The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:00:00 · Daniel Dines
[00:00:00] S0: In my opinion, even the labs in China that are building AI right now, I would classify them as the good guys. I've never hidden from my employees that there will be a transformation. Jensen is bound by the success of open source. Models are interchangeable, but the workflow, the map of work and the workflows around the map of work is where the the real value is.
00:00:24 · Harry Stebbings
[00:00:24] S1: This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now joining me in the hot seat today is one of my dearest friends and one of the greatest founders of the last decade, Daniel Dines, founder and CEO of UiPath. And today, we discuss the biggest questions. What on earth does pacing the frontier mean? Is it even possible? Will we replace humans with AI? What happens to the pipeline of talent if it narrows down and we have fewer and fewer juniors? What about human consciousness if we have recursive super intelligence really being as powerful as frontier model providers say? This is a truth telling myth busting conversation, if I can get myth busting out, and it's just a fantastic discussion between two old friends on what no one is talking about but everyone needs to know in the world of AI today. But before we dive into the show today, founders face a different set of challenges at every stage of growth. For Sid Shait, cofounder and CEO of dMatrix, JPMorgan delivered the guidance and expertise to help navigate what came next. He credits JPMorgan's high touch approach with supporting dMatrix as it grew and expanded internationally. Whether you're in the early days or expanding into new markets, JPMorgan helps startups navigate complexity with real confidence, offering personalized guidance and deep sector expertise. Find out how JPMorgan helps founders at jpmorgan.com forward slash grow without limits. JPMorgan is the bank of the innovation economy. While JPMorgan powers your finances, Asana keeps the work moving. Most companies have tried AI. Most aren't seeing results. Not because AI doesn't work, it's because AI hasn't reached the workflows yet. That's the gap Asana is built to close. Asana is the operating system for human agent teams, your easy button for AI productivity across every team. Ready to go AI teammates, prebuilt for marketing, ops, and IT. No prompt engineering, no setup. They show up where the work is happening, already onboarded in your workflows, ready to deliver. With Asana, your whole company can work on the same plan towards the same goal, whether you're a team of 10 or a team of 10,000. Asana, where humans and agents workflow together. Try it at asana.com. That's asana.com. While Asana aligns the road map, Base 44 helps you build faster. You have the idea, but with most AI tools, you hit a wall.
00:02:46 · Harry Stebbings, Daniel Dines
The setup, the config, the gap between what you pictured and what you actually ship. Well, Base 44 is where that wall disappears. You describe it? Yeah. Base 44 builds it. Apps, websites, AI agents, real working products built in minutes using nothing but plain language. And it's all batteries included. The back end, the database, the authentication, the hosting, the heavy lifting is handled, so you just really stay in the flow. This doesn't just take the busy work off your plate, but it gives you an advantage and pushes you past what you thought you could build alone. So in this market, fast is the baseline. To win, you just have to be first. Base 44 is that edge, the move that skips the troubleshooting and gets you straight to the breakthrough. Build your next thing at base44.com. That's base44.com. You have now arrived at your destination. Daniel, dude, it is so good to have you in the hot seat. Have been looking forward to this one. So thank [00:03:44] S0: you so much for joining me, dude. Likewise, dude. It's always a pleasure to be here, and it's the, I think, the hottest moment in technology. So I'm very excited to talk to you and get your perspective also on a lot of topics. [00:03:57] S1: I... It really is the most wild time right now. And so I wanna start. You've written a book. A lot of people write books. With the greatest of respect, you're my friend, and I care deeply about you. Why on earth did you decide to write a book as a public company CEO? No offense. You're not doing it for the royalties. Why did you decide to write a book?
00:03:57 · Harry Stebbings, Daniel Dines
[00:03:57] S1: I... It really is the most wild time right now. And so I wanna start. You've written a book. A lot of people write books. With the greatest of respect, you're my friend, and I care deeply about you. Why on earth did you decide to write a book as a public company CEO? No offense. You're not doing it for the royalties. Why did you decide to write a book? [00:04:18] S0: Man, I dreamt to write a book since I was a kid, and I discovered I have no talent. Now I got really a great opportunity. Claude and Chad GPT helped me a lot. They were my ghostwriters. And it was a good moment actually to put my own ideas in order. Because really when you write something, you get much more clear perspectives on what you are doing. So it was maybe almost six months effort. And I started with different threads of thought. One was, you know, what are the limitations of AI? Is there any durable limitation of AI? Or in a couple of years, there will be millions of Einstein's in a data center, and we can all go to play or do whatever we would like to do because the Einstein's will do the work for us. [00:05:11] S1: Can we just start on that then? I think it's nice to take it in kind of segments. Limitations of AI, Einstein's in data centers. How should we be thinking about that moving forwards?
00:05:11 · Harry Stebbings, Daniel Dines
[00:05:11] S1: Can we just start on that then? I think it's nice to take it in kind of segments. Limitations of AI, Einstein's in data centers. How should we be thinking about that moving forwards? [00:05:20] S0: When I heard about this statement that in a couple of years, we will have millions of Einstein in a data center, look, I was really concerned. And Dario is a guy that I highly respect, and he's highly successful. So I was thinking, man, what does it mean for us? What does it mean for... Can I hire one of these Einstein, put it in a laptop somehow, assign, you know, an enterprise account, a Slack account, and and I ask, do my job or do whatever job in the enterprise? It seems that reality is maybe different. And probably Dario wanted to say that we'll have millions of entities that will have the... Some of the reasoning powers of Einstein, which I agree, but not Einstein's as a person's, not Einstein's that are capable of learning on the job. Because do you agree that one of the major expectation when you hire someone is that they will hire on the job? There is no manual that a company has to give a new employee. This is exactly how you do your job from end to end. So we expect that [00:06:27] S1: No. I think humans do learn on the job, and they do improve on the job as do models. So similar there, except humans get tired. Humans want more money. Humans want culture. Humans can be toxic. Humans are difficult to manage. I'll take the AI any day of the week, please.
00:06:27 · Harry Stebbings, Daniel Dines
[00:06:27] S1: No. I think humans do learn on the job, and they do improve on the job as do models. So similar there, except humans get tired. Humans want more money. Humans want culture. Humans can be toxic. Humans are difficult to manage. I'll take the AI any day of the week, please. [00:06:44] S0: If AI can work as well as a human hurry, but you say that AI learn on the job. AI can create a notepad on the job, a scratch pad where they can memorize some of the policies on the job. But AI doesn't alter its weights on the job, in the way humans are transformed by a job. This is a huge difference. Let me give you an example. You have two chefs. One chef twenty years has done only Japanese food, the other only Italian food. And you give them one recipe. They will create different foods. So it's not that you can write down your enterprise on a sheet of paper. It's much more complex. It's becoming. It's like, think about if I give to someone the ability to read all the books about chess, do you think you will become a grandmaster without playing, without losing, without going through all of this process? Probably not. If I have you watch all the videos about skiing, are you becoming a skier? No. You are not becoming a skier.