Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:54:44 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:54:44] S0: What would you say about him? [00:54:45] S2: I don't know that I have anything to add other than it's impossible for me to understand how one individual has been able to achieve. And I know he's a controversial figure, but I'm just looking at him through the lens of history and through an investor's lens. They have this phrase in Britain called gobsmacked. I'm completely gobsmacked by the scale of his achievements in a variety of different industries, which is the thing that sets him apart from others.
00:55:18 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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00:56:50 · Michael Moritz, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:56:50] S2: I don't know. If you go to China, you will find the founders of companies, or if you go to, I think probably South Korea, which I know far less about, you will find that the creators of one company have really imperial ambitions. And the creator of a company is along the way, or they take their one company and convert it into, look at Xiaomi, the manufacturers, these cars today that exceed the quality and performance and other attributes of Porsches, but began in 2010 as a phone maker, as an Android licensee, I think. Creative people or these rare, rare people armed with this extraordinary selection of power in the tools that are at their fingertips, or at the fingertips of the people who work for them, they're gonna be able to do a lot more in the future than somebody might have been able to do in the past. [00:57:46] S0: What is your model of this technology? Like as an observer of it, and I'm sure interested observer, how do you tell your family about it and what it will mean? [00:57:54] S2: Well, we don't talk about it. Well, not very much. [00:57:56] S0: It's kinda nice. [00:57:57] S2: People will always ask me, but I'm not a technologist. I'm not an AI sousse. [00:58:02] S0: But you were so good at seeing what was going to play out. Like if I think about so many of your investments, the thing seemed small, but it was then something that became like infrastructure that the, Instacart or something that the world was built on.
00:58:02 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:58:02] S0: But you were so good at seeing what was going to play out. Like if I think about so many of your investments, the thing seemed small, but it was then something that became like infrastructure that the, Instacart or something that the world was built on. [00:58:16] S2: Yeah, you're being too generous. I had very little sense that a company could grow at the rate that some of these artificial intelligence companies have grown at today. I mean, it's beyond comprehension. I remember many years ago, this was at the dawn of the internet or probably after the dawn of the internet. And Tom Siebel, who started a well known entrepreneur and had been seen as a very successful entrepreneur, I remember him wistfully saying one day, his company is sold for whatever it was, 10,000,000,000. And he said very wistfully, that was back when $10,000,000,000 was worth a lot of money. Today you look back and you say, whether it was Facebook's IPO or Google, was back when $100,000,000,000 was worth a lot of money. I think the idea that you can have a six year old company with trillions of dollars, nobody would have imagined that. [00:59:10] S0: Are you mostly excited about this technology
00:59:10 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:59:10] S0: Are you mostly excited about this technology [00:59:12] S2: or scared or both? I read what everybody else reads and have heard the boogeyman opine. I think I'm probably a bit more hopeful than others. Again, I'm not an expert. I don't mean to diminish the dark side of what may or may not happen with AI. I do take some solace in the fact that Armageddon was predicted or a form of Armageddon was predicted when the first nuclear bomb was exploded. And fortunately, here we are close to a century later and that hasn't occurred. Or if you read all the stuff from the mid 1970s about the genetic revolution and how there were gonna be scientists creating legions of individuals that they deem suitable to walk on the face of the earth. That hasn't occurred either. And today, even though I'm absolutely certain that there's gonna be enormous disruption, in particular job sectors caused by AI, I think that it's gonna create more jobs than are gonna be lost. Everyone can say that this time is different, but there hasn't been a huge improvement in technology that has in the last two or three centuries led to lower employment in the long term. I mean, there've been depressions and massive disruptions in sectors, but overall employment has grown. So I'm a little more optimistic. I think there'll be a lot of jobs that get created that we couldn't categorize today.
00:59:12 · Michael Moritz, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:59:12] S2: or scared or both? I read what everybody else reads and have heard the boogeyman opine. I think I'm probably a bit more hopeful than others. Again, I'm not an expert. I don't mean to diminish the dark side of what may or may not happen with AI. I do take some solace in the fact that Armageddon was predicted or a form of Armageddon was predicted when the first nuclear bomb was exploded. And fortunately, here we are close to a century later and that hasn't occurred. Or if you read all the stuff from the mid 1970s about the genetic revolution and how there were gonna be scientists creating legions of individuals that they deem suitable to walk on the face of the earth. That hasn't occurred either. And today, even though I'm absolutely certain that there's gonna be enormous disruption, in particular job sectors caused by AI, I think that it's gonna create more jobs than are gonna be lost. Everyone can say that this time is different, but there hasn't been a huge improvement in technology that has in the last two or three centuries led to lower employment in the long term. I mean, there've been depressions and massive disruptions in sectors, but overall employment has grown. So I'm a little more optimistic. I think there'll be a lot of jobs that get created that we couldn't categorize today. [01:00:46] S0: Because AI produces prodigious amounts of new text and writing so easily, I think the value of extraordinary writing is going up, that can cut through the CF slop. How would you define extraordinary writing, having done quite a bit of it yourself?