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 83 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 4 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
Hulme: Microsoft acquired Inflection primarily for its 12,000 H100 GPU cluster
“I do not believe that Microsoft were buying the Pi model. I think Microsoft are GPU constrained, and we're buying a cluster of 12,000 H-one hundreds.”
Hulme: GV would not invest in OpenAI at a $90B valuation
“I would struggle To make that investment today. No.”
Hulme: 90% of AI foundation model capital will go to zero
“Foundation models, 90%. Application layer, 70%. And in the incumbents, the value going into the incumbents, only 20%.”
Hulme: AGI hype correlates directly with founders' capital fundraising needs
“I think there is a Correlation between how aggressively people predict AGI is coming and how much capital they need to raise. So you've got Emodi from Anthropic, you've got Altman, OpenAI, Musk, XAI, all of these guys are saying that it's just around the corne…”
Hulme: Ending non-dom status drives top UK angel investors abroad
“If I do say, see the brain drain. I recognize it. And I do see that many of the people I know well that have chosen to leave have left. They were also incredible angel investors. They employed a bunch of people. And so do I think everyone should pay Equal tax.…”
Hulme: Requiring every VC investment to be a fund-returner is flawed
“I think, ah, a lot of VC strategy is a lagging indicator of what did work in the past, and the test, Or the experiment that worked very well in the past is funds with 25 portfolio companies, power law of returns, and one or two return the whole fund, and then …”
Hulme: Generative AI is a sustaining innovation, not internet-scale creative destruction
“I think one of the frustrations with Gen AI, as the technology is commoditizing so quickly, is it's a sustaining innovation. It's actually going to get sprinkled across all businesses to lower costs in call centers or to improve the product in personalization.…”
Hulme: Expecting AI researchers to build profitable businesses is ridiculous
“The idea that they can all go out and create highly profitable, fast moving businesses seems ridiculous.”
Tom Hulme: Distributing VC capital evenly damages talent concentration
“I don't think What we should be doing is necessarily just sort of evenly distributing capital across the whole market. I actually think that's damaging for talent concentration as well. Instead, we should have sophisticated people that say, these are the compa…”
Hulme: Less venture capital will be available in two years
“I actually think there's probably going to be less money in the market for venture in two years than there is today.”
Hulme: High UK energy costs prevent competitive AI model training
“We have the, probably the highest electricity or energy costs in the whole of the Western world. In the UK. That just does not enable you to do a great job of this. It doesn't even enable you to do a great job of training foundation models. Like, if the blende…”
Hulme: AI foundation models are the fastest depreciating assets in human history
“Foundation models can be distilled relatively quickly. When I was on your show last time, I talked about how foundation models were sort of going to be the fastest depreciating assets in human history, like weeks. It's almost days now.”
Hulme: The idea of a one-person billion-dollar company is a myth
“I think I keep hearing people talking about the first one person billion dollar business is already created. I think that's absolutely ridiculous. On the one hand, companies are growing faster and more efficiently than ever. Like bolt.new, forty million dollar…”
Hulme: OpenAI is a consumer company, not a foundation model provider
“So my big one here is that I've changed my mind. I thought OpenAI was a foundation model company. I now think it's a consumer company. So a twelve billion dollar run rate or something.”
Hulme: OpenAI is a good investment at a $12 billion run rate
“I it doesn't mean I think it's the best gen AI investment, but if I was sitting independently, do I think it's a good investment now when your downside is somewhat protected and they're at a twelve billion dollar run rate? Let's say it's a 20 times forward mul…”
Tom Hulme: Generative AI will not cause internet-level creative destruction
“It's actually going to get sprinkled across all businesses to lower costs in call centers or to improve the product in personalization. It's not going to Have a creative destruction effect like the internet did on many industries.”
Hulme: Founders must avoid passive investors who think they are smart
“There are basically three types of investors. You've got smart investors that know they're smart and they're going to add value. Then you've got passive investors that are going to stay passive and they're not going to get in the way. Both of those are absolut…”
Hulme: Second-time founders strongly prefer passive investors over value-add ones
“First time founders are looking for investors that add a lot of value. Those that are second time around understand it, bias, and skew wildly towards the passive.”
Hulme: Founders should accept realistic valuations instead of complex deal structures
“I think actually, if you want to maximize value for the business, you're much better off accepting the valuation That's closer to reality in the moment and building from there.”
Hulme: Premature scaling inflates costs and destroys startup adaptability
“And I think what you're talking about is when the money's used for premature scaling, it's really damaging because costs go up. When your costs go up, ironically, you actually become less adaptable. So your clock speed goes down. So if your primary job in a bu…”
Hulme: Angel investors should refrain from making follow-on investments
“It led me to draw the conclusion as an angel, I shouldn't follow on. So I had examples of companies that would go up sort of 50 X, my pro rata allocation in the next round would be a million dollars plus, and they went to zero.”
Hulme: Asking founders about product is a lens to evaluate thinking
“I spend a lot of time with founders, and I'll ask them a lot about the product they're going to build. I know that that's probably not what they'll end up being successful with. In fact, empirically, the product often changes a lot. But I'm asking about that p…”
Hulme: Being too early in a market equals being wrong
“Being too early is tantamount to being wrong.”
Hulme: Absolute conviction in VC investments is irrational and unrealistic
“I don't understand in our industry how anyone can have complete conviction on anything. That makes no sense to me. Like I studied physics at university. We would go through a proof and I still didn't have complete conviction that I got it right. And then now w…”
Hulme: Virtual event platform Hopin had product-COVID fit, not product-market fit
“Is Hopin, does Hopin have product market fit or product COVID fit? It clearly had product COVID fit. It was, you know, no one was excited to do events online. They were forced to do events online.”
Hulme: Free products generate bad feedback because users don't value them
“I see a lot of businesses, and it's slightly different in consumer, but they will not charge their early adopters, they won't charge their design partners, they won't charge their ICPs, and the problem with that is you don't know if it's valued. And generally …”
Hulme: Generative AI minimizes the long-term impact of technical debt
“I actually think technical debt is almost less of an issue over time, particularly with generative AI, which is actually incredibly forgiving of how you integrate it. You don't have to have like perfect systems like you perhaps used to, or certainly not as mon…”
Hulme: Best founders execute aggressive cuts rather than repeated shallow cuts
“I think it's one of the reasons you've seen the best founders are quite aggressive in cuts. They never do shallow cuts too often. They see that burning platform as a way to actually shift the culture and maybe move this cultural debt to the side.”
Hulme: Defense tech collaboration will become increasingly vital over 20 years
“I'm going to say working with the military is important, and it's going to become more important over the next 20 years.”
Hulme: VCs cannot fundamentally change founders
“I think it's a good reminder that you can't change founders. Like, you can help them be better, you can give advice, et cetera, but this idea that you can just fundamentally change founders, I think it's completely wrong.”
Hulme: AI drives a stronger power law than past tech cycles
“My belief is that AI is creating a real power law, far more than we've ever seen before.”
Hulme: Wiz's $32B acquisition valuation is ~7% of Israel's GDP
“The Wiz Acquisition, thirty two billion. That's like seven percent of Israel's GDP.”
Hulme: Company HQ, employees, and IP create more value than listing location
“Given the choice between Picking where a company's HQ is, or where the bulk of the employees are, or where the IP is generated, or where it's listed, I'm taking the first three. They're way more valuable.”
Tom Hulme: Non-dom investments in GoCardless yielded massive UK tech spinout value
“Like angel investing in GoCardless. If I look at some of the other angel investors in that business, they were non-doms. They were actually Europeans, some Americans. The founders of that business built an important company for London, employing hundreds of pe…”
Tom Hulme proposes tapering UK R&D tax credits over time
“Maybe we should start to take into account time Like they do in the U S with capital gains tax and start to actually maybe taper off R and D tax credits to avoid what you're describing.”
Hulme: Capital gains tax exemption for founders would help retain talent against quant funds
“And I actually think the idea of making for entrepreneurs So maybe capital gains exempt would maybe tip that balance when you're comparing against quant funds, if that's the competition.”
Tom Hulme: Hardware is under-invested and massive value will accrue there
“I'll go hardware. I think if you take a hardware company out to market, the people, investors, immediate response is, oh, that's really hard. But the paradox about venture capital is you need it to be difficult to be valuable. You need to be contrarian and rig…”
Hulme: Stripe is not listing publicly anytime soon
“But some of our best portfolio companies like Stripe aren't listing anytime soon, and they're finding ways to deliver liquidity.”
Tom Hulme: Meta will own 14% of global Nvidia H100s by year-end
“He'll have 350,000 H-one hundreds by the end of this year. That is 14% of the world's H-one hundreds, and he's going to open source the result.”
Hulme: Heavy deal structure in venture investments damages businesses
“I think a lot of structure in a deal can actually damage a business.”
Hulme: Second-time founders handle overfunding better than first-time founders
“Again, one of the reasons second time founders do so well is they would be less affected. No one is unaffected, but they would be less affected.”
Hulme: Angel investors frequently rely on others to do due diligence
“I think too many people in our industry, particularly angels who have other jobs, full-time jobs, We'll take the view that probably someone else has done the work. I actually think often it's surprising how people haven't done the work.”
Hulme: VC learning depends on deal cadence over time, not cash losses
“The learning cycle is number of deals and time To see how they do. And so for me, it looks more like five deals over five years to figure out, actually, if you're building the muscle and you're learning, then it looks like an absolute quantum of cash.”
Hulme: Active startup founders raising side funds is concerning
“Now, when you start talking about raising funds, that worries me a lot because building a company is ridiculously hard. Like there's only a handful of people that have ever managed to kind of build multiple companies concurrently. And this idea of having a sid…”
Hulme: Venture capital is undoubtedly a game of access
“Look, without doubt it is. I think it would be really unfair to say that actually everyone has even access.”
Hulme: Investors underestimate winners by assuming single S-curve growth trajectories
“We have a sort of bias that whenever we're looking at businesses, we see them on an S curve. It's very difficult to imagine new S curves, but the best businesses will continuously put themselves on new S curves and create new opportunities.”