Ankur Goyal: belief

Transcript context

…thing. And you asked for dinners and stuff. We'll do that next year. Excellent. Actually, we're doing a whole syndicated track thing. So, you know, Brain Trust Con or whatever might happen. One thing I think about when organizing, like literally when I organize a thing like that, or I do my content or whatever, I have to have a map of the world. And something I came to your office to do was this, I call this the three ring circus or the impossible triangle. And I think what ties into what that VC that rejected you did not see, which is that eventually everyone starts somewhere and they grow into each other's circles. So this is ostensibly, it started off as the sort of AI LM ops market. And then I think we agreed to call it like the AI infra map, which is ops, frameworks and databases. Databases are sort of a general thing and gateways and serving. And Brain Trust has beds and all these things, but started with evals. It's kind of like an evals framework and then obviously extended into observability, of course. And now it's doing more and more things. How do you see the market? Does that jive with your view of the world? I think the market is very dynamic and it's interesting because almost every company cares. It is an existential question and how software is built is totally changing. And honestly, the last time I saw this happen, it felt less intense, but it was cloud. I still remember I was talking to I think it was 2012 or something. I was hanging out with one of our engineers at MemSQL or SingleStore, MemSQL at the time, and I was like, is cloud really going to be a thing? It seems like for some use cases it's economic, but for the oil company or whatever that's running all these analytics and they have this hardware and it's very predictable, is cloud actually going to be worth it? Like security? He was right, but he was like, yeah, if you assume that the benefits of elasticity and whatnot are actually there, then the cost is going to go down, the security is going to go up, all these things will get solved. But for my naive brain at that point, it was just so hard to see. I think the same thing, to a more intense degree, is happening in AI. When I talk to AI skeptics, I often rewind myself into the mental state I was in when I was somewhat of a cloud skeptic early on. But it's a very dynamic marketplace and I think there's benefit to separating these things and having best-of-breed tools do different things for you, and there's also benefits to some level of vertical integration across the stack. As a product-driven company that's navigating this, I think we are constantly thinking about how do we make bets that allow us to provide more value to customers and solve more use cases while doing so durably. We had Guillermo from Vercel, who is also an investor and a very sprightly character. I don't know.…

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