Uncapped #9 | Qasar Younis from Applied Intuition

22:08ZF just, you know, like you just all this stuff. It's kind of like if you grew up in Cupertino. Yeah. And but you know, Silicon Valley is in center of the universe. Fast forward to like 2075. Silicon Valley is just another thing. But you grew up in everybody works in the business. Yeah. It is not a cool business. It's just everybody works in it. Yeah. And then by the way, in car business, it's because it's also consumer. Totally. So you know, you sit in cars, people rent, you know, I worked on a 69 Mustang on over a summer, you rebuild an engine. So when you do that kind of stuff, it's like, it's like true passion.

22:36Oh, yeah. I remember I'd meet people who would come from like Kansas and they were like, it's like, you know, what, why'd you move to Warren? And they're like, oh, to work in GM. And you're like, what? You moved across country. I'm just here because I was, you know, I was like, this is my dream. And then that's when you meet people in the Bay Area who are like, moved across the world to work in the Bay Area. But there's some people who are just born here. And it's a little more strange. So like, where are we in, like with cars today, obviously, like, there's a ton of intelligence that's being added, obviously in San Francisco, you can feel it, you can also just see it, you know, you buy a new car, you can feel that they are updating quickly.

23:07What's like the, the landscape and the latest? I think generally cars are still pretty dumb. I mean, if you look at a parking lot, there's just not a lot of intelligent. Most cars are still a mechanical electrical system. They'll have some connection to your phone. They're mostly dumb. And our vision of the future is every moving machine will be intelligent. That is the world that we see itself driving is like just one small part of that. Part of that intelligence. Yeah. It's part of that intelligence, but it's not the whole thing. Yeah. What are the other big parts of the, I don't know if you think of it as like, you know, different pillars of it, but like, obviously mobility is a big part of it.

23:42The end cabin experience. Yeah. So if you're in a tank, if you're in a fighter jet, there's already a lot of work in order to make the war fighter more efficient in their executing tasks, but that integration can be way tighter. And I think defense in the future right now, defense is still typically one person with one machine or a small group of people with one machine. And I think in the future, it's the opposite where it's one person with lots of machines. And that's like, you see the early versions of that through swarms of drones, but I think that is going to be prevalent and kind of the future.

24:13And so the machines are the ones that can be at risk rather than the human operator. Is that like you're prompting a swarm that can now do swarm level things? Is that kind of what you mean? Yeah, absolutely. And but the human is still relevant and making ultimately a lot of those decisions, especially when you're talking about taking lives. Would that have an on a construction site that like one person is coordinating between, you know, a digger and an excavator? It'll have a lot of trouble. It's still far from that. It's so far from that. So you asked what are the subcompetents? So one component is, you know, the thing that you just autonomy, the other component is interaction with the machine.

24:43The other component is literally just the guts of how to run software on these things. It's that seems so trivial to us, but these machines are typically built by lots of sub companies that will assemble all these parts together into a truck. And they're so the typically the OEM, the original equipment manufacturer, the Skanyas, you know, the biggest, a trading group, biggest commercial trucking company in Europe. They're assembling parts, but some of those parts are getting from other folks. As we go into the future, those, you're going to be de -fragging of those parts because it's partly in electrical power -train, and partly just because you're bringing all this compute that exists throughout the whole vehicle into a centralized compute.

25:23Once you have a beefy central compute, you can do a lot more things with it. You can interact with it. It can run, you know, models on it. And suddenly it's more intelligent. And so then you can do more intelligent fleet management. You can do all of the things that you would kind of normally expect. Just think about it, just the dumb car, or the dumb tank, becoming more like your phone. So I remember when I was, you know, in the surprisingly early days of lattice, but definitely as things, you know, progressed, our customers weren't just like, we just want some software, we have the whole plan.

25:55They were like, we also want to help making the plan for how we're going to do performance management or whatever. And as listening to you talk, I'm imagining that when you're talking to one of your customers, they're not just like, we know the spec, you give me the parts I'm good to go. But our rather like, can you help me get into the future? And so I'm wondering out loud about like, what is your relationship like with these customers you work with? Because I'm guessing that extremely deep. You're thinking all day about what they could be doing that they might not have even thought about yet.

26:24And then you're like partnering with them in a different way. I mean, like in the, a lot of the word partner gets sort of around like basically. But I can see it for this company. Yeah, it's like we, because we do the software side, they do the hardware side. And so they're bringing a set of expertise that we don't have. It's not in our, in our company. And so it is very much like, let's do product planning. To some of the people ask us like, late stage investors ask us, you know, how, you know, is it easy to replace you guys or what is it? It's like, we are as deep in these companies as you possibly.

26:53You're like, I would guess some people on your team and some people on your customers team feel like actual teammates. Yeah, and it's extremely intimate. You're working on just giant projects. Yeah. You know, when you're making a new truck, that is thousands of engineers that work together. Those are like, if you ever think how complex it is, open the hood of your car. Yeah. Every little screw has a team behind it. That's to make sure that that whole thing and that screw with that weight is. It's crazy that we can make a car. Honestly, it's unbelievable. Yeah. It's unbelievable. It's the most complex thing that humans make at scale.

27:27Yeah. We make rockets. More than an iPhone, I guess. Yeah. Which is like the other big like, you know, thing that you always look at. I'm like, wow, I can't believe we have an iPhone. But I've also can't believe. Yeah, but an iPhone is like, I would say, you know, one tenth the complexity, maybe one 50th. Totally. Like it's just like a new flight on the highway at 75 miles an hour. And you don't think twice like this thing is going to like the wheels are not going to fall off. What about employees? Like is that another big thing that you have to educate people on? Because like, you know, a lot less.

27:53Yeah. The employees because they're, they're our employee base comes from really two big pools. It's the traditional Silicon Valley, Genswy, you know, engineer or AI software. You know, background Stanford, Eeks, Berkeley, and that's what they're that's that that group that we all know. And there's a whole other group which are like the automotive defense construction mining trucking folks. And they don't really miss looking. So you have to educate them. This group on how to work like Silicon Valley, directness speed efficiency, et cetera. And this group on, you know, safety, criticality on how these markets move, how these markets buy.

28:29Like what does a vehicle lifecycle look like? And it's not as hard as you would think because you're just in it all day. Yeah. Whereas an investor or a partner, you know, for them software is going to be needed for investor. And this is like a new area altogether. Yeah. Because you have to like learn two categories and it's learned software and AI. And they've learned like vehicle manufacturers. Yeah. And then there's a lot of errors. Aside from cars, you also mentioned tanks, mentioned the military. And so obviously like there's like a big dual use thing going on here where you're both in work true dual use company, the government and commercial.

29:03And so like what is that like how different is that? What is it required from you to build a dual use company that's working with both arms like the way you do business must be completely different. So you're just for everybody who does not in the business system, a little bit education. Because you have companies like an androle who is really working primarily in defense and they might work in multiple countries and things like this and multiple let's say domains. But they are working primarily for a very specific vertical, which is the defense market company like us. We are working cross bunch of verticals and the defense vertical is will use the same products roughly that we have for the other verticals.

29:42But it's not only made for the defense vertical. The pros of that is you're essentially subsidizing these very expensive tech technologies through non defense uses. And then you augment them for the defense, you know, there's there are specific things that the defense ecosystem has. I think the future is more dual use companies to be very honest. I think Palantir is a great example started as more of a defense oriented company does a lot more commercial work now. So I think that's just I think you're going to see more and more of that. You see a big boom in defense tech investing. I think the thing that a lot of people will recognize once you get into the defense ecosystem is there's limitations there too.

30:22It's not like this endless market with no competitors. I mean, there are there's really mature competitors there. There's emergent competitors there. And then it's the pot of money isn't as big as people think they hear these big numbers like trillion dollars. But that money is used for labor, literally soldiers that's used in supply chains and logistics. And then some is used for technology. But there's like a lot more cars than tanks. You know, there's some like a level numbers you could just look at and say like, okay, like it's not. Yeah, the spending is humongous obviously, but it's probably tapping in the specific budgets.

30:52I mean, the automotive industry, global automotive industry is 3 % of the world's GDP. Wow. It is the biggest of the industrials. And the industrial is one of the biggest markets period. And so when you add defense and construction mining, all these other things, that's like five ish some percent of the GDP. So for our, I think the magic trick that we're playing as a do use company is how do you build things that can work across these different verticals. You know, without a lot of augmentation and then that makes everything cheaper. And that's a, you know, that's kind of and the companies have done this before, but our automotive suppliers before our defense suppliers before they'll overlap each.

31:27They'll make something for, you know, one type of vehicle and then they'll actually resell it for another type of vehicle. Does your own work change as you know, you know, as you work with the military or whatever, because you know, obviously, you got to know more about the government, you got to know more people to government. Yeah, like what does that change for you? I'm also now curious after that to ask about like what have you learned? What do you think about, you know, the tariff situation? Yeah. What do you think about just like the overall like climate at the moment? Yeah, so I mean, I've said this many times for our repeated, which is, you know, I think American tech companies, small and large, are for maybe obligated is too strong of a word.

32:00But, um, I think nothing comes up and obligated like you're almost obligated to help the US government. If you're a citizen of this country, you get the benefits of being a citizen of this country. And you, it is such a privilege to say, well, I don't want to work with defense or the government. It's like, well, you are getting a lot of the upside of being an American, right? So at some moral or ethical or mission foundation, we believe it's important for the company. And this is, you know, we started a defense work a year after we started the company. So it's not a recent proclamation. And it was less invoked than I think now it's no longer controversial, frankly speaking.

32:37So I think that that that that has a, but the defense ecosystem is very different. How you, you know, allocate dollars, how you talk to the DOD. So we do all that stuff, including all the way to, you know, having facility clearance, having cleared engineers and cleared senior executives who can work on top secret things. You don't really have that in trucking. Like it is now don't get me wrong. The trucking industry as example is very nationalistic. It's very global. It's very competitive. But it doesn't have the same connotations. Now for other countries actually trucking and construction mining and cars are like their defense industries.

33:11To Italy, Ferrari is a big deal. You know, to Hyundai, Hyundai to Korea is a big deal. Toyota to Japan is a big deal. Renault to France, right? It's gone yet to Sweden. These are, I mean, not only there's like some motor emotional thing about Renault and France, there's a jobs program involved. In Valley, when we forget this very thing that exists in defense and construction money. In the Valley, we just have the top part of the pyramid, which is highly paid engineers and the support staff that are around it. And these other industries of a giant, you know, workforce. So you got the executives and the engineers and they give a huge labor pool who builds this stuff, maintains this stuff, takes this stuff to the field.

33:51And so the, you know, when a factory opens up, that's three to five thousand families who now have a way of living. So that we understand the defense context. You know, this senator wants this new plant in their, you know, state or their district. But actually exists in all the commercial industries as well. Where a new factory goes is actually a big deal. That's why you have these tax incentives. So for us, we've just had to become way more sophisticated about working with the government. It is its own complete. It's its own universe. It's very different. I want to talk about it for even founder listening.

34:30I wouldn't walk into the defense vertical like with some casualness. It is, it's, it's, it's its own universe. It's not like building a B2B staffs out. No, it's just a very, the way that things are bought is very, very different. Yeah, actually, I want to talk now about like the company and culture and management as a company that is simultaneously deeply Silicon Valley and also deeply, you know, other parts of America. I remember during COVID that you stayed, I think, pretty much in person five days a week. We've been a person, as long as the government has allowed us. We have been a person by the way.

35:09I feel like the, I think I remember you telling me once that like the day you were allowed to get people back in with Matt. And then you asked, you're back. You were back. And like everybody else was like freaking out, you know, and you know, going remote. Because COVID is a conspiracy theory. No kidding. Should we go to the next? Let's do conspiracy theories next. I would like to show that. Yeah, I mean, I think there was that, you know, you're down in sunny Vale, taking like five hours to get down here. I mean, you're saying this, this is look like a, so I mean, look where we are. Look where we are.

35:32Square footage you have. I know where we are. This is sunny Vale, I think. Yeah, I mean, you, and you probably, I mean, now it's called due defense, but I bet you knowing, you know, just the climate we've lived through, I bet you didn't feel, you know, so great to be supporting. Yeah, at some point in Silicon Valley in history. So you've done a lot of these things. And so I guess I'm curious what the common threads on the culture have been to be a Silicon Valley company that's also like a little anti Silicon Valley. A little anti Silicon Valley. Yeah, yeah. I think it's the same Walton in his great book made in America.

36:02And he says one of the things he says he's always swim against the street. Like just as an instinct swim against the street. And so I think that's really that which is like if everybody does the thing, it's, it's probably like priced out somehow. So if you're trying to build a company in San Francisco, you're priced out in the sense of there's other companies like you. There's not a lot of companies like in San Francisco and Sunnyvale, but there's a lot of good engineers everywhere from San Jose all the way up to like, let's say, Berlin, a red or we have, you know, big double digit percent of our workforce comes from San Francisco down in Caltrain.

36:33So I think that's a part of it. It's like some of it's just skepticism of the mainstream, but really it's like how do you carve your own path? And then we're very first principles thinking so we just debate it out. Take the COVID example. I'll give you that. You know, it sounds like we had this clear void of view. The way we made that decision is we had I think it was four or five different meetings. The early applied people, the parents, the new grads, SF people. It was like this like we had and they're all like the discussions of let's say five to 15 people and the discussion was should we go fully remote or should we go back in office or should you do hybrid?

37:10And I, you know, I did the GitLab investment OIC. So I'm not against a remote like at some fundamental dogmatic radical pragmatism. That's the name of the game. And so the whole discussion can boil down to we originally were like hybrid. Nobody wanted to be fully remote. That was across all the groups, the new grads, the parents, nobody wanted to be fully remote. So we're like a hybrid or full time with the hybrid group. And we have customers come on site all the time. We do interviews every day. So then we were like logistically hard to do interviews only Wednesday Thursday Friday. Well, good CTO comes from, you know, from Toyota.

37:43They're not going to tell you they're just going to come to whatever one hour slot that they have available when they're in Silicon Valley. And so then we're like well, and then we have offices everywhere else. We have on both sides of the time spectrum on Munich. You know, when we do all hands, we have to do them at 2 p .m. Because in Tokyo and Korea at 6 a .m. and in Munich, it's 10 11 p .m. Depending on the time zone. And it's like, so you're really covering the full spectrum. It's like the three corners of the world right in terms of time zones. And, and so all of that led to, okay, we're probably in office.

38:13And then it was like, well, we should probably be in office as a consistent thing. And all these principles are true here. They're probably true in Germany. They're proven to other places. And so we made the decision. What we didn't do is what did was everyone else thinking. What's everyone else going to do? If there is a version of that, I mean, I say this like kind of tongue in cheek. We're like, whatever the big companies do, we should do the opposite of. So like whatever Google does, we should like to do the opposite of that. And ironically, before Google was never remote, and then there were all remote.

38:39And so we just were always flipped to that. You know, I think we had a bit like when we started the company, we very seriously consider being a remote company. Yeah. How do you feel when you see things as a sort of like a, you know, intrinsic contrarian? How do you feel when you see the world come around to you? Does it make you any easier? Are you like I told you so? You know, if there's a person that I'd love to emulate, if I could, if it's Andy Grove. You know, I mean, we as a company and part of onboarding for managers, we read high output management. I mean, that's a favorite management. Yeah.

39:08And so you know, and then like we, you know, at the joke I make to, again, like these are kind of weird things. Like joke I make is like, the engineer is like, where to call it, where a college shirt? Because the norm is to not wear a college shirt. So you almost, so I think you're contrarian almost just to push the principles that you pull so dearly that everyone should be casual or everyone should be formal. Like whatever it is, you're just pushing it. And then in that, you know, in that, in that conflict is when you actually discover what the truth is. Without that conflict, you're living these assumptions.

39:36And then you don't know what the truth is because you might think something slightly different than me. So a core part of our culture is like, just debate, debate, debate. Say which one your mind. Let's have that currency. That doesn't mean it has to be disrespectful. It doesn't mean that it's a culture of constant yelling and, you know, you don't have to do that stuff. But I think there are like, get along cultures. And then there are cultures are like actively pushing each other. Yeah. And we're definitely in that category. Do you have any like contrarian beats you're on right now? Like, I mean, what's the most contra, I mean, yeah, I think, I mean, this is the macro stuff.

40:09I mean, because macro being this month, this year, this time, you have big, you know, amount of investments going into broadly, gen A, I specifically in humanoid robotics, look right now in this, in this universe. You know, I mean, I just think where's the business models? Because when you take applied intuition as an example in 2016, 2017, lots of companies getting funded in autonomy. Billion dollar raises were the, were the, were the craze. Because autonomy was a hot hot thing. All the tech currents list everything was all autonomy, autonomy, autonomy. And now it's like, you know, self driving is some, like, almost out of, it's coming back.

40:42These are way more starting to flood San Francisco. But I think like the point about saving humanoid robots or gen A. I companies, I think maybe they're really, I don't know if this is true. It's truly so I don't know if this is true. So I can be completely wrong. Probably the really good ones are going to emerge in four or five years from now. Because you're just going to, the ecosystem is going to learn a lot about the space. And then the most important thing to learn is what the business model is. Right. I would think based on how you spend your time, you would think that we will end up with very smart humanoid robots though.

41:10Yeah. So you believe in the product happening. You just don't believe there's a good business there yet. It just has to be found. Yeah. What they might even exist. It might even exist in a company that's for all funded right now. It just has to be discovered. And the reason you think that is because you're like, why should I build a humanoid when I could have a counterpillar or I could have like a machine in a factory doing a purpose built thing? Yeah, exactly. It's just first principles. Even though we had one of those Chinese unitary. Why do I need a human shaped robot? Though it's so emotional, we had them on the office with the Chinese team here.

41:42And they're showing that it's like really the whole company like gathers around. I mean hundreds of people. It's like a celebrity. We've had Mark and Reese's, we've had Sam come. And you didn't have as many people as this humanoid robot. You can't discount that to fool you as an engineer or as a founder. And do thinking something is actually a good thing than it not. So just like step back and have that debate. I was like, what really is the thing here? And I think for applied, we did that. We believe in autonomy. We built a horror and a zombie business where you can give the tools to all these people to build.

42:19And so then you're kind of abstracted away. So I think there's some version of that in the companies. By the way, our trying to do the applied play in humanoid as well right now. So the ecosystem gets more more sharp. I feel like when I talk to people on like Wall Street, whether it's like at a hedge fund or like a goldmine or something, I feel sometimes surprised that actually public investors are, you'd think that they are short term minded and they're not is my experience. And I think actually in some ways, I think there might be like a U shape where it's like early stage investors think very long term.

42:51Real like public investors think very long term. And maybe it's like the growth investors that are like the most short term minded because they're just getting taught to think about like how long to liquidity and what's my mark going to be there. I think it's all over. I don't, I think the brain wants to find that pattern. I don't think there, I think there's a lot more noise than signal in there. I think I've, you know, I've certainly met seed, you know, folks who are like trying to flip their money by C .R .C. And are just looking at the mark up because they want to get the next fund raised.

43:20So they're, you know, optimizing to invest in what is going to get marked up. Which by the way is not a bad strategy because I know it's specific investor who's that's their strategy and done exceedingly well. Their view is just like ride the hype. Interesting. Because the hype is going to get funded again. Yeah. And then if you had, it's the old classic question, what, does a company make money or does money make a company? Yeah. The reality is if we're starting to humanoid robotics companies and I raised 3 million, you raised 250 million. Yeah, that's a better audience. You're better on, you're going to win.

43:49And everyone thinks you're going to win. Yeah. Employees think you're going to win. The customer think you're going to win. The target who. And then I self -fulfilling. Yeah, exactly. And then so like it's in a self -fulfilling. No, absolutely. So I don't think that I think I've met late stage investors that are like, you know, I can see that they're going to dump on when the public comes to this public because they're just looking for that 20 % bump. You know, return. And then you met like, you know, early stage investors that won the double. I don't think that's true. Do you think as the jobs changing, it's making you change too?

44:17Like, do you think that doing this job changes who you are? And the reason I'm asking is because I felt like in a lot of ways, I mean, I think whatever work we do change us in some ways. But I felt like there were so many things about, you know, last was not as big as applied, but you know, there's hundreds of people and, you know, you just experienced a lot of those things. And I felt like it was very hard to not be. I think in many, many more good ways than bad ways. It changes your psychology, your behavior. Like it does update your software a little bit. Yeah, I am not removed enough for myself to have that objective third party view.

44:53I'm sure I've changed without a doubt. And this is impossible, not too based on the surroundings. But I can say, again, maybe it's like rationalization you never know. I feel more myself today than I've ever felt. That's great. Yeah, I mean, it's like, I feel that's a huge privilege. That's amazing. Yeah. And we're just like settle into yourself. But that's going to be a long way to go. Yeah, maybe that's a good thing. You're getting old. It's like, you just come to peace with like, these are things I'm good at. These things are not good at. For me, I'm like, even just like having kids takes a little bit of the edge off of just like, I don't really care about all this.

45:28There's a list of things that I used to care about that I don't care about anymore. Yeah. And I guess there's just a lot of things about getting older that update that. Yeah, there's a one thing that reminded me that is I, that I want to repeat, which in my last co -founders had this line where he said, Michael Mahtt, and he said, no matter how successful you become as a founder or venture investor, whatever, if your kids don't like you, you're a failure. Yep. And that just like for me, I think 10 years ago that would have kind of made sense. It's to me, it's like, I know that is so true. There's nothing more true than that.

46:00So true that didn't even belong in this conversation. And I want to interject and because I believe it's so absolutely true. Then that Gandhi line of what's true, truth is what stands the test of time. So when we are, we will all die. When we're hopefully we make it to 80, 90, we're laying in that bed, you're not going to think about this fucking podcast. You're not going to think about the fucking podcast. That was a good podcast though. Yeah. You just go watch it one more time later. So what are you going to think about? You're going to think about your kids. You're going to think about, oh, I had a good working career.

46:26You know, I had a good relationship with my parents. Well, you know, that's the thing you can think about. You know, everything else is kind of grays out. And so I think becoming more okay with the professional stuff and being more successful like, hey, I'm going to always give direct feedback. Yeah. Like that's just going to be who I just cannot lower my bar. I ask on a weekly basis of my team. Am I just being too, you know, pedantic? And one of the team members on our team is, whenever an engineering leads, he said to send us a whatsapp. I don't know if I'm just being an asshole here. And I'm actually just, he goes, no, no.

46:59You are your only role in this company is to maintain that bar. And we maintain that bar. Everything else. All the products we'll get taken care of. All the, but you listen to your lower bar. Everyone becomes more mediocre. And so I think you as a founder, as not only, you know, you as starting an firm, but anybody out there who's starting to think, you have to kind of figure out like, as the company changes, are you becoming more of yourself or are you becoming less of yourself? Then you kind of ideally want to orient that to more of yourself. And then you become more comfortable. And yeah, but it's not easy because I think your brain is rationalized.

47:29One thing is absolutely true is what's the parallel universe where applied intuition fails. We raise $10, $20 million. We never, my part of work fit. We might be partnering together with a venture fund. Who knows? I've been great. I'm still, I would rather work out than that. On the last note, on that topic, four founders, because obviously, you know, you saw a bunch at YC. You've been doing your own various success. That's the one now. You're angel invest. What are the things that, you know, when you find yourself talking to a founder, what do you focus on most with helping people or advising right now?

48:02There's a book called Intithin Air, which is about this fated Everest climb. And it was a journalist who wanted to just talk about Everest tourism. And he ends up being in this trip where 16 climbers ultimately died of Blizzard. It was a worst single campaign incident. And in this Blizzard, when he gets hit, he's coming down the mountain. And there is a Japanese climber. And she's going up the mountain. And he sees base camp. He's like 100 yards. I just got to make the tents. And I live. And there's people who fall in up. And all this is because everyone's lacking oxygen. So everyone's kind of in this delivery estate.

48:40So he's going down the mountain towards the camp. And this woman starts pulling on him and says, no, no, the camp is that way. And he's like, no, the camp is right there. And he goes, I looked in her eyes and you can see that she was gone. And I make a decision. Am I going to die too? Or am I going to leave her? Obviously, left her. She dies. I meet founders all the time. We're going up the wrong side of the mountain. Oh, wow. And you're just like, this company's not going to work. So what do you do? You tell them, but they can't because we all have to believe that you're doing the right thing.

49:13So hard about that is as a founder, so many people are telling you you're going up the wrong mountain. And when you're going up the right mountain, there's going to be people telling you that you're wrong. There's people telling you that you're wrong. Yeah. Still, I think you might be still. I can't tell if this is working or not. Who knows? That's the thing. That's the thing. It's working. It's working is a state in time. Yeah. It's not a permanent state. And there's a lot of headfics right now available with like a new paradigm and everything like that. And I think, I think, so I find myself often talking to founders and having that conversation.

49:44I think it's not easy to start a company. It's really, really hard to stop a company. Yeah. Does it do you then end up in a contentious conversation or is it usually just like I disagree and move on? I think you can only tell a founder. I mean, almost always an investor in the company. Yeah. And I'm saying, hey, like I'm not telling you because it's in my financial interest for you to stop this. I know you have six million in the bank. This isn't what it looks like. Yeah. And I think the crazy thing, you know, and there's a lesson to be taken away. We're applied. You know, again, there's a parallel universe that doesn't work.

50:16But it hasn't been hard. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the, it's been pulled out of you the whole time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, this is something to YC's credit that I really, I mean, there's many things. YC's credit. At this point, I give to them strongly, which is they will tell founders pretty directly if this isn't working. And I think a lot of investors aren't willing to have those kinds of conversations with founders because we've gotten to a place where everybody knows that, you know, screw, you know, screw the haters. The cancer unit is maintaining a list of the people who passed on the company.

50:44And when it crosses 100 billion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, at our next podcast, that's what we're going to do is we're going to go through a few years. Yeah, because I can just again, to on the VC side, it's very hard. If you're looking at a series A company and you're passing, do you don't know if it's the right decision? Yeah, probably. So why? How are you like, you're like, I'm not going to invest, but you might actually be on the right for sure. 100%. It is very hard. All right. Well, I got a lot of your time here. This was awesome. I really appreciate it. Thanks for. It went by flash. It was fast.

51:13That's what could be. Thanks, bunch.