Aarthi and Sriram's Good Time Show

0:00 Intro to Paul Buccheit8:14 History of different emails13:03 Building in public, 100 happy users19:43 Gmail, over the years27:35 Platforms built on open APIs33:00 Iterate internally, User Experience36:00 Advice for founders and startups, YC culture50:00 Founders: Keep trying! Learn from failures53:00 The state of Artificial Intelligence1:00:00 I am nothing - identity, imposter syndrome, ego Paul Buchheit is a computer engineer and entrepreneur who is best known as the creator of Gmail. He worked at a number of Silicon Valley companies, including Intel and Compaq, before joining Google in 1999. At Google, he played a key role in the development of a number of products, including AdSense and Google's search infrastructure.

Based in San Francisco, Lenny Rachitsky is a Product specialist with a strong focus on growth. He spent seven years at Airbnb, where he started as a Product Manager in 2012 and later became a Product lead for supply growth. Lenny now works as a writer, investor, and consultant for product growth. He creates content on Substack, YouTube, and other podcasting platforms. Subscribe to Lenny's newsletter: https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/ 🎙️ The Good Times Show: Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan host conversations with leading builders, and CEOs and reveal what it takes to make it to the inside.

➡️ Are you curious about the future of work and the rise of remote teams? Meet Alex Bouaziz, the innovative leader behind Deel, a groundbreaking platform that simplifies global hiring, payments, and compliance for businesses of all sizes. In this episode, we sit down with Alex to learn more about his mission to make work more flexible, accessible, and rewarding for everyone. 🎙️ The Good Times Show: Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan host conversations with leading builders, and CEOs and reveal what it takes to make it to the inside.

In this episode, we talked to Emil Michael, who is Silicon Valley's best dealmaker. This was a masterclass in negotiation, art of making deals, when to walk away from them, his story, working with Travis Kalanick at Uber, and so much more. Emil Michael is an investor and strategic advisor to many high growth tech startups. He was the Chief Business Officer at Uber, during it’s period of expoential growth where it was the most valuable startup in the world. He’s also held leadership roles at Tellme Networks which was acquired by Microsoft, and in the Office of the Secretary of Defense under the Obama administration. Today he advices founders on fundraising, M&A, corporate strategy and culture, global expansion and building exec teams. Born in Egypt, with degress from Harvard and Stanford, to us, Emil is the embodiment of the American Dream, and how an outside can truly make it and become an insider.

In this episode, the gang gets back together! Marc Andreessen and Steven Sinofsky are back to talk about all things AI. We cover the rise of ChatGPT, Bing's AI powered chat Sydney, AI ethics, sentience, whether AI will take over jobs, the economic impact, AI startups vs tech incumbents, and whether it is time for AI to become sentient. This was an incredibly fun episode! Marc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, venture capital investor, and software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Steven Jay Sinofsky is a former president of the Windows Division at Microsoft. He was responsible for the development and marketing of Windows, Internet Explorer, and online services such as Outlook.com and SkyDrive.

In this episode, our special guest is Marc "Tryndamere" Merrill, co-founder of Riot Games, the game developer and publisher behind League of Legends. This was an awesome episode and Marc is a fantastic guest. We talk about the origin of League of Legends, building a gaming startup, player focused culture, fundraising, building 'Arcane' the popular Netflix show and so much more. Enjoy!

In this episode, we talk to Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of programming languages such. as C#, Typescript, Turbo Pascal and Delphi, on a life spent on building programming languages, the history of Java, his systems and setup, and what the future of programing languages looks like. Anders is someone we have looked up to for a big part of our lives, and this episode was a treat for us!

In this episode, we talked to Elad Gil - a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur, operating executive, and investor or advisor to companies including AirBnB, Pinterest, Square, and Stripe. He is also the author of High Growth Handbook, the playbook for turning a startup into a unicorn, and for navigating the most complex challenges that confront leaders and operators in high-growth tech startups. We covered a wide variety of topics during this chat - the current economic conditions and what it means for tech startups, his investing philosophy, how he finds founders, on AI and the AI market map, on energy and the politics of nuclear energy and so much more. Chapters 0:00 Intro 0:42 Who is Elad Gil 2:42 What motivates Elad 4:56 Elad’s first investment(s) 6:24 Who to invest in? How has it changed over time 8:48 What Elad looks for in a founding team 13:47 Startups during COVID 21:33 Bloated companies and layoffs 30:16 M&A and the state of seed market 33:30 Why Elad does it all by himself 35:35 What to do if you got laid off 38:27 The state of Artificial Intelligence startups 44:26 The AI market map and used cases 55:12 Will AI replace human jobs? 58:30 Elad’s history in energy 1:00:00 Carbon footprint & nuclear energy 1:01:49 The history and politics of Nuclear energy 1:11:30 Talent and human capital flow 1:16:26 How Elad finds the smartest builders 1:18:07 Looking back and predictions 1:20:20 Passing the baton in Silicon Valley

This week, we're doing a quick 'solo episode' where we talk about layoffs in tech, what to do if you are impacted, the power of networking, shifting careers, consulting, and hitting the reset button. If you've been impacted by the recent tech layoffs, or have wondered how to think about layoffs and their impact, this episode is for you.

This week we dive deep with Noam Shazeer, founder of Character.AI, Google veteran, and inventor of much of the current revolution in large language models including transformers, Mesh-Tensorflow, T5, and Google’s LaMDA dialog system. We cover: the evolution of Google and AI, transformers, LLMs, neural networks, commercialization of Google’s research, future of ChatGPT and AI, engineering philosophy, his work at Character.AI, and much more!