00:00:00 · Elad Gil, Aditya Agarwal
[00:00:00] S0: There's a bunch of conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that I either think is always wrong or mostly wrong. An example of that is you always need a cofounder. Michael Dell didn't have a cofounder, and Jim Pizzas didn't have a cofounder. [00:00:10] S1: What is the most common mistake that you see AI startups making nowadays? [00:00:14] S0: Your thing isn't working and you stick with it too long. There's radical openness to trying things that didn't exist three, four years ago. And that's really important in a way that I think few people really understand. [00:00:27] S1: Very excited to welcome a close friend, a close personal friend and a close friend of Best PC Care for a Minus One fireside chat. Elad, I think you are the first guest who's coming here for the third time. [00:00:40] S0: Wow. They keep inviting me back. Don't know why. So thanks to you for...
00:00:40 · Elad Gil, Aditya Agarwal
[00:00:40] S0: Wow. They keep inviting me back. Don't know why. So thanks to you for... [00:00:44] S1: I keep on raising these big ass funds so we don't even know we think to invite you back. So, Elad, we've been here for three times. I guess to kind of start off, we have a bunch of folks in the room all of various stages, I would say, of ideation, figuring out what they want to work on. And you know about the Minus One kind of like, you know, I would say, stage yourselves. You've kind of started companies. You've kind of been... Not just started a company, you started a new venture fund. But the first set of problems I want to talk about is how do you do minus one in today's day and age that might be pretty different than five years ago when the capabilities for building seem a lot more pronounced, but also the ability of what you build is, you know, kind of in some ways a lot more commoditized. So how would you go about doing Minus One today if you are starting a company?
00:01:31 · Elad Gil
[00:01:31] S0: Yeah. I think there's multiple ways to start a company. So I think there's, like, a single prescriptive approach or, like, a single right thing. I think fundamentally, there's two or three different ways that you can approach things that are still pragmatically true. One is obviously being very customer centric. Sometimes it's just building for yourself as a customer. That's brain trust. You know, company where it's an eval and prompt ground and, you know, etcetera tool, and he built that for himself effectively as a as a potential user. That's something he kept beating over and over. You can also do that for specific customers. So one one approach of the world is doing that and being very customer centric or honestly self lead centric. Second approach, which I think is really interesting in today's day and age, which I think is very unique, which is I'm starting to see people do these AI driven roll ups or buyouts where they're effectively buying companies and then expanding margin dramatically using AI. And there you need three skill sets. You need the ability to buy things. You need the ability to operationally change them, which is often the hard part, the change in management. And then you need do the AI stuff on top of that so you can actually expand margins and make it a better business and make it more software like. And then, you know, there's there's a third, which I know most of you is kind of a grab bag, which is, you know, you iterate on different things. You invent things. You run them by... You know, you try customers. That's kind of almost a traditional approach, and it's a little bit more of a winding road in some cases where you come with an idea, and then you
00:02:47 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:02:47] S1: try embedded and, you know, see what people think. So... Okay. So let's perhaps say our goal page would take a slightly different approach, which is that
00:02:55 · Elad Gil
[00:02:55] S0: And by the way, sorry to interrupt. I do think things are faster now. I was... But, yeah, I'll do that. And so I figured that part is dramatically faster and better. And then I'd also say it's faster in two ways. One is you can build things much faster, which makes a big difference. But the second way is customers are very interested at trying stuff in a way that I haven't seen in my lifetime. And because of AI, every CEO has the edict of you need to do something in AI. What are you gonna tell you to worry about AI, and how you gonna do AI? And so there's radical openness to trying things that didn't exist three, four years ago. And that's really important in a way that I think few people really understand. And so I remember when, I was diligencing, I I invested in Harvey, the High Legal Company, really early in their first round, and then I led their series b. And, for Harvey, I remember calling their customers as due diligence, and I called these big law firms, and I asked them. And usually law firms, by the way, are really bad adopters of technology. Right? They're very slow. They're hesitant to change. There's a big security reviews. Like, many legal laptops are completely locked down. Right? You can't download things onto them without, like, CIO permission at the law firm. So I call these people running these law firms, you know, the the 10 biggest law firms in the world, and I ask them, what is the biggest change you expect to the party and why you're adopting it and all the rest? And even two, three years ago, the insight was so interesting and unexpected where they said, we think this will augment associates the point where we'll need fewer of them for the same book of business. Let me... We can grow our book of business quite a bit. And we grow partners from associates. So who are gonna be our future partners? Are we gonna have enough associates per partner to actually have the right number of partners? Like, it's part of the training. It's part of choosing people. It's a selective criteria. It's the filter. It's, like, whatever you wanna call it. And I thought that was fascinating as an insight. And this is insight, like, three years ago or whenever it was two years ago. And so I do think there's other aspects that are really overlaid on this that are, like, super fascinating.
00:04:46 · Aditya Agarwal, Elad Gil
[00:04:46] S1: Would you say that as an extension of that observation that there is more openness to buying today than has been probably in our generation is that if your stuff is not taking off today, if you're having a hard time selling your thing today, then that's a pretty bad spot to be at. [00:05:02] S0: A 100%. And I take it a step further, which is even a couple years ago... So I think there's there's a bunch of conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that I either think is always mostly wrong. And an example of that is you always need a cofounder. And you look at the biggest market caps in the world, and Michael Dell didn't have a cofounder, and Jensen didn't have a cofounder. And, you know, you go through company by company. Steve Jobs is a dominant founder. There was two founders, but he was really the main one. Although wasn't it, of course, built everything, initially. But you're kinda your company by company and either it's unequal in most cases until YC. Right? YC and, Google was roughly equal, although Larry had a little bit more stock even earlier. [00:05:46] S1: Larry Ellison, Oracle, no cofounder.