How I built a $3B AI Startup + 7 AI Business Ideas

been an engineer for like you know a couple decades now and no longer ride code i only prompt i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never look in back alright so you founded this company but your story is crazy so your high school dropout grew up in argentina have been building things and hacking on things since you know a very young age sold a company kinda early on i don't know if a big sale or small sale and then you built this product that has just taken off every front end developer i now loves it it's valued i don't know three billion dollars or so you know whatever you or take and you've just done this incredible thing and now and now you have this ai tool that's also like super on trend and it's something that is doing really really well it's a really cool agent that that builds sites for you that's my version of the of the the summary of your story it's a great summary maybe the only thing i'll add is that the crazy way that have been able to go from like a teenager in argentina to today was has been a lot of open source so i've been involved in creating a lot of technologies that have become foundational new tech ecosystem and i felt like that and the web has sort of been my ticket to success of course over decades of hard work well explain that so why why'd you drop out high school i i i've never been a fan of like the high school drop monitor because i actually really loved the high school that i went to so i was that high school in argentina that was the free public school that had an entry exam you had a study really hard to get in and i worked so hard to get in entered in position number ten out of like thousands of students but i had two competing interests i was becoming popular in this open source ecosystem because i was creating libraries for javascript and front end development you're like becoming popular at an open source but you're only fifteen sixteen years old so when did you start started coding very early like you know seriously i would say when i was ten years old i was creating websites shipping i started doing work online helping my parents with our like home finances was it just a lucky break or what got you started lucky break in some ways but obi horse so i was contributing a lot to like online forums helping people out and the lucky part is i remembered this guy who whose name it i guess he'll i'll never know was like dark shadow one two three he's like hey you seem to really enjoy helping people out by writing tutorials and guys and things like that there's this website as a freelancing website you could just sell your services here because you know so many things about linux and ph and programming so there's was a bit of a lucky break in that i figured out a business model for myself really early on i got my first check when when it's in like eleven years old then started i had a client in the netherlands when it was like twelve or thirteen are you're pretending to be a adult or you'd openly like never gonna there we go i i wanted really badly where never come up and i'm really i guess lucky that at the time like even skype was not a thing so it was like actually kinda rare that you'd have to get on the phone so it really took advantage of that but so when i got into this high school my reputation for doing all of this work and then my reputation in the open source world were both growing simultaneously so as my grades were decaying my sort of online networks and contribution in not in the world was growing so i would write articles i would get to the front page of big dot com i would write open source of software to would get a lot of traction i would get written give give me a sense are you i'm just saving about dumb like are you a genius or you were just being extremely helpful like was it just like nobody was writing the tutorial and how to host your wordpress site or whatever right i sort like you were figuring things out it was cutting edge stuff where were you yeah when i advise young people and like hide to bootstrap their careers i say start by teaching anything so i started with like how to compile those was a project called rp to get internal internet connectivity in linux and it's like it's just like writing down the door to today deal with do hundred does better job right or like at best it becomes training data for ai to then explain it back to people but then over time i started coming up with my own breakthroughs and so i i my quote quote big break was i started contributing to a library called mood tools when i was fifteen sixteen years old and this library got picked up by facebook to become sort of the inspiration slash foundation for their javascript infrastructure and i got a job offer from facebook was like seventeen years old and so my contributions to that project it was starting to become more important and so you got a job offer from facebook when you're were fifteen yeah so was that was probably seventeen sixteen so super early days of of facebook so in many ways you know you could have play out another timeline in which i was in america already and like i was an early engineer at facebook things like that you turn it down well when they discovered i was in argentina and the other age i was like yeah maybe we should look for someone else but that same project kept opening up up doors for me because other startup started using the same foundation and they were like who should we hire and the first thing you think of is i'm gonna hire the people that contributed the project we do that ourselves today with our opus projects like next ne day as we go and like okay who's contributing like that person seems really interesting so when i was about eighteen that's when this startup up from switzerland reach out and saying hey like we wanna hire a tools developer and that's what i basically just dropped that high school like i i i had my first real job offer from a company in los sun switzerland and for my parents for myself who's kind of surreal right like i'd never left the country and i was like leaving argentina for the first time with a job offer in hand at like an amazing country you know so it's kinda surreal yeah i we hired a kid and when i was doing a startup up in san francisco we had a guy who was in eighth grade and he emailed me johnny dallas and he said hey i loved to code i my dad met somebody i met pete at a dog park this is our sis sis admin guy and he was like i don't know anyone else who codes can i just come hang out for the i just wanna be around other programmers i was like oh man amazing yes for sure he comes in first day we just actually give him a test we're like hey we want you to make this little onboarding quiz html just make a quiz like multiple choice take him down a flow and land them in one of these four buckets and he just sits thirty he sister to like seven or eight at night i feel i'm like but he's like not asking for help i just wanna to see how it plays out and he actually ships the quiz at the end of the the evening i was like alright this kid's legit by the time he's in tenth grade we're like because you know he's working basically full time for him is after school he's coming in and so we had this i had a conversation with his mom i remember at the like downtown and she's like i can't imagine my son being like a high school dropout out and i said do you know the lebron james kobe bryant i was like your son is going pro that's i think that should be a little bit of a yeah totally if any of a kid is listening to this it work like a charm on on that mom try this on your mom or try this on it on anybody where you can really go pro early yeah totally i i always give people very caveat advice right like i tell them look i went to a high school that was giving us college level content so i actually developed a good foundation a good quote good world model i was i became quite competent in a lot of sciences and we had really good chemistry classes physics math etcetera so i'm actually really thankful that it had a good foundation and then by the time i decided not to continue down like the normal unquote educational career i had a really good alternative right like by that time i was really clear that my my skills are gonna take me somewhere i didn't know specifically i was gonna get in i was eventually gonna end up in san francisco building companies but you know it was it was a bit of a leap of faith that was well subs in existing evidence of success you talking about new tools and talk about javascript i read something great that you said you you go i kinda bet on javascript because i realized that for the back end there's you know hundred different languages you could choose but the the browser only no javascript right unfair advantage it looking back i think you you always arrived to success by finding a s or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages and javascript has this unfair advantages that and and i can explain how we'd won as well but right now every single device in the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language and that language is javascript it can't run python it can't run c plus plus it can't run java right and the way that javascript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives so way back in the day we had macro media flash as a proprietary plug that steve jobs put to rest eventually with the iphone was he right on that by the way was his have like correct absolutely we had java app right so there was an idea that the jv java was gonna be that universal language and the fact that when i started going deep into javascript strip it was there was still a little bit of a perception of like it's like a toy why was that why because okay i'm a mostly non technical person but i i love you see love situations like this where like there was a hundred contenders in one way but it doesn't win because it had the obvious trait that what you would think would win but there's this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage totally you know we were just talking about like mid journey before this yeah and we're like mid journey like it's not like the product design it's not like somebody some designers sat to happen then you'll open up dis scored and there'll be a hundred random channels and it it'll be strangers making images but actually bad was better bad was good yeah because you learned how to use it hurting the say worse is better yeah don't worse i haven't see worse better i i've seen the paul one where he's like if you're great you don't have to be good i think it's really similar but can you explain worse worse this better was a paradigm i'm in the early days of the internet of specifically that essay a spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology you make it a lot more predictable and so there were some advantages to like markup up languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet but there's a broader point that brendan and i the creator of javascript pointed out which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution in natural selection and darwin ism rather than like the obvious quote go intelligent design so there was an article that he shared at one point called what would charles darwin thing about clean slate architectures okay and so javascript was almost like got a piece of dna that evolved and became more sophisticated over time but started out looking very simple small it was a piece of code that it would in line into the markup so we when you think about markup in the sense of like my space codes or like html it was like can we bring html is slightly more alive okay so we need something that's very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code and from there it became more powerful more sophisticated but most people when they looked at it in the beginning they were like well it can't be fast it can't be typed it can't be correct it can't scale it can't have a module system but all of these observations that we were making we're not actually paradox they were not quite technical you're were like well at that point as it exists at that time it cannot do those things so a lot of the alpha that i created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying like well we can add this thing so very simple example it's a little technical but javascript lacked classes it couldn't do object oriented programming in the conception that people had with things like action script or c plus plus or java but in the moodle team we did figure right a way of what go faking it we created a function called class with an uppercase c when we presented the developers are like well like so you added classes to javascript well yeah we kind of added them and that actually was one of the salient features that that stood out to the facebook team and and many other teams in the bay area and so by evolving that thing and actually betting on it that became the symmetry of of my early career and and again like the experts at the time and this is why i think there has been a shadow of doubt cast on experts for many years now the experts i think we're familiar with this because angel investments that are successful had the same characteristics of like look at how rough that it looks so like look at how shitty the home beach looks and like you have to be able to project out what it's gonna be in the future and now javascript has eating the world yeah one of the best blog crossover ever did was i just went back to the way back machine i just said here's what the first website of airbnb look like here's what the first website uber look like which brilliant actually it's like very important for entrepreneurs first to look at you kinda know to let if i ask you bill yeah i probably started off rubbish but literally go look at it yes look at the thing get at the pixels look at the actual pixels because it does a couple of things first it you're overthinking it whatever you're doing you're probably overthinking to start to launch second it shows how far you really have to go to like iterate to get make things better and also like how narrow of a wedge you take like the airbnb initial one is like there's a design conference the hotels are booked and expensive stay on sleep on another designers yeah couch or air bed yeah and you just take so much from those like initial initial web pages yeah and you're right like once you hang around and silicon valley if it humble you so that the things that look like toys or the things are start narrow or the things that seem limited on six dimensions but are really good at the one thing they can't be underestimate underestimated and it does raise the question of genius versus acts didn't for in the there's just so many good stories about the creation of javascript street one was the extreme time constraint that mark andres put brand than i into the reason called javascript is they needed to market it as java they just added a script there's no relation whatsoever do these few things and so the other one was i think brandon always says that it took him ten days to conceive the language and that's primarily because of deadlines so like okay we have to ship something that makes pages come alive for those that are not technical the way that i sometimes explain what we do with running javascript the server and running it in the client is there is this newspaper and harry potter which is like a regular newspaper but when you open it it comes life pictures move yeah so think of getting the newspaper as the server is giving you the server rendered pre rendered artifacts so it comes with all the letters so this static image etcetera but then it's really cool that you can open it and what we call it technically is it becomes hydrated it becomes alive and more code can run on your side of the equation and that can be a very enriched experience so that's the power of javascript stress that's great out you can run at the production line it could be manufactured could be printed but then it can be shipped to you and then it can become alive again and so in those ten days mark andre jason wanted to basically pitch that like one of the initial names that i think life script is like and then they renewed a java script to market it more like the enterprise traction that it'd be a akin to today like we wanna call things agents and perhaps are not agents or whatever like you're get use the evolution example it's like the skin color blended in with the trees it's like java just right in with the java that's right that gave it an evolutionary advantage percent versus getting eaten because it stands out the other interesting observation is okay so you have ten twelve days you have to ship something whatever and what is the minimum surface that you can ship on top of which evolution can be bootstrap i think that's much better than try to aim for completeness of that initial version and what i asked myself when i study the success of others is were they really clever to think i have to delete delete the delete like i think we're referencing rick reuben reducing thing i'm a reducer not a producer so i think if you're truly brilliant i think you'll find that you have to delete and delete and delete and that's one path to success and because you know what the more complete picture would look like but you can exercise that restraint or you can just stumble upon it through deadlines right like you have the classic yc let's make you ship a start in three months and so that is access a forcing function for the reduction of the surface and you think there's something about human nature or perhaps the pressure that people put themselves under which is that i have to add more i have to make that homepage i have to add more images i have to add more gradients whatever but then through the exercise if you talked about you can go back and see well actually things look pretty simple and they focus a lot on the content and the on the essentials so you you're doing blue tools you you go out there to switzerland how do you get to ver and what's the like insight you have to start this company that has become this juggernaut right like i think of dm like every year for three years being like hey can i invest in this because i it's such a juggernaut or that like so obvious to me that when you have this sort of developer love yeah you really can't help but win and you were like on the you were on the right waves that to be on for the last few years the pattern throughout my career has been iteration velocity is the most important thing to optimize for so my previous started which i sold to wear wordpress anytime i would start a project before starting the project i would start on the mechanism to ensure i cto of that start up i would start on the mechanism to ensure that my colleagues my engineers my everyone in the company could ship really fast my obsession became how quickly can you go from idea to shareable artifact from idea to url and today it seems obvious that v zero is so successful in that you can prompt and get a link and you can go from prompt to application but i didn't have ai at the time what i had was what i can do is i can streamlined the deployment pipeline of ideas so i just so i can summarize what you said you said most of important principle for me when i work on a project is that we're gonna be able to ship fast and iterate fast ship in order to ship fast and iterate fast we need like our our pit crew you if we're a formula one car we know a pit crew to not take six hours to change the tires or to get a refuel to get back on the road to go over the next lap so what you were saying is you would focus more than the average bear down that that pit down between idea and because we're so exist so i had a like i had the insight that instead of just assuming that the world that maybe it takes hours to ship or you can ship once a week i was like no let's look at the web the web is so fluid because of all of the reasons that we just outlined it's just is so alive why can we be shipping a hundred times a day why can we try lots of different things i i actually just interviewed recently for off site the the founder of door dash and he was talking about how door started out with one html page in six pdfs of the restaurants that they were gonna deliver for and they just brought the idea online as soon as possible so to some people it becomes obvious that the most important thing is to get the idea out into the world as a url and see if it sticks so i wanted to create a platform where that was the norm and that was sort of the inception the idea for ver and because before ver i was at wordpress i noticed wordpress a company had become quite good at deploying one app wordpress dot com but if you were were working for the company and you had a new idea you were kinda getting stuck you had to go to the it team and be like hey please can you set up a server for me can you give me an area here where i can come up with a new application or a new idea and so ver brazil started out as can we reduce that friction from idea alive to seconds in fact it became such an of session started measuring each millisecond of like you have an idea you write it down in javascript or html or whatever you press deploy how quickly can we get it online i it was that it was literally love a little i love the formula one metaphor because it was it's about shaving down the seconds that we're stopping the scar in this car it's not just one app or one idea or one person is literally how the entire business works this is why versa husband has been so successful with the largest companies in the world like investment banks and also it powers most of the yc startups that are creating new ideas in the manner that i just described which is like hey i need to try something out and i need to hit demo day what is the quickest way to deploy it's for sale sounds like this might be one of those stars where you need to pivot a ton it sounds like you maybe had the correct idea like you knew the pain that didn't problem correctly and it sounds like he had a right idea of a solution that you obviously made it better yeah is that true yes and no so when you achieve some level of success people start studying your success a lot and people ask me a lot like did you pivot did you not pivot that what what what it can for to chicken or the egg and the reason that they asked me this is we have an extraordinary least successful open source project that versa created called next reyes ne ass powers a lot of their modern internet like you talk about mid journey mid journey built with ne ass you you make money off that i didn't understand it's just you you source that's source widely adopted does benefit in it in any way because it's in the service of okay how can we get that formula a one car going okay start with ne ass you're gonna cut down on the whole assembly of the car okay the alternatives ne js is that you have to procure the the chassis and the wheel and the engine like this was actually what was happening to engineers when i started the company i was like okay so how do you start a new idea oh well i go to home depot and i shop for like two hundred different kinds of wheels and i grab the wheel and i go to this thing and and then i assemble it for my one car and then maybe i get started running it and then maybe see if i had product markets fit so you created next js and i i believe the story is you were trying to build something and to use react you're like oh shit i gotta like go get the engine in the chest i gotta go get all these pieces alright i'm just gonna build this kind of template for myself website for the company kinda like the experience of door like i had to build xi dot c o our domain name at the time and was okay to get started with react i have to do like get a phd so to your point about was the idea correct this idea is so powerful that you cut down the time for humanity to go from some hypothesis to a production grade deployment and going down from weeks of setup to seconds it seems obvious what was not obvious and felt like endless pivot was narrowing down the scope the reduction that you just talked about we started out with like oh you can deploy anything you can deploy java he's so contradictory even to my genesis story right like you can deploy haskell you can deploy ph you can and then we're realize wait why aren't we doing all this clearly we we believe that the modern web will be powered by frameworks like x js and we believe that there a there's alpha in the market and the world of they democrat this idea of using both javascript as you're sort of like back end and front end language which massively simplifies software development so i will say we didn't pivot in the sense of going into different space but we simplified the offering way way way significantly you have this interesting seat where you get to see what a bunch of people are building on your platform are using v or whatever and then you also just like you're on the edge i would say of like tinker hacker technical person who kinda sees what's possible but you only have so many hours in the day so you tweeted out this thing that said free ai ideas yeah and it's like if gordon ramsey open up a lemonade stand it's like wow like you steve jobs was like hey free product lessons for toddlers yeah i'd be like like get my daughter in that class right so when you say free ai ideas is i wanna show up so can we run through some of your ai idea yeah and i'll give you a little bit of background right so i've always been obsessed with the democrat sizing the web for everyone so any anyone with the idea has to be able to create and that's why we created v zero because these zero like chat but for creating web applications instead of giving you text it gives you a fully working web application you say i wanna make a make me an app or a assignment maybe the next door you can literally type that in and it's it'll it'll make one yeah and the difference i would say there's many players that are trying to build this but one of the things that i'm really excited about is that it's banking on the lessons of the last ten years of building the world's most popular framework for javascript in building the production radiant infrastructure to support it right like i'll name a cool brand that uses versa ramp supreme dot com b in fact we we have so many successful companies in every market segment that you could imagine but all of those companies needed expert engineers right like in order to build like a really cool website like drink wireless dot com you need to learn next ask now the magic over sale is that we cut down the learning from like i need to know all of the foundations of computer science in all of the foundations of aws and how to deploy software we brought it down to like take a react course and use an extra ass but with ai we can cut that down even further it's just to speak english and we will steer the model towards what do we think are gonna be the world's most successful outcomes we care deeply about performance when e commerce websites they deploy in ver versailles they vastly out compete everything else so we'd recently heard about a public company that sells billions of those worth of consumer electronics a year that improved their conversion rate by thirty percent on some markets to ninety percent on some other markets why because the website is faster so imagine if you could go to an agent and say i wanna create the next big competitor to apple dot com we're gonna make it faster more accessible beautifully designed and deployed on this enterprise grade infrastructure you get those out of the box get those for free out of the box so and it's true to the spirit of the company of like how can we get that formula one card running as soon as possible so it's opening up creation and deployment to basically every human on the planet okay but you were saying that's context for the ai ideas because what because of two things one is that with v zero any idea that i have i can bring it to reality but then there is a meta so we're being very successful with v zero because we created ai for web engineers or ai for people that are interested in shipping to the web there's gonna be so many other verticals that are gonna be similarly disrupted and it seems really obvious to me because i'm on the you know to your point and behind the scenes of building things like v zero but i think there's gonna be for example why don't we have a v zero for creating video games a studio that combines the best of both worlds of software one point o techniques and so far two point o techniques and i don't if you're familiar with that framework but explain so andrew ko who's the lead of ai at tesla in later open ai came up with this incredible essay that i think is canon now like everybody must read this because he's so ahead of its time of he called it software two point o and he says look software one point o was what i grew up with programming languages data structures algorithms you learn how to make things more efficient by writing better for loops and recur and you're in control of everything and everything is very deter and predictable so for two point o or still using foundations of computer science but we're making the process a lot more s sarcastic prob instead of writing every circuitry of the programming language we're relying on training models with data and the output of what those models do might resemble what a program might do on its own like a one point zero program i do on its own so the best example would be you can use cha for o with image generation to produce like incredible diagrams and there's ways of generating those diagrams with traditional software engineering but this ai is it's almost like this miracle general purpose program that can do anything based on what it's been trained on so let's call training and neural networks and ai software two point zero and it has all of this magical emergent properties that were not thought through by the engineers the engineers didn't have to go and write every if else branch that is under the hood and think about every corner case and that's why it's so exciting to people because every time a new model comes out we're all like we call it discovering the lay in space we're all trying to figure out what is even possible because even the creators of the models don't know what's possible which is in stark contrast to software one point o so for one point noise is like there's a pm giving you tickets i know exactly what this can do i know exactly what it can't do yes i know if you push this button you're gonna get this exact result i know if you push that button you're gonna get that exact result the new model you're saying even the makers of it are like i'm not sure exactly what it could do how well it could do you push this button you're gonna get something yes it could be phenomenal it could be you know a little bit unpredictable in some ways but my what i offer is that the successful ai products of the future are gonna be an intersection of this two worlds your the software one point o parts of the product there's still gonna be highly valuable if not the zero would just be purely an autonomous ai but think about it is still writing next code is still using ui that make it friendly for people it's still has a community of of templates that you can click with one click deploy and it's still banking on the ten years of investments over ver sell infrastructure and our partner infrastructure like super base and neon and the databases that we bring in so i think people are gonna be able to do this in many other verticals so video games is an obvious one to me because you will want parts of the game engine to be just like a unreal engine is right like you'll want something like a next js but for video games that is under the hood but then you want to open up video game creation to as many people as possible like start with a prompt and you're gonna be like i wanna create something that is like pokemon red but the art should resemble this and it should be in three the dimensional space and it has ten missions so you start describing with english what do you actually want so is this possible today like what does the tech up the the tech could do this today oh yes in fact i'm like why does someone done be please like where are y'all at and so i'll tell you some of the things that we've done to help facilitate this world so using the game engine metaphor you can think of v zero as one video game that ver built and you can think of ver as a game engine and so there's gonna be way many many other video games that you're are gonna create so if you have an idea for an ai agent you can deploy it on the cell platform so you can you can do v zero for doctors so you can do v zero for video games so you can do v zero for lawyers so any vertical that you can imagine we even temp digitized so we've open sourced a lot of what makes v zero so great so that entrepreneurs can come in and say like look i see an opportunity for ai to disrupt this space let's take the video game example quick yeah i think you may did you make a doom thing or did you did just port doom or was that an ai generated doom no so that was the one you're talking about is my zoom capture so for context i'm a i hit cap first of all like capture is likes where you go to a website and it tells you please tell me how stupid because you're like still the like that's right the like or select the staircase yeah right so i created one which was instead of you select staircase or stoplight you have to kill three enemies into and funny enough the idea came over the christmas break and what i did is i went to v zero and i said i want to create a cap capture that looks exactly like google capture because it it needs to look familiar for people for the joke to like pops up yeah yes and then i basically took advantage of the fact that doom has been open source so what i did is and this is kinda like a maybe a little bit more of advanced engineering here but like i took a web assembly version of doom that can run inside the browser and they prompted my way to basically spawn the user in a very specific level and then this actually involved hacking the c code base of of the of the game and then basically set it so that it was a constrained version of the video game so you kill three players and you pass the capture so it it's almost like creative engineering you can call it and this is something i think is also gonna be big in in in in the world you could argue that someone could create an entire platform for just creative coding ai for creative coding we're like the next generation of artists are gonna be playing in this dynamic medium they're gonna be offering up things that are highly interactive so you could create the v zero for interactive art so it's kinda meta right but like i started with v and created this thing and it went viral and like there's like three or four like new articles written about it but it literally took a couple hours of prompting like myself i've been an engineer for like you know a couple decades now and a no longer to write code i only prompt the last one on this video game because it kinda blows my mind that that's possible i i would have assumed it's not possible is can it only make very simple flap bird style games or can it make like can you build a fortnite can it make fortnite you know where are we at today of like what's actually possible yeah so there's two levels to this if you go to v zero day you could prompt and create a one off video game but the next level is that i think there's gonna be entrepreneurs who we're gonna create the next big ai platforms and they play them to cell and so it depends where you wanna play if you just wanna create something it looks like fortnite you could do that today you just prompts like it's possible really yeah i mean i think you'll probably go down a journey similar what javascript went through where you'll you're gonna be able to get something basic going and it might take you the next ten years to perfect it or the level of what format is today but this is the beauty of things like v zero like anybody can cook you can start you can get it out there kinda like door was six pdfs in a website you can get the b zero of fortnite out there into the world but i think there's also gonna be ambitious people that maybe have skills that are more on the game engine side kinda like i created next and can say look there's an opportunity to create a framework that works really well with l that enables broad massive scale game creation and the things that you can facilitate in that world are for example for a game to be successful it needs really high quality textures in its really cool art so you can start creating kinda like a platform that facilitates bringing the art in so that's why i mentioned with you will need software one point o skills just to create kinda like the platform and and create a connective tissue that facilitates this highly opinionated workflow because creating video games you know obviously there is a lot that is like art in like emergent the the game creator has to come in with an idea but there is a lot of things that are highly predictable like there is there is kinds of games there is like the two d platformer what is a two d platformer need well all of the run runtime infrastructure all of the things that make a game work already exist on the internet and the ai is perfectly capable of sort of orchestrating it so what a game i would be game creator would need is a very easy way of like generating the the game assets and so what i would do if i was an entrepreneur doing this is like i would connect it to other image generation models so that when you come to this game and creation studio i'm kind of like guiding you into like here's all the things that you're gonna need here's all the integrations sound creations is another good example eleven labs allows you to create sounds with l in fact i've i've coded a few things that required sound and instead of like googling for like open source sound effects or whatever i just went to eleven laps and i prompt for that so and i can do that because i know everything that kind of exists in the ai world i know that eleven engineering exactly but imagine a would be game creator it doesn't know that so they just wanna go to a platform that has already built in sound creation with ai and so behind the scenes you can sort of like plug this in so maybe to summarize i think there's is all of these perm of technologies that already exist that are making new platforms possible and i think entrepreneurs don't need to like go and train foundation models they just need to go in and put the pieces together into opinionated workflows the things that are becoming obvious to people today are you know ai for legal ai for developers and i think those are kinda like the zero one is what feels very immediate what feels very emergent i sometimes call it un unsettling tragedy when chad came out people were like i can ask you for a a draft of a nda and so people said you know i you i can take that slice of an idea and it can turn it into a legal platform what we realized was like you can go and ask it for web ui chat was quite good at outputting you know react html next shares and so we went and said oh this can be v zero this can be a whole platform for web development and so i what i challenge people to think about is that what are those like clusters of queries that people are going to chat four that can become entire platforms and i'm sure that a lot of people that are going to these things and it's saying like i wanna create a video game but this is just one of the many ideas that i shared in that thread right so let's go back to this type form idea so this seems like a super simple one which i like because like you don't need to build like world changing blah blah blah just to be able to be able to do this yeah yeah so that one arose from the fact that if you look at why type has been so successful it's an interface innovation it gives you one question at a time it feels friendly for i mean i hate respond to surveys but the most compatible that he can make it for me is if you give me wanted multiple multiple choice versus like boom don't have to answer this whole long page yeah here's an irs form please fill it out in fact irs would really have way higher completion rates and people paying on time if like they they create a better ui essentially this maybe be this turbo text by the way turbo text is actually a phenomenal of experience and it's type form it's one question at a time they don't ask you things that you don't know the answers to which is the problem taxes so smart they know what i mean like what do you owe no and this is one of the golden rules of onboarding right forget about forms onboarding like give me one thing to do remove all the distractions remove all the links that might take me out of the flow i i give you this little hack sometimes like if you're in a flow where you want people to complete a task why are you making the logo clickable and why i heard they're like six food links taking me to like the fucking founding story of the company right why a disruptive person so i a type form kudos like they they nailed that but i think there might be an opportunity on two levels one is i i keep using this formula of if i need to create a form and very quickly send it to you i could have the b zero for form creation where i prompt my way to tune the form it because it could even come up with the questions for you exactly like hey i'm coming up with a i'm trying to get i'm asking my friends what dates work for the basketball party send a quick survey out friends if i make get fun i'm sure someone will get be zero listen to this and start creating the ai form creator right i think it's a really good idea and by the way i think there's a add on to this i had a similar idea once but i was thinking we own this business called somewhere dot com great domain name yeah we paid a great price for this domain name i'm jury out on that one but you know you find talent lat or south africa just like your story right this talent is everywhere opportunity is not always everywhere and so when the website the way it works today you land and you click like okay i wanna start hiring and then there's a long form and it's all there's is a bad experience like your name what you're hiring for your budget you know do you need a full time part time whatever and then it says great now book a call and then you're gonna talk to a sales guy and i'm like you know with ai what this should really do is it you should land and be like hey what are you hiring for what you need and you say what your what i need a designer cool so you know cool we got plenty of designers we actually just hired designers for x company x y z company tell me are you looking for a graphic designer or above blah yeah what are they gonna do and you come just quickly tell it it says you know we recently placed somebody like this candidate profile pulled from our system yeah and just say you know would this be the type of person that you know would fit the type thing you're looking for they cost this much that's know pretty affordable to be able to hire somebody of this level of talent and you're like yeah yeah that would be great more like that it's like awesome what's your email i'll send it to you like it's a salesperson it's not a totally and it's a salesperson that does what all sales would do they ask questions yeah follow they were they note what you say they respond intelligently they follow where they need they disqualify you if you're not a good fit and if you are a fit they're basically giving you bits of proof and promise along the way to get you to say yes i can't believe this doesn't exist it's a more dynamic interface right so you said something really interesting which is i think when people have ideas it's like they're looking they're staring into like a vector space they know that there's something there that they wanna do and this is for everything like may have an idea for like a survey that you wanna send to your customers and you're like yeah i know that it's mostly about getting product feedback and how happy they are and what they do for work but you might be forgetting that there's is a very important question that people that do this service typically ask and you just don't know about it this is why an ai first type form would make so much sense because when you prompt it i wanted this form for this thing it'll know right don't right and and it this even goes back to and it'll by the way summarize all the results for you yeah at the end because it'll be like you know that's otherwise a full manual step i have to do yeah we got three hundred responses hi i gotta go through those and this is why ai is gonna disrupt everything because you would just talk about like okay i can also bring ai to the results process and my other point was you can even bring ai to the submission process because instead of being rigid and making you select between twenty things and then you press other and whatever there might be innovations also in the maybe it's purely league conversational or maybe it's hybrid conversational and what do we call generate ui which is that right on the exactly on the fly it chooses what is the right format to answer this question and you might learn another thing that humans do poorly is where did you hear from us and we ride down fucking like aol and google and you're like wait does anyone who uses anymore that should also yeah you should also give it to the ai to choose okay this customer is coming from argentina so in argentina no one uses you know the you use them on their wing that's right yeah you know from g headers but this is a a plus plus plus plus idea there were a lot of people nit picking my idea on the in the thread which is like this is a freaking tweets storm like like i'm not like like describing the f entire company right and they were saying no but ui is still better because when i was like sure but again it doesn't mean that the ui is as rigid as it is today in that the eight choices of checkboxes boxes are rigid as well and and i remember it was this company called wu in yc bash at one point they had created a beautiful for a builder and the form builder was all drag and drop and you had to select the type of response all that stuff is gonna go away in fact i would give you us a rule of thumb that if drag drop is involved this a primary interaction mechanism is probably ripe for disruption because no one was to actually drag and drop stuff you usually wanna say like this my idea just build it right right that yeah that's like a tell it's like a poker drop is like the maybe to use the solve one point o into no matter drug and job was was making one point o more paddle inaccessible to more people visual coding visual programming was that as well how can we make one but no more accessible well we invented dragging stuff and showing it into the initial space let's do some more so you had one that was called ai camera what's the ai camera idea this is bags to like embrace the wrapper embrace the fact that models are fucking phenomenal and there's a few hyper online people like me that know all of them or try to know all of them of like deepgram b three just landed on how basin and whatever like you're paying attention to that level of of debt yes but the average consumer just wants to take awesome photos yeah and so i've been this one came up because we were at a very big meeting for a bank that i wanted to use for sale in new york and the champion on the bank side i was like let's take a photo with a beautiful like new york backdrop whatever and it was so awkward that we tried to we tried to take the photo twenty times because it's hard to take a photo with like where is the sun and the back lane we want new york to be visible but when our faces is to be visible and like someone blinks during the photo and so there's men involved in a photo it's a terrible photo yes this is a general rule making it yeah standing in it posing in it that we don't gotta to do any of it so think of the input from the shutter think of the click of the camera and this is a software camera like in camera app as the input into the prompt rather than the output if you're extremely good at taking photos it could just be the output or maybe it's lightly tuned then filtering and whatever in in becomes the output but maybe it just embrace the fact that it's an idea to give the ai right and the ai will know that if that photo was taken in that place the goal is to obviously show people smiling no one should be blinking the batch needs to look amazing and you know maybe actually gives you five perm mutations of we know what good looks like we know the shades lighting the maybe it removes objects for you and so i also mentioned that there is software one point o techniques and so forth two point zero techniques to embedded into everything you shouldn't believe that you need the perfect model that'll make that photo perfect or either you can give people at workflow so what i had imagine at the time was like it's gonna look like instagram because i love how instagram you took the photo and then filter picker and score like sun rem ramon filter and whatever like oakland clan and like hips or whatever so imagine is giving you fermentation but also maybe it gives you the tools is like select something maybe already i mean it's just purely brainstorming now by the way like you have me like full on resolving like yeah there's a model that is really good for like that apple uses for like removing objects in the scene so maybe by the time it gives you the produced photos all of the objects are already movable so you get because what happens a lot of time is someone blinks but also there's an obviously that you don't want in the scene like your your baby was like crawling in there your dog pooped and like you wanna take have the best one argentina what's what's the name of that beautiful waterfall like the craziest the waterfall was falls it was take out the tours i go there with my my fiancee and we we take this photo under the waterfall we're kissing is somebody takes a photo and there's this dude in the by kind of the angle you know the background there and he's got his shirt off and he's taking like a photo for the boys and it's like ruined this photo and my wife is sick i wanna frame it because i think it's so funny and she's like yes been trying to find a photoshop to like get rid of this thing hundred percent and you're right like that would be like her dream would be the magic magic camera that says let me guess you want this guy out of yes and we have the model that is good at taking you know detection and then good at removal as automatic yeah and this is all possible today you know your job will mostly be to combine models create pipelines of models prompting even right do you think that apple will just make this kinda of default in the camera i mean apple could have shipped instagram apple could have shipped so many things like apple get a shipped that the zoom annoying pop over of facial effects whatever goes away and they haven't is still broken like when the blades come up so i know i'm i mean a post worrying about what apple does world i'm actually more worried about their constraints some developer freedom on how they tax you and only let you run one browser engine that's kinda my mental model like apple is like in the ibm phase of like list preserve what we have at all cost in lit like they're almost becoming like oracle of our generation purely it's all about terms of service and two point one point one prohibits this is like hopefully you know i'm saying this so that the company becomes better in the interest of like open public feedback tim sweeney from and unreal from epic games just had a similar comment on the podcast i think there needs to be a world where developers can just ship that's him made idea of or sell and like apple has sort of been constrain that so i'll tell you like there's so many cameras that he can ship to the phone that people love right so there is hell holiday camera i think it's called and it's pronounced there is obviously instagram is a camera right so savage is a camera so yeah and and also but it's also time like you know these things come in these waves or about every seven eight ten years the window reopen on you know the these kind of like things if you just like an instagram and snapchat when they came out it was sort of like this eight year period after facebook came out yeah and like there was enough new stuff new either new social norms like people taking pictures everywhere new technology like smartphones that all of a sudden there was like an opportunity for those it's now been another ten years post yeah snapchat and instagram for somebody to build a better camera and there's a wedge through utility like you can build a better camera you can build a better like oh just imported your photos start editing like the the the exact project i mean who knows how this is gonna happen but it has to happen it has to happen that like i can take great photos even if i don't if i didn't capture everything perfectly like the ais is already there like just make it happen people yeah you could even actually just do the camera roll part right because you know google photos and all these they trying to do like hey we made a memory and like you know like my my mom loves these it's like oh i forgot about that it's just together and put corny music on top just a cool factor to that yeah those are all pretty totally bad but it's your photos and your memory so it's still good enough imagine if you had taste and you did like you imagine if kevin's sis and you you realize oh there's a gold mine on people's camera roles that i could just be generating i could just be mining that and creating like good content yeah there's so many thoughts that come to mind one is look brilliant things happen when people focus and obsessed over a problem the domain so the operating system makers have so many iris in the fire and there has to be someone that just loves to take great photos and who wants to democrat that with everybody else right so that's kinda how i think about it and there's so many angles there is the memory video creation there is the photo there is some aspects of share ability of the photos so who knows i mean like i think my prediction is more around like something amazing is gonna happen into the space more than like what is the specific thing alright i wanna do a couple of your other ideas oh this one was clever absurd smart auto complete like i didn't know when you said i was auto completely who cares and then i saw your kinda like brief description i was like that's actually brilliant can you explain what this idea is yeah i think when it started to become obvious that l were gonna transform software engineering it was when we started typing code into a code editor and he just suggested stuff based on the whole project the whole sort of corpus of code that it has existed in in humanity the next wrinkle was that things get better the richer the context so if you only give the one line of code and nothing else it will still produce something useful and it'll blow people's minds and i think we're in the time of humanity when like things blow our minds for like a week and then we get immediately bored and used to it but the next wrinkle was what if you put the content of your clipboard into the into the prompt because developers typically are like would they just saw they put into their clipboard because they intend to search for it or make a mutation so what's in the clipboard is likely to be kinda what's in your mind could help yeah right and so our completion conditions get better and then they get better with more context and like i get smarter models and and with search because now when i am in a different file i'm likely to be writing code that it's related to the dependency of this other file so long story short things get better with better context and auto completion is sort of the first manifestation of how l and ais can enhance your cognitive ability yeah i mean it's just in time expertise yes right like in line right while i'm writing it yes give me the perfect thing right there without me having to leave go ask things think of a question just give me a suggestion right there so now what's the that worked in code you're saying what about the rest yeah exactly and and i get frustrated with like how bad spell checking is so if you look at you know macos s spell checker it's gotten better over the years but it just doesn't know the things that you literally saw ten seconds ago like someone tells say hey can you can you send me the b zero someone says in slack and then you go to an email and you start writing v zero and and and apple goes i think you meant via like it comes up with a new word and like no i literally just was talking about this how could i possibly want to not write that down and so that's gonna where the inspiration came for it and i think there's a lot of ways to go about this like one is like you enhance the operating system is not a is a non trivial task but i think this general idea applies to so many things where we forget that the l are here the context is not evenly distributed meaning if you just put the right things into the prompt magical happen without changing the actual sort of engine of intelligence and so that example you gave of like the v one sounds minor like oh who cares you because you just push bad space twice and just fix it but what you're saying is if the ai knows what i'm talking about what i'm thinking about what i'm working on what we're doing then in the same way that in code it auto suggests the right code because it knows about my whole multiple files in the projects it'll do the same when i that email it won't you just give me the generic thing it knows how i talk and it knows what we were talking about and it knows what the plan was that i'm trying to relate to this guy i take the black mirror the entire history of review is that the one where the camera is like your memory external memory basically the other thing that's really interesting is that this systems are all about next token prediction right and right now we're not fully exploiting that because we're not putting in the sequence of everything we're doing and everything we're thinking about every time you go from app to app that content is getting lost and we typically actually tend to work sequentially what happens is i read an email that is about a problem and then it go in another app and i'm likely gonna discuss that problem or i'm gonna try to look for the person that is an expert in that problem so the other way to go about this is like you know how can you ingest this series of apps and integrations and systems that people used to do their work and you connect the thoughts there's one more that you have here you said more granular v zero so this is almost like hey come disrupt us yeah it's it's what i talked about with the game engine right like just like cha got broken down into like individual things we have a big effort at ver versailles to sort of like we wanna be the platform of platforms we won the next shopify to be born on a ver cell and what i anticipate will happen is that if an entrepreneur financial says i wanna make it easy for people to sell online they're probably it's just like we did it with a type form exercise they're probably gonna start with ai they're gonna they're they're not gonna build the same shopify that exists today didn't create something that starts with intelligence it starts with maybe importing a photo of the product that you wanna sell maybe starts with a prompt of what you one your sort to be maybe it's so smart at like if it's a physical sort already exists it knows everything about it right it's like one button create the store and it ingest all the products and skus and categories and whatever so similar to the game engine thought experiment that we went through like that would be a more granular v zeros like okay vi can create anything but and the reason that this would work out is that is the same reason i shopify if i worked out like there is things that are very general like aws like if versa cell you know self is like aws some steroids in a way like we're making it so easy for people but it's is still a broad platform on top of which any ad idea can be deployed and so i really believe that ai will transform everything it'll transform website to build it it will transform e commerce it'll transform building so a lot of the sources exercises that i do is i look there's gonna be v zero for legal our our general counsel uses tool called gc c dot ai gc c dot ai is essentially v zero for lawyers and it was built on the platform and and the other ring is used to what built their website only or drafting contracts so like you can prompt your way to you know saying like i need this contract between these two parties or i to review a contract that i need to import documents and so that's kinda what i mean by the more granular it's more like a theme that a specific idea one of the other things i wanted to ask you about something that brought for you i thought this was incredible this is a piece of a you know internet internet history here to make explain what i just handed you and the the backstory of this this were printing this out because i used this example so much as like the magic of silicon valley i was i ended up at this party you know the classic like could've have been an office warming party something along this lines or like meetup and were you know copying conversations passing out drinks and he met this gentleman named brian armstrong and he did something that i find myself doing a lot is i walk up to people not with networking agendas or random ideas i walk up to people with content okay i wanna show them something okay i wanna show them an app i woke up to people in a stranger me or what are you talking about well be people in the intercontinental of like working internet i might been whatever but i could do it with an driver like i i i have no limits i i take no prisoners so he walked up to me and he's like here's a i'm working on coinbase it's yeah it's like a bank for digital currency and i'm building an app and he shows me the app and then he goes if you install the app i'll send you a bitcoin just think about how crazy it is like if you install an app like first of all twist my arm i love trying out new things right and i love bitcoin at that time i'll give you a hundred thousand dollars or whatever what date the date is on this email what year was this the november ninth twenty twelve so it's magic of the bay area because you can just walk up on both sides you can just walk up to people and show them things you can see their reactions you can get their feedback etcetera etcetera and on my side and there there's some people on the street that will show you some things you didn't ask for here that's that's another pod of services francisco crazy yeah for sure it comes with a lot of diversity and but on my side you know it's like well you can be the on the receiving end of new ideas new opportunities new like you can invest like i had been an investor the was like hey this brian guy is pretty smart and he's hustling hard and digital currency might as well give it a shot right so yeah i can you sent you this email he said you a big bitcoin important that he says worse ten dollars and eighty one cents for the app installed now that's a hundred and three thousand dollars as of this morning yeah and then i actually ended up the following coinbase for many years at the time i think it was poor or i had just began i i can't remember exactly when i sold my company but i couldn't angel invest most likely at this time but that was the other thing that i started doing when i sold my my first company right like i put it at all back into the game which is kinda crazy in fact i dealt to this guy who had really respected in the javascript community and and he was like he was also starting to do angel investments and he goes well the way that i trip bit bitcoin is like an angel investment i put in a twenty thousand dollar check into bitcoin and i remember when i sold my company did that and and it was probably also because of the serendipity of like having coinbase and you know this infrastructure that that was nascent but i was i had been exposed to the magic goes to the valley is that you can still do this things you can just like make things happen did it also help that you were you know born and raised in argentina and you had seen kinda like maybe you questioned currency more than the average bear did right a hundred percent a hundred percent so the concrete memory that was a young child but it had everyone in argentina stressed the f out was and people can fact check us and looked this up but it was like i think we had like three precedent in three days one president had almost like i think he he raced quit because it was an economic in financial meltdown i think it was this is about like two thousand two thousand one the next guy comes in and he's like oh cool and vice president becomes president and something along signs is like cool like i'll try to fix it two weeks in he's out too and then someone comes in who i'm not even sure if he was like literally like next in line another guy comes in and i think this is the guy that pretty sure that is the third guy it that goes to national tv they did they do the whole thing or like they interrupt all of the ongoing channels and they like president comes in is like he's addressing the financial turmoil and he's saying look there's a lot of noise about how your dollar savings will get lost and they might get converted into pesos and they may get converted at a non beneficial rate and he said do not worry and this is a national tv fully synchronized across every screen in the country do not worry your dollars are safe if you deposited dollars this is exact quote if you did deposited dollars you will receive dollars if you deposited argentinian pesos you will receive argentinian pesos literally a week later it didn't happen the dollars get converted into bezos and then they currency lost its value so basically your money was a stolen from you the banks were in c with the government to make this transactions happen your money is effectively just like when when people joke i i take it personally excuse michael jordan people joke oh bitcoin is just a database we could replace it with post chris and we would get a lot more throughput say well not really what we had in argentina was post or maybe worse maybe it was excel or something and like and the government literally did go in and in the currency column said select all convert mean like that is the database that is not immutable and so i became extremely peeled with bitcoin because i have that like i have the create memory and i have my dad screaming at the screen and saying like these people are so crap they're like scream and then there's thing that happened was all this protest of people that had large dollar savings that it was so terrible because argentina has been guilty of this before melee many times of like if you're rich that's frowned upon that's terrible you probably got rich by screwing someone up that is like how the culture is largely configured so it was very hard empathize with this process that would happen because people would literally be outside of the banks protesting that their savings got stolen but the way that it would get sort of you know manipulated by the media was are you gonna empathize with that rich guy oh poor him his complaining about his huge dollar saving so that added even more insult to the injury that there was no empathy to people that were losing their money and so you know the bitcoin seems so obvious in the context of like we need a globally distributed database that is immutable that has extreme security guarantees because this is your life this is your the things that you might leave for your kids this is everything you've worked your entire life for you you cannot trust any given actor you cannot trust the government you cannot trust the banks you cannot trust you know your friends you cannot trust anyone like you need to be able to have crypto certainty you can only trust math and the universe which is kinda like the zoo emerging properties of it you trust the universe in terms of like the energetic demands on top of which bitcoin banks that it's so hard to mint a block right and it's so hard to manipulate and do this cyber attacks and whatnot and you're also banking on the crypto graphic verification like you you if you want you can be a node and verify the blockchain yourself with software that you run as opposed to trusting the world of like is this legit is this the chain that i should be looking at which is why i mean we can go into a whole different tangent but like i've always been somewhat sympathetic to non proof of work systems because they create an uncertainty about what is the right chain to be looking at and in in that category falls like ethereum and a few others two questions for you one given that you went through that do you like kinda den dominate yourself in bitcoin like put a huge percentage of your own net worth in bitcoin or like how how have you so decided to do that i put my entire net worth into ver cell i o i've i so having said all of this i always think about the mental model that warren buffett has offered of like if i have if if i could have a cube of all gold on the planet and know like i would look at it as i go it's this shiny block of gold or i could have a cube of all of the productive farmland in the us and all of its companies what cube would i rather own but it is a false dichotomy i wanna own both i won bitcoin and i want assets in productive assets that are gonna grow over time that it also want to support and so i like by far first and foremost placing a bet of myself in ver brazil so that's kind of my primary net worth but if bitcoin is not some percentage of my net worth i would be really worried because i would not have that rock solid foundation that i missed when i was in argentina like it it didn't feel like i had access to something that could be so reliable and trustworthy so i am a fan of a potential fusion in which everything is den under the hood everything is re based on top of this system that would be really cool i so when i do these podcasts like the way i people think that this is the oh how did it go and i'm like it's good or bad actually for me i get the win far before we sit down because i when i know you're coming on i go down a rabbit hold of guillermo and i go and i stuff and i learn from you that's where i get and i'm in i'm in this for the wisdom so i'm like i'm looking for the golden and nuggets the insights the wisdom the frameworks that he use is the stories that inspired me or i can remember i can tie to my own life so by the time i sit down here this is all gravy now i'm just having chicken out can tell me to the lunch but one of the things that i saw your old blog and think it like twenty sixteen or something it was a newspaper clipping i forget who it was if it was edison or who it was but they had this idea of the energy dollar it's wild that's i never heard of this i but like i guess back in the day like the was it edison or i don't remember who it was in ford i can't remember yeah i was like two of like kind of the lu of the time it was like ford and somebody else yeah and they were talking about this concept of an energy dollar was like hey we need a currency that's based off of like production of jewels you know jewels of energy use of electricity or work and then that'll be a more sort of like rock all appearance like it tracks reality it tracks the universe perfectly right it's it's also related to the car of scale in like our ability to capture energy from our nearby star and the types of civilizations that we are in the other one that the the reason i've been actually also thinking about this more recently is we're clearly entering a world in which energy can be trans into intelligence i mean it's already the case that i can do so much test time compute that any any problem seems tract with enough cycles of gpus and the only limiting factor does seem to be our ability to harden energy and so the the unit of wealth or or the store of wealth has to be something that is rare right and it has to be something that's pro and so the idea of tracking are yeah our fundamental store of wealth through energy i mean i'm very intrigued by that so well did thanks for coming on i think what you've built is amazing your story is great your big ball of energy and some of these ideas are really really good like i'll share more so there's that more there's free ideas to thread coming on x so okay the sequel is it gonna be like a shitty movie sequel where you know just person help but i i did sit a high bar i don't wanna i don't wanna brag off comes out can we do brainstorm two on here when we on because the that's what we do here so alright man thank you so much i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back