Ex-Twitter CEO on Why AI Needs a New Internet | Parag Agrawal

**Parag Agrawal** (0:00)
The answer to every problem is a model. You're tempted to write a bunch of code for it. No, instead collect some data, figure out what a good output would look like, figure out what model architecture is right, train the model and put in a loop so that you can keep improving the model. That mindset just allows you to get out of that decision making process and hire people who are very versatile and problem solvers. It's simple once you sort of just internalize that worldview. Agents and AIs will just use the web a lot more than humans ever have. New business models will be needed. And now there's going to be like a second birth of what the future of the open web is.

**Mamoon Hamid** (0:33)
A parallel web.

**Parag Agrawal** (0:34)
A parallel web if you may. If we just figure out how to incentivize being open, how to reward high quality, unique, differentiated content, that we get to keep the web open.

**Joubin** (0:57)
Welcome to Grit. I'm Joubin, partner at Kleiner Perkins, a show where we go beyond the highlight reel and explore the personal and professional challenges of building history-making companies. Today on the show, we've got Parag Agrawal, former Twitter CEO and now founder and CEO of Parallel, the company building web infrastructure for AI. Before starting Parallel, Parag spent more than a decade at Twitter, where he rose from engineer to CTO to CEO. Now he's asking a different question. What happens when AI becomes the web's second user? We're also joined by my partner, Mamoon Hamid. Enjoy. When we were sitting in the kitchen right now, we were talking about fundraising, all sorts of stuff, and I said, can you take a breath? And you're like, dude, you take a breath, this company is dead.
And I was like, okay, that's a fair and dramatic point of view. I like, but okay, like I understand. And he's like, do not feel that way.
And yeah, Parag asked me like, do you feel that way? And I said, well, I definitely feel that way, except I just want to make sure that whatever I'm running at is the right thing, because there's so many things that are, feel like they're on fire and is full chaos.

**Mamoon Hamid** (2:10)
And let me ask you, can you take a breath?

**Joubin** (2:12)
No, but I just want to make sure that-

**Mamoon Hamid** (2:14)
You know he's running a company, right?

**Parag Agrawal** (2:15)
I know, I know, he's just told me, I didn't know that. I didn't know it until that conversation.

**Mamoon Hamid** (2:18)
He has a whole team elsewhere, it's half your team size, at this point.

**Parag Agrawal** (2:23)
I did not know that.

**Mamoon Hamid** (2:24)
Yeah, walking in today.

**Parag Agrawal** (2:26)
I found out in the kitchen, and I'm on his board too, man.

**Joubin** (2:28)
Yeah, that's right, that's right. I just wanted, your point resonated. The reason I took a beat was because I was like, the temptation when everything feels like it's so insane, where if you take a breath, you die, makes you feel like you have to do everything all at once. And for me, I was like, okay, what am I actually doing that moves the needle? Because otherwise, I could be doing stuff, making myself feel like the most productive human in the world.

**Parag Agrawal** (2:52)
We can talk about all these things.

**Mamoon Hamid** (2:54)
Yeah, we're live, we can just talk. We're already live, man. We're just recording. We're just go, we're just go. No, no, no.

**Parag Agrawal** (3:00)
I am the...
I'm the kind that is extraordinarily comfortable dropping balls. And I don't know if I should say this in front of my board, but like I drop balls all the time. And so there'll be like a bunch of things that will come at me. But every week, every day, I have like a few things that I care about or that matter. I'm just going to do those things. And there'll be a bunch of other balls that are less important that I will drop.

**Mamoon Hamid** (3:25)
But you will ultimately catch them though, right?

**Parag Agrawal** (3:27)
No, someone will.

**Mamoon Hamid** (3:28)
Someone will, okay.

**Parag Agrawal** (3:29)
I am betting that my team, because I drop balls, is just built in the structure of evolving to catch the balls I drop.
And so now you build this sort of cultured team, where, and if it's important enough, it's going to come back to me. It's going to bounce back to me.

**Mamoon Hamid** (3:47)
What if the ball that is dropped is only known to you?