of predicting the next word. Putting us on my little tiny insight there. And then Coda I use for building workflow products. What we used to call workflow in our industry, as you know, things that Lotus Notes used to do where, you know, hey, we're putting some data in and then we want to have things happen.

37:05little scripts happen based on uh and reporting happens based on what happens with that data so what is the common vision for the two companies if you had to describe it in a sentence yeah so so at the core we're building a user-centered ai platform of applications and agents and and those two things together are what makes this magical so maybe i'll just sort of divide them up quickly so agents first uh you know that word's tossed around a lot these days I think of Grammarly as the original AI agent, the one that, you know, 40 million daily active users, 200 billion words a day. It's in the middle of everyone's work and follows them everywhere they are.

37:44And the real magic of what Grammarly has done, which is, as you mentioned, you experience well, is it works everywhere. It doesn't force you to change your behavior. They've done integration with 500 ,000 applications. So the Grammarly experience can be like this agent alongside you as you're writing. One analogy they use is it's like an AI superhighway being built into every other product. And the analogy that Max and Alex, the founders here at Grammarly, talk about is that they feel like they're only driving one car on that superhighway. They have this one agent that comes along and helps you with proofreading your work.

38:22Another way to think about that is that superhighway, now that we're in the world of AI and there's all of these different types of agents, I said, what else could we put on that? And so this part of the conversation mostly focused on a new product we're building in Coda called Coda Brain, which is basically we've taken all the integrations of Coda. It's one of Coda's favorite features. Everybody loves to use Coda to connect to other tools. We have about 1 ,700 or so different integrations, 800 or so that are public, and they connect everything. So it's email and Salesforce and Jira and so on.

38:50And you can just picture that all of those now become agents on the same super high vision. I like the vision. I understand it. This first one is really easy, right? So you're going to come along and rather than this agent helping you with, hey, you got your grammar wrong, it's also going to tell you, oh, here's the context on that investment. Here's a little bit of what that customer said last week in their meeting. Here's a little bit about the feature you're talking about, so on. It's a co-pilot for writing better. But if it was reading everything I'm doing, which it is, and it's thoughtful about it.

39:21It could say, by the way, I know you're responding to this founder in your founder Slack. Other conversations with this founder exist in your superhuman, in this other CRM. Oh, by the way, you're not just talking to this startup here. They're also an advertiser in there in the HubSpot where they're in this marketing database. That's like a really interesting observation for sure that Grammarly is following around. And kids love Grammarly. So the thing that I was just talking to somebody and they said Grammarly just got banned in their class. Their teacher doesn't like Grammarly because it's too good.

39:58They'll let you use ChatGPT, but they said no Grammarly. And I said, that's really interesting. Why not? I've been teaching my daughters to use Grammarly as they learn to write because it makes you superhuman. It's so powerful that, yeah. Interesting. By the way, I mean, I have two teenage daughters of 16 and 18. So they're my first test for many of these things. And, you know, of the of the many wonderful text messages and everything I got yesterday, the ones from my daughter's friends were definitely the most heartwarming and from their teachers, which is also great. They love it. Yes. And they do.

40:29And I actually that the experience you described is it's usually the opposite, actually. Usually it's Grammarly is approved and ChatGPT is not. That's what I said. Yes. But there was some teacher was an English teacher who was like, I want you to write without Grammarly. I understand that. I would if I was a teacher, I would have them write something without Grammarly. then I would put it into Grammarly and walk through each correction and then debate each one. Then they would learn how to use these tools, not, you know, without relying on them, but to use them to augment their brain. We should get to the second half of the vision, but I would say even on just this topic, this idea of an agent that can do everything with you and knows more than grammar.

41:08One way to think about that, just to picture a world is I actually want that agent to be the teacher's agent. I want the teacher to be actually part of that. You should one of the amazing things about Coda packs is anyone can make them so a lot of them have been made by many people around the world many people build them inside their their um explain what that is a Coda pack yeah so a Coda pack is an extension of Coda so that that uh most of them are integrations so they're mostly integrate between Coda and some other product but they're a way of them as zaps for zapier or if this then exactly exactly great companies yeah so the common ones will be two systems they connect to gmail they connect to sales but you can build ones that have a particular point of view.

41:47So you can absolutely build one that is, here's the chemistry agent that knows everything about chemistry. And for that student use case, you can really imagine that AI superhighway having a whole different class of agents, even for just that audience. It's also, I think, interesting to think about, Grambling obviously grew up known for students, very core audience, but it is actually the vast majority of users are actually professionals. And so, yeah, that's right. You can't get to 40 million daily active users without that. And so there's a huge number of people out there that rely on Grammarly.

42:21It's marketers, it's salespeople, lots of CEOs. I mean, the number of messages I got yesterday from CEOs who said, this has saved me many, many times as I have tried to communicate with my board, with my team, with whatever it is. I think it's awesome. So one half of what we're doing is that. And that's, you know, Grammarly is a big AI superhighway. We're going to use it as a platform for the future of AI agents. The other half is applications. And this is something the Grammarly team's approach to this was, up till now, Grammarly has mostly been the magic is that it works everywhere else. And it's always kind of lacked a home.

42:57It's lacked a destination that feels like your true writing space. There is a Grammarly editor, which is quite good. Yeah, but you know what? It's great, but they don't support it now on iPad and iPhone anymore, I don't think. So they seem to have gone away from trying to compete in the document space, and they just want to be agentic. They want to be a copilot. It's a, as you might imagine, a common debate inside Grammarly was, do you want to work everywhere else? I like to say Grammarly spent the last 15 years enabling every other blinking cursor. Coda spent the last 10 years trying to build a new one.

43:32And so there was this big question about, does Grammarly want to be in that market? And so as Alex and Max walked me through their vision, they said, we've made a decision. We really want to be in that market too. And the reasoning really resonated with me. Their view was that we're going through this change in how people think about their tools. And they sort of see it as three phases. There was a phase of the PC phase and all the tools came out and it just felt like digitized versions of our physical tools. And that was the office days and so on. And then the second phase happened with the web.

44:00And all of a sudden, tools became about collaborating with people. And so it was Google Docs and Slack. And it was all about communicating with all these other places, with all these other people. And then this phase is AI. And all of a sudden, the applications work like people themselves. And they're sort of working alongside you. And that's the sort of role of the agent. And what they said that I thought was really interesting is they get a lot of pressure from users of, do I have a home for my work? But more importantly, what is that first class place to understand an AI native collaboration surface?

44:32And they had this plan for how to go build that. And we sat down and looked at what we built. And the plan was your roadmap notion and what other people are doing. So, hey, now the two of you come together, peanut butter, chocolate. It's such a great combination. Peanut butter, chocolate, I'll use that one. I've been using Lego pieces and puzzle pieces, but I like peanut butter. No, it's peanut butter, chocolate. But you know, like you guys, and this is the thing that makes me crazy about the whole lot of you in SaaS, is that you're always trying to upsell me on AI. Stop with this upselling. Just put the best out there for everybody.

45:03Because what I'll tell you what happens with AI is 1 % of your, or maybe 5 % of the people at your company use it. But then you guys demand that I pay 100 % of my users pay for it. Now you put me in this cognitive dissonance. I got the top performers saying, I need this tool. And then you guys are saying like, everybody's got to pay for it. and i'm like oh my god i gotta pay another two thousand dollars a year grammarly or coda or notion or whoever wants this upsell on ai just include it yeah can you fix the entire sass industry for jason please just talk to everybody it's enough with the upselling on the ai i'm gonna start with your two favorite products and then i'll work from there are you gonna do that will you promise me right now we'll stop with the two different non-ai ghetto and then the ai elites?

45:47That is the Coda approach. Coda AI is included for everybody. Thank you. Thank you. I mean, generally, it's the obvious approach because the whole product is AI. How we bring that together, we'll get to. But yes, I agree with the sentiment. I understand very much the haves and have-nots of the... creates a weird choice for the buyer. Alex, do you have any questions? Oh, I got a bunch. I mean, we have two ways to go with this. There's product, which I've taken up all the product discussion, but you love markets and you love M &A. So I think you probably have some M &A questions or some business architecture questions.

46:21Oh, hell yes, I do. So one thing that blew my mind when I was reading about the deal was that it was done in stock according to Axios and was done, I believe, at the last kind of valuation marks for the companies. And Grammarly was valued, Jason backed me up like 13 billion. And I think Coda was valued at like 1.3 last time. So Dan Premack writes that it's about 90 % Grammarly stock and like 10 % Coda stock. I'm curious why you guys went with those prices to set the rate to consummate the deal. Because to me, those are older numbers. Are those numbers correct or ballpark correct? Let's start there.

46:55I can't comment on those numbers. The numbers are correct on the last valuations. Our last round was done at 1.3, 1.4 post. And the Grammarly last round was done at$13 billion. So I can't really verify anything about the actual numbers. You can draw your own conclusions on that. Maybe I can comment on the process of coming to a decision like that because I think it's always hard. I think there are different ways to approach these situations. So sometimes you do it based on revaluing companies and you sit down and you try to come up with the metrics and you come with cash flows and so on. And sometimes you take the approach of we're about to build something new and it feels a little bit more like, I'm sure you've coached founders on this before, a little bit like when the founders are coming out and saying like, hey, we're going to kind of split things up here.

47:43What's a reasonable way to split things up based on the future? And this was definitely a case of us saying, we're going to build this together. We have these two vision memos that are quite similar. And we came up with what we felt was a reasonable split between them that I think is appropriately fair for everybody. But I think that's, it's much more looking to the future than it is looking to the past. back to profitability, I assume. I mean, you're in investment mode right now. I would also assume that. Grand Valley's been profitable for a long time. Oh, wow. That's fantastic. So, you know, there is a big discussion.

48:15I don't know if you saw the Satya Nadella comment the other day that like on the BG2 pod, they had this like interesting thing where he said, listen, there's databases on the back end and there's just going to be AI agents. That actually kind of aligns with your vision. so uh but these companies are going to take less and less in terms of infrastructure and people to run them as an you know entrepreneur for a while now like what do you think about how many people it takes to grow these companies another ceo i don't know it was the clarness ceo or somebody you know said a flippant comment like why would i hire anybody i can just build agents i can just build use ai and you know he said that and people are like he's lying it's not true i think he said the quiet part out loud is that the next hire is harder than hiring somebody is sometimes sometimes oftentimes i don't know is it all the time most times i don't know if it's most times or often i would say often perhaps somewhere between often and most times the most the best use of your resources is to automate something and use technology than to hire and throw a human at it where it hasn't always been that way.

49:24How do you feel about that? So I really like Sebastian. I think he's done an amazing job with Klarna and spent a bunch of time with him on this topic. I think they, and he does, he makes actually a couple of different observations. One is that he thinks AI can build, rebuild all the software you need to run the business. And the other one is about hiring. As you mentioned, those are sort of two separate observations. And I think I count myself as an AI optimist. My view is it's going to be a net additive to the world. I mean, there's definitely a view of the world that is, as technology advances, every wave of it, as you both know, there's been this fear of will it replace jobs?

50:01Will it make it impossible? And obviously it does in some in some cases. and technology over the last hundred years has shifted jobs. But I think in almost every case, it creates them instead of removing them. And I don't think it's, I think it up levels people. I mean, the idea of I'm going to have agents to go and, you know, help me do my research and help me prep for my day or help me write code or so on. It's great. What does that allow me to do? It allows me to up level and allows every person to up level what they're doing and changes the jobs. And I, so I think, yes, it's going to change the nature of our jobs.

50:33I think it's going to create jobs. Maybe on the second part of it, the will it replace applications? I think that's slightly misguided. And the reason, maybe just give you an analogy. Imagine I came and told you AI can write great assembly code. Can like automatically generate as much assembly code as you want. And you'd say, who gives a shit about that? Yeah. Writes assembly code. I mean, there are people who do, but there's not a lot of them. Yeah, that's not. And so, yes, of course, can AI, it's a magic trick, can it generate this thing? But I actually think AI working in a surface with building blocks that I understand is very important.

51:04The fact that AI can go and create something that I understand, that I can still work with. And I think this is the idea of AI should feel, we call this user-centric AI, but the idea that AI should feel like something that's working with you in a surface you understand and doesn't produce a bunch of, you know, I think one of Sebastian's statements was, we can just generate Salesforce or Workday or so on. I'm sure you could, I'm not, I'm not, but then what do you do with it? Where does it go next? i got a double click on this one i'm so glad you came on i appreciate you coming on i know you're very busy it's the holiday season and you're in the middle of this but you guys it's such an important discussion for us to have and i have to say you know i have found um young people uh who are what i'll call ai first people they use chat gpt first before a google search or just a search because google now has gemini so they'll do a gemini deep research have you played with deep research by the way 1.5 yet oh my god literally the second you get off this pay for 20 bucks on your gmail account to get gemini 1.5 with deep research it's scary scary good um putting that aside i have people on my team now we have 20 people we're paying you what 20 bucks a month for a coda 30 bucks what is our what is the rack rate probably at 30 i guess so i'm paying you 360 60 bucks per person i'm spending 7 000 a year with you maybe 10 whatever um they just did a function i'm not gonna say what it is but this is something that's time consuming in a venture firm that processes a lot of applications and they said you know we save this amount of time and i said this amount of time for what and they said well per like transaction or whatever or per processing thing and i said well how many of those do we do a year and they said 20 000 okay 20 000 times five minutes, you saved 100 ,000 minutes.

52:52He said, yeah, we saved 100 ,000 minutes. And I was like, okay, people work 2 ,000 hours a year. I can literally put numbers on what's being saved now. And I can tell you, having high performers, bar raisers in your organization who are AI first, who use code of first, who have Grammarly turned on everywhere, and they took the time to turn on, these people are 50 times more valuable for my organization than the people who are not doing it. I'm not saying that to scare everybody inside my organization. Please clip this and send it to the people who aren't using it. Like you're not long for this earth if you're not doing this.

53:24In my organization or others, because there's a group of people behind you who are making applications that save 100 ,000 minutes and you're thinking in those terms. What this means to me is, you've got a great future, by the way. I mean, I do think like people building apps is the future and the agent following you along, but I'm going to disagree. I think static team size is going to be the future. If you are an elite CEO, elite leader, Alex, I think you're going to look first at automating with the existing team rather than throwing a body at it, hiring more people. It's just too much work.

54:01And having the same team size, like you're the Navy SEALs, you're like the same team size, but everybody got a little bit better. Everybody's a medic. Everybody knows how to use the defibrillator. Everybody knows how to use CODA. Everybody knows how to use a sniper rifle. Everybody knows how to fly the Apache, whatever like if you can actually do that at every navy sales and apache sniper and medic which are three distinct fields in you know the military then all of a sudden you got like a really killer team so anyway i'm taking the other side well no you also do away with middle management i mean what's the bloke problem at every single major tech company they always say we have too many layers where did all these layers come from i'm like you literally made them out the door yeah just to be just to be super clear i'm in the productivity business i've been trying to help people be more productive for years.

54:46So it's not, I'm not averse to the, the, the idea that using the right tools can make you individually and your teams and your companies a hundred times, thousand times. I mean, obviously that's, that's my whole business. And maybe to give you one, you were mentioning earlier about things people do with Coda and you can kind of use it as a workflow tool and you can do automations and so on. I think last year we automated something like 4 billion tasks. I mean, the, the, just on, on, on Coda. So, I mean, you know, go multiply that by how much time you would have spent in every one of those emails sent or every one of the notifications or the updates to Salesforce or whatever, whatever it might be.

55:17So I'm, I'm, I'm definitely aligned with you on that. My statement isn't so much the, you know, any of that's going to stay static. It's my job to go make that thousand times, a hundred thousand, a hundred thousand times better. My point is more that I think the, the human imagination is really high. And the, the idea that my company size is going to stay static because I can do the same thing with the same amount of people. Yes. If you're just trying to do the same thing, I think that's true. But then you're going to sit down and you're going to dream up to like, what, I could do something else.

55:45Okay, fair enough. Yeah, that's true. But man, see, this is the natural tension. I think you're going to look at that and say, yeah, you know, we want to start this new year. You know what I'm thinking? Okay, I'm taking, I'm going to pluck these two people out of this unit and they're going to start it. And then these people are going to pick up their slack and automate whatever they did. But maybe I'll use you as the example. Like it's nuts to go run an investment fund and multiple podcasts and so on. You could have stopped. You could have said, I've got this magical Coda thing. I'm trying to stop.

56:19You didn't. Now, because of Zoom, this took no time to go get this set up. Technology made it possible. You know, because of Coda, you now can invest with like so much less of your attention than you used to be able to invest. That's all true. What'd you do? You filled your time with new productive things to go do. That was my, that's my AI optimism view. Productivity, I think, produces humans are full of imagination. Alex, who's right here? Neither of you. I'm right. But critically, I want to ask about the agent point because I know we have to go in a second. But in your discussion of the plan for the combined company, you said you're going to weave the best of code and grammarly together.

56:55Of course, you're going to combine company knowledge, gen AI, chat features, full productivity suite, and hundreds of agents. Now, Shushir, the thing that I struggle with is what does hundreds of agents mean and how do I touch them? Because I feel like people have their own view of what agentic AI means. And so in your future vision, where do the agents live and how do I know to call them? How do I know to interact with them? And what does that really look like in your view? Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I don't know if touch them is quite the right phrase I would use. Interact with them very politely with consent.

57:25Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think that and I think this is like defining this word is really important. So we spend a lot of time on once an agent. I think of an agent as a mix of a few different things. an agent, if you sort of analogize it to human, an agent is something that has context, that has a certain set of knowledge, it knows certain things. The Grammarly agent knows the entirety of everything about grammar. The Gmail pack on Coda knows everything in your email. So there's context first. Second, skills. So there's things that this agent can do. The Grammarly agent can go and revise your work.

57:58It can go and answer questions about it. The Coda Gmail pack can go and send emails on your behalf. I think there's jobs. There's things you've asked it to do all the time. You've said, hey, auto send emails out to my investors. You've said, please correct my grammar in these places. And then finally, I call it the instructions. I'm going to talk to this thing. I'm going to say, hey, right now, I'd like you to do this. Right now, I'd like you to answer this question. So you take all those pieces together. And in my mind, that's what agent ends up meaning. It's something that's context, skills, jobs, and instructions.

58:28And so I'm working on how to um context we understand right and the skills yeah the knowledge okay yes those actions skills are like the buttons you can press these are the activators got it updated database whatever it is something to slack yeah jobs are your workless jobs are hey i hired this person i said this is what i'd like to get done and then instructions i think of as one level up is kind of the personality it's the it's the current thing i'm trying to get done and what i how i want you to behave with me. And at that point, I expect to interact with an agent in many ways like I interact with humans.

59:04I want to be able to assign tasks to agents. I want, you know, one magical thing about the Grammarly experience is it kind of feels like somebody came along, this really good proofreader, like Jason, the way you were talking about it earlier of like, hey, I'm sick of reviewing all my team's writing. What does Grammarly do? It does what I would have done i come through and uses you know red and blue marker and says good bad and then teaches you by the way this is why you're using then and then wrong that's right yeah time and yeah yeah so that but i think and i know you had to squint a little bit to see how these things all come together and i know the term is going to feel slightly unfamiliar but if you start if you think about it like applications act like people i think it's the easiest way to think about it like people yeah it makes total sense but but the substance is and grammarly studying all this so it reminds me of what apple intelligence is doing alex we talked about this on a previous episode yes in apple intelligence you can go in and you can say let apple intelligence study what you're doing in this app essentially and it's on an app by app basis so people are turning it off for things like signal or telegram or i message because they don't want apple intelligence listening in on those conversations uh for obvious reasons um you know but they do want it watching i use spotify or co-buzz another high-res music service because co-buzz hasn't written siri integrations yet but if apple intelligence is studying how i use co-buzz when i'm on the ski slope and i say play this song in co-buzz or play me you know whatever uh it should know how to do that it doesn't because it hasn't been written so you have grammarly studying how people do things you have code explicitly having people write apps.

1:00:47So this is like a pretty awesome combination. And Athena, Alex, is also down this path. Everybody go to athenawow.com to get a month off. I'm an investor. Athena has virtual assistants and they're studying and watching them work and then using that to back into agents and technology. So a lot of people are onto this business process studying and applications. I think it is the future. I think you guys are perfectly positioned. But the thing that we're getting to here is that it's not going to look like one single thing. So there's ambient agents like Grammarly, which follows you around everywhere you go.

1:01:20There's things that Shashir mentioned that you would have to prompt directly. And then there's other things that might look more like a to-do list or a task list that you assign to it. So I think the thing that I struggle with is agentic AI seems to be everything that's not ChatGPT. No, here's an idea. I would include ChatGPT. I think of ChatGPT as, I go back to my analogy, apps acting like people. What did we all love about ChatGPT? What was the thing that blew our minds about ChatGPT? Is that I could go to this thing. We've all had the experience. You're sitting at dinner, somebody asks a question.

1:01:50What would you do? You turn to your smart friend and say, what do you think? And instead, I can go talk to this thing and it acts like a person. It's an amazing person. It's a person that read the entire internet. What's the context for ChatGPT? It's the entire internet. Yeah, it's all human knowledge. You know, I do see the vision here pretty clearly, you know, of Grammarly, you know, one of the concepts that people always need is give me an idea of what to write next, right? The blank sheet of paper. What Grammarly and Coda should do next is they should say social media. You know, I use my Athena assistant to go find everybody talking about Foundry University or Accelerator, yada, yada.

1:02:27and then they share that in a Slack group. It's a manual process, but it's well worth the$33 ,000 a month I pay for it. It's about one thing the person does. Instead of having a social media manager, they just put, here's a list of the people on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, talking about us, our firm and our companies, go engage. And then they go and say, who hasn't engaged? Who did engage? And they just remind everyone in the team very gently, these people have engaged. If everybody else could engage, that'd be great. Just means go find the founder. if you were one of our founders and you were talking about this merger.

1:02:59I did this exercise yesterday. Yeah. But now you do it. How do you do it? You have somebody prepare it for you and give you a set of links. No, we have a code of doc for it. Oh, you have a code of doc, right. So people just dump them into there. So now social media monitoring as an app with Grammarly, plus you combine what should you write next. So here's everything. These are people that you should engage with. This person from calm.com, Alex from calm.com, tweeted about a new feature. Would you like to engage? here are possible responses click one and edit it and then post it so a social media agent should be the next one you do yeah and it should just be built into gromly should just follow you around but it should all be documented in the single source of truth in the database should be on coda we i would have people build that right now but i think it's probably your next best use of time because everybody needs help with that yeah those are great ideas i think this is the way i get myself to the top of the product roadmap but somebody's got to be a startup doing this too like a social where is the social media monitoring startup i think i think part of the reason um there are i mean there's a bunch of them but the problem i think is most most applications built that way they they're forced to be rigid cookie crudder things so they'll build a version of it that is designed to run a very specific kind of company why do you guys use coda because nobody builds software for your unique way of investing for you so the thing you want i think and the back to Sebastian and Klarna and so on is I think he's right.

1:04:22You don't know, not everybody needs exactly the same Salesforce. And I do think you should, you should have your own version. Like you guys have your magic Coda doc that runs everything. We did not specifically use any of the CRMs out there. And there are CRMs now, verticalized ones for venture. We looked at them and we're like, but that's not how we work. That's how the average venture, it's not my business. I need something that does these customizations. And I looked at it and I was like, you know what people were going to charge us for that stuff? 100 ,000, 200 ,000 a year. Because they're like, well, you're a VC firm.

1:04:53We'll just take a 1 % tax on your, whatever. We'll just tax you 1 % or 2%. I was like, f*** that. I blew that out. I was like, f*** that. I'll just build an encoder in Notion. I'll use Zapier, if this, then that. And I'll have it done. It may take me two or three weeks to get this done, but I'll just have some of the young guns on my team build it. And by the time they build it, would have been us debating the price with you. Ah. and training and creating logins for everybody. I would rather just go into Coder and Notion and just do it. Just to be clear, I think that's a good example. I mean, if you think about what we're trying to get done here, agents and applications, what do you really want?

1:05:31You want a social media agent that really feels like a human that does all the things that you, you know, would you actually hire a million people to go do that? Probably not. But now you have this thing that can do it. And you want an application that feels like your unique perspective on how to do it. You don't want the one everybody else does, that everybody else uses. You want your unique way to do it, because that's your strength. That's what you do. Super power. Putting those together, that's the heart of what we're doing here at the Combine Family and Coda. All right, listen. I am a super fan of yours and the products.

1:06:00Why don't you come on in six months? We'll book it right now. Welcome to the twist500.com, powered by Coda. You're not a sponsor of it, but we'll give you the plug anyway, because it's such a great tool. twist500.com, built on Coda. It is what it is, folks. It's a great product. So you can always tell, you can always tell like which products I love. Cause I'm just like, this is, if I use it, we love it. You know? Authentic. Yeah. Yeah. And so I'm pretty authentic. Like we're using it. And so maybe in six months, let's talk about how the integration works. I would love to hear, is this the first time you've done an M &A kind of deal like this?

1:06:30I mean, I was, I put a quote, obviously, but you know, I was at Google for a long time. I was YouTube. Google was, you know, a different version of the same thing. I bought many companies. So definitely been through them. This one's unique. Every one of them is unique, but the. So yeah, I want you to just, if you could be thoughtful when you're doing this and maybe write down the lessons you learned in this merger, in this time period, would you be willing to maybe in three, six months come back and just tell everybody what you learned about doing this kind of M &A? because I do believe we're going to be in a new M &A moment where companies like yours and other companies, like I can't imagine Zapier, If This Then That, yourselves, et cetera, that we might not see more of these get togethers.

1:07:09And these products can remain independent. You can buy them that way, but they could also be deeply integrated and come together. Just a great vision. So congratulations to your general catalyst partner. Who was that that came up with this idea? Give them a round of applause. Heyman's brokered it. Yeah. Heyman's an agent. Yeah. So he's, he's your agent. He's your, he's agentically looking at the portfolio and saying, Hey, sometimes one plus one equals three. You know, and I think that's how VCs look at this great job. And we'll talk to you in three to six months when you're, when you're out of the weeds.

1:07:39Sounds great. Thanks for having me. Ah, appreciate it, brother. And that's, you know, that's what you get here, Alex, on the short term is we're able to pull the guests who are breaking news. This is all news that happened in the last 48 hours and we got the first on this week in startups for founders by founders getting it done absolutely also this just reminds me of my favorite headline of all time which was from 2014 entitled pure storage ceo acquisitions always suck worse than you think so i'm looking forward to seeing how that was wrong 10 years ago no no it's you know m &a's hard for every youtube deal or instagram deal you know you got another 20 that just returned nothing but If you look at those two deals and use them as a proxy, those two deals define the modern Google and the modern Facebook.

1:08:27Facebook didn't buy Instagram. Facebook would be in decline right now, I predict. Oh, massively. And it would have been, I think, for the last three, four, five years. I mean, seriously, when's the last time you fired up Facebook on purpose? Never, never. I mean, the only reason my Facebook's being updated right now is because once in a while, I'll do something on Instagram and it gets syndicated there. Another great guest. All right, everybody. What an amazing episode. We'll see you again on the next one. Remember 2025, we're Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific, noon in Texas time. And then Alex time, Pacific Coast, 1 p.m.

1:09:05We're live, live, live on YouTube and x, x.com slash Alex, x.com slash Jason, x.com slash twi startups and youtube just search for this week's startups hit subscribe hit the bell subscribe to alex's amazing newsletter cautiously optimistic cautious optimism cautious optimism cautious optimism and that's uh on sub stack where you just type in cautious optimism alex wilhelm thank you to our partners and we'll see you all next time