IBM

“The web bank is a media, and nobody's using it as a media, and it could do a lot of interesting things, from accounting to all kind of interesting things, and the banks are just sleeping, and they're locked in in stupid contracts with IBM, managing their whole…”

“I will say that I think if you historically look back at the greatest companies in history, they typically have come from more of a grassroots organic type of feel like Microsoft or Apple or even IBM or going back to the Ford Motor Company, going back eons ago…”

“For IBM, for example, we saw a shift from 72 engineers to every one designer in 2012. Again, 72 engineers to every one designer. And then in 2017, five years later, they were at eight engineers to every one designer across the company. And on mobile, they were…”

“This record acquisition by IBM of Red Hat is really all about Amazon Web Services crushing them in public cloud, them trying to make a play for hybrid cloud more aggressively and essentially draw a buffer line where they can be relevant and aspirationally they…”

“I think so. The scale of the market, and the way that the kind of advertising auctions and data asymmetry is in place is just much stronger than kind of these previous generations.”

“Kodak and Polaroid lost their market. IBM and Xerox got killed by competitors. AIG went bankrupt in the global financial crisis.”

“The result will be that some very iconic companies are being built today that will be the Exxon's and General Motors of tomorrow, or the IBMs, and we've already seen a handful of examples. The FANG companies have already shown us what kind of upside is availab…”

“I will often ask people that I'm interviewing, what other companies would you interview at? What other companies are you inspired by? Now, no offense, but if they say something like IBM, which I've definitely had, they're not going to be a fit for Coinbase. If…”

“Inevitably, like, the problem with most of those use cases is, once you start to follow the money, you end up back in B to B SaaS land, right? Like, or at least B to B land anyway, right? There's not a lot of money selling software to wedding planners. There's…”

“Think about what consumer tech companies operate in China. Zero. There was, there's enterprise tech like Hewlett Packard and IBM and all those guys, but no one else had done that.”

“Zuck said something very interesting. He said, one heuristic to know whether you're saying something meaningful is that, like, reasonable people can disagree with it, and the opposite of it is also reasonable. So, like, move fast and break things could be, lik…”

“And then my first role at IBM was a competitive sales rep. So every account I talked to didn't want to talk to me. So you get to kind of have this like bulletproof skin on you, which is a really, really great way to get into sales.”

“And like IBM's at fault. IBM was consulting, like charging for services to consult on how to adopt blockchain into your enterprise. That's ridiculous.”

“I'm concerned that we've only had two SaaS-ish IPOs since twenty-twenty-one. We've only had two since HashiCorp was the last one of the bubble of December of twenty-twenty-one, right? Just got bought for IBM. If only had two, we've only had Klaviyo and Rubrik.”

“Hey, you were at this startup company and you did really well, and then you went to IBM to use an extreme example. You went to IBM for five years. We're never talking. I'm never recruiting you. Not because you're not a good rep, because by that move, I know wh…”

“If I were to short a stock publicly, it'd be IBM.”

“What I learned was that a four-hundred-thousand-person company just can't move as fast. Lou Gerstner was the CEO at the time and wrote a book called, like, Why Elephants Can Dance, right? And I don't think, I disagree with him. Elephants can't dance.”

“The role of IBM has been played by Microsoft. They set this Viper in motion, and they've allowed it to exist, and in one sense for a while it looked like Microsoft got a good deal because they got access to OpenAI's technology early on, and they got a little b…”

“You went to IBM for five years. We're never talking. I'm never recruiting you. Not because you're not a good rep, because by that move, I know what I need to know. You're done with, you don't want to do the heavy lifting anymore.”

“Unless it gets its shit together and makes great agents, it's another IBM.”

“The entropic sale force in five years will look like the Oracle sales force, the Microsoft sale force, and the IBM sale force, 50 years ago”

“I don't think the IBM brand is that relevant anymore in terms of like evoking an emotion and people to go use their products. But as a business, it's going to be awesome.”

“IBM is still around because they went and bought Red Hat and HashiCorp, and now they're buying Confluent.”

“Every technology company either goes bust or lives long enough to become next generation's IBM.”