Venture with Grace
00:51:55 · Grace Gong, Austin Spiegel
[00:51:55] S0: I agree. I feel like AI is very... I feel like nowadays everyone's building their own bot, on the other hand, do we need the same bot for everyone's building for the same company? I feel like it's super interesting to watch. I wanna be mindful of time. Maybe we do like a quick fat round for you. What's your favorite book? [00:52:15] S1: My favorite book? Oh, man. I don't really know if I have a favorite book. I mean, I I think, like, the books... I read a couple books this year. One is called Breakneck. It's about kind of, like, Chinese society versus American society and how The US is very lawyerly and the Chinese society is led by engineers and, you know, what that means for how China can innovate. And then I read another book about called Apple in China about, you know, China basically or Apple moving to China to do manufacturing and then kind of building up this community of practice in Shenzhen. And I think, you know, what I really want to see here in Southern California is that we have that community practice, and I want that community practice to grow, and I want this to become the hub of next generation hardware development and manufacturing in The US. And I'm hoping that we can, not to get political, but find a way to make that the case in California. So, those were both very interesting to read and kind of helped me think about what do we need to do in order to actually re industrialize. [00:53:31] S0: Who made the biggest impact in your career?
00:53:31 · Grace Gong, Austin Spiegel
[00:53:31] S0: Who made the biggest impact in your career? [00:53:36] S1: Oh, god. These are hard questions. I think, you know, there's several people along the way who have made huge impacts in my career. I would say actually, like, you know, my cofounder, Karthik, he was the one who said we should go found this business. And I was like, I think there's something here, but I'm not entirely sure yet. And he was like, no, absolutely. Let's go do it. And, you know, I wouldn't be on this journey without him. So certainly very influential. [00:54:09] S0: Who would you invite to a dinner party? [00:54:12] S1: Who would I invite to a dinner party? Honestly, like, I'm not a huge, like, oh, you know, Sam Altman and Elon Musk kinda kinda group. Like, I'm... And I do this frequently is like I like to do dinner parties with our customers. I know that's super lame answer, but I'm more interested in understanding on the ground what's happening and how are people building their hardware, leveraging our tools, leveraging other tools. So in the context of work, that's who I would invite to a dinner party, but would have to think about it more. [00:54:48] S0: Where can we find you outside of work? [00:54:52] S1: Like physically outside of work? [00:54:55] S0: Yes. [00:54:57] S1: Or you're like, oh, you can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter. [00:55:00] S0: Well, yeah. [00:55:02] S1: Yeah. No. I mean, like Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. Oh, I [00:55:06] S0: was gonna say actual outside of work if you have outside of work.
00:55:06 · Grace Gong, Austin Spiegel
[00:55:06] S0: was gonna say actual outside of work if you have outside of work. [00:55:10] S1: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've been working a lot recently, so there's that. But I live... So we're off to the marina. I live in Santa Monica. So every Saturday I walk down to the farmer's market because my wife and I like to cook together. And then I go to the gym with some of my friends. So you'll see me walking around Santa Monica, I guess. [00:55:32] S0: Very wholesome. Love that. Well, Austin, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It was such an interesting conversation about everything deep tech. [00:55:41] S1: Awesome. Thanks so much, Grace.