00:01:45 · Aydin Senkut, Eric Newcomer
[00:01:45] S0: First of all, kudos to you. Anything that's unconventional and unorthodox always draws us. We're drawn to outliers. I feel like I'm an outsider myself. I love the idea and I think there is kind of like an analogy and adage in the restaurant industry that if you want to find a true hidden gem, ask a chef, not food guides. So I feel it's a great implementation and execution here. I also feel it's a great honor. [00:02:15] S1: If you want a great restaurant, ask a chef. If you want a great founder, ask a founder, not the pundit class. [00:02:21] S0: I think it's true because look, at the end of the day, I think what people miss is you've got to be able to see a version of the future that is not yet obvious. And I feel like founders are the real heroes. So they have a way of seeing the future like nobody else can. And So they have a different lens. What I'm really excited about this is that they actually get a chance to show that lens to the world. [00:02:42] S1: And what are some of the themes that you're seeing emerging? I mean, it's like almost this post ChatGPT world where people are building a world, obviously agents, robotics, like what stood out to you from the companies that people are paying attention to so early?
00:02:56 · Aydin Senkut
[00:02:56] S0: Well, there are three areas that stood out to me. But before I tackle those areas, I feel like this business, we're always talking about like the valuations or what companies are worth. And people sometimes got to remember that the foundation of that is incredible business traction and growth and the precursor of that is hyper demand. And so the right way to find companies in our business, you have to be right and non consensus. And so I feel founders have this special lens. And not surprisingly, three of the areas that they chose really resonate with me and with my team, especially AI infrastructure. One thing that we talk about is kind of like the hot companies or the most valuable companies. But then the thing is like every kind of one of these tech cycles and hype cycles have leading companies. We have succeeded in finding the foundational layer of each one of those waves. Like in the mobile wave, was gaming and we were investors in Rovio and e commerce, it was Shopify, in payments it was Adyen. And now like in AI, we have a lot of interesting companies like Supabase and all of that. So one of the cool things is looking at these three areas and say, I'm excited about them particularly because I think for the next decade in the world, these are the areas that are going to face hyper demand and hyper demand would result in stellar business traction. Not surprisingly, AI infrastructure is one of them. So obviously there are some companies that are already positioning to go public or not. I'm more interested about the foundational companies that power this wave. Like what's the glue for AI agents? Who's going to keep the AI agents secure and keep them in check? There were so many aspects of AI infrastructure. The next thing, AI and biology. We sometimes are so focused on technology we forget that some of the biggest products in the world are in pharmaceuticals. I have this like running joke. One of my close friends was employee number eight of Google and we were dreaming about starting a company. We didn't know what we were going to do. And we're like, what do you think could be the most important company in the world? And we decided if we were to do it, we would call it You Don't Die. Because every human being cares What
00:05:04 · Eric Newcomer, Aydin Senkut
[00:05:04] S1: would you definitely buy? [00:05:05] S0: You Die is something that you would definitely buy. And joking aside, this is why biology is so important because even or despite all of the amazing changes we had, we're still like having people come to cancer even though we're about to like get close to curing and all of that. So this next wave much more so than this chat based interface and intelligence, I'm super excited because we can actually have an impact on our physical lives. And then the last thing is just physical world and robotics. First of all, if you're a sci fi nerd and fan like me, you know every sci fi movie has some aspect of robotics. But I think one of the things people do not realize or think about is that if you ever studied economics in college, Oh, what are the major inputs into wealth creation and economies like labor? And labor was limited by people. And now all of a sudden we can have unlimited labor because of robotics. Or I can imagine a world and it might take ten years, maybe a lot less, but we might have as many robots as people, maybe even more. And I don't think it's like a zero sum game. There are a lot of things that humans are unwilling to or are incapable of doing and robots can do that. So this kind of idea of abundance we have now real underpinnings of that with labor now being completely infinitely scalable and many other aspects with AI now like intelligence is super scalable. So I'm super excited about the implications of that.
00:06:35 · Eric Newcomer
[00:06:35] S1: I want to dig into each of the categories for a little bit. AI infrastructure in particular. There's clearly a wave right now of these inference companies, whether it's Base10, Fireworks, Modal, and then a lot of companies around the inference layer. I guess the argument against them is just lots of revenue growth, but then people wonder about the revenue quality. That's one piece of the infrastructure question. The other is sort of the, I don't know, heartburn from the crypto era where it's like there was a lot of inference investment in something that didn't really take off. And I guess do you worry with agents that if we build sort of the infrastructure layer for something that hasn't been built out yet, there's the risk that it never fully gets built or the world that you expect doesn't come exactly that way. So I'm curious for your perspective on both
00:07:29 · Aydin Senkut
[00:07:29] S0: those Yeah. Mean, I think the way to look at inferences, the moment AI became interesting is when it transcended from one token in, one token out. When you think about how we think, like the way that brain works, there are some things that you take extreme shortcuts and some things where actually like spending literally all of your neurons are like focusing getting it right. And the big difference to crypto in my mind and the reason why inference is really important is now all of a sudden you're getting real jobs done and like you're making real decisions. And that honestly, like if you think about what human beings like use their brain for, like we make decisions. And even when you're not realizing it, when you're like seeing something, hearing something, smelling something, each one of these things have like hundreds, if not thousands of processes that is not completely oblivious to you. And all of this stuff like includes like making some decision and like, oh, like I'm going use this signal and not that signal. So in some essence, inference is like a key unit of how our brain work. And now we have managed to scale it. Then you think about, well, human brain, even with its ingenuity, can do X. And now we can be in a world where that X can be 10X or 100X. And the reason why that's really important is that can produce uncapped value, right? There might be like a lot of things we do that previously we couldn't do or we could do it but we could not scale it. So unlike crypto, that's why I feel the whole inference thing is not a toy. And trust me, like I'm speaking, I was an early Google employee and I'm like, God, please let this be a $10,000,000,000 company, became a $5,000,000,000,000 company. And that's just given human beings information, access to information, equalize it, scale it. And now what we can do is if we basically change it and say now we can allow human beings like make better decisions or even do their work for them. It's just a new era. But the reality is if you also ask me, do you ever envision a world where Google is going to spend $100,000,000,000 in CapEx a year? And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like that is never going to happen. This is a company that like...
00:09:30 · Eric Newcomer, Aydin Senkut
[00:09:30] S1: That's going to ruin the beauty of the business [00:09:32] S0: that it does happen. This is a company that didn't even want to do advertising. So there is real... I think the scary thing is you cannot not spend that money. I feel like we're in some kind of like survivor game and like the winner is going to take a lot of value but like five, 10 people are spending the money. And at the end I'm not sure if all five, 10 players will the economic returns will be equally distributed. So there will definitely be some changes. But look, every time we get afraid of momentary stock market changes or whatever, we're to see some shock in the economy, whatever, what follows is a 10x improvement. 2008, 2,009 people are like, Oh my God, this is the worst thing. Stocks lost all the values. But then that became a great foundation and some of the most interesting and valuable companies got created. So I'm an eternal optimist and I do think there is some really exciting stuff to come there. [00:10:28] S1: Are you investing in agent infrastructure in particular companies to allow some sort of agent economy or are you