Unfortunately, the world of work now has painted itself into the following corner: is it work from home or is it return to office? And we're seeing examples of both of those out there. Amazon announcing, of course, hey, you're not in the office Jan 1, you're out. Other companies saying, no, we're completely all remote. We think actually there's a new way, a third way. What's going to happen with jobs here? I believe that AI will produce literally millions of new jobs to people who want to quote unquote play the AI space. What, how do I invest in the AI space? What company do I invest in? The bigger way to play AI is to look at the biggest sectors of our economy, who are going to be the winners and losers.
Hey everybody, Peter Diamandis here, and welcome to Moonshots. On this episode, we're going to be diving into an important conversation that every entrepreneur, every exponential entrepreneur needs to be having right now, which is if you are running an organization, or if you're joining an organization, or if you're starting an organization, do you build it around a physical office? Do you return to the office? Do you allow your employees to work from home, or is there a different way? I'm going to be joined by Jack Hidary, CEO of SandboxAQ, an extraordinary entrepreneur out of Google. His chairman is Eric Schmidt. They, you know, broke out of Google with $500 million of startup capital, and they're changing the world. SandboxAQ, A stands for AI, Q stands for quantum, and they're transforming a whole slew of different areas with incredible success. Part of the success, Jack Hidary states, is because of their work model, their agility. So we're going to be doing an interview to understand how does SandboxAQ do their work. It's the how versus the what. Again, if you're an entrepreneur, this is an episode that you're going to want to think through to decide how you're building your company or how you manage your company going forward. We just saw Amazon with a return to the office requirement. Is that the right way to go? Other companies may be following. Is this right for you? All right, let's jump into this episode. And if you enjoy conversations like this, please subscribe. It helps me know that I can serve you, which is my goal. All right, on to the podcast.
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Hi everybody, welcome to Moonshots. Today we have a really fun conversation, something that can impact all moonshot entrepreneurs, all exponential entrepreneurs, which is what should you be doing? Should you be going back to the workplace? Should you be working virtually? What is the new way of work? I'm joined with one of the most extraordinary exponential entrepreneurs, Jack Hidary, a dear friend. He's been on this podcast a number of times. He's the founder of SandboxAQ, happens to have an incredible chairman, Eric Schmidt, who's been on this podcast as well. They've gone from zero to infinity faster than most any company I know. He is also joined by Nadia Haroun, who's the general manager of AI simulation at Sandbox. As I've said before, we're going to see the emergence of three-unicorn-billion-dollar startups faster than ever. These are exponential organizations that are being driven by the convergence of computation, AI, robotics, 3D printing, all of these technologies. And the question is, how should these companies be materializing? You get an office these days, do you find office space? Do you go into an incubator? Are you starting a virtualized company? We're going to be diving into all of these things. We've talked about in the past what SandboxAQ does, now we're going to talk about how they do this magic. Jack, Nadia, welcome.
Peter, great to see you, my friend. Nadia, great to have you with us. Peter, I think this is a really exciting moment, as you just pointed out. A lot of breakthroughs coming out of our company and other companies, and people often just focus on what is that next breakthrough, what's the next frontier that we're going to explore with AI, both on the language model side and on the quantitative model side. We'll get into that a little bit today. But what's not focused on enough, Peter, as you pointed out, is how we do what we do. And at SandboxAQ, we really put a big focus on paving a new pathway in that as well. How we actually organize ourselves, how do we get this collaboration done, how do you get a lot of creative minds from so many different disciplines, Peter, physics and AI and chemistry and biology and pharmacology and mathematics and cyber, I mean, all these things, how do you actually get creatives to work together in a way that produces on a systematic basis breakthrough after breakthrough after breakthrough?
And you've just published an extraordinary list of breakthroughs. I hope we'll get to that as well. But I do agree that how is so important because we have a lot of moonshot entrepreneurs watching this who are diving deep into AI and utilizing it. They've got huge world-changing dreams, but the question is, do you go back to the old model of how it was done, you know, 10, 20, 30 years ago? It's got to be different now.
Absolutely, Peter. And I think very often as humans, we know this, this is one of the cognitive biases that Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for, cognitive biases in our head that we fall into, the bias of anchoring and other kinds of biases. One of those biases is the false binary choice. People often paint themselves into a corner, Peter, as you well know, that oh, it's either this one or that one. And unfortunately, the world of work now has painted itself into the following corner: is it work from home or is it return to office? And we're seeing examples of both of those out there. Amazon announcing, of course, hey, you're not in the office Jan 1, you're out. Other companies saying, no, we're completely all remote. We think actually there's a new way, a third way.
And I'd love to hear about that. But I'll tell you one of the things I've heard from two different CEOs is, thank you Amazon for forcing people to come back to work because I get to steal all those amazing employees who don't want to go back to the office.
That's, we're actually seeing that already, Peter. We're seeing that. We're seeing actually, we literally just hired somebody from Amazon who did not want to go back to work. And so we did not, you know, seek out to get that person, but that person became available once that return to work, a return to office policy kicked in, and they themselves put themselves on the job market. So we're seeing the impact of that. And I think this false choice of either return to office and everyone's in the old way of doing things or remote first, I want to say that even before COVID, we were already on this track of doing things a different way. This was not just because of technology enables it, all technology enables, but also we have to think about the person themselves. You know, we call it 3 C's. We think about collaboration, Peter, and collaboration is about all the different disciplines. I'll ask Nadia in a minute to elaborate on that, different disciplines we bring together. We talk about customer, you know, what it means when you don't have to be in an office. It means you can actually embed yourself with the customers. Recently, a five-person team from our company embedded itself for two weeks at one of our customers inside their offices. You know what it means to a customer for a team to go and take the time and live essentially with them. With another one of our partners, we're actually going to permanently embed about 10 of our employees in their various offices around the world permanently. That's going to be their place of work, is going to be the partner's offices, not one of our hubs or locations. And then of course, you have community. Our mantra, Peter, here is work where you thrive. That is, don't uproot somebody and have to bring them over to Mountain View to eat burritos every day when they were in a great city in their country or their city where they have their support structure, they have their in-laws to take care of the kids, they have the university that they know, where they cultivate new talent to bring into our company, where they have their community and they can engage with that community and bring in new ideas and customers from that community. That's what work where you thrive. So maybe I, if it appears okay, I could turn it over to Nadia, I would love that, to talk about collaboration first. Nadia, hello, good morning. Nadia, maybe you want to introduce yourself a bit more, talk about your background as a bench scientist.
Sure thing, sure thing. Thank you so much, Peter. It's a pleasure to be here with you and Jack this morning. I'm Nadia Haroun. I'm the general manager of the AI simulation group here at Sandbox. And funny enough, when Jack spun this company out of Google, what he called me up and I had just had a baby and I just bought a house, and he said, hey, we're doing this cool new thing. Do you want to come join us? And I'm like, Jack, I'm not moving. And you know, and one of the things he told me was that don't worry, that this company is completely remote. We are going to work together to do amazing things in a collaborative fashion. And you know, you are not going to have to move like you did when you went to go work at Google. And that was music to my ears.
I remember you living now.
I live in New Jersey. I live in New Jersey, right outside of New York City.
Yeah, so it was like give up this amazing opportunity or have to relocate the entire family 3,000 miles to the west.
That's right. And I had done that before, like many folks do, to take these amazing tech jobs. And you have to find new doctors, you have to find new schools, you know, you uproot your whole family. Your partner doesn't have a sense of community. And so your support structure, which I think we all realized during COVID was very, very necessary, is completely missing. So that is a big part of thriving. I mean, here we have access to our network, our people, you know, friends, family, etc. The whole family is happy. And so I think community.
Yeah, please. Yeah, do you mind if I ask you, what does a general manager of AI simulation do at SandboxAQ? Because that's a, it's a pretty wicked title.
It's a job that did not exist five years ago in the world. Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, yeah. So I work on leading an extraordinary team that is globally based to create new drugs, new types of molecules, impact the biopharma industry and also the material science chemistry industry primarily. So as you might imagine, we have folks from all different disciplines that need to collaborate to do this amazing work. And we work across many, many different time zones in order to do that. And it is truly being able to hire the talent where they are in the corners of the planet is really key to what has helped us be successful and putting these people in a virtual room together to collaborate and get the job done.
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Peter, amazing. You, Jack, you said something a few minutes ago. There's a false dichotomy here between return to work or work from home. Each has its problems. And I just want to, you know, for the entrepreneur who's thinking about which route they go, can we just dive into that one second for each of those and then talk a little bit more about your third option here?
Yeah, so let me just be very provocative and explicit. Return to office as a total policy fail. Work from home as a singular policy fail. Just to make it super clear, I hope I'm not being too subtle, Peter.
Never happened, buddy. Never happened.
And I'll kick off and I'll ask Nadia also to talk about some of the ways that we collaborate, for example, you know, bringing people together in collaborative gatherings and things like that. What we realize is, yeah, there's problems with going with either of those as your singular focus and policy. What you want to do is you want to be outcome-based rather than be time-based. People get obsessed about, are we going to have this number of hours in the work day? How about this? How many vacation days do I have? Do I need to be in the office this day, that day, and Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3:00 on a leap year? I mean, this is ridiculous. Let's be outcome-based. One of the reasons why I think we've had breakthrough after breakthrough after breakthrough recently, the team, Nadia can talk more about it, had a breakthrough with PFAS, the forever chemicals. People may know that they're called forever chemicals for a bad reason because they don't leave our bodies, they don't leave the environment. And I'll ask Nadia in a minute to talk about that breakthrough. But how do we get these breakthroughs from multiple disciplines coming together? What it means is you have to think about the collaboration part, then you've got to think about the customer part. Who's your partner? Who's your customer? Don't just once in a while have a Zoom call with them. Go visit them. We have a sizable travel budget, Peter, because we have to go visit these folks in person. Now that we can post-COVID visit people, now's the time to go and do that. Yes, we use some Zoom, of course, but we like to go physically see the customers, see the partners, work with them, understand what their issues are, how they're working together.
You're effectively trading real estate expenses for air.
That's correct. So net-net, we're actually saving millions of dollars, Peter. Our CFO did the numbers. He's the numbers guy, 30-plus years at PricewaterhouseCoopers. This guy knows numbers. And he was an auditor of public companies before that. This guy is really, really solid. And what David said is that we're saving money. Look at the numbers. By not having all these permanent offices all over the place, we're actually saving millions of dollars. And we're taking a portion of that and we're spending it on the collaboration gatherings, the offsites, visiting customers. But net-net, even with all that, we're saving millions of dollars a year. So this is a great way to boost your company's productivity and output, and it's also a way to save money. But Peter, the most important thing, the theme is outcome-based and treat people like adults. And so, for example, you know, we have in the US unlimited vacation policy. We're not here to say, oh, teacher, can I please take a vacation day? Can I take, you know, Thursday 3 p.m. off? I have a doctor's appointment. Treat people like adults. People know what to do. And if you're outcome-based, if you use the OKR system that we learned so well from Google, let's remember John Doerr's book, right, on OKRs. Let's remember the early days of Larry and Sergey and Eric thinking about the OKR system. That is a powerful system to communicate what to communicate. We're outcome-based. We're looking for that breakthrough. How you get there, that's for you to shape, you as a team for you to shape. We give budgets to teams. Like Nadia, Nadia is empowered to decide what to do with that. Nadia, maybe you want to jump in and talk about why do we meet in person here and there in different cities, often with universities in mind who are in that city.
Yeah, yeah. You know, we're outcome-based, and what that means is that we have very ambitious goals. We're trying to revolutionize drug discovery. We're creating chemicals and matter that hasn't ever existed. And how do you get a group of people that are, you know, located all across the planet on that singular mind share? And that is really the purpose of an offsite, is to have this purposeful mind share around strategy, around goals, around sprint cycles. And I will tell you that, you know, there is research that shows that you have to bring people out of their comfort zone, take them out of their environment, their kind of regular office space, to boost that creativity, to enhance that problem solving. And we come out of these offsites, and we tend to do them in locations that are inspiring. We go to the mountains, we go to the sea, we go to universities where there is a lot of mind share and inspiration and things to draw upon. And when we leave these offsites, people are so impassioned, so excited. You can see that there's all this momentum. Everyone is rowing in the same direction, and it really carries us through to the next offsite. And so you end up having a few of these over the course of a year, and you don't need an office. An office is very casual. You know, people come home from the office, they're tired. You know, people leave offsites, they're excited. So it's very different.
Yeah, I just want to ask you a quick question. Why do you think Amazon is literally forcing people to come back to work? What's their thesis there? What do they believe?
Yeah, not to comment on Amazon specifically, but in general, I think why we're seeing a lot of large companies go with RTO is that, number one, they have a sunk investment, right? In other words, they have some sunk costs in huge infrastructure. Often they own these buildings or have very long-term leases to these massive buildings all around the world, and certainly in their headquarters locations. And that is an asset that needs to be used, or something's going to happen to it. It's not a great time right now to try to sell these things because, of course, many other companies are not using these kinds of platforms. And so, you know, one reason I think we're seeing it is people want to leverage the investment they've made prior to COVID, and then during COVID, you know, things continued. Number two, I would say, is there's a lot of traditional thinking, really, just to be honest with you, around, you know, people need to be in one space. And I understand people say, hey, there's a spontaneity when you're physically in the same place. We agree with that. That's why work from home alone is a fail. We agree, Peter, with the contention that just working from home, just working remotely, does not work. I mean, when you're working from home, you're lonely, you're cut off. Um, you know, it doesn't give you a through line in a company. But at the same time, returning to the office doesn't.
I loved your point about actually assuming everybody's an adult and that they can, you know, if they've got key objectives they have to hit, allow them to manage themselves. If you don't have that belief of them, they shouldn't be working for you.
Exactly, Peter. And also, let's talk about cross-pollination. So it's one thing, and if you look at most return to office, what are they returning to? They're returning to offices where their team is there. But how about cross-team? How about the fact that a place like SandboxAQ, we've got a team working on biopharma, we've got other teams working on chemistry, we've got other teams thinking about AI in new and in very exciting ways. We want to get those teams also cross-pollinating with each other. So some of these gatherings might be with some parts of one team and some parts of another team coming together. And by the way, who also shows up at one of those offsites? We have our HR folks, we have our recruiters. Let the recruiters listen in. Let's see what's happening. Have the recruiters imbibe so that they know the kind of talent. And let me come back to talent, Peter, because part of what fueled our thinking about breaking through, not just on what we do, but how we do it, was the talent issue. When we started getting resumes, both when we were inside of Alphabet and then post-spinout, we realized the talent is everywhere, Peter. The talent is in Europe. The talent is in geographic...
Entrepreneurial opportunity here of massive scale.
Exactly. Now you say to somebody, hey, I know you have a great support system around you, living in Austria, living in France, living in Spain, living in other countries around the world, but by the way, we're going to uproot you now and you've got to live, you know, 10,000 miles away where you don't know anybody and, to Nadia's point before, don't have that support structure. Is that a good recipe for a great work environment?
Just like with Nadia, you would not have gotten her if you'd made that demand.
Nadia, how big is your team and how distributed are they and how often do you meet?
Yeah, so our team is about 60 or so people at the moment, and we work across six, seven different time zones. And, you know, it is, we are intentional about where we hire depending on where our customers are as well, so we can also organize ourselves to service our needs a little bit better. So we have folks out in Europe to service our European customers. It has allowed us to scale much quicker because we have these pods everywhere. You know, we didn't have the hub and hire people into the hubs. We created the hubs around the people, which I think is another key distinction here as well.
And Jack, I just want to, you said it in passing, but I want to just take a second to spell it out. Your triple C strategy, your third way, not work from home, not return to office, but the triple C. What do those C's stand for again? And just take a second to hit those beats.
So Peter, there's a third way. We do not have to fall into the false dichotomy of either return to office or work from home. The third way that we are pioneering, that others I think are taking a cue from us, we literally have people calling us, asking us to visit and understand this third way, is the three C's. The first C is collaboration. We have so many different disciplines, and the work of today and the future, Peter, in all companies is going to be collaboration across disciplines, both in the workplace and also in academia. Look at some of the most dynamic universities. Look at Arizona State with Michael Crow. Look at what Michael Crow has done there, breaking down barriers of departments, breaking down silos. The same thing in the most successful companies, breaking down barriers and having people collaborate. In our particular company, it's even more pronounced because we've got 80-plus PhDs in our company. We have another 70 engineers in our company. They have come from many different disciplines: pharmacology, chemistry, physics, engineering, AI, all these different areas, and of course, software coding. And taking that domain expertise of the PhDs, putting it into reusable, scalable software code, this is a whole workflow that involves many different disciplines. So collaboration is the first C. The second C is about the customer. Jeff Bezos talks so eloquently about customer-first thinking. We agree with him. I think he was one of the pioneers to really focus on how do you really put yourselves in the shoes of the customer. And that's something we take from him. A lot of what we talk about, Peter, in our company is take the best from all the different cultures you've been in and let's bring it together. And that's kind of the birth of the three C's. We kind of got around people from many different companies. Many of us came from Google. We took the best of Google, but also we thought about other cultures. So the second C is about the customer, not just treating the customer like a transaction, but really thinking about what's their point of pain. And you know how to find that out? You've got to go and be with them. You've got to go spend time with them, not just in their workplace, but also, for example, let's say you're both going to a conference, set up a time, a special dedicated time on the side of that conference to have your team and their team go out, have a dinner together, spend a lot of time understanding what they're up to. And the final C is community, community and connection. So maybe it's two extra C's, but we'll put them in one. But community and connection, what is that about? That's about work where you thrive. It's about what is your support structure, Peter. You know, very often a company says we're here to support you, and you know, they might have great benefits and so on and so forth. But the fact is, supporting someone means that you want to recognize and respect where they are going to work best, where they're going to live best, where they're going to thrive as people, where they're going to realize their potential. An example, they may have a local university that they love, that they want to take more courses at. They may have a set of family and friends around them that can support them. Let's say they want to have kids. You know, if you're having kids and you don't have a support structure around you, God bless, okay, that's going to be difficult. That's going to be difficult.
I mean, it's a happier employee, it's a more fulfilled employee because you can't support all the stresses at the same time. And if you've got, you know, if you're able to have your home life and your emotional and social life thriving, it gives you more capacity to give to your company.
Yeah, and let me say, you know, a number of things that people have said before is that we think of company as a community. Sometimes people say it's a family. I think that's not the right term. Families are different. You have your crazy uncle who comes for Thanksgiving all the time. You can't uninvite them, unfortunately. But workplace is more like a community. We respect each other. We treat people like adults. We are outcome-based. We set forth clear goals. And by the way, where do those goals come from? They don't come from on high, from Mount Olympus, okay? They come from the conversations and the offsites themselves. It bubbles up. Nadia has been running a great process with her team. What is going to be our outcome goals for 2025? Once a year, Peter, once a year we gather the whole company. We're still small enough we can do that. And we choose a university city. Last year we did it in Palo Alto at Stanford. This past year, right now, this past few months, we just did it in Cambridge, Mass. at Harvard, MIT. We're choosing some new cities now. So if you're a city, free us.
How frequently do you have these meetups? Go ahead now, you want to talk about that in your team.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we have our company-wide offsite, as Jack mentioned, once a year, just because we're getting so large. We used to have them twice a year when we were only, you know, three people, and then we became fifty people. But now we just do that once a year. Our team itself, so we meet, and our team is becoming so large at AI simulation, we meet once a year as well. But what the sub-teams do, so our engineering and product and UX team will meet together. In fact, they just had an offsite out in Vancouver. Our drug discovery team will meet together. That's about a group of twenty. And so we have these little pods, and so there's always touch points going on. And depending on what work is being accomplished, we have different cross-functional teams that also are invited to those meetings. And so there's not a lot of time that actually passes when you're not interacting in person with your colleagues. It may seem as though, wow, you know, you're always at home, but you're really not. You're with a customer meeting and understanding their pain, or you're with your colleague solving for that, or you're with your family. And so people are just able to be a lot more well-rounded and taken care of and accommodated in this sort of setting.
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Peter, if I can talk about another innovation, which is that what is the role of the senior executive in this new 3C structure, in the third way? Is the senior executive supposed to sit in some ivory tower in Mount Olympus and send out commands? No, that is a prescription for failure. The senior executives, we believe in service leadership, and that's something that's embedded inside the third way, which is flip the whole pyramid. It says that as a senior leader, my job is to ask Nadia, Nadia, what do you need to succeed? We've agreed on outcomes. We've agreed on outcomes for 2025, let's say. Nadia, what are the resources you need? And along the way, how do we adjust and make sure you have those resources? Resource doesn't have to be just money and budget. It could also be Nadia telling me, hey, Jack, I really need your help opening the door to that partner. I need your help opening the door to that particular customer. I need advice on how do we work with to help her succeed. That's right. That's my job. And so that means that the senior leadership, we've got to be on the move.
Yes, and then Nadia's job is to help her team succeed in the same way.
Yeah, in the same way, I agree. And I love that it is a service mindset from leadership. And I've seen so many companies absolutely fail when the CEO's got this massive plush real estate office, and that's like, you know, come and pray at the temple of...
Yeah, I don't have an office, Peter, on purpose, because my office is typically traveling. And recently, I just flew to New York in order to be with one of the team offsites. It was a really exciting time. They're dealing with a number of different ideas about what's their next roadmap. They're not sure whether to put this feature first or that feature. They're having a lot of very good discussions. Not my job to decide, by the way. I did not opine on that particular point. I was there just, again, to support and understand how could I be helpful to that team. And then a few weeks ago, I flew to a different offsite to pop in there and see how I could be helpful there. And so as senior leaders, what I tell my senior leaders when I bring them aboard, you've got to sign up for this. This is something that is not typical. You're not going to be showing up in an office and clocking in. And once in a while, as a senior leader, we have a bigger burden.
Yeah, do you make an investment in the employees' home office?
Absolutely. So we make a lot of investments when people are onboarded. The first thing we do is make sure they're set up well in the home office. I can ask Nadia to talk more about that. I want to talk about something else, though. There's also skill sets that we invest in. I'll give you an example. Every single person that gets onboarded into our company gets media and presentation training to give speeches, to give talks. Why is that? Here's another part of the third way, Peter. In the old way, in the big companies of the world today, you are not allowed to just go and give a talk on behalf of the company. If you're not the CEO or one of the senior leaders, you've got to go get permission, fill out three forms. I've been involved in several large companies in my career, and it would take months sometimes for me to get permission to go give a talk. And Peter, I've had some experience giving talks, as you know from your conferences.
And you do a beautiful job of it.
