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12 Sept 2025 The Logan Bartlett Show EP 150: Bret Taylor (CEO, Sierra): A New Class of Software Winners
“look at something like log code which is kind of saddened between being the foundation model and the actual application itself I guess where you said you have an interesting purview of both you have a board seat with open AI and then you also have a company is there any way that you you think about that and like where companies can exist as applied AI systems on top of foundation models versus where foundation models are going to capture value I'll give sort of one framework that I think about the technology evolution which is in the early days of a new technology whether it's the smartphone or the web browser in the early days of the technology adoption cycle a lot of the value and as making it just work like it's it's hard to make a website or a database that scales to consumer scale on a website that was true in 1995 it was true in 1998 in 2025 it's absolutely trivial to make a website it's absolutely trivial to make a scalable database you're going to sell or whatever and do it in afternoon so if you're in the early days these technology cycles often startups and incumbents will be selling the vision of what that new platform is and it works and that's the value proposition if”
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- 12 Sept 2025
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- The Logan Bartlett Show
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…u 10 million dollars but if you roll that out that year it would go down to two hundred thousand dollars how do you actually do that if you're a public company that's really hard just because like all of a sudden you're going to look like your business is slowing down even though you're just eating your vegetables for a greater you know a brighter future if you're a not unprofitable or not cash low positive start up you know all of a sudden just your burn rate you know go way up if you have let's say none of those applied you're a private company that somehow is ready for all those things all of a sudden to do your employees like you know jump ship in the middle because they're betting on the the come and you just look at the transition from like windows revenue to azure active directory each one of those is a ground game at the customer by customer level to sort of transition people into that new world and it's so easy for you know armchair strategist like of course that's the correct thing to do and then the question is like well if you don't care about the messy middle yeah it's totally obvious but everyone in the world cares about the messy middle so it requires just incredibly exceptional leadership to go through those transitions and I think people don't think about it enough and and I just think in part just because the you know a lot of folks haven't really operated businesses at scale before and I've told this story before but at Google our first campus was sgi silicon graphics and we moved into their campus after they effectively were going out of business and at Facebook we moved into Sun Microsystems campus after they were acquired and sort of like summarily shut down by Oracle and like both of those companies in my relatively short career were successful companies and and build campuses and in my relatively short career at the time had gone out of business and were you know selling their campus for parts you know it was just because their technology and business model was once great and they didn't transition to the next one and that is the default for companies in our industry and there's just a very small handful of companies that have been able to move to multiple products change business models but you can list them on like maybe two hands and I think it's very important as entrepreneurs we keep that in mind because if your ambition is to create a company that outlives you which is certainly my ambition you have to create a culture that's not like a one one trick pony I've heard you talk about like the three different segments of maybe the AI ecosystem today being financial foundation models tools and then applied AI one of the questions that I think we have come up and I'm not just asking diligence questions that are someone an unanswerable but I think you said that a unique lens is where the foundation models pushing up into different applications where that's going to be true and where it might be harder to go do and you look at something like log code which is kind of saddened between being the foundation model and the actual application itself I guess where you said you have an interesting purview of both you have a look at something like log code which is kind of saddened between being the foundation model and the actual application itself I guess where you said you have an interesting purview of both you have a board seat with open AI and then you also have a company is there any way that you you think about that and like where companies can exist as applied AI systems on top of foundation models versus where foundation models are going to capture value I'll give sort of one framework that I think about the technology evolution which is in the early days of a new technology whether it's the smartphone or the web browser in the early days of the technology adoption cycle a lot of the value and as making it just work like it's it's hard to make a website or a database that scales to consumer scale on a website that was true in 1995 it was true in 1998 in 2025 it's absolutely trivial to make a website it's absolutely trivial to make a scalable database you're going to sell or whatever and do it in afternoon so if you're in the early days these technology cycles often startups and incumbents will be selling the vision of what that new platform is and it works and that's the value proposition if that continues to be your value proposition from 1998 through 2025 you're not going to exist as a company because it becomes a commodity because essentially the platform matures and so the entire ecosystem around it matures I assume that will happen with a reasoning agents and action-taking agents and voice agents and all the things that are really really hard today and so as a consequence I think you know for companies that are building applied AI agents they need to focus today on making it work because it's one of the main values that the companies provide but they need to as you think about you know building a product which is like what is our value on top of that and you know what I was joking around about is like every SaaS coming just a database in the cloud well there's it turns out they've created a ton of value on top of that database no one cares about the fact that the database scales anymore that's not like a question you have about your SaaS product and if you do it's got bigger problems right and I think so I think what's going on now is I think people are not in a rational way sort of just literally translating the technology to a domain and the question I would have if I were doing due diligence for your companies like what is the product you know like once once the fact that the technology works is no longer the differentiator what does it become…
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