“Every generation of technology seems to exacerbate the skew of outcomes of every young generation. One way to say it is it seems like the median gets slightly worse, but the extremes get immensely powerful.”

We take a very bimodal view of how we invest in some of this. In some areas, you go with super deep domain experts that understand the workflows, the politics, the incentives, the data sets, et cetera. And they have the credibility to get the partners they need to design and build systems to attack problems in particular verticals. But we're also very extensive investors in what Shield described as these young. This is their first job. And they're just sort of hacker type personas that have no idea how an industry works. Because we also believe when you have these tectonic shifts and nobody knows where it's going, you need heat-seeking missiles that are just insatiably curious, move super quickly and iterate. And it's somewhat Darwinian in that a lot of these things don't work. But when they do work, they reinvent industries to an even greater degree than anyone from the industry might do. So like someone from telecom wasn't going to invent Snapchat or someone from the hotel industry wasn't going to invent Airbnb, right? So you look at it from a completely new paradigm in a blank sheet of paper. You have some of the most revolutionary advancements because you're not burdened by sort of the prior logic and maybe constraints that the industry had faced historically. So I think it's a really interesting time for sort of young founders because you can also do so much with so little money, much like what cloud computing did for people to sort of not need all the sort of capex in order to get off the ground. I mean, what you can do to spin up and iterate quickly with these AI tools is pretty incredible on luck.

I think how AI-pill the founders are has an impact on how we think about them because they're going to take the bets that they feel will be the right bets for the company in the coming years. They're making an informed approach about what the underlying capability of the large frontier models will be. And then they're basing the bet on the company on that. So being AI-pilled is probably, I guess, very, very important axis now. Age-wise, I've seen all various ages. Yes, they're the younger founders, but also folks who are like, you know, clearly in their 30s and 40s and 50s. But because they are able to take the ambitious bets and they think about, you know, like we are investing in a chip design company that is going to release a chip with like 20 folks because they have so many more agents that can do a lot of design and exploration and all of the hard work of generating the RTL and also all the way to physical design. I think it's just a new world now. And so I think we all have to reassess what the high quality founder looks like, but we're all learning. There is no pre-made template like, okay, thou shalt look like this or thou shall be at this age. I think we all have to just fundamentally question our known beliefs here.

I'm a bear. Look, I think these personal agents, I think this is actually going to be an unlock period for personal agents and it's going to be super exciting in the next few years. I think a lot of what I've seen with other people and certainly applies to myself is there's only so many points of entry into my private data that I want. And, you know, my Gmail has, you know, social security numbers, taxes, like all sorts of things that, you know, it just gets very dangerous at some point to have too many like things plug into that. And obviously, like Facebook has just massive distribution. I was actually looking this up with a founder friend of mine, and it's something like, you know, three and a half billion people on the platform, you know, and Google with YouTube and everything is similar, right? I think it's even greater. It's like 4 billion people. It's like half the people on the planet. And it's like something like 70, 75% of people that are connected to the internet. And so, you know, the distribution reach they have, the intimacy they already have through Gmail or Apple or, you know, I think is not, is a very, very difficult thing to get over. And so, you know, I think either a more specialized model versus a general sort of personal assistant, I just think it's very non-trivial to overcome getting people to give you access to their most intimate information that is dangerous from a cyber threat type of standpoint. And I think people are going to really want high levels of trust and security. And I think this is an area that could favor incumbents unless you're highly specialized, like travel or something like that, where you just have real advantage in a particular domain. But we'll see. So I think paying that kind of valuation, even if you have a super select product, that versus distribution and the ad networks and everything that the huge platforms have, I think that's a big uphill battle from my standpoint. So

Instinct, you don't think this will overcome distribution. That makes sense. What about Muse at large? Like, do you think Muse is a billion user product, billion DAO product? I

mean, it could be. I mean, look, I think OpenAI ran into this situation, right? If you look at what they're building relative to, like, I mean, it's Google's to lose in a lot of ways, and they seem to be foot faulting again. They seem to be on, you know, the balls of their feet for a while. And now they're, now they're, now they're, they seem to be a little off. But, you know, OpenAI, you know, needed to build monetization, right, to bring the cost down for a lot of folks. And that's going to be, you know, some sort of where the consumer is the product, right? And the payer is someone who has a commercial interest in selling something to or showing something to that consumer, right? So they had to build out an ad network. Then they're also trying to build hardware devices and sort of the whole stack that like decades of work have gone in at Apple and Google and whatnot. And so, you know, I think it's not just distribution, it's distribution and the ad ecosystem and the wallets and the, I mean, like all of the different things that you need in order to do everything to commercial transactions to advertising and the network of commercial relationships that you need in order to monetize this in order to subsidize it for the consumer to make these agents, you know, free or very low cost for them. And so I think there's lots of layers of the stack that the incumbents have. And look, startups beat incumbents all the time. But I don't think, you know, paying that kind of entry valuation to me, the risks are significant, even if the reward is significant. And it's hard to justify that risk-reward sort of trade-off in my mind.