Bret Taylor - The Agent Era - [Invest Like the Best, EP.386]
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Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of positive sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
My guest today is Brett Taylor. Brett's resume is absurd. He built Google Maps, famously rewriting the whole thing in a weekend. He was the CTO of Facebook in critical years. He founded Quip. He was the chair of the board at Twitter. He was the co CEO of Salesforce. The incredible list goes on. Now Brett is the cofounder of Sierra, a conversational AI platform for business, and he is the chairman of the board at OpenAI. Together, we discuss the past, present, and future of AI agents, New programs that will begin doing incredible amounts of work for us humans in astonishing ways that are a thri
So it's called mythical man moth, and it's essentially the myth that I think stereotypically a lot of folks who come from, I'll say, a business school background as opposed to computer science background have about software, which is to make a software development project go faster, you should add more people to it. And often, the inverse is true. In fact, there's some proverbial statement. It's if you wanna make a software project go twice as slowly add another person to it. I think it's that truism, I think, is based on I think when you're designing a very complex system, it's often individu
do you think that the primary reason that it's an interesting heuristic is this idea that you need to have a systems understanding or an architect's almost understanding of a system to be able to move really fast to change it or build it. Is that the thing behind the thing that fewer people are able to keep that model in their head, and if you start to distribute that, you lose that benefit of speed?
I think it's a few things. So if you have a small, accountable, empowered team, often it means they understand the customer problem they're solving precisely, I e, you're not just implementing a piece of code. You're actually delivering a solution to a problem. And I think when you have hundreds of people working on a project, often the part of the problem that you're staring at is so narrow. Often, you lose sight of the forest for the trees, and that's part of it. I think, similarly, when you have lots of people working on a project, it requires a lot of upfront planning about how you might a
to nail home this point, because I think agents, one of the things they'll do probably is enhance the power of the most powerful engineers, maybe by scary amounts. And I don't ask you about that. But just to give the people in the audience a sense of one of these stories in situ, Everyone I ask about you brings up the Google Maps legendary rewrite story early in your career, an
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