Bret Taylor
speaker
184 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Bret Taylor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I think we are in a bubble. I am inherently skeptical of companies doing pre-training. Unless you are an AGI research lab, doing pre-training on a model, I believe, is just burning capital. Software is like a lawn. It needs to be tended to. It's not like you write software once and it just works forever.
I think almost every company that has chosen to build their own in an area of their business where there is a software as a solution service available has regretted it.
Thanks for having me.
I don't think so. When I was young, first I wanted to be Indiana Jones, which I know is not a job, but to me, he was by far the coolest example of an adult that I'd ever seen. By the time that I was in school and started thinking about a job, I thought I wanted to be an attorney in high school. I'm happy to tell the story.
It's actually kind of an interesting story, but I ended up getting a job at a gas station and then hustling my way into making a website for a mechanic that was nearby and I was getting paid $4.25 at the gas station an hour, which was minimum wage at the time, and ended up getting paid $400 for the website.
So I quit the gas station job the next day and ended up making websites for a lot of local businesses in my hometown. most of those websites endured for decades, you know, because it turns out if you're a florist, it's not like you're actively SEOing your website. So, you know, my fingerprints on the internet in 1996 and 97 lasted for longer than you'd expect.
And even when I went to Stanford, I think if you'd met me that summer before, I probably would have said I probably want to be a lawyer. But then the combination of my accidental entrepreneurial experience, plus going to Stanford and the dot-com bubble, First quarter at Stanford, I took a class called CS106A, which is sort of the intro class and the rest is history.
I was so obsessed with software at that point. I would do it in my spare time. It had nothing to do with school. I was just totally obsessed with the craft.
Is that the first billion dollar seed round, by the way? I think it is the first, right? There's no, there must be, right? Yeah.
That might be a $10 million seed round.
I think we are in a bubble, but I think bubbles have different shapes. There's a Mark Twain quote that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And I think the AI bubble will rhyme with the dot-com bubble. I believe with the benefit of hindsight, most of the excess of the dot-com bubble might have been justified.
If you look at the top market cap companies in the world, they include Amazon, they include Google. If you look at across segments, it's PayPal, eBay. If you look at the enterprise software companies like Salesforce started in 1998, if I'm remembering correctly. All of these companies were started in the dot-com bubble.
And I think people associate mentally and emotionally the dot-com bubble is associated with Webvan and Pets.com. But actually, if you look at the most frothy statements about the dot-com bubble and the transformation of the economy, and you fast forward almost 30 years from that point, maybe it was true.
When you look at how much Amazon disrupted commerce, how much consumer payments have been transformed by digital technology, it took a few waves of technology like smartphones and NFC to really fully realize that vision. A huge percentage of the gains in the stock market over the past 30 years have more or less been these digital companies created in the dot-com bubble.
And so I haven't done the math on how much money was burned in that period. But I think that doesn't mean that the excitement around the impact of the internet on the economy was false. So I think the same thing is likely to happen in AI.
We will look back and laugh at some of the excess, but I am confident we will have brand defining, likely trillion dollar consumer company come out of this, 10 plus enterprise software companies that are enduring, public companies coming out of this that are native to this new technology. So I think it is both a bubble.
I think there are areas of access, just like there are areas of access in 1997 and 1998. But I think it would be dangerous to dismiss a bubble as strictly excess. And in fact, there'll probably be outsized returns within it.
I think it's a reasonable point. And it's as a venture capitalist makes a ton of sense. You're thinking about it that way. I'm more thinking about the impact on the economy. We're in a world where there's a lot more capital than there was. There's a lot more, I'd say, structure around how people invest in technology companies.
As you talked about the private equity surge over the past 20, 30 years. It doesn't surprise me that given the amount of capital available, valuations are sort of markedly different than they perhaps were, though I think it seemed excessive back then too, right? I don't think people could contemplate a trillion dollar company in 1998, rationally anyway. What you're saying is reasonable.
I also think that from my vantage point, I'm not investing, I am creating. And my perspective is like, where are consumer behaviors going? How will the automation implied by large language models and agents change productivity, change the structure of companies, change the economy? And how do you define a generational company based on those trends?
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