Why Cursor is Dead

Hey, happy to be here.

thing I think about a tsunami is that it’s harmless when it’s out at sea. It’s only dangerous when it hits the beach. That’s number one. Number two, it’s messy. You’re to get maybe an earthquake or two notifying you there’s something something possibly coming. And it’s not just one wave. There’s these pre-peak waves and post-peak waves, but there’s an event coming that is more than a single product. And in this case, it’s autonomous agents. Autonomous agents is, is, in my opinion, what the tsunami is about, not just AI in general.

I’m not a doomsayer, but I am one to say, look, change is coming fast and you need to anticipate that. You need to be on top of that. And, you know, the idea of, oh, I can just bolt on AI to my company. It’s possibly true. You can maybe get an exit. But being AI native and thinking that way is to make you a better company. And thinking deeply about what is going on in the in the communities that are driving the tsunami. right? Those open source communities that are popping up in massive amounts, they’re the ones that are to have the big impact.

If look look at real true AI startups like E2B or Eventual or Lotus AI, Get Dynasty, these are all native AI companies that are up and running. Ovens, another great one. What’s happening with them is they’re all using OpenClaw, Claw or one of their own homemade, you know, autonomous agents. And I think that’s not obvious yet in the marketplace because it’s only about two months old. These guys have been doing it for anywhere from two weeks to six weeks roughly that have brought in autonomous agents to actually write code.

That’s the thing that I think is mind blowing.

Yeah, I’ll tell you. So for most of the companies I just mentioned, their view, as they’ve told me, is Cursor is obsolete. That’s where the product is today. Now my view is, yeah, but that team is really smart. They’ve got a lot of money and a lot of customers. They’ve got time to embrace autonomous agents, which is what I think they’ll do. And they’ve got shots to pivot and figure out what the next direction is. But, you know, in the AI business, you’ve to be going where things are to be.

You can’t be thinking about yesterday. So I think those guys are to have to quickly embrace autonomous agents.

Great question. Look, first thing you gotta do is look at Open open Claude and look at the community, the commitment to open source and the number of people developing for it. I mean, you can look at huge companies like OpenAI and you can look at Anthropic putting massive resources. And and then you look at open source and you’ve got sheer numbers of people doing integrations, massive amounts. If that community keeps accelerating and growing, we’re to see agents do incredible things that they don’t have today. When I think of an autonomous agent, first of all, we’re to have to come up with what we call a claw stack or some form of stack for the autonomous agent.

Back in, you may not remember, back in 2003, 2004, we were post the world was miserable. People couldn’t afford to build websites with Sun servers and Oracle databases, which were expensive. But the LAMP stack came out, was Linux, Apache, web server, MySQL database, and PHP front end development tool. And that led to the explosion in 2004, of of websites and ultimately commerce. Google went public in 2004 and rode that wave brilliantly. And I think in the same thing with autonomous agents that you’re to find the open source community coming out with the stack. right? right? now, you’ve got a reasoning layer that’s dominated by Claude and Codex and Gemini.

I think what’s to happen with the autonomous agents is ultimately they’re to have an orchestration layer where they can have multiple different LLMs, you know, that they can orchestrate on and triage workflows. They’ll triage workflows and say, hey, for this part of the workflow, let’s use Claude. They’re expensive tokens, but they’re to get the job done better. And then for this other part of the work, let’s use an open source model like DeepSeek, Llama Llama 3, whatever, you know, and they’re to start from a big picture.

Maybe this is to happen as soon as orchestration gets solid enough. They’re to determine where the workloads go for reasoning models, which is to be super powerful. And my guess is this will lead to the rise of open source models more proficiently, and that going to lead to the rise of ASICs chips. Because what’s to happen with ASICs is you’re to put the model on the chip. You know, ASICs is to be a lot cheaper, a lot more tunable for a specific workload than an expensive chip from Jensen.

So I think that we’re to see massive development of of autonomous agents influencing open source models and Asics chips. From the big picture, that’s a revolution.

Well, it’s the thing that wasn’t mentioned as to why he bought Grok. He needs that capability so that he can handle ASICS chips eventually. right? I mean, because Grok, those guys know how to put memory right on the chip. And so that’s automatically an ASICS chip today. And so I think Grok is not just about handling different types of workloads and getting memory on the chip. It’s about making sure that CUDA can also support ASICS chips. They know what’s coming. They absolutely know what’s coming. And so so I think the Grok acquisition is to help them make sure that CUDA is viable for the ASICS ASICS explosion that’s coming.

Depends on execution. This is the thing about the game, you know? Who’s to out execute? Who’s to get it more? A lot of people like to criticize Meta here and there about being behind the game, but they had the balls to say no to Jensen. Sorry, Jensen, we don’t need you. So why did he do that? Because he’s betting on ASICS chips. No question about it.

The answer to that question is to be decided by the autonomous agent, not developers. The agent is different than a developer. If you and I are developers, we’re to go and do something based on what our experience tells us, what we think, okay, let’s go build something here and we’re to use an ASIC chip or whatever. The difference is an autonomous agent is probabilistic. So the probabilistic nature of an is to say, I don’t know which is better ASICs or use one of Jensen’s chips. Why don’t I just go out and get 10 Python libraries, run them in 10 different sandboxes, write the work the workload, and then to see which which one performs better.

That’s what’s to happen. And so look for autonomous agents to have a more of a say in that.

That’s why you get paid the big bucks, Harry, is that no one’s to tell you what’s safe. And

I mean I I’ll tell you about 80% of the investments I’ve made have returned less than x. So it’s the 20% that made all the money in my life and made all the impact. Money is just a sort of batting score for how much impact you had as an investor. That’s the way I see it. And so there is nothing safe right now. You’re to have to watch who’s to execute the best.

To answer your question question about the markets and they over overrotate? If you go to Wall Street, you’ll see the giant bull that’s there in the statue. It’s because of a herd mentality. And yeah, I think investors are like, hey, I’m not a technologist. I’m just to sit back and watch this. Someone panicked. Maybe the others are just sitting on the sidelines. What you’re seeing is is less about panic selling because it’d be down a hell of a lot more than it is. And what you’re seeing is cautious on the sidelines buyers that are saying, hey, I don’t see a deal here.

I’m not sure I have enough information to jump back into CrowdStrike and bring the stock price up. So is it an over rotation or is it just a pause where a lot of investors are sitting back saying, hey, let’s let’s get more information about who’s to be the winners and who’s to be the losers. That’s the way I see it.

Yeah. So March 2000, almost years ago, tech stocks dropped between 30 and 40% across the board. And then if you missed a quarter, you were down over 50 or 60%. And we lived in that malaise March through the summer. And by the way, we were still able to get a couple IPOs out, but at lower multiples during that time. And we just sat in misery until which what I call was the coup de grace to finish us off. And the market got destroyed. And we were thinking, hey, you know, we don’t do .com investments and Insight.

We’re to be fine. Because we knew that in that there was a bubble, and we knew that coms were going blow up. We said, look, it just can’t be sustainable. There’s not enough commerce. There’s not enough people on dial up. You can’t do commerce on dial up, and there’s not enough fiber in the ground. So sure enough, there was a burst. However, the tsunami came in, took out the dot coms, and then took out all software. We all went down. We were in misery for years.

Well, it’s always to be a little bit different. What’s happening now is the speed at which things are changing. Like, we have this company, E2B, and you think, okay, they do sandboxes. Great. If you talk to most technology people, they don’t particularly put much of a emphasis on differences between sandboxes. It’s just a thing to keep your agent safe or keep whatever code you have safe. In reality, it’s also a productivity tool. And for the agents, if you’re making sandboxes for an agent, it’s to have a qualitatively different speed.

For example, about 400 milliseconds milliseconds is about a time period that humans can recognize a delay. So a lot of systems from mobile on that 400 millisecond millisecond time frame, and that’s what most sandboxes are. Well, E2B has sandboxes that respond in milliseconds. I’m like, wow, How no one would ever notice it. He said, the agents notice it. And that’s what matters. When an agent spins up literally sandboxes in seconds, that response time is critical.

Well, it depends. I’m an investor in Carta and have been for a long, long, time. and that’s a system of record of sorts for stocks. and it has a lot of potential. And I believe they’re doing the right thing on all fronts. But if tokenization of stocks come and they use Carta, then Carta to be infinitely more valuable. right? Because they have the cap table, they can help manage the tokenization. However, if tokenization comes and they bypass Carta and a new system of records get built, then there’s not much to say that that system of is to be worth much in the future.

So it depends on execution of the Carta management team and their ability to to go capture the trends that are coming forward.

There’s a lot of companies that sit on top of it, like Encino. There’s dozens and dozens of companies that have built on top of the Salesforce system of record. So the real question is let’s look at their health. Let’s see how they do. You know, if those guys start getting knocked off one by one and they enough of them get knocked off that they’re. the underlying value of Salesforce becomes less, then you’re to say Salesforce is going be worth less. But in the history of companies, Salesforce is like a Mount Everest, right?

It’s an 8,000 meter peak sitting there. It’s not going to melt overnight. That thing is going be around for a long time. The question is, how valuable is it? And the way to look at it, that question, the way to analyze it is how valuable are all those companies that build themselves on top of it. If those guys start going down, well, then you’re to see some issues.

It depends on what the time frame frame is. If you look at most software companies that are out there, normally when a new technology comes, it sort of expands the market before it contracts because people are already in their momentum. They’re doing what they’re doing. I wouldn’t expect to see normal software companies to see software just fall off the radar. That’s not to happen. I think what what happens is is that people get fearful and prices change and then the underlying quality of the business changes based on how well the management team adapts to the situation.

You can imagine some companies that have system of records that have great context, but actually increase value if they’re able to put that context to work you know, with agents, with autonomous agents. And then you have other people that, oh, they don’t really adjust fast enough. They don’t really understand what the new market’s like. And then their system of record or their software declines because they haven’t really moved fast enough. What we have with the tsunami happening is a wake up call to move to higher ground.

Don’t get caught on the beach when the damn thing hits the beach. Move to higher ground. And that kind of adapting of your business. Some people will do it, some people won’t.

Well, think about this. Right now, all software is eventually purchased by human beings. Software is going to be purchased or used by agents. And what’s going happen is an autonomous agent becomes an employee. You give it credentials, you give it identity, and then it’s up to the agent to make the decision. You will review them like an employee and say, hey, what did you buy? What did you spend? What did you accomplish? And you will manage that autonomous agent just like an employee. You need to prepare for that.

If whatever you got invested in, is that future going be done and controlled by agents? And am I in the right position for that or not?

First of all, it’s never happened before. So it’s happening now. My guess is the way pricing models will work better. and it’s been in process for a few years. One of my companies, Docker, has been moving dramatically toward this as they move into AI, which is a consumption based model. So if the agent has the access and has the authorization to use something, say a sandbox, you’re just to pay based on consumption. Sandbox sandbox is nothing more than you’re buying memory or buying compute. And so you just open it up.

It’s free. Start using it, and then you ultimately have to pay. and the agent will come and tell you, hey, we’ve reached our limit with the sandbox company here. What do we need to do? And that’s how it’s to work.

Look, I was just at the Olympics, and there’s a lot of people trying to win a gold medal, and not many people do. And so, you know, you can try all you want, but you better be world class at what you’re trying to do if you’re going get the medal.

Well, first of all, autonomous agents, and it may take a year or longer for most enterprises to actually enable and get committed to autonomous agents, but they’re to write software faster, cheaper than any human being on the planet. They already are. And so, again, it’s this thing of like, if you’re making your software for autonomous agents and they have a reason to use it and it’s valuable, great. you’re to do fine. But if you’re not making your software for autonomous agents, you’re to be challenged in the future.

Maybe it’s six months, maybe a year, maybe months, but you’re to be severely challenged if you still think human beings are to buy your software.

You know, I’m glad you brought that up. We’re about two and a half years from the next presidential election. I here to say that that is to be a major issue on the next presidential election. It could decide the election. It’ll be one of the most important things because there’s no easy answer. There’s no question that anyone that inputs data into a computer that does scheduling, that, you know, like an executive assistant or people doing marketing, those jobs are ultimately going be better done by autonomous agents, White collar jobs.

People have been saying that for years. I mean, is nothing new. The question is, when was it to happen? And now with the advent of OpenClaw and NanoClaw and all the other autonomous agents that are coming, there are the direct threats. First of all, not to the people with the job. First of all, to the next person in line, the next junior developer you to hire, the next executive assistant, the next marketing person. So the first thing you see is people stopping or slowing down hiring of white collar employees that input data and use a computer.

That’s the first thing. Second thing, depending on the speed at which these autonomous agents evolve, because there’s a lot that they need to do. They’ve proven it exists that they can write code and they can do anything you want from a scheduling perspective for your life. So they already can replace a human being. They will. I think that the job market’s very uneven. I think the first companies that are going go with this are to be small, medium businesses because they’re the ones that, wow, one secretary makes a huge difference in their, you know, two, three, four person company.

You don’t need humans doing it. You’ve got the autonomous agent doing it. So I think we have to look at what’s the speed at which the autonomous agents grow in three sectors, consumer, small business, and enterprise. My guess is enterprise last. This whole AI revolution, there have been last. They may catch up in a year or two. We’ll see. That’s to be what I think ChatGPT and Google and and Anthropic are absolutely going be focused on, is getting their own version of autonomous agents adopted by enterprises rapidly.

When this happens, we’re to see dramatic change. And I think politically, the minimal viable income may become a reality or at least a ballot question in two and a half years.

It means that, you know what, you’re to go and get effectively a certain amount of money guaranteed to you every month. And so that Well, if you’re a white collar person, they’ll they’ll change the unemployment program because no administration to sit there and say, yeah, I’ve presided over 15% of the country unemployed. What they’ll do is give an option to put them into a program and we retrain people to do something different, maybe to have a better quality of life. If you take the optimistic view, you know, those jobs that are to be going away are not to be jobs that get you a a vacation in Brazil anytime soon.

They’re the jobs that are you’re suffering at every day, making a living, and you’re struggling as to whether you can pay your health care or not. And so maybe those people say, I’m to move out of the city, move out of the suburb, and maybe I’m to move back to the country and and grow food. You know, I’m to get this grant to do so. There’s already innovative businesses in Wyoming where they’re taking veterans and giving them branches to lease because now with technology, one or two people can run a massive branch instead of eight people.

And so there’s new things like that happening everywhere.

Depends when it happens.

I think healthcare may hit that before the the labor market hits it because it’s to happen. We’ll find out this fall. What’s the impact of health care on the election. And if it’s a big impact, then you can assume that labor will be a major impact on the, you know, on any administration.

You know, look, people never really talk about it, but it’s all about culture. What’s your culture? If you’re looking to have a culture of a players, and Steve Jobs talked about this at Apple, you want how do you just continue to grow with a players? You’re to have a hell of a lot more agents than people. So it depends on what those 2,000 people are doing at Klarna that are left. What’s their culture like with those 2,000? If they’re all able to have a greater quality of life, have more time with the kids, maybe it’s an awesome win, you know?

But I’m not there. I’m not him, so I can’t comment.

absolutely. I mean, it’s all about how smart is your agent? How smart are you to deploy the agents and how well are you willing to listen? I think the thing that’s shocking is that autonomous agents work, that OpenClaw worked. And that’s why so many developers are so passionate about OpenCLaw because it’s something that’s working on its own without having to be reviewed. It’s an employee. You’ve gone from an assistant to actual employee. Think about that. That’s major, major, difference in life. And I think those kinds of changes are to be really important to notice.

Well, let’s go back to 9/11, There was, several of these traditional. now they’re called, you know, something more sophisticated, private equity, but they were kind of buyout shops. Teddy Forsman, who I knew ran a great one, except in 2000, he went all in on telcos, virtual telcos. Then it was over for him after 911 Done. No more Forceman Little. And so there’ll be stories like that. I don’t know about Bravo or anybody else, but they’ll definitely be PE firms that end up like Forceman Little. And then there’ll be other ones that had the right bets and did the right creativity, and they’ll be bigger and better and more important than they were before.

Life is basically a set of experiences you have and the total sum of the decisions you make. Any of these firms is about the decisions you make. And now we’re at a point in time when you need to review what your assumptions are and what decisions you’re to make going forward.

The problem is you got an old man here who’s to want have it up in the mountains in Aspen or in the or in the Alps. That’s my new thing. I’m not like Elon or Jensen that are to do this for the rest of their life. I’m just doing this for impact. I can’t even imagine going out there and doing it for the same reasons I did it years ago. It’s like Bob Dylan got interviewed they asked him, what was it like for you back in 1964 at Newport?

He says, I don’t even know who that guy was. you know, And I feel the same way. I don’t even know what that guy was like back in 1995. It’s moved on. I I was always into this business for the creative impact and to play a very small role on a team that was doing something meaningful. So I to do that. That’s to be important. But it’s just a matter of having the right amount of of wisdom about how the change is going impact people and how you’re going do it.

I mean, VC firms should have their own autonomous agents. Everybody should. I mean, can you imagine the the medical analytical work? Certainly, the PE firms are all to have autonomous agents analyzing markets, analyzing where the opportunity is. So if I was starting from scratch, the one thing I could imagine is having incredible data I could vet on a new opportunity for the white space for where these new AI companies are to go and say, wow, the data says this guy’s on the right market. He just needs to execute.

And then you evaluate not just the person, but the quality of of how they use autonomous agents. That’s to be the deciding factor for venture capitalists and startups. We’re to be on the same level playing field. How well do we use autonomous agents in our job?

Well, if we use money as a proxy for success, it’s funny, you know, with some of our mediocre companies, we thought about swapping out the CEO and it’s like, well, the problem is it’s a mediocre company, and anybody we would put in would have to already be worth, you know, a couple million So why would they do it? And so you’ve been forced to sort of limp along with the existing team because you’re just not going recruit someone better They wouldn’t be successful. There’s no validation unless they’ve made a lot of money.

So number one, it’s a proxy for success, and success is a combination of experience and validation of when and how to make decisions. For me, there’s two components to every decision. There’s the logic, and the second is the intuition. And you need the intuition. And so the one thing that the autonomous agents aren’t to have is intuition, not anytime soon. And so we need people. We need good intuition to make good decisions. And without that component, you’re not to succeed. So in my humble opinion, maybe I’ve got better intuition, and that’s the reason I’ve been more successful.

Good question. The first thing is, how do you know it’s really intuition and not wishful thinking? So that’s the first thing I’ve I’ve I’ve learned over time that intuition was almost never wrong. But what I was wrong was me thinking it was intuition. It was nothing but wishful thinking.

When I found an entrepreneur that I liked, it was smart, but maybe too comfortable. Maybe a a person I liked as a human being more, and they weren’t crazy enough. They weren’t really driven enough. They didn’t have that chip on their shoulder. They didn’t have that obsession. You know, because, you know, you want work with people you like. And so most of the people that I liked were the ones that let me down and let themselves down. It’s the people that you struggle with that are a little sharp edged, that are a little aggressive, and that you may not like as people that are like, wow, okay, well, but they might be the ones that succeed.

And you have to find that core of humanity in them that you can like them and help them. But most of the most successful people are to be challenged socially.

Yes. you if you don’t change, you die. Changing is what allows you to adapt to the world. I mean, the most interesting thing if AI, if look look at feature stuff is new startup about this visual representation of the world. I mean, what she’s clearly articulated is that, you know, language is is a very subpar descriptor of the world. It’s It’s just limited. So for autonomous agents, we need a new system where we can visually recognize the world to be able to have an an objective view of reality for the autonomous agent.

That’s why we have poets, because we can’t really describe the world in enough detail with language, but we can give you a feeling about it. I think that that what we have to do in the world is to definitely be aware that we have limitations in understanding that with language.

You know, there’s a great British actor I had lunch with once named Kenneth Branagh, and he was reflecting on exactly that question. He said, he’s made Hollywood movies, but but he’s done a lot in theater, a lot with Shakespeare. And he said, you know, I could have been more like Olivier that went to Hollywood and did Hollywood films late in life, but I didn’t. I chose a different path. And for Branagh, I think he was very happy he didn’t move to Hollywood. He could have had that career.

And he’s 65, now looking back and he’s saying, yeah, I could have been that. But you know what? I’m really happy I didn’t do that. So maybe you’re like Kenneth Branagh. You’re to be happy you didn’t do to Hollywood. I didn’t we we started in New York. I’ve never left Aspen. I lived in New York part time. I never moved away from Aspen. Jeff and I found Insight in New York City, and I cover the West Coast because it was a lot quicker for me. But Jeff and I just lived on airplanes for the first years, you know, and that’s how we handled it.

Back in the day, that was pretty revolutionary. Remember, Silicon Valley was all about people walking down the street. There was VCs that said, I don’t invest in anything more than five miles from my office.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, look, look, you you choose your life, you choose your path. You shouldn’t regret it if you’re getting what you want and you’re growing as a person. The most important thing looking back is what have you learned about yourself? When I would talk to our younger partners, like you had Jeff Lieberman on your show and some of our other partners, I’d say, hey, guys, you know, it it doesn’t help to get super rich early like you have, unless internally you you have a sense of self and you’re comfortable with the decisions you make, because that’s the key thing.

You know, You you can become super successful early, but you’ve got to internalize that success, recognize where the failures are. If I have any wisdom at all, it’s because I fucked up so much and I’ve learned from it.

Absolutely. You’ve got to go. Hunter Thompson was a writer that lived near the Aspen area who I used to love Hunter Thompson’s works. He said, you really don’t know the edge unless you go over it. And clearly you did.

So knowing the edge, Harry, that’s what it’s all about. We’ve got to all go over the edge and hope to live to tell about it. That’s what gives you the sense of knowing. That gives you joy in life and gives you a sense of ease and comfort as you move through it.

Well, did a different kind. At 19, I got accepted to United States International University in Nairobi, Kenya. So 1977, I get on a plane, go to Europe, hitchhike around for a couple of months, and then I go spend six months in Africa. I spent spent weekends documenting traditional dances with the director of BOMAS. I was out in the hinterland, and Kenya is the size of Texas with, you know, 13 major tribes with individual clans and dialects, and we wanted to document it all. And going out and living with these people on the weekends was going over the edge.

I mean, I ate things I’d never believed I’d eat again. I mean, I had lived in little huts with goats. You know, it was not a pretty sight.

Oh, that we hadn’t done. In the early days of Insight, the big mistake, we hired some famous guy to start Insight Europe. And after six months, we shut it down. It was It It was a mistake and a half. We were not mature enough to do that. And Europe was something. well, you know, we we loved Europe early on. Fund one had an investment called SLP in Paris. Fund two had a company called MetaQuattro in Spain. It went public. That was a big win. We did deals in Portugal.

We did deals in the Czech Republic in the 90s. So we thought, oh, let’s do a fund. Big mistake. Too much difference. Too much. We needed to stay in New York together. We needed to focus. We needed to learn from each other. Having people in Europe was too challenging. That was a mistake that we made.

That’s a function of the team. That’s a function of who’s involved and that a function of experience. You know, Overall, if I were to invest in a company, I would be very suspicious of remote management because human beings today need it. As we move to autonomous agents in human beings, that’s a good question. You know, that’s a very good question. I don’t know how the is to play out, but in the past, remotely managed situation, I know for me, because I didn’t live in New York.

As a co-founder, it was really hard on my team for me to fly in, fly out, fly in, fly out. And because you have to make decisions remotely. You have to sit with an entrepreneur. You’re in San Francisco and you have to commit now. And you’ve got a whole team in New York. You know, it’s really tough being that remote guy. You know, if you’re all local and you’re all sitting in the same office, you gotta make a decision tomorrow. It’s a lot easier. So I would argue that remote decision making is very difficult.

One correlation you can look across all VC funds and look at their vintage, whether it’s a vintage or 2004, 2005 vintage. And the one correlation you can make to success was timing. If you did a fund in 2005, 2006, you were in great shape to take advantage of the mobile thing that started happening in 2008 when Steve Jobs got 10 million subscribers from AT&T. AT&T. That’s when mobile became real. So if you had an an ’05, ’06 fund, fund, you had a chance to get some of the best, most iconic companies.

But if you start a fund in 2009, you’re to miss being early in Twitter. You’re to miss being early in Facebook. You’re to miss being in Uber. You’re to miss all that. So timing is the most important thing, whether you’re early stage or late stage. You can’t apply it to just an overall general strategy. Depends on the timing of when you did the investment.

Absolutely the best time. You’re in a sea change. Humans are no longer to be the decision makers about software. It’s to be autonomous agents. This sea change, this tsunami is so different than anything that’s come in the past that people that embrace this new model can embrace it from scratch right now, can have a huge advantage over people that have been successful with older models that don’t quite move fast enough because they’re already rich. They already made a lot of money. Hard to get old old dogs to move fast.

Here’s the Here’s the secret. Here’s the the real secret. I never left the game. I retired from inside. I retired from negotiating term sheets. I retired from board seats. I retired from internal investment committee meetings. I retired from having dinners with LPs and answering LP phone calls. But I didn’t retire. I haven’t done a single investment on my own that someone didn’t bring me that I love and I trust. Every investment that I’ve done, which is over 100 has come from someone close to me and said, Jerry, I need your help to help me think about this thing.

And through that process of trying to help someone else, I end up in it. And that’s been fun because it’s an experience that you’re not doing on your own. Your experience you’re doing with people you care about.

That’s the only way I played the game. And I mean, I went big on my things, you know, when I invested in Twitter in 2009, there was 30 something people, no revenue. My fund for like, are you kidding me? was a watershed moment that my partners allowed me to make that investment. What did you see? What I saw, and this is really interesting, like our early investments, the idea of Twitter, which I call the status update for the world, was so brilliant, so over the top.

It was far better than anybody on the team’s ability to execute against it. So I think Twitter could have been infinitely a more interesting company. But VCs got involved and created politics, and they fired Jack Dorsey early and they created issues. And the company was pretty messed up from that trauma of firing one of the founders. And at the same time, they were very excited and the community was growing. The community was helping it. And for me, I saw an incredible idea that wasn’t easily replicated.

And there was enough momentum to it that this was for me a no brainer. And it was the the bet that I put my entire reputation on the line. I got Jeff Horn and Devin Parekh to jump in with me on this, and we I pushed really, really, hard. We did that investment less than days from the time I met the team and the time we closed, And it turned out to be a watershed investment for the company and got us into lots of things like consumer and things we weren’t doing at the time.

That was that was just because the quality of that idea was insanely great.

I was lucky because I was losing money every year I’ve been in this business. I failed. So I was always, you know, balanced in that I knew I was to fail. I knew it was to be miserable, but I knew I was to win some, you know, and we were fortunate to do what we did. You know, we were very, very fortunate, but failure to me was always part of my job and I had to just suck it up. And so there was nothing that came down the pipe that caused me to lose confidence because I’d been taking and dealing with it from day one.

I would have him go buy a Mac Mini, have an open claw, and go to the, a job interview with his open claw.

Oh, that’s easy. The The partners at Insight, I mean, what what we’ve really built is one of the great sourcing engines of the world. I mean, Mike Triplett, Jeff Lieberman, Devin, these guys all just were focused on sourcing and managing their teams. And they and to get through the gauntlet of Insight due diligence and get to something that could be funded was a pretty big accomplishment. I think that those guys were the absolute best sourcers in the world.

I don’t to build egos up, but Peter Fenton, John Doerr early on, those guys were astounding at picking deals.

Oh, wow. I had the founders of Truecaller in Sweden come to Aspen. I I said I’m not to invest in them, but they took their last dollars to get a plane ticket to Aspen. And they came to me and it was. this was written about in the information by Amir Efrati, the story about it. But basically, these guys were nice guys and I couldn’t let them down. I didn’t want told them, I don’t want to invest, but I’ll help you. And I ended up helping him and giving them some money and making it a successful company.

And it went public a few years ago. and it was a great company for a number of years, but that’s one I did not want go into. I didn’t want go to Sweden, but I liked the guy so much and they came out and asked me I said, okay, I to do it.

The used car salesman knows that he’s lying.

It depends what stage you get me a shot in.

That’s a I take them both. I take them both, but I think for me, it’s it’s OpenAI because I got 800 million people using it. you got 800 million people doing it. When you cross a billion, then you’re there. Like, I’m not that big a Bitcoin fan. I’m big in in a couple of crypto things, but until you get to a billion users, I’m suspicious of of any consumer technology.

They can and they are long term better assets. They’ve got. if I have an autonomous agent business and I’ve got Gmail, you’re to have a phenomenal asset that OpenAI doesn’t have. But the issue is who’s got 800 million people getting to a billion first? I mean, look, you can say there’s a billion users on their other properties like YouTube and things. But if you can convert OpenAI’s chatbot to my own Jerry Murdock autonomous agent from ChatGPT, which I I think what Peter Steinbringer is to do, you’re to have an insanely great business.

Very easy answer. Money does not come with instructions.

Well, everything else you buy, you get. You know, you got a Rivian, it comes with instructions. You get an iPhone, it comes with instructions. Money doesn’t come with instructions, so you need to learn to respect it. It’s energy. Money is the equivalent of energy, and you need to respect it. You know, you don’t just leave the lights on at home and the air conditioner on your home all day long while you’re gone. You respect energy. You you treat it with respect, and you use it for good and you use it to make things happen, and you don’t waste it foolishly being an idiot.

You don’t want go to Las Vegas and hand out $100 bills to just random people. Take that energy and do something great. I mean, I don’t know. As was Larry Page has said if he had extra money, he’d just give it to Elon to let him build things to change the world. I I think that if you’ve got money, you’ve got energy, you can give it to entrepreneurs. They’ll do amazing things.

Well, you know, it’s like you’ve had a fantastic life, you look back and you say, it’s already great. Why would I change it? You know, number one. Number two, that guy, when I was younger, he wasn’t ready for kids. he All he was doing was building a business. He was building

I would have been divorced and a pretty sad character probably. Look, I mean, when Jeff and I went out to raise money and we were getting sand kicked in our face, he was 30. I was 35 or 36. We both had acne. I mean, nobody wanted to give us money. Me, that guy with kids, I I can’t imagine him, you know? imagine he’s a disaster.

You know, it was the fact that we survived 9/11. I mean, I mean, if you to know Insight had incredible funds, you know, fund one, these incredible successes, fund one and two are still some of our best funds ever. And then fund three Our 99 fund was like all challenged and it did pretty well, all things considered. But the fact that we survived that collapse, a lot of VC firms were zombies, walking dead, partners splitting up, people going different directions. We hung in there. We hung in there and survived.

That’s the breakthrough moment.

I would say your kids are always, always watching you. So use that as an opportunity to be your best self. Put your heart first and be your best self every moment of the day that you can with those kids.

There was a movie in the 1950s called The Long Hot Summer, and the character Big Daddy was dying of cancer. And at the end of the movie, things were working out with the family. and he says, I feel like I’m to live forever. And I think about autonomous agents and AI, and maybe it’s to help me live forever. That’s what I think.

Yeah. I mean, what I’ve heard is if you can live another five years, you’re to extend another five years. So if you’re whatever state of health you’re in today, if you make it five five years, you’re to at least get five years in the back end.

Oh, it’s great and great catching up with you again, Harry.