YouSaid · the spoken record

Christian Lanng

lines on the record: 93
first: 2023-09-27
most recent: 2023-09-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I'm hopefully doing something I'm really enjoying doing and having fun. And I'm not thinking about why I hate my work or why I need to just take a break. Yeah, I don't know what that is. And actually that is exotic. I'm completely open to what that could be.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, because that is sort of my primary. If I have a hit, I know and I typically had invested in startups coming out of Denmark because the small network and a lot of them go to San Francisco. As a founder is first, because if I know who they are and I know what they've done and I invested quite a bit of the trade shift alumni, right? So I know those guys, that's the first. But then today I would say market and I'll probably flip it before and said traction and market.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Classic thing like just because you have a great product and a great business model. I mean, if the market is wrong, the market is wrong. And it doesn't matter how much you pound a fight or whatever.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'll probably pick somebody like Moonfire, and it has a lot to do with the philosophy and how they're optimizing. Again, I have very mixed record as a seed investor myself, but yeah, I haven't picked one yet.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, actually, not a whole lot. Like, I mean, one of the things I was talking to Steve Krasn, who is Krasn is a former head of product at DeepMind, and we were both talking about the same thing, which was he's like, if you go back five, six years, it was like AI was made by these, the cathedrals, like Google. And it was like really serious scientists doing really serious stuff. And now people are hacking in LM models on Discord. So we have this underground that's now just hacking and building everywhere. And I think that community is really, really fun. We are part of a number of other startups and everyone else in Discord, by the way, now. I mean, it's so crazy. Nobody is on Slack that I know in this environment. And it feels very, very different from anything I've ever been part of. So I wouldn't change a whole lot. I think maybe slow down the papers a little bit so we can have time to read them because it's like a hundred new papers every day.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And so I think that's going to be really, really hard. I think for the market, like what's going to happen? I mean, look, if you were there when the world switched from on-prem to cloud and you could have written the checks, there was a few people who did, right? Like Rid Hoffman, he just walked around and San Francisco and looked for any startup that has survived 2008 and just gave them money. There's going to be something similar. And probably we need a good calling first, but I do think there's going to be something similar happening in this paradigm shift here.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's interesting, right? Because you're seeing even very big names scrambling to get access to deal flow”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think there will still be a lot of money going into the long tail. But you're right that the concentration will happen in the top. But I think ultimately there will still be more companies getting funded just because some of the smartest people I know are just starting to boot up on it now. They spend a year thinking, looking a little bit at the hype, and now they're really getting into it. And I think those startups are going to really crush it and avoid a lot of the early generation mistakes.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really good question. I would love to talk to Steve Jobs still. I think he would be one of the most brilliant people to have a discussion with.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But whether they're going to remove it, I know, but that world is going to be blown up completely. And you asked me, am I scared? I'm a bit nervous about what's going to happen, but I'm mostly excited. I think it's fun when things are up in there and we don't know”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you can at least have anything else, you can probably license your IP to have some AI keep doing the podcast.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, and I think look, it's also the same tradeshift, absolutely, but also a bit beyond work, which is we know how to build enterprise-grade data isolation, security, how to load in these models. I mean, look, I've spent 14 years convincing the largest companies in the world to give me their supply chain data, put it in the cloud. The first time I did that, people are like, you're insane. That is never going to happen. Do you think that some of the largest phone manufacturers in the world are going to give you all the supply data? That's the tax you got to pay to get to those proprietary data. And to pay that tax, you've got to have a full understanding of compliance regulatory, all of these things, but you're still not, you can't be Google or whatever because then you just have too many lawyers that's going to say no.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, and I think obviously because people are afraid of the copyright issues, I think the copyright issues are trending in a direction where I don't think it's going to be a major problem. I mean, fair use, I think, is cover.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, we were talking about it all day. I think it's almost like the idea of an app almost becomes like TikTok. It's like, here's the flavor of the second, you know. Have you tried this thing? Somebody made this really good prompt to generate this fun thing or whatever. So I think in consumer, it is going to be absolutely pandemonium. And to try to build a consumer tech brand and hold on to any population of users is going to be very, very, very hard in a world where innovation is almost free and LLMs can make anything. In Enterprise, again, is that it's going to be different because there's so many modes, there's so many layers of complexity regulation, et cetera, that there's still a lot of space. And then the last bit is the biggest differentiator in the world to come is going to be proprietary data. I'm sorry, but like with a few exceptions, right? All of these are trained on the same data set. It's the public data. Okay, Google haven't been more prior to data on where you are and you're traveling email. Meta has some other stuff and so on. But it's all the same consumer world.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is very, very like, I think actually that one of the biggest impacts of AI in LMS is that most application based brands are going to be really struggling because the brand is the UX. If you're not touching the button, so why are they making copilots? They're making copilots because they need you. In fact, everybody's talking about the big problem Google haven't searched where they are and their revenue stream. Nobody's talking about what it means for enterprise applications. I'm so sorry, but Salesforce is just a database. And LLMs are really good at talking with databases and curing data. You don't need 15 layers between you and that database to do it. That's where the real challenges are going to come and they're going to be, I mean, it's going to be fun to watch.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is a necessary step for anyone who tries to still make enterprise applications to remain relevant. Even the idea of an application is going to be challenged quite hard, right? If you can just tell your phone that you want to buy two tickets to go to Barcelona and by the way, book this hotel and by the way, can you play this music? Why did you need to know about Spotify, booking.com, all of this? Why do you need to know about any of this?”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just imagine a thousand of them and none of them kind of completely understand each other. And, you know, so I don't think that's a model for the future. I think it's one of those weird things that happens when we transition from one paradigm to the next one.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's even worse. Like, I mean, who wants a copilot? I want to be a pilot. I don't want to have a copilot. I don't want to be inside an application. I don't care how many copilots you have. The problem is not to have an AI help you navigate an application that's shit. The better solution is to remove that application that's shit and just talk straight with AI. The copilot metaphor, right? I mean, what happens when we have 10,000 clippies all just talking to each other? And for you to work, you have to go and work in all of these clippies and you're going to have to tell Clippy A to go talk to Clippy B about that thing you have over in Clippy C. I mean, it's going to be worse than it is now.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That last year, same time. So in less than 12 months. And so I think what we also see is the cost of innovation will drop rapidly. Will it go to zero probably not? But it will be much more about execution and ideas and necessarily having the best coders. And I mean, a good friend who's a programmer his whole life, he said to me, look, there's got to be a whole different generation of coders. I'm a very shitty programmer because I don't have patience, right? So I thought when I learned programming is like, this is going to be fun. There's some great things with my mind and whatever. And then you learn programming is 90% debugging. And I hate debugging with such a passion. But now I just throw my code at ChatGPP to say, hey, where's the problem? Right. So I do think it will impact society massively, but in ways we can't really predict yet, even in the short term.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's again about back to the trust question. I saw a pilot recently where we went from in 60 days trialing to the enterprise going, we want this deployed to 3,000 people. And it's because the guardrails around the trust side and the human validation loops are so strong that essentially they say there's no downside because we have humans validating at everything. Back to the impact on society and the timeline to it. I think, as I said, it's almost like we always underestimate the future in the long run and overestimate in the short run. If I see another agent demo on Twitter, I'm just going to like, I mean, I cannot see any more of the hype demos of AI and anyone who's building real stuff have to do enterprise great stuff, et cetera. Like, we know how many problems there are that needs to be solved. But I think still, when I'm seeing stuff, like I made a game with my son in a weekend in a programming language I never programmed in. That's real. Like that's real world stuff. That is not overestimating anything in the future that happened. I would not have been able to do that.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The AI can do all of that for you, pull all information correlated, and then you can validate. You can use your brain for what you're good at. So I think it's more about when I say changing the work experience, it's actually about putting the human brain in a place and the loop where it's the very best and stop trying to make humans into robots.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think humans are incredibly important in the AI loop. Everybody who's pushing for ATI level AI right now, they're going to be sorely disappointed. I think asymptomic curve, and I think we're going to end up with way more style cars, meaning you almost have a lawyer, but not quite. And the 5% you don't quite have, it's going to be really, really bad. So I'm not sure there's a big market for almost lawyers or almost designers or almost whatever. I think what's very interesting is all the trivial stuff we do every day. All the trivial stuff, like as you said, even in VC, right? You have to, you know, get these documents over here and then you have to correlate and you want to run an R if we can automate all the trivial stuff that still requires knowledge. That's actually where the sweet spot of capabilities and models are. And we don't need AGI to get there. And then the second piece back to the human piece, which is, I think people ignore the obvious. Just have humans in the loop to validate it. Just have humans in loop to look at. You know, you don't have to go and find all the information. You don't have to go search and obscure and click on really bad buttons and some UI you didn't even understand to get your job done.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For us to really truly trust AI in the work environment, we need to have cues and we need to feel we can trust them as co-workers. And that is absolutely a user experience that needs to be designed. Like if you drive a Tesla at self-driving, it renders everything that's”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We need to do the experiments. But I think the other thing is beyond word, we banned token or using AI as something we talk about. AI is essentially as interesting as saying database or we have an HTML rendering layer or whatever. It's a set of technologies. And I think what is really, really important, and I think most people right now that are rushing into, as you said, AI is missing, is I think it's about the user experience. I think it's about trust. And trust, by the way, is a user experience. It's a design exercise. You know, everybody's like, we got to have AI stop hallucinating. Well, hallucinations, they're more powerful the model, the more powerful hallucinations. Maybe it's more about showing why and it went.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most likely two things. I think we are right now both 99% of the money going in is going to be lit on fire. And two, we are underestimating the impact of AI. And I think both are true at the same time. But I think we've got to get at least one or two cycles in to start really seeing what's happening.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, product growth is definitely one way, and I think that's much healthier than the sort of SaaS revenues of classic enterprise content software. Sorry, to the people I saw for the last 14 years. But I do think the world is changing. I think we're going to absolutely move to consumption-based pricing. It's the only way I think it's going to be very hard to hold the mode on recurring revenue as it is today because customers will want to see more value and they'll want to see a more soft ramp up to that value. But I also think on the workpiece, look at the demographic problem. Like most of the people I talk to, even if they wanted to replace the workers they haven't yet service today one-to-one, they can't because that generation of young people, they don't want to go in and sit in front of a computer and type formulas into workday every day. So we got to completely change the work experience in next five to ten years that we're going to run out of people to do the work.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The point is think about your HR system. That's the head of HR that buys that. It's not you as a worker who sits every day. The same for your piece system. Same for any system. Whoever made a set of tools, platform for you as a worker. It's like, I mean, if you're a forester and you're cutting down trees, you would have a chainsaw as your daily tool, right? But all these systems have been made by somebody else who's charging by the license, by the user, bought by people who don't use it. And then we wonder why the people who sit in the middle, they are miserable. And I think, by the way, like demographics.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think we're seeing the same right now. There would be a new generation of user interfaces that haven't fully been invented yet, but we will look at all of the screens of applications we use every day as dinosaurs in less than three years. We're like, holy shit, why were we sitting with thousands of buttons and thousands of screens?”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely. User interfaces are stupid. It's only because we only had that metaphor, right? We create screens with buttons. Every year, every enterprise vendor is forced to come up with more screens with more buttons. Why? They sell user licenses by the seed. Guess what? Is there incentive to make the application more complex or less complex? They only go one way. Why would you need that if you can just say, hey, I'm going to take two weeks of vacation. Could you please update the company record? Or if you could say I would like to generate a vendor database based on this folder, Google Drive folder I was just touched at you with the invoices. So national language, of course, is far more efficient, but we can't just do prompt. We can't just like, I mean, everybody's that, well, you can do anything you want with chatTPT. Well, I mean, 99% of people use it as Wikipedia and that's it. So we need more. We need the ability to be able to push buttons. But we need to have a completely different experience. When mobile came, it took five years before we really started having the concepts of responsive mobile web design, user interfaces emerge.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But nine months later, I was running on my laptop a model that was as powerful as ChatGPT 3.5 that was released as open source by Facebook. So I had never in my life in computing seen something that moves this fast. And you know what's really, really exciting? I have no clue how this is going to turn out. I don't know if the incumbent's going to win or somebody else. I don't care. I just want to build something that's valuable for people. But I think it's really exciting that we don't yet know how it's going to play out.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think you're right when you talk about consumer. And I think, by the way, everybody will be making a big mistake if they count Apple out of the AI race. They're going to come with 100 miles an hour when they come in, it will be really, really good. But if you think about those winners, what they really provided was platforms. We went from having 1,000 to 35,000 SaaS companies in 10 years. If you look at the explosion of unicorns, for instance, a very good chunk of them were SaaS companies, right? Because enterprise is a multipolar world. It's not winner takes all. I mean, Peter Thiel's power laws works really well in consumer. But in enterprise, there's so many modes. I mean, compliance, regulatory, incompetence. There's just layers of layers of layers of stuff that makes decisions happen differently. And I think the other thing is if you look at the next generation of stuff about these modes, if you asked me last year, I'll say somebody like Open AI is going to be like the AWS of AI.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should need less than that. Absolutely, right? And I think that's actually where, I mean, to me, building a startup today that is AI first is as pivotal or revolutionary as it were 14 years ago to build the first cloud companies. And I'm not talking about ChatGPT here and all that. I mean, that's amazing and they're probably going to invent either superhuman intelligence and we're all going to die according to Elon Musker. It's going to be totally fine and they're going to be almost as good as self-driving cars, but they're going to fail some of the time, right? But what I'm talking about is what are the companies building this architect going to look like? And 14 years ago, there came something completely new, cloud computing. And suddenly we could make software in a whole different way from on-prem and change the world. It changed the enterprise world. And I think today there's new generation of startups that's going to come over the next five, 10 years, and they're going to be built on an AI first architecture. And what I personally find exciting is nobody have an idea what I look like yet.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly right, but it's centered on humans in the sender. Salesforce don't have a human in the center. Salesforce makes you into a robot that has to click buttons in a certain order. And while on earth should you learn that? Why should you spend 10% of your brain storing information that's completely useless for anything you do? What you really want to be doing is to look at that data and pull out conclusions or figure out who's my top 10% salespeople. And we have some amazing, powerful tools right now.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beyond work is essentially the idea that we should be able to automate any work we want as regular people. And we should be able to take any task and combine it and collaborate with other people around it without having to log into applications. Imagine you have a problem say, hey, I want to create a vendor database based off of all these invoices. Then the user interface just appears and show you that and it goes away.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly right. And I think so with this new thing, like with Beyond Work, one of the things that I've really been thinking hard about is, can we try to redefine the modern work experience? Can we make it so it's not the applications that define how you work? Why should it be Salesforce or Workday or SAP, all these systems that make you into a robot? Why shouldn't it be you who can just work the way that your brain works and all these systems should be in the background?”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I also think just look broader, right? Most modern works suck, right? Why do people go to startups? Because it's exciting, because it's great, because it's fun, because you're doing something with your mind. If you go to most corporate work, 90% of it is like copy something from this paste of this spreadsheet into this field. Type this form, click this button. You have no idea what it does, then update this, and then keep going. It's so far removed from who we are as humans. I mean, we are animals. We get a kick out of defending the village, you know, hunting for stuff, raising children. So it's very hard to get excited about clicking update lead source four.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember, you know, when I first came to Silicon Valley, Mr. Rid Hoffman, who actually told me, said, within two square miles of where you stay in there's 5,000 startups, within three months, 95% of them are going to be dead. And everybody there are going to be into new startups recycling all the knowledge, et cetera, right? So you have, just to start with, the whole machine recycles knowledge much faster. But the second thing I think within those startups is that shit just gets done. Nobody stops until then. you work or don't work on weekends it's just not a thing and you know if you're doing a startup in these early stages you just work you just build you just do and i mean i know it's ironically to sit and praise that right here as we started the conversation on burnout that's probably the paradox there is no good ways to combine all of these things”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We just honestly like vacation a little bit too much. We like coming home at five with the kids. We are starting to have other things that are other benefits, right? Because the very best people in the world in, say, AI or engineering or whatever, they want life quality, right? So Europe can offer a lot on that, but the extremity of execution is something I only ever seen in Silicon Valley. Actually, one other place is China.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How are all these people, right? And I mean, that's the real, like, so operational lessons is that I think the other one is just, I mean, this is said so many times, whatever you charge double your price. We found out in Tracy very early on that there was an inverse relationship between price and speed of sales cycle. The more we charge, the faster we closed. People are afraid of that. People are afraid of saying really large numbers, especially if you come from outside this world. I think another operational lesson that is really, really important is just you just got to iterate faster and you got to kill stuff faster. You're going to kill everybody thinks that you can kill stuff fast, but it's not fast enough. The very best operators, like you mentioned Parker Conrad and people like that, they are so insane at the iteration speed and that's why they win. And I think there's an ability to understand that I think in Europe we don't really still understand. I was 10 years in Silicon Valley. I don't think we still understand how much better that most really good San Francisco startups or Silicon Valley startups are compared to the Europeans.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but I'll give you an example again. It's a very real example. It's like at one point we fired 50% of the VPs in trade shift. There was no drop of productivity. And I really thought to myself, what the fuck have we been doing?”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Essentially, it's just a question of pain. How much pain are you willing to endure to get the right people on the team? Because when everything is scaling like crazy, if you don't fill that role, it means everybody else has in more pain. But on the other hand, if you start filling those roles with people who are not the same level of quality, then you have a challenge, right?”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First off, never ever compromise on quality when you hire. You will be so tempted when you're in the hyper growth stage. Everybody will be screaming at you that they need people on this function or this function or this function. And I think”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the things we put into what we're building right now is that we are a team, not a family. Because, let's be real, like, some of the hardest things I've had to do, I fired a person that I've known since high school. I worked with for 10 years who moved to California as part of the journey. At that moment, you really do not want to be friends with the person, the people you work with. On the other hand, I think it's very, very hard to do something as intense and wild and crazy as a startup without becoming friends with these people because you have all these war stories, you have everything you do together. So one of my good friends and early advisors, he always said, look, absolutely go work with your friends or become friends with who you work with. Just know you might have nine really good years and then the breakup is probably horrible. But why not have five really intense good years with someone when most friendships, to be honest, is we meet in the part and we talk bullshit about the game. It's a trade-off and I don't have the answer.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of the things that were the sources behind Mugnus probably have grounding. It's extremely hard to discuss that within some very extreme environments like startups because they are extreme machines, there are extreme environments. On the other hand, there's also been a lot of founders out there that is exploiting that and said, look, it is an extreme environment, so I can do whatever I want. I can be a psychological terror or whatever, right? So you got to create an inclusive environment without going aboard. And then you're just going to focus everyone on one thing and one thing only, and that's building. I like what David Heimer says, like he banned politics in signals. And I think that's absolutely right. We shouldn't sit around the table discussing all this stuff. We should just build something and make it work. And if we allow everyone to be the best at building, then we don't do it right.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, I think, I mean, talk about mental health and startups is wow, that's a big one. It's hard, right? Because I believe myself I have the hustle called my check. Don't stop. I can just keep going all of those things, right? So, you know, when I was younger, I thought like, how do we deal with mental health and startup? We just make sure we hire people only like that, right? Like, I mean, the first joke was like, we don't need an HR department because everybody here is just like here to work and, you know, Fargo will just go full speed. But I think if I can struggle, then anyone can. And if I can burn out, then anyone can. And I think startups is 99% people. That is the primary asset. If the wrong person goes down at the wrong time, that can be a very, very big destruction of value, right? So I think we got to find better ways of thinking about it. It should definitely not be that we now have to all do our journaling and a lot of other vogue things that I think probably does contribute more to stress than that actually helps solve things.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is. It is the hardest thing in the world. But if you let yourself become jaded, then you let those people define who you are. Look, I have people out there right now that I really like. They just want to exploit the situation that they want to hurt me. But what I want to focus on is like, I don't want to give them any energy. I don't want to think about. I want to think about what I'm building now. I want to think about where I'm going in the future. I want to think about being happy. Because back to the point about having this is the best for mentioned in the world.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just because people take advantage, they see an opportunity, they see money. And then it's really hard the morning after to wake up and say, I don't want to become a fucking cynic. I rather have one more time where you say, okay, I was vulnerable and I got F', but it was more important that I don't lose who I am. Now, people around me will say, yeah, that's true, Christian, but you could be a bit more, you could still be a bit more skeptical and a little bit more critical of people.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's spot on. Like, you know, I think I failed at the first leadership principle, I taught most of our leaders. And that's right. Maybe undifferently if I had. But I think still, like, I think to try to be real people is very, very important. And I think vulnerability is actually one of the biggest trust building things you can do. The hard part is I've also plenty of time shown vulnerability and gotten screwed over hard, right?”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. No, I think actually this is part of the US2 part of the leadership principles in Tradeshift, which one of the very first things I taught all our leaders is show vulnerability. And the reason I say that is, you know, in American business culture, you just got to be perfect. It's like, hey, what do you think about this? You have an answer, right? Actually, that's why ChatGPT is kind of screwed, because it just want to give a perfect answer to everything. And it can't say, hey, could you clarify? I don't know or whatever. But I told my leaders, I know people will actually trust you more if you show vulnerability. If you say, hey, this is an area I'm bad at as a leader. This is an area I'm good at. build a relationship with people. And I think the same is true as an investor. I think it's absolutely right to show vulnerability and say, look, I've struggled with these things and so on because it makes you a human.”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have in vessels where I have this relationship with, right? Like, I mean, a bunch of our investors also wrote me after my post. I mean, somewhere we're happy with the results of the round, which just did some were unhappy, but they still wrote me. And so that meant a lot. But it is clear, right? Like, of course, investors are in it for the money. So to some degree, most degrees, I think founders are as well. But I do think it's better when there is an understanding. And I mean, there's this whole thing like, you know, if an investor is good, if they show up and shit is hot, right? Like everybody is just cheering when it's like up, up, up. It's like, yeah, go faster. But the investors that I have a relationship with today are the investors that were there when stuff was really, really hard or when something blew up in a way we didn't expect or whatever. And they were still there. And so I think, you know, as an investor, you probably have some control in the sense that you show up for your founders when everybody else is about to bail on them, for instance, right?”
2023-09-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source