What's for Dinner? AI-Driven Commerce with Instacart CEO Fidji Simo

Fidji Simo, the CEO of Instacart and co-founder of Metrodora Institute, a medical center and research institute for neuroimmune axis disorders, shares her personal journey from growing up in France, to leading the Facebook app, to becoming a wartime CEO. Fidji talks about the future of Instacart, their AI strategy, how the current era of AI is different from prior ML waves, and the impact of LLMs in commerce, robotics and healthcare. She also shares how she earns followership from her teams. ** No Priors is taking a summer break! The podcast will be back with new episodes in three weeks. Join us on July 20th for a conversation with Devi Parikh, Research Director in Generative AI at Meta. ** No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode. Show Links: May 31, 2023: Instacart users can now plan meals using AI - Fast Company Profile May 13, 2023: Instacart CEO Fidji Simo makes groceries personal. Now she’s doing the same for women’s health December 2, 2021: Rapid Response: Re-founding Instacart, w/ first-time CEO Fidji Simo | Podcast: Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman Metrodora Institute Fidji Simo’s LinkedIn Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Fidjissimo Show Notes: [00:01] - Leading With Impact and Authenticity [11:48] - Implementing AI [17:28] - Future of Grocery Shopping With AI [25:38] - AI in Advertising and Commerce [32:54] - Metrodora: AI in Biotech and Healthcare [34:18] - The positive impact of AI, mitigating harm & role of regulations

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

• 0:05Sarah Guo?

  Welcome to No Priors. Today, we're speaking with Fidji Simo, the CEO of Instacart, the leading grocery technology company and co-founder of the Metrodora Institute, whose mission is to cure neuroimmune access disorders. She's also the former leader of the big blue app, Facebook. Instacart is transforming the way we shop, making it possible for millions of busy people to get the groceries they need from the retailers they love. We're really excited to explore Fiji's refounding of Instacart, their use of AI, and the impact of AI on commerce and healthcare. Fiji, welcome to No Priors.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Sarah, and Yalad.

• 0:36Sarah Guo?

  Let's start with some personal background. You've been a star leader in technology for a long time, from strategy at eBay to meteoric rise to product and eventually beloved leader of Facebook and now CEO of Instacart. That is a wide range of different things. What's driven your career decisions?

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Wow, that's a hard question to start with. I think it sounds cliche, but it was all about where could I have impact on problems I deeply cared about? And I always say that I am a pragmatic technologist. And what I mean by that is that I love technologies that solve real problems for real people. And eBay was a good example of that. You know, when I joined the company, I was kind of in love with this idea of like all of these like communities of collectors exchanging goods, but really exchanging their passion. And I was fascinated by that. And then, you know, my transition to Facebook was very similar. I was an immigrant in the US and I was starting to see that it was so much easier to stay in touch with my family

• 1:40Speaker 01

  back in France thanks to Facebook. And then transitioning to Instacart was kind of similarly about the mission. You know, I thought the idea of connecting people to the retailers they love so that they can enjoy the food they love and spend more time with their family was so critical. And food is, you know, one of the most important things in our lives. And so it felt like I could have a big impact there as well.

• 2:06Sarah Guo?

  Yeah, amazing. I remember what an impression you made on me when we first met when you were at Facebook. Like, you are very French, you wear lipstick and heels. You've led some of the most iconic products and companies in the tech world, but you don't subscribe to some of the, let's say Silicon Valley monoculture. And you were clearly very conscious of that. Like, why is that important to you? Or how do you think about like cultural image and how you present as a leader?

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I've been French since I was born. I have been wearing lipstick and high heels since I was 12. So it is such a big part of me that it was never a conscious decision. It was just about being me. And then when I arrived in Silicon Valley, a lot of people were commenting on that. And I was like, pretty surprised because, you know, that was just me being me. And they were telling me, well, you know, especially as you move into product development, you really need to blend in with the engineers. So like, remove the makeup, tie up your hair, start wearing a hoodie. And I did that for one day at Facebook. No one recognized me. I would pass in the hallways. No one would say hi.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  And the reality is that it felt like a lot of effort and work not to be you. And when I thought about it, I realized like, you know, if I have a lot of effort and energy to put into something, I'd much rather put it into building amazing products than trying to shape myself into something I'm not. And so, you know, I decided to embrace the French accent, embrace the heels and all of the things. And, you know, people around like adapted to it and then got used to it. And that was not a problem anymore. So, you know, better to be you, basically.

• 3:48Sarah Guo?

  I asked a mutual friend of ours, Ravi Gupta, what I should ask you. And he said that you are, you know, a very, very good leader with tremendous loyalty from your people while still being really tough. His suggested question was, how do you, how do you earn followership as a leader?

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a good question. Not surprised Ravi would ask that. I think, you know, I I tell my leaders when I stopped, you know, working with them and I did that when I joined Instacart, that I want to be, like, I want them to look back and realize that I was a big accelerator in their career. And like, and I'm telling them that to play that role, like, it's a partnership, obviously, they have to want that. And, and for that to happen, it's gonna mean two things. It's gonna mean that I am going to hold them to a very high standard and give them a lot of tough feedback and help them meet that standard. But it's also going to mean that I'm gonna be there backing them up every step of the way and

• 4:53Speaker 01

  being in their corner and wanting them to succeed like no one else has wanted them to succeed before. And so I think, you know, it's not for everyone. Like, there are some people who are like, whoa, that sounds way too stressful. Thank you very much, lady, I'm gonna opt out. But that's actually a good, you know, a good thing, because like, I don't think you need to be necessarily a leader for absolutely everyone. You like, you pick your team and they pick you. And the people who like that end up being people who want to excel, but want to excel through a leader that like, is gonna back them up, is gonna be compassionate, is gonna create enormous safety for them to stretch themselves

• 5:34Speaker 01

  and potentially fail. And when that happens, you know, across many people in the team, you end up creating exceptional results. Because everybody can kind of is in this mindset of like, doing the best work of their lives.

• 5:48Sarah Guo?

  I imagine becoming CEO of Instacart at the time you did, having to, like, you know, learn to be CEO, build that followership, recruit the people you need, but also at a time of like, massive, somewhat unexpected growth for Instacart and becoming critical infrastructure with the COVID-19 pandemic was a lot. How did you react to all of that? How did, how did the pandemic change the company?

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, what do you mean, Sarah? It was a total walk in the park. Must have been chill, very, very chill. Well, listen, first off, ten years at Facebook prepares you for a lot. So I would, I would credit that experience with, you know, me being ready to handle a lot of stuff. Um, I would say, you know, I joined Instacart in twenty twenty one and it was a very interesting time because the company had Forex the year before. We were in the midst of just absorbing all of the demand from customers, completely new habits, um, much larger team all of a sudden that we had to hire.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Uh, but at the same time, there was also this question mark on is Instacart gonna be just a pandemic darling, a, you know, one trick pony? And are people just gonna go back to their like usual uh way of doing things and the company is just not gonna maintain that? And, you know, uh, fast forward a couple of years, clearly we have continued to grow during this time and clearly these habits are here to stay. But what you do during times like that is like you need to go back and focus on mission and vision. And so I spent a lot of my time really painting the picture for the company of what that company could be.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  And we even did like a full like day called the Vision Summit where everybody needed to be on the same page on the fact that Instacart had become critical infrastructure that came with a lot of responsibility. Instacart was also a retail enablement company, meaning that we weren't just building the Instacart app. We were actually building technologies for our grocers, you know, when you go to publics.com, kroger.com, snacks.com, like that's Instacart technology that's powering a lot of that. And, and that it represented a huge, uh, you know, endeavor that would give us, you know, a lot to do over the next ten years, but a very big opportunity.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  And so you have to get people to rally again after like a massive period of growth like that to figure out what is the next mountain, what is the next thing that we're gonna all go accomplish together.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  I guess related to that, it feels like one of the next mountains that you all are conquering has to do with the incorporation of AI into your product. And obviously you care more about how the product impacts the users. But I'm a little bit curious, you know, when did Instacart start focusing on AI and ML? And how do you feel that this wave of generative AI differs?

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's interesting because obviously AI is having a big moment. But Instacart has been focusing on AI since the very beginning. Like if you think about it, we are fundamentally a search engine. We do a billion searches a month, a quarter, sorry. And you know, it's all powered by AI. Every time a shopper goes to the store and a product is not on the shelves, we suggest replacement. We have suggested a billion replacement at this point. And like, that's all powered by AI. The way in which we match shoppers to go to specific store, all powered by AI. So the list goes on. But I think the thing that's changing now with generative AI

• 9:21Speaker 01

  is that we are finally at a point where we can answer people's questions using natural language and the way they've been asking themselves these questions before. If you take a step back and you think about commerce online, it is very bizarre that we have forced humans to train themselves to express their commerce needs in the form of keywords. I mean, people don't think about like, you know, how to put dinner on the table for the week in terms of like cilantro, eggplants, sour cream, which is exactly what they're currently typing on Instacart right now. Instead, what they think about is like, I have a budget of 300 bucks.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  I have to put, you know, X meals on the table. My daughter is lactose intolerant. We traditionally eat Mediterranean food and I have a set of recipes that I always cook, but I'm open to suggesting, like to trying out a new one. Like, let's figure it out, you know? And that's the way in which, you know, like people ask themselves this question. And therefore that's the way software should answer them. And to me, the thing that's most exciting about this new wave of generative AI is that we can finally match the answers to that we give people to the way they ask themselves these questions.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. You know, there has been this sort of shift in terms of what the underlying technology can do. And I feel like so many people just kind of extrapolate, hey, this is just the same AI curve as what we did with CNNs and RNNs and all those sort of firewaves. But in reality, it's a new technology discontinuity with a new underlying model and new capabilities. How did you get the team to start thinking in terms of those capabilities? Because I feel that often when enterprises now adopt generative AI, some of them don't actually realize that it can do dramatically new things.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So a couple of things. First off, like, it goes back to my philosophy as pragmatic technologist. I don't get enamored with the tech. I get enamored with what it can do. And so I actually, the prompt I gave the team was, what are the problems we've always wanted to solve for our users that we can now solve so much better? And I see so many companies like coming at it from the point of view of like, do we need an AI roadmap? And I'm like, no, no, no, you need to figure out like, what is the biggest problem you're trying to solve? And now can this new tool help you solve this problem in a completely different way? And so that was very much the prompt. More tactically, though,

• 11:50Speaker 01

  we have had two approaches. One approach is a centralized approach. So under our chief architect, we now have a centralized team that is really going deep in understanding these technologies and trying to figure out what can be done that couldn't be done before. And then we have a federated approach, which is really about like, taking some of these learnings and then making sure every team uses AI. And I think that has served us well to have this combo, because you can't expect every engineer to go super deep to understand everything that's going on. But at the same time, if you keep generative AI just in a centralized team, it's not going to impact all of your products. So you really need the combo of the two to make that happen.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  And do you have then, I guess, from a tactical perspective, you know, I've seen some companies, hackathons, where they just say, okay, this week, everybody's going to experience this technology, just so that people get that intuition, because I think the intuition is missing. I've seen some companies have the sort of consultants. Who will drop in a different product team and try and discuss like what could they actually do with the technology? Or what does it enable and give some almost like very fast demos on it? Is there anything sort of tactically that you all did along those lines?

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, we certainly, we did a big hackathon focused on that. And again, like the prompt wasn't just use generative AI. It was like, take all of the problems we're already trying to solve and figure out if generative AI can solve them way better. And that generated a lot of great ideas. And then we have this model because we have this kind of centralized team that we call K R T I. These people get pinged all the time by the rest of the company to kind of advise on like how to deploy some of these things. We've also deployed an internal assistant called Eva. So that all of our engineers can leverage the G P T four models in a lot of what they're doing. But do that in an assisted way that helps them figure out how to integrate that.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  So that has also been very helpful. And, and the thing also is like, it reminds me a lot of like the like transition to mobile. I was, um, when I was at Facebook, I was put in charge of monetizing ads on mobile. Right at the time where there were all of the headlines post I P O saying like Facebook will never monetize mobile. Mobile is too small of a screen to have ads, like, you know, you remember that. And the reality is that like, you know, there were a lot of companies that were trying to take the desktop ads and just like shrink them to a mobile screen. And instead, you know what we came up with was Adinuse feed, which was a completely different paradigm.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  And I use that a lot internally to help people understand that being A I native is going to require like really rethinking from the ground up. How you use these technologies, not like trying to fit them within your existing paradigm. And I'll give you a very concrete example. We recently launched Ask Instacart, which is a way to like, you know, ask questions like, you know, what are the best sources to grow my chicken and things like that? And there was a lot of debate on like, should it go into the search box or not? Because the search box is sacred, you know, on a commerce site, like you type keywords. People are not gonna know what to do if we start putting questions.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Let's put it as a separate thing. And then it's like, no, actually, if you were rebuilding commerce from scratch, that search box would be the place where you start asking questions. It shouldn't like, we wouldn't like, think of it as a, as a keyword search box. And so these are the micro decisions that are actually big ones to train the company that we need to disrupt ourselves and the prior paradigms in order to be truly AI native.

• 15:26Sarah Guo?

  Can you describe why you guys did an internal assistant versus just saying, everybody, you know, go hit chat G P T on your own or whatever? And and sort of what's been interesting from a productivity perspective so far?

• 15:38Speaker 01

  So we just, we just released that. So hard to know on productivity, but it was a lot about like, you know, making it more accessible and making it easier for engineers to kind of deploy these things as a bunch of like keyword shortcuts and just making like the interface very user friendly so that engineers would feel like it's just a core part of their work now. The thing I would say about productivity is that, you know, it's early to be able to measure any of that, but I think it's gonna impact productivity well beyond engineering. A lot of people are talking about, you know, making software development easier, but I'll give you some other examples, like our marketing team, for example,

• 16:20Speaker 01

  created an entire library of animated characters using A I and using, you know, limb mirroring technology and things like that. And now we have like two hundred plus, you know, characters and animations that we can use in marketing. That's huge. That would have, you know, cost a ton of money if that was to be done, you know, not using A I through an agency. Our legal team has like used A I to figure out like, so, you know, how to to detect the specific terms, the custom terms that we have with specific retailers so that we can track that in a much better way. Like, all of these things, they seem much more minor than, you know, launching a

• 17:01Speaker 01

  fancy new A I thing, but they actually make the lives of each team way better. And I think it will create a lot more satisfaction with the job because when you think about it, like. Like no lawyer will tell you, yeah, going through a thousand documents to look for custom terms was a highlight of my day, you know, and the fact that that AI can actually do that for them, summarize that for them, like that means that we're going to get the best out of our people and we're going to remove a lot of the, you know, more minute tasks.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Are there any other sort of big areas that you've seen either impact productivity or the customer experience or things that are coming that you can talk about that you're just excited to be launching? I know that you did things, for example, the ChatGPT plugin and you were very early there. I'm just curious if there's other efforts that are that are sort of exciting and on your roadmap?

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Well, there's so much. I think the ChatGPT plugin was a great example because it allowed us to start to see how people were using these things. And again, the questions are, you know, fantastic because right now Instacart is really a tool as of today that is very like bottom of the funnel. You have to have already decided like that you want grocery delivery, that you know what to eat, like all of these things. Whereas when you look at the ChatGPT plugin, it starts with like, I have a birthday party, I don't know which snacks to get, you know, like there's a lot of like intent and different occasions that we can tap into and serve better because we can capture intent in a very different

• 18:34Speaker 01

  way. And so I'm very excited about that. And I think we're reproducing a lot of these experiences with Microsoft Bing, with Google Bard, and and hope to be kind of the layer of conversion between bits and atoms. Because the way I kind of see this trend of generative AI is that everything software is going to become a lot easier and lower barrier to entry. But the translation between software and atoms is still very hard. And the fact that Instacart has aggregated, you know, eighty thousand stores, more than a thousand retailers, means that we can create these magical experiences where you ask the software, you know, things in a natural language, and food shows up at your door in two hours.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Like, that's, that's pretty incredible. And so we're really doubling down on that. And then you ask kind of what's coming in the future. In the future, I want to make that available kind of as a platform, because you could imagine any nutrition app, any app that's doing like anything that has to do with food or even commerce, tapping into this network and making it available to like.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Basically turn intent into things being like showing up at your door in two hours. So we're we're very excited about that. And then longer term, I think it's all about like, how do we answer all of the questions that people ask themselves? And the the thing I would highlight is that it requires these large language models, but it also requires having really unique data. And the fact that we have an incredible catalog, the fact that we have billions of data points on what people need, that's what gives us our strengths and we're marrying the strengths of this like incredible data with these large language models. And that's what's turning into, you know, really unique experiences. And so

• 20:23Speaker 01

  my advice for any company is just really thinking about your data infrastructure and the unique data sets that you bring to bear in this new world that can create these delightful experiences.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, that makes sense. I guess related to that, given that you're a real a real world company, a place for AI perhaps has shown a little bit less progress than the the recent burst of L L M's is in things like autonomous vehicles and self-driving in terms of drones, delivery, automated picking. How do you think about the more sort of real world robotic side of this? And when do you think that's coming?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've been following this incredibly closely, as you can imagine. And you know, my take is if we were starting from scratch, like rebuilding the grocery industry from scratch, we would probably not rebuild it the way it is. There will probably be fewer like stores the way they are. There will probably be more dark automated stores. But the reality is that we're not starting from scratch. And when you think of Instacart, like we have a network of eighty thousand stores. These retailers are already paying a fixed cost on all of these stores. So it is actually incredibly efficient to be sending people to these stores, like these retailers get incremental demand on top of that fixed cost base.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  And these stores are very close to the customer. And so a big part of why, uh, you know, these kind of automation initiatives have failed is not because the technology is not good and not there, it's because the economics are Actually very hard to make work like if you want to have like a very large, you know, automated warehouse, you kind of need to put it further away from the customer so that you can aggregate all of these orders. Now you're talking about next day delivery instead of same day delivery and we all know that customers want speed. And so you end up in a situation where, yes, like you have great automation, but that's not reducing costs and that's not improving the customer experience.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  So back to my point on pragmatic technologies, there are some technologies that are great, but if they don't help with either cost or customer experience, you know, they they are not going to get mass adoption anytime soon.

• 22:31Sarah Guo?

  Can you describe what you guys are doing with the connected store effort and caper carts? Because that's a different direction of like, you know, more extension into the real world.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So the thing we realized is that the grocery industry is in the middle of this massive digital transformation. And that digital transformation is not just happening online, it's also happening inside the stores. And grocers really turn to us as the partner that can deliver them the best technology solution during that transition. And so we, when I, when I joined, I think within a month of me joining, I made the acquisition of caper carts. Because they are basically smart carts where you can, you know, put products inside the cart and using computer vision and AI, of course. The product is automatically detected and then you can check out from the cart directly. And so these kinds of technology, whether it's caper carts, whether it's can and pay

• 23:25Speaker 01

  from a mobile phone, these kinds of technologies are really helping grocers embrace that digital transformation, are helping connect and bridge online and offline, because we think that we have actually have data that shows that customers who are omnichannel customers are more valuable than the online only customer or the offline only customer. And so that that enriches the store experience and also makes customers more likely to use that retailer across those channels. So we're really excited about that. We have a caper cart rolled out at Kroger, SoBe, Wake Farm. And it's a pretty magical experience and it's not just a part of us skipping checkout.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  It's a part where you have a screen in front of you and now if you drop the particular item into your cart, we can like suggest a related dressing and. We can tell you which aisle to find that dressing in and we can show you which savings you're getting and you can manage your budget on that screen. It it's a really rich experience that stores are missing today and I think that's gonna be, you know, over the next five years, the future of grocery shopping.

• 24:31Sarah Guo?

  I have to ask because you have multiple different experiences that are really deep and interesting in advertising from Facebook to what you're doing with retailers and CPG brands today. If you zoom out, what predictions do you have for the impact of AI on advertising?

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Oh, I think it's gonna be fantastic for us. I think it's really about much more personalization and really like this kind of ideal that, you know, you're gonna get the perfect ad at the perfect moment for you. I think it's also gonna be an explosion in creative. When you think about all of the variation of creative that can be created now so that, again, we match the right person to the right user, like, that's gonna be just incredible. And that's gonna, again, make advertising a lot more relevant. And then the other thing is that I think advertising fundamentally follows the consumer product and the consumer use cases. I mean, that was one of our guiding principles at Facebook.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  And because we're gonna see such an explosion of new consumer experiences, I think as a result, we're gonna see new placements for ads that are gonna be interesting. So, for example, we talked about, you know, our chat GPT plugins, we talked about asking Instacart, like, it is a very obvious place to start putting some sponsored content so that if you're asking, you know, what are the, like, best dairy-free snacks for my kids, you know, we can show you organic results, but we can also show you some sponsored results there. And these are placements that are, you know, gonna be really interesting for advertisers to tap into because, again, there's a much clearer expression of intent than just a keyword and things that didn't exist before.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  So I'm I'm really excited about that new wave and making that as relevant for people as possible.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  One of the things that people are talking about, I guess, related to both advertising, but also more generally in terms of e-commerce and shopping, is that the way we think about information delivery and transactions in the web over the next five, 10 years may change dramatically. So basically, everybody is eventually represented by some form of agent. And you tell that agent, "Go and buy me these clothes," or "Go and find these things for me. Go and do these things for me." How does that impact all this? How does that impact advertising? How does that impact commerce? Or is it so far in the future that it's not worth thinking too much about today?

• 26:56Speaker 01

  I actually think that it will have a lot of positive impact on commerce. Because again, like, first off, it's gonna make people a lot more, either more productive or have more free time, which always leads to good things. Like, a lot of these tasks are tasks that people would rather not be doing. Like, you know, there are some commerce tasks that they love, like, you know, browsing clothes, guiltiest charge, or, you know, like, types of commerce that are like that mixed with entertainment. And I fully expect that for these, we're gonna make things even more entertaining in the future through AI. And then for the things that are absolute chores,

• 27:40Speaker 01

  these are the things that we're gonna be able to automate a lot more. And so I think that's gonna lead to really good results. The thing that has frustrated me the most with, in fact, Instacart, is that it is an app that, when you look at it today, is fundamentally a utility. It's very transactional. You just like, type keywords, add to a cart, it shows up at your door. It shouldn't be the case. Food is one of the most inspiring things. It's like, it's one of the things that connects humans. It's one of the ways in which we celebrate, in which we show love. In fact, people spend more time watching food content than ever cooking it. And so, you know, that tells you that there's such an opportunity

• 28:20Speaker 01

  for, like, making this thing that everything, everyone considers a chore of, like, grocery shopping, making it a fun moment where you discover a new recipe, where you get excited about what you're gonna cook this week, where you discover a new snack that's gonna be like the highlight of your week. Like, that, these are the opportunities that I think are gonna be, you know, pretty amazing. And I believe, like you mentioned advertising, and I believe that advertising thrives in more immersive, more inspiring environments. And I don't see the conversational nature of an agent taking away from that. On the contrary, I think this conversational nature is going to be more engaging

• 29:02Speaker 01

  than a very bare bone search engine that we have today.

• 29:06Sarah Guo?

  Yeah, I definitely think there's some division even between, as you said, like the different, in each category of commerce, like that there's a piece of that commerce that is, I don't know, the operational toil of being alive. And then there's a piece of it that's fun, right? So if you look at food or, you know, I have, I have two young girls, right? Like you can, you can think of like parallel tasks here where eighty percent of the food I am eating. I'm like, okay, like there's an optimization, right? Like, you know, there's a, I'm home this night or my husband is home this night. We want to eat relatively healthy. Like there's some distribution of like proteins and veggies. We want to try to hit and, you know, these are things I know how to cook or somebody knows how to cook. And then there's like ten percent of the time where I am, I have this ritual I do with my startup companies

• 29:50Sarah Guo?

  where, you know, you, you hit five million of ARR and I'll cook you in the, you have the leadership team dinner. And that I care a great deal about, right? That's not a chore. That's something I, I want to go browse Instacart or paper carts in the store for, for, you know, two hours thinking about what, what we're going to eat. But I'd like to spend less time. I'd like to fully entrust an agent with the first task and spend more time like with the inspiration side. Or if you think about, like, let's say, you mentioned, you know, clothing, dressing my kids in general, or just like it has to be functional and there's a base level of like enough socks and underwear of the same size. Like that should happen automatically, right? Like, you know, there, there's enough data out there somewhere that says like these kids are this size

• 30:34Sarah Guo?

  and they continue growing and like, please just keep me supplied.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:37Sarah Guo?

  Um, and then there's, you know, I want to wear matching outfits with my girls, you know, on Saturday. But I, I'm hoping for more of that, uh, division of labor over time.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I absolutely agree. I think your examples are spot on.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  So one of the other things that I know you've been spending more time on recently is biotech and the neuroimmune space. And you've started an organization called Metrodora, which, you know, really helps accelerate research in a variety of areas. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? And then both what you're doing there and how you're approaching it, then maybe we can touch a little bit upon how AI impacts that area as well.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So about three years ago, I got diagnosed with a chronic illness. And it was interesting because I didn't know much about healthcare and biotech at the time, but clearly I was very naive. I thought that there were, you know, wonderful researchers in a lab trying to figure out a cure for my condition. And it turned out like, you know, for that not to be the case. And I started discovering a lot of the issues with our healthcare and biotech industries. And so I decided to co-found Metrodora with two amazing partners, one's a doctor, one's a scientist. And the idea is really like blending clinical care and research so that we can accelerate

• 31:58Speaker 01

  discoveries in these conditions and really bringing the best technologies into the clinic as soon as possible. Because there is actually a 14 years delay between a new discovery, a new research discovery, and that impacting the clinic, which is insane because when you're living with these conditions every day, when they're taking away so much of your joy and the types of things that you're able to do, telling yourself that, you know, there's like things out there that can help you, but it's going to take 14 years for them to be like deployed in a clinic. That's just absolutely maddening. And so our goal was like accelerate that translation and then also create the research

• 32:39Speaker 01

  infrastructure by, you know, getting data on our patients to help biotech accelerate the path to a cure and in particular, accelerate the translation into therapeutics and potentially improve the results that biotech gets from clinical trials. And so. To your question, you lad, on like the role of AI, you know, I I think if I look at the clinic, we're using AI in clinical genomics, we're using AI in pathology, we're using AI to like interrogate the immune system, like all of these things are things where on the diagnostic side, like AI can do so much better than what a human can do,

• 33:17Speaker 01

  because these are vast amounts of data, and therefore we think we're going to be able to detect things in ways that, you know, humans wouldn't have been able to do alone. And then on the kind of, you know, uh, biotech and drug development side, it's also a really amazing age for for that, because I think that's going to massively accelerate the discovery of new compounds and also like actually uh improves the clinical trial results. So I'll tell you the thing that makes me incredibly mad when I hear like the AI doomers telling us about these very theoretical scenarios about like robots coming to kill us and the fact that we need to stop progress just in case the robots come.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  It's like, I'm like, there's no way these people are living with like atrocious chronic illnesses, because when you're living with this every day and you see what AI can do, you're like, wait, like the the positive impact is like so obvious. It's like, it is going to happen. There's no way that the next five years are not better than the previous five in terms of like actual discovery of cures, acceleration of research, all of these things. And so like blocking that progress for a theoretical, you know, arm, like that seems crazy. Do we need to mitigate the arm? Absolutely. Do does technology do bad things? Absolutely, always.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  But that's our job to maximize the good, minimize the bad, but not stop the good from happening, because a lot of sick people are going to rely on AI to get cured in the next ten years.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's interesting because we've talked quite a bit about this, and I should say that like in the long run, I'm a I'm a doomer, but in the short run, I think the impact of AI on global equity and healthcare and education and all these areas is so massively large that I think the calls to regulate are way premature, the calls to interfere in all sorts of ways that distort the market are way premature. And so it's this very odd moment in time where for some reason people have lost all the positives. And all they focus on is fear. And you're like, well, that's, that's the wrong way to think about anything. You know, most telling is when they say it's just like nuclear. And we should regulate it like nuclear. And you're like, well, you know, because of us regulating nuclear, the, the new nuclear regulatory body,

• 35:40Speaker 02

  which was established in the seventies, prevented any new nuclear power plant designed from being approved for 50 years. So is that really what we want? And so I just think there's a lot of naivety and sort of misconceptions in the industry right now around this stuff. It's kind of striking. What do you think is missing in terms of AI supporting biotech or supporting your efforts?

• 35:57Speaker 01

  I think people are already doing these things. I mean, you know, on the biotech side, recursion has been added for a while. Um, on the healthcare side, we're starting to see some, some, uh, real progress. I think it's all about like adoption, like on the healthcare side, I think it's all about adoption in the clinic and in the real workflows of doctors. And so the technology is there, it's more about like, how do you embed that into clinical workflows in a way that actually enhances what doctors are doing? Because I mean, think about your doctors, like, when do you think they have the time to keep up with the latest research? Like, they don't, like, they are overwhelmed by, you know, administrative works, are seeing patients all the time, like,

• 36:42Speaker 01

  most doctors do not read the latest research. That's something that can be solved through AI, like AI can do a great job summarizing the latest research that your doctor is actually current. But, you know, how do you integrate that so that doctors see that as an enhancer to their knowledge? And something that, you know, they can rely on to, to, um, help. I think that's going to be critical. Obviously, accuracy is going to be like critical here. I think it's, uh, really important that we, uh, vet all of the sources that go into whatever AI engine powers doctors' decisions, uh, to say the least. But again, there's nothing new there. I mean, doctors have used Google for a long time and Google is not fully vetted.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  And so, uh, I, I think it's like, these are the types of problems we're gonna have to solve, but they're not necessarily new problems. And then on the biotech side, I would say. You know, there is this promise that AI can find new compounds, that AI can accelerate clinical trials and things like that. So the reality is that we haven't seen that yet. You know, like the best AI-driven companies in biotech, I've been at it for a number of years. And there's a question on like, does this new trend fundamentally accelerate that? Uh, does it take just more time? Because everything in biotech takes time. But I think in five years, we need to be able to look back and be like, oh, great. So number of

• 38:09Speaker 01

  AI-driven, you know, drugs that have been put up the market has increased tremendously. By the way, that's already the case and happening. But not just that, they have actually made it through clinical trials with a higher success rate than the rest. And they are actually, when they get deployed, they end up helping people at a greater rate than the drugs that are currently deployed, that sometimes pass clinical trial, but help, you know, 20% of the intended audience. And so, um, these are the proof points that I I think we will need to see. And right now, it's just too early to to know if that's gonna happen.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  Makes sense. Yeah, no, it's very exciting. You're working in this area as well. So thanks for contributions there.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Thank you. Well, I I have to, I have to credit you, Yolad, because when I started this journey in biotech, I asked Yolad, like, hey, how do I get up to speed? And he gave me the best advice, which was to hire a Stanford grad to teach me biology and biotech. And that has allowed me to know a little bit about what I'm talking about. And so thank you for for the tip, Yolad, and the encouragement early on.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  Oh, sure. Now you probably just use chat GPT, but you're not gonna be treated humans for that kind of stuff. Well, I guess as we wrap up, is there anything else that you were hoping we'd talk about that we didn't touch on?

• 39:22Speaker 01

  No, I think we covered a lot of great topics, guys. Thank you so much for having me.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  Ah, thanks for the incredible conversation.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for joining us, BG.