Bill Maris: How Google Could Crush AI Competitors, Why Small Funds Win, and AI's Atari Stage

After saying he was out, now Bill Maris is returning to the investing world. The founding CEO of Google Ventures has raised a $150,000,000 for his new fund called Section thirty two. With a smaller fund, I have the advantage to be very selective in the companies that I invest in, the people that I hire. We're gonna invest for a financial return. Any other metric is impossible to measure and therefore won't succeed. Think of the change that has happened just in the last hundred years and what's about to happen in the next hundred years with the advent of AI. The world's gonna change by orders of magnitude. Thank you very much for that, warm welcome. I am Bill Maris. I'm the founder of Section thirty two. Prior to that, I was the founder and CEO of Google Ventures. I was also Google's vice president of special projects where I incubated Waymo and Google X, Calico, and many other projects as well. And before that, I founded a web hosting and data center company, which we're gonna talk a little bit about. And, today, I think I'm gonna talk to you about a few of the lessons I've learned on these interesting experiences I've had, in life. So we'll start we're gonna have four lessons I'm gonna talk about, and we're gonna go back to 1997 to start when I was a, fresh college graduate. I had a degree in neuroscience, and I found myself on Wall Street. Somehow managed to land a job there, but I was miserable having to wear a suit, and, trudge to work in the heat. But one good thing came of that, which was I looked in the closet of the office one day, and I saw a server. And I asked, well, what is this thing beneath our jackets? And they said, well, that's where our email and websites, live. And and as can happen to many of us, I I had a moment where I felt like I was bathed in the light of inspiration. And and I thought I thought I think I've glimpsed the future. I I I think I can maybe make a business out of this, because if you can have our website and email in your closet, how many websites and emails could I put in my closet? So I immediately quit my job, because I I had I kind of glimpsed through a keyhole. And through that keyhole, I thought I saw the Internet, and I saw a data center, and it looked something like this. Or maybe when I say data center, you think of something like this or something like this. But in 1997, a state of the art data center, looked almost exactly like this. We had three servers, a small, medium, and large. Business grew. We eventually had five servers, and this isn't a data center at all. This was my apartment where I founded the company, with credit cards, …