Bill Maris: How Google Could Crush AI Competitors, Why Small Funds Win, and AI's Atari Stage

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After saying he was out, now Bill Mares is returning to the investing world. The founding CEO of Google Ventures has raised $150 million for his new fund called Section 32. With a smaller fund, I have the advantage to be very selective in the companies that I invest in, the people that I hire. We're going to invest for a financial return.

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Any other metric is impossible to measure and therefore won't succeed. Think of the change that has happened just in the last 100 years and what's about to happen in the next 100 years with the advent of AI.

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The world's going to change by orders of magnitude. Thank you very much for that warm welcome. I am Bill Maris. I'm the founder of Section 32.

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Prior to that, I was the founder and CEO of Google Ventures. I was also Google's vice president of special projects, where I incubated Waymo and Google X. Calico, and many other projects as well. And before that, I founded a web hosting and data center company, which we're going to talk a little bit about.

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And today, I think I'm going to talk to you about a few of the lessons I've learned on these interesting experiences I've had in life. So we're going to have four lessons. I'm gonna talk about, and we're gonna go back to 1997 to start.

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When I was a fresh college graduate, I had a degree in neuroscience, and I found myself on Wall Street somehow, managed to land a job there, but I was miserable having to wear a suit and trudge to work in the heat, but one, good thing came of that, which was I looked in the closet of the office one day and I saw a server.

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And I asked, well, what is this thing beneath our jackets? And they said, well, that's where our email and websites live. And as can happen to many of us, I had a moment where I felt like I was bathed in the light of inspiration. And I thought, I think I've glimpsed the future.

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I think I can maybe make a business out of this, because if you can have our website and email in your closet, how many websites and emails could I put in my closet?

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So I immediately quit my job, because I had kind of glimpsed through a keyhole, and through that keyhole, I thought I saw the internet, and I saw a data center, and it looked something like this. Or maybe when I say data center, You think of something like this or something like this. But in 1997, a state-of-the-art data center looked almost exactly like this.

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We had three servers, a small, medium, and large.

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Business grew. We eventually had five servers. And this isn't a data center at all. This was my apartment where I founded the company with credit cards. And the servers lived in one room. The work happened in the other room. And it would get very hot in that room. And this was in Vermont. So I opened the windows and then it would get very cold.

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So cold, in fact, that by noon, if you had a glass of water in your desk, it would ice over. You may think, though, this isn't so bad. But actually, this was also my apartment as well. This was the bed. And you may look at that and think, well... You've got a mattress and a nice pillow, and look at that nice blanket. But this is a rug I got from Home Depot to keep myself warm on those nights.

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And one day, there was a thunderstorm. The roof started to leak. And I knew I needed to do something because water and computers and servers don't mix well. So I called the landlord and said,

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The roof's leaking. The landlord said, well, that happens sometimes. But I knew that I needed to do something. So when you don't know what to do, you go to Home Depot. I got a bucket of tar and a mop. And I went up on the roof. And there was lightning. And there was rain. And I went up there and I tarred the roof.

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And I did not glimpse the future in that case because I didn't know when you're tarring the roof that you should start at the far corner and work towards the door rather than the reverse. And I tarred myself into a corner, but the choice that I faced was either

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the servers get electrocuted, or perhaps I get electrocuted, but as an entrepreneur, I was willing to take that risk, which, newsflash, I survived. My shoes, though, are still stuck on that roof in Vermont, which takes me to lesson two, which is To see the future, sometimes you need to be a little bit insane. It may appear to those around you that you are tarring the roof in a thunderstorm.