Crunchbase CEO Jager McConnell - predicting acquisitions, value of data, AI

Jager McConnell is the CEO of Crunchbase, a leading business intelligence platform for startup and investment data, serving over 80 million users. In this episode of World of DaaS, Jager and Auren discuss: The polarized venture funding landscapeWhy 'religion' beats 'truth' in data companiesFinding defensible moats in the AI eraPredicting acquisition targets at scale Looking for more tech, data and venture capital intel? Head to worldofdaas.com for our podcast, newsletter and events, and foll...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Auren Hoffman?

  Hello, fellow data nerds. Welcome to World of DAS. I'm your host, Orin Hoffman, CEO of Incubate and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes, get weekly data as a service news, original content, articles on data and more at worldofdaas.com. That's worldofdas, D-A-A-S, dot com. Hello, fellow data nerds. My guest today is Jager McConnell. Jager is the CEO of Crunchbase, which he's led since it spun out of AOL Verizon in 2015, and it serves over 80 million users. I'm a huge fan, as probably most people who are listening to this are. Jager, welcome to World of DAS.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Great to be here.

• 0:42Auren Hoffman?

  Really excited. Now, give us the current state of startup investing landscape right now.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Compared to the past, it's not that great, but compared to the recent past, it's doing pretty good. We're at 2019 levels of funding, but we're like more than half off of our peak in 2021. So even though there's huge rounds happening, we're nowhere close to peak venture.

• 1:05Auren Hoffman?

  Where is that getting hit the most? From seed stage, it seems like the valuations are as high as they ever were. At least that's my anecdotal. Is that hitting the Series B stage the most? Or where is it hitting the most? Or is it everywhere?

• 1:18Speaker 01

  It's kind of peanut buttered over all of them. The difference is just there are fewer deals getting done.

• 1:23Auren Hoffman?

  Got it. So the valuations of seed stages are still high. It's just it's harder to get funding.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  That's right. So those valuations are going up and up and up, especially if you look at averages. Obviously, OpenAI just totally skews the average in the wrong direction.

• 1:36Auren Hoffman?

  The average YC company is today raising money at a higher valuation than it was ever before, I presume.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  That's 100% right.

• 1:45Auren Hoffman?

  Does that just mean the reason why the valuations are still pretty high is that there's still a lot of money and they're chasing fewer deals? So therefore, there's a supply and demand curve there?

• 1:56Speaker 01

  There's a lot of deals that could be done, but I think a lot of companies are not getting across the finish line. The best deals are certainly in scarcity, and that's where people are bidding up these crazy valuations. But at the end of the day, if you have a company that certainly would have been Funded in 2021, there's no guarantee you would have been funded today. That's the people that are losing out, depending on your perspective.

• 2:16Auren Hoffman?

  My anecdotal is that there's basically three types of rounds that are getting done. There's rounds where you have zero term sheets, so they're just not getting done. There's completely non-consensus, one term sheet getting done. And then there's the one where you have eight or more term sheets. Whereas I think in 2021, a lot of times you had the two to three term sheets happening in that. I don't know if you would agree with that or not.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  We don't really track term sheets, but anecdotally, I hear the same thing where a lot of CEOs are saying, I just can't get a single term sheet at all, or they're so thankful they got that one and they're going to go with that one. Because that was the one that at least they got the funding that they think they need.

• 2:57Auren Hoffman?

  I don't know any company that gets three. It's either like zero, one or eight.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  That's exactly.

• 3:02Auren Hoffman?

  There's like no three anymore. Most of these deals are like complete consensus or complete non-consensus, but nowhere in between.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  What I suspect that speaks to is I think a VCs, generally speaking, don't have a good sense of how to tackle this shift. They've seen shifts time and time again in their markets, but this one's different. This one, how do you bet on the technology that's going to change in a week or a month or a year? And certainly when you think about where my history is, enterprise, SaaS, X, Salesforce here. How do you bet on a workflow tool? How do you bet on a thing that's going to make your workday a little bit better? When you've got this huge disruption whirlpool happening over here, sucking down any sort of competition down the road. It's a hard place to be. So I think those one term sheets are either VCs who they're just praying and praying. So they're just saying, I'm going to go and apply this to a ton of different potential deals.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Or they don't know what they're doing. I hate to say it. You find the one that hasn't quite figured this out yet. I think it's unlikely that you found the investor who saw the diamond in the rough that no one else could see. I think that particular narrative that you'll tell yourself is unlikely.

• 4:11Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's interesting. It's in the super early stage where I usually invest. It's still the same, which is a big bet on the founders. Whereas if you're betting in the series B and the company is growing crazy fast, as some of these AI companies are growing, it's very hard to model that. You know, it's not going to grow just that fast. Are these things going to turn and how sticky is the revenue? So not only those guys, they might be consensus, they might be getting eight term sheets, but the valuations of those term sheets, the highest one might be more than two or three X what the lowest one is or something.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  I see the stream of deals getting done and I'm just like, what are these people thinking? And I mean this across every aspect of every single person that is working today in tech. I just don't think we really truly grok what the difference is now. When a VC is investing in any tool, any tool, if they're not thinking that they need to exit within the next 24 months, it doesn't make any sense to me. If I was starting a CRM tool that was going to do better than Salesforce, whatever it was, that company won't exist in three years. And that may be controversial, but like the one that's starting to now, hey, we're AI first. We got to 10 million ARR with a handshake and three people that use Repli to go and build this thing.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Even if it has amazing proprietary tech, that thing is going to not exist in three to five years. Why do you say that? Because look at where we're going. If I can code a decent app myself today and it will be okay. It's not that great, but it's a prototype. And one more year, it's going to be a great enterprise class app. It's going to do everything I need to do. If I'm an internal IT person at, insert any company name here. And I say, oh, we really want the CRM system, but I need to do these 16 different things. Am I going to go and buy an external software to do it? Or will I just be the person who builds the custom solution inside? I really think we're going to shift back to internal apps that are custom bespoke for the business that you're in, doing all the weird integrations you need to do.

• 6:07Auren Hoffman?

  That is what people traditionally have done with Excel and Google Docs. And so it's always unclear. A lot of these companies are things you did in Google Docs or Excel before. And now you're tuning them out and maybe it goes back and forth, like the pendulum keeps swinging. I don't know that has to there.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  I know, I disagree. It has to because the AI is going to go and say, look, this would be so much better if you had these other features that you can go and build and I'll just build it for you. And now you have this continuously custom solution for your enterprise to go do this. Why would I go deal with anyone else's robot? Why would I worry about you changing the things that I love or getting rid of the thing or by the way, charging me some different price to go and maximize the spend that I'm doing? All of that goes away when I start using internally.

• 6:50Auren Hoffman?

  At some point, yes, if it only takes one person to build, then sure. But most of these apps, they do require more than one developer full time. And if you just have more than one developer full time, it's usually a lot less expensive to buy it.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Do you think that's true in 10 years? There's no way you have an army of developers doing this. There's just no way. You might have an AI manager managing your AI engineering team. We are necessarily going in that direction.

• 7:19Auren Hoffman?

  I am very pro AI. I love your enthusiasm about all this stuff. I hope you're right. That would be amazing because then there'd also be this massive number of things. And then at that point, the price might come down. So then instead of paying 200 grand for this enterprise thing, I'm paying 10 grand. It's still cheaper than me doing it myself and hiring a full-time developer to do it. It is possible that I'll go back the other way and there'll be all these small companies, but that are making 100 million dollars with three people or something.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  That is where it ends up. And that's happening a little bit today. You hear these little anecdotes of these small companies that have hit 100 million in a short amount of time or 10 million in a short amount of time. If I was that founder, I'd be selling to Martin. Good job. You got the bootstrap company. That business model is not going to be sustainable. Sell it. Sell the company or sell it. You're going to make 100, 200 million dollars. Congratulations. Get out.

• 8:14Auren Hoffman?

  And so you just think they're not going to be smart enough or they're not going to be able to ride the curve. There's too likely that things are going to be destruction. Say, hey, take the chips off the table.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  The AI is going to be smarter than us. That shouldn't even be controversial.

• 8:27Auren Hoffman?

  But I mean, look, you run a company. I mean, it does data, but you run a company today and it's a pretty successful company and you want to just sell it right now or something? Yeah, the AI could probably do a lot of the stuff that your company does too.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  That's 100% right. So the real question now becomes is what is the completely defensible thing? It can't be you did it first. It can't be you thought of this cool process. It has to be what is absolutely completely defensible mode. Those are the only things that may survive. And you really have to analyze, cool, you have a very defensible thing. Is that truly a necessary thing for the future?

• 9:01Auren Hoffman?

  What are the things you think are going to be so defensible to override AI and stuff like that?

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Totally biased opinion. I think proprietary data that no one else can get in any scenario is truly the only thing that's going to matter in the end. And by the way, it has to be changing data. It has to be time series data. That probably is one of the only things. That and foundational model stuff. If you were building the building blocks of the thing, I think that does persist and make money and people will pay their fair share to you.

• 9:31Auren Hoffman?

  Most data, there are substitutes or there's other types of data. So there's other things to back into it. And obviously you have companies that sell like credit card data and these are fine companies, but almost none of them have become unicorns. Maybe they will in the future. They've gone to be good businesses, but none of them have been like iconic businesses.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  And I think that does change. You need to have the equation of it is critical for the future. And I think a lot of people who have the proprietary don't fit that. Are there any of these companies? I don't know. Again, I'm a very biased person. I think Crunchbase has at least a stab in this direction.

• 10:07Auren Hoffman?

  But part of the Crunchbase benefit is you have great data, but also has amazing brand. Everyone's heard of it. Great SEO. So you can acquire customers for cheaper. Yes, I agree that the data Crunchbase is very good, but you have a lot, a lot of things going for you too. I'm sure you have some super talented people. You have a great CEO.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Questionable. The reality is those things are nice. I don't take them for granted any day. They're super powerful stuff, but I don't think it's powerful in the future. I just don't. Funding data is already on the brink of being commoditized. Sure, I think we have the best, like the early stage stuff, we get sooner than anyone else. Cool. That's true today, and that matters a little for some today. And we have built a business on some of that stuff. We have competitors, but we also have people just straight up taking our data and reselling our data out the back. And by the way, when those factual pieces of data get into an LLM, they're there permanently. That's it. All I can play, if I stayed with historical data, is focusing on the ones that haven't yet been absorbed by the LLM. That isn't

• 11:08Speaker 01

  sustainable. So we, as a business, have to say, well, what else do we have as an asset that we can go and build on top of that's going to differentiate us now and into the future? That's why I play with usage data. The one thing that no one else has, certainly in our competitors, even LLMs, they don't have 80 million people using our stuff.

• 11:24Auren Hoffman?

  What are they searching for? How are they searching? What are people doing with the data?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  How are they editing? Even just view data. Obviously, I can't say, what is Orin looking at? And hey, who wants to buy what Orin's looking at? But I can't go and say, what are investors looking at?

• 11:39Auren Hoffman?

  What do they care about? How's that changing?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  And down to the profile. How are people looking at Blue Sky, let's say, as a company? How is investor traffic shifting on the Blue Sky profile over time? And when I go and look at that and compare it to the past, and I sort of look at the 17 years of data, and I say, well, how is this working? How is that profile being edited? Has anyone edited the Blue Sky profile? Like, why would they edit it? Why are they editing it? And now I have a massive influx of investor flow. No one else has that data. What can I build with that insight? LLMs can't do it. LLMs won't be able to, like, make that up.

• 12:10Auren Hoffman?

  That could, like, completely change your business model. Right now, you charge for the deep access to the data. If you really cared about the viewing habits and what people are doing, you would, for free, you might even incent them to use it.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  100% right.

• 12:25Auren Hoffman?

  And then sell the insights in the back door.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  We were at the exec offsite just last week. We were saying like, how does our business model change with this new direction?

• 12:34Auren Hoffman?

  That's super scary because it's like, oh, we got all these like tens of millions of revenue that we may have to like give away or something.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Full transparency, that self-service business where people come in and buy a license to go and tool around in Crunchbase, that's really not going to be the focus. I still want them to have a good experience. I still want them to use the app, of course. But yeah, you're right. The behind the scenes, we're thinking, look, what other insights? What are predictions? Can we predict when a company is going to go out of business? Can we predict when a company is going to do layoffs? Can I go and take that and sell that to a creditor or to a bank? Create a risk score on all those things are dependent on this very proprietary thing that no one else has access to. And I think that's where a lot of data companies are going to get wrecked because if all you're doing is, oh, I've got this secret way of getting data that has a fact. Facts are all commodities.

• 13:20Auren Hoffman?

  Do you really believe that facts are commodities? Because in some ways, whenever I'm looking things up, it's actually very hard to know what's true. And often, things are wrong. Obviously, data is always about these four nouns: people, places, companies, and products. It's about one of those four nouns, sometimes across the other, sometimes across with time and price. And the data is just often completely bonkers. Maybe it was right at one point, but it's not right anymore. But often, it's not right at all. I bet you there's a lot of databases that have, marketing database have your stuff that say you're a woman. They're just so off sometimes. So is it just most database will just get so much better in the future too? Because part of selling data is that ideally it is true. That's one of the things you want to sell.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  As a business that focuses on private companies are by nature opaque. I mean, that's a particularly hard challenge for us. And we have a lot of mechanisms in place to try to get to the truth, but we know it can never be 100% accurate. Do I think LLMs are going to do a better job in the future? Yep, I do.

• 14:20Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. Make it easier to get truth. They can check in many different ways or they can say, this doesn't seem right.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Everyone has this problem. IMDb, as just a random example, is like, is IMDb going to be the source of truth of who did what movies? That's weird. Those are all factual historical things. So that will just be some of you ask our LLM is going to tell you the answer. You never have to go and talk to IMDb anymore. And I think that's so true across every data set you can think of, unless you're getting it in a weird way, unless you're getting in a way that can't be done by an AI. And that's where even like partnerships, at some point, people might just do partnerships with OpenAI. An AI agent working for OpenAI is going to reach out to all these places that did partnerships and say, would you rather give us the data? And they're going to say, yes.

• 15:02Auren Hoffman?

  In fact, a lot of our companies are selling data to OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, some of these other ones.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  And I don't think those companies are doing a good job at scale of making those partnerships yet. But as soon as they start using AI to figure out how to do that with their own BDAI agent, you're proprietary way because you had 4,000 partnerships. It doesn't matter anymore.

• 15:21Auren Hoffman?

  I mean, you're scaring me. Because it seems like 90% of our companies might not work now. And maybe I should just be like investing in things AI is not going to tackle anytime soon. Local massage spas or something or whatever.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  The local doom and gloom that's happening now. The reality is there is an M and A market that's going to open up because what people are going to realize is these larger companies are saying, well, how do I get this stuff into my products as quickly as possible? So I can go and monetize this and then use our huge resources to go and push deeper onto this. So I do think the M and A market on data is, I mean, it's already hot. It's going to keep getting hotter as this becomes more and more apparent.

• 16:01Auren Hoffman?

  Is the M and A market, quote unquote, hot right now?

• 16:04Speaker 01

  In data, it's certainly hotter than it was a few years ago. You see like Tegus and all this sort of stuff happening. This is a world that is figuring out the things I'm saying.

• 16:15Auren Hoffman?

  At least from what I've seen, I haven't seen it hot at all. You have much more data than I do. A lot of these data companies I'm seeing can't even trade for four or five times EBIT, let alone four or five times revenue. Chigas being an exception.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's rules that you need to have. One of them, again, is how many people are in your market? And how many buyers are there? Just for fun, us, we have a ton of people who play in the company data space. Most of them are focused on the public company side. A lot of them want to be in the private company side. If they want to get into private companies, who are they going to buy? There's only a few options available.

• 16:49Auren Hoffman?

  One of them was bought by Blackstone.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:53Auren Hoffman?

  There's not that many left.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  And when they're gone, they're gone.

• 16:55Auren Hoffman?

  But that's where I think some of these things like brand do endure. Part of the reason I want to buy Crunchbase is that brand is worth 100 million right there.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  You're welcome to, like, actually, it would be a little bit worse if I said that.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  But the reality is that brand, I think, is a temporary thing. We're going to try to not be temporary, but the gravity is going to try to pull that brand back down. We can't rest our laurels on the fact that 80 million people come to our site. Because those 80 million people might have a reason never to come to our site. That's why we need to put things on it that no one else has and give you reasons to come that no one else can give you. So back to your question, there are other data companies that maybe don't have that same dynamic. There's a lot of people in the space and it's hard to differentiate between all of them. And there's not a lot of buyers because no one really wants, I'm just making sure up, the baseball card anthology or whatever has the baseball card history of all time. Who cares? No one's going to buy that. It just depends on what you are and what marketing you're in. But if you have one of these things that there's a limited quantity is necessary for the future

• 17:54Speaker 01

  and these large public companies need it to get to their next level and to survive the AI way that's coming for them as well, it's a great time to be in market.

• 18:03Auren Hoffman?

  Interesting. We have companies that are selling and we have also companies that are trying to buy. Nothing is happening on either side. They can't sell. There's no buyers to sell. But then the buyers can't find anything to buy because most companies, they don't want to sell, at least for those prices, because they're all so profitable. AI has made all these data companies so much more profitable than they were. And I'm, maybe they have to start giving away those profits to customers soon. But at least for now, they're way more profitable than they were in 2023.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  And this is why we've pivoted to what we're doing, which is trying to predict what companies are for sale. Which companies are going to be acquired soon is a whole area that we're not pushing into. So we can predict what's going to happen next at a company.

• 18:45Auren Hoffman?

  Can you give me a list of companies to go buy?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 18:48Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, that's great. I'd buy that list.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a good list. And so that's why we've said, when people come to Crunchbase, they're already asking those sorts of questions. Which companies should I buy? Which companies are even going to be for sale? Which companies are in my price range?

• 19:02Auren Hoffman?

  If I say three to 20 million revenue, this type of thing and data with this level of complexity or something like that, you could just spit out a list of potential companies in order of ones that are most likely to be interested in me trying to buy them.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 19:21Auren Hoffman?

  That's amazing.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  You should totally do that. These are the companies that we predict.

• 19:26Auren Hoffman?

  And I guess vice versa, I want to sell.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Same thing.

• 19:29Auren Hoffman?

  Who are more likely to buy my companies, then you don't need the investment banker in the future or whatever. Here's the list of the buyers.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Banker does a little bit more than that, but that's right. Right now, we'll say which companies are most likely to get acquired with some percentage next to it. The UI will just have a little bar chart, but in the API, we'll actually go and say not only what the percentage chance is, but also what are the drivers that we are looking at that made us decide that this is company is likely to get acquired soon? That's step one. Step two, which is on our roadmap, is let's tell our users which are the most likely acquirers or which are the most likely companies you should buy or should buy. We'll then get more tailored to the user itself.

• 20:07Auren Hoffman?

  I think you say for your company, here's the companies that are most likely to buy you. And we're going to run marketing campaigns to the exact people in those companies for you. I'd pay 10 grand a month for that, just to like always be in front of those people. That sounds amazing.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  I don't personally know how an LLM can do a good job. All they can do is say, look at the historical and say, it was about time for them to get acquired, or it's been a long time since their last funding round. But with that extra data of who's looking at it, what are they doing, what's happening on the page, there's a lot that we can sort of extract. And that's where I get excited. That's for me, clearly the future of where we're going as a business and trying to find more of those predictions. There's a growth prediction. Do we think the company is going to grow? That sort of insight. Can I predict with any sort of accuracy, what we think a future valuation might be? For instance, so we're talking about like, how do we do valuation predictions? And that's where Crunchbase actually does the valuable thing that you always wanted to do. Because when you were coming to Crunchbase before, those are the questions you're asking. And we're just giving you like, one data point saying, well, here's the last funding round. And you would have to sort of

• 21:08Speaker 01

  figure that stuff out on your own. Now we're using thousands of feature vectors that go and figure it out. It's way more accurate than people expect.

• 21:15Auren Hoffman?

  I forgot to tell the audience, I am an investor in Crunchbase. So I do love the company, but I have financial incentives to love the company as well. I left San Francisco three and a half years ago, moved to DC, and I think I called the bottom perfectly. When I had left San Francisco, I thought ambitious people are going to be moving all over the country, all over the world. They're going to move to Miami, they're going to move to Austin, they're going to move to Berlin, they're going to move to Lisbon, and they're going to go start a company. And then fast forward to today, 2025, it seems like almost 100% of ambitious people I know who are 24 and they're in tech are moving to San Francisco. If they're gonna move, none of them are moving to Miami, none of them are moving to Austin, they're not moving to Berlin or Lisbon, they're moving to San Francisco. Do you agree with me?

• 22:01Speaker 01

  100%. It's also weird. It feels like a temporary thing to me. Like, this is easy to dispute and to debate. So I understand that I'm right on the fence here. It feels like people are saying, I need a certain set of skills right now, and I need to get to where those VC dollars are. And everyone moved out, so everything's a little cheaper. I think San Francisco is improving as a city.

• 22:20Auren Hoffman?

  Way improving. Amazing. I mean, it's so fun. Every time I go there, the Waymos and everything.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  It's cool. So I think there is this draw coming in. I think you're gonna get some peak San Francisco again, like prices are gonna get kind of crazy. And then, again, controversially, I think the talent market. Talent isn't the reason you're in San Francisco anymore. That becomes less important with AI's improvement.

• 22:41Auren Hoffman?

  You still might need a couple of people.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Couple of people, I agree. I think VC funding maybe becomes less important to be close to.

• 22:49Auren Hoffman?

  Or just getting VC funding is maybe not as important, period.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Bootstrap companies are the new cool thing.

• 22:55Auren Hoffman?

  I mean, almost every data company we're involved with is profitable. Maybe it wasn't at one point, but it is today.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Totally. The draws of going to San Francisco are then therefore the city itself rather than anything else. I think then you'd get back to, well, why don't I just move to Lisbon or somewhere else? I think it's a temporary cycle.

• 23:11Auren Hoffman?

  It's a fleeting thing. It's true today, but it might not be true in 2027, 2028, or something like that.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  San Francisco is always going to be a popular city to live in. I don't know if it's going to be the tech hub of all tech hubs.

• 23:24Auren Hoffman?

  If you are an ambitious 24 year old and you're in tech, you really care about tech, you are 100% going to move to San Francisco. Now, if you're 44 and you've made a gazillion dollars, you might move to Austin or Miami or something. If you're 24 and you're ambitious and you don't have a family yet and you can live in a group hacker house or whatever, it sounds super fun, you're moving to San Francisco. If you're not, you're just probably just not ambitious. Like when you meet people who are like, oh yeah, I'm moving to Miami. You're clearly not ambitious person if you're moving to Miami and you're 24.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  And then you have your first sex and you're like, hmm, the tax implications of that aren't as good as they should have been. Maybe I should reconsider.

• 24:01Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, so there are a lot of good reasons to not live in San Francisco. That'd be one of them.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Five to 10 years from now, I think it slowly starts drifting back to just a beautiful city.

• 24:10Auren Hoffman?

  I called the bottom before, but you think there's another bottom. We're in like a new hype cycle right now.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  That's right. I think we're in a hype cycle.

• 24:17Auren Hoffman?

  Interesting. Now, you posted a while ago, which I love. I've now invested like in hundreds of startups and I still have no idea what the difference between like a seed and pre-seed and series A. And you posted that we should just get rid of all those things and just use the numbers. Like you did round one, then you did a round two, then did a round three.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Oh, not even that. I'm raised $15 million. Who cares what round it was? The arbitrary. Letters that we have done. And what drives me crazy is when B C's are like, well, you know, at Series B, I expect you to have X, Y, Z, these particular things. Otherwise, I'm not investing you. It's so arbitrary. It's so silly.

• 24:53Auren Hoffman?

  Maybe based on your valuation, that kind of makes sense.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  That makes sense.

• 24:57Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, at a $100,000 valuation, you should have certain revenue metrics and certain other things.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  And this comes from a place of just, yes, Crunchbase has raised money. Our last round was a Series D in 2022. When we spun out the company independently, we called that our Series A. And the reason we did is because we started with $8 million-ish of funding, but we had no customers. We had no product to sell. By every metric of what a Series A company is, we did not have it. Yeah, we had a brand. Yeah, we had traffic. We never had the thing that most Series A companies get judged on.

• 25:33Auren Hoffman?

  $8 million is a lot of money. But yeah, now there's some people calling it a seed. I talked to a company today. They have already raised 10 million, and now they're raising another 12. And that 12 is going to be their Series A. I was like, what is the 10? You know, they did a seven and they did a three. And you're like, oh, that was a seed and a pre-seed or something like, oh, what? Okay.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Totally. If you've raised money, you should say, well, I need another $30 million. I've raised 20 million so far. Here's what we did with the $20 million and why we think the 30 million makes sense. And then investors should be like, cool, that's all I needed to know.

• 26:04Auren Hoffman?

  It's like a public company of selling stock or they're selling bonds or something. They don't have like a letter on it.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  No, we're coming from Crunchbase because we tracked this. Like, I've got a dropdown menu that has these things. I could change that. I could delete that. And then we won't have to worry about it anymore. But it's so ingrained in how we talk about these things. I just, it doesn't matter. I am bearish on the whole thing. I think we also shouldn't celebrate big funding rounds. These metrics don't matter. In fact, if anything, it's a detriment to the business. Let's not celebrate them. And certainly, let's think of smarter ways to talk about them than weird letters.

• 26:36Auren Hoffman?

  Are you managing your company? And you've seen people managing their companies differently with AI and et cetera? And how are you thinking about it?

• 26:45Speaker 01

  That's probably the biggest initiative that is happening right now at Crunchbase, especially as a not company that's starting. We are a company that can't be built from the ground up. We've been around for a while. So how do we go and transform ourselves into an AI-first company? From internally, like, how do we do the work? And I think there's a plague going on in all internal IT houses and all these companies where they say, we're AI-first, we're AI-forward because we have a ChatGPT subscription that we share around the office. And therefore, our product marketing is being edited by a thing.

• 27:16Auren Hoffman?

  Helps us learn how to debug our MySQL server.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 27:22Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, you're AI-first, totally. Yeah, I get it.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  So it's like this checkbox, we're like, oh, you know, I bought the AI extension on Marketo. So like, we've got AI. That's not what it is. And to change people's mindframes all the way down to the IC level to save themselves, my job is different now. What I was does not exist anymore. I now need to become the expert on how to go and do my job better than anyone else using AI. And it's on me to become the expert to figure out what tools I should be using. That mind shift is a very hard one.

• 27:53Auren Hoffman?

  Very few people are going to move to that mind shift. I mean, there's super talented people I've worked with forever that they're just never going to make it to that mind shift. But they're still adding some value. But today, maybe they're getting overpaid. Maybe they're getting paid X and they should be getting paid X over two because somebody who's getting paid X over two is using those tools and doing some of these other things that they're not yet doing.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  That's right. Now, there's a real problem here. As a, let's say, a product marketing expert, how would I possibly stay on top of every tool that's coming out? And I don't just get stuck to the one that's my favorite. And then I stay there when there's 16 more that came out next week. Stay on top of that flow and trying them in a way that makes sense. I don't think anyone's figured out. I saw Duolingo, so it was like, yeah, you could go and spend 10% of your time just researching AI tools to help you do your job. Maybe that's a way to do it. I don't think we've cracked it.

• 28:42Auren Hoffman?

  Not everyone's a good researcher, no one's good at that. Maybe it's another pivot for Crunchbase. Maybe you can help me get better vendors or something like that, or like a G2 or something, and help me understand what I should be buying.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  That is a very hard challenge, but I'll tell you, the ones that figure out how to do it. If I were a product marketing person that was applying to that next job, my pitch isn't going to be, I write great copy. My pitch is going to be, I know the best AI tools that makes me a 10x employee out of the gate. You want me on your team because I'm going to infuse that into your product marketing organization.

• 29:13Auren Hoffman?

  Not that I know the tools today because those tools are going to change. And I'm so good at evaluating and moving. And the best skill, the number one skill for employees in the past hundred years was the ability to hire talented people, manage them, grow them, get leverage from them. In the future, the most important skill is being able to select and manage vendors.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Adapt to whatever the new tech is and incorporate it in.

• 29:39Auren Hoffman?

  There are thousands of books on hiring. Every MBA has gazillion courses on it and managing people. Everyone talks about it all the time, even on these podcasts. There's not even one book, I don't think, that I've ever heard of on like, how do you select vendors? How do you figure out what to buy? There's no MBA courses or even CS courses on it. It literally is the most important skill. I think, I don't even think there's a second more important skill in business. Is it just trial and error or something? And only people I know who are amazing at hiring vendors, it's a super stereotype. There are all these Eastern Europeans, they run like a $200 million company. And it's like a company of one or two people. They're like incredible at stringing together all these vendors somehow.

• 30:23Auren Hoffman?

  But like, they will never teach you because they're so wealthy already. It's like their proprietary advantage. Like you can't learn from those people.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  So the question now it becomes for us, how do I up level my existing employees to become that?

• 30:36Auren Hoffman?

  Maybe you have to have fewer people somehow and spend more time or, yeah, I don't know.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  When we're hiring people now, it's easy to sort of have these questions to be part of the interview process. Sort of say like, how are you doing it? What are you doing? Is it a garbage answer?

• 30:47Auren Hoffman?

  What tools are you using? Show me the tools, et cetera. Watch them code. If you're coding today, you're not using like an AI enabled IDE. There's no way I would hire you, like zero. I would hire you today.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. I don't think it's a find and replace. The question for a CEO is how do you up level your existing workforce to get there?

• 31:08Auren Hoffman?

  How are you personally doing it? Cause I struggle with that. I'm trying to spend time on these tools. It's hard.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  What I do with my own life is I said, break up your entire day on every percentage that you've got. Every percentage of everything you do in your day, work. Personal, whatever. What are the tools that you're using, AI tools that can help you with each of those things? There's going to be blanks in there. Nothing's helping me yet how to shower.

• 31:31Auren Hoffman?

  Opportunity in my house, sometimes I have to wait like multi-minutes for my shower to get hot. Maybe there's like an AI tool I could put into my basement that would get my shower hot faster. Or just know that my alarm's coming, so I should start the shower earlier.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  So you break apart your daily that you fill in the tools that you're using and then you literally go through each one and say, I'm going to research this and try to find the better tools that I'm not using a day in this area to help me with the thing. I'm an investor in Superhuman. I use them for my email. But there's probably 19 other email tools out there that are doing other things.

• 32:03Auren Hoffman?

  My full disclosure, I'm also an investor in Superhuman.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. Sounds good. Am I doing what I need to do to stay on top of that? And that's me at a personal level. I'm making my entire executive team do that as well, at least for the percentages of their day that is work-related. And sort of going through their tools. And the nice thing is that there's a live opal app. I had a product, might have some of my head of people start sharing it. And they had them do that with their managers and go all the way down.

• 32:29Auren Hoffman?

  I asked, we need to go, we're going to share, what are you doing? How are you doing it? And you get the nugget and then you got to start trying it. And the thing of these tools is they're not that easy to use. It takes actually a lot of training. Some of these tools like Superhuman, you have to spend hours training before they even let you use it. Actually using even like ChatGPT well could take hundreds of hours of training. Well, it's not that easy to use it that well and actually get a lot out of it. And then of course you train on the tool and by then like the tool might not even be that usable anymore. Maybe a year from now, there's something so much better.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Replit is my very example of that because Replit a year ago was garbage. Today it's actually really good. So how do you stay on top of even the change within your vendor, let alone evaluate others? And I do need those AI solutions.

• 33:15Auren Hoffman?

  You have a vendor today, you look at one, just because you evaluated a vendor and either you thought it was good or it was not good or whatever. Six months later, that evaluation may not, whereas like if you evaluated a candidate for your company. Six months ago, and whatever you thought they were good, you thought they weren't good and they didn't join your company either way. Six months from now, you probably still have a similar opinion about them. People don't change as fast as vendors.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Exactly right. So it's an exciting time to be a CEO because if you can force this change in your business, you're going to see these outsized returns. But I think also as an individual employee, which I am, like all of us are, am I changing enough to stay on top of this wave into the future?

• 33:55Auren Hoffman?

  I don't think any of us are changing enough. I'm certainly not. You're inspiring me to change more.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Good. Too many people say, I use chat GPT every day. That isn't it.

• 34:05Auren Hoffman?

  That's a start. That's better than not using it. I mean, there's still probably too many people who are not using it all.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  And even just choosing models, there's all sorts of things to learn about even how to do that effectively. It feels like the old days, 97, 96, people are like, I don't need a website. It's the same moment where people are just like, I got a one-page website. It's like, no, you need to really think about your entire business as I was going to shift and put in the effort to make it happen.

• 34:30Auren Hoffman?

  I knew people in 97, 98, even 99, they're like, I don't need internet at home.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  That shift has happened and it's going to get a lot worse. If you're not the leader and the expert and the czar in your space in AI today, in a year, in two years, in five years, you are irrelevant. And you won't be able to get a job because you can't prove that you were. You need to be proving it now that you are to get that job five years from now.

• 34:55Auren Hoffman?

  You'll be forced to start a company because there are probably so many people today that make X dollars that I think within a year or two, they are not going to be able to get a job for even X over two. Whereas there's other people who make X today, a year or two from now, they might make 10X. But it's a way smaller number that are going to go from X to 10X and a way larger number is going to go from X to X over two. These office workers are just, they're going to have a harder time as this world changes.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  I've been having engineer or a prime marketer or customer success person come in and say, "Hire me because I am 20. I already figured out how to automate the job that you're hiring for. I'm going to be that and I'm going to run 20 agents that will work 24/7 and that's going to be my function is making sure those agents stay on task to get stuff done."

• 35:42Auren Hoffman?

  Fuck yeah, I want to hire that person right now.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  I'd hire that person.

• 35:45Auren Hoffman?

  Nobody pitches out. That's where you should pick, but that's incredibly difficult to do. Maybe if you could do it, like, why would you want to work for me? You should just go work yourself. They're smarter than me, clearly. Very hard to find those people, these super proactive type of things. Now, in the data world, in some ways, like the way we think about data is that there's truth. This is what happened in the past. In some ways, that's what traditional Crunchbase has been. And then there's religion, which is what will happen in the future, which is what you were just talking about. Here's the companies that will be selling. Here's the companies. There's some sort of prediction. It sounds like what you're saying is that religion will be more valuable than truth.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  It has to be. The tricky part of all that, of course, is tell me any prediction engine you've ever seen that's good.

• 36:33Auren Hoffman?

  They're terrible.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Almost all of them are terrible. That's changing. In our case, we have 95% precision. It's hard to even believe it's that good because we have all these little secrets that make it easy to figure out, but no one else has access to it. They don't think that way. The user has to start believing it. And the user has to say, "I'm going to put my business future into the hands of a company that's predicting stuff when I have a history of not believing in predictions." That's our challenge when the prediction is good enough. But I would way rather place my bets on that company that's placing the one that we're on top of the right size of funding rounds. That doesn't matter anymore. It just doesn't.

• 37:11Auren Hoffman?

  It's interesting. Historically, the religion companies have had a tough time. They've been super competitive, like real religions. If you believe a certain thing and someone else will think you're going to hell or you say you're a Bayesian, I hate Bayesians. Well, then it's off right there. And the only way that any of these religion companies have ever become big companies is if They've crossed the chasm from religion to currency. And then it's like, well, people actually don't really believe in a religion, but it's priced like a FICO. Maybe people don't even believe in the FICO score, but it's the currency. It's in every single loan. So therefore you have to trade in FICO scores. It's almost like the US dollar in a way. And so therefore the company becomes super valuable.

• 37:55Auren Hoffman?

  How do you go from religion where you could have thousands of religions to, okay, this is the canonical one that we're all going to agree with. You don't want to have thousands of competitors either.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  At the end of the day, it does come down to proof is in the pudding. The nice thing about predictions is someday they come true. So I can show it's not just a faith based thing. Then it is now this thing like, look, we have proven time and time again. In our case, how we talk about it is in April, 600 of our predictions came true. So we were able to go and say, these companies got acquired or they got funding. What was that worth? Because you missed it. What did you miss out on that? For you doing deals, if you miss out on the hot company and that company sells for $5 billion, your ROI on not buying Crunchbase is very, very clear. If we do get competitors in that space, we'll go and say, well, here's our accuracy rate in the last six months. Let's compare, let the best one win.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  And that's where we feel really good because no one else has any in the now data. Unless they're somehow getting into the process itself before it happens, which is unlikely to happen. There isn't a lot of data that does happen that can help these predictions beyond historical data, except for usage.

• 39:04Auren Hoffman?

  The best prediction algorithm would be the one that because they predicted it caused the thing to happen.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  I've already been accused of that. One of the theories is you might get more term sheets. Because once we start thinking that you're getting a funding round, we're going to raise the visibility of your company up to a broader set of investors, which will get you more P and downs, which could get you more term sheets. Maybe just having the prediction that we think you're getting acquired might help you actually get acquired, which makes our predictions come true, which is okay with us.

• 39:33Auren Hoffman?

  Totally. That's where it becomes maybe really valuable.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 39:37Auren Hoffman?

  I know many, many truth data companies who are doing what you're doing and are investing in religion or pivoting to religion. What advice would you give those companies?

• 39:47Speaker 01

  It's got to be something around what I started off this conversation with. What is the defensible mode and don't lie to yourself? Too many people call too many things a moat that are not moats. And if you don't have one, if you can't find one, you need to pivot the company into doing, finding one. That should be the only purpose. I've done it. I've said Crunchbase brand is our moat. It's like trying to start a new LinkedIn tomorrow. You can't go and be another Crunchbase. I don't know if that's true anymore. So I'm not going to rely on that moat, even though it may be true. That may be a moat for the next 50 years. I don't know. I'm not going to rely on it. And I would encourage those data truthers, go and find your religion.

• 40:26Auren Hoffman?

  And one of the weird stories about Crunchbase is it was originally part of TechCrunch, then it got bought by Verizon. Eventually it got spun out into a new company. You were kind of there as the founding CEO, Emergence came in. There are probably a lot of companies like that where that could happen. They're kind of like orphans somewhere. They've got a good brand. They've got something. The bigger company is not going to invest in it. A, because they don't want to lose money. B, because they can't necessarily like attract the talent who needs equity and other types of things to invest in it. Have you seen more of these spinoffs happen like Crunchbase? And what advice would you have for people who want to think about that?

• 41:08Speaker 01

  I haven't seen it. I've had people talk to me about it. And because I've done it before, I'm one of the people they call, but I never see it actually happen.

• 41:16Auren Hoffman?

  Doesn't happen often, yeah.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's pretty rare. This is where Emergence was great, who helped with the spin out just to drive that forward. It was a complicated process and they handled the bulk of it. If I was thinking about doing that today, ask these same questions. Are you just walking into a world that's about to change and make that great idea that you have not actually that great? If you have real conviction that that's a good idea, find a great investor who's going to help you spin it out. Had we not had Emergence, that just never would have happened, honestly. So you need to have that really credible investor who's willing to take that gamble with you. That's maybe where you should be spending all of your time is helping find the partners who are going to help make it happen.

• 41:53Auren Hoffman?

  Like so many companies, Crunchbase did raise a lot of money over the last few years, partially because they could. It was easier, as you've mentioned, 2021 to go raise money. Do you wish you raised less? Do you think some of these companies should have raised less? How do you think about it?

• 42:09Speaker 01

  The world today is different than the world yesterday. The world today, yeah, raise as little as possible. If you don't need to raise at all, don't raise. I mean, that's just good advice. Back in our day, there was few choices. There was a lot of work to be done. People think Crunchbase is just a user-generated content data thing. It used to be in 2014. When we spun out, user-generated content is like 5% of the data that comes in. It's an important 5%. But then all these data pipelines we had to build, we had to rebuild the entire thing from scratch. All these different inputs that are coming in, that takes a lot of work. And then the data science itself, in the last few years, was incredibly expensive for us to try to figure out how to do. Multiple data engineering scrum teams, a data scientist, all focusing and working on this very hard problem of predicting the future. Could I have done that without the funding?

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Maybe, but it would have taken us 10 more years to get there. And by then, who knows if we would have been totally disrupted already. So I'm glad we did what we did because we wouldn't have been so well positioned when this stuff started shifting in 2022 to be able to go and be where we are today in 2025. But I wouldn't recommend someone do it again, honestly.

• 43:09Auren Hoffman?

  There are a lot of companies right now that are good companies. They're doing 20 million in revenue, 10, 20 million revenue. They're making a decent profit, making a few million dollars in profit. But they raised a whole bunch of money. They're never going to be worth the old valuation that they had. They might be worth more than they raised. They raised 50 million, they might be worth 70 million today, but they might not be. They may raise 50 million and worth 45 today. What advice would you have for the company? What advice would you have for the investors who invest in the company? For the founders that run that company, et cetera?

• 43:43Speaker 01

  I am very doom and gloom on those. If they can't find that moat, I think the Grim Reaper is coming for them anyway. So now it's an opportunity cost question. If you can get any value out of the business, I would pursue it.

• 43:54Auren Hoffman?

  None of the investors are going to be like, especially if the company's profitable, like, well, I want my money back, so don't sell. Or I don't want 50 cents on the dollar usually, though sometimes they still do it or.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  I think that attitude starts to change too, when market starts getting disrupted here. When AI builds these tools and the story is AI just wiped out these companies because it just went and built it. I think investors are like, I'll take 50 cents.

• 44:18Auren Hoffman?

  By then, they may only be able to get 20 cents. A lot of investors I know, they've got these 10-year orphans. They're just waiting. They're not being proactive. The founders aren't being proactive. The founders aren't incented anyways. They're not going to sell because they have no incentive to sell.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Those are just zombie companies.

• 44:35Auren Hoffman?

  There's so many of those.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  There are. That's the scary thing of how our whole industry is about to change is I don't think they stay zombies because I think the customers go away. Unless, again, there's some mode that protects that industry. But most won't because a lot of those companies, those 10 to 20 million dollar companies that can't grow, they're often workflow. We help you do this job a little bit better. I think those companies are done. Maximize the value when you can.

• 44:59Auren Hoffman?

  I agree with you. I just don't think the VCs are going to do it. The VCs seem to be doing many things wrong right now in general.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  If I was a VC, I would be taking an extremely different approach to this whole market. Because you're right, people don't want to accept the truth. But I don't think the truth is going to wait for them.

• 45:17Auren Hoffman?

  A partially, they want to accept the truth because they're raising their next fund. They don't want to take the write down right now. So I'll take the write down in a year from now after I raise it and all this stuff. All right, this is great. A couple of personal questions we ask all of our guests. What is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

• 45:31Speaker 01

  I don't even know if this is a conspiracy theory anymore, honestly. I'm a big believer that covert AGI already exists.

• 45:38Auren Hoffman?

  Covert AGI?

• 45:40Speaker 01

  That's right. The military is always years ahead of us in tech. But I've got to believe that China, Russia, and the US have at least programs. Let's just agree that they're trying to figure out how to use AI to go and further their cause. They've been working this way longer than most folks know and probably have access to stuff to go and build further with deeper resources, spend a ton of money. Do I think AI is already affecting public policy? Surely it's driving propaganda and driving these bots. Do we really think there's some folks going and coding up some bots to go and make mass inputs on comments to go and drive public opinion? No, there's probably a really well-thought-out plan hiding behind some of this to go and start influencing things in a certain direction.

• 46:24Auren Hoffman?

  I love this conspiracy because I'm so skeptical of it. Just good. Anytime I've done any type of software, AI data thing inside a government, it's just so frustrating.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  It may not be ours.

• 46:36Auren Hoffman?

  You're right. I mean, it's possible somebody else is more competent that's out there.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  If I had to place my money, do I think China is doing that already? Absolutely.

• 46:44Auren Hoffman?

  I definitely think they're trying, whether they're good at it or not, I don't know. It's a good question. I agree. They're probably spending a lot of money on it, trying to do it. Why would you not?

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Lot of money to do it. And is AI already affecting public policy? Is AI already making wartime decisions or investments in tech? There's all sorts of interesting areas here.

• 47:03Auren Hoffman?

  There's been this whole trope that Renaissance Technologies developed this AI for a very long time, and they've been using it to trade and stuff like that. That makes sense to me.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  You're okay with that? Government with infinite resources can't do that?

• 47:16Auren Hoffman?

  I know the people at Renaissance and they're just extremely smart. They have motivations and there's not a lot of bureaucracy there and they all get to see each other's work and stuff. So when you get to government, there's just so much bureaucracy. It's so much like need to know. It's just hard to collaborate.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Our government, that's true.

• 47:34Auren Hoffman?

  I'm pretty confident that the Chinese government has a ton of bureaucracy as well. But you're right, there might be some tiger team somewhere in Shenzhen that's like doing a great job.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  A tiger team of like a half a million people.

• 47:47Auren Hoffman?

  You might be right. So it's a good point. Our last question we ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice? And you can't say follow your passion because like 90% of people have been saying that.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  How many people have said, don't go to school? I'm a big like, don't go to school. School is done.

• 48:04Auren Hoffman?

  School meaning primary school?

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Honestly, it's as soon as you can stop, you should. A lot of people, oh, the social, all my best friends, blah, blah, blah. But from a skills standpoint, you are learning nothing in school. And I would argue this may be the last generation where people even go to college. That may be too bold, but it's definitely going to be massively declining for the kids that are born today, whether they're going to go to school or not. What is the reason they're going to school? What are the skills they're learning and are those skills applicable in the workforce? And the answer becomes none, that there is no reason because it's not going to help me in my job.

• 48:38Auren Hoffman?

  If you're already wealthy, like your parents are already wealthy, great.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fun.

• 48:44Auren Hoffman?

  Super fun and it's great. I could see a great reason to go learn about all this stuff and meet with super smart people. And then of course, just you might meet your spouse that. There and dating is fun and parties and everything like that. And you get to drink a lot and all these other things. Go to sports games.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  College is the new Tinder.

• 49:04Auren Hoffman?

  If you think of college as a bundle, one of the biggest bundles is social interaction, dating, finding people, all this other stuff. Are you actually going to learn something in college? I don't know that people ever went there that much for learning anyway. What you're seeing is the piece of paper is going to be less valuable.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no reason. If you're doing that, go to your local community college. It doesn't make sense to go and do it.

• 49:26Auren Hoffman?

  Right now, we already have a great tutor. I'm already using the AI tools to tutor me and stuff. It's so much better. If you're willing to just spend some time with it, if you want to learn about the Peloponnesian War, you will learn so much faster using it as a tutor than you will from like some sort of course.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  That's right. What about creative thinking? AI can't do creative thinking. I'm a believer that creative thinking is on the roadmap.

• 49:49Auren Hoffman?

  Well, I think it already does as much as human.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Fair, fair. Kids are going to get pushed as like, go start your company as soon as you can. If the smartest chess players are done by 29, you gotta be doing your brilliant business idea in your late teens. AI will enable you to do that by the time that they're actually in their teens.

• 50:07Auren Hoffman?

  How do you think about it with your own family?

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Well, I have no kids. That makes it a lot easier. But if I were to have kids, I would be trying to push them into started companies and get to 10 million, sell it really fast. Sell it while you still can and live out that money.

• 50:22Auren Hoffman?

  Build a trade or just whatever might be that's out there.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  Art, I think, will be one of the last ones to go. Now is maybe the time, especially if you're in a wealthier class.

• 50:31Auren Hoffman?

  I think art's the fastest one that's kind of.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  No, the best we're talking about. Are we going to hear our top 40 song come out of AI that will become popular? Absolutely.

• 50:40Auren Hoffman?

  A hundred percent in the next 12 months, that will happen.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  That's happening. Do I think we're going to go to a museum, build AI art and just marvel in the beauty? I'm just a little bit more skeptical.

• 50:50Auren Hoffman?

  Does anyone actually ever go to museums today?

• 50:52Speaker 01

  I went to a museum like a couple of weeks ago. What are you talking about?

• 50:55Auren Hoffman?

  You own your museum in your home city?

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Oh, I was visiting our city.

• 51:01Auren Hoffman?

  When you're visiting Rome, you have nothing to do. That's what you're supposed to do when you visit another city. But they go to museum when they visit another city, which means they don't really visit museums. It's like the checklist that you do.

• 51:13Auren Hoffman?

  I'm in Amsterdam, so I'll go to the Reichs Museum or something. Fair enough. But I don't see the AI museum, except for a novelty. I don't see that happening anytime soon. I went to an AI museum in London and it was terrible, I have to say. But guess what? All museums are terrible. That's my controversial opinion. The MoMA, it's so boring. I can't follow you there. Okay, all right, okay. All right, well, this is great. Thank you, Jager McConnell, for joining us on World of DAS. I follow you at Jager McConnell on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with the air. This has been a ton of fun, very controversial, and I really enjoyed the conversation. It's good times. I appreciate it.

• 51:53Auren Hoffman?

  Thanks for listening. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe to World of DAS wherever you consume your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and more. And please help us get discovered by leaving a review. And check out worldofdaas.com. That's worldofdas, D-A-A-S, dot com. And of course, connect with me on Twitter, at Auren. That's A-U-R-E-N. Would absolutely love to hear from you.