Prof G Markets
00:52:15 · Misha Laskin
[00:52:15] S4: I think they're gonna do just fine. These are incredible companies that have scaled at an unprecedented rate and keep discovering new breakthroughs in AI. So, I think that you can be in a world where... I mean, it's positive sum world where it's a this and that. There'll be open model companies, and kind of builders on top of open models, and distributors that are successful, right? And there will be closed model companies that are successful, and you have a rental and ownership market. And just because ownership is starting to grow in its demand, doesn't mean that everyone will then own a house. There'll be still people who are renting, still people who are owning. Think that... Mean, OpenAI has open sourced models in the past. I think that when something is not the core strategy of the company, you tend to not pay as much attention to it, and you tend to open source maybe like a lesser version of the thing that you're actually kind of monetizing. And that's kind of what we've seen from open source launches, Google has done a lot for the open source community with the Gemma launches, but it's a very different model class than the Gemini models, similar when OpenAI launched GPTOSS. So, right, it's very different from the class of actual internal models they're sitting on. So I don't see that strategy necessarily changing for them, because I think that they have so much opportunity ahead of them just chipping away at their current business that I don't think they might, but I think they're also gonna do just fine.
00:53:54 · Ed Elson, Misha Laskin
[00:53:54] S2: Reflection has been in the news recently. Reportedly, NVIDIA was in talks to acquire your company or at least deepen their relationship, deepen their investment. NVIDIA is already one of one of, Reflection's largest shareholders. If you can speak to that, that would be great. But more generally, what's next for Reflection? What is the plan over the next few years? [00:54:20] S4: The goal for the company is to continue building great open models, deploy them into customer segments, into enterprise, public sector sovereign, and build a generational company around this. And we hope that we're not kind of the only ones that... We hope to see an ecosystem of open model builders come out of The States this year, next year, that rivals... That that is comparable, right, in quality to the Chinese open model ecosystem. I think the thing that makes China so powerful in its open model build out is that it's not just one company. It's a handful of companies, and it's a whole ecosystem. And then fact that one keeps leapfrogging the other, ensures that kind of as a composite, there's always great models coming out from there. So we want Reflection to be a standalone leader in this ecosystem. But we wanna see a whole ecosystem of such companies emerge in the West. We don't really comment on media speculation, but the plan for the company is to continue building great models and basically distribute them into enterprise and public sector and sovereign accounts.
00:54:20 · Misha Laskin, Ed Elson
[00:54:20] S4: The goal for the company is to continue building great open models, deploy them into customer segments, into enterprise, public sector sovereign, and build a generational company around this. And we hope that we're not kind of the only ones that... We hope to see an ecosystem of open model builders come out of The States this year, next year, that rivals... That that is comparable, right, in quality to the Chinese open model ecosystem. I think the thing that makes China so powerful in its open model build out is that it's not just one company. It's a handful of companies, and it's a whole ecosystem. And then fact that one keeps leapfrogging the other, ensures that kind of as a composite, there's always great models coming out from there. So we want Reflection to be a standalone leader in this ecosystem. But we wanna see a whole ecosystem of such companies emerge in the West. We don't really comment on media speculation, but the plan for the company is to continue building great models and basically distribute them into enterprise and public sector and sovereign accounts. [00:55:36] S2: For anyone listening to this who is thinking about entrepreneurship, thinking about AI, you've built an incredibly valuable company, $25,000,000,000 as the most recent round. You've worked at Google. I mean, you have a lot of expertise in this area. Any advice for any younger people listening to this, thinking about entrepreneurship, and maybe starting a company themselves?
00:55:58 · Misha Laskin
[00:55:58] S4: The biggest learning that I've had, and it's pretty straightforward, is to have a deep sense of what it is that you're interested in, and it's okay if you don't know what that thing is now, and there's no rush to jump into building companies. Just building a company for the sake of building a company is not a good reason. Building a company for, I think, financial reason, there are plenty of way better, less risky ways to make money. So, it has to come from something that you're deeply interested in, that you're going to commit a lot of time to, and see through even when things are tough, and so for me, the journey of getting to this company was preceded by studying physics for a long time, for years, developing an interest in science there, discovering this interest in AI in the mid-2010s, as deep neural networks were starting to work, going in and working at the frontier, really understanding the frontier of something, right? And so understanding what is a problem set, finding a business partner that I trust fully, and that I was very kind of excited to build something with, because we already had worked together very closely on projects before that. So, right, I would say that if someone is considering starting a company, I'd advise it not to be rushed in the sense that, oh, I need to start a company for the sake of starting it. It should just come from a place of deep interest and commitment, and you'll kind of... People will feel when it's right. You can't kind of... We all have our own BS detectors, and maybe there's a quote by Feynman that the easiest person to fool is yourself. And so I think that maybe the advice is not to fool yourself into building a company, but only do it if it's coming from a place of deep interest in in that space and idea.
00:58:05 · Ed Elson, Misha Laskin, S0, S1
[00:58:05] S2: Misha Laskin is the cofounder and CEO of Reflection. Misha, we appreciate your time. [00:58:10] S4: Ed, thanks for having me. [00:58:16] S2: This episode was produced by Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our research associates are Dan Shalan, Kristen O'Donohue, and our senior producer is Claire Miller. Thank you for listening to the Prof G Markets Founder Series. We'll see you next month with another Founder story. [00:58:41] S0: You've been asked to run the company's social channels, but company content plays by its [00:58:46] S1: own set of rules. [00:58:47] S0: It needs a logo in the first three seconds, but it can't feel like an ad. It needs subtitles, except when it doesn't. It needs to run at two times speed and deliver a complex message Simply, of course, within nine by 16. Thankfully, your company has Canva, so you can easily edit your video and every version of it. What will you Canva today?