Victor Lazarte: From Building One of the Largest Mobile Gaming Companies to Investor at Benchmark

Hello, hello. Now we have to be good, otherwise people will sleep. It's after lunch. So it's my pleasure to do this fireside chat with Victor. A small story before I ask him to talk a little bit more about himself, but Victor and I met at a lunch at Elon Musk's house in 2016. I organized this lunch with Enrique from Brex and Jorge Paulo and a very small group. And Enrique said, I want to bring this friend of mine. And I said, cool, let me tell Sam, the chief of staff, that I need to add another person. Could you send me a profile? And then the profile said nothing. And I said, give me more data. And then what I remember is he had a gaming company. This is back in 2016 that had over a billion downloads. That's, I think, what was written. And I'm like, wow, how come nobody has heard of this guy who's very low key? But Victor started his company in 2010, I think a year after graduating from which is the top engineering school in Brazil. He started it with his brother. In 2018, he was valued at, I think, $1.3 billion and got a round from Benchmark. And in 2020, that went up to $3 billion. He moved here to the Valley, and last year he joined Benchmark as a general partner. So Victor, tell us, Just to start, why did you decide to start this company with your brother? And what are some of the things that you think made you successful from an early sort of stage standpoint?

Sure.

With no capital.

Yeah. So, well, first, it's great to be here. I remember when I was starting out my entrepreneurial career, I went to some of Endeavor's events and I saw these amazing entrepreneurs. It was something that was always very aspirational. So it's very cool to be here and talk with you, Veronica. And I remember this lunch that we had with Elon. And one thing that I remember is that Elon said— we asked him, what's going to be different about the future? And he's, you know, money is just an entry in a database. So the way we think about money, that's going to change completely. So you guys should forget about money the way we think about it and you should buy Bitcoin. And I was like, shit, we should have bought more Bitcoin. So yeah, that was an incredible lunch. But going back to wildlife, growing up, I was I always loved math, and I was doing math Olympiads, and when I was in middle school, that naturally led into learning how to write code, and I remember I made a website for people to go home and gossip after school. And that website became super popular. But unfortunately, some of the people that were on the website got mad at me, so they wanted to There was this, like, mean kids in my high school, like, they wanted to beat me up. So I had to, like, take the website down. But when I finally graduated, like, I knew, like, I had that feeling that, like, building things on the internet was very cool. And I wanted to do it. And so I called up my brother and said, hey, like, the app stores, like, this is 2010. And I was like, hey, like, the app stores, it's gonna be a thing. People wanna play games on their phones. So we decided to do that.

Did you raise any money?

So we haven't raised money. So we didn't raise money for the first 9 years. And people say, oh, it's so cool, like you bootstrapped a business. But the reality is we tried. Like we tried very hard. We didn't raise money, but it wasn't by choice. So, but let me tell you like about some of how some of these conversations went. In, like, beginning of 2011 in Brazil. So most people turned us down. And then I remember there was this one guy that said, hey, like, you guys are looking for money. I'm going to give you something that is even better than money. I'm going to give you my advice, and you guys are going to give me, like, 20% of the company. So those are the types of offers that we got. And then the best offer was someone offered $50,000 for half the company. So we couldn't take that. And along the way, yeah, we had all sorts of crazy offers. So my brother and I, we decided that we wouldn't have any employees. We would do everything ourselves. So we coded, we did the game design, we did the graphic design. But I think the thing that we got right is 2010— sorry, 2011 was the right time to make free mobile games. At that time, the largest game in the world was Angry Birds, and they charged $1 per download. So any team that had some design sensibility and was very focused on making a great product and launching it for free would get traction. And so that's what we did.

So tell us how you built the company. So we were talking the other day about culture. And you were saying that you were hiring people from all over Brazil to move into São Paulo. How did you build that team? What was the culture? What were the values? And why do you think that you were able to build this very strong, hardworking culture?

So when I reflect on Wildlife and what allowed us to basically take $100 and over a stretch of 9 years—

$100 was the investment they made before they raised with Benchmark for $1 billion in valuation.

And so what allowed us to do that? I think there was this initial insight of, yeah, there's a wave which is mobile and there's a platform shift and there's this huge demand and there's not enough people making high-quality applications. So I think that was the initial insight, which is very similar to what we see in AI right now. And the way my brother and I understood that there was this latent demand is we heard those stories about— I don't know if you guys remember, but the first few successful apps in the App Store were— there was the beer app. Like, who remembers the beer app? Like, the beer app, it's just like a photo of a beer cup, and then like you tilt it and the beer remained the same, and people were like, oh, that's so cool. But right now, there are things that are very similar in AI. So there's this influencer that connected ChatGPT to her blog, and then she allowed her fans to talk to her for $1 a minute, and she made $100,000 in the first month. So that's like, to me, that's the most similar story to in the beginning of the iPhone. There was a very inventive entrepreneur that created an app that was called I Am Rich. And I Am Rich was— you opened the app, it cost $1,000, which was the maximum that Apple allowed you to charge at the time. And then you opened the app and it was just a photo of a diamond. So to me, like, you see these initial things and like, of course, these things are not going to last, but those are the signs of a new platform. And for us, it was clear. So we did our first game, and it worked. And we used that to build a better team and build better games. But after the initial insight, I think what we got right is mostly a lot of really tactical things. So we had this incredibly hardworking culture. And there was a few things that we did, there was a few rituals in the company, that ended up over the next 10 years ended up having an enormous impact. So one thing that we did is we recruited from all the different states in Brazil. And we had this program that if you lived within a half mile from the company, we would pay for your rent. And San Francisco is very expensive, so it would be hard to do that. But São Paulo is much cheaper. And so what this did is people would— we hired almost exclusively out of college, and then people would move from a different state, from a different state, and they'll get roommates that also worked in the company. And we also served dinner 7 days a week at 8:00 PM. So, and of course, people are living by themselves, like they don't like to cook. So there's this like very— So what happened is people spent a lot of time together. Like they had dinner together every day and the company ended up becoming this like one-stop shop for people's lives. You know, like that's where they went to make friends. That's where they went to learn. That's where they went to—

Almost like a community.

Very much like a community. And even more than that, it's like a club. It's like you, when you join the company, it's like, hey, like you're part of this club.

And then over time, I mean, you said in a podcast that I listened to you that you're as good as your competition. And from a certain point in time, you were already, I don't know in how many countries. Right now you have, I think, offices in the US and Ireland, Brazil and Argentina.

And Helsinki.

Helsinki as well.

Very cool.

So how do you build a global company? How did you go about— and especially for Brazil, which is a very large country, a lot of times the entrepreneurs have a lot to do within the country and don't go abroad so much. When you're in smaller countries, you already have to think global pretty early on. What brought you to think that big? Did you have any mentors that helped you sort of look at the world as your sort of area of interest early on?

I feel like this is a loaded question. So there's this one person in Brazil, Jorge Paulo, who's phenomenal. And he's touched the lives of basically every great entrepreneur. And he was such an inspiration to me. And I don't think that I would have thought globally if it wasn't for him. And I think that in a lot of ways, we were lucky that the gaming market was always a global market. So for us, it was very natural, like, okay, you make a game, you're not gonna sell in the local market, you're gonna sell globally. And on the opening up offices in different countries, We took a long time before doing that. I think we only did that after running the company for 8 years. And what motivated it is, over time we understood that a gaming company is as good as its game designers. Like the same way that if you're running a book company, if you're running a book publisher, yes, there's a bunch of things that matter, but there's one thing that matters disproportionately, Which is, who's your writers? And for games, it's the same thing, 'cause games, like, it's a piece of art. It's like, it's a perfect mixture of art and technology, right? But there's so many, I would highly, like, I would caution anyone wanting to set up multiple offices in different countries. And this may not be a popular opinion, but this, having so many cultures that are so different makes managing the company so much harder. And so we resisted it for a very long time, and at one point we understood, okay, our strategy is completely dependent on having the best game designers in the world, and the game designers, they are everywhere, they're in different countries, so we have to do it. And we thought it would be super hard, but it ended up being way harder than we thought.

Why?

Because I think human psychology is— we love creating these groups and we love having this us versus them. And I think that people want to be nice, but people want to be nice to people that they perceive are close to them, the people that they perceive that are advancing their objectives, right? And I think this benefited us a lot in the beginning. 'Cause we created this feeling of a club. Like, you join the company, like you're part of this club.

Everybody in the same physical place.

Exactly. But then, so one experience that we had is the best companies in the world for monetizing games, like, they're in Israel. And the reason they're so good is there's a casino industry in Israel. And people from casino industries, they started developing online casinos, and then they started developing social casinos. And a lot of techniques to monetize games, they come from the social casinos. So the best talent in the world to monetize games is in Israel. So we decided, okay, we're gonna set up an office in Israel. But the problem is, we had this very strong culture in Brazil, and then we had this very strong culture in Israel. And there was this very strong us against them. And the Brazilian culture was very, we used to recruit a lot of people from Math Olympiads and like everyone's very scientific and very rigorous and thought of everything from first principles. And in Israel, they were much more pragmatic and they were thinking, there's like, hey, there's all these techniques that worked before, so they're gonna work now. And so what emerged is, like, the team, whenever something would go wrong, like, the team in Brazil is like, yeah, of course, like, these guys in Israel, they don't understand what they're doing. Like, they're just doing, they're just copying something that worked before, and of course that's not gonna work. And then the team in Israel was like, yeah, like, this team's in Brazil, like, they don't even know the best practices, right? So we ended up having to, like, shut down. At one point it was like, hey, like, we either have Brazil or Israel. The divide was so strong. So we ended up having to shut down the office in Israel. So managing these multicultural complexities—

Very complex.

Exactly.

So talking about the challenges, is there any other very big challenge or something that did not work that you could share? Because we obviously know that it wasn't always like a Blue sky, easy ride, something very challenging that you went through that you could share the learning and what you would do differently today?

So we've always experimented a lot. And the company started so small, so the experiments were small little games and sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn't, and that was fine. And as the company scaled, we scaled our experimentation, which is appropriate. But I think in, in 2021, like after, like after we raised the $3 billion round, I think we made a mistake that a lot of other entrepreneurs did, which is like you, you raise more money than you need and you have a pressure to like, oh, you have all this money and, and you have all these initiatives that are working, so you should do, you should do more things, you should spend more money. So we started too many experiments and we started them very big. And so one of them was the Israel office. The other one was the, like, so I think if I were to generalize, I think like starting experiments in a very big way and expanding headcount, I think those are things that we did that were not smart. So we started Israel. That ended up not working. We started a team in Argentina and that worked, but the regulatory environment in Argentina is so awful. It is just so, so bad. And we kind of knew that coming in, but we didn't know the extent to which it was bad. So we made a bunch of mistakes that were later very expensive to to come back to. So I think when you're— the lesson for me is like, hey, sometimes you're feeling optimistic and instead of starting experiments really, really small and giving them time to get big, we're like, hey, we're gonna go all in on some things and we're gonna deploy a lot of capital against some ideas that we think are very good. And a lot of times when you do that, you ended up killing the idea.

Very interesting. Could we talk a little bit about the change in strategy that you had at Wildlife? So when you passed, I think it was 2 years ago, in the local Endeavor panel, I was actually in Pantanal doing the video conference. You were talking about how from creating your own games, you suddenly realized that you probably wouldn't be able to create all the wonderful games that would come out there, why not use all this base of users that you have and become a publisher, selecting who was creating the best games on a global sourcing level? Could you talk a little bit about that shift and how's that going, what you learned from that?

Yeah, so the first 9 years of the company were— my brother and I were game designers, so we were basically inventing the games ourselves, and we had a team that would help us execute on those games. And the company grew very nicely. So over these 9 years, these games generated close to $2 billion in revenue. But the question in our heads is, okay, how are we going to keep growing? So we're growing 30%, 40% a year, and you get to a scale where you're doing hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, And you start making the math, it's like, okay, 5 years from now, how am I gonna be able to sustain this growth? And the only way you sustain this growth is like, you either have games that are much, much bigger than what you have today, or you launch more games. And there are problems with these 2 alternatives, 'cause when you go after like a, okay, imagine you're making games that are on the top 20 globally, If you want to plan for creating the game that will be the number one, at some point it's something that you don't control. And then to do more games, it's like my brother and I were the lead game designers, and you can't make multiple games at the same time. So what we understood is while everything we had done was great, it was something that would be hard to scale beyond. where we were. So we started thinking very fundamentally about the gaming industry. It's like, okay, there's a lot of things you need for a game to be successful, but what's the most important thing, and what's the bottleneck? And that's how we came to the conclusion that the video game industry is just like any other creative industry. It's like the book industry, or it's like the music industry. And in the end, you need to organize everything around the creators. So we said, okay, let's rethink what is it to be a gaming company, and let's make a gaming company where everything's optimized for the creators. So we became a platform. And we found— so we looked around, and we looked at the people that created the largest games in the world. And what we discovered was something very interesting. So So if you create— if you write a great book, like everyone knows who you are. Like you're, for example, like you write Harry Potter, like you're J.K. Rowling, and you make a billion dollars. But if you create a great game, for example, like who here has played Clash of Clans? Wow, you guys are not gamers. All right, so Fortnite. So who here heard of Fortnite? That's easier. But so who's able to tell who's the creator of Fortnite? Like, not the company, the person. Like, who's the game director? Like, no one, right? And that's wrong, you know? Because like a game has a game director who's like a visionary that creates a game. And then based on that, we looked around and we found the people that had created the 20 largest mobile games in the world. And we told them, and sometimes we found those people, and these people, they made games that in one case, the game generated $5 billion in revenue, and the guy was being paid $1 million a year. And don't get me wrong, $1 million a year is great. But when your creation made $5 billion, you deserve more, right? And that was a very easy argument to make. It was like, hey, you made this game, we think you deserve a larger cut. And people tended to agree. So we created this program that we called Studio in a Box. And it was like, just for the people that created these fantastic games, we said, we're going to help you set up your own studio. And for you to set up your studio, you need the marketing, you need some technology, you need a little bit of capital, and then we're gonna do a profit share. And to do that, I moved to San Francisco, and that's when I raised from Benchmark. And now, some of the best games that we've launched recently, they have come out of this program.

Could you talk a little bit about the data and the technology how you really make these games be successful. I also listened to a podcast where you were talking about machine learning and how instead of— that was a funny comment you made, like, you don't wanna match people like who are 15 years old with somebody who's a grandma playing because they're not gonna be motivated. And how sort of the TikTok strategy of showing to the player what they would want is something you're able to do. Talk a little bit about those tools and how you went about that. I thought that was really interesting.

Wow, you remember my podcast better than I do. So I think a video game company is very interesting because it's half like a creative endeavor, which is just an inspired individual, And the other half is a data science company. It's just like a growth machine. And the way we scaled the creative part is with this program, but then we invested very heavily on the second part. And the second part, you can break it down on user acquisition and then monetization. And the problem with user acquisition is for some people, You show them a game, and they're like, wow, that's exactly what I wanted to play, and I'm gonna spend a ton of money on this, 'cause this is gonna become my hobby. And then for other people, it's not interesting at all. So just being able to match the right audience is incredibly important. And for the monetization part, it's also very similar, 'cause the spending patterns of players are so different. Just to give you guys an idea, Every single modern mobile gaming company in the world allow players to download their games for free. And then in our company, which is not very different from other companies, like 70% of the revenue comes from people that spend over $500 in the game.

Over what period of time?

Over their lifetime, which spans for like probably like 18 months. So if you think about it, it's like it's a free game, but the majority of your revenue comes from people that spend $500 or more. So your entire business depends on finding people that love games, that will play for a very long time, or finding people that will refer your games to these people, right? And then creating this profile, and then creating the video ads that appeal to this kind of player, right? And then on the other side, you know, when you think about promotions and you think about, there's a whole science when you go to, I don't know, a retailer, the way people place things on the shelves and the way they— there's a whole science around that. But on mobile, that's on steroids. Because your marginal cost of selling anything is zero, right? So you can do any kind of promotion, and you can show any type of product to your player, right? So just being able to— and then it's like a matching problem. It's like, how do you show the right ad to the right person? And then how do you show the right offer to the right player?

And is this the suite of sort of products and features that you offer to the creators that you're bringing on board?

Exactly. So from one hand, it's a framework for you to analyze your player behavior, and it's a taxonomy of players, player behaviors, and offers, and then the tools for them to manage these things. Because this part of the business, like, it's pretty scalable.

So how does AI, which is now across the board changing a lot of industries, if you could talk on 2 lenses. One, how is AI shaping the gaming industry? And how is it shaping how you look at companies from your new role as an investor?

Wow, we went for 20 minutes without talking about AI. That's a record. So I think AI—

Is gaming still the 2nd largest industry sort of globally in terms of growth?

I don't know where it ranks in terms of growth, but I know that the mobile gaming market alone is over $100 billion. So it's a very large industry. And I think I'm super excited for what AI is doing with games and what it's going to do going forward. Because the 2 largest costs of developing a game are coding and then the art assets. And those are the 2 places where generative AI is making a bigger difference, right? So what I'm seeing is we're being able— at Wildlife, we're being able to create games with around 30% less people right now, and that is going to continue changing. I think that probably in 2 or 3 years, we are going to be able to make games with between 40% and 50% of the headcount that we needed before. The thing that is interesting is, okay, your speed of development is going to be much faster, so your speed of iteration is going to be much faster, And because your budgets are lower, people are gonna take a lot more creative risk. So I think AI is gonna be the biggest thing that ever happened to games. So I think that's on the production side. But then there's something that is even more interesting. I think we're a little bit further away from that, but we always dreamed, like humans always dreamed of talking to characters. And games are the perfect environment for you to talk with characters, right? So I think a lot of people here played with, like, I don't know, character AI, or some people even, like, use ChatGPT, like, to have a conversation. But to have that inside of a game, like, people haven't done— like, the killer app for, like, AI games hasn't been made yet. But it's going to be fantastic.

So Victor, I'm going to change course a little bit here. You did some work and mix it with AI and games. I heard you and your brother invested in a school or developed a school. And while you were talking about, you know, how games are being more accessible to be created by more people, when will games— and I'm a mother of sort of 3 very young, not that young, but 21, 17, and 15, and my 15-year-old loves games. And I'm always wondering, when will the games stop being only shooting people and doing things that seem a little bit more violent and become more educational but interesting? Why hasn't there been something that— or when will the school system be able to access something that is creative but that has quality content?

Yeah, well, shooting games are great. But to your point, so my brother and I, we started this philanthropic school in São Paulo. So we have this school that gives high-quality education to 100 kids. And we're making some experimentations with AI. And I think the potential for AI tutors is fantastic. And you see demos like the Khan Academy demo. And you get this feeling that we're not too far from having an AI teacher, and that is the thing that will solve the education problem. And someone will create a company that will be very valuable doing this. But there's a bunch of problems with it, because right now, the people that The people that know how to make games, like, they're finding too much commercial success making games to spend time building an application like that. But my brother and I, we have this dream of creating an app, creating a game that you can just give to a kid and the kid learns how to read and write and learns a bunch of things just by playing with it. And I think the technology is there. And it's just like a problem of how do you monetize it? Because if you're in the US, okay, you have the school systems and outside of the school system, no one is willing to spend a lot of money on an educational app. That's true in the US, that's true elsewhere. And if you're selling to schools, schools, they're very conservative. And for good reason, because imagine you're developing like a new educational system and then you're going to tell parents like, yeah, like we're going to try this new thing. And like, yeah, but what if it doesn't work? You know, like what if I put my kid through this for like 5 years and it doesn't work? Oh yeah, that's—

You can't experiment with the kid, right?

Yeah. So I think there are those problems. So I think that not having revenue, like not having like a super clear revenue path prevents the great entrepreneurs to invest in it and the venture capitalists to put money in it. But the technology is there.

Yeah, I really hope that happens sometime soon. So let's talk a little bit about that move that you did where you left your company and you became a partner at Benchmark. What happened? Were you tired of being an entrepreneur? Were you more interested in being an investor? And by the way, Victor has been investing and mentoring guys like Henrique from Brex. I'm sure you've had a lot of success there, as I did, but tell us a little bit about that shift.

Yeah, I was never a very active angel investor. Like, I made very few investments, but it was always Like, whenever, like, sometimes, like, you meet someone and you're like, wow, like, this person is very special. And I remember, like, I had lunch with Enrique and Pedro, the founders of Brex, when they were working at Pagarmi. And they were 16, but I was like, oh my God, like, I'm sure these guys are going to do something great. And I love this feeling of, like, you meet someone and it's like, hey, this person is going to get there. And it's almost like it's this secret hidden in plain sight. And it's like other people haven't figured it out, but like I have. And then I just— and also investors in Brazil at that time were so bad that he had like this very weird deal with an investor. And like I was spending a lot of time with him like trying to help him. And we bonded over that, right? So like I was having a great time like helping him out. So when he started Brax, like he called me and he's like, hey, like will you be a— our seed investor and will be our first board member. And I was like, yeah, sure. But it was much more led by, this kid is awesome, the thing that he's doing is amazing. I wanna learn, I wanna be involved. I think this company's gonna work and I wanna be around. It was always that feeling, right? And then my passion, so when I was in college, I studied engineering and psychology. And my passion was always understanding people and understanding technology, and games was a great avenue to do that. But after 13 years doing games, I was like, you know, my curiosity was leading me to study other companies and invest in other companies. So there's 2 other entrepreneurs that I ended up investing in, in Figma and Scale AI. And I was like, having such a good time spending time with these founders and learning about their companies. And at some point my brother, he was super interested in running the company. I was the CEO, but he always wanted to run the company. And then we felt that it was the right time for him to become the CEO and for me to spend all the time doing this thing that I was very curious about, which is finding amazing people that are at the beginning of something that So how was that transition?

You decided to leave. You're still the chairman. You're still involved. And I'm sure you have a relevant stake, but you're spending what, 80% of your time investing? Yeah.

So I'm still the chairman and I spend, but you're right. I spend like 80% of my time investing and like 20% of my time at the company. And there's a lot of things that I see in AI that are helpful. And hopefully, I think that a company having a really good board member and a good board dynamic, it's useful, right? It's like, that's a lot of the work that I do. But the bulk of my time is in finding new companies.

So tell us, what are you looking at from Benchmark? What do you look for? What are some of the sectors? What is the stage? We have some entrepreneurs here that I'm sure would love to talk to you. So tell us, what are you trying to find?

Yeah, so today I just announced an investment that I did at Benchmark. So I led the Series A for HeyGen. So Benchmark, we invested $55 million in the company. And HeyGen is an AI video platform for businesses. So businesses that want to create videos, they can either like hire a crew and have cameras, or they can create this AI video. And the second one is like 10 times cheaper and 100 times faster, right? So, and I think it's a good example of like things that I wanna do. It's like, so for me, like Series A is where I get really excited. Sometimes we do seeds, sometimes we do Series Bs, but like Series A is kind of like our sweet spot. And not surprisingly, I'm very interested in AI. And I think with AI, there's a few things that are very interesting. One of them is the previous generation of software companies, they made workers more efficient and then they charged per seat. And this new generation of AI companies, instead of like making a worker more efficient, you just replace the worker. Like you're able to do the entire work that a person did All through software. I think this is going to be amazing for society. This is going to be the best thing that AI does for society because companies are humanity's best invention. With AI, we're going to be able to have way more companies because we're going to need less people per company. I think any company where you're automating work with AI or automating work with LLM, that's something that I'm excited about. I think For the last 5 or 10 years, we haven't really had a lot of consumer companies come out. But I think with AI, finally, computers speak the language of humans and they allow for like a different user interface. And I think this will allow for like a new generation of like consumer companies. So like, I'm excited for that. And then like fintech and financial services. It's something that I've always felt was super interesting. So that's something that I care a lot about.

Very cool. And do you invest only in companies that you can drive to, or do you look globally? How is the sort of geographic?

So Benchmark is a very simple place, and we believe a lot in simplicity. So it's a firm where we We have like 5 general partners and like we don't have analysts. We don't have principals. And we don't have processes, like almost to a fault. Like there's no rules. So it was like, hey, like do you invest only in companies that you can drive to? Or like, no, there's no restriction. Like invest globally. And the only, like the North Star is you gotta meet a founder and feel the same way I felt when I first saw Enrique. That is the metric. That is the North Star. And if you see that, it's like, hey, this is an amazing entrepreneur working on a problem that is very interesting. If you have that, we'll make everything else work because that's the only thing that matters.

And how many deals do you do per year? Or does Benchmark do per year? Just to see how active.

Yeah, so the Benchmark model is very different from most firms. Because we do— each investor is expected to do 1 or 2 deals a year. So the entire fund will probably do like 8 deals in a year. And the reason for that is we believe that the only way an investor can add value is if you come in early and you have a lot of time to understand the company and to build a great relationship with the founders. And And so a few months ago Enrique said something that made me super happy. He came to me and said, Victor, you're the closest thing that we have to a co-founder outside of the business. And I was so honored by that. But the only reason I was able to help him is I spent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours with him. And so if he has a problem with an executive, I'm the first person he calls. And it's not because like, he has some great investors and it's not because like I'm smarter than the other investors. It's not that. It's because like I just have so much more context. So if there's a problem—

You've been in his shoes in a way.

Not only have I been in his shoes because I built a company, but it's like I know every single problem that he had at the company. I know every investor, every executive we hired, every executive we fired. I know like every good decision we made.

You have all the data.

Exactly.

Very good. That's wonderful. Could you talk about what's next? If you think about sort of the next 5 to 10 years, more from a personal level, a lot of entrepreneurs here, they go through phases and you're just into this new phase. But where do you see yourself? What is your big dream? What are your expectations? How do you see your future?

Yeah, so I think for the next 10 years, I think 10 years from now, we're going to have AGI and like none of us are going to work anymore. So I'm trying to like get a lot done because I think this thing of like humans working, it's like a temporary thing. I'm kidding, like half kidding. But I think it's just so hard to see that. that far ahead. But what I feel is like when people write history books, they're gonna write about this moment that we have and they're gonna write about Silicon Valley like the same way they wrote about like France like during the French Revolution or— there's something really special happening. And I think like spending like every amount of time people can like understanding, Okay, LLMs was a start, but now there's these models where you chain a bunch of LLMs and you develop reasoning and you automate more and more work. And then you have something that can think and that can not only do things that humans do in a minute, but tasks that humans take 10 minutes and then tasks that humans take an hour. I think just focusing on that path and understanding it and helping companies Build around it. That's my goal for the foreseeable future.

Cool. And what do you think will not change? A lot of things will change. What will not change?

The thing that will not change is people want to connect with each other. I think it's becoming more and more apparent with all this technology that is satisfying our material needs, And people are getting richer, which is great. But then when you think about happiness, so much of it is not about material needs, but like it's about human connection. It's like you spending time in person with someone else. So I'm also super excited about technologies that enable that, that help people just like spend more time with another human being.

I think that's super important. So very right on. Victor, what advice would you give to somebody who's starting a company right now, knowing what you know? And I also have a couple of very short questions before we finish. We only have a couple of seconds.

So I think it's hard to give like super generic advice. Because each case is so specific, right? But I think one good advice is there's a lot of really smart people in the world. And the reality is not everyone should be an entrepreneur. And not everyone should work as a startup. And you should be an entrepreneur and you should start something if you're uniquely positioned to do something that matters, right? So I would start by thinking, it's like, hey, is there a problem that matters that I'm uniquely positioned to solve? And you can be uniquely positioned to solve it just because you're more passionate about it. And you're gonna work harder. And you're gonna convince a lot of really smart people to do that with you. But I'll be really thinking about what makes your approach unique? What makes your approach special? And if you don't have that, then just don't start the company.

So finding a bigger purpose that is relevant to the world.

Finding the purpose, but then it's like, okay, why are you better at doing this thing than anyone else? And if you can't answer that question, spend more time—

Keep searching.

Exactly.

I think that's a great ending. Thank you so much, Victor.

Thank you.

It was wonderful to hear you.