Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - The most successful AI company you’ve never heard of | Qasar Younis

Starting point is 00:00:00 You decided to join Twitter recently. You put out your first tweet. Mark Andreessen, quote tweeted it and said, this is the best AI CEO. Nobody knows. Our best work is done alone and quietly. Every minute you're writing something for public consumption, you're not focusing your very limited time

Starting point is 00:00:15 that you have on your customers and your product. You're building a lot of the future that we're going to be living in. What does the next couple of years look like? Us solving some of these impossible problems like cancer are directly going to be related to this AI boom. Net suffering in humanity. overall should go down significantly. A thread that has emerged on this podcast

Starting point is 00:00:33 is that AI is coming just in time to save us. The real impact of AI in the next five to ten years really is going to be in farming, mining, construction. These industries, they need autonomy. And it couldn't come soon enough. If you look at farmers, the average age of a farmer

Starting point is 00:00:50 is in their late 50s. What does that mean in 10 years from now? There's a lot of anxiety about what AI is going to do to the world. The core root of fear is misunderstanding. If you, at home are very anxious about AI. The best thing that you can do is spend time to understand and you will quickly see the limitations. Get to know it, then actively make the technology be used for good. Today my guest is Kasser Yunus, co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition. You have probably

Starting point is 00:01:20 never heard of Kasser or applied intuition. This is the most important under the radar AI company and CEO that I've ever come across. It's a $15 billion company that has been growing quietly over the last decade. What they do is they add AI to vehicles like cars, tractors, planes, submarines, mining rigs, and a lot more. 18 out of the top 20 automakers are customers, as well as the biggest global construction, mining, and trucking companies, also the Department of Defense. They're basically Waymo or Tesla, but without the hardware. Kasser himself was born on a farm in Pakistan, grew up in Detroit, started his career as an engineer at GM, and then at Bosch, you then went on to start a couple companies before starting applied intuition.

Starting point is 00:02:04 I love everything about this episode, and I am so excited to bring it to you. Don't forget to check out Lenny's ProductPass.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. Let's get into it after a short word from our wonderful sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Omni. Many product teams today are in the process of debating how to ship AI analytics. The hard part is obvious. Having an LLM guess at SQL in production is a huge mess and just a bad idea.

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Starting point is 00:03:41 so that you can win bigger deals sooner. The result? According to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slashed over $500,000 a year and are three times more productive. Establishing, establishing trust isn't optional. Vanta makes it automatic. Get $1,000 off at banta.com slash lennie. Castor, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. You're basically building a lot of the future that we're going to be living in and people may not even realize this. And there's two sides. So this on the one side, let me ask you this question. If things go really well, what does the next couple years look like for people with the emergence of AI, with physical AI? What's a vision of the future?

Starting point is 00:04:28 Let me take the broader AI point and then the micro, the more specific one on physical AI. Macro, I think, think about this like the Industrial Revolution, right? So if you're sitting, let's see in the late 1800s, there's a lot of, you know, we can focus on a lot of bad things that happen because of industrial revolution, right? You have child labor and you have monopolies emerging and you have abuse of, you know, wars end up happening. But there's also, it's an almost, almost unimaginable present without the values and without the kind of benefits we got out of the industrial revolution, which is broader access to health care like we've never seen before. Like access to goods, material goods, things like we take for granted, like heating and cooling your home. There's this great YouTube kind of channel that focuses on POW letters from Jersey. Germans who are seeing America in the early 40s and they're writing letters back to Germany

Starting point is 00:05:29 about what they're seeing as they're basically, you know, prisoners of war. And they're kind of blown away that the towns that they roll by in these trains as they're going to their POW camps are all lit up or that there's cars everywhere. 80% of German towns in World War II did not have electricity. And that's kind of a mind-bending kind of thing because we just assume all this stuff, all this technology is, you know, equally distributed. So the positive version is these things that we, let's say folks who are wealthy or folks who have access to technology, these things everybody has access to.

Starting point is 00:06:08 The fact like simply having somebody who's a coach to you and having that coach very specifically to you, not a generic chat GPT that's giving fairly generic answers. But this is a very powerful thing. I think us solving some of these impossible problems like cancer are directly going to be related to this AI boom. So I think net suffering in humanity, I think just like the Industrial Revolution overall should go down and should go down significantly. And I'm a fundamental optimist in that view, that technology will bring that positivity. In physical AI specifically, again, you know, when you have things like you have your own car and you, You have the ability, you have your limbs and you have your senses and you can drive.

Starting point is 00:06:55 You take these kind of things for granted. You jump in your car and you go to the store. For somebody who maybe is disabled or somebody who doesn't have the money to afford a vehicle, access to mobility that's nearly free or is free is a big deal. And that like simple example of making self-driving cars free for everybody and how that would change the planet, you live in Rwanda and you are two. hours from the nearest hospital, that matters. That's in a very, very true way.

Starting point is 00:07:26 And so I think a lot of, let's say, that negativity around AI comes from people who, frankly speaking, are living in a very, very good existence. And when you live on the other edge of society, yes, and I'm not like some naive person who thinks that there's no downsides of technology. We can discuss that. But I just see there's a lot more positive. So when you ask that question, what's the next? get three to five years, what's the next 20 years? These things that we take for granted that are bad

Starting point is 00:07:56 suddenly are not there. And I think certain diseases, certain accessibility to basic, you know, services suddenly start going away. One last example that is you take just the fact that you can message people basically for free, you know, for people old enough. Like this is not the norm. We came from Pakistan, we couldn't even communicate back to Pakistan because the long distance, you know, was so expensive and so it was handwritten letters. Today, you can basically contact anybody on the planet basically for free. There's obvious downsides for that. But there's lots of upsides for that, which is being in touch with people that you care about and you love, basically for free. And so I think AI has the ability to bring this abundance to many, many more people at a near

Starting point is 00:08:47 free, you know, free cost. On the flip side of this, as you pointed out, there's a lot of anxiety about what AI is going to do to the world, to jobs, robots. They're like these videos coming out of China with these robots with nunchucks, like

Starting point is 00:09:03 the stock market. I feel, you know what? I feel the Nunchuk Union is up at arms with that. How terrible? Yeah. But it's, you know, it's scary. And, you know, the market's reacting more and more to just like, oh, wow. these companies are maybe not going to survive long term.

Starting point is 00:09:21 Again, being at the center of this and building a lot of the stuff that will get us there, how do you envision that couple of years playing out? Are you optimistic? What keeps you optimistic? Any advice to people to help them kind of stay, you know, calm through this period? So there are two separate things. Anxiety around technical shift and then the public investors reacting to specific stocks they've held to separate those things.

Starting point is 00:09:45 So let's talk about them separately. And the first one, you know, the core root of fear is misunderstanding. And I think if you at home are very anxious about the impact of AI in some variant on your own job, the best thing that you can do is spend time to understand it. And you will quickly see the limitations. There are some great videos on YouTube, which are like, you know, trying to get Gemini to understand what a cup is by just holding it upside down. and it like really strut,

Starting point is 00:10:18 then to do it with, you know, chat GBT. So it's like if the, if the revolution is coming, you know, the AI overlords have to first understand like the top and bottom of a cup. And so you realize that

Starting point is 00:10:30 you can see the video of Nunchuk wielding humanoid which are pre-programmed and that costs $15 million to do that video. Yeah, that is true. It's not, it's not fake. I'm not implying it's fake. But it's also not what your brain

Starting point is 00:10:46 kind of fills in the gaps. You see Nunchuk robots and you just feel like well the gap, these are sentient beings that are at their own volition rather than it's a bunch of motors that have been programmed to do a certain thing. If you really want to be impressed you go to a car factory and we've been

Starting point is 00:11:03 doing that for 25 years. We have very, very advanced robots moving extremely fast to build things. And why are we don't, we have anxiety about the car factory, but we have anxiety about the Nunchuk robots is because the human beings doesn't like that gap, we understand the gap of a, you know, of a welding robot. You see,

Starting point is 00:11:22 oh, okay, that's a robot. It's been programmed to make this weld, but we don't know the technology, we as and just as an individual human being living in, you know, in the world. You don't know how that robot was made to do that nunchuck thing. And so you substitute that with anxiety and fear. And so I would really implore you to, you know, kind of learn more about the technology. And you start seeing the edges. Now, does that take away from the most fundamental, thing that you're getting at, the string that you're pulling at, which is, like, is society going to be fundamentally harmed and is this, you know, net, net bad for society? I think in any technical shift, the emergence of WhatsApp, just as a example, there are people who are damaged

Starting point is 00:12:05 by that, literally companies that go away, but also humans who are damaged by the advent of that technology. And so I think as members of society and as leaders in society, we can we can kind of move that funnel in whichever way, you know, technology first. Remove the word AI. AI is such a like emotional word because it's wrapped in these things you don't know. And so that fear then kind of deforms. So let's just say technology, you know. So it's up to us to recognize this. technology can be used for good and technology can be used for bad. And I think that's where

Starting point is 00:12:45 really the focus is. So get to know it and then actively make the technology be used for good as a participant, whether you're a founder or all the way as an individual, you know, employer citizen of a large company. Then on the second part of the question about, you know, public investors and stuff, this is my, I don't have any, you know, particular research on this, but this is what my guess is what's actually happened. Beyond being an engineer, which is my my core identity for the lack of better word. I was also, I did an MBA at Harvard. And so that was the first time that this, let's say,

Starting point is 00:13:21 I didn't come from very, you know, very, very kind of wealthy upbringings. And this was the first time when I went to Harvard, I saw like, you know, that world, that world of people having like private jets and stuff. It was a really eye-opening experience for me. But the real world I was exposed to was high finance and how high finance works.

Starting point is 00:13:41 And you might think, as I did, from far away, that folks at hedge funds or at large, you know, public equities funds are extremely nuanced and thoughtful. And they are like, you know, on whiteboards with, you know, extremely deep and, oh, maybe even theoretical math to figure out should they buy or sell, you know, Figma. And that's not actually how it works. I mean, really what these folks are is, and in this specific case, I think what's happening is they are, they buy and sell stock. They are smart people and they do work hard. It's not to take that away. But they don't have a fundamental edge that you would assume that somebody who sits in, you know, skyscraper in New York has. And by the way, that's why retail investors have become such an active and kind of significant part of the market. So those folks have gone to AI consultants and have gone to people who are literally,

Starting point is 00:14:38 developers at these firms, and they'll do something like, hey, why don't you build me this app in a week? And then, you know, this like consultancy will come back with an app, which kind of looks like maybe a Figma or another, you know, some web app. And so that hedge fund manager, they're like, well, and then, you know, if the company was sitting there, they would say, no, no, this is, this just looks like my app, but this is actually not my app. It's not as deep. It doesn't have all these things. There's integrations with all these other systems. But for the, in public, investor buy, they're like, yeah, but it only took like a few weeks or a month to build this. It took you 500 engineers a couple of years.

Starting point is 00:15:16 This AI thing could be real. And the things I'm reading on X about like just vibe coding your way to replace, you know, billion dollar companies that might be the case. And the market immediately prices in that risk. And that's where that selloff comes from. That doesn't necessarily mean all of those. I mean, just within the last 24 hours, I had a, uh, that's, I would, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, can't say his name, but like a very, let's say, a calibrated investor who said, this is the time

Starting point is 00:15:43 to buy because these companies are not actually going away. And so I think those are two, anxiety within society and the sell-off are two very different things. They're motivated by different things. They're part of the larger AI narrative, but I wouldn't conflate those two things. It's not that the hedge fund investors, like, I'm worried about society, sell service now. Like, it's, it's different than that. At least that's, at least that's, my impression. This is the alpha we've been talking about. Time to buy. This is not investment advice. Well, that's really good advice. I think the real advice is to fight fear, and I feel that anxiety, especially when I go to Michigan and outside of people in the Silicon Valley bubble.

Starting point is 00:16:24 It's like just try to learn a little bit about the technology that you're afraid of, and then you'll start seeing some of the edges. I love your point about how self-driving cars are essentially robots. We don't call them that, but the robots. Absolutely. And you see a non-track wheeling robot. A self-driving car doing bad things could be very dangerous already. And so that's a really good reframe that if you just think of it, it's just another robot, and it's been really good for us. And by the way, the self-driving thing, as an example, you know,

Starting point is 00:16:53 whichever way you slice the statistics that are available from self-driving companies, they're supremely, supremely more safe than human drivers. And I do believe in 20 or 30 years, not that much longer, We'll look back and we'll kind of be like, it's kind of like we think about child labor. You know, in post-industrial revolution, that was a normal thing. You would send kids who were in middle school to go work.

Starting point is 00:17:19 It happens in third world countries today. There isn't a lot of emotion behind it. It does not consider to be exploitative because you have no choice. You know, everyone's just, and I think we'll look back in 25, 30 years, we're like, people would just like tired, under the influence, you know,

Starting point is 00:17:36 after like extremely stressed going through a dramatic life you know experience and then they jump in into a car like that that that that's it's it's it's crazy and and just for everyone everyone should really emotional think about just in the United States over 30,000 people will die in the next year from these accidents that like yeah the old Stalin line it's like uh you know a one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. And we just let the statistic kind of go over ahead, like, oh, it's 30,000 people. But if you ever have talked to a family of somebody who went through a tragedy like a car accident, it's unbelievable. And, you know, you suddenly all the fear of AI robots goes away and you really see that human impact and you realize, like, actually,

Starting point is 00:18:25 us driving doesn't make sense. And it's not for any other reason than literally people die. I've become a huge, I have a Tesla and the self, I've just used self-driving all the time now. Just like a few months ago, we got very good. And it's, it used to be nerve-wracking. And it's like, wow, this is much better than I. And you're doing, you're not using, you're not doing driving as a job. Imagine if you're a commercial truck driver or you work in a mine or you work, you know, like there, a little bit of intelligence, a helping hand in that very dangerous task. It's incredible.

Starting point is 00:19:00 And I think there's something about the human brain where, you know, when you bring up that reality of like self-driving trucks, the immediate people are like, well, what about the trucking jobs? Now, needless to say, we don't have enough people who want to do that job. So leave that fact to the side. I think the fact that you really focus on is the fact that people die from trucking accidents. Like we can't, you know, throughout the baby with the bathwater. And so I think I implore everybody, you know, who thinks about AI broadly and physical AI specifically to always recognize that your monkey brain is programmed because of thousands of years of being in, you know, hundreds of thousands of years of living out in the wild and being in the cave that when you hear the rustle in the bush, that is, you think it's a snake because that's what our ancestors were programmed. So now when something new enters our psyche, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're. view isn't, well, if mining, if mines became autonomous, well, wouldn't that lose jobs? It's like,

Starting point is 00:20:06 those are awful jobs that people die in. And the best evidence is that people don't want to work in them. Like, that's the best evidence. Like, nobody's clamoring to go work in a mine in a remote area. And so intelligence can help make that, you know, make that reality much, much better. People are seeing AI advance in all these different ways on the software side. They see all these The model is being releasing. It's driving 100% of people's code now. What's really cool about you is you see the hardware side of this. And I think one of the biggest changes to our lives will probably be robots walking around

Starting point is 00:20:39 doing things for us. You have a sense of just how close we are just robots around us day to day? So I would think about the framing here matters again on a spectrum. So there are robots around us like Zumba's, you know, like they clean your carpet where you're sleeping. there's robots around you when you make a coffee. That's an automated machine that is taking an input and doing a bunch of things based on what you need. So what you're really talking about is how fast can go up that spectrum to where you have a robot that can take on lots of tasks with little guidance.

Starting point is 00:21:18 And the way that I would think about this is, let's say we're sitting in, this podcast is happening not in 2026, but 2006. and you're asking me the same question about mobile. And you say, well, mobile is coming. This is remember pre-Iphone, which comes out in 07. Everyone has got those flip phones. So we have some, we have mobile. It's not like a completely, you know, so we have some robots around us already. But like it's like, so when are we going to, and you asked me in 2006,

Starting point is 00:21:44 when are we going to get that Star Trek phone that can do everything? And I think at that time I would say, because I don't even know the iPhone is coming a year later, I would say, well, Lenny, I don't know. maybe it's one to five years. And if it's not five years later that Uber, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat are all products and they're being consumed by many, many, many millions of people. So what happens when you think about sitting in 2006 and why can't your brain figure out that Instagram is coming?

Starting point is 00:22:15 Instagram is very hard to even conceive without phones that have an app store, have cameras on both sides, are available. generally available that lots of people have it. And the fact that people are comfortable being on social networks. In 2006, it's still an early thing. This is pre-Twitter and Facebook is not that big. And MySpace is, but it's not the same type of private kind of communication. And so the point of making is I think it can come pretty fast,

Starting point is 00:22:44 but the way and the form factor will come is hard to pick, just like it's hard to figure out Instagram is going to happen because the intelligence in that point. particular type of hardware, which will be generally available, that's a key word, generally available, is really going to impact the use cases. So I think, like, the most obvious use cases that will come early are going to be use cases where you get the most amount of bang for buck. And the bang for buck is a car that drives itself or a mining robot, which is a mining vehicle, which is now intelligent. And the reason is all that, you know, let's say engineering required to make this giant, you know,

Starting point is 00:23:24 machine that moves dirt has already been done. It's been done over the last, you know, 50, 60 years. So then you're just importing a little bit of intelligence into it and leveraging everything else that the, you know, companies and kind of people have developed. So I think, I mean, and I'm not just, you know, pitching my own book. I mean, we're a physical AI company. I continue to believe that I think our brain emotionally loves the humanoid concept because we're monkeys. And but actually, just like more pragmatically, it's actually just putting intelligence into things that already exist all around us.

Starting point is 00:23:58 And I think, and then once that happens, then new applications will emerge, which I think we'll talk about in five to seven years, which we'll start seeing. So let's just move forward five to seven years and let's see what reality exists and then maybe we can try to jump into the future from there.

Starting point is 00:24:13 I think generally speaking, every single car company on the planet right now is working on a product that's like a Tesla FSD product, every single car company there, without exception. Many, many companies are working in versions of that that would become fully autonomous within a cheap sensor suite. So the fundamental difference, just to simplify it all, the Tesla approach versus the Waymo approach, just to really keep it simple, is the Waymo approach is lots of sensors

Starting point is 00:24:39 and lots of compute and maps. And the Tesla version is very few sensors, no maps, no high-fidelity maps, and just generalizing here, and cheaper compute, for the lack of better word. And the Tesla version of a product, this is in the industry, is called an L2++ product, is going to be available everywhere because it's literally cheaper and it doesn't require like HDMaps. The Waymo product functions better in a geographically constrained area. So you fast forward five years, both of these types of technologies will be much more ubiquitous. L2++ and L4 will be much more ubiquitous, not only in the best,

Starting point is 00:25:21 Bay Area or in parts of China, but really globally. There are companies working on this globally. So now, I don't know if you remember, but nav systems used to be a big deal in cars. You would pay thousands of dollars. And nav systems are kind of the thing that everybody wanted. We're at that moment for L2++ systems, where like people are willing to pay thousands of dollars for a semi-automated vehicle. It will not be a long time.

Starting point is 00:25:44 You're already seeing this happen in China where the downward pricing pressure for that autonomous product, for the lack of better word, will become close to free. So now you fast forward five to seven years and every car has some level of autonomy. So now you have to like mentally live in that reality that everybody who's buying a car, they just get FSD with it. Now you start seeing a different world because now the average person isn't wondering is self-driving in a company. They use it all the time. They don't wonder our NAFs. And so what you have in NAV systems is a car play emerges and Android auto emerges and it's very natural. People are like, oh, I have my phone. I just plug it in and it wasn't a big revolution, but the car play in Android auto revolution is actually

Starting point is 00:26:26 huge. It brings free navigation and free applications to your car and it's fairly ubiquitous. And so I think the next thing that happens in five to seven years is then full autonomy becomes the thing that everyone expects. And so I think, and all of that, and you will see a clear decrease in injuries and death because of that, because you have some intelligence help. you help you drive it. Now, again, I'm using the consumer vehicle analogies just so people can understand it. But this is the same in construction. It's the same in mining. It's the same in defense. It's in every one of these verticals. There's these big physical machines that humans are interacting with. That teaming up with that machine is the future. The productivity unlock

Starting point is 00:27:08 from just you looking at a machine, not like a sentient being, but almost like a physical agent of something you're trying to accomplish unlocks things that I think are very hard to think about. So I love you know, things like Motebook and I love the, let's say, open claw revolution that's happening for the lack of a better word. But I think

Starting point is 00:27:30 the big impact, that's still such a small part of society. My barometer of impact is like you go to the Detroit airport and you sit in a gate and you look around and you're like, how many people are using open claw? And it's like, let me look it's like, Like, you might be the only person who knows what that is.

Starting point is 00:27:48 And whereas everybody, they're living their lives. And so it's like to them, actually the impact of AI is going to be in this physical, physical world. I see you also have a, you have so, yeah, there you get out. I'm a convert, open cloth. There you go, perfect, perfect. Peter's coming on the bot soon. So I got some lobster class. Yes, I think, I think the real impact of AI in the next five to 10 years really is going to be in farming.

Starting point is 00:28:15 in mining, in construction, in self-driving trucks, that's where you're going to have a real impact. Though I think, I mean, I love the stuff that's happening on these platforms, but it's still segregated to, like, frankly, developers and a small, very, very small part of society. I wasn't planning to spend so much time here, but this is extremely interesting. And I think it's important for people to hear from folks like you about where things are heading, because as I said, everyone's just like, what is happening? what is going to be my future. The job piece is really interesting.

Starting point is 00:28:47 And a thread that has emerged on this podcast recently is that people are afraid AI will take their jobs, but in reality, AI is coming just in time to save us because populations are declining, people are aging, and we need something to help us there. I know this is something Mark talked about and you're really close to them. Help us feel better about just how AI isn't going to take our jobs

Starting point is 00:29:10 and actually going to save us. Yeah, I think, I think honestly speaking, these industries, like, they need autonomy. I mean, and it couldn't come soon enough, frankly speaking. This is not like people are not fighting for those trucking jobs. If you look at farmers, the average age of a farmer is in their late 50s, 58 or so. What does that mean in 10 years from now? That means many of those farmers are going to be retiring if they're not already retired. and 20 years we have even a bigger, a bigger problem.

Starting point is 00:29:45 That, by the way, is every vertical is like that. And, you know, my hypothesis here, but unlike, you know, sometimes people say like, you know, McDonald's can't hire or like, you know, the mind, local query can't hire and where are all the people. The people are still here. I think they just, the trade-off is just not worth it anymore. In the 1980s, in the 1990s,

Starting point is 00:30:06 doing the long-haul trucking job was what the family has to sacrifice. the father not being there for for days and weeks on end and today that same working class family has can make that decision and say you know what i will drive for uber door dash and i'm willing to do that because i can turn that app off and pick up my kid and i prioritize that the that is where i think this you know this uh this kind of intelligence kind of revolution in the real world is really i think is going to fill those gaps in um rather than like an entire industry is suddenly gone and it's just automated. This is, this is, this is, I don't believe that future, mainly because the realities of actually, you know, replacing an entire industry with robots

Starting point is 00:30:52 is, is still, that's too complex. One day it will happen, but it's not happening anytime soon, but the entire society will be different by that point. And I think, again, use the industrial revolution as, as a good version. I, uh, the, you know, the earlier question, if I'm somebody who is not in the AI ecosystem and I have this anxiety and how would I do? Reading history books is a great way to really

Starting point is 00:31:18 understand how society deals with this and there's a lot of literature because industrial revolution doesn't happen like, you know, in the dawn of Christianity where not many people are writing and not many people are reading. Lots of people are writing, lots of people are reading in the last 150 years

Starting point is 00:31:34 and you can read both the people who are, impacted by the Industrial Revolution, people who are benefiting. And writ large, it's a very positive experience. And that doesn't mean there, again, their downsides, we should mitigate the downsides. But the thing that we can't do, and this is maybe specifically as America or society as the global population as a whole, there's this impetus to say like, we got to pump this break on, again, don't say AI, say technology. Pumped this break on technology. The issue then is the American economy really ends up stuttering.

Starting point is 00:32:08 And that impacts the lowest end of the labor market way more than anybody else. And so in the attempt to help the people who are the most marginalized, we actually hurt them the most. And the statistics between Europe and America are, you know, have been, have been a pretty explicit. But in the last decade, basically, the American economy is now, you know, grown at a much higher pace. And that growth hasn't come from, you know, Detroit, Michigan. That growth has come from Mountain View. And it's come from Sunnyvale. It's come from the Bay Area.

Starting point is 00:32:45 And which is another way of saying, it's because of new frontier technologies. So putting breaks on frontier technologies because we're afraid of unintended consequences will actually have real intended consequences on people who are trying to help them most. And the reality is very, very fundamental in a future that does not take care of the average worker and the average person in America will have much bigger problems. So we need a solution that takes that into account. But that solution isn't just pump the brakes, AI is bad, or frontier technology is bad or whatever, you know, whatever thing that you don't like.

Starting point is 00:33:24 I think that that'll have really, really bad consequences. One of the reasons that we don't pump the brakes is just fear of China and competition with China, the Dunchuck robots, being a recent example. of like, oh shit. And I have kind of a contrarian take on just how much of a threat China is and how they're approaching things. The summary version of this is, I think the way we recently read as a company, we read this book, House of Huawei, which is just a really great, interesting book. And Huawei is a really amazing company for the reason that it makes great technology. But the couple hundred thousand people that work at Huawei, about a quarter of them

Starting point is 00:34:03 are members of the Communist Party. And Huawei's goal is not to grow profits or shareholders. It's a private company. It's really an extension of the state. So literally the name Huawei means China's ambition. So imagine if you had a company called, you know, MAGA, and half of the company or a quarter of the company was a certain political party. And they said, our goal isn't to make profits or to, our goal is just the expansion of,

Starting point is 00:34:30 it's not even a company anymore. It's something else, right? And so I think we incorrectly, when we specifically speak of Americans, we think about China, we impart our understanding of markets and companies onto China. So we think Huawei, since they make phones, they must be just like Apple. It's like, no, no, no, actually, that's not like Apple at all. And so I think the first thing I would implore everybody who thinks about China, especially with anxiety in America, is you're not comparing companies to companies.

Starting point is 00:34:59 This is not apples to apples. This is very, very different. And so imagine instead of thinking Open AI is competing against, you know, Deepseek, you say OpenAAS competing against the Chinese government. Instead of Apple competing against Huawei, Apple's competing against the Chinese government. And you can even remove the word Chinese government. Government is the best word to define what this organization is. But it's not a for-profit, privately owned, independent group of people who are working on projects together, build products to market. So that's the first very important thing.

Starting point is 00:35:32 You cannot treat China like another America or another Europe or another whatever. Number two is if your goal isn't to make profits, you can do incredible research and it can be extremely compelling. But like we've seen, if the system is not sustainable, that's also not a company. That's not sustainable. Let me give a very stark example of that. Chinese EVs are really lauded as being this exceptionally. interesting product, right? And, and you constantly get the streamer of, I would say, fairly shallow

Starting point is 00:36:05 analysis, which says, look how good. China is like how bad Munich, Detroit, Tokyo, Solar, the other other epicenters for automotive globally. There is a Chinese EV-like company in America. It's called Rivian. Makes great products, but they lose a lot of money making those products. And therefore, the company is not very highly valued. I think if you said top 50 or top 100 companies in the Bay Area, I'm not sure Rivian would even make that list. And it's not that the products are bad

Starting point is 00:36:35 or the people at Rivian are incompetent or they're not working hard. It's just the business is a tough business. The EV business in automotive is a tough business. So how can we hold these realities? So we say, look how amazing these Chinese EV companies are. Look how bad the home team is. It's just because the home team is being assessed for being a business.

Starting point is 00:36:54 It has to make profits. and because it doesn't, it gets hammered by public investors. The other thing is not even a company. Now, if we do apples to apples, America just has to build great EVs. That means Tesla and everybody else combined and we don't care about profits. I think America would field some very good products and there would be wow products. So the comparisons are really, really off. And I think that creates an misunderstanding.

Starting point is 00:37:21 I think, you know, then the little maybe the most philosophical, question. Can China succeed? And does that mean America has to fail or vice versa? If you believe in open and free markets, you believe everybody can succeed in those markets. And that's been proven for over 100 years. And I think what we're experiencing right now is how does China play in that ecosystem? Because I said open and free markets, and those are not open and free markets. And so, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have an antagonistic relationship. It certainly doesn't mean that China's incompetent. And it certainly doesn't mean that it's not, doesn't warrant our attention and that are our kind of, let's say, focus.

Starting point is 00:38:00 But it's also not a one-to-one comparison. I think we should be very careful in implying it's a one-to-one comparison. And by the way, that, like, five-minute explanation is never going to get to the average person sitting at an airport in Detroit, Michigan, waiting for their flight. They just, all they consume is China bad. Like, it's like that, it's not like that. It's not that simple. It's way more nuanced. This episode is brought to you by Lovable.

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Starting point is 00:39:19 that tweet got like 2 million views. Elon replied to you. Mark Andreessen quote tweeted it and said, this is the best AI CEO. Nobody knows follow for free Alpha. Elad Gill, famed investor, describes you as the most successful, most quiet company in AI.

Starting point is 00:39:41 And to me, this is really interesting because most founders are told, build in public, build a following, be loud, get out there, talk all the time about what you're doing. You did the opposite. You were very into the radar, stayed quiet, build, build, build, and then decided later, okay, now time. It's time to talk about our story. So I think this counter narrative is really interesting. And I think we'll inspire a lot of founders to not feel like they have to do this. What was your philosophy of just staying quiet and then starting? Yeah, it's a great point. So number one, it was intentional. And I think if it was up to me, we would do that forever. I think we're very much inspired by folks more. like a Berkshire Hathaway and less like, you know, let's say a Silicon Valley darling. And the, I'll tell tell why I changed the views and then just, but before some founders

Starting point is 00:40:31 go and take that advice immediately without, without really thinking about it, I can do that because I'm known in the ecosystem. You know, I know these folks personally. And so I don't need to have a brand out there that is getting Elad to, you know, remember me think about me. And so if you're, you know, if I'm doing my first two companies, uh, were a lot less known as before I really, you know, became a YC. So, you know, all of our company values can be reduced these two words of radical pragmatism. So before you take the advice, make sure it applies to your situation. One of the reasons, and of all, who's one of our investors and a friend, uh,

Starting point is 00:41:12 you know, says, you know, fame itself is like a tool and it's, and it's powerful. Now, if you don't have a network and you can get a following, that's a fantastic way to get, you know, to recruit people to your company, to recruit investors to your mission and then, of course, you know, customers. And so, but for us, and I think, I think that wasn't a hard requirement, you know, 10, 10 plus years ago. The other thing is, I think Peter and I, you know, the old saying about life is kind of like, you do things and then you rationalize the thing that you do, right? So I think fundamental with Peter and I, we don't get a lot of, my co-founder, Peter, a lot of of, we don't get a lot of emotional satisfaction out of doing very public things. And I think

Starting point is 00:41:56 if I was really to play armchair psychologist and really try to get to the root of why, beyond the rational view, which is focus on your customers, focus on the product. Every minute you're doing a podcast, every minute you're doing an ex post, every minute you're writing something for public consumption, you're not focusing your very limited time that you have on your customers and your product. And ultimately, that's the only thing that's going to produce and yield results. But the, you know, the reality of the situation today, you know, 2026 is even a company like us that's known or somebody like me is known in the ecosystem, you still want to get that broader message on. That's what I talk a little bit, a little bit about on X. So it's a, it's,

Starting point is 00:42:39 it is definitely contrarian, but it's not just contrarian. But it's not just contrarian for contrarian's sake. It plays a little bit of our of our own psychology. And then I would say just to just to finish that thought there is, you know, I grew up, you know, I'm an immigrant. I came to the U.S. from Pakistan when I was a kid, have a little bit of a weird name. And you feel like, you know, anybody, I grew up in, in Detroit, in Warren, Michigan specifically for all those at home. And when you feel that you're a little bit on the edge of society or you're not maybe in the mainstream, and this is, you know, resonates with some people. That's not as resonate with everybody. You feel very skeptical of the

Starting point is 00:43:17 mainstream because you're just on the outside for so long. And I think you can trace a bunch of founders psychology to this feeling of being an outcast, actually. And so then you find yourself in a situation where you're like the YC, you know, CEO of YC. And the narrative of I'm an outsider is like, you know, I don't know if there's anything more inside than being, you know, the YC, CO, right? So I think that reconciliation, I think over the, over my career also has, has had to happen, which is like maybe that's just kind of a weird, weird kind of thing. And so when I talked to, you know, Mark Andreessen, who's who really pushed me to go, go online or Elad or whoever it is, their view is leave your baggage and your trauma, you know,

Starting point is 00:44:02 in the background. And really, let's, let's think more pragmatically. And the pragmatic thing here is whether I like to do these types of things or not, fundamentally, it helps get the message out. And the message can be something very small in myopic, like what's happening in physical AI and machines become intelligent, or much larger, which is what's happening in society through this fundamental change that we're going through. I've had the rare privilege or the experience of seeing the full economic spectrum. You know, I've really seen the extreme ends of both sides. And truly, I've really seen the extreme ends of both sides. And truly, I

Starting point is 00:44:41 I really mean that. And so somebody like Mark, who is close to our company, says, well, that's a, those are some ideas that are worth getting out beyond just, you know, you're there promoting whatever some, you know, your company or something like that. And that I actually, that I can get behind, which is like the debate and discussion about ideas and what's happening to our society because of these technical changes. And, and so, you know, here I am. Amazing. Okay. So there's a few threads I want to follow there. One is you were, as you said, C-O at Y Combinator. You saw a lot of startups up close.

Starting point is 00:45:17 This is your third startup on your own. Something that I hear you talk about is that successful companies almost always show traction very early. A lot of founders here are like, no, just keep trying to fighting and maybe it will be the next Figma notion four years in. We'll figure it out. What's your experience there and what's your advice to founders who aren't seeing traction early? Nuances. I mean, if I was starting another company, it would call nuance. right? So I think what you're saying is correct. I continue to believe that. I think good companies tend to be to have traction fairly early and then just sustain it for a decade plus.

Starting point is 00:45:54 To the founders that's toiling, let's say you're listening and you're about two years into your company and you're maybe having a tough time building, getting money and building that first product that consumers or businesses really love, either through attention or dollars. two years is the difficult time. The heuristic that I would use is if I'm not, if the information I'm getting from the market is not informing me on a more and more specific path, I would consider resetting. And what I mean by reset is oftentimes, and this is wearing my YC hat, seeing hundreds and thousands of companies,

Starting point is 00:46:30 is oftentimes as like the co-founding, like literally the foundation upon which the house is built is not correct. It's like imagine you built this house and every time you put a cup of water and it slides off the table and it falls on the ground. And you keep adjusting the table. It's like maybe the foundation is actually wrong. The whole house is off kilter. And that foundation might not only be your co-founders. It could be the market that you're in.

Starting point is 00:46:51 It could be the phase of life that you're in and the amount of effort that you're willing to put into that thing in order to make it successful. So there's a bunch of reasons that a company can fail. And you have to be able to somehow say, I don't know what is the reason. I'm just going to have to hard reset here. One thing I would tell founders, and I tell applied as creating a founder class in itself, people who work at Applied Intuition are now starting their own companies. You know, we have 1,000 plus engineers,

Starting point is 00:47:18 and over time they're starting their own firms. And I say to all of them is, just imagine the first time you're going to do startup for the first three years, it's a zero. Just rid yourself of the expectation that it's going to be successful and that you're really, you're a craftsperson, And if this was a woodworking podcast and you said, you know, the first table that you built was, you know, what was wobbly, you wouldn't say, well, go work at Creighton Barrel.

Starting point is 00:47:49 You'd say, that's the first table. We're going to keep at it. Being a founder is its own muscle. And you want to exercise that muscle. But I think a lot of founders, especially earlier in their founding career, put such an incredible pressure on themselves to make it great. out of the gate that they actually miss the thing that you're getting in that first round, which is learning and building that muscle in the second third time. And I think it's not random that my third company is the most successful company.

Starting point is 00:48:17 I think that's, I think, and you see that more often than not. There are funds which are almost exclusively focused on multi-time founders, right, for this reason. What I love about that advice is often the best ideas come from when you're, you have low expectations, you're just playing around, you're just tinkering, you're not like, I'm going to build the next great, I don't know, Google. It's just you having fun. And that's like how I found this world that I'm in right now, this path. And Open Claw is a good example of that.

Starting point is 00:48:46 I think why that advice is so difficult is if you hear this and you're like, you know, you're in the, you're in the proverbial war. You're like, what the hell are these people talking about having fun? This is hard. And so you have to like hold these contrasting kind of or conflicting views in you had. which is like, it's deeply very, very important, and you should give it your all, and it's also not that important. And that's a really hard thing to reconcile and keep in balance. And the way that you approached this company where you stay quiet, like that, I think helps a lot where you're not.

Starting point is 00:49:21 Absolutely. Yeah. It's it. Like, you know, even like at YC, when I became COO, I told Sam Malm was a president. And I told Sam, let's not announce this for like a year. because, you know, if the partners don't want me to be CEO, it's not a successful thing. I, you know, I don't have the pressure of the public scrutiny that, you know, why were you CEO only for six months or something like that?

Starting point is 00:49:46 And I think you have to be very honest with yourself as a founder and as a human being, that those things matter. What people think about you matter and it impacts yourself. And having the spotlight on you, you know, I always say it's very easy to pivot before you raise money and before you have employees. Nobody cares. The moment you raise money and the more importantly, the moment you hire employees, employees join a very specific mission. And you go and you walk into the office and there's 10 of them. You say, guys, turns out this isn't wrong. We're going on a different mission. Imagine if this was war. It's like, what the hell? We're attacking that hill and now we just

Starting point is 00:50:20 say that hill's not important. How do you know the next hill is important? And you as a lead, you lose a lot of credibility. And it's not only for the superficialness of being a credible leader. It's a practical nature of when you're very, very public, the startup becomes your identity. And then suddenly you're, you're having to reconcile that actually that thing is not correct. So it is one of our, we have these core values in the company.

Starting point is 00:50:46 And early in the company, you used to have this line which says, our best work is done alone and quietly. And I deeply believe that. And so founders, I would think of it that way. But it's for pragmatic reasons. It's not like some just because it's cool to be under the radar. It's, it's just allows you to maybe work in a bit more peace.

Starting point is 00:51:09 I love these core values you've shared so far. This is the last one. The best work is done alone quietly. I'm so on board with that. Radical pragmatism is the other one you shared earlier. Are there, are there a couple more there? These are, these are gems. Yeah, we those are like I would say, the, the meta values.

Starting point is 00:51:23 We have very specific, let's say, operating principles. And this is, this is real, as tactical as advice, I can give to founders. So we can, to come up with your values when you're getting a little bit of traction. And the reason I say that is early enough where you, and the way you come up with the values

Starting point is 00:51:40 is not like, what values should we have like as philosophers? No, no. You should figure out why are we being successful? Like literally write down the five to ten things that are the reasons you are being successful. And those become your values and you kind of re, and so we did that.

Starting point is 00:51:55 And so our first one was going to speed above everything. And it was like us being fast. The second one is like, you know, never disappoint the customer. Technical mastery, high output matters, like all the way down to like, you know, ones that are not obvious, like laugh a lot. That's been our core value from at the beginning of the company's history. It's like when you're working in intense things, if you don't have the ability to keep grounded, have perspective, laughter and humor also is a way to get subtle feedback and a slightly different taste than this sucks.

Starting point is 00:52:25 You can say it's not the best. And that is slightly. And so you're you're really creating the framework in which people are learning how to behave with each other within the company. And so today the values really serve us as almost like they're like guiding principles. And so, you know, we do new team meetings every week, Peter and I will meet all the new team members. And we're almost always just talking about the values and some level of detail and depth. Yeah. Another value, half of the work is follow up.

Starting point is 00:52:54 Like just taking notes and following up. That is the business. it's not more complex than that. Laugh a lot is my new favorite company value. Yeah. Sounds like a wonderful place to work. And on the last piece there, there's this book that just came out by Stripe Press about maintenance

Starting point is 00:53:09 and how valuable and underappreciated the maintenance part of work is. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I think like if there's a takeaway that you get from, let's say, a bit of my philosophy on where we started the conversation around like why, being promotional has all these negative connotations in it. So I'm careful using that word, but why not be promotional? It's because there's costs to everything.

Starting point is 00:53:38 And so if you can focus on the craft and making the product really, really good and really listening to your customers, you have a much higher likelihood of success. And then you can always then go and scale that. A part of that is the thing that you're talking about. maintenance or another version of, you know, my roots are in automotive engineering. And automotive engineering is actually of exercise and quality. That's really what it's, you're building these very complex machines at scale. You know, people talk about rockets being really, very complex.

Starting point is 00:54:12 You only got to send up a rocket, even at the highest capacity, like once every couple of days. You're making a car every 30 seconds and you have to make it extremely cheap and it's globally competitive. So you really get into the nuance and minutia of, how a factory runs. And a factory is about safety and maintenance. There's not a lot of complex things. It's just,

Starting point is 00:54:31 you know, it's like when you break down, what is being operationally, you know, strong. Operational strong is keeping an eye in a handful of things and makes you're doing them really,

Starting point is 00:54:41 really good. And I'm, I'm one of those believers that, you know, there's this adage is a man who cannot command himself is not fit to command others. And it's like that maintenance aspect is a part of that,

Starting point is 00:54:54 right? It's like, if you maintain yourself and your own work, you maintain your team, you maintain the company, the products are almost, they come out of all of that system. And I think a lot of founders don't think about their company as a system or almost as a machine. But I would implore you to do that because then you really focus on the craft of the machine and building the machine and making it more hygienic and making it more well-tuned. Just like, you know, you'll meet people.

Starting point is 00:55:24 really love cars and they they really obsess about the maintenance of cars, you know, like, like they will detail like underneath the driver's seat as somebody who details my own cars. Like, nobody's going to look at that, but it's under that same ethos of really caring a lot about the craft and being, and frankly speaking, since you have a limited amount of time, it's hard to really care about X and also making your, making your company's hygienic. And there's different reasons at different points of your company that you should do different things, but that's kind of a little bit of the ethos. I love how it keeps coming back to just

Starting point is 00:55:57 staying quiet, working, just working on the thing and not talking about it. Your point, last point there makes me think of that the score takes care of itself. Yeah. Yeah, so Joe Montana is actually one of our investors. In our series D post, the post was the valuation takes care of itself. Like very much we fall into that category. And it's like, it's like, you know, sometimes people will come to our office and they'll say, oh, like it's like such a clean office. You guys must have like this giant cleaning staff. And it's like, actually, we clean our office. Just like in Japanese school, as I mentioned, I lived in Japan, like the students

Starting point is 00:56:33 clean their, clean their own schools. We have a cleaning Zen every week and everyone cleans the area around them. And I think it's important that, like, there's something about this ethos of like also, like, not getting so wrapped up in your own narrative of like, I'm a Stanford software engineer and I do AI. It's like, clean up your desk. So there's like some like basic things like that. And I don't know what that larger philosophy is,

Starting point is 00:57:01 but it is a philosophy that we kind of drive towards. And I think like, you know, our claim to fame, which is kind of a crazy, you know, reality is we've never spent any money we've ever raised. You know, the history of the company, which is kind of, it almost sounds like it's made up. It's an absolute company is almost 10 years old, you know, 1,000 engineers plus.

Starting point is 00:57:20 And so we're a functioning. business without using capital that we've raised. And I think it's somehow connected to us cleaning the office. I don't know how. Because you're saving all these cleaning costs. It all makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. We still have people clean, but like we also are, like our employees also are aware of their surroundings. And I think there's a direct line between like be quiet and alone and clean your desk and well-written software. And I don't know what that thing is, but it's all falls in the same. arc. I know you also have a no shoe policy for that same reason to think things can. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it also influenced Japan. I think the, you know, I worked there and we had a similar office set up. The other,

Starting point is 00:58:02 the other other other way to think about this maybe as again, I'm just trying to impart everything I've known to founders because I feel like that's my, you know, that's who that's who that information is so limited and everyone's kind of trying to make it up, frankly speaking. This is the alpha. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly is I would implore you as a founder to really, really try to take the best of Japan and the best of Germany, the best of China, the best of Detroit, the best of Silicon Valley. And, you know, I think sometimes people take that Steve Jobs line and they really, like, you know, deform it where they say, like, great artist steel.

Starting point is 00:58:37 What he's really talking about is, like, the less magnanimous version of that is be humble and learn from everything around you and as a leader and be well-rounded. I think like reading is should be you know I there's a Charlie Munger line where he says I've never met anybody very very successful who doesn't read all the time and I like very much fall into that category as well. And so if you like unpack why that is like why does reading a physical book make you a better founder? Like I just like ask that question in the most direct way is I'm not reading you know if you especially my my ethos of reading is read old books. don't read anything new. Read old books because time is filtered out a lot of the noise. So you get a lot of signal.

Starting point is 00:59:25 And in your life, you're going to, a thousand books, maybe you'll read, like in the best case scenario, you're going to read probably 50 to 100 books, which is kind of crazy for the average person. So you're not going to read many. So don't read low-quality content. You read, there are true pillars of kind of human ideas out there. you consume those ideas and then it's up to you to interpret how those ideas then reflect upon the business that you're leading or the technology that you're developing. I absolutely believe reading a book like Malcolm X's autobiography will make you a better founder and it's not, again, it's like the whole cleaning Zen all the way to clean code. It's not directly one-to-one

Starting point is 01:00:10 related. I think we always want these very simple if-then statements. But I think being a well founder where you understand society around you and history around you, that somehow makes you build a better product. I don't know how and how to why, but I think it's absolutely true. I do see a connection there. And then people like Charlie Munger who are not an AI founder, obviously also believe that. And I think so there's some pattern there. Like it's interesting. This is the same. It's a metaphor for LLMs. You feed all his data. Somehow they become almost conscious. How does that happen? No one fully knows. It's so interesting how similar you are to Mark Endries and your way of thinking and the way you consume content.

Starting point is 01:00:51 We're both bald. There's a thread here. Here's important ingredients to being really successful. Yeah, I mean, Mark, I mean, you know, we're fortunate enough to choose, you know, our investors. And that's a true privilege. I didn't have that. My first company, we spent years. We didn't raise a dollar.

Starting point is 01:01:09 So I'd certainly appreciate it. But, you know, if I've ever had like a mentor, you know, Mark would fall into that. category. And I think before applied and we debated and talked a lot. And I think Mark is also like that. He really consumes content actually outside of this little industry that we're in. And then I think it makes him actually a better investor. Yeah. We'll point people to your website. You have a list of the books that you recommend and love. And it's very long and very not what you often see. I can't help but just ask, are there a few books that have most influenced your think, getting most influenced your life.

Starting point is 01:01:46 Yeah, that list is, like, I've very thoughtful, been thoughtful about that. And the reason I use books like, you know, the autobiography of Malcolm X as an example is, I know that's not on the top of the list. Everyone's going to, you know, if I say high output management, classic Andy Grove, you know, you guys know that.

Starting point is 01:02:03 So it's like partly is a book here. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like partly the theatrics of also entertaining you, but also giving you new information as a, as a listener. I think like a good the books I'm currently reading this is kind of a random you know,

Starting point is 01:02:19 a lot of books like I'm reading the vibe coding book that came out that were our whole company's reading that which is a new book and it kind of goes against my grain of my heuristic but the emperor of all maladies the cancer book fantastic book I'm almost done with it

Starting point is 01:02:33 like I think it changes the way I think like you read that and it changes the way and I think that's the ultimate test when a piece of material changes your existing framing on life. This is, this is good. In the LLM use, this is somehow related in the sense of diverse data makes your understanding the world more rich and nuanced and therefore it's better. But yeah, so like I'm always inspired to give like more wacky kind of examples rather

Starting point is 01:03:07 than than the obvious ones. But the obvious ones that if I really wasn't, wasn't being theatrical, I think Sam Walton's book Made in America's an unbelievable book. It's very, very good. He wrote it on his deathbed. You know, My American Journey is also very good. Colm Powell's book. It's not on my website, but it's, it's really good. You know, I'm somebody who tries to connect some of these dots from like us being, you know, cave people to now like living in, you know, Silicon Valley working, you You know, there's a venture-backed AI company founder. And so books like Guns, Germs and Steel really are top of that list of fantastic, fantastic book or collapse, also same author.

Starting point is 01:03:50 So, yeah, but my point to founders is read the stuff. You can still go to physical bookstores. Read the stuff that is both old and well regarded and you know nothing about. I often, when I'm trying to find the next book to read, like I remember the way I picked up SPT, QR, which is the book on Roman history, was like, I was like, I don't actually know a lot about Roman history. I know the high level stuff. So like, think about all the ideas in the universe, from philosophy to history to, you know,

Starting point is 01:04:21 Jainism, to the rise of, you know, Japan as a, as a feudal state. Like areas you don't really know. And then just find the best book in that space. And I think you just start filling in the blanks. And so often I, that's kind of like the way that I grok the ecosystem is like, What don't I know anything about? And let me find the best piece of material in that. And yeah, it doesn't work well.

Starting point is 01:04:45 I like that. So Mark's philosophy is this barbell strategy of only today news like X and 10 years ago books. I love that you're like, no, just like upside down to you almost. Just only. Yeah. I mean, you know, Mark was a heavy influence in me getting on X. So, you know, he's, he's propagated that. That view.

Starting point is 01:05:05 The thing that I really do agree with him is as our company becomes a larger, more influential and impactful company of society, it is my responsibility as a co-founder of the company and the CEO of the company to at least propagate my ideas to our first AI founder community and then larger the technology leadership and then the world writ large. And so that's part of it. I think in that way Mark is, Mark has really taken it. You know, you think about VCs, not long ago, you would never even know who their names are. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:05:43 I mean, they were like this, they were like, you know, they're like PE guys or, or, you know, hedge fund managers. You can't even think of names. They're like, they're just blobs of ominous sounding, you know, obsidian corporation or something like that. And it's only A16Z and a couple of other folks, John Doar, who really kind of created the, hey, I'm going to be the indifference. individual investor and I'm going to propagate a certain set of ideas and that's going to create gravity within Silicon Valley's and influence founders to then make certain types of companies and of course they invest in those. On this thread about reading to find almost areas you disagree and don't, you know, haven't thought about. I know one of your approaches to management and one that may be

Starting point is 01:06:26 a value is to encourage your leaders to listen to naysayers to not create this positive reinforcement cycle. talk about why that's important, how you operationalize that. So imagine, you know, I'm not the founder of the company. Peter's not the co-founder of the, it's just a generic company. The ideal situation where the generic company is one that you can put in lots of different competing ideas. The culture is one where you will shake those ideas out. There's not an emotion in it.

Starting point is 01:06:57 Whoever brings the idea, the best, best idea wins. So why can't companies do that? Frankly speaking, a lot of times it's the founders. And the founders are told by popular media and the way that human beings experience life and our tribal kind of outlook that you have to have this hard view. And everyone has said, if they're not following you,

Starting point is 01:07:19 then maybe you're a weak leader or something like that. And I think we just don't believe that. We don't just believe in that philosophy. And I think we believe maybe a more tactical way of saying that is we take inputs of the environment, our customers, specifically, our employees, our competitors, of our investors, and we, of what's happening in society at large, and that impacts our strategy. And, and I think it's one of the reasons we've been very, very successful. We're not, we're not so arrogant to think that we just have the answers because we had the

Starting point is 01:07:52 ambition to start a company. And I think that permeates into a very specific culture. And I think the culture that we've built is one. It's also not being. contrarian for contrarian's sake. One view I do have is emotions are generally not helpful in making rational decisions. They're almost like the opposite of it. And sometimes passion and, you know, leadership are supposed to be about, you know,

Starting point is 01:08:17 they're supposed to be like, again, magnanimous or emotional. And we just don't believe that. And that's, I think, a bit more of our kind of Midwest, you know, you know, roots showing for Peter and I, And so I think it's not that we say, hey, disagree with everything in the room. What we specifically say is speak up, speak up. Everyone has to speak up because that one person with their one experience because they worked at, you know, Zooks or Waymo or wherever Tesla or they worked at a Chinese company, whatever it is, that one idea they have in their head when the debate is happening about what we should do in, you know, in space, like literally the space of space. and and something maybe we don't know much about that one person's one idea they have to feel

Starting point is 01:09:05 comfortable sharing it even if they're the most junior person or they feel that they didn't get their way in the last debate or they feel you know whatever whatever anxiety that they might have they have to share that opinion that guys this is actually the right idea or this is the wrong idea and if you can create that environment where the best idea wins you know Gandhi has this line truth is what stands the test of time we're trying you know and I think there's become a little bit of a meme in the Bay Area, like truth seeking, you know, as a culture. But it kind of is like that. We're trying to find the best idea. Maybe truth is the wrong word. Maybe it's the best idea. Find the best idea and then let's go full bore against the best idea. Let's maybe use a

Starting point is 01:09:43 counterfactual. Why do companies fail when they have great talent and they have, you know, seemingly all the same components that an applied intuition have? It's because maybe the best ideas they're not being surfaced and certainly maybe they're not actually being adopted. Or more often than not, when I think about companies that have been very successful, is they have momentum going in a specific direction. And that momentum over, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that's emerging. Hey, the market's changing. The market's changing. You just can't even hear that, because there's all this is a momentum going in a particular direction. A good example, I had front row seats for this. When I worked at Google,

Starting point is 01:10:26 It was the era where Facebook was emerging. And here was Google. And people don't remember Google in the late double-Os and early teens. Google wasn't just a company. It was the apex predator of Silicon Valley. Apple was just, you know, the MacBook Air had just come out. Steve Jobs was getting in the right direction, but nothing like Apple is today. Amazon, AWS was still a young thing.

Starting point is 01:10:51 InVideo was teetering off of bankruptcy. I mean, all these. giant companies that you think of Microsoft was run by Balmer, you know, Twitter was a small thing. And then you, so it wasn't, it was in it, but Google was this already larger than life, number one company. Everybody wanted to work at Google. And there was, there were not many companies with that stature. And then in the periphery, this little company, Facebook starts emerging. And Google, who has the best engineers on the planet, is making a billion in cash flow a month, tries to fight this little company that, and I remember Facebook at that time,

Starting point is 01:11:26 maybe had a thousand people and Google was like you know 15x 20x to size with a lot of cash flow and why couldn't Google fight Facebook it's because Google is not Facebook it's like the confucian saying like how does a gorilla learn how to fly by not being a gorilla the way that Google would have won the social media wars by being a social media company it's just fundamentally not and so the large this happens in companies all the time which is you're just going in one direction with momentum consciously or unconscious because that's where all the employees are. That's what the culture is. That's what they work on. And then something changes in the market. And you just can't even even move there. And I think that also can happen on character or surprisingly

Starting point is 01:12:11 at really small companies. So where founders have a view and it's like that view is the view it's going to be. And actually that can be just 10 degrees off from what is the was the correct path. And the whole company is kind of led us straight. So they were in the right market. They might even have been solving the right problem, but they were just a little off. And so we're so scared of failing and so scared of losing that I will humble myself and listen to other people. And they say, hey, we're five degrees off course here. And it's like, okay, let's maybe fix the course. And then once that becomes your culture, then it's really hard to lose.

Starting point is 01:12:46 Because everybody's not about fulfilling a preset path. They're just about finding the, you know, how to win. this is exactly what I wanted to ask about. Everyone listening to this either is like, oh yeah, we're very open-minded. We're absolutely going to listen to everyone's opinions and decide rationally the right path in practice. Almost never happens. Right. Or they're just like, we're just, we know we're not good at this. We're just like too nice to each other. How do you do this at a company that isn't good at this? Is it like, does it have to be the CEO top down in your experiences that have to be part of the culture? How do you operationalize at a company that's not like you? you know the the middle way is typically the right way and it's it's hard to find the middle way because these are conflicting ideas. The the guardrails or the flag the post you just

Starting point is 01:13:35 set. One side is like we're just going to go on the other side is we're too you know maybe like almost like unsure and you have to somehow once you do make that have that debate you have to then confidently walk down that path and again this is conflicting. I just said be humble enough to listen to what's going on, but then once that decision is made, the decisive, in our values, that first value, the speed value, which is specifically the wording is

Starting point is 01:14:02 move fast, move safe, that's specifically the wording. We assess our managers on adherence of those values. Literally, we compensate and promote against those values. They're not just like abstract values. So the behavior we're actually looking at under speed is decisiveness. So we're setting up a system that is looking at, you know, you know, these conflicting kind of things. One is like be open and the other ones make decisions quickly. And you have to hold those intention. This is why you as the co-founder or founder of the company get paid the big bucks.

Starting point is 01:14:36 You got to do that. You have to know when to bluff and when to hold them and, you know, when to fold them. So at some point, and that point comes sometimes faster than you think, you will not get any more information. You have to make a decision. So you're walking this very, very thin line. Your point about emotions was extremely interesting. And I want to make sure people don't take away the wrong takeaway here. So what I actually found really helpful, which I think is aligned with what you were suggesting, is taking emotions out of it.

Starting point is 01:15:08 The way I've used this in my work is when you have to make a hard decision, pretend nobody's feelings would be hurt and emotions are not involved. What would you do if nobody cared if they're like totally great? So what would you do in that world? And then that tells you, okay, that's actually the right thing to do. And then it's, okay, how do I help people feel okay about this? How do I deal with the downsides of this path? Yeah, I think that's the obvious version of it. I think maybe another version of thinking is it's an emotion is, let's take another.

Starting point is 01:15:40 You as the leader or as the engineer who is getting direction, you already have some preset view that this is my idea. that's an emotional, you know, that's an emotional construct. And it's, it's around ownership and feeling of ownership. So, yeah, I'm, I really fall into that category of like the more. So like, even maybe most fundamentally, like, what is an emotion? An emotion is like these set of reactions that have been, that a framework that's been imparted in your brain through life experiences. And those life experiences might not actually make you optimize, they've not been optimized for

Starting point is 01:16:19 you to make a decision in a product review. And so the more you can pull that away, a good heuristic would be the same decision being made by multiple people in the company gets the same result. So you're removing a little bit of that almost like filter. You can almost think of that emotion as like a filter. So I like to have the raw image come through, the raw decision come through, so we can consistently classify it again and again, not to get too abstract, but on a, that makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense. And I have one last question, but there's an interesting

Starting point is 01:16:53 trend I've noticed with people talking about AGI. The missing piece I've been hearing more and more is just emotions are what creates consciousness potentially. Michael Paulin has a new book out about consciousness and his take is it's not just more intelligence. It's actually emotions that led to the consciousness. I think it's it's under, let's say undermining how complex human thought is to think that it's just the, let's say, the inputs and outputs of, or let's say, association for the lack of better word, of ideas, facts, words, letters. It's not just as associations. And creativity is kind of a little bit of that as well.

Starting point is 01:17:39 Like the old saying of like technical mastery is mastering the complex. And I think computers do that really well. and creativity is mastering the simple. I'm sure I'm going to eat my words on this as like the best artist in like three years. That will be. It will be. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:17:55 And so I think, and this again goes back to my philosophy of like consume broad, you know, broad inputs, but then try to remove that filter, see things as honestly as they possibly can, create a culture in the company that is also similar and doesn't put any weight on who the idea came from or where it came from, but then ultimately as a leader, you decide. And by the way, you got to be right.

Starting point is 01:18:23 Like, that's the other thing. I think a lot of founders just were not, we don't emphasize enough. Founders love to take credit for things. It's just human nature. Everybody does. But the reality is you have to be right. It's not enough to just start a company. It's not enough to, you know, have this vision of the world.

Starting point is 01:18:42 You have to be right. And the evidence is, is the company a sustainable, standalone business because we're talking specifically about, you know, venture-backed AI companies in Silicon Valley. All of my, but I should have said this at the beginning, all of my, you know, all my advice is specifically for that narrow group, which is founders of AI venture-backed companies in the Bay Area. Speaking of that, last question, I've been wanting to get to this because it's an interesting, spicy take that you have as the last question. I know you have to run after this. You have this view that a lot of CEOs in Silicon Valley don't actually have great taste. I'm excited to hear your experience

Starting point is 01:19:16 there and just what you're saying. Yeah, I also want to be careful to imply that I do. I follow into that group. I think, you know, the, it is true because a lot of times, a couple of reasons. Both, both taste in the most, let's say, you know, artistic sense and in the most specific, like running a company and like what should be the policy, like HR policy for being a point X. a lot of that is I think they're just not exposed to a lot of interesting good things. And that's been a theme in this whole conversation is like just get more and more exposure. It's very unfortunate when I meet somebody who, and I'm not thinking of anyone in particular. So if this is you and you're one of my friends, I apologize. I'm not talking about you.

Starting point is 01:20:02 But it's like, you know, you grow up in Cupertino, you go to Berkeley and you start. And the first thing you do when you come out of school is you start a company and then that's all you do, you know, for 20. Like, you've never even been an employee. And why I think that's so important. Like, I spent over a decade working in large organizations and, like, truly large, like more than 100,000 employees, like a General Motors or like a Bosch. And when you're in the, you know, the back alley of that organization, the bowels of those organizations, you learn how bad it is to be an employee.

Starting point is 01:20:36 Like the bureaucracy above you, leadership doesn't know what's going on, the industry, you know, your antiquated tools, all this stuff. Why that's so important to experience as an individual is then when you become a leader, you're making policies and you're creating culture and you have to keep that in mind. And a bunch of founders, we just never had the, frankly, the fortune of being at the bottom of the totem pole. And that's just one version of how to, you know, that doesn't obviously seem like, you know, read, you know, consume the photos of Bresson or, you know, Picasso or whoever it might be. But it's something similar.

Starting point is 01:21:15 There's something similar about, you can sometimes meet founders and maybe a good heuristic here is like, there's some founders that would be good at lots and lots of things, actually not just being a founder of an AI company in the Bay Area. And there's something about taste there. Because you're really what you're talking about is like understanding humans and understanding life and then being able to discern with some judgment what is good and what's not good because that's really what we're talking about. And so if your life experience is very narrow, you could still be good and you might have the ability to discern what's good and what's,

Starting point is 01:21:53 what's not good. But I think like there's something about like, if you've backpacked for a few years around the world, I somehow believe that's going to be a better founder. It's like, you know, I don't know how I can, there's no peer reviewed research that can, that I can point to that says that. So I think that's what I'm getting at. There is some developing of taste. Yeah. Well, I feel like we have helped people build their taste, build, feed their model with more

Starting point is 01:22:20 insights and different perspectives in this conversation. I feel like we could chat for hours, but I know get a run. Yeah, I'm not sure if there were any real takeaways other than that. Okay. We really, we really went everywhere. I'm sorry if you had a particular line of questions you want. wanted to go down. We went in all the perfect directions. Okay, good, good. Kassar, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much for being here. Final question, just where can folks finding

Starting point is 01:22:42 online? How can listeners be useful to you? That's a great question. I mean, I love to hear what are books that I don't know. So that's always good. Some of my favorite books have been just randomly kind of recommended to me. So I'll take that. Of course, I consume, you know, research as well. And So if there's something particularly novel that's going on, obviously all the mainstream stuff we as a company and me as an individual are going to consume, but things that are a bit off the beaten path, we're always looking for that. But yeah. And then if you if you have a particular opinion about specifically our domain, physical AI and how AI is going to impact minds, farms, you know, construction sites, robotax, all of that stuff. I'm always interested in here, new opinions on that, or even old opinions maybe with a different viewpoint. So, yeah, if you see me, you can see me online.

Starting point is 01:23:37 Of course, I'm always around as well. I'm always open to that feedback. And you're on Twitter now. There you go. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, follow me there. Yeah, exactly. That's the answer.

Starting point is 01:23:49 That's the call to action. channeling my inner mark. There you go. Kasser, thank you so much for doing this for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun. everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating

Starting point is 01:24:10 or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - The most successful AI company you’ve never heard of | Qasar Younis

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