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.
00:05:46 · Aditya Agarwal, Elad Gil
[00:05:46] S1: Larry Ellison, Oracle, no cofounder. [00:05:48] S0: No cofounder. Right? So you look at many of the... Gates cofounded with so many, but then he really became the sole founder when Paul Allen left. So, over and over, he's either unequal or solo for many of the biggest sins. Now there's lots of people who are co founders who been incredibly successful, in some cases equal, in some cases unequal. If you actually look at cap tables as companies go public, you actually realize that most sins were unequal. And it was really y c that normalizes equality. So, anyhow, there's a lot of conventional wisdom, that I just think is wrong. [00:06:19] S1: I mean, we don't we don't love equality. We love. Right? [00:06:22] S0: Yeah. No. I I I think, Weihing is important for startups. People often ask me what is the single biggest determinant of culture in a startup, and I say winning. You know, it's not the kombucha. It's not the ping pong table. It's, you know, not the number of GPUs you have up, but that is exciting. It's winning. But anyhow, back to the original question. The companies that we said I've been involved with that have tended to work have tended to work early. And it's not like we're gonna grind for seventy years and then the thing will work. And it's usually something starts working really fast.
00:06:22 · Elad Gil, Aditya Agarwal
[00:06:22] S0: Yeah. No. I I I think, Weihing is important for startups. People often ask me what is the single biggest determinant of culture in a startup, and I say winning. You know, it's not the kombucha. It's not the ping pong table. It's, you know, not the number of GPUs you have up, but that is exciting. It's winning. But anyhow, back to the original question. The companies that we said I've been involved with that have tended to work have tended to work early. And it's not like we're gonna grind for seventy years and then the thing will work. And it's usually something starts working really fast. [00:06:54] S1: Yeah. It's actually interesting you bring up that particular statement. One of the precise lines I remember from when you spoke last was actually that for startups they can often just kind of be wandering around for a while, but when stuff works, tends to work very quickly. And there's some cases where, you know, success happens on slow curve, but the best companies, when it starts turning the flywheel, it turns even quicker. So I think it... I'm combining the two things. What I'm really hearing is that if in today's day and age, think you you're building something or but you're having a hard time selling it, that's a pretty bad signal because I agree that there's propensity to buy across almost every vertical, including old school regulated verticals that we haven't seen in a while. And also, if it's working, it should be working quickly. Right?
00:07:39 · Elad Gil
[00:07:39] S0: Yeah. This actually ties into competing schools of thought in Silicon Valley around, are there enough founders in the world? So the YC school of thought is there should... If you just have more founders, more magical things will happen. And on the alternative viewpoint of the world, and I think both are partially correct, is there's only so many markets that are open in a given moment in time, and, therefore, there's only so many markets in which in which you could build a big company. And they're open because of a regulatory change. They're open because of customer behavior. They're open because of technology shift. Right? Right now, we're going through a simultaneous massive shift in technology and a massive shift in buying behavior. So many more markets are open right now than I've ever seen in my lifetime.
00:08:19 · Aditya Agarwal, Elad Gil
[00:08:19] S1: Of the frameworks we talk a lot about in SPC is, like, are you in modality one or two? Modality one is that it doesn't actually matter if the good or bad. The only thing that matters is how petite it's drawing. Right? And often in those kind of, like, domains, there's often not just one player. There's often two or three. It's often pretty neck and neck in the early days, but really the only thing that Paris is actually winning. And then modality two is you're actually betting something actually heretical slash non consensus. But by definition, that should mean that you should find it hard to get funded. You should probably not mean... Most people should actually laugh you out of a karoo. Right? Or they should say that, like, this acu doesn't make any sense. And I think a lot of people want to do modality too, but they're still seeking kind of, like, the validation offer, you know, whether it be customers or employees or investors. And I think mortality too is actually very lonely. And I think it's... There's not that many companies that I think are able to pull that off. I'm curious. Have you seen any good mortality to companies? [00:09:15] S0: There's a few, and there's also a lot of stuff that took off in ways that people didn't anticipate. Right?, but also ChatGPT. It was launched Thanksgiving week. This is... It's a buried launch. November 2020. I... It was like, oh, it's nobody's gonna pay attention, but then send me how someone's launch it during Thanksgiving. So, like, what does that be in terms of our ability to predict what's gonna be compelling?
00:09:15 · Elad Gil, Aditya Agarwal
[00:09:15] S0: There's a few, and there's also a lot of stuff that took off in ways that people didn't anticipate. Right?, but also ChatGPT. It was launched Thanksgiving week. This is... It's a buried launch. November 2020. I... It was like, oh, it's nobody's gonna pay attention, but then send me how someone's launch it during Thanksgiving. So, like, what does that be in terms of our ability to predict what's gonna be compelling? [00:09:37] S1: So today, we have three to four players, and it's called it three players who are kind of dominating the frontier. I will say four. Because, obviously, you know, OpenAI is Anthropic. There's Google. And then we'll put all the Chinese open source models into their own kind of bucket. Right? So they say there are four kind of big categories. Do you think that this is a stable, or do you anticipate this shifting, call it, in a five year time frame? [00:10:02] S0: Yeah. And then I'd I'd probably add XAI as an ongoing wealth correction. [00:10:05] S1: Sorry. You're right. I mean, if you want the if you want the beans and what's happened right now, you should go raise. Yeah. As in med, Grok is the best of that. Yeah.