Naval
@naval • 3,687,393 subscribers
Incompressible
Videos
New podcast with Garry Tan, farbood and Daniel Francis. Live in the Future! 00:00 Guest Intros 02:35 Live in the Future 03:58 Will AI Outsmart us? 07:43 In the Anthropic Breadline 09:59 The Tech Genie Is Out 12:33 We Invested in COVID?! 14:25 Good Writing Is Novelty 18:50 Living Like It’s 2028 24:32 Truth dot ai 30:18 Does China have the Weights? 35:38 Everyone has AI Anxiety 39:32 Have Your Agent Talk to My Agent 42:01 What if Open Source takes the Lead? 44:03 The Sun is Setting on Google 48:00 Ride the AGI 50:46 Will There be Startups? 54:05 Defending Taiwan 1:00:05 The California Empire 1:01:26 If the U.S. Falls 1:03:11 Universal Basic Robot 1:06:01 Humans as AI Handlers
Naval723,989 views • 20 days ago
New podcast on AI (full episode). Links below. A Motorcycle for the Mind 0:00 If you want to learn, do 2:13 Vibe coding is the new product management 6:49 Training models is the new coding 10:13 Is traditional software engineering dead? 13:07 There is no demand for average 14:12 The hottest new programming language is English 18:36 AI is adapting to us faster than we are adapting to it 22:56 No entrepreneur is worried about AI taking their job 26:46 The goal is not to have a job 29:49 AIs are not alive 32:55 AI fails the only true test of intelligence 36:49 Early adopters of AI have an enormous edge 39:37 AI meets you exactly where you are 43:02 Always leverage the best intelligence 44:37 If you can't define it, you can't program it 49:37 The solution to AI anxiety is action
Naval2,359,821 views • 5 months ago
New podcast on sales - Sell the Truth. 00:00 Be Credible 03:18 “Yes, And” 04:31 Selfish Honesty 05:37 Charisma Is Confidence + Love 07:56 Don’t Manage, Lead 11:16 Hunt Together 14:51 Feed Your (Good) Obsessions 18:57 Sell the Truth 21:07 Good Deal or No Deal 23:39 The Age of Nonlinear Returns
Naval664,643 views • 2 months ago
New podcast on vibe coding - A Return to Code. A Return to Coding 00:20 The Personal App Store 03:17 Vibe Coding Is a Video Game with Real-World Rewards 06:22 Pure Software Is Uninvestable 10:33 A Place for Each Model 14:22 AI Is Eager to Please 17:57 Why Math and Coding? 22:10 The Beginning of the End of Apple’s Dominance 24:17 Coding Agents As Customer Service Reps 27:55
Naval623,013 views • 2 months ago
Full podcast episode with Guillermo Rauch, Max Hodak, and Blake Scholl 🛫. 40 minutes of unreleased material. The AI Industrial Revolution Part 1: Waste Tokens, Save Time 0:00 Three Frontier Founders 1:27 AI Software Factories 4:15 Waste Tokens, Save Time 5:47 Models Instructing Humans 9:29 Is Pure Software Dead? 12:03 You Don't Get Stuck Anymore Part 2: Vibe Coding Hardware 14:39 Vibe Coding a Turbine Blade 18:07 Open Source Compounds China's Advantage 20:15 You Always Want the Smartest Model 22:44 Software Still Needs Hands 24:43 Humans Are Becoming Verifiers Part 3: The Regulatory Frontier 27:53 The Regulatory Red Queen Race 32:32 Why There's No Innovation in Healthcare 36:49 We Need a True 50-State Experiment 40:31 China's FDA Is Beating Ours 43:37 Healthcare Is a Communist Society Inside Capitalism 45:57 Sid's Story: N-of-1 Medicine Part 4: The Autonomous Company 47:49 Autonomous Infrastructure 51:25 Your Job Is to Train the Agent 54:54 The Next Lord of the Rings 59:08 What's Your Definition of Art? 1:05:00 Can AI Have New Ideas? 1:07:03 A Large Number of Small Teams
Naval279,454 views • 1 month ago
Is Traditional Software Engineering Dead? “Does this mean that traditional software engineering is dead? Absolutely not. Software engineers—even the ones who are not necessarily tuning or training AI models—these are now among the most leveraged people on earth. Sure, the guys who are training and tuning models are even more leveraged because they’re building the tool set that software engineers are using. But software engineers still have two massive advantages on you. First, they think in code, so they actually know what’s going on underneath. And all abstractions are leaky. So when you have a computer programming for you—when you have Claude Code or equivalent programming for you—it’s going to make mistakes. It’s going to have bugs. It’s going to have suboptimal architecture. So it’s not going to be quite right. And someone who understands what’s going on underneath will be able to plug the leaks as they occur. So if you want to build a well-architected application, if you want to be able to even specify a well-architected application, if you want to be able to make it run at high performance, if you want it to do its best, if you want to catch the bugs early, then you’re going to want to have a software engineering background. The traditional software engineer is going to be able to use these tools much better. And there are still many kinds of problems in software engineering that are out of scope for these AI programs today. The easiest way to think about those is problems that are outside of their data distribution. For example, if they need to do a binary sort or reverse a linked list, they’ve seen countless examples of that, so they’re extremely good at it. But when you start getting out of their domain—where you have to write very high-performance code, when you’re running on architectures that are novel or brand new, when you’re actually creating new things or solving new problems, then you still need to get in there and hand code it. At least until either there are so many of those examples that new models can be trained on them, or until these models can sufficiently reason at even higher levels of abstraction and crack it on their own… And remember: there is no demand for average. The average app—nobody wants it, at least as long as it’s not filling some niche that is filled by a superior app. The app that is better will win essentially a hundred percent of the market. Maybe there’s some small percentage that will bleed off to the second-best app because it does some little niche feature better than the main app, or it’s cheaper, or something of the sort. But generally speaking, people only want the best of anything. So the bad news is there’s no point in being number two or number three—like in the famous Glengarry Glen Ross scene where Alec Baldwin says, “First place gets a Cadillac Eldorado, second place gets a set of steak knives, and third place you’re fired.” That’s absolutely true in these winner-take-all markets. That’s the bad news: You have to be the best at something if you want to win. However, the set of things you can be best at is infinite. You can always find some niche that is perfect for you, and you can be the best at that thing. This goes back to an old tweet of mine where I said, “Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.” And I think that still applies in this age of AI.”
Naval850,600 views • 4 months ago
New podcast, new format. Three founders join us. Waste Tokens, Save Time 00:00 Three Frontier Founders 01:27 AI Software Factories 04:15 Waste Tokens, Save Time 05:47 Models Instructing Humans 09:30 Is Pure Software Dead? 12:04 You Don't Get Stuck Anymore With Guillermo Rauch, Max Hodak, and Blake Scholl 🛫.
Naval280,451 views • 1 month ago
Part 2 of the Naval Podcast with Guillermo Rauch, Max Hodak, and Blake Scholl 🛫. Vibe Coding Hardware 00:35 Vibe Coding a Turbine Blade 04:04 Open Source AI Compounds China’s Advantage 06:12 You Always Want the Smartest Model 08:41 Software Still Needs Hands 10:40 Humans Are Becoming Verifiers
Naval130,305 views • 1 month ago
Good Products are Opinionated. “Every great founder I’ve seen up close, or even from afar, is highly opinionated and they’re almost dictatorial in how they run things. Also, early-stage teams are opinionated. And the products they build are opinionated. Opinionated means they have a strong vision for what it should and should not do. If you don’t have a strong vision of what it should and should not do, then you end up with a giant mess of competing features. jack Dorsey has a great phrase: “Limit the number of details and make every detail perfect.” And that’s especially important in consumer products. You have to be extremely opinionated. All the best products in consumer-land get there through simplicity. You could argue the recent success of ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots is because they’re even simpler than Google. Google looked like the simplest product you could possibly build. It was just a box. But even that box had limitations in what you could do. You were trained not to talk to it conversationally. You would enter keywords and you had to be careful with those keywords. You couldn’t just ask a question outright and get a sensible answer. It wouldn’t do proper synonym matching, and then it would spit you back a whole bunch of results. That was complicated. You’d have to sift through and figure out which ones were ads, which ones were real, were they sorted correctly, and then you’d have to click through and read it. ChatGPT and the chatbot simplified that even further. You just talk to it like a human—use your voice or you type and it gives you back a straight answer. It might not always be right, but it’s good enough, and it gives you back a straight answer in text or voice or images or whatever you prefer. So it simplifies what we looked at as the simplest product on the Internet, which was formerly Google, and makes it even simpler. And you just cannot make a product that’s simple enough. To be simple, you have to be extremely opinionated. You have to remove everything that doesn’t match your opinion of what the product should be doing. You have to meticulously remove every single click, every single extra button, every single setting. In fact, things in the settings menu are an indication that you’ve abdicated your responsibility to the user. Choices for the user are an abdication of your responsibility. Maybe for legal or important reasons, you can have a few of these, but you should struggle and resist against every single choice the user has to make. In the age of TikTok and ChatGPT, that’s more obvious than ever. People don’t want to make choices. They don’t want the cognitive load. They want you to figure out what the right defaults are and what they should be doing and looking at, and they want you to present it to them.”
Naval468,980 views • 7 months ago
To understand human nature, read the older books. To develop specific knowledge, stay on the bleeding edge, read newer (technical) books. The best authors - Deutsch, Schopenhauer, Borges, Ted Chiang - write with very high density. The best authors respect the reader’s time.
Naval522,645 views • 9 months ago
A second clip from my recent podcast with Chris Williamson . Full episode releases Monday.
Naval759,050 views • 1 year ago
New collected podcast. Links below. In the Arena 0:00 Inspiration All the Way Down 2:40 Life is Lived in the Arena 4:51 If You Want to Learn, Do 6:14 In Most Difficult Things in Life, The Solution is Indirect 7:30 When You Truly Work for Yourself 10:11 Find Your Specific Knowledge Through Action 12:06 You Have to Enjoy It a Lot 14:45 Pause, Reflect, See How Well it Did 16:23 Blame Yourself for Everything, and Preserve Your Agency 21:02 It Is Impossible to Fool Mother Nature 25:17 The Best Authors Respect the Reader's Time 28:18 Most Books Should Be Skimmed, A Few Should Be Devoured 32:01 Good Products Are Hard to Vary 35:27 Find the Simplest Thing That Works
Naval366,508 views • 8 months ago
“Geniuses only.” Nivi: To me, the missing ingredient in most people’s recruiting is intolerance. You should really just treat every employee in the company, including yourself, as an enemy agent that’s trying to destroy the company by bringing mediocre talent into the business. It’s unfortunately just the nature of human nature. Naval: My co-founder and I have a new criterion in our company: “Geniuses only.” It’s a harsh word, but it sets a very high bar. You can just look around for who’s not a genius. The only way you’re going to attract geniuses—whatever that term means to you—is by having a company full of geniuses. And if someone’s not a genius, then either you’re transitioning into the phase where you can no longer hire geniuses and you just need to scale up for whatever reason, or you can just show that person the door because you hired them prematurely for the kind of company you’re trying to build. Now, this is very difficult. You’re lucky if you can hire one genius a month. You as a founder have to identify them and do whatever it takes to recruit them and motivate them. So it’s inherently self-limiting. Given that a person probably isn’t going to stick around your company for more than three, four, five years—although in some great companies, people stick around for decades—at that attrition rate you’re talking about a 30 to 50 person company. But if you can even assemble a team of 10 geniuses, you’re way ahead of everybody else. At most companies—the successful ones—the founders, and maybe a few early people are at the genius level. But in the urge and the rush to scale, that gets drowned out too quickly.
Naval286,476 views • 7 months ago
“You can't get rich renting out your time. You can go to school and study how to make money, but there's no actual skill called business. You get rewarded by figuring out what society wants, but doesn’t yet know how to get, and becoming the person who delivers that, at scale.”
Naval844,204 views • 2 years ago