AI Will Replace Most Jobs (And No One Is Ready) | Adam Spector

Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of NF Twins. Today we're talking to Adam Spector. In my books, he's a legendary investor from Silicon Valley who has already invested in more than 14 unicorns early stage. He's also the founder of Chore. Chore enables founders to focus on what's most important, getting shit done. Chore takes care of the rest. Now let's jump right in.

For my focus, it's all the US, right? And like, you know, there's obviously lots of great startup stuff happening over in Asia, but in the end, like for better or worse, You know, like I'm based in San Francisco. It's sort of this bias towards companies that want to be in or move to the United States is for better or worse, like the US has the greatest startup ecosystem out there. And it's the greatest sort of single market as well, right? That's why it's hard for a lot of companies to get started in Europe and be really big and successful in Europe is because you guys know this, I'm sure, better than I do, but there's, it's just so much more difficult with all the different countries and regulations and rules and languages and everything else. Yeah. In the US being 50 contiguous states that all adhere, they're all a little bit different, but they adhere to generally the same laws. It's so much easier to build a big, long-term scaling business in the US than it is, I think, really anywhere else in the world, maybe outside of China. China, you could do it probably too, but China has its own set of challenges.

Especially with the excess of capital. I mean, we've seen it in— I mean, we raised, I think, 5 or 6 years ago for our first startup, a gaming startup here in Spain. And man, it was like, you need needed all the metrics. I'm like, if I have these metrics, I'm not gonna raise any round. So it was like, we had to talk to over 100 investors just to get like a seed round of like $400,000, like $500,000 roughly. And man, it was such a pain. But in the end, it's like, that's the thing. If you live here, it's harder to raise, especially back in the day because it was before COVID So yeah, that was a different story. But yeah, it's definitely much better to raise in the US for sure.

Yeah, it's the ecosystem, and not just the US, right? It's really the San Francisco Bay Area and sort of the tech space. I mean, I have friends who have been in other locations, in other cities, and they're like, oh, I'm raising and I need you to sign an NDA, and I have all my numbers and metrics prepared. And I'm like, dude, it's all about execution. I'm not signing any NDA on anything, and I don't care what you put into an Excel spreadsheet. It's meaningless to me because it has no relevance on your long-term success. So, and he just didn't get that. So it's not just the US, right? That was— he was in the US, smart guy. It's just the Silicon Valley mindset of saying, I want to see how fast you can scale, how fast you can move. And if you think your idea is so special, I can show you 10 million other ideas that I've also looked at who think they're special and all have failed because they didn't know how to execute and move fast.

I love that. Do you think that nowadays, because I heard there's a lot of exodus of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, that this is the same mindset is coming to Austin and other hubs that are increasing now in velocity?

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely for the real tech hubs. Absolutely. That mindset exists in those places too. The difference is you have less of a concentration of investors and founders who really understand it. So you still have at the periphery and all these other places, Austin included, other people who don't really understand this stuff. And so they might be a wealthy individual who wants to invest in tech, but that guy has no idea what he's doing. And so he's still asking for, I want to see your financial statements and the same thing you were getting asked for, for your company. I think that still happens outside of Silicon Valley where everyone just knows what it's about. If you're building a fast-growing tech-forward business, there's a very different set of metrics that someone cares about and arguably the only thing they should care about.

Could you tell us the difference between what these specific metrics are in Silicon Valley versus somewhere else where you have invested, or have you only invested in San Francisco? Silicon Valley.

I've invested in companies outside of the Bay Area, certainly, but those are still— those companies are still companies who understand the mindset of being a tech-focused startup. So they understand those metrics and what they're looking for. And they're mostly, even though the companies are not based here, they're mostly raising from companies that are in They're from, sorry, investors that are in the Bay Area and understand that mindset. And I'll give you an example. I mean, part of why I really mostly only do companies that are based in the Bay Area is really 2 reasons. Well, one is simplistic, right? We probably all know who you spend time with are who you end up being like, right? If you spend time with washed-out druggies, you might be a washed-out druggie. Right? If you spend time with your 2 brothers, you're going to be like 2 bros and really close with each other and probably very similar. My guess is you both are very similar to each other. And there's actually lots of studies around being obese, right? If you're around people who are also obese and that's your culture and the people you're with on a regular basis, you are almost certainly going to be more overweight than you would be were you around other people who are much more in shape. And it's the same thing with Startups. So if you want to be around other people who are pushing the cutting edge of AI, of technology, of startups, of growth, of just crazy new ideas, building things, you end up wanting to be in the place where everyone does that, and that is San Francisco. So I'll actually give you a perfect example of this. A friend of mine, he's really well connected in Austin, everything else. He recently moved. He and someone else, they both moved to San Francisco. They rented a whole house for this whole summer, right? Not even summer yet, but like for the next 6 months, they rented this house. And they're going to be here for probably 50 to 75% of their time from Austin. And they're here because they're like, I want to be around all the other people who are hacking away and building cool stuff with AI. And that just doesn't exist in Austin for them. They feel like it doesn't exist in Austin the same way it does here. That's awesome.

That's crazy. I mean, AI is like the cutting edge right now in terms of also, is it a little bit of hype, do you think, right now? Because everything is AI. Everyone's like, oh yeah, we're doing AI. And then you look under the hood, you're like, I don't know about that, man.

So I have so many answers there for you on that front. And so, so, Mark, let me try to answer this a few different ways. I think AI is still a little bit overhyped in what it's actually doing within enterprises. Right? Everyone's like, everyone can kind of see ahead, be like, well, if I can only automate this work or get this thing done, then my business is going to be dramatically changed. My profit will go up. I'll have— I'll be able to let go lots of other people and overhead, et cetera, et cetera. Um, I haven't seen a lot of that be reality yet, right? You have like Square and Jack Dorsey, or Block and Jack Dorsey, like saying they're laying off 40% of people because of AI. My guess is that was more of an overhang of overhiring from COVID than actual using AI. But with that said, I also see stuff every single day that we're doing in my own company, right? So I'm a 4-time founder.

Sure.

Decently big company at Chor. We're using AI more and more in everything, but we haven't fully figured out how to integrate it in the right ways because at least for us, we deal with so many edge cases and then you really still need a human to deal with these really weird edge cases. But with all that said, then you keep reading every day about new pieces of technology coming out and you see these companies that are going from $1 million in revenue on, you know, right away to $100 million in revenue overnight, it seems like. And that's not happening. That doesn't happen unless the product is truly valuable and provide— like people are paying real money to buy that product. So it has to provide real value. So it's a combo of a little overhyped still. most organizations. Yes, you can all look forward and say, this is probably coming. In fact, it's definitely coming. It's just a question of when. And maybe it's not tomorrow, but I wouldn't be shocked if it's this year. Like, 2026 is the year we— if we haven't already, you know, crossed the chasm where we're essentially living in a world of, uh, the full singularity, um, it's coming real soon.

I have 2 points there, because first of all, I would love to hear also more about Chor. So basically tell our audience a little bit more about Chor. That's one thing. And the other thing is, especially with AI— well, wait, first explain this and then have another point.

Yeah, I'll tell you a bit about Chor and we should talk about— there's an article that I think would be really fun for all of us to talk about, sort of related to Chor. I'd pull it up. Where did I put it? I want to get the title correct for you guys.

Oh,

Okay. Um, there we go. Um, so, uh, but, but so at a high level for Chore, um, we're essentially back office services for startups and for businesses. So the whole thesis is if you want to be a fast growing business that's successful, and this goes for arguably every business that exists, um, you should do as little admin work as possible. The reason is pretty simple. You want to focus all of your time and talent On the things that you are the best at, that is your differentiating property. Like, why are you great? Why are you different? And if you're spending any of that time doing admin work the day to day, you will fail. So a really simple example. Imagine you two, you're the best cookie bakers in the entire world, you two. And you're like, you love baking cookies. You're amazing at it.

How did you know?

I am. You look like you love cookies. So best cookie bakers in the world, right? best ones in the world. And your friends are like, please go, please go create the— I'm going to mispronounce your last name— the Leissner, Lesner, um, cookies.

Very good.

Right? So I'm going to create this cookie store. Um, you say, yeah, I'm going to go do this. You go create the cookie store, and now you're baking cookies every day, and you are stoked. You're so happy because you love baking cookies and coming up with new recipes and everything else, and it brings you joy. But you keep selling out, so you're like, oh my gosh, I need to go get a physical storefront. Well, now you have to deal with all the regulations in Barcelona to go get a physical storefront set up. Well, that's really annoying. Then you probably need to hire someone to manage that storefront, like do checkout and sales and all that other stuff. Next thing you know, you're managing a whole team of people to manage your storefront, to help you cook enough cookies to accommodate the interest you have from your people who want to buy your cookies. And you're spending all your time managing this team and you're spending zero time Baking cookies, which is what brought you joy in the first place and why your business is successful. Um,

so,

and then you fail because guess what? You're not good at that work. That's not why you started your business. And then it all falls apart and you go out of business and you're depressed and sad and you can't make cookies. So that's the story. Why would you ever do that to yourself? Why don't you just delegate it and outsource it to someone who's an expert? It's the same thing. Why do people go to AWS for, um, their servers? They don't build servers in their garage anymore. Because AWS is better at it. And it means you can delegate that away and do the things you're great at. And it just goes on and on. So it's back office, the same thing. That's what Chore does.

So basically replacing the middle layer of work inside the company. So like the boring stuff of everything like accounting, HR, finances, everything that like, everything that took—

so takes away from building our cookie industry or business. That is what basically Chore does. For startups.

Correct. Yeah, exactly. Um, imagine, uh, it is— we, we do, we, we do the chores, the things that most people view as chores, we, we think are fantastic. We love them. And once again, like, this is once again the beauty of how the economy works today, right? We buy things from different people, right? We talked about at the beginning of this how I have a good microphone and a camera for this recording. I didn't make those. I let the people who have a comparative advantage at making microphones and cameras Make those for me because they're better at it. And I gave them money because they were good at that and I paid them money for the things they're good at. It's the exact same thing in every single business. You should hand off the things that you are not good at and buy those from experts who are going to constantly iterate and improve on those. So at Shore, we are constantly building better systems to automate more of your human resources work, your compliance work, your finance work. You as a company, your cookie store is never going to build that expertise. Because it is not your core competency. It is not why you are special. So we will always be better. That is our comparative advantage. And yes, you pay us a slight premium for that. But that premium— Is it really premium? Because the question is like, is it really premium?

Because otherwise I would have spent all this time in doing that thing, which I could rather spend in things that actually generate more money. And then in comparison, it is way more— it's way little. It's not as much money as you would have spent otherwise.

I would— you should join my sales calls. That is exactly it. That is exactly right. But that's the right way to think about it is it's not more expensive. It's actually cheaper.

Yeah.

Because if you— this goes to the point I want to talk about, like hiring people in the world of AI, but like the cost— most employers and most companies don't take into account the expenses of hiring full-time employees or even part-time employees, the recruiting, training, managing costs of the person, let alone their compensation, and the fact that they are likely to fail. And we should talk more about this other article in a bit, but like, is so high. Why don't you just hire an expert and say, you know what, I'm hiring you to achieve X goal. If you achieve X, and the expert says, okay, it's going to cost me $100 to achieve X goal. And if that expert doesn't achieve X goal, You fire them and you ask for a refund, and then you find someone else who can do it better. You can't do that with an employee.

Oh no, especially not in Europe.

The regulations are super hard. It's like once you're hired, man, holy cow. It's, uh, I'm pretty sure California is also similar.

Not anywhere close to the way it is in Europe. I mean, it's a little bit more protective than other parts of the US, but not anywhere close to Europe. But that's it. So like, why would— if I were a company in Europe, why would I ever hire a full-time employee? Like, literally, why would I ever do it? I mean, I don't understand why the regulations are set up. I understand in theory why the regulations are set up that way, but it disincentivizes hiring. Like, so you said you're never going to hire people. Why would I ever do that? It's insane.

It's just old school. Like, think about it. There's not so many big new companies that are coming out of Europe. I mean, Lovable is one of them, but I'm just saying, okay, that doesn't count. It's like an AI-based, uh, it was like a unicorn. But otherwise, it's like there's not so much innovation happening or growth in terms of companies. Even though Europe is bigger than the US when it comes to like everything, every kind of metric, they're bigger in theory. But also, we're also much— we have a lot more regulation.

And look, there's a whole political debate about regulation and the pros and cons of that. And I'm sort of in the middle ground, frankly, when it comes to regulation. I think sometimes it's very valuable. I'm very though probably on the more, I don't know the right terminology, but I'm much more less regulation when it comes to employees and employment. I think more people are employable. I think it's better to have more people employed because there are a few lower regulations in place and protections than the opposite, right? And Europe has sort of been the opposite. US says, look, you can fire people, give them notice, no notice, whatever it is. They file for unemployment through the government, that's fine. And you can essentially get rid of someone right away. I mean, there's still some protections in place, but generally you do that. That makes it much lower cost for me to hire more people in the US and faster and move quickly. And if someone isn't working out, letting them go. And frankly, that's a net win for the person too. Like, I actually, if you've ever hired people, you know, if someone's not working out, they know it too. They're not having fun. That isn't enjoyable for them. So like, why would you want to make that process longer where they have to stick around so they can get paid out and just say like, hey, look, it's not working. I really hope you find another job that's a better fit for you. Like, we weren't the right place. Sorry, we all messed up. So less regulation equals hiring more people.

I agree also, because otherwise I think you're overfocusing on the hiring aspect— sorry, the interview process versus the actual job, because people who get the job are usually ones that are really good at the interview, not necessarily good at the job. So And that's why they're optimizing for that, the current regulation. But you want to see how are they actually doing the job and then fire them if they're not doing the job. Because there are some people who are horrible at tests, but they're going to crush it at work. So this is one of the things I'm like, oh yeah, makes sense what you guys are saying.

2-week trial, baby. 2-week trial. Hire slow, fire fast. Because if there's doubt, there is no doubt. So that's one of the awesome mistakes we did earlier in our previous startup or first startup actually. And it was just like, we hired too fast and then also didn't fire too fast. Like, we just like very slowly just like, oh yeah, but they will change. Improvement plans. No, no, they will not change. Like, if you tell them, like, you can try as much as you want, in the end, if they are, you will notice if somebody is an A-player from the start, because there's no doubt. Might give them 1 or 2 weeks, otherwise didn't make the cut. It's just learning still.

Exactly right. And this is the thing. Most people are not A-players. Let's just be clear about it. There's a great article by Daniel Meissner. I don't know if you've read his work, but he's a really good theorist on some of this stuff. He wrote it about a week ago, 2 weeks ago maybe, and it's called Exactly Why and How AI Will Replace Knowledge Work. Essentially, I'm maybe more on the San Francisco cutting edge of this where I just think we're going to see 20 to 50% white-collar job loss in the next 2 to 5 years. Even though to where we started, it's still taking a little bit more time, but it's coming pretty fast. And what this article argues, and it says there are other things humans can do, so it's not totally negative, but I'll give you some just quick data from it. Please. He says only 21% of workers globally are engaged. Only 21% of people are engaged. 62% of workers are doing the minimum at work. 15%, so 1-5, are actively working against their own companies. 70% dread going to work on Monday. 15% of frontline workers say work fulfills any sense of purpose, and half of all workers are watching for or actively seeking a new job. Think about all those stats. Given that data—

Seems good.

Would anyone ever want to hire a full-time person? Like, No. Why would I want people like— this is the lowest baseline that AI is going to replace, is these people who essentially aren't doing good work at your company. They don't like it. They don't want to be there. They don't enjoy it. They aren't engaged. They really aren't doing much work in the first place. Like, that is the bar that AI has to clear to be better than people. And it is a freaking low bar. And so—

Honestly, when you said that, I was just thinking about our friends and they're like awkward, like people that we know. And like, yes, it's exactly these stats. I was like, going through the numbers like, yeah, seems about right. They're complaining about work. They're like actively not doing anything. They do something else in their work time, or they just are, I don't know, hazardously taking risks at their job that is just not worth it. And just like, yeah, seems about right. The stats, I'm like, yeah, I wouldn't hire that person. Correct.

And so this, once again, this goes for Every organization in, in not just the US, not just Europe. I mean, Europe's harder because once again, if you can't really fire people when you figure out they're not doing a good job. But this is why everyone who does work should be so afraid of AI in their roles, is at some point management is going to figure this out that like, God, like most of these human workers are terrible. Like the bar is so low. They, once again, A players are great. But everyone else, like the bar is so low, they are not actively engaged. They are not doing good work. They are ignoring all of your SOPs and best practices and everything you put in place to help them do a good job. And you say, or I can replace this with an AI for $20 a month that can do 95% of their job. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't make mistakes. It doesn't complain. That's an easy decision. And so were I not an A player, I would be— I'm trying to think of a good way. I'd be really scared and not even prepared to make

this. Hey, you can, you can say whatever you want on this podcast.

That's also one of these— I'd be shitting my pants. Let's put it that way. I'd be shitting my pants. Scared as all hell that, that my management is going to figure out that I am a worthless employee.

Yeah.

Because most employees are worthless.

That's also one of these points I could say in general, because I'm in the opinion that, for example, AI is right now, it's not taking right now, at least not taking most of the jobs, because, but it will enable A players to be even better, like 10x better than the average worker or employee. But the average person who's not even using AI or barely using it, just like texting with ChatGPT a little bit or something, the difference will be so rate, like the gap in performance, that yes, management will notice the gap. And then of course, I mean, why do I need to hire 5 of these people? Even management, like people like, why do I need middle managers? Yeah, also, like, if they're not necessary, yeah, exactly. Then just like—

Well, and this is, it's, look, it's all overhead, and you need middle managers to keep the people who are disengaged more engaged and to follow up. And this is sort of the way business has been run. And we have, we have, look, I just want to make sure it's clear. Like, I think all the people at Chor are great and we really spend, we spend a lot of time hiring, recruiting, and training. But even then, every single person, we talk about this internally on a pretty regular basis. Like, everyone needs to be really good because if you're not, like, there are, forget even AI for a second, there are overseas workers. Right outside the US. US is expensive. Europe is somewhat expensive, who are also really hungry to do that job, who are really good at that job, and who are 90% lower cost. And so to, to be employable as a person in an expensive country or be employable in the world of AI, you need to be an A-player who is constantly saying, how do I do a better job? How do I keep improving? How do I make sure I don't need to waste a middle manager's time training me or holding my hand? And they're holding my hand because I'm just like too lazy to actually do it the right way. Like, there's so many different challenges, so I could go on, but like that article reinforces that AI is going to replace most white-collar jobs to me.

Adam, you seem so passionate about it. So what actually got you into starting Chor? Because like, you, like, I love your passion about this.

Thank you. Um, what got me started was pretty simple. Uh, I, I believe the world is a better place when there are more entrepreneurs. Um, more companies, more people starting new ideas, trying new things, um, building stuff leads to a better world, right? If we're all stuck on— if there's no competition and we're all stuck on the same tools, systems, and services that we used to have, that is not a good world, right? We're able to do this podcast because Riverside exists, because Riverside said we want to digitize the podcasting recording studio. Um, Thank goodness there were entrepreneurs who said that, and there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ideas like that. Um, but, but also, there can only be— if there's a lot of entrepreneurs and most of them fail, then the world is not as good a place as it could have been. So the idea of Tor, going back to our cookie example, is how do I accelerate them and make them have a higher chance of success? Well, I know for a fact you have a higher chance of success if you can spend all of your time focused on what you love. And what you're great at and what makes your company special. Every second you spend distracted by back office tasks and probably a bunch of other things is a minute you can't spend on the things that matter. So I'll give you one other example and I'll try to be quiet because I'm talking a lot on this. But, you know, a perfect example of just not a back office kind of task business-wise, but just a general one is I don't enjoy doing laundry. It's not fun for me. Some people, it's calming to them. I get it. For me, it's not. I don't enjoy it. I have 2 kids. I don't want to do their laundry. I maybe could get— they're a little too young to do their own laundry. So I wanted to find a solution to this, and I didn't want to ask my wife to do our laundry. I didn't think that was fair to her either. Guess what? I take it to the wash and fold place a few blocks from my house every few weeks. Take 3 bags, my clothes, my kid, each of my kids' clothes. Walk it over to the wash and fold. I drop it off. 24 hours later, I get it all back. It's washed, it's folded, it's cleaned. And yes, I handed money over for that task for someone else who has a comparative advantage at doing laundry, who hopefully loves doing laundry. I let them do it and I paid them for that. And I can spend more time with my kids playing football or soccer, whatever word term you want to use in Europe. You know, spending time with them, spending time with my wife, you name it, or doing my job at my company. That to me is a really good trade of money for time to do things that are more important to me.

Buying back time. Yeah, 100%. I mean, this is a big thing. I think the difference— in Europe, it's not that common to think about it this way, that you can buy back time by doing these kind of things. Or I mean, the US in general, the whole gig economy and everything is so much bigger than in Europe, just because they have this different mindset, which I love, honestly.

Well, yes and no, right? I would say the downside, maybe tell me if this is true, but like the downside is in Europe, it seems to be the case that people also appreciate their leisure time more. And in the US, in many cases, I take that new time that I have by not doing my laundry, and I essentially just reinvest that into staying really busy. Right. So, Marc, it ends up being that I'm just busier and I work harder instead of saying, hey, how do I have more leisure time? Like, I want to spend more time with my kids, but it probably turns into just me working harder. So that's maybe not healthy.

100%. No, 100%. But the thing is, I don't know what is healthy. I think, look, obviously, of course you have kids, so it's a little bit different. But for me, I love working and I love what I'm doing. So for me, this gives me energy and this helps me, I mean, not relax, but just like sometimes also relax, right? The podcast, I love it. Like when I get to do it, oh my God, I'm like, I get so much energy out of it. So for me, that's not extra work. I'm like, this is fucking amazing. I get to do this. I have amazing guests, good conversations. But if I have to do laundry, I'm like, oh my God, and all this stuff. And we are entrepreneurs. I don't know, I would like to think we're A-players, but everyone likes to think that about themselves. So if I get to have the extra hour to do something that I can work towards my goals, I'll do it. I love doing that. But again, that's why we're like, oh, in the US, we appreciate that in general. The whole ecosystem is so much more—

Well, in San Francisco, okay. I want to know about San Francisco.

Yeah, no, but I'm saying in general, if you're in Ohio, just companies, like we had companies in the Netherlands, in Germany, in Spain, and they're all a pain in the ass. Germany is like the cheapest out of them, but you still have to go and get to like go to a notary, get it notarized. Everything if you want to change something. And so now finally with our latest business, we chose to have a, like Delaware. It just doesn't make sense to do anything else. It's just everything standardized. You do it online. I mean, Europe is now working on something, a Eurocorp or something. What is it called? Yeah. Eo Inc. Eo Inc. Yeah. So basically like the LLC Delaware equivalent, but since I don't know, that will probably take another year or 2 or 3. Till this is actually working. Because again, like you said, Europe is very complex. So this has legal issues in all different countries. And what does it imply? Because as you know, as an investor, if you invest, for example, you have a mandate from your limited partners or whatnot, or maybe you get funds from the government as well, that you can only invest in a company that is from that country, that region. And in Europe, this is very, very strict. Like when we were in Amsterdam, we talked to investors, but we had a Spanish company like, we'd love to invest, but you guys are not a Dutch company, so we can't. And this would be amazingly solved with the Euro Inc., I think it's called. And because there's so much regulation, again, it's like, it's wild.

Simplification.

Simplification. Yeah.

Well, I hope for Europe's sake that happens. I hope they also make it happen quickly. I mean, one of the challenges with all governments everywhere is it seems to go slow. But there's a tsunami that is either coming or arguably it's already here. I would sort of say it probably is. And that tsunami is AI. And like, it is happening so fast. And for most people, they don't understand that at all and what that really means. But everything we knew to be normal is changing and nothing is the same anymore. And so you need to move fast as a government, as a region, you name it, to stay ahead of this tsunami or even better, try to surf a tsunami, which is probably pretty difficult. But let's pretend you can surf a tsunami. That's probably what you need to do in Europe.

Is that what you do? Is that what you're doing with Autopilot?

Yeah, to some extent. So the Autopilot Fund is, is, is a fund that we created to focus on early-stage companies and make investments there. I will say a lot of the investments, we don't do a lot more investments out of Autopilot anymore. for a few different reasons, but I have sort of, you know, look, I think I think a little bit differently than many people in Silicon Valley to some extent. I mean, I'm sure we all think somewhat the same too, but I think early-stage venture capital as we knew it is essentially dead. And the people playing in that space are playing a game that was over, that is already over. They just don't know that it's over yet. The reason I say that is because of AI. It is— there's so much creative destruction happening on a regular basis that what was amazing a year ago can be dead today. So one easy example, Cursor, right? Cursor, I know it's a $20 billion valuation or something now. I mean, one of the fastest growing companies out there, utterly amazing, great company. But because Claude Code is coming out and the LLMs are building this in as a core functionality of their tools, There's a real existential crisis at Cursor right now, whether they would still— they're going to still exist in a year or two. That's crazy. Like the ability to invest properly in an early-stage company and have it exist in 5 to 10 years when it actually has a chance of going public. I don't know if that's going to happen anymore. Like, so I'm making late-stage investments now and very, very rare early-stage investments.

But this is only then for software. If something was hardware or something, what are your thoughts on that?

Same thing. It doesn't go quite as fast, but hardware is also moving pretty quickly. We have recursive self-training on the AI LLMs at this point where they're building themselves. We'll get to that same point with hardware in relative short order where the AI is building its own hardware and they're going to have their own sovereign factories, probably. They're going to be building their own factories to make their own, dark factories, no people involved. And they'll keep improving that on an incredibly fast pace as well. So it's slower. Hardware takes more time to make, but not that much slower. And it's just maybe a few years behind where software AI is today.

Adam, I've seen you invested in over 100 startups.

200.

And you found like 200 already. Damn, that's a lot.

You have to update that LinkedIn.

And also, I think over 14 unicorns or even more. How did you find like, What were the things that were like, were you like, okay, these are the things I noticed directly at these founders? How, like,

also, how did you get involved into the whole process? Because sometimes it's just a privilege also to get like invited to these, right? Or— Absolutely.

Being, being an early stage investor in general is a privilege. The way I got invited to a lot of it and when I first started was back in 2011. So I moved to San Francisco in 2010. In 2011, I started getting more involved in this. And what I realized was there was— this was before there were special purpose vehicles or SPVs and AngelList and stuff like that didn't exist. But I realized that I had access to these deals because I was hanging out with all these founders like they were my buddies. Like I was just going to parties and events and I was a founder in San Francisco, right? Be where everyone is who's building the cool stuff and you're part of that ecosystem, right? And you don't know if they're going to be big. And some of these people are really famous now, right? Like I would hang— not hang out a lot, but like with Gary Tan and people like that, like people that are really famous, big people nowadays. And they were just like good, good, cool, good guys, good people at the time. Um, and you go to all these events and no one wanted to take my like $2,000 check, right? That would— they'd laugh at that, right? That's too small. Um, but I realized I could kind of put together a pool of money from wealthier East Coast investors who wanted access to these deals, and I could be that route to the access and put money in. So we essentially pooled our resources and invested in a lot of those companies early on. And these were, once again, these were founders that I would sit down with for coffee and be like, hey, what are you building? Wow, that's actually really cool. When are you doing your next round? Oh, I just got into YC and we're closing up a really small friends and family right now. We'd love to have you involved. Great. So you get in before, like, you know, I'll give you one example. There was a company called Human Interest. They do 401s, which is like retirement in the US, right? The founder was super passionate, incredibly smart. He explained things in a way that I could tell, like, this guy is obsessed with solving this problem. Like, he'd gone really deep there. They'd literally just gotten into YC. They were doing a small friends and family round. So we were able to invest at an $8 million valuation.

Wow.

They're, I think, worth $2 or $3 billion now. You know, it's a good thing that just happened, but you had to be in the game. to actually play ball. If you're not in the game, you kind of can watch from the sidelines. Spectator.

Yeah, vicinity is power. Like, the closer you are, the better it is.

But it's super cool, like, for me just to see, because, I mean, we apply every time to Y Combinator, got twice to the interviews, sadly never made it.

But I guess chances are 50/50, so pretty bad at math here. No, but seeing that actually being in the ecosystem helps so much because you're seeing so many founders just like being at a coffee shop and then yeah, maybe the Airbnb founder sitting next door or something like this, which is super, super cool.

Well, so I'd ask both of you guys, right? You're based in Barcelona. Why are you based there? Why aren't you in San Francisco right now?

Barcelona is an amazing city and for us it's super hard to get visas. San Francisco and all this stuff. We've been working right out of college. We started our first business, basically our first startup, and we were hustling hard with the hardcore mentality. Like, we're going to do this, we're not going to raise money. Then eventually we did raise money with it.

But we were living 2, well, almost 2 years sharing a room, Mark and I, you know, like Airbnb-ing it out.

We had the 2 rooms and, you know, the classic story.

Wrote a master thesis as like a ghostwriter, another paper just to get money in because we were like, okay, fuck, We're gonna make this work, like anything just to get the ship off the ground.

We didn't have any network because we were based in Barcelona because I studied here.

And then like, yeah, how do you reach 100 investors? So we're like, okay, what is the thing? So I was just like, alright, from each investor we want to talk to, look at all the portfolio companies. So I looked at like 3 or 4 portfolio companies. From these portfolio companies, I took the 3 founders, texted each of them a LinkedIn request with a short note and said, Hey, my name is Lucas. I saw your portfolio company Autopilot. So we're just doing our own research right now on them. Do you have maybe 5 minutes to give your feedback on them? For example.

Smart.

And then I was like, hey, cool. And that's how we got into the conversation. So I had like hundreds of calls with founders. And then I just like heard their story because I thought like, for me, it's very interesting to see like just How they got it, what they're building, because like, Mark and I just love hearing about this, like founders, their stories, because you learn so much. And yeah, and then in the end, I was just like, hey, like, this is what we're doing. We're looking to like get an intro potentially. Would you be open for it? And there's like, like, of course, some said no, but yeah, most were like, actually, yeah, you guys are cool. I'll give you the intro. And then yeah, it took like over 100 VCs to finally close the round. But yeah, it's the hassle that we were hustling

in Europe. We're not going for the US.

Yeah, exactly. We were only in Spain then, which is even harder than Germany because Germany and Berlin is much easier.

But yeah, but so I'll give you guys a hard time here still. So apologies. Please. I love it. Please. So your overall answer for why you're not in San Francisco right now is because Barcelona is a great city and I'm guessing it's lower cost and lots of things and visa stuff too.

Oh yeah.

Let's pretend to get the visa stuff out of it. There are ways to get around the visa things. There's ways to make it here. Lots of people do. Why aren't you really here? Like, are you worried about putting yourself up against like the best of the best and like being in the game with the best? Like, what scares you about being here?

The biggest thing is right now we don't have the capital to sustain ourselves there because our current company is not making enough money to sustain ourselves there. This is the biggest problem. So if we would be able to sustain ourselves, so for example, if we would get into YC, hell yeah, I would be on the first plane there.

In the seat with my laptop, 100%. Because like, for me, I love it. Like, in general, we went to another accelerator in Amsterdam for like 3 months. And I loved that like everybody was there and just like pushing because you learn so much and like seeing everybody else pushing, like, it gives me energy to push harder. So like, for me, that's like fantastic. But it's just more about the, okay, we can sustain ourselves, for example, Mark and I, because we sold last year A project, an iGirlfriend website.

Anyways, we just built it to build it, but it wasn't a really great big exit or anything, but it's kind of sustained ourselves, for example, right now till end of May, beginning of June. So right now we have with our new latest project, which is basically helping beauty professionals to run local ads as well as create content with an avatar because they're camera shy. Oh yeah. They don't want to get ripped off of agencies. So that's like why we have a subscription for them to basically automate that anyways. But right now we have time till May to make this work.

Fair enough. Fair enough. The only thing I would say is there are always ways to make it work. And even if San Francisco is expensive, there are hacker houses, there are houses that are being sort of like subsidized by VCs. The group of people I told you who moved here from Austin, they're literally giving out rooms to people who they think are really good people to like, be there. So like, hit me up, we'll send a message after this. But like, you know, yes, please, you know, just like—

Give us the pitch.

Make it, make it out to the Bay Area. And, um, you know, I'm biased. I think it just being part of the ecosystem is such a powerful contributor to your thought process and thinking beyond what's possible. Because for better or worse, like, you go to any coffee shop and everyone's talking about AI. Like literally it's just this, AI, that. And look, before that it was, it was crypto and before that it was SaaS and before that it was mobile, like you name it. But being here as it's all starting and being around that is an accelerant to your own thinking.

All right. I have another question. Lukas and I are both not technical co-founders in that sense. We're business marketing, this kind of background. We both have business degrees, master's degrees in it, and did that also for our first startup. I now, I learned no-code and then now vibe coding a new project. So I understand how the concepts work, but I'm not a coder. Like, I understand how I have to connect everything and whatever. How does it, how is the value of these kind of founders in Silicon Valley?

So I will tell you a controversial take probably, which is that I think the coders, if you want to put it that way, of the future are not standard engineers in any way. In fact, having that engineering background can be a hindrance and not help you. And in fact, some of the best founders that I know are ones who are spending all their time, who become the world's best vibe coders, and that they are producing more code on a regular basis that is high quality and new products than most engineers ever could dream about. And like, literally, they built the checks, they built a QA engineer, they built all the steps that you would need to do, but they can all do it with vibe coding. So, Mark, for you, the question would become like, are you one of the best vibe coders out there? What are you— are you every day, are you building something new and trying to test out your skill set and getting to the point where you're writing hundreds of thousands of lines of code every single day, right? Gary Tan put out a whole post about his GitHub repo about how he built all this stuff on, on Cloud Code. Have you already merged that into your own GitHub repo and are building all those key things yourself? Right. So I know the best founders in the world are doing that, even if they're not engineers. A person on my team has done that. I literally sent this message about the Gary Tan stuff yesterday and he's like, oh yeah, I've already merged that in and made edits to it. He is not an engineer. He's already merged it into his own. He's making changes. It's updating things that he's doing. If you can prove that you're that sort of founder, then no one cares if you have an engineering degree anymore. It's irrelevant.

So wait, wait, you said something about Garry Tan's GitHub and what did he post on his GitHub that your teammate would merge this in?

Let me see if I can get this open. Yeah,

that would be awesome. I mean, I watch normally of every YC video that they're posting, but—

Yeah, so it's called, it's Gary Tan-GStack. And he literally just posted, I think last week, and it's essentially his ability of like, his whole essentially like setup and Claude code for building products. And so he basically literally says, GStack is how I do it. It turns cloud code into a virtual engineering team. A CEO who rethinks the product, an eng manager who locks architecture, a designer who catches AI slop, a reviewer who finds production bugs, a QA lead who opens a real browser, a security officer who runs OWASP and plus Stride audits, and a release engineer who ships PR, right? 20 special things. Oh, this is neat. Power tools, all slash commands, markdown, and all free. on this MIT license that he has. So like, that is, that's what he built. Sick. You need to be in the eco— you don't need to be here to see that. You can just follow the stuff on Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it. But like, the world's best people are building on that stuff. So Chor, as an example, Chor has no engineers. I'm essentially anti-engineer. I think you're mistrained if you're an engineer nowadays. You instead need to be a vibe coder and somebody who can move quickly, update with the new options that come out there, and build really fast. That is what a new— the leader of the future in the— going back to A-players, the A-players of the future will be doing.

That's interesting that you say that. We had another guest on. He actually had a startup at some point, was $4.5 billion worth, and it was stacked more at some point faster growing or more important in the AI space than OpenAI. Yeah, but I mean, it went tits up because they had some He went out, he had a new one now because they had an, what is it called, board takeover, like a hostile takeover. And then like, yeah, he got ousted from the board. But yeah, anyways, but the thing is, he's now in his new startup. He's like, also like, hey, I'm only looking for 5 coders. Like, he's like, I don't want to have a super old engineer. Yeah. He's like, if they're over, if they started learning without AI, I don't want them. He's like, look, The 20-year-olds are going to outperform. That's his mindset. He's like, look, I'm just getting new young ones. And from there, he's going to go.

I will disagree a little bit with that, maybe just because of the, you know, I'm getting older myself. And so the ageism part, but like, I think, look, I've seen it with a lot of people. If you have an open— it's all about mindset. So the problem with like really young people, even if they know how to really code and like really build stuff with AI, There's a lot of things they're missing in their sort of mental stack of what to do and how to do things that are really dangerous. And you don't want that either. If you can find someone who is mature, has had some jobs before, knows how to think like a customer with a customer focus, and knows how to use all these tools quickly, that's the sort of hire you want to make. Like, that's the person who you're like, this person's amazing. I want them on my team, not just somebody who's really young. So I guess I would disagree with that. I think anyone can learn this and anyone can be good at it. That's the beauty of it. It's literally just, are you willing to put in a little bit of time to go figure this stuff out? And if the answer is yes, you can be just as good. I mean, Gary Tan runs YC and yeah, he has a little bit of an engineering background, but it's been probably 15 years. I think he says it on the thing. It's like 15 years or something since he last coded. And he just put this all together in his free time and built something that like people are copying and forking in different ways. Why do either of you or does anyone else have an excuse not to be that good? Frankly, better, because you have more time than Garry Tan does.

What is your thought on Lovable versus Stat5 coding? Because we currently use Lovable for it. And, uh, yeah, what's your— what's the—

I think the tools that make it really easy for some of these things, you should be using all of them in your sort of— they're all different tools you should have. I do worry for Lovable and all these companies that, um, it all converges on just the big LLMs at some point, um, because all these features are going to be rolled into those companies largely, not completely, but largely rolled in. And these companies have something that these other companies don't, which is distribution. So like for the average person in the world, they might know what ChatGPT is. They have no idea what Lovable is. But if they're going to go to ChatGPT and say, hey, I want to go build a website, ChatGPT is like, great, here's how you do it. Let's go build one together. You're never going to hear about Lovable in the first place and go build it there because you already have ChatGPT. So I would be worried for those companies. I hope the founders are taking secondaries right now and essentially selling some of their stake.

Yeah, I mean, I'll see. Honestly, I'm, I'm super excited because it's a European company. to have someone, at least a European company, doing something in the forefront there. But I get your point because they are rolling back out these features. I mean, Codex and all the recent things that OpenAI bought, OpenClaw. Now you have the agents and what will come out of that. I mean, what is your thought on OpenClaw, honestly, right now?

So I spent a lot of time this weekend playing with it, actually. The short answer, though, is I think what OpenClaw defines in the ability of what it's meant to do as sort of this autonomous sort of chief of staff agent that can do so much for you is amazing. And it heralds sort of the next big wave of where AI is going for all of us. Like, that is going to be on our phones at some point, like built into iOS, um, and certainly going to be built into Android. Um, with that said, I even think Claude Code is being surpassed by— or sorry, uh, OpenCLAW is being surpassed by Claude Code and Codex and other things like that, where they're building some of those things into the remove the pain of trying to manage your own server and all these other pieces that are still a little too engineering for most people. And it removes a lot of that, that sort of removes that pain. So OpenClaw is a point in time that will be well remembered, but I don't think it's the be-all end-all of where this is going by a long shot.

What are your thoughts on security in that sense?

I mean, OpenCLAW definitely doesn't have great security. So as an end user, I'd be pretty careful using it. I think though, the forks of OpenCLAW, so NVIDIA just announced their own sort of enterprise version of that. Amazon has sort of a version of it. Those can become really powerful. But once again, I think for a lot of organizations, they'll just default to essentially the OpenCLAW version that Claude or ChatGPT will launch themselves.

Yeah, it is crazy. I mean, just, I'm just like, the story sometimes is crazy that there was an acquihire for almost $1 billion, just one dude. And just to have that—

Austrian dude.

Yeah, Austrian dude. European. And just to have the talent in there. Do you think there's a lot of moving chairs in the AI space between Meta, OpenAI, and whatnot? Do you think they're this is going to continue, or do you think this is toning down now? I mean, you're in Silicon Valley, so you have a much tighter grip on the situation than we do.

No, I don't think it's going to get— I mean, paying $1 billion seems insane, but it's also not, right? If you're getting the world's best talent, and as we talked about talent, most, most, most talent, most people are not great at their jobs. So if you're getting the world's best talent, paying up for that, especially if you believe, which I assume most of these big companies like Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, they all believe, um, you need that talent to build the tools. The tools will build themselves in the future, right? Recursive self-improvement. So spending a billion dollars on the best talent is meaningless if you're shooting for a multi-trillion dollar outcome as a company. And so the only right answer is to hire all the best people now. Those people might be irrelevant in 2 or 3 years, But like your company won't be, and therefore you need to get your company ahead. Because if, let's say, Anthropic has hit recursive self-improvement and they're off to the races, they're getting better every single day so fast that they're way ahead of their competition, and they will always stay ahead of their competition. And so the company that hits that potentially reaches a milestone that no one can catch up to and becomes essentially the world's AI. And that is, if you are a competitor, that's a really scary prospect, in which case you should be willing to spend every cent available because the outcome for you is essentially death as a company. And who knows for humanity, maybe a different discussion, but like, but death as a company.

That's a philosophical one.

You can't keep up. Yeah.

Do you believe, because you said earlier that basically in the, these like LLMs, the big like ChatGPT, Claude, etc., because they're bringing out more and more features, that wrappers basically die out? Or do you still think that wrappers have a place? So for example, Like they're getting better with the models, for example, because certain, certain wrappers get better because the model is getting better? Because UX/UI is better. Let's put it this way.

Yeah. So I actually do think, I think the whole SaaSpocalypse stuff that happened, you know, this is all really happened so fast. Let's say SaaSpocalypse was like a month ago. I think that is overblown to some extent because in the end, people Even if I can rebuild my own version of Salesforce, let's say, right, I can build my own version of Salesforce, my own CRM. Um, will I want to? Right. I actually had this debate with a teammate of mine yesterday on this exact topic. He's like, well, we can build this. I'm like, yeah, we could build it, but like, let's just pretend it costs— um, I try to be very careful about my time, right? Per our original conversation, like, my time is so precious. I try to think deeply about where I spend it. Um, Yeah. So if I say my time is worth $1,000 an hour, which is actually cheap, it should really be viewed as more like $2,000 an hour. But to make the math easy, if we want to rebuild a product and it takes me 30 minutes a month, just I hand it off to someone else on my team, but it takes me 30 minutes a month to manage that person and talk to them about features, keep it updated, rebuild the— rebuild a CRM, then add features that Salesforce is adding every single day trying to make their product better. Even if it's 30 minutes a day for that, that's $500. Um, sorry, not 30 minutes a day, 30 minutes a month. It's $500 a month of wasted time for me spent on that. Very quickly, it doesn't make sense for me to rebuild Salesforce. I just might as well buy Salesforce and let them worry about all the other things to keep the product great. Because even if I can rebuild what Salesforce is today, they're working on Salesforce in 6 to 12 to 18 months into the future. And they're going to have new features that are even better. I'm never— it's not my core competency. It's not my specialty. I'm never going to build a better version of Salesforce. So unless the cost is prohibitive and you're spending, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year, it probably doesn't make sense to rebuild it.

I think that that again is the classic shovels, like in the gold rush, sell the shovels. And that's why Claude and Lovable and all these projects are just going through the roof because everyone's like, I'm going to build it because heck, I know, I'm like, we're like, oh, I don't want to pay for this tool. Let's just build it really quick because we're like, look, if I can save this money, but then you're in the rabbit hole and then you're like, okay, actually it took me 20% effort for the 80%, but I want the last 20%. So I have to put the 80% of work in now for the rest. And it's just not worth it. It was cool. Good for the ego. I built this, but then—

The one danger though, is for a lot of the wrapper companies is so yes, rebuilding it. So the SaaSpocalypse has like It doesn't make sense for most companies to rebuild that SaaS piece of software, right? You and I, I could— we could probably go rebuild Riverside. It doesn't make sense for us to go do it. The cost isn't so high, right? This recording, for those listening, the recording software we're using. On the other hand, the real risk becomes that, that the major LLM companies become so good or make it so easy to build these things, or it becomes the default that I don't even go look to go buy a product anymore. that I just go ask my AI coding agent to go build it for me, that you don't end up like these companies will have a slow death because it just becomes so easy to build it, right? So let's say I didn't know anything about Riverside and I said to Claude today, hey, like I need a software that can do recording for 2 different people across the globe and I wanted to have these key features. I bet it could build me an okay version of Riverside right now. Give it 6 to 12 more months and it'll build me a great version of Riverside. And so at some point I will get trained not to go search for a tool that solves my problems, I will be trained to go have my AI build me a custom version. And that's when it starts to become dangerous for these companies, is the AI can build anything I want because it has all the knowledge and it knows how to build it better.

Yes, but at the same time, I have 2 counterpoints. First of all, it's like distribution becomes more and more important in these cases because in the end, yes, everybody can build it, but not everybody can distribute it. And the second point is like, Yes, if it gets easier and easier to build, you still have the cost of the tokens. So I don't know whether it's going to be a one-shot or how many tokens it actually costs to build that riverside.

So agreed, but also I'll push back, right? One, the cost of tokens is going down dramatically every single month, so it's getting cheaper and cheaper. Number one, in the distribution part, what if you're talking about it from an entrepreneur's perspective, but what if I don't care about distribution, right? For— I care. So as an end user, I don't care about distribution. I'm just building a custom product for myself. I don't care about distributing it. I'm just like, I want to go build it and I can go have an AI agent go out. I've had a crazy idea, go build it. I've had a bunch of ideas. If I get my agents working properly right now myself, I have a ton of ideas of things I would go build. There might be solutions that already exist, but I'm, I'm personally already trained more to think I'm going to go ask my AI and maybe it can go build it for me. And that's what's going to happen for everybody. So I do think the wrapper companies have trouble because for them they still have to get distribution. The problem is distribution goes through Google, Anthropic, and ChatGPT, and those companies will just say, why don't I build it for you?

I'm super curious to find out where it hits the limits when it comes to the solution, because there's always— how am I going to put this? Riverside has websites or mobile apps, etc. These are end of the day, you have some kind of a framework that you need to do. And how will these agents do that? Because you can't just build an app and then I have it in the App Store. The process is a pain in the ass. I did it already 3 times. The App Store is not that— it's really, really annoying. And then the website is interesting.

Maybe to the point, like, I think there's a good argument that the App Store disappears as something that's relevant because everything is a vibe-coded app. Everyone will have their own custom set of apps. There won't be any I mean, look, to be clear, I'm kind of on the very far edge of a lot of this stuff, but like— Love it. I don't think most people are going to have the same way. We've already lost a shared reality in the world, right? Because of social media, right? We're all in our own little niches of specific, like we've gone in deep holes and like, I only believe this version of a world because we don't have a shared reality anymore because of social media, essentially algorithmic social media, right? I think it's going to get further eroded. Because we're going to have a world of we're all going to create our own apps, our own systems, our own tools that are fully customized to us. So today we all use probably Chrome or standardized web browsers. Well, we're all going to have our own vibe-coded web browser. We're all going to have our own vibe-coded text messaging system. Like all these things just disappear as like a shared reality pretty quickly when you can build your own stuff. And that is great for the consumer in some ways. You get exactly what you want. Probably dangerous for society.

So would you say then that these companies are still grossly undervalued?

Yes.

Like OpenAI?

Oh yeah, I think OpenAI— there's an argument that some of these companies won't be— they either are massively undervalued or overvalued. I can argue both sides, but I generally think they're undervalued. I think there's a very good argument that OpenAI, Claude, and probably Google with Gemini, but probably really just Claude and OpenAI are undervalued and are going to be multi-trillion-dollar companies that essentially sweep up the entire economic force of the world. Probably.

That is wild. Like, for me just to think about it, because like, Back in the day when we started getting into the entrepreneurial world and you just say, oh my God, a unicorn. Oh my God, the first company that made like $100 billion, worth $100 billion. And then the first company worth a trillion. And then just like always these milestones that seem like unachievable and the same how fast companies can grow. They're all just getting shattered in the last few years. And I think the same, like, well, yeah, will we see a $10 trillion company? Probably. Question is just when.

Sooner than we all think. This is once again happening faster than any of us can understand and recognize, and we should be prepared for that. I don't have a lot of good answers for how to prepare, but just assume everything that you know to be normal is going to change.

I'm excited for that. I love change, honestly. Like, it gets me excited. Like, when you earlier said that about the change to San Francisco, I was like, yeah, Yeah, I want to sign up. Yeah. I mean, that gets me pumped. That gets me pumped. Just like, think about it. Oh, sorry.

No, no, I was just saying that's the beauty of it right now. It's just like you got to be excited by change. And if you're scared by change, you're going to be in trouble because you won't change. And when you don't change, you get swept aside.

I love it. Adam, where can people find you?

Pretty easy. I'm on LinkedIn a lot, so Adam Spector, I think, too, on LinkedIn. I'm on X, @aspect00, uh, or obviously everything at Chore. So hirechore.com. And if you think that you should be spending your time building great products that are special for your company and not doing the back office admin, uh, give it to— hand it— give us a call, hand it to us, save yourself the time, energy, and go back to doing the things you love. That's maybe the only thing that matters, um, in the world of AI for humanity. So that's where you can find me.

Thank you, Adam. Appreciate it. Highly appreciate it.

In general, honestly, love the conversation. And from a personal perspective, as entrepreneurs, learned so much and just ignited another fire in us. Like, yeah, fuck it, let's fucking go.