00:07:07 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:07:07] S1: Well, that's interesting because one of the things that we internally at SPC also, when we're talking about, we're looking for people who have interesting taste in problems, right? And often these dots connect back. When you're looking back, they connect really well. When you're looking forward, right, and there are a bunch of things which might feel interesting, right, and which you might be curious on or about, right? What is the recommendation to people as they are thinking through this, right? Because personal curiosities often are different, right, and environmental changes are often very different. How should... What is your recommendation to people who are trying to look at what are the interesting problems or interesting areas? I
00:07:49 · Srinivas Narayanan
[00:07:49] S0: don't know if there is one process, but, you know, finding something that you will spend your time, entire energy thinking about, giving yourselves the space to explore because, you know, you're not gonna wake up one day and, like, some brilliant idea comes in. Oftentimes, you get passionate by actually doing things yourself. So I... That is one of the big reasons I love the SPC mandate about minus one to zero. You need the space to go and explore things. And if you don't do that, you're never gonna find that thing. Right? So give yourselves the space. Ideate. Be practical. Be hands on. But also find a problem that you have some deep personal connection to. Why is this important to you? Right? Like, do you spend... Do you see yourself working on this for the next ten years? What... Like, imagine what is the world that you want... Want to see different. Right? Yeah. And so when you find that purpose... And that can... A lot of time, it comes from some deep personal beliefs, some experience you've had in life, your interest. It's a combination of all of those things. Yeah. And, you know, find that purpose. I think one recent book that I read is is just a collection of quotes by Steve Jobs. I think it's called make something wonderful, if I'm not mistaken. It's just a collection of his quotes. Like, it's incredibly inspiring. You know, if you want inspiration for doing something useful, meaningful life, go read that. I think, you know, it sort of talks about one of the philosophies being, you know, don't take the world as granted. You being a passive observer, you know, you are an active participant. You have so much agency to change. You have, you know, you have your one life. You know, you shine briefly in the sky for a moment and die. I think that's the metaphor he uses. Yeah. Make full use of that. You know?
00:09:24 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:09:24] S1: Yeah. That's interesting. You know, you talked about lived context and personal point of views on things. Right? And a bunch of folks who have been building for a while, right, are... Which is the other part of the code that I referred to earlier. It feels like bewildering and surprising. You feel at sea, right? And primarily because you found joy doing a certain set of activities. And some of those activities seem to be disappearing, right? I was just listening to Greg Brockman's interview where he said that I used to achieve flow state while coding twenty four... Twelve, twenty four hours. Right? But maybe many of people today or many of us who possibly had that in the past are never going to see that again because the world has changed, right? So for people who have spent a lot of time building a certain point view on the world the way it exists and their life experiences might be in areas which seem to be in the blast videos of labs, how should they think about the same statement that you just, the set of postulates that you just gave us on what is, how do they find their purpose and meaning today?
00:10:38 · Srinivas Narayanan
[00:10:38] S0: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one change is hard, but, you know, I would say we as software engineer engineers have been blessed in many ways in the last several decades to be the people who have caused so much change for the rest of the world. So we've inflicted a lot of change on lots of other people. So for us to now complain that change is happening is actually not fair. We have to we have to deal with this change. I think the positive side of it, I'm not denying this change is hard, but, you know, the the... On the flip side, we have so much more ambition for what you can accomplish. Right? Yeah. I think you should see that as a huge positive side. And, yes, the mechanism by which you used to build and what you find joy might have changed, but you can find so much more purpose in being able to imagine and dream higher, which is I think gonna be incredibly exciting. And I think somebody else had a quote that I found pretty pretty interesting. You know? If you think change is hard, what do you think about extinction? Right? So, you know, you have to embrace change, and I think there is always change. I I think also one thing... One frame that might be helpful for people is, you know, think about the outcomes you wanna achieve. Right? Ultimately, software is a tool to create outcomes that are positive for the world. And if you really focus on the outcomes, I think you will enjoy getting to the outcomes in much faster ways through all these new technologies that we never had before.
00:12:02 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:12:02] S1: No. I think that that's a powerful one because Buddha Bedikhi to dream and bring those dreams to fruition, both of them seem to be getting unlocked. Right, though they might not be visible today. And that brings me to the next question. Both at Facebook and OpenAI, right, if I look at what you've been building, there was no set playbook Because frankly, it's unchartered waters, non defined markets, opportunities. And those categories themselves did not exist. And I'm not even sure that even in OpenAI's case, that category is fully manifested yet. And every founder, some point in time, feels that there's no playbook. So I'm just curious on when you're flying without a compass or without the GPS coordinates, how do you figure out which is the most interesting direction to go? And how do you point resources and personal bandwidth and attention?
00:12:54 · Srinivas Narayanan
[00:12:54] S0: Yeah. I mean, oftentimes at OpenAI, we kinda feel like we are building the plane as we were flying it. You know, everything was growing like crazy. Facebook, I had some experience of dealing with hyperscale, but the hyperscale at AI was just of the even different magnitude that was exposed to. We had to break a lot of the playbooks. You know, conventional software... Sorry, startups would tell you, you know, focus on one thing. Right? But AI is so broad. Like, we had a consumer product. We had a developer product. We had an enterprise product. We had a business product, and, you know, we had to deal with all of these things. So so doing... Being able to do so many different things at the same time, we just had to do it. Like, there is no way to do that. No way around it. Yeah. We had to scale at 10 times what anybody else had gone through, you know, in in our infrastructure, in our systems, in our process, in people, everything. I think one thing that really, really works is just hiring incredibly good people, not just talent, but also people with very, very high agency. That's one of the ways I think we were able to deal with. I think OpenAI was... Had one of the most talent dense, you know, places that I've ever been at. I had the incredible privilege of working with these people. And so... And, you know, I've also had the privilege of building these teams. I think when you're dealing with so much change and so much chaos, you need an amazing team, and we had an amazing team because you can then lean on all of the other people to be able to go solve these difficult problems. So I think that was extremely important. We also had to mature extremely fast compared to any other startup. Right? Because you're dealing with Fortune 500 customers. They want security. They want reliability. How do you give reliability when there is so much change and you're growing at 10 times? Right? All the systems you're relying on are breaking. So I think the other thing that helped us is somehow figuring out some balance between how do you build the guardrails while also trying to innovate. You know, we found some ways to do that. You know, when do you... How do you build and how do you buy? Because you don't have the time to build a lot of these things.