Guest: Rony Abovitz, founder & CEO of SynthBee

SynthBee CEO Rony Abovitz grew up “really believing” in Star Wars and the idea that there could be benevolent, artificially intelligent beings like R2-D2 and C-3PO.

“It wasn't a dystopian vision of the future,” he says. “It wasn't HAL from 2001. It wasn't the Terminator. It wasn't Skynet. It was this kind of friendly, empathetic, more utopian vision.”

George Lucas himself told Rony to tone it down and not “take it so literally” — but he was undeterred. The way he describes today’s leading AI powers sounds like an idealistic Rebel conceptualizing the Evil Empire.

“You’ve got companies that receive massive funding that want to take all the data in the world ... I feel that's a massive mistake,” Rony says. “We become serfs. They become the Lords. They become the Kings. I'm completely opposed to that. So I started to imagine for SynthBee what is a different form of computing intelligence, one that could help us, but have much more safety [and] human centrism.”

Chapters:

• (01:12) - Fundraising
• (02:27) - Meeting John Doerr
• (07:05) - The Beast
• (10:06) - Unfinished business
• (11:47) - Apple and Meta
• (15:20) - The COVID-19 pandemic
• (21:12) - “Investors panicked”
• (25:28) - Shaquille O’Neal vs. digital Shaq
• (29:43) - Magic Leap alumni
• (32:45) - Financial outcomes
• (38:27) - Peggy Johnson
• (40:27) - “A weird version of hell”
• (44:08) - A strange intro to Google
• (50:42) - Larry Page and Sergey Brin
• (54:27) - Founder voting power
• (01:00:40) - Mako Surgical
• (01:03:04) - The 9/11 term sheet
• (01:06:40) - The worst pitch ever
• (01:09:55) - The 2008 IPO
• (01:16:15) - Selling to Stryker
• (01:18:30) - What is SynthBee?
• (01:26:44) - Humility in tech
• (01:31:44) - Who SynthBee is hiring

Mentioned in this episode: Scott Hassan, Bing Gordon, Chewy, Mary Meeker, Suitable Technologies and Beam, NASA, Mark Zuckerberg, Matthew Ball, NTT Docomo, Blade Runner, Wired Magazine, CES, Dow Jones, Tesla, Zoom, OpenAI and Anthropic, Adam Silver and the NBA, John Monos, the Apple Vision Pro, Madden NFL, McLaren, Satya Nadella and Microsoft, the HoloLens, Godzilla and King Kong, Willow Garage and ROS, Trading Places, Z-KAT, Frederic Moll, John Freund, Christopher Dewey, John and Christine Whitman, Sycamore Ventures, Andy Bechtelstein, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, Kevin Lobo, Muhammad Ali, Star Wars and George Lucas, Yuval Noah Harari, and Infosys.

Links:

Connect with Rony

• LinkedIn

Connect with Joubin

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guest: Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO and co-founder of Klarna

Living and working in Stockholm, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski thinks a lot about how he’s perceived in Silicon Valley: “I feel like here I am, I am the small, country cousin from Sweden.” And on top of that, he knew that someone like Sam Altman wouldn’t initially think of a European banking startup as an ideal partner for OpenAI — so, he made up an excuse to fly to San Francisco and meet with Altman.

“I felt like, OK, this is going to be the busiest man in the world very soon,” Sebastian recalls. “When I first booked it with Sam, I think I got three hours in his calendar. By the time I arrived in San Francisco, it was down to 30 minutes.”

Chapters:

• (01:02) - Workday and Salesforce
• (06:01) - Rolling your own
• (08:45) - AI-driven customer service
• (15:33) - Automation at scale for business
• (19:28) - The Toyota way
• (23:40) - Sam Altman
• (25:36) - Playing offense
• (28:25) - Reinventing Klarna
• (31:44) - The startup journey
• (35:37) - Common equity
• (39:28) - Champions League
• (42:24) - Hype cycles
• (47:35) - Sebastian’s father
• (52:28) - Control and stability
• (57:23) - Comfort zone vs. stretch zone
• (01:02:27) - Creating resilience
• (01:06:23) - Why Klarna isn’t hiring

Mentioned in this episode: OpenAI, Seeking Alpha, Slack, Workday, ChatGPT, Stripe, CRMs, Mark Benioff, Twitter, Anthropic, Waymo, Devin AI, the Collison brothers and Stripe, Pieter van der Does and Adyen, Daniel Ek and Spotify, General Atlantic, DST Global, Anton Levy, Michael Moritz, Sequoia Capital, Niklas Adalberth, PayPal, CNBC, “Under Pressure” by Queen, Boris Johnson, Elon Musk, Google, Sam Walton, Made in America, Nina Siemiatkowski, and Snoop Dogg.

Links:

Connect with Sebastian

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Connect with Joubin

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guest: Kyle Hanslovan, CEO & co-founder of Huntress; and Ev Randle, partner at Kleiner Perkins

Talk is cheap, says Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan: “I learned real early on that integrity is like one of the very few things, if not the only thing, you can't buy.” En route to Huntress’ current status as a $1.5 billion firm with $100 million in ARR, he took a long time to hire new execs, or partner with VC firms.

Indeed, Kleiner Perkins partner Ev Randle recalls the deliberation Hanslovan underwent before signing KP’s term sheet. “It's pretty rare for a founder's diligence process on you to increase your conviction on them and the business that they're building,” he says. “You just saw that the effort extended across to so many different places and so many details that it's typically not.”

Chapters:

• (01:03) - Learning how things work
• (03:31) - Default trusting
• (05:07) - Over-sharing
• (10:50) - Kyle’s leadership style
• (15:44) - Hiring for conflict
• (19:24) - Scaling execs
• (22:52) - Evaluating VCs
• (28:55) - Pattern-matching
• (32:13) - Why Huntress is worth $1.5 billion
• (38:34) - Kyle’s childhood and early career
• (42:00) - The 99 percent
• (47:49) - Bootstrapping
• (51:14) - Deep roots
• (57:47) - Customer love
• (01:01:14) - “Nothing will stop us”
• (01:05:50) - Who Huntress is hiring
• (01:07:22) - What “grit” means to Kyle

Mentioned in this episode: Sony, Sam Altman, Nike, Elad Gil and High Growth Handbook, Kim Scott and Radical Candor, JMI Equity, Vinod Khosla, Todd Park, Capterra, Reddit, FUBU, Rippling, the NSA, QuickBooks, Amazon AWS, and South Park.

Links:

Connect with Kyle

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Connect with Ev

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Connect with Joubin

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm