No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:12:34 · Sarah Guo, Andrew Feldman
[00:12:34] S2: Can I ask you as an aside, actually, just because you have, for more than a decade, believed that this revolution is going to happen? How much is all of this AI generated coding relevant for Cerberus internally? Hugely. [00:12:49] S0: I would say that that, you know, eight months ago, we weren't spending a thousand dollars in engineering on tokens, and we're we're probably at 25 or 30,000 right now, and it's ripping. I I think it's not useful for everybody. I I think that's the truth. I I think there are some some people who have sort of the perfect mindset for it. Right? And you you they are running eight or 10 agents, seven by 24. They've moved their coding style to being one in which they govern agents, whether they think about how to QA. So they've got a QA agent running. They think about how to sort of remedy some of the weaknesses in the coding models. Right? They're often verbose. They often cut out comments. They've really thought about, and it's a type of puzzle that the perfect fit for their mind. And they've gone from being sort of 10x guys to being 100x guys. I think the rest of us, myself included, we're sort of limping along. We're trying to figure out how we can make it work for our different jobs, for being the CEO, for being the CFO, for being accountants, for being in marketing. But for a small number, it is such a tool. And then the rest, we try and show them what others are doing, what best practices are. [00:14:02] S2: You're about 800 people now? [00:14:04] S0: 800, eight fifty, yeah. [00:14:05] S2: It's a lot of market cap per person.
00:14:05 · Sarah Guo, Andrew Feldman
[00:14:05] S2: It's a lot of market cap per person. [00:14:07] S0: I like that. Yeah. [00:14:08] S2: That's great. It's a good metric overall. When you think about where to go from here, you know, making business bigger, strategic directions, like what you predict, and where can you go from I think we Besides delivery. [00:14:22] S0: Well, when you've got a backlog that's north of $20,000,000,000 delivery is pretty important every day. I think we have to continue to sort of be fearless. I think one of the malaise of companies as they get to 1,000 to 2,000, 3,000 people is they stop taking the type of risks that they were taking before, right? You move from being a fearless engineering culture to sort of being, what can we get in in the timeframe of the next rev? And I think that's extraordinarily damaging, and we take such pride in doing fearless work. We want to hire people who do fearless work. We want to kind of sort of guard that culture that that says we would much rather fail in pursuit of the extraordinary than succeed in the ordinary. That that is a horrible thing to do. And so those are some of the things that worry me. I think recruiting, right? You have so many openings, and it's so easy to settle, and it's so easy to just try and put a butt in the seat. Yeah, pretty good. Let's get that butt in the seat. I mean, that is death. And so we think really hard, and I spend a meaningful part of every day in talking to candidates. Those are things that sort of I worry about and I think about every day.
00:15:37 · Sarah Guo
[00:15:37] S2: We have a lot of founders and leaders who, you know, listen to the podcast who are thinking about maybe they have a successful business and they're managing through the period of waiting for the market or trying to figure out if they're still right. They think about how to hire from 800 to several thousand. There we talked about the managing of your own psychology when you're like, am I right for this decade? How did you like keep and motivate employees when there wasn't external feedback for this long period of time?
00:16:06 · Andrew Feldman
[00:16:06] S0: Well, first, I have empathy for them. I mean, being CEO is an extraordinarily lonely thing. And you're building a business, you're building a business. You guys know this, that being a leader is lonely, and it's not easy. And people don't like to say that, especially for those of us who like to solve problems, specifically the problems everyone else says can't be solved. You sort of you you you gain fire from that chip on your on your shoulder. Right? When when they say it can't be solved, you say in your head, you can't solve it. Right. I thought it was just fine. No. That's right. That's exactly right. You You know, you were a top venture firm. You wanted to do it your way. Right? And so you stepped out doing it your way. And you say to yourself, I can do this, and it's not easy. And that's one thing. The other thing is you have to love the journey. Right? These things we do are too hard if you don't like the building. Right? That you do this for the money is is a horrible thing. There are way easier ways to make money than than trying to create something extraordinary and compete with somebody as strong as as NVIDIA. That is not the easiest path. You you gotta love being a David. Right? I'm a professional David. This is my fifth startup. I compete against Goliath. That is what I do for a living. And I think to myself that every dollar, every million dollars, every billion dollars we sell, if it wasn't for our brains, their muscle would have taken it in a heartbeat. And you gotta love that. And if you don't love that, it's a very long road.
00:17:47 · Elad Gil, Andrew Feldman
[00:17:47] S1: When do you think because there's sort of two views of the world in terms of when to give up on something. And one argument is just going no matter what, and hopefully things work out or eventually they will. The other view of the world is, you should be constantly reassessing whether the journey you're on is the right one. And there are some moments where actually giving up is the smartest possible thing you can do. What's your view on that? Or how do you think about when's the right time to give up on something? [00:18:13] S0: I think it is clearly the right time to give up when you've laid out a set of hypotheses about what it's gonna take to win, and they all come back negative. [00:18:27] S1: Yeah. But I see people kind do this sequentially. Right? They say, oh, I just need to test one more thing, and they test it it doesn't work. So I need to test one more. And so [00:18:33] S0: the slippery slope is a beast. Yeah. The slippery slope in all things, in ethical situations, in your life. I mean, the slippery slope is really something you have to guard against. Right? And I think sometimes having other former CEOs or other really seasoned entrepreneurs who are on your side and who can share with you remember a year ago, you said, if you got to this point, you didn't have this, and to remind you, so so they pull you back off that slippery slope. Right? They they said, you know, the old frog in the the warm water thing is like, you said if it got this hot, you were gonna get out. Yeah. And it slowly kept getting warmer.
00:18:33 · Andrew Feldman, Elad Gil
[00:18:33] S0: the slippery slope is a beast. Yeah. The slippery slope in all things, in ethical situations, in your life. I mean, the slippery slope is really something you have to guard against. Right? And I think sometimes having other former CEOs or other really seasoned entrepreneurs who are on your side and who can share with you remember a year ago, you said, if you got to this point, you didn't have this, and to remind you, so so they pull you back off that slippery slope. Right? They they said, you know, the old frog in the the warm water thing is like, you said if it got this hot, you were gonna get out. Yeah. And it slowly kept getting warmer. [00:19:18] S1: So it's basically, can other people keep you effectively accountable to [00:19:21] S0: That's right. [00:19:22] S1: Directions. [00:19:22] S0: Accountable to your own thinking. Yeah. If you understand why it's not working, right, if there are some things that that you can articulate that have to change Yeah. In order for it to work, and and you can put some sort of time frame on it. But that is an extraordinarily hard question. And I I think it's probably the case that lots of efforts ought to be truncated. Yeah. And those people sort of redeploy their efforts to new and different ideas that they have.