Share the exact moment

"a heuristic in the book that I borrowed from Ben Gilbert at Acquired, a lot of podcasters, where he had side hustles at all his jobs. So at each job he went to, he would ask the employer, if I do it on my own time, can I do this other thing also? And there's something really great about that. One, In each of his cases, he ended up doing something pretty remarkable in the side hustle. At Microsoft, he created Microsoft Garage, which became this way for Microsoft to stay relevant with founders. And he met all these founders. All this kind of extra goodies came from that. But I think it all— so you learn more. You learn maybe two— you get two shots on goal instead of one. And I think the employer makes you look proactive so it reflects positively on you. When he ended up at Madrona VC, asked him if he could start a podcast and look where that led. And I just had dinner with both of them and they were in Austin and man, they're happy. Like, I got to tell you, like, they are really happy people."

43:21 – 44:28

"is, this is like half joke, half true. So if you think about software engineering, when you're like a junior engineer, you work like 1, 2, 3 years. And in those 3 years, there's like maybe like a handful of moments where like you really learn something and then a bunch of other days where like you're not really progressing. Yeah. I think now we can use AI and these models to actually like shortcut these careers and almost like simulate the early years of your work and like just make them like super dense in like these learnings. It's like, hey, we're working on this feature, which is like a distributed system and you need to learn this thing that might take 3 months at a company. And so you take 3 months. Here it's like we're just simulating the whole thing. It's actually not a real thing. And in 1 week we kind of speedrun through the whole thing and you kind of learn your lesson from there. And we kind of repeat that. And like one year, you basically got like 3 years worth of like projects and experience. Yeah. I think it's harder for like things like sales or for things like, you know, marketing because you don't really have a way to get the feedback loop. But I think a lot of it, it sounds kind of silly. It's like you're making them do a fake job, but it's almost like you go to college, right? People pay to learn how to do it. And this might feel similar where it's like, hey, we have the Jane Street simulator. It's like, you want to come work at Jane Street? We'll just put you in the simulator for like 3 months and you'll come out of it. It's like, you know, I'm ready."

46:28 – 47:48

"this is a difficult disease to treat. We don't have many options. If we can reduce progression somewhat and there are no major side effects, certainly that would be worthwhile. Also the reality is that the use of drugs has different effects in different people. There could be some individuals where the drug is completely ineffective and in other people they just seem to respond to the drug and are perfectly stable and have no progression. And maybe we could figure that out with individual use. Of course the concern is the risk of side effects, the risk of elevation of liver enzymes and of course the potential increased risk of deaths. and the rate of deaths was numerically low but still greater than what has previously been reported with other randomized trials. For instance, in the ortorio trial, the rate of deaths was significantly lower. Now, I personally would not recommend this drug to people with relapsing MS, especially people who are young and healthy and doing well on other disease modifying therapies. I certainly wouldn't recommend it to someone who is newly diagnosed or has never taken a disease modifying therapy. For progressive MS, people who have tried other agents and still progressed, including the B cell depletters, I have mixed feelings. I'm definitely concerned about the risk of liver injury and potentially the increased risk of death. I'm not sure if the FDA will actually approve this drug. I'd like to know your thoughts. Do you think the FDA should approve it?"

20:35 – 22:01

"So it turns out that in all the research that they conducted for New Coke, all 200,000 people that they did the taste test with, they never asked them how they would feel if this new beverage replaced The old Coca-Cola. And Gosweta's response to this in later years is you can't ask a question like that because people don't know. Like, you can't get real data on emotional questions like that. You can only actually test, do you like this taste better or not? And so, like, sure, you can run that experiment, but ultimately, how much faith are you going to put in the data? They would have learned something if they'd asked that question. Yeah. So the company immediately starts getting thousands of letters and phone calls every single day. One of my favorites is a letter that reads, "My dearest Coke, you have betrayed me. We went out just last week as we had so often, and when we kissed, I knew our love affair was over. I remember walks across campus with you discussing life and love and all that matters. I remember the southern summer nights we shared with breezes leaving beads of water hanging delicately from your body." "But last week, I tasted betrayal on your lips. You had the smooth, seductive, sweet taste of a lie. You have become corrupted by money, denying your ideals." Oh man. Or this story: In Marietta, Georgia, a woman assaulted a Coke delivery man with her umbrella as he tried to stock a supermarket shelf with new Coke. "You bastard!" she screamed. "You ruined it! It tastes like shit!" [LAUGHTER] [Speaker:LULU] And I think they just didn't realize that what they were taking away was people's childhood. [Speaker:LATIF] Yes. They were taking away America!"

183:00 – 184:56

"I don't think external impact is enough to keep people going, or at least I've seen way too many people who had a high level of external impact and then at some point they just stop. Okay. Well, here's the problem with external impact. It's like, okay, it's 4 in the morning, you're staring at the ceiling. Like, is that enough? Right? Like external impact is stuff that's happening to other people, right? But it's like, all right, What is it about you? The story I like to tell myself is that I'm competing with myself, right? The story I like to tell myself is I'm getting up in the morning 'cause I'm trying to become a better version of myself. I'm trying to become, you know, smarter and better informed and, you know, reach better conclusions and, you know, be better at what I do and continue to expand my skills."

6:23 – 6:57

"Just a quick mention of Lucky, just because I'm curious. I've met Lucky and like he's obviously a very good investor now on Physical Intelligence. I call it a generalist super angel, right? He invests in everything. And I always wonder, like, is there something appealing about focusing on developer tooling, focusing on databases, going like, I've invested for 20 years in databases versus being like a Lucky where he can maybe connect you to all the customers that you need. This is an excellent question. No one's asked me this. Why Locky? Because there was a couple of people that we were talking to at the time, and when we were raising, we were almost a little— we were like a bit distressed because one of our peers had just launched something that was very similar to Turbo Puffer. And someone just gave me the advice at the time of just choose the person where you just feel like you can just pick up the phone and not prepare anything and just be completely honest. And I don't think I I've said this publicly before, but I just called Lockie and was like, look, Lockie, like, if this doesn't have PMF by the end of the year, like, we'll just like return all the money to you. But it's just like, I don't really— Justine and I don't want to work on this unless it's really working. So we want to give it the best shot this year. And like, we're really going to go for it. We're going to hire a bunch of people and we're just going to be honest with everyone. Like, when I don't know how to play a game, I just play with open cards. And Lockie was the only person that didn't, that didn't freak out. He was like, I've never heard anyone say that before. As I said, I didn't even know what a seed or pre-seed round was, like, before, probably even at this time. So I was just like very honest with him. And I asked him like, Locky, have you ever invested in a database company? He was just like, no. And at the time I was like, am I dumb? Like, but I think there was something that just like really drew me to Locky. He is so authentic, so honest, like, And there's something just like, I just felt like I could just play, like, just say everything openly. And that was, I think that was like a perfect match at the time. And honestly still is. He was just like, okay, that's great. This is like the most honest, ridiculous thing I've ever heard anyone say to me. But like that, like that. Why is it ridiculous to say competitor launch, this may not work out? It was more just like, if this doesn't work out, I'm going to close up shop by the end of the year. Right. right? Like, it was— I don't know, maybe it's common. I don't know. He told me it was uncommon. I don't know. That's why we chose him. And he'd been phenomenal. The other people were talking at the time were database experts. Like, they knew a lot about databases, and Locky didn't. This turned out to be a phenomenal asset, right? I, like, Justine and I know a lot about databases. The people that we hire know a lot about databases. What we needed was just someone who didn't know a lot about databases, didn't pretend to know a lot about databases, and just wanted to help us with candidates and customers."

38:17 – 40:54

"that it's not just accountants that are being impacted by AI. It is everyone, right? I mean, I don't know what the future holds for college graduates needing entry-level positions because those positions may be being done by some streamlined process that has been perfected. So some, they won't have the work experience to actually oversee the machines and make sure that it's doing the right thing because they don't have that work experience to, you know, the whole cycle, right, of, you know, good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment. Yeah, you have to bang your head against something in order to become an expert with it. You know, what's the— it's 10,000 hours of contact with something in order to consider yourself an expert. And I think that actually goes back to the Tao Te Ching and the 10,000, 10,000 everything. But the, that level of being able to hire experienced people is going to change because they'll only have learned how to read these outputs, not actually developed them and be able to critically analyze the results. So, you know, but, you know, we're, we're kind of preaching to the choir here that these AI conversations are everywhere. But I thought it was really interesting that the, that the entire software industry is -facing a critical mass of having to evolve their software to automate tasks, which is great for productivity, fabulous for our productivity."

13:06 – 15:03

"Bloomberg is the IDE for analysts. Like I believe every one of these IDEs These are done. It's dead over here and dead. I just think it's why, why it doesn't like, just imagine the concept of you. Like, I remember when I learned Bloomberg, I had to like watch videos to learn about all the random subfolders, keys, how to use this, how to use this, you know, the tactic knowledge of using this function versus that function. That's like crazy to think about. That is like, that is like horse and buggy. Okay. The agent with the information that can perfectly retrieve an generalize stuff, is going to have the ability to pull that all together in a better UI than it was with no legacy, whatever. I think all of that is dead. And like, this is why I'm like, my spiciest take of all is like, Microsoft has a lot to lose. I think they have the most to lose of everyone. Yeah. Because Excel is a human IDE for information work that's generalizable. So is PowerPoint. So is email. Those are the base core"

70:12 – 71:08

"defiant acts that people think are iconic, like Rosa Parks saying no on the bus, it's preceded by hundreds of moments of compliance. She complied with segregation laws on the bus many times before she defied. And so we shouldn't really feel bad or beat ourselves up for having complied because we can learn from that. Like in this situation, next time I want to do this."

1:04 – 1:27

"Rosa Parks saying no on the bus, it's preceded by hundreds of moments of compliance. She complied with segregation laws on the bus many times before she defied. And so we shouldn't really feel bad or beat ourselves up for having complied because we can learn from that. Like in this situation, next time I want to do this. So we anticipate it, we visualize it, we script it out. Like this is what I wish I could have said."

1:07 – 1:33

"really defiant acts that people think are iconic, Rosa Parks saying no on the bus, it's preceded by hundreds of moments of compliance. She complied with segregation laws on the bus many times before she defied. And so, we shouldn't really feel bad or beat ourselves up for having complied, 'cause we can learn from that."

44:31 – 44:52

"Exactly. Yeah. On the first, like, Anthropic just installed Workday. Yeah, I know. Famously. Exactly. So I don't think, I don't think, you know, we're cloud coding— systems of record are, are, are— that's the category. Yeah. People do not seem to be, you know, we see this with Tribbling as well. Like, I don't think anyone's cloud coding one of those systems of records. Do you use Workday? Anytime soon. No, we use Workday. I don't know what to make of the second criticism, but again, it just feels like for a very broad and deep system of records, it's kind of hard to make the argument that the business is somehow impaired versus a year or two ago."

51:24 – 51:56