This Week in Startups - Next Unicorns: Unlocking the power of photonic computing with Lightmatter CEO Nick Harris | E1787

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Carta now lets you launch and administer SPVs for your syndicate. Share your knowledge, capital, and network to launch your syndicate SPVs through Carta. Get 10% off your first SPV at carta.com with promo code TWIST. Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. Now you can add the Pod Pro Cover to any mattress! Go to eightsleep.com/twist to check out the Pod Pro Cover and get $150 off at checkout! LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters. Go to LinkedIn.com/unicorn to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply. * Today’s show: Lightmatter CEO Nick Harris joins Jason to discuss how his startup is revolutionizing the future of computing with photonic chips (1:48), the challenges of building the next-generation AI hardware (18:35), and more! * Time stamps: (00:00) Lightmatter CEO Nick Harris joins Jason (1:48) Photonic computing and the optic engines involved (5:08) Lightmatter’s background and customer base (9:24) The impact of this technology (11:38) Carta - Get 10% off your first SPV at https://carta.com with promo code TWIST (13:12) Catching up to demand and the endgame for process tech in semiconductors (15:37) Using AI tools to build AI chips and the potential of data centers in space (18:35) Fixing issues associated with advanced chips and supercomputers (21:58) Eight Sleep - Go to https://eightsleep.com/twist to check out the Pod Cover and get $150 off at checkout! (23:30) Where we are on the path to AGI (26:17) Nick’s background in quantum computing (29:15) The LK-99 superconductor (33:42) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at https://LinkedIn.com/unicorn (34:58) Scientists gaining recognition and the app diversion (40:17) LinkSquares CEO Vishal Sunak on going from $1M to $10M in ARR in 2 years * Follow Nick: https://twitter.com/theanalognick Check out Lightmatter: https://lightmatter.co * Read LAUNCH Fund 4 Deal Memo: https://www.launch.co/four Apply for Funding: https://www.launch.co/apply Buy ANGEL: https://www.angelthebook.com Great recent interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland, PrayingForExits, Jenny Lefcourt Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow Jason: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

I think what you're going to see from light matter over the next year and a half is extreme volume on ground-breaking optical products. And, you know, what I'm really aiming to do with light matter ultimately is to build the photonics company. So if you think of the word photonics, I want you to think of light matter ultimately. And the way that's going to happen is through the whole set of technologies that what we've developed can kind of be realized. This weekend startups is brought to you by Karta now lets you launch and administer SPVs. for your syndicate. Share your knowledge, capital, and network to launch your syndicate SPVs through Carter. Get 10% off your first SPV at carda.com slash twist with promo code twist. 8Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. Now you can add the pod cover to any mattress.

Go to 8Sleep.com slash twist to check out the pod cover and get $150 off at checkout. And LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people. people and every hire matters. Post your first job for free at LinkedIn.com slash unicorn. All right, listen, everybody. AI is changing everything. A big part of that is what's been made possible by GPUs, TPUs. All of this is powered by electric chips, basically, right? That's a standard for decades. We took sand, we made it into chips, and we changed the world. But electric signals, we all know that produces a bunch of heat. Of course, cooling systems, but there's something called photonic computing.

And our guest today is at the forefront of that. And his name is Nick Harris and the company's name is Light Matter. Nick, welcome to the program. Hey, good to meet you, Jason. And thanks for having us on the show. Yeah. So tell me what is photonic computing? Because I am a neophyte in this.

I'm aware of it. But I don't really know the state of it and if it's actually competitive and when this will actually be reaching people's desktops or servers. Yeah, so maybe I'll start with a little bit of a story to give context of it. So for the past 60 plus years, computers have done all calculations and communications generally using electrical signals. There were a bunch of incredible physics that were enabling those transistors, the fundamental component doing a lot of this computation and communication that we all use today,

enabling it to get better, faster, more energy efficient, smaller, cheaper, all these good things. And that was kind of described by this idea of Denard scaling, which is that energy usage per device would shrink with time and also Moore's law, which was that we'd get more transistors per unit area as time progressed. So those were the two things driving all that progress. In around 2005, that trend broke. And a lot of people in the physics community, You know, at universities, but also at the big companies doing the work developing these fab processes, realize that there was a fundamental challenge. I was working at Micron at the time when that wall was hit, and you could feel it.

And I love computers. I don't know why. I've just always been obsessed with them. And for me, it was, wow, this thing that I love is kind of coming to an end. We're at this wall. How can we make it better? There are a lot of different ways that people have looked at trying to extend the computing roadmap. The way that I've looked at and the way that others have as well is using light.

Now, there's two ways that you could use it. One would be to do the computation, and that's the oddball really new thing. The other is to do communication where you're sending data between points. A lot of the undersea cabling in the ocean, all of it actually is optical. In data centers today, if you go into the data center, there's optical. cables everywhere. They're using light to communicate signals. The new thing that's happening in the communication space, which we're working on at light matter, is that people are sending data between chips that are actually within an inch of each other using light and between racks and

all of these scales. But what's fundamentally happened is that these optical engines are getting closer and closer to the processors that we use. We're finding that there's a benefit actually to bringing them all the way into the chip itself. Wow. So, If you were going to put a bunch of servers across the ocean from each other or across the data center, of course, you'd use fiber optics. You can move a ton of, and you see that, right? Some computers have Ethernet plugs on the back. Other ones have literal, you literally you can plug into the back of a server and optical cable where all the data coming out comes out by light. And there are other constraints like hard drives, which of course have become SSD, so those are faster.

but what you're saying here is the next step is, hey, between the chips, we're setting the data over optical computing. That's right. So the distance that people are using optics over is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And it's starting to make its way inside the processor. So we've actually developed two kinds of technology at light matter. One is actually doing the computation behind deep learning using tiny little optical components that measure microns by microns. and it does the additions and the multiplications that describe neural network mathematics, deep learning, think about large language models, it does that math using light.

That's a huge breakthrough, new field, something that we've pioneered here. The other thing we're doing is we realize that these optical compute engines we've built are very fast. We need to find a way to keep them busy. One of the big pieces of feedback that I've gotten from diligence groups,

famous people in the field, when they've looked at us as like, it's cool, you can build that. How are you going to keep it busy? So we took that to heart and we invented our product line passage. And what it does is it allows you to feed the beast. It allows you to send bits at data rates high enough, both between the cores and memory, but also to other servers

so that you can actually keep these things busy and not just sitting there waiting for work. And that is one of the keys right now as part of this massive, compute-intensive language model building is that we're actually under-utilized. a lot of the hardware, correct? Oh, yeah, it's embarrassingly underutilized. I've heard numbers as low as 5%. So you'll have a huge number of theoretical maximum operations per second, and only 5% of them are being used.

And the reason is that if you look at a profile of these jobs, let's say a chat GPT type workload, most of it is spent shipping data between memory and the processor core or communicating between cores in the same box or distant boxes. It's not doing computation. Yeah, so just moving the data to the point at which the computation can occur is the bottleneck. And you're trying to solve for that. So have your products hit the streets yet, as it were, or is it still theoretical?

Where are you at in terms of these things being in the field? Yeah, so a little context on the company. We have about 130 employees' offices in Boston and Mountain View. We've raised about $300 million from investors, including Sequoia, Spark Capital, Fidelity Matrix, Google Ventures. So we've really got a bench of all the top VCs in the world. We have built many generations of chips, about three or four at this point. We have six customers on our compute product line,

and we're going to be launching our Interconnect product line at high volume next year. Got it. So pretty far along. And who are the customers for your products? Is it the open AIs of the world, the cloud computing platforms, or is it, you know, deeper in the stack, people who are building the servers and who are building the platforms?

It's cloud infra. So we're building like heavy-duty hardware for running these huge AI models. So it's these big clouds. And so are you then being put up against, say, Nvidia in these cloud offerings and how do you compete against them today? So on the compute side, yes,

we would be compared against Nvidia. On the interconnect side, not really. So on the Interconnect side, we actually enable all companies. So you can think about companies like AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and even the internal product teams for TPU, Amazon builds their own chips, and so on. They can all use our Interconnect technology to help extend what they've got as far as it could possibly go.

And those are generally chips that would be deployed in a data center. The way that we work with them is they have a chip, an accelerator, or a network chip, or FPGA. And they want to scale it out using our optical interconnect. We figure out basically what the floor plan of their chip is, where are the pins? And then we build a passage, which is a very up to a full wafer format, silicon photonics chip with waveguides that interlink everything on top.

Think about it like a chess board with light connecting all the chess pieces where the chest pieces are chips. Wow. So we basically lay their chips out in arrays. they can be processors, memories, any type of chip, and allow them to scale the solution. So in that way, we're kind of helping everybody. And what impact, if this is fully deployed to the cloud, what impact is this going to have on what we've already seen in terms of language models being built and, you know, the number of

or the amount of data being processed by them? Yeah. There's an interesting story here. So we're kind of bound by power usage and cooling at this point, not light matter, but the world in terms of data center deployments. When I started the company, chips were about 300 watts, if you looked at a GPU, maybe 250, 300 watts. Today, they're over a kilowatt. The next gen chips are about one and a half kilowatts. So things are accelerating really fast.

You could even say they're heating up. Things are heating up, yes. I mean, that is the key, right? Is that this creates a bit of a heat issue, no? Absolutely. And if you look at that heat issue, part of it is that the interconnect bandwidths, how many bits per second are leaving these chips is growing very, very fast. It used to be maybe 100 gigabit per second, and the latest ships will push out 7 terabits per second. So we're seeing a big acceleration in the number of bits that are shipped. The problem is when you ship those

bits over electrical wires, it ends up being the case that a server, if you do a power profile, more than half of all the power used is just moving the bits between the chips, not even on the chip, just between the chips. And so if you look at what we're doing with Passage, it's about 10 times better energy efficiency. So 18 picojoules per bit for the typical type of inside the box communication

that you would see with an NVIDIA server or an AMD server, take that down to two picojoules per bit. And I know this sounds quite technical, picoes per bit. But the point is 18 devices. by two. It's a big difference. What is a pic of jewel?

10 to the minus 12 joules. Jewel is a unit of energy. Right. So you can massively reduce the amount of energy, which then gets rid of the heat and the cooling. And then you can put more compute in the rack. Right. And all that real estate that you build out is now more useful. If you didn't want to add more compute, the power bill went down.

So that's nice. And by the way, the power bill is about 50% of the cost for running the data center. Listen, if you're in the tech industry, you know about Carta. Carta is the leading venture capital and equity management platform. And they have huge news to share here on this week in startups. Carta now let you syndicate an SPV. You know what an SPV is, a special purpose vehicle. So you create an SPV on Carta.

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Do you think we can catch up to the need? Because part of the issue here is we went from, let's say, millions of enterprises having no AI strategy and saying, yeah, we're going to get to that at some point to in one year, half of those, you know, million saying, this is the most important thing in the building. And the other half are kind of realizing, and I'm sure by the end of the year, they're going to say, hey, this is the most important thing we need to catch up on. So we're in catch up right now, clearly. Do you think we catch up or do we think that all of this energy by corporations,

not actual energy, but all of this intensity that they're putting towards this is we're going to be able to, between Nvidia Intel yourselves and everybody else working on this, we're going to be able to catch up, or do you think that this is just going to spiral where once organizations get a taste of what AI can do, they're just going to be doubling and tripling down.

Are we going to catch up? And what's the window of catch up? It's going to grow like crazy. We're not going to catch up. I think it's going to be a case of trying to build out enough ships. Companies like TSMC adding more

capacity, Intel catching up on process leadership, and I think they will. It's going to take... You actually think Intel's going to catch up, yeah? I think they'll do quite well. I actually think there's an endgame for process technology for semiconductors. There is a final node. I'll put it that way.

And someone will reach it first, but then everyone will get there. That's sort of my view on things, having seen the physics behind it and then what it takes. Yeah, so I think that the demand is insane. If you look at companies like Nvidia, they have more demand than they can possibly build out. which gives them great pricing power and these sorts of things. And the whole world doesn't like it when someone has great pricing power. And so there's an opportunity for other companies to come in and bring a solution. That does seem to be the truism here, which is it's very rare that everybody wants the same thing in the world.

Taylor Swift and H-100 seem to be the two. Dwellers-s have tickets and H-100 seem to be the two items that are that much in demand. And there's only so much Taylor Swift to go around. But Nvidia has competitors, right? And they're going to catch up. They're going to have competing products. And that will bring these prices back down. Yeah?

Yeah, I think that that's possible that it will happen. There's another thing to consider, which is that you can use the AI tools to build your AI chips. One of the big, powerful things behind Moore's Law was that you used the chips that you just made to make the chips that you're about to make. And that's something that you're seeing Nvidia do and hopefully the whole industry do. Google's done good work on this. our VP of Engineering led TPU at Google, and they had a paper in nature a couple of years ago where they were using an AI to actually design the floor plan of the chip and lay out the circuits. And you can get big advancements in this.

So it's going to be a big nonlinear feedback. You're going to see these tools being used to design themselves. Yeah, and at the speed these things are going, my lord, that could be quite impressive, yeah? Yeah, I mean, I have to tell you every year, one of these results like chat GPT comes out, and it's mind-blowing. It makes you question what the future is going to be like. And if that happens every year, I mean, it's hard to imagine where this ultimately goes. But I can tell you we're going to need to ship a lot more bits per second. The AI models are going to need to get bigger.

You're going to need more compute hardware, you know, and you're going to see exotic things. You're going to see water cooling is standard for computer chips today. So we run water over the top of the chip to pull heat out. The next thing that people are doing, and in China, this is actually quite common, is immersion cooling, where they'll take the chips and actually put them in a liquid that boils. When liquids boil, their heat capacity increases, so we're able to pull out more heat at that phase transition. So it's a very interesting technology. I don't know what happens after that. Maybe data centers in space.

Well, it's pretty cold up there. and yeah that would and it wouldn't it doesn't cost you any energy except to get up there and doesn't cost you an energy to cool it up there but you need to radiate the heat because there's no air blowing there are no molecules bouncing into the uh the chips to cool them down or the heat sinks so you have to build a special kind of radiator i think that's an interesting physics problem uh but is something to disperse the heat off the chip because you can't blow air onto it you need to shine the heat away you need to shine photons Wow.

It's fascinating to think about data centers in space, the pros and the cons, obviously all the energy to get it up there and to maintain it up there. But then you do gain a lot by having it out there, I guess, in terms of... Maybe you'd have to look at serviceability, like the lifetime of the chips. There are all sorts of alien things that happen to silicon. I hear they grow dendrites when they're in outer space. Like silicon chips will grow these dendrites and ultimately the packages will fail. Oh, wow.

It's crazy. It's crazy. But I guess the thing to look at, initially, should scare you a little bit. We're at sort of the heat death with computers. With Dernard scaling being broken, Dernard invented DRM at IBM, and he also predicted...

That theory, if I'm correct, is, hey, no matter what we do to these chips in terms of, you know, Morse law or doubling the capacity of it, whatever, it's just going to be the same amount of energies being used. Is that like the basic definition? Well, the point is the density goes up. If you happen to find a way

fit more transistors in the same unit area, the amount more that you added, the heat's going to go up by the same amount. And this is the real issue. Today, computer chips have the same energy density as a nuclear reactor. Hopefully, that, like, sets the right picture here. So ultimately, what happens, there is a death spiral to the heat problem. Silicon, the resistivity, the thermal resistivity, and we're going into physics land here, it's nonlinear with temperature.

the hotter it gets the resistance changes, and you generate more heat, and it goes into runaway and sort of lights itself on fire. We're already close to this. With chips coming out that are one and a half kilowatts, we're pretty close.

There's a limit to... It's just going to go up in flames, and there's no way to cool it, I guess. So how do you fix that? The way that you fix that is, okay, stop scaling the chips. Like, don't change the performance per chip. Just build a huge supercomputer.

It's going to be very expensive. all of those like maker movements and things that were created by electronics becoming cheap, they die. Now you build gigantic supercomputers that will continue the gauntlet of performance. That's it. So you only have a few companies that can build them and own and maintain them. Which is fascinating because we went, you're referring to like Arduino chips and like, oh yeah, we're going to get chips down to a dollar, $2 and we'll just make a ton of them,

but that doesn't work for these jobs that we want to do. These jobs require much more compute. Therefore, yeah, we are going to live in a world of supercomputers again, and we're going to be time, we're going to be renting time on a supercomputer. We're literally back to the age of vaxes and mainframes. You got it. It's back to parole computers where you're going to be renting time on some giant supercomputer.

And these computers are going to cost how much to build and maintain do you think in the next five? there billions of dollars if you look at Anthropic and all these other AI startups that are getting funded like crazy to build LLMs, Claude, you know, from them, they're raising billions and it's all going straight to NVIDIA, which is amazing for Jensen

and NVIDIA. But it's also kind of scary. I mean, if you think about that future. So that's why at Light Matter we've looked at the compute problem too. Because fundamentally, you can't just let the chips go on this singularity spiral of heat death.

You have to find new ways for computers to make progress. And so for us, it's both the compute piece and the interconnect. You have to innovate on both to keep it going. I also suppose the software needs to be optimized massively. It seems like we are so far behind on the optimization of these LLMs. And then a lot of these jobs are just getting, they're just throwing hardware at the problem, yeah? Oh, 100%.

There's a big, there's a big improvement to be had through software innovations. But just remember, in 1960, you could have done software innovations. So you do need to do that, but the hardware also has to progress. That's the tricky thing. If you want to get ahead in your career, then you've got to be ready to fight every day. You've got to grind it out day after day. This is obvious. You're listening to This Week in startups.

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but they got the U.K. and select countries in the EU and Australia. Knowing what you know, it's always fun to speculate about, you know, general AI and feels like one of the interesting tricks that chat GPT has taught us is just how simple our brains are. Next word prediction? Yeah, it's kind of like, you know what I'm about to say. Oh, I just had this conversation with a friend. You know, when you're talking to someone you're close with, you kind of know what they're about to say. They don't even really have to.

It gives you this hint that maybe there's something to that, that this next word prediction is actually fundamental. It is in terms of us speaking and us consuming the data. And so we may have just figured out something very basic about how the brain works. And then it does feel like we're getting to the point where, yeah, we forget about what test we run to figure out if it's general AI. But it doesn't feel like there's much a human can do that we're not going to accomplish with, you know, this latest volley. where do you sit on when we might accomplish a general AI? That's a tricky one. I think the one that is most tractable,

the way to approach this that's most tractable to me is just parameter counts. If you're looking at trillions of parameters, we're almost there already. So just from that kind of standard, let's say, two or three years. Practically, there are going to need to be algorithmic improvements and theoretical improvements to get this done. You can't schedule those, unfortunately. You can lock the Euras in a room with the schedule and they'll laugh.

But let's see. You know, maybe hardware-wise, we could be ready for it in the next three or four years. But I'll put my bet on 2030. Feels like a good number, too, a good round number. And you will have a tipping point. It feels like when we look at vertical AIs, something like self-driving, we certainly watched it in games of scale and video games. And we see it with words and just being able to write and communicate that we're kind of there, right?

And it feels like watching what Elon and some other folks are doing with self-driving, man, they seem like they're really close. It feels like this last AI push is going to solve it, yeah? It does feel like you're really close. But remember, you're really close and you're up against the wall of physics of this heat problem. So you're going to see some new technologies come to bear and will be one of them. that will allow that to happen. But we're very at a scary line. We've pushed the limits of everything.

So whether they get to that without new technologies is the big question. Yeah. And quantum computing in relation to all of this? Yeah. I did my doctorate at MIT on quantum computing. And I love the field. I think that it's like sort of an incredible Olympics for your brain. Great exercise.

You being an incredible shape. But maybe not super practical yet. In another 10 years, I think there'll be enough progress on the theoretical and experimental side to kind of scale quantum computers. But right now, it's going to take companies like Google and IBM, just pouring cash into the program and believing in the vision of what it ultimately could be to get there. It will be a useful tool, but it's not going to be super broadly applicable. And that's the thing that I think people don't understand. It's not like our savior. You need GPUs and things like GPUs to keep marching along.

The quantum computer is not going to run your deep neural nets faster. And by the way, and this is very controversial, and I think I'll probably get in some trouble with my friends from grad school. But, you know, it's not clear to me that with deep learning, you need quantum computing. There are a lot of problems. You look at alpha-fold and some of these molecular challenges that people are looking at, it seems that deep learning is able to traverse the problem space in a way that reduces the amount of compute you need by huge orders. And so the question is, do you even need quantum computers at all?

Maybe a sufficiently complex deep neural network could actually just do that for you. That would make sense, I think. And then let alone some optimization on the software driven by AI. Sure. So with AI writing the software, there's going to be. massive gains there as well. I mean, that's the part that I think people are underestimating is exactly the role of AI in solving some of the problems around the ceilings in AI. Certainly, you're using AI to design some of these optical solutions.

Yeah, definitely. When we design optical components that is using AI algorithms, we'll use things that look like back propagation to decide the shape of these optical components that are built out of silicon that the light travels through. So it's a big, big tool in the toolbox. I think there's a lot of work in ship design, computerated design for A6, that can improve energy efficiency, the size of the circuits and things like this. And we're looking into it. You know, one thing that sort of came to mind when we were talking about where AI is going to go, there's a heat limit, but there's another one, which is a sort of operating cost expense limit for companies. Look at how much they're spending on these supercomputers.

it's billions and billions of dollars. If you double that a few more times, it's going to really make a big dent in Google's bottom line, right? There is, yeah, I mean, billions of dollars are speeding tickets. Tens of billions are considered purchases, and that's kind of as far as you can take it. Hey, speaking of like scientific breakthroughs, every nerd in the world is over the last four days

watching this LK-99 room-taverger supercomputer. I'm sure by the smile. on your face, you've been on Twitter, or I'm sorry, X.com. Watching on X.com watching people try to recreate this paper. Yes. I'm, I went straight to the prediction markets where people are placing bets because gamblers are so good at handicapping stuff and they had it at 25% replicable in the next two years. What do you think's going on here and how awesome is it that?

It seems like a dozen teams that are in some way credible decided to fuck it. it's August, whatever, it's the summer. Let's try to replicate this for the of it at night. I love that. I feel like it's a new kind of scientific process. Someone posts a paper. Papers have gotten to the level where people

actually read them, non-scientists, non-like deep academics, or reading them, and they're trying to reproduce the results. That's actually an exceptional model. There aren't many things that you'd be able to go after this with, but this is very cool. The odds that it works. I'm

I think there looked like there are some holes in the data. I worked on superconductors at MIT for detecting single photons for quantum computing. Niobium nitride is what I was working on. The critical temperature there was around 10 Kelvin. Here they're saying like room temperature. It is a massive leap. I think that if it works, it will have a big impact, but maybe not quite as big as people think.

It will definitely help reactors for fusion. It'll make the magnets cheaper. We'll have more interesting experiments for LHC. It's not going to make your chips dramatically better. There are a lot of limitations. Certainly help batteries, right? Batteries. Yeah, it can help batteries.

You can think about EVs, things like this, but I always think it's important to kind of look and temper the expectations. Like quantum computers are not a general purpose computer. Superconductors are not going to just make everything free energy and energy transports free everywhere. Remember, there's inductance and capacitance, not just resistance. When you calculate the power dissipated in a wire,

you have L, R, and C. R is a really important one, but it's not the only one, okay? Capacidants, if you look at a computer chip, you know, maybe 30, 40% of the energy dissipated capacitors will not go away with superconductors. What is your gut tells you is going on here? Like, do you think that they stumbled onto something?

Do you think it's a fraud or a mistake? What is your gut tell you? I think they believe in it because, you know, they did reduce the author count to three positioning themselves for sort of a Nobel Prize. That takes, you know, they're very excited. So I would assume goodwill here. I think that they really do believe they found something. There might be another physical mechanism that's going on. And I think we're going to find out soon.

You can bet researchers at MIT and Caltech and Stanford and everywhere else are looking at it right now and trying to see if it's real because it would be a landmark result. it would be a huge deal. I just love the fact that, like you're saying, people know where to find the papers. The papers are kind of roadmaps. Malcolm Gladwell, whatever, 15, 20 years ago, started turning these papers, you know, obviously social science ones, whatever, into pop culture.

Yep. Darryl Morey started reading them, you know, from, you know, the basketball GM. Everybody started getting into, you know, like, hey, let's read some fundamental science here, Michael Lewis, etc. and it became pot-up culture. And I don't think it's, I don't, I don't think it's a, either we're in a simulation

or this Oppenheimer film and Christopher Nolan releasing the Oppenheimer film at the same time as this paper means we're in a simulation because it's all happening at the same time. But I do think it's sparked in a lot of scientists and people with the, you know, capability that, well, it would be quite fun to do science in. public. And what an amazing moment for society that you could capture people's attention and everybody wants to try to replicate it. I think it's absolutely fantastic and inspire a lot of young people to pursue heart science. Yeah, 100%. All right, listen, you're listening to the next unicorns, right? That's table stakes. Well, if you want to start on the path to becoming a unicorn yourself,

you're going to need to find and hire great candidates and how do you do that? LinkedIn. Of course, You're on LinkedIn, I'm on LinkedIn. Over 900 million users now, the March to a billion continues for the amazing team over at LinkedIn. Then you can attract both the passive and the active job seekers. And all you have to do is put that purple hiring ring on your profile. Then you post some interesting content. When they see that purple hiring ring, it says, whoa, wait a second.

I know that founder. I know that CEO. I know that VC. Well, they're hiring. Let me click and check it out. And then all of a sudden you start getting this great inbound, right? We love LinkedIn. I mean, I've gotten some of the most amazing people.

In fact, I just got a new personal assistant because things are going so well and I've got the new accelerator that we have coming in San Mateo. And I need somebody to help me run that and set it all up. And I said, you know what? I need to have an executive assistant again. So we found somebody amazing on LinkedIn. Of course. And so here's your call to action. LinkedIn jobs helps you find qualified candidates.

You want to talk to fast. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash unicorn. That's right. LinkedIn.com slash unicorn to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply because LinkedIn is so generous. You know, I remember when I was in undergrad and I was sort of asking, why are scientists not rock stars that are paid like crazy? That was around 2005 and, you know, Google was coming up on getting ready to make a lot of rockstar,

you know, scientists and engineers who were building these things. But I heard that the first time that really happened was around the Manhattan Project. You had Feynman and Einstein and Oppenheimer and all these people. and they really were celebrities. And people were inspired and they were excited about science and engineering. I think we're at another moment like that. Right now, I think it has a lot more to do with AI than anything else. But, you know, I think that the science rock star moment is here.

I'm a scientist and, you know, I'm not a rock star, maybe someday. Yeah. But, you know, that's a rock star potential. Well, I'll tell you what the diversion was. I think the diversion was there were so many applications to hit consumers that building consumer apps and consumer products in the style of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and then eventually Zuckerberg and Elon that that was a quicker path to, you know, delighting consumers, right? But now deep tech is kind of coming back and it's like, well, wait a second. And if we're going to this next more interesting level of applications, what's the millionth app going to do for society, right?

Like, what's the next Uber going to do for society or next Robin Hood or Facebook or Twitter, all due respect to incredible products and incredible founders? But we kind of need a next leap. We need to kind of make some fundamental leap here. And I think companies like yours are part of that. This LK99 thing is part of that. Certainly with the team at, Open AI has done has been eye opening and inspiring, I think, to a lot of people to maybe,

let's get into some fundamental deep tech and see if we can get some f*** up and make some actual progress, right? Yeah, there was a lot of skating. There was, I felt like there was a period of 15 or 20 years where everybody's just riding the internet platform, building apps, and that was like the whole thing. But now it's like, okay, well, this is boring. What's next? You know, how can we actually make progress?

Yeah. And you know what? we're going to need to, the next generation of problems, I don't think an app's going to solve. You know, like, all due respect to Fitbits and Apple Watches and quantify itself, all very important. But we really need the AI to analyze what's happening in our bodies in order to make the next generation of change. It's great that I can wear an Apple Watch and know how many steps I did, or, you know, Peloton. All this stuff is great. But man, when AI looks at what's going on inside our bodies and tells us like, hey, here's a, here's what you should do next.

here's how to extend life, here's how to cure cancer, you know, that's going to be a different level, drug discovery, et cetera. All right, listen, Nick, congratulations. You raised a bunch of money. That means you got to hire a bunch of really hardcore folks to go to Boston and help you build this. You got an in-office culture, I assume. You can't do this stuff remote, right?

Yeah, so we do three days a week. We find that's a pretty good sort of even thing. But I have to say in person, there's a huge difference. When you're trying to innovate and you're trying to do something really hard, you need to be next to each other to talk and to kind of go through things. That's not novel. But a lot of people tried to get away with the remote thing and it really hurts culture. Ultimately, it was a very damaging period, that COVID period to companies. Yeah, I agree. And it's time to kind of undo a little bit of that and remind people that, you know, we're alive to be with each other and to hang out and

enjoy the company and invent things together. And that's what's fun. That's what you do. And the right people, I'm sure, since you put your foot down and said, hey, three days a week, quite reasonable. You're getting paid. 60% office time is not a big ass. I bet you they're stoked. People are stoked to hang, right? People are excited.

They're excited to see each other. And, you know, with 154 million, actually 160 million that we raised, we're expanding. So we're hiring a bunch more engineers and product and sales and sort of going into these motions. I think what you're going to see from light matter over the next year and a half is extreme volume on groundbreaking optical products. And, you know, what I'm really aiming to do with light matter ultimately is to build the photonics company. So if you think of the word photonics, I want you to think of light matter ultimately. And the way that's going to happen is through the whole set of technologies that what we've developed can kind of be realized.

Super easy. If this sounds like the job for you, you go to light matter. You dot co. Dot co. slash people. Lightmatter. dot co slash people. You see all the great people working there and go ahead and look at the open positions and go

change the world. Listen, congrats on the all-star roster of investors and really excited that you're working on this, Nick. And we'll see you all next time in the week's startups. Bye-bye. Awesome. Thank you, Jason. Next up, we have a great talk from the Founder University podcast.

Link Square CEO and founder, Vashal Sannock, breaks down how he grew from $1 million to $10 million in ARR in just two years. Stick with us, and if you like the content, subscribe to Founder University, available on all podcasting platforms and YouTube. I'm really excited to share this awesome playbook, how to grow your startup, 1 to 10 million ARR in two years. What does it mean to be the best in SaaS? Well, SaaS as an economy is like three quarters of a trillion. And so when you look at data around who's made it to $1 million in ARR, it's about 4%. And who's made it to 10 million is 0.4%. So we're really going to focus on the strategies to first put you in the 4%, then put you in the 0.4% today.

Be here in the moment. The slides are all available, and I know this is recorded. So go back and take a look at it. And all the content is really available to you. As an introduction, I'm Vishal. I've recorded this in Boston, where our headquarters is for the companies I founded, Link Squares. I have a couple engineering degrees and spent the last decade working in SaaS. Little side about Link Squares founded in 2015, we're the leading multi-solution enterprise legal management platform.

We are an AI company. That's a fancy way of saying we sell software to in-house legal teams. I've raised $161 million. I have over 400 employees. So we talked about the 0.4%. And there's so much pattern matching that venture capitalists have to describe the journey of the best SaaS companies of all time, specifically first to a million at ARR, which really doesn't matter how long it takes.

I think UiPath did it in like 14 years. So take your time there. When you reach a million at ARR, then you're really on the clock on the pattern matching of all the other great SaaS companies who really did the one to 10 journey. in under three years. I'm here providing these tips because we did it in two years and three months

and I'm going to tell you how. It comes down to four P's, people, product development, predictability and go-to-market philosophy on venture capital. Let's talk about people. As a CEO, my job is to hire the best executive team I possibly can, hire experts. And I've been trained in my decade of being

individual contributor and working at SaaS companies with amazing experts that really taught me everything. So I created that here. This expert and apprentice model works, works really, really well. And this enables everything to happen. So definitely hire top down with the best world class executive team that you possibly can. And I'd caution you on handing out executive titles too early. It's really hard to have a conversation with someone that you thought might be running engineering

or sales from the early days to when the company gets much bigger, like say after 50 people, to layer them or give them a boss. That's a really hard thing to do. So don't set yourself up for failure by handing out too many executive titles too early. Definitely have to balance the ego on that. But a company of six people don't need five senior vice presidents. Do things smartly in terms of executive titling and try to avoid it if you can. Unless you know the person you hire is the best that they're,

could possibly be ever. As CEO, I tell my executive team what is important, but really never how. Shame on me if I hire a marketing expert that I'm trying to tell how to do marketing too. And that really enables them to run the company in like the quarter we're in or the year that we're in. They're the one going out and running the operating plan that we put together maybe a year ago. That means I'm solely responsible for the future, like all of it. The next time we raise capital, where we're going with the product, what do we want to do strategically, what's our next move, what's our three-year move? I often say the best days for me as CEO is I have like figuratively nothing to do because

all the experts have really hired more experts underneath them who've hired other great folks and they are the ones actually running the company. I'm more like managing the executive team. Think about it that way. Don't tell an expert how to do their job. Product development is so super important as a software company. I will give you a guaranteed way to fail on this journey, which is not doing your research and not understanding your ideal customer.

Customer development and that understanding of your ideal customer is the number one priority before you build one piece of software feature or functionality. And I often say you have to know your buyer, really inside and out. You have to know everything about them. And for me selling software to the general counsel, me not being a general counsel, I really didn't know anything about them. We had an idea thought, you know, understanding what was in contracts might be a great idea. But we had to learn so much about the general counsel.

What motivates them? Where do they go to school? How do they think about the world? What do they read online? What do they not read online? What software do they use today? Are they interested in buying new software? Where are they on the power line of the executive team?

All of it. And until you know these things, you're not going to be able to grow as fast as you want. with confidence. I always say the goal is before you build the software, you have talked to 100 of your ideal customer. I cannot stress how important this is. Please do not try to shortcut this because you will build the wrong product for the wrong problem for a buyer that does not care about it. And yeah, solving the right problem has never been more important in the early days of the journey. And there's so many misconceptions about how you become a startup founder or a software startup founder. A lot of people think, hey, we have a business problem.

Immediately I'm going to build a solution for it, then I'm going to put it next to a customer. And I got to tell you, that's just going to end up in a big sad face. You have to validate what you're doing. You have a business problem. Validate that that problem exists with your ideal customer, your ideal buyer, then build the solution. Another way of saying it is ask yourself, if you took a multivitamin. today. Did you take a multivitamin today? That's right. I didn't either. Because people don't buy vitamin type of products that will make your life better but not actually fix big problems that are going on. But if you break your arm, you're going to need a real strong pain killer. That's the

type of software that you're going to have to try to create. Pain killers. People don't take their vitamins. We use a train car philosophy and we've thought about it this way over the last seven years running the company around what should our engineering team do and how should product think about giving them work to do. There's three cars of the train figuratively. The blue car is infrastructure, bugs, technical debt, kind of behind the scene stuff, performance related stuff, super vital to keeping the app healthy and alive, usable, fast. The purple is the customer everything, so bugs that they have, but also features that they desire, features that you can make money with. And then the green is like the roadmap and the vision. So I would challenge you every month or

every quarter to really know what is the mix in these three categories of the stuff your engineering team has been doing? Because if you never get to the green part of the train car, you're actually never going to get the company to actually where you want it to be in the future. And remember, if you're the CEO, you're in charge of the future alone. That's your responsibility. Make sure the company gets to where it has to go. If you do too much of the blue and the purple, it can cause derailment, know what you're doing, track it and assess it at that high level quarterly. I always say our customers have their hands on the steering wheel and the company is in charge of the gas pedal and pushing it down. We build software so that our customers more delighted and when our

customers more delighted, either new customers that we're trying to acquire or existing customers, good thing happens in the form of ARR. So the faster you build it, the faster the ARR is made. But try to let your hands come off the steering wheel, let your customer's hands get on steering the product roadmap. If you ask them, they will surely tell you what they would love to have improvements in your product. These are the five most dangerous words inside your company.

It would be cool if blank. And I feel like in 2023, we're at a fever pitch level of amazing, shiny technology that everyone can chase and embed and really get excited about internally. But you have to validate it with real customer feedback. Embedding some sort of technology will not always do the things that you wish it would. And if you're finding yourself saying, it'd be really cool if we did this.

Well, yeah, things that are really cool don't really matter. I always say that unless our customers think it's really cool. Avoid the things that you think are cool. Do the things that buyers want. predictability and go to market is so important, especially as you start getting your revenue flywheel running. In the early stage, track data on every opportunity you create, the source, like where it came from, and the tactic that was used. So maybe it's an outbound method through email. That's how we got the meeting set with the buyer. Then two dates, the initial qualification call,

and then the date that the demo happened. That's basically what you need to look at trends over time. oh, what sources are really doing really well and which tactics are not working so well, which ones should we experiment with? Because ultimately, you need predictability. So you're experimenting until a million and then you're really using what you learned to accelerate to 10 million at ARR. You will likely hire an expert in sales. I would recommend that you do probably at a million at ARR. Founder-led sales cannot go on forever. And it shouldn't really, as the founders and other early team members are going to go on other missions inside the company.

But these metrics are the ones that are the standard set for everything revenue, everything, ARR on the new business side, right, finding new customers, product productivity, conversion rate, weighted pipeline, average selling price sales cycle. You will track all of these and you should and monitor them and view them over time, how they move up and down.

One thing that I hear a lot from founders is when they hire a sales rep, they might expect that they are productive maybe in the first month that they hire them. And so I would just tell you that when you're forecasting productivity for new sales reps that are focusing on new business, you build it an appropriate amount of ramp time. It will not be 100% productivity the month that they start. Figure out what that ramp time is for your reps and then build that into your financial modeling. There's a huge help for you to actually get closer to what reality is and you really need to when you model out. the future. Data is the key to success in sales. I remember partnering with my sales team in the early

days and saying, y'all, I know that tracking this stuff is a headache. And yes, there are so many required drop downs that you have to fill out before you hit save on an opportunity. But the more data that we have in the executive team level, the easier it's going to be for us to figure out how you're going to make more money faster. And that partnership is so important. You're going to create that partnership forever, started in the early days and really build a culture around. We need this data to help the company go faster. When it comes to hiring folks in the sales role, the first 30 days are really like the next 3,000.

You'll know whether they can understand the script, the pitch, the ejection handling. They understand the buyer, the software, kind of through the training. Unfortunately, in 30 days, you probably get a good understanding that if it's not going to work, it's just not going to work. you're going to have to make an adjustment to essentially keep on your hiring plan. One thing that we didn't do that I wish we did was making more reusable sales training content. We did everything back on a whiteboard. We started the company when 100% office was kind of the standard.

So if you can make Google slides or PowerPoints of training materials so that as you keep on hiring more sales reps, you're going to have the ability to train them much faster. Believe me, you don't want to do it one-offs forever. philosophy on venture capital. Yeah, we know what's going on, right? There's a correction in the public markets resulted in the private markets being corrected, being heavily impacted. But the good news is pre-seed and seed is as open as it has been in the past. It's really no change there. In fact, there's more seed capital available than ever before. So get out there with a decent pitch deck, a great idea, big market, good things should happen. Series A, I always thought was the toughest

round to raise kind of that awkward teenager phase. You're not a full, blown awesome company that knows everything about how you make money, but you're not like a seed stage company either. You're somewhere in between. And so it is the toughest round to raise under any market condition. In good times, they said it was like 80% attrition rate seed companies that are not going to make it. And probably in this world, it may even be even a little harder.

So focus on the retention, the go to market, the product efficiency. And remember, don't be disheartened. You only need one investor to keep the dream going. If you're a late stage company, you know that this is the hardest hit part of the macro economy and the private market. So you got to focus on efficiency. You got to focus on doing it durably and maybe even to profitability. I think about venture capital like bottles of water. There is no differentiation between these bottles of water.

The only differentiation is the marketing that was marketed to you and the taste of the water. I personally don't like Evian. So that's why it's not on this list. And so if you need capital to grow, which a lot of companies do, we're an AI company. So it's capital intensive to build an AI company back in the day the way that we did it. Water, just like capital is an essential element for your body and also for your company. Don't put too much over emphasis on it. At the end of the day, I always value choosing better people over pre-money valuation.

The people that you work with for investors are basically more difficult. to get rid of than say 10 marriages that you've had or you're in 10 different marriages at the same time. You're not going to be able to get rid of people that you don't like easily. So don't make decisions based on just price. And if you can, don't do 30-day fiance with venture capitalists. Try to learn and get to know them over an extended period of time. That way, when you show up at the time, it's time for a capital raise, you know who the good people are, people you can work with. Always choose better people. Fundraising is not. not real life. The things you read on TechCrunch are not real life. Running a business is real

life. Having customers and a product and market and happy customers, NPS, writing you G2 reviews, that is real life. Don't get too wrapped up into fundraising and reading TechCrunch because honestly, kind of vanity anyways. Unit economics, these are all the things that I track. I'm not going to go through them, but this is the standard playbook of what you're going to track. Basically, forever. And as the company gets bigger, you're going to have to try to optimize and control all of these. Do not make a mistake on the formulas. It's a huge no-no. Make sure you get the formulas right. These are the formulas that we use. I'm going to leave you with this amazing framework, Georgian partners. They're not even an investor in Link Squares, but this G7 framework of the seven

SaaS metrics that they track and think highly about, they have a whole guide to them. They have a free XLS that you can use. I think it's Google She. You can put all your information in there. And it's been massively helpful and valuable to me as a free resource. Closing thoughts. Yeah, 10 million ARRR. Super hard.

Everyone says it, but it's not impossible. And your company really is the SaaS metrics. And in the future, you're going to have to try to control them, optimize them, know them, and forecast them. I always say we are what the spreadsheets say we are. Remember the four P's on your journey. keep a level head. Good things will happen and terrible bad things will happen also, but you got to try to keep a level head and a fixer attitude. Celebrate everything as much as you can. When we started this

company, we took a whole bunch of pictures. I wish I took more. You will make it to 10 million ARR. You can do it. And it'll be nice to have all those as a memory. Celebrate everything that you can. Big thanks to Founder University for having me today. Thank you.