Guest: Bill Magnuson, CEO and co-founder of Braze

The deployment of smartphones around the world was more impactful than any other technology to date, says Braze CEO Bill Magnuson — and that has big implications for emerging fields like generative AI. “If we get to the point where they [LLMs] really can be useful, human-like companions ... they will be usable by everyone that has smartphone technology.” In other words, the question is not business opportunity or scale: It’s capability.

In this episode, Bill and Joubin discuss earnings days, Aaron Levie, MIT, customer churn, shower thoughts, technical co-founders, lacking context, AGI, “hands on keyboard,” the T-Mobile G1, app marketing, the 2008 financial crisis, Bob Iger, World War II, Peter Reinhardt, Watershed, and international offices.

Chapters:

(00:51) - Morning people
(05:09) - What Braze does
(06:59) - From CTO to CEO
(08:17) - Waking up and commuting
(10:49) - Leading vs. engineering
(12:35) - Cognizant of believability
(19:52) - LLMs and the human brain
(25:46) - The AI ceiling
(28:43) - The historic deployment of smartphones
(37:58) - The benefits of youth
(40:18) - Taking the leap
(43:35) - Read more sci-fi
(46:38) - Survivor bias
(48:55) - Big risks at scale
(52:30) - Who Braze is hiring around the world
(55:32) - What “grit” means to Bill

Links:

Connect with Bill

Connect with Joubin

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#196 CEO and Co-Founder Braze, Bill Magnuson: Principles of Change

Grit

#196 CEO and Co-Founder Braze, Bill Magnuson: Principles of Change