Kareem Amin - Re-Enchanting the World

**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. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus along with all of our podcasts at colossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:00)
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 p-s-u-m dot v-c.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:27)
My guest today is Kareem Amin, co-founder and CEO of Clay. Clay has become one of the fastest growing software companies of the last few years, valued at over $4 billion.
It helps companies find their customers and reach them at scale. But this conversation is about a lot more than Clay. Kareem is one of the most original founders and thinkers that I've met recently. We talk about the statues he keeps at the center of how he runs Clay, truth, justice, and courage, and what those words demand of him in practice. We talk about risk, ambition, and what he's learned about both. I've had a lot of conversations with Kareem over the years, and this is one that I'll remember. Please enjoy this great conversation with Kareem Amin.
Can you describe the long, strange journey you've been on, why you started, and then what it was like to exist and have done some interesting stuff, when this thing happened, and then how you took advantage of it? I find the two-chapter story so interesting.

**Kareem Amin** (3:18)
We started with the really abstract ambition of, how do we give the power of programming to more people?
My co-founder, Nikola and I, we'd worked in product even though we both studied engineering. I think it was really just, hey, you're in the 21st century, you have computers that can do things for you, and if you can't tell them what to do, then you can't capture any of the value that's being created. We had a lot of ideas and we wanted to build them, and every time we tried to build something, it was taking so long. I was also starting to play around with producing music, and I really like tools like Ableton Live. I have an idea, I can extract it from my mind and into the machine, and we were also in this kick of looking at the history of computation. Things like in the 1960s, the mother of all demos, just seeing the fluidity of the interaction between you and the computer needs to be super fluid for it actually to lead you to the next stage of thinking. You need low latency between I have an idea it happened, and because we were coding, we felt that adrenaline is what everybody's feeling right now, which is, hey, I can tell the machine to do something and it does. In the 21st century, the material is computation. If in the past it was oil or steel or whatever it is, today it's computation. So the more we can give that to more people, the more interesting things happen, the more egalitarian it is. It's kind of interesting because that was our desire, and there were no LLMs, which we started off by thinking about the terminal, and we're like, how do we reinvent the terminal where engineers are spending all of their time?