EP 69: Emmett Shear (Co-Founder, Twitch). Behind-The-Scenes stories from Twitch's growth to streaming leader

Emmett Shear is the co-founder of Twitch, one of the most influential platforms in recent history. From its humble beginnings as a gaming streaming platform to becoming a cultural phenomenon, Twitch has redefined the way we connect, entertain, and build communities online. The episode is packed with stories from Emmett’s 16-year tenure as CEO and his journey to founding the company. Emmett shares product frameworks he used to grow and retain streamers, how he learned to not suck at management, and why he thinks remote is bad for most tech start-ups. Emmett also shares insights from being part of the very first batch of YC-founded startups in 2005 alongside Sam Altman and Paul Graham. Finally, Emmett shares what he’s most scared about when it comes to AI. (0:00) Intro (1:46) Welcome Emmett Shear (8:03) Products leading to Twitch (18:19) Justin.tv (28:10) Getting growth (32:40) Cultivating the community for the streamer (39:02) Google acquihire (47:05) Declining value to more money (54:16) Changes in levels of abstraction (1:00:13) Management lessons (1:08:52) Remote work debate (1:17:49) Mentors and coaching (1:28:24) Ambitions of the founder (1:36:53) Back to YC (1:44:45) AI Concerns (2:03:28) Being a techno optimist (2:17:44) Turning 40 Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky Produced: Rashad Assir Executive Producer: Josh Machiz Music: Griff Lawson 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/three-cartoon-avatars/id1606770839 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb4br3LlyVrdqOYYb?si=3076e6c1b5c94d63&nd=1 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9zb0hJZkhWbg 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes. Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

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

• 0:00Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the Logan Bartlett Show. I am your host, Logan Bartlett, and what you're going to hear on this episode is a conversation I have with Emmett Shear. Emmett is the co-founder and former CEO of Twitch, one of the most influential tech platforms in recent memory. From its humble beginnings as a reality television show focused on one of his friends, to the most influential online community that exists.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  They have the framework for prioritizing features, which is, I got out of talking to a bunch of streamers, and they wanted fame, love, and money. Is this thing producing more money, more fame, or more love? Great, we will prioritize resources against those. Is it not? Then it's not important, and we're not going to do that.

• 0:32Logan Bartlett?

  Emmett and I take the conversation in a bunch of different directions about how he learned to grow as a leader, and how he ultimately sold the business to Amazon, and then stayed on for another 10 years after that, running the company.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Amazon actually lets CEOs be CEOs. If you want to sell your company and keep running it, I couldn't recommend really any big tech company other than Amazon. How do we just make sure Twitch continues to be the best place for streamers?

• 0:54Logan Bartlett?

  We also talk about why he thinks remote work is actually bad for most tech companies.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  There's a reason why Silicon Valley's taken over. You can't take that culture and transplant it into a remote work environment and expect it to work.

• 1:04Logan Bartlett?

  Emmett was a part of the first Y Combinator batch in 2006, along with the founders of Reddit and Sam Altman. And so we talk what it was like in the early days of working with Paul Graham at YC.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  You somehow walk away from the conversation with Paul, believing, "We are the shit. We are smart, capable, and we're going to take over the world." The only thing standing between us and taking over the world is we have to go grind even harder. Road trips are not tours of gas stations, and your life shouldn't be a tour of money picking.

• 1:30Logan Bartlett?

  Finally, Emmett shares what he's most concerned about with artificial intelligence. So here's now Emmett.

• 1:45Logan Bartlett?

  Emmett, thanks for doing this. You had four co-founders of Twitch, Justin T. B. You stayed on and ran Twitch. Michael has been running various aspects of YC over the years. Kyle started Cruise after he left. And then Justin Khan is a quasi-internet celebrity at this point?

• 2:05Speaker 01

  I mean, he's gone through a bunch of stuff, but yeah.

• 2:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, he had Atrium.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Exact Atrium. And now, yeah, now I think Internet celebrity and DJ.

• 2:13Logan Bartlett?

  DJ, got it. Interesting guy. What made your relationship to their co-founders such that you guys all stayed together and worked well together over the years?

• 2:24Speaker 01

  So I've known Justin since I was eight. We grew up together in Seattle, went to school together.

• 2:31Logan Bartlett?

  School being high school and college?

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Elementary school, middle school. Of course, you didn't go to the same high school, but then we did go to the same college again. And I met, we met Michael in college, probably closer to Justin than to me. And then Kyle, we recruited out of MIT as we were starting the company. He was a, he was a, I think a sophomore at the time.

• 2:54Logan Bartlett?

  How'd you come across Kyle?

• 2:56Speaker 01

  We sent an email to the MIT like hackers who want projects list, and two people replied, and one of them was Kyle.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  And he thought we seemed credible because we'd built a startup and sold it on eBay before. And we thought he seemed credible because he sent us a 27-page PDF with CAD drawings. And so we, we wound up picking him up.

• 3:19Logan Bartlett?

  Selling a startup on eBay, by the way, we glossed over that, but you, you literally listed the IP for your company on eBay, which is an interesting separate story. You've told it, you've told it enough, I won't make you do it again.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  I can tell the short version of it, which is that we started a copy of Google Calendar, but before Google Calendar existed. And after Google launched Google Calendar, we were like, oh, we don't really have any other ideas for what to do other than a JavaScript calendar on the Internet. And they already did that. So we decided we'd sell it.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  We didn't know how to sell something on the Internet, like how to sell a software company, especially one that wasn't like a real acquisition. And so we thought we'd just list it on eBay, which, which worked actually. We sold it for like a quarter million dollars. Which I think is actually a good demonstration of like the kinds of thing you have to do in startups a lot, which is you, you have to just figure out how to solve a problem.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Even if the standard paths don't, you have to make up what it is. There's a lot of making it up that has to happen for something like a startup because almost by definition, the normal stuff isn't all set up.

• 4:24Logan Bartlett?

  Was that a PR, did you know it was going to be kind of PR stunt-y and that that would lead to distribution?

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, that was the idea.

• 4:31Logan Bartlett?

  That was part of it.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  The idea was we were like, we need to get people to know we're selling it, how to reach them. Oh, if you listen on eBay, that'll be funny. We can get people to write an article about that. It was very intentional.

• 4:40Logan Bartlett?

  And it actually worked.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  It worked. It totally worked. It worked. It worked as planned, actually.

• 4:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Minus the fact that eBay took down our listing because we had two links in it. About five days into the seven day listing and we had to relist it, which was kind of a heart stopping experience because we had one bid at $50,000 at that point and we were like, no, we've lost our bidder. But it turns out that that didn't actually hurt us at all.

• 5:03Logan Bartlett?

  So you had the credibility of that. And so Kyle was like, these guys have credibility.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they must know what they're doing. I think Kyle overestimated how much credibility that should have given us. But it did, it did prove that we were the kind of people who like could actually build things and sell them. So that's, I guess it wasn't a zero.

• 5:19Logan Bartlett?

  And there was a deep level of trust, but also some dysfunction among the group. Kyle went nocturnal for a while to avoid conflicts.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  So yeah, there's actually, we did a podcast about this, an Only Friends episode with the four co-founders.

• 5:31Logan Bartlett?

  Which is great. It's super entertaining. Two hours of like you guys shooting the shit.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if you want the, the full, full deep details version of it, but the high level version is like, it worked because all four of us trusted each other. And we somehow managed to pick four people who were smart, hardworking, you know, competent. But I think most of all, who had the, who understood what it meant to be part of a we, not, not a bunch of individuals always thinking about whether or not, how is this working for me? And I think that that's what makes, that's what makes partnerships work. Both probably like romantic partnerships and business partnerships.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Cause if you're going to be in a partnership, not an employer employee relationship, but a partnership relationship, you can't always be thinking about whether or not. You can't be modeling, what are they doing? Are they trying to, what's their incentive versus my incentive versus the company's incentive? It's dramatically simplifying and makes everything a lot easier if you can just only think about what is right for the company? And then just ignore everything else.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  And I think that that's something that goes wrong in a lot of, a lot of things. And it's, it's what causes instability. Because suddenly, when there's lots of interest at stake, there is conflict about my interest versus your interest. But when you can simplify it to, well, what is our interest? And everyone, everyone can actually commit to that. It works pretty well.

• 7:02Logan Bartlett?

  Is there any way to solve for that as you're now working more with entrepreneurs?

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, be, be that way yourself.

• 7:08Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Like the, the number one, the number one cause of the problem in all of your relationships is you. That's true, again, romantically and in business. Uh, and

• 7:19Speaker 01

  the solving for, how do I actually buy into this is, this is we? We are doing this is really important. And also, obviously, you need to work with people who have that mindset as well. But you have less control over that and you have less ability to detect it. And at some level, you know, you have to trust and hope. But, uh, I think there's something about if, if you do it, first of all, you can control that, so that's good. But second of all, it brings it out of other people. When they, when they can see that you're serious about we and you're not, you're not, you're not gaming them, you're not cheating. Uh, you're not like pretending you're about, all about we and then actually being about yourself. People respond to that and draws it out of your partner as well.

• 8:03Logan Bartlett?

  So you launched and shipped a bunch of products over the years, uh, that ultimately led to Twitch. So there was a calendar for Gmail, which was you and Justin. Then after that, social network for families, SoundCloud, like business, a web crawler that had popularity like clout. Flexible to do list, kind of an airtable-ish thing. An Evite competitor, something that was kind of similar to GitHub, Heroku, Replit, whatever you want to call it. Then Justin TV, ultimately Twitch. I heard you say something interesting. When learning, you get exposure to a wide variety of problems related to the topic to actually teach you how to understand and see the differences between things. You don't just study one piece of music to learn music. Did all these experiments and all the different products that you guys iterated on?

• 8:46Logan Bartlett?

  Did it actually help prepare you for Twitch's success or were they just aimless cycles along the way?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Um, I think they did help prepare us. I think the main thing they actually prepared me for was building. I did learn something from the product we're on it, but honestly, we did such a bad job on the product

• 9:04Speaker 01

  design aspects of it and the sort of business design aspects of it that I didn't learn as much from that as I'd like to. What I, what we learned from is the engineering side of it, like the design side of it, like, how do you actually build a thing? That like functions and, and has, uh, has functionality and not too many bugs. And I got a ton out of stuff on the, uh, uh, on the building side. I would say on the, on the, how does stuff work side and learning how to design, how to, how to build a product, how to build a successful business. The stuff I built myself was probably only a tenth of the data. Mostly I was like obsessively studying how other businesses worked.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Um, because you get a lot more, you can only launch a new thing every, you know, few weeks, if you're fast, usually every few months. Like a significant new thing, but there's new stuff being launched all the time. And if you want the number of reps you need, you can't just learn from your own, your own mistakes. You have to be learning from everyone else's mistakes and everyone else's successes at the same time. And I think that's the, uh, that was my, you know, my primary, uh, you know, university for that was. It what, what was with Justin, with Michael, with Kyle, every lunch, every night, every weekend, like we just talked about startups non-stop. And the thing we would often be talking about would be not our startup, but like, oh, why is, you know,

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Facebook is working, why is Facebook working? Why are they beating MySpace? Like what's different about it? Why? What's good about their strategy? What's not good about their strategy?

• 10:38Speaker 01

  And that and really carefully paying attention and trying out and like using the product and, and paying attention to what is actually working in the real world, you learn a lot. Um, I think that's where, that's probably the main thing I learned from, from a design point of view.

• 10:54Logan Bartlett?

  I, I, I, I joke that that's my main only value as a career finance person investor is one, I'm used to just giving advice and letting people decide, you know, I'm not used to having actually owning the decision myself, which is actually can be nice as a board member. Like, hey, here are the options. And two, you get to simulate out a lot of different data points for all the companies that come in and pitch. And so you're, you can extrapolate on a bunch of different stuff there.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  One of the things that, uh, I have, I have a friend, uh, Matt who, uh, Almost started our first company with us, but instead went into finance and runs a hedge fund and has worked at a bunch of finance jobs over the years. And he's an investor and what I've discovered is investors have this, just in totally different lens, at least, you know, public markets investors and I think most private markets investors as well who are later stage, where it's about like whether the industry is good and like the capital allocation and like the structure of the business, which is not something actually that founders think about all that much. I think it's right that founders don't think about that because for the first two, three years of a company, it doesn't matter.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Just build something people want and sell it to them, like ignore everything else. But as you get bigger and bigger, those things become actually quite important and you start to try to think about, oh, we're in this industry, but we could be in this adjacent industry and there's some way to shift how our business is perceived or what kind of work we do and what's the structure of how capital flows work and can we change that? Those actually do become very important questions, but like usually later, there's sort of a handoff that happens.

• 12:26Logan Bartlett?

  It's funny to hear you all talk about like iterating on the product and trying to find something and one of the throwaway lines I've heard, I don't know if it was you or Justin or someone saying, "We could go build enterprise software, but that's boring and we don't want to go do that." I was like, you know, in 2006 or 2007, you would have created a lot of value doing enterprise software and you were just like, "Hey, not for us. That's too boring to go pursue it."

• 12:49Speaker 01

  I think we talked about building, instead of Twitch or SocialCam, because Michael went and founded SocialCam, which he wound up selling to Autodesk. That was weird and annoying. The Autodesk thing never really made sense to me. We talked about building a WebEx competitor because like WebEx is obviously a huge market, like teleconferencing, and we have, like no doubt, we could build a better product than WebEx because WebEx is annoying to use, which we're basically talking about Zoom, right? A more consumer version of WebEx is Zoom. And we decided against it because we knew it would involve enterprise, not the product side of it, but the sales side of it. Like enterprise sales is like a whole business.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  And We just like had no interest in like learning how to do that. And it's actually, I think, I think a good example of sort of knowing yourself. Like, I actually don't think I would have had. I think I probably could have learned how to do it, but I don't think I, I didn't want to do that. I wanted to do something else, and I think it's, it's important for founders to do after the thing that they're interested in. Although it was also a better time for consumer. Like, I think Twitch worked. A lot of actually good consumers and companies started around that time. It got a lot harder to win in consumer as the big players consolidated more of distribution. And I think, I think three or four years later, maybe we would have pivoted into enterprise just because

• 14:19Speaker 01

  lack of any credible other option.

• 14:21Logan Bartlett?

  Just getting distribution would have been really hard with, and certainly today, it's a huge pain. There's an Ira Glass quote that I like a lot, and I know you do as well. I think I've quoted it before. I won't read the whole thing, but nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone told me, all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste, but there is a gap. For the first couple of years, you bake stuff, it's not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you to the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn't have the special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out, or you are in this phase, you got to know it's normal.

• 15:05Logan Bartlett?

  And the most important thing you can do is put in the work. Going through that period, it's a sort of profound quote, and I think it can be applied to a lot of different things. As you guys were iterating on all of it, did you, did you know that your products just weren't that good? And was it disappointing along the way to ship all these different things and not have it take off like you hoped it would?

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd say there's, I had that in three different layers. And the first was from an engineering perspective. I just wasn't that good of an engineer. I knew what good engineering looked like. I remember visiting for the FriendFeed offices, which had like Paul Buchheit, who's like a creator of Gmail, incredible programmer. I think, who else is there? Maybe Brett Taylor, like, like really insanely good programmers. And them talking about their engineering process and like me using their product and seeing the engineering behind it and just being like, oh, that's what, that's what I'm trying to do that. And like, the thing, I'm just like incompetent, like the thing I'm doing, just doing this all wrong. Um, and then spending like 10 years trying to get better at building stuff. And eventually I, I, I did learn how to build stuff more like the way that they did.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Um, and it, it was better, but it was, it was 10 years of like, being quite disappointed in the quality of the engineering I was doing. It was, it worked, but it, it wasn't like, uh, it wasn't well-designed. It wasn't good.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  And then there was this, the product side where, um,

• 16:34Speaker 01

  I, I did, I didn't think, I didn't,

• 16:40Speaker 01

  I wasn't that disappointed in the, the micro design of the product. I actually thought we did a pretty good job there from fairly early. And to some degree, it's a, uh, it's a little different from, uh, from other kinds of creative thinking. It's sort of like, whatever you can think of, you can kind of do, like copying is very easy at that level. And so if you have good taste, you can just copy good stuff and it works. But at the macro level, there is this thing missing where like, we weren't good at business. Like, we weren't good at figuring out what do we need to build that people will actually want. And the constant disappointment was we'd build stuff and I wouldn't have actually solved the problem for the person.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Like, and that was very frustrating and like hard to, uh, hard to deal with. Um, and, uh, there was this sense of like,

• 17:38Speaker 01

  that, that's, that's almost more like learning to do science. I would say the engineering thing is the thing where I felt the Eric Glass quote the strongest. The, and about like, I had this level of taste where I could really see what I was trying to do and I just couldn't achieve it with my hands. The other thing was not understanding like,

• 17:58Speaker 01

  It's like I was, I was, I was a grad student. I was writing papers and they're getting published. But I knew I wasn't actually like discovering anything that's that important. Like the, the papers were just weren't on important discoveries and I was somehow missing, I knew I was missing something.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  But that's a, that's a slightly different thing than the, than the Eric Glass question.

• 18:19Logan Bartlett?

  Justin TV, so you, the original idea for it, for people that don't remember, was actually following Justin, your co-founder, around for 24 hours a day filming 100% of his life. Did you, did you actually think at that time that like, that you'd be a reality television studio business or did you know this was kind of a means to some end and you were bucking around?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  The idea was always that we would open it up for other people to produce shows. Like we never thought we were going to be the people for doing the production.

• 18:56Logan Bartlett?

  You were going to license the MTV or whatever?

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, we thought we were producing, building a technology to enable ourselves to make the first live streaming reality show and that other people would then go on to build, make more live streaming reality shows using, using what we built. Which, you know, within one order of magnitude is what, what happened. But where we got, what went wrong was that, uh, uh, with that vision was that like, reality TV requires editing. Live reality TV is a bad idea. I just didn't really understand how the entertainment, I didn't understand, we didn't understand anything about anything. So that, that was, that was crazy. But actually to level below that, we were very, very right.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Because what we, what we actually had was that Justin, uh, who, uh, has always been, you know, living in the future a little bit when it comes to this kind of stuff.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Really wanted to be an influencer and really wanted the attention and wanted, thought it would be cool to like live stream a lot about of, of, of his life. Which was a thing that not a lot of people had done at that point. And we built the technology to enable him to live his influencer dreams. And that turned out to be quite powerful, actually. The number one thing we did right with Justin TV, the thing I would encourage everyone who's trying to build consumer software to do, is we built something for ourselves. We built the thing that we wanted to use every day, or at least one person in our team wanted to use every day. And, uh, most of the innovations. On Twitch, on Justin TV, were things we invented for ourselves running the show because we thought they'd be fun. Like, the idea of having our own custom emotes in chat that

• 20:31Speaker 01

  are like faces of the people on the show. That Twitch still does that today. And we had that idea because we were running the show. We would never have come up with it in a vacuum. And so, I think there's something really powerful about that approach. Even though we were wrong about the reality TV show thing, we were right about people wanting to do live streaming.

• 20:54Logan Bartlett?

  I mean, Twitch was ultimately a version of just Justin TV. It was just more verticalized or specialized. Do you think, had you kept at Justin TV? I guess, why didn't you guys keep at Justin TV? Why didn't you keep plowing ahead?

• 21:08Speaker 01

  We got Justin TV profitable after the 2008 financial crisis. I spent about a year, you know, cutting costs, generating revenue, just iteratively focused on money.

• 21:19Logan Bartlett?

  And you had a doomsday clock, actually, on the wall?

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:22Logan Bartlett?

  Is that something you would recommend to people?

• 21:24Speaker 01

  It wasn't on the wall. It was every Friday, we would sit down with the employees and be like, we've got, we've got, you know, 14 months, we've got 11 months, we've got, I think at the worst case, it was like we were down to like nine weeks. It was certainly clarifying. I think, I only recommend it if you can convince people on the team that we can succeed. Otherwise, people will start packing their bags and looking elsewhere.

• 21:50Logan Bartlett?

  Pretty fatalistic.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  But I think, I think the founding team never showed any indication, nor ever had any indication or belief that we weren't going to figure it out. We were, we were very sure. And also, we started sharing, we didn't start sharing it when there's like two months left. We started sharing it quite far in advance. And everyone could see that while the clock was ticking down, the rate was getting better. And we were making progress. And so, it felt like, oh, yeah, yeah. We are pulling the plane out of the dive. It might be a close thing, but like, people could see that we were going to get there.

• 22:24Logan Bartlett?

  So was the pursuit of profitability ultimately at the expense of Justin TV's success as a standalone?

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Oh, it was, it was at the expense of our growth. And then, so we had this thing that wasn't growing. We're trying to decide, it was profitable but not growing. And we're trying to decide, okay, what do we do from here? And

• 22:45Speaker 01

  No one thought just pursuing Justin, we had no good ideas for ideas for what to do to like reinvigorate growth of Justin TV per se. And so we had, you know, Michael, they did a pivot into so much to build some mobile video stuff, which in an era before, before Snapchat and before TikTok, pretty good insight.

• 23:04Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  I like

• 23:06Logan Bartlett?

  Autodesk didn't seem to execute on the, uh, the vision of the consumer video.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  We didn't quite get there, but, but like, but there was a, there was a there there for sure.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  And I wanted to do the, the video game thing because I was watching video games on,

• 23:22Speaker 01

  on Justin TV and enjoying it.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  But the big pivot from Justin TV to Twitch, like the real difference between the two companies is not the gaming versus the general purpose thing. That's a superficial change and it motivated me to focus on a set of customers.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  But I think we could have in retrospect. I know why we did the rebrand and like, but we actually had a debate at the time whether we needed to do the rebrand. And I think we probably would have been successful without it. I think the rebrand was helpful and it was,

• 23:52Speaker 01

  it made more sense like the, uh, for the, uh, for the company. And so it was probably like, you know, a good idea, I would do it again, but not strictly necessary. It would have found some amount of, a similar level of success regardless. And, uh, no, but the big change, the big change was, was I realized that the important customer for live was the streamer, not the viewer. That, that ultimately for live video, unlike for, uh, for YouTube,

• 24:25Speaker 01

  we, we could not say, well, whatever, the creators will deal with it. What matters is the audience. They're just here for an audience. They weren't really there for the audience. The, the audience was there for them. And you have to keep winning the streamer's business every day because if you don't, they're going to go stream somewhere else. And now there's no library of content like there is for the, uh, for something like YouTube. And so You can't just have people show up, create a little bit and leave. That like, that doesn't work. You need people creating all the time. And so the focus had to be, how do we build something great for streamers? And that's why we invented paying streamers money. That's why we, like, I went and interviewed a bunch of streamers and figured out, here's what streamers need. And that was a, that was a much bigger shift than the gaming part was.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Building a product that was designed for streamers first and foremost.

• 25:14Logan Bartlett?

  Was the gaming thing in intuition on your part? I mean, you obviously enjoyed watching it. Or was there, I guess, as you reached these conclusions, gaming and focusing on streamers and not the viewers, was there data that backed that up? Or was it just an intuition thing that you kind of realized?

• 25:33Speaker 01

  The gaming thing was purely intuition. I mean, you could point at data like, there are a lot of gamer, if I was to do a McKinsey market research thing, I could be like, oh, look, the gaming industry is very large. People are increasingly spending more time on the internet.

• 25:44Logan Bartlett?

  Bessemer's memo is public from their investments, so you can go look at all their market sizing stuff.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  I actually went back and I found my email I wrote. It's like, it's like, two paragraphs long, like a half-page email. It's like, here's why gaming makes sense. And it's basically, it's the very abbreviated version of that argument. Advertisers like gaming, you know, like the game companies' interests are aligned with ours. So the copyright stuff, like, I thought about that, but the idea was purely intuition. I really like this. I bet I'm not that much of a weirdo. Like, I, I like popular media. If I like watching this, it's likely to also be popular media.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  The part that was more data-backed was the streamer part.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  I went and looked and found that there were about 200 people making gaming content and who had any audience at all. And I was like, oh, if we get, you know, if we can convince 180 of those people to stream on Twitch, we just win. Like, there's just, there's just no, it's just unambiguous. There's no way we can lose, actually. And so we just pivoted the company to be wholly focused on that. And that, I think, was reasonably data-driven in the sense that I went and like, looked at, I looked at, to just make the decision about viewer versus streamer, I went and actually got data and then thought about it.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Although, It was certainly informed by having worked in the space for five years and like having the intuition to sort of understand the dynamic of uh what it would mean to win a streamer.

• 27:09Logan Bartlett?

  And so the band kind of broke up at that point. Michael went with SocialCam, Justin left the company around then and Kyle ran the legacy of what was Justin TV for a while.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we uh we actually weren't sure whether we wanted to do the SocialCam idea or the gaming idea. Instead of debate it, we were like, we're gonna fund the gaming idea and the mobile idea as like Skunk Works projects. And then we're gonna set goals and if they hit the goals, we will pivot to them.

• 27:37Logan Bartlett?

  And was this just jamming more ads on Justin TV to pay for this?

• 27:40Speaker 01

  We were already jamming more ads on Justin TV. That was that was already the plan.

• 27:42Logan Bartlett?

  Pre-roll, mid-roll, banner.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  That was already the plan. The plan was already to extract, like, we were already in the, we were Justin TV plan unchanged, extract maximum profit.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  We then, but yeah, that that meant we were profitable, which meant we could fund like these projects.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  And Twitch, we hit our goals, we hit like the, we hit like said like a 25% growth a month goal and we were hit like a 30% growth a month, which is great.

• 28:10Logan Bartlett?

  And how'd you go about actually doing that? Was that the work with the streamers?

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was just, it was the the exact, you know, process I was talking about of like, oh, there's 200 streamers, let's call them. What does it take to convince them? So I, Kevin was one of the very first people who I think he was the first person I brought on to my my gaming team. He was like, the person I was like, I need Kevin. And I was like, Kevin, uh was our, he was basically all the non-programming engineering stuff originally. And I was like, Kevin, your mission is to convince people they need to stream gaming on Justin TV. Like, go talk to them and get them to do it. And Kevin is probably one of the single best BD people I've ever worked with. And uh he did a very good job of doing that. And like, I backed him up with, he would be like, oh, they'll switch if we build this. And I'm like, great, on it. And then we just go build the thing.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Michael had took two engineers and built, and Justin kind of started working mostly on that project with Michael, building SocialCam. We didn't actually hit the SocialCam goals. It took them longer to build Twitch. The Justin TV Gaming was like literally just built on Justin TV Gaming. Like we didn't have to build a new product. We turned out we overestimated how fast it was, it would be to build an entirely new product from scratch for mobile gaming. So that they didn't hit the growth goals. We felt like the product they built was promising enough that it was worth doing the effort to spin it off. And in retrospect, we were right about that, too. So we spun that off. Michael went with it. Justin hung around for a few months, but like, I think, you know, was also feeling the itch to do something

• 29:43Speaker 01

  else. And I think wasn't, it's funny, Justin now like loves Twitch and like with learned what the product was. I think at the time, didn't really understand or love the gaming streaming product. And so he was like, didn't want to work on it that much, which totally makes sense to me. And then Kyle was figuring out what to do, graciously ran the legacy business for me for like, more than a year, I think, and then found Colin Carrier, who was our, who was the, his replacement to run it, which was amazing because like that was basically funding the business. So we needed someone good running it. And then he went off to start Cruise.

• 30:19Logan Bartlett?

  I heard you say that people come for the entertainment, but stay for the relationships within the community. What, when did you realize there was something unique going on from a community standpoint?

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, come for the video, stay for the chat. So when I first started building Twitch, I was using myself as the prototype viewer. And I am the type of viewer we've come to call a strat, the strategist, which means I was there because I liked watching people who are good at the games that I like to play. So I could learn from them, ask them questions, stuff like that. Almost like a group coaching session. Or I could watch esports and like, like live esports entertainment. And that was also, that was also great for me. It turned out very rapidly, though, that I was in the minority. Strategists make up about 20% of Twitch viewers. 80% of people were there because they liked, they liked the hanging out. They liked the connection they got from hanging out with other people

• 31:15Speaker 01

  in chat. And

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Talking to people, looking, you know, watching them, it was just rapidly obvious, oh, I'm, I'm actually not the prototype here. These other people are the prototype.

• 31:27Logan Bartlett?

  Is that, are those the two groups?

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can, you could, you actually can subdivide the community group more finely, so we have more psychographics underneath that, but there, at the top level, there's like, are you there for the entertainment, or are you, and then learning, or are you there for the entertainment and then community?

• 31:43Speaker 01

  And then there's, you can, you can go deeper.

• 31:44Logan Bartlett?

  I'm curious, is it like, are there any broad strokes of the other types of people?

• 31:48Speaker 01

  It, it comes down to like, are you, do you, are you about the personality more, or are you about the chat vibe more, like, what's the, what's the part of being here that's the most important thing, but like, it's a little inside baseball and fundamentally not that important because they all benefit from the same, like, you don't actually build different products for different people.

• 32:10Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  So it doesn't, you know, it's, at some level, it doesn't really matter. Whereas the, the learning versus community thing is a really important product impacting insight. And so that's when we were sort of realized like, oh, people are there for the connection, okay. That's the like, real, that's the thing that they stick around for, most of our users stick around for. And so that was, that was a pretty deliberate learning from looking at our users, like, wasn't, we didn't just make it up.

• 32:40Logan Bartlett?

  Were there, were there non-obvious things that you did to cultivate the community, or ultimately what is building the product for the streamer, then it became obvious that they would cultivate the community?

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think that, that was the, that was the learning from focus on the streamer was like, very, very early, it's obvious, if our customer is the streamer, then our job is to help them cultivate their community. I still believe that to be true. I don't think Twitch has communities. Twitch doesn't have any community. Twitch has streamers, streamers have communities. And when people get confused and think that, oh, the community, people on Twitch care about Twitch, they don't care about Twitch, they care about the streamer. And our job is to Facilitate that. And it's very egoic, I think. It's like you get, you're like, you're telling the story that you're the hero. The streamer is the hero. Our job is to like, with the one of the slogan we came up with for it later was we play support. Like the streamer is the carry. We are support. And I think that's

• 33:33Speaker 01

  that's a key like mental model for a product like Twitch.

• 33:38Logan Bartlett?

  Twitch was able to uniquely beat back competition from a bunch of heavily funded tech companies along the way. I guess what was the feeling? Google had a famous tweet, welcome player two. When they, when they announced their presence, where were you when that happened? What was the sentiment around that?

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. So after we were acquired by Amazon, I think everyone else who was like, oh, maybe we'll acquire Twitch is like, oh, we're not going to acquire Twitch. Okay.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  We better launch competitors. And so within like less than a year, Microsoft, Google, YouTube and Facebook had all launched very explicit like Twitch competitors and started spending huge amounts of money bidding on streamers. In a very non-sustainable way that wasn't, that was trying to them trying to buy a critical mass of, of audience. Which was, was exhilarating.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  I think it was good for Twitch, like competition is good, is good for the service. Yeah, we, we posted a kind of snarky tweet, the sort of welcome player two when, when YouTube launched theirs.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  But I think that really was our attitude, which was like,

• 34:44Speaker 01

  if you can build a better product for the streamers, you're more than welcome and you should win.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  But we think our product's better and we think streamers are going to choose us every time. And our strategy to beat everybody was we had to bid against people and stuff, but like ultimately we let a lot of streamers walk, like we, we could have kept bidding more money.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  And we didn't outbid on everything. We outbid on a bunch of stuff, but like not everything. And

• 35:10Speaker 01

  Our focus was from the very first beginning, how do we just make sure Twitch continues to be the best place for streamers? And have we continue to make it to like, they continue to choose us instead of, instead of the competition?

• 35:24Speaker 01

  I remember reading a bunch of, some streamers complaining about Twitch, be like, basically like, oh, I want to go to the, you know, YouTube, except like, you know, I feel like they're, they're offering me more money, but uh, and I'd go except, you know, it's not fair, like Twitch, Twitch has to be trapped because, because all the moderation tools are so much better and the, this is better, I'm like, yeah, you mean we're trapped you by with our nefarious plan of building a better product that actually works? Yes, I fully admit this is our, our, our secret plan.

• 35:51Logan Bartlett?

  The ruse all along.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Yes, you, you didn't see it coming, but we would, we're gonna build stuff that you like and then give it to you for free. Yeah, so that's.

• 35:59Logan Bartlett?

  Very diabolical.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Totally diabolical, but like, that, that was the, that was the thing, like we, we won because our product was better. And uh, I think that's like a, and it was better in the way people, people cared about, there's a lot of nice to have features. Like fun, things that people think they want, polls is the best example, I think we actually have a polls feature now, but for many, many years we did not. And our competition did, they had a polls feature, people would complain about this. But the truth is, you can run a poll using like a online, like there are many poll things you can just use on the internet if you want to. If we screw up chat moderation, if we screw up, uh, if your, if your, if your subscriptions don't work well, if discovery isn't good, you can't fix those things, only we can, and you don't actually want us to build a poll, you think you do, but like,

• 36:44Speaker 01

  the truth is you don't act, and when you would confront them with the actual choice, would you like to make a dollar more per hour? Or would you like to, us to build, launch polls, like, oh, a dollar, obviously, what are you talking about, like, well, that's, right, okay, we're gonna keep working the other thing then.

• 36:56Logan Bartlett?

  How, how do you get to those conclusions, like when you're hearing from your users, I want this thing? But being able to discern that they actually don't really want this thing at the expense of what it would take you to go do it? And is it actually framed in those terms of would you prefer an extra dollar or would you prefer like more engineers on this?

• 37:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so when I got started with Twitch, I, I came up with a framework for prioritizing features, which is, I got out of talking to a bunch of streamers and basically. Uh, asking them why they streamed and sort of what their goals were and what, what they, what they wanted out of it. And what we came up with was they wanted fame, love and money.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  Uh, fame, they want to like, obviously reach an audience, grow it, have more people watch them, get more hours of video watched, basically. Um, love, they wanted to feel positive social feedback and connection for doing it. Whether that's from Twitch because they got invited to TwitchCon or because some Twitch, you know, partner manager reached out. Or it's from their audience saying how great they love the show and how amazing that was. And then money, they wanted to make money on the stream. And basically if we built something, and there's a secret fourth thing, which is like, the video has to work. They want the live video to be like, actually good enough. Okay, cool. That's a, let's put that one aside.

• 38:07Logan Bartlett?

  That's the underpinning.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  That's the underpinning of you. That's the table stakes. That it has to work. Uh, assume it does.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Is this thing producing more money, more fame or more love? Great. Like, we will prioritize resources against those. Is it not?

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Then it's not important and we're not going to do that. Um, and

• 38:30Speaker 01

  uh, that worked because those were the three most important things. And then, once you have that structure, you can kind of, it's easy to compare within money, which of these things we think will be most helpful to make the most money. Within discovery, which of these things in fame, which of these things will help grow audiences the most?

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Love is the trickiest one, obviously, because love is a little bit less, it's a little more fuzzier and less clear than fame and money are. But, uh, but ultimately it's like having good moderation in chat. Having, uh, experiences for streamers where they feel, they feel loved by, by Twitch and that we care about them.

• 39:02Logan Bartlett?

  Once upon a time, Google came and made an offer to buy Justin TV, uh, before it was really in the, before all the Twitch stuff came to be. And ultimately, uh, you got far down the acquisition process and then people on the team failed Google's, uh, tests or something?

• 39:18Speaker 01

  They, uh, Google was considered an aqua hire and out of our like, whatever, I don't know, 30 total people, they like, had like 10 that they thought were like Google quality. Um, and made an offer on that basis and we were just like. No. Uh, and in retrospect, I remember like looking at the offer and if they'd offered us three times more money, I think we would have taken it. Um, but, uh, but I'm really glad they didn't offer us three times as much money. Um, same thing actually happened with Kiko on Yahoo. Yahoo offered to buy Kiko.

• 39:49Logan Bartlett?

  Which is your calendar?

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Where the calendar company for a million dollars in, but like in retention over like four years or like $250,000 a year in signing bonus on top of a, you know, mid-level Yahoo engineer offer. And I'm really glad they lowballed us because if they hadn't lowballed us, we might have taken it. And like, uh, uh, we didn't really want to do those. We didn't really want to work for Google or work for Yahoo. We wanted to run the company. It's just, it felt like you have to take, if they offered you a win, you could like, you have to take it. Um, so I'm, so I'm glad they didn't.

• 40:22Logan Bartlett?

  Are there any lessons actually from either of those stories that are, that you could extrapolate as a, as something you would tell a founder? Or is it, hey, those are the funny situations and the road not traveled, but at the end of the day, it's just, there, there was nothing to be learned from the individuals.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  I don't really think I've, I, I've, the only time I ever use it, someone's like, oh, I got an acquisition offer from this company.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  And I talked to them and I'm like, okay, this is, this is like an aqua hire. Here's like, here's how it's going to work. Like here's, here's how aqua hires work. And having been through one myself, I kind of like, I know what the, what the process will be like a little bit, although it does vary from company to company. It's not that variable. Um, and so occasionally it's helpful for advising someone who's in the exact same situation. But other than that, there's not really much, there's not much of generalizable from it. I don't think.

• 41:10Logan Bartlett?

  This might be an annoying question that just, uh, people in the media and I guess venture capitalists ask you, but how much time have you given to thinking about Twitch as a standalone versus within Amazon?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Like whether we should have sold it or not?

• 41:22Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, selling it, uh, worked out really well for us because, uh,

• 41:30Speaker 01

  It was unrelated to let Twitch grow on its own.

• 41:33Logan Bartlett?

  Did they help with bidding for streamers and like was that an expensive capital outlay? That wouldn't have been obvious because the weird thing about Twitch versus Instagram, for example, is Instagram. It's hard to disconnect Instagram within Facebook, right? Because of all the stuff they did from an ad infrastructure standpoint and you know, the adoption and promotion and all that. I think it's kind of hard for me to mentally disconnect the two. Twitch was, to your point, able to operate pretty standalone, right? And so almost you can, you can, at least from the outside in, maybe you disagree, almost see what the business would look like. In some ways, absent Amazon.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Amazon, what you, Amazon retained me as a CEO for a very long time and they retained many of its CEOs for a very, very long time.

• 42:15Logan Bartlett?

  How long you were there?

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Don Katz at Audible.

• 42:17Logan Bartlett?

  Ten years, eight years?

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Uh, eight years. And

• 42:23Speaker 01

  they do it because Amazon actually lets CEOs be CEOs. It's like it's, uh, it's the most decentralized of the big tech companies. And, uh, I think, uh, if you want to sell your company and keep running it, I couldn't recommend any, really any big tech company other than Amazon. Because it's the only one that runs under that model.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  I've thought about what it would be like to have done it separately. And I actually just think it wouldn't have been that different. The biggest difference was I, the reason I sold at the end of the day is I don't like fundraising. And I knew that if I sold to Amazon, I'd get to keep running my company. In fact, they would demand I keep running my company and that, but we were aligned in that I wanted to and they want, they wanted me to, so great. And they would make sure that they would, they would fix the, I have to raise capital every year problem because they're committing by buying us to fund us. And, uh, or like write up, they take a big loss, but like they're basically committing to fund you. And so, uh, that worked out, I would say it worked out as planned. And so, uh, I feel really good about the decision in retrospect.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  I think I made it more intuitively at the time than like reasoned and it only took me a couple of years after doing it. To even figure out what the math I was I had been doing subconsciously was, but uh, but I think it was the right to call for sure.

• 43:40Logan Bartlett?

  What did Amazon do to keep you around for so long besides just letting you run autonomously or was that it?

• 43:45Speaker 01

  That that's yeah, what that's literally the thing that they did. I don't, you know, hey, hey, like, you know, you know, big tech companies, if you want to retain CEOs after you acquire the company, you have to let them still be the CEO, which means they decide who gets hired, who gets fired, what contracts you sign, what products you launch. If you try to take that away from them, make them go through your processes, there if they're any good at all as CEO, they're gonna leave because they're not a CEO anymore. They're a division vice president and that's not the job they signed up for. So FYI, if you want to retain CEOs, one weird trick.

• 44:18Logan Bartlett?

  What uh, but did they get strategic value? I guess to take it from their vantage point, obviously Twitch is a very important asset within there, but the the flip side of of the reason I think people end up being somewhat heavy handed or or at least involving themselves post acquisition of a company is to try to make the value greater than the individual component of it. Were there things they did from an integration standpoint or or things that they pushed that benefited other parts of Amazon?

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Um, I mean Twitch advertising is sold by Amazon advertising, the third biggest, I think third biggest, I don't know if I have to say that. I think it's the third biggest advertising company in the world. So that's that's good. That's like the like the Instagram, Facebook thing in a way. Um, except for I think we provide more value to Amazon relatively. Facebook already had a lot of ad inventory in feeds. That's basically the identical, whereas Twitch, Amazon did not have a bunch of UGC video and uh, you know, premium gaming video to like sell against.

• 45:18Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's that's them to you. I was wondering you to them if there was anything that.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I think actually the revert in the advertising case, unlike Instagram where it's mostly Instagram benefiting from the Facebook advertising machine, here it's much more two way. We open up a new kind of inventory. They don't have access to otherwise, which is good for the overall Amazon organization, but also good for Twitch because we get access to the big sales team. So I think the advertising thing is the obvious, just like with Instagram, it's the obvious integration point for something like Twitch. Um, we also do stuff with Prime. That's that's been very good. That's which are quite well. Again, very two way.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  And we've launched IVS, which is our interactive video service, an AWS service. Very cool. To be able to take one of the things, core things you built and externalize it as an AWS service is very cool. And something you can't do unless you go to, I guess, it has to be Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, basically. Because those are the cloud companies. And we definitely couldn't have done that on our own. But yeah, a lot of it has been less deeply integrated. And I think that that's, except for the points like advertising, which is a really big one, where it does make sense to integrate. And I think it's really to Amazon's credit that they didn't try to force a bunch of integrations for efficiency reasons. Because it's always efficient in theory. It's never as efficient as it seems in practice.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  So I think strategic, there are strategic acquisitions where you're buying something as a technology. You know, Apple buys some semiconductor companies so they can start making chips. Sure. And that should get integrated. It's not, it's not actually a separate product. But if you're buying a product to be part of your portfolio, I actually don't, I think the, often the integrations are a little heavy handed for no good reason.

• 47:05Logan Bartlett?

  I've heard you say that as you get money, there's a clear declining value to more money. Obviously, that's true. It sounds like something people just say, but how did, how has that actually impacted your life? Having success and how would you internalize that?

• 47:22Speaker 01

  I mean, having money is great. The utility of money declines approximately with the log of the amount of money. You can actually see it on like, if you, if you plot like, you know, life happiness correlation curves and stuff. So every 10x more money you have is like one incremental unit more. So like, it's not that there's no value of going from 1 million to 10 million. But it's like, 1 million to 10 million is the same as 100,000 to a million. And so every, going from 1 million to 2 million is like, eh. Like, it's just not that big of a deal. Even though it is a million dollars more, it's like, it doesn't change your life that much.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  I am very glad to have money because it makes my life directly better in terms of consumption, but most of all because it allows me to do things like invest in, I've invested in my friends' companies or in other, you know, in strangers' companies and people I've met's companies and that's, you know, being an angel of us is really interesting. I feel like I get to support people and, and help. I got to fund SF New Deal, right? And like, I got to write a check for a million dollars into SF New Deal because I, I had someone I knew, Lenore, who, Lenore Estrada, who CEO and I trusted, she could step up and run it. And I could make that decision fast and just write the check. I didn't have to go try to raise money from other people or put it together crowdfunding it. And that was

• 48:44Speaker 01

  really valuable. I really like stand by that being, that was, it was, and it was interesting. It was, it was fun for me. And you get to go do think, cool things for your friends and your community. So I mean, yeah, but I guess having money is great. Who doesn't like having money? I don't think it's the, it's not the only thing. There's a, the quote I like about money is like, you need money. Like you, if you're on a road trip, you need gas, but life, you know, road trips are not tours of gas stations and your life shouldn't be a tour of money making activities. But like, also like, you should think about where the gas stations are on your road trip. Like it's, especially if you're going on a long, big one. Like you really don't want to run out of gas.

• 49:29Logan Bartlett?

  Uh, over the years, you've been particularly transparent about being a bad manager initially. Uh, I, I, there was a quote you had, "I was bad at hard conversations. I was bad at good conversations. I was bad at delegating. I'm sorry to the people that worked for me in the early days." I assume you're being too hard on yourself there, but what were some of the things you learned about yourself and managing that allowed you to develop into a good manager?

• 49:52Speaker 01

  So I would say in the early days, I was a pretty good leader already, but a bad manager. Like I could, I could inspire people with a direction. I could communicate, but I, I was, I would, I would stand by what I said there. I was a bad manager. But I don't think I'm being particularly harsh. I have yet to meet anyone who is a good manager the first year they are a manager. I don't think anyone is. Uh, being a manager is a set of skills, like a thousand different skills and

• 50:24Speaker 01

  The you aren't good at them by they're not like things you just know automatically. Like no one's a good skier the first time they go skiing. It is not possible to be good at first. There's only one thing that distinguishes good managers from bad managers consistently that I've found. Some people, when presented with this,

• 50:43Speaker 01

  don't like this truth that they suck. And decide that they're in fact good managers already, or that management is easier, that they don't have that it's not any they're as good as they need to be. And some people realize that management is a skill and not good at it yet and decide I I'm want to get better at this. I want to learn how to be a better manager. And they every year they're thinking about how do I get better? How do I how do I how do can I become a better, more qualified manager? And I can be better at this set of skills. And the people who try don't always succeed. But fair amount do management is not so hard. If you if you treat it like a set of skills, they're not the hardest skills to learn anywhere. It's not as hard as like, you know, abstract math and inventing like new.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  You know, new theorems about topology. That's that is more difficult than management. But it is it's hard enough you have to learn. The people who dedicate themselves to it, often usually not always become good managers. The people who don't are universally terrible. And that is that is just the only thing that differentiates the people is like whether you accept into your heart. You need to learn. You need to get better at this thing. And that's basically it.

• 51:53Logan Bartlett?

  What was counterintuitive or what what skills were counterintuitive to you that you that that maybe took longer to learn? Or just were super surprising as you got higher and higher with more and more people?

• 52:04Speaker 01

  The thing about management skills is they're all dumb. They don't they're not surprising. When you say them out loud, they sound stupid.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Like.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Uh, when you delegate something to someone, you have to actually delegate it to them. You can't delegate it and then like look over their shoulder and then tell them they did it wrong. Like, that's just gonna make them unhappy. Um, and, and, and worse, they're gonna stop trying to even do the thing, cause they know, whether they do it well or badly, you're gonna show up and then review it and then make it the way you would have done it. And then, and so why should they put much, they should, their whole goal is to get it in front of you so you can correct it. And like, that's obvious if you think about it. It's not like, that's a dumb, it's almost dumb to get wrong. And almost everyone gets it wrong when they first become a manager. It's a little, it's, I guess it's counterintuitive, but I don't even think it's the counter intuitiveness.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  It's just you don't, most of management is learning to notice the thousand and one things that you can do wrong. And if you thought about each one of them, you would probably come to the right answer, but you just, it just doesn't occur to even notice.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  I guess the thing that, one counterintuitive thing about management that was a surprise to me is that managing individual contributors on a team is not the same job as managing a team of managers, is not the same job as managing a team of managers of managers. It's not the same job as managing a team of directors. It's not the same as managing a team of VPs. And that's not the same as managing a team of SVPs. Every time you add a layer to the company,

• 53:40Speaker 01

  your job is like, it doesn't have nothing in common, but it's fundamentally quite different. Um, and that's one of the reasons why it's so hard to scale teams. And people like, sort of, uh, hit a scaling limit at some point. It's because as you keep, in a fast growing company, everyone's like winding up underwater all the time. As you layers under, you get more layers under them. And that, that directory was doing such a great job is doing a bad job now. They didn't get bad. The job changed from underneath them. And so everyone's in this race to like, figure out the new job before it, uh, before it kills them.

• 54:16Logan Bartlett?

  What changes in those levels of abstraction, like, I mean, at a high level, when you're, when you're so far removed? What, what is so different than being on the ground?

• 54:25Speaker 01

  I would say like, uh, the, you have, just the techniques, you, you have to use techniques that scale better. As you get, that, rather than things that are maximally effective, you want things that are scale best. And that, like the trade off between how effective is this individual interaction, how good it, how, how, like in the beginning, you need things, you need to actually fix problems and ship code and make things happen. Um, and that kind of dynamism is really important. As you get higher and higher in a, in a hierarchy, you have to figure out how you can make your time and your effort and your energy scale. Because you can't go do it thing by thing. And so there's a trade off between those two things and you, uh,

• 55:06Speaker 01

  uh, you need to pick, the, the skills that you need are more of the scaled, scale, scale level skills. Um, writing becomes more important when you're higher up in the organization, for example.

• 55:16Logan Bartlett?

  As you get higher and higher and the company gets bigger and bigger, there's also a component of transparency and input of decisioning that, uh, you can't be, can't be quite the same as it was in the early days, right? Like the decisions, all the inputs that went into an individual decision, you can't communicate en masse to the totality of, of the company, which I think could be hard. I think that could be hard when you come from a culture of like full transparency, or it was small and now you're big and all that. Did you, did you experience that? Was that something that you struggled with of just like how to balance transparency with just giving people the outputs of stuff?

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, there's, people can use the word transparency a lot when what they mean is input. You can give transparency for stuff, actually, not everything, but most things, no matter how big you are. A lot of the time, the transparency just makes people more upset though, because what they really meant when they said they wanted transparency is they wanted a voice.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  And that you cannot scale. Everyone cannot have a voice on everything. In fact, almost everyone can't have a voice on almost everything. And

• 56:27Speaker 01

  that's not true when you're small. It gets true when you're bigger. When you're small, you can stay very, very synchronized. And as you get bigger, everything has to just desync. And

• 56:40Speaker 01

  figure creating mechanisms and processes that the right people can have input at the right time is like, that is the art of management and and production in a company of greater size and like, I don't know, there's no, there's a short answer to that question that like, is it all meaningful? But

• 56:57Speaker 01

  I think the the main metaphor I always use for it is like, you have to, you have to shard the decision making. Like sharding is an idea from programming and from like databases. We have to find a way that you can divide stuff up such that some set of the of the data of the decisions can be made in this hundred people and this hundred people in this group owns everything about that and they don't have to communicate much with the other groups and figure out how you can bottleneck and shrink those between group communications and and let people interact in a more asynchronous way.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  And again, there's a thousand and one techniques for that, but that's what you have to figure out how to do.

• 57:38Logan Bartlett?

  What was something that you you found that even after whatever, 10, 12 years? How long was your run at Twitch?

• 57:45Speaker 01

  Seventeen years.

• 57:46Logan Bartlett?

  Seventeen years from from Justin TV and what was something that you found that was just you were never going to be particularly good at and that you needed to augment or or get people around you to to help you with?

• 58:00Speaker 01

  I think I, what I discovered is I could be good at literally anything. There was no skill I could not learn. But there were a lot of things where

• 58:13Speaker 01

  I don't like doing it. I'm never going to enjoy doing it and it's always going to drain energy from my day. And by the end of the day, if I'm doing a bunch of that kind of work, I'm going to be grumpy and unhappy and tired. And people interacting with me are probably not going to have the best experience.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  And so it was less about what I could get good at. I could get good at almost anything. At least, you know, once.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  It was more about like, what could I do sustainably? What, what, what? How do I manage my jobs that I am doing things sustainably? In a way where I am can consistently do it at high quality?

• 58:52Speaker 01

  When I'm not at my best?

• 58:55Speaker 01

  And so for me, one of those things is like, I really have never been great at interviewing. I don't like interviewing new candidates for jobs. There's a lot of energy for me to meet a new person and

• 59:14Speaker 01

  bring, bring that there, who they are on and make a connection. And like, I, I like doing it actually. When the, either someone I find myself naturally drawn to, which is, you know, whatever, one in four people or something like, which I don't think is unusual. In terms of the one in four part, I think it's just an unusually high energy cost for me for the other three. And I can do it. And I've learned how to do it and I, but I don't like doing it. And so I've just found ways for that. I was not the first person. I, I had this heroic idea, like hiring is super important. I need to be the one out there, you know, interviewing for the new CFO.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Or the new, you know, head of product or whatever. That turned out to be a terrible idea. I was grumpy all the time if I did that. Then instead, the right thing for me to do was let other people do most of the interviewing and only interview, you know, two or three final candidates.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  And you're just sort of admitting that you don't have to like all the, all the work you do.

• 1:00:13Logan Bartlett?

  You, you tweeted recently, management lessons from the front, number seven, six, one. I don't, I didn't go back to look if there were actually 760 before the, in front of them. But your reports will ask you a lot of stuff, especially beginning, like, should we do X or Y? Do not be tricked. This is usually, usually unintentional trap. The only correct response is what, what do you recommend? Does that tie back to the autonomy of decisioning and being able to delegate?

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you, and this is, this is not to say that you should never answer your reports questions. I want to be really clear. Uh, some people interpreted me as saying, uh, in that, uh, you should, uh, when, when, if you tell the report, like, you, you, you, you, if you tell someone like,

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  You know, hey, go, go make this thing, go build this thing and they come back and say, oh, well, there's this trade off. That's above my pay grade. You know, the company, we have to commit the company to $20 million of liability. Or we have to spend an extra 16 weeks doing this. And I kind of think we should actually commit to the liability, but like. What do you think? That's a fair question. That is not. That is not.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  It's not their job to figure out. You know, some individual contributor, you know.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  New person on the marketing team is not the company's job to figure out, should we run this level of risk? No, no. Fair, and those often get kicked up the chain and that kind of ticking on of risk sometimes requires all the way up to the CEO to sign off. Totally reasonable. But. When you ask someone like, hey, like. They're designing a new, a new ad campaign. If they come to you and they say like. Oh, well, do you think we should make the ad campaigns message this message or that message? That is literally the, that's the job of the person who's you asked to go, should we use this creative approach or that creative approach? I don't know. It's your ad campaign. Like. You tell me.

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  Because if you don't do that. They don't own the decision. And the whole point is to delegate down both the authority to make the decision and the accountability for the results of that decision. And in very dysfunctional companies, sometimes.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  People. People have learned you, they actually don't have the, actually have the authority, no matter what no one tells them. And that means they don't want the accountability and you went up this entire, this circle of them very logically. Constantly trying to push off accountability by getting input and making sure everyone is signed off. And they never have to make a decision to take any risk. And that's because they know they don't actually have the authority. And they don't really believe they'll be allowed to do a good job.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  And I have empathy for people who are stuck in that situation. It happens even in good companies. It happens sometimes. But the the good solution is not then get everyone to sign off on everything. So it's all safe, but rather then actually empower people to make decisions. So it so that they you can actually just do stuff.

• 1:03:10Logan Bartlett?

  You did a great Y C talk with regard to product development about how to think about developing product and talking to your users and customers, users and customers that are competing services as well as other people that aren't using your product today. We touched on product development a little bit and the three pillars that you guys kind of use to think about.

• 1:03:33Logan Bartlett?

  How do you think about? I guess now it's probably been 10 years or eight years since you did that talk. How do you think about product development and actually figuring out the features that matter at a zoomed out level? Maybe not twitch specifically, but just like, how do you make these prioritizations?

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  So that the saying that comes to mind for me for this is planning is essential. Plans are useless. I think it's like a like Eisenhower or something, some some general.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  And it's totally correct because you if you don't make a plan for you're going to get you know, from point A to point B, you're going to miss so much stuff and you're you're going to fail. But once you make the plan, no plan survives conflict with the enemy. As soon as you start executing, you realize like, oh, that didn't actually work. This didn't actually work and you have to you have to improvise.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Talking to customers is essential.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  But the results of talking to customers is useless. Like it is the talking to the customers and they're really paying attention that informs your intuition that then lets you design the product. You're not you're not delegating. The mistake people make is they're trying to delegate product design to the customer. And if they were so good at the product design, they would be starting the company. They would be the product manager. They're not good at product design. They know what problems they're running into. They know the realities of their business. And what you need to do is you need to understand them incredibly deeply. Not get them to do your job for you, sort of almost the inverse of the manager situation. Don't delegate that to them.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  The that's one one direction you make the mistake is you try to delegate the product design to the customer. No, no, no. You design the product. You talk to them. You get you understand them and you use that to design the product. The other side of it is you have this you come up with a great idea and you got to talk to customers to validate it. Validate is the like, uh, when I hear people talk about validating product ideas, I, uh, I instantly know that there is a there's a problem. Um, because once you've had the idea,

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  no amount of talking to any number of customers will change how good of an idea that was. It is exactly as good as it is the moment you have it. And you have a thousand customers tell you it's a great idea. It was or was not, and it will a great idea, and it will or will not have the impact before they've told you or after they've told you. If a thousand customers tell you it's a bad idea, same thing, doesn't change anything. And so unless you are actually throwing away lots of ideas, customers tell you they don't like them,

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  you're not having any impact at all. And so that mostly and I've also just I that never happens. Yeah, every now and then people validate ideas and throw them away. And actually, what's even funnier there is it's usually when they do actually throw them away, those ideas might have been good. The customers are just bad product designers and they don't realize that actually is a good solution to their problem. But,

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  the, uh, the main thing is the order is wrong. You need to talk to customers, uh, first and then have your great ideas. And so like, there's this idea from the rationalist community online that I really like, hold holding off on proposing solutions.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Holding off on proposing solutions is one of the key product design skills because you have to like know there's a problem and not come up with the solution long enough to actually go like gather some data and think about it. Um, because once you come up with a solution, you're it's actually your your brain is like attaches to it. It's really hard to like let go. Some people can do it, but it's surprisingly difficult.

• 1:07:12Logan Bartlett?

  There's a, I want to talk about, more about decisioning and one as it relates to,

• 1:07:20Logan Bartlett?

  when you had four co-founders, Kyle, Michael, Justin and yourself in a room, you mentioned there was ultimately kind of a war of attrition on decisioning that it was whoever was last man standing kind of got the, got the vote?

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  We had a real hybrid model. So we would, we would have these epic debates, which were mostly useless. And sometimes we would do the thing of like the person who like had the most stamina, but often it was just like,

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  there's this other thing happening, which is like whoever did stuff, they got their way too. Like, that was Kyle's main move, but actually it was my move and a lot, Michael's move too. Like we'd, we'd argue about it. And then we'd, we'd go off and like all just like do stuff. And actually I would say in retrospect, it's a little bit of the planning is essential plans are useless thing. We could, the arguments could have been less contentious. And we could have probably shortened the debates, but they were valuable. And we would, we would game it out, we would argue it out extensively. We would hear from all the sides. And the person who was in charge of that would go make a decision and make stuff happen. And actually that's actually in retrospect, a

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  relatively functional process, because there was a distribution of authority and accountability. Although it, it maybe was an unpleasant, it was an unpleasant, but kind of effective approach. And I would say it was like a high end pleasant, medium effective. I wouldn't really recommend it as a, you can do better. There's more Fredo optimal outcomes, but like, but it's better than the stuff that's ineffective.

• 1:08:52Logan Bartlett?

  One, one question on, I guess just because it's been a big debate of late is the remote work thing. And now having lived through Justin TV and Twitch and seeing all the discourse online, you're, you're working with Y Combinator now, like what's your, what's your perspective on remote work and decisioning? That specific question, I guess you had tweeted out my observation, you can build a two by two for workplace environments, remote, local. And hierarchical versus egalitarian, there is an island of stability out and deep and remote and hierarchical. What did you mean by that? And what's your perspective on remote?

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  So the island of stability is an idea from like the periodic table. Where like as elements get heavier and heavier, they become unstable. But there's a theorized, we've yet to synthesize one of these elements, is a theorized island of stability. Way out at like a very high neutron proton count, where suddenly the elements get stable again for a little bit.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  But there's like, but in between, the in-between options are all bad and are unstable and intensely radioactive. And I, I have seen, I know a couple of companies that are very effective remote. And what differs, the way they differ from the traditional valley culture is it's not. Distribution of authority, everybody like, you know, is autonomy, everyone like figure out what to do on their own. It's like the army, like there's, there's delegation, there's delegation of authority, but it's not this. Delegation of authority and distribution of authority are not the same. And.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  They're all over auditing and follow-up and interactions and documentation. And you have to document your work and you submit it and you can, you can build. A mechanism and a culture that works remote.

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  But the valley approach, I think, I think of it kind of like canonically in its most extreme of like the Google vibe of like. Yeah, like no real accountability, like directly, like, because we don't really know what's good and like. Go experiment and try stuff and like, maybe it'll work and like, no real urgency to like launch stuff fast. That does not work remote. It works okay in person because there's sort of this weird implicit social pressure thing that gets used in place of official.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  Methods to like manage stuff. But once you take that away and you don't have the official thing either. It's just like bad. And so. There's the silicon, the valley culture works, there's a reason why like Silicon Valley is taken over like, you know, the. It didn't evolve for no reason, but you can't take that culture and transplant it into a remote work environment and expect it to work.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  And I think we'll slowly sort of like, you'll start to see models of like, oh, you're on this, you're on the this model or you're on the that model.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  And I think that that will.

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  Uh, I think that will, that'll be good for us. Actually, well, they'll, they'll, if you really care a lot about remote, you'll go work at a company that has a remote culture that works. I actually like love the in-office thing. Uh, I love being able to be remote sometimes, but like,

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  I just enjoy, I enjoy being around my coworkers. I enjoy being able to see them in the face. I like the organic parts of it. Um, but I know not everybody does. Um, and I'm really happy that they get to go work at a remote environment that hopefully has a functional, not dysfunctional, remote culture.

• 1:12:18Logan Bartlett?

  Goals and OKRs versus intentions? You prefer to focus on intentions than OKRs rather than being tied to specific goals. Can, can you elaborate on that?

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  I mean, that's, that's where we're on a personal basis than on a, on a corporate basis. Like at a, at a corporate basis, go, goals are very important. Like you need to actually, setting goals is a, I could probably give an entire hour-long talk on like, setting goals and the trade-offs and various ways to do that. But, uh, at an individual level,

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  setting goals for yourself can be fun, but ultimately goals are usually a way to coerce yourself or whip yourself into doing a thing you don't want to do. You sort of set a goal and like, that's why you need them in the corporate environment. People have to sometimes be a little bit coerced into doing something that's less than the thing that they want to actually do. But it's important to the company, even though it's not the most interesting, exciting to them personally. And you're trying to artificial excitement and fun. It can also, it can be inspiring. It can be exciting to try to hit a goal too. It doesn't have to be always a whip. There's a carrot there too. But even carrots are coercion. Like ultimately, it's not the intrinsic thing itself. You're, you're, you're using reward or punishment, like operative conditioning on a dog to get it to train it to do what you want.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  There's a place for that, but like, I try not to like coerce myself all the time.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  And I find that, uh, an over-focus on goals, like goals are set with your intellectual, like top-down analytical mind. And if you're good at setting them, you can be effective with it. But like, your intellect, your like top analytical mind is only so good. And it's easy to set a goal that is not, it. It's like related to what you wanted to do, but not quite what you actually wanted to do. And then that's very dangerous because you can spend years sometimes pursuing this and achieving and succeeding. Only to find out, oops, I didn't actually, that goal was, that was like sort of right, but it missed this important thing. And now I have like, I have to actually go way back and start over. And so I mostly think about it in terms of like,

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  you know, make a really concrete one, like, don't set a weight loss goal.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  Set an intention about wanting to be strong and healthy and acting in accordance with that.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  And

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  creating an infrastructure to support you in doing that. Well,

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  is it the book I think about on this a lot is the score takes care of itself.

• 1:14:47Logan Bartlett?

  By Walsh.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, by Walsh. That's, that's, that book's great. And I think it really, it's for the people who haven't read it. It's the idea of like, what you, the score in the game is literally irrelevant if he's a football coach. And you ignore the score, score, it's like, screw that, like,

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  what's important is, did you practice? Did you do the practice you needed to do? Did you, everyone showed up to practice? They give, they give practice their all. And if they, if you, they did that, you're going to win or lose the game. That will, that, that will take care of itself. And I find that's very true for, for goal setting.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  The goals tend to focus you on the score.

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  And we're creating a score, you're, you're going to create a way to score yourself. And that's not necessarily the best way to do it.

• 1:15:35Logan Bartlett?

  I, I, I don't know if we have an hour to do the, the setting goals for a company thing. But is there a short primer on how you think about setting goals or OKRs for companies?

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  No, like, let me see, some, I don't have any maxims about goals.

• 1:15:54Logan Bartlett?

  Obviously it sounds like focusing on inputs versus outputs is.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  No, you need a blend of input and output goals because the output goals keep you honest and the input goals keep you focused.

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  I'd say,

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  There's a lot of different kinds of goals you set for different kinds of reasons. And the most important thing is to be kind of clear with yourselves. Like one goal I set for Twitch was like, I want us to have a million people earning money on Twitch in five years. 2016. I set a goal, we had like at the time, I think 15,000 people earning money. 10,000, something like that. And I was like, I think it was 10,000. And I set a goal, I want to have a million people earning money on Twitch by the end of 2021. And we hit it, because of COVID, we hit it actually early 2021, which I'm very proud of. We, I called that weirdly accurately, but I didn't really call it. I, I, uh, God, I sound like a hippie. Like I manifested it, right? Like by just saying that to the company and having people think about that.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  It generated things like other people inventing things like the affiliate program. Well, if we're gonna have a million people earning money, we have to have a really easy way for people to sign up to earn money. And so we created the affiliate program and like, and then a bunch of other things like that, right? And that's one kind of goal. That's like a five-year goal. That's like, I had no idea how to achieve. It was very output oriented and supposed to be sort of an inspirational goal. But then you also set goals like, you know, this quarter, we need to get our, you know, the number of TPS reports filed up by 17%. And those goals can be very effective and important also. You know, and I, I think it's like, uh, it's the,

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  they are useful for different things. They're motivating to different people in different contexts and you should just not confuse each of the goals for each other.

• 1:17:49Logan Bartlett?

  I know you're a big believer in coaches and that a coach will pay for itself as soon as you can afford it. I guess maybe, can you tell the story of your coach? And then ultimately why you think it's important, how you go about assessing a mentor or a coach along the way?

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

  I think I got very lucky. So, you know, with my coach, he was introduced to me by Stuart Alsop, who's our, on our, on our board. The, and was our first, you know, VC investment. And whenever he became CEO, shortly after, he, he recommended I start working with Yozie. And I said, all right, I'll give that a try. And I was honestly a little skeptical at first, but I was like, uh, I guess I took getting better at being a CEO very seriously. And if this thing could help, I wanted to give it a, give it a shot. Um, and

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  Yossi has had taken his previous company public, um, had been a CEO before. And then he pivoted into wanting to do coaching. And I feel very lucky I got someone who had that level of background because I think it's very hard to coach as a CEO if you haven't lived, seen, been part of that. I don't know if you had to be a CEO exactly, but if you haven't at least been an executive or a board member or something, if you haven't been part of those decisions, it's hard to give, to do good coaching.

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  Coaching is valuable because it, it creates a space where you, you, uh, get to have someone who has no incentive other than helping you hold a mirror up for you to what you're saying, what you're doing, what your goals are and helping you and what your intentions are and helping you live more in accordance with those and notice what you're doing better, what you're doing worse. And there's a bit of coaching where it's like literally just advice like,

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  uh, you know, how, what, what are the, what are tactical tricks to handle this given situation? But honestly, like, that's like the, the less important side of, of coaching and mentorship. The more important side is like you're almost,

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  you're learning the questions they ask and you're learning to ask their questions of yourself consistently.

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  The, you, you know, you have a coach that is, you, you have to really, I think the, the way to think about coaching is sort of like, uh, find, selecting a good coach, a little bit selecting a therapist or selecting a good, um, you know, a good partner or something on a, on a startup, a good co-founder. You know it's working when you have more like positive surprises than negative ones. You know it's working when you feel you're growing, you're, you know, the things you learned there, you find yourself repeating to other people. And, uh, and so I, they definitely recommend it, but I also think that a lot of coaches aren't that good. And so like, there's a process of looking and selecting.

• 1:20:45Logan Bartlett?

  How do you go about assessing the relationship and make, is it just, are you getting?

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  I'm the worst person to ask. I got very lucky. I got some great, I got, I'm one for one. I don't know what to tell you. Like, it's like people who like met their sweetheart, high school sweetheart and they were like the person for them. And it's just, it's great. And they're deliriously happy with that person 30 years later. It's like, that's amazing for you, but like, not an actionable plan for anyone else.

• 1:21:08Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah. Hard to extrapolate.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I actually, I have, you need, I have great advice about how to go about learning how to build product. Because I sucked at it and I, I didn't get it right a bunch of times. You know, I actually think Drew, I love Drew, but I bet he gives bad advice to startups about how to go about finding your very first glimmers of product market fit, because he happened to build the right.

• 1:21:32Logan Bartlett?

  Drew Hausen.

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  Drew Hausen. Yeah, yeah. Drew managed to build the right product, just like directly, he just directly somehow. I think he's very, obviously very good at product, but like, he just did it.

• 1:21:44Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:44Speaker 01

  Nobody does that.

• 1:21:45Logan Bartlett?

  That's what I, that's what I feel about Twitter today.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can't, you can't give that advice. Yeah. You can't, you can't advise anyone if you've done, like that's, you don't know how to figure, how to get from failure to success, because you never spent any time in failure.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  Drew has a lot of great advice about scaling a company, uh, because he has a struggle with that.

• 1:22:06Logan Bartlett?

  I want to go back in time. So you were a part of the first original YC batch, which also was Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian, have read it, uh, Sam Altman as well. A- as you look back on the success of the group of people, uh, that came out of that, how much do you put that, just the people innately, the insights and lessons learned, right place, right time, some other variable I'm not thinking about?

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  I mean, I certainly think, you know, I have to, we all have to credit Paul with like being a mentor to all of us. Um, and like really, I do think, you know, leveling us all up a little bit, like I, I absolutely don't think it's a coincidence. But I also think this is true of YC today. It's true of every elite university. Selection effects is some, it's like this massive part of it. And it's not just, it's not so much that Y C was some brilliant filterer that filtered out the best people. It's like, who thought in two thousand and five, remember in two thousand and five when I graduated, it was the smallest computer science class that Yale had graduated in years. Because uh, the tech, the tech was over. Anyone who was like reading Paul Graham's essays, thought it was a good idea to start a startup in two thousand and five.

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  That was a good idea to go take a risk on a thing like Y C. Like that seemed like, it drew in people who turned, it would turn out that that was a, a good, like trap for people who turned out to be ambitious and talented.

• 1:23:35Logan Bartlett?

  And a good vintage to be starting companies.

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  And it was great. It was, it was very counter narrative, which is always the best time to be starting, right? We were, we were starting at the bottom. And so, yeah, Y C classes of like oh five, oh six, oh seven, particularly like before, the density is a little higher. I don't know if that's actually true. The density is pretty high later too, but like, it certainly pulls in a lot of, uh, it pulled in a lot of very talented people because, uh, it was, it wasn't prestigious yet. So you only did it if you were like really committed to wanting to do a startup. Because even though that sounded like, even though everyone was telling you it was a bad idea to do that. Um, and I think that's like, uh, uh, that's actually always still the best reason to start a startup.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  Um, fortunately, starting a startup is so painful that mostly that people still do it. Unlike a lot of things that people do for fun, uh, because they're supposed to. Starting a startup is so painful that most people just select out correctly. Um, because unless you like buying your pain economy size, they don't really recommend it.

• 1:24:40Logan Bartlett?

  What, what did, what did Paul do uniquely well in those early days? I mean, the whole institution he started has obviously lasted and been, but.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  Paul, Paul's supervi, superpower, by far his superpower, like he's, Paul's very smart, good at a lot of things. But it's by far his superpower is you somehow walk away. It's everyone, this would meet me, but also Justin and also everyone else I talked to inside of Y C. You somehow walk away from the conversation with Paul, believing.

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  We are the shit. We are smart, capable, and we're gonna take over the world. And the only thing standing between us and taking over the world is we have to like go grind even harder. We but like Paul believes in us, but it's not what's happening is like Paul is Paul believes in you, so you believe in yourself. But it's not actually somehow he doesn't it doesn't feel like Paul believes in me. It feels like Paul just sees that I'm obviously extremely talented and capable and like, I mean, I'm just I'm the only issue is maybe I'm aiming too small. Should we be aiming bigger?

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  But it feels like he's just noticed this fact that now you can see two. And that is such a gift to be able to give to people because I think I think that did. What it gave us was the most important thing that startup founders need. And I think that anyone doing anything ambitious needs. Which is the like gumption to keep going when things aren't looking so hot midway through. Uh, and Paul really convey like Paul's that's that Paul gives that to people. And I think that's like, that is by far his his greatest talent, which is which is funny because he has a lot of other talents, but like that's uh, that's a big one.

• 1:26:20Logan Bartlett?

  So so it was you, Alexis, uh, Steve Huffman, Paul, like was it Sam Altman? Was it obvious at that point in time that something special was in the room? Or was it, hey, we're in the room with these people?

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  Absolutely not. I mean, yes, in the sense that like, I thought everyone seemed smart and good, but and and like.

• 1:26:46Logan Bartlett?

  But you're coming from Yale and I'm sure there's smart good people there too.

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  And and I'd I'd been in several elite programs in my life that where there's other smart people.

• 1:26:57Speaker 01

  I I had that sense more of like joining tech in San Francisco at that time. Like in Boston and Cambridge, not really. When we moved to San Francisco, it was like, oh. Oh, I'm in the middle of like ground zero of something.

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  And it actually wasn't the first batch. The first batch was just like some weird summer program. But when the batches kept getting bigger and I would meet the new founders and like more companies. And they had a building with much of everyone's in the and like you're is like, oh, oh, well, this is something. The thing is happening around me. That became very clear by like two thousand, by early two thousand seven. Absolutely. But at first, no, it was just, just, it just seemed like a thing. It was cool. I was really grateful I got to do, got to raise money and like start a company, didn't have to go like live with my parents to like. Certain in their basement.

• 1:27:46Logan Bartlett?

  Was it obvious Sam was going to be the leader of the free world?

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  Uh, no. It was obvious Sam was an incredible deals guy. Like he was, he was somehow convincing the uh phone companies to give his startup that like didn't really have a product. Like deals, I still don't know how he did that. And like. He's doing the same thing like convincing Microsoft to like, you know, buy his fusion power like. Sam is still an incredible deals guy, obviously. But that, that was, that, that was the only obvious thing about Sam at the time was like. That he was, he was ambitious, but we had, most of us were pretty ambitious and he was great at. Great, great deals guy.

• 1:28:24Logan Bartlett?

  You said something interesting once. The only reason you ask about TAM is to understand the ambitions of the founder. Can you tell me why, why you think that, why, why you approach investing in that way or why you approach thinking about TAM in that way?

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  What, what was the TAM of uh live reality television?

• 1:28:40Logan Bartlett?

  Uh, whatever Justin was willing to pay you at the time.

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, like nothing basically. Um. And yet that's pretty big. Live streaming is a pretty, pretty big business.

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  I ask people about TAM a lot and I, I'll push them on it. But it's like, it's because. What you're trying to figure out is. Do they have a story? They might have a lot of holes in it and like, or like questionable assumptions. Where like they're trying to build something really great and big. Or do they have a story? That's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I will. No, don't worry about the TAM. We're just going to flip this to Google. In two years, once we hire the talent. Like, that's a really bad sign. Companies don't get built by people who, who are looking for the exit. You want people who are looking to build something big, something great.

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  Because even build something medium sized, you have to be trying to build something really great. And if you're aiming for the aqua hire, you're probably not even gonna get that.

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  And so it's a very important question, but the point is not to like that you can actually analyze the TAM per se.

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  And I think that's a little different for more established founders especially. It's a little different in places where there's more, you need more commitment upfront, more capital upfront to get going. Because the other thing I look for is there's founders who, there's this trap you can wind up in where you start, is the, if you're building for a customer that doesn't exist or like that hates buying software or that like doesn't want to, doesn't want any, anything to do with this whole thing, that's bad. So like,

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  I don't care if your thing credibly, you know, is in, is every developer on earth is actually gonna use your product. But building software for developers is a good plan. There are a lot of developers and they spend a lot of money on software. And so even if you're wrong about your exact thing, it's gonna be okay. Like the software developer market is big. If you're building market for software that's like really for public school librarians, and that's the only people and you're like, and I'm pushing you on like, no, but isn't this bigger than that? And they're like, no, no, it's for public school librarians. I'm really worried for you because even if you like crush it, that's not actually, they don't, nothing wrong with librarians. They don't even buy, they don't like buying software in the first place. And there aren't that many of them. So like,

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  that's maybe not a great idea. And so like, and founders can kind of get trapped in these ideas where they're building, okay, businesses targeted at very small groups of people who don't want to buy their product.

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  And so it's more about your, just in theory, if you executed like crazy and figured out six things that we didn't even think of in this room. On a pivoted idea that's like halfway, only halfway connected to your idea, would that be a big business?

• 1:31:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  No, okay, maybe, maybe we should change ideas.

• 1:31:33Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. There's two options for companies. You can either be, generally, you can either be early or late. And I get the feeling being early is probably better. How do you think about timing a, timing a market and making sure that you're there to ride that wave? And the differences between being too early and too late?

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  Your, every startup that wins, pretty much, not everyone, but like 98%

• 1:32:03Speaker 01

  is too early.

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  Because if you're not too early, you're usually too late. Basically, if you think about it, you're trying to like, there, there is some optimal day.

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  Like literal, there's probably a day where like, start, if you start the company on this day, everything will be available as you need it. There will be sufficient bandwidth to do your idea. There'll be sufficient this to, you know, the monetization techniques will work, the distribution will be in place. But if you start it on that day, someone else, when everything actually becomes available, everyone else, someone else will have started it a year earlier, stupidly. Just by random chance, because every idea is getting started over and over again. And they will be in motion and they will have infrastructure and they will have a product built. And suddenly their product will be working and you will be too late. And so what you're trying to do is,

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  like, so if you think about it for, for Justin TV, we were too early. Bamforth is too expensive to make our business work. And almost honestly, most people couldn't even watch, didn't have good advantage to even watch reasonably quality live video. And the video ad market didn't exist. We didn't have a business. It was impossible, but we, but, but there were other startups that tried to compete with us, several that started later. And they just got destroyed because we'd built global live video infrastructure for the past four years. And they hadn't.

• 1:33:27Speaker 01

  And so, you know, from when the start gun went off on like, oh, no, no, the business works now. There's just, how do you catch up with someone with a four-year head start? Still led by the founder CEO, still like grinding super hard, trying to make it work like you're just screwed. And so a big part of it is if you, if you have faith that your thing is going to work and the pieces are going to come into place. The question for startups is how do you survive? That's why you read so much about like YC's advice is like be a cockroach. Like, don't, don't, don't be a, a graceful swallow, be a cockroach. Because you're usually too early and you just have to survive and survive. Until it's a combination of like you find the secret thing, but often it's actually like you didn't change anything. The market caught up with the future that you saw, that you can't ever time exactly, right?

• 1:34:13Speaker 01

  And suddenly your thing that wasn't good is good and boom. Like Airbnb is a good example of that, actually, I think. Like they, they had a product and yes, they did iterate and they did figure stuff out. But like a big part of it was like, people got comfortable with the idea of like host listing stuff on the internet and renting through, renting other people's stuff. Uh, and, and the business that didn't work and wasn't good became a business that did work and became and was good. And I think that's a, it's a very common pattern.

• 1:34:44Logan Bartlett?

  Talking about cockroaches and you guys were certainly that with Justin TV.

• 1:34:50Logan Bartlett?

  Frugality being something that's important, but maybe not a virtue. Uh, that, that being able to use frugality, I, I've written down here, I assume you said it because it's in quotes. Frugality isn't a virtue in itself, speed is. How do you think about the balance of, of speed and frugality and the ability to execute? The other thing I think you said, the blast radius of startups is low, which is to your advantage as a startup.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, frugality. For uh, Amazon, one of Amazon's core uh, like, like, Amazon, Amazon's Twitch, uh, Amazon's leadership principles, the A L P. Um, one of them is frugality. Um, it's about how leaders should be frugal. And inside of Amazon, there's a saying about like, yeah, yeah, frugality, but don't, you don't, oh, you're going to need to avoid frupidity. Um, because frugality and frupidity are near and far aligned. Because you need to be willing to spend money and to invest for something that's important to do something. But also, but wasting money is very bad. And the difference is one man's investment is, one man's waste is another man's investment and vice versa.

• 1:35:57Speaker 01

  The real thing that kills startups in terms of spending money is usually not overspending on like bandwidth or like server capacity. Or like even marketing, obviously don't run marketing, it doesn't work, it's inefficient, but like what uh, what kills startups is hiring. You hire too many people. And that does kill you because you have this high burn rate and eventually you run out of money, the burn rate kills you. But it also kills you because more people means more slow. Um, and speed is the essence and like hiring is not in alignment with speed. Um, speed is in alignment with speed and so there is a point where you do need to hire more people to go faster. But like, it is later than people think, it's less hiring than people think.

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  Um, and so I think a lot of the advice that get about to startups about frugality is really better framed as advice about. You need to be going fast and that means don't grow your team too much, that creates a lot of drag.

• 1:36:53Logan Bartlett?

  What, what drew you back to Y C as a, as a partner now, like what was, you were at Amazon for a long time, what made you want to go back?

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  I've, I've always wanted to be a Y C partner, like I, uh, I don't know if it's like my forever job, but like I watched my friends go through it. I love advising startups and I was like, oh, that looks fun, I want to try that. And so I just always had the intention of going and doing Y C for a year as a partner. Um, just honestly, because it's like a life experience and I'm really enjoying it so far. Uh, I think there's a chance I do it more ongoing. But I also have, am enjoying like having a little bit more freedom post stopping a C E O and the job, it's a real job at Y C. Like, you know, it's not, not like being a C E O of two thousand percent company, but like, it's a job. Um, and so we'll see if it's like the long-term thing, but no, I just always wanted to, and then once I was free, I was like, oh, well, there's a batch coming up. I guess I could go do that.

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

  And so it's more of, almost more of an impulse thing, less than like a, I have some like, plan of wanting to do it.

• 1:37:46Logan Bartlett?

  What, what do you think's allowed the institution to survive in the way that, that it has? Uh, it's obviously scaled quite a bit over the years.

• 1:37:53Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, Y C is like a, a little like a university.

• 1:37:58Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  Uh, and like universities, it has this very strong network effect. The smart people want to hang out with some other smart people. And want to be at the place where the other smart people are. And that like creates a positive feedback cycle that allows it to scale and, and grow. Um, and makes it hard to, Harvard was the first university in America, weirdly still the most prestigious. That's weird. Like I think Yale was the second university founded in America. Second or third most prestigious, like, that's weird. Uh.

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  Uh, I think that exact same dynamic happens here. And like, it's not a, and unlike the universities, Y C is designed to s- and can scale up a lot more. And so there's, the second place gets, is a little bit smaller. Um, because people can move around more, much more easily now, right? If, if a, if Harvard had been founded in the era where anyone could have flown anywhere. And had an attitude of scale as much as possible. It's not clear there is university two, three, four immediately. Um.

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  And I think Y C has been sustained because it's, it's always had a long-term mindset. Like I remember Paul telling me like, saying like year two or three N. Our biggest advantage in the long run is going to be our alumni, the alumni network. That's what Y C is really building. And they call them alumni, right? It's not, that's, that's a different attitude. Um, and, uh, and so he was thinking that far ahead at the, at the beginning.

• 1:39:26Logan Bartlett?

  I had another question about Y C and I, oh, what do, what do you think the biggest constraint on startups today? The reason that we don't have. Uh, 10 more stripes or a hundred more twitches or 30 more, uh, Airbnbs. Is it because, is it, is it founders? Is it ideas? Is it capital?

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  Sufficiently talented people who, who want to take on the pain of starting a company.

• 1:39:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  Like, pretty much exclusively. There's lots of capital available. Um.

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  I will say, there's, there's a, uh, there's definitely a, a missing, there's like a missing, a few missing gears in that process of like, there are people who should get access to the capital and if they did, they would be successful. And it's not that there isn't enough capital, there's plenty of capital, there's more than enough capital. But like, there's lots of people who think they should have the capital. Many of them are wrong, some of them are right. And the system is like, pretty efficient, but there's definitely some number of people who like, just don't get funded and they should. Because they, because they're bad at pitching, because they don't present,

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  because, because on the surface, it looks, looks wrong, because, because they, they, they can't show you that they should get the funding.

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  And I think that's a shame and like, one of Y C's mission is to sort of find and fund those people, we can't do it perfectly. Were you, were you bad at pitching or did you just hate it? I was okay. Yeah. I wasn't great.

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  I'm, would be a lot better at pitching now and I think I would enjoy it more.

• 1:41:05Speaker 01

  Weirdly at Twitch, after we sold, I, I got to practice sales a lot around with the game, game companies and, and advertising. And I, and also, I started investing. And I, uh, there's no way to do this, but like, if I could give every, every founder, superpart, have them like, go be an investor for two years and then go pitch their company. Cause it's suddenly, I'm like, oh, I see what I was doing wrong. Like now, I know that I'm sitting on the other side of the table, I'm like, oh, oh no, wonder that person like passed my startup. I was, I was explaining it all wrong. I didn't understand their incentives, I didn't understand how they saw the world. And so the most important thing you can do is a, like, I wonder if this would work, if I was, if I was to go back and give earlier Emmett advice on how to pitch better, what I would tell him to do is like,

• 1:41:48Speaker 01

  go find some V C who you're friends with, who like sees good companies. And be like, I will give, do some due diligence for you for free. If you let me sit in on like, you know, a month of pitches and hear the discussion afterwards.

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  Because I think I would have been like, oh, I know how to, I know how to do this. I would have figured out how to pattern match. The problem is like startup founders have only, usually have only seen their pitch. How do you get good at something that you've only, you've only seen your performance at? You don't know what good looks like. And I think that's the, so yeah, that's, if that's what I would, that's what I would tell my pri- priors self to go do.

• 1:42:26Logan Bartlett?

  The information's gotten so much better about VC. I mean, one of the things I, I want to do is try to sort of give elements of how I think or we think and operating, but the pitches, it's, it's almost a voodoo science in and of itself. Are there specific things that you learned in pitching DEA or whatever that you would?

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  There's, um, there's things you can write down that people have written down a thousand times, like, you know, templates and stuff.

• 1:42:54Logan Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 1:42:55Speaker 01

  They're all wrong and they're all bad. Actually, you pitch templates, whether they're pitches for VC money or for like product things. Templates are the enemy. There's certain like aspects you can do, but every pitch is unique because if it wasn't unique, you don't have any unique insight. Like your company is unique. There's a, there are generalizable principles and rules, but there's a template you can go off of. And so, and yet you know it when you see it. And there's like, there's, there is, there is a, I think pitching is one of those things where it's a, it's very much metis. If you know that idea, the idea of like a skill that you learn through organic doing.

• 1:43:32Speaker 01

  There is no training for pitching that would be more effective than just like watching a bunch of pitches. And then the honest brutal discussion afterwards about like whether they think that's a good idea or not. And participating in that.

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  And unfortunately, I don't think anyone's brave enough to put, there's no, I don't know how, you want to create a piece of content that would be like incredibly valuable to founders who are going to pitch. Record three months of every, every partner pitch and every pre-partner pitch for every company and the discussion afterwards and the decision and publish that.

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  And like then edit it down so like you cut out the dead time edit it down and just have people watch that as a as a uh as a

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  uh as a course that would work like people would get a lot better at pitching um unfortunately I don't think the companies would like that I think the partners would be really be awkward but like you need to create some system like that um because that's the that's the only way to get it's like trying to learn how to like cook from a cookbook you learn to cook in a kitchen you don't learn to pitch watching a YouTube video you learn to pitch from a PowerPoint you learn to pitch in the in the pitching room

• 1:44:43Logan Bartlett?

  That's interesting uh shifting gears artificial intelligence um I get the feeling you might have some concerns about the path we're on and some elements of how things are playing out is that

• 1:44:56Speaker 01

  I mean so I guess I have I have a very specific concern with AI like generally I'm I am very pro technology and I really believe in the sort of like

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  the upsides usually outweigh the downsides everything technology can be misused you should usually wait and you should wait until you eventually as we understand it better you want to put in regulations but like regulating early is usually a mistake um when you do do regulation you want to be making regulations that are about uh reducing risk and for uh innovation and actually uh authorizing more innovation innovation is usually good for us

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  I sort of have a very a very high level like syllogism about like like AI that I've come to believe that I think is like correct it's like if

• 1:45:43Speaker 01

  we can build if you consider intelligence to be the capacity to solve problems from a given set of resources to a given goal

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  we are building things that are more and more intelligent like the the we've built an intelligence it's kind of amazing actually we built something like definably it's it may not be the smartest intelligence but it is unintelligence it can solve problems so we've built something that can solve problems like arbitrary problems from arbitrary resources and make arbitrary plans At some point, as it gets better, the kinds of problems that we'll be able to insult solve will include programming, chip design, material science, power production, all of the things you would need to design an artificial intelligence. At that point, you will be able to point the thing we've built back at itself. And this will happen in before you get that point with humans in the loop. It already is happening with humans in the loop.

• 1:46:37Speaker 01

  But that loop will get tighter and tighter and tighter and faster and faster and faster until it can fully self-improve itself. At which point, it will get very fast, very quickly. And a thing that is very, very, very smart, that you generate something that is very good, very intelligent. And by intelligent, again, I mean this capacity to solve problems. There's people, there's lots of ways people, it's a, it's an English word, which means it has no one definition. But I have that, in that sense, we mean that kind of intelligence. And that kind of intelligence is just an intrinsically very dangerous thing. Because intelligence is power. Human beings are the dominant form of life on this planet, pretty much entirely because we're more smarter than the other creatures.

• 1:47:16Logan Bartlett?

  When was the last time intelligence came into, you know, entity at this level?

• 1:47:20Speaker 01

  Right. And within humans, I think people get confused between these two different things. Within the band of human intelligence, intelligence is not the most important thing. Humans have a lot of other attributes. But intelligence is a very important thing for people. We have a lot of other-

• 1:47:32Logan Bartlett?

  Gorillas are more intimidating as a species than we are. But gorillas did not build this studio.

• 1:47:40Speaker 01

  And humans are, like, humans are dangerous as hunters, for example, because we're smart. We do things like, you know, crowd the woolly mammoths off cliffs and set traps and like, uh, human, we have, we have whites in our irises. It's the exact balance of white to color is what communicates what we're looking at. Other primates have black eyes because they don't want the other people, other creatures to see them because they're trying not to give away information. We have the white around the iris because it lets you tell what other people are looking at. We actually have this eerie ability to do it. You know exactly what other people are looking at. Imagine hunting, these creatures are hunting you, and you see one of them. And one of them can like, indicate to them one across the way, that they just saw a deer

• 1:48:24Speaker 01

  by like, looking at the deer. And there's no sound exchanged at all. It's just purely this like, and like, you'd be pretty smart to do like, big, very strong theory of mind to do that.

• 1:48:37Speaker 01

  If you build something that is a lot smarter than us, not like somewhat smarter. Again, within humans, the smartest people don't rule the earth, obviously.

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  But like as much smarter than we are as we are than like dogs, right? Like a, a big jump.

• 1:48:53Speaker 01

  That thing is intrinsically pretty dangerous because if it gets set on a goal that isn't that, that uh, like the, the, the instrumental, first instrumental steps, instrumental convergence. The first instrumental step towards achieving that goal is we'll go first. Step one, if, if this is easy for you because you're really just that smart. Well, step one is to like take over the planet, right? Like it's like, then I just have control over everything and then, and then step two, solve my goal.

• 1:49:18Logan Bartlett?

  Can you define instrumental convergence for those that didn't sit through three and a half hours of me talking to L A.

• 1:49:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so instrumental convergence is this idea that like, uh, often when you're trying to achieve a goal, step one is to achieve a instrumental goal along the way. So like if you want to like, for example, like, uh,

• 1:49:39Speaker 01

  uh, what's, what's a?

• 1:49:40Logan Bartlett?

  Paperclips is the one that?

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, so, uh, no, I, I'm thinking more like an instrumental, instrumental convergence. Uh, I'm trying to give an example for where it happens to people and their people's lives. Um, oh, in chess, um, your actual goal is to checkmate them. But like along the way to checkmaking them, checkmaking them, most of the time, one of the things you want to do is take their pieces. Now, you could not take their pieces. There's probably, I bet a really, a really good chess player against a kind of mediocre one could checkmate them without taking any pieces. Just like trapping their, their, but like, that's like even more impressive. But like generally speaking, if you're just trying to win a game of chess, taking their queen, taking their pawns, taking, taking their pieces is a good idea. It like makes it easier to checkmate them. And so I can predict something about almost anyone, any good chess player.

• 1:50:27Speaker 01

  They'll take a bunch of their pieces, they'll take the other person's queen eventually, probably. In the same way, you can predict, uh, that corporations, uh,

• 1:50:37Speaker 01

  Uh, that want to expand into a new market. There's an instrumental goals like step one, they'll probably hire people in that market. It's like just predictable. And in general, if you want to accomplish most goals, like big goals, step one is like accumulate a lot of money and power. Like if you have, if you have a goal of uh, changing the world. It accumulating money and power or accumulating followers who like care, listen to you and will do what you say. These things are like, obviously good first steps. Even if you don't, you didn't even know what the next goal was, they would be good first steps. And if you know what it is, they're definitely good for steps. Step one, if you can achieve it along the way to, to achieving any big goal, yeah, paper clips is the traditional one.

• 1:51:17Speaker 01

  Um, is first, just as if you, if you can pull this off, which like you can't, humans can't do this. We don't think of goals like this because we're not capable enough. But if you could pull it off, step one would be like, well, first I'm just gonna like, literally just make sure I have total control over everything at all times. And then step two, I'll like do whatever it, step two, do the thing. Easy. I already have control over everything. No one can stop me. I have access to all the resources. Simple. Um. And I think people just don't, it's hard, it's hard to, people don't imagine sufficiently capable as sufficiently capable. Um.

• 1:51:57Speaker 01

  And then, so then, and some, some people have this idea like, oh, what if we just don't give it goals? Well, first of all, we are giving it goals. People are already building agents, but let's just say we didn't.

• 1:52:07Speaker 01

  And so you ask this oracle, what's the best way for me to accomplish goal X? And it knows.

• 1:52:15Speaker 01

  If it takes you literally. Um, and it, and it, it actually answers your question correctly. The answer to your question will, will be a thing that causes you to bootstrap an AI that then takes over the world and accomplishes the goal. That's the most reliable way to accomplish that goal. Now.

• 1:52:34Speaker 01

  I just laid out a chain of argument with a lot of if this, then this, if this, then this, if this, then this. Uh, I know Eliza thinks that like we're all doomed for sure.

• 1:52:47Speaker 01

  I buy his doom argument. I buy the chain and the logic. I just think that like, first of all, I'm less optimistic that the current set of technology is going to get to self bootstrapping superintelligence. I'm less optimistic than he is that or good optimism or pessimism, whatever. I'm less, I'm less sure than he is that when it hits that self bootstrapping step, that that process will be fast and that we will, that there aren't important new discoveries that will take a long time on top of that, that we haven't found. I'm less sure that, uh,

• 1:53:23Speaker 01

  so there's an idea of alignment, getting it, you could make the AI such that it wants the same things we want. And then if you ask it to do the thing, it won't go and do horrible things because it's not dumb and it's aligned. And if it wants the same things, it knows what you mean. It's smart. And it has, it has aligned goals. Hooray. Like that'll work great. I'm, uh, Eliza thinks that we're like just alignments, this incredibly hard problem that like is almost unsolvable and we're doomed. I'm like, not so sure. I think it's a more solvable problem than he thinks it is for a variety of reasons. You know, just it would take too long to like go into it, but like my, my belief is that it's easier. And so, uh, as a result, like my P doom, my probability of doom is like,

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  my bid ask spread on that's pretty high because I have a lot of uncertainty, but I would say it's like between like

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  five and 50. So there's a wide spread.

• 1:54:16Logan Bartlett?

  Which I think Paul Cristiano, Paul Cristiano, who handled, uh, you know, a lot of the stuff within OpenAI, I think said 25 to 50. It seems like if you, if you talk to most AI researchers, there's some preponderance of people that's give some percentage.

• 1:54:31Speaker 01

  That should cause you to shit your pants.

• 1:54:33Logan Bartlett?

  But it's human level extinction. I think.

• 1:54:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No, no, it's not just human level extinction. It's such, extincting humans is bad enough. It's like potential destruction of all value in the light cone. Like, like not just for us, but for any species caught in the wake of the explosion, like. Uh, it's like a universe destroying bomb like it's really if if if if if it's really bad. It's bad in a way that's like makes global warming like not a problem. It's bad in a way that makes no normal kinds of bad not a that's not nor. Normally I'm like, yeah, we'll just roll the dice. It's fine. We'll figure it out later.

• 1:55:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:07Speaker 01

  No, no, like this should go. This is not a figure it out later thing. This is like a big fucking problem.

• 1:55:12Logan Bartlett?

  Southern Manhattan Miami might go underwater like, oh, okay, but this is we're talking about. And so why do you think, I mean, I, I.

• 1:55:19Speaker 01

  It's, it's like someone figured out how to invented a way to make like 10x more powerful fusion bond bombs out of like sand and bleach.

• 1:55:27Speaker 01

  That like could anyone could do at home.

• 1:55:29Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:32Speaker 01

  It's terrifying and, and I've had enough time with it now that I can laugh about it. When I first realized it was fucking heart stopping.

• 1:55:41Logan Bartlett?

  When was that?

• 1:55:42Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 1:55:47Speaker 01

  Probably like.

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  It's, it was, it was a dinner I went to before. When opening, I was just getting, we had basically right after attention is all you need. Had been written like, and they sort of realized the scaling laws were there. And I went to a dinner and someone was there and they were talking about it and they were like, I think we were, were, uh. We actually might be on the, the path to build with general AI.

• 1:56:13Logan Bartlett?

  Attention you all need was 2018?

• 1:56:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think early 2017.

• 1:56:17Logan Bartlett?

  2017.

• 1:56:19Speaker 01

  And.

• 1:56:19Logan Bartlett?

  Google paper.

• 1:56:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, Google paper that kicked this all off and, uh. And I, I heard about the problem. I thought about it. I just had, I'd like, I'd been like, the, the AI doom thing seems plausible, whatever. Like, I don't think an AI is coming anytime soon. So I'm just not gonna think about it that hard yet.

• 1:56:36Speaker 01

  And then I was like, oh, maybe. And then I started thinking about it harder. And then I was like, oh, shit. Oh, oh, oh.

• 1:56:43Speaker 01

  And so, uh.

• 1:56:46Speaker 01

  Uh, I guess.

• 1:56:49Speaker 01

  The, the, I believe the proper response is like. Unfortunately, this isn't the kind of thing where.

• 1:56:57Speaker 01

  Uh, we can stop forever.

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  And it unfortunately is also the kind of thing where like more time is good. Like I'm actually, I'm, I'm okay with stretching out the time a little bit, but like ultimately to solve the problem. I think this is one of my biggest points of diversions with, uh, Yudkowsky.

• 1:57:16Speaker 01

  He is a mathematician philosopher, you know, decision theorist by training. I am an engineer. And my, everything I have ever learned about engineering is the only way you will ever get something that works. If you need to work on the first try, is to build lots of prototypes and models at a smaller scale and practice and practice and practice and practice and and try, start, start building the thing, but like smaller. And if there is a world where we survive, it is, and everything goes wrong, where we build an AI that's smarter than humans and we survive it. It's been gonna be because we built smaller AIs than that and we actually had lots of, as many people, smart people as we can, working on that and taking the problem seriously.

• 1:58:02Speaker 01

  And so I'm, I'm generally, I'm in favor of trying to create, cause we got a fire alarm where we like, like maybe not AIs bigger than X at some point, like trying to like create a, and I actually think there's good reason to believe, like, nobody wants to end the world and this argument is not that hard to understand. And so I actually think there's a good, there's a good option for international cooperation and like treaties about some sort of, you know, the AI test ban treaty about not bigger than X. At some point, I don't think, I don't think we're actually at the point where it needs to be not bigger than our, the current AIs are just not that smart yet. But I think we should be moving towards creating that kind of a, some kind of soft, I don't know, we have to figure out what that looks like, cause it's, it's trickier to set that than it. Setting that rule is way harder than it looks. Writing good policy is hard. We should be thinking about it now.

• 1:58:46Speaker 01

  I just think we're not, we're ready for, for it yet. But in the meantime, on these smaller models, we, it is good that lots of people are fucking around with them. It's good that we have more and more people trying to figure out how they work and trying to figure out how you can make them do things, how, figure out how to make them do bad things. The best way to figure out how to stop a big AI from doing bad things, well, that's the best way. There's a bunch, it is true. There's a bunch of failure modes for super intelligent AIs that don't exist in less super intelligent AIs and we better not bet on, oh, don't worry, it works, it works in the dumb ones. No, no, that's not how it works. You can't do that. But like, we will figure it, we are figuring out more and more about the principles of how it works. And if, if we survive, it's gonna be because that process produces a

• 1:59:30Speaker 01

  a good generalized understanding, a good generalized model of how these kinds of predictive models, which I think includes humans as we are some kind of very complex predictive model. With other stuff too, but like that's a big part of what a human is. We'll understand how those work at a deeper level. We'll have some of some science of it, actually. And that's what we need. We need a science of AIs. Right now we have an engineering of AIs and no science of AIs. And we need to get, use the engineering to bootstrap ourselves into a science of AIs. Before we build a super intelligent AI. So that it doesn't tell us all.

• 2:00:02Logan Bartlett?

  Why do you think people are struggling with the discourse around this? Like very smart people seem to abject.

• 2:00:08Speaker 01

  It's very, very obvious, very obvious. Mood affiliation rules everything around me. People don't make decisions on a reasoning basis. I mean, myself included, most of the time. I happen to like. I happen to find this problem interesting and compelling on its own. So I spend a lot of time like digging into the arguments themselves. Because I was like drawn to it. But like, most of the time, I make decisions the same way as everyone else does. The person pitches me on pitching me on the flat earth thing. Who's saying that like a bunch of things. I don't really like listen to them. I just like. I can, they say some things and it triggers like, oh, you're part of that tribe. Those people generally, I don't think, think very clearly. I'm just going to discount everything you're saying and ignore you.

• 2:00:45Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, Robin Hanson talks about nine 11 people. And it's like, you don't argue with them. You just sort of move on from the conversation.

• 2:00:52Speaker 01

  And the AI people sound like. Uh, religious nuts. Who are telling you about the ends of the doomsday end of the world. And it sadly, pattern matches really nicely, right? Like the AI is like the, you know, is like the Antichrist is coming and you know. If what if we're good, the good AI will come and save us from that. It's like, it sounds like, like. Uh. Christian rapturous.

• 2:01:15Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 2:01:16Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 2:01:17Logan Bartlett?

  Last of us, what was?

• 2:01:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It, uh, unfortunately, um. Reasoning from fictional evidence is it doesn't work. And that mood affiliation reminds me of this is not an argument. And the earth is not round because the flat earthers sound crazy. The earth is round because you can demonstrably. See that the earth is round and go measure that yourself and it's true. And if you make decisions based on anyone who's telling you that doing X will unleash a force which is going to kill us all, they sound like a bunch of crazy religious people. Because it's never happened before. It's never happened before. Guaranteed, guaranteed, the first time that's true,

• 2:01:58Speaker 01

  we're all dead. Because your algorithm always predicts the same thing. The thing you're going through in your head always predicts the same outcome for anyone who is predicting doom from creating a powerful force beyond human ability. Now, it is true, you should be skeptical in general when someone proposes that, because there are a lot, there are infinity examples from the past 3,000, you know, 6,000 years of history of people predicting that falsely about things. And, and people, people made imaginary cures for medicine, medicinal cures for like tinctures that were supposed to cure you for a very, very long time, and then we made one that worked. And, and you just can't reason that way. Sometimes, sometimes

• 2:02:43Speaker 01

  it's new. Sometimes it's not like before. Usually it's like before, and sometimes it's not. And I, I am personally convinced, this time it is not like before. And I encourage everyone who's in that mode, like, the main thing that, what I want you to pay attention to is, listen to me like, people like me, listen to people like, even Yudkowsky, who I disagree with on the amount of doom, but we're like pro cryonics, pro technology, like technology's gonna fix all our problems crazies. Like if I, if I have a, if I have a defect, it's that I am too pro technology. I want too little regulation, like. Are you doing cryonics, by the way? I have not signed up yet. I really should. It's one of those things on my to-do list. I'm failing the rationality test. Yes.

• 2:03:28Speaker 01

  But you're a techno-optimist. I'm a techno-optimist. And like, and most of, you should notice that the people, the people who are affected by this particular one are not like the people who generally predict. We're not Paul Ehrlich. Paul Ehrlich is full of shit on like, oh, the doom is coming, the population bomb. He is wrong, and weirdly so, and refuses to learn from his lesson. That he's wrong again. He's wrong over and over again.

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  This is not like that. Like, I am not panicked about global warming. I think, I think warming is a real, a real thing. I don't want to say like, I don't want anyone to walk away thinking like, I think global warming isn't real, but like, I believe, I, I believe in technology. The engineers will figure it out. Don't worry. It's gonna be fine. I'm like, quite sure. It might have some, well, depending on whether we have the political will to get around to it quickly or not, it might have more or less dire consequences, but like, we will figure it out eventually. It will be fine. We will figure, we will get this. I do, and, and it's okay. So here, here I am being the guy who's like, the techno optimist, and I am like, no, no, no, the AI thing, this thing though, actually, maybe, maybe a problem. And I think if you're, if you are rejecting it because we sound like a bunch of crazies, just notice that like,

• 2:04:39Speaker 01

  at least some number of people who are worried about this

• 2:04:45Speaker 01

  are not, are on, I'm on your team. I'm on the techno optimist team. Really think, and it, and it's not, it's not obvious why it's true. It takes a good deal of engagement with the material to see why it's true, because at first, at first, it seems like it shouldn't be that big of a deal. It shouldn't be that big of a problem. But then the more you dig in, the more you realize like, oh, well, actually, but wait a second. And it is. And so like, I just encourage people to engage with the technical merits of the argument and I always welcome people to come to, to, you know, ask questions, but also like, if you want to debate, no, no, I have an idea. We can align it this way, do this, and it will create, you know, it will create the AI that like, cares about things we care about.

• 2:05:27Speaker 01

  We want your ideas. Like, that's great. Let's have an argument about that. Self-improvement won't work. Okay, if, no, because like, people have said self-improvement will work in the past and it never did. Then I don't want to hear it, because whatever, it's not a real argument. But if you have an actual, like, argument about how the current learning techniques won't work for that for some reason, engineering reason.

• 2:05:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Let's talk about it.

• 2:05:50Logan Bartlett?

  Well, I'm glad we spent all this time building your credibility as a normal person. Just gotta go off the rails here. But, but seriously, I mean, it's

• 2:05:59Logan Bartlett?

  it is something that people are like genuinely concerned about. And there's no incentive you have. Mark Andreessen published something recently about like AI and he had a bunch of different points against it. But the AI killing everyone point was the first one. And I think it went back to a lot of discourse around people that profit from this is their business and this is how they make money. And therefore that's what why they're intended to communicate in this way. You are not, I, as far as I know, your business is not in dooms, doomsday scenario planning around AI.

• 2:06:36Speaker 01

  I have no financial stake in, in either doomsday scenario planning around AI or the other weird like double think 40 chess thing people impute to, it is like, oh, we're actually trying to build up OpenAI and Anthropic as being and Google as being like super powerful. And it's all an ego thing about making, talking about how amazingly great this stuff is so that we can like raise more money for OpenAI.

• 2:06:58Logan Bartlett?

  For regulatory capture or whatever.

• 2:07:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And like, like, I don't own any equity in any of these things.

• 2:07:03Logan Bartlett?

  You're not trying to help your 2006 batchmate or 2005 batchmate Sam Altman?

• 2:07:08Speaker 01

  No, he's, he's, Sam Altman's really good at raising money. Like, he does not need my help.

• 2:07:12Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 2:07:12Speaker 01

  I, I promise.

• 2:07:13Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. What would you recommend to people? I mean, if they are curious about all of this stuff and like, I, when people ask me about it, because I've had Eliezer on, they're like, so now what? And I'm like, ah, you know, call your congressman. I don't, I don't know.

• 2:07:29Speaker 01

  So there's sort of two paths that you can, where you can contribute if you care about this problem. One is, if you're technical and you're technically minded and you think that you,

• 2:07:40Speaker 01

  if you want to work on it, like, go learn how the AIs work and work on interpretability and work on courageability and

• 2:07:52Logan Bartlett?

  Can you define those terms?

• 2:07:53Speaker 01

  So interpretability is like understanding what's going on inside the AI.

• 2:07:56Logan Bartlett?

  Which we have very little understanding of right now.

• 2:07:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And courageability is, is how do you make a decision-making thing that is willing to be corrected?

• 2:08:07Speaker 01

  By others. Because that's where Elijah has a lot to say about this, because it's kind of a decision theory thing. How do you get it to sort of like? Believe that? Even though everything it knows seems like this is the best way of doing it. The other people are telling me that's not right, and so I'm open to being corrected by their point of view. How do you make it sort of this, how do you give something humility almost in a way, right? And and we have no idea to do that either. We've made some, we've made more progress on interpretability than courageability. But we made a little bit of progress on both, and we're making more on interpretability. And? What my real pitch for this is, it's actually really interesting. There's just stuff lying around that no one's checked, no one's tried.

• 2:08:50Speaker 01

  It's like when the microscope was invented and suddenly like you could just make a scientific career by like pointing microscopes at things. And like, there were like lots of things to point the microscope at that no one had ever looked at before. We have a mind you can go look at and examine and experiment with. We've never had one of those before. And so there's a bunch of like interesting, kind of like scientific work to do. I would encourage you to go do scientific work on AIs. Go take the AIs other people have built and then the engineering. And try to see what science you can do to them, particularly around interpreting what's going on inside them or how you get them to accept corrective feedback.

• 2:09:25Speaker 01

  If you're more, if you're not technically minded and you don't feel like learning how to like actually build a transformer.

• 2:09:31Speaker 01

  There you have, there's less obvious how you contribute directly. But I think mostly like.

• 2:09:39Speaker 01

  Helping correct the debate and correct the tone of the discussion because this like? The super intelligent AI must kill it, might kill everyone thing gets wrapped together with a bunch of other concerns about AI that are real, that are things, but they're like normal concerns like. Will it just cause discrimination? Job loss. What called job loss like? I know that like? That stuff's all like a thing, but like honestly, on those things, I sort of feel about it the way I feel about most regulation more like. You know, like it's a little early, probably, there probably will be a good regulation to write. We don't know what it looks like, the area is evolving so fast, very hard to write good, good regulation.

• 2:10:15Speaker 01

  Don't let that get confused.

• 2:10:18Logan Bartlett?

  Job loss doesn't kill everyone.

• 2:10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's AI ethics and then there's AI not kill everyoneism. And the AI not kill everyone thing is like, we need the AI to not kill everyone. Don't let people mush it together when you hear people conflating the two, correct the record. Because they're just not the same idea.

• 2:10:43Speaker 01

  And they're not the same kind of problem and they won't be solved with the same kind of tools. And

• 2:10:53Speaker 01

  the danger is that those two get sort of wrapped together into some thing that gets rejected by people who just like, well, I don't who reject the AI safety, AI ethics stuff that they is like, well, this doesn't really make sense, which I kind of agree with a lot of the people who say like, most of that stuff kind of doesn't make sense to me. I could see in theory, maybe some of it.

• 2:11:13Speaker 01

  We will throw out the good part with the bad.

• 2:11:16Logan Bartlett?

  And a lot of that other stuff is true of almost any technology, right?

• 2:11:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that stuff is just general, it's general technological like.

• 2:11:23Logan Bartlett?

  And that's my thing of why I think Silicon Valley in particular has struggled to talk about this. And I don't even know what my fully formed opinions are on this stuff, but it's that for a long time, Silicon Valley has been accused of all the negative externalities that are going to come from whatever the technology is that we've been abraded around. And so everyone's very used to being defensive about like, oh, job loss is coming.

• 2:11:48Speaker 01

  Everyone's on the on the defense against anything critical, like sort of broadly critical of new technologies because it pattern matches to a bunch of people who go around throwing up chaff in the air, attacking everything all the time, even when it doesn't really make any sense. And so it's easy to slot it into that, to slot the whole thing into that thing and just, you know, throw it away. And I just think like,

• 2:12:14Speaker 01

  the, there's a piece of that that is different than the norm. It's hard, mood affiliation drives most of our decision making and it's hard to get people to notice that.

• 2:12:25Logan Bartlett?

  I have three more questions. How are you on time? Can we keep going?

• 2:12:29Speaker 01

  That was it.

• 2:12:30Logan Bartlett?

  We're almost at 30, so we're way over time.

• 2:12:35Speaker 01

  What's my calendar here?

• 2:12:40Speaker 01

  Oh, I have to meet my friend. Uh, let me just text my friend real quick.

• 2:12:43Logan Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 2:12:45Logan Bartlett?

  These won't be nearly as long as AI ethics.

• 2:13:11Logan Bartlett?

  Alright.

• 2:13:14Logan Bartlett?

  There's a graphic you tweeted out about income that you said you keep handy for dinner parties.

• 2:13:20Logan Bartlett?

  Why do you keep that graphic? We'll show it on screen as we're talking, but why do you find that graphic so interesting?

• 2:13:26Speaker 01

  It shows.

• 2:13:28Logan Bartlett?

  I think on a more optimistic note than the one we were just on there.

• 2:13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It, it, it shows, so first of all, the, the fundamentals of what it shows is in general, people getting much richer. Households getting much richer in specific. House, you know.

• 2:13:42Speaker 01

  The, the, almost all of it is the, the bulk of this curve moving down and that the big spike on the right isn't a small number of people getting much wealthier. It's a lot more people making 200, that more than $200,000 a year, like 8% of the population.

• 2:13:57Logan Bartlett?

  And for people listening, it's like a distribution since 1970 or something of income and maybe families.

• 2:14:04Speaker 01

  Household, household income.

• 2:14:05Logan Bartlett?

  Household income.

• 2:14:05Speaker 01

  In real terms.

• 2:14:06Logan Bartlett?

  And in real terms, and so it slides from like a, you know, sliding kind of smiling graph to be much more on the 200K plus side of the axis.

• 2:14:15Speaker 01

  And, but the other thing that happens is it goes from being a pretty defined like bell curve to like this weird, like, almost like exponential decay shape. Like, there's still a lump in the bell curve area, but like, it's less and less a bell curve and more and more flat, like an exponential decay curve of people making every bucket, people makes, there are slightly fewer people in the bucket, but actually there's about as many people in 40,000, 30 to 40 as there are in 50 to 60, as there are in 60 to 70, as there are in 70 to 80. It's actually, the main story is the flattening. Of the distribution. And what that flattening means is it used to be there was a normal income. Uh, normal household income was thirty, thirty-five thousand dollars a year. And if you were within, and some people made a little bit more and some people made a little bit less, but

• 2:15:00Speaker 01

  for the most part, everyone was in the mode, they had, they made, they, there was, there was a real modal income. The, the, there was a most common income. And most people made relatively close, mo- almost everyone made relatively close to that, that amount of money. And what has been happening, and then you have a few, some number of very rich people and like medium rich people, but like the bulk of society was in that thing. And what's been happening is

• 2:15:25Speaker 01

  there isn't really a norm anymore. We've destroyed the norm and instead, there's just

• 2:15:32Speaker 01

  some people made a lot more money, some people made a lot, a lot more money, some people made a medium amount more money, some people made a little more money. But like in general,

• 2:15:43Speaker 01

  everyone's do- making like, uh, everyone's making more, but the, the there isn't a, it's hard, everyone can now look to the person to the left and the person to the right, there's like lots of people making a lot more money than me and lots of people making a lot less money than me for most people. And that feels bad, feels like inequality. I mean, it also is inequality actually, but but everyone's getting richer, which is good. And yet somehow it's this flattening that creates this sense of like being left behind. And I don't quite know what to do about it because it, it's a, it's a very optimistic story on the one hand of like American households generally getting much wealthier and many, many more people having access to more uh, resources, which is good. That's the good, we'd like that.

• 2:16:29Speaker 01

  There is a slight spike at the very bottom of people with, with almost nothing. I think that's, that is, that's also an issue.

• 2:16:36Speaker 01

  And it's not to say there aren't any issues in our society, like, you know, obviously healthcare, education, housing all costs too much, but.

• 2:16:44Speaker 01

  Like, the, the real, uh, underlying thing that bothers people that, uh, that, on the other side of like this, this flattening out, I'm not quite sure how you, how do you, how do you, how do you fix that without like making everyone really poor? There's an easy way to fix it. Make everybody poor. Go back. Everyone, take, take a bunch of money from everybody. It's easy to break things. It's easy to make people more poor. Um, and so I think a big part of what happens there is as it's, you get spread out more, you have the, the housing in the middle. Um, the people in the middle can't afford things that get bit up. If there's a good that gets, where there's a limited supply and it's getting bit up. And you make, you're making more money on that particular good, you are screwed.

• 2:17:30Speaker 01

  And that sounds a lot like education and housing to me.

• 2:17:33Logan Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 2:17:33Speaker 01

  Um, and so I think that's a, that's a big part of why it feels so bad for people. Um, which is why I care so much about getting more housing made, making education more available. I think these, these things are very important.

• 2:17:44Logan Bartlett?

  You recently turned forty and you did a Tim Urban-ish layout of your life and time spent. Doing that exercise, was it on a weekly basis?

• 2:17:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, every week, yeah.

• 2:17:53Logan Bartlett?

  Over a week? Did an internalization of turning forty and laying graphically out how you spent your time, did, were there any takeaways from, from that that you?

• 2:18:02Speaker 01

  No, I, I mean, I kind of, I knew the story already.

• 2:18:04Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:05Speaker 01

  Um, it was just kind of cool to see it all laid out. Um, and, uh, I guess my biggest takeaway was, man, I spent a long time in school.

• 2:18:13Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:14Speaker 01

  Like a really long time. Like maybe longer than I needed to. Like maybe I could have started working earlier in retrospect.

• 2:18:19Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:19Speaker 01

  Uh, that was, not, not, not many surprises. It was fun though. It's like fun to, I encourage everyone to do it. It's fun to lay your life out like that and take a look at it.

• 2:18:26Logan Bartlett?

  You live in San Francisco. Are you optimistic about San Francisco?

• 2:18:30Speaker 01

  Absolutely. The city is, uh, doing, doing much better than it was during COVID. COVID was very hard on San Francisco, I think. Um, we have problems. Um, you know, the fentanyl crisis is really real. People are dying in the streets. It's like, not okay.

• 2:18:45Speaker 01

  But we also have a lot of really big advantages. And there's a lot of good happening in the city, too. And I'm.

• 2:18:53Speaker 01

  I think I'm most encouraged by the number of people I know who. Have built their careers and their lives here and who are committed to the city and who are. Not leaving and they're planning to do the work to try to make San Francisco a better place where it's. You know. The core things that everybody cares about, right? Like, you shouldn't be people who. Don't have anywhere to live, dying on the streets. There shouldn't be. Obvious rampant crime, people being victimized by that. Left and right.

• 2:19:21Speaker 01

  There shouldn't be, housing shouldn't be so expensive that like. You have to be rich to have access to it.

• 2:19:28Speaker 01

  There should be better transit options for people. They don't, they don't want them stuck in traffic. Like, the park, we have more and better parks. Like, I don't know, there's. And none of these things are controversial. And in fact, I wouldn't even say any of these things are. Things that we want, we don't. All, we don't have wide agreement that we should go do.

• 2:19:48Speaker 01

  It's a matter of, I think that. I pretty strongly disagree with many of the people who, but. What will cause the outcome? But I, I think the good news is we're all aligned on wanting the same things. And so. It's just a matter of. Getting the right plan in place with the right people executing it. And these kinds of changes are not. Startups are all about speed. Politics and government policy is all about consistency. And so that's, that's sort of where my focus is, just, you know. Keep. Keep turning the wheel.

• 2:20:18Logan Bartlett?

  Last one before I let you go. What's, what's a piece of conventional Silicon Valley wisdom that you wholeheartedly disagree with or think people get wrong?

• 2:20:27Speaker 01

  The, the, most of the. Wholehearted wisdom in Silicon Valley. Is a hundred percent correct. For certain people in certain contexts and a hundred percent wrong for other people in other contexts. And trying to get with a piece of advice that's always wrong is like. Pretty hard, because like that's, you know, advice is over generalization. And so it almost always is true in some context. What about proportionally gets said? Yeah, it's said a lot and like is, is, should be said relatively is usually not right.

• 2:21:03Speaker 01

  Oh, I, I know startups hire A players. Startups should not be trying to hire A players when you can be trying if you want. You're not, you're lying to yourself.

• 2:21:12Speaker 01

  You don't know what an A player looks like. If you did, they wouldn't work for you. You might be an A player because you like the founding team like might be A players. Potential, you hope, you hope you are, that's your goal, but like, and you might hire some A players because you attract them and they like believe in the mission. I'm not saying you never hire an A player, but they think you're gonna hire all A players. I mean, come on, no, you're not, that's just like a lie. And, and, and that's okay. And this idea that you can separate people into sort of A players and B players. And I know what people mean by it, it's like you want to hire like the most talented people in the entire world. But actually, what you really want to hire are talented people who will work hard and believe in the mission and who want to work for you. And like, there are a lot of those people and you should go hire them.

• 2:21:59Speaker 01

  And, uh,

• 2:22:03Speaker 01

  and that, that, that, that idea is like this sort of toxic elite idea that like, I think, I just think is ridiculous. Like that's, you can't do it and you shouldn't try most of the time. And then you have companies that are on the very, very cutting edge of technology where you better hire pretty much all A players, you're gonna die. And you have to hire very slowly. Renaissance Technologies is basically Renaissance Technologies is a hedge fund that actually hires only eight, like you have to have published multiple groundbreaking math papers before they'll like, they'll hire you like in statistics, like they're, they're not joking around, they're actually hiring A players. It might be the most interesting business in the world, or at least on a very short list. Yeah, yeah, but like, you're not rent tech. Yeah. Don't kid yourself. Yeah, yeah, good.

• 2:22:48Speaker 01

  Well, Emmett, thanks for doing this. Thank you, it was very fun.