Garry Tan Interview: Politics, SF Boom Loop, The Future Of Tech, Lina Khan, and AI
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I did not consider myself really that much of a political animal at all. How can we have an elected official, the person who's supposed to the top cop of inferences, go basically come out and say, it's open season on asian american elders, the people who try to build the housing have to pay off the nonprofits like todd cow. This is a grip.

This should be A, I do not understand why this is possible. You know, all the twenty some things, all the super crack engineers, they want to be here because they know the high order bit is here. And so that is the origin of the blue. Like we are going to create dozens, if not one hundred, companies worth billions of dollars.

Man, so I have a lot of questions for you. Are gary you I feel like the last really of the last four years since twenty twenty, I think the evolution of you in public and incentence this who has been just inspire ing and exciting for me personally and somebody who cares about the city and the technology industry and really the kind of connection between the two, which is I think IT looks part when I want to talk about with you today.

And I just want to start with, there was a media story that I believe was wrong, which was that you were like forcing new y combination a everyone in the new y combinator batch to move the same go. My sense of IT, and correctly for one, was that actually were recommending that stronger, yes. Stronger from recommendation? yes. First thing is a IT strong.

Like do we force anyone to do anything in american more?

Yeah exactly. Certainly the same for this go um I I guess a bunch of questions on this one because it's spend up a bit since this new not forcing of people into the city. I want to know, is your sense still that san Frances go is the capital of tech? And um how has the move affected the new batch?

yes. I mean, same from cisco, I think right now is sort of brimming with the kind of crazy energy that I can only imagine. Uh, you know what that felt like during the personal computer revolution down in the south day with the homebrew computer club.

What's happening is that, uh, you know, the rocks can talk literally like we have taught, uh, silicon language and large language models were trained you by engineers right here in silences go, uh, at opening iron anthropic are now sort of empowering a whole new generation of startups that are actually like not just sort of making these toy thinky demos that you see on x but things that are actually creating like new jobs, new revenue. So you know something weird happened even in the past couple years that I see uh here the the typical company um increase the revenue in a matter of ten weeks by five x so you know and agree, get all the Y C there. We fun about two hundred uh two hundred seventy companies every six months.

So you know going on six hundred a year. And um in aggregate, they went from sort of just under five million five or six million dollars a year in revenue across all those companies to more than thirty million dollars in a matter of ten weeks. And it's that is like never happened before.

Um it's like the best indicator of like people actually making real software that actually solves people's problems. And those people love those solve problems being solved so much. They're paying a lot of money very quickly.

So I mean, this is mostly in the realm of sound like artificial intelligence is obviously the big original atoms of the entire new boom. Yeah, i'm thinking now about the recent legislation surrounding artificial intelligence forded by Scott weiner. And I think before we get to that, I did I want to go back to the extraction narrative.

So four years ago, city is locked down. Um the industry is leaving. Crime is really bad. The drugs are really bad. Nine of these viral, the virus sort of Mandates.

Um there was a mean that went around that the technology was extracting all of the wealth from the city. And the time I criticized IT, I thought that was crazy. There were a piece about IT, but I also criticize techniques.

Know we should have gotten much more involved. Um that was the real problem was not that we broke the city IT, was that we never actually took control of the city in the first place. You've got a lot of work correcting that over the last four years. And I guess just at this point, i'm wondering where you see IT in terms of your progress that you've made, just like local politics progress. And then we will talk about scanner in the second .

I mean but let's see, I did not consider myself really that much of a political animal at all uh until really when covet would happened I started seeing um basically elders in my community being, uh you stabbed, robbed, uh push down. You know a vital rotana party was a uh you thi man in his seventies who was killed on the streets of inferences go and uh I saw the reaction from the D A at the time uh the men name chase a buddy um you know .

sun of so what just think far noise I thought I heard .

that um I mean, this is someone who literally said, you know what, that was a temper tantrum I want to let this person now I mean, in so many words, like he did not take crime against our community seriously. And I looked at the numbers. Same from cisco is thirty percent asian american. The voter basis, twenty to twenty five percent asian american. And yet, how could we have an elected official? You really say openly that you know what I don't really I don't care like they don't you know it's like that tony west moment or it's like like so and so I didn't care about black people was like, how can we have an elected official, the person who supposed to be the top cop of inferences go basically come out and say it's open season on asian american elders and you know, I got angry like I just couldn't believe that this was the deal and actually I think we are on a clubhouse with him and was I was so i'd .

been drinking. This was like, this was, I was in miami at the time. I was like, just bloviating was the clubhouse.

The high clubhouse. Hate is nothing had been serious that point. All the conversations were very casual. And I wish doing a primer on local politics, just how that worked.

Who is your supervisor, which the average person? And sf, that I talk to you did not know. And chess board just showed up, oh no, I have to take this seriously now. But he did log off.

The second pology came on, of course, doing this. Yeah so there are levels to this game.

I guess I got involved I and you did a lot. I mean, you got not only you do Gavin I tech, but you put money into this.

You are a big supporter, grow itself um all of me extraction the thing that so the reason i'm liking IT back to extraction is a because because obviously wealth is not extracted from empresses go if we leave and the wealth wasn't here if we weren't mining tech people didn't come here in mining like they we're mining microcode or something like gold, right? They weren't striking oil. They themselves were the value. They brought people from all over the country, brought the value to the region and created the value fifty .

percent immigrants. honest. Yes, if people from around we are literally brain draining, the smartest people from all the way around the world, and then they come here and they create, you know, billions or tens of billions, sometimes hundreds of billions of dollars with their GDP and they create thousands of jobs. So that doesn't sound like extra .

a to me and right its its creation and I was being driven away by policy. Now Scott wenner was sort of seen as one of the moderate he was supported um by all the mb people is obviously thought by doing mosque IT. Um I think open philanthropy, I don't actually know what this is. I shouldn't say I don't know that part for sure um but his A I regulation feels a bit like.

Like he thinks san Francisco has some kind of claim over IT where as I don't necessarily think that's true, I think people are here working on IT and could easily leave um what do you make of Scott A I uh regulation? Do you think that there is a risk that um the sort of exciting moment that we were just talking about could end? And and then what do you make a Scott specifically?

I think the wild thing is there is sort of a meme out there around A I safety that they're probably some real risks. I mean, everyone sort of walks around and say, you know, what's your p dom and then the tRicky that I think what Scott winner figured out was that a the this topic in particular is a little bit the judge, I think he came out next, said this that it's, uh, you know, the jets versus of the sharks.

And in this case, like he didn't realize that and he sort of ran out and started supporting the jets real fast. So I don't know if he would have done the same thing. I can't speak for him, but I think he did realize there's a lot more nuance to the debate than not. Uh, personally, I think it's really important for us to maintain the ability of your open markets, of open source of people actually being able to get lots of choice about large language models.

You maybe there is a moment, maybe two years ago that um we sort of worried that IT was possible that a big tech situation could spring up again with access to the world's best models and that might have been uh sort of in sconce to buy really, really overseas um new A I regulation that would basically be like the thing that we see in uh, amErica over and over again like a new industry pops up and then sooner later there's uh, regulatory capture and that was a real thing that we're pretty, you know, we worried about back then. Thankfully, less worried is simply because there is open source. You know, we fund thousands of companies who actually need access and need they they need choices.

And so you in the broader debate, you know, uh, being able to maintain access to great alums is sort of the same thing as being able to access A P. I. Is being able to the whole innovation economy is sort of enabled by 啊 open standards and open source。 And that's like really the big danger.

I think when you have regulation, especially at a local level, like I actually think that the biden eo, uh, you know there's IT was not that bad and actually maybe that was the correct level at which this type of regulation should happen. And the number one thing that i'm really worried about is you this is a powerful technology. It's like the invented cars.

These are bicycles for the mind. These are self driving cars for the mind. And uh, you know, do we prosecute the people who create cars? You know, that would really sort of hampered society, actually know. We regulate, and we are very careful about what people use cars for and we hold the people who miss use cars um that we hold them responsible. And that's yeah really what I hope happens with this whole topic.

So the new bill, I mean, I just passed is about to be signed or not rejected by newsman will sea. Um IT does seem to be targeting open source a little. I mean IT IT IT feels good for companies like OpenAI and and bad for an upstart trying to compete with the OpenAI. 嗯， i mean you behind the scenes political whisperings you can share with us like what is I mean.

I hope newsome, uh, I hope newson doesn't sign IT. I hope you veto that. Uh, you know have no insight, knowledge beyond that. But yeah, I genuinely hope he does. Because if we want california to continue to be this magnet for the best talent in the world, we don't pass things like this.

Um I want to talk a little bit about the doom loop verse, the boom loop. Um so you guys do you specifically and I think you're just sort of the y combinator game online. A lot of mean a lot of like boom looping, a lot of founder mode, founder mode I like the mean that you guys do anyway what i'm going to find her mode but what is great mean um I want IT so is after school dying is IT driving is the are the brighter days ahead of us um obviously you both have criticized the city government a lot. But I think both have clearly you you grew up here and certainly me I have a lot of love for the city downtown seems worse than IT was four years or right like totally gutted um other than A I which now possibly this legislation putting at at risk there things feel little bit diminished here um what are the signs for boom of optimism and then I want to talk about the power of the means and what .

you do with um i'm pretty bullish um you IT was in a bad state I think three or four years ago um your differences go has a fourteen billion dollar budget every other day even like even right now we're starting to see that um yeah there was sort of an outsource of state capacity and then unfortunately, if you trace the money, the money goes in nonprofits that are uh you are spending money not to actually serve the people but to enrich themselves and you know sometimes you for political purposes to ensconce I mean IT is its own form of capture.

Um I mean, if you spot if you look at every major issue and differences go uh or most parts of california, you'll see the same thing actually why can't we build? For instance, it's because we prevent people from building uh even things that have thirty or fifty percent affordable housing because the people who try to build the housing have to pay off the nonprofits like todd co. And you know if we are looking at this, uh, if this saw a new york times article about a third world country, you know you wouldn't be surprised, but we should be surprised.

We should expect more. This is a grief. This should be illegal. I do not understand why this is possible, that you can have a sitting supervisor in the city say, oh, that that this is a real project.

Some there is a developed trying to make thirty percent affordable housing on a north from parking lot and uh, you a sitting supervisor said, oh, I don't know why we're even here talking about this. Uh, you know, what they needed to do was go talk to you, john, Operating at tadd e co, and pay him off or work out a deal, and then this thing would be built. And i'm like that corruption like that is not actually should not be legal.

And so when you wonder, like, why is rent so high? why? Why are there all these problems in the city? Like if you dig a little bit, it's a lack of state capacity and IT is a you we tolerate, uh IT IT feels little like we spend so much. It's incredible how much time we spend thinking about like the big national issue, uh, and then we totally neglect what's going on in our very backyard. And these are elections that are one or lost by dozens of votes, maybe one hundred votes.

And they go on to you, um pology actually has a great line about this where you know they're talking about billionaires, but there are eleven supervisors, each of whom if divide the fourteen billion dollar budget out, like they're responsible for way more than a billion dollars in government spend and IT goes to their cronies, their nonprofit friends, you know, the nonprofits take their workers and go work on their campaigns like IT is an entire loop and that is in the nuttall. I think the doom loop like we are literally in const in this moment where the the government funds are actually being spent on things that you know do not serve the people that only and counts the existing uh, politicians in there. And then if we're not paying attention, then IT just continues.

That gets worse and worse. The budget keeps going up. We keep passing more and more taxes. And but you know, on the political scale, I am actually fine with the taxes. What i'm not OK with is for us to spend billions of dollars not serve the people.

So that was like that four years ago um and maybe a little bit worse because folks like chester, we're still in power. But you did have the chesser recall. You did have the board of education recall there were some Victories in a regular november election on sort of moderate side of the supervisors. And we think still seem you just said that the doom loop, right, like the doom loop does still seem to sort of exist.

Oh yeah, there's still in power. Sorry guys.

so what what are the science for optimism? How do we get to I mean the U S but uh gary producers is like crazy A I generated um beautiful future 3Frances go bias um we would like boom loop on there self driving car and like the golden grid in the background。 And it's like very happy.

And I think honestly kind of imagine we need. But what do we need to get there? How are we going to get there? What are the signs of hope?

Yeah no. I mean the hope at the end of day, I think, is still technology, its founders, its people working and tech like, uh, I am hopeful and thankful for people to continue to come to some Frances o despite all the problems. And the reason why people do IT is the money is here, the the talent is here, and I I, I mean, bite.

Okay, let me like talk about Y, C. For just a moment. The reason why I push people to be in 3Frances go， and we all want that to happen, is because literally the rate of unicorns is twice as much.

Uh if you base your company in 3Frances go or the bay area， IT is IT literally, IT is like the high order bit like IT is the one thing that will double your odds of being a successful billion dollar company. And this is like just basic agglomeration effects. If you have all the people, europe, most people from the rest of, like we have to appreciate this about conferences, go.

If you come here and you honestly want to solve a problem technology, you have five, you know, you're in a cafe. Half of the people, three quarters of other people in that cafe, you can be like, that's awesome. In fact, I want to help you and if you go to any other cafe and almost any other part of the world, they're going to be like, oh, sorry, you don't have a real job, do you? Back away slowly.

And it's like, that is incredibly special. Like this is something that, you know has been happening in the bay area four decades. And then now, because of the A I boom, like the elms were literally birth right here in safran.

Ces, go. All the twenty some things, all the super crack engineers, they want to be here because they know the high order bit is here. And so that is the origin of the boom loop, like we are going to create dozens, if not one hundred, companies worth billions of dollars and they're going to fill all the office tollars. They're going to fill all the apartments.

but we have to build enough of them for them. It's clearly that's all exciting, but that's clearly them up to save the city. We lived through a massive boom on the company's and and all kind of came crashing down in twenty twenty because tech was not involved.

What i'm wondering is, do you see more people, tech in the new yc batches involved in local politics? And how are they thinking about IT if they getting more engaged than because when I I was fourteen years ago, no engagement and I and I hope it's changing. I wondering you .

see signs of that. I mean, exactly getting there. I mean, uh, there are lots of people who are who absolutely love and Frances go and we're working together to try and fight for this.

I mean, Chris larson, mike more are so many people who, you know, they already earned. Like, what's funny is the founders actually are a little bit premature. They come to me and they say, like, well, i'm here.

What can I do? And i'm like, a you should vote b, you should join, grow S F or together or like stop crime. Sf like go find people, just just go spend your time. I mean, it's in in A I and in civic engagement, attention is all you need. And so I actually think that that's a really important part. Like all we have to do is at dinner when something happens, talk about IT and then don't go skin deep, don't take what the chronical has to say, like dig A A bit deeper.

And if you work through these local political groups, you're gone to meet literally the person who works in the city who will tell you, oh, that's, uh, corrupt and rot now because of this and then you know, when you find out, like put that out there, tweet, you know make uh x post, I will repost you like, you know earlier we're talking with um Francis fooks yma about this idea like, uh yeah sort of how media shifting. And what I realize is like that's actually what individuals are like. We, like all the institutions, are a little bit ruined and all of the trust has now been atomized down to the level of the individual.

That's why you know it's substate or it's uh you know your individual writers, right? Like is Lucy there's like new voices and new in like tired wires is a great example of like there's new adam ization, right? And that's what IT takes. Actually, attention is all you need and that if we do not pay attention, if we don't actually talk about what's really going on, there's no one else who's gonna do IT and then just going to read this dumb voter card and we're going to be going to read the pissed off voter, pissed off voter guide .

people who have run the city into the ground exactly.

And you know that sort of how we got here. It's low information voters not caring about the local individual issues. And the good news is IT doesn't take a lot like just pay attention, you don't have to be as mad as I am.

Like you can just you know when november comes around, like let's read the grow sf guide like you. And if you're in these groups, like if you're in like the united democratic club is a fantastic democratic club that anyone who lives in some Francisco can join. And if you go to those events, you will understand what is actually going on in the city and like your vote and your work in those organizations. S H, I mean, IT moves hundreds, if not thousands of votes like, yeah, I think this november, we are actually pretty much on deck to retake the board of supervisors and have a moderate mayor in the city. And that has not happened in many, many years.

Which mayor do you think is going to win? This is like the game of thrones. They're like fifteen different moderate democratic mayors .

who are running. I mean, there's fail and there's Larry. I encourage you to go and get to know each of them in their platforms.

Um and I think feral and breathe personally are like who I really like if you look I mean, this is a tRicky thing. Like once again, you can look into people's teams and what non profits are associated with. I think luri himself is fantastic.

I think you know he has as a spokesperson max sobo who was uh you know the biggest chases supporter. And I like if you have like people like that on your closest team, I do not trust this percent. I do not, you know, you have to hold people to account. And when you have policies that hurt asian elders, like I can't abide by people like that.

um you a little bit earlier we're talking about um the atomization of media and e in this obviously of their new voices where you know professional writers or publication subsets we've also seen the rise of sort of the ship posting gods of tech. I call them uh elan obviously like the greatest body body in of this. And then you have a whole cast of characters below that. I've seen ryan Peterson, the flex poor talking about shipping. I mean, this man literally got on a boat and sailed out to the uh to where the shipping so there was boring the supply chain crisis.

He went next, exploited long.

sort of explained everybody what was going on. Um you have been um talking relentingly on local politics and what that means protect. So we were seen the rise of these um I guess it's you are a media personality in addition to the president and CEO of y combination. Two questions here.

Um I guess the first one is just do you where do you see this trend going? Do you see more people getting into IT or we sorted out at a local maximum here? And then too, what do you say to founders? You maybe feel like they need to express something about their industry or their company, but they just aren't good at this.

Yeah I mean, I I think that it's remarkable when you go back in attack and you ah start diving into the stories of uh, the dawn of the biggest tech companies ten or fifteen years ago and they all kind of started with pr IT sort of started with how do I actually get my story out you know brian chess, I uh with you to come up with ten thousand different hilarious lines to get reporters and TV news anchors and you are all these stories about airbnb early.

Um you IT was very important to get P R. And press back then and then the wild thing now with the atomization is that um you know you look at some of the or sort of the organic use on x of uh you know some of the biggest, oldest names out there. And you know there's no engagement like people aren't you know clicking favorite on that thing.

They're not actually uh, reposting these things like there are no comments on that. There are on authentic people talking about their direct experience. And so I actually think that we're onna have a lot more of that and that's probably a good thing. Like you know what if this is what democracy actually really does look like, and you know, you have to pick carefully who you follow and you know why, and your authenticity and being treated yourself and not wind your audience. Like, I think that your being media, that that is media, like the mental has been passed and the responsibility is the same responsibility that know we used to hold the institutions to in the past.

So what are you encouraging Young founders to do more of this immediately or of going direct immediately?

I think I think so. And then the danger is like keep the main quest, the main quest yeah and the side quest, the sideways st. So which I also you know struggle with and also find like it's possible to your politics and media easily can be the sides quest. And then you know i'm always trying to make sure like my main duty is to y combinator and to founders who go through that program because again, like how does the boom loop papen if why combinator is actually doing a great job with founders and their dozens of billion dollar companies that come out like the main quest is the most important .

to defend your side quest a little bit. What we saw in twenty twenty was all of your work in tech, all of all of our work tech, every investors work, every found his work was put in jeopardy because that side quest was totally ignored. You came to a place where there wasn't exists of talent.

People were leaving. They didn't feel they had a future in the city anymore. IT was really bad. People forget how fucking bleak IT was in twenty twenty in the summer when going off in your house and writing was looting was legal ize across union where we're watching footage of b is just getting sacked and like you don't even you can even call the cops when your house is broken in, like you have to get involved. So there is A I believe IT seems pretty obviously a significant link there and and this is important work.

I mean, I feel um if anything, because we are telling people you really should well try to be successful by actually being in 3Frances o the match pair of that is we do need to build enough housing。 We do not need a lot of bird founders ensure their their workers like they all want to have kids and you know, how can you send your kids to public school and live in and Frances go if they don't teach algebra in eighth grade, like only ten percent of children in eighth grade for this year will be allowed to take algebra and they're .

not going to teach algebra but they will read about lincoln high school because lincoln is racist. That IT was the priority in two thousand nine to twenty. Um I wanted talk about the boom loo. I would not the boom of hope sorry, big tech verse little tech um really, really just like about ten minutes left, get to IT.

So uh a couple years ago you coined the phrase little tech that has become very much invoke the war between the big and the little pretty, I would say an interesting kind of contrarian take. There is a magic reaction among people in business to defend business. I share that impulse myself.

Um you have kind of drawn a distinction between the two camps first. Can you just kind of define the two camps for me? And then I want to ask you about .

lina cond yeah of course. I mean this morning um you know me and my team and my other partners at Y C. We're sitting down with minority leader hockey m. Jeffery.

And um you know it's like he's honest tour of a california and silicon value particular and I really needed to make sure that he knew little tech is what we're trying to do like two or three people who you know half of whom or grants they're coming from around the world. We are literally brain draining one hundred fifty I Q people who know A I from all around the world. And we're trying to concentrate them in amErica to make uh amErica as exceptional as possible.

And these are two or three people who in five or ten years, might have a hundred billion dollar company like airbnb. And that that is little tech. We need to protect that. We need to make that happen. And that stands in a sort of start contrast to big tech, which is the apples and, uh, the meta and you sort of the giant tech companies of our time, which are basically in manager mode.

We are trying to protect founder mode yeah and you know this funny because you this this idea of founder mode is essentially about very small sets of people having very high agency to create technology that that is used by a dalian people like that is literally the dream of every twenty year old. Moving the same Frances right now with a computer science background is like, I am going to create tech for billion people, and that's good for society. I was trying to explain to the leader that, like you know, concentration of power is bad.

Lack of competition is bad, self referencing is bad. And the concrete example I gave him was, who here uses the iphone? Raise your hand. And then who here uses theory only like three of you or something.

And why is that? It's because and you know, large language models have been around for years, like we know that the worst technology has been ensconced in, you know, basically self referencing. And so this, you know there is a direct link between what kind of world do we want to live in and who is building those things.

And you know what mode are they in? Are they in manager mode? We're like it's just about the mode is just about making money, right? Like I am also a capitalist. I am capitalist with capital, see its in the definition of my job. But what I want is little tech to have a chance and a voice.

And what that translates into is actually Better products like are we will actually pull forward society and humanity through technology if their open markets, open source and open ability for new startups tour three people with just an idea sitting in a garage to become the next apple. Like, I want, I don't want one Steve jobs every fifty years. I think that amErica can and should have fifty Steve jobs like one every single year. And you know what that takes is little tech. We have to invest in little tech.

So this brings me to lick, you guys have to speak at White combination a colleague of years yesterday. This was like barely on my riter actually until last night. Dita, um when I wear colleagues was like, so where are you on the question of, you know, is lena come bed to secretly bed and I was like, way what not based like not on that on side of things 嗯， i didn't realize maybe the strange belt fellow the extent to which the strange bedfellow thing was happening.

Obviously liner can be seen as a champion of um preserving competition or something some recent things that have come out of danican F C C uh today in the video is denying this but there was um uh there are claims of an investigation. Uh obviously the lizzard microsoft merger was botched a the video ARM we have apple metal medical kind of whatever. The one that alarms me the most is uh IT was never actually investigated.

But speaking a founder mode, we have elon mosque and we have twitter. Um they sort of quite aggressively demanded all sorts of information during that merger. They were rarely worried about IT. And that leads me to, I think, what really worries me about lacon. A SHE wrote in twenty seventeen the what was he called the amazon paradox um the amazon IT was IT was IT was a twenty seventeen essay on how he sees the role of anti trust and if he talked about preserving democracy, not just consumer harm, not even just preserving competition, but but but protecting democracy in democratic norms so that is to me that you have sound of power trying to preserve power, not necessarily trying to preserve competition and I wonder just are you at all worried that um that she's not on your side and she's not really on the side of little tech but he is on the side of government.

I mean, I guess I am not familiar with that particular thing. On the other hand, like we've set down with her, we've host to her many times. SHE even came right before Scott wiener was presenting at a one of our events about A I. He sort of got a visceral by one hundred of our I found her about why are you you're doing this to us um right before that he actually came out very strongly in favor of open source A I uh in my conversations with her SHE and I am very aligned on this idea like how do we make a thousand flowers bloom and that does mean open markets, open source.

Um you I want to throw in counter uh JoNathan canter and D O J A you are doing a pretty bang up job of trying to point out things like the series thing or you know why is that that apple pay was self referencing uh, over the course of many years for a tap to pay. And those are things that startups could have done, could have a provided choice. And only recently, after counter sued apple did they open up tap to pay and they're onna be an early your apple has only recently decided, oh yeah, we maybe should open up apple pay like that's a bad look for us.

So you know I think that there is a role for government to try to open, uh, open these markets and allow your tiny startups to sort of to actually even get a chance of yeah surviving like these are companies that without a pathway to getting users or getting access to aps or getting access to uh, you know, open source l ams, they can they can raise money. No investor will invest in them, uh, they can get revenue and they will die on the vine. And we will be stuck with seven one trillion dollar companies or be seven ten trillion dollar companies.

That will all be a manager mode, totally keeping you in. Like, imagine you know how annoyed you are about theory. Think about that in your entire digital lives. And like, these technologies are only going to be more and more present and powerful. How we do everything like, I think that that's a dangerous thing.

So I don't know about democracy, but I know that I don't want to live in a world where new founders with an idea who, you know, they might be Young, they're very technical. They are probably artist. They're very correct, you know, they want to create the future. I want them to do IT. I want them to .

be able to do IT. I think that it's possible really hard to defend apple in google. Okay, i'm not going to do IT here. Um what I worry about is like, what does what does lindon consider ellam does he consider him little? Take her big tech and if you can consider some big tech, that's a huge problem not just for me but I think for democracy the democracy SHE wants to say because he is yourself and maybe we don't have to talk about you ready yes say um IT seems that there's a conflict maybe fundamentally between government, a fount of power and every emerging font of power attack business generally and tech business specifically is a real is a real counterweight against government.

And while IT could benefit these little guys today, um IT seems like we're now kind of slightly embed with what will be their future assessment. Know eventually if they succeed they will be staring down the barrel of of lena's gun um is I mean, yes, maybe the senses they should be at that point, they will be too big and we need to preserve a competition. Is that like roughly just like the competition .

is the good there? I mean.

you might be the circle of life.

okay. I mean that sort of the problem is um like anything we are these are great companies. Like there's nothing wrong with, I mean we should we celebrate them? Like these are incredible companies and they are you know also a part of an important technology landscape.

I mean literally like these the biggest, best companies in the world and we're really proud of their american companies actually. Um but at the same time, like we shouldn't like strangle the next generation, like I I think it's uh we shouldn't allow these successful companies to like sort of strangle the next generation the way that I think they are now. And you know I think the most a profound version of this is actually the consent decree grants against microsoft, right? Like the the concentric create did change the way microsoft was approaching internet floor.

IT allowed chrome to happen. And, you know, IT allowed google and alphabet to actually thrive and become, you know, another trillion dollar company. And that, I think was a good thing.

And so that's my argument to you was like, no, we do not want to in pute, I personally am worried about a ipod, you know a sort of government that does not apply laws equally to all players like perhaps what might be happening with iran. I think that's highly problematic um but I think that we we do want the next billion dollar company. We want the next deca corn and we want the next head corn. We want the next trillion dollar company and there is a role for government to play.

Um last very quick question as we are winding down, I wonder obviously A I huge bright spot in tech. Um you are on the front lines of all of the new things that are happening is what beyond A I if anything, are you excited about right now?

Oh well, Y C did just fund its first cruise missile company.

OK, let's go.

Well, I mean, honestly, thanks to file respond for a sort of leading the way and uh you know creating Andrew, what an incredible company 那边 i think that there is the pendulum is swinging and I think that's a good thing。 Um you IT is important for us to invest into all kind, all forms of technology. And um you that's not just for defense tech like we also do a lot of climate attack um were interested in.

You are continuing to invest in the health care and digital health. There's a lot to be done. And like honestly, it's not just like crack software engineers. It's cracked engineers of any kind of scientists of any sort.

Who should they should be able to have, uh, access to capital, they should have access to markets and then they should get access to a community of people who will actually help them. And that same from cisco. Like that's why combinator that conference is go.

You know, we want safety. We want our kids be able to learn algebra. You know .

it's just land. I want the colosse. I sorry, I forgot. I have what the last question is actually is what are you running for mayor?

Oh, uh, never. Or twenty years from now.

It's twenty years from now. IT is. Thank you so much.

This is awesome. Thank you guys.