Uncapped #6 | Elad Gil

20:04And it's often odd how early some of these folks meet each other. There's one really well known founder who I think is like one of the most successful people of his generation. And he was telling me a couple weeks ago that all the people that ended up being the most successful people he knew in Silicon Valley, he all met in his first six months out here before anybody knew who he was. He was just some random guy who showed up. He just graduated college and suddenly had this huge network of other young really great people who eventually did huge things. And so I think it's almost like like recognizes like or people self -aggregate.

20:35I'm not putting myself in this bucket. I'm just saying, I've observed that you almost see the self -assembly of people over time. And a reasonably small number of people end up all knowing each other. And then a reasonably small number of people end up driving a lot of the big changes. Yes. And I think that's true in every field. I think like if you look in biology, you know, maybe there's a dozen biologists in each field that really matter with the exception of some really big fields like cancer at where then you do it by sub -specialty or whatever it may be. But like you look at certain aspects of, I don't know what stem cell biology it's gonna be like 20 people that everybody knows that matters.

21:08It's really interesting to me when, you know, I hear from you that, you know, you're like, oh, I, you know, I haven't done so much or I don't have that network. And I think to most people, including me, it's like where you are is very aspirational. And I'm wondering, is part of the story of you that you've always, you know, you're thinking about, there is always a bigger fish and how do I keep going? And that's part of what drives it all, like is that the thing about you? I think I have a high bar for myself and I feel like I am continuously missing the bar. And I don't mean that in a bad way.

21:40Like I'm proud of some of the things I've done and you know, I'm happy that I started color because that helped save a bunch of lives. And you know, there's a bunch of things that I'm very happy I did over time. But I do think that there's so much more to be done, right? And so it's a little bit of the, how do you maximize the impact you're having and your minimal time on the planet? You know, how do you judge yourself relative to what you think may be possible? What are some of the flavors of things that you haven't accomplished yet that you would like really hope you accomplish? Yeah, I mean, there's two or three things.

22:09To put that aside for one second, one of the things that I found really interesting as a friend of mine is on one or two prominent boards. And he feels like the existence of Elon Musk has been a hugely empowering for him because he can go to these really important CEOs and say, look at what Elon Musk is doing and they suddenly get remotivated. You know, they've been running a company for 10, 15 years. And so there are some people who have had, I think, really outsize impact to maybe one in a hundred or multi hundred year sort of talents. And obviously that's really rare because it's definitely once in a very rare period.

22:38But you know, there's a lot of things left to do. And I think there's almost like three or four levels that people often talk about, right? If I used to spend a lot of time in India doing yoga and stuff like that, which sounds very cheesy when I say it out loud. But I really enjoyed it while I did it. And some of the discourse or discussion was, you know, throughout your life, you're moving through different rings of importance, influence, focus, whatever. So early in your life, it's about yourself and your studies and, you know, your early career. And then a little bit later in your life, it's about your family because you have kids and you focus on that.

23:10And then it becomes about your society. And then very late in life, you go off to a cave and meditate and you become a saddue and you like, shut off the world, right? Throughout your life, you mix these different poor things, right, between, you know, yourself, your work, your family, your society and your, you know, religion or whatever, other thing you have. So many of that's five things. What I've been thinking about a little bit more lately is, and I honestly have always thought about like, what's the society level? Impact I'm having, so I start off as a biologist because I thought I could maybe help with some certain diseases or help find the cures or solve things for people.

23:41And then that turns into technology. How can you use technologies to lever or just sort of impact the world in a positive way? Lately, I've been thinking about other things in terms of your applications of technology or, you know, one project that I've been working on a little bit with some folks on my team. We're gonna change the name. We've been calling it monumental. And it's basically, if you look at every society at its apex, people have dealt large scale public artworks or architectural works to basically inspire the next generation, right? And so that Eiffel Tower was built in the 1800s is an ode difference steel making for a world fair, right?

24:13They literally trying to show off how good they were at making steel. Yeah, we're kind of missing that, right? It feels like. Yeah, we haven't built anything big in like a hundred years, right? It's all very utilitarian now or something. It's very sort of, I think in general, postmodernism has been a very bad trend in every level, academically, society, architecturally, et cetera. And so we don't really do large scale works of public beauty. And so that's one project that we're working on, which is we're looking at a few different test sites. We have a bronze, foundry, and France that's actually doing our first work.

24:38It's a small, it's only like two feet round, but we're just seeing sort of the quality that they produce. We're working with some marble worksplaces. We're looking at carbon fiber. And then we're looking at test sites. And we're working with some both architects as well as developers and saying, are there places where we can put large scale statues? And it could be something like the 15 or 20 foot statue, like the Atlas in front of London Feller Center or it could be a multi -hundred foot work, like the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty or something like that. And so the aspiration is to do one or more of those giant public artwork somewhere.

25:05It's cool that you're doing it now, while you can also still kind of like inspire yourself with it rather than like waiting 30 years or something and doing it. Yeah, I think also from a longevity perspective, that may be a really interesting artifact to leave behind. Yeah. I think a hundred years from now, that maybe besides my family, the thing that could sustain. Do you think that having this sort of mindset that makes it so that you're always aspiring to more? And one of the cool things about business, but one of the also things that I think makes some people feel like they can get on a treadmill is no matter what you accomplish, unless you're Elon Musk, there's somebody who's accomplished 10 times more.

25:36And then you accomplish 10 times more and there's still somebody who's accomplished 10 times more and everything like that. Do you think that that is a fundamentally healthy thing or do you think that is something that is like a fundamentally like anxiety sort of dissatisfaction -dosing thing? And if the answer is like in the middle or blended somehow, like how have you managed your own psyche as you've kind of like continued aspiring to like a new rank all the time? I don't know that I've aspired to new rank. I think one of aspire to is to do things that are useful. It almost feels like there's a set of people who truly self -sacrifice and have pretty rough lives otherwise, but they're doing large -scale works for humanities sake.

26:13Like Elon Musk tends to be self -sacrifice in quite a bit. Yeah, so I think if you read a lot of biographies of people who have done very large things, many of them have had these unhappy lives. And I think part of that is that self -sacrifice. So to your point on is it good or bad, it may be terrible for the individual in some cases, but maybe fantastic for society. And maybe society doesn't move forward that much without these sorts of folks, you know? One of the things that we've talked about before is that there are like pivot points in careers and you go through these moments where you make a new change and decide to do anything.

26:43Like I did one year of investment banking before. Sorry to hear that. It was terrible. I mean, it was bad, not a lot of life. But I did a year of investment banking. Then I worked in tech, joined a company, started a company, became an investor, angel invested throughout. But like, you know, I could probably point to like three or four pivot points that have happened. Like, and those seem important. Like those seem like more important than other moments in time. How do you, when you're talking to either people, you know, earlier in their careers, when you think about it for yourself, like how do you navigate those?

27:14Like, is it spend longer thinking about those than you would normally do it? Would you say go talk to a zillion people? Is it just follow your gut? Is there some frameworks? Yeah, I mean, I think there's almost two test of pivot points. There's the things in your life that matter and then there's the things in your career that matter and those overlap that are different, or distinct. You know, career wise, I think we talked about it in terms of you in the right location. Or you in the right company, the right network. I think those are the things that actually do matter from a career perspective.

27:40And then everyone's small, you're making the right trade off. And I think many great careers have two or three of those choices done right. Sometimes when I meet people, I used to do this. I don't really think about this way anymore, but I used to, almost a few people, I'd meet some of you like, what's the Monte Carlo simulation of them, right? Monte Carlo simulations, you rerun things with a little bit of randomness, like a million times and then you end up with some average outcome. And so if you were to rerun somebody's life a million times on average, how do they do? That's a good question.

28:03And you know, there's going to be probabilistically scenarios where you're the total wipe in scenarios where you're doing incredibly well, despite yourself. And I know people like that, probably on average, you end up doing extremely well, depending on who you are. And so those are the types of people that I think on average have amazing careers, right? Or the people who just have some mix of characteristics and then those pivot points or decisions, they should make better decisions on average, but everyone's small, they'll get something wrong. And so sometimes you see these careers where somebody just kind of had to hit it every time.

28:29And the question is, were they exceptional in some cases they are, or did they also get lucky once or twice, right? Which is often the case as well. But there's other kind of big life drivers I feel that are decisions that you made and those include things like, what school did you go to early on? Like I didn't realize an Ivy League school matter and I didn't apply to any of them, right? Are you in the camp, thinking still that that matters much? Yeah, 100 % it matters. Because of this network thing and this talent. Yeah, the network in the brand opens doors, it opens opportunities, it creates a lifelong network.

28:54Like the schools have unfortunately purposefully degraded that, right? They removed merit, they did all sorts of things that make it their student body's worse. They selected for activism over goodness, all sorts of stuff. And I think we're kind of seeing a slow motion pay the price of that right now. But I do think on average, it's still better to go to a branded well -known school of a not. If you had to guess, are we on a trend where in 20 years going to Stanford still matters? Or do you think that we're heading down to sort of the Peter Teele forecasted thing of college as a facility exercise?

29:26I think it depends on two things. I think one, it depends on what the school's due to reinforce quality in terms of the types of people who go there. And I think they still have very high quality people, but they've mixed in a lot of low quality people under all sorts of assumptions about what makes sense. And then secondly, I think it comes down to the degree to which there are advanced forms of technology that could disrupt how society works, right? And those are the two things that could matter. You were speaking about like my prediction though would be on average, it's still going to be important.

29:51When we were talking just a second ago about sort of, there's some people who navigate these pivot points in their career and they kind of seem to get lucky a couple of times and it just goes on up. And that's great. There's also some examples of people who are really smart, really hard working and it just seems like not go their way. Have you ever thought about that or like diagnosed what might be happening there? I find it really difficult to diagnose because I know a few very talented people who just tried a few things after another and it just never worked. And you don't know is that just luck?

30:25Is it a characteristic of finding product market fit? Is it something else? So like somebody gets a bad role in the Monte Carlo simulation. Yeah, exactly. And so is it just a bad role or is there something inherent to that person where maybe they filter information slightly differently and they make more bad decisions? Like there's a few people that I've worked with where it's been very hard for me to understand their thinking or their framework for the world. There's one or two people who repeatedly just make bad decisions. Another version of that would be an amazing technical person who has no commercial sensibility and can't pick it up.

30:55And we've all worked with people like that. Where for some reason they just can never think from a business perspective or from the human psychology perspective. Is it brainwiring? Is it something else? Like why are they unable to learn these things? And it probably goes the other way, right? There's probably people who could never pick up a technical subject matter. And so it could just be an inherent characteristic. It could be something else, I'm not sure. For people trying to specifically become great investors because we talked a bit about companies here. For people trying to become great investors, what do you think are like the different potential configurations of how somebody gets great over time?

31:29Say somebody who has like maybe been an investor for a few years or hasn't even done it yet, but like what are the ways that somebody becomes great? I don't know. Is that an exception? It seems hard to tell, I can't tell either. Well, the problem is I don't think there's a single right way to be a great investor. And so, and also it depends on what stage you're investing at. Say it's a early stage. I mean, early stage you just need one thing to truly work and you consider a great investor, even if you do 100 things that are bad. Yeah, so the question is like, what is consistently good? Or how do you have a high hit rate?

31:58Which is a little bit different. And I feel like there's all sorts of styles. Like I think Naval is a great investor in a Vowr OutCon. And his characteristic is often, is it an interesting technical problem? Is it somebody I want to work with? Like he has a set of criteria that are really good, but very different from mine. Mine are much more product market. Like I think there's a product market that here are potential for it. And he's done great. Right? And so I don't think there's a correct style. I think each person has to kind of adopt the style that works for them. I think there's a really good set of discussions with Jensen Huang from Nvidia, where he points out that his org structure is radically different from most CEOs.

32:35And he's like, you should really build the org structure around the CEO. And you shouldn't be able to just pop in a new CEO in the same org, right? It should actually be tailored to that person and function around that person and their style and all the rest. I think that's two of investors, too, right? Different investors have very different styles that they bring to bear. And I don't think there's a right one. I think it's just differential trade -offs relative to what that person's good at, with what they're interested in, what, you know, how they work with people and founders. That seems like one of the easiest places that people go wrong is investors, I think, can often look at other people who are succeeding and try to do their play.

33:08And it's like, if you're not Jensen, Huang, don't try to do what he's doing. Kind of think. Yeah, and it's very hard to replicate these things, too, because again, it may just not be a good fit. It's almost like there's different types of athletes, right? And you're like, well, the powerlifter may be really different from the sprinter, but they're both great athletes. That may be true for investing. Maybe somebody's a powerlifter, maybe somebody's a sprinter, and you just need different training and different styles and different things that you do. I have a couple of questions about how you personally have worked as an investor.

33:33How do you spend your time? Because you are involved in a surprisingly large number of companies that a lot of people are heard of. I assume those founders are calling you when I was running Latis, I called you sometimes, so there's a lot of people who call you. What is your time look like? And now you've also got, you got a lot of stuff going on. So how do you seem to be there for everybody? Because I think somehow there's a combo where it's notable how founders say you pick up the phone, but you're involved in a lot of big projects. So what's your time like? It's very busy. I think one thing I've been trying to sort on my side is how to get more leverage on time.

34:08And so I'm definitely going to be adding in my team and adding people over the coming year. So my goal for this year is to be able to offload 30 to 50 % of stuff that I'm doing that I don't think is relevant to the things I really enjoy doing. One of the things I really enjoy doing is working directly with founders and like, helping them with whatever sort of things they need help with. And it could be trivial things, it could be important things, whatever. But also I used to, and I'm going back to spending more and more time, more directly hands on with technology or more hands on with projects or other things.

34:40Part of that also has just been finding people on my team who can do things like that. So for example, Shreya and my team is working on this project called the Alexandria where we're taking eventually a thousand of the great works of humanity that are off copyright in terms of philosophy and history and other texts. And then using an added translate them into languages that represent 85 to 90 % of all the spoken languages in the world in terms of, as you'd say, population coverage. Building audiobooks for all of them so that you can stream it off of every device. So the idea is basically, can you create a modern library of Alexandria where humanity's knowledge base is sort of unlocked?

35:16Well, you know, and so, there's stuff like that that I like doing. And I think there's a societal version of it, and this is fun to play around with the technology and XS, which APIs are actually good for certain things. Or how do you think about QA across a very large text? Right, or how do you capture nuances of work? So for example, you're dealing with a bug of a Geeta or the Bible or something else. And you know, there's all these translations, right? There's the King James version of the Bible because it's the specific translation and the nuances of words are set a certain way. And so how do you think about word and nuance against dozens of languages relative to such an important set of texts?

35:50You know, so I think there's things like that. There's interesting, you know, questions. Totally. And so your own projects will lead to anything. It kind of leads to nothing, but it's just interesting. You know, it's back to like, what are you driven by? I'm driven by like technology, it's impact, interestingness, like things that, you know, can move the needle for the world, but also I like the technical details of things. I also feel like because you've done a few things that prevented you from getting caught up in tons of minutiae, like you mostly don't join boards as far as I know, you don't have to navigate firm politics obviously.

36:21So you've got a lot of things that I think are huge draws on other people's time that I suppose you've avoided. Yeah, I've tried to purposefully avoid them. I used to be on boards and I found them, here's to be painful. I mean, I'm still more recently, I've kind of, done a few, yeah, added to a couple boards, but they're largely silent seats. So it's a little bit of, you know, I officially have a board seat, but I don't show up to the board meetings. Yeah, and you're not, you know, you're not in the middle of internal firm meetings and stuff like that. There's so many other things people get caught into.

36:49Yeah, yeah, and again, there's a lot of that's accumulated more recently, and so that's why I want to hire people to offload it. And so I think I probably have to hire, you know, half a dozen people or something. What outside, obviously you're interested in AI and have done a lot there. What outside of AI are you most interested in right now? There's interesting in terms of things that I think are useful and interesting in terms of things that invest in, and those aren't necessarily the same thing. Maybe what do you find just interesting to you? Yeah, you know, one area of sort of application and technology that I think is very under focused on, I think there's two or three.

37:18I think, so I was about to write a blog post on this or a post on this where there's like four or five areas of biology that I think can be a pilot, nobody's doing anything. I'll give you like four or five examples, or very few people are doing something. There may be the one -off company or whatever. One is, and there's a company called OVM doing this, there's research out of Japan where you can take any cell type, you can differentiate it down a set of lineages, and then eventually you can make sperm rag, right? And so basically anybody could reproduce with anybody. They've done this in mice, they're not translating it into people.

37:45Then that looks like it's possible. Yeah, yeah, yeah, again, it's done in the lab for mice. It should be done in, you should be able to do it in people. And it has those sorts of weird implications, like you meet LeBron James at a party and you take a skin scrape, and suddenly you claim that there's a paternity suit or something. You know, because you'd be able to differentiate the cells down the line of sperm, and so there's crazy things you can start imagining, but it also means that anybody over a certain age or certain capability, whatever it is, you can have kids, right? That's huge, unlocks society, right?

38:13Yeah. Why are there so few companies working on that? That'd be one example. Another example is... And also male, male, female, female. Could do everything, right? Wow. Yeah, it's amazing. That'd be a really big deal. Yeah, it's huge deal. That's why I'm like, you know, why are there more people doing this? It's like why are more people not talking about that, that's crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a whole swath of reproductive biology that nobody's doing much in. That's one area. Another area, again, these things may sound stupid, but I think they're huge quality of life. There's a whole set of genetic pathways that lead to two, three growth.

38:41So if you have a cavity, you should just be able to regrow the tooth. Lots of animals actually have replacement of teeth, you know, certain types of cats, sharks, like anybody who has... And again, pathways have been mapped out. You should do some translation. I'm not meaning to trivialize it. It'll take time and work. Third is sort of cosmetic applications against longevity. So, graying hair, balding, wrinkles, you know, again, there's a lot that's been uncovered there from a basic biology perspective. It just hasn't been applied. It's like big branch on some energy going on. Oh yeah. That'd be good.

39:09Well, I mean, if you think about it, Botox is a $40 million market cap company or the company that makes Botox. Yeah. And in that case, you're literally injecting a bacterial toxin into your face to paralyze nerves. Is that bad? That sounds good to me. It sounds okay. It sounds fantastic. When you say it, that way I want more. Yeah. Why are there more toxins I'm injecting? Yeah. And so, why don't I use more paralytics? I don't know. And so... I don't also make your armpits not sweat or something. Yeah, that's why I use it. Yeah, that's mainly because of fire. It was, it'd be sweating like crazy or something.

39:35For sure. So, there's just all these really interesting areas of biotech when nobody's doing anything. And if you look at biotech as all sorts of structural issues in terms of why it's set up certain ways, and, you know, there aren't really that many founders. It's often these things that are incubated by companies and they're all spun out to be bought by Farma. You know, it's a very... Yeah, it's been hard for... It's been hard for Silicon Valley venture to fund biotech. Obviously, it's... Profitable and goes well a lot of times. It's just been a hard thing for... It's a very different structure and the outcomes...

40:03Like everything's different about it. But the key thing is like, there's like half a dozen things I can think of that are societally really impactful or useful that aren't going into a cancer, which is really important. I used to work on cancer as a biologist for years, right? Well, AI matter to some extent in... I don't know. And this or is it not clear that it will apply? It's unclear to me. Anything outside of biology that speaks to you right now or like gets you some orderly excited? I mean, there's a ton of AI, obviously. I've long been involved with... You know, Andrew L. from your defense perspective and he was interested in this happening in defense.

40:33I mean, there's a lot of areas that I think are interesting. I guess there's sort of this two -by -two matrix of interesting versus focused on. You can't focus on everything. Well, I mean, it's not just you can't focus on everything. It's kind of like, what are the things that nobody's thinking about that they should be thinking about? It's sort of an aspect of the energy like that. It's sort of an aspect of biotech or definitely like that. So it's more like we're the gaps in the world versus, hey, everybody's funding AI. Do you think about that question at all from like a market perspective, meaning like when you think about what stages of the startup ecosystem are over and underappreciated?

41:08It's not just about what companies, but also just like what stages and where is the capital going? I mean, I've gotten some of those things very right and some of those things very wrong. So like I did a bunch of stuff in crypto in 2017, 2016 because it was so clear that it was important. I really just believed crypto then things were good. Yeah, I mean, you just, you got the theme right, you're right. Yeah, yeah. And there's some areas like that where that isn't true. A friend of mine actually is a very prominent crypto angel and he invested in it. I don't remember how many 200 crypto companies.

41:36And he said his biggest takeaway when you look back at his portfolio of crypto investments, he did amazing on them, right? I don't know what he made 20 acts or whatever is money. He said if he'd actually indexed further, he would have done better because he missed Salana and he missed one or two things that he said, as long as I took the meeting if I'd funded it, I would have done a 40 acts instead of a 20 acts or whatever. I think giving the theme right is actually probably worth more than people even talk about. You were investing in AI slightly ahead of everybody else, I feel like, and just if you were just doing a ton of AI investments and let's say 2022 and 2023, probably got something, feels like.

42:08Yeah, I know, it ended up quite good. I mean, I led the first round for perplexity. I was in the first round of Harvey. I was, you know, really to a bunch of characters. I was amongst the first money in. Which is not to say it couldn't still be good now, obviously it's just that now that everybody thinks it's good, it just changes the calculus a little bit. A little bit. I mean, even then, you know, my big lesson from technology trends, especially these things that will last for 10 -20 years, is people always say these things are over, over, over hyped and it still early. It's early for a longer time than you would think.

42:37It's always that way. Basically, all of Silicon Valley can think something and we're all still early together. All still be right, yeah. Yeah. And then the question is, are you choosing the right things? Because in any technology way, 95 % of things go under, are they're crappy? And most of the market cap is usually like two or three things or five things or whatever. And that's going to be true here. And so you could also be right in early, and then just, even if you're indexing, just index the wrong things. A friend of mine did that in social gaming. He had a fund in 2000, or eight, or nine, or ten.

43:06And he invested in 30 social gaming companies. And he missed Zingha and he missed Platum. And his fund basically went to zero, but he invested in two other companies that sat a gaming that actually really worked. And so he did really well. But he indexed the right theme and just missed the right companies. And so that can happen too. Because you have so much range in terms of like what stage you'll do. I mean, like the other person who comes to mind is Josh Kushner, who will both incubate things and also do a pre -IP around, which you also are capable of doing both. And does that make it so that you are thinking often also about, you know, about Josh?

43:37About Josh. Yeah, Josh is great. Josh is great. He's been doing it early versus going late. And what types of moment were in? Oh, you know, there was a moment where a couple, maybe it was 18 months ago or something. But there was a moment when like the growth stage was kind of clogged up. And just like nobody wanted to move on serious B or C. And like there was probably some interesting stuff that was over there. Yeah, I kind of knew it is just like what's good. So three years ago, the good stuff was super early stage Gen A .I. And that's where I almost saw my time went. And it wasn't that some calculated thing.

44:07It's just like kept seeing great things. And then, you know, a year, year and change ago, it was all these amazing compounding companies. That's something went out to the Fundres again. It was rippling and Figma and Andriel and a few other things. And I think it could go forever. And then six months ago, I felt to me like it was a lot of that kind of mid -stage AI companies. So that's when me and my team did the bridge round and Decagon and Harvey again. And a few other companies where it's just kind of like, okay, these are the things that are really working. So is the way that you make these sort of like thematic observations, just a function of good stuff that comes by?

44:44Or are you actively thinking about it? Or are you just observing what's around you? And that's how it goes. It's both. I think sometimes it's, hey, Gen A .I. is going to be really important. GPT -3 came out. It's dramatically better than two. You extrapolate the curve. Of course you do it. Or crypto. Hey, it's this real sea change. And how you think about two or three really big use cases. And then there's other times where you think there's a theme in the reason. You know that happened to a lot of people with attack or digital health, which I did, right? And then sometimes it's just organic, like a bunch of stuff shows up.

45:12And I think most of the time it's organic, right? Because to some extent, if you're only thematic, there's enormous hubris in terms of assuming that you know better than all the founders out there. Right? There's thousands and thousands of founders excavating away. Right? Looking for that. There's like a genius hive mind happening. Yeah, the genius hive mind. And they're covering a huge surface area. Are you going to be better than thousands of people in terms of deciding what's going on? Yeah, I think that's a good idea. Most of the time probably not, right? Everyone's wondering, am I get lucky?

45:39I mean, I guess the steel man of the counter is you got to just get good at something. And so it's easier to get good at something narrow than to do everything. It depends on how you define something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I guess the counterback would be like, do you want to be pretty good and on the right theme? Or do you want to be incredibly good at the thing that's, you know, not as a matter? Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I think you cannot be flexible in terms of how you think about the world as an investor. Right? As a founder, you definitely have to choose one thing to go deep on.

46:06And so that's harder in all sorts of ways. And I think maybe what happened is 10 years ago, the best advice that you could have gotten was keep going no matter what. You know, there's a small number of themes and just dig away and it's hard to raise money and et cetera, et cetera. And it wasn't that hard to raise money, but still on a relative basis. Probably the best thing to say these days is, you know, maybe you should give up. This thing isn't working. There's so much low hanging fruit in AI, for example. And I think really in a market, you want to focus on the low hanging fruit. And if you have these really complex hard things you're doing, you're doing the wrong thing.

46:36There should come way later in the life of a market. Right now all the easy shits available. We just go do an easy thing. Totally. Well, some of the easy things are important and clear. Like, you know, like customers to port like that. You know, it's like a lot of these things are just they're good and they just haven't been done yet because there hasn't been time. Yeah, and people really overthink that they're like, oh, it's easy and straightforward. And so therefore, I don't want to do it and then nobody does it. Right. And it's actually just like a huge blessing to be able to platform shift for the easy looking fruit.

46:59Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, go do that. If you last question, because then I think we got to give the room up. You got a new book coming. Yeah. What's up? Yeah. So I'm working on another book for Stripe. Stripe Press. And it's basically more of the zero to one part of the startup journey. And so it's just like my Hagrathen book. It's very technical advice, except instead of being technical advice to really scale up a company, it's technical advice around how do you hire for some employee? How do you raise money for the first time? How do you build your first product? How do you choose a market? You know, all the very early stage stuff.

47:28So I'm very excited about it. That's good. How do you find the time to do that? It's been tough. You just don't sleep. Try not to. Try not to sleep. All right, well, this is very fun. Thanks for your time. Yeah, thanks for doing it.