Ex-Meta Director: Why Wrapping OpenAI Will Kill Your Startup

Rodrigo Schmidt grew up in a fishing town in the south of Brazil. No money, no network. Fifteen years later he was leading the engineering behind Instagram's feed, the personalization machine billions of people open every day. His take on AI agents: they're making the mistake Instagram almost made. They optimize for what you want right now instead of what you actually want. Rodrigo left Meta to do something about it, co-founding Vetto to build the research-grade data frontier models train on, betting the next leap comes from better signal, not more of it. --------------------- 0:00 - Intro 3:00 - From a Small Town in Brazil to Silicon Valley 9:50 - Balancing Career Ambition and Family 16:45 - Why Personalization Became Critical in the AI Era 18:30 - What Few People Understand About Personalizing Instagram at Scale 22:30 - The Mistake of Only Giving Users What They “Like Most” 28:10 - Instagram’s Biggest Lesson for Building AI Products 33:20 - Why More Context Can Make Your Agent Worse 40:10 - Why AI Startups Need Research Teams Earlier Than Ever 59:40 - Radical Candor: Silicon Valley’s Brutal Truth-Seeking Culture --------------------- GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER 🗞️ Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss Rodrigo's LinkedIn:   / rodrigoschmidt   Enzo's LinkedIn:   / enzo-cavalie