00:05:40 · Sridhar Ramaswamy
[00:05:40] S0: I mean, all of you, I think intuitively understand this. The true superpower of great founders, this could be an Elon, definitely Larry and Sergei, is their incredible reductive ability. Is that ability to remove all superficial detail and get to the heart of problems and to arrive at it with relentless discourse. No conversation with Larry and Sergey about any topic was ever easy. They argued endlessly. IITs were the same way. We argued endlessly about every single thing, important or unimportant. But out of all of that was that desire to push for like what are the things that truly Matter. Matter in a particular situation. The other side of Larry Sergey and Eric who was the CEO for much of my time at Google was they did this while still being really good human beings. I told people repeatedly that the three of them have never yelled at me, even though I've given them an endless number of opportunities. I would just go there and argue with them about everything. And we would just go at it for hours and hours. They took these as intellectual challenges. I've never seen them be disrespectful to anyone. I've never seen them scream at anyone. I think to both be good human beings, relentless competitors, make no mistake. We put lots of companies out of business. But it was still fair competition. And they were really good to the people around them. To me that combination of relentless drive combined with the humanity, that us is like defining both for those three and for Google as a company. And some of this you only realize and learn after you have left and you're able to look at yourself there or look at a company with an outside in view, I think is a truly remarkable place.
00:08:03 · Aditya Agarwal, Sridhar Ramaswamy
[00:08:03] S1: Yeah. I really like that phrasing of having extreme reductive power because it's interesting when you listen to interviews with Elon. A lot of the common refrain people have is like, oh, he just keeps on fucking talking about the laws of physics. But ultimately, the reason I think he does that a lot is because he has reduced kind of the problem down to like where is like the actual... Like, what are the things that matter? Where are the places I can change something versus not? And I think that simplified almost Zen like view at the end of it is a result of a lot of kind of like reductive like power over the intervening kind of like years. Yeah. [00:08:44] S0: I mean, for the things that he deals with, those are the immovables. I'm sure if you got Elon to do physics research, he'd be arguing about string theory and what's the immovable of physics. It's just it's a way of thinking.
00:08:57 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:08:57] S1: Yeah. It's interesting. Some of the kind of like at least at SPC when we are talking to potential founders, probably some of the most determinative kind of characteristics are just what we call internally clarity, which is that for a given problem, are they able to essentially... Like, they can spend thirty minutes walking you through all of the logic and the detail. But if you just ask them ultimately what are the one or two things that matter for your business in the next six months and the next eighteen months, they often have very short succinct answers which is like, this is just kind of the one or two things that matter. If this happens, then I think we have a shot to kind of take it to the next level. If it doesn't, we're kind of like, we'll have to zig and zag but that's a pretty bad sign, right? They have a lot of clarity. And in some ways, it's almost not emotionless, but they're very passionate about it. But they also just have... These are the two things. I wake up and I think about it and this is what I'm trying to do, especially in the early days. To use this framing, and you already talked about Neeva a little bit. Left Google after fifteen years to go. What are the one or two things that were going through your head that you wanted to tackle with Neeva? Because part of where I'm going with this, Sridhar, is it that you had the right idea but perhaps one year too early, two years too early? That's actually a hard way of thinking about the world, kind of like to kind of play the counterfactual back.
00:10:17 · Sridhar Ramaswamy
[00:10:17] S0: Yeah. I mean, to be brutally honest, I think that first of all, the idea was born abstractly that a search ads, I mean, an ad supported search model had reached sort of its useful limits. And there's nothing wrong with that conclusion. If you're not bound by ads, like obviously you can do a better job. I think the real sin of Neeva and my own arrogance in it was a lack of a clear roadmap on, okay, how? Like what must happen for there to be a much better search engine? It's not something that I should have figured out by building. It's too big a thing to build if you can conceptualize in the first place. It took the arrival of GPT-three nearly three years later for us to realize, ah, I want to click on a link, said no one. And so that's like the brilliant insight for what can AI powered by a search engine do because you've removed the click. You give the person what they are looking for in one shot. I think the lack of that clarity, there's a lot of detail about how... And sometimes you can draft onto a wave that comes that you are not quite expecting. That's all the, you know, you know, it's it's better to be lucky kind of story. But the fundamental sin of
00:11:52 · Aditya Agarwal, Sridhar Ramaswamy
[00:11:52] S1: Neeva was that lack of clarity for, okay, new search engine, but how? You know, arguably, the people who built GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT didn't really know what they had, right, until it kind of came out and we started using it and everyone was like, oh, this is actually the right way to kind of do everything from like Internet search to commerce and so on. So sometimes you also luck but also just serendipity. Just kind of get the stuff out there 100%. And then you see it takes on a life of its own. [00:12:24] S0: I'm not first of all, serendipity, absolutely. But execution still matters. Sure. If you go back and look at early twenty twenty three, how many people here remember the we will make Google Dance speech? [00:12:38] S1: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is from Right? [00:12:42] S0: This is from Satya? [00:12:43] S1: Yeah. Yeah.
00:12:43 · Aditya Agarwal, Sridhar Ramaswamy
[00:12:43] S1: Yeah. Yeah. [00:12:44] S0: Yeah. The opportunity was there for the taking. I'm sure most of you don't remember Sydney, but Sydney was way better than ChatGPT. ChatGPT would like spew out trash through much of 2023 anytime you asked a factual question. If you ask for a high query to do a great job, if you ask for a fact, it'll just like happily make it up. Sydney Bing chatbot had solved all of this. It had this fatal flaw that every interaction with it would take two minutes. They never fixed it. These are the people that are supplying capacity to open AI. They didn't see the opportunity. Bing itself makes 10 plus billion dollars. So they had a lot to lose by pushing on Sydney as the definitive search experience. But these are the people that actually created a much better search, not OpenAI, and they still blew it. So [00:13:34] S1: It's hard building new products. It's really hard. Before we kind of get into Snowflake a little bit, let's talk. I mean, I'm curious to get your take right now. We are... Is this kind of an interesting time to be an open source kind of like model right now? We obviously had GLM five two come out, which is getting great reviews. And in general, it feels as though that, yes, GPT 5.5 is exciting. Fable, whatever the... Whatever it is, you know, if I could use it, is sounds pretty cool. [00:14:02] S0: There's a line of thinking, by the way, that says that all model progress is just dependent on underlying hardware. And Fable and 5.6 are merely B200 models.