The CEO of Golden talks investing, indexing knowledge, and important problems.
Jude Gomila is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and the Founder & CEO of Golden. Golden is on a mission to map out human knowledge and is backed by a16z, Founders Fund, Giga Fund, and others. Prior to Golden, Jude co-founded and spent several year working on Heyzap, a mobile advertising platform which was acquired by Fyber in 2016. Since making his first angel investment in 2010, Jude has made over 250 early stage investments including Carta, Gusto, Airtable, Boom, Superhuman, Mercury, Calm, Relativity Space, Ironclad, Astra, Benchling, Ginkgo Bioworks, Linear and many more.
TRANSCRIPT IS AUTO-GENERATED
[00:00:01] Alex: Jude Gomila is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and the founder and CEO of Golden. Golden is on a mission to map out human knowledge and is backed by a16z, founders fund, giga fund and others. Prior to golden Jude co-founded and spent several years working on Heyzap, a mobile advertising platform, which was acquired by Fyber in 2016 since making his first angel investment in 2010, Jude has made over 250 early stage investments, including Carta, Gusto, airtable, boom, superhuman, mercury, calm, relativity space, ironclad, Astra, Benchling, Ginko Bioworks, linear, and many more.
We talked investing, indexing knowledge, and important problems.
[00:00:52] Alex:
So, oh, geez. Where, where to start, where to start, where to start? I think a good place to start would just be a bit of background on yourself because you've had quite the entrepreneurial journey.
It sounds like you've been doing this startup thing for quite some time, even just out of college. Right.
[00:01:07] Jude: Sure. Well, yeah, so, so I'm Jude Gomila, the CEO of golden and background wise. So there's lots to go into here.
It's always interesting, which bits you focus on, what part of history you know of yourself to do, to do kind of summarize, but that the kind of TLDR my background is I studied engineering at Cambridge in the UK and worked pretty hard to, to get, to get into there and get really into the subject and. I, I always had a bug full foot kind of building things on the sides and making little side projects and understanding how things worked and things beyond my subjects usually and esoteric kind of areas.
And then, you know I started getting involved in Cambridge university Ultra-Preneur society. So they had a little kind of group of people who, who are entrepreneurs. And one of them actually role. He, he, he went and made stupid human. So this is when we were like 18 years old years ago for 2002.
Before the university, I was getting involved in like a lot of web scenes underground, like web web people in London who, who really there's a bunch of hackers, just making different things, playing around with phone lines, playing around with code, playing around with electronics. So, you know, I was kind of into the internet from probably about 1996.
I just absolutely hooked by it. So, so, you know, getting into university, I was always kind of like thinking, why don't we have this? Why don't we have this? So in, in second year I applied for, for that competent, they had a competition actually. So I applied with this idea that we could put an MP3 player into a headphone and the headphone would sit in your ear and you would not have a wire coming out of the headphone to the MP3 player.
And that was the, that was the pitch. And it's really cool that, that I fought, you know, I calculated how much storage, how many MP3s we get stolen. The current chip at the time, the dimensions of that chip, my Fred friend to built this little MP3 play on breadboard from scratch, which was extreme. And he got it to work and it played like six seconds of, of audio.
And I was just like, this is really cool. And now nowadays you would just have like one little kind of, you know, chip or. As equal whatever you want, SPGA or dedicated chip, that would take all the kind of, all of figuring out from, from the ground up. And I felt like if he can do that, then we can miniaturize this thing and, you know, have half, I was looking at the chips and getting kind of into the engineering of like, how do we fit this thing?
And we only have one track. So I think at the time it was just like, you can get one track. Maybe you can go for a run and have it on loop. But I never heard back from them. I never heard anything back from him, this idea, just kind of like, you know, word document, five page word, document on it with sketches and stuff like that.
And I thought, okay, well, if they didn't get back to me, then it's a bad idea. And I know I was waiting for validation which was, which was completely a waste of time. So, so then in third year I, I went in again for the competition. This time more seriously, we'd been working on a, a project for our third year engineering project.
To solve a problem. And we picked perineal dialysis. So it was actually a medical device. I tried building a medical device company which, you know, which was actually kind of cool. The name is cool connectors. We were making like this dialysis technology much easier to use. And we went to like the hospital and interviewed all these patients and took it very seriously and spent $20,000 on the prototype of someone else's money.
And they had to build tools that didn't exist at the time to build the thing that we needed because we didn't design it correctly because we didn't know what we were doing. We went into the competition and we actually got into the final. So we, we were the only non PhD students in the final as for 50,000 pounds.
Which was, you know, to us was a huge amount of money. And then they told us on the Eve of the competition, Hey, there's no money. There, there's no money in the, in a competition with like, what's, it's like, Snowpiercer when they're like, what are we eating? You know and 18 these insects. And they're like, oh my God, the protein boss insects which was not that bad by the way.
Cause you know, people suggest that that could be a way of scaling up protein. But so, so yeah, we, we we, we effectively were pitching on stage for money for this competition and there was no money and we had to actually act the whole thing out and it was really sad. So we were, you know, we went really detailed and then I realized, okay, well this is not how startups are made.
Like waiting for the single gatekeeper in a competition to go do it. So I started this doing my own thing in, in the fourth year was to actually set up you know, a company where we just make some cash. So, so one of the opportunities we just had some clients. They wanted us to be able to text messages over Bluetooth, to show the pictures in a club on a big screen.
And they put the spec out. But on this, it was like guru.com or something. I don't know whether you remember these old consulting websites where they put, put job posts. And we went and made it in a weekend and they paid us like 5k. And we're like, well, we just got paid 5k for 24 hours or overnight work or whatever.
That's pretty good. And we really need that money. And I remember I was cycling on my boat to see my friends who had written the code for it. And, and I handed him 2.5 K and he had to need a CD with the code, with the code for it. And I was like, that's good. And that, that was a good, good, good. And so we started doing that over and over again in different level projects.
And then out of that, we, we tried we, we said, okay, what's going to be big for this Christmas. And, and digital photo frames were taking the off. I don't even remember. People put it in their pictures on these little, this is pre iPad. So yeah it was, it was kind of interactive at the time. So we actually went into China and we looked for all the different digital photo frames and selected one that was like a higher resolution at the market.
And that was all kind of angle to go higher Rez. And we, you know, we, we, we were selling into, into the UK. We formed a brand around it and it, we started getting some sales. I mean, she'd go to, into Selfridges in London. It was really cool to see the product on the shelf. This is no fun, no funding, no ecosystem.
It's just us trying to figure things out and really like road like Ashley negative capital. No, no, no. Zero like less than zero money. So every move you have to do has to, has to make some cash, like actually there and then, and so, so that, that goal the market started getting very price sensitive in, in, in the frames, all prices collapsed and we had to get out of the so we tried lots of different experiments actually around the 2007.
And time, like when I was trying, you know, just getting out with university, trying different experiments out. And I you know, we noticed like things happening in Silicon valley at a time. So, so, you know, I, we, we started seeing all this stuff happening. You know, it's using Twitter on the other side, you know, in the UK, from my phone text messaging, paying to do a tweet.
So you would pay for an SMS and you pay to do your tweet. So it was like 10 cents for a tweet or something. So like, this is what, you know, really, it's kind of like. Kind of very weird, different time. Right. And so then, then I my friend is over it Silicon valley and he's, he's working for a YC firm and he says, you know, I want you to come out and check it out.
So I was like, this sounds good. So I went out there and it was completely different world. So I found the people that I was looking for, the, you know, the entrepreneurs actually building things. And these were the early, I guess it was early Y Combinator group is kind of like the the Dropbox crew and justin.tv crew.
And, and it was just kind of 50 to a hundred people are actually building really cool stuff in software. So I landed right into the middle of that. And spent some time trying to find a co-founder to build a software company and go get into Y Combinator. And that was my kind of mission. I didn't have a visa at that point.
I was allowed to be in the USA. I was on 90 days, you got 89 days. So I had 89 days to like pull something off which is pretty extreme and to try and get into YC. So And, and my co-founder MRD, he was also wrapping up with his, his YC YC experience with the first experience that he has. And we decided to go make a company together.
So we got really serious. W w we're trying pitching different ideas and settled on, on HaZaP which was, you know, originally we could probable the flash games out on the web and that, you know, they were on, on they were scattered across all these different flash game websites. This is kind of pre mobile gaming in a way.
So that, that's where the action was in gaming. It was all on these little flash websites, believe it or not. And, and so we got into YC on this idea. We had compiled them and then websites were installing this little widget this, and instead of Kamala was very different. It's very, very small place where there were kind of real celebrities of Silicon.
Yeah. And, and it was a very different time and it was kind of really fun. In terms of all the kind of different meetings that were happening well, like kind of events, events were like happening everywhere. People throwing parties. It was like a who's who of tech all in one physical space. And, and that was, that was a very, very crazy time.
So, so we got into YC, we got interviewed by Paul Graham, which is cool on, on the side, on a sidewalk outside of a mountain view. And, you know, it was very, very casual, you know, not even face to face, just sitting, like looking at the road side, looking at the car park, the sitting down on the Cub, this informal.
And he's like, I don't really, I don't really get what you guys are building, but you like you guys, so I'm gonna let you in, we, we got a lucky break. That was, that was a right. Right. So we go into YC and then we, it was the deal with 15 K for 50 K is nothing. So it's 15 K for three months for two people.
And we asked her 30 K and we got 30 K. So we negotiated a a little bit, which is good. And nowadays it's like, what, like 1 50, 200 free going, you know, Piper's like 300 or something. Right. So 10 X, 10 X more money. So, so we had that 30 K and then we spent 20 K on legal bills, 10 K each for our visa, we had 10 K left.
We had not started YC yet. And then we're like, okay. So, so so we, we basically lock ourselves away and we, we really did lock ourselves away in, in in, in Soma, in a re in a apartment and work on up and get traction. And then we're running out of money and we get negative on the cash negative, like 10 K each on credit card debt.
And then we, we, we, we trying to raise our rounds and, you know, 2009, 2008, the crash happens. So nobody's getting funded. Half the people, half the companies in our batch. There was one really successful company, Airbnb. It came out of it 8, 8, 9 companies. Yeah. But it was really tough time. So nuclear, winter funding and the funding environment is very different.
So we have to go and meet like every investor, like one-third of the valley to try and race. So we learned a lot about racing and we realized actually that actually like at the time, like who all these jokers, like, like backing these companies, they just got cashed, but they don't really know what they're talking about.
So we found people that didn't know what they're talking about. People like Laval and people like union square ventures and, you know, Neval, and I think Marc Andreessen had a fund hitch forge by pre-injury and Horowitz. Like those two guys were working together and as union square ventures and all this kind of software, so really different environment.
And so we raised we use our loss, like I think it was a lost, absolute liquidity to get the flight done for you USB. And it feels so dramatic compared to like how things can go down nowadays. And, and, and we get funded by union square ventures, which is another big upgrade. Right. So we get, you know, Albert joined school, Novalis, joins the board, and then we, we effectively sought trying different ideas in the idea, maze and haze up.
And eventually we get to about one mil ARR and then south of 45 mil, 2016. And that's like a nine year wild journey of different things, different experiments. But yeah, that, that's the kind of the stock was thought. Right. There's always like more, you know, more story before and after that,
[00:12:48] Alex: Yeah, primer, right.
Oh my gosh. Quite the journey I liked that I didn't know about that 89 day window. Insane.
[00:12:57] Jude: Yeah, we have to do it in a couple of times because like you're allowed to do it three times in an 18 month window, and then, then you can't come back in or something for, and every people were failing to get in and eat in.
Some were getting banned from the U S by messing up. And so we had to lose very precarious visa situation, precarious money situation. So it was, it was good, like two or three years of, of like negative bank balance and, and how to survive on negative bank balance, which is, which is tough. And but it, it, it made us frugal.
And you know, we got to, we got to learn a lot and, and, and getting, you know, along the way, then I started like doing angel and vet checks, as soon as we started getting some cash. So doing angel investments go to like two 50 angel investments or something now, 14 unicorns going 15 close now, superhuman this release, or like eight to five post-money valuation.
So getting close to it. And, and then onto golden something big. So yeah, different kinds of gears. You know, when you're first starting out to like late at later on. But yeah, it felt like a wild journey actually, genuinely when you're like, you don't know whether you're going to be able to come into the USA or not based on the secondary interview and your startup and your kind of dream is on the line.
You know what I mean? Even, even one case where I think, I think my co-founder hats, the guy bought a gun out onto the table, put it on the table to intimidate him in, in the interview process. And we're just trying to fucking make startups. We're not breaking any rules, not paying ourselves a salary. You know, there's no rules being broken and we're here this train, you're trying to build a company, not, not pay yourself salary until the is done.
And and, and you get people, you know, get people. Crazy gatekeepers, intimidating you to try it. Like, and then you try to, it's this wild story and you're in YC and someone's pulling it, putting a gun on the fucking table in
[00:14:48] Alex: immigration. Oh, this was for immigration. This wasn't for like
[00:14:51] Jude: coming through, coming through just to get the heat up, assess to see, are you ready to tell them the truth or something?
So, so that, that, that was kind of interesting. I think a lot of people that did come over had interesting immigration stories when they were trying to build a company out of Silicon valley. Definitely. Some people got sent back on a plane. I remember one, we got sent back. He came off the plane and immediately reprimanded him and sent him back just for having an empty suitcase.
You hadn't broken any rules, but that was a sign that he was going to be staying here or something. Wow. He hadn't yet broken a rule. He just has a light suitcase.
[00:15:23] Alex: Crazy, crazy journey. I mean, tons, tons to unpack as well. I just, I guess. Like very fundamentally. What do you think? Maybe it's a little bit weird to be doing this like self reflectively, but what do you think about you makes you a good founder, right?
Cause obviously there's tons of other options you could have had coming out of Cambridge. Like no, no issues there. What about you? Do you think drove you to do it in the first place? And what do you think drove you to be successful ultimately?
[00:15:51] Jude: Yeah, I'm really not happy with the status quo of how things are on the product level.
Like when I see when we do this zoom call and just before we started the podcast and I was asking you, you know, can you hear the keyboard? And you said yes. And I was thinking, okay, I've got crisp online. I've turned it on. It works for discolored. Why isn't it working that pisses me off. And like, I, it, these, these product inadequacies or service inadequacies piss me off so heavily.
I, I it's like, I think we can. And then I look at it and like, we can fix it, but then you have to dedicate a lot of time to her. And the second part is. Just sticking, you know, you have to be willing to stick with it. You can't be like, oh, that's a cool idea. And I'm going to work on it for 24 hours in a movie, but no, it doesn't work like that.
You have to see it through. So you have to be like, you know, oh, you won a gold medal in the Olympics. Okay. You're going to have to dedicate 18 years of training and drop everything if you want it. And I'm willing to do that, which isn't maybe a bit naughty. I don't know. So I th I think, and then there's kind of like seeing this, the creativity part of like, saying, well, how could we detect like keyboard strokes and remove them from the video?
Is that an AI problem to detect the sound envelope of, and you have loads of annotations of what a keyboard sound could sound like if it's mechanical, non mechanical. And then so it's kind of seeing, seeing it's like the creativity part, there's a drive for, for something, you know, for, for something more interesting and fixing the problem.
And then there's the kind of grit and determination. I think the three of them, you need the three of them. Th th they may not be minimum. They may not be the absolute minimum that you need to get to, to, to make it happen. Right. So yeah, I think, I think that there's some of the components, but I think different founders have different kinds of strengths.
They lean on, you know to make it work. And you
[00:17:35] Alex: mentioned, you know, this almost obsession with just like product inadequacy is I I'm assuming is, is that sort of, part of the reason you found yourself getting into angel investing so much as it's sort of another way to work on problems that you think need fixing?
Yeah.
[00:17:51] Jude: Yeah. It's a way to keep, keep it's kinda like an off pressure valve for not getting distracted by, from working on different, too many different things at once. So, you know, if you're working on a staff up, you gotta be really focused. And but if your brain is constantly seeing opportunities, then you know, you can't constantly build all the different things.
Cause you need to go deep into some, some of the areas. Oh, it's just really one area. And then, so that, it's a way of saying, okay, well I've satisfied. My curiosity in terms of investing in this thing that I think is a big deal. Yeah. And it's a way of also building it a closed loop feedback on whether your idea's any good, because if they are, then you'll get paid for it.
So that's another way of it. It tunes to know like, is my next idea going to be any goods. And, and maybe, and then there's a learning component as well, but I think it keeps, it keeps things interesting. So, you know, my brain is thinking about 3d printing. Bioprinting synthetic blood different kinds of stem cells and putting them over and like, you know, different types of computing, reversible computing, and other kinds of computing.
So it's just, and then it's a really quick way is education as well, because you quickly, if it's working or if they're closer at working, you get, you solve a lot passively in an area. So I find that really cool. Like you, you, you, you get to, and you get to meet interesting people. Well so th I think that, that that's, you know, the product and agriculture cattle disease is definitely caught that we didn't have access to a cap table.
So I wanted to find that and found that in Gusto, we had ADP and Paychex, which sucked, and you can ask the employee could not access the w two or w four without making a phone call or something like that. Yeah. Well, like logging into horrible interface. So definitely product inadequacies and one of the biggest drivers for me.
[00:19:31] Alex: Yeah, sure. And how transferable do you think those skills are? Right. Like, you're operating at a very, very high level across, like being a founder and being an investor, obviously like found a lot of success in both of those. You said like 250 angel checks. What 14 going on 15 unicorns. Now, how transferable do you see those skills?
Like you were talking about earlier, some of those reasons you think you've done so well as a founder, obviously you're, I think in, in many respects, it's good to have someone who's like an actual operator has been at some point, writing checks like that. But do you see the skills as being transferrable or are they completely separate.
[00:20:06] Jude: I think they're transferable somewhat. I think you know, when you're interviewing someone you're trying to measure you're trying to understand the person and that's similar to understanding a founder in some respects, not in all respects, that's all. And then when you're thinking, is this project a good project?
What's the ROI ROI on this project. You're doing that with the company as well. So there are definitely analogies. And I think, I think if you look at a lot of successful investors, especially in tech, they are X operators. It's not always the case. Yeah. Some of the pure thinkers. So, so I think the, yeah, I think there is transferred to the T and M and you can also go back the other way and say like, okay, well that company built this kind of culture and that's interesting.
Or they have these processes. These founders can become a network of people that can inform you as well, how to become a better founder. But it doesn't work for everybody. Some people are. Then, you know the zone of genius and Justin Collins was, you know, maybe purely, you know, technical and, and, and not like model centric or people centric, and sure.
They can make something really cool that everybody wants, but, and, and the growth goes around that. Yeah.
[00:21:12] Alex: Gotcha. And you know, when you're writing angel checks, like maybe as early as, as you are usually say, if you're just writing pre-seed checks, for instance, how much of that is a bet on a person and how much of that is, are you actually taking the idea into account?
Right? Because just going back to what you were talking about with Paul Graham, sort of sitting there on the curve and being like, I don't really get what you guys are doing, but I like you, so I'll let you in, like how much of it is conviction in a person and how much of it is, this seems reasonable. The idea itself.
[00:21:42] Jude: I think the person is the first, it's the primary. Cause you can pivot an idea. And you can tweak an idea if the audio is in a good space. Well, if you're in a great space, reasonable found the, you know, they'll probably do really well. And, and a great founder in a, in a totally bad space, we'll have to figure out how to pivot out of that space, for sure.
So there's all these different kinds of mixes, but I think if it's, if it's a killer, if there's a killer idea and they've got the traction it's working, they're probably going to be really smart anyway, cause they've made that happen. So that's very important. If I look at the biggest companies, the ones that redid the breakouts, they have exceptional, really exceptional found those.
So, so yeah, I, I think, I think the founder would be, would be it, but if, if, and normally this is self solving as a problem, cause there's really exceptional founders, wouldn't be working on some imploring anyway. They would be there'll would be in something really interesting. Gotcha. So they kind of, they kind of go together.
They're kind of relatively bounded.
[00:22:37] Alex: That makes sense. Do you think there's a point at which that changes like it's, it's, it's difficult to articulate, but do you think there's a point at which, you know, the company has sort of become the larger entity and maybe you should be paying more attention to that than the person that's behind the whole machine?
[00:22:55] Jude: I mean, maybe for late stage investing? I think for early stages, it's all about not just the founder, but the founding team, the founding chemistry between the co-founders as well. But like, I certainly don't want to back things that I find boring, no matter who it is, I just can't bring myself to do it.
Cause I gotta be, I gotta be engaged with it. Yeah.
[00:23:13] Alex: Do you have, do you have like a philosophy when it comes to investing? Like, is it purely, I think this is interesting or is there something, you know, more to
[00:23:21] Jude: it definitely a philosophy and I don't even know how to even articulate that at this point, because you ended up with all these different kinds of ideas, the old get munched together.
And you know, you have to kind of point a different area because you end up with like thesis around founders, founding teams. Sure. I found the dynamics, co-found the product, you know, not this PMF, but found the market fit markets that are interesting models, interesting network effect dynamics. You end up with all these different pots.
I know there's hundreds of different pods and they kind of come together on solve problems beachheads strategies, you know, first, 18 months and where it just, there's so many different parts in it. And it becomes like Paul, if you will kind of rule book will and you know, philosophy around it. So, so yeah, there certainly is one it's difficult to do you accumulate and, and some, and all of it has to get like revisited because the market's changing over time so that you've got some kind of idea or like philosophy, but then it can be out of date within eight years.
Sometimes some things don't change.
[00:24:26] Alex: So, I guess, just to start with, or to drill in on that a little bit more, what would you say makes a project interesting to you, whether to invest in or to work on, like, where does that stem from, do you think?
[00:24:37] Jude: I think, I think the ability for it to remove some kind of suffering or inefficiency from the market.
So that that's one, one way of looking at the other ones, like bringing new optionality to the world. So, so, you know, rocket company brings optionality to the world and you can get, go off and travel into new places or, or Gusto or air table and Carter, they remove tedious work, but they also have like unlock interesting things as well.
So I think, I think things that underpin those aspects of there's a spectrum of the suffering, you know, from a very trivial, like I've got to load something into a space. And it's boring to like someone's dying of stage four cancer. Can I save them? So I think, I think though there's a spectrum there and you can't do everything on the heaviest side because the, on the lighter side, those that that's, those systems are fueling the leverage for the side where it's the heavy side.
So, you know, the payroll, penny being more efficient allows that biotech startup to do more deeper research. Right. So I think, I think I go for a blended strategy where 50% of the tools that underlie all the kinds of innovations and 50% are these hard edges of like we want a supersonic plane that's like on the hot edge.
And then like, but the supersonic plane company has to have a cap table that works really well. So you've got Carter and cap base over there. So I think, I think that I like to be across that spectrum and divvy up like energy to, to. To lift all ships and build these like super power boats as well or special boats that will go and do some
[00:26:17] Alex: interesting.
Definitely. What did that philosophy look like for golden? Like what was the fundamental sort of belief that led you to start working on this in the first place?
[00:26:28] Jude: Yeah, so, so I, over the last 10 years, it was looking at all these different companies and technology piece, like this keep coming up short on, on the data that's out there.
It seems to be spread around the web on, on websites and people's blog posts on, in different academic papers. And then it just doesn't make sense to me. We don't have a database for knowledge that we can, we can't, we should be able to access that. And Wikipedia is the best version of, of the public kind of public version in a way of knowledge of knowledge.
That's being compiled. Yeah. But it's 21 years old. I think it's going 22 years. And it's not really quite a database of knowledge in a sense. And then I can't do certain things with it. You know, I can't easily like API into different parts and do queries and set up alerts for like, tell me if this, this thing happens.
Certainly, you know, more difficult to edit and keep up to date and then it doesn't cover everything. And then Google knowledge graph and Alexa, Siri, those knows graphs, there's knowledge, graphs are very much walled gardens where you can only get to each individual piece of data by asking a single question at a time, really on the voice side.
Right. Or in the case of Google, you, you you're confronted with an ads. If you, if you do your work. Which may or may not be what you're looking for. And then, you know, you can't, you can't query across it, I call an API into it. Right. So, so I just feel like it's inevitable. We need to have a database of knowledge that is huge and knowledge maximalist and captures all information about these entities and canonical and improving, and then all the functions you want to do with it.
And then power, power, like research and work tools with that data.
[00:28:06] Alex: Why do you think information indexing is important to begin with? Like, is it purely a I'm working on this thing and I need information about it and I need like, sort of a central place for that to be, or is it, is there like a broader philosophy there?
[00:28:21] Jude: Yeah. So, so in order to make a decision in life on something, you need to have data around the situation and around what you're dealing with. So if I'm going to go pick up my iPhone from my desk right now, it's saying that I need to know that the iPhone is on the day. I need to know how far it is away from my hands.
And I need to have information to do action to complete objectives. So if you Humana, if you want to have objectives, they want to get done. They need to know information about things. And the more information we know about things, the more efficient those decisions can be. And they end the process of achieving an objective.
So that might be that I want to make, you know, nobody died from some snake bites. So who's in the, you know, what's the research on this? Like who are the companies building anti snake, venom proteins or otherwise antigens. The, I think yeah, there's, there's, there's the compilation of the information allows you to answer all the questions, not all the questions, actually, not like what's your opinion on expert, a lot of the questions.
And then that, that efficiently, efficiently allows people to move forward. But there's also this general education and people are abstracting models from other things. That then improving their brain. So kind of training that brains, right. It's kind of like a reference bootloader for training your brain and having like great information that's compiled on that can, can mean that people can be educated faster.
And, and that, that can fuel some systems of education and be a backbone for, for some of it. So yeah, different, different reasons. But you know, ultimately humanity's best asset, it's kind of human minds and we, we optimally should have the best software, I, the best education for each mind. And if we do that, then, then we move faster towards hopefully be some, some positive goals or whatever we choose to do.
[00:30:10] Alex: Yeah. You know, I've always thought it's indexing, I think is a really interesting thing just because, you know, the internet itself, I think is sort of an act of, of data centralization or information centralization. And obviously you have, you know, services like Wikipedia or anything else that sort of go a bit further into that, but I've always thought that, you know, just simply the act of, you know, let's say you're doing research on something just the act of like having to go to a website, find some information, copy and paste it to another page.
It, it almost seems like too simplistic in a way. So I, I'm curious to see if there's what you think, the sort of future of just data centralization and data indexing looks like. I know Golden's working a little bit in automating some of those processes, but do you have any sort of vision for what this might look like?
Like 10 years out?
[00:31:02] Jude: Yeah. And, and, and on the seat on the centralization decentralization point, you can, you can write golden, you know, into a decentralized blockchain if he wants it. So there's different kinds of layers, right? Like you can be decentralized in your backups around the world. So all your backups are like everywhere.
You can be decentralized. And I like in terms of that aspect, there's certain like centralization. Well, you can even decentralized the validation for example. So, so I I'm thinking the product products right now, product experiences, a better centralized right now. I, apple was not like decentralized decision of like how the UI is made.
So I think the product experience centralized under company is a good model right now. Decentralization of edits is a good thing. Like we want everybody to be able to contribute to it and add information, the information suddenly fragmented. So I think, I think about it in terms of fragmentation, more than decentralization centralization, maybe.
Okay. So we've got a lot of fragmentation I want to like fragment it, but then you could read decentralized the fragmented component, you know fragmented information everywhere. So, so it's really like linking and then there's also structuring it so you can have a very structured, decentralized information.
So this will structured like centrally and it could th th as there were different layers to this, right. You know, the, the I think, yeah, we, we go to think, not necessarily just in terms of descent, decentralization, centralization, so I guess a little bit vague. And then if you look at different layers of projects, you get all these different variables, depending on where you're looking at the layer.
And, and, and yeah, so I think structure structuring the information, bringing it more meaning and clarity and, and, and making it more useful and then centralizing product experience. We could view it as more decentralized product experience as far as on the stand. But decentralizing access it, access to the information is very important.
Like every, a that should be everywhere. Right. And you should have backups everywhere. So yeah, I think that whole field, I guess, is like to be understood right. Of, of the centralized, decentralized so-called dilemma.
[00:33:04] Alex: Yeah. You know, when you talk about democratizing access, maybe democratizing is the way right where it I'll I'll use it anyway, when you talk about just, you know, sort of democratizing access to information like that. I think the first thing that comes to mind is how centralized or decentralized if you want to use that word editing is because I know I think Wikipedia has done a pretty good job of of dealing with this, but when it's a publicly editable database, you know, more or less, I think that the question of bias always comes up and fact checking always comes up.
Is that something you've thought about at all? When it comes to golden is, you know, who's actually able to make any changes in what that process looks like.
[00:33:49] Jude: Yeah, for sure. And I do think, you know, anyone should have a shot at improving the state of the knowledge. And then that should be kind of checked with different layers of validators, which could be human or non-human.
You could use statistical methods or like group consensus methods or axiomatic methods that many methods should be kind of like applied to try and hone in on, is this correct information or not? As, as best as we can. So I think you know, right now, I guess Wikipedia myself and yourself we can't edit the page on India.
I think we're locked out from doing that even. And if you had spent 20 years in a bedroom reading about India and you got every single book and went there traveled there you would not be able to touch it until we built up certain kinds of status in the group. And I think it'd be better if we could have a, you could propose a claim with evidence and then we could see that very transparently and then try and validate.
And let it, let it, let it stand the test of time. And, and maybe someone can counter it late later down line or improve it. So I think something mechanisms that converge on the correct answer as efficiently as possible from as many sources as possible. Well, I mean, obviously some sources can have noise, right?
So but I think innovating that is, is interesting. And obviously bringing AI to the equation is an interesting one as well. Like, could we do this more efficiently, could we remove like some of the boring checks, for example, like scanning language for neutrality or scanning language for into incorrect, just straight up incorrect statements, you know, and, and even writing the texts with NLG is kind of exciting with GPT3 and stuff.
Yeah. So can we get rid of all the boring stuff so we can focus on the hardest. And argue about the harder stuff. Like people are still arguing about stupid things. Like, is the earth flat We're just wasting a lot of time with, with the, with the arguments like that? Rather than, you know, things at the edge.
And I think it's because the edge is so difficult to get to that. No one, no one, no one can has the time resources or energy to get to the edge because the argument should be, have it happening at the, you know, is the universe discrete or continuous, or does it run forever or does it run a loop? Well it doesn't, you know, what's, what's the kind of model, how does it work?
We should be arguing about physics and, and mathematics and, and we almost it's like, how do we get everyone into that state so we can argue about, you know, just deeper, deeper problems. That, that, that gap is, is, is, is very interesting, right? Only, only a very small percentage of the world.
Think about. The edge of what humanity knows. But how could we lift that percentage up to get more people there that that's kind of cool. Really
[00:36:24] Alex: cool. And, you know, I guess more practically right now, it seems like there's sort of been this focus as far as golden is concerned, even when you're on the homepage.
Just sort of looking around like very much this emphasis on these like deeply technical topics. So if I want to go on there and look at something like blockchain or quantum physics or something else, like that's going to be filled out. But on the other hand, there's a lot of, you know, maybe more easily sort of researchable topics.
Like, I don't know, India might be an example. Not having looked that up on golden, obviously that hasn't been quite as filled out. How do you see the progression of all of this sort of being built up in golden? Was there a point of Maybe starting with these deeper, more technical topics. Okay.
[00:37:09] Jude: Yeah.
There's a couple of reasons for doing that perfectly. So one is you end up with a selection bias for the people that would be reading it. Some of the readers going to be people involved in the community or, or editing information or changing things or become users. So you, we want those particular people in who have high signal in, in making sure the information's correct.
And the unit economics attached to them, right? So we have a SAS model for some of the tooling, some of the, kind of more tooling useful for teams, organizations, and that the, that group of people looking for those entity types and topics are usually more aligned with becoming paying customers, which allows us to have more resources in the early stages of this game, in order to invest in, in the, in the topics where there is no commercial reason to have that information So it's like, it's a quality booster in terms of data, like getting the right.
It's also kind of testing the depth of the platform as well. Can it kind of cover these kind of deeper topics? But, but, but mostly quality and unit economics in terms of getting resources in a loop coming back into the company so we can go and do the other, other things, which may be more academic or more, be more popular type topics.
There's also not doing, not doing what is already out there. So there's no point I was doing a page right now that has a really, really good Wikipedia page. Right. Because it would only be worth doing it if it's going to be a certain percentage better. So, so it's like, how do you pay your resources?
Like in terms of the early stages of the game, do you go in like, do go off to the, the, the page on India, which is pretty, pretty good? Or do you go and do something that they don't cover? Like a non notable topics and some anti CRISPR protein company that doesn't have any coverage. But maybe, you know, AstraZeneca care about it and anger contact you to become a customer or something like that.
So I th I think, yeah, we, we've kind of architected the group, the entities we're going after, but we do want to cover everything eventually. And, and that, that w that may take a while to ramp up. But the, the going off the companies and cryptocurrencies and technological topics and the people around them, it's a good, it's a good place to start in our opinion.
Yeah,
[00:39:16] Alex: that makes sense. Now, I do want to shift gears just for a second, because there's, you know, you touched on this earlier when we were talking about investing and sort of this vehicle for, you know, looking at and being a part of, and to some degree, all of these really interesting projects solving really interesting problems on your site, I came across this, you have just this list of problems that you think are a quote, unquote, open for solving, or like really important.
And I'm curious, are there any that you've been thinking about more in-depth more recently that you think are particularly important?
[00:39:50] Jude: Yeah, that list is probably like four years old. I was going to say, I don't know how old it is. Some of them are just like esoteric, mechanical contractions. I just find interesting.
Yeah, but they actually don't matter that much. Some are more important. For example, green coin, you know, green coin. I was thinking like peer to peer Bitcoin lending. This is, this is an old idea from like 2012 and I'm making a, a green at political which, which has achieved the functions of, of decentralized cryptocurrency with, with lower compute.
So they, these things were from a while back ago. And. Some of them still, still need to be done. So, so I should probably put dates on these cause and update it. But yeah, th that's that's really important problem. I mean, carbon sequestering is, is a key one, right? Getting, getting things that have great unit economics around carbon sequestering and sucking in carbon, especially into things that are gonna stick around for a long time, like building materials.
So that, that's an interesting problem. Anything that speeds up like true, like hidden billion dollar wastage of time, like everybody starts as zoom calls five minutes late. So how, how many, how many business hours are we waiting? Are we wasting and suppose of those first five minutes? And, and, and whether, whether that can be cut out, like how could that be cut out?
So things that these kinds of drag factors I'm interested in like industrial drag factors, which are really quite boring, like the sound of the keyboard, like interfering with it with a conversation that that's a small thing. It seems like a small thing. If, if it's a 5% drag factor on a compensation, maybe it's a really big thing.
So, you know, that, that says that Chris could be that AI audio company could be really big, big thing, right? If it's 5% of distraction in cycles or business schools. So, so electric planes are interesting. And I'm just getting, getting us in a much more stable place, as well as the humanity. I don't feel like we're by 2020 with good, good proof that we're not in a stable or even like w we know in a kind of bust place of the welds.
Right. We're still, we're still open for pathogens that could be worse than COVID-19. So things that things. Get in front of that Cove. Pretty much most software like commercial software is all still broken and slow. And so that every single startup that you can mention uproar, you know, someone's going to come and beat it in like a year's time.
So, so, and then like everything moving, everything from active to passive is another theme as well. So, so things are, I guess, get, make things cheaper. Like every, everything that coming a little cheaper as interesting, but we, we got to balance that with sustainability as well. So if things become too cheap, then we just shred the for that resource.
Right. What's an
[00:42:25] Alex: example of a passive thing. That's interesting.
[00:42:29] Jude: Yeah. So I'm going to try and think of, I've got one re weird example, which is a, a component could be inserter. And, and in F1, there is like active suspension, but there's as a way of pulling off some of the properties of active suspension where the passive component called that enough.
And this is kind of very niche. So I kind of wanted to give you a more I wanted to give you a better example. I'm trying to think of one that's that's that's a really good, yeah. Example
[00:42:53] Alex: recharging car batteries while you're breaking kind of thing. Like things you'd be doing anyway.
[00:42:59] Jude: Yeah. Yeah. So that's a bit active, I guess, as you're breaking, that's a bit of an active, active system.
I'm trying to think of something that would be very common in, in front of you, I guess. Like, you know, when you, when you drop your iPhone as well, gorilla glass is kind of a quiet, passive thing. It's not active, there's no active like electronics or stabilization trying to stop your phone, like a phone, becoming a drone.
It's trying to like, hold the, is it fools? You know, it's just like straight up really gloss and it's very passive. Right. And that stuff works and it usually stands the test of time. Like when you look at a nail, a nail is quiet, like simple objects, right. And a screw. We didn't have screws at some point in our history.
But screws seems so simple to us now. Right. And that's a very passive thing. So I think moving, like when I look at a Dyson, it's a very active, it's a pretty complex machine, right? Lots of parts. So anything that kind of reduces the complexity of the parts, like relativity space of doing re 3d printing of, of the rockets and that's become a thing that I guess a lots of broccoli companies starting to do, but trying to get the whole thing for you to print it.
It's, it's kind of an interesting simplification. Maybe, maybe it's more like simplification as well. And I think that simplifies calendar leads a great example of this, right. It's kind of moving what was quite a multi-step process into like a much more simple and elegant form. The things that I'm not producing problems down, I'm always interested in.
I've got this post of the apple one circuit diagram up in, up in my, in my office right here. And it's. It's a pretty, pretty elegant circuit diagram. Right. So, but you can imagine the future that, that circuit just being like a single chip or even like a symbol single like crystal that represents all the kind of logic gates in, in, in out sentence.
And so I think things that can reduce complexity down, I'm really interested in cause they usually get cheaper, they get more robust and you can maybe do more things with them as well. And you can build, you can stop these components together to build other, other things. That's
[00:44:51] Alex: really cool. I know it's it's nuanced, but it makes sense.
So if you weren't working on golden right now, what would you be doing? Do you think?
[00:45:00] Jude: Yeah, I don't know. I haven't wanted to think too much about that question because
[00:45:04] Alex: you'll get way too far,
[00:45:06] Jude: right? Yeah. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. You don't want, I don't want to get too distracted. So the, the. I think there are lots of, I mean, one thing would be to say like, what is the most efficient way of sucking carbon out of the atmosphere?
And can you build a company around that for sure. And to look at everything that's currently being done and to say, is it a bio solution? Do I need to like genetically engineer, some kind of, you know, some kind of mycelium that prints protein and we make like an amazing burger as well. Also, like, you know, take the sucking out carbon.
Like there is a company called air protein that kind of does actually I don't think it's mycelium now. I can't remember. So I would think about the, the key problems. Like we got carbon dioxide. How do you pull that out and turn build like a trillion dollar company out of the pulling out of that.
And energy energy is an interesting one. How could we generate tons of different energy, but I feel like it's quite relatively competitive or at least you got to be quite specialists, maybe a PhD in your areas to do it. I would probably look at reversible computing. It's kind of interesting. I would maybe look at quantum computing but the thing is, if it's exotic, it has a higher risk as well of, of networking.
And then, you know, but there's also really boring things that could bring huge scale you know, business processes that are broken. So I would look at AI compression in AI compression in general. But these are all over the place. Right. So I think, I think it's you know, I think, I think so thinking about how, how we could speed up the whole ecosystem so that we could print start-ups faster, but that's an interesting one.
Now YC has been that factory and an angel list has made big impact. Right? So I think that that's another thing to think about how, how we get have like graduate. Usually always swarming a startup if they're up for it. That, that could be kind of an interesting question of how, how to lower the barrier to entry, even more of being a startup.
[00:46:51] Alex: Off to the races once again. Oh my gosh. Yeah. All right, man. Well, thank you again.
Great talking to you.
All right. Thanks very much.