Hankes: Thrive Separates From Quantitative Rigor for High-Upside Bets
Vince Hankes · Vince Hankes: Why We Put $300M into OpenAI; Sam Altman's Pitch; Lessons from Josh Kushner | E1009 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · May 3, 2023 · at 37:14
Vince Hankes, Partner at Thrive Capital, explains how the firm justified investing in OpenAI at a high valuation despite traditional quantitative metrics.
0:00 / 0:12exact quote · 12.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We're able to kind of separate ourselves from the kind of quantitative rigor that, you know, we rely on for a lot of investments we do and hold the tension of what could go right.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Vince Hankes
Hankes: Many Venture Capital Firms Passed on Investing in OpenAI
“Well, you know, I think there's a lot of people that said no. So at the end of the day, I, you know, there, as much as I like to think we want a really competitive deal, I do think It was not obvious to everybody, and even now I don't think it's still obvious …”
Hankes: Disrupting Google Search Is a Trillion-Dollar Opportunity
“We're not talking about building the next unicorn or decacorn. We're talking about disrupting search or Google. I mean, that's a trillion dollar opportunity.”
Hankes: AI Moats Will Be Ecosystems, Not Model Outputs, Within Five Years
“I do think, again, the dimension by which people are going to think about this in five years from now, looking back, isn't going to be about The commoditization of the model and the raw output, it's going to be, oh, the ecosystem around the model has become mu…”
Hankes: AI Startups Will Struggle to Compete With Fast-Shipping Incumbents
“And so if you're a startup, I get that you have the advantage of speed, but you need a multi-year execution window to be able to take advantage of all that product you can ship quickly. If these big companies are able to ship this quickly, they've got so much …”
Hankes: Bet on Startups Creating Novel User Experiences Over Incumbents
“Yes, if you're going toe to toe right now with an incumbent on their home turf and their shipping, I think it's a hard bet to take the opposite side of, you know, in our business. But if you're creating something that's totally a different user experience that…”
Hankes: Most AI Value Will Accrue to Applications, Not Infrastructure
“I have to believe it's gonna accrue mostly to the application layer. I think if you think about infrastructure companies as platforms, you know, if you think about the software market as the relatives, the value of AWS and Microsoft and Google cloud versus the…”