Qasar Younis: belief

Transcript context

…The summary version of this is I think the way we recently read as a company, we read this book, House of Huawei, which is just a really great interesting book. And Huawei is a really amazing company for the reason that it makes great technology. But the couple hundred thousand people that work at Huawei, about a quarter of them are members of the Communist Party. And Huawei's goal is not to grow profits or shareholders. It's a private company. It's really an extension of the state. So literally the name Huawei means China's ambition. So imagine if you had a company called MAGA and half of the company or a quarter of the company was a certain political party and they said, "Our goal isn't to make profits or to... Our goal is just the expansion of..." It's not even a company anymore. It's something else. And so I think we incorrectly, when we specifically speak of Americans, we think about China, we impart our understanding of markets and companies onto China. So we think Huawei, since they make phones, they must be just like Apple. It's like, no, no, no, no. Actually, that's not like Apple at all. And so I think the first thing I would implore everybody who thinks about China, especially with anxiety in America is you're not comparing companies to companies. This is not apples to apples. This is very, very different. And so imagine instead of thinking OpenAI is competing against DeepSeek, you say OpenAIs competing against the Chinese government. Instead of Apple competing against Huawei, Apple's competing against the Chinese government. And you can even remove the word Chinese government. Government is the best word to define what this organization is, but it's not a for-profit, privately-owned, independent group of people who are working on projects together to build products to market. So that's the first very important thing. You cannot treat China like another America, or another Europe, or another whatever. Number two is if your goal isn't to make profits, you can do incredible research and it can be extremely compelling. But like we've seen, if the system is not sustainable, that's also not a company and that's not sustainable. Let me give a very stark example of that. Chinese EVs are really lauded as being this exceptionally interesting product and you constantly get the streamer of, I would say, fairly shallow analysis which says, look how good China, isn't like how bad Munich, Detroit, Tokyo, Seoul, or the other epicenters for automotive globally. There is a Chinese EV-like company in America. It's called Rivian, makes great products, but they lose a lot of money making those products. And therefore, the company is not very highly valued. I think if you said top 50 or top 100 companies in the Bay Area, I'm not sure Rivian would even make that list. And it's not that the products are bad or the people at Rivian are incompetent or they're not working hard. It's just the business is a tough business. , I'm not sure Rivian would even make that list. And it's not that the products are bad or the people at Rivian are incompetent or they're not working hard. It's just the business is a tough business. The EV business in automotive is a tough business. So how can we hold these realities? So we say, look how amazing these Chinese EV companies are and look how bad the home team is. It's just because the home team is being assessed for being a business. It has to make profits. And because it doesn't, it gets hammered by public investors. The other thing is not even a company. Now, if we do it apples to apples, America just has to build great EVs. That means Tesla and everybody else combined and we don't care about profits, I think America would field some very good products and there would be wow products. So the comparisons are really, really off and I think that creates a misunderstanding. I think then maybe the most philosophical question, can China succeed and does that mean America has to fail or vice versa? If you believe in open and free markets, you believe everybody can succeed in those markets. And that's been proven for over 100 years. And I think what we're experiencing right now is how does China play in that ecosystem? Because I said open and free markets and those are not open and free markets. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have an antagonistic relationship. It certainly doesn't mean that China's incompetent, and it certainly doesn't mean that it doesn't warrant our attention and our kind of, let's say, focus, but it's also not a one-to-one comparison. I think we should be very careful in implying it's a one-to-one comparison. And by the way, that five-minute explanation is never going to get to the average person sitting at an airport in Detroit, Michigan waiting for their flight. All they consume is China bad. It's not like that. It's not that simple. It's way more nuanced. This episode is brought to you by Lovable. Not only are they the fastest growing company in history, I use it regularly and I could not recommend it more highly. If you've ever had an idea for an app but didn't know where to start, Lovable is for you. Lovable lets you build working apps and websites by simply chatting with AI. Then you can customize it at automations and deploy it to a live domain. It's perfect for marketers, spinning up tools, product managers, prototyping new ideas, and founders launching their next business. Unlike no-code tools, Lovable isn't about static pages. It builds full apps with real functionality and it's fast. We used to take weeks, months, or years, you can now do over a weekend. So if you've been sitting on an idea, now is the time to bring it to life. Get started for free at lovable.dev. That's lovable.dev. So you decided to join Twitter recently, put out your first tweet. Your first tweet was just like, "Hello, I'm going to start tweeting." That tweet got two million views. Elon replied to you, Marc Andreessen quote tweeted it and said, "This is the best AI CEO nobody knows, follow for free alpha." Elad Gill, famed investor, describes you as the most successful, most quiet company in AI. And to me, this is really interesting because most founders are told, "Build in public, build a following, be loud, get out there, talk all the time about what you're doing." You did the opposite. You were very under the radar, stay quiet, build, build, build, and then decided later, "Okay, now it's time to talk about our story." So I think this counter narrative is really interesting and I think will inspire a lot of founders to not feel like they have to do this. What was your philosophy of just staying quiet and then starting to be public?…

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