BIG IDEAS BY NEW ECONOMIES
00:46:36 · Richard Socher, Ollie Forsyth
[00:46:36] S0: Proof is, existence proof exists, is there. But yeah, I think... Obviously, we also have quite substantial resources. We raised $670 million. We had access to tiny amounts of compute compared to the big guys, but lots of compute compared to an individual hobbyist. And so that was important because it wasn't just us doing it. We had to have an incredible... It's a team of really, really smart researchers and engineers that we assembled at Recursive, but it's still a fairly small team. And so the majority of the inventions and so on came from them working with the Eureka machine that then automated the ideation, implementation, and validation of all these different ideas that led to this model being faster and better and still [00:47:25] S1: This is your latest company, Recursive. You mentioned over $600 million raised. You have an incredible roster of co-founders, everyone from Google DeepMind, all of the amazing AI companies we hear about on a daily basis. It's like seven, eight co-founders, right? How do you all come to a consensus to agree with each other? I just had Lin Qiao, she's the co-founder of Fireworks on the show, who also has, I think, six, seven co-founders. That's a lot of co-founders to work alongside, which is awesome because of how fast AI is moving. But at some point, you've also just got to all come to a sensible conclusion on, you know, we both all got to agree, right?
00:47:25 · Ollie Forsyth, Richard Socher
[00:47:25] S1: This is your latest company, Recursive. You mentioned over $600 million raised. You have an incredible roster of co-founders, everyone from Google DeepMind, all of the amazing AI companies we hear about on a daily basis. It's like seven, eight co-founders, right? How do you all come to a consensus to agree with each other? I just had Lin Qiao, she's the co-founder of Fireworks on the show, who also has, I think, six, seven co-founders. That's a lot of co-founders to work alongside, which is awesome because of how fast AI is moving. But at some point, you've also just got to all come to a sensible conclusion on, you know, we both all got to agree, right? [00:48:05] S0: Yes, co-founders, in some ways the co-founder title does not mean you're automatically a board member. You don't have to have automatically equal votes and if you have eight now you could be in a deadlock of 4v4 or anything like that. So we still have a CEO of me and as such we also have a board, [00:48:27] S1: not all the co-founders are on the board and all of that. [00:48:32] S0: A company could have a thousand co-founders, but 999 of them are just individual contributors. In some ways, it's a title that obviously carries a certain weight and It suggests a certain amount of ownership and impact on the organization that you assume those people have. We're certainly seeing co-founders having an incredible impact on the organization, but they all have different qualities and also knowledge that they contribute.
00:48:32 · Richard Socher, Ollie Forsyth
[00:48:32] S0: A company could have a thousand co-founders, but 999 of them are just individual contributors. In some ways, it's a title that obviously carries a certain weight and It suggests a certain amount of ownership and impact on the organization that you assume those people have. We're certainly seeing co-founders having an incredible impact on the organization, but they all have different qualities and also knowledge that they contribute. [00:49:08] S1: You raised this mega round $500 million earlier this year. How long did that round take you? [00:49:15] S0: I guess it depends on how you define. There's not like an official sort of, you know, you shoot the gun and everyone starts sprinting. There's just conversations here and there and then you're like, oh, you know, and then we add another co-founder and they're like, oh, do we restart the clock now? [00:49:27] S1: But I don't know, a few weeks. That's insane. When you think about managing your time, you're building you.com, which is actually how I first initially heard about you guys four or five years ago when this whole generative AI ecosystem was coming together, you.com was initially such, and then obviously now you're your latest company and you've got your funds. How do you think about just managing your time when building three different companies?
00:49:55 · Richard Socher
[00:49:55] S0: So it helps to work a lot, like 80, 100 hour work weeks. So you can squeeze in a lot. Also, it is extremely important to work on what really matters. Thinking about the bottlenecks, sometimes the dumpster fires, sometimes just, you know, sort of most important things for each organization. And then it's extremely, I think, important to be motivated and excited about what you're building, which I am. Surround yourself with the people, understand your strengths and weaknesses and Find people and hire people for your weaknesses and then give them also enough freedom to have the right impact and do the right things and have the right level of trust and control and management there. And when you really surround yourself with incredible people, it gets a little bit easier. How do you navigate putting out those dumpster fires? Yeah, not too many dumpster fires. Part of it is you don't get the license to do that if everything was a dumpster fire. Things have to be in a pretty good state for your board to be like, okay, we're okay with you doing something else. And so things are going well. And then, again, mostly I said like, I mean, at a high level, you just start spending a lot more time on it. You start double-clicking into all the details. You collect all the data, get all the advice, and you make a decision, and then you fix it and you move on. In some ways, that's sort of at that level for all the different kinds of issues that come up with is kind of how you have to approach it. But yeah, there are all kinds of different people issues, technology issues, go-to-market issues, and each of them have lots of interesting different facets to how you're solving.
00:51:44 · Ollie Forsyth
[00:51:44] S1: As founders, we get told every day, just focus on one thing and do it really well. But then you see the likes of, you know, you've got Elon Musk who's doing like nine, 10 different companies. Should we, and should founders, if they are capable of doing so, obviously it takes like a different skill set. If they can work on one or two projects at the same time, should they?
00:52:03 · Richard Socher
[00:52:03] S0: You know, it's interesting in a weird way, on the one hand, the CEO is really important at the same time, like the CTO, for instance, it's hard. So I already would say like founders in plural. Actually, it's not, it doesn't work. Like CTOs kind of have like unlimited work at all times. It's hard for a CTO to do multiple things, which sounds weird, but I think is the case. I've never seen a CTO do it. Founders who are also CEOs, obviously it would be hypocritical of me to discourage anyone from doing that. Word of warning, it is very, very hard. You just deal with a lot of different questions around how you spend your time. You're spending a lot of cycles on just making sure people feel like everything is important. You love your children equally to some degree and everything has to work well. You can't do what Elon does if all his companies were a dumpster fire and were on the edge of bankruptcy. So it's a right to do multiple things and that right can disappear very quickly and basically you have to constantly work on keeping it. So it is a lot of extra stress too and a lot of extra work. But also there are synergies. Every aging company needs search, including Recursive. There are ways that these companies can work together. There's a lot of positive lessons and learnings that I have that I apply to the other companies and try to make sure everyone benefits.