Let's start with this $20 billion rumored $20 billion partnership that you have with Nvidia. Can you talk about the structure of the deal and how it came about?
So the most interesting part about it is the call where the idea was first floated was about 3 weeks before money was in the bank.
Oh, so Johnson moves fast.
Of course, that's how you stay ahead.
Yeah. So how'd it come about?
So, we had been working on integrating GPU and LPUs together. The best way to describe why this helps is if you were building out a logistics network for the United States and I told you you could have either 18-wheelers or vans for last mile delivery, which one would you pick? And the answer is both, right? And so GPUs and LPUs combined ended up giving better performance across the performance curves. We had implemented it and we had gone to Jensen asking could we buy about a 100,000 GPUs because we were going to deploy them ourselves and Jensen saw what we had done and thought maybe it would be better to make this available to all of their customers.
You and I had this conversation at NVIDIA GTC and you were talking about the fact that these technologies are very complimentary. Can you explain a little bit more about that?
When you're processing an LLM token, what's happening is you're doing all these different matrix multiplies. And some of them are more compute constrained and some of them are more memory throughput constrained. And the ones that are more compute constrained, we put on the GPU and the ones that are more memory throughput constrained, we put on the LPU. And the bottlenecks are all over the place. There's all sorts of different bottlenecks. There is no one strategy. There is no one perfect architecture. So the realization was you put these two things together and you defeat the bottlenecks across all of the different maps.
There's another thing that I love that you said when we had this conversation that when AI is talking to other AI, speed is becoming more and more important.
Yeah. I mean a human can wait a second or two to get a response when they type a command into a computer. AI is just sitting there waiting because it produces these tokens so much faster. Now you bring in LPUs and the speed is so much faster that it just becomes all about how do you move as fast as you can. AI is really good at using AI. That's really what Agentic is, right? So humans benefit from using AI, so does AI. Just like you would do research about me before I show up on your show, AI is going to kick off a job doing research on different tools it's going to use while it's using this other tool. And so kicks it off to another AI. And so you get this exponential growth.
I'm going to go on a tangent just for a second and then we'll come back to this. I talked to a lot of founders about this recently, but the whole point is like when agents are making payments, the amount of payments that are going to be made is going to skyrocket. Do you have any insight into that?
Yeah, I think it's still early and one of the limiters is payments aren't really built for this yet, but if you can make micro payments, the number of payments is going to skyrocket. Like I did a little hobby project and for the hobby project I needed a couple of different phone numbers so I could have a bunch of different agents on with me on Signal and WhatsApp and I had to go to Twilio and I had to prove I was a human in order to get the number and all this stuff and it was just this big pain to get it done. If on the other hand I could have just done if I had allocated a budget to the AI and it could have just used that budget they would have spent it and I would never have known and it would have just been within the budget.
Tell me more about the hobbies and the side projects because this has come up in a couple of our previous conversations that you and I have had.
I like to do cutting edge stuff on my personal computer. So I don't have access to the work codebase like things where there's risk. I'll spin up a server in GCP or AWS and I'll just start building stuff. I built everything from apps that tell you what airplanes to take if you're traveling and what routes and which routes have the best seats and all this stuff all the way to apps that do certain mathematical things like a daily brief and all of this stuff. Very simple stuff. At work, I use it very extensively, but I always start with a hobby project before I bring it to work. What's the daily brief? Every morning, I get an email to me that says what's going on in the world based on what I'm interested in and how I interact with it and just a whole bunch of research. It's very much like the presidential daily brief except personalized for me.
And is this in text form?
Yes, you read it. It's text with links that I can click through to learn more. The big shift I did on the daily brief though was I started off by getting a whole bunch of text and I would read it and then I realized, oh, it's AI. It's done a whole bunch of research. It has the context. Why don't I have it just summarize everything? Just give me a bunch of headlines and I can ask follow-up questions.
I just spent time and recorded an episode with Gustaf, who's the co-CEO of Spotify right now, and he did something very similar because he tries to avoid any kind of feeds. The whole thesis behind the organizing principle of Spotify is like time well spent. And he's like, 'Well, me just scrolling and getting like rage baited at on X isn't beneficial, but there is information I want to know.' And so there's a couple different places that his agents go out and essentially summarize stuff he might be interested in. He's like, 'Hey, don't include rage bait. Don't include politics.' But then he also heavily emphasizes these are the people that I'm interested in. What are the people that I'm interested in speaking about? And if the same people that I'm interested in are speaking about the same topic, I want to know about that. And then he can read it, but now he turned it into this personal podcast and he actually listens to it in Spotify. He's like essentially his daily briefing, but he listens to it in like 5, 10 or 15 minutes.
Yeah. I mean, for me, the interactivity of it is important because it's sort of a you ever play the game 20 questions as a kid? Yeah. So, you can figure out within 20 questions what's in someone's mind. Questions allow you to sort of distill down into what you actually care about. If you have a podcast, it's a static form. You hear it, but if you can interact with it, then you can just get to the information you most want. So, as I'm learning through AI, I'm not reading a static piece of content. I'm interacting with it.
I'm glad you mentioned the thing about questions because I have a series of quotes that I've saved from you, and I love your tweets, by the way. So, you said, 'Success in the information age was about being able to answer questions. Success in the AI age will be about being able to ask the right questions.' Can you expound on that?
Yeah, and this also goes towards a shift of people moving from being ICs or individual contributors to all being leaders but leaders of AI. And what really good leaders do is they don't do the work themselves. They don't have the answer themselves. They're just asking the question. They're just considering everything they're hearing and then they ask the question that no one else asked or everyone is thinking but is afraid to ask. So with AI because it can go off and solve all of these problems for you. It can do the research report. The question that you ask determines what you get and that determines the output. From information age like we were all trained to just answer questions. Like that's what school's about. Remember this, remember that. With AI, you just ask AI. It knows. You just have to think of the right question. It's a fundamental shift.
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I want to go to something you text me about your views on leadership, which is what is your description of leadership.
So, I got this from a John Levy book, but it didn't detail it much. And the first principle of leadership is you have followers. Duh, right? It's that simple. You're not a leader unless you have followers. But when you think about leadership as having followers, it's also like thinking of investing as making money. There's a lot of ways to be an investor. You can be a venture investor. You can give debt where you can take equity. You can be seed stage. You can be series A. You can be growth. You can be crossover. You can do convertible notes. There's private equity. There's so many different ways to be an investor. Public market, right? Same with leadership. And so with leadership, the mistake I often see with new founders is they're like, 'How do I be a leader?' And the problem is they don't realize that there's an infinite number of ways to be a leader. And so they go off and they listen to someone and they get all this advice and they try and execute on it. It's not true to them. So one of the things that was very different for me as a leader, most of the people that I hear on your podcast, they are control freaks. They want things done their way.
On Founders Podcast or this one?
On Well, both actually.
And so, had I tried to be an absolute control freak, that wouldn't have worked for me. I'm one of these weird people where I can go to a restaurant and I can tell the waiter, 'Just bring me whatever you think is best.' Or I don't even have a driver's license. I haven't had a driver's license since I was 18. And I've...
Why don't you have a driver's license?
Because I don't feel the need to drive. I'd rather think. I don't need to control driving. I want to control thinking. I want to focus. I want to be on my phone. I want to be doing something useful. And that's been the case since I was 19 years old. And so, I'm happy to delegate things in a way that others are not. So, one of the things that's different about my leadership is when I hire people, I hire very autonomous people who often go off and execute on their own. And they would be terrible in most corporate environments. But also I can't hire the same kinds of people. And that was true to me. Had I gone the other way, I wouldn't have been very successful. If other people go this way, they're not going to be successful. Then again, there are a lot of things that are very similar, which is most of the best Silicon Valley leaders, they lead from a place of inspiring their people as opposed to trying to get people to be afraid. But that is a form of leadership. There are plenty of leaders out there who are successful because they cause people to become afraid. And so you just have to pick the form of leadership that works for you. But also, when you're picking where you're going to work early in your career, you should probably work somewhere where you're going to learn the lessons that are good for you. If you're more of a kind of person who can show appreciation and gratitude, you probably should not work for someone who inspires fear because you're not going to learn any lessons that you can use yourself.
Man, this is so important. This actually fires me up because did you ever spend any time with Toby Luke? I haven't. Okay. So, the conversation that I had with him I don't know on the show like 5 months ago. I still think about like every few days and in fact we go through the past episodes and like mine and I constantly finding new insights from that and like so that's why you see all these like clips that we're putting out on X from things that might be you know we did 6 months ago. And Toby one of the things I love that he said in the conversation was just like man there's not like one right way to do things. There's probably a hundred ways that could accomplish your goal. You have to do the one that's based on you. This is why you see all these different tech companies that are so different from each other. Like Apple, complete silos. Google, everyone has access to the codebase. They're just completely different ways taken to the absolute extreme. We just had Dana White on the show and his whole thing was like the first thing to do is like know yourself. So, I'm going to ask you a question. When you figured out your leadership style, wait one second. And then once you have to really know who you are, right, and what fits you. And then second thing is like what you actually want to do in life. And then once you those are your two biggest questions then you just wake up once you figure that out and you just get after and focus on accomplishing whatever that once you have step one taken care of you just wake up and attack step two. So when you figured out that you needed you you couldn't work your leadership style wasn't like the typical way and you needed like these autonomous people which by the way if you ever started another company again then I would have to imagine it's going to be just be you and a bunch of agents.
It would probably be AI. So I think this is going to be a shortcut for founders in the future and we can get into this but the first thing that you have to do as a founder is you have to go from the technical thing that you know how to do and that you can add value with to learning how to manage people and for me that probably cost Grok 3 to four years.
I was a terrible leader. I was one of the world's worst leader when I started. I had a lot of I gave people a little too much latitude because I'm more of a delegator, but I entrusted people who probably shouldn't have been entrusted with that level of autonomy. I didn't hire people who could operate autonomously, but I was naturally someone who would delegate and give autonomy. So, what ended up happening was things would just grind to a halt because they wouldn't know what to do and I wasn't telling them what to do and they were used to being told what to do. And then finally I would get so frustrated I would go in there and tell them what to do but it was so unnatural to me that they didn't accept it.
Why is telling people what to do unnatural to you?
I work through questions. I like to set high-level direction. So for me my leadership style was come up with a goal that was so simple that I could put it on a challenge coin and give it to everyone. So, everyone at Grok had a challenge coin that said 25 million tokens per second and had a little graph of it going up and everyone knew that was the thing to do. And it's sort of like when you ask an AI agent to do something. The fewer constraints you give it, the more freedom it has to solve your problem. And so I liked to work with incredibly creative people who would come back with surprises. Say that part again. This is important. The fewer constraints that you give someone the more freedom they have to solve the problem and the more freedom they have to surprise you with the solution. So if you want to run a highly creative and innovative organization then what you really want to do is minimize the number of constraints but you also have to give them the things that matter. If you aren't able to very crisply distill what you're trying to accomplish, then either you're going to over constrain or under constrain the people. When you're trying to do something as a founder, you are inherently trying to disrupt an old industry. There's a moat. You're trying to do something differently. If you're not doing something differently, what's the point? They're already well-established, well-funded companies. If you can bring a team together that is also disrupting and innovative and it's not just you, then it goes from being Superman to being the Avengers. And so that was just my natural leadership instinct. Had I been more of a command and control person, I should have doubled down on command and control. You have to just do what's natural.
Have you spent any time studying Kelly Johnson, the guy that did Skunk Works at Lockheed?
Okay. He has this great quote where he said it reminded me of what you just said when you did the challenge coin for Grok. He says extreme performance often comes from one brutally clear priority. Yes. Yes. And you see this because...
If you don't give people a clear enough but under constrained enough objective that they can't surprise you in a good way with the result then you are not giving them the ability to innovate. I want to double down on that for a second. The only way for your team to innovate, right, without you being the innovator is they must be able to surprise you in a good way, which means you must not over constrain the goal.
