government

“I think government is absolutely horrible and screwed up, and it's hard to imagine how a for-profit company can go disrupt it, but I'm very open to Founders who are disrupting government.”

“At some point, we're going to have to smash back through the looking glass to some sense of normality. It'll be ugly when it happens, but no central bank or government has a stomach together set.”

“And so I think, actually, in practice, what's going to happen is the government will clean up Our understanding of where those lines are, and once we have that regulatory certainty, we'll actually create even more investment and more innovation, because then e…”

“For 40 years, VCs had data telling them the government was a terrible place to invest”

“I believe the government can work for us. Being here in Silicon Valley, there's a very strong libertarian ideology, and there's a very strong notion that, oh, government's just this terrible thing, and it can never work, and it's always screwed up, and I worke…”

“There are other things that the Fed and the government can do, and they'll do them all to try to bring the economy back.”

“I guess the point is the government is very bad at funding cutting edge new R&D because you haven't proved that it will work to them yet. And they're not in the business of risking taxpayer money on crazy science fair projects. But if you show up with a real t…”

“If you're reliant on the government paying you to do work, it means you're only ever going to build things that the government and that politicians already believe are possible. And if you do that, you're never going to be able to build the things that are tru…”

“The governments are the biggest problem. And if the governments don't change, if they don't up the level of ambition and urgency, simply put, we're screwed. We will not succeed.”

“That's why I love capitalism so much more than nonprofits or governments as ways to solve problems, because if someone's willing to pay you to solve the problem and you can make money doing it means that you've created a tremendous amount of value, and it crea…”

“Governments, it's hard for governments to change the culture. That we can provide nudges and fiscal incentives to try and get people to do things. Yeah, but changing the culture is, is quite a hard thing to do for a government to do.”

“It's, you know, it's difficult in business. It's even more difficult in politics and in government, right? Where, you know, we're just not set up well to be able to say, look, we're going to try some things knowing that some of them are not going to work, but …”

“This is where like we often struggle as a company where, you know, 95% of the time, I think being the most trusted brand in the space is about working with the government. And I'm happy to show up in D.C. Anywhere, and I work with people, and we, 95% of the ti…”

“As you have to view, I think government and stuff like this as a static entity, that's probably not going to change. And I think you need to build with that knowledge in the back of your head.”

“Woke up Saturday morning after the events of the week, pretty convinced that if the government didn't, at a minimum, guarantee deposits at Silicon Valley Bank, we'd have a massive run at pretty much every regional bank on Monday.”

“Governments will not run on black boxes.”

“It's very hard for governments to fund uncertain research and science projects because when it doesn't work out, you know, like some taxpayers will for sure complain.”

“And so, I think the great opportunity, and really, so the playbook was, look, I'm not gonna let you pay me by the hour. I'm going to refuse to accept any revenue that's services based from you, and instead, I'm gonna build a product, and I'm gonna keep investi…”

“And so as the world transitioned from a place where all of the R&D was done by the government, fifties, sixties, obviously the preponderance of R&D is done by the commercial world.”

“Now, we can, the government can spend three percent of the fund every year, and it funds roughly 20% of the state budget.”

“You have to be Good at selling to the government to make companies in this sector work. You just, you can't, you either have enough money to survive being bad at it for a long time, or you know what you're doing from the beginning.”

“All of the authorities that need to exist to buy products from non-traditional companies, they all exist.”

“Shifting that risk to us rather than putting it on the government was really important to those early wins.”

“Governments become insanely and dangerously powerful when their citizens cannot say what they believe is true or not.”

“Like the most extreme offers that you get is like people are going to pay Sell it like government is going to pay salaries for three to five years. For your top AI talent. Like, they're gonna do that.”

“I haven't seen it in my own company. That's why I've been so surprised that, but I don't run a social media company, so I don't really know what the government does with these big consumer platforms.”

“What AI companies is doing right now that like the foundational companies, It's like privatizing the Manhattan Project. Ok? Alright, so imagine that they do build the atomic bomb. And now they're sitting and saying, ah, you know, I don't know, maybe we'll do i…”

“I do believe that having, you know, government entities or quasi government entities support local innovation is in that critical field is, is important. I think the way to do it is not necessarily to I think they should be customers. I think they should buy t…”

“I think not enough. I don't think, I think people are still grappling with What does AI really mean? What is, how fast is it going to diffuse? They're not even thinking enough about reskilling.”

“I think it would make sense for governments to build their own internal versions of some of these models, which would require proprietary data again to be collected.”

“So in 24, we won the fight against the government. We won that, that we sued the government and then we won that fight in October seven, 24.”

“The next day we came back, and we were like, we're gonna try again for the twenty-twenty-four election. And then we tried another year till the end of twenty-twenty-three. Then the government blocked it again. And then, so that's the second time. And then God …”

“All of these things can be characterized by Like a singular champion on the other side of the table that gets it, that believes in it, that wants to shepherd it. Actually you mentioned Shyam. He talks a lot about this kind of like heroism. Like it actually com…”

“Governments are extremely bad at what they do. Everyone needs to know that like the moment a government takes over anything, it will cost 10 times as much, which is really, really, really bad”

“The role of government is very simple. It's to define games that have as externalities societal thriving. And then completely get out of the game to then let the players in this game cause, through means of competition extremely positive externalities to accru…”

“The only thing regulation can do, in my opinion, is stop that innovative culture. So if the government took Major equity shares in a company, and because of that provided unfair access for those companies to its products and its people. By definition, they're …”