Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Books, apps, and tools
tool / uses
“Yeah, yeah. Both. So I use VS Code as like my daily driver, although I'm like super excited about things like Cursor or the AI agents. I have my own like stack underneath that. I mean, some off the shelf parts, some pretty custom. So I use the continue.dev just like AI chat UI basically as just the UI layer, but I also proxy the request.”
tool / uses
“Yeah, yeah. Both. So I use VS Code as like my daily driver, although I'm like super excited about things like Cursor or the AI agents. I have my own like stack underneath that. I mean, some off the shelf parts, some pretty custom. So I use the continue.dev just like AI chat UI basically as just the UI layer, but I also proxy the request.”
app / uses
“Both. So I use VS Code as like my daily driver, although I'm like super excited about things like Cursor or the AI agents.”
Claim ledger
23 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“Although certainly, in my experience that I did get in periods where I was just sad and angry all the time.”
02 / belief
“" At some point you end up blowing that up as a founder, and that was certainly my experience.”
03 / belief
“I think one of the big challenges or lessons from this whole period is that one, is as part of the problem we had with competition, and this chapter two was external, but a lot of it was internal, where we couldn't organize ourselves effectively.”
04 / belief
“I think there's benefits to that, but what I've grown to appreciate a lot more is over time is this thing or the experience and the journey of starting a company can really be of forge for a better character or there's transfer.”
05 / evaluation
“Well, I think first thing is I think a theme that's carried throughout a lot of these different chapters is you have to figure out what game you're playing and what the rules are when the game keeps changing.”
06 / recommendation
“Well, if we think we're selling a commodity, try literally selling paper towels.”
07 / evaluation
“We got the product to this many users, we got it to where we got this valuation, or let me back up. So my whole life, or it's common, I think for a lot of founders, especially if you get good grades and stuff, you follow pretty linear path from childhood, from first get the right test scores, then get into the right college, get into the right college, take the right classes, get the right internship, get the right job.”
08 / evaluation
“Because everybody's got strengths and weaknesses, but as CEO, both your strengths and your weaknesses are massively amplified and a lot of blind spots in your personality can become huge cultural dysfunctions in the company.”
09 / prediction
“Then obviously after ChatGPT, not only can you do conventional search, but you can ask questions in natural language, and answer a lot of the questions that ChatGPT can't because it's not connected to your stuff.”
10 / preference
“The single most important impactful thing for me has been reading because talk about this micro, macro, meta games or abstractions, this is the kind of stuff you can learn from history.”
11 / evaluation
“Not just photos, but video. And so they just totally nuked our business model in ways that were bad enough in terms of just their obvious impact, but even worse because it was so easily anticipated.”
12 / evaluation
“And the Dropbox products had stagnated. And I started to learn the hard way that, okay, yeah, I now understand what Bill is talking about, because we were hiring all these smart people, but the things we would do as a company would seem really stupid.”
13 / prediction
“I think as a civilization, we're going to, hopefully in 5 or 10 years be like, "Man, we took this crazy detour where we basically hooked up that brain power to this thing that was just burning off half of it as friction with our tools.”
14 / evaluation
“It's just the complexity on our screens just keeps growing and the whole environment gets kind of more out of sync with what makes us like cognitively productive and engaged. And then even something like Dash was initially seeded, I made a little personal search engine because I was just like personally frustrated with not being able to find my stuff.”
15 / observation
“Now the problem is the same, the shape of the problem and the shape of the solution is pretty different.”
16 / recommendation
“Both. So I use VS Code as like my daily driver, although I'm like super excited about things like Cursor or the AI agents.”
17 / prediction
“Everybody sort of party that everybody could, you know, come to some downsides of that security. But I think, you know, the advent of AI, I think there's a real question, like given the capital intensity of what it takes to train these foundation models, like are we going to live in a world where oligopoly or cartel or all, you know, there's a few companies that have the keys and we're all just like paying them rent.”
18 / recommendation
“And then absolutely, like we have products like Dropbox Dash, which is our universal search product. That was like very elevated in priority for me after COVID because like now you have, we're putting a lot more stress on the system and on our screens, it's a lot more chaotic and overwhelming.”
19 / prediction
“Or, you know, maybe if we create AGI that will sort of solve the rest of the, or we'll just have a different set of things to worry about. But, you know, the simplest way I think about it is like this is sort of a rent not buy phase because, you know, I wouldn't want to be, we're still so early in the maturity, you know, I wouldn't want to be buying like pallets of over like of 286s at a 5x markup when like the 386 and 486 and Pentium and everything are like clearly coming there around the corner.”
20 / preference
“Because we don't really want our customers to be thinking like, well, do I use Dash or do I use co-pilot?”
21 / prediction
“Maybe the bigger picture is like, it's super exciting to talk about the LLM and like that piece of the puzzle, but there's this whole other scaffolding of more conventional like retrieval or conventional machine learning, especially because you have to scale up products to like millions of people you do in your toy app is not going to scale to that from a cost or latency or performance standpoint.”
22 / preference
“One is that, I mean, there's a lot of like repetitive and like manual work you have to do as an executive that is actually lends itself pretty well to automation, both for like my own convenience. And then out of interest in learning, I guess what we call like classical machine learning these days, I started really trying to wrap my head around understanding machine learning and informational retrieval more, more formally.”
23 / recommendation
“Yeah, yeah. Both. So I use VS Code as like my daily driver, although I'm like super excited about things like Cursor or the AI agents. I have my own like stack underneath that. I mean, some off the shelf parts, some pretty custom. So I use the continue.dev just like AI chat UI basically as just the UI layer, but I also proxy the request.”