The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 25 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Tavel: AI application layer will capture tremendous long-term value
“I focus on the application layer because I do think that's where a tremendous amount of value ends up being captured and created.”
Tavel: Escalating training costs will produce foundation model oligopoly
“Each successive model is going to be more and more expensive. That suggests a world where you're going to have an oligopoly.”
Tavel: AI for existing workflows will drive tremendous market cap for incumbents
“If it's existing employees and their existing workflows that, you know, AI technology is going to be sustaining and it's going to drive tremendous market cap for the incumbents.”
Tavel: OpenAI will not match specialized audio and video startups' focus
“Those are going to progress, but they're not going to progress with the same level of focus and ambition as the core foundation model that OpenAI is working on. They might progress as beneficiaries of that core work, but it doesn't have the same level of focus…”
Tavel: OpenAI will not build deep enterprise workflow integrations
“So that something coming out, you know, an open AI, they're just not going to build that same level of workflow, the same level of integration. And so it's going to be, there's, there are, there's plenty of work to be done. That's beyond the model itself.”
Facebook cutting Pinterest off its newsfeed shifted growth from exponential to linear
“I remember early on at Pinterest, there was a time when Facebook acquired Instagram. We were both growing exponentially. Pinterest and Instagram were growing exponentially at the time. They acquired Instagram, and then they shut Pinterest off the newsfeed. So …”
DoorDash outmaneuvered Grubhub and Uber Eats by subsidizing economics for market dominance
“DoorDash in particular that was able to raise an incredible amount of capital, and they were competing against Grubhub and Uber Eats, both of whom were at that point public companies, and then were being evaluated by a completely different rule book in a way. …”
Tavel: Benchmark does not delegate operational work to platform teams
“At Benchmark, our model is that we don't delegate any part of our job. We've tried not to scale our business and just be focused on scaling the founders with whom we work. And so that means that there isn't a talent partner that is doing recruiting calls for m…”
Tavel: Compressed venture timelines will cause suboptimal board relationships
“Rounds are just happening so quickly right now, and to use the analogy I used before of speed dating, it just feels like It used to be that a round would happen over the course of a couple weeks, but now I just see things happening in a few days, and it is the…”
Private startup valuations are seeing massive step-ups across all funding stages
“I would say the same feedback that your seed investors gave you on the step up from the C to the A, we're seeing the A to the B. And I've got to imagine it's the same for every subsequent round. It's just, if you have something that's working, I just continue …”
2018 crypto startups secured nine-figure valuations based solely on white papers
“And then what's different though, from ad tech is that, and it makes it even harder is that you're often investing in a white paper or a deck. There's no code or traction that you get to invest behind. The company often has, you know, over a hundred million do…”
Crypto investing will increasingly mirror Open Source 2.0 corporate governance models
“The trajectory right now is that increasingly investing in crypto is looking more and more like technology investing that we've always had. It reminds me very much of kind of the open source one point O era. And I just think this is going to look a lot more li…”
Tavel: Frontier AI models currently require closed-source architectures
“Right now it feels like if you need a model that's on the frontier, you're going to be closed source.”
Tavel: Early-adopting AI startups will take market share from traditional service firms
“New technologies, more often than not, are best served for the group of hungry up-and-comers that want to become the new incumbents. And so, you're going to see a class of companies that realize that if they're early adopters of this technology, they're able t…”
Tavel: Traditional 5-star rating systems like Yelp have lost their signal
“The cliche is that everything on Yelp is three and a half to four stars. And so the signal has kind of gone away.”
Operating Experience Is Not Required to Be a Great VC
“I think to be a great investor, you don't need operating experience. I think if you look at many of the best investors, they actually don't have operating experience.”
Sarah Tavel: AI application startups will improve and expand margins as models advance
“I think all the companies that we invest in, they will only get better as the underlying models get better. And they'll be able to take on more work over time. They'll be able to, you know, take, you know, have better and better margins, better because they wo…”
Tavel: AI Adoption Is Currently Driven by SMBs and Mid-Market
“Right now we're just not, it's too early to know for that enterprise use case. What you're seeing, like where most of this adoption is happening is like the mid-market and down, this kind of digital native company, the SMB, the, these, like the hungry companie…”
Tavel: Benchmark partners make only 1-2 new investments annually
“Our way of thinking of things that benchmark is that each of us makes one or two new commitments a year.”
Tavel: End-customer AI model costs will continue falling due to competition
“The cost to the end customer, I think that should continue to go down. And that's what we're seeing is that it is just getting more and more competitive. The price continues to go down.”
Tavel: Booking.com leapfrogged Expedia by offering lower take rates to small hotels
“Booking.com came in with a different structure to their marketplace and that let them have a far lower take than the incumbents at the time, which let them bring on small hotels. Which couldn't afford the higher take rate of the other marketplaces that were ar…”
Tavel: Early consumer startups raise $10M–$15M with only thousands of users
“The classic early stage consumer that I'm seeing right now is a 10 to fifteen million dollar round for literally single digit, like thousands of users.”
Airbnb, Uber, and Amazon all launched in seemingly small niche markets
“All of those companies look small in the beginning, you know, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest, like the lists, you know, even Uber in the beginning, they all looked like they were going after something small in the beginning, Amazon just doing books.”