BIG IDEAS BY NEW ECONOMIES
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.
00:53:34 · Ollie Forsyth, Richard Socher
[00:53:34] S1: What's been your biggest lesson in running three different types of companies? You've got Recursive, you've got you, and then you've got your fund. Is there a lesson you've learned over the last 12 months in running Three different companies at the same time. [00:53:47] S0: There's so many lessons. I haven't really given talks yet on my top three. So I do think overall the most important thing is the talent that you can attract into an organization and then setting the right goals with the team and knowing when you do need to go all the way down into the last detail. Work out the main issues and when to just let people cook and let them do a job, have been built that trust and knowing this thing with that person is going to get done because you can trust them. I think that's extremely important. The general idea of working on the right things and thinking about the strategy, that part never really changes but becomes even more important because you can only do so many things in each organization. [00:54:42] S1: I feel like the awesome thing about being an AI is the opportunities are so huge. Everything keeps changing every five minutes, almost like an iPhone update. It just happens every like, you know, a new update is like every two months in this kind of AI ecosystem we're living in. As we think about 27 as we're nearly entering that year, what are some of the things you think we should be expecting for superintelligence over the next, you know, 12, 14 months?
00:55:05 · Richard Socher
[00:55:05] S0: I think we will see the first single genome diseases be cured. I think that will be really exciting. I think we will see more people having access to personal assistance the way only millionaires had until a few months ago. I think we will continue to see the price of intelligence go down and that will unlock more and more new use cases. I'll just give you a simple example. Our sales team can now write these beautiful summary dashboard websites for one account. It's like a $100,000, $500,000 account. It would have been like before, no one would have spent the time and built this beautiful dashboard with all the different moving pieces for one complex sales process. But now anyone can do that. I think we're going to see more and more one-time use apps or one-time Group of people, apps. And that will be, I think, interesting and exciting. And then we're going to see just the proliferation of the technologies that already exist but aren't yet expensive. Waymo and Tesla and others will continue to have more self-driving range and more cities will open up to it. And then I hope Bryan Johnson and others will continue to push the Overton window into more health and trying to help people stay healthy for longer. I think that will be hopefully a positive thing. I think we'll also see On the negative side, more and more people fearing AI. And it's just so enticing for storytellers to tell dystopian stories. It's so obvious that when you say, look, people might die over there, everyone's going to look over there. And if they're like, you might die, they're like, well, I definitely need to click on that now. And so it's just so easy for journalists and storytellers to... Tell dystopian stories and just kind of scare people because that creates more clicks. If it bleeds, it leads or something as a phrase. And so I hope that there's a little bit of learning from China where they do, and it's kind of weird to say it, but obviously propaganda has this really negative connotation, but they're doing like Better marketing for the future in China. Like they're asking the heartthrobs in soap operas to also be an engineer from time to time, who's a little bit awkward, but can still be kind of good looking and nice. Like they're making their top act stands right. So kids are like, ooh, that's fun. They're doing the Robot Olympics.