Transcript for Interview with Francis Pedraza on Heroism

Interview with Francis Pedraza on entrepreneurship, heroism, and spirituality.

0. Introduction

Johnathan Bi: Almost a decade ago, Francis and I sat down and recorded six hours of conversations on philosophy, entrepreneurship, God and romance. At the time, Francis was by all accounts a failure. But I saw this unquenchable, borderline delusional fire in him, the same fire I recognized in myself, and we became fast friends. A decade later, Francis is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of his generation, who's built one of the fastest growing AI unicorns. So I've invited him back to see how success has changed his perspectives. The first part of this video, is the conversation in 2025. And the second audio only part, are the highlights from 2018.

Johnathan Bi: And what's so beautiful is if you watch them together, you'll see how Francis' obsession with philosophy, which made him seem a complete buffoon in 2018, was ultimately the cause of his success. You'll see how because of his continued study of the great books, Francis was able to come up with ideas no one else saw, persevere through the most dire challenges, take his company to the most ambitious extremes, and ultimately enjoy and share his newfound wealth in a dignified way. My name is Johnathan Bi. I'm a founding member of Cosmos. We fund research, incubate and invest in AI startups and believe that philosophy is critical to building technology. If you wanna join our ecosystem of philosopher builders, then you can find roles we're hiring for, events we're hosting and other ways to get involved on jonathanbi.com/cosmos. Without further ado, Francis Pedraza.

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Johnathan Bi: The last time we had a conversation like this was almost a decade ago and I wanna paint a picture for our audience. I invited you to my sophomore Columbia dorm, cold email outreach after some crazy stuff that you wrote about online. We were doing this podcast setup where there was a drawer, there was no table, there was a drawer we put in right in the middle of us. So it was deeply uncomfortable because there was no place for the legs to go. And we had these tiny, tiny mics. And then we were hunched over trying to talk into it like this for two hours. And we enjoyed that so much that we did that three times. When we were filming those sets of interviews, I had just failed a company, came back to Columbia, I was a sophomore. You had just failed a company, Everest, and you were just starting Invisible. And now, a decade later, I started something with Joe Lonsdale that's going quite well. Invisible is going extremely well. And we get to have this conversation again as made men. How does it feel?