00:26:58 · Sridhar Ramaswamy, Aditya Agarwal
I think like ironically, ad systems are secure. Ad systems are secure in the world of AI because they involve a feedback loop that's largely invisible to the outside world. So all of us need to be thinking in terms of what states if all software can be easily replicated. [00:27:17] S1: It's a good answer, actually. I mean, to kind of almost... You're right. Code can be very easily generated, but historically, time to value in any enterprise software has been low. Like how do you kind of get your solution in there? How do you customize it? How do you tailor it for the particular customer? And now you can actually get in there and these code generation systems can help you with a lot of that. Correct. [00:27:37] S0: That's right. That's And remember the other thing that is also going on that's true for all of us is that it is a reasonable bet again that the music will stop at some point for model improvements. Yeah. Okay, we don't know when, but it will. You just want to make sure that you're next to a chair and that stops. That's part of the reason for building up businesses quickly. [00:27:59] S1: Yeah, yeah, for sure. You started touching upon this figure which is what are businesses that will have enduring value after kind of like software feels as though it is not commoditized but certainly faster to build and cheaper to build. Ad marketplaces are kind of one example. What are some other categories that you're kind of bullish on? Maybe not bearish on. Not bearish on.
00:27:59 · Aditya Agarwal, Sridhar Ramaswamy
[00:27:59] S1: Yeah, yeah, for sure. You started touching upon this figure which is what are businesses that will have enduring value after kind of like software feels as though it is not commoditized but certainly faster to build and cheaper to build. Ad marketplaces are kind of one example. What are some other categories that you're kind of bullish on? Maybe not bearish on. Not bearish on. [00:28:23] S0: I mean, think things that interact with external worlds. We talked about ad ecosystems, which are a kind of marketplace. But I think other marketplaces, whether it's an Airbnb or an Uber or any other kind of specialized marketplace even, I think they have clearly reliable enduring value. I don't particularly think that infrastructure as a category, and I think you would agree, Aditya, that there's anything special about it. It used to be that people are like, oh, SaaS software is easier to rebuild and replace than infrastructure software. I don't really think agents care. For example, with something like a Spark or even a file system implementation, if you have a reference implementation, you can build a new implementation that's compatible API by API with what's already out there. Yeah. I don't know much beyond that in terms of what has long term enduring value. It has to be something beyond just software.
00:29:24 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:29:24] S1: One of the things I was struck by, Prateek, in our conversation before this was just your willingness to learn, desire to wake up. And particularly right now, it's just an incredible moment that every single day, the pace of change means that if you enjoy learning, it's a little bit overwhelming but it's of it's awesome, right? You wake up every day, there's something new and it's easy to be both overwhelmed but also kind of like giddy with the progress. But what is your information regimen? How do you keep up to it? Are you a Twitter guy? Do you read more sub stacks? Do you like to talk to people, the smartest people that you know? How do you get alpha in terms of information that you ingest and then digest?
00:30:11 · Sridhar Ramaswamy
[00:30:11] S0: I mean, first of all, I think this is also a time where if you have a day job, especially like I do, you better be ready to put infinite amounts of time. The people that I see routinely have no clue about what is going on in the world of AI around them are the ones that I was saying this when we were chatting and Ruchi laughed, which is like, if you have an eight to five calendar and have a life, AI is not for you. You'll never learn anything anyway. First of all, it just requires a lot of time. I talk to a lot of people both one on one but also on Slack. I have direct connections with a lot of our most progressive engineers at Snowflake and we are constantly going back and forth about, hey, look at this or look at what is possible. I spend a lot of time tinkering with things hands on. I thought of various levels, yes, writing code but even figuring out new ways of doing things. It only took a little bit of tinkering to figure out that you know, Coco, our coding agent, mostly runs on Opus, but I wanted to generate an XKCD deck. I was like, okay. Just... You just need an OpenAI API to generate, like, really good cartoons. And out of that came a deck to teach people at Snowflake how to better use agents to write software. And so just keeping your mind open about what is possible. Yeah. I think it's exhausting, but it's also, I've had more fun at work in the last six months than probably the previous fifteen, twenty years put together. It's just an amazing time to be alive.
00:31:54 · Aditya Agarwal, Sridhar Ramaswamy
[00:31:54] S1: Yesterday was Father's Day. I have three young children. So Ruchi decided to interview my children with a couple of questions. And one of the questions was, What does your dad like to do? So one of them was like, My dad seems to be reading all the time. The other one was like, My dad likes to work. And there was a part of me, I was like, they think of me as a guy who reads and works. And then I was like, but right now is the time to do it because we're just living in these times where you of need to put it in. But it was kind of an interesting moment because it's hard to have the eight to five and then because I think we are just living in super accelerated times right now where you have to make some sacrifices. What is a book that most changed your trajectory? You asked [00:32:38] S0: me this, I don't have a good answer. I'll give you a geek answer. I think it was a trigonometry book my high school teacher gave me. I spent an entire summer solving all the problems in it. I'm ashamed to admit it but [00:32:52] S1: That's a great answer. I mean, now I kind of want to know the book. Okay. This is a good one actually. A belief about search that you held strongly that turned out [00:33:00] S0: to be wrong. People cared. I think there's more more about privacy, definitely about search, that people cared enough about things like the utility or the intrusiveness of ads to want them to actually do something. [00:33:14] S1: You're saying that most people actually
00:33:14 · Aditya Agarwal, Sridhar Ramaswamy
[00:33:14] S1: You're saying that most people actually [00:33:15] S0: Most people don't. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I think convenience trumped convenience accessibility trumped irritation. [00:33:24] S1: Completely agree. [00:33:25] S0: This is also what people say is not what they mean. [00:33:29] S1: Correct. Yeah. [00:33:29] S0: It's And like so like relying on any kind of interview, surveys, etcetera tells you nothing. There are a class of problems that you should not ask people about. You should see what they do instead. [00:33:42] S1: Like stated preferences versus revealed preferences. Absolutely. The thing that Google got right that most people I think still don't really quite grok or still misunderstand.