00:29:03 · Eric Newcomer, Yoni Rechtman
[00:29:03] S0: She's a political... [00:29:04] S1: It's like it's like not my like vibe and aesthetic, but like she's fucking knocking it out of the park. And and part of it is like she has been very, very... She had a really hardcore message discipline about not talking about how much money they've raised, but instead talking about the outcomes and what they're spending the money on, which is, like, you know, improvements to the subway system and, hey, look at all of the outcomes we're achieving in terms of, like, shorter commute times and lower air pollution, and less noise pollution, and you know, more shoppers on the street, and you know, all of these things are like awesome and real and we have proof of, and like it is just that is a positive way of talking about government intervention that is exciting, and you make a case for how you're gonna make people's lives better instead of making a case about how you're gonna make their enemies' lives worse. [00:29:54] S0: All right, so talking about the business of venture capital. Talk a little bit Oh, that? Yeah, our job, you know, your job and sort of the main thing [00:30:03] S1: I write about. I think probably like all of, you know, the rest of my team is They're skipping to this moment. Yeah, they're fucking God, he's done. [00:30:11] S0: We'll have a little link where people can just join us. Like, oh, yeah. They're done with politics. Talk about business. Yoni and [00:30:17] S1: Eric living out for twenty minutes.
00:30:17 · Yoni Rechtman, Eric Newcomer
[00:30:17] S1: Eric living out for twenty minutes. [00:30:20] S0: Give us give us your articulation in classic spicy slow fashion of what Slow's Slow Ventures philosophy is.
00:30:28 · Yoni Rechtman
[00:30:28] S1: Yeah. Look, we are a very decentralized partnership, so it's four partners investing in seed fund, and I think we often... It's like 80% alignment with the last 20% being language. What I always say is like, we need to find really awesome people with weird takes on important stories, and it's... That's it. The the really awesome people thing is like self evident. We talk about what awesome people look like, what really, really exceptional people look like, but by and large, everyone buys the premise. You need awesome people. I think where most people in venture get wrong is they just look for really cool stories, and they forget the second part of it, which is like weird takes they're on. So my belief very deeply is that we need to find things that are a little bit like off kilter, out of center, obvious, non consensus. Basically, need things that are like unique inputs to achieve unique n of one outputs, and like that's it. That's the entire business. There's nothing else. If you believe in power laws, like don't invest in things that are obvious or same same. So I am a generalist. I think I can find those kinds of weird takes and and important stories in a lot of different places, but really try and, like, constrain myself to companies that can sort of be articulated through these, like, big if true statements, or really feel like when you first hear it, you're like, that's fucking stupid. And then if you think about it for a little while longer, it kind of starts to... It grows on you. There's a creeping realization. So how do
00:32:02 · Eric Newcomer, Yoni Rechtman
[00:32:02] S0: you invest around AI? Yeah. Are you in foundation models? [00:32:06] S1: No. No, we're not in any foundation Big mistake. [00:32:09] S0: What? That's a big mistake on some level, alright. Look, on
00:32:12 · Yoni Rechtman
[00:32:12] S1: some level, yeah, we probably should have done it, it's a great trade, we should have done it and sold, and you know, we could have, whatever. We didn't. Sometimes maybe we're a little bit too like honest and principled for our own good, and if we see something we think doesn't make sense, we just don't do it. But no, we're not in any foundation model. Models. So I am at this point much more interested in the like second order effects of AI. So rather than saying like, how do we like max tokens, what happens after we do? Let's just like accept as a general premise that like, yeah, it's like, this is a real thing. It's gonna keep getting better. It's gonna wind up in more parts of the economy, like not without some pain and struggle and strife, but like it's gonna wind up in more parts of the economy. What happens then? And I think to my point on like, okay, do you like improvement in deployment of AI is a really important story? Like, but the most basic version of that is like, well, I'm just going to make the capabilities better. I think that's the wrong approach. I think honestly already at this point, we're on the wrong side of some scaling laws around this. We're like, and frankly, a lot of even feels unnecessary. I think that all of the model development could stop tomorrow and we would have like ten or fifteen or twenty five years of really big important work in front of us. And we have some evidence for that, which is that like, you know, we're still in, we, like the whole economy, is still in the move to the cloud. Right. Like twenty five years later. Right. You know? So this is not gonna happen overnight, but like what are then the things that only make sense or only possible in that world? What are either the types of problems that AI creates and new businesses will need to solve, or the types of opportunities that only become available once like the capabilities have gotten
00:33:59 · Eric Newcomer, Yoni Rechtman
[00:33:59] S0: there So give me some examples. [00:34:00] S1: Sure. So I think throughout like, probably the number one feature of, like, what AI is really good at is inverting any kind of system that relies on, like, scarce production and abundant attention. So, like, things like writing, phone calls, hiring, coding, all of these are things which previously we had pretty, like, limited ability to produce. You can only make so many phone calls. You could only write so many lines of code. And we have entire social systems built on the fact that you have like effectively unlimited bandwidth to like review and process those things that have happened, those things that have been produced. That is very obviously reversed. So like what are some of the consequences of that? Well, like everything is slopped now. Like sure, yes, but specifically, like, you know, even as the amount of code getting generated is going up in large organizations, large companies, velocity is going down because now code review has become this like unbelievable bottleneck, and like all of our system of... [00:35:09] S0: Every AI hater is just gonna be like, oh, they're just, they're pumping out tons of words, but it's not valuable, it's creating problems