← The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Product: Is an AI Winter Approaching | The Future of AI Software Development: What is Real & What is BS | OpenAI: WTF is Going on & How Far Into Application Layer Do They Go | The Future Role of Software Engineers with Guy Podjarny
00:46:10
Guy Podjarny founded Tessl, Snyk and Blaze. Tessl is reimagining software development for the AI era and shaping AI Native Development. Snyk created and leads the Developer Security category, and is now a multi-billion dollar company with over 1,000...
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- [00:00]
Guy Podjarny
I think that's bullshit. I don't think that's true for a variety of reasons. First, SaaS businesses are far more than just the software that they create. In fact, if you have a SaaS business and your only differentiation is I've written all this code and nobody else can do, then your days are numbered. Expectation of when would the GPT5 scale models arrive? I now think that those are further away. You've sort of seen Sam Altman and others change their tune to talk about reasoning and things like that as the progress. And my sense is there are actually some architectural problems, so it's possible there's year or two in which these things are stuck.
- [00:34]
Harry Stebbings
This is 20 products with me, Harry Stebbings. Now today we are joined by one of the best product leaders. He founded and scaled sneak to being a $7.4 billion company. Now he's back with his new company Tesl, which He's already raised 125 million for at a $750 million valuation from the likes of GV Index and Bold Start. But before we dive into the show today, how do you get your users to do what you want them to do? Well, that's where Pendo comes in. Pendo is the only all in platform for any type of application. Honestly, Pando's differentiation is in its platform. Every capability from analytics to in app guidance to session replay, mobile feedback management and roadmapping are all purpose built to work together. But don't take my word for it. 10,000 companies use pendo and Pendo also does Mine the Product, the world's largest community of product management professionals. So check out their amazing free product today on Pendo iO20 product. That's Pendo iO22.0 product podcast and talking about AI. Glean is the leading work AI platform that transforms how teams operate. So this is how it does it. AI has the potential to help everyone at work with nearly everything they do, but only if it deeply understands the data, the people, the processes and the context specific to your work. Well, Glean is the leading work AI platform that does exactly that. So Glean's powerful AI assistant helps you find answers, generate content and automate work. You can also build no code and low code custom generative AI app apps and agents that scale the power of your company's knowledge anywhere it's needed. That's why hundreds of enterprises, including some of the world's leading technology, telecom, retail, manufacturing, banking businesses, put AI to work with Glean, empowering engineers to ship code faster, sales reps to better understand their customers, support agents to resolve cases more accurately. Even IT teams to deflect questions and solve issues automatically. Glean is work AI for all visit glean.com 20 that's two zero to request a demo to.
- [02:40]
Sam Altman
You have now arrived at your destination. Guy, I am so excited for this.
- [02:44]
Harry Stebbings
Listen, I always learn so much from.
- [02:46]
Sam Altman
Our conversations, so thank you so much for joining me today.
- [02:49]
Guy Podjarny
Oh, thanks for having me back on. Clearly I said a few interesting things last time. If you were to do it.
- [02:53]
Harry Stebbings
Dude, I always learn from ours.
- [02:55]
Sam Altman
Now I've got a little bit spicy and I want to start with like.
- [02:58]
Harry Stebbings
A quick fire on what people have said and how we think about it now.
- [03:02]
Sam Altman
Masasun said Nvidia is undervalued today. Agree or disagree and why?
- [03:08]
Guy Podjarny
I think there are really three questions in one. In that one, the first one is is the market Nvidia is in going to continue to grow? And I think that is absolute yes. You know, the semiconductors for AI, no doubt it's going to grow. There are going to be a lot more players in that space. I think the second question is how much would Nvidia capture of that market? I think they are going to continue to dominate. I don't know percentage wise, but I think they're doing some brilliant things like taking advantage of their momentary lead. Not that momentary. They have quite a substantial hard to capture lead, but they know that the clouds, for instance, have distribution advantages and so they're building a cloud. They're using their semiconductor advantage. So I think they will continue to be the market leader by a margin for a long time. I think the third question is what do you think about what is it now a 35x multiple on these revenues? That one's a bit trickier because it really isn't a question of would they grow. The question is should you put that money into other stock and would they grow faster? That one's a bit harder for me to answer.
- [04:08]
Sam Altman
The only one I have a question on there is actually the market itself, which I think everyone would actually uniformly be surprised at me questioning. Everyone seems to also acknowledge that actually we're going to go through this trough of disillusionment that companies will realize that actually the ROI on a lot of these AI tools hasn't proven out in this first batch and actually there's going to be this kind of depression, so to speak, in the AI world, which will lead to a reduction in demand for Nvidia chips potentially in the next year.
- [04:34]
Guy Podjarny
Well, I think first of all they sold a lot of commitments already. And so I think a good amount of their revenue is pretty guaranteed. I also think that the core technology here compounds it keeps evolving and becoming better and better. So it's quite likely that they're also the ones best able to produce things in the cheapest fashion or that achieve output with least compute or other types of savings. It's not just about being able to deal with the biggest and biggest models, which is a part of it as well. So I think those are just between the manufacturing, the ip, the processes to be able to deal with that CUDA and the whole kind of development environment on top of it. All of those are pretty durable advantages.
- [05:12]
Sam Altman
Do you think we will go through this trough of disillusionment with regards to enterprises thinking that actually it hasn't delivered the value that it once claimed to?
- [05:20]
Guy Podjarny
I think so. But it's not because AI is not going to be as promising as it is before. It's just because the numbers are a little bonkers at the moment.
- [05:28]
Sam Altman
The numbers are bonkers or the timing with which the value should be created is bonkers.
- [05:32]
Guy Podjarny
Well, I think a lot of AI budgets at the moment are non resilient, right? They're coming in, people are spending money, they're trying things out and they expect a lot from them. And I think in the long run that would be correct. But it's hard to think that people will adapt the processes that companies that the way that would work will adapt quickly enough to really return something in the periods of time. And so there will be some amazing winners. But yeah, I think a lot will go sideways. I think the biggest one also is all of these tiny startups where there's like a thousand. I think in some cases there might be even 10,000 companies doing the exact same thing. So it almost doesn't matter how good they are and how good the use case is. A lot of that money is just redundant. You know, a lot of these companies are building the same thing that would surely, you know, a lot of that is waste.
- [06:17]
Sam Altman
I cannot tell you how many note takers for wealth managers, for dentists, for doctors. I'm literally like oh for fuck's sake, not again. Okay, staying on Masa, he said the cumulative cost to achieve AGI is 9 trillion in CapEx, but the benefit would be a shift in GDP to 9 trillion per year. Agree or disagree?
- [06:36]
Guy Podjarny
Yeah, the investment would be substantial, but I think people underestimate the non technology parts of adopting AI. I think AI is a transformative or a disruptive technology, not a sustaining one. And it requires people to change, it requires accountability to change insurance and things like that. And so there will be a lot of delays on how does society accept these things. I mean the hold back for adopting an AI lawyer wouldn't be the tech, it would be the law. Right. Or insurance. But what happens if that lawyer kind of give you the wrong advice? Who do you sue? Same with seeing this with self driving cars. Right. You know, it takes forever. Yeah, the tech is a part of it, but really a lot of it is society. And so I think there was a lot of investment, but I think there's also a time horizon. So I think the volume is probably about right. I know it's hard to assess, is it 9 trillion or 15 trillion or 3 trillion? It's like very large amounts of money. I think the end result would be very much worth it. The time horizon is much harder to assess, not because of the tech evolution.
- [07:36]
Sam Altman
Larry Ellison said, to enter the frontier model race, you need $100 billion. Do you agree or do you think we're seeing the democratization of cost to enter that race?
- [07:45]
Guy Podjarny
Yeah, I don't think we're seeing democratization of cost when it comes to coming to the models generally. I agree. I think you need vast quantities or vast amounts of capital to be able to properly compete in the foundation models. There are kind of two competing theories though. One is that scaling laws will continue to show themselves and as a result of that you'd need more and more money to make progress. And the general models, the generic, the global models, they will continue to grow and they will eat everybody's breakfast. The counterargument is that you would actually really benefit from specialized models. And so if the big guns are really trying to get the massive models and they're trying to scale and they fail, which there are all sorts of rumors around how the latest sort of GPT5 and equivalent in Gemini and Anthropic and all that are failing with some tests. But if that is correct and they spend a lot of money and time on that, then the ones that are building maybe code specific or robotic specific models of it, they may have a shot at being able to train with relatively small amounts. I still think that's a short lived though. If you take a five year, a ten year time horizon, those are just like maybe you get some gain for a few years, but over time capital plays a huge role here.
- [08:51]
Sam Altman
So you would fundamentally say in the short term we'll have specialized models which are better for efficiency and accuracy, but it will lead to longer term More generalized models.
- [08:58]
Guy Podjarny
I think I am more willing to bet that the specialized models will prove out in the sort of call it three year timeline than I did before. Just because I think the big generic models are apparently, and this is again a bit of rumors, they are running into some limitations on it.
- [09:14]
Sam Altman
Did you contemplate building your own model with Tassel?
- [09:17]
Guy Podjarny
Not very long. I think fundamentally also you want to tap into the innovation of the market. You see now Anthropic and OpenAI. Some of them might be better at reasoning which software development might be important when you design the piece of software. Anthropic is currently perceived as better at the actual co generation piece of it. Other models might be better at visuals and so why choose? I definitely don't want to compete with all of those, but I also don't even want to pick amidst them. I want to be able to use the best technology available to me at any time. If you draw the cloud analogy, I want to be the best user of the cloud as opposed to actually try and compete with the cloud players.
- [09:51]
Sam Altman
I want to move into that kind of substat there beneath it, there is a huge amount of AI devtools as well. I mean we spoke about note takers. There's a lot of dev tools. Benioff came out fighting against Copilot. He said it just doesn't work and it doesn't deliver any level of accuracy. Gartner says it's spilling data everywhere and customers are cleaning up the mess. We've got Benioff coming on in a couple of weeks, so that'll be fun. Is Benioff justified in his criticism of Copilot Guy?
- [10:17]
Guy Podjarny
Well, I think GitHub copilot and rather coding assistance as a whole cursor and GitHub copilot. It's hard to say that they are not providing value when they are in a place in which a lot of developers say this is now the way I develop software. I don't want to go back to not having them. I do think that it develops software of questionable quality in many places because you're just kind of reviewing the codes that got generated as opposed to actually writing it. And so just naturally the amount of thought you put into it is far lesser and as a result of that you don't notice anything. And I think LLMs as a whole, they kind of average everything, right? Like they generate things that unless you give them very specific instructions, the code that gets generated is quite average. And most code is totally fine being average, but it is a bit of A concern that it's duplicating a lot of code that is average.
- [11:05]
Sam Altman
Why does everyone love Cursor?
- [11:07]
Guy Podjarny
When you think about AI solutions as a whole, if I think kind of broader mental framework, the solutions that are easiest to adopt right now are the ones that really don't require any change in how you work today. And they just provide you with some magic and they don't really need you to trust the result, they just need to work often enough. And so coding assistants and cursor specifically are really, really nice. And cursor has taken that further in. Hey, I'm going to make changes in various places in the code and things like that in multiple files. And they just make it very easy, very easy to eyeball to say this is correct, this is not correct. So you're not worried about them doing something incorrect. It's in your flow, you're just sort of coding away.
- [11:44]
Sam Altman
We mentioned kind of the proliferation of AI devtools and just how many there are. Are they any good?
- [11:50]
Guy Podjarny
I think they are providing value in very specific places. And so where they've been helpful is reducing toil is when you are trying to do toil is this notion of just repeated work that you have to do to decorate and sort of describe your code over time. So creating documentation, creating tests, they help because it's kind of like a template for your email, right? Like you instead of needing to start from scratch, they give you something to start with. And those have been quite helpful, the code completion piece, because of that sort of low cost of verification. They've also been helpful beyond that, they haven't been dramatic yet, mostly because they are still unreliable. Our founding AI engineer calls it the jagged edge of AI. It is amazing at some point and then it bombs it like a complete disaster. The second. And so it's very hard to.
- [12:38]
Sam Altman
Are those bombs predictable?
- [12:40]
Guy Podjarny
They're not. There's sort of two types of mistakes that might happen. There's the ones that humans might make that AI sometimes makes or maybe never will, but humans are kind of quite forgiving on those. And then there's mistakes that AI will make that humans will never make. And that makes people mad, that makes them viscerally annoyed. If there's a leaf in the middle of the road and the car thinks that that's whatever some creature and it's not willing to move, people get upset, they get annoyed by that. And so I think in code you see this as well. When there's sort of small bugs, small mistakes that they can imagine themselves doing it and Then it's like, fine, I'm going to fix it. But then sometimes you can come across as like, what is this?
- [13:17]
Sam Altman
A lot of people today say to me, oh, we can actually replicate the majority of SaaS companies and actually service titan, it's not that complex a product. We can just build it in seconds with co creation tools and spin it up.
- [13:31]
Guy Podjarny
Yeah, I think that's bullshit. I don't think that's true for a variety of reasons. First, SaaS businesses are far more than just the software that they create. In fact, if you have a SaaS business and your only differentiation is I've written all this code and nobody else can do, then you're probably, your days are numbered. So you might have data, you might have, you know, distribution, you might have, you know, specific switching costs as you've sort of built in. That's when you're already successful.
- [13:54]
Sam Altman
Partner relationships, customer relationships.
- [13:57]
Guy Podjarny
I think there's a, there's just a lot more to the machine that is a SaaS company and specifically a SaaS service over time, which is a lot more than just the code. To think that you can just replicate the SaaS business because you can tell an agent what it would do I think is silly.
- [14:10]
Harry Stebbings
What is adjantic development?
- [14:12]
Sam Altman
How does that differ from AI DevTools?
- [14:14]
Guy Podjarny
So it depends on at what level do you sort of delegate a task to the machine. Let's say you want whatever, a shoe, e commerce shop, right? Do you just basically tell that to the LLM and you trust the LLM to go do the product research, explore it, figure out what are the types of shoes to handle in there. Build the application, verify that the application behaves correctly. You know, like do all of that process and you're just this slightly less sophisticated customer interacting with this system on it. That's the extreme of an agentic system. There are a lot of decisions there that you don't even know. What are the sets of steps that need to happen for that application to be created. You're just giving the instruction on it. Maybe you get a bit more specific. Companies like Cognition with Devin are trying to do that. I think Magic dev in, they're trying to build it into the model and things like that. I know they're quite secretive so maybe I'm misrepresenting them. They're trying to build this whole process. I think that's different than most sort of AI dev tools today that try to give you a bit more control. So they're still assuming that there is a software developer involved and they give you kind of more tools to be able to create with them. There is a bit of a chasm in between. You can go to anthropics Artifacts or to the new OpenAI interfaces and just sort of say, hey, create an app. And for small apps, it's kind of like agentic behavior, but it's very tiny. And then the question is, how do you break through to something bigger? Do you build a new software development methodology to be able to say, okay, let's work together with the machine to define what is being created? That's kind of more the workflow approach and frankly more the Tesla path. And then there's the outsourced lens, which I think agentic tends to be embrace the chaos a bit or embrace the customer perspective.
- [15:55]
Sam Altman
I've seen that be quite a lot of skepticism. I think it was towards cognition and their abilities. Is that fair?
- [16:02]
Guy Podjarny
Well, first of all, they slightly overplayed their hand with the initial video of it. So it's very easy to create amazing videos in AI amazing demos. There's a big, big gap between that and creating a reliably working product. Hence the jagged edge of AI. I think most of the flack that they got was that they just overrepresented what they're doing. From everybody that I talked to that has tried Devin, they all think it's really cool and that it doesn't really work.
- [16:28]
Sam Altman
When I look at magic, I look at cognition. Honestly, look at Tesl. You guys have raised so much money so early. Do you need to. Or is this not just peak enthusiasm from a venture crowd that has too much money?
- [16:40]
Guy Podjarny
Twofold one part of it. And I think that's true for magic for sure, and I think that's true for cognition is that they use a big chunk of that cash for GPUs and sort of training models on it. I can tell you that at Tesla, that's not our path. We talked about not wanting to train a foundation model. AI is still costly. You know, before coming here, the team has run a quick evaluation, cost them a thousand bucks. You know, they. Because you need to run statistical evaluations and it does take more money. That said, you know, I think a lot of these are go big or go home type propositions. So when you're trying to say, hey, this will either flop or it would change the world, then you want to have good reserves, so you'd be able to run the distance. But also, you know, you're trying to be ahead. And. And right now these systems require a lot of iterations to get it Right. It definitely reduces optionality when you raise a lot. For me, that wasn't an issue and I'm very much sort of not looking to make some sort of quick one, $2 billion exit.
- [17:37]
Sam Altman
Now we spoke about some of these products, from Magic to Cognition to many of the others before. A lot of these platforms are pretty closed off gardens, magic boxes, whatever you want to call it. How do you think about open versus closed in the future of software development?
- [17:50]
Guy Podjarny
Yeah, so I'm actually quite worried about it. So closed environments, closed development platforms, closed ecosyste. Like the big platforms, when they add AI, it's a little bit easier to think about how to make it useful, how to live within that, and eventually they create these magic boxes and you have no ability to interact with it. That's a concern, right? If the web becomes 2, 3, 4 companies in the world that have these very, very powerful large compute models to which you can give an instruction and get a result, you really have no ability to build tools that would plug into them or modify some things.
- [18:23]
Sam Altman
So why would that ever be the case? Like if you look at like an OpenAI, for example, they are clearly doing a platform play where they are not expected to build all the different tools around it. They are fully trying to develop an ecosystem and it will be multi participant who service very different factions of the customer base.
- [18:41]
Guy Podjarny
I think the platform themselves actually want to be the LLM foundation models actually want to be platforms because they want everybody to build on top of them. So I don't know how deep they will go into the application layer. I think that's a debate for them. You definitely see OpenAI getting into the application layer and the question is how far do they go? I think the next layer of the big companies are the ones that are more concerned about whether you think about the cognition. They're not doing that yet, they're still at the beginning of it. But if that model works and you just give it the instruction and that succeeds and again they're building great stuff, what happens next? You're building these platforms and you're just giving them the instruction and they go off and they build it out, how does the rest of the tooling ecosystem plug into that? If the core of software creation becomes dependent on this one magical understanding of your code, of the applications of all the domains and you just become a customer to that system. I worry that we go into a place in which there are a small number of players that have that broad capacity and that the rest of the dev tooling ecosystem becomes minor and Delegated versus today's world where we have many thriving developer tooling companies.
- [19:48]
Sam Altman
Companies, how likely is that? The concentration of these platforms being the sole providers or kind of few providers to really dominate the space? Is that like a 10%, like a 50%?
- [19:58]
Guy Podjarny
There is a pretty high chance that we're going towards this path. Ease of use of software development is already amazing and you're seeing platforms like Vercel, for instance, make it very easy to generate applications and go end to end with them. That's great because again, they represent a subset of the ecosystem, a specific type of application. When you think about GitHub now, for instance, going to actually deploy applications, they're going from the IDE to the deployment and they're also the engine that writes much of that code. I think that's a pretty high probability. And the more you lean into the agentic magical creation of it, the less control that the developer has.
- [20:36]
Sam Altman
How long do you think it will be before we move out of the experimental budget phase for large enterprises?
- [20:41]
Guy Podjarny
I think it's incremental. So I think assistants are already providing value today and some of them are moving out of the experimental budget into real budgets. The resolution ones, the ones that are like true outcome oriented autonomous activities, I think they're in very specific fields. Support that we talked about right now, I think is already real. I think to an extent the SDR ones, although there's like a lot of blast radius over there, if you mess that up, you could really hurt your brand. Some of those sales tools are getting out. I'd say they're probably still somewhat experimental. Mostly it's the assistance that are getting the dollars. I think the rest are probably a couple of years away. And as I said, I don't think the LLMs are the limiting factor. I think it's more the processes and the systems around them to make the LLMs more reliable.
- [21:25]
Sam Altman
You said the assistants, the ones getting the dollars. I recently interviewed Sam Altman at OpenAI's Dev Day. How far do the models go in terms of into the application layer? It's pure speculation. It's unfair. But how far do you think they go in terms of entrance into the application layer?
- [21:39]
Guy Podjarny
I think as long as we are dealing with the same data and just a different way to interpret it, I think they will go all the way. And so search is a good example of that. Right? There is no reason why they wouldn't go all the way to actually replacing a web search because it's the same type of data that they need. They don't need a different type of expertise to an extent. User experience of code generation or image generation might fall under that bucket as well because it's the same data, it's the same ingested data that they would go into. I think those domains are there. I think when it becomes different data or very dedicated elaborate workflows like it's not about the magical make a call, get back a response, but a whole system around. How do you process those? I think that's outside of their domain and wouldn't make sense for them because it doesn't really threaten their core business and they actually would be more better off if many, many different applications were built on top of them.
- [22:31]
Sam Altman
Okay, you have three options, right? You got chat or OpenAI at 150 or 160, you have anthropic at 4 or you have x AI at. I mean the latest pricing says it's 50. You can only buy one. Which one do you buy?
- [22:45]
Guy Podjarny
I think I go anthropic. I feel it still holds to the quality of the team or maybe the stability of the team and their opportunity to grow. And yeah, the value arbitrage is.
- [22:57]
Sam Altman
Do you not think it's nuts, the safety and alignment team moving so much out of OpenAI?
- [23:02]
Guy Podjarny
I don't know what's happening inside of there, but it's hard for me to imagine that the organization is not suffering substantially from the churn in leadership. Even regardless of whether the reasons are legitimate or not, having such a big turnover must really rock the boat.
- [23:16]
Sam Altman
Final one on this. You said about search being an obvious one for them to do and obviously they've got GPT search. I think it is. Would you rather invest in perplexity at 9?
- [23:26]
Guy Podjarny
I still think Perplexity is not going to go as far as people think. Mostly not because of OpenAI but because of Google. I think people again, I think we underestimate because of Google. I think we underestimate the self driving call company. We underestimate how hard it is to change people's habits. And I think Google is so deeply ingrained and have the distribution around search. Google is generally pretty terrible at product on many fronts but the one product in which they actually do a pretty good job is the search product and they have all the traffic.
- [24:05]
Sam Altman
I don't understand what you mean. I think the world of you. You're smarter than me, you're an engineer. I'm not. Their product sucks compared to Perplexity.
- [24:14]
Guy Podjarny
It does, it does. I think Perplexity is a lot better.
- [24:18]
Sam Altman
And like my mother now Uses Perplexity over Google. I think we underestimate how fast people can move if the ease of moving is bluntly very obvious.
- [24:29]
Guy Podjarny
Yeah. You might be overestimating how many moms have a son who is a tech podcaster. They're sort surrounding. I think people generally change a lot slower than we think. And if Google was oblivious then I would say, you know, there's no way. Right. Like if they didn't have that muscle, if they weren't in the game, do.
- [24:48]
Sam Altman
You think they have the muscle to compete there now? They don't have the product shop. I don't think they're going to do it.
- [24:53]
Guy Podjarny
I think they have the tech jobs, I don't think they have the product chops. But I think they have the advantage of such like incredible distribution and access to the users that they don't actually need to invent. Well, what perplexity is doing, they can copy it now at the moment, I don't think they're executing super well. I do think that on the.
- [25:13]
Sam Altman
Why didn't they just buy.
- [25:14]
Guy Podjarny
They're actually like doing better than they are on sort of the Gemini and many of the others. But their core technology is still pretty good and I think buying it is. And I guess we'll sort of see the Trump administration, but I think it's still going to be pretty hard. From a, from an antitrust perspective, do.
- [25:28]
Sam Altman
You think we're going to see IPOs and M&As open up? New Trump administration the very top layer.
- [25:34]
Guy Podjarny
The top companies that Trump affiliates as liberal and anti Trump will not have kind of a better life because of his administration. And the companies that are just the layer below, they will be able to acquire a lot more easily.
- [25:47]
Sam Altman
Why would Snyk or companies like Snyk ever go public? With the extension of private capital and private markets, Meaning you don't have to.
- [25:54]
Guy Podjarny
In part because if you want to build a long term sustainable company, then the reality is that in vast majority of cases you, you should go public. That gives you some brand recognition. It gives employees constant liquidity. It gives some enterprise customers some assurance around being able to see your financials and work with you. Eventually you have to do it. When that's a different question. That's math where you compare all of that to the heavy toll that is public company.
- [26:21]
Sam Altman
Would you like Snyk to be public now?
- [26:23]
Guy Podjarny
I would like Snyk to be public at some point. Whether now or not is a constant conversation.
- [26:27]
Sam Altman
Do you miss being CEO?
- [26:29]
Guy Podjarny
I do. I think it's tricky handing off the sort of the CEO reins. I think there was a lot of great implications of that that came to Snyk because of that. I think Peter is incredible. It is hard to transition and it's hard later on to sort of find your place in the company a bunch of years later.
- [26:43]
Sam Altman
I do want to go back to some form of structure because we've mentioned the change in how products are created, the changing structure of teams. What is the future role of a software developer? When we look at like assistants but then also co completion platforms, like how does the role of a software developer change?
- [26:59]
Guy Podjarny
I think the best software developers are not the best because they're the best coders. It's because they think about development as a whole. They are systems thinkers. They understand the important bits about the requirements of it and they emphasize around it they can anticipate trade offs and what will happen later. And in fact the progression path that oftentimes developers most want is most likely the architect path. And architects don't write that much code. And so I think the coding piece of software developers work will diminish substantially. I think in 10 years time coding would be very much alive and well, but it would be the edge case. It would be the thing that you do because it's something that you have to be close to the bare metal or some older technology. I think most developers will either progress up the architect path and they will really invest in those trade offs and systems.
- [27:48]
Sam Altman
So what does that actually mean, go up the architect path for someone who doesn't?
- [27:52]
Guy Podjarny
It means that they will think about put software and sort of systems in slightly bigger paths and they will make some decisions. Every time you build a system you have to trade off for instance how extensible it would be versus how simple it would be. The more extensible it is, the more complex it is. Is it important? Is it not important? You can super optimize it to a specific environment, say like aws or you can say no, I want it portable between the different clouds. So all of those are architectural decisions that have implications downstream. And I think they will continue to be important because the LLM doesn't know. The humans don't know either. But they can make an assessment on what is more likely to change with the software in the future.
- [28:31]
Sam Altman
The challenge is with that transition up to kind of more architectural thought processes around core strategic decisions like which architecture are we doing, which trade offs are we making? That seems to be like a progression towards leadership style thinking. And there are by definition only so many, many big decisions or Leadership positions to be had. My question is, does everyone progress up the architect path? Because you don't want 20 devs all going well, I've got this architectural opinion.
- [28:57]
Guy Podjarny
Well, I think you do because you are creating software substantially faster. You will have more software for which you need to make those decisions. I gave you a few examples here. Many decisions are more immediate. I do think there's another progression path for developers that is more towards the product path, more understanding of user empathy. Whatever the Henry Ford if I did what customers told me, I'd build a faster horse. There's examples like that that are more towards the product manager. And so I think those two paths, they evolve up one of those routes. I do think that we will produce more software than ever. I think consider the web of whatever like 2000, it was all boxy and messy. And to build a very fancy website, you know, like what we consider today even a legitimate website, it would have taken a ton, a ton, a ton of work and money and expertise and it was very, very hard. Today it's much, much, much easier to build software that, you know, creates a pretty website. Therefore, expectations of consumers have changed and now we expect websites to have that level of functionality. Performance of websites. We used to be much more tolerant of latency, now we don't have those. And so some of it is just the systems will allow us to create software better, will give us more leverage, developers will have more leverage in their ability to produce high quality software. And consumer expectations, business expectations will increase accordingly.
- [30:18]
Sam Altman
How does the role of PM's change? We have a lot of PMs.
- [30:21]
Guy Podjarny
Listen, part of it is they will be more autonomous and maybe there will be some blurriness of the lines between the product manager and the software developer because oftentimes the product manager will be able to say things. But product manager is like a very ill defined job. And some PMs are quite technical and they're close to the software. I think those roles will definitely merge. And some PMs are very much the conduit between the technology and the user and the understanding of those users. The role of those individuals will actually stay fairly, fairly similar. Like they spend most of their time with users, with customers, observing what happens, trying to kind of rationalize those that would probably be AI assisted as well. They'd be able to, to get some support. But that's a decisions and an accountability position that will continue to need to remain humans because we want humans to make those decisions.
- [31:10]
Sam Altman
So if we project forward then say five years out and we think about that evolution of the role of the PM and the evolution of the role of the software developer. What does the structure of a technology company look like?
- [31:21]
Guy Podjarny
It's a good question. I don't know. I like to think about first principles for these things. And so what would we still still need? Well, we would still need to make choices between multiple options. So you'd still need decision power, arbitrage choices that try to say this is my strategy, this is my business and therefore this is what I need. And so you'd need that at multiple levels, at the business level and someone that can translate that into the sort of the product side of it. You would still need people responsible for the system running, for keeping the system running. And they would be probably their span of control would be much bigger. And so I think those would be the development teams that can produce more software. Software would be more adaptable, it would be more personalized even. But I think you'd still have the strategy, you'd still have the developers and you have teams, right? And they're sort of building together and so naturally you'll need management. So I don't think a lot of the structure will change dramatically. I think the roles of the different positions, the sort of the scope of what they can do are the things that will change.
- [32:20]
Sam Altman
Final one. And then we'll do a form of quick fire. Security is kind of hotter than ever in the emsing landscape and the threats seem to be more prominent than ever. Moving forward in this world of co completion AI devtools why is security an ever more increasing problem?
- [32:38]
Guy Podjarny
Well, the real challenge with LLMs right now is that we lose all control. We make a request and we get something back and we hope that it is correct. And we're reliant on a very kind of unreliable review of what was produced to say that it's correct. And that's specifically happening in software a ton. There's a lot more unreviewed or poorly reviewed code that gets deployed and I think that's a real security risk. The other thing that's happening is people produce software like a lot of these coding systems. They create code but they don't maintain code. And so that code will stick around. Technology never dies. It'll be another entry point for attackers and code rots over time these systems will become more prone to attacks. The problem is really this messiness. We have to figure out layers of control to be able to say alongside the creation of software. We have to think about maintenance, we have to think about ownership and we have to be able to have guardrails at various points to say, this thing that we created, is it any good?
- [33:41]
Sam Altman
We're going to move into a very interesting new round. I essentially have some super spicy questions here.
- [33:48]
Harry Stebbings
You have a choice.
- [33:49]
Sam Altman
So you can either donate to a charity of your choice or you can answer the question. What would you like the donation to be per card?
- [34:00]
Guy Podjarny
Per card? I don't know. A thousand bucks.
- [34:02]
Sam Altman
Okay, let's do 1,000 bucks per card. This is good. So these were submitted by your friends as the spiciest questions. How much. How much liquid did you take out from Snyk?
- [34:12]
Guy Podjarny
I sold about a third of my ownership and it's in nine figures.
- [34:17]
Sam Altman
What were the acquisition offers for Snyk and how much were they for?
- [34:21]
Guy Podjarny
We had more acquisition offers early in the sort of when we were still sub 1 billion, where people thought they can get us cheap and I wasn't interested in selling. And I think after that there was a lot of dancing. But generally the investors were a lot more bullish than the acquirers. A little bit of sort of the, you know, the hype of it. And so I think investors were always ahead of the numbers. I think the last acquisition that really, I sort of felt like we were talking in concrete numbers was early in the journey, it was in sort of 200 million range. And I think later on we talked about multiple billions, but they didn't get to like concrete. These are the numbers because we were always well ahead of them.
- [34:59]
Sam Altman
I'm enjoying this. I hadn't seen these also. I literally got rid of these before. Oh, I like this one. What was the worst investor meeting you ever had and why?
- [35:09]
Guy Podjarny
Ooh, the worst investor meeting. Yeah, I have a clear one. I'm debating whether I should name the. So there was a firm that has since disbanded here in the uk. Oh, you're fine. A Series A investment firm. I sat down there. I really liked one of the partners. He ended up sort of investing in my. In my Series A, like, as a small investor. But then the other two were just on their phone. Felt like they really couldn't care less that I'm in the room. I had high demand at the time. Like, I really didn't need them on it. And that was just insulting. So I think to me, the worst thing is to have to be in a room with someone you bothered going to and have them not pay attention to you.
- [35:47]
Sam Altman
I love Mike Chalfon. The joys of my job is I can say things.
- [35:51]
Harry Stebbings
Okay, so I want to do a.
- [35:52]
Sam Altman
Quick fart I love that. That's such a good advice.
- [35:53]
Guy Podjarny
It was fun. It wasn't. I don't know, like, I'm a pretty difference friend, guys.
- [35:57]
Sam Altman
Dude, I was not expecting that. That was great. Yeah, we're totally doing that moving forward.
- [36:02]
Guy Podjarny
I'm going to donate some anyway.
- [36:05]
Sam Altman
Okay.
- [36:05]
Harry Stebbings
So quick fire, what have you changed.
- [36:07]
Sam Altman
Your mind on in the last 12 months?
- [36:09]
Guy Podjarny
I think maybe this expectation of when would the GPT5 scale models arrive? I now think that those are further away. You've sort of seen Sam Altman and others change their tune to talk about reasoning and things like that as the, as the progress. And my sense is there are actually some architectural problems so it's possible there's a year or two in which these things are stuck.
- [36:30]
Sam Altman
What in AI does no one focus on that? Everyone should focus on more.
- [36:34]
Guy Podjarny
I think everybody's very focused on the short term gain on these kind of low friction just optimize my existing workflow and people are really not imaginative enough. They're not trying to think about. If I stop and think about this domain for first principles, which things just shouldn't be here in the first place, I wish I would see more of those.
- [36:52]
Sam Altman
What's the most contrarian or unorthodox advice for founders? Listening.
- [36:55]
Guy Podjarny
Look for ideas that they need to work to convince people are useful. Like you need to find something that people don't immediately believe when you pitch them things. And everybody's like, oh yeah, that would be awesome. There are basically a thousand other companies figuring out the same thing and you have to have something that's a little bit harder to understand that really requires some depth of thinking or a different angle. And that is very valuable if you're successful, if you're right about it. Otherwise you're just going to get lost. It doesn't matter how good you are. If there's a thousand other companies doing the same thing you are doing, it's going to be very, very hard for you to succeed.
- [37:31]
Sam Altman
Do you like competitive markets? I just had this debate internally with the investing team and I was just, I don't want to be in the 50th note taker for wealth managers. And they're like, yeah, but that shows that it's a space worth going after.
- [37:43]
Guy Podjarny
Yeah, I don't love them. I think it depends on the levels. I think a market of one is not good because oftentimes there's a reason. So there's nobody else in that domain. And you have to be careful. I think a market of five or ten companies is actually Pretty good. That's healthy. Everybody's pushing along, people are raising awareness for you. I think when it's a market of 50 or 100, again, you could be amazing, but it's just everybody gets a few of the dollars in the market and you have to really be kind of heads and shoulders above the rest to be able to break out. I don't love those. If you are going to invest in those, you really need to think about massive operational excellence. The equation changes and you need to not just find the best product teams, but you need to find the best sort of company builders, maybe the best GTM builders on it. You need different perspectives.
- [38:30]
Sam Altman
How much have you raised now for Tassel?
- [38:32]
Guy Podjarny
125.
- [38:33]
Sam Altman
125. When you have 125 million sitting in cash, the interest rate is quite high. How do you approach that strategic decision of where you store cash?
- [38:44]
Guy Podjarny
I think we're pretty. There's really high interest right now, so we don't need to get sort of too fancy around what we do. We get high interest rates. Rates as is. We don't need to invest it or risk losing.
- [38:53]
Sam Altman
But with that, do you not have like $10 million a year in interest?
- [38:56]
Guy Podjarny
So you definitely get into somewhere between that sort of 5 and 10. Right. If you're sort of massively, massively, which is basically your burn, which is definitely sort of at the burn level. The reason that we raised the large amount is that we really have the ability to build for the long run and to invest when we get the thing that is working alongside just having really, really good partners. Like, I love Carlos, who now joined the round and index, is a great investor. I think the insulation from the craziness of the market and as we discussed, the potential bust of valuations or realizations really allows us to think long term. I think eventually urgency comes from markets timing, not from Runway. And so I would be concerned if.
- [39:38]
Sam Altman
What do you mean by that?
- [39:40]
Guy Podjarny
So as an angel investor, and I've made maybe like 100 angel investments over.
- [39:44]
Sam Altman
Dude, you're literally the best fucking angel I've ever worked with. You invest in step size with me years ago, have put in more time than anyone else into that company.
- [39:52]
Guy Podjarny
I appreciate the kind words. I think the two primary mistakes that I'm seeing with raising too much money too early is one is spending it too quickly and the other is not spending it fast enough. And so the ones that spending too quickly is probably more obvious and we talked about them, which is they think they have the money and therefore they can build the team faster and they can acquire customers faster, but they haven't actually hit product market fit yet. And as a result of that, they either get fake product market fit or they get more people on the boat. They're all rowing in the same direction. That's great. But it's harder to turn. And if you're at a period in which you're supposed to zigzag and try things out, it's harder to do that with more people. That's one mistake. The second mistake is not spending the money fast enough because you don't have that pressure of the Runway way. You don't have this, like, in 12 months, I'm going to need to raise, and therefore I have that forcing function. And I think when you see an idea, market timing is so critical, and if it's the right idea, then you're probably seeing it for a reason, and other companies are seeing it for a reason. And so there's a window of time for you to execute on that in the market. And I think having more Runway gives you some flexibility. Right. You don't need to. It's like, hey, if that window is like six months later or six months before, then you can still work towards it because you have the money. But if you lose the urgency and you think, hey, that's fine. If this takes another five years, that's fine, I've got the money, then you're just going to lose the race. Like, you're going to lose the opportunity.
- [41:14]
Sam Altman
What's been your single best angel investment?
- [41:16]
Guy Podjarny
Cloudinary went from effectively zero to about $4 million worth. I think Sierra is a really good investment. Yeah. I invested in Security Scorecard when they were at $6 million valuation. That was a pretty good one. Unfortunately, it was a very small check at the time.
- [41:30]
Sam Altman
Does money make you happy, guy?
- [41:32]
Guy Podjarny
Money doesn't make me happy. I think money gives.
- [41:34]
Sam Altman
Does it change anything in mindset? Because everyone's always on the treadmill. It's like, oh, when I have this, I get that.
- [41:39]
Guy Podjarny
Yeah, I'm in a good place financially in that I have more money than I can spend. And I focus right now mostly on how do I donate that and pass it on. And actually donating large amounts of money requires effort and investment, which is.
- [41:54]
Sam Altman
Does it change marriage?
- [41:56]
Guy Podjarny
Well, not for us. I think it can be depending on your relationship. I think my wife and I have been through fire together on it. We've been 27 years together now, and we're.
- [42:05]
Sam Altman
What's your biggest secret for a happy marriage?
- [42:07]
Guy Podjarny
Communication. Don't Let things stew when there's something that is bothersome.
- [42:12]
Sam Altman
Do you ever go to sleep angry.
- [42:13]
Guy Podjarny
Just take the hit and talk about it? I don't think I go to sleep angry, but mostly I don't go to sleep, like just sort of seething inside and not talking about it. I will talk about it. I might still be angry at the end of the day. In fact, maybe she will be as well. But then it's on the surface and it gets kind of stomped down pretty.
- [42:31]
Sam Altman
Love the transition of topic there. Final one for you. What recent company product strategy have you been most impressed by? Where you're like, that was slick, that was smart.
- [42:40]
Guy Podjarny
I guess kind of two examples come to mind. One is indeed Intercom's bet on this autonomous agent I thought was very, very wise. Fin in fin. And I think that was a bold and correct move to jump onto that. And I think it required a lot of conviction around this being the future and then subsequent good execution. So I thought that was impressive, I guess. On the earlier side, I'm an investor in Light Dash, which I really, really like. And they're sort of the future of BI Tools. They built what feels obvious and yet nobody has conquered, which is they basically allow you to embed this as your reporting platform. And so like Everybody, practically every SaaS solution needs a reporting sort of solution embedded inside of it. And practically for all of them, that is not their bread and butter. Like, there's no reason why they would differentiate on it. And yet everybody needs to build that. And it's so similar to BI in the capabilities that you need. And so they built this open source BI and they opened up this ability to embed those dashboards into your product and it's selling like hotcakes and it's doing amazing. I love Hamza and how he thinks. And that's an example, by the way, of like, I would love for him actually to run even faster and to spend even faster. But I really liked that, finding that, that opportunity and really tapping into it.
- [43:55]
Sam Altman
Guy, I love doing this. Thank you so much for putting up with my slightly direct question.
- [43:59]
Guy Podjarny
This was fun. Fun as always, dude.
- [44:01]
Sam Altman
It was so much fun. Thank you so much.
- [44:03]
Guy Podjarny
Thank you.
- [44:05]
Harry Stebbings
That was so much fun to do with Guy. I want to say a huge thank you to him for joining me in the studio today. If you want to watch that episode.
- [44:10]
Sam Altman
In full on YouTube, then you can.
- [44:12]
Harry Stebbings
Find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC.
- [44:14]
Sam Altman
That's 20VC.
- [44:16]
Harry Stebbings
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