00:08:25 · Michelle Gilmore, Sachin
[00:08:25] S1: It's a really good point. I was on a panel a few weeks ago with Steve Yeah. At the AFR Summit, and we were talking about domain expertise as a as a moat and the notion of that. And I think the investment that you raised is a really good example because Mira raised 2,000,000,000, Relevance, pre strategy, pre product, pre plan. Yep. But her herself, like, she's a very good, safe bet if you're an early stage VC. And let's let's be honest, they are betting. Mhmm. Any that say that aren't, they aren't. I'm lying. Right? They are betting, early stage particularly. And so she's a she's a pretty good bet. So her current plan will probably not likely land where they sat in the meetings and defined it to be. But will she do something meaningful? Absolutely. I think the certainty is probably higher. It's a crazy amount of money, but I think that what's interesting is the domain expertise bet. It's the founder bet. It's the pedigree bet in terms of capability and certainty of being able to do something amazing, which is incredibly hard. [00:09:42] S2: And just to build on there, I think it's also a bet on her ability to attract talent. Like, if Zuckerberg is paying anywhere between 10 and 100,000,000 for top AI engineers, I think a lot of them would want to work for Mira regardless. And so like then quickly a billion or 2,000,000,000 doesn't seem like that much money if she has the ability
00:09:42 · Sachin, Adam Miller, Michelle Gilmore
[00:09:42] S2: And just to build on there, I think it's also a bet on her ability to attract talent. Like, if Zuckerberg is paying anywhere between 10 and 100,000,000 for top AI engineers, I think a lot of them would want to work for Mira regardless. And so like then quickly a billion or 2,000,000,000 doesn't seem like that much money if she has the ability [00:09:59] S5: to attract those top researchers. But how I'm really curious, like, how do we justify the economics of these valuations? And I guess my sense is that what people in AI are saying is that AI is going to rebuild whole industries. And so that means the TAM on offer is just incredibly big. It's like the whole economies are being rebuilt. So you can actually imagine like multiple trillion dollar company, multiple trillion dollar companies coming out of this. Like, is is that how you justify? [00:10:26] S1: I... I'm I'm gonna start by saying I'm not sure I accept the premise of the question of that we have to justify it. Early stage VC, like, when have we justified this? So firstly, I'm gonna flip it and say early stage VC isn't justifiable, and that's the very notion of betting, sometimes mostly with other people's money. And they've already said goodbye to that money. And most of them are, statistically speaking, going to fail. And, really, what they're betting on is the possibility. [00:11:01] S5: Mhmm.
00:11:01 · Adam Miller, Michelle Gilmore, Georgie Healy
[00:11:01] S5: Mhmm. [00:11:01] S1: Right? The possibility that there are enough factors that exist here. So I'm not sure we can rationalize or justify valuations that are created for the purpose of a construct that is they see in this context. But perhaps we could talk about the... Is it proportional to the opportunity that exists before us, which is global, which is a different pace than we've ever seen, which is talent being created faster than we've ever seen it before? What do you guys think about that? [00:11:36] S4: Microsoft's a trillion dollar company. It owns OpenAI. I think it could be a trillion dollar company. I think there could be multiple trillion dollar companies from AI. And I was a VC during a similar period. What did we see come through? Crypto? The metaverse? Some other bullshit? I'm not surprised they had down rounds, but AI, I feel that we can all agree on, has already transformed our lives. I would be surprised if we didn't have multiple trillion dollar companies.
00:12:08 · Daniel Palmer
[00:12:08] S3: I also think something we're seeing here that's potentially a little different from other periods of software is that a lot of the things being built now, I have a platform level where the TAM is massive, or they're sort of fundamentally shifting very verticalised industries in ways that make products that are actually way more horizontal, whether intentional or not, and therefore the average market I think these companies are addressing is actually a lot bigger than we're used to in VC and in tech recently. And so I think that makes a really big difference. I also want to add like, I think a really good point about betting on people, like we discussed earlier with Miro, that's particularly unique to AI, is that we're so early in this technology that the use cases are not actually clearly defined yet. I think even in Agencik AI, which my company focuses on entirely and has for multiple years now, still we're very slowly discovering the really key use cases for authentic automation. And so I think it is really important to have a good team, the right company set up that can move and adapt quickly, and you don't know what big new models coming out tomorrow, or new NCP self framework is coming out tomorrow, and so investing in people and investing in companies that have proven their ability to be really good at executing and really good at being nimble, I think is more important than ever in this current period.
00:13:49 · Adam Miller
[00:13:49] S5: Thanks for tuning in so far. We make these documentaries to uplift and celebrate startup culture in Australia. But apart from the documentaries, we've actually got a special offer for the founders that are tuning in up to six months free of Notion Business if you follow our link. This is the new Notion dashboard, which is tailored just for startups. It's got pre built AI agents, OKRs, calendar scheduling, product roadmaps, investor update schedules. This is all situated in one place just for start ups. We run our start up on Notion literally almost our whole start up and it's quite a lot of fun. You should too! So hit the link at ntn.so/satinandadam for up to six months free with a Notion business plan. This could save you up to 12 ks of tool costs. Which startup founder doesn't want that? And now, back to the video.
00:14:36 · Sachin
[00:14:36] S2: I think something that Adam and I have spoken a lot about is it's probably one of the most intense times ever to be a founder because like in no time in history have things changed this fast. Like new models come out and sometimes it changes a bit like a lot of businesses get eradicated, lot of businesses get built. In this kind of context of how we build great companies in AI, I think there's still a lot of question marks about where value will accrue. But I think a lot of people have started to kind of maybe confirm the thesis that a lot of the foundation of AI, the price will trend towards electricity. And a lot of interesting stuff will be built on the application layer. I still like, in my opinion, I think these companies are still going to be big companies in their own right. But what do we think about this thesis of AI becomes like electricity, and then it enables all these new worlds like light bulbs or electric cars or, you know, the things that electricity does?