Latest / The Learning Corner by Precursor / Episode #72: Delve's Compliance Fraud, Has Startup Advice Ever Worked, OpenAI Refocuses

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Episode #72: Delve's Compliance Fraud, Has Startup Advice Ever Worked, OpenAI Refocuses · The Learning Corner by Precursor

• 0:00
  Think the startup advisory complex has gotten out of control.
• 0:03
  There's a lot of people who are pushing narratives and frameworks not because they work
• 0:07
  or they're helpful, but because that's their personal brand.
• 0:09
  Part of what I tell a lot of founders that we work with is most of this stuff doesn't apply
• 0:13
  to you, and it's simply noise.
• 0:14
  And you have two choices.
• 0:15
  If you have a good filter, you can actually take this stuff in, listen to it, and extract
• 0:20
  the parts that are relevant to you.
• 0:21
  But if you don't have a good filter, in some cases, the safest thing to do is actually to
• 0:24
  ignore this stuff.
• 0:25
  It's the week of March 23.
• 0:27
  Welcome to the Learning Corner, a Precursor Ventures podcast.
• 0:35
  Welcome to the Learning Corner by Precursor.
• 0:37
  I'm Mia Farnham, and I'm joined by our GP and managing partner, Charles Hudson, where we will
• 0:42
  be talking through the articles and Goodread that caught our team's attention over the past
• 0:46
  week.
• 0:46
  For our first piece this week, an anonymous source published a lengthy expose on Delve via
• 0:52
  Substack.
• 0:53
  It's a YC backed compliance automation startup that recently raised a $32,000,000 series a,
• 0:59
  accusing the company of systematically fabricating audit evidence, generating auditor
• 1:04
  conclusions on behalf of rubber stamp certification mills, and leaving hundreds of
• 1:08
  startup clients unknowingly exposed to serious legal liability under HIPAA and GDPR.
• 1:14
  The piece walks through how Delve's AI native platform is, in reality, a collection of
• 1:20
  prepopulated forms and fake integrations where clients click through templated board meeting
• 1:25
  minutes, fake security incidents, and pre written risk assessments that never actually
• 1:30
  happened.
• 1:31
  What makes this especially damning is the leaked spreadsheet.
• 1:34
  It's a publicly accessible Google Sheet containing hundreds of draft audit reports
• 1:39
  showing that the auditors' conclusions were machine generated by Delve before any client
• 1:45
  even filled in their company information.
• 1:47
  High profile Delve clients named in the piece included Lovable, Bland, Cluelly, Whisper Flow,
• 1:53
  and even a Nasdaq traded company, with the broader argument being that the startup
• 1:56
  compliance space may be rife with this kind of manufactured credibility.
• 2:00
  To be clear, we don't know the full story here.
• 2:02
  We didn't invest in Delve.
• 2:03
  We're not inside the company.
• 2:04
  And we don't have access to information beyond what this piece published, but it does raise a
• 2:08
  real question.
• 2:09
  When a company is just a concept and a team, how do you actually diligence something like
• 2:13
  this so early on?
• 2:15
  Delve raised a $32,000,000 series a, which is a significant amount of capital for a very young
• 2:21
  team.
• 2:21
  Both founders were on boards 30 under 30, and you have to wonder if that kind of raise
• 2:25
  created pressure that pushed them above their skis before the product was ready.
• 2:28
  I was with friends earlier this week, and we all asked the question of when a company has
• 2:33
  this large of a public blowup, how much of that could you have hedged from the true earliest of
• 2:39
  stages?
• 2:40
  Wanted your perspective on it.
• 2:42
  I feel like this happens I was telling somebody this weekend, this seems to happen more often
• 2:47
  in regulated industries.
• 2:48
  And I have a theory that what ends up happening is in regulated industries, the regulations are
• 2:54
  designed to make you go slow.
• 2:55
  So if you were to call Drata or Vantor or someone else, they're gonna give you an answer
• 2:59
  about how long it's gonna take to get SOC two that's gonna be rooted in compliance.
• 3:04
  And I think there's always something attractive where a startup shows up and says it's gonna
• 3:08
  take them three months.
• 3:09
  I can do it for you in two weeks, which ought to beg the question, how?
• 3:13
  How can you do it so much faster than somebody else?
• 3:16
  And sometimes the answer is we're cutting corners.
• 3:20
  Sometimes the answer actually is technology.
• 3:22
  And in some ways, I think this is kind of like the perfect storm.
• 3:25
  You have all of these companies that are building these AI apps that are growing really
• 3:30
  quickly.
• 3:30
  They're talking to enterprises, and enterprises are like, you've gotta be SOC two compliant.
• 3:35
  And if you're a three person startup, you're like, well, what's SOC two?
• 3:38
  Oh, it's a box I gotta check to be compliant.
• 3:41
  This company is telling me it's gonna cost me a lot of money, and it's gonna take a long time.
• 3:45
  And this new startup is telling me they can do it quicker and cheaper.
• 3:48
  I'm a startup.
• 3:49
  I'm gonna go with the startup.
• 3:50
  And the implicit trust is that, well, they must be doing the right thing because I don't think
• 3:54
  most startup customers know how to navigate the SOC two compliance process on their own.
• 3:58
  If they did, it'd be a much harder job to be Vanta or Drata.
• 4:01
  And I do think as investors, whenever I see companies that are growing much faster than
• 4:06
  somebody else in a regulated space, my immediate question is, how are they doing this?
• 4:11
  And I think in this case, the answer was probably it's AI.
• 4:14
  Oh, we're using AI, and it's saving all this time.
• 4:16
  And if you wanna believe that story, you're like, well, I have tons of examples of how AI
• 4:20
  is taking processes that used to be really long.
• 4:22
  And if you're an enterprising founder, you could tell a story to investors that says,
• 4:26
  look, we're using AI to dramatically speed up the compliance process.
• 4:29
  We're not cutting corners.
• 4:30
  We're just taking all of the human back and forth slow stuff and compressing it.
• 4:34
  And we're in an environment where right now I don't think investors get paid to ask hard
• 4:37
  questions.
• 4:38
  If you ask hard questions, you get this sounds a lot like we talked about in 2021, where if
• 4:42
  you ask hard questions and it's a hot round, that founder might decide to work with someone
• 4:46
  who's going to ask fewer probing questions.
• 4:49
  Right.
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  And the people that are investors in that company are good investors.
• 4:52
  I'm not saying that they didn't do their homework.
• 4:53
  I was talking to one of our teammates yesterday, and she was like, well, what if
• 4:57
  they'd called customers?
• 4:58
  And, like, the customers wouldn't have been able to tell you anything either.
• 5:00
  They would have just said, hey.
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  Like, they pitched me on this SOC two thing.
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  I got a certificate.
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  I gave it to my to my customer.
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  My customer accepted it.
• 5:07
  And instead of having to wait three months, I got my SOC two in two weeks.
• 5:10
  I'm super happy.
• 5:11
  That would have been probably what you would have heard from Dell customers.
• 5:13
  Like, without it feels like the leaked spreadsheet, it'd be harder to kind of connect
• 5:18
  the dots on, oh, none of us even had the right accreditations.
• 5:22
  What makes this really dangerous for founders is that if you were a Delve customer, this
• 5:27
  could blow up your entire legitimacy as a company.
• 5:31
  I mean, there are really well funded folks who are on that customer list there, but there are
• 5:35
  some folks who maybe are much earlier on that were not mentioned that, like, something like
• 5:38
  this could upend everything.
• 5:40
  It does raise the question for founders since exactly what you said, we're flooded with a
• 5:44
  market of new tools and great backers behind them too, which used to be the legitimacy
• 5:49
  benchmark.
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  What should founders actually be diligent about when they're evaluating vendors right now,
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  especially in places like this, like compliance that actually have a true touch point on the
• 5:57
  future of the business?
• 5:58
  I think my experience has been startup founders apply critical energy and skepticism to things
• 6:04
  that they view as mission critical.
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  So if it were your cloud service provider, if it were something that you're like, this is a
• 6:10
  mission critical business function, you would, of course, analyze it.
• 6:13
  I think the issue is a lot of startups are like, well, SOC too is this check mark thing I
• 6:17
  have to get.
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  It's a binary.
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  I either have it or I don't have it.
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  If I don't have it, I can't sell to this customer type.
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  So let me just go get it.
• 6:25
  And when it's that kind of purchase, oftentimes people will optimize for cost and speed, all
• 6:29
  things being equal.
• 6:30
  And I think it's worth reminding people that some things that don't appear to be business
• 6:34
  critical can turn out to be business risks, and all vendor relationships are important, and you
• 6:39
  should think about them.
• 6:40
  And I just think back about, like, Zenefits, and I think about Synapse, and all of these
• 6:45
  other companies that we've seen that have had these, like, rough patch.
• 6:48
  And I think it's hard to come back from these things because in regulated businesses, so much
• 6:52
  of the currency is trust.
• 6:54
  And so I don't know.
• 6:55
  I hope that you know, I don't wish anything ill of the Delve, and and I'm sure there were
• 6:58
  employees of the company who had no idea that this was what's going on in cuss I mean, the
• 7:02
  only thing is we had I know people for whom Delve was a significant customer of theirs and
• 7:07
  a flagship customer and someone they highlighted as someone who used their product
• 7:10
  or service.
• 7:11
  And now they're like, great.
• 7:12
  Our, like, shining star customer turns out to be not who we thought they were, which has
• 7:17
  nothing to do with the service that they were selling that company.
• 7:19
  But you gave from the vantage point of an investor, because this is what we are talking
• 7:22
  about with my friends yesterday.
• 7:24
  They walked through in the piece how most of the integrations that were claimed by the Delve
• 7:28
  team were fake.
• 7:29
  The funny part is, at at pre seed, tons of demos I've been on with, this isn't built up
• 7:33
  yet.
• 7:34
  I'll show you the Figma instead of the actual demo.
• 7:36
  I that I can get comfortable with.
• 7:38
  I need to eventually see that it works, but I can totally believe when it's prelaunch that
• 7:42
  not everything is set up.
• 7:44
  The difference is when you go from c to series a where that fell through.
• 7:49
  And this isn't the first time, like, we've seen this so many different times.
• 7:52
  And we're back in an environment where we're operating at super high speed.
• 7:57
  Deals are getting done quickly.
• 7:59
  Companies are growing quickly.
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  And I think it creates this dynamic on both sides to rush.
• 8:04
  And look, I think it's also worth noting 99% of startups are not doing this.
• 8:08
  So on average, if you're like, I can trust what a startup is telling me is true and that
• 8:13
  they're doing what they said they did in the way that so on average, trusting the startups
• 8:17
  that you meet, if they're run by good people, is usually a safe strategy.
• 8:21
  It's just when it isn't, it's very unsafe.
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  Our next piece is titled, We Have Learned Nothing, written by Jerry Newman, and it makes
• 8:27
  a pointed and data backed argument that decades of startup advice, the lean methodology,
• 8:32
  customer discovery, growth hacking of it all, has produced no measurable improvement in
• 8:37
  whether startups actually succeed.
• 8:40
  Jerry tracks seed to series a conversion rates over time and finds that they have steadily
• 8:44
  declined, regardless of how many companies were being funded or how widely startup best
• 8:49
  practices were being adopted.
• 8:51
  His argument is that we are living through a red queen dynamic.
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  Once every founder is running the same playbook, the playbook stops conferring any
• 8:59
  real advantage, and everyone ends up just running in place to stay average.
• 9:03
  The deeper and more uncomfortable conclusion is that startups may simply be too human, too
• 9:08
  variable, and too chaotic to ever reduce to a reliable framework.
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  And then if we cannot run controlled experiments on them, what we call startup
• 9:17
  wisdom might be closer to pseudoscience than any of us would like to admit.
• 9:22
  Jerry makes the argument that we have spent countless hours and billions of dollars on
• 9:25
  startup frameworks, and at best, the numbers show they have had no real effect on whether
• 9:29
  startups actually succeed.
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  He raises three possibilities for why these theories are simply wrong.
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  They are too obvious to matter.
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  Or once everyone runs the same playbook, the advantage disappears entirely, so the red queen
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  dynamic.
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  Which of those three resonate with you, and do you think that it changes how you advise
• 9:48
  founders?
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  I think the answer is all of them.
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  And so I think if you zoom out, there's a lot of things that have changed in the last twenty
• 9:56
  years.
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  There are a lot more people who start startups than there used to be.
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  Part of it is that the cost of doing so has come down.
• 10:03
  Part of it is that the allure of startups has increased, whether that's the social network or
• 10:08
  just general, like, media awareness of startups.
• 10:10
  It's not surprising to me that increased entry and creation of startups has not meaningfully
• 10:15
  changed because building a successful startup has always been a low probability event.
• 10:20
  And so it's not surprising to me that adding in more competition and more entrants has not
• 10:25
  dramatically changed the average because the average startup is simply average.
• 10:29
  I think the value I see in things like Lean Launchpad and Lean Startup, you know, we didn't
• 10:34
  have a framework before.
• 10:37
  I mean, to be fair, like, a lot of the Y Combinator devices build something that people
• 10:41
  want.
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  Duh.
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  And so I think in some ways, the fact that we have clear language to describe what startups
• 10:47
  are supposed to do and what winning looks like is not the same as making it easier to do so.
• 10:52
  And now what I find is the whole language around product market fit and Lean Launchpad,
• 10:58
  it gives you kind of a road map to figure out, well, where have we gone wrong?
• 11:02
  Have we built a product that nobody wants?
• 11:04
  Have we built a product that a small audience of people wants?
• 11:07
  Have we built a product that people want but won't pay for?
• 11:10
  And I think before, it was just like startups would talk about when we launch a product and
• 11:14
  nobody likes it.
• 11:14
  And everything started from first principles.
• 11:17
  And I think it's good to have a common language.
• 11:19
  Now, you know, startups will ask me.
• 11:21
  We think we found product market fit, we can argue about whether they found it because we're
• 11:25
  both talking about kind of the same concept.
• 11:27
  And I do think before we had this vocabulary, there were a lot of startups I met that were,
• 11:31
  like, wasting time because they didn't have a roadmap or a plan.
• 11:34
  And so I think the contribution of these things is not that I never thought that, like, oh,
• 11:38
  product market fit would help you make startups better on average.
• 11:41
  It would help you highlight when you were on the wrong track, which is unfortunately the
• 11:44
  case with many startups.
• 11:45
  The thing I think is totally right, and this is, I think, the hardest thing to tell founders
• 11:49
  is, oh, I wanna know what such and such company did because we're gonna copy it.
• 11:53
  And I'm just like, well, these frameworks or these growth hacking, these things are useful
• 11:57
  because they're novel, and they work because people didn't expect them to work.
• 12:00
  Like the Brex email pretending to be from the CEO where they'd forward him, like, give this
• 12:04
  person a like, that works because people never seen that before.
• 12:07
  The first time a vendor sent you donuts or some cool swag, that was impressive because, like,
• 12:12
  you'd never seen it before.
• 12:14
  Startups doing billboards that were laughed at in the beginning and they started to work.
• 12:17
  People hadn't so I'm just sort of like the real answer I tell you was like, look.
• 12:20
  Can introduce you to this company.
• 12:21
  They could tell you what they did that worked.
• 12:23
  It probably won't work as well for you as it did for them.
• 12:26
  The trick for you is to find out your own novel unique strategy.
• 12:30
  And I think the challenge, and I think Jerry kinda hints at this, is some of these
• 12:33
  frameworks have run the risk of being reductive, and people think, if I just follow
• 12:37
  these rules, I will be successful.
• 12:38
  That is not true.
• 12:39
  Those frameworks to me are a guidepost for a set of questions you should ask yourself as
• 12:44
  you're going to make sure you're headed in the right direction, which is very different than,
• 12:47
  like I think there were people who were like, oh, well, lean startups should keep you from
• 12:51
  building a dumb startup.
• 12:52
  And I'm always like, well, no one I know has ever built something with the intention for no
• 12:55
  one to use it.
• 12:55
  And and each framework or belief system lives in its own camp too, and they can sometimes
• 13:00
  conflict with one another.
• 13:01
  And so, like, folks who come from IDO really build intentionally and really empathize with
• 13:06
  what your customer is thinking at the end of the day.
• 13:07
  And I think founders within our own portfolio who have come from IDO do build in that
• 13:11
  direction.
• 13:12
  I think folks who come out of YC, to your point, build and iterate quickly, and then so
• 13:15
  it's trying to strike the balance of also what noise you wanna absorb and bring into your own
• 13:21
  startup.
• 13:21
  What's the negative impact from too many frameworks being shared?
• 13:25
  I think the startup advisory complex has gotten out of control.
• 13:29
  And there's a lot of people who are pushing narratives and frameworks not because they work
• 13:33
  or they're helpful, but because that's their personal brand.
• 13:36
  And I think part of what I tell a lot of founders that we work with is most of this
• 13:39
  stuff doesn't apply to you, and it's simply noise.
• 13:41
  And so you have two choices.
• 13:42
  If you have a good filter, you can actually take this stuff in, listen to it, and extract
• 13:47
  the parts that are relevant to you.
• 13:48
  But if you don't have a good filter, in some cases, the safest thing to do is actually to
• 13:51
  ignore this stuff and to not engage.
• 13:54
  I was talking to a founder.
• 13:55
  They're like, I read this article on agency.
• 13:57
  We gotta find all these people who have agency.
• 13:58
  I'm like, what does that mean to you?
• 13:59
  And they're like, what do you mean?
• 14:00
  I'm like, well, you read an article.
• 14:01
  What did you take away from it?
• 14:02
  And how are you gonna apply it to your startup?
• 14:05
  Nine nine six.
• 14:05
  There's a bunch of things.
• 14:06
  I'm just like, these are ideas.
• 14:08
  If you're gonna adopt them, you should understand what the beliefs are that underlie
• 14:11
  this whether they apply to your company at all.
• 14:13
  And I get it.
• 14:14
  There's a lot of it's it's funny.
• 14:15
  It's never, I feel like, been harder to give in founders to, like, follow their instincts and
• 14:20
  their gut and what they think makes them special because there's so much advice out
• 14:23
  there that sounds so prescriptive.
• 14:25
  Yeah.
• 14:25
  Do this.
• 14:26
  Don't do this.
• 14:27
  This always works.
• 14:27
  This never works.
• 14:28
  And I'm like, that's not been my experience with startups.
• 14:30
  Yeah.
• 14:31
  And sometimes that advice is coming directly from your own investors.
• 14:33
  So I don't blame you as founder if you feel like you're getting whiplashed.
• 14:36
  This is a funny question that I just thought of.
• 14:38
  I guess I know that you helped lecture a course over at Stanford and both of us have gone to
• 14:42
  business school.
• 14:42
  Should you be cautious of courses that you enroll in that say startup framework, startups
• 14:47
  one zero one?
• 14:48
  What can you actually extract from those classes, do you think?
• 14:51
  I know your class runs more guest speaker esque.
• 14:53
  But I think the utility of frameworks in start ups is the same as the utility of frameworks in
• 14:59
  strategy class, in HR, in people man.
• 15:02
  Like, it should give you a way to think about how to solve the problem.
• 15:06
  Probably not gonna give you the answer.
• 15:08
  And I think that's the thing that's alluring is a lot of these frameworks purport to give you
• 15:11
  the answer.
• 15:12
  I'm like, what they're really giving you is a road map to get to the answer.
• 15:15
  You have to still walk the path and make all the decisions.
• 15:17
  And the ecosystem has evolved.
• 15:19
  So the game has changed, and I think it's always nice to kind of explore what new
• 15:25
  frameworks or the stories that have worked for other companies, but to rinse repeat for yours
• 15:29
  just without experiencing it yourself, I think, is danger zone.
• 15:33
  The flip side though, I will say is if you operate without any frameworks, you have to do
• 15:38
  everything from scratch.
• 15:39
  And I will say in defense of MBAs, I think in most cases when MBAs that I work with are
• 15:44
  presented with a problem, the immediate thought is, is there a framework I've seen that could
• 15:47
  help me reason my way through problem?
• 15:50
  Not answer it, but help me reason my way through and structure, like, what we're
• 15:53
  actually trying to and I think that is a very useful thing in startups because you can't
• 15:57
  solve every problem from scratch.
• 15:59
  Well, our last piece is from the Wall Street Journal reporting that OpenAI is undergoing a
• 16:04
  significant strategy shift, pulling back from its do everything all at once approach and
• 16:08
  refocusing the company squarely around coding and enterprise users.
• 16:13
  OpenAI's CEO of applications told staff in an all hand meeting that top leaders, including
• 16:18
  Altman, were actively identifying what to deprioritize, warning the company that it
• 16:23
  cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests.
• 16:27
  The pressure is coming largely from Anthropic, which has quietly built a dominant position in
• 16:31
  the enterprise encoding market.
• 16:32
  While OpenAI was spreading its bets across video generation, hardware, a web browser, and
• 16:37
  social features, products like Sora launched to fanfare but saw usage flatline.
• 16:42
  And internal employees described a period of real organizational confusion around strategic
• 16:47
  direction and computing resource allocation.
• 16:49
  It is a fascinating moment to watch in real time, a company that has defined the AI era.
• 16:54
  Being forced to confront whether being first and being everywhere are actually the same
• 16:59
  thing.
• 16:59
  Charles, I know you mentioned Yeah.
• 17:01
  Internally that this reminded you of Google's more wood behind fewer arrows moment back in
• 17:06
  2011 when they shut down a wave of products under similar competitive pressure.
• 17:10
  Do you think that's the right analogy here?
• 17:11
  And when you see a company make this kind of public pivot, is it a sign of maturity and
• 17:16
  discipline?
• 17:16
  Or does it raise questions about what got them here in the first place?
• 17:19
  I think almost every company that's really successful like this go Facebook went through
• 17:23
  this cycle too.
• 17:24
  You go through a phase where people are like, whatever they release is gonna be amazing.
• 17:28
  They're a total juggernaut.
• 17:29
  They're unstoppable.
• 17:30
  Which if you bind that narrative as the company, you think, we can do anything.
• 17:33
  We can dig.
• 17:34
  We can do anything.
• 17:34
  We're gonna continue to launch stuff because we can do anything we can't miss.
• 17:37
  And it does remind me of that.
• 17:39
  I mean, I worked at Google in part of that era, and people would do things like, oh, we're
• 17:43
  Google.
• 17:43
  We can do this.
• 17:44
  I'm like, are you sure?
• 17:45
  They're like, yeah.
• 17:46
  Why not?
• 17:46
  We haven't we haven't failed that much yet.
• 17:48
  Let's go.
• 17:48
  And then you have a few things that don't work, and you start to realize, like, well, we're
• 17:51
  mortal too.
• 17:52
  And then the bigger question becomes, what could we have advanced that was and I remember,
• 17:55
  like, this for me was a big life up at Google.
• 17:57
  Once people realize the opportunity cost of putting people on ads, they're like, if we just
• 18:02
  took that engineer who's working on that weird little labs project and put them on ads
• 18:06
  quality, and they made a one bips improvement in ad fill rate, that's tons and tons and tons
• 18:11
  of money.
• 18:12
  Or if we put this person on the YouTube search algorithm and it gets 1% better, there were
• 18:16
  just all of these things at scale where you're like, these little things don't matter.
• 18:19
  I think it's interesting that this is just, think, you know, you think about Google.
• 18:22
  Google operated with 20% time and all of this little tinkering for almost a decade before
• 18:27
  More Wood Behind Fewer Arrows came out.
• 18:29
  For OpenAI, it was, like, four years.
• 18:31
  And to be fair to OpenAI, at the time when they were doing all of this stuff, it felt like they
• 18:35
  were so far ahead.
• 18:36
  Anthropic, we weren't talking about them in this way eighteen months ago.
• 18:39
  We weren't talking about Gemini in this way.
• 18:41
  We weren't talking about DeepSeek and Kimi and these open source models in the same way.
• 18:45
  It really did feel like they're so far ahead.
• 18:48
  Why not?
• 18:48
  Why not try all of this stuff because there was nobody in the rearview.
• 18:53
  And now that that market that their core market they're in has become much more competitive, I
• 18:57
  think it makes a lot of sense to say, hey.
• 18:59
  These things are while they're interesting, they're not core.
• 19:01
  I'll be very curious to see what happens with the hardware stuff.
• 19:04
  I know.
• 19:05
  I mean, when that news release came out with Johnny Ive, I was like, whatever they create is
• 19:08
  gonna be in every single household in the next ten months.
• 19:11
  And now I'm like, where is that?
• 19:12
  That was such a great little video they released when they were walking down literally
• 19:15
  our streets outside And our now I'm like, where is the product?
• 19:19
  There's a lot of activity there.
• 19:20
  There are couple doors down from us.
• 19:21
  I see them, like, working hard.
• 19:22
  I think at some point, for me, the big question is, you know, OpenAI has an unbelievable global
• 19:28
  consumer footprint and brand with ChatGPT.
• 19:30
  And the question is, what's the best use of resources?
• 19:33
  Is it to lean into that and be the, basically, front door to AI for consumers?
• 19:39
  Or is it to try to be the front door for consumers and for businesses?
• 19:42
  And I think the business use case is so big, it's hard to, like, seed that to OpenAI and
• 19:47
  Gemini and just say we're not gonna compete there.
• 19:50
  But I think these are some will write a really good Harvard Business School case study on what
• 19:54
  happens at OpenAI in the next two years around this strategic decision making framework.
• 19:58
  And I'll be very curious to see what they decide is worth spending time on.
• 20:01
  And again, to what you said earlier, kind of inflection point of deciding when to focus
• 20:05
  versus kind of tackling surface area, it happens at every single company.
• 20:09
  It just the magnitude of capital that OpenAI has and the time that they've been able to kind
• 20:14
  of exist in more of the work on everything concept is way longer than the average startup
• 20:20
  that has started at the same time with far less capital.
• 20:22
  So fact that they're doing this isn't surprising nor should I think is a ding on
• 20:26
  them.
• 20:26
  It more is a call of, like, this is still anyone's game.
• 20:29
  Everyone should be innovating in the direction that they think they can win.
• 20:32
  And startup news operates in narrative cycles.
• 20:35
  And for a while, OpenAI was the narrative winner, and Anthropic was the narrative, also
• 20:41
  ran cute second company.
• 20:43
  And, you know, tech news loves the narrative shift.
• 20:45
  Then there's a big narrative shift, and now Anthropic's top.
• 20:48
  Claude Code and all these things that are shipping.
• 20:50
  There's nothing to me that means that the narrative can't shift back.
• 20:53
  And in the year, people will will say, like, you know, we'll see a picture of Sam Altman in
• 20:57
  a suit, the return of the focused version of OpenAI.
• 21:00
  How a year of focus helped them get their mojo back, and now they're back in it again better
• 21:05
  than ever.
• 21:05
  And these things move in narrative cycles, and there will be another narrative cycle for
• 21:09
  OpenAI.
• 21:09
  We are all out of time today.
• 21:11
  Thank you, Charles, for popping in.
• 21:12
  Thank you to our listeners and subscribers.
• 21:14
  Please like and share with friends, and we will talk with you all next week.
• 21:18
  Thank you.
• 21:19
  Bye.