Bret Taylor: belief

Transcript context

…people are experiencing the same pain point. What if I make it? That it's just very incremental. And you know, I always like to use the metaphor, like you can sell coffee beans, roasted coffee beans. You can add some value. You took coffee beans and you roasted them and roasted coffee beans largely, you know, are priced relative to the cost of the beans. Or you can sell a latte and a latte. Is rarely priced directly like as a percentage of coffee bean prices. In fact, if you buy a latte at the airport, it's a captive audience. So it's a really expensive latte. And there's just a lot that goes into like. How much does a latte cost? And I bring it up because there's a supply chain from growing [00:30:00] coffee beans to roasting coffee beans to like, you know, you could make one at home or you could be in the airport and buy one and the margins of the company selling lattes in the airport is a lot higher than the, you know, people roasting the coffee beans and it's because you've actually solved a much more acute human problem in the airport. And, and it's just worth a lot more to that person in that moment. It's kind of the way I think about technology too. It sounds funny to liken it to coffee beans, but you're selling tools on top of a large language model yet in some ways your market is big, but you're probably going to like be price compressed just because you're sort of a piece of infrastructure and then you have open source and all these other things competing with you naturally. If you go and solve a really big business problem for somebody, that's actually like a meaningful business problem that AI facilitates, they will value it according to the value of that business problem. And so I actually feel like people should just stop. You're like, no, that's, that's [00:31:00] unfair. If you're searching for an idea of people, I, I love people trying things, even if, I mean, most of the, a lot of the greatest ideas have been things no one believed in. So I like, if you're passionate about something, go do it. Like who am I to say, yeah, a hundred percent. Or Gmail, like Paul as far, I mean I, some of it's Laura at this point, but like Gmail is Paul's own email for a long time. , and then I amusingly and Paul can't correct me, I'm pretty sure he sent her in a link and like the first comment was like, this is really neat. It would be great. It was not your email, but my own . I don't know if it's a true story. I'm pretty sure it's, yeah, I've read that before. So scratch your own niche. Fine. Like it depends on what your goal is. If you wanna do like a venture backed company, if its a. Passion project, fucking passion, do it like don't listen to anybody. e. So scratch your own niche. Fine. Like it depends on what your goal is. If you wanna do like a venture backed company, if its a. Passion project, fucking passion, do it like don't listen to anybody. In fact, but if you're trying to start, you know an enduring company, solve an important business problem. And I, and I do think that in the world of agents, the software industries has shifted where you're not just helping people more. People be more productive, but you're actually accomplishing tasks autonomously. And as a consequence, I think the [00:32:00] addressable market has just greatly expanded just because software can actually do things now and actually accomplish tasks and how much is coding autocomplete worth. A fair amount. How much is the eventual, I'm certain we'll have it, the software agent that actually writes the code and delivers it to you, that's worth a lot. And so, you know, I would just maybe look up from the large language models and start thinking about the economy and, you know, think from first principles. I don't wanna get too far afield, but just think about which parts of the economy. We'll benefit most from this intelligence and which parts can absorb it most easily. And what would an agent in this space look like? Who's the customer of it is the technology feasible. And I would just start with these business problems more. And I think, you know, the best companies tend to have great engineers who happen to have great insight into a market. And it's that last part that I think some people. Whether or not they have, it's like people start so much in the technology, they [00:33:00] lose the forest for the trees a little bit. How do you think about the model of still selling some sort of software versus selling more package labor? I feel like when people are selling the package labor, it's almost more stateless, you know, like it's easier to swap out if you're just putting an input and getting an output. If you think about coding, if there's no ID, you're just putting a prompt and getting back an app. It doesn't really matter. Who generates the app, you know, you have less of a buy in versus the platform you're building, I'm sure on the backend customers have to like put on their documentation and they have, you know, different workflows that they can tie in what's kind of like the line to draw there versus like going full where you're managed customer support team as a service outsource versus. This is the Sierra platform that you can build on. What was that decision? I'll sort of…

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