hi everybody welcome to this highlight episode of the podcast in Good Company what we've decided to do is for people who are really in a hurry we're going to clip down the episode to just be 10 minute long but probably what you'll see when you heard 10 minutes you're going to want to hear the whole thing now what we do Wednesday full episode Fridays the short episode tune in
hi everybody today we are in really good company with one of the most successful entrepreneurs and Venture Capital investors of all time vard kosla
vard um co-founded Sun Microsystems back in 1982 and kosla ventures in 2004 and Kosta Ventures is uh making money in technology whilst also doing good stuff for society so uh warm welcome anod
great to be here you say that it is only the improbable which is important what do you mean by that most in this goes immediately into my views on expert opinion it's very good at predicting the an extrapolation of the past as opposed to a new kind of vision for the future
how do you identify these situations where experts are totally wrong I think it's very hard to identify precisely these situations
when we invested in open AI in 2018 is when we made the commitment to invest it was hard to say when there would be a breakthrough in AI
what was predictable was the trend line was an exponential it was very likely we were in the F flat part of the curve of an exponential the early changes suddenly AI capability took off uh I would call that improbable because nobody else was predicting it
what have been your best investments in 1996 we invested in a company called Juniper that said tcpip would be the protocol for the internet there was not a single Telco player AT&T Verizon they had different names them before their mergers and all that that predicted tcpip would be the protocol for the internet and they had other uh more technical reasons for going with other protocols
uh we just bet on that uh we got a 2500x investment over about five years I was at Klein hins then we made 7 billion on a $3 million investment uh uh that was very nice I was at K Perkins at that point
we also invested in Google when it was a couple of flaky PhD students and you didn't know how large it would be how important the improbable would be when they were talking about organizing the world's information it was hard to extrapolate 1996 from two kids talking about that to it will change the world in many many ways so those are all improbables
characteristics of people with the resolve and determination with persistence with low probability high impact bets and the environment being right for them to find a tow hold and then expand from there those are characteristics we look for from an investment point of view
s now I'm I'm a flaky PhD student uh I come into your office what kind of things do you ask me I say he not I got a super plan I'm going to change the world here we see that all the time and we have to judge how persistent will they be
if we talking to them about the investment for a month or two you can usually tell how fast they will learn how do you screen for fast learning how how can you figure out whether I'm you can watch somebody and see how well they answer questions
uh if you challenge them how they respond are they thinking from first principles uh and saying let me examine this assumption or are they being reactive I know this to be true which is very common in experienced business people we've always done it this way we've uh had the world this is always worked I've done this for 30 years those are all bad signs for an entrepreneurial person
let's um utilize some of your smart thinking now and let's try to predict the future which you have done in a in a fantastic Ted talk so you have identify 12 trends for the future and I'd love to dive into each one of them if you don't mind but just uh before that just what these Trends what do they have in what do they have in common what are they about
my particular area of expertise and I hate to even call it expertise it's more specul smart speculation or I call them intelligent gats of what might be possible uh is technology driven
let's dive into some of these radical uh predictions you have
first one expertise will be free we very close to the point where AI is as good as the median person in most areas and then because it's computation only it can be replicated infinitely there's a million doctors in the US couple of hundred thousand primary care doctors and then specialists in various areas
but if you could have 10 times the amount of expertise it would be near free uh and we could provide a lot more Primary Care without much cost and maybe even substantially lower cost
you also say that you think labor will be free I do think uh and this is a little harder to project today but uh almost certainly over the next five years we will develop bipe robots that means robots that have two legs and two arms
that can do the kind of work humans can if you had a billion such robots they could do more work because they can work 24hour chefs um than all the human labor today
what about uh the growth of computing power Computing as a cost per unit of computing is declining very very rapidly what has been very expensive is programming these computers and most people can't program a computer
I do think we will get to a world where you can program it with voice in natural language and you can use them much more effectively so the range of uses could expand dramatically because what I'm talking about is essentially an AI computer programmer
so when Computing is free or you know extremely cheap as electricity and water is now what what will it change you will be able to program almost any task There's 7 billion humans each could have 10 agent so imagine 70 billion agents running around the internet doing tasks for computers
what about the tailor making or medicine you're talk about the signs of medicine changing as well we are already doing it you know cancer is a large uh problem in the world of course in human health um with very few really effective Solutions we can delay death a little bit
but if you could tailor design a protein to interfere with that cancer one person's cancer not a drug approved for all 7 billion people on the planet AI will let us design drugs predictably for one person's cancer
what about food what will you do to food the food we eat will be the food we eat but can we produce it with a lot less chemicals for example absolutely because uh robots can pick bugs off trays instead of bombarding them with pesticides or herbicides
clean power you are also a strong believer in nuclear fusion um how do you see this I'm very optimistic in the next five years nobody will doubt that Fusion is a viable technology and then we'll have the 30s and 40s to scale It Up
My Hope for Fusion is we use current power plants but replace coal boilers or natural gas boilers with Fusion boilers we may need to replace the turbine too but retrofit old plants with Fusion clean power much cheaper much cleaner and of course much more scalable
so then energy will be free too basically you're free
I hope you paint um a very positive uh picture of the world here and in this world what is your advice to young people I used to say pursue your passions as long as you can make a living at it
I'll drop the as long as you can make a living at it because I think there'll be enough abundance in society for sociey to support uh a minimum level of living for everybody independent of the job
it's been really really great uh talking to you thank you very much great to talk to you