Aarthi Ramamurthy: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. They're up there. So you mentioned the chat with Elon and how you're very tech positive and I think that's something that you two are at the forefront of, is this trend, I don't know if it's called techno-optimism or maybe there's another term for it and I'd love to hear just like why? Because I know that's important to you too, why that's important to you and just what is this movement of techno-optimism- Let me take a small stab at it. Look, I think it's also very personal to our context and our upbringing. For us, Sriram and I came from a fairly middle class family in India, this city in India that most people here won't probably know. And we grew up really liking computers but didn't have access to a computer for a longest time. In both our cases, our parents bought us our first computers after saving money for it and it was a hard thing. And when we eventually got onto it and started learning to write code, we met each other online. We're dating ourselves now, but we met on Yahoo Messenger back in the day and we worked on this nerdy coding project, that's how we connected. So technology and computers have given us everything. Our first jobs were at Microsoft, we built developer tools and platforms. If you were in our shoes, you would feel the same way too. Tech has given us so much. And so for us to come here all the way from India, through multiple cities, we lived in Seattle and then here, the Bay Area, I've started tech companies, it is a bit frustrating to see the other viewpoint because you can see how much it has uplifted people, careers, lives, but also just from what we've been able to work on, what we've seen our friends work on and ship and put out there, it has dramatically moved the needle. And so for us, we are the living testament of tech actually helping us and help us do better, so I don't even see the other viewpoint from like, why wouldn't you be optimistic about technology? I don't get it. Yeah. I think the personal part was really core. I think there's generally two schools of thought. One school of thought, I would broadly write up as things are getting worse, technology is making things worse and we should all do less, build less. And then the other school of thought, which I think I subscribe to, is technology is not perfect, the impact technology is definitely uneven, but pretty much most of the good things in the world over the last 100, 200 years are responsible for it. And we can have a whole long discussion about the evidence why and we have lots of very fancy sounding intellectual theories as to why, but at the heart of it is what Aarthi said, if it wasn't for tech, we wouldn't be here, we wouldn't be doing this. I suspect a lot of folks who are listening to this wouldn't be able to listen to it, wouldn't have the opportunities they have or have the opportunities we have. It is a great level up. My dad pretty much had the same job for his entire life, essentially from age 25 till the time he retired and there was really no easy path out for him. And I imagine like, "Hey, if he was born 40 years later and he had a laptop and an internet connection and could get on GitHub, here are opportunities that would be just impossible, even 30, 40 years ago and that's all from technology." So I think that's at the heart of it, it's the best thing we have of getting ahead.…

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