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AW Alexandr Wang On Cheeky Pint

“It's like entrepreneurship on hard mode. It's like the opposite of Lean Startup. Like, Lean Startup is like, yeah, you like see if you get something working and then you double down and then you see if that works, then you double down. Like, you cannot do that in AI.”

Cheeky Pint · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · October 2026

“It's like entrepreneurship on hard mode. It's like the opposite of Lean Startup. Like, Lean Startup is like, yeah, you like see if you get something working and then you double down and then you see if that works, then you double down. Like, you cannot do that in AI.” — Alexandr Wang, Cheeky Pint

Asked how you build good products when a model is planned more than a year before anyone knows if it's good, Wang said frontier labs have to commit huge investments long before there are proof points. Muse Wonder was planned from the previous August.

Transcript

Cheeky Pint Around 00:00 into the episode
Speaker

…I've been here, but also, you know, as you mentioned, like, long before that, where you have to make very large investments or make very big decisions about, you know, how you're going to invest or develop the technology or, you know, what decisions you're going to make long before there's proof points around whether or not even the thing is working. And so I think this is like, in some sense, it's like entrepreneurship on hard mode. It's like the opposite of Lean Startup. Like, Lean Startup is like, yeah, you like see if you get something working and then you double down and then you see if that works, then you double down. Like, you cannot do that in AI. You have to like weave— I mean, we've been investing into these data centers since, you know, for years and years and years. We've had to— John Collison And you'll be radically behind if you wait to see if things are working. Yeah. Mark Zuckerberg So we have these conversations where it's like, At the end of last year, we're like, all right, we are quite excited about the progress. Yeah, we…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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