Max Hodak

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And I think that if we're successful, what will happen is that sense of jeopardy will fade. Like we will be we will just become much less fragile.

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That world is is generated by the brain. And so, if you can get visuals the visual signal, auditory signal, balance, motor, like somatic sensory motor in and out of the brain, that is that is an end in itself. That is the central object.

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the only organ that you can't even in principle transplant is the brain. The like the heart, pancreas, the liver, the lungs, as far as I'm concerned, they're really support characters. They're there to keep the brain activity interesting and and going.

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Yeah, well I mean becoming profitable or at least have like having the ability to do this forever is a super high priority. Restoring vision to the blind is pretty good business if you can actually do that.

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Well, I mean ironically it's probably working on AI.

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I mean it feels like a lot of physics. Like if you apply enough compute to matter, you get this thing that looks like intelligence.

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And so when you look inside these big AI models, the mathematical objects that you see look a lot like the things that you see in neuroscience. So if you look at how do how do these AI models represent um just like represent concepts and you look at the parts of the brain that represent concepts, you see these you see very similar geometry.

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so I'm in the camp that like continuity is greatly important. And so people will accept significant drift in their identity over time as long as they have continuity.

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because if you can if you get vision, hearing, balance, and a kilobit per second of motor control, you're halfway to the Matrix.

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It'd be pretty annoying if they just start like spontaneously getting notifications during meetings that like, "Oh, it thought that you were thinking about an Uber, therefore it decided to summon summon two for you." And so you'll probably want these to be pretty explicit.

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Yeah, I mean I think BCI is a category kind of like how pharma is a category. I think sometimes you I I'll talk to VCs and like, "Oh, we have a BCI bet." I'm like, "Do you have a drug bet? You made one bet on a drugs? Like that's that's how you think about the category?"

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It's like, you know, when we went to the moon, we did it. And so, historically, the success rate of moonshots is higher than I think people give them credit for.

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It's like if I put electrodes in M1, you will probably be using a computer in an hour. Um and so it's just it's easier, it's more amenable to biology in many ways.

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People have spent huge amounts of time and money looking for drugs to restore vision or to restore hearing or to stop Parkinson's or to to help paralyzed people move again. Understanding the like the biology and the molecular detail required to make a drug has been very difficult. Humanity just isn't that good at that, to be totally honest.

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Like, the brain very literally, very clearly, plainly is a computer in in my understanding of the world. I also view the universe generally as a computer.

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there are definitely some ideas that are worth funding with $50 million or zero dollars, but not $5 million. Um you won't run the experiment. It'll be really frustrating experience. You'll get an ambiguous outcome.

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It gives you these effect sizes that you just don't really see in medicine. Like if you have a patient on on a dopamineergic drug for Parkinson's that works for some period of time, but it's a it's a relatively small effect after a little while. You turn on a deep brain stimulator and a patient goes from not being able to hold a cup of water to being able to write cursive in like 10 seconds.

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Now, if we had a tech if we had a magical BCI that allowed me to see the instant state of every neuron in the brain and and drive them, I think we'd figure out consciousness pretty fast. I don't think I think this is a practical problem, not a philosophical problem.

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I think you have to have that type of competitive feedback. It is tough to know if you're exceptional um without having some legible competitive game.

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So when a field really starts to work, industry can just marshall such larger levels of resources and can just move so much faster.

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Now, the good news is that in my experience, it's very difficult to actually get stuck. Um, you can get yourself into trouble and the action space is always larger than it appears.

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And so um in order to succeed your judgment has to be differentiatedly good. Now the reality might be that you don't know if your judgment is good yet. And so um one way or another you will have to find out and that means making decisions that make sense to you even when you are totally alone in that realization.

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And one of the harder lessons as a startup founder, one of the harder things I think to to really deal with is the fact that you cannot delegate your judgment. As as the CEO, you must always make decisions that make sense to you, no matter how much momentum or inertia alternatives seem to have.

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It's like it's it's uncommon that these deep tech companies that fail because the technology doesn't work. They fail because once you end up with this organization of hundreds of people and thousand hundreds of thousands of square feet of physical infrastructure, you haven't built the systems to manage that.

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And so speed determines success and failure and speed is determined by infrastructure. This is driven by really boring sounding things like how well do your purchasing and recruiting and spending processes work. This is as important as how well do you understand understand the object level technical content of the thing that you're building.

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But the the real theme of the talk is that rate of iteration separates success from failure. And if you can get a fast iteration loop, that really overcomes many other things you're going to run into. And this effect is so severe. I mean, if you can learn one thing every week and there's a competitor that's learning a thing every month, they will they will never matter.

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This is a little bit different than actually literally I vector centrality but it's very similar and so we call this technique IGEN reviews and I've become convinced that this is more or less the right way to do performance reviews.

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Um which based on my experience is like this is a a very disruptive process that doesn't tend to surface issues that you don't already know about but haven't acted on because you knew that thing was there.

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And so we can distribute the voting across a lot of the company for this initial review, which is essential because if you're doing anything cool, by the time you get a couple years into it, that top of funnel is overwhelming. And if you place any in any small group of employees or any one person in the way as a bottle bottleneck on this, they will absolutely bottleneck the whole rest of the organization.

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there's no one right answer, but this is a thing where you need a really defined process. There is no right answer, but a wrong answer for sure is not having something that you do very religiously as a company.

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I think the best companies in my experience come from what might be characterized as scenes. There's like a moment that enables a new company to be born and there's a bunch that comes together that really creates this like unique nucleation for the new company.

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And so if nobody knows how much an experiment costs, like every time you like grow up a new cell line or every time we make a new a new probe in in the fab, how much does that loop cost? Nobody knows. Therefore, experiments are free. Um, it doesn't cost dollars. It costs media. And media comes from the fridge.

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And so what you realize is not only is this very hard to keep burn under control, but also it's just this is the inappropriate place to exercise spending review. Spending review has to come earlier. You have to have some concept of budgeting.

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then you also remember that you've hired some very highly paid and talented employees. And are you saying they can't get the tools that they need? That you're spending $100,000 a week. If you wait a week to get a power supply half off, you have certainly dwarfed any possible benefit from getting it.