Latest / The Learning Corner by Precursor / Episode #79: Networking Is Mostly Cope, AI Is Changing What Skills Matter, CEO AI Psychosis

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Episode #79: Networking Is Mostly Cope, AI Is Changing What Skills Matter, CEO AI Psychosis · The Learning Corner by Precursor

• 0:00
  Well, that's why I think all these conversations about taste and judgment have
• 0:02
  come back.
• 0:03
  Because in a world where you can build anything, I agree with the core premise,
• 0:06
  deciding what to build and what to work on is really, really, really important.
• 0:10
  And ironically, I think in a world where building is cheap, planning is actually far
• 0:14
  more valuable.
• 0:15
  Everyone's like, oh, it's so cheap to build.
• 0:17
  I'm like, yeah.
• 0:17
  But once you build something, fixing it doesn't feel cheap.
• 0:21
  It's the week of May 11.
• 0:23
  Welcome to the Learning Corner, a Precursor Ventures podcast.
• 0:28
  Welcome to the learning corner by Precursor.
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  I'm Mia Farnam, and I'm joined by RGP and managing partner Charles Hudson where we will
• 0:34
  be talking through the articles and Goodreads that caught our team's attention over the past
• 0:38
  week.
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  Our first piece is a post on x from the account signal that has been circulating across
• 0:44
  platform, and it's a direct take on networking culture, specifically for startups and venture.
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  The argument is that traditional networking, the conference circuit, the warm intro economy,
• 0:54
  the grab coffee culture is mostly negative selection.
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  The logic is that the people actually worth knowing are too busy doing the work to be
• 1:03
  farmable, and the people who are consistently available to be networked with are often
• 1:07
  available precisely because they don't have that much else going on.
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  The Post makes the case for a completely different orientation.
• 1:12
  Do the work.
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  Publish it loudly enough that the right people find you rather than chasing them.
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  One way broadcast over two way schmoozing and specifically calls out X as one of the most
• 1:22
  important platforms right now to be doing this.
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  This one is super interesting because venture is one of those industries most historically
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  synonymous with networking as a core function of the job.
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  You've got warm intros.
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  You have LP conversations, founder referrals.
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  Obviously, this is different when you're a founder.
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  But how much of this did you resonate with Charles and agree with?
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  And then is there a balance that you can actually strike here?
• 1:43
  Yeah.
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  I definitely have talked to some of our portfolio company founders.
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  I mean, I think the once upon a time, there was this mind virus going through YC, which was
• 1:50
  like, you should never do anything other than work on your startup.
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  You should never go to an event.
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  You should never I'm paraphrasing.
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  How it was described to me.
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  This idea that anything that was like not working on your startup was a waste of your
• 2:00
  time.
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  And I do think that if you're a new founder, it can be really attractive because you get
• 2:05
  invited to all these events.
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  And there's so many things you could go to.
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  They all feel productive.
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  You're like, oh, I'm gonna go.
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  But I always ask people, what what's your goal in going to this event?
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  Are you trying to meet a customer?
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  Are you trying to build a relationship?
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  And, I read the article, and I was like, well, this doesn't seem like an argument against
• 2:21
  networking.
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  It seems to be an argument that networking on x is more effective than networking in the real
• 2:26
  world.
• 2:26
  Mhmm.
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  And I think it depends on who your audience is.
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  If your audience is x pilled VCs, there's probably no better use of your time than
• 2:33
  posting and sharing and engaging on x because that's where your audience is.
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  If you're trying to become an enterprise software thought leader, I might argue your
• 2:41
  time is maybe better spent on LinkedIn because your audience is there.
• 2:45
  Mhmm.
• 2:45
  And so I think when it comes to networking, the the useful part of this article is some events
• 2:49
  are just low value.
• 2:51
  And it's worth questioning, like, why are you attending?
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  And it's also the reason I try to keep the programming that we do for our portfolio light.
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  At least at the founder and CEO level, we don't do a lot of events because I think people are
• 3:02
  busy.
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  And I think the best portfolio company CEOs I work with, they're always evaluating time
• 3:07
  requests.
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  Is this time that I could spend at this event?
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  The irony is everyone's like, you should go to no events in network, you should spend a ton of
• 3:13
  time with your customers.
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  Where do where do the come from?
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  Where do they hang out?
• 3:16
  Where do they hang out?
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  Where where where do they come from?
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  Is it possible that spending time in person with your customers might actually yield more
• 3:22
  customers?
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  Of course, it is.
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  Yeah.
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  Is it also possible that going to some fourth tier networking event in your city is a
• 3:28
  complete and total waste of time?
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  Yes.
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  But I do think what this post highlights is there are certain platforms that are far more
• 3:34
  important to certain people than others.
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  So I do think x is a platform that is very important for a lot of VCs and a lot of
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  founders.
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  And I think about someone like Nicole Wischoff.
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  He would argue that she basically x slash tweeted her way into the venture business, and
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  she's got two funds under management, and she's got a big following on x.
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  And I think it's cool that there are platforms where people can start from scratch and build
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  followings.
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  And I think I know other people who are really good at going to the four or five events in
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  their industry that really matter and crushing those events and building tons of
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  relationships.
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  And so I think networking done right is one of these things where you never know when you're
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  gonna be in the room with somebody that you really need to meet.
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  Like, I met one of our most important LP relationships walking out of an event that had
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  been pretty good, but not amazing.
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  Highest ROI thing I've ever done for the firm on the LP side, but not something that I
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  thought would be that.
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  So I think nobody would go to low value networking events if they knew they were low
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  value, but sometimes you can't know.
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  Would you make any specific recommendation if founders know that they have, like, a fundraise
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  in their near future?
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  What would you say to those folks if they're like, should I start going to more events?
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  Should I not go to more events to create a stealthy FOMO?
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  What is the formula there?
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  I think it's interesting.
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  As great as X is, there's a lot of really important information.
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  The mostly back channel, side channel stuff about startups that isn't shared on X.
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  Yeah.
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  You can only get by sitting down with somebody over coffee or on text or whatever.
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  And I think people's willingness to share that information with you is also a function of the
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  quality of your relationship.
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  And not all those relationships have to be built in person.
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  Some can be built online, but it's still work.
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  I know lots of people who think they're smart and have great content and publish it, and it
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  feels like they're yelling into the void.
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  So in the same way that being good at networking is about deciding which events to go
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  to and figuring out how you wanna show up and who you wanna talk to, it's not just randomly
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  posting on x as the strategy that most successful people I see do either.
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  They're thoughtful, and they're making a time investment in what they post and how they post
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  too.
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  The platforms have become so noisy just because you can put together even, like, good content
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  doesn't mean it's gonna be the substitute if what you're building doesn't work.
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  So being hopeful that content will bring you these followers when you have maybe nothing
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  going on in the background, I think is a hard argument.
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  But I think your advice on what is your desired result, and what does a successful outcome look
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  like?
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  I think that actual deep thinking makes a lot of sense because I think people just run
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  headfirst into creating content and putting it out there without knowing, Lenny, what am I
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  doing for?
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  Our next read this week is an essay by Alberto Romero from his Substack, The Algorithmic
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  Bridge, titled You Spent Your Whole Life Getting Good at the Wrong Thing.
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  Alberto's core argument is that AI is collapsing the cost of the how for knowledge
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  workers so dramatically that the what, as in what you actually want to build, create, or
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  accomplish, is now the bottleneck.
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  He uses the image of a genie lamp to make this concrete.
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  If a genie handles the how completely, you quickly realize that wishing well is actually
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  the hard part.
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  And that most of us have never really practiced it.
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  The piece breaks down the specific skills that become load bearing in this new world.
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  It's taste, it's judgment, agency, curiosity, and decision making, and argues that these
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  traits were always important, but they were just buried under the weight of execution.
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  He closes with a real and honest observation that the reason people resist this shift isn't
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  ignorance.
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  It's that our entire sense of self worth is built around doing.
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  And when doing becomes cheap, it can feel like you've become worthless.
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  Alberto draws this distinction between the what and the how of work, and the argument is that
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  most of us have spent our entire careers sharpening the how without ever deeply
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  developing the what.
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  Wanted your reflections on this one, Charles.
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  It's so funny.
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  I was at a board meeting this week, and this CEO and VP of engineering were giving us an AI
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  engineering update, which I feel like has become standard practice at every board
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  meeting.
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  Yeah.
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  And the engineer was telling us how things that used to take four weeks now take four hours.
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  And I was like, that's great.
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  But how do you know what to build?
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  And he's like, what do you mean?
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  I go, well, you can ship anything.
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  So how do you decide what to ship?
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  And more importantly, how do you decide what not to ship?
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  And he's like, yeah.
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  This has become a problem.
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  You know, I think as much as we criticize the old development frameworks, they had one
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  benefit, which is if a customer emailed you and said, Mia, I want a purple button.
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  You wouldn't just make a purple button.
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  You'd say, well, why do you want the purple button?
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  Yeah.
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  What What are you trying to do with purple button?
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  What problem are you trying to solve?
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  Why can't you do it with the green button we already have?
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  Because building was expensive.
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  You did some amount of planning upfront and some amount of investigation to make sure you
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  were actually solving the problem.
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  Mhmm.
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  And I hear from so many startups, oh, everything customers want, we just put in the
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  product now.
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  And I'm like, well, that was never it was never possible before.
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  So you had to have this, like, prioritization and force ranking thing.
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  And even if it had been possible, I think most people would say, well, it's not a good idea
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  because your customers, in telling you what they want, aren't necessarily telling you what
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  they build.
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  They're telling you they're describing a problem that they want solved.
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  And he talks a lot about, like, what do, you know, what what do product managers do.
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  And I think there's a lot of translation that happened in companies, and you were able to do
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  this because you had to move slowly.
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  And now we're in a world where I think people have over optimized for, like, well, you can do
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  anything, so you should just do everything.
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  Well, that's why I think all these conversations about taste and judgment have
• 8:33
  come back.
• 8:33
  Because in a world where you can build anything, I agree with the core premise,
• 8:36
  deciding what to build and what to work on is really, really, really important.
• 8:41
  And ironically, I think in a world where building is cheap, planning is actually far
• 8:45
  more valuable.
• 8:46
  You know, I build a lot of things in cloud code.
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  Everyone's like, oh, it's so cheap to build.
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  I'm like, yeah.
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  But once you build something, fixing it doesn't feel cheap.
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  Turns out like we're all becoming software developers.
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  And I think this has been my theme of the last quarter.
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  Every if everyone's becoming a software developer, we have to all learn many of the
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  best practices that other people learned about planning and code review and being thoughtful
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  and giving yourself time to think about the full range of what you wanna build as opposed
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  to just taking a vague prompt and slamming it into cloud code and getting started.
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  And I just think it's highly ironic to me that we're all learning what my friends at
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  BuildBuilding Software have known for decades, but we're learning it under a very compressed
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  time frame.
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  A couple years ago, definitely within health care, one question I would always ask folks
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  when they were in the initial pilot conversations with customers that seemed like
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  they were gonna be high value, I would always ask them, you know, how can you prevent from
• 9:36
  becoming dev shop?
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  And I actually really like that conversation because it showcased how thoughtful the team
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  was on where they want to prioritize time.
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  I still ask this question too.
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  When you're working with your initial customers, how do you decide what things
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  they're requesting are actually worth dedicating resources and time towards?
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  I think where we are today, to your exact point, that conversation you could remove
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  altogether if you're a founder who says, I can become a low cost dev shop.
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  My customers are happy.
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  So, like, what's the problem I with mean, our next piece that we're gonna talk about, there
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  are all these negative consequences of just bloat If you've just decided to optimize for
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  saying yes to everything and make a purple button just for the sake of doing so and making
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  someone happy, I don't necessarily think long term that results in being very thoughtful of
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  who you're trying to build for and what your pain point is, you just become an agency
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  business essentially and, like, outsourcing all of your capabilities.
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  I do believe in this concept of the taste, the agency, those things are really coming forward
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  and being held at a premium now.
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  I believe that.
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  Also, I just think there's many products that I use that are surprising and delightful because
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  the person building them had a point of view about what I'd want before I expressed it.
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  And I also worry that the other challenge is if you're just like, well, we're just gonna build
• 10:44
  what our customers want.
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  What about the unexpressed, unarticulated needs that they have that are your ideas that they
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  haven't yet expressed?
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  If all you're doing is building the stuff that they tell you to build, how do you actually
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  build something really interesting that that's a breakthrough?
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  So there's a tension there for sure.
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  My last thought there is if that's all you offer is just kind of saying yes to all their
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  requests.
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  I mean, somebody else just comes in and starts doing that as well, it's just a race to the
• 11:06
  bottom on pricing.
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  You don't have any specific perspectives.
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  I know that people really do value, oh, I'm hearing what you're saying.
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  Maybe what you're asking for actually could come to life in this way.
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  Is that something that's interesting to you?
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  And it's the thought partnership that actually is the longest lasting piece of that
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  relationship.
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  But it's really tempting to just say yes now because it it is possible.
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  It's just what's most important in the short term and the long term and balancing that all.
• 11:27
  Our last piece this week is from Jake Handy's Substack, HandyAI, titled Your CEO is suffering
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  from AI psychosis.
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  Jake opens by positioning himself as a genuine power user, so this isn't a skeptic writing
• 11:41
  from the outside.
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  His core argument is that a specific kind of brain run is spreading through executive suites
• 11:47
  and VC circles right now, one that looks like productivity and sounds like innovation but
• 11:51
  produces almost nothing of measurable value.
• 11:54
  He points to Gary Tan shipping 37,000 lines of code per day across five projects while running
• 12:02
  YC full time.
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  And his CTO at YC even claimed this was like god mode, code that a developer actually later
• 12:09
  audited and found riddled with bloat, empty files, and uncompressed assets.
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  He then layers in a Stanford study finding that AI models affirm users' actions 49% more than
• 12:19
  humans do even when those actions involve deception or harm, creating this loop where the
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  more your AI tells you you're doing great, the more you trust it and the less you check the
• 12:29
  actual results.
• 12:30
  The piece closes by advising people to define what done looks like before you start the
• 12:35
  agent, measure output, not activity, and audit your fleet.
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  Because if you can't account for what every agent is doing and what it produced, you have a
• 12:42
  shadow AI problem.
• 12:43
  Jake makes this distinction between the feeling of orchestration and the reality of output.
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  And the data he cites, we've talked about before, like a long time ago.
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  90% of firms reported zero measurable productivity impact from AI over the three
• 12:57
  years.
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  One thing he digs into is how the allure of spinning up large agent workflows is that it
• 13:03
  gives you this illusion that you're running your own mass organization.
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  And that can be lethal when it gives the CEO a false sense of what's truly moving forward
• 13:10
  within a company.
• 13:11
  How can you reroute as an organization if these things like token leaderboards are actually
• 13:17
  taking up space within your workspace, where you actually have to just see how it all turns
• 13:21
  out in order to reroute and change direction thereafter.
• 13:23
  I read this, I was like, I know a lot of these people.
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  I hope I'm not one of these people, but I know a lot of these people.
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  And I think part of what is happening, especially at c I don't know about Gary's got a
• 13:33
  different he's org managing a very different type of organization.
• 13:35
  But I think for a lot of CEOs, problem the has been if you're like, hey.
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  I wanna know what's happening with our 10 biggest customers in Europe.
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  You would have to, like, call your VP of marketing or go on Slack and be like, hey.
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  I want this information.
• 13:45
  Then you and your VP of marketing would have a meeting, and VP of marketing would be like,
• 13:47
  what do you wanna know about these customers?
• 13:49
  You're like, I think I wanna know net revenue retention.
• 13:51
  I wanna know who's the churn risk.
• 13:53
  You have like 10 questions.
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  And you'd give it to your VP of marketing, and then they would go talk to the director of
• 13:56
  marketing, and then tell the director of marketing, drop what you're doing.
• 13:59
  The CEO asks us to do this project.
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  And then two weeks later, you get the project back to the CEO, and you get a presentation.
• 14:04
  And you're like, well, now I have 10 more questions that I should have asked you upfront.
• 14:07
  And that cycle continues, and as a CEO, you're like, well, this stinks.
• 14:10
  It's a two week turnaround because I don't have a login to Salesforce and to our billing
• 14:15
  system.
• 14:15
  I don't have logins to all the systems.
• 14:17
  Even if I had logins, I don't know to query the systems and do this myself.
• 14:20
  And now you've cut all of that out with Cloud Code or Codex or Gemini.
• 14:24
  Oh, I've got MCP servers that I can connect to all of these things.
• 14:27
  I can express natural language prompts.
• 14:29
  I can get to the thing I wanted.
• 14:31
  You know, also just like every time I tell the VP of marketing, they understood 90% of what I
• 14:35
  told them.
• 14:35
  And the director of marketing understood 90% of what the VP of marketing told them.
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  And the poor marketing manager who's pulling the data understood 90% of what they were told.
• 14:43
  So now a third of what I intended has probably been lost in translation.
• 14:47
  And I think as a CEO, it's frustrating.
• 14:48
  I waited for two weeks, and the thing I got back was not what I wanted.
• 14:52
  If only I could just go to the data myself and touch it, I could answer my own questions all
• 14:57
  the time.
• 14:57
  I see a lot of CEOs who have a deep desire for that, not because they don't trust the people
• 15:02
  that they work with.
• 15:03
  It's that that human iteration cycle because the VP of marketing doesn't wanna put something
• 15:06
  in front of the CEO that isn't perfect.
• 15:08
  Claude doesn't care.
• 15:09
  Claude will give you an answer.
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  The answer might be wrong.
• 15:11
  But you will get an answer in
• 15:13
  check marks, everything.
• 15:14
  You will get an answer in forty five seconds or a minute or two minutes.
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  How do you compete?
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  As a CEO, that's, like, way too tempting to be like, I can get an answer in two hours that's
• 15:22
  statistically probably right.
• 15:23
  Or I could wait for two weeks and get something that's maybe no better or maybe actually worse.
• 15:28
  And I think it's created this desire to solve all of these time to value problems that you
• 15:33
  have as a and the higher you up in the in the company, the more communication letters there
• 15:37
  are between what you ask for and what you get, the longer it takes for it to come back up the
• 15:41
  chain, which is why I think you see so many CEOs who are AI built.
• 15:43
  I think the challenge is with agents, you can just build them.
• 15:47
  And, you know, CEOs spend a lot time talking to other CEOs.
• 15:50
  I can tell you, me and no CEO or VC I know wants to go into a meeting and be like, oh, I'm
• 15:54
  not running any agents.
• 15:55
  People would like, well, but what are you even doing?
• 15:56
  You're not running any agents?
• 15:57
  None?
• 15:58
  Zero?
• 15:58
  So everyone's gotta you gotta have an agent.
• 16:00
  I've made an old man analogy to one of my friends.
• 16:02
  I was like, I remember when people first got BlackBerrys.
• 16:04
  You don't have a BlackBerry?
• 16:05
  Are you like not important?
• 16:06
  Does your company not think you're important?
• 16:09
  And it was really like, oh, I don't want email on my hip all the time.
• 16:12
  Well, if you're an important person, you have BlackBerry.
• 16:14
  That's just like the way it works.
• 16:15
  And I think AI agents have become the same way.
• 16:17
  And so I've actually decommissioned a few agents because they don't serve me anymore.
• 16:20
  I've like found better ways to solve those problems.
• 16:22
  I also now write pretty detailed specs about what problem I'm actually trying to solve with
• 16:27
  the agent.
• 16:28
  How I'll know that I'm solving it.
• 16:29
  How much time I actually think I'm gonna save by doing this.
• 16:32
  What my objective is.
• 16:32
  And sometimes I write the spec and I'm like, this isn't really a good use of my time.
• 16:36
  This isn't actually not that not this actually isn't that big of a problem.
• 16:38
  Yes.
• 16:39
  I could make it agentic, but why?
• 16:40
  Do you think that becoming almost in this cyberpsychosis, which is what Gary coined it as
• 16:46
  being so lost in the sauce on all the value you extract from agents and spending time
• 16:51
  dedicating to build there, is the natural progression to getting smart on them so that at
• 16:55
  the end of it, you can decide what the value is that you specifically can extract from it?
• 16:59
  Or is there another way that you can get smart on this without becoming so lost in, I don't
• 17:06
  know, ecosystem that's like saying this is the best use of your time.
• 17:09
  And if you're not doing this, then what are you doing?
• 17:11
  I think there's two different things.
• 17:12
  One I've told one of my friends is getting to agents.
• 17:14
  I'm like, be careful.
• 17:15
  This is productive doom scrolling.
• 17:16
  It will make you feel like you're doing something, but you might be avoiding some other
• 17:20
  work you should really be working.
• 17:21
  I'm guilty of that sometimes.
• 17:22
  I'm I'm speaking of personal experience.
• 17:24
  But the other thing is, I think this feels to me like this is more of a tech thing than a
• 17:28
  general CEO thing.
• 17:29
  When I talk to my friends in tech, I think AI is impacting their engineering organizations
• 17:33
  and their businesses in such a profound way.
• 17:36
  It feels almost irresponsible to not have firsthand experience Yeah.
• 17:40
  With this stuff so that you understand the power of it so that you can when people are
• 17:43
  resistant, you can push them harder.
• 17:45
  I have some friends who are in much bigger Fortune 500 companies where that agent
• 17:48
  development is not being done by executives.
• 17:51
  It's being done by centralized teams.
• 17:53
  And they're observing it, but they're not the ones up at two in the morning doing pull
• 17:57
  requests and get up.
• 17:58
  Like, they're not doing that.
• 17:59
  I think they're, like, hands on Gary Tan thing is very much a CEO a tech CEO and VC thing,
• 18:05
  predomin not a tool, but predominantly.
• 18:07
  Talked to a friend who works at a larger fund.
• 18:09
  They have a whole IR system set up.
• 18:11
  They're in the middle of a fundraise, and they were sending out a DD request back to an
• 18:15
  investor.
• 18:16
  And last stop after, like, everyone had reviewed it, somebody on the actual investment
• 18:20
  team was like, I take a look at the DD form?
• 18:22
  Takes a look at it, completely made up numbers throughout, and was like, where are you getting
• 18:26
  these numbers?
• 18:27
  But we talked to everyone.
• 18:28
  It seemed like everyone was vetted off.
• 18:29
  Email chains floated back and forth, and it was very clear that somebody had just put in
• 18:34
  specific reporting metrics into Claude and then put in the DD request and then was like, match
• 18:38
  it.
• 18:38
  Make it work.
• 18:39
  And they caught it before it went out.
• 18:40
  But it said check, check, check.
• 18:41
  Everything's done.
• 18:42
  Everything's filled.
• 18:43
  That's an example of, I would say, no one's owning how deep you actually need to get in
• 18:47
  terms of architecting what an agent looks like.
• 18:49
  We're staying at the service level.
• 18:51
  And that actually, I think, happens a lot at larger organizations.
• 18:54
  And I think actually that's where a lot of the mistakes are gonna be occurring when nobody's
• 18:58
  taking ownership over what that task look like.
• 19:00
  Also, in relatively flat organizations, it's easy.
• 19:03
  Yeah.
• 19:03
  Preversure, if somebody gives me a work product, can look at it and be like, that's
• 19:06
  right or that's Yeah.
• 19:07
  Just intuitively, I can look at it be like, that's not right.
• 19:09
  I'm one level removed from the data.
• 19:11
  My fear is that there are some big companies where if you're the CEO of some I'm making this
• 19:15
  up an airline company, and something lands on your desk and your team's like, we all vetted
• 19:19
  this is accurate.
• 19:20
  You're like, it should be.
• 19:21
  There's a lot of money that was spent before this got to me.
• 19:24
  Even in the old days, you know, people hand reviewed things to make sure there weren't
• 19:28
  mistakes, whether it was a presentation going to a client or a spreadsheet that was going to
• 19:31
  your boss.
• 19:32
  And now I think people talk about all the laziness of thinking.
• 19:34
  I don't worry about that as much.
• 19:35
  I worry about the laziness of review.
• 19:36
  Because I get work products sometimes, not from anybody on our team, where I'm just like, even
• 19:40
  a cursory scan of this would have, like, given you cause for alarm.
• 19:43
  Would have caused you to think, is this is this correct?
• 19:46
  And it takes time, and it, like, undermines the AI makes everything cheap and fast if you still
• 19:49
  have to do human review in the
• 19:51
  end.
• 19:51
  Well, we are all out of time today.
• 19:52
  Thank you, Charles, for jumping in.
• 19:53
  Thank you to our listeners for hopping in as well.
• 19:55
  Please like and subscribe, and we'll talk with you all next week.
• 19:58
  Thank you.
• 19:58
  Bye.