Guests: Varun Mohan, CEO & Co-Founder of Codeium; and Leigh Marie Braswell, partner at Kleiner Perkins

“A lot of people are really bad at knowing what good is,” says Codeium CEO Varun Mohan. Specifically, he’s thinking of startups that hire based on a “logo” — a well-known company on the résumé — rather than exceptional talent. Codeium is based in Mountain View, CA, and Varun believes that it’s incumbent on any new startup to hire in the San Francisco Bay Area, because of how exceptional talent is concentrated there.

“When you hire someone that’s 10x better,” he says, “you can’t replace them with 10 1x people. Because the the 10x person is going to be thinking of ideas that none of these 1x people are ever going to think of.”

Chapters:

(01:05) - Ludicrous growth
(03:54) - Seizing opportunity
(07:29) - Product-market fit
(13:05) - Scale AI & MIT
(17:42) - Coding efficiency
(22:58) - Larger companies
(25:20) - Varun and Leigh Marie’s working relationship
(29:51) - Pivoting to Codeium
(34:00) - Giving away the product
(37:01) - The code-gen landscape
(42:20) - Annual reinvention
(45:00) - Picking a problem
(47:07) - Bipul Sinha’s help
(50:43) - Ambition
(53:13) - Building in Silicon Valley
(55:11) - Spotting talent
(59:11) - Who Codeium is hiring
(59:43) - What “grit” means to Varun

Mentioned in this episode: Graham Moreno, Wiz, ChatGPT, Google, Nuro, Goldman Sachs, Waymo, the DARPA Challenge, Alex Wang, Douglas Chen, Safeway, Equinox, Carlos Delatorre and MongoDB, The Qualified Sales Leader by John McMahon, GitHub Copilot, Microsoft, Exafunction, Mamoon Hamid, Figma, JPMorgan Chase, Starlink, SpaceX, Rubrik, Michael Dell, Stripe, and John Doerr.

Links:

Connect with Varun

Connect with Leigh Marie

Connect with Joubin

Twitter
LinkedIn
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

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