#212 Founder Magic Leap & SynthBee Rony Abovitz: Underdog

Guest: Rony Abovitz, founder & CEO of SynthBee

SynthBee CEO Rony Abovitz grew up “really believing” in Star Wars and the idea that there could be benevolent, artificially intelligent beings like R2-D2 and C-3PO.

“It wasn't a dystopian vision of the future,” he says. “It wasn't HAL from 2001.  It wasn't the Terminator. It wasn't Skynet.  It was this kind of friendly, empathetic, more utopian vision.” 

George Lucas himself told Rony to tone it down and not “take it so literally” — but he was undeterred. The way he describes today’s leading AI powers sounds like an idealistic Rebel conceptualizing the Evil Empire.

“You’ve got companies that receive massive funding that want to take all the data in the world ... I feel that's a massive mistake,” Rony says. “We become serfs. They become the Lords. They become the Kings. I'm completely opposed to that. So I started to imagine for SynthBee what is a different form of computing intelligence, one that could help us, but have much more safety [and] human centrism.”

Chapters:

• (01:12) - Fundraising
• (02:27) - Meeting John Doerr
• (07:05) - The Beast
• (10:06) - Unfinished business
• (11:47) - Apple and Meta
• (15:20) - The COVID-19 pandemic
• (21:12) - “Investors panicked”
• (25:28) - Shaquille O’Neal vs. digital Shaq
• (29:43) - Magic Leap alumni
• (32:45) - Financial outcomes
• (38:27) - Peggy Johnson
• (40:27) - “A weird version of hell”
• (44:08) - A strange intro to Google
• (50:42) - Larry Page and Sergey Brin
• (54:27) - Founder voting power
• (01:00:40) - Mako Surgical
• (01:03:04) - The 9/11 term sheet
• (01:06:40) - The worst pitch ever
• (01:09:55) - The 2008 IPO
• (01:16:15) - Selling to Stryker
• (01:18:30) - What is SynthBee?
• (01:26:44) - Humility in tech
• (01:31:44) - Who SynthBee is hiring

Mentioned in this episode: Scott Hassan, Bing Gordon, Chewy, Mary Meeker, Suitable Technologies and Beam, NASA, Mark Zuckerberg, Matthew Ball, NTT Docomo, Blade Runner, Wired Magazine, CES, Dow Jones, Tesla, Zoom, OpenAI and Anthropic, Adam Silver and the NBA, John Monos, the Apple Vision Pro, Madden NFL, McLaren, Satya Nadella and Microsoft, the HoloLens, Godzilla and King Kong, Willow Garage and ROS, Trading Places, Z-KAT, Frederic Moll, John Freund, Christopher Dewey, John and Christine Whitman, Sycamore Ventures, Andy Bechtelstein, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, Kevin Lobo, Muhammad Ali, Star Wars and George Lucas, Yuval Noah Harari, and Infosys.

Links:

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• Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com 

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm