00:11:03 · Ankit Chowdhary
[00:11:03] S1: It's interesting because, you know some of the things you talk about reliability and dependability actually and more importantly this is Mehta I think you message you were sharing there where you know can I expect you to give me what I want and what I need? You know a lot of folks here are also very early stage founders or, you know, they're building startups in very early stages. That's something I know that they also try and figure out. What is advice that you would... Because you've now seen company scale, startup scale, Stripe became... You know, what did you see Anthropic go through its own journey? What is advice you would give to founders and, you know, technical leaders here, which is to do with how do you manage the trade off? Right? We'll be moving fast at that early stage and making sure everything is dependable or is it really a trade off?
00:11:51 · Rahul Patil
[00:11:51] S0: There's two parts of the question, which is when you make strategic decisions, what is the framework that guides you? Okay. So I'll start on that. So it's a slight tangent, but I will definitely come back to the trade off question. So in life, many times you have to choose between a lot of imperfect answers, right? That's like the hardest part when you're growing really fast. It isn't like there's a path that has all upsides and has all correct answers, and you can't say we'll be free of criticism if you choose this path. So when you're working on a very critical strategy, there's always this thing about what is the goal that I'm trying to maximize for, And what am I willing to give up or be criticized for? So when I choose the upsides, I choose the downsides that come with that specific upside. And most people, especially in early stages, especially when you come from large companies, the tendency is, I want to protect from downsides. Know, people say, you know, people want to pursue happiness, but actually a lot of people want to pursue avoiding pain, right? And so people tend to build to avoid downsides, but at that point you're giving up upsides in pretty much all dimensions. So the number one advice I have for people is know what you really want. Know the upsides that you want and what are the downsides that you're willing to accept. Now, we will get criticized for those downsides, and that is okay. But test it back with, Is this the upside you chose? Those are fundamental tradeoffs you make, especially as a fast growing company. I want to say that you should always be a fast growing company no matter what your size is. You should always have that urge and that curiosity that you want to be on that exponential line. Then when it comes to trade offs, you're like, Hey, do I ship fast? Do I break things? And you know, what, none. There is a philosophy, there exists a philosophy where these don't have to trade off. So one of the things over multiple years that I built at Stripe was like, you build systems such that the automatic thing is also safe and fast. So I think many of you are developers here, builders here. You all have CICD pipelines, right? These are the things that take code and deploy. So very simple.
00:14:16 · Rahul Patil
We built touchless deploy, which means as soon as you write code, it automatically runs unit tests, automatically merges, automatically goes to preprod, automatically runs something, rolls back. Like 80% of all the deploys that happened were touchless. So not only was it fast so I could ship more, not only was it safe because then it would continuously test against whether it's working as intended. It also asserted all the global properties we cared about, safety, security, and all that stuff. And every time you feel like there's a trade off, Hey, I can go fast or safe, I'm like, No, zoom out. There has to be a system. There has to be a mechanism where this is not a trade off. And so I urge all of you to build what I call the pit of success. You know, you've all heard of pit of despair. It's so hard to get out. I say build the pit of success. Pit of success is your team and your developers feel so successful. They don't want to do anything else that trades off velocity and dependability. So the mindset of building something dependable is not to make it a trade off. The automatic thing is the fastest thing, is the safest thing. So that's how we should be thinking about building systems.
00:15:34 · Ankit Chowdhary
[00:15:34] S1: I'm gonna just pick on that because the reason I think a lot of people talk about pain and despair is because startups are hard. Yes. You know? Building is very hard. And and more often than not, you know, breaks, like things go wrong, stuff happens that you can't control. I'm sure you've had those kind of moments, you know, with your team. How do you, at that moment, still bring in that culture of Prate of Success?
00:15:59 · Rahul Patil
[00:15:59] S0: So, one, we're all scientists, right? Before you start your day, before you start an experiment, you should have a hypothesis. You know, what do you expect out of this? And what is the probability that what you expect is not going to happen? And when something doesn't work the way you think it worked, you will be like, cool. Scientifically, was this within the probability? Was this luck? Was you know, was this, I bad? Was I good? You have to think about it. So my grandparents were farmers in North Karnataka, okay? And so I had a lot of the farming mindset. So it takes six months to grow a crop. But today, I have to put the seeds. Tomorrow, like, have to put water. And then after that, I have to put, like, cow dung on it. Trying to explain to somebody for the first time all of this is required, but in six months, you'll see amazing crops. But in the six months, weather patterns can happen. You may have 10x more output. You can have 10x fewer output. But does it change what I do today? So that mindset of being scientific is like, do I turn on my team because on the sixth month something bad happened? But I know repeatably through experience that these are the steps that gets us there. This is my scientific hypothesis, and I will evaluate whether, like, you know, I was within luck that this happened. And this is for success as well. Did I get lucky or was I good? I ask myself every day, was I lucky or was I good? Was I unlucky or was I bad? These are things that help me take control of the situation. So being scientific and having that mindset is super crucial. And then knowing that your team is also scientific and not to attach personal success or personal failure based on a single outcome. That is a very important mindset to build in the hyper growth, especially as startups.
00:17:54 · Ankit Chowdhary, Rahul Patil
[00:17:54] S1: I think you're good. You're not just lucky. [00:17:57] S0: All too lucky. [00:17:58] S1: All too lucky. Talk to me about Anthropic. You know, think you said a few things which seemed to kind of answer this question, but what made you make the big move? You said it's one of the most important works you want to do in your life today. Why? You know, what is it about this that really drew you? Yeah. So I was on the other end of using AI like all of you. ChatGPT blew our imagination in some ways. There was a moment.