Bret Taylor - The Agent Era

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts, and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes, and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:39)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of PositiveSum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit PSUMVC.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:08)
My guest today is Bret Taylor. Bret's resume is absurd. He built Google Maps, famously rewriting the whole thing in a weekend. He was the CTO of Facebook in critical years. He founded Quip. He was the chair of the board at Twitter. He was the co-CEO of Salesforce. The incredible list goes on. Now, Bret is the co-founder of Sierra, a conversational AI platform for business. And he is the chairman of the board at OpenAI. Together, we discuss the past, present and future of AI agents. New programs that will begin doing incredible amounts of work for us humans in astonishing ways that are a thrill to consider. Bret believes agents will become a meaningful part of the future and transform the ways in which we interact with technology. We discuss a strategic approach to AI integration, the different categories of agents and their scopes and the essentials of craftsmanship. This is a must listen with one of the great builders of our time. Please enjoy this discussion with Bret Taylor.
Okay, Bret, so I thought of an unusual place to start with a very strange topic that probably most people won't know about, but I promise it will set the stage for many of my questions. Can you explain the concept of the mythical man moth?

**Bret Taylor** (4:18)
So it's called mythical man moth, and it's essentially the myth that I think stereotypically, a lot of folks who come from, I'll say, a business school background as opposed to computer science background have about software, which is to make a software development project go faster, you should add more people to it. Often, the inverse is true. In fact, there's some proverbial statement. It's if you want to make a software project go twice as slowly, add another person to it. I think it's that truism, I think, is based on, I think when you're designing a very complex system, it's often individual engineers who have a system mapped out in their head that is very intricate. And similarly, when you have really high functioning teams, whether it's early teams, I worked on like Google Maps or some of the folks designing some of these very powerful AI systems right now, small teams who are completing each other's sentences, so to speak. And own parts of the system and really understand it and work in unison is a very magical and fragile team dynamic. And adding more people often requires you add a lot more process, you add a lot more bureaucracy, you disempower some of the most advanced technologists on the team and can broadly speaking just slow things down. And so whether you look at projects like healthcare.gov that had a billion people working on it and went very slowly or just the classic software projects at most companies that take twice as long and cost twice as much, that's the idea of the Mythical Man Month. And I would say it's broadly true though, like all rules of thumb. It's just a rule of thumb and every situation is different.