Guest: Bill Magnuson, CEO and co-founder of Braze
The deployment of smartphones around the world was more impactful than any other technology to date, says Braze CEO Bill Magnuson — and that has big implications for emerging fields like generative AI. “If we get to the point where they [LLMs] really can be useful, human-like companions ... they will be usable by everyone that has smartphone technology.” In other words, the question is not business opportunity or scale: It’s capability.
In this episode, Bill and Joubin discuss earnings days, Aaron Levie, MIT, customer churn, shower thoughts, technical co-founders, lacking context, AGI, “hands on keyboard,” the T-Mobile G1, app marketing, the 2008 financial crisis, Bob Iger, World War II, Peter Reinhardt, Watershed, and international offices.
Chapters:
- (00:51) - Morning people
- (05:09) - What Braze does
- (06:59) - From CTO to CEO
- (08:17) - Waking up and commuting
- (10:49) - Leading vs. engineering
- (12:35) - Cognizant of believability
- (19:52) - LLMs and the human brain
- (25:46) - The AI ceiling
- (28:43) - The historic deployment of smartphones
- (37:58) - The benefits of youth
- (40:18) - Taking the leap
- (43:35) - Read more sci-fi
- (46:38) - Survivor bias
- (48:55) - Big risks at scale
- (52:30) - Who Braze is hiring around the world
- (55:32) - What “grit” means to Bill
Links:
Connect with Bill
Connect with Joubin
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm
