Patrick O'Shaughnessy

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Hello and welcome everyone.

I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best.

This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money.

If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing.

You can find Colossus along with all of our podcasts at colossus.com.

My guest today is Gokul Rajaram.

Gokul is one of the most prolific product builders of the last 20 years.

He's built the core ads and product businesses at Google, Facebook, Square, and DoorDash, working at each company during its most formative scaling periods.

Alongside his operating career, Gokul has invested in more than 700 companies, giving him an unusually broad view into how products are built and scaled.

This conversation is about how product building is changing with AI and what remains durable when software becomes increasingly cheap to create but hard to defend.

We discuss the one thing Gokul believes is truly future-proof in AI, why companies like Zendesk and Slack are more exposed than Salesforce and NetSuite, and the few sources of defensibility.

We also talk about everything Gokul has learned from helping build the most important ads businesses, including the only three ways an ad business can make money, how those constraints shape product decisions, and what consumer behavior change threatens every major platform.

Goko shares lessons from working closely with Larry and Sergey, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Tony Hsu, and what he learned from watching each of them build generational companies.

Please enjoy my great conversation with Goko Rajaram.

I thought an interesting place to start would be the changing nature of how people are building products.