"The Cognitive Revolution"
00:38:15 · Prakash Narayanan, Samvit Ramadurgam
[00:38:15] S6: One and two billion tokens per day. [00:38:17] S3: Yeah. Product... Productively deployed. And so in terms of how we're building the company, this is like an agent native company. And so we have not only, like, coding agents, we have, like, coding agents that talk to each other. We have, like, an internal organization we've set up of, like, agents. So I have, like, a a chief marketing officer who reports to me, who's got, like, a bunch of different sub employees reporting to that AI. All of them are, like, long running agents that, like, talk to each other and talk to our coding agent sessions and listen to our team video calls. They're, like, are in the meetings with us and chime in and chat to build things for us while we're... Like, I had a meeting this morning where there's some issue with one of our dashboards. We just said, hey, agent. Like, fix it during the meeting. They got updated while we were talking. I think the gap between work and meetings is converging. It used to be that, like, hey. I wanna get out this meeting so I can get back to work and do real work. It's actually changing. There there is still an element of that for sure, but it's changing. It's changing because when we're in a meeting, if you have, like, a rigorous discussion, that's all creating, like, really rich context from different perspectives for an agent that then goes and, like... Then you can just have a have a debate and say, okay. Go do our conclusion with all the aspects that were mapped out there...
00:39:23 · Prakash Narayanan
[00:39:23] S6: In there. What do you feel... You know, you you had Forged Global, which you built in the kind of pre pre agentic era. What what what do you feel is like the big difference between that era and this era in terms of running a company?
00:39:36 · Samvit Ramadurgam
[00:39:36] S3: Here... Here's the metric we have. We're a small team. We're like five people, soon to be 10 people right now. And so the heuristic I have for hiring someone is, are they going to prompt me to do something different than we would have done before? We don't really... You don't really need people to do, like, work anymore for the kinds of work we're doing. You need people to have, like, visionary insight that adds to the DNA of the company, that really lets you do things that... Really, like, makes you do things that you wouldn't have thought to do otherwise, that no age... You can't prompt an agent to do it for you. So I think that we're not... We wanna build this company a way that's, like, building the machine that builds the machine and eventually have more and more agents to spin it up. So I I I think that, you know, there's there's a type of company you could start now that does with a dozen people, like previously took a thousand people. And so we... We'd like to be one of those companies and have more that go towards tokens just because let's just be really lean and move it, be really agile, and have, like, a concentration of of talent and vision. And it raises the bar too. Another thing that changes is that when you hire people now, the incremental value of interdisciplinary skills increases exponentially. So if someone is an engineer, that's valuable. Someone's an engineer and a product person and a designer, that's much more valuable than before. Because before, that person didn't have the ability to actually make use of the integration of these different skills. In the modern world, the more skills you can integrate into one system, the more you, like, coordinate all... If you cut out a lot of interhuman coordination by having it being done in your head, you can articulate a clear vision. To our agent systems, we have so much leverage that the the bottleneck is not execution manpower. The bottleneck is, like, clear articulation of good ideas. That's like the real bottleneck.
00:41:19 · Nathan Labenz
[00:41:19] S0: Great stuff. It's one of the biggest issues we've heard, so looking forward to following your progress. You gotta love the old act one is coordinating the global economy level of vision. That's really something else. Hey. We'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. The Cognitive Revolution is brought to you and powered by Tasklet. I've been running Tasklet agents for almost a year, and they've become a major part of how the show gets made. Before every recording, one agent researches the guest and sends me a suggested outline of questions, complete with links to all sources. Meanwhile, another agent scores the overwhelming number of pitches that I'm getting from PR firms. And that's really the core idea behind Tasklet. Run your business on agents by giving them real jobs to do on an ongoing basis. Setup is incredibly easy. Just describe the work in plain English, research a new sales lead, update the CRM, and draft a personalized reply. Tasklet connects to your business tools and can run around the clock on a schedule or when something happens, like a new email arrives. Each agent works with your tools and business context and remembers useful information across threads. You can also share agents, connections, and reusable skills with your team so the workflows that one person figures out become something the whole company can use. No developer needed. You decide what agents can do on their own and what needs your approval, and there are no per seat fees. You pay for usage, not for adding teammates. Start with one recurring job, like researching the people you're meeting, and then just keep building from there. Visit tasklet.ai and use code cogrev for $50 in free credits. That's code cogrev at tasklet dot a I. After Samvit left, with Microsoft offering buyouts to some 60,000 employees that week, Prakash argued the economy has to grow fast enough to absorb the white collar workers that agents displace. My reply? I mean, I can see the growth. I have a hard time seeing, you know, the, the job growth picking up enough to offset. I mean, you know, just look at what... He just said he had five people. Right? But wasn't that a number? Soon to be 10. He said, you know, we we could have a dozen person company that could do the work of a thousand. He said, you don't really need people to do work anymore.
00:43:53 · Nathan Labenz
Like, the only thing that matters now is people who will cause us to do something differently than we used to do it. There's just not that many of those roles. Right? Like, it's... How many people are you gonna have before you're just not gonna find that many more people that are gonna change the way you're gonna do things? It's like, that's just extreme... And that's also just not what people have been really developed for. You know? There's, of course, been, like, lip service given over time to the idea that good ideas can come from anywhere within companies. But, you know, the the up to potentially 25% of people who might soon be departing Microsoft, like, they primarily have not made their way there by causing the company to do something fundamentally different than it was otherwise gonna do. Right? They've made their way there by, like, executing tasks. Know. We just don't... I don't... I just don't see how so many people are going to pivot from task completion to, like, counterfactual, you know, we wouldn't have done this but for your unique Snowflake contribution. It's tough. I mean, how many people work in sales? Like, he's basically attacking all of sales. Prakash had a leading indicator for what the labs will ship next. Everything in it is his account.
00:45:19 · Prakash Narayanan
[00:45:19] S6: I'm in some WhatsApp groups for data brokers. And so the data brokers put out requests, requests for data. And essentially, whatever requests for data they're doing now, in about twelve months, that's gonna hit the product. So you can basically see the trajectory, because what these guys do is that they will go and they will buy up data from a company, and then they will take that data and they will create these training playgrounds for agents, and then those agents will learn in that training playground, and then that becomes product in the Frontier lab in about twelve to eighteen months. The labs are buying up entire company's data. So what I imagine is gonna happen in like twelve months, is they will give you a company in a box. You can buy yourself very easily, probably in like six months, you can buy yourself a drop shipping company in a box. Add capital, add one idea, I wanna focus on this, go. And it will do all of the Shopify ing, the advertising, the analysis, the market entry, the customer service, the returns, end to end. And you have a small number of decisions that come back to you, right? I can easily imagine someone running 10 of these kind of companies, but this idea to commercialization gap is enormous. It's enormous in sciences, it's enormous when you go to university like Stanford and you see the ideas, but you don't see them commercialized. And what I'm hoping is that you basically get the agents do the commercialization for you, which is kind of like the gritty entrepreneurial work that used to take a lot of time, calling up like... Calling up Walmart, getting to see the guy to show them your product, raising capital, etcetera. A lot of these things are driven by metrics anyway. A lot of these yes, no decisions at firms which are gonna make these investments are driven by metrics, number one, and number two vibes. You can supply the vibes. Like the metrics, maybe the AIs can supply the metrics. Right? Like, why do you need to be the one that supplies the metrics? Right?