Founding Partner Gokul Rajaram

Auren Hoffman (00:00.514) Hello, fellow data nerds. My guest today is Gokul Rajaram. Gokul lead product teams at Google, Facebook, Square, DoorDash. He was the creator of Google AdSense. He helped scale the Facebook ad platform, led Caviar and merchant products at DoorDash through its IPO. And he currently serves on a number of boards, including Coinbase, Pinterest, the Trade Desk. And earlier this year, he launched a venture capital firm called Marathon Management Partners. Gokul, welcome to World of DaaS.

Gokul Rajaram (00:29.26) And thanks for having me. It's so exciting to be here.

Auren Hoffman (00:31.604) I'm really excited. Now you, you're kind of like part of building two of the biggest ad platforms, Google ads, and then Facebook ads. Like what are some of like the core principles that translate into these different advertising models?

Gokul Rajaram (00:45.534) It's an interesting question. I've seen now over the last 20 plus years, a bunch of ad platforms been closely involved with two of them. then with Pinterest and trade, they're seeing different kinds of ads. think one thing I've learned is that to be successful, an ad platform has to balance both user value and advertiser value. This means that your metrics, leading indicator of success can't just be advertiser focused. They also have to include user focus. And I think one of the most interesting things there is

how you select which ads to show, which is targeting, running the auction and that. But also, where do you show these ads? How do you make sure that you're not overwhelming a piece of content with ads? So where you place ads, ads placement, campaign goals that you want to serve. For example, if you started serving in search, if you started serving ads that are not relevant to your search, but relevant to your identity, it would look very, very incongruous and probably would not be interesting.

And then similarly, the ad format also matters a lot. Obviously, the powerful thing about, again, search ads was the fact that the ad format looks exactly very, very similar to the SEO ad format or the organic ad format. everything, all of those things together, targeting, campaign creation, campaign goals, inventory ad format, all of them have to be consistent and really in keeping with what the platform, the broader platform is trying to achieve. So Facebook's ad system, good example.

The initial ad system of Facebook when it started at Facebook was actually very much like Google ads. In fact, I think some engineers had just taken Google ads, they read some papers and just copied Google ads. So you could enter keywords and you would basically just bid on keywords. And what is crazy is that it doesn't make sense. Why? Because in Google, when you bid on the keyword accountant, what do you get? You get people are searching for accountants, right? And so your ad shows, but in Facebook, when you bid on a keyword accountant, there's no search context.

you are actually targeting accountants. So we even at Facebook, before I joined, we had built a system to take your Google campaigns and port them over to Facebook with one click. But of course that doesn't make sense because you take the keywords in Google and the same creative and it does so.

Auren Hoffman (02:56.79) Yeah. Yeah. You're not searching for, it's just, it's just not the same user experience there. Yeah.

Gokul Rajaram (03:01.906) Exactly. And so we had to rebuild everything from ground up, looking at Facebook's unique value, the context, everything had to be changed. And so that was the real lesson. You can never copy what works because what works in their platform, their context will not work in yours.

Auren Hoffman (03:17.698) And part of like, I mean, really what you're just saying is like, this is content that the user wants to see. and the, the, ad, reason why the Google ads are so powerful is they're actually things that I want to click on. Cause they're, they're relevant to what I want at that moment. And a lot of those Instagram ads are actually things that like I, I'm excited about. can't tell you how many shirts I've bought or hats I've bought or something.

Gokul Rajaram (03:26.234) That's all the time.

Auren Hoffman (03:46.806) from random Instagram ads, maybe because I'm like doom scrolling while I'm bored on a conference call or something. And it's more exciting than that. like, it works. Like it actually, works. Why? But it still seems that content recommendations are still not there. Like when I get content recommendations, even on Netflix or Amazon, which have so much data about me, they're often pretty subpar.

Gokul Rajaram (03:58.646) It works exactly.

Auren Hoffman (04:13.442) I don't get good movies. I don't even get good music on Spotify anymore that I really want to listen to. Like, why is it so hard?

Gokul Rajaram (04:13.516) Yeah, they're getting better. think Facebook's...

Gokul Rajaram (04:21.388) I think part of it is because in the past till recently systems have not been able to preserve context on everything you've done. But now with embeddings and generative AI, this is why if you look at the Facebook revenue growth, it's been so traumatic this past quarter because from all that I hear a lot of the innovations in gen AI, all the stuff that llama et cetera, but even using third party models, Facebook has really dramatically transformed both the advertising platform.

Auren Hoffman (04:47.468) So it's not just like an old collaborative filter or something. It's actually like about like, it's very, very based on what I'm interested in right now.

Gokul Rajaram (04:53.838) It's looking at everything you've done. And so you can maintain context of a million tokens per user, and you can see everything they've done and be able to choose much, much, much better. No, I I don't know if they're maintaining a million or not, but I think you can obviously with the new models, you can do up to a million. have no idea how many they're maintaining, but essentially their ability to show content, both organic and ads has dramatically improved. And I think this is going to be the case across all platforms. think every content platform that's not using GenAI.

Auren Hoffman (05:02.358) Were they're maintaining a million tokens? Okay, well that would be amazing.

Gokul Rajaram (05:23.21) and deep learning and basically reinforcement learning is going to be falling behind. They're going to work. So they have to be this. This is the reason. And this is why I think Facebook is able to make this kind of capex investment because I think there is a massive path forward for advertising that I think the acceleration they'll see the next few years.

Auren Hoffman (05:41.256) Amazon, and Netflix, these are all smart companies with super smart engineers that have massive capital. They can do lots of investments, but I think their recommendations still completely suck. Why have they not somehow moved to what Facebook is doing?

Gokul Rajaram (06:02.444) because I think you need to, I don't think you can just use off the shelf models at that scale. You've got to have people who basically are inside your company who are doing research. So I think a lot of the FAIR, Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research stuff, FAIR, FAIR Labs, that stuff has been applied. So I think, I don't think they built native gen AI capabilities the way Zuck and Facebook invested in it over the last few years. And so I think they are building it now, but I think...

Auren Hoffman (06:09.27) Yep.

Gokul Rajaram (06:30.126) They are a little bit behind, but hopefully they will also invest. But I don't think you can just use for that scale of Netflix or an Amazon. I don't think you can just use open AI or cloud off the shelf. think you need another layer at the very least because you have so much data. have so much data. You've to figure out what the right token size is or the right token window, what the right embeddings are. It is much beyond what a normal AI company would use. It's a different beast.

Auren Hoffman (06:53.942) And why, like the other thing I've been wanting to say to me, part of this thing is like personalizing the product. and like when I listened to a song, like, you know, like the DJ college shout out in the song, I would love them to shout out me and my friends in the song. Right. I'm listening to it. If I'm like working out, like that would really pump me up. If there's like, if I'm listening, if I'm watching like a superhero show on Netflix, like

seeing me and my family like walk by as extras, you know, when the meteor is coming, like that would be really exciting. That would get me engaged. Like that's so easy to do. Like why is the personalization not

Gokul Rajaram (07:37.218) I think again, all the things we talked about were text stuff around recommendations. Now we're talking about injecting video and making it seem that we're talking about audio models, all of these things. So I think it's going to happen. The thing you mentioned, the scenario is pretty incredible, but I think in the next five years, these kinds of shows are going to be, these kinds of situations are going to be commonplace. And if they don't do it, they're going to be risking someone else doing it.

Auren Hoffman (07:59.998) Someone will do it for sure. Yeah. Now, if you, if you were now like advising open AI on how to do ads and obviously they have to think about it completely differently in this kind of chat interface on chat, TPT or perplexity or whatever, like how would you be, how, would you help them design a system?

Gokul Rajaram (08:21.066) good news is they have a lot of great people who who have joined recently leaders who are going to design it. But one of the most interesting things with these AI assistants is, I think Google search has your intent in some ways and Facebook had your identity with these AI assistants. They have both intent and identity. And so it's pretty amazing because on one side, people are using them as ways to find for commercial queries, to find recommendations for commercial content for those. It's a pretty straightforward thing to.

Auren Hoffman (08:23.051) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (08:38.881) Yeah.

Gokul Rajaram (08:49.952) actually add useful ads in addition to commercial recommendations, just like Google Search has done. So that set of queries, you can do that. And for the rest of the queries or the rest of engagement with these apps, you basically have their identity. Because as you know, many people have done this experiment. If you or I were to enter into chat, GPT, or cloud, me, draw a picture of me based on all you know about me. It is going to draw a pretty representative picture. So I think they know as much about us as they

Auren Hoffman (09:13.154) It's pretty cool. Yeah, I've gotten it. It's super cool. Yeah.

Gokul Rajaram (09:17.762) maybe a Facebook or someone because they've inferred it from all the things you've done. given that, shoot, you have identity and most of Facebook ads are based on identity on your implicit associations with organizations, with loyalty programs, with restaurants, et cetera. So you have that set of ads you can show. I think the big question for these assistants for these kinds of ads is going to be where to show them. And I think how to introduce them into the experience. know some of the larger AI apps have been experimenting.

Auren Hoffman (09:30.528) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (09:41.111) Yeah.

Gokul Rajaram (09:47.424) And bunch of them have pinged me over the last few months. And we've discussed different things. think you start out, Gmail was a great example. Gmail, because I was involved a little bit in helping them think through advertising on Gmail. there is actually a, I don't know if you've ever clicked on that in Gmail, but Gmail actually does quite well in advertising. And the reason they do well.

Auren Hoffman (10:07.394) didn't even know. I thought they did it and then they kind of took the ads off or something. I don't know if I've ever even seen an ad in Gmail.

Gokul Rajaram (10:14.998) It's because they, they rotate content into, least back then, I think I last five years, I myself, I'm not sure, but till about five years ago, they rotated content and ads into the same slot. In other words, it's very important to make sure people don't get blind. If people realize that a certain slot is always going to be for ads, you basically start ignoring that. And so it's very important to start showing useful content 80 % of the time or 50 % of time in the remaining 50 % show ads. think there's going to be very important.

Auren Hoffman (10:34.818) Yeah, you ignore it. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (10:42.85) All right. X does that too. So they'll have like, here's the people you should follow. And some of those people are sponsored, but some of those people are actually algorithmically like the people you should follow.

Gokul Rajaram (10:48.98) Exactly. Exactly. So I think that's the best practice where you have to intermix interleave content and ads in the same spot. And that's what I think web publishers didn't do well, but they would always put a banner out on the right. And none of us can ever remember back in the day, right? What the hell did banner ad said? Because it was, we all got ad blind quickly. So the key is to not get ad blind and prevent it from exactly what you said, interleaving content ads in the same slot. Never have a slot B. They won't have a notion of a slot, in fact, an ad slot.

Every slot can have some content and some ads. You just don't know when and it's determined by the algorithm or the AI. But that's the most important thing to make sure there's no like ad spots. That's why in Facebook, think the beautiful thing is as you're scrolling, never know whether an ad is going, it's not like every five piece of content. It's a smart feature.

Auren Hoffman (11:37.154) Yeah, it's just part of the feed. Yeah. The thing, what I like about Facebook, you know, is that the ads are good and it's It's actually real. It's content that I want us. It's actually just content that, that I want to see just happens to be paid content. That's kind of what I want to see in, in, on X or Twitter. Like there's, I upgraded to not see the ads. can pay X dollars a year to not see the ads and

Gokul Rajaram (11:47.736) content.

Gokul Rajaram (11:52.238) Exactly.

Auren Hoffman (12:04.354) The main reason I did that is because the ads were terrible. So I just never saw an ad that I wanted to see. So I just decided to, would, I would pay to not see them, but I would happily want to see ads if they were good.

Gokul Rajaram (12:16.31) And look at what Google did. I was just looking at Gmail to refresh what they did. Of course, what they've done is they've put ads as emails. Their ads are actually just tagged sponsored. so actually, it's the ultimate blending of ads and content together.

Auren Hoffman (12:24.82) Yeah, okay.

the ultimate, like that would be great. Right. Exactly. If they show me an email that they know I want to see, like that, that would be good. As long, as long as I actually want to see it, like, is it spam or is it content? Right. This is always the debate.

Gokul Rajaram (12:35.084) I've actually clicked on many things thinking, exactly.

Gokul Rajaram (12:41.964) And that one absolutely uses, I'm sure, Google Search results and so on. So it truly knows a lot of stuff about me and is able to surface really interesting offers for me and ads for me as email content. So that's a good example. I actually think the right ads in Gmail should be email offers, and that's what it is.

Auren Hoffman (12:59.084) problem is I think at some point, I think actually in Netflix, really they're mainly just promoting their own shows, right? And so that's essentially an ad, right? So they're always promoting their own shows. I think they've gotten really, they've gotten to a point where they only promote their own shows and it's just not good for the user anymore. So they think of it like a...

like that ad there, but I think the number one Goku rule that you had is you have to do what's in the best interest of the consumer.

Gokul Rajaram (13:32.142) Exactly. have to have an, the reality is every ad system in history from eBay's sponsored ads to Facebook, the reality is once you start injecting ads into a purely organic setup, engagement will degrade. It's an axiom almost. And so the only question is how much you wanted to degrade. so Mark Zuckerberg used to have an engagement budget every year as to how much engagement degradation he was willing to permit. And so the ads team and the News Feed team had to really stay within that.

in that budget. I think that every company should be measuring and probably is measuring through holdout groups and so on. So you have holdout groups of people who never see any ads. And so you understand people who see ads versus that holdout group, what the engagement degradation is. And then you want to hold that degradation to a certain amount per year. But then you do other engagement enhancing things on the organic side to counterbalance that. And so you always have this tension between advertising and organic. And that's good tension to have. You need ads to monetize and grow the business.

Auren Hoffman (14:25.089) Yeah.

Gokul Rajaram (14:31.192) but you also need the organic side, the content recommendations get better and better.

Auren Hoffman (14:35.266) Now, I'm an ad buyer and I want to buy ads, if you think of things like X, Netflix, and Spotify, in those platforms, the richest people opt out of ads. They can afford the premium version of Spotify, the premium version of Netflix, the premium version of Hulu or whatever, and then they don't actually see the ads. And as an advertiser, I might want to advertise to the richest people.

the amount of opportunities to advertise to these very wealthy people has gone down. What would be your advice to the advertiser?

Gokul Rajaram (15:11.116) I think the interesting thing is even though people want advertisers, the people, the reality is there's not that many of them. So most people do want to hit the mid market and below. And if you want to go mass market, exactly. So I think it's probably a smaller set of advertisers who care. And I bet that even for the premium tiers, there will be ads introduced back again, if they're not today.

Auren Hoffman (15:20.192) Yep. Yeah, if you're Coca-Cola or something, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (15:32.994) Mmm.

Gokul Rajaram (15:33.146) because the creep of, if there's one thing I realized is every company you either die as a company or you live long enough to become an advertising company and a FinTech company. And so every company ultimately does, I never imagined Netflix would do it because they were so against it for so many years. But now that they have capitulated, I know this is an axiom again, every company is going to become an advertising company, just like the AI assistant.

Auren Hoffman (15:40.224) Yeah. Every company is an ad tech company, essentially. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (15:58.07) You have a great tweet about how the future of AI is shaking out. Like, do you think most of these categories are winner take all, or do think there's going to be like a plethora or like a group of winners?

Gokul Rajaram (16:12.814) I think almost in every category, unless there's a very strong network effect, there's going to be a few winners per category. We're already seeing that in the foundation model. I don't think it's going to be monopolistic situation. think there's going to be, that said, there's going to be multiple winners. That said, I think it's likely that the number one player in the category will capture 50 to 70 % of the value. The number two captures 20 to 30 % of the value. And then everyone else together captures 10%. So I think there'll be three to four companies, but there is importance to be number one and number two.

because I think the rest of the players are going to be fighting.

Auren Hoffman (16:44.128) And how do you like today, like, you know, if we're, companies are extremely promiscuous. Like we're constantly moving between the model providers and really looking at kind of quality price continuum and trying to, and, and, and even, even there, we don't want to be like too overwhelming to one, but I could see if they like start memorizing the context more of what we're doing, that we're going to get a lot more locked in. that.

like you think the ultimate strategy.

Gokul Rajaram (17:15.202) I think it depends on what the company's ultimate goal is. I do think there is a theory that the reason OpenAI dropped the price of GPT-5 so much is that they almost want to burn the boats and they want to say, look, we are going to make enterprise almost a zero profit pool business over time. And instead we are going to basically make money off of.

Auren Hoffman (17:32.937) Yep. Right. You already saw some people move over from ranthropic. And even if GPT-5 was, you know, maybe it's a hundred percent as good, maybe it was 120 % of, but maybe it was only 80 % as good, but it was, if it's 5X cheaper, I'm going to likely at least try it out.

Gokul Rajaram (17:37.771) Exactly.

Gokul Rajaram (17:48.558) Exactly. then the profit pool shifts. So your profit will go from enterprise to the consumer side, and then you have ads and subscriptions monetizing it. So I think that's the interesting question for me is, is there a profitable enterprise? And if so, is it at the foundation model layer, or is that the application layer where you're building agents and adding more value and so on? It might be that, you know, through pricing strategy and so on, because Google and others have other things they can do, they're trying to almost raise the ground in some ways.

for these token-based models and token-based pricing strategies and say, look, that's not going to be, we are signaling that this is going to be a zero profit pool thing. Anyone who tries to make sustainable profit off just selling tokens, any model, that's not going to be the case. We are going to systematically eradicate that profit pool. And I mean, that's what happened in some ways. I think in AdSense, think that's the thing, there is a saying that just commoditize your compliments. And so they're commoditizing their compliments by just saying, yep, that's complimentary.

Our core business is this. that's an interesting strategy. It's B2C. It's B2C, exactly. Anthropic is an interesting, I I'm talking about a better chunk of the revenue comes from enterprise today, obviously from cursor and some.

Auren Hoffman (18:49.538) So the core business is B to C essentially. Interesting. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (19:01.73) Cursor, yeah, mean, they've probably have a, they're gonna have a billion dollars from cursor or something, know, some crazy number like that, yeah. Yeah, replet.

Gokul Rajaram (19:04.566) and thought code. Exactly. So the question for them is going to be how they adapted this replete exactly. All of the v0 replete cursor, all of them use Sonnet today.

Auren Hoffman (19:14.242) Yeah. Yeah. Bolt.new, right? All that stuff right there. coming there. I mean, I know we're investors in many of those companies and a lot of them are becoming a lot more promiscuous. using some of these, they're even using some of these open source models as well.

Gokul Rajaram (19:27.836) It's a great thing for them because now they're no longer dependent on them.

Gokul Rajaram (19:36.451) They have to because otherwise you are negative or very low gross margins. this then changes the axis of competition. It's brilliant. mean, it's such a, think historians are going to look back business historians at this period from 23 to 30, probably when everything just the wave of innovation and the business model innovation is so incredible. I Chad GPT was such a, I mean, masterstroke in retrospect because it just showed open air that they don't just need to be a developer focused company. In fact, I always say now.

Auren Hoffman (20:04.576) Yeah.

Gokul Rajaram (20:05.966) Any infrastructure company I invest in, I want the company to not just be a defense company building deep tech defense, defensive company building deep tech, moving slowly, getting enterprise customers, but have the opportunity to play offense, build a consumer brand. Versel, great example, right? I'm going to invest in Versel. And what a brilliant thing. They just went up the stack and made V zero. So I want an infrastructure company that has the potential to do that, like an open AI or a Versel and build that because...

Auren Hoffman (20:31.52) Yeah, we're also investors in Vercell. mean, one of the thing of all these companies, if you think of Vercell, Perplexity, Replet, Bolt.new, Cursor, et cetera, they all have these incredible founders who are very, they're not just super technical, and they are, they're all super technical, but they've got this dual thing. They're also super go to market, super good at marketing.

And mass marketing, like perplexity CEO, he's like a master at mass marketing at like getting into the news cycles of finding a way in. Obviously, Sam Altman is like the master at it. Yeah. Yeah.

Gokul Rajaram (21:10.104) By buying, buying Chrome for 35 billion buying. It's a great marketing stroke. Exactly right. And so I think the nature of companies is changing just like the nature of people that companies want is changing. Can people want, know, any of we can talk about that more, but I, think it's, it's a, a time to be alive.

Auren Hoffman (21:28.258) How are the people, how are what people want changing?

Gokul Rajaram (21:31.599) I think there was an article in the New York Times that talked about how CS grads are having tough time finding jobs. And I think I got a degree in CS and I feel like 30 years ago, getting a degree in CS, could just do the coursework. You could do a couple of internships and yeah, you get a job. But today what companies are looking for is full stack thinkers. I mean, that's the word. I really someone who is not just an engineer, but can be a product person, can think about business problems, can go up and down the stack is proactive.

can really be a battle over time. And they are looking for people like that more T-shaped people who can go deep into something but also have a broad perspective on things. And I think just doing the coursework and doing an internship or two is not going to be enough today. You've got to build a product thinking mindset as an engineer. So you've got to really be a full stack. And then you've got to be AI native. hate it. I think companies are being weirdly specific in some ways and many of those

many of these are almost unreasonable, but that's what they're trying to be, you know, find people who have truly built with AI and lived their lives with AI and have built their own personal AI stack and AI agents and so on. showing over the last two or three years, they were sitting back and doing coursework. They were embracing this wave. They were doing stuff proactively, et cetera. So proactivity, being able to, you know, be on the cutting edge of things and be able to be full stack thinker. So it's hard. I mean, I feel a mid-career professional. They're all having...

you know, these moments where they're looking back, looking at themselves in the mirror and saying, Hey, you know, it's this, should I just take a step back and go be an IC now and relearn some of these skills? Because what I learned so far, what made me succeed in the last 10, 15 years is not what's going to get me to succeed in the next 10 to 15 years.

Auren Hoffman (23:16.61) You mentioned proactive. mean, in some ways, like if someone was just proactive, and really, you know, somewhat smart and just proactive, like that puts you in like the 99th point something percentile. Like that's all I need. mean, it's so rare to find someone who's actually proactive. Yeah.

Gokul Rajaram (23:32.91) Exactly Exactly Exactly agency right I mean I always say the two things you have to look for in any role is problem solving ability to just problem solve Just be fearless or problem solving and then high agency someone who you don't have to that Micromanage you just come to you with problems with solution

Auren Hoffman (23:50.018) But those skills have always been rare. It's not that easy just to learn how to be proactive.

Gokul Rajaram (23:55.491) But the AI now makes it easier to amplify those skills. That's right. And proactively, you can now have more ways to measure, this amazing tool that exists for two and a half years now, what have you done with it? Have you been producing it? Earlier, there were harder things. Now you can actually say, tell me about five tools you've used outside of chat GPT in your AI side. Formul audio build. Exactly. Exactly.

Auren Hoffman (24:07.286) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (24:13.494) Yeah, totally. Show me what you built.

Auren Hoffman (24:18.998) Now you, you have been somewhat vocal about disagreeing with like Paul Graham, Brian Chesky about this founder mode essay. Where, where do you kind of disagree with them?

Gokul Rajaram (24:28.814) I think first of all, it's a great framing that Paul Graham came up with around founder mode. I founders, look, think hands-on leadership is very important, but it's a double-edged sword. think whether it helps or hurts a company depends on the context and the stage of the company. So where does it help? It's obviously very critical, as you know, as a multi-time founder in the early stages of the company. So you're setting the tone.

You're basically being super involved in every single hire, every single decision, every single product decision. so, I mean, when I look at Google, for example, I was there early and Larry and Sergey, even until about, you know, few hundred people were setting the tone, every single nation of the company was, they were, were basically super involved in it. That level of involvement is needed. And the other time it's needed is when the company is going to, when the company is either tackling a high stakes problem or even an existential threat to it. And I think that's when.

or when something is not going well, something meaningful and meaty, company is not going well. Those are the times. So I remember when Google Plus was launched, Zuck used to have these sessions called lockdown. Whenever he perceived that Facebook was under some kind of threat, he would basically light a sign outside his office that said lockdown. It would light up and it was almost a beacon for all the engineers in the company to congregate. And he would give a speech saying for the next X weeks, there was no timeframe till we have built all the things we need to build.

and shipped all the things we need to ship and gotten to a place where there's no longer an existential threat. The whole company is in lockdown. No one's going to work on anything except this. Yeah. So when Google Plus launched, even though ultimately it didn't prove an existential threat, he became the PM. He's like, here's the things you're going to build and here's the teams that are going to build it. And I was on ads, but we still contributed. mean, we had our ads teams, but even those engineers jumped on and for, I think it was six or eight weeks.

Auren Hoffman (25:58.267) that's amazing. I've never heard that anecdote. That's super cool.

Yeah.

Gokul Rajaram (26:19.552) No one did anything except these features and working directly with Zuck and he was the PM and that's hands on. Now, I think on the contrary, if you start taking every, if you're hands on in everything, it basically signals to your leadership that you don't have confidence in them and you can't delegate. And then many times you get involved in things where you're not the best in the room at that. So I think you have to understand what your superpower is. Zuck today.

Auren Hoffman (26:45.184) Yeah.

Gokul Rajaram (26:46.626) till today, is still very, very, I think again, I think the AI moment is again a lockdown moment for him where he's, you can see, taken ownership fully. But when I was there, I mean, a lot of the ads and sales stuff, Sheryl Sandberg would lead and she was excellent at it and he would defer it to her and her team and periodically he would get involved, but it was more, we would pull on him versus he would push. And I think you've got to, you've got to have a partner like that. think part of it is having trust and having a partner whose superpower is complimentary to your own.

Auren Hoffman (27:16.534) And you've talked a lot about these number twos that are, that are complimentary. Why else is that relationship so important?

Gokul Rajaram (27:23.862) Every company I've been at, now that I think about it, has had someone like that. Larry and Sergey had Eric, Mark Zuckerberg at Cheril Sandberg, Jack Dorsey at Keith Revois, and at Doe Dash, Tony Zhu had Christopher Payne. And so each of them, think, on one side gave them a superpower because the reality is every person has a superpower. Even though they are T-shaped, they can do a lot of things, they have a superpower and they have something they really want to do on a day-to-day basis.

Auren Hoffman (27:48.13) Mm-hmm.

Gokul Rajaram (27:53.539) This helps them, this person, especially if it's product, it's product, it's engineering, it's really the vision of the company. But then there is an infinite number of things that need to run in order for that product to sustain, including monetization, the business side regulations, all of those things. So you need somebody who has an owner mindset, even at that senior level, someone who can get into the details, someone you trust. And interestingly, think Zach has said this a couple of times, someone you'd be willing to work for.

Auren Hoffman (27:55.148) clearly for Zockets product.

Gokul Rajaram (28:22.894) if the roles are reversed. In fact, you could argue that Eric was a CEO of the company actually, and Larry and Saga theoretically dotted line into Eric or worked for Eric, even though they were a triumvirate. And I think Zuck has said the same thing. So you almost need a person who's equal. And I've seen the same at Coinbase with Brian Armstrong and Emily Choi. They're so complimentary. Brian really runs product engineering and Emily runs, you know, huge chunk of the company. And I suspect that all of these folks, it works that there is mutual respect.

Auren Hoffman (28:24.354) Hmm.

Yeah.

Gokul Rajaram (28:50.963) mutual respect and they're almost like peers and the reason is they have complementary superpowers. Really? Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (28:55.618) One of the things I, so I have a theory about this. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts or what you think about my theory. So you usually there's like a number one and a number two and the number two is very complimentary to the number one. have very different strengths than the number one. Sometimes what happens is the number one retires or whatever. And then the number two takes over the company. And I think this is universally bad. Like, um, because the number two is complimentary for a reason. So they wouldn't like that.

particular company needs a different, needs the number one strengths as number one. so if like, you know, if you think of Sheryl Sandberg, like, yeah, exactly. Like Sheryl Sandberg would, I think she could run many companies, including like JP Morgan, but I don't think she should have run Metta. Like, I don't think she would have been the great number one for Metta because that would like, she was there as the complimentary kind of person. And again, I'm like, and so this is my

Gokul Rajaram (29:34.07) You can see Steve Bomber

Auren Hoffman (29:54.274) crazy theory. I'd love to know what you think of it.

Gokul Rajaram (29:57.091) I think I actually think Cheryl can run any company she wants, including Metta, but I think she would need a complimentary, she would need a complimentary product person who's just as good as her that she respects. And I think knowing her, would hire somebody like that. think you're right. think.

Auren Hoffman (30:00.362) Yeah, yeah, she probably could.

Auren Hoffman (30:10.348) Like if you think of Tim Cook, Tim Cook was complimentary to jobs. Now, obviously he's done an incredible job as CEO, but I don't know. I think I still feel like Apple would have been better off if it had like more of the product person as the leader and someone who's super operational as the number two.

Gokul Rajaram (30:17.634) He needs that product leader who's.

Gokul Rajaram (30:30.668) Look, think Uber has proved it wrong so far at least where Dara has had some amazing product people as his lieutenants. So I think it can work.

Auren Hoffman (30:38.028) Good point. Yeah.

In any case, it's hard to succeed a founder in any scenario, right? So it usually doesn't work.

Gokul Rajaram (30:44.814) Especially these iconic companies, I mean, they are one of one. Each of them is one of one.

Auren Hoffman (30:49.898) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's a good point. Now I love to ask you a question about boards. You're on a bunch of boards. I've been in many boards in my life, including many I've run. And I would say pretty much all of the board meetings I've ever been to, including all the ones I've run have been subpar, have not been that great. You know, in the end, like I've not done a good job of running them. Like what have you learned about not only being a good board member, but having actually a good board meeting.

Gokul Rajaram (31:19.04) Aha. So to be a good, good member, first of all, you need to care about the company and the industry. need to care. in other words, I don't think once you join the board of a company where you don't care about the problem they're solving, the customers they have, and that you're not willing to be proactive with learning about this industry and sitting to this. So I think for example, I love Procter and Gamble as a customer, but if Procter and Gamble would ever invite me to join the board, I don't think I'd be a good board member because I honestly don't care about that problem specifically to be proactive with what they're facing.

Auren Hoffman (31:35.457) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (31:47.83) Yeah.

Gokul Rajaram (31:48.459) I always advise people who call me, hey, should I join this board? Do you really care? Have you ever in your life or are you going to be proactive about thinking about this company and the problem? So that's one. And I think this is a good one for you to test prospective board members. they at all? Do they care about this? What have they shown? Just like we say, show me evidence that you're proactive.

Auren Hoffman (32:04.342) Yeah. And by the way, if you're a B2C company, like do they already love your product? So they're already into it, right? Yeah.

Gokul Rajaram (32:08.718) How do you use it of your product? Exactly. If you're X and you go and find someone who's never used X, probably shouldn't be a good executive or a board member. The second thing you learn is that as a board member, you have two or three jobs. One is governance, making sure the company is running well. The second is fiduciary, where you are a representative of the shareholders. The shareholders in some ways have put you into the seat and you are kind of the nominal boss of the CEO and the managing team. And the third is strategic.

Auren Hoffman (32:16.706) correct.

Gokul Rajaram (32:35.884) And so the second and third are the most interesting ones. First, you've got to hold the CEO accountable and you've got to, you know, you've got to make sure the CEO is the right person in the seat. But the last one is the thing that you do most often, which is strategic. You've got to be asking the questions, not around day-to-day operations and financials, what's happening this quarter or this year, but is the company set up in light of the competitive environment and dynamics and everything that's going on to thrive over the next few years?

So what are the challenges around the corner that the company might or might not be looking at? And so I always, I, when I joined first joined boards about 16, 17 years ago, I was very directive in my, in my feedback, let's do this. And I quickly realized that that doesn't make sense because the executive management team is running the company, not me. So my goal, and ultimately I'm going to hold them accountable. They have to make the decision. So I would, I always now ask questions in a Socratic way. Have you thought about this?

Have you considered this competitor? So Socratic questions that really still frame the dialogue and discussion. So the right board meetings having an opinion and you try to gently nudge and make sure they've considered enough things. So the right board meeting in my opinion is a three to four hour meeting for public companies or later stage companies. I think for younger companies is two hours is more than enough. Three to four hour meeting where the first hour you start with an executive session where the CEO gives CEO and the board meetup. The CEO talks about what's on their mind.

Auren Hoffman (33:40.618) Yeah, rather than like having an opinion or something.

Gokul Rajaram (34:05.358) fresh off like good and bad, what's going well, what's not going well. Give some, that's about 30, 45 minutes. Then the CFO and the leadership team joins the board meeting. And then we talk about the financials, which are obviously important. Typically it happens around the quarterly earnings. So how the company has been doing, what the quarter looks like, what the year looks like, all of that. So you get done with that planning for the year. So that's about one and a half hours. After that, you spend two hours, two topics, one hour each or 45 minutes each.

which are strategic topics. One can be product centric, one can be business centric. Could be channel partnerships, could be a new product, whatever the case is. And those are the topics that there's a lot of time spent ahead of time discussing what those topics should be. And typically I like one product and one business. Typically led by product team. And then you want more, you also get to see other folks in the boardroom. You want to make sure obviously the execs are there, but you also want to see the next level and you have the discussion. So really.

those are things that we just sent out a little bit ahead, but really the goal is to not present, but as much as discuss and really be open to the board around some of the challenges, problems you're facing and have a discussion around this. And really the board needs to really come much more than any session. Those two sessions really were the point of view around what questions to ask, how to challenge folks, how to bring the diverse set of experiences the board members have to each of these discussions. And some board members will be more actively engaged in the product one.

some will be more actively engaged in the business one but you want again if you feel your board members can't actively engage in one or the other you don't have enough then you probably need different set of board members and that's why I think

Auren Hoffman (35:39.01) One interesting thing that is, don't, the only company I know that does this is Metta. I'm sure there are others where they actually have two boards. They have a board of directors and they have a product board. Some of the people are on both like True Halston or Charlie Songhurst are on both the product board and the, and the, and the, the board of the traditional board of directors, but they're different and they have different goals and different objectives. And I assume they have different topics that they dive into.

And the CEO is going to get different things out of them. Have you heard of other companies that have something like this?

Gokul Rajaram (36:13.23) I've never heard of, I've never heard of any other company doing it. That's pretty impressive that they have two different boards. I mean, I didn't know this to be honest until you mentioned this. I'm pretty impressed with that. think most companies, you know, getting the board together, you know, once a quarter and then there are all the committee meetings and so on. It's good enough or at least it's hard enough, I should say. So running two boards, obviously there's overhead on the company. You ought to really make sure it's worth it. But I mean, I'm sure it's worked well for them with those kinds of folks in there.

But yeah, there's product and business. And then finally you wrap up with feedback from the board on the meeting on everything else you've seen and heard, but that day with the CEO initially, and then you have an exact session without the CEO at the end. So that's, it's like cleanly many of the boards I'm on now we've gotten to the structure where CEO plus board thoughts, unfiltered thoughts, CFO comes in, CFO managing comes in talks about the quarter of the year, two or three maybe, but two is better, 45 minute sessions.

and maybe three, sometimes 30 minute sessions. And then you end up again, everyone leaves, CEO and board, and then the board alone giving feedback to the lead independent or the lead director to summarize and communicate back to the CEO and the management team.

Auren Hoffman (37:22.498) Now you recently launched your fund marathon, but you've been an angel investor in like, you're super prolific. You've been in hundreds and hundreds of really interesting companies. How, how has the venture landscape changed over the last couple of decades?

Gokul Rajaram (37:37.135) I think what 15 years ago or 18 years ago when I started doing investing, it was very clear and there were swim lanes that were very clear. You raised the friends and family around, then you raised around, back then there were no seed investors, you raised around from early stage VCs, then you went to later stage growth VCs, et cetera. Now, there ain't no any swim lanes. I everyone swims in everyone else's lane. In fact, if you think you're swimming lanes, you're living in a different world. I've seen pre IPO quote unquote firms do seed rounds.

Auren Hoffman (37:58.658) Yep.

Totally.

Gokul Rajaram (38:05.302) And I've seen like seed firms to like series D rounds and lead series D rounds. So I think there is no swim lanes and you've got to really, as an investor, you've got to, I think it can be very chaotic and there can be a lot of temptation to change.

Auren Hoffman (38:20.896) the strategy is changing constantly as an investor. Like you can't be like, I have this strategy and stick to it. Like you have to be very fluid.

Gokul Rajaram (38:27.246) But it is also very dangerous because strategy drift means that you end up doing many different things. And so you've got to understand where your true north is. What is the core of things that stays constant through all this change? Because if you don't have a core, if you don't have a core, that basically means that you have no strategy at all. And I think that is challenging. think it's hard to, there has to be something that is consistent across all your investments, something. It doesn't need to be the stage. It has to be something.

Auren Hoffman (38:36.908) Yep.

Gokul Rajaram (38:56.974) It could be the domain, could be something. think everyone needs something because otherwise you're just rudderless. You're just capital chasing the best deal, which I think is hard. think it's possible, but I think it's a hard way to. In fact, I always look back at my angel. I think of vintages. I have vintage years where I've done 30, 40, 50 investments. Not as many as how many you're doing, but when I did more than 30, 40, 50, I'm like, I could barely remember the names of the companies in those years. You're doing one a week.

Auren Hoffman (39:24.076) Yeah, yeah, totally.

Gokul Rajaram (39:26.414) And then there were years when I did five investments and I really remember them because I was proactive with those years, those vintage years. Some of them died, some of them did well, but I just had a deeper relationship with those companies and I felt more satisfied with those. But anyway, think the speed at which things are moving and capital is being deployed, it's almost like capital is just being deployed and it's hard, at least from the outset. So when you're in, you kind of see there's a method to the madness. But the other thing you realize is that

You've got to really make sure you you build your own conviction on the company. You cannot outsource conviction to someone else. I think what it means is that because everyone is playing their own game. And so if, for example, you work with you, you say, multi-stage platform fund is leading around. I should invest. Guess what? You better know that if they're leading a seed round, their goal from that seed round to be very, very different than your goal as a seed investor potentially. And so you've got to be very, very careful and thoughtful. And so you've got to build your own conviction.

only then maybe you learn. So I've many times made mistakes of, oh, know, firm X is leading the round. So, okay, you know, I was on the fence, okay. Literally, you know, you go from saying a no to the deal or made a no to a yes. And I would be like, hang on. And then you look back saying, I was a no. Why? Just because someone is leading the deal, why would I make a yes? Right? I mean, so you only make that mistake and you learn from it. yeah.

Auren Hoffman (40:31.488) Yeah. Yeah. Sequoia is in. I should be in or something, but yeah.

Auren Hoffman (40:43.702) Right? I've made that mistake many times in my life. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (40:51.062) Now what you, you recently raised a fund. How was that process? Like what'd you learn from like the process of raising the fund and pitching LPs and stuff.

Gokul Rajaram (41:02.414) The biggest surprise I have of having just being a venture investor is the importance of patience. think most LPs are, basically, many times when they meet you, they, unlike a venture firm where they move fast, I LPs are thoughtful, they move at a certain pace and many times they want to build a relationship for fund two or fund three. So I think it's, you've got to just be, it's almost like an enterprise sales funnel where you have

folks and then some folks could go for fund one, but the vast majority of folks you meet want to see a certain strategy and deployment and all of that subroutine working together before they say they'll invest. And this is true even on the investing side, I realize. I think as an operator, I always felt able to launch product fast, see impact, fast. So you're used to certain cycles, reasonably one or two years, even months now, weeks with venture capital, as you know, mean, my God, I mean, when you're...

Whole life is around making decisions that don't pan out for years. And increasingly, I don't use any markups and so on as any markers of success. It's all about whether or not the company achieves a liquidity event of some, which is 10 years. I invested in the seed round of Figma in 2012. It took 13 years, which is why our firm is marathon. It is a marathon. takes 13 years from seed to IPO. If you're lucky, some companies have been around for 15 years.

Auren Hoffman (42:13.248) Yeah, and that could be like 10 years later or more.

Auren Hoffman (42:19.714) Same.

Auren Hoffman (42:25.62) If you're lucky, yeah. What are there things you look for in founders that most other investors overlook? Like what's the money ball?

Gokul Rajaram (42:37.122) The biggest one I look for is can I meet, can I see these founders operate outside of my pitch? In other words, I'm very, very nervous about only getting to see founders during the pitch they make for me because I feel every all behaviors are hidden, amplified, et cetera. And you don't really see the true nature of the founder. So I really try to not meet the founder. If the only time I'm to meet the founders and they're pitching me, I feel that is a dangerous time to invest because you don't really

Auren Hoffman (43:06.53) But any good founder, if they're meeting you, knows that they're pitching, even if it's not during a quote unquote pitch, right?

Gokul Rajaram (43:06.765) nor the truth.

Gokul Rajaram (43:10.968) is pitching. So what you do is exactly, so what you do is you try to become the confident. And so my goal is to try to build a multi-month relation with the founder ahead of the pitch by actually, and one of the best ways you can do that, if you can make an introduction to a customer for them, a real customer or a person, those are the two things, even before you invest, that just instantly breaks down the wall. And then actually, if you make an introduction to potential customer, you can sit in that customer meeting.

Auren Hoffman (43:25.824) Yeah. Customer, potential employee, even another investor.

Auren Hoffman (43:40.162) Totally, yeah.

Gokul Rajaram (43:40.686) You that recently you have the privilege to actually sit in and listen to how they pitch to you.

Auren Hoffman (43:44.256) Yeah, we just did. just did that in a company where I introduced them to Anthropic and then I could see, okay, well, how is it? Is Anthropic actually interested in this product? Like are they wanting to buy it? And obviously, so that would also increase my conviction in the company, but, then you're adding value and all the, all the above.

Gokul Rajaram (44:00.259) when you make an introduction, employee, the same thing, you can ask the employee, how's it to work at this company if they do the job? And what is the experience like? And so you get two very different perspectives. So trying to really not just get my one perspective, so trying to really have other. And that's what been the difference as an operator angel, you don't have much time, but as a venture investor, you have more time to think about and do these things. mean, that's why I'm always impressed that you're able to do both on a new yourself as an operator and also as an investor.

Auren Hoffman (44:05.121) Yeah, yeah.

Gokul Rajaram (44:29.154) because you just time is the key thing. The more companies invest in the less time you have per company.

Auren Hoffman (44:34.306) For sure. Yeah. Now you've actually talked recently about like why people with leadership roles should try to like maybe move back toward being more individual contributors. I can see how like that would be, looks seem like for many people a step backwards in their career. Like how do you engage with them when you're giving people career advice?

Gokul Rajaram (44:54.23) I think good news is it started out by a couple of the folks who work for me proactively saying they are exploring this. so over the last few months, I have seen ex-colleagues, ex-friends, and friends, sorry, proactively move from leadership, which is manager or manager-manager roles, to IC roles, mostly at AI native companies. I think the key twist is at AI native companies. think they were prior to that working, not working at AI companies. like you said, it does seem counterintuitive in the start, but.

Auren Hoffman (45:16.172) Yeah.

Gokul Rajaram (45:23.446) It's a right career move. Why? Because most AI native companies, they want to make sure the person can do the work. And they are generally suspicious of people who are leaders, who've been leaders and managers without necessarily doing the work. so by signaling the, signaling the eagerness or ability to do the IC work and doing the IC work, you actually, but you have leadership experience, you, I think have a really good chance of becoming a leader again at this company.

If you want to, if you can do the IC work because.

Auren Hoffman (45:55.33) I also like managing people is not like that's almost the opposite of doing good work. Like you're starting to see, uh, you use, there was this ratio where like I was seeing many companies where it'd be like one manager to five people or something. And now you're seeing one manager to 20, 25, 30 people or something.

Gokul Rajaram (45:59.531) Exactly. If you want to.

Gokul Rajaram (46:10.606) to 20. Span of control has increased dramatically. I mean, this is the first time in history where probably we're getting to the point where leverage from technology is greater than leverage from people. You used to get as a manager, leverage from managing people. Now you can manage AI agents and you can manage technology, the work of people. And so you get better vendors.

Auren Hoffman (46:29.718) Yeah, you get more vendors. get good at selecting other vendors to help you. And that's like, it's better than having a person.

Gokul Rajaram (46:36.928) Exactly. And as you know, I think for managing people and running companies yourself, managing people is not all that is touted to be. And so the more time you spend managing people, you actually realize that, you know what, if I can do IC work, if I can be impactful, if I can be productive, I can get paid well, you know what? I can be an IC. I can be an IC and I can do great work. Leverage is what is missing and leverage is what is now unlocked through technology and AI.

Auren Hoffman (46:45.324) It sucks. It's a lot of work.

Auren Hoffman (46:51.66) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (47:04.863) What, you know, there's this relationship that between like product engineering, data science, design, it's, seems like it's changing a lot. Like, how do you see those, those relationships evolving?

Gokul Rajaram (47:17.324) I think the actual job of each of the product engineering and data science folks is still the same. So product is still the what and the why. Owning that obviously in a collaborative way with engineering and data science, engineering does the how. And the data science is the, I call it the inside engine, which is always not just building dashboards, but coming up with new interesting insights around pricing, around markets, around hypothesis testing, et cetera, hypothesis review testing. Those roles are changed to stay the same. What is changing dramatically?

is how many and what that ratio should be within a team of product to engineering to data science. In other words, and how many people who should do those roles. For example, I have companies now that say engineering is no longer the bottleneck because they can move much faster. Product is a bottleneck. So instead of having one PM to five or six engineers, I'm going to have one PM to two engineers. In fact, there is a very

Auren Hoffman (48:07.456) Yeah. Also the product people, can vibe code. They can, they can get things done. They can, they can, they can use vendors and outsource things, et cetera. They can spin up a contractor if they need to.

Gokul Rajaram (48:11.01) they can write code and that PM also does data science. Correct.

Gokul Rajaram (48:19.502) Exactly the role of the product managers now goes far beyond. feel some of them have been put into service as designers. Some of them are putting the service as data scientists. So you almost have to do all of them.

Auren Hoffman (48:25.185) Yeah.

You get in a bolt on you. You can just like spit it up or something or whatever.

Gokul Rajaram (48:31.638) You can do AI prototypes super quickly. And then you have one designer shared across multiple teams that's making sure that you're not doing something crazy. like, but you're staying within the design systems they have. Even front-end engineering can be done with these prototyping tools now.

Auren Hoffman (48:40.012) Yep.

Auren Hoffman (48:46.23) Yeah. And of course there are those engineers who kind of act as product people too. So maybe it's like hard to know there's a tension of how to know like what you need.

Gokul Rajaram (48:52.494) Exactly. So that's a skill that if you're a college student, the skill you want people to build this comfort with taking any of those roles. feel product engineering designer, I shouldn't say fully interchangeable. think there's backend engineers who do complex system stuff, which are not, but front end engineering, design, product, and data science. I think everyone should try to get all four of those skills, at least figure out how to be possible at two or three of them and have a superpower in one of them. Because I do think

Auren Hoffman (49:00.972) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (49:04.883) Yeah, for sure. Yep.

Gokul Rajaram (49:20.142) That's the example when you're about college students and so on, early career folks. People are looking for people who can do multiple things. We used to all look for full stack engineers back in the day, right? The unit one, but now it's full stack thinkers, product people who are comfortable just thinking about the design, but are comfortable doing customers, doing insights. So you've got to be comfortable doing those things.

Auren Hoffman (49:30.113) Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (49:42.23) Yeah, people more, yeah, and they've got to be AI native.

Gokul Rajaram (49:45.23) They've to be able to work with AI tools exactly from day one.

Auren Hoffman (49:49.74) Cool. All right, a couple of personal questions. ask all of our guests. What is a conspiracy theory you believe?

Gokul Rajaram (49:55.375) I don't really buy into conspiracy theories in the traditional sense, but I do think that there are systemic blind spots in how people interpret events. example, the way the media and public initially fully dismissed the potential reasons of COVID-19, right? People are like, it wasn't made in the lab. It wasn't a lab leak. It wasn't just about science. I think a lot of it was politics, group think, and people weren't intellectually curious to try to understand what the reason is.

Auren Hoffman (50:23.074) What's your theory about why that happened? Like why did so many people kind of dismiss what's kind of was somewhat the obvious thing, right?

Gokul Rajaram (50:27.63) I think it became a political thing.

It became a political thing to express your opinions and it was very quickly. If you expressed a there's almost a strong peer pressure. If you express a dissenting opinion, you'd be quickly shut down or canceled in some way. And so it almost was a, you know, I think a sign of the times in some way you could say. And only now that we are actually seeing real evidence with I think a bunch of the health authorities have released that is probably probably a lab leak. And I think that it was a knee jerk thing partly by

I don't know whether it was a government knee-jerk thing, but then everyone felt compelled. And if you weren't, you're going to be canceled because you're questioning the... So that uncomfortable, it was uncomfortable. So that's, think, a recurring pattern you see, think, knee-jerk dismissal of uncomfortable ideas. And so I've always like, tried to say, I think any consensus narrative probably, almost any consensus narrative is probably, should be questioned because there's, you know, there's this, it just become two consensus. So.

Auren Hoffman (51:08.502) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (51:31.24) Before I enter our last question, I noticed that behind you, there's a, for people who can see this, but for the audio, there's a settlers of Katan box behind you. Are you a big settlers fan? Okay. Okay. I love both of those as well. Why do you like them so much?

Gokul Rajaram (51:43.874) Settlers and Carcassonne, two of two favorite board games. Settlers and Carcassonne.

Gokul Rajaram (51:51.181) I think they are strategic, but they're also fun. They kind of allow you to think long-term within the context of a game. So you're not just thinking transactionally each play of the game, similar to poker in some ways, you're kind of building your hand over time. But it's a fun game and it's also something that young kids can pick up. So it's a great family game.

Auren Hoffman (52:11.938) Yep. I play with my wife and kids last night. I played Settlers. We had a great time.

Gokul Rajaram (52:16.814) great thing. Kids love it, adults love it. You can play it at different levels. There are movies you can experience like Inside Out. You can experience it at five different levels. It's one of those games you can experience at five different levels. Young kids with adults, with colleagues. I many companies have set up a Kattan, Knights and so on that they play.

Auren Hoffman (52:22.934) Yep.

Auren Hoffman (52:30.954) Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. When we were in person, we would always be doing them. that would be awesome. I would love to do that. Our last question, we ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

Gokul Rajaram (52:35.426) Well, next time we meet in person, should play Settler's Catan, my friend.

Gokul Rajaram (52:45.93) I think the, this is, think, increasingly not current, but I think there was a obsession with work-life balance. And I think early in your career when building something transformative, it's a luxury, balance is a luxury you can't afford. I think the reality is that building a great company and mastering a craft requires intense, maniacal, like focus. And I think people, you you see every single person achieved extraordinary outcomes. Don't just clock out at 5 PM. I mean, they basically work. mean,

You probably have companies and I have companies, the AI companies are 996, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week in the office. And some of them are 997, actually it's called 007, where it's like midnight to midnight, seven days a week. think some of those things are challenging, but that's what it takes. And now you need to have, I think a better analogy is you have intense periods like that, and then you have basically renewal periods.

Auren Hoffman (53:27.074) Yeah.

Gokul Rajaram (53:42.188) And then you have intense periods and you have renewal periods. think, but early in your career, especially, I think to build something extraordinary, you can't do it without extreme amount of focus and cutting out some of the balance stuff.

Auren Hoffman (53:53.654) Yeah. Okay. I don't, I think that is, I think what you're saying is almost conventional advice now, right? Or like, yeah, for at least for people in the startup scene.

Gokul Rajaram (53:59.342) I was coming through the center.

Gokul Rajaram (54:03.886) for our 100,000 tech Twitter friends basically.

Auren Hoffman (54:07.138) Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right. This has been thank you, Gokul, for joining us on World of DaaS. I follow you at gokulr on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage you there. This has been awesome and a ton of fun. I knew it was going to be great, but this has been awesome and a ton of fun. Thank you.

Gokul Rajaram (54:23.897) Thank you, Auren, for having me.