From chatbot to agent-coworker

What could ambitious unhobbling over the coming years look like? The way I think about it, there are three key ingredients:

1. Solving the “onboarding problem”

GPT-4 has the raw smarts to do a decent chunk of many people’s jobs, but it’s sort of like a smart new hire that just showed up 5 minutes ago: it doesn’t have a... See more

I’m a fan of companies that operate like studios with the awareness that they’ll create a series of seasonal hits and try to capture value along the way. The assumption of seasonality could be wrong (and one or more of these hits endures much longer), but that ends up being a good problem to have.

So if not for the structure, what caused venture’s shift towards such risk-averse investing? As fund sizes grew dramatically and a tech boom spurred a startup surge, the industry's emphasis shifted from discerning selection towards a more diversified 'spray and pray' approach, diluting the value of traditional tasteful investing. When the game of b... See more

Because Ramp will see so many trips across its more than 25,000 corporate customers, it will be able to suggest expense controls based on what other travelers are paying, not a generic “average cost for this route.” It might also suggest restaurants, hotels, and other local trips that other Ramp companies enjoyed.

For someone to be successful in starting a company and then turning it into a multigenerational business, they need to have good taste in at least these two things: ideas to pursue and people to recruit.

The only enduring value is in identifying hard problems that face customers you understand, solving that problem better than anyone else, and staying obsessed with serving that customer forever.

Agriculture was a tremendous invention – it got people fed and freed them to do many things. But agriculture – taken to the extreme in the pursuit of profit leads to a sick and obese population and industrialized farms with little regard for the environment or animals. And in response to that, we now have amazing artisanal and healthy food choices ... See more