00:10:28 · Eric Newcomer, Aydin Senkut
[00:10:28] S1: Are you investing in agent infrastructure in particular companies to allow some sort of agent economy or are you [00:10:35] S0: looking I for more am. The middle and the way that we're thinking about it like I think all you have to do is like I don't even think you need to be like the most incredible expert. You just have to imagine a world where like instead of just humans now you have like millions, billions of agents and millions, billions of robots. What changes in that world? And so a lot of it is around developer ecosystem and it used to be just people that can code computer science degrees. Now you have citizen developers and the agents themselves. And it's awesome because these agents, there are so many ways that Citizen developer. [00:11:08] S1: I don't know if I've heard that phrase before. [00:11:09] S0: Citizen developers isn't like, look, think about all the replets and lovable of the Right. [00:11:13] S1: No.
00:11:14 · Aydin Senkut
[00:11:14] S0: Get People that didn't even like can barely speak English or their language is now coding and creating apps. How cool is that, right? It's democratization. Also I feel like every great Felicis company is democratization of something. Canva is democratization of design. Shopify was like democratization and scaling of entrepreneurship and commerce, make it available to people like citizen entrepreneurs. And now we have citizen developers. But I think more importantly than that, one of the things that fascinates me imagine I don't think people are appreciating the potential of commercializing the agents because the agents don't know the world the way we do. Think about all the years that brought you to here, how many things you learned you don't even think about. You know what a university is. You know what a country is. You know like a location that's a city or any type of simple thing. Like you know colors whatever versus the agents have to learn the context and everything from scratch. In a world where search was only consumed by humans, now imagine a world where search is no longer consumed the way humans do it but via an API by billions of agents that will do like a million more searches compared to like a single human. How exciting is that world? Then all of a sudden you're like, Wow, we created this amazing abundance in terms of AI but now security is the biggest threat. Well, how do you manage a world where even the smallest bad actors have insane AI tools in their hands? Now this is going to be really important. If you thought identity management, whatever, that was a big area. It's going to be like a thousand times more important critical bottleneck with what's going on. And so every time you have this chaos and unexpected situation, we don't know how this is going to turn out. It is the best foundation for some of
00:12:59 · Eric Newcomer
[00:12:59] S1: the biggest disruptions to happen and surprise us hopefully to the upside. I wanted to turn to the second bucket, which is the, don't know, biology, health. Where do you see the most opportunity? There are companies investing directly in drug discovery. That's obviously like a hard, slow business. Like where do you think there is opportunity in that sort of, I don't know, the do not die business? Like if you were going to fund that today, what are the approaches that you're most bullish on?
00:13:28 · Aydin Senkut
[00:13:28] S0: Well, part of the extension of the do not die businesses, I think some of the most durable and exciting businesses in the world is where people gave up and said, This is just too complex. Even think about like space. We couldn't scale space because the rockets were not usable. And then guess what happens now? We have reusable rockets that land themselves. We were joking about how we wanted flying cars. We didn't get anything. Now we have flying cars. And you know what I love about it is that that basically tells people nothing is impossible. And so in biology it's like, Oh, why would I go into healthcare? It's regulated. There is this thing, that thing. I'm like, Well, how about if you just reimagine everything? And what I love is like we are going through this amazing moment now where the toughest problems in the world, nobody wanted to step in and solve them. And now that we have seen like maybe 0.1% on 1% getting solved, now everybody is asking, But what about the other 99%? And the other 99%, I can't imagine something more personal and important to humanity than biology. Because think about how many of us have lost a relative or loved one that succumbed to a disease or just died too early or even if it's not in the family, it's somebody you respected. Like think about amazing people like Steve Jobs. Like why did we lose him to like liver cancer? Why can't we identify it early? Why do people have to pass this life so early? We have kids getting sick around the world, whatever. Why can't we help them? Why can't we instead focus all the human energy on innovation versus fighting to keep people alive or still struggling to cure the sick? So what I love about it is not like one thing but how all of that could be reinvented with AI. Every single aspect like regulation, the way that the practices run themselves, the way we do clinical trials. Why does it take ten years to bring a drug to market? Imagine if you have, God forbid, life critical condition and somebody is telling you, it's going to take ten years. We have a miracle drug and the only way to make it is if you make it to one of the clinical trials like to even have a prayer.
00:15:28 · Aydin Senkut, Eric Newcomer
So I feel like all of that is going to change and the change is going to force also regulators and governments to think differently because I feel like maybe they don't care about AI as much but when we talk biology, I guarantee you all the people that are making power decisions, either they themselves probably have some kind of clinical condition or somebody in their family. So it's going to be personal for all the people in power. And I feel we've got to go through this amazing wave of AI crossing biology. I think just This can't just even [00:15:58] S1: slowing down the gap between we have a pretty strong hunch that we could help people to allowing it to be sort of deployed and testing it in real humans. Is that part of what you
00:16:08 · Aydin Senkut
[00:16:08] S0: want to read? I think a lot of it and even the lab part of it, like for instance, like we have a company that is not biology in the hard science part called Periodic Labs. We keep talking about these AI models that they can do amazing things. But you know one thing that we found out is that when it comes to the physical world, one of the things that is missing is how do you even test if this works? Let's say that the AI model came up with a new element like we have a new superconductor or we have a new chip material. Like you can do things 100 times cheaper. Like how much of an impact it would have? Great. Well, AI models can come up with it and the same thing can happen in biology. The problem is you don't know if it works. You can't just take a human and test on them like the way you do software testing on an app. So what I love and what we learned with Periodic is they basically spend years building an infrastructure where they can do more than a thousand experiments a day. And so they took over a biotech space. So And what I'm excited about biology is there are a lot of things right now we cannot scale because the real world verification and testing does not scale. And all we can still do is test things on animal, which by the way doesn't even reflect to people. So to me, one of the very interesting examples, my wife and I support this professor at Stanford that basically took advantage of that you can grow brain cells from skin cells, basically make like replica human brains and actually test on them for different things. They were able to cure like one of the first diseases. So there is like this new era of biology coming that people don't even imagine how cool it's going to be. In terms of just like we're gonna cure so much disease. And one of the only ways it's gonna be possible though is that AI is also gonna change the testing environment and how we basically verify that these things actually work.