22 korrents from this recording
Every claim below is a statement made in this recording, quoted word for word and linked to the second it was said, so you can hear it rather than take our word for it. The wording comes from the transcript published alongside the recording; the sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording.
Their wordsthen you also remember that you've hired some very highly paid and talented employees. And are you saying they can't get the tools that they need? That you're spending $100,000 a week. If you wait a week to get a power supply half off, you have certainly dwarfed any possible benefit from getting it.
Their wordsAnd so what you realize is not only is this very hard to keep burn under control, but also it's just this is the inappropriate place to exercise spending review. Spending review has to come earlier. You have to have some concept of budgeting.
Their wordsAnd so if nobody knows how much an experiment costs, like every time you like grow up a new cell line or every time we make a new a new probe in in the fab, how much does that loop cost? Nobody knows. Therefore, experiments are free. Um, it doesn't cost dollars. It costs media. And media comes from the fridge.
Their wordsI think the best companies in my experience come from what might be characterized as scenes. There's like a moment that enables a new company to be born and there's a bunch that comes together that really creates this like unique nucleation for the new company.
Their wordsthere's no one right answer, but this is a thing where you need a really defined process. There is no right answer, but a wrong answer for sure is not having something that you do very religiously as a company.
Their wordsAnd so we can distribute the voting across a lot of the company for this initial review, which is essential because if you're doing anything cool, by the time you get a couple years into it, that top of funnel is overwhelming. And if you place any in any small group of employees or any one person in the way as a bottle bottleneck on this, they will absolutely bottleneck the whole rest of the organization.
Their wordsUm which based on my experience is like this is a a very disruptive process that doesn't tend to surface issues that you don't already know about but haven't acted on because you knew that thing was there.
Their wordsThis is a little bit different than actually literally I vector centrality but it's very similar and so we call this technique IGEN reviews and I've become convinced that this is more or less the right way to do performance reviews.
Their wordsBut the the real theme of the talk is that rate of iteration separates success from failure. And if you can get a fast iteration loop, that really overcomes many other things you're going to run into. And this effect is so severe. I mean, if you can learn one thing every week and there's a competitor that's learning a thing every month, they will they will never matter.
Their wordsAnd so speed determines success and failure and speed is determined by infrastructure. This is driven by really boring sounding things like how well do your purchasing and recruiting and spending processes work. This is as important as how well do you understand understand the object level technical content of the thing that you're building.
Their wordsIt's like it's it's uncommon that these deep tech companies that fail because the technology doesn't work. They fail because once you end up with this organization of hundreds of people and thousand hundreds of thousands of square feet of physical infrastructure, you haven't built the systems to manage that.
Their wordsAnd one of the harder lessons as a startup founder, one of the harder things I think to to really deal with is the fact that you cannot delegate your judgment. As as the CEO, you must always make decisions that make sense to you, no matter how much momentum or inertia alternatives seem to have.
Their wordsAnd so um in order to succeed your judgment has to be differentiatedly good. Now the reality might be that you don't know if your judgment is good yet. And so um one way or another you will have to find out and that means making decisions that make sense to you even when you are totally alone in that realization.
Our reading
It is very hard to actually get stuck, because the action space is always larger than it appears.
Their wordsNow, the good news is that in my experience, it's very difficult to actually get stuck. Um, you can get yourself into trouble and the action space is always larger than it appears.
Their wordsSo when a field really starts to work, industry can just marshall such larger levels of resources and can just move so much faster.
Their wordsI think you have to have that type of competitive feedback. It is tough to know if you're exceptional um without having some legible competitive game.
Their wordsNow, if we had a tech if we had a magical BCI that allowed me to see the instant state of every neuron in the brain and and drive them, I think we'd figure out consciousness pretty fast. I don't think I think this is a practical problem, not a philosophical problem.
Their wordsIt gives you these effect sizes that you just don't really see in medicine. Like if you have a patient on on a dopamineergic drug for Parkinson's that works for some period of time, but it's a it's a relatively small effect after a little while. You turn on a deep brain stimulator and a patient goes from not being able to hold a cup of water to being able to write cursive in like 10 seconds.
Their wordsthere are definitely some ideas that are worth funding with $50 million or zero dollars, but not $5 million. Um you won't run the experiment. It'll be really frustrating experience. You'll get an ambiguous outcome.
Their wordsyou do need to think about how do you get to revenue so that not just you can do it forever, but then you'll be valued on your long-term road map, not not valued on your probability of dying.
Their wordsI think one of the things that makes science the company very special is that it has both of those cultures and is able to integrate them and we're able to simultaneously do some really cool research that I think is really at the edge of the Overton window while simultaneously running clinical trials in six countries now with an approved medical device in Europe and clinical trial results in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Their wordsWell, I mean, okay, even the whole basis of building Helix is contrarian. Like, I think that if you raise a series A and then you tell your investors that you're going to vibe code a purchasing system, I think that any reasonable board is going to like ask you what you're thinking.