Bret Taylor: belief

Transcript context

…That's a very interesting framing. It gets back to the point you were making about the company that was looking to standardize and not have three different ERPs and stuff like that. You're like, "Why? Just try not doing that." I think maybe the consumer example of this is I think people have probably had the experience of you paste data into an LLM to do something with it, and the formatting is all messed up and the tabs and the spaces don't come through and everything like that. It doesn't matter. LLM doesn't care. You can just paste it in whatever and it'll work with it. This idea that, as you say, if the system of record is important because it's your general ledger and it matters to the auditors, that's one thing. But if it was a system of record in this all your data in one place way and because it was easier to build incremental software atop it, maybe that advantage is going away because the agents are fine plucking data from 10 different places. That's roughly my view. But the bull case, I always mix up bear and bull. I need to spend more time on Wall Street. The bull case, though, is I think all these companies have a right to win. They're all big, they still have sales capacity, they have all these advantages, but it's a race. How fast will smaller companies build differentiated, scaled businesses before the incumbents go into this new world? But for a wide variety of well-documented reasons, like disrupting their own business model, it's harder. But I think your ask is, "Is it irrational?" I don't think it's irrational. I think there's just more uncertainty now than there's ever been. I think markets are telling you there's a lot of uncertainty, and that's why you see people recede from the whole category, basically. I feel like there's also a totally separate thing playing out here, where for a long time, certain companies were criticized for not taking profitability that seriously. And at some level, there's just a return to normal valuation levels on a fully loaded, stock-based, comp baked in and everything basis. That's independent of the AI thesis, but maybe just some return to, again, on a fully loaded GAAP basis, more normal valuations.…

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