0:00We may [music] never achieve a utopia, but it is worthy and worth it to attempt. Everything that's [music] awesome in my life is kind of a cult. We had to go over to the Windows team. They wouldn't [music] reply to our emails. They wouldn't fix our bugs. And we had to go over there with a baseball bat. An org like Microsoft can't. [music] Yes.
0:20And every startup must.
0:26Gary, so good to have you, brother.
0:28Thank you so much for joining us today.
0:30Thanks for having me.
0:31Amazing, dude. Well, we're going to cover a bunch of the basics, then we're going to get into the advanced topics to make sure that we uh kind of match the the curiosity, ambition of our audience.
0:40Does that work? Awesome. Well, dude, maybe talk to me a bit about the beginning of your journey 2003. You know, it feels like what's under discussed is founder psychology and then sort of Silicon Valley culture and how the two are connected. What did it feel like when you first got in the game back in 2003 coming out of Stanford? I guess I wanted to work at startups but uh 2003 was funny in that like web 1.0 had just ended like the you know NASDAQ had just crashed and uh actually there were no jobs that I could even find in the Bay
1:09Area other than you know working at GAP IT and so the two job offers I had were uh Microsoft for Windows Mobile which I was pretty excited about or Expedia.
1:19Yeah. I you know I had student loans and I you know while I wanted to start a company I just you know felt like I needed to get a job and then actually there were no jobs in the base. It was like kind of hard to believe actually uh that moment was so bleak and then right before web 2.0 it felt like it might have been the end of tech. Huh.
1:39Right. A little bit. Yeah. That's that was the vibe and then you know at the end of the day like that's the boom that's the bust. Like these things sort of happen over and over again. So at the time did it feel high status to work in tech or on startups?
1:51Not at all. I mean you know it's sort of lost to the sands of time but um I was still excited about tech though. Um you know I had done a lot of web programming and then one of my regrets actually was um I was sort of chasing what was hot instead of what was clearly the thing I knew. Mark Zuckerberg was probably doing face mash um around then around 2003 and then Facebook didn't even exist yet um and I was getting out of web programming
2:20at exactly the wrong time because it felt like that was the smart thing to do.
2:24Yeah, it was smart and you know I mean this is true now. Um you know in in front of all these people at startup school uh you know I sort of started this don't lar um meme.
2:37I saw that. Uh, but I think like that's that's embedded in this idea that like you should just be earnest. Yeah.
2:44And then you shouldn't follow what the crowd is saying, right? Like at that moment people said the web was dead, but that was sort of the perfect time to work on web and social and things like that. Um, and you know, I didn't do it.
2:56I I ran off and said like, "Oh, well, the next hot thing will be mobile." So, I wanted to work at Windows Mobile, which was true, but um why I give up like the thing that could have been the next thing?
3:09What I love about what you're saying though is often when we hear earnest, we think naive, but actually what it sounds like you're saying is there's like earnestness is a sort of result of maturity and courage. Is that courage is actually I think the right thing.
3:23Yes. Like if you know something, it sort of if someone just like comes and contradicts you or even if like a blog post or like someone on Twitter uh contradicts you, you're like, "Well, I I don't I don't agree with that because I believe my own direct experience."
3:40Yes, I know that I'm not a time traveler because if I was a time traveler, I would have I would have sent a message back to myself and said, "Just stay on working on web stuff." Like you literally have um five years of experience on top of everyone else. Like you could do an end run around everyone. Like you could have built like any kind of social software.
3:59But instead I was um you know I was 22 so I was like being whipped around by uh whatever I could read in the Wall Street Journal. And you know I the the classic question I'm sure you get that you know all investors get all the time is what's hot and what should I work on, right? And that's the wrong question to ask. Like the right question is like what are you interested in? What do you know uniquely? And so that's like, you know, one of a great many mistakes I
4:28made in my career. I feel like I'm a little bit uh doomed to be the first principal storyteller of uh all the mistakes that I made in my career.
4:37I think that it's it's very inspiring for founders to hear your own journey and your own mistakes and then not feel so bad about the ones that we've all made along the way. Yeah.
4:47I mean, maybe talk about the culture of Silicon Valley today. You know, on one hand, maybe it was despondent 20 years ago. It's crazy to think that was just 23 years ago that you're talking about.
4:56Um, now you think we would all be incredibly elated. Yet, there's this undercurrent. Maybe it's the laring thing that you mentioned. You know, it's being outside of the light cone, the permanent underclass. Where does that come from? Do you think there's any truth in it? Talk through that.
5:11I mean, I get it. Like, there's just more competition than ever. And then um I think maybe it's just that we're spending too much time in distribution.
5:22I think Chris Dixon talks about this all the time where um you know you're in the idea maze but you the cool parts of the idea maze are like the weird fringe parts actually. It's always like uh what is a toy like? And that's the pattern in Silicon Valley over and over again that bears repeating, right? Yes.
5:39Like the idea that you could have a computer on every desk in every home.
5:43Yeah. uh today is like of course like that's what's come to pass but the people who created that thing they were fringe weirdo punks totally yes they were outsiders I mean homebrew computer club was not where you were getting laid yeah that's true [laughter] you just were like following this weird obsession that you know actually I want my own computer and I think Chris has said this too I think a good measure of how interesting the thing is is can you find the edge and for the most interesting things you
6:12typically can't even if you find the edge of the conversation you can't find the intellectual edge which I think is a very good sign I mean I had this growing up in the 80s maybe you had this too there was sort of one way to be cool in grade school and probably in high school and maybe when you got to college you kind of found your people and now I think one of the miracles of being internet native generation is that people find their people much sooner you find your people on Reddit you find your people on you know X or Insta or whatever your network is oh yeah I mean that's the coolest thing
6:42today like there's probably a subreddit, there's probably um a part of X like you know some part of teapot that is uh you know this part of Twitter that um is just your set of super weird but like really really into that thing and you can find your tribe more or less instantly.
7:01Yeah. Yeah. Can you talk a bit about the culture of Silicon Valley? felt like 10 years ago it was sort of, you know, it was lower status to work on something like Palunteer either because people were nervous about doing things that were too much in the national interest or because it was sort of dismissed as a services business. Now it's clearly one of the most important companies in the world with one of the most compelling CEOs. You were early there. What did it feel like? Why did you do it?
7:24Yeah, I mean uh I have a worse story than that. I have another mistake story. Okay. where um uh Joe Londale and Stefan Cohen uh were my fraternity brothers at Stanford FAI.
7:38Uh and then I had a job and they were like interns at Peter Teal's hedge fund.
7:43And uh Peter has this thing where you're supposed to like you know when you start a thing you write down on a piece of paper all the smartest people uh who you need to go and hire and like get to join you. And so, uh, they said, "Oh, both of them were like, oh, let's go get Gary. He's up in Seattle." Like, they flew me down to have dinner with him.
8:03And he said, you Peter said, "I'm so sure this is the right thing for you. Like, here's a check for 70 grand." That was how much I made at Microsoft at the time. Yeah. And I said, "Thank you very much, Mr. Teal, but I might get promoted to level 60 this year."
8:16Which I did, [laughter] but uh I think it's like that was like a$2 billion two to four billion dollar mistake at this point. No, no.
8:24Um, and I think about it all the time. Like basically I did the same thing again. It was like the same thing that got me to go work on Windows Mobile instead of um just staying on the thing that I knew and loved. Yeah.
8:38Uh it happened again. I was like, well, I don't know, you know, I was working backwards from the map instead of looking down at the territory and saying like, oh, well, these are the smartest people I know. Like Joe and Stefan were among the smartest people I'd ever met.
8:53Um and you know if not them like who was I gonna you know be a co-founder with like it just you know the universe was saying like this is the thing you need to do but all I cared about was what was cool, what was hot, what would a really good investor say. Um and the thing is like they're like going off of uh a map. Yeah. And like you can see, you can look down, you can look around, you can like have first principles knowledge of what's going on.
9:21Um and you know what they were doing is like they were going to governments and three-letter agencies. Yeah.
9:27And it was clear that um the things that really good computer scientists in Palo Alto could do and create. Yes.
9:35Uh DC did not have access to that. And you know, it's funny how much that thing that they had identified, like Peter and Joe and Stefan and later Alex Karp identified.
9:46Um that like runs through almost everything that we do um in Silicon Valley. It's just like uh the future is already here. It's not evenly distributed. Yes. And then that's where like first principles knowledge or like just viewing the world as a scientist is actually very useful. Yes.
10:07Um and what a scientist does is you know sure there's published papers but you go and you examine all the truths and what you find is that once you go down into the experiment or you go down and talk to the first party people who are experiencing experiencing a thing yes um then you learn secret knowledge then you have nosis and so uh you know from Palunteer I definitely learned that uh everything that's awesome in my life is kind of a cult. Yeah.
10:36That starts with some sort of truth or belief that flies in the face of an orthodoxy which is very punk actually.
10:44Yes. Yes. To dude that's very Rick Rubin would approve.
10:47Yeah. Yeah. Well actually what I love about you're saying is that there's a beautiful truth in the fact that you've talked through some of these maybe tragic misses but you know the lessons are courage the lessons are earnestness right the lessons are when your instincts are pulling you to work with a set of people. So, so maybe talk a little bit about, you know, we talk a lot about how Silicon Valley and the magic is it takes outsiders and turns them into insiders. And I feel like YC is the ultimate distillation of that.
11:13You know, you go from being two founders perhaps from a foreign country to two people with YC on their LinkedIn and everybody now knows what that means.
11:21So, talk about how that happens. Is it a process? Is it a mindset? And how has it changed over the years? Um, I mean I have to credit Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston and the original founders including Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris. I mean uh what Paul and Jessica figured out was that there are lots and lots of really smart people who do not get access um to Silicon Valley. I mean, I think in the past you had to like go to the right schools, you had to know
11:51the right people sort of, and if you didn't, you'd come to Silicon Valley and you try to get invited to the right parties. There's like a social network that you had to crack.
11:59Um, and then, uh, at YC, we have a porative for that whole scene, which it's like we call them sceners actually.
12:07Uh, which is I mean, it's sort of a nod to like what you used to have to do. Um, and some people still believe that's like how you do it. Um, all they did was say, you know what, like here's a here's a website, here's 12 questions. Later, we added like a one minute video and, uh, people on the other end who are builders are going to try to give you a fair shake. And so, today we have, uh, you know, 16 equal partners, including myself and all of us like went through
12:34YC and had successful outcomes. And um I think there's something valuable to that that just you know welcome to welcome to Silicon Valley. We just um celebrated uh 7,000 people coming to San Francisco. The majority of them the very first time they came. It's you know our startup school every single year.
12:55We kind of call it like Birthright but for tech.
12:57It looked like the Roman coliseum dude.
13:01Yeah. So, you know, I think that that's the coolest thing about Silicon Valley. like you sort of it sort of doesn't matter where you're from or who you are.
13:09It just actually matters what your ideas are and can you execute. The only other thing that I'd say like why see people get that a lot of people don't get is um a community of people who you can be super real with. It's like if you go to a tech crunch event, you look to the left, you look to the right and it's like are you really going to be able to tell them anything real? like you're going to hold your cards pretty close and uh you know you're going to say how you doing and they're going to say killing it and then they're going to ask back and like oh I'm also killing it. I
13:37mean honestly founders really need that like it's very solitary. It's um you know on the day that you lose your best customer on the day that your best engineer quits like who you going to call and if you have no one like I mean the day your co-founder loses hope and you're not allowed to right that's a tough day you know talk about the historical upside sort of surprises of like founder types business types and the downside surprises what have you learned through YC I mean what's we're sort of in the middle of a big transformation now I
14:06think um for the longest time we really really believed that you needed co-founders And I think that everything else being equal, having co-founders is net really, really good. Totally.
14:17Um I think some of this is like the beginning of a cult like you know a cult where there's only one person and that person can't convince anyone else to join them is like you know worse than a cult is just like a crazy person actually.
14:30Right. Right. Right.
14:31Um I think this is like an old Derek Civers TED talk right where it's like uh yeah one person dancing in a field is a crazy person. Yes. But um you know it's really the second person [laughter] who like gets up.
14:45And joins that person like then you what you find is you know suddenly 10 people are there dancing then it's a party. Yeah. That's literally the TED talk.
14:54And um I think there's something to that. But you know I think what's happening right now with vibe coding and agentic coding Yeah. Um, literally any given person could be 400 of that person like from two years like even like nine months ago. Um, you can be a multiple of yourself.
15:18Yeah. And so do you think founders are more ambitious than they've ever been?
15:21They should be. Yes.
15:22Um, if anything like that's the number one thing that people should do.
15:26Is realize that like don't chase your success or my success. Like that was, you know, when we were coming up like the game done changed, you [laughter] know, like you actually you can't just do a SAS thing like you know I was just doing an analysis on like pure SAS and I was like oh shoot like you know a pure like per seat SAS thing like not totally clear it will exist in another five or 10 years like it's perfectly fine as a wedge but if you're doing that now in 2026 like
15:55you better hope that that's like a leap to some sort of moat around data or network effects or something else, right?
16:01Um, and that's like, you know, if you if we would time travel to like even two years ago, it's like SAS was God, you know, like the 1020x like next 12 months uh revenue multiple was like, you know, iron law.
16:16And like it's hard to believe it was like, oh yeah, no, that's not true at all now.
16:20Well, all this, you know, a related thing that I love is that KOD is no longer precious. Mhm.
16:25My god. Like the things that we had to go through to get something shipped. And that's why you had to have this like sense that what you were making was important with a capital I. And that actually flies against the kind of beautiful truth we were just talking about because often earnestness isn't obviously important with a capital I. So you pursue things that seem important when most of the most important things actually start out seeming actually unimportant.
16:48I know you've been all over this with GStack and GBrain. And you know when you started out to build those things with the intention to like contribute to the community or just explore your interests.
16:57Oh, I was just messing around like you know uh what was it? I think Boris Churnney came on Lite Cone podcast right and I just felt like the urge to you know and a bunch of our mutual friends like all of them uh basically just started coding again and I was like oh something's happening I'd better start. Um and then initially it was just messing around. It's like, oh, I mean, what would it be like to do an like make an office hours? Yeah.
17:23Um, and then the craziest thing there was like we had just started um like recording all of our office hours actually and then I could I had like a few months of data and there were like very clear things that um the YC partners used as like rhetorical devices or ways to like draw out like a step function in your ambition. Mh.
17:46[clears throat] Um, and then what's funny is I have this markdown file that is basically like the perfect script on how to advise founders to like increase their ambition.
17:56And then I actually had to go into Claude and I said reduce this by 90%. Reduce the strength and intensity of this prompt by 90%. And then I open sourced that [laughter] cuz some of it is like you got to come and do YC 100%.
18:11Of course. Of course. Well, we'll take your five. Okay. Thank you.
18:14Yeah. We can't give away the crown jewels like for free.
18:18This just a taste. The first one's free, you know.
18:21Well, dude, Kevin caught this. I think it was a Gstack or GBrain. We're deep in the open source. You had said, "Please apply to YC."
18:27Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But only if you're a top 10% user of cloud code.
18:32Like based on whether you're um thinking about users, like thoughtful about your product and your design, like it's not not everyone gets that message actually.
18:41Yes. Yes. Well, dude, I love that you're doing it. And I love that you're doing it so publicly because I think this comes back to the earnestness point which is the whole thing about building intuition at this moment is just using the technology.
18:51You know and I think that there's this feeling like oh how can I possibly catch up or there's so much seriousness around it. It's like no just use every model and build completely trivial things for no other reason to have a chassis with which to learn the new technology. I think the most exciting thing is like you can just have ideas and then in the past it's like oh well I had to be the PM let me write the spec like let me make sure I have you know one or two engineers like oh how are we going to do QA like there's just all this stuff that
19:20you used to have to worry about and then now it's like no slash QA like it's done like you know yeah we tested it it's good like we have unit tests like 90% test coverage you know totally you know it's like arranging your zen rock garden it's just fun to do it and the like the output doesn't matter that much which is why everybody talks about coding agents but very few people are showing their work.
19:41Oh yeah because a lot of it is sort of low stakes work and I think that's beautiful and okay.
19:45No I mean and then I think it's crazy to what degree like suddenly agency and taste like off the charts important now right and then the hard part is like helping people realize like just by the act of doing it and exercising it like that's how you get better. It's I don't actually think that like those things are in innate or inbornne like some people have more of it coming out of the womb per se but sure you know it's you just it's like a practice you know let me challenge you on this because Nikita said this a couple maybe a year
20:15ago and I thought it was interesting which is hey we were told that the like highest form of art in business was you know film and software and now anyone can make films and anybody can make software yet the same 20% who were originally doing it are still the ones who are doing it. Is there kind of this like is agency something that you can you know embrace or are there just people that are naturally high agency and many that are not? M I mean if I look at my own career like I would
20:43easily say that I'm a late bloomer and you know I had to make these like ridiculous mistakes like saying no to Palunteer or like leaving web programming to like learn and so uh I feel like my life is somewhat like a testament to no no like I can make mistakes and then I can introspect I can reason about them and then make different choices.
21:05That's the hope anyway.
21:06Yeah, that is the hope. talk a little bit about loops. I think there are kind of coding loops um which are well discussed and now the graphs thing which is sort of you know both funny and and also real but it feels like the most interesting loops are business loops. Oh yeah like how can you actually have a loop where the output is changing the way the business itself operates. I know there Tom gave this great talk about how to organize your company in that way.
21:29Talk about how YC is organizing around loops and how you're advising your companies too.
21:33Yeah, absolutely. I mean I mess around with openclaw. I created Gbrain which is kind of like soda retrieval. Um I basically distill I earlier this year I created giryslist.org which is sort of like actually an agentic newsroom and then I had to create like really really good rag around like you know uh personal deep research just to be able to put together some of those articles.
21:56Uh and then all I did was like I had OpenClaw look at that repo extract out like the agentic rag part especially around like um like after the fact uh graph generation um and then it just ended up being soda even against like memory palace and a bunch of other open source uh and then what I realized is that just allows the agent to know what million tokens to keep in its head for any given task.
22:23Yes. And so um what's interesting is like I think there are a couple things at work right now like um the frontier model labs that are you know letting you use chat GPT or claude I think that they're still pretty constrained on cost and pretty constrained on um amount of compute they want to give you. And so if you really want to token max, you actually have to use something like Hermes agent or openclaw.
22:50Um and then you have to like tune it all the way up. Like you're just like give me like let me load a million tokens or 800,000 tokens in to any given request and like have that be in your like soul.md. Yeah, but when you do that, like I think that you basically get to live in uh 2028, like you know, it costs I don't know 50 or $100,000 a year to like use the agents at full strength, like full 150
23:20Um but you'll feel it more or less immediately.
23:23Uh it just costs like a crazy amount. But um for a CEO or for a founder, uh it actually makes a lot of sense to do that. And you have to give yourself permission to token max in that way. Um but you know and then what you get is like I get you can live in 2028 today.
23:40Amazing. Um, but I think like going back to what founders can do, um, if you live that way, uh, not only do you want to do that task, you want to like skillify it like you you do some like feet of strength and then you turn it into a markdown file plus code plus tests that can be reused and like put into a cron job.
24:02Yes. And so, uh, I think we're just seeing like across the board, um, a markdown file is an employee.
24:11And it's an employee that, uh, will do the job perfectly every single time and it'll do it like as many times as you want.
24:18And then, you know, at that point, all you're doing is like take any business process that you need in your company and you just do it once perfectly. And the first time you try to do it, it's going to be bad.
24:28Expensive. Yes. Many iterations.
24:30Yeah. But then at the end you can you as long as you can tell very very quickly and in very simple ways like hey agent fix this fix that like this was wrong um your the actual trace and the actual uh history out of um that agent uh working with you it'll actually turn that into a skill file that's perfect actually right and anytime it screws up in like a future case is just a bug fix and then it's there forever
24:59and this loop you would apply to sales marketing to customer support to everything.
25:03Yeah. To everything.
25:04I mean, GStack was basically that for engineering, right? It's like there's a QA loop. I had to build something that works with browsers to go and because that's what I found like early with GStack. I found myself um you know, automating how I thought about PM and then uh you know, I had an engineering skill that was like an edge manager that made sure that there was uh unit test and end toend test coverage.
25:28Yep. Um but then in the end I found myself like I automated all the other things so much that all I was doing at the end was blackbox testing to to verify and I was like oh no no okay like even that part like it's interesting like uh building these agentic systems today I think that's all you're doing is you're seeing where the bottlenecks are and then you know almost every single time it's like how do I just instruct the agent to create a piece of software
25:55or a markdown file that blows away that roadblock, right? And then when you take a step back and you've done that for the whole task, it's like I mean we we there are companies now today that you know we were talking about earlier. It's like literally you can go from zero to 15 mil ARR in about four months with like two or three people and like hundreds of agent like you know a few hundred skill files.
26:22It's amazing. So there's this like recursive self-improvement. there's this hill climbing that happens like at what point does it start to fall over? Is there like do you need error correction?
26:32Does the errors compound? Does it get constrained by exception handling human relationships? Because otherwise these companies should just be able to grow and run forever.
26:41Yeah. I mean I guess my experience once you get a lot of markdown files or anytime you have like some large amount of data um that's where like provenence matters that's where um conflict management sort of you know when you have two facts.
26:58If you have provenence then you're like well this is the more recent one like this is the one that wins. You need a cron job that's sort of sweeping through that and making sure that things are accurate and from the right places. Um but these are things that I think as you use the systems um you just know that you need to build these things like anyone who's I mean this is actually one of the interesting things I think is an advantage for founders in their 30s and 40s now.
27:26Um like I mean I think that there are going to be as many Patrick Collisons as ever.
27:32Yeah. Um but one mega trend that we're seeing is like the 35 40 45 year old founder who like been around the block built a lot of energies.
27:44I mean I think uh yeah Peter Steinberger is like a perfect example of that where it's like he's been around the block like he knows what to build.
27:52Um and then if you take that person like suddenly there's 400 of those people like you can outperform an entire department of like any mag seven. I also think that if you've had some experience in the enterprise, there are these dynamics that you know you can seek to kind of mirror and explore. So, one of the things I'm really interested in is conflict, right? Most people at an enterprise would say conflict is a bad thing, but actually think that there's this sort of productive, constructive conflict that at its best is the search for truth.
28:22These systems allow us to do things like explore conflicting approaches and totally unbundle it from the human emotion. And I think that's actually very important because this is why the sort of the decentralization in an organization or an economy works well because every idea gets tried, you know.
28:38Yeah. Uh do you know uh Pedro from Brex is like the most aggressive person I've met who does this with his exec team.
28:46So which is cool. Like he uses like he actually was one of the people who like really got me into open clock. Okay.
28:51Um because he just came in and you know he had lunch with us at YC. Yeah. and he just walked us through um you the vibe around openclaw was that it was too unsafe and dangerous and like delete your whole computer and stuff like that.
29:05Uh what he ended up doing was like building an entire open source layer which he actually has open source called crab trap. Okay.
29:12That is like an agent that watches all the network traffic and all the things that um openclaw does.
29:18Nice. And then that's how he squares the circle. Like BX is one of the most regulated, you know, fintech, of course. Um, and then the upshot of what he got is that um he has his agent look at the meeting transcripts from like all of his direct reports and he like can see that like two levels down.
29:38And then the thing that really jumped out at me is like he can use uh meetings that he's not in.
29:44Yeah. to figure out like what's broken, what's inl compliance team.
29:59And then he can walk in and he's like, "Actually, you're right. We're doing it your way." And then he can leave.
30:05Yeah. And it's like, can you imagine like that is actually one of the defining reasons why um startups or businesses fail. Yes. It's like it's actually like a a management challenge like the business becomes too big to fit in one person's head and then this is like the most profound form of you you have agents, you have memory, you have retrieval. Um you like zap the rocks more. The rocks give you like raw intelligence about like what's happening
30:34and it can actually introspect not just on the opinion of like someone two levels down in your organization. Yes.
30:39But it can actually look at the ground truth from the data. Yes. Right. And it's like that, you know, that's clairvoyance, right? Like you I mean if you once you have that in your brain like actually every business in the world is available for you to take their business, right? Like like the world is basically built on uh things that are built around human beings and human beings can only keep seven plus or minus two things in their head at any given time.
31:08Yes. And you know, guess what? You plus an agent can keep basically three Harry Potter books in your head. You can like rifle shot more to come. Yeah. I mean, and more to come, right? Like this is as this is as bad. There are so many cryptoisms that like applied like 10 times more to AI, which is like this is the worst it will ever be actually.
31:29Um, and so the whole world, like all business, all things that people rely on, government especially, uh, is basically still built on a world that is predicated by human beings, limited human beings that can only keep seven plus or minus two things in their head.
31:47And it's not ready like it's not ready for the world where agents can think at the speed of light. Like you have unlimited amounts of it, like unlimited amounts of data. Um and then you know my hope is that like basically products are going to be 10 or 100 times better. Like they should be a thousand times better.
32:06Like services should be a thousand times better, right? Like you know the invisible hand of capitalism at that point like properly done. It's not about lowering the cost of something. Yes. It should actually be um creating these like sort of magical things that I was like on Wall Street Journal podcast recently. Yeah. And the reporter like kept trying to uh like gotcha me. He kept saying like, "Are you you know you guys in tech, are you trying to make a utopia?" And I was
32:35like, "This is a trap." Like I don't I I would not go so far to say you know but as I went through like a bunch of examples from like a bunch of the startups that you and I have like worked on and funded and things like that it's like actually like maybe right like you know we may never achieve a utopia but it is worthy and worth it to attempt right and that you know I I would not say that Silicon Valley or tech will achieve a utopia. I will very earnestly
33:05say that we are trying to bring about a better world.
33:09Dude, maybe another way to say this is just this is the least happy you'll ever be.
33:13You know, because I think it like one of the other implications of what you're describing is just the ergonomics of the sort of white collar job today. You know, you think about you've worked at big companies like you think of just the kind of morass that you have to get through torture. You think of how lossy the communication is like the entire management science sort of managerial class like maybe that was a hundred-year distraction from what was founder mode you know in in the industrial revolution
33:41all the way through Henry Ford all the way through some of the early Silicon Valley founders and then everybody just kind of hit this title wave of management.
33:49Oh yeah. Now we have this new model that can lead to dramatic productivity improvements like 3 days a week of really intentional work maybe one day and the other days you're touching grass and I think the time that you do spend is just so much less burdened by this stuff that you always felt like you had to wade through.
34:07Yeah, that's right. I mean if you look at the typical Mag 7 daytoday it's insane. Like I remember when I was 22 working on Windows Mobile. Uh we're you know these crazy devices that were like years before the iPhone and um we needed integration for instance from the Windows team which was like you know on the other side of the highway in Redmond right and then I remember you know me and my sort of PM mentor uh we had to go over
34:36to the to the Windows team and like they wouldn't reply to our emails. They wouldn't fix our bugs. They wouldn't even like mark it as won't fix. They just ignored us.
34:44And we had to go over there uh with a baseball bat. Like I don't know why he brought one. Like it wasn't like he was going to like rough anyone up. It was just like this vague threat or something incredible.
34:54It was actually hilarious. And I think about that all the time. It's like what kind of like bureaucratic hell uh is it where like two perfectly smart people who are making like good tech money Yeah. you know, are put into a situation where like there's a thftdom over here. Like literally there's like seven levels between us and that person. Yes.
35:17And this person doesn't even know that we spent like 4 hours trying to get like a P3 bug fixed that was like a blocker for a thousand of our users or something. It's like and how much humanity is just wasted. How many 2 a.m. sort of anxious wakeups were there? Yeah.
35:34Because somebody wanted to not have a hard conversation. Like it's, you know, it's it's a really it's a waste of the way we should be spending our time and working.
35:41Yeah. And that's a profound version of like the seven plus or minus too. Like I don't think that like the you know product unit manager or whatever the heck their, you know, their title was like I don't think that they uh wanted us to waste our time like that. Yes.
35:55Uh I think it's just that you know your day like you just don't have enough hours in the day. Yes. And we're like incredibly limited human beings. But you know Yeah. It's funny like I think that you know I think about my time at Microsoft and it's like I remember getting an iPod and like doing um competitive research for Windows Mobile versus the iPod. I could imagine today at Microsoft you could imagine a markdown file and a skill.
36:22That is run on a cron.
36:24And it's like how are how are all the people working on this team like are they blocked? Who are they blocked by?
36:29What are the external dependencies? Like suddenly there is a graph there's a loop and then suddenly like you know the products can actually just move fast like you could release something in a day or two that would have taken like six months. It's incredible and if you could like multiply that out across like the thing is like probably an org like Microsoft can't.
36:50But like a startup can.
36:52And every startup must Yes. They must be organized this way. I also love what you said. It's almost like the mid level of bureaucracy should be agents.
36:59Yeah. Because I actually think that, you know, being in charge is somewhat overstated. Like I'd love to actually have at least the mid-level organize the work, you know, resolve the conflicts that it can somewhat programmatically, probabilistically, programmatically. Of course, the executive team maybe sets direction. The individual sort of decides on execution, but just the whole organizational layer, which a lot of product managers historically did, should not be human. I mean, the great thing is, um, it doesn't have to be, do you know how Venitates RAW has this
37:28thing where it's like you need to be above the API line? Like, if Uber came out, like if you're an Uber driver, you're below the API line. Like, you should be fighting to be above the API line. I actually think AI erases the API line. Yeah. Um, like one of the funniest things I saw recently is there's a API company um that we funded called Claw Visor and they released a um a bug report endpoint that is not for humans to use. It's for agents who use their
37:56software to use and there's an LLM where it's like if there's a bug in the software um it like the bug report goes but then it replies real time. Yeah.
38:05And it's like actually like that's a good bug. We filed it. we're gonna fix it next week, but also like try this workaround.
38:12And then like I can't get that out of my head because you could imagine um that could be how companies work, right? Um like instead of being below the API line and having to do what like I don't know the API tells you to do like this can be a back and forth actually. And then I always think about um you the reason why cars in the 80s got so good in Japan was uh it was actually a management technique like they realized the Toyota
38:41production system that's right meant that like if you are the person doing the work on the line you should be allowed to change the line because you are the person with the most amount of context to be able to improve your own working situation and that's why American cars really started sucking and why Japanese cars became absolely absolutely incredible. There's like this very subtle simple way that actually empowers the worker. And so there's this sort of like mix that I which is so interesting because what's traditionally seen as a hierarchical
39:10society came up with this very bottoms up way of working which led to like arguably a 40-year generational run because of process power.
39:18Yeah. Which is beautiful.
39:21How how many as you think about kind of our evolution towards this vision, how many of these problems do you think are intelligencebound? like we need smarter models versus there will be other attributes of models that will unlock success.
39:34I mean honestly it's all human uh humans are the ones who are going to like slow this down and then um actually I'm realizing this might be a white pill.
39:43Okay, so if you look at like the tenor of what's going on just broadly in the discourse about AI, it's all like this sort of doom and gloom like all white collar jobs are going to go away.
39:55There's going to be a permanent underclass. Yes. And then uh funny enough what I think is um all of the bureaucracy and the slowness and the seven plus or minus two uh of like every company, every institution, every organization, all the middle managers in the world.
40:13Yeah, that is actually the white pill 100%.
40:16So you know these things are going to be slower than you think.
40:21Right. Uh, I looked at, you know, we had 7,000 people. Most of them were 18 to 22 years old.
40:28And I looked in their faces and like they're all AI native. Like they were born more or less like, you know, they became adults in the time of chat GPT.
40:38Uh, and it's going to, you know, and for us it's like now we, you know, run which is nice.
40:43But, you know, imagine us like 20 years ago, like, you know, we were the ones who were native to the web. We were the ones who were native to mobile. Yes.
40:51Um, and then now we run So then all of society runs on the things that we expected from when we were 18 to 22.
40:58So I think that, you know, the white pill to me is like it's going to be 20 years. And that's not a bad thing. That's actually a good thing.
41:06Um, like society is way slower than you think. Government is way slower than you think. Every company in the world is way slower than you think.
41:14Um, and there are real moes to these things. like there are structural reasons why a Microsoft isn't going anywhere.
41:20Um and then I guess this is sort of a little antithetical to what most you know most people in Silicon Valley would say like I want a startup to replace all of them.
41:30Uh and the reality is like they won't you know they won't. I love it. Okay. I have two more questions for you. Um you know one on this kind sort of trying to envision the near future. What do you think the next computer looks like? What does a new computer look like? Oh man, I think in the short term it'll probably keep looking like the way it is, but it seems inconceivable that um it'll stay that form factor. Like it's pretty clearly going to be voice.
41:57Yes, I think there's a lot around memory. Um it's going to take a while to you we're at this moment where everyone's sort of happy with chat GPT or cloud co-work or whatever it is. Yeah.
42:08Um but I don't think they will be in the long term. like um I think you're going to want a lot more context and you're going to want like all watched over by machines of love and grace. Like you're going to want this thing that uh is benevolent, knows about like your hopes, fears, and desires and then is sort of like relentlessly searching to help you in that way. And that's actually going to be really exciting. And you know the path through that will probably be like computer use
42:36memory like uh diorization like ingestion like um yeah I mean I think there's going to be a lot there and you know the cool thing is it's actually going to take longer like this isn't a like I don't think people are even talking about this now. My guess is like next year 2027 will be like the harness wars.
42:58You know and then but it's really a cost thing like it's just too expensive right now.
43:02Yes. you know um but it won't be like there will be a war for a billion consumers uh right when like the frontier model compute of today will be like maybe 50 or 100 bucks in like two or three years.
43:18And that will be when like the most fear the browser wars will be back on.
43:22Yes. Yes. Well, we're already seeing it like the price per token of Frontier is going to infinity. Like mythos is infinity dollars a token. You can't have it. And the price per token of the model that was frontier a week ago is collapsing to zero. Yeah. And I actually think to me that is a huge white pill for a lot of reasons. You know, one of the most important of which is just we need more consumer AI software. And in a world where most consumer products are free to try. You just can't do that when you have really high costs of incremental distribution. The magic of software is zero cost incremental
43:52distribution. We have these magical primitives like we have computers that are emotive and have emotional texture for the first time in 40 or 50 years. What a tragedy that we haven't built more ambitious consumer products yet.
44:04So I'm really excited for the sort of changing economics of models to unlock these new categories.
44:09Yeah. I mean and we're so early like I was convinced that like being becoming a convert to OpenClaw made me very very convinced that it was going to happen right away and then at this point I'm like that's not correct at all. like, you know, well, you should try the new chatgbt desktop app actually has got a voice mode and it's sort of it's an operator or concierge that can see all your threads.
44:29And you can access it from your phone. It's very open clawish and I'm sure Peter had his hands all over it. It to me it's the closest thing we've seen yet to a true consumer assistant.
44:38Oh, I can see that. It's awesome.
44:39Yeah. Yeah. TGPT always had like basically the best memory. So, yeah, I got to try it again.
44:44They've done a great job.
44:45Okay, last question. Um, you know, we talked a lot about kind of utopian visions for the world and problems that are maybe intelligencebound. You've also put a lot of energy into sort of local politics and doing things I think are very pro-social, but it seems like more of those problems are human coordination bound.
45:02Yeah. How do you get energy to do that work? You know, is there a white pill for that aspect of our society? Maybe talk a bit about that. I mean, the white pill is just believing that uh America still has rule of law and that um people in government are trying to help and like somewhat earnest like it's not perfect.
45:20Um I think that the white pill for me recently was even just doing jury duty in San Francisco and to see like this orderly process of really a cross-section of San Francisco. Uh, one thing I realized was like actually we are a big part of the city like we're 10 20% of the people are like directly working in tech.
45:42And so um to see something that was I mean the judge was really good. I mean it was a horrible case but like you know government is not here to like ruin people like Yeah.
45:55And so and then at that point um we can vote.
46:00Yes. like we actually have a say. Um, and then I think everything is downstream of media at that point. Like I think the San Francisco moment that got me very uh engaged was realizing, you know, Asian-Americans are 25% of the voting populace, about 30% of the population. But during COVID, like we had a district attorney who was turning a blind eye to some of the most heinous crimes against our elders. Mh.
46:26And simultaneous to that, we had a school board that was openly hostile against Asian-American kids who just wanted to learn algebra in public middle school, which hit me because uh I was that public school kid in Fremont in the East Bay. Like, if I couldn't have taken algebra in middle school, I couldn't take calculus by senior year. I wouldn't have been able to study engineering at Stanford and I wouldn't be here doing any of the things I get to do today. And I'm like, "Oh, okay. Now, now they've made it personal."
46:54Yeah. and like let me understand uh and it turned out to be like sort of all the same people the same people who want to destroy all data centers the same people who um you know don't want to build any housing yeah in uh anywhere in California or the world like it's sort of nimbies who want to virtue signal who um sort of have these ideologies that like don't square with mine I mean as a builder you're like well the you know words have meaning like supply and demand exists
47:23markets exist exist like incentives exist and then you know I think that government is what you know when people like us don't speak up uh when we don't like pay attention and like hold our media accountable not just the government uh then things get very deranged and that's what San Francisco was I think around co and then just by sheer organization like you know this is I think that like the Chinese of the west
47:52side organiz izing around algebra and um you know the deaths of our elders um going to farmers markets and like literally physically like telling each other they're killing us, they're killing us, right?
48:08Um ABC News uh you know literally the med the mainstream media uh TV channel of uh San Francisco and the Bay Area would not cover anti-Chinese and anti-Asian crime. Wow.
48:23And um you know I I it's like unconscionable, right? Like our institutions failed us. And the great thing is like when the system becomes so odious, you've got to put your body on it. I think that was Mario Savio.
48:38And it's kind of it's I mean it's ironic almost to like say that, but on the other hand, like that's what I believe like uh they can't do this to us and we're going to stop it. And uh even at like personal peril, even at um you know reputational cost, like we should be willing to take that cost because that's our covenant with our fellow man and our fellow citizen, you know, and if we don't do it, who's going to do it? Like nobody does it. And uh I'm super proud of what we're doing in San Francisco
49:06because we have beat back that ideological uh set of people who like created this mess. Yeah. And you know, it's not perfect in San Francisco, but it's getting better.
49:18It's amazing right now. I mean, I think I saw that Luri might be the most popular mayor or politician in the entire country.
49:24Things have gotten so much better.
49:26Everybody sees it, feels it in the vibe.
49:28Some people say, "I wonder why." But I think for those of us who know, we see that your sort of stewardship not just of the industry, of the startup community, of sort of technology, but also of the community is one of the big catalysts. So, thank you for doing that work. Thank you so much. Yeah. So, and I think San Francisco should be the beacon for pushing this back in every blue city in America. And you know, I that's what Gary's list.org is basically like how do we take the lessons that we learned here
49:56and like LA needs this, New York needs this, Minneapolis needs this, Seattle needs this.
50:02Well, and also let's find, you know, to connect the two, the sort of, you know, culture, society, and technology. like let's find very local ways for the ambition that this technology unlocks to show up. You know, I was in London last week and we were talking a little about what's possible. It's like, hey, you don't have to have an American vision for how AI impacts your society. If you want the NHS to be incredible, then like you could do that with this technology.
50:26So, the kind of the opportunity for ambition to be very localized in our communities, I think, is something really interesting.
50:31Yeah. And so, yeah, act local, like take care of the people right next to you.
50:36Like, you know, I I think it's funny. Uh, so many people get very very obsessed with national. I don't even want to look at national generally right now. It's like, you know what? Like, I care about San Francisco. I care about housing. I care about crime. I care about uh, you know, treatment and recovery. And if we do that, like, we can have the society we want to live in. And then you know if we fix local like state and national will fix itself because like on a five or 10 year basis like the people who win up there [music] like they they will come
51:05up through a system that's functional and about saying no to things that don't make sense about saying yes to the things that are awesome for the people.
51:14I love it. All right, Gary. First of many. Thanks, brother. [music] Thanks, bro. This is great. Cool. Yeah.
