Very True by Verissimo

Alex (00:00)
Welcome back to another episode of Very True by Verissimo. Today I've got a very longtime friend joining me, Alex De Simone. We overlapped at Stanford, we were both trained mechanical engineers, and then we spent years together hanging out in San Francisco with an awesome group of people. Alex is the founder and CEO of Avachato, a messaging platform for businesses. One of the things I like to do on the show is talk about the way things were. Ten years ago, if you called a company and nobody picked up, you waited on hold. Texting a business wasn't a thing.

That's the problem Avachato was built to solve. And now it's so normal, nobody thinks about it. That's really the thread of this whole episode. Somebody solves a hard problem, it becomes infrastructure, and then everybody forgets it was ever hard. That's progress, but it also creates blind spots. The best example is Alex's own. When his cloud bill started getting out of hand, instead of accepting it as the cost of doing business, he and his founding engineer went and built their own servers in a data center. Everyone had told them, you don't do that anymore.

Turns out you can, and it's a lot cheaper and higher performance for their specific use case. From there, we get into whether software is approaching its final form, why learning to code mattered less than learning to think like an engineer, and what we'd tell someone in their 20s trying to figure it all out right now. Let's get into it.

Alex (02:07)
welcome back to another episode of Very True by Verissimo. I'm excited to have a very longtime friend, Alex Di Simone, join me today. we overlapped at Stanford and then spent a lot of time together in San Francisco hanging out with a ton of mutual friends. I think for both of us, it actually kind of

became the core of our, I'll call it like business network. and we have a lot in common. we've done pretty different things with a lot of overlap. But I'm excited to have hopefully a very engaging conversation today that covers a variety of topics, everything from cloud computing, AI, mechanical engineering, maybe even some cycling. And so I will hand it over to Alex to give

some background and intro. And I always say, take us as far back as you feel comfortable taking us.

Alex De Simone (02:52)
Awesome. Well thank you for having me on your podcast. excited to talk about all these topics and then some. yeah Alex and I we we met what like 15, 16 years ago? It was during the era

Alex (03:03)
nine or ten.

Alex De Simone (03:04)
nine or ten, yeah, maybe yeah, exactly.

I'm also a mechanical engineer, just like just like you. I studied in mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins, moved out west to do a master's at Stanford, and really got pretty deep on on fluid mechanics during that time. But if you want me to go way back, I could take you back to just my childhood. you know, a pretty strong desire to take things apart and then put them back together, I think.

My parents weren't very excited about that when I took the VCR apart. and I used it as a garage for my hot wheels. I now have a almost four-year-old son who is almost identical to me in that way. So it's exciting to watch. and a daughter who's one who is also along those lines of being very curious and tinkering. So yeah, mechanical engineer was was kind of what I

Had as a desire to do. I think at one point I wanted to be an architect, drawing and designing buildings. And yeah, that brings us here today. I started and run a software company called Avachado, which has been coming up on 10 years since inception. And happy to chat about any and all of the above as a fellow Mecchi and software geek.

Alex (04:15)
Okay, amazing. we'll start with a little bit of a what one of the things I like to do is talk about like the way things were. and so if you go back 10 years ago to when you were starting Avachado and what was new, what was going on, what was the clear and present opportunity, what was the technical problem that needed solving? Because

One of the things I've been thinking about a lot is like once a problem is solved, people tend to lose appreciation for that kind of commoditization. The first time I experienced that was when I was in investment banking, I was covering three different types of companies. I was covering enterprise software companies, I was covering internet companies, and I was covering semiconductor companies. And if you look at how hard what those companies are doing is semiconductors, it's like a thousand times harder than the other ones. And

Summic Director companies are like trading on PE like dogs, like no one cared, even though they're the underpinning of everything else interesting. And these internet companies were trading on eyeballs and and you know click-through rates and like other very loosey goosey, very what I call proxy metrics. and so there's this progression that is is it's progress, right? That's what it is. It's that like someone has a really good idea.

And then it becomes ubiquitous, commoditized, and easily copyable. And that's great. That's called progress. But there's often a lot of money to be made along the way in different parts of that curve. I think it's hard to nail it. I think it gets that concept that like it's not just a simple curve gets glazed over by a lot of investors and like what's too early, what's too late, what's the right part of that curve to be in?

From a technology perspective, from a market adoption perspective, you all kind of have to hit it all right. But I think the way that we learn how to do that better is by these history lessons. So walk us through the inception of Abuchado.

Alex De Simone (06:14)
Yeah. So going back about ten years ago, I was just coming out of business school and I had been tinkering with this prototype at the time in 2015, maybe even around 2014, just before going into business school. And I would say that problem that we were trying to solve still exists. I mean, it it's a it's a big one. It's communication and how do we use tools to communicate.

Whether

it's with our customers, our communities, our you know, our teammates. And so communication can still be a challenge. the inception of Avachado really stemmed from the original name was actually called caller Zen. And the idea was to bring a caller to Zen. In other words, when you make a phone call and someone doesn't pick up, could you send a text message? And

Really the pain point came from many experiences, but one very vivid one is being in in the dorm room at at Stanford Business School trying to set up internet and being on the phone with Comcast for a very long time. and just waiting on hold, right? And I would imagine there are still examples of that where you have to call and wait on hold. a notable one recently was Pods, a company that

sends you a container for storage. I had to call and still waited on hold. you know, and companies have come a long way since

Alex (07:32)
Well, now it they've

innovated. So now they call you and then put you on hold. That's what I get now. They they call

Alex De Simone (07:37)
Right. You can schedule a call back and then be on hold.

Alex (07:40)
you. It's not even a callback. It's just like you answer the phone and they're like, your number, caller number seven. I'm like, you called me.

Alex De Simone (07:48)
The the calling world is fascinating. And and Avachado does a the a fair bit of phone calls too. So we we know the the struggle and the pain. But at the end of the day, that the the problem is how do you solve a need from a customer or how do you get a message across to a teammate? If you're a large company with hundreds of thousands of employees, a big challenge is getting everybody to sign up for their benefits for open enrollment. And they need to do so by a deadline. And so text messages have actually become

very effective at converting that message and getting folks to pick their benefits. And so, you know, we've seen a lot of flavors of communication at Avachado. And you know, for better or for worse, it makes marketing a little hard, right? Because we serve, I want to say, 30 odd industries across five different use cases. So you know it's been exciting. But that's what gets us up in the morning. It's

Solving problems for customers with whatever technology is available and whichever technology accomplishes it at an ROI positive math. You know, we we geek out just like you do on all these metrics because we wanna build a sustainable, profitable, long-term business that yields value for everybody involved. And it starts with the customer, right? Making sure that they're able to get that message across and receive it, right? Avachado is not just a one-way

communication product, it really prides itself in two way. What do we do with some when someone calls? Do we put them on hold? Do we you know offer press one to receive a text? And then you can opt in to follow up over a more asynchronous channel that is messaging, whether that's SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, you know,

whatever that flavor of

Alex (09:27)
So but again in the

Alex De Simone (09:28)
channel.

Alex (09:29)
in the historical context, like what you're explaining now, I'm assuming everyone who's listening to this has experienced in one way or another, right? Like whether you're trying to chat with customer service and you start with an AI bot and then they're like, Do you want to call us? Do you want us to call you? Do you want to ch like ten years ago, that's just not how it worked. It was just like a phone number or like a really crappy chat. And so again, what has become

kind of ubiquitous in what people's expectations are because it's frankly what they deserve. and we have the technology to do it, it it wasn't around back then. Like these, these were very acute and real communications issues. So can you give like, like what was the first customer example, like use case of the product?

Alex De Simone (10:13)
First, very first customer company called Pet Box. They you could buy gift box gift boxes for your friends, and they were treats for your pet cats, dogs primarily. And they used Avachado to send text messages out and let people know the gift box was on its way. you know, it started with that kind of delivery update notification. And you're right, back then, you know, go back to 2015, very different.

landscape for those kinds of notifications, a lot of them were email based if if even, right? so you're right, companies have certainly

Alex (10:43)
And now t Twilio existed.

Alex De Simone (10:44)
upgraded. Yes. And obviously Twilio existed, but is much bigger today than it was back then. you know, think of ride sharing, right? I mean Uber was very early to put in text messages to send out updates, right? Your drivers arriving. obviously

Alex (10:58)
But but if I remember correctly,

it's like Uber had a 2,000-person engineering team and could either use Twilio or frankly build the whole thing from scratch themselves. And

Alex De Simone (11:07)
Correct.

Alex (11:08)
so they chose to do that. But basically everyone else, it's like, hey, here's this out-of-the-box solution that's going to meet your communications needs and integrate with the tools that you have and you know, kind of down the middle go-to-market stack.

effectively infrastructure software for go-to-market teams for either you know for really any part of it, like w one to many marketing, one-to-one sales and customer service, and like everything in between across industries, teams, use cases.

Alex De Simone (11:43)
the point I think you're trying to make is you know, the difference that ten years has made in sort of the ubiquity of that of that SaaS, right? Or that service

to build on top of infrastructure to provide a solution, right? And that's largely what I think small businesses are able to get today. They they have access to you know, an entire stack right of tools to get them to do either marketing or outreach or notification based communications. But the point I wanted to make is that the challenge remains the same, right? And I would even argue that there are new challenges because

as I'm sure you've seen, AI bots can do way more today than they could even five years ago.

Alex (12:22)
Five months ago.

Alex De Simone (12:23)
five months ago, yes, exactly. The timescales are just warping everyone's reality here. But

They may not necessarily always lead to the outcome that a specific business owner may want, right? And so

Alex (12:36)
For sure.

Alex De Simone (12:36)
that there's a challenge there. I'm not saying it's impossible. It's just you need to do a fair amount of configuration, prompting to make sure that you're sending, an AI model all the data that is relevant and accurate and that you want to disclose, right? You don't want to give it data you don't want to actually disclose.

to a customer erroneously, and then they're not gonna be happy, right? When you miss their expectations. But again, that can happen with a human teammate. We all make mistakes, right, as humans. what I'm trying to say is that the the challenges have definitely evolved into very interesting challenges, right? How do you properly find this point along the spectrum of how much to automate? I mean, there's certainly value to automating communication, but then there are certain scenarios where

it is pleasing to just be knowing you're talking to a human, right? depending on whatever that interaction is meant to bring, right? I'm not talking to a bot now, am I? Are are you are you real Alex?

Alex (13:27)
So if we you might be, I don't know.

I've just I've told I've put all my podcasts into AI and said just like figure out how I would respond and then used 11 labs to you know

Alex De Simone (13:37)
That would be pretty incredible.

Alex (13:39)
do my voice. There's for sure podcasts already that exists like that. I actually saw Lance Armstrong has like a YouTube channel and it's like clearly AI generated. It's very odd. I cannot figure out what's going on exactly. so we have

A close mutual friend who's been on the podcast, Mike Sopelman, who when we all met, he was the VP of engineering at Yelp. And I think he took that job in some capacity going back to like 2006. And I remember one of his things that really like made him a VP of engineering that people cared about, frankly, and still care about, and made him very, very relevant despite

You know, Yelp was never like that huge of a company, was that they were always, again, at the time, this is going back to like 2010, 11, 12, 13, 14. they were always at the edge of where it made sense to be fully cloud. It was always like, okay, yeah, if you're small, use, you know, we mentioned like Heroku before. Like, if you're small, like you should not be managing this infrastructure. You just don't have the fixed cost basis for where it makes sense.

but if you're big, like you should be doing this stuff all on site. And now, again, people may not remember, like, there was always a line where it was like, no, no, you're too big for AWS, for GCP, or whatever. Like, you need to be doing this stuff in-house. And that line kept moving to bigger and bigger. Again, I don't even know what the right metric to use is. but it just kept getting bigger and bigger. And somehow Yelp for years stayed right at the edge of that. And so they were always like.

one of the bigger companies that was a hundred percent cloud based with nothing on-prem. And that was and that put Mike in like a really novel position and got him in front of some really cool companies as an angel investor and and as an advisor over the last several years because he was in that spot. And then again just history lesson like another thing that just people stopped thinking about.

that's a lot where we're going to take this today is like people stopped thinking about it. to preview something I just started that popped up in my head yesterday is this idea of like, is software approaching its final form? And what I mean by that is take a plastic cup, right? Nobody thinks about plastic cups anymore. They just are.

Like they just figured out how to stamp these things, how to extrude them, whatever the method is, it works now and nobody cares. But if you go way back, like I'm sure you remember this. Do you remember being at like a water cooler, you know, at like I feel like at like karate, you know, and you had these cones. They were like waxed paper cones. Like you couldn't set them down. It was a cone, and like that's what you drank.

Alex De Simone (16:26)
Classic doctor's office

Alex (16:28)
Yeah, doctor's office. Like

Alex De Simone (16:27)
water water cooler. Yeah.

Alex (16:29)
that's what you drink water out of. Like, when's the last time you saw one of those? Right. This was for

Alex De Simone (16:33)
In a while.

Alex (16:33)
me, it was in Marin County, California, right? Like this is not like third world, you know. and it's just not something people think about anymore. Like, here's what a cup looks like, this is how they work, you know, like done. there's so many other examples where we just we just don't care anymore. I mean, you mean you were talking about getting your internet set up, like

Alex De Simone (16:52)
Well, hu humans have a fascinating

Alex (16:53)
Wi-Fi router,

right? you remember, you used to get a cable modem and then you went and bought a Wi-Fi router. And then people are like, why don't we just put these two things together? Like, cause it's all the same stuff. if you want to do something fancy, like my brother-in-law is an IT guy, it's a whole different thing. But like you just have your cable modem, and that's also your Wi-Fi router, right? Like, okay, done. There's not like, which one's broken? Do you remember having to debug? Like,

Is it the router that's down, or is it the modem that's down and like you couldn't figure it out? Now it's like it's all one thing. So there's so many examples in life like this where we just stop thinking about it. And that's actually the goal. Like that is progress. you would know better than me when it comes to software. but my understanding is that if you were our parents' age and you were studying computer science, which very few people did, it was slow and boring and very

like in the minutia, right? not necessarily going back to like punch cards, but like Fortran and like these other things. everything was done very, very manually. And then all these different computer programming languages, what the reason they're good for different things is they take different challenges off your plate and automate a bunch of stuff in the background.

But like when you see the source code, it's like massively complicated. if you want to solve more important, bigger, more complicated real world problems, you need to abstract away all of those nitty gritty things. And that's how you end up with a stack, right? Because people are all trying to abstract away different pieces of it. And then just like a kid building blocks, you build your stack.

And then constantly you're updating your stack as you care more about one thing than another thing. And someone's managing that. And that is the nature of software. Like, and people employ thousands of people just to manage this from

Alex De Simone (18:44)
It's the it's the nature of

humans. I mean, you're you're so many good topics here. I mean, I think it is I guess in a way both a blessing and a curse that humans like forget and just move on, right? And and that's good because then we get to innovation and progress. And then on the other hand, remembering the past, learning about things that history can teach you.

is also something we forget about. And so I think the point you're trying to make is like, you know, things move, progress. That is human nature. That is evolution. That is where we're all headed to, you know, the next thing. But there is something interesting and exciting if I'm reading between the lines of what you're trying to say about either the nostalgia of the glass we used to eat or, you know, whatever challenges we used to solve that were harder.

But I also come back to, you know, I own a a 1987 vehicle. It is old. It is older than me by, you know, a couple months. And it's interesting how you read that manual. I have a manual for the car. It's a it's actually a textbook, it's pretty cool. And it'll tell you exactly how to fix everything in the car. And there are very detailed chapters, about 350, 400-page book.

Alex (19:54)
This is your E thirty.

Alex De Simone (19:55)
This is my E30.

And I'm looking at it right now. It's a it it it's a it's a fun car. and the point I'm trying to make is you look at a manual from a 2025-2026 car, and in the instructions it says, do not drink the oil from the car. And so there's a meme about this. I'm not making that up. And so

Alex (20:14)
It's it's it's like

at the same time, it's everything and nothing, right? It's like this barrier gets laid where it's like don't don't open Pandora's box, right? And what keeps popping into my head is like these security vulnerabilities, every major security vulnerability that's interesting enough to make the news or have a book written about it or even have a YouTube video about it, it's always some person who

Has a deep understanding of the source code and like in the firmware and the memory management and like something that's going on, like deep, deep, deep within something that's been abstracted away by who was ever programming it. And so it's this almost like forgotten about mistake that creates this issue, which it's like, it's not like modern cars are significantly more reliable than

Again, maybe 30-year-old cars, 40-year-old cars, hundred-year-old cars for sure. But it's that they solved a lot of edge cases, but they made it really complicated in doing that. And as a result, like you can't fix it. Like you will void the warranty because like it's gotten so complicated. And it's it's hard to call that good or bad. Again, like you were saying, it's just progression.

Alex De Simone (21:23)
No, but this is exactly the the

Yeah, so

Alex (21:26)
But people forget, like

they just take for granted and they forget and they move on and they're like bigger, better problems. And it's like,

Alex De Simone (21:29)
That's it. Yeah.

Alex (21:32)
you know what? If the infrastructure wasn't laid right and every edge case wasn't handled, you're gonna get, for lack of a better term, bit in the ass at some point.

Alex De Simone (21:42)
Yeah. And that's when you need to pause and ask, why, right? Like why has it always been done this way? Or why do I think in the time scale or time frame I'm looking at, has it always been done this way? by the way, awesome podcast with Mike Stoppelman. I I listened to it the other day and you know, on AI Motes, a lot of good topics there. and yeah, Mike and I talked about this a lot around, you know, what you were pointing out of

you know, your your cloud bill as a percentage of revenue, right? it's it's an indicator, it's a metric, right? That you are scaling a cost function, and not just a cost function, but the actual thing that is making your product, you know, if you're a software company, you need to deliver it. This that is the delivery mechanism. It's where do you store the data? How do you search for the data? How do you index it? How do you do all these things that that you know cost money and take time? And so

funny that you brought that up because you know, for us, we've been on AWS since inception. In fact, we started on Heroku and then migrated, all our stuff to AWS. A, because it's the thing people were doing in 2017, and B, it was something you just didn't have to think about, right? And didn't have to maintain. But at some point, and this was last year, about 13, 14 months ago, we kind of said, hold on a second.

There's

more API traffic coming through our product. We're we're seeing some latency that we need to dig into. What exactly is causing that latency? Is it something in our code? Is it something going on in the servers? you know, I can look back and think we've had a pretty good run on AWS. You know, you always talk about these things and then knock on wood. But there have been some outages, right? As I'm sure we've all seen in the internet when Twitter or something goes down, then it's like, nothing's working.

Alex (23:25)
Everyone knows about those.

Alex De Simone (23:25)
You know, and you could talk about AI

and security and all that stuff, but but like this is just this happens, right? Like incidents happen and you can only do so much with redundancy. But for us it was kind of a black box. We were trying to get more information as to why there was latency or why there were outages. and you know, you could argue maybe we didn't have the right contacts at AWS or or we just didn't know how to navigate their internal process. But you know, I thought we had what

seemed reasonable, a a paid support plan. I think it's something like eight or ten percent of your bill, you know, is support. and what was challenging for us is we just didn't know what was going on with open search. And so we went to the drawing board literally, physically, there's one right behind me here that we use and said, hey, let's start from like first principles, right? Like what is a computer?

Alex (24:11)
What's open search? Just real quick. What's open search?

Alex De Simone (24:14)
Open search is well there there's a history there.

But effectively, OpenSearch allows you to index and search for records. so if, for example, you have a CRM and you want the user to go into the search bar and type Alex Oppenheimer, show me everything you've got on him, right? Then that would that would query open search, right? And then return the results. And you want to do that very efficiently. You don't want to

Alex (24:37)
Great example of an abstraction

tool, right? Because like to design a search algorithm just to build that functionality into your software would be very, very painful. So Amazon offers this abstracted away solution.

Alex De Simone (24:49)
Yeah. I mean you still have to build the front end and make it look like whatever you want, but in the back end it will do so, right? It will pull those records up. And again, you don't want to query the entire database because that takes a long time. So you want to figure out an effective way to do it. And obviously with AI, it even gets more nuance, right? Like what is the context window and and how are you retrieving and and delivering the data? So that's what open search did for us. It quickly became 60% of our bill. you know, up from say 20%.

Right. So that was a very big jump, effectively doubling our bill. at that point in time, we thought, okay, well, this isn't going to scale, right? Because then you look at your cost of goods sold and and that's something you wanna keep in scale. If you want to double or triple or quadruple in revenue, you want that to, you know, move alongside with it. So, anyways, long story short, and this is something that I think

is a good question for anyone to ask is like why are things done the way they are? And you might surprise yourself, especially in today's day and age with the models we have at our disposal, that you might be afraid to do something like buy servers and set them up. And you might be afraid to set up Linux boxes. And you might be afraid to manage them if something goes wrong. And you know, it's it's the kind of thing where it kind of just woke us up. I think it was

You know, a talk by David Hanemeyer Hansen, the creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder at 37 Signals has a lot of videos that that I recommend watching about this. you know, he talks about the pink chained elephant, right? You you think you can't do stuff because that's what you've been told is the way people do it, right? And that's and that is a tactic or a strategy that a lot of companies have, right? If you are a cloud provider, you want

People to think that your way is the easiest and best and easiest to maintain. but that might not always be the case. And so that's what I would encourage any listener here. you know, it is possible to set up your own rack in a co-location site. It's far less expensive, and there's far more bandwidth you can extract from it if you get the right specs. And so that's effectively what a team of two, myself and

founding engineer D'Avachado did. We basically just went to a data, a couple data centers, toured them, got pricing on it, had to do a lot of, you know, I'm oversimplifying it. There are many aspects here that require research, but you can build a highly redundant, highly visible system that you can then get your own logs on it and not have to rely on someone else. you know, in this case for us, it was Amazon

Potentially moving our boxes around from one region to another without us knowing. you know, there's so many things behind behind the curtain that we wanted to know. And that's effectively what getting our own servers did for us. and so Avachado's Open Search runs at a site called Equinix in Santa Clara. you know, happy to explain it or chat on it more if you're interested. Obviously, we can geek out.

But

I will say that AI played an important role in helping us design it and spec it to make sure that it exceeded all of the specs we had on Amazon's virtual cloud. And you know, here we are today with half the bill and probably eight to sixteen X the compute potential. not to mention the ability to include GPUs in that rack, right? It's a 42-unit rack, so units are basically.

you know these little blocks where you could put a one one U one unit server in and there are servers that are up to two, four, you know, six units. And so it's it's highly configurable, right? But you gotta show up to the site or have someone do that and and make sure you set up the right monitoring. You know, there are plenty of pitfalls here. But think of it as like with AWS, the best analogy I can give if anyone's you know trying to understand this is you're leasing a car, right? And

Instead of leasing a car, let's say you want to buy a really nice car and you can actually rent the the garage, the valet service, right? And so you can have your car in a nice garage, and those are the services that you will get with it, right? Like if something goes wrong, you can just ask that valet service, hey, could you give me an oil change? Or hey, could you do this? That's the effective support you get from an on on site smart hands team, right? Which Equinix in a

bunch of other data centers offer so you don't have to drive out, but you can drive out. You you can go to the data center if you wanted to do your own maintenance. I mean again, it's a it's a DIY approach. Like I said, I'm a DIY kind of person just by

Alex (29:09)
Ha ha.

Alex De Simone (29:10)
nature. So that this project gave me so much energy and excitement. you know, not because

of the metrics, but because of the hey, I have to build a mechanical

Alex (29:17)
It's cool. It's fun. Yeah.

Alex De Simone (29:19)
hardware system that then plays nicely with

Linux, you know, all the configurations to to make it secure, to make it connect to because we still use Amazon for other services, so you have to, you know, have a a a connection to the on ramp there in Santa Clara. So anyways, yeah, that's the best analogy I can think of. And and the value to us has been incredible. Our customers are seeing sub eighty millisecond latency on the website, right? You can't even notice anything below two hundred.

And that kind of bandwidth gives us the ability to just quadruple or you know, or more in size and not have to change that hardware. Now we own that hardware. And if you want to talk finance, you can, you know, depreciate it over a certain time period, whether it's three, five, however long your warranty is. I saw servers at Equinix that have been there for 30 years. There was a guy giving us a tour and he said, yeah, then these folks have been here for a while, that they've never touched those boxes. So, you know, it's pretty fascinating. And there's obviously another.

kind of sketchy game you can play with the your your PNL and and and kinda how far you stretch the the life or how short you make it. So that's all happening in AI for sure, as a separate topic.

Alex (30:29)
That's

that's the whole thing. That's all the stuff it's making the news. But I I I would I wonder I've I wanna see if I can stretch the analogy and make it more of a generational thing. I think, you know, we're in our

Alex De Simone (30:38)
Let's let's do it.

Alex (30:40)
late 30s and we're both mechanical engineers. So like we're a sweet spot of like cars, bikes, like I'm gonna do it myself. You know, like I was on a bike ride yesterday with my six year old and he got a flat tire. And I was like, I'm gonna patch it.

Right. Like when's the last time you patched a tire? I mean, either my bikes are either tubeless or I'm running TPU tubes. So like there's no patching. but he's got butyl tubes and like in his

Alex De Simone (31:04)
Yeah.

Alex (31:05)
in his, you know, 16-inch or I'll just patch it. and it's definitely a view, but I think that expands to like, you know, when I turned 16, it was like, Yeah, you get a car. Now I did like commute to high school, but you get a car because you have to drive and then you tinker and whatever. Like

This generation, though, from what I've heard, especially in America, and I don't live in America, but I know people who work with high schoolers in America, like they don't have any desire to drive. Like they'll like, why would I get a driver's license? Why would I get a car when I could just get an Uber? And then there's

Alex De Simone (31:36)
Yep, that's right. The rates have been dropping.

Alex (31:39)
Yeah, and and then there's some gradation of that, right? There's the like, I remember my friend moved to Florida from New York and like he just needed a car. And there's like this kind of packaged lease that you can get.

Where it's like kind of all in with insurance. And okay, that's one step down from that. Right. And then there's like the traditional lease where you, you know, the car is also, you know, actually registered in your name. Obviously, there's just renting a car from, you know, Avis or Enterprise. And then it's just like I just use Uber, I don't care. And it there is a certain point where like,

That makes sense. And another point where like it becomes totally not economical. And I think, you know, like I said, I there's this idea of like software reaching its final form. Because if we think about what software is, software really only has intrinsic value to the extent that it can affect the physical world. Right. Like the virtual world is cute and yes, people are making money there, but it's almost all like sin industry and like.

Stuff like that, right? Like in the in the virtual world. Everything else is to drive physical experiences, physical products. Like that's actually like that's GDP, you know, that's value being exchanged. And the technology sector in my professional lifetime went from being a sector to a layer of the economy, similar to like the entire financial layer. And just people like this is unendingly large.

Because everything is connected and software, technology, you know, digital technology can affect every part of the physical world as well. And all these things, like we're talking about open search. And then, you know, there's that's that's like a tiny sliver of something. But then if that something becomes almost ubiquitous across the entire technology layer, it's massively valuable. Now, again, all of a sudden what used to be like a pretty straightforward stack of what you build became

Like astronomically complicated. And again, people built companies, people built careers on just a tiny piece of that. And that became very, very valuable. But I think if we zoom out, not everyone may agree with this, but like again, all of software at the end of it, some physical thing needs to happen. Right. So infrastructure software is one layer removed, right? Application layer software. Let's just take like a Salesforce or a HubSpot, like CRM.

point is to sell something. No, okay, take out all the people that are selling digital goods because they're just selling people's probably ability to build something or sell something in order to build something to sell something else or whatever it may be. But some of those people are selling solar panels, right? I remember that was one of your early customers as well, was like someone who sold and installed solar panels, right? Like, and

Alex De Simone (34:21)
Yeah. yeah. Big industry, of course.

Alex (34:24)
and I think you had a lot of that all along because it was like it was text focused and it

Inherently took people away from computer screens where they're in front of email or Slack and put them in the field. And that's just generally going to be more oriented toward the physical reality that we experience. And so as we get deeper into AI and like coding in general becomes less important as a skill, right? Like again, it's funny to think that.

Like, don't waste your time learning that like deep, nerdy part of the coding stack because like it's been abstracted away. It doesn't matter. But again, meanwhile, that's where all the security like stuff is vulnerabilities, like the big ones are hitting. Abstracted now to like, do you really even need to learn to code? Or can we just leave that to like a handful of people who are gonna like check this and make sure that like other people aren't manipulating it? Because really what you need, I I wrote this other piece about how like the thing that people tell you you need to do or learn.

At

some in some era, it's correct, but it's never correct for the reason that they say it's going to be correct. Learning how to code never mattered. Like it mattered for a minute. But what really mattered, like the thing that accrued real value to people's careers and to the world, was learning how to think like an engineer. When you take computer science classes, they're not just telling you, like, here's what syntax is. No, they're giving you a puzzle. They're giving you a math problem. They're like,

Solve this digital experience using what you understand about how to talk to the computer. And like, okay, this language, that language, whatever, right? But that is the skill. It's actually an engineering mindset that's what matters. So again, that side effect is always ends up being the thing. And for software engineering, computer science, development, those like software development, those all kinds of coding, those four things are all very different, actually, but they all get kind of lumped together. And

Anyone who's in the business knows that when you're talking to a coder versus a computer scientist versus a software engineer, those are all very different conversations. And like a software architect versus a developer, like these are different skill sets and they got lumped together for a long time. But again, what matters more is what you're interested in, how your brain works, what kind of problems you can solve, than like which specific language you actually know. And like this is a little bit self-serving because I've always like

not been good at languages. By the way, whether that was a foreign spoken language or MATLAB, or Java, they they just remembering the details of the syntax, just like not this is not where I want to spend my cycles. And so AI has been amazing because it just abstracted that away. Now, not completely, right? But at some point it feels like it generally will be completely.

And I'll just hire someone to just check this back end right? Like Microsoft, I think, employs probably most of these like deep, deep, deep engineers who are in the source code and checking for these things. Right. Like most people don't know. Microsoft is the largest cybersecurity company in the world, like by a lot. And they employ these people and they matter and they get paid a lot of money now. But there's not that many of them. It's not like, that specific thing is the number one major at every top college.

Like computer science became. So again, that was a long way of saying that, like if you can go from physical world to physical world through video, through voice, through text, whatever it is, then all that stuff in the middle gets commoditized. It's valuable, but it's commoditized. And there's a very big difference between things being forgotten because they get taken for granted and commoditized.

Versus things being forgotten because they are obsolete. Like the fax machine

Alex De Simone (38:06)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (38:07)
is obsolete. So our kids will never know what a fax machine is because it is obsolete, not because it's become part of the woven infrastructure of everyday life. Now, the ability to send data across telephone lines, which I think was basically invented, you could argue it was invented with Morse code, but like

Was invented for the purpose of fax machines, that's become literally everything we experience into to a large extent. But that use case, that thing, like my mom used to like sell fax machines for GE capital or lease them, right? Obsolete. And there's but there's a huge distinction between obsolete versus critical infrastructure that's commoditized and taken for granted. And

It's like, I'm never gonna learn that. That doesn't matter anymore. And it's like, no, that still very much matters. And and I another example that pops into my head, the first company that I got assigned to when I hit the desk at Morgan Stanley and Investment Banking in 2011. The first company that I was on coverage on was Micron. I was talking about semiconductors earlier. Micron is not even a semiconductor company. Like, we shouldn't have been like covering Micron out of the tech group. I I also did a

IPO for a small semiconductor company called Amborella, which actually makes the genius chips that make GoPro and basically all mobile form factor video work because it's low power, super efficient processing, great cooling, like high res. It's a it's an amazing product. And like that's real innovation. And you know, the founders of that company are mega geniuses. Great. but Micron is like DRAM, which was like an innovation like 50 years ago.

And it's basically an industrial manufacturing business that makes this commodity for technology. And then it became like a hot commodity because all these data centers need DRAM. And then Micron's stock price like goes through the roof. And now it's like a company

Alex De Simone (39:57)
Yeah.

Alex (39:58)
people have heard of. Right. When I was there, it's just MU which is I also I always as an engineer, I always loved that ticker symbol. Like

Alex De Simone (40:05)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (40:06)
for from a company called Micron to have the ticker MU. but anyway, I I think that there's as we look into the future.

Like we were saying earlier, we gotta understand history and understand the past. And part of that is being able to contextualize it in what was lived there, not just looking back either fondly or dismissively on that and thinking like, what was it like? What did we understand? What did we not understand? What was the moment that this crossed over? Where were the mistakes made? I think that we're already seeing in AI, it's like as we abstract software further up, which you could argue again, people, it's a whole different world. Like

It's another abstraction layer of software. That's basically what most people are using AI for. People are trying other things now. Great. And it does open up a lot of opportunities, but so did every other previous abstraction of software. Maybe again, it's a curve, it's not a line in terms of what that does. But that also creates blind spots for people who are like raised in that. And so I I actually just recorded a podcast with Nick Greenfield.

One of my good friends, and he was saying that when you want to build something really big, best not to know anything about it. If you want to build a small business, you got to be an expert. If you want to build a big business, best to just go in naive and

Alex De Simone (41:24)
Going blind. Yeah.

Alex (41:25)
try to learn fast because otherwise you won't have the creativity that you need to build something truly innovative. And so if you look at the latest batch from YC trying to build stuff, it's like, are there just huge blind spots?

And are those blind spots a bad thing or are those blind spots like a necessary thing? Or both, right? Like, is it just a necessary weakness that you need to have that like no one can see all and know all and be as creative as they need to be? So you kind of always are going to need this balance of like the venerable, experienced, I don't want to say like naysayer, but the more like realist feet on the ground, and then like the naive, aggressive shoot the moon, what are the opportunities? I don't know. Now I'm just kind of like.

Rambling on these I these philosophical ideas of the progression of technology. But I think what you've done here,

Alex De Simone (42:12)
But let's come back to what

Alex (42:13)
yeah, taking a step back is like just such an incredible example of like why the middle doesn't disappear and it shouldn't disappear, and it will never be totally optimized. Because every single possible use case cannot be accounted for if you're doing anything interesting. Like edge case cannot be accounted for.

Alex De Simone (42:33)
Yeah,

l lots of topics here. Let's come back to software in its final form, right? maybe just clarify for us like maybe what what you mean by that, if you have an analogy. I like I like the analogies you share. And and w and after

Alex (42:47)
The the analogy would be

Alex De Simone (42:49)
that I have a comment about, you know, the the future that I believe will be heavily

Alex (42:55)
Yeah, a l a lot of technology

Alex De Simone (42:56)
in the direction of robotics

and and and bridging, you know, the software hardware gap which effectively will be bringing automation into the the physical realm, which is one

Alex (43:06)
A lot of technology,

the goal of it is to disappear, right? It becomes invisible. That's that's the goal. Like, and so again, software has become this layer of the economy, this massive thing. Like software was a sector 15 years ago. And it's become ubiquitous. I mean, I've got 17 different cloud services. We're on one right now. and these things and what's running it on the back end again becomes invisible.

we're using Riverside right now as an example to record this podcast. And we have audio, we have video, it's doing all these different things in the background. Who knows everything that's going on, right? We should be able to just have this conversation on the phone and hit a button that says podcast mode. Right? Like, why not? Like the fact that I can download this.

I can throw it into transistor, upload it, and then hit go and then it's like live on Spotify.

Alex De Simone (44:03)
Yeah.

Alex (44:03)
Like again, so many things disappeared into the abstraction layers to make that a seamless, beautiful experience. And that's I think what we live with. We all want these seamless, beautiful experiences. It kind of in in certain areas, you don't want that to happen for all of life, because then what's life? I mean, I don't

get too philosophical here, but like we are supposed to struggle with things. We just we want to work our way up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? Like if we were hunter-gathering full-time, like we wouldn't have time to think about these bigger ideas, solve bigger problems, elevate to the the higher levels of existence. So when I talk about software in its final form, it's like it's the moment before it disappears into not into irrelevance, but into ubiquity.

Into the commoditization phase, right? Like spices. 500 years ago, spices were it. getting a spice from another part of the world that grew there was like, my gosh. And this was like a ridiculously valuable commodity. I am a five-minute walk from the shook in Jerusalem. I can go get any spice you want. And by the way,

where it was originally grown in India. Well now it's actually in Indonesia because they realized that if you move it there, the climate's actually better and the labor's cheaper. And then they ship it on boats and they figured out how to store it. And so it's like abstracted away. All those careers gone.

So with software, and again, I can feel like I can be as broad as software. people aren't gonna like this, but like software doesn't actually matter. All that matters is the thing that punches you in the face. Right? Like all that matters is the food on your table.

Alex De Simone (45:42)
The the delivered result. Yeah.

Alex (45:45)
Yeah, like, and and I'm not saying it's not massively enriching to my life and many other people's lives, but it's

At some point, it's just like, well, why don't we just collapse all of this? Like, why am I stringing together APIs? Why can't that all just be done? Like, just do it. Like, dude, I don't care. Like, just take care of it, you know? Like, this is why people use Deel right? Like, like

Alex De Simone (46:08)
Yeah.

Alex (46:09)
all the, I gotta set up an entity and employ these people and pay the blah blah blah blah blah. Like, no, I just just do just do it. Just give me the thing, you know?

Alex De Simone (46:17)
Yeah, thank you for the analogy. it's it's interesting. Yeah, and I and I asked because there's that gap, right? I think a lot about robotics and and sort of the you know, we're we're what you'd say early in the software automation.

life cycle, right? Obviously we have we have agents, we have you know, classic automation, if you will, like API triggers, but but now reaching the you know, call it a a a border or a a challenge, which is okay, how do we make those, how do we bridge the gap with mechanical systems that can start leveraging the software? I mean you see it in most new cars. You have like a very impressive lane assist. I mean

And and I'm talking about like mainstream cars, not just the Tesla FSD, right? There's many vehicles.

Alex (47:05)
MobileEye headquarters is like a twenty five minute walk from here.

Alex De Simone (47:09)
Yeah. Do you have a Tesla? No. I know Mike Stoppman does. He mentions a lot about the the self-driving.

Alex (47:15)
I think most of our friends at this point have Teslas.

Alex De Simone (47:18)
Well, hey, and look, this is not like I I think this comes back to the topic you made, right? Which is how

Alex (47:22)
But but I'll I'll give you another I'll

give you another great example. If you bought a 2006 BMW 7 series.

It had all the same technology infotainment, technology safety features, basically, that a bottom-of-the-line Toyota Corolla has now, 20 years later. Except they work way better now than they work 20 years ago. by the way, now the features in a brand new BMW 7 series across all of those same functions are like 20% better.

Versus going from non-existent to excellent in a Toyota Corolla in that same period of time. And again, that's that's progress. That's great.

Alex De Simone (47:56)
Yeah. Yeah, you can't deny that change. Right.

Alex (48:02)
But at a certain point, which company would you rather have been an investor in over the last 20 years? I don't know. I didn't look at the stock prices, but Toyota or BMW? I don't know. Like, and then that's why you see, again, maybe it's just my rabbit hole that I live in, but like.

The whole concept of like resto mods for cars, which, if you haven't discovered the resto mod world, people are figuring out really cool, nostalgic ways to spend stupid amounts of money and have physically engaging, beautiful experiences with cars. And I don't want that to sound too weird, but like that that's what people care about now. It's not just like, you want to go zero to 60? Well, I can do it in a

7,000 pound electric car. It's like riding a roller coaster. Like, yeah, but that's not what I want. Right. Like my six-year-old son asked me, like, what's your favorite kind of car? I asked him, you know, we're just walking to school and he's like, I want a Jeep. I

Alex De Simone (48:56)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (48:56)
was like, why? He's like, because they look cool and they have big wheels. I'm like, that is the appropriate

Alex De Simone (48:59)
Yeah, there you go.

Alex (49:00)
answer for a six-year-old. And he said, What kind of car would you want? I said, I would want a rally car because you can ride it on the road, you can ride it on dirt, it rips your face off.

And it can kind of do anything. And it's just like a visceral experience. And I think that that's just that's what people want. That's what people are paying for.

Alex De Simone (49:19)
I mean, look, that's the beauty of it. You the beauty of choice, the beauty of being able to be comfortable at the bleeding edge of technology and understand it and have enough time and effort and investment in in figuring that out while still finding this balance of of taste and and desire. I mean, why do some companies still hand make things, right? There are

Plenty of great examples about this, right? I mean you can go down the luxury per

Alex (49:48)
You know who doesn't?

Alex De Simone (49:49)
so wait, what is what are you showing us to tell us.

Alex (49:51)
It's a big thing in the watch world. Like, it's handmade. People,

Alex De Simone (49:54)
Yes, the I mean that's exactly

Alex (49:56)
people want handmade stuff, but it's like, yeah, but aren't machines better at this? And it's like, yes, but the top .001% of artisans can do things that the machines can't do. And it's like, yes, but the machines

Alex De Simone (50:08)
And that's my point.

Alex (50:10)
can also do things that the top .1% of artisans can't do. And it's a matter of creativity to figure that out. And what I just showed him was my Rolex. Rolexes are not handmade.

They produce way too many of them. But the innovation at Rolex, and it's all very much under wraps, is these machines that they design and build that have incredible precision manufacturing. And then the whole testing thing, right? Like the clasp on this watch has been run through QA 500,000 times or something ridiculous, which like a human's not gonna do that. It's never gonna work that well. Like, is it a special? Can you feel it?

so again I don't

Alex De Simone (50:49)
But again, it's it's

the choice and the I I think it's exciting to work on my old car. Like, do I have better uses of my time? You could argue maybe. you know, I do my own brake pads, my I I don't do transmission or anything crazy. I mean, I would like to at some point, but hopefully I don't have that problem. So knock on wood, you know, because it could be very painful. Even changing your timing belt on this car requires you to take parts of the engine apart. So you know, like

Pick your battles, right? You might want to take it to the shop every once in a while. And my point is you you

Alex (51:19)
I'm gonna pause you right there.

Alex De Simone (51:21)
can you can pick. You can you can choose

Alex (51:23)
Exactly.

Alex De Simone (51:24)
where along this DIY spectrum, if if at all, you want to play and if that's enriching and exciting to you. and and there's no wrong answer, right? I mean, maybe the one wrong answer, my takeaway from everything you're sharing, is there's a lesson in history that you choose to just ignore and you think it's no longer relevant because it's, you know, kind of

left your field of vision, but it ends up being a thing that's actually pretty logical and sound and can maybe solve a problem you're trying to solve and you just haven't thought of it, right? I mean look, you went back to your textbooks for Zeta and like hopefully that ends up getting more data points and people start using the metric and then it becomes more of a benchmark and a and a and a genuine way to see if you're headed to a wall or headed to you know f green pastures. And so there's

There

I what I'm trying to say is there's an excitement and a beauty to be able to pick along that spectrum wherever you're comfortable, right? Like maybe you don't want to adopt self-driving, you don't want to do any of these next gen things, and you really don't care about AI and you're not on Chat GPT and you're just an artisan you know, fixing things, or l I'll give you another example. So I I have a couple of watches from a company called DIY Watch Club. And I think I was served an ad at some point.

About it on Instagram. And it's a stainless steel automatic watch, and you build it. They send you the kit and then you put all the parts together. It's more of assembly than it is real build. Like I'm not building the movement from scratch, but you can build your own movement from scratch if you want. You can get that kit, right? And then it has you put in these tiny little pieces and gears and and springs into place. And if you mess it up, you're done. Like that thing's gotta get thrown out and you gotta start fresh. And so.

You know, it gives you an appreciation, I think, the more you dabble with some of these older ways. And you could say the same about our parents. Had they, you know, driven a Model T or like you go back in time and you keep wondering, okay, well, what was before that? What was before that? And how was it done before? it's just exciting to to have that appreciation, to go back, to try some of these things if you're excited about it. If you're not, then you know, hey, you don't have to.

Alex (53:27)
So I'll push on one thing there because I think it's really interesting, which is what I was saying before was with this final form of software, like disappears into ubiquity and just no one thinks about it anymore. What you're bringing up, I think, is much more exciting and enjoyable and optimistic way of looking at what could be this final form of software is like you pick and choose, like you have in your business, right? You move certain workloads off AWS and you manage it yourself and you keep certain ones on. But

Everything what you mentioned was like, what do you want to focus on? What do you want to learn? And I know for me, I didn't always learn the things I wanted to learn. And I didn't always like the things that I thought I would like.

what then begs the question, and this is where again I'm a fan of like the liberal arts education, is like if you don't get exposed to a lot of different things and you're not challenged by full stack problems.

It's hard to know which part and which type of problem you actually enjoy solving. Because a problem is a challenge. And if you just go for like kind of the easy game, right? You just play Candy Crush on your phone because it just passes the time, right? Like that's not good. That's not called progress. That's not personal progress, right? You need to be challenged and taken out of your comfort zone. I remember I said to someone, yeah, this I was referring to something as being really hard. And it was something like,

I want to say it was like marriage being hard. they were like, nah, yeah, I I've done a lot of hard things. I'll be fine. And I'm like, I don't think you know what a hard thing actually is. you think that taking the next level of math class is hard. No, no, no, no, no. That's like on a linear scale. Like hard is like sneak attacks. Hardest things that you weren't expecting. I did investment banking. It kicked my butt, right? I learned a lot though.

And I didn't learn all the things that I thought I was going to learn. I think that's probably the key takeaway. You don't know what you're going to learn. And those are the often the most like the best experiences. I actually, I found the other night, I was like, I want to read something. And like all my books fall into like one of three categories. They're either Jewish books, they are business books, or they're like,

Personal productivity, kind of that world, like I just finished Cal Newport's slow productivity. Amazing book. And not like hard to read, not like exhausting. Some of these other books feel like so prescriptive that they're exhausting to read. And I was like, you know what? I actually just want to like read something for fun. And it made me realize that like I took this class in high school. We had English electives. And so the teachers actually got to teach what they liked, which made the classes amazing. And I took world lit and we're like reading Jane Austen.

And here I was like a 17-year-old high school guy, who like drove fast and like you know, played tennis and biked and whatever, and was like, and drank beer and was like, I really like what's going on in these in this book. Like, I like the story

Alex De Simone (56:18)
Yeah.

Alex (56:19)
and the character developed, like it just appeals to me, you know? And

Alex De Simone (56:22)
Yeah, you go. Called you.

Alex (56:23)
it became a little bit of a joke but

Yeah, if you're not forced to do things that make you uncomfortable, you're not gonna know where to focus in that stack. And it's really nice to be able to focus in that anywhere you want in that stack and like kind of solve the problems that you cleave to, which is great. But it's the same thing I always talk about. everyone basically that I worked in investment banking with started as like an analyst or at least an associate, in the numbers. Like the older guard was like.

literally in the numbers by hand on pieces of paper like using HP twelve C calculators.

Alex De Simone (56:54)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (56:55)
And you know, for me, I I was also in the numbers. It was Excel, and it was like way more numbers and way more charts and way different other kinds of data. if that all of a sudden goes away and like you don't need junior folks anymore. but the junior folks will find other problems to solve. Like, I don't know, will they? Will

I guess people again, people said the same thing. Like, if people aren't using the HP 12 C, will, these kids know math anymore. And like, my generation knows math. so what do we lose versus what do we gain? Will there always be that next problem that builds those instincts that gives people the breadth of experience and challenges that actually exposes them to the what they need to know? I just think this is what people should be not like thinking about every day, but should at least be considering as they move through their own.

Tech technology adoption cycles and think about the future.

Alex De Simone (57:41)
Yeah, and it's about asking questions, asking the right questions too, that is a a good question. I think you're basically asking, you know, what advice or or what what could or should people do when it comes to these kinds of claims where it's like, well, well don't don't learn how to code, it's a waste of time because that's you know, I I would argue the opposite. I mean, I think the comment you made about languages and syntax is is accurate, right?

but let's let's simplify it to languages. Like if you want to learn French, German, a a language, right? there's two things I think. One is process, like what is the way to learn it? And then the second to that is are you exposed to that environment? Like are you in that environment? Are are people talking to you? I mean, you can duolingo your way to some fluency, but it won't be the same as hearing other people speaking it, right? And so I think there is a skill.

In coding that's very similar. You sh you know it's ideal to be surrounded by people speaking code, reviewing your code. I mean, don't just AI your way to code because I think that's one mistake folks are making. they're just kind of writing up code, maybe checking localhost to see if it's doing what you want it to do locally before you deploy it. but I you know, I would encourage people to read what code it generated if you are strictly.

using AI generated code. I mean, I still write some of my code. I definitely take advantage of you know the latest models and and and I think it's a huge leg up for security, right? For catching bugs, for catching regressions. But you gotta read it and you gotta review it. And you gotta be around people who speak that language too. So that is a skill. And and you're right that the skills are evolving. But again, coming back to what what advice or what what guidance

you know, would you give people I mean, it's hard to prescribe a single thing for everyone. Again, I think it's choice. Like you can choose where you want to be at any given time. And it might be exciting to be at the forefront for a certain amount of time and then kind of back out and do some more artisanal things if if that has any knowledge that you can apply to the forefront, right? I think that's where it gets interesting. I mean look at the research going on with fusion. like there are massive discoveries happening at at Lawrence Livermore and obviously

lots of effort and time and studies going into bringing the cost of that clean energy down so that we could provide you know the needs of the of the world and reduce dependence on other energy alternatives. So there's so many of these questions that I think will point back to the past or a learning in the past or something someone discovered. I mean it's only it's statistics. Like there has to be a physical discovery that is not in our current time that

Would yield some value to something we're trying to solve for today. There's no doubt about it. I mean, it has to, it has to apply, right? And I'm I'm not just elevating your Zeta here. I think there are other big problems that are yet unsolved that are buried in some kind of you know, research or or learning from long ago. And that excites me, right? obviously there's a lot to comb through. We we have much of history not documented. And so

I don't know. It it it's hard to prescribe one single thing to anybody. And you know, then there's the whole debate of like do you follow your passion or not? Well, I think that ties to what you just said. Like you just don't know until you do things. And it evolves.

Alex (1:00:53)
You don't know what your passion is until you've until you've tried a bunch of stuff.

Alex De Simone (1:00:56)
Like your 20 year old isn't the same as your 40 year old, your 60-year-old, like your passions change because you're exposed to different things. And so, anyways, that's a whole nother topic, but

Alex (1:01:03)
Yeah. I just watched a video about how like

how like at professional athletics already are filled with rich kids. It used to be that professional athletics was basically filled with poor kids and now it's filled with rich kids. And I think that the explanation is like pretty obvious to why that happened. And the answer is it's it's kind of a s it became a little bit more of like a solved problem. Like if you have X, Y, Z genetics and you do ABC training for a certain period of time, you're

statistical chances of making MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, whatever, are actually real and meaningful. And then the ROI is like quite good. And then again, just the whole achievement focus and whatever. And does that take the fun out of it? I don't know. Again, I I started reading this book called Range about, you know, Tiger Woods playing golf at two versus like Roger Federer being a multi sport athlete until he in high school.

Yeah, I I don't think there's a specific way. What I what I would say is that you gotta try different stuff. you know, I had a guy reach out to me.

Alex De Simone (1:02:01)
Would claim apply to

would would that claim apply to football or would you disagree there? Like soccer as as we know it. like does that apply?

Alex (1:02:12)
it's a good

question. I don't know the stats. He only had it for like American. I think it's really hard to get the statistics on that and it would vary massively by country. I think here's my hunch. If you looked at Spain specifically.

And you looked at the percentage of players who were playing in major European leagues 30 years ago versus now who came from Spain. The quartile of wealth that they started in, I think probably has changed a lot. I think it was only bottom quartile, bottom half 30 years ago. And now there's like a bunch more top end.

And and in America it's become a whole other problem where it's like you can't play travel soccer if you can't afford to spend forty thousand dollars a year on travel soccer, and then you have no chance.

Alex De Simone (1:02:57)
Right. And my

yeah, and my point was just country based, sport based. I like I I think that's an interesting question. I don't know if I would apply to every sport in every country, but you know, and you look at like some of the star athletes like were raised very poor playing on the streets, you know. and and it was like,

Alex (1:03:11)
Yeah, you have these generational talents.

Alex De Simone (1:03:13)
yes, you could have developed that that talent more with with the the right environment, the right field, the right equipment, but on the other hand you could argue that's what made it

That's what made them so good. They were just always in street or wherever they were playing with

Alex (1:03:27)
Yeah, and and like

by the way, this is another thing you see now. And there's two different hypotheses to why this is the case, is like basketball players in the NBA are getting injured at a higher rate now than they were 30 years ago. Ankle injuries, stuff like that. And again, they're adapting to this real time and it's changing, and I think it will grow out and phase out shortly here. But like if you do hyper focus training on what is perceived as like the main

Kind of we'll call it the direct forces necessary to excel at a certain sport, but you don't take into consideration like the orthogonal forces, that's how injuries happen. And so if you're cross-training and like you're playing tennis and volleyball and hockey in addition to playing basketball, you kind of naturally will get all of those orthogonal forces through your body. And therefore, when you get a weird

Alex De Simone (1:04:17)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (1:04:18)
kind of nonlinear force that's unusual for the sport.

you're much more likely to be resilient to it. That's one hypothesis. And then now they're doing all these other sorts of kind of specific cross-training for these specific sports. But the other theory is that just like all the players in the NBA in the 90s were on all sorts of performance-enhancing drugs. that's why they were all bald and that's why they somehow never got injured. Like

Alex De Simone (1:04:46)
Hmm.

Alex (1:04:47)
so it's fun to like

Alex De Simone (1:04:47)
That's a good question. That's

a good question.

Alex (1:04:49)
pontificate

about these things. We don't really know. I think the most important thing is that we're thinking about it and we have to engage with it. I see like in the younger

Alex De Simone (1:04:55)
Let me ask you this has the

has the average height in basketball increased?

Alex (1:05:00)
For sure.

Alex De Simone (1:05:00)
Yeah.

Alex (1:05:02)
Absolutely. I what I'm seeing in

Alex De Simone (1:05:04)
I mean there's a physical

there's a physical factor that could impact injury, right? I mean

Alex (1:05:08)
Yeah. And

so one final thought on this is like what I'm seeing of from people in like let's say their mid-20s now. I don't know how often you interact with those folks, but I do kind of fairly frequently. And I'm seeing a a couple things that range from like interesting to disturbing. one thing that's disturbing is like they don't have

Any attention span or patience and they're like over-relying on AI, and I think that it'll bite them and they'll figure out that like they got to slow down and actually start using their brain if they want to do something meaningful. And just doing as fast as possible and like not engaging with people properly is just gonna turn people off. Like having my AI bot talk to your AI bot is not how interesting things will ever get done. Like it's just because again, it just lives in that different world.

But the on the interesting side of things is like they all want to guarantee. They're like, well, what career path should I go down so that I can make good money? And I'm like, dude, that was a question for our parents' generation. I mean, in my parents' generation, these people are 10 plus years younger than me, right? And now I think in a lot of ways, people are like, yeah, you got to be entrepreneurial or you just got to work super hard. And like, there is no like just be a lawyer and like stay the.

Stay the course and like you'll make good money if you're like decently smart, you just behave well and like work hard enough. Right. And like I just don't think those things exist anymore. I mean, maybe here and there, but like the bar is high. I mean, talking like being a doctor, right? but at the same time, I think and I hope, and it's maybe easy for me to say from where I sit in all sorts of different dimensions, you know, you have to do what.

What you're passionate about, what you're good at, and what the world needs. Right. It's those three kind of vectors that you have to optimize for. And in a lot of ways, like it almost feels like what the world needs is genuine, unique humanity. And as a result, what people should be doing is doubling down on their passions. Now we talked about the challenge of discovering your passions and what they actually are, not like what your brother or your friend did, and therefore what you think is cool. No, like a real passion that's unique to you, which takes

time and iteration and failures to really discover. But I think in a lot of ways, like just lean into like who you are. There's so many people, I feel like in my parents' generation and even in our generation, that's like they became lawyers because it was like the safe path and they just hated always being a lawyer, but they just did it because it was like a good paycheck and whatever. Like and like that's just not a thing anymore. Right. Like and that's scary to some people. Again, if you're

If you're being raised by people who are raised in that mode, and now that rug feels like it's been pulled out from underneath you, that's scary. But at the same time, it's kind of like, no, you can make money doing so many different things so quickly now. Like it's great. You don't need to rely on someone else. Like you can just, I'm like, people are like, what should I do for the summer? I can't get an internship. I'm like, solve someone's need, deliver them value, and get paid for it. I don't care if it's mowing people's lawns, making their websites for them, like.

Go work and learn things, solve problems for people. Like it's kind of like way simpler. People think it's more complicated now. I think it's actually simpler, right? I don't know. You finish us off.

Alex De Simone (1:08:10)
of that mindset of yes it's it's desirable to find that overlap of the Venn diagram, right? Like you most humans want to feel useful, right? To contribute to society, doing something they enjoy or and get real enjoyment, not you know, difference between pleasure and enjoyment, right? I think they're they're they're very different things. And so it's perfectly fine to

get pleasure from watching a TV show, like you said, or or playing Candy Crush, like, hey, there there's a place for that. But that won't that probably won't lead you to enjoyment, right? In the way that I think this Venn diagram that people, you know, talk about and try to get to will get you. So if you if you do find that overlap, that's awesome. And if you don't know where to start, just pick one, you know, and and like you said, start solving a problem for someone because that'll be at least the impact.

Right. Like, hey, I'm I'm helping. And that feels good and that feels valuable. And, you know, businesses arbitrage, right? Like you find a way, coming back to your episode on, you know, just the financials of of successful businesses, like you you really want to solve a problem at a low cost and deliver it at a higher cost. Like you're you're just providing value, right? And if you can find a way to put if you want to assemble a team, an organization, then you can do that and then

Set up processes and and set up a structure that allows you to reproduce that over the years consistently to build value. So again, I'm extracting an internship to company building, but I think the the the gap isn't that big if you think about the core of, hey, here's an unmet need. And this is how you can meet that need based on everything else available in the environment. Like mowing someone's lawn.

Yes, other people mow lawns, but they might be in a different town that's far away. And so you are the advantage. You are the advantage.

Alex (1:09:57)
And that's fine.

Alex De Simone (1:09:59)
You are there, you are ready, you're hungry, you're willing to do it for 20 bucks or 10 bucks or whatever, you know, as long as as long as your your your costs get met, right? At least over time, then you will have justified

Alex (1:10:10)
Yeah, and I I think that

Alex De Simone (1:10:12)
the value. And and you know, you might have picked up interesting skills and observations while.

Cutting grass. Like, who knows, maybe you start getting interested in birds or insects or things that are around you. Like, and then you're off to a different passion or a different tangent. And you just wouldn't have known that had you not been testing it and in that environment. So, yes, in short, like if you are an intern and you're wondering what to do, go find some some unmet needs, go talk to people. Cause again, at the end of the day, like that's what all of us at software.

Alex (1:10:40)
Could be in your internship,

by the way, inside a company. That that's fine to do that too. They're like, what's actually

Alex De Simone (1:10:44)
yeah, it doesn't you don't have to be solo, yeah.

Alex (1:10:46)
bothering people? That's by the way, how to make the most of an internship to become a founder. It's like pay close attention to what's pissing

Alex De Simone (1:10:51)
And to just ask questions. Go.

Alex (1:10:54)
people off inside the office that you are working in. Come with fresh eyes, come with that naivete and be like, why does this work this way?

Alex De Simone (1:11:02)
Yeah, and ask why. Exactly. I d you really can't go wrong there. It it you know, curiosity is is a is an incredibly valuable skill. I I try to be more curious every day. You know, I find opportunities where I'm not asking either the right questions or enough questions. And if you do so in the right way and and interact with people, your customers, your family, like anybody, right? anybody who's willing to listen, you can you can even ask questions too.

you know claw to chat GPT and and do that and it won't be as valuable as a human interview but you'll uncover some things and then and then give a shot at different opportunities. So anyways, we covered a lot of topics here.

Alex (1:11:40)
Dude, this was great. Thanks for joining. Yeah.

always great to catch up. And thanks for hopping on. my whole view on the podcast is if you already have enough rapport with people, it gets interesting. And thank God we've been friends for a long time, hopefully for many more years into the future. And thanks for joining. Appreciate it.

Alex De Simone (1:11:59)
Awesome. Thanks, Alex. thank you for for having me and excited to to keep building stuff together.