One thing I always tell founders is only talk to the press if you have the end result in mind. I want to hire engineers. You probably shouldn't talk to the New York Times to hire engineers, right? One of the biggest challenges to become a media entrepreneur is to be also thinking about the business side, the growth side. You can't really let any of them drop. You just always now have to be playing multiple games at once. It's like we're playing Jenga and we're talking right now, but on some level my brain is also thinking about my deadlines later this week. It's so hard figuring out how to pitch your company to media.
The first insight that I think is valuable, nobody cares about what you're doing like you do. Once you embrace that and accept it, then you think, okay, how do I win them over to maybe care a little bit? Can you tap into a bigger trend? Fun to work on is key because if all the work feels like work, obviously being a founder can really suck if you're not enjoying what you're building, you don't believe in it. I've already had a couple moments just in the first year where it's like, you know, nothing feels fun. It's like you're just grinding so hard. You're working long hours. The payoff isn't quite there yet. And so you're sort of like, gosh, this is not a great time.
Alex, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's great to have you.
Thanks so much for having me. It's a blast.
So, I have a kind of an opening question for you. You spent 12 years at Forbes. You're the main editor covering AI, and you decided to leave and start an independent journalist company, Upstarts Media. Why did you become an independent journalist? Like that's a big bet.
It's funny because some people are like, "Why did you wait so long?" And other people think I'm still insane. So there's like a full spectrum of too soon or shouldn't have done it at all. But for me, it was kind of a combination of a market reason and then a personal reason, which I'm sure is true for a lot of entrepreneurs you talk to. On the personal side, you know, I built my career at Forbes. I got to run the Midas list. I got to run and co-create the Cloud 100 list of enterprise companies. I did a bunch of events, you know, I did all these cover stories. I kind of felt like I'd maxed out. I don't know if your audience plays video games or anything like that, I'd kind of reached the top level and then it's like you can do side quests, but from an ambition standpoint, it felt like maybe I would be playing out the string a bit and that's just never been my way. And so I was thinking like what would be a real challenge for me? And then at the same time on the market side, I felt like we really needed more in-depth, empathetic but also trustworthy reporting about the startup ecosystem. Not just OpenAI, you know, five reporters covering Elon Musk per publication, but small startups, unproven startups, startups like yours. And so I think that was something that was really compelling to me and I thought if I can bring that journalism with a new brand, it checks off those personal and professional boxes.
Yeah, that resonates so strongly with me because I feel like I read so many... I won't shame the publications but I read a lot of publications and it just feels like yes, and it feels a lot of consensus thinking. And I think there's the same movement from founders as well as venture capitalists, but it's so great to see that in media people wanting to build and do differently. And so from an independent journalism perspective I absolutely love your content and I'm very excited to have you on the pod.
Well hopefully I get one or two new readers out of this so you know it's free to subscribe.
Subscribe. Subscribe to Alex. So part of the Not Another podcast is we play a game so I can lure you into distraction and get very awesome.
Yes. And so today's game is Jenga.
Which, I haven't really thought of the metaphor. But I don't know there's some tech metaphor saying that media empires are all Jenga towers or something.
Yeah. Yes. That exactly. That's right. Cool. So, as the guest, you can take the first move.
Okay. This is a little trickier with these mics. You know, it's... you picked an extra challenge here.
All right. What is the shortest game that you've played on this show so far? Like, did someone just wipe out and lose?
No, we usually accidentally do long games.
And then there's no resolution.
Yeah. Jenga is really fun though because we'll usually get to the meaty conversations when it's very tall and then it like collapses and... Oh yeah, I forgot. There you go. Okay, that's my move.
So, what's been the biggest difference for you basically operating at Forbes versus being an independent journalist running your own media company?
I'd say one thing that I've thought a lot about is, you know, I was kind of the journalist equivalent of the 10x engineer cliche where I liked to go really deep on a project, do a really high impact cover story or investigation or event and then I could kind of reset, think, you know, what is my next project? What is going to really excite me? And you can't really do that as a founder. You have to... Wow, this is structurally tough. You have to be running a sprint and a marathon at the same time.
Yes, I think that's... Oh, that... I lost. I think technically maybe that's the fastest loss. Well, we're going to keep going.
It's because of the mic, man. I can't... We're going to keep going. All right, you're going to give me one mulligan, right? As a year one founder, I get the mulligan. It's like basically every day is a big adventure and a goal that you're trying to achieve and then there's another one the next day. You know, you can't just kind of lay low and reset. And I think that's been a real focus issue, discipline issue that you learn firsthand as a founder.
Have you been able to have more like content freedom with Upstarts or since it's your company, your coverage, like how has that impacted the stories that you write?
There's a lot of freedom from an editorial standpoint. I can write about startups as early as I want. I can do launches, you know, companies coming out of stealth. I can be the first interview for a startup that maybe a Forbes or a Bloomberg or one of these publications wouldn't say is big enough. You know, so PR people say, you know, what's your cut off for a funding round? I don't have a cut off for a funding round. I have what I think is going to be interesting for the audience. And so for me, the blessing and the curse is that I don't have bosses and managers telling me what to cover, but I have an audience, a customer who I feel laser focused on providing value for. And it's almost harder in a way, but I theoretically can write anything I want.
Yeah. It's in a lot of ways when you're building something for the customers is the same as startups, it's like what's more pure. And from a founder perspective and a lot of my audience is founders. I think it's incredibly hard to pitch your company to media and they usually cue in on the size of the funding round and where you're at and you know people are putting like debt together with equity to make these rounds seem bigger and I feel like that's the only proxy certain tech publications have. And so it's very refreshing that you're looking more holistically at like okay how interesting is this company and how interesting are these founders and how cool is the story. Like for me that makes me want to pitch you every story I have which I guess that means it's working right.
Well, I think there's constant demand for people, startups and their investors and friends who want me to write about them. I think the real challenge is how do I get the wider ecosystem to care about these early stage startup stories because I think the real hard part is let's say a Sequoia or an Excel is like Alex we'd love you to write about our new series A funding round like that's good like you want them to be thinking of Upstarts alongside the Journal or whoever. The hard part is would the person at Excel read a story if the other firm invested? You know, will Excel read about a Sequoia company that I wrote about or vice versa? And I think we're all so busy and the attention economy is so brutal right now that that's the challenge for me is to get everyone to care about these early stage startups, not just their supporters or their investors.
Completely. I think it's so hard figuring out how to pitch your company to media. Like a lot of us as founders train how we pitch to investors, how we pitch to recruits and customers. If you had a tip to a lot of the founders out there, whatever the stage, like what do you think is the best way to approach someone to get your company covered?
Yeah, I think the first insight that I think is valuable that I have to embrace myself as a founder is nobody cares about what you're doing like you do. Nobody cares. That's kind of a motto is like default is that nobody cares. And once you embrace that and accept it, then you think, okay, how do I win them over to maybe care a little bit? But you know the default is that we're all busy. We're all skeptical about reading about another startup. And so can you tap into a bigger trend? Is what you're working on really topical? Like I've written about multiple companies doing agentic security because I think as you have agents involved in commerce, you have agents going from proof of concept to actual scale, empowerment to make a purchase or talk to a customer. That of course has created a lot of security concerns, right? And so those smaller startups tap into a trend that I'm already interested in. If you're in a new category that nobody cares about yet, you have to sell me on the excitement of the category, right? Like why is this going to be the next big thing? And sometimes I'll get it, sometimes I won't.
Yeah, that's great advice. It's like my... I've talked about my wife in these episodes, but she's also a founder and whenever I find myself getting frustrated at, you know, one of my employees as a founder or an investor or whoever, right? She always reminds me no one cares as much as you do as the founder. So, like, you know, she says it nice in this, but like shut the [__] up. And I feel like you almost need to have that same approach when you're pitching your media stories. Which is like you got to find your person and also find a way to share your company.
Well, my wife is also a real reality check for me often. I'll be grinding till 3:00 a.m. and I'll say that's just founder mode and she'll be like but was every meeting you took today actually high impact? You know, could you have maybe managed your time better to not be working at 3:00 a.m.? There's, you know, I think it's a reminder that there's no inherent nobility in just grinding long hours. We can always be more efficient. And so that's the kind of feedback, the tough love I get.
I think I get the same tough love and I think it's so great to have a partner that calls you on your [__]. I was actually just talking with a managing partner of a pretty big fund and he was saying the same thing about his wife and I think that is really under-indexed and how important your partner is and that trend that you're hitting on. You can't just brute force and work hard and create something. Alexis Ohanian talked about this. He's like, it's almost insulting to think if you just work really hard, you can create this exponential billion dollar thing or this really valuable media company. It's also catching lightning in a jar. So, I think mindfulness is so important. So, you're obviously like working at 3 a.m. to get the right stories and talk to the right people, but how have you balanced the year one grind of Upstarts with mindfulness to be able to show up in the best way on the most awesome podcasts or with getting the best founders and the best stories? Like, how do you balance that?
It's funny because one of the first events I spoke at after launching the company this year was in Miami this spring and I flew down and I spoke at a couple things and I thought, okay, this is a pretty good use of a couple days. But at the same time, a founder was on stage at the same event and basically was like, you know, in the back of my mind, I feel guilty that I'm here because I should really be building my business right now. And I didn't fully get at the moment how much that would resonate with me. But I do think that you just always now have to be playing multiple games at once. It's like we're playing Jenga and we're talking right now, but on some level my brain is also thinking about my deadlines later this week, right? Like you were just always operating on multiple levels at once. And I think that is definitely a challenge that a lot of journalists don't have at a big publication. And one of the biggest challenges to become a media entrepreneur is to be also thinking about the business side, the growth side. You can't really let any of them drop. So I am the kind of person who would love to just go deep on research or a project. I get very excited about something. I can spend hours engrossed in one idea. Can't... that's a luxury now. You know, you really have to earn that. And so that's something that has just been a constant adjustment for me. Am I having a healthy number of biz dev meetings, forecasting meetings? Am I looking at the numbers even if I don't really want to because I'm worried they're not going to be amazing? Like am I forcing myself to do all the company building and not just creating a product?
What's been an activity that helps you create that balance between like all the business things? Like for me, I got hugely into weightlifting and then I also do therapy. So those two things max and keep me somewhat balanced as a CEO. Have you found in your year one the thing that gets you not to be up at 3:00 a.m. or are you still like in the wind because you're spinning many plates?
It's interesting because I love going to the gym and it does... this is really wobbly. This might be the real... I pulled some from the bottom.
Okay, just to spice it up.
Well, I just want to... you know, I once did a story where I interviewed Magnus Carlsen about a chess startup he was working on. He's, you know, for anyone who doesn't know, he's by far the best chess player in the world. And as a joke, I said to the VC firm that was pitching it or whatever, I said, you know, I'll only write about Magnus if he plays a game of online chess with me as part of the interview, and he said yes. But then I found out to my horror that you can't play a private game on chess.com. And so random people started to tune in and be like, "Why is the number one ranked chess player in the world playing a random game with like Joe Schmo?" Who's like imagine it's like Serena Williams just going and suddenly is on ESPN 2 playing like a nobody in tennis. And so people tuned in and watched as I just got slaughtered. But I survived more moves than my friends thought I would. And that was... it was just like how can I hang in there and survive? And this is now... you're obviously the Magnus Carlsen of Jenga. So I'm just really in the same boat. But in terms of like we were talking about strategies or...
I was talking about balance. So like what is a fun thing or what is a way to sort of balance yourself while you're spinning all those plates.
Right. So I think having a project that I believe in that I'm excited about that is fun to work on is key because if all the work feels like work obviously being a founder can really suck if you're not enjoying what you're building you don't believe in it. I've already had a couple moments just in the first year where it's like you know nothing feels fun. It's like you're just grinding so hard. You're working long hours. The payoff isn't quite there yet. And so you're sort of like gosh this is not a great time. But I find that for me refocusing on hey I have this project coming up like my own upcoming podcast that I can be really excited about that makes the rest feel a little less painful. And then I think just finding moments like I don't go to the gym enough but when I do it feels great. So it's actually on my list always like how do I find ways to go to the gym more. You can tell me how to be a dad and go to the gym and do this stuff because for me my personal care usually falls by the wayside first, but when I read a book or I just spend an evening logged off with my wife, I always feel much better.
I mean, the best advice I can impart is everything is one. So, integrate it all together. And for me, I realized like, oh, going to the gym and having that downtime in my brain actually lights up other things. And so, in a way, I'm being paid to go to the gym and think about that stuff. And if I'm not showing up the best, you know, I won't get the most exponential opportunities. And that's usually, in year one, I'm at year one and a half for my current business. And so I finally was able to start getting some really awesome people involved and that takes the pressure off some of those things. But, you know, I love your story about just spinning all the plates. And I think also in the media space is incredibly interesting and challenging as well. So like what do you think as you look to the next year with Upstarts like where do you see huge opportunity for independent media and where are you pushing your brand?
Yeah. So I think one challenge for a lot of us that is also possibly an opportunity and you have to tell me whose move it is because I don't even remember. Is it my move?
It's my... No, it's my move. I'm holding, stalling.
I'm holding it to get you with the great question.
That makes sense. Let the record show that it wasn't me stalling.
No. Look, the good thing and the bad thing is that in a way I am my product. So, while I have a lot in common with the startups that I talk to and I love talking to founders every day, we're all building something a little different, of course. And in my case, often it's very different from an AI software tool or something like that because I'm not quite an influencer, but in a way, I am kind of a creator where I am the brand in a lot of ways. And so, the do things that don't scale cliche is my entire life. So, I work with a fractional business development person. I work with a producer, but I don't have full-time employees because I'm not sure what they could exactly do that would 10x our business right now. And I never want to be a media company that hires a bunch of people, raises money, falls into a growth trap, and then fails. So, I'm building a revenue funded, careful business. And so when I think about sort of scaling, it's sort of like how will I empower people that they can grow and become stars themselves or they can really run with Upstarts in a way that I'm not basically just hiring a chief of staff or an EA or like some of these other things to make my life easier. As a startup like yours naturally scales like you have software that works, you have smart people that work. And I think that's one challenge for people like me that if I can crack it will make my life much more easy and exciting in a year or two. Someone who's done a pretty good job of this is there's a very popular Substacker named Emily Schildt. And Emily Schildt basically has brought in a couple writers. She's launched a podcast that she's not even hosting. She's kind of building this little empire around her brand but helping grow these other people too. I think that's what you're going to see from Substack people, from other new media companies, is like we want to be very honest about who owns the IP, who can grow. And we want to basically never fall into the trap of a Forbes or some of these other media companies where you're arbitraging, you know, your margin is like labor versus the advertising dollars you're bringing in. And someone like me was one of the better paid reporters at Forbes, but even then was acutely aware that I'd sort of hit a limit and was creating a lot of profit back for my employer.
I mean, I also think AI is a perfect catalyst right now for a lot of founders, yourself included, not to have to hire a bunch of people. How destructive or disruptive do you think it's going to be to the legacy media industry?
I think AI is going to hurt journalism at the margins and then empower other things, too. I think the reality, one joke I tell people is they act like AI is going to write all this content slop. You know, we've seen people talk about Sora and AI video slop. We've seen the concern about AI slop across the board, right? There's the dead internet theory. Like, I don't know if you ever go on Reddit, but occasionally I'll be on Reddit.
That's one of my favorite theories. Do you want to tell the viewers what the dead internet theory is?
The dead internet theory is that a lot of the so-called users on a place like Reddit who are interacting with each other are bots talking to bots and that it's basically bots and not humans all the way down, right? And occasionally you will see like Reddit surfaced, the algorithm surfaced me a community recently that I don't follow called Co-worker Stories. And it was a cringy first person account of a boss who had not been recognized as the boss and had been treated as the janitor and blah blah blah. And the top comment was this is AI and then other people said yeah this is totally AI and then they started to downvote it but then the next top comment that hadn't noticed it was wow seems like a blah blah blah on the one hand the boss should have said this on the other and then someone the top comment on that was oh my god this is also AI then people said oh no the AI bots are talking to the AI bots and so that is already out there and so what does that mean for a journalist it means that we have to be curating, building a community, being known for our craft because just generating words is happening left and right. It was already happening. You know, there were already sweat shops in Macedonia and Southeast Asia that were regurgitating news under sort of pseudo legit seeming websites without AI. AI just is the latest tool for that.
That's so interesting and really well put. The dead internet theory is one of my favorites. And then oddly enough, a bunch of that is now fed back in, a bunch of Reddit data is now fed back into OpenAI and other people. And so it's just like this circular motion of slop on slop. Something I would love to write about more that I'm definitely fascinated by is how AI search engine optimization or, you know, everyone has a different term. I'm curious which one you use. I've heard AI engine optimization. I've heard GEO for generated engine optimization. But, you know, SEO for anyone who's not familiar was basically like how you played the Google algorithm and did well showing up on search engines, right? Very important for a business. And how people are now gaming ChatGPT and the AI models is fascinating to me, you know, because those Reddit posts or fake blog posts, press releases can all basically train the model to maybe have the wrong assumption. So there's actually an argument to be made that a business could put out a bunch of stupid press releases that nobody reads and just hope that a model trained off of them and took it as gospel, right?
Yeah. I mean, you can see that. So I'm a big user of Perplexity and I loved it because it used to give me really specific recommendations and I liked it because it was better than the Google search. Now Gemini has flipped and gives me better recommendations. And Perplexity like I was like what's a really cool hotel I can take my wife to on whatever and they're like the Ritz-Carlton the White Plains Ritz-Carlton and I was like wrong whereas like before it used to give me like a really cool recommendation so I think that optimization is already happening and yeah I wonder I think you do kind of seed it with slop in different ways and there needs to be like a QA around it.
Yeah, you... I think you have to hope that quality still has a place. I mean, I don't know how much time you spend on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has been weirdly good for Upstarts, more so than when I worked at Forbes. You know, I think traditional media and big institutions get no engagement on social media, including LinkedIn.
Yeah. New brands like Upstarts, you know, and I'm sure you see this too if you do post. We get more actual response, more involvement, but I never want to go too far and really just write like you can use software now to basically write generated fake posts every day. I don't want to do that. There's whole people for years that would just write your LinkedIn... Like half the founders I know that are writing really intense hustle porn type LinkedIn posts. Like they're literally paying some shop in Israel to run their account and get them tons of followers.
It's true in X as well. I mean a lot of the tech people, sort of thought leaders on Twitter/X are not actually writing those posts, right? One time I was sitting with one of them when one of their sort of engagement bait posts went up and I said, "Okay, you definitely didn't send that." And they were like, "No, that's so funny."
So I want to cover a bit around how you pick stories as well as what you like to cover. So for the audience that doesn't know, you used to cover companies like Foursquare and Zocdoc in our backyard here in New York. Oh yeah. So like lots of respect for you.
First story on WeWork, you know. Still alive. I shouldn't say RIP, but yeah.
If he would have lasted a little longer, Adam would have hit the trend because everyone wants fractional workspace now. So, it's so funny how timing works. But whereas where I was going with this is like you were covering founders and companies that got big in New York while everyone else was covering the Valley. Now with Upstarts, you're covering companies that are earlier, pre-IPO, not these mega billion companies yet. Like what's the bet you're making there? And why like what's the next horizon that you're covering and tell me a bit about why you chose to cover those.
Yeah, totally. So I think on one level another startup lesson that I believe in is you know your right to win and finding your right to win and basically not burning yourself out or spending a lot of resources competing in a market that you are not ready to dominate. And I think of course there are exceptions to this and there are challengers who just kind of go swim upstream like that. But I think for me I've always looked for like where's the market opportunity? Where's the gap where someone could just eat up some space, make a mark? And so back in the day a lot of tech reporting was based in San Francisco. And I think San Francisco reporters were, you know, they still are very SF-centric but even back then they were extra SF-centric. And so there was kind of a gap in coverage around some of the emerging exciting startups in the New York ecosystem. And I think that led me to cover ad tech. It led me to cover, you know, some of the other interesting areas that New York was good at. Then I got to go national international with the coverage. But if you look at some of my favorite cover stories, Canva was in Australia and people kind of discounted it as not going to be a huge business. I covered UiPath before it went public. That was in Romania and then even in Silicon Valley I wrote a piece about Zoom when everyone thought Zoom was stupid. You know, I had to... it was funny. I had to write a piece for Forbes about Zoom. Then COVID happened and Zoom exploded and they had me do it again as a cover story because suddenly even Forbes was like, "Wait, we should have done it. We should do a big story on Zoom." And I was like, "Yeah, I did that a year ago." And they were like, "Oh, can you do it again?" So I'm always just looking for where is there an untold story that someone who is dedicated, hardworking, asks the right questions can have an impact. And I just think right now it's fun to talk to early stage startups and there is that market opportunity where it's hard to get quality in-depth reporting about again startups that are not necessarily just huge AI companies or super controversial but are doing something interesting. It's TBD. How much one can make money from that, how big you can get. But that is at least my play right now.
Yeah. I love that. So, we're both New York guys and I think there's obviously a lot of gravity for the foundational models and the AI community in Silicon Valley and New York is still kind of behind the ball on large AI companies coming out of the New York tech ecosystem. Where do you see... do you think that is because New York doesn't necessarily have the AI tech talent that San Francisco has like the deep research teams or do you think New York is going to be more the second chapter because we have more access to distribution and have different types of companies. So like for instance my company is partially here as well and we're a bit of a different type of AI company. So, really curious how you see New York from just like a New York founder and a New York journalist mixing up into AI. Because you know right now the Valley seems to be where all the action is.
I think we're in a moment in the tech cycle where research and hardware are where the obvious growth and crazy valuations are and Silicon Valley will win on research and hardware. And so if you think about, you know, the big labs like Anthropic, OpenAI, you think about the newer companies like Thinking Machines or some of these robotics companies like Physical Intelligence, it makes sense to me that they're in Silicon Valley. And I think when they're raising billions of dollars at these huge valuations, they're going to get a lot of attention, right? I think New York has always been where I see tech meeting the real world in a lot of ways, meeting commerce, meeting finance and retail and culture in a lot of ways. And so I think we will have a few infrastructure companies that are successful in New York. Modal is one example. We had MongoDB here pre-IPO and I think we'll still have a few of those.
Of course, Datadog is great. And I think over time the real question will be who is the WeWork, Zocdoc kind of companies like that. Blue Apron, remember all these category creators come out of here and I think we will see more AI enabled companies there and then I think we'll see companies like Ramp which is based here do more and more with AI until it's sort of a silly question like is Ramp an AI company? It's a fintech but it does a lot in AI and so I think a ton of AI related people will be employed by tech companies here. I just don't think it'll be, you know, those Stanford PhD AI researchers working on a new frontier model here so much. But I mean, Hugging Face employs people here. OpenAI is opening an office here. These companies will be here, but I think they'll do a lot of sales here, a lot of marketing here, and then they'll all fight over the same few Stanford PhDs who can, as we've heard, command like hundred million dollar salaries or something insane. That is not the experience of most people in startups.
Well, here's a sleeper and maybe this isn't so much of a sleeper thing, but MIT, early Cursor, early Merkore I believe there... I don't want to name the incubator because I don't want to put them on blast but there's like a loosely affiliated incubator of sorts that's loosely affiliated to MIT and there's obviously a huge amount of research talent there and they stay on the Eastern Seaboard and so I think there is the right alchemy of something really amazing big companies to happen here and I'm kind of excited to see what it is but I think you're making a great point that it's likely not going to be like the quantum chip companies or the research team. I think it's going to be much more in the applied AI space or the enterprise AI enablement. More on the... New York's always been more about the distribution side of things historically and that's where I think we'll end up playing.
I think one challenge is that MIT has produced a lot of great AI founders, but even a lot of the ones that I think of today and several that you mentioned such as Merkore have moved to the West Coast. So yes, there's like east coast traces in them, but I think if you are a deep math, deep research company, you feel a lot of pressure to move to the Bay Area.
Well, I mean, the talent pool, but if you're trying to build, you know, the next Shopify or, you know, the next whatnot, whatever it's going to be, and those companies are obviously still around and growing, I don't see why you would need to do that in San Francisco. You know, I don't see why the next Stitch Fix needs to be in San Francisco, even though the last one was. I also think there's a huge opportunity for European talent. So like a lot of the research teams are coming out of Europe. We have Mistral which is a very good foundational model out of France. Lovable an awesome applied AI company out of Stockholm. So I think there is an opportunity for New York also to pull talent from Europe to help seed and feed businesses here as well.
Well selfishly that's why I like Upstarts being in New York is I go to the Bay Area every month but it's also easy to go to London. I'll be there in February hosting a couple events and I've already written about several startups in the UK and Europe. One is one that I use all the time. Granola is my app. So that's led by an American who lives in London and he said to me when we wrote about him earlier this year that he likes being outside of the echo chamber. He said that if he had been in the Bay Area, Granola would not exist the way it is today because they would have fast followed on to every flavor of the month trend or fashion. But being in London actually allowed him to focus and spend a year refining the product he wanted. And I love stories like that.
That's an upstart story to me.
Yeah, that's an incredible point. And in a lot of ways, I think of AI sort of more akin to the microprocessor than cloud computing. Like cloud computing happened once. The microprocessor just exponentially evolved and then the people who could apply the microprocessor the best had the best technology. And so I think really your speed to iteration is probably the way to win. So, like when you were like, 'Is Ramp an AI company or a fintech company?' I think Eric would say, 'It doesn't matter.'
Because he's a beast at iterating and he's like, 'I'm going to go take a huge chunk out of Concur's ass,' right?
I think what Eric would probably say, and Eric, come on the show if you haven't been yet, is that they're a growth company. I mean, they just care about growing and they just continue to grow so fast. And that was actually a challenge with our Cloud 100 list at Forbes was, you know, it was around for 10 years. They published their 10th year after I left this year. But even as I was thinking about leaving Forbes, it was sort of like everything is cloud now, you know?
