00:04:50 · Ankit Chowdhary
[00:04:50] S1: I love that you know something that we also at SPC focus on is curiosity we over index actually on that and we call that you know phase of minus one and the way to get out of it is you know is pull on threads you're curious about yeah And it'll lead you to whatever the next ten years of your life will look like. How did that lead to being curious about wanting to maybe go to The US start there, study there and then of course get into what you called the plumbing of the Internet.
00:05:24 · Rahul Patil
[00:05:24] S0: Yeah. Look, always wanted to learn more. I always wanted to study more. And so even throughout college, when I was reading some of the things that excited me, this only course is, you're like, Oh, this person was locked up in this room for two years with his friends or her friends. And they came up with this crazy invention. And the theme there is that they spend time with like minded people doing nothing but ideating some cool stuff. And so I always had this that I want to be where some of this learning and advanced research happens, and that's what took me to The U. S. In 2003. Again, very grateful for my experience here and in The U. S. Now, you know, kind of half and half now exactly of my life in Bangalore and in The U. S. And I've learned just as much here, as much as I've learned there. And one of the attractive things for me to be there was, like, I want to be in the thick of where some of the cutting edge technology is happening. And for me, it's always been about scaled impact. So I became a manager very early on in my life because I feel like I could scale my impact even more. I feel like want to help other people build. And so the reason I chose plumbing infrastructures, building platforms, is so that everybody can have the scaled impact. And so that's what really drives me. I yearn for some sort of a scaled impact. Not that I spend an hour, I get one hour's output, but if I spend an hour, how can everybody around get, like, scaled input for a longer time? So that's what drew me to, like, be thinking about the hearts and guts of what makes computer science tick.
00:07:02 · Ankit Chowdhary
[00:07:02] S1: I mean, was it a conscious decision then to move from there to, you know, I mean, went to Microsoft, but also Kinesis, you know, which I think today with inferencing and what you're trying to do today, you know, the dots do connect backwards. But was that a conscious decision then because you saw something there?
00:07:19 · Rahul Patil
[00:07:19] S0: When you think about scaled impact and we think about where things are going, look, one of the things that's really hard to... Like, you know, mathematically, everybody understands compounding and exponential. Right? I was saying even something like 1% every day, you know, exponential three sixty five looks like magic in a year. But if you look at data back then, it was still growing, like, you know, 10 x every year and whatnot. There's something about exponential that just drives my curiosity. It's like, what is it? What is this pattern? What is this durable thing? CPUs were growing crazy. Memory was growing crazy. And data was the thing that was such a durable exponential curve that it was going through. And so I'm attracted to anything that's growing exponentially. It completely warps your mind because you can understand it intellectually. You can plot it on a graph. But when you live it, like, somehow, you know, like, in a year from now, everything is magical, but tomorrow feels just a little bit the same as today. Then how do you actually realize and experience that exponential? More than, like, data specifically or anything, I always step back. My minus one phase is, like, curiosity, but what is the thing that is going on the exponential? Like... And I can let the exponential happen to me, or I can be part of it. So that was... That's what keeps taking me to the exponential, basically.
00:08:40 · Ankit Chowdhary
[00:08:40] S1: Very interesting. You know, while all of that was happening, you also and I saw this talk that you gave in Stripe sessions I think where you gave a very profound story about the London fire and use that in reference of reliability. So we talk about exponential growth but you're like, look, all of this is great but none of this matters if, you know, it's not reliable. So and you saw that with the payments infrastructure. You also can now do that with AI, which is, you know, probably, I mean, it's non probabilistic. I mean, it's not deterministic, but there is a certain level of reliability and trust you need to build here. How do you think about that, and how is your experience with even something like payments led to that?
00:09:22 · Rahul Patil
[00:09:22] S0: Yeah. Great question. So there's two things. Right? So being part of the exponential... Like, my mission statement for my personal life is I want to build the fastest improving technology or product. Like, the product itself should feel like it's the fastest improving compared to everything else. Second, I want it to be the most dependable. Dependable has many axes. One is reliability. Second is, is the company dependable? Is the roadmap dependable? Can I bank on, if I fast forward three months, are they going to come through on their promise? Is the company going to be holding true to its values, which is we're going to be building a platform, we want to do it safely, we want to do it responsibly. All of those things, some things are not perfectly measurable. API reliability, can measure. But some things are not measurable. Trust is not measurable. Because it's not that you're available most of the time, all the time, but those ten seconds that something went wrong and it happened to be the most critical thing in your life, those ten seconds, people don't remember you like on averages. They remember you when you needed something the most. Was it there for you? Right? And it's not just about it was there, but did it give you the correct advice? Did it give you the correct answer? Did it help you get unblocked? And, you know, those are the ways I think about dependability. And so my mission... My personal mission statement is I want to keep working on things that are improving the fastest rate, and I want it to be dependable at all times.