> Superintelligence is not around the corner. OpenAI knows this and is trying to become a hyperscaler / Mag7 company with the foothold they've established and the capital that they've raised.
+1 to this. I've often wondered why OpenAI is exploring so many different product ideas if they think AGI/ASI is less than a handful of years away. If you truly believe that, you would put all your resources behind that to increase the probability / pull-in the timelines even more. However, if you internally realized that AGI/ASI is much farther away, but that there is a technology overhang with lots of products possible on existing LLM tech, then you would build up a large applications effort with ambitions to join the Mag7.
The interest and actions are there now: Hiring Fidji Simo to run "applications" strongly indicates a move to an ad-based business model. Fidji's meteoric rise at Facebook was because she helped land the pivot to the monster business that is mobile ads on Facebook, and she was supposedly tapped as Instacart's CEO because their business potential was on ads for CPGs, more than it was on skimming delivery fees and marked up groceries.
I've been in this situation a few times and looking back at my career, I could argue I made the "wrong" choices, but they were definitely the "right" choices for me at the time. The way I think about it these days:
1. The space and how exciting it is (AI, Blockchain, etc)
2. My personal growth (learning, but also compensation & rate of career progression)
3. The people (especially who is my direct manager)
Ideally, you can get all three in a job! However, when I can't, then every single time, #3 has contributed more towards my job satisfaction than #1 and #2. However, over-indexing on #3 alone is also sub-optimal.
Even "boring" spaces often have hard problems and if you dig into the problems, then the work can become intellectually interesting. It may not be sexy or shiny, but you need to decide how much you want to index on that. If you are getting intellectual fulfillment in your day-to-day, better personal growth (including compensation growth), and work with & for good people, then that's a pretty good deal. Don't undervalue doubling your salary. It can provide optionality down the road to work on other things, like folks have said below.
Early in my career I worked on what is seemingly boring stuff but the internal engineering problems were surprisingly complex and therefore interesting, even though my "resume bullet" for that stint may appear boring to a reader. Also, the people I worked with were just the nicest and I couldn't imagine leaving that team.
I still look back on that period as the happiest time of my professional life, even though I now make many times the compensation and work on some really externally "sexy" stuff. Nostalgia might be playing into that, but I do remember being pretty happy on a day-to-day basis.
The counterpoint is that I did eventually leave that team and that company because my career was not moving fast enough and I would not have hit the financial goals I had for my family's wellbeing.
It's actually really hard to go from sell-side to buy-side, post-MBA. I went to a top-5 business school in the US and everyone recruiting for banking wanted to eventually move to the buy-side. I think out of a group of ~100, <5 might have made it into a decent buy-side job. Top private equity funds put their best analysts through business school and then just hire them back. Breaking in at a post-MBA level is really hard. You really have to know "the path" early in college and get into a top bulge bracket right after college graduation, put in your two years of 100 hour weeks, and then get on recruiters' radars for PE and HF.
That was just my school, 5 years out of graduation. That might change in another 5 years as bankers get to MD levels, and then have a client and relationship roster that they bring to the buy-side. There are also people who switched to Tier 3 or Tier 4 buyside firms, but then don't make the kind of money you make at a top PE or HF.
Also, I did not go to Harvard, which typically sends more people to the buy-side then the other top-tier programs (but is somewhat self-selection, because HBS tends to accept a lot of pre-MBA buy-side people from top firms)
Exactly this. I have family (through marriage) who grew up in the New York / New Jersey area and went to nice public schools. Many people they went to high school with ended up in finance on the buy-side. They knew the path from high school onwards: Get into an Ivy League for college, major in CS, EE, or Math (but with no intention of working in those areas) get recruited by a top 3 bulge bracket (MS, JP, GS) in either M&A or LevFin, put in your two years, network with the people a year or two ahead of you in college who then went onto private equity or hedge funds, get an interview there, make bank.
Yes, but then why invest in an actively managed fund at all, as an LP? whole premise is that fund managers can beat an index such as the S&P500 or total market etc.
LPs don’t invest in funds to beat the market. By the time they are investing in VC they have already have millions in traditional investments like index funds, real estate, etc. VC investments are a high-risk, high-reward play.
Individual VC investments are a high-risk, high reward play, but for an LP, investments in large baskets of VC investments via VC funds are ideally intended to collect an uncorrelated risk premium. The idea isn't to simply to beat the SP500, its to diversify, and thus improve risk adjusted returns, of their broader investment portfolio.
For large institutional LP's like pension funds, endowments, charities, etc, they need steady smooth returns that they can draw upon year after year to fund their beneficiaries. In particular a down year really hurts them since they will have to draw down on their principal. This is a very different risk calculus to an individual saving for retirement who can stomach 30-40 years of stock market volatility with a good probability of having enough money at the end of their career.
So rather than chucking the bulk of their fund in to the asset with the highest expected returns as an individual might, these institutional investors buy a big basket of very different return streams (i.e. as uncorrelated as possible) to smooth out the bumps in each one.
Shh... if all people do is invest in funds made up of existing blue chips, nothing new will ever be funded again and we'll end up with an economy of nothing but stale old Soviet bureaus.
I wonder how many other products in the enterprise space could be built by startups, by simply doing a much, much better job than incumbents, despite incumbent moats and lock-in. On the other hand, there are also examples of poor products that attempted to "solve" things like word processing better than MS Word or Google Docs and yet are simply much worse products than the incumbents.
I think in the video conferencing space, all existing solutions were simply bad. Video conferencing has been bad everywhere I have worked and we just shrug our shoulders and joke that someone first needs to build strong AI, and only then will video conferencing be solved. Zoom decided to do something about it top-to-bottom, end-to-end. Very inspiring founder and company.
Office on the web also has the same collaboration features now, and has had for years. Google's real time collaboration is slightly better, but I've worked in organizations that use Office and organizations that use Google. gSuite offline mode makes for many unproductive business flights (ie it simply does not work properly). Large spreadsheets choke up Sheets as you mention.
Did you know that most enterprises who had "tried" gSuite actually switched back to Office? Office is very much not under threat. By many estimates, Office revenue is over 20X that of gSuite and growing. I agree with you that a lot of young people grow up with gSuite because Google has done a fantastic job getting gSuite into schools and colleges. But when these young people go into corporate America (which is a lot bigger than just Silicon Valley), they quickly have reality handed to them, which is that most real work is done in Office.
+1 to this. I've often wondered why OpenAI is exploring so many different product ideas if they think AGI/ASI is less than a handful of years away. If you truly believe that, you would put all your resources behind that to increase the probability / pull-in the timelines even more. However, if you internally realized that AGI/ASI is much farther away, but that there is a technology overhang with lots of products possible on existing LLM tech, then you would build up a large applications effort with ambitions to join the Mag7.