Latest / The Learning Corner by Precursor / Episode #80: Narrative Above All, The Job Market Signal Collapsed, IC Work Is the New Career Flex, OpenAI Files for IPO

Transcript

Episode #80: Narrative Above All, The Job Market Signal Collapsed, IC Work Is the New Career Flex, OpenAI Files for IPO · The Learning Corner by Precursor

• 0:00
  If colleges become trade schools, I think they're doomed.
• 0:03
  I think there's a lot of things that happen to college.
• 0:05
  Education is one of them.
• 0:06
  Personal development, self discovery, adulting.
• 0:08
  All of these things happen, I think, in a relatively safe place to explore these things.
• 0:13
  The jobs that come out the other end are, I think, an important part of the equation.
• 0:17
  If we get rid of college, for some reason, I hope we replace it with something that feels
• 0:21
  similar that allows people to go from being literally teenagers to adults.
• 0:25
  It's the week of May 18.
• 0:28
  Welcome to the Learning Corner, a Precursor Ventures podcast.
• 0:32
  Welcome to the Learning Corner by Precursor.
• 0:34
  I'm Mia Farnam, and I'm joined by our GP and managing partner, Charles Hudson, where we will
• 0:38
  be talking through the articles and Goodreads that caught our team's attention over the past
• 0:43
  week.
• 0:44
  Our first piece this week is a blog post on LinkedIn by Vili Ilchiv titled Narrative.
• 0:49
  Vili makes the case that the Quiet Builder Playbook, the one where a great founding team
• 0:53
  compounds in the background and let the product speak for itself, is no longer enough to win.
• 0:58
  His argument is that the sheer scale of growth venture funds today has changed the incentive
• 1:03
  structure.
• 1:03
  The biggest mistake a major fund can make is missing the market leader.
• 1:07
  So they're backing narratives as much as companies.
• 1:10
  The pace at which narratives now form and collapse mean that if you're not actively
• 1:14
  shaping the story around your startup, someone else is shaping it for you.
• 1:18
  Billy closes with a pointing challenge.
• 1:20
  Founders need to be spending 20% or more of their time thinking their startup, not just
• 1:25
  exciting, but inevitable.
• 1:26
  And speed remained nonnegotiable throughout the quiet builder identity has always been
• 1:32
  celebrated in early stage venture historically.
• 1:35
  Do you think, Charles, that there's a version of that archetype that still works today?
• 1:39
  I read this and, like, my immediate reaction was, like, yes, this is right.
• 1:42
  And then I thought about it some more, and I'm like, but maybe less right than I initially
• 1:46
  thought.
• 1:46
  I do think that we're in a world where attention is really scarce, and getting
• 1:51
  people's attention is really hard.
• 1:53
  And so I think certain amount of competition for attention and companies that can break
• 1:56
  through do have an advantage.
• 1:57
  I think as we've talked about before, sometimes breaking through and having substance are not
• 2:01
  always the same thing.
• 2:02
  I think the other thing is, almost by definition, if there are companies that are
• 2:06
  succeeding without pursuing narrative, we probably don't know as much about them by
• 2:10
  design.
• 2:10
  We just haven't had as many examples of that lately.
• 2:13
  And I do think what Villa says is true, which is it's harder to do the, like, build in quiet
• 2:18
  compound thing because there are far more capital providers, you know, mid to late stage
• 2:22
  in venture, who are looking for those companies and trying to discover them.
• 2:25
  But I think there's always been the summits and the TAs who've been out looking for companies
• 2:30
  that were under the radar but top performing.
• 2:32
  I think it's harder to hide as a startup now if you are one of those because of the amount of
• 2:36
  metadata we have about startups from tools like Spectre and Harmonic and others.
• 2:40
  It's just harder to hide if you're amassing talent, revenue, or other things.
• 2:43
  For me, it's harder to answer that question of can you become large and build.
• 2:48
  I'd say if you're in AI, it's pretty hard right now to do that.
• 2:51
  And I honestly think a lot of it is because of the talent piece.
• 2:54
  The talent is being so tightly tracked.
• 2:56
  If people begin to cluster around the company, people will wanna figure out, well, why are all
• 3:00
  of those smart people?
• 3:01
  Maybe if you're in a category where there's less attention being paid, this is a strategy
• 3:05
  that's easier to execute.
• 3:06
  Marina on our team yesterday made the great point of stealth is an archetype that kind of
• 3:10
  fits in this world a little bit.
• 3:12
  But to your point, the talent issue comes up of how easily is it for you to grab the top
• 3:17
  people.
• 3:17
  You can't really share that much information as to what you're building.
• 3:21
  I also think it's funny, founders who now build in stealth understand how to send signals out
• 3:28
  to the right people and create narrative.
• 3:30
  Putting your job history on LinkedIn as stealth immediately fires different
• 3:35
  things
• 3:36
  then posting on LinkedIn and and tweeting constantly, there's always interest and the
• 3:41
  difficulty is actually, how do I get in front of this person to hear more?
• 3:44
  It's just like the upside down world of venture.
• 3:46
  I do think what you are seeing too is there are some companies that do such a good job on early
• 3:51
  capital raising that, like, the narrative becomes that they are the market.
• 3:54
  I think about Harvey and Legal before Legora.
• 3:56
  If you said, like, what's the legal AI company?
• 3:58
  People would say, well, it's Harvey because that's the one I've heard of the most.
• 4:01
  That's the one that's most associated.
• 4:02
  With that trend, I can think of some other categories where there are, like, companies
• 4:05
  that seem to have captured people's association with that category.
• 4:10
  I think that's valuable.
• 4:11
  The thing when I read it, I I thought about it is in a world where customers are also confused
• 4:15
  about what company should I use to solve problem x, being the narrative leader, being
• 4:19
  the most well known company in your category, being associated with successful other brands,
• 4:23
  or those are investor brands or founder brands, I think does give people comfort that like, in
• 4:27
  a world where all of these things maybe feel the same, this is the one I wanna pick.
• 4:30
  Yeah.
• 4:30
  It's like, what's the easier discussion to kind of run up internally is, like, it's certainly
• 4:34
  the company that everyone's heard about versus this one you found on a weekend when you were
• 4:37
  scrolling the Internet.
• 4:38
  Really draw the line between creating narrative versus capturing one that already exists.
• 4:43
  For founders in our portfolio, how do you maybe advise them to figure out which position
• 4:48
  they're in, or do you do that at all?
• 4:50
  I think I talked to a lot of founders who are just like, oh, I don't wanna post on LinkedIn.
• 4:53
  I think it's cringe.
• 4:53
  I don't wanna like, do all of this other stuff.
• 4:55
  And I'm like, first of all, there are many things you do at work that you maybe don't like
• 4:59
  that don't come natural.
• 5:00
  So in my opinion, that's, like, not a good excuse.
• 5:01
  I tell people, like, if you don't do this, you're leaving the playing field open for
• 5:06
  somebody else in your category to do so.
• 5:08
  Someone told me yesterday, it's not always that the loudest companies are the best, but you
• 5:12
  certainly know who they are.
• 5:14
  And so, I don't know, I think pre product market fit, is there a danger in being super
• 5:17
  loud?
• 5:18
  I think so.
• 5:18
  But I really do think we're in an environment right now where people have so many questions.
• 5:23
  Where is this stuff going?
• 5:24
  What matters?
• 5:25
  That's like a narrative conversation.
• 5:27
  And if your startup's not part of it, you run the risk of, I think, being irrelevant.
• 5:30
  Well, our next piece is from Oren Hoffman's Substack titled, If You Can't Get a Job Today,
• 5:35
  It's Your Fault.
• 5:37
  Or it opens up by pushing back hard on the narrative that the job market is soft, pointing
• 5:43
  to US unemployment sitting near a fifty year low, entry level hiring projections revised
• 5:47
  sharply upward for the class of 2026, and companies like IBM tripling junior hiring
• 5:52
  outright.
• 5:53
  His argument is that the market didn't disappear.
• 5:55
  The definition of what qualified did.
• 5:57
  The old system of college branding acted as a hiring signal that is largely broken down for
• 6:02
  anyone outside the top 20 schools because AI made knowledge access free, rate inflation
• 6:07
  eliminated GPA as a differentiator, and admissions criteria stopped predicting much of
• 6:12
  anything useful.
• 6:13
  What replaces all of this, he argues, is did you build something?
• 6:18
  It could be a launched app.
• 6:19
  Could be a side project.
• 6:20
  It could be a small substack with less than 50 readers.
• 6:23
  Really, anything that moved from idea to working is now worth more to a hiring manager
• 6:29
  than a 3.9 GPA from a top 50 school.
• 6:31
  He closes by naming the rarest skill in the market right now as follow through, doing what
• 6:37
  you said you're going to do every time.
• 6:39
  Charles, curious if this piece after you read it should be absorbed as an optimistic take on
• 6:44
  the job market for folks in high school or college.
• 6:47
  It does feel like a lot of the headlines that we've seen have been very doomsday.
• 6:50
  I mean, I don't know.
• 6:51
  I talked to a lot of people who are coming out of college, and first of many of them have done
• 6:54
  some of the things that Oren is suggesting and are still having a hard time.
• 6:57
  They've done extracurriculars.
• 6:58
  They've been presidents of clubs.
• 6:59
  They've shown leadership.
• 7:00
  They've started stuff, and it's still hard.
• 7:02
  And so I think sometimes posts are written with evocative titles to get you to read, and maybe
• 7:08
  the the underlying point in the post is maybe less radical.
• 7:11
  When I read it, was like, yeah.
• 7:13
  Right now, if you wanna stand out if finding a job is about standing out, the best way to
• 7:17
  stand out is to show that you get it.
• 7:18
  And I think in every market and every moment, showing that you get it means something
• 7:22
  different.
• 7:22
  I think right now, showing that you get it means that you have I hate this word, agency.
• 7:26
  You have some fluency with AI tools, and you have the wherewithal to go from idea to getting
• 7:31
  stuff done.
• 7:32
  And I think that skill is more important than ever because previously, as a junior person,
• 7:37
  most of what you did was you got orders from many people, many layers above you that
• 7:41
  trickled down to you, and they told you exactly what to do.
• 7:43
  They said, take this spreadsheet, run these numbers, update it, and send it back to me.
• 7:47
  It was kind of a factory floor type model.
• 7:49
  And now I feel like even at our firm, projects are just more ambiguous.
• 7:53
  It's more like, I wanna know what's happening in category x.
• 7:56
  X.
• 7:56
  That's the extent to which I can't tell you what to do.
• 7:59
  I can't tell you how to do it.
• 8:00
  I can't tell you what tools to use.
• 8:02
  And I think managers and hiring managers, executives are looking for people who can take
• 8:09
  these ambiguous asks and turn them into outputs, which has always been valuable.
• 8:14
  But I feel like at companies, you always had people who could take the boss's big idea and
• 8:18
  then scope it and refine it.
• 8:19
  And by the time it got down to the junior person, was like fill in the spreadsheet
• 8:22
  because the spreadsheet is gonna go into this deck, and the deck's gonna go into a meeting,
• 8:26
  and the meeting's gonna go into a strategy off-site, and there's gonna be an answer that
• 8:29
  comes.
• 8:29
  So your piece of the puzzle is very small.
• 8:32
  And now the CEO's like, hey.
• 8:33
  I have this question.
• 8:34
  I'm shooting all the way down to you, and I don't know whether you should use Anthropic or
• 8:39
  XO or whatever tooling you should use.
• 8:41
  I know what question I want answered, and I want someone who's smart enough to figure out
• 8:45
  how to find the answer.
• 8:47
  And I think the more you can demonstrate to making something from nothing, the better your
• 8:51
  your odds are.
• 8:52
  I think there's, like, a lot of validity to the argument of once you're in the interview
• 8:55
  process, saying all these things that you've built is really helpful.
• 8:58
  But I don't know if it solves for getting out of the stack of thousands of people who are
• 9:01
  applying for jobs.
• 9:02
  To your point of there are people who have done all these things but can't get through the
• 9:06
  first barrier, which is just getting in the seat for the interview.
• 9:10
  I think has a lot to do with, like, we also have to change and shift the way that hiring
• 9:13
  managers recruit, how people even screen for candidates.
• 9:16
  I think it's also important to talk about the world of tech and the world of everything else.
• 9:21
  I'd argue, I know a lot of people who've done all of the things that Oren mentioned here and
• 9:25
  have a hard time finding jobs in tech.
• 9:27
  Because you can't open x or LinkedIn without reading about a company that's laying off tons
• 9:31
  and tons and tons and tons of people.
• 9:32
  So it's very possible that the TLDR is, like, it's just very hard to get entry level jobs in
• 9:37
  tech almost no matter what you do, which might just beg the question is, if you've got these
• 9:41
  skills, are you better off looking outside of the world of technology to apply these skills?
• 9:46
  And I think those things Orin mentioned would absolutely help you stand out in that world.
• 9:50
  And I know people from top schools who've done all the things he said, who have computer
• 9:54
  science degrees, which seemed like a great idea four years ago, who are struggling.
• 9:58
  And the answer is it's not that they're losing out to other candidates.
• 10:00
  They're losing out to nothing.
• 10:01
  So I think the part about the piece that I kept coming back to is, like, there are some people
• 10:05
  who just aren't hiring.
• 10:06
  It's not about, did you do enough?
• 10:08
  It's, like, they're just not adding people.
• 10:09
  When I talk to candidates, it's not so much like, oh, there was a job posting.
• 10:13
  I applied for it, and my classmate got it.
• 10:15
  If 50 people applied, they didn't hire anybody.
• 10:17
  That is a story that I hear the most when I loop back to people who've reached out for
• 10:20
  help.
• 10:20
  Oh, they removed posting altogether.
• 10:21
  Last b, he kinda predicts an enrollment crisis for universities outside the top 20,
• 10:25
  compression in student lending, and mid level managers getting squeezed out.
• 10:29
  As junior employees with AI tools outperform them, curious, I guess, from you reading this,
• 10:33
  do you feel like any of these hold credence or what things you're like, we need more time.
• 10:37
  I do think I don't know.
• 10:38
  I I have this sort of romantic view, which is if colleges become trade schools, I think
• 10:43
  they're doomed.
• 10:44
  And you could argue that there's a set of colleges that maybe the value proposition
• 10:48
  doesn't make sense.
• 10:49
  I think there's a lot of things that happen to college.
• 10:50
  Education is one of them.
• 10:51
  Personal development, self discovery, adulting.
• 10:54
  All of these things happen, I think, in a relatively safe place to explore these things.
• 10:58
  The jobs that come out the other end are, I think, an important part of the equation.
• 11:02
  If we get rid of college, for some reason, I hope we replace it with something that feels
• 11:06
  similar that allows people to go from being literally teenagers to adults and to go through
• 11:12
  some of the exploration of, like, what I wanna be, who am I outside of my family, parents, and
• 11:17
  my home community.
• 11:18
  These are important things.
• 11:19
  And I would hate to see us lose the space for people to do those, and maybe it's less
• 11:24
  centered around knowledge.
• 11:25
  And ironically, the knowledge that seems to be most interesting, which just tends to be the
• 11:29
  humanities, social sciences, interpersonal communication, is all the stuff people crapped
• 11:32
  on for the last few years as being useless and soft skills.
• 11:35
  It turns out I mean, I say this as an economics and Spanish major.
• 11:38
  Who cares deeply about the humanities?
• 11:39
  I find it highly ironic that all the stuff people told people was a waste of your time.
• 11:43
  Apparently, now is the only thing that matters.
• 11:45
  Yeah.
• 11:46
  And even I think we could look back at COVID and the college students who were there that
• 11:49
  got that taken away from them.
• 11:51
  Got a grand as a look into what that looks like when that experience is disrupted.
• 11:55
  My younger sister was one of them.
• 11:57
  And I think that transition into adulthood is different.
• 12:00
  And not to say because there's people who don't go to college at all and transition well, but I
• 12:04
  think to your point, we just have to be able to find some sort of bridge that allows people to
• 12:08
  have the opportunity to experience what it's like in that seat environment.
• 12:12
  Our next piece is from Elena Werner's Substack titled, I See Work is the New Career Flex.
• 12:18
  Elena makes the case that the old corporate ladder, the one where your title and the size
• 12:22
  of your head count, were the primary signals of success is being quietly dismantled.
• 12:26
  She introduces the concept of the high impact individual contributor, also known as the high
• 12:32
  c, a person with no direct reports who can do what used to require an entire team end to end
• 12:37
  and get paid like a leader for it.
• 12:39
  The unlock, as she frames it, is AI functioning as average intelligence, meaning a single
• 12:45
  senior person can now pair their actual craft with AI to cover the gaps that previously
• 12:50
  required a designer, PM, or an engineer to fill.
• 12:53
  Elena is living this herself at Lovable, having moved back into an IC role after flattening the
• 12:58
  organization, and she says 90% of her time is now spent on the parts of the job she actually
• 13:03
  loves.
• 13:04
  The piece closes with a clear challenge to leaders.
• 13:06
  Stop juggling decks and cross functional alignment and get back in touch with the craft
• 13:09
  that started your career.
• 13:11
  We have been talking about the rise of individual contributors for a while internally
• 13:15
  and how important they are to a team.
• 13:17
  So wanna pause here for what your thoughts were.
• 13:19
  I think branding and naming things is important, and I think Hi C is gonna stick.
• 13:23
  That's my belief.
• 13:24
  I think if you look at a lot of the discourse around AI related layoffs, you know, you read
• 13:29
  about what Evan Spiegel said about Snapchat.
• 13:32
  There are two things that are happening, I think, that are related.
• 13:35
  One is a desire on the part of the most senior people in organizations to get access to the
• 13:40
  information that they really need to make decisions with fewer intermediaries who might
• 13:44
  shape or otherwise massage that information.
• 13:47
  And second, I think the first and only time I was a product manager.
• 13:50
  I met a guy in our company.
• 13:51
  I'm like, well, what does that guy do?
• 13:52
  They go, oh, he's like he's like our chief scientist.
• 13:54
  Like, oh, he doesn't have any reports.
• 13:56
  Yeah.
• 13:56
  He just likes to write code.
• 13:57
  He doesn't wanna be an engineering manager.
• 14:00
  He's not our CTO.
• 14:01
  He's just a really good engineer.
• 14:03
  And I think a long time ago, technical careers realized that, like, you force every good
• 14:07
  person to be a manager as opposed to an IC in order to advance their career, you are going
• 14:13
  to, in some cases, get the worst of all worlds.
• 14:15
  People who could have thrived as individual contributors and who are not interested in
• 14:19
  management, you're going to lose the benefit of their individual contributions, and you're
• 14:23
  gonna force them into a management path that they don't have any interest in.
• 14:26
  Your organization will be worse off.
• 14:27
  And they've kind of figured out how to have that, like, individual contributor slash
• 14:31
  manager path.
• 14:32
  We've never really had that for other careers.
• 14:33
  This is part of my general view that we're all mimicking software development organizations
• 14:38
  little by little every day.
• 14:39
  We're rediscovering what they've discovered.
• 14:41
  And I think that the allure of this is for a lot of people, like, hey.
• 14:44
  I became a marketer because I like marketing.
• 14:46
  And now I don't do marketing.
• 14:48
  I manage a bunch of marketing managers and directors who do the marketing.
• 14:51
  I wish I could get back to doing marketing.
• 14:52
  And it used to be, like, the only way to do that was to take a gigantic step backwards in
• 14:56
  your career.
• 14:56
  Yeah.
• 14:56
  People would even allow you.
• 14:57
  Yeah.
• 14:58
  I mentioned to you guys in our team meeting.
• 14:59
  I've seen some of my friends as GPs who are like, I wanna do a summer internship this
• 15:03
  summer.
• 15:03
  I wanna go back and work in a company as an IC, partially, I think to get a better sense of,
• 15:08
  like, what's actually possible with these tools.
• 15:10
  But also partially because I think there's something that's magical about building stuff
• 15:13
  and doing stuff.
• 15:14
  And the tooling today allows you to do a lot more.
• 15:17
  And management is mostly about helping other people do stuff and directing the work of
• 15:21
  others, but it's not actually about doing stuff.
• 15:22
  AI is obviously the catalyst for people to have interest in in doing things.
• 15:26
  Like you mentioned, of taking a summer internship as, like, a g you have a fund.
• 15:29
  Would you make the argument that people in their management positions should always be
• 15:33
  trying to get down to the ground floor level and trying to learn about like what's happening
• 15:37
  in the front lines?
• 15:38
  Or do you feel like that just becomes near to impossible because you're just juggling
• 15:42
  management, which as you know, doing it takes a lot of time in the people management world.
• 15:47
  I think part of the problem is the construct of management hierarchy in most firm.
• 15:51
  So, I mean, the one way a lot of people have tried to get rid of this previously, like,
• 15:54
  anthropic, like, everybody's a member of the technical staff.
• 15:57
  You're seeing a rise again of these, like, titilless companies.
• 15:59
  Because I think the problem is when you have hierarchy, when you have a CEO and a VP and a
• 16:03
  director and a senior manager and a manager and an IC, if the CEO goes from CEO to IC, you're
• 16:08
  skipping a lot of people, and it makes those people nervous.
• 16:11
  And I think a lot of the challenges are the social dynamics of manager hierarchies, which
• 16:15
  is that also you're gonna terrify that IC if you show up in their office and just say, hey.
• 16:19
  I'm the CEO of the company.
• 16:20
  I got a question for you.
• 16:21
  That person's gonna be like, uh-uh.
• 16:22
  Yeah.
• 16:22
  And so those layers are designed ideally to filter, protect, and scope that work as it goes
• 16:27
  down the chain.
• 16:28
  But it means as a CEO, you have to work through the system of having an idea.
• 16:31
  You gotta let it go all the way down.
• 16:33
  It's not like a boomerang.
• 16:34
  Go all the way down to the bottom.
• 16:35
  It's gotta come all the way back to you, you hope it looks like the thing that you wanted.
• 16:39
  I think there's a lot of positives that'll come out of this.
• 16:42
  One of my biggest realizations as an adult when I came into the working world was that, oh,
• 16:47
  just because you're a manager doesn't mean you're good at managing people.
• 16:50
  No.
• 16:50
  Everyone who's had a boss can name a story of one that was just a horrible experience.
• 16:55
  And nobody tells you that when you're not in the corporate world.
• 16:57
  You just think that older people, more senior people are better at their job and also know
• 17:02
  how to manage people.
• 17:03
  Turns out completely different skill sets.
• 17:05
  I do think about, though, Elena, her model makes a lot of sense when you're talking about
• 17:08
  seasoned operators who have ten to fifteen years of craft under their belt.
• 17:12
  But I guess what happens to the generation coming up behind them if AI is absorbing the
• 17:16
  execution work that junior employees traditionally used to grow into?
• 17:19
  Where do the next wave of high ICs actually develop those skills, I guess?
• 17:24
  And make the differentiation of I would actually like to manage genes, and that's
• 17:27
  something interesting if if they've never seen it done in the way that it was done previously.
• 17:32
  I really don't know.
• 17:33
  The only analogy I've been able to use, and it's not perfect, is I have a bunch of friends
• 17:38
  who were in consulting, investment banking, and law in during the global financial crisis, the
• 17:43
  GFC in 2008, and they didn't hire junior classes in those years.
• 17:48
  They're like, financially, it's hard.
• 17:50
  We're up on the we're on the ropes.
• 17:51
  And the problem is in jobs like that, you go through this linear progression.
• 17:55
  And so in some cases, my friends said, hey.
• 17:57
  Like, we have this donut hole of partners.
• 17:58
  It would have been people that we'd hired that year that we we didn't hire them.
• 18:02
  So when it was time for that cohort to graduate, there there was no one there.
• 18:06
  And I worry that, like, something similar will happen here, which is everything will be fine.
• 18:11
  Maybe the bet is that the AI will be good enough at some point that it won't be an issue
• 18:14
  because you won't you won't need the junior people, which is very dystopian.
• 18:18
  But I think the risk we run by not making these investments is that if in three or four years,
• 18:22
  we realize, oh, we needed more entry level computer scientists than we thought we did.
• 18:25
  You can't go back in time.
• 18:26
  I think this is gonna be fascinating to see what happens in five years.
• 18:30
  So the companies who just said we're done with junior people were, like, not gonna make the
• 18:33
  management or educational investment.
• 18:35
  We're just gonna take these high high c's.
• 18:37
  When the high c's retire, we'll see what happens.
• 18:39
  But I think there's a set of people who just saying, by then, AI will be good enough, and
• 18:42
  that when the high c's retire, they might be getting pushed out the door anyway.
• 18:45
  I do remember one thing in consulting.
• 18:46
  This kind of model of high c almost existed.
• 18:49
  We'd either go be the partner route, do all the normal stuff, or you could be like a
• 18:52
  specialist.
• 18:53
  It meant you're never gonna manage teams on the ground in projects.
• 18:56
  You would just swoop in.
• 18:57
  And I remember talking to my friend when we were like one year out of college, and a
• 19:01
  specialist came to our project, and they were amazing.
• 19:03
  Wealth of knowledge.
• 19:03
  And I was like, god, I wish we worked for them.
• 19:05
  And then my friend was like, do you think that they're a pleasure to hang out with because
• 19:09
  they don't actually manage people, and so they don't have to turn that on so they can kind of
• 19:13
  spar with you and joke around?
• 19:15
  Or do you think it's actually just because maybe they have a super good leader in them?
• 19:18
  It's funny to think how it could transform.
• 19:20
  One last quick news slash before we sign off.
• 19:22
  Reports from basically every news outlet appeared on Wednesday that OpenAI is preparing
• 19:28
  to confidentially file for a US IPO in the coming weeks, targeting a public debut as early
• 19:33
  as September, working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and looking to raise at least
• 19:37
  $60,000,000,000 at the low end at a valuation of up to $1,000,000,000,000.
• 19:42
  This comes two days after OpenAI defeated Elon Musk's legal challenge.
• 19:46
  Obviously, wanted your quick reaction to this one, Charles, about the timing, the valuations,
• 19:50
  and and what does it mean for the broader IPO market if both OpenAI and SpaceX actually get
• 19:55
  Well,
• 19:55
  I've enjoyed reading my friend's takes on the SpaceX s one.
• 19:58
  I think it helps crystallize a little bit more what's actually happening inside these
• 20:03
  businesses, which Mhmm.
• 20:04
  You know, a lot there's a lot of speculation, but not a lot of facts.
• 20:06
  I'm very curious to see what happens with particularly with OpenAI.
• 20:10
  SpaceX is different.
• 20:11
  You have Elon.
• 20:12
  You have, like that's like a different thing.
• 20:13
  I just think OpenAI is, for most people, the most closely identified with AI company.
• 20:20
  It has hundreds of millions of monthly active users.
• 20:23
  If there's ever a company that I think could have a tremendous retail uptake, it's OpenAI.
• 20:27
  I can see people just saying, like, this is my bet on AI.
• 20:30
  But I also will be curious to see what lessons OpenAI learns from being a public company and
• 20:34
  whether that trickles down into changing the interest level that late stage private
• 20:39
  companies have in going public.
• 20:40
  Will this pull Databricks and Stripe and some of those other more highly valued companies off
• 20:45
  the sidelines, or will it give them, like, more reason to pause?
• 20:49
  Well, more to come.
• 20:50
  I'm sure we'll see a flood of news over the next week or so, but we are all out of time for
• 20:55
  today.
• 20:55
  Thank you, Charles, for shopping in.
• 20:57
  Thank you to our listeners for hopping in as well.
• 20:59
  Please like and subscribe, and we'll talk with you all next week.
• 21:01
  Thank you.
• 21:02
  Bye.