Latest / The Learning Corner by Precursor / Episode #67: Always In The Office, Bubbles vs. Balloons, Tool Shaped Objects

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Episode #67: Always In The Office, Bubbles vs. Balloons, Tool Shaped Objects · The Learning Corner by Precursor

• 0:00
  It's so hard to find product market fit.
• 0:02
  When you add distance to it, you're taking something that's really hard and you're making
• 0:06
  it even harder.
• 0:07
  Why would you do that to your startup?
• 0:09
  But I've started asking people is, is your company in the optimal place for the business
• 0:13
  that you're in?
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  And do you have the optimal configuration?
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  I just want people to make sure that they're making a reasoned thoughtful decision about
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  this stuff as opposed to just either what feels easiest or what they read online.
• 0:24
  It's the week of February 16.
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  Welcome to the Learning Corner, a Precursor Ventures podcast.
• 0:34
  Welcome to the Learning Corner by Precursor.
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  I'm Mia Farnam, and I'm joined by our managing partner and GP, Charles Hudson, where we will
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  be talking through the articles and Goodreads that caught our team's attention over the past
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  week.
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  For our first Goodread of the week, we are in luck.
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  We've got our first ever precursor portfolio company founder as our guest for the podcast,
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  Ariana Ferwerda, CEO and cofounder of Half Days, a ski and outdoor wear brand for women by
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  women.
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  Ariana, thank you so much for making the time in the middle of your peak busy season for you.
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  Of course.
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  Thanks for having me.
• 1:08
  Excited.
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  We're super excited.
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  You wrote a piece recently titled, why my team will always be in the office, and it highlights
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  the journey Half made about going remote, becoming distributed, and then ultimately
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  building IRL in one office headquartered in Denver.
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  Half Days raised its entire pre seed over Zoom.
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  And you credit the pandemic for changing fundraising forever, but what worked maybe for
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  pitching investors doesn't always translate to building the fabric of a company.
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  And for a while, Half Days intentionally split into two offices, New York City for design
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  talent and Denver for marketing and ops.
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  You had each cofounder manage one location.
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  And on paper, it did make sense.
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  But in practice, distance created friction, marketing and product fell out of alignment,
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  and context got lost.
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  And decisions really just took longer in subtle but compounding ways.
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  You noted that once the company crossed the $10,000,000 revenue mark, those gaps really
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  became impossible to ignore, and the shift to one office in one city was immediate.
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  Your ideas move faster, feedback got more honest, and problems really just surfaced
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  earlier.
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  And you close the piece saying that you know that you're not anti remote days.
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  Half days is in office three to four days a week, but you're deeply pro presence,
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  especially for early stage companies where speed, clarity, and shared context are
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  everything.
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  And throughout the piece, you walked through the different orientations half days took,
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  remote, distributed, completely in one office.
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  I imagine that the realizations didn't happen overnight that illuminated.
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  It was time for a new physical version of the team.
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  Do you mind sharing some of those inflection points?
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  I know you talked about crossing the $10,000,000 mark as a moment where growth
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  demanded in person speed.
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  Anything else that comes to mind?
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  There's really so many things on the realization of needing to have the entire team
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  under one roof.
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  I would say that the marketing and product misalignment was a huge one.
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  Mia, you you said it perfectly, but we split our offices.
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  So we were New York City for product and design talent, and we did that from day one kind of.
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  We hired our first VP of design in New York City and sort of just let her run with building
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  the team there because my co founder Kylie and I had zero product manufacturing design
• 3:10
  expertise.
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  We're like, okay.
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  You're the expert.
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  You can do this.
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  So she built out a team there.
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  We ended up having, like, eight or nine full time people in New York.
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  I ended up moving out there to be with them.
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  And it was just so clear that having my cofounder still in Denver and me in New York
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  and all the product fittings happening in New York City, and then the marketing team also
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  being in Denver not being like around those product fittings, understanding the context of
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  why did we design this product, why did this zipper get moved from this place to this place?
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  What is the the technical features of the fabric?
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  And just not having a lot of that context, I think really started to show in our marketing
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  capabilities where the marketing team just lacked so much.
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  Like, I think they got to a point where the product team would just pass off a deck or do
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  like a quick presentation about the products, But you really have to be so intertwined across
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  so many areas of the business for it to all feel so seamless and cohesive.
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  And we were just too small to have two places.
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  And also the office culture was very different in New York versus Denver.
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  Like there just started to be things where I'm like, wow, we really need to be building this,
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  like, singular brand.
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  And I kinda felt like it was we were, like, starting to do two different things.
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  So there were there were a lot of things that happened, but I would say that the biggest one
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  was just the lack of cohesion between the product and marketing side.
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  And then, yeah, like when we got to, you know, the the 8 figure mark, I would say things just
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  started to feel a little bit more serious.
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  We had retailer relationships, these, like, big partners like Nordstrom and REI and DICK'S
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  Sporting Goods wanting to expand our door counts.
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  And we were so misaligned on what was getting put on the hang tag because the product team
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  was in one place and the marketing team was over here and it was just really, really hard
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  to manage.
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  And honestly, it was it just became inefficient and we were just spinning our wheels
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  unnecessarily.
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  And it sounds like you guys came to that realization on your own.
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  It's really time for us to start building in person, but Charles wanted to ask you, are
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  there any other kind of flags that you see along the journey that maybe it shows, oh, it's
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  actually a physical location issue that is inhibiting on speed.
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  I feel like coming out of the pandemic, I felt uncomfortable as an investor telling people,
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  hey.
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  You should get back in the office and be in the same even even though I felt like this will be
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  better for your company.
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  A, I was like, it's not really for me to dictate that to anybody.
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  And b, I know a lot of founders were, like, working through things.
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  And maybe it was sort of the '22 or '23 where a handful of founders started coming to me and
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  saying, is it okay for me to pull the team back into office together?
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  I'm like, what do you mean is it okay?
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  They're like, well, I wanna do this.
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  I feel like something is off in my company.
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  In some cases, they're like, I'm worried about looking like the Grinch, or I'm worried about
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  being one of the first people to do this, and should I mandate it, and should it be five days
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  in the office?
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  And I feel like what I saw in 2324 was a lot of our strongest companies were coming back
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  together for two reasons.
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  One, either they were pre product market fit and they realized things were going too slowly,
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  or to Ari's point, they'd gotten to a scale where they're like, oh, I can really see the
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  cost of being in multiple locations, or I can see the cost of being fully remote and
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  distributed.
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  Now that we're at scale, and I don't like this.
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  This is not what I want for my company.
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  I want something different.
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  And that honestly seemed to drive a lot of the decision making that I saw from people was this
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  desire to sort of fix something that founders intuitively knew wasn't working.
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  But I started to tell people, Mia, is it's so hard to find product market fit.
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  It's really difficult.
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  And when you add distance to it, you're taking something that's really hard, and you're making
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  it even harder.
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  And why would you do that to your startup?
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  Like, we have companies where there are familial or lifestyle reasons that are
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  legitimate.
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  Kid needs specialty care in a place where it's only available in that location.
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  Spouse slash partner is doing some kind of graduate or educational program that's rooted
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  in one place.
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  But in all of those cases, every one of those founders has always told me, I realize this is
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  not optimal for the company.
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  So what I've started asking people is like, do you think you have the configuration that's
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  optimal for your company?
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  And that's how the whole field trip thing started to happen where we had people come work
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  out of our office in San Francisco because, you know, they were in other places, and I'd say,
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  is that the optimal place?
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  So now I always ask people, is your company in the optimal place for the business that you're
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  in, and do you have the optimal configuration?
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  And there are very few companies in our portfolio where I think five days in office in
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  San Francisco is the right answer.
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  But maybe if you're building an AI application layer company, maybe that is the right answer
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  for you.
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  So I just want people to make sure that they're making a reasoned thoughtful decision about
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  this stuff as opposed to just like either what feels easiest or what they run online.
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  For me, it was also I could just feel it.
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  I felt that being in New York City felt inauthentic for my brand.
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  And we realistically could have been like, hey, let's center the company in New York City.
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  I actually think we had more full time employees in New York City than we did in
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  Denver at the time that we made the decision.
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  And I was just like, it this isn't this isn't it for us.
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  It's hard to get to the mountains.
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  The other weird piece of it is that New York City is actually our number one market in terms
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  of e com revenue.
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  So it it literally goes Manhattan and then Brooklyn are like number one and number So from
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  that perspective, it could have made sense.
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  But I was like, you know, having a store here at some point will make a ton of sense from
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  like a revenue customer perspective.
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  But like our team, we started the business in Colorado where Kylie and I met.
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  It's where we both love to ski.
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  It's where we're doing a lot of our photoshoots.
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  Like it just felt way more authentic for us.
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  And there have been challenges that come from that.
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  Right?
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  Finding really good design and marketing talent in Denver, Colorado versus Manhattan or LA is
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  is hard.
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  We've had instances where we've missed out on amazing talent because we're requiring people
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  to live here.
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  And it's just something we've kind of like had to put our foot down about.
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  And unfortunately, there are some cons, but the pros certainly outweigh the cons.
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  There's a couple threads on what each of you said that I wanna pull on, but one of which
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  Charles touched upon.
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  I know that there are versions of in office culture that aren't actually productive or feel
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  more performative than their outputs.
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  I'm thinking nine nine six culture.
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  I'm thinking just, like, honestly, office environments where everyone's too terrified to
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  just voice their opinions at all.
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  And you could be in person for, like, ten hours a day.
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  So when you were bringing everyone back into the office, Ari, four days a week, what culture
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  did you know you didn't want to build knowing that being together in person really was the
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  key component?
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  Yeah.
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  I think the the biggest thing for us, and we've honestly had this culture from the beginning,
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  is we understand that we're all living our lives and work is not the center focus of a lot
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  of my employees' lives.
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  Right?
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  Like, it is absolutely mine.
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  It's absolutely my cofounders.
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  But a lot of my team have kids and several of them, they go and pick up their kid at 03:30PM
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  every day, and that's just something that's really important to them, so that's important
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  to me, and I think that there's just certain things.
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  Sometimes I go get a haircut at noon on a Tuesday because that's when I need to get it
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  done and that's when the appointment was.
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  There's just certain things and I think that we've really established that as a huge part of
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  the culture, just being flexible and understanding that we're gonna work really hard
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  and we are going to get things done and move things forward and really rally around things
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  when we're in office, and that we all have to have a little bit of balance.
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  And I think that anytime anyone's taken advantage of that, like, they probably don't
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  work here anymore.
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  Right?
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  So, like, I think it's just a matter of knowing where that line is and people people respect
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  it, but they also are like, I have a life, and I'm gonna get my work done too.
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  And that's definitely how we've built the culture.
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  Last question for you.
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  I know in the piece you said proximity isn't just about having an office.
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  It's about being in the same room, building in real time.
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  And I wanna talk specifically about, you know, what was the experience of building when
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  specifically your co founder is located in a different location.
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  Yeah.
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  That was really hard.
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  I think that oftentimes, something would be progressing in New York with a product decision
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  that Kylie just wouldn't be aware of, and then I'd have to, like, fill her in after the fact.
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  And maybe she wasn't aligned with it or whatever.
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  Like, that was definitely a tricky component.
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  I will say though, Kylie and I, from the very beginning, have had a really, really seamless
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  relationship because we focus on such different parts of the business and like, we both really,
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  really trust each other.
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  And at the end of the day, she runs a lot of our creative and photo and marketing, and I'm
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  the CEO.
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  And she trusts the decisions I'm making, and I think that that's like such critical part of a
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  co founder relationship.
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  So it wasn't the main thing that I would say.
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  Think the thing that, between the two of us, that was most difficult was us not being
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  together with the product team.
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  Difference hands down for us with having an apparel business is that Kylie and I are in two
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  to three fittings a week with our team in Denver.
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  And Kylie and I try on every single product at every single sample stage of the process for
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  like months before the product actually comes out.
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  So I have really felt like our product has been so positively impacted by that.
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  We just don't miss anything anymore.
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  And it fits exactly how we want it to fit and it looks exactly how we want it to look and the
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  colors and the names of the products, like everything is really and I think at some point,
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  like, we'll have to figure out how to operationalize that without us.
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  But I think for as long as possible that we can be really embedded into it, the better.
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  Well, Ari, thank you so much for hopping in and walking through everything.
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  I'll let you go back to
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  Mhmm.
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  The slopes and supplying people with the best fashion there is on the mountains.
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  Thank you guys so much.
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  Well, our next piece is titled Bubbles and Balloons written by Connie Makubella from
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  Kindred Ventures, exploring the difference between how markets actually unwind.
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  The core metaphor is that a bubble exists until it doesn't.
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  It pops, and that's it.
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  But a balloon can spend a long time in the in between, less pressure than before, but still
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  very much there.
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  The argument is that 2021 and 2022 was a balloon, not a bubble.
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  The major indexes sold off really hard, roughly a quarter off the S and P and about a third off
• 12:48
  high growth tech.
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  But earnings bent without breaking, and capital didn't evaporate.
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  It just took a breath.
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  In ventures, global startup dollars fell sharply from the 2021 peak, but didn't revert
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  to some pre Internet baseline.
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  They just reverted to pre 2021 levels, and then AI showed up to reinflate the balloon.
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  So by 2024, total startup funding had stabilized and nudged back up, but the
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  composition had radically shifted with AI pulling in over a $100,000,000,000 and
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  accounting for a huge share of global venture volume.
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  The piece makes the case that in the meme investing era, the constraint is no longer
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  whether an asset is actually mispriced on fundamentals, but whether there's a large
• 13:26
  enough crowd willing to believe the story at the same time.
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  The access from 2021 didn't disappear.
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  It just transferred from everything growth to everything AI.
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  One quote that stuck out was a close investor friend that told Connie, it feels like it's
• 13:41
  1999, but it's like 1999 forever.
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  So Charles wanted your thoughts on bubbles and balloons and the thesis entirely.
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  I talked to him about various elements of the arguments in this piece, and I asked a few LPs.
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  I think I told the team this.
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  Like, you know, in 2021, it's quaint to think that people were writing all of these blog
• 13:59
  posts about capital efficiency, and we're never gonna pay these crazy multiples.
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  That was just three or four years ago where, like, efficiency and, you know, output per this
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  was the thing we talked about in 2021, 2022, and part of 2023.
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  And then AI happened.
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  Everyone's like, okay.
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  Just push reset.
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  We're doing this again.
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  I remember the distinct feeling that it's 1999, but all the time is the perfect I was like,
• 14:20
  guys, we just did this.
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  We're gonna do this again.
• 14:22
  And, apparently, the answer is yes.
• 14:24
  We're gonna do this again.
• 14:25
  And, you know, I have a bunch of friends who are in crypto, and I talked to them about just,
• 14:29
  like, you know, the roller coaster that crypto's been on.
• 14:32
  And I asked one of my friends.
• 14:33
  I said, what's driving this coaster?
• 14:34
  He said, vibes.
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  I kinda laughed, I was like, I think you're also kind of right.
• 14:39
  Crypto is very much a sentiment seems to me to be a very sentiment driven market.
• 14:43
  And when people are excited about crypto, it goes up.
• 14:45
  And people are not as excited about it, it goes down.
• 14:48
  And I find this to be the best explanation for the behavior of many firms in our industry.
• 14:54
  If you're just like, hey.
• 14:55
  This is about fundamentals, and this is about multiples and underwriting, you would say,
• 15:00
  well, a lot of this feels very bubbly.
• 15:03
  I remember I wrote a few years ago to some of our LPs.
• 15:06
  I was like, feels like it's 1999.
• 15:08
  He said, no.
• 15:08
  It's like 1996.
• 15:09
  This was maybe two or three years ago.
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  I didn't realize that, but I'm like, yeah.
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  It was 1999.
• 15:13
  It just stayed 1999.
• 15:15
  And I think right now, there's so much money in private assets that if AI went away, we'd kinda
• 15:21
  have to find something else to get excited about.
• 15:23
  And something else in in some ways, I don't know whether AI is the tail or the dog.
• 15:28
  Is it there's so much more money in private assets because AI is this amazing mega cycle,
• 15:34
  or is it AI is the perfect mega cycle to consume massive amounts of private capital,
• 15:38
  both on the equity and the credit side, because the CapEx requirements are so great that it
• 15:43
  gives the credit dollars somewhere to go.
• 15:46
  Mhmm.
• 15:46
  And the application layer solutions are so attractive, it brings in all the equity
• 15:51
  dollars.
• 15:52
  Maybe you don't get this kind of private capital mega cycle without AI, or maybe it's
• 15:56
  the other way around.
• 15:56
  I don't know.
• 15:57
  But it's made me think a lot more about what gets valued.
• 16:00
  If And you think, like, what matters is moats and business model and metrics, you make one
• 16:06
  decision.
• 16:06
  If you're like, what really matters fundamentally is attention, then hypey, buzzy
• 16:11
  AI things make sense.
• 16:13
  People who can break through the noise make sense.
• 16:16
  And you're sort of back to a momentum investing style that, like, presumes that the good times
• 16:21
  will continue.
• 16:21
  But I think private assets are so big now.
• 16:23
  I don't know where we'd put all this money if we didn't have AI.
• 16:25
  There's no single theme that could absorb it.
• 16:27
  Yeah.
• 16:28
  And that's, I guess, my next question is, like, I obviously know hindsight bias is is always a
• 16:33
  thing, but this time it actually, to me, kinda feels way more like a bubble than a balloon
• 16:37
  because it feels very finite.
• 16:38
  Like, when it ends, it I don't know if it's gonna reinflate just because what you
• 16:42
  mentioned, the sheer amount of private capital.
• 16:44
  Just going into AI feels way more concentrated that if it does deflate, it's hard to imagine
• 16:48
  what the next wave of air, where it will come from.
• 16:51
  Do you think that that's the core piece of where the balloon metaphor breaks down here?
• 16:55
  But I think what if we'll always find something?
• 16:57
  I like talking to Kanye because he always challenges my thinking.
• 17:00
  And I was like, well, at some point, things have to reset to sanity, but maybe they don't.
• 17:05
  Maybe maybe we never go back to something that feels the scary thing is maybe it was never
• 17:09
  that way.
• 17:10
  It just felt that way.
• 17:11
  But, you know, it could be humanoid robotics.
• 17:13
  It could be data centers in space.
• 17:15
  It could be computational bi it could I'm convinced we will find something because, like,
• 17:20
  capital needs a home.
• 17:21
  Right.
• 17:21
  Because we
• 17:21
  are not out.
• 17:22
  Just hope whatever we find is a good investment.
• 17:24
  The bigger question is we haven't really solved the problem of 2021.
• 17:29
  Had We a bunch of really expensive SaaS companies that neither went out of business nor
• 17:33
  got acquired by PE nor got acquired by other venture.
• 17:36
  Now we're beginning to see more of these, like, merger of equals, and we're seeing more of
• 17:40
  these seven, ten, twelve year old companies that are merging.
• 17:43
  But it's unclear to me whether the merged entities will go anywhere either.
• 17:47
  And so we left all of this detritus behind in 2021.
• 17:50
  And I don't mean that the companies are bad.
• 17:52
  It's just we created all of this stuff and all this energy, and then everybody just moved on.
• 17:55
  And he left all of these SaaS founders to run businesses, and it's, like, unclear to me,
• 17:59
  like, where are those or where many of those businesses will go.
• 18:02
  Probably investors who backed those same businesses are arguing that, like, SaaS is dead
• 18:05
  now.
• 18:06
  So, like, let's move on.
• 18:07
  But we haven't even done the unpacking of what had actually happened before we start with the
• 18:11
  next, but that's, I guess, how balloons work in the way Connie described it.
• 18:14
  The reason I think it's a balloon is I've asked a few LPs and, like, well, who did you, like,
• 18:19
  take to the woodshed because of 2021?
• 18:21
  You guys all said VCs blew it.
• 18:24
  We invested in all these companies.
• 18:25
  The valuations were too high.
• 18:27
  What were you thinking?
• 18:28
  And most of the firms that were at the forefront of that era are also at the forefront
• 18:33
  of AI.
• 18:34
  So what if the, like, market signal conclusion is that the consequences for balloon be we
• 18:39
  won't say for balloon behavior that you get to stay in business so long as you can continue to
• 18:43
  ride the balloon.
• 18:44
  It creates a very weird incentive structure.
• 18:46
  Our last piece is a post on X from Wilmanitus titled Tool Shaped Objects.
• 18:51
  As a reflection on the viral post, something big is happening.
• 18:54
  I'm sure everyone who listened to this podcast also saw that and come across x.
• 18:58
  It had millions of views over the last week.
• 19:01
  For context, something big is happening was written by Matt Schumer, clearly sharing alarm,
• 19:06
  concern, and advice pointed at every person as it pertains to AI and how it's threatening
• 19:10
  everyone's world and jobs.
• 19:12
  Will introduces the idea of a tool shaped object, something you can hold, you can use, it
• 19:18
  fits in your hand the way a tool should.
• 19:20
  It produces the feeling of work, but it doesn't actually produce work.
• 19:24
  The piece opens with this great example of a 300 year old Japanese blade making tradition
• 19:29
  where the setup and the shavings are the entire point.
• 19:32
  From there, the argument is that the current AI boom is the most sophisticated tool shaped
• 19:37
  object ever created.
• 19:38
  We're spending unprecedented sums on GPU farms, billion dollar training runs, and trillion
• 19:43
  dollar infrastructure build outs, and the primary product of that spending is the
• 19:47
  experience of spending it.
• 19:49
  The piece is careful to say LLMs aren't worthless.
• 19:52
  They'll, of course, become very good and have real effects on productivity, but the diffusion
• 19:56
  into the real economy will take much longer and look much different than the current hype
• 20:00
  suggests.
• 20:01
  The line that stuck with me was the market for feeling productive is orders of magnitude
• 20:06
  larger than the market for being productive.
• 20:09
  Yeah.
• 20:09
  Reading this article felt like borderline therapeutic after seeing the amount of chatter
• 20:15
  and conversation and concerns sparked from Something Big is Happening.
• 20:19
  And I've said it with the team before, but I it's always fascinating to me what pieces in
• 20:23
  the tech and venture ecosystem permeate out to people who are not in those areas, and this was
• 20:28
  one of them.
• 20:28
  So wanted to pause here for your reactions to both Something Big is Happening and then Will's
• 20:34
  post.
• 20:34
  You know, I feel when we had Saaspocalypse and Matt's piece, I was just like, I forgot.
• 20:40
  There is a lag time between things that are obvious and visible in the private markets.
• 20:45
  First, then getting to be digested by public markets, and then being promulgated to the
• 20:50
  wider world.
• 20:50
  And I read that post, and I was like, I don't understand why this was the one.
• 20:54
  Why was why was this one the one?
• 20:56
  Many people have made very similar arguments, and I'm like, I feel like whenever these posts
• 21:00
  have this moment, it's either engineered or all of the preconditions of people's brains being
• 21:05
  primed to hear this were right.
• 21:07
  And I think it's I don't know, Matt.
• 21:09
  So I'm gonna assume that it's more that the timing on this was just was at a moment where
• 21:12
  people's consciousness had really been raised about what all this stuff means.
• 21:16
  And I kind of laughed because a friend of mine was showing me his open claw setup and all the
• 21:21
  things he could do.
• 21:21
  I go, does any of this stuff matter?
• 21:23
  And he goes, what do you mean?
• 21:24
  And I go, it's cool that you can do all of this, but, like, does any of this stuff matter?
• 21:28
  And he's like, no.
• 21:30
  And it's like that, like, the Jeff Goldblum line from Jurassic Park.
• 21:34
  Euroscopically trying to figure out if you could do something that you never asked whether
• 21:37
  you should do something.
• 21:38
  And I find myself sometimes building things in AI or starting to build things.
• 21:42
  I'm like, you know, I could do this myself faster.
• 21:44
  It'd be cool to have AI do this task for me, but I actually I could do it faster just
• 21:49
  myself.
• 21:49
  And, like, yes, I get a certain amount of it.
• 21:51
  You know, I get a lot of joy from building things in AI, but the principal output of
• 21:55
  building a lot of things I build is, like, the joy of creation.
• 21:58
  I've built some things that are very, very useful that do actually save me time, but half
• 22:02
  of the things I build are because they're fun.
• 22:04
  And it's in the same way I tell our portfolio companies, never confuse activity with
• 22:08
  productivity.
• 22:09
  I think there's some of that in AI too.
• 22:11
  People are like, we automated this process.
• 22:12
  I'm like, maybe you should have just eliminated it.
• 22:14
  Maybe the answer was instead of, like, making it run faster with less human contact, you
• 22:17
  should have figured out how to simply get rid of that process.
• 22:20
  And I think we're in this moment where people are just infatuated with, like, what they can
• 22:25
  build, so they're building a lot of stuff.
• 22:26
  My friend, was like, hey.
• 22:27
  You bought a Mac Mini and Dell this stuff to, like, do some things that he was very proud of,
• 22:31
  and I felt bad.
• 22:32
  But even he said, I was living fine without all this stuff.
• 22:34
  And so I I do think that these tools can make you feel amazing because you're like, wow.
• 22:39
  I just did this thing, I made a PowerPoint deck.
• 22:41
  In three minutes, it would've taken me three hours.
• 22:43
  And like, a, maybe some of the value of that three hours was like wrestling with the
• 22:47
  underlying concept of whether the deck needed to be exist exist in the first place.
• 22:50
  And second, maybe the answer was you just at the end the three hours, you would've decided
• 22:53
  there was no deck that needed be created.
• 22:55
  I've thought through this issue, that's it.
• 22:57
  I don't know.
• 22:57
  I mean, love Will's comparison to FarmVille as, like, a previous FarmVille farmer myself.
• 23:04
  You're literally building an entire farm, and the whole point is to amass more hay, amass
• 23:10
  more animals for no purpose.
• 23:12
  There's no outcome at the end.
• 23:14
  No one wins anything.
• 23:15
  You just get to look at your giant virtual farm at the end of the day, and that, for some
• 23:19
  reason, makes you feel so productive when in fact, I can't do anything with this after.
• 23:24
  So it felt so perfect for the article when he was describing tool shaped objects.
• 23:29
  I mean, I do think a bit of media and written content, not a bit, a lot of media and written
• 23:34
  content about AI these days is optimized for views and reshares, exactly kind of what you
• 23:37
  gleaned earlier.
• 23:38
  And I think that people in tech and in venture might know that, but how do you have these same
• 23:43
  types of conversations or level setting with folks who are outside of this bubble?
• 23:48
  I'm thinking teachers.
• 23:49
  I'm thinking kids who started their first job out of college, etcetera.
• 23:52
  They read something like this because it's the first time something of this magnitude has hit
• 23:56
  x for them on their feed, and they're like, oh, wait.
• 23:59
  Should I pause planning for a wedding because this article told me to save up as much money
• 24:03
  as possible, or should I really rethink making major life decisions with money because somehow
• 24:08
  this feels 10 times more magnitude than anything else I've experienced?
• 24:12
  I think we go through these cycles all the time.
• 24:15
  It'd been interesting just seeing how something is definitely shifting.
• 24:18
  I look at a lot of the local pushback on big data center projects, and I've read and
• 24:23
  listened to some of the audio trans it's beginning to dawn on them the scale of the
• 24:26
  transformation that this stuff represents.
• 24:28
  And I think people are like, I don't I don't want a repeat of social media.
• 24:32
  I don't wanna let the cat get so far out of the bag that, like, I, as an autonomous individual,
• 24:37
  have no ability to stop this.
• 24:38
  Maybe maximum speed all systems go isn't the way to handle this.
• 24:42
  I I don't know if they'll be successful, but I see that happening.
• 24:44
  I I talked to someone whose company has a token leaderboard.
• 24:47
  I was just like, so you're keeping track of who's spending the most money?
• 24:50
  I was like, isn't this just like when you used to count lines of code?
• 24:53
  And there was the belief that that more more is better.
• 24:55
  And it turns out that if you incentivize people to write more lines of code, you get more lines
• 24:59
  of code, which does not necessarily equate to better code.
• 25:02
  And some of the best projects I've written are very token efficient by design.
• 25:06
  The goal is to not burn tons and tons of tokens, but if you have a token leaderboard,
• 25:09
  you will incentivize people.
• 25:11
  So I think we haven't even figured out, like, what is it exactly that we're trying to
• 25:14
  measure?
• 25:15
  And right now, people are trying to take the most crude course measurement tools available
• 25:19
  to get some sense.
• 25:21
  And, you know, I'm I'm sympathetic to CEOs.
• 25:23
  You know, if you're a CEO of a company, your board, or your shareholders are like, tell me
• 25:26
  that you are all systems go on AI.
• 25:28
  I am.
• 25:29
  And they're like, well, where is it showing up?
• 25:30
  You're like, let me see if I can find second order effects, token usage, or other things.
• 25:36
  And then I saw a chart, I think Jason Lemke might have posted it, on just the decline in
• 25:39
  customer support hiring in the last three years.
• 25:42
  That's a real thing.
• 25:43
  So I don't know.
• 25:44
  I think this might be the first technology wave in I can think of in my life.
• 25:48
  Like, people were generally enthusiastic about the Internet.
• 25:51
  People were generally enthusiastic about mobile.
• 25:53
  People were generally enthusiastic about the cloud.
• 25:56
  Not not universally, but generally.
• 25:57
  This is the first thing where I'm seeing general unease, and that's a new thing for tech
• 26:01
  outside of defense and missiles and all that stuff.
• 26:04
  Going to the customer success piece, we hosted a customer success dinner for our precursor
• 26:08
  portfolio companies last week.
• 26:10
  And as you can imagine, AI was a center conversation topic, naturally.
• 26:13
  I didn't geekly start it off.
• 26:15
  And it's funny because I think everyone went around the table, and in today's world, they
• 26:19
  were like, I wish AI could do the heavy lifting of my job.
• 26:22
  I wish I could just show the transcript of what the customer said to me to prove to them that
• 26:27
  they agreed to these terms.
• 26:29
  I can't because that's not how this job works.
• 26:32
  And so there's general pushback, but also interest in learning more, I think that's where
• 26:36
  we haven't quite struck the balance at what's the correct amount to spend as you yourself, an
• 26:41
  an individual with just a job.
• 26:42
  And Ari said it great in our first good read.
• 26:44
  There's a lot of people who work is not the center of their being, and so how do you find
• 26:48
  time out of your day to get, I don't know, smart on AI?
• 26:50
  Also, thing my friend told me this weekend, he's like, you gotta remember the experience of
• 26:54
  the average person just using Chat GPT as a Google replacement is very different than you
• 27:00
  building things in Cloud Code on GitHub.
• 27:02
  If they knew what this stuff was really capable of, they might be actually even more concerned.
• 27:08
  We are all out of time today.
• 27:09
  Thank you, Charles, for jumping in.
• 27:11
  Thank you to our subscribers for hopping in as well.
• 27:14
  Please like and share with others, and we will talk with you all next week.
• 27:17
  Thank you.
• 27:18
  Bye.