Alex Rampell

Or like, oh, the military, we should have more people in the military because that way we're going to do a better job.

Whereas actually, as you know, it's like sometimes there's addition by subtraction.

If I have a smaller team, there's less communication necessary.

You're going to come up with more creative ways of actually solving the problem.

You're going to solve it with technology.

Whereas if you just say, I'm going to solve it on the input layer, I'm going to address my constituents by saying, I'm going to just allocate more money to this thing, you're going to get a worse outcome.

versus I allocate less money with great people.

This is the key.

So you can't just say like, I'm going to allocate less money and give you the worst people on earth.

And then no, but it's like, you know, take tax fraud.

I would rather have two people at the IRS than 80,000 people, but have those two people be the Noam Shazir and some other like super genius.

Because if Jeff Dean and Noam Shazir are running the IRS, like, oh my God, like that would be so much more efficient, but the input cost would be like one 100th as much.

And there's always that disconnect.

Well, I think the problem is that there's the nomenclature, which kind of varies company to company.

So when I started TrialPay, our Series A was $3.1 million on $9.5 million pre.

And that was expensive.

I remember arguing with the partner at Battery.

It's like, this is the most expensive deal we've done.

This was 2006.

At SiteAdvisor, I think we raised 2.7 on 2.7 pre, so even lower.