#217 CEO & Co-Founder Codeium, Varun Mohan w/ Leigh Marie Braswell: Limitless

11/18/24 • 60 min

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Guests: Varun Mohan, CEO & Co-Founder of Codeium; and Leigh Marie Braswell, partner at Kleiner Perkins

“A lot of people are really bad at knowing what good is,” says Codeium CEO Varun Mohan. Specifically, he’s thinking of startups that hire based on a “logo” — a well-known company on the résumé — rather than exceptional talent. Codeium is based in Mountain View, CA, and Varun believes that it’s incumbent on any new startup to hire in the San Francisco Bay Area, because of how exceptional talent is concentrated there.

“When you hire someone that’s 10x better,” he says, “you can’t replace them with 10 1x people. Because the the 10x person is going to be thinking of ideas that none of these 1x people are ever going to think of.”

Chapters:

(01:05) - Ludicrous growth
(03:54) - Seizing opportunity
(07:29) - Product-market fit
(13:05) - Scale AI & MIT
(17:42) - Coding efficiency
(22:58) - Larger companies
(25:20) - Varun and Leigh Marie’s working relationship
(29:51) - Pivoting to Codeium
(34:00) - Giving away the product
(37:01) - The code-gen landscape
(42:20) - Annual reinvention
(45:00) - Picking a problem
(47:07) - Bipul Sinha’s help
(50:43) - Ambition
(53:13) - Building in Silicon Valley
(55:11) - Spotting talent
(59:11) - Who Codeium is hiring
(59:43) - What “grit” means to Varun

Mentioned in this episode: Graham Moreno, Wiz, ChatGPT, Google, Nuro, Goldman Sachs, Waymo, the DARPA Challenge, Alex Wang, Douglas Chen, Safeway, Equinox, Carlos Delatorre and MongoDB, The Qualified Sales Leader by John McMahon, GitHub Copilot, Microsoft, Exafunction, Mamoon Hamid, Figma, JPMorgan Chase, Starlink, SpaceX, Rubrik, Michael Dell, Stripe, and John Doerr.

Links:

Connect with Varun

Connect with Leigh Marie

Connect with Joubin

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guests: Varun Mohan, CEO & Co-Founder of Codeium; and Leigh Marie Braswell, partner at Kleiner Perkins

Chapters:

(01:05) - Ludicrous growth
(03:54) - Seizing opportunity
(07:29) - Product-market fit
(13:05) - Scale AI & MIT
(17:42) - Coding efficiency
(22:58) - Larger companies
(25:20) - Varun and Leigh Marie’s working relationship
(29:51) - Pivoting to Codeium
(34:00) - Giving away the product
(37:01) - The code-gen landscape
(42:20) - Annual reinvention
(45:00) - Picking a problem
(47:07) - Bipul Sinha’s help
(50:43) - Ambition
(53:13) - Building in Silicon Valley
(55:11) - Spotting talent
(59:11) - Who Codeium is hiring
(59:43) - What “grit” means to Varun

Links:

Connect with Varun

Connect with Leigh Marie

Connect with Joubin

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Previous Episode

#216 Founder Khan Academy, Sal Khan: Dangerously Curious

Guest: Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy

AI is poised to change nearly every business, but few are changing as quickly as education. And Sal Khan, who has spend more than a decade manually creating more than 7,000 educational videos, says that’s a good thing. He’s encouraged Khan Academy to focus on “disrupt[ing] ourselves ... more than almost any other organization that I know of.”

The reason is backed up by the data: Personalized tutors — designed to help students achieve mastery in a subject, but previously thought to be unscalable — could shift the educational bell curve “significantly to the right,” Sal says.

Chapters:

(00:52) - John and Ann Doerr
(05:20) - Khan Academy’s origins
(07:42) - What it is now
(12:43) - Emotional fortitude
(15:25) - Generating revenue
(19:36) - The two-sigma “problem”
(21:31) - OpenAI and Sam Altman
(24:47) - What AI can do
(27:56) - Cheating and other fears
(30:06) - Video production
(34:08) - Standardized tests
(38:36) - AI tutors’ tone
(40:22) - Not leaving the closet
(43:20) - Who Khan Academy is hiring
(45:58) - What “grit” means to Sal

Mentioned in this episode: Nasdaq, Dan Wohl, Vedic and Buddhist literature, Microsoft, Benjamin Bloom, ChatGPT, the Turing Test, Greg Brockman, Donald Trump, Bing Chat and Sydney, Khanmigo, the SAT and ACT, Schoolhouse.world, Craig Silverstein and Google, John Resig and jQuery, and Angela Duckworth.

Links:

Connect with Sal

Connect with Joubin

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Next Episode

#218 CEO Etsy, Josh Silverman: Second Acts

Guest: Josh Silverman, CEO of Etsy

When Josh Silverman joined the board of Etsy, he had one condition: “Don’t ask me to the be the CEO.” And technically, they didn’t ask. One day, he got a phone call informing him the board had elected him as the new CEO, just days before an earnings miss. He knew the odds were against him — layoffs would be necessary, and “I was going to have to be the villain” — but decided to say yes out of a sense of duty to Etsy’s users and workers. “If I can be helpful, I have a responsibility to do it,” Josh says.

Chapters:

(00:55) - Energy management
(02:42) - Meetings
(09:56) - Etsy’s strategy
(13:36) - Learning to delegate
(17:10) - Setting an example
(24:17) - Evite’s rise and fall
(27:46) - Self vs. company
(30:22) - Legacy
(34:21) - Control and agency
(37:44) - Joining Etsy’s board
(40:40) - Becoming CEO
(46:16) - Culture shock
(48:09) - “We need you, trust us”
(51:25) - eBay and Skype
(57:15) - Pushed out
(01:00:40) - Accountability and family
(01:03:53) - Time horizons
(01:05:55) - Gen AI-supported art
(01:08:29) - Who Etsy is hiring and what “grit” means to Josh

Mentioned in this episode: Ken Chenault and American Express, Nick Daniel, Rachana Kumar, Ticketmaster and IAC, Etsy Studios, Silverlake, Shopping.com, Google, Microsoft, and Austin City Limits.

Links:

Connect with Josh

Connect with Joubin

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm