00:01:30 · Markie Wagner, Nikhyl Singhal
[00:01:30] S1: Cool. Thank you for having me, Nikhyl. It's so great to be here. So, yeah, a bit of context about me. So I run Delphi Labs, which is a frontier tech research and advisory firm. And we'll help founders anywhere from day zero all the way up to folks who've gone public and beyond as a stand up AI teams for the first time and go to market with AI products. And before that, I was a researcher at Waymo and Google and Stanford, where I spent a lot of time focused on AI. From there, I went rogue, sort of Delphi, and doing the work that I do today with founders and executives. [00:02:04] S0: Yeah, and what's been fun is we've gotten to know each other is, though you had so much success in AI and with your consulting practice, I think the more that I got to know how you got to become an expert in these areas and how you kind of moved into leadership so quickly, I almost found myself torn between having a podcast on your GoodQuest article, having a podcast on what you're doing with AI, or having a podcast just on, like, how the heck did you become an expert so quickly when so many people are struggling to kind of find that path forward. So today's episode is a blend of all three, and we'll start with your origin story.
00:02:04 · Nikhyl Singhal, Markie Wagner
[00:02:04] S0: Yeah, and what's been fun is we've gotten to know each other is, though you had so much success in AI and with your consulting practice, I think the more that I got to know how you got to become an expert in these areas and how you kind of moved into leadership so quickly, I almost found myself torn between having a podcast on your GoodQuest article, having a podcast on what you're doing with AI, or having a podcast just on, like, how the heck did you become an expert so quickly when so many people are struggling to kind of find that path forward. So today's episode is a blend of all three, and we'll start with your origin story. [00:02:53] S1: Yeah, the early days. I grew up as an only child with just significantly too much time on my hands. And so when I was, I want to say four or five, we got a family computer, one of those G egg shaped iMacs. I think it might have been the blue one or that early one of those. And I had a lot of time on my hands and I was totally obsessed. I would spend all of my days on just like crawling across the internet, like Yahoo Answers. And you remember Yahoo Answers back on the day? I would answer any question that anybody had about absolutely anything on that website. [00:03:25] S0: What was like the craziest question that you answer there? Like what kinds of questions? Because you're at what age at this stage?
00:03:25 · Nikhyl Singhal, Markie Wagner
[00:03:25] S0: What was like the craziest question that you answer there? Like what kinds of questions? Because you're at what age at this stage? [00:03:30] S1: Oh, I wanna say seven or something like that. It's so funny. The answers are all extremely clearly written by like a seven year old. It's just so funny because Yahoo Answers was sadly shut down, I think a year ago or something. And I went through all my answers at the last hurrah before it went away. I was like, they really gave me internet access. And sometimes it would be like, someone would say, what's M theory? And I would like crawl around the internet, kind of repackage information. But sometimes someone would say something like, why doesn't my son Charlie talk to me? And I'm like, well, clearly you and Charlie don't have lines of communication open. And just like all this crazy parenting advice to like how to train your hamster. Anything. When I tell you it was anything, it was like really absolutely any question that was on the internet, I felt like I had full range of faculties to answer. So that was my duty. [00:04:19] S0: You're like the original chat GPT, but you were doing that at age seven. I love it.
00:04:19 · Nikhyl Singhal, Markie Wagner
[00:04:19] S0: You're like the original chat GPT, but you were doing that at age seven. I love it. [00:04:25] S1: Love talking to people, strangers on the internet. I was like a extremely active, one of the top contributors in Yahoo Answers. And I was also very active on the online games of that era. Some might remember Club Penguin or Webkinz or some of the other all time iconic early web games. But for me, that was just heaven. I had so much fun with my friends, making new friends, Club Penguin, making my igloo, the coolest igloo in town. I just thought that websites were the coolest thing ever.
00:04:55 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:04:55] S0: It's funny because we always hear these stories of computers and computing really kind of destroying youth and how it's such a huge challenge for how young folks are not kind of having this sort of origin notes that they could. Like, young folks are not getting the education they need because they're distracted by devices. And at the time when I was growing up, the same was said about television. And your version of working with your computer is like how much television I watched. So when I was a kid, I watched every eighties television show that existed from Love Boat to Three's Company to Different Strokes, and I literally memorized every episode. And it sort of helped me kind of understand how the world through that distorted lens, mind you, worked, and it led me to understand conversations between adults and what people are doing outside of this little town in Kansas. And it's funny because when I hear your story about getting a computer, was sort of the window to the rest of the world in some way. Did any of the folks that you interact with kinda know that you were a seven year old kind of pounding away on the keyboard, or was the Internet so early, it was just hard for anyone to kind of grok what was actually happening?
00:06:19 · Markie Wagner
[00:06:19] S1: No. I don't think they did. And there's this hilarious quote. I forget who says it. On the Internet, no one knows if you're a dog. And I love that because no one really knew I could just be bad at writing sentences or something like this. And I would chat with people about so many random things. And sometimes I would pick up the phone and call and say like, okay, have a question. I'm going to call the professor or I'm going to call this person who works in tech because no one in the area that I grew up in or my family works in tech. Or I call tech support or whoever, and they'd pick up and they'd say, oh, hello, like, you know, happy to answer questions. And me and my high pitched, like eight year old voice would be like, hello, I'd love to hear about your research or something so silly like that. And they'd always be so shocked. Like my mom has a story that she'll tell at Christmas or family events where she walked into the living room when she heard me on speaker with, I think, an Apple engineer or somebody who I wanted to, like, know how the iPhone was made or something. And they pick up and I'm like, Hello. They're like, Is this Markie? I'm just so shocked. And so I think it was really powerful because if I had been walking up to Apple as an eight year old, they would have been like, Get out of here. What are you doing here? But by the time I started to know different people, they had already thought that I was at least earnest enough to help a little bit. Right? And so, yeah, I was a very obsessive child. And I think that is kind of the overarching theme. I mean, like you, you sound like, you know, you memorized lines to these TV shows. One of my housemates has every line of Titanic memorized. And I think obsession reveals itself in different ways. He watches the Titanic still, like, all the time. It's so funny. But for me, yeah, it was obsession with the Internet.