The Wisdom Wall

“If your group's entire purpose for existing is to fight an enemy, then you need to make sure that that enemy exists. To do that, of course, of course, of course, you would fund them.”

“my theory is the, the ability to directly participate in online virtual combat, uh, is shunting away a lot of the energy that in the past would have, would have translated to street violence.”

“if you read the history of, of those people at that time, specifically people like Oppenheimer, you realize, yeah, the people who invent the technology have no special moral claim. Uh, they have no special predictive power for the consequences of the technology, and they have no, no basis for a superior moral claim on…”

“professional CEOs Are often very good at running a status quo business, but when the, when, when things change, they have a very hard time reacting.”

“what's happening is what Ted Kaczynski Famous philosopher, Takasinski, what's called over socialization, right? People are too worried about what everybody else thinks, right? Uh, and so people, people get too wrapped up in the sort of mob scapegoating cycle of, you know, being able to, and, and, and sort of this, this…”

“new people entering the workforce had a much worse experience, right? And so the, the COVID was sort of a, there was this sort of dichotomous experience where if you were like a 20 or 30 year veteran of a company and like a high ranking official, it was Absolutely fantastic to work remotely because you got to go to…”

“And then basically within like five years, it was like Facebook is like the living demon incarnate on earth and destroying everything. Right? It went from like useless to evil in one step. Right? You know, the headline never gets never just like, oh, this is kind of cool. Right? Like that's never the story. Like this…”

“maybe it's actually easier to automate the manager job than it is the worker job.”

“with, with sort of sufficiently advanced, ubiquitous video conferencing, Um, all of a sudden immigration law becomes less relevant, right? Because like if, you know, it's perfectly legal to stream bits across the border, um, even if it's not possible for people to move across the border.”

“why I won't destroy all the jobs and, and the sort of short version of it is because it's illegal, uh, to do that because so many jobs in the modern economy require licensing and are regulated.”

“If you take out every possible restriction on what people can do and you let them fully express themselves, then what you're left with is pure choice. Right. Right. Right. Right. And so, and so at that point, the, the differences in the outcomes that are based on pure choice maximize. They don't minimize. They…”

“So a cynic, a cynic would say, a cynic would say, That the A number one reason why a big company would be lobbying aggressively to try to get basically government regulatory protection, um, is if internally they are convinced that it's gonna be a race to the bottom.”

“a society built in the idea that love scales becomes an Incredibly dark, dystopian, hostile, you know, and ultimately murderous, murderous place because, because love doesn't scale.”

“from a societal standpoint, the last thing on earth you would have wanted to do is to slow down the progression of the introduction of the car to protect the blacksmith jobs. Like that would have made everybody worse off, right? To protect a very small, what ultimately turned out to be a small number of blacksmith…”

“an AI that's smart enough to, like, turn every atom on the planet into paperclips is not going to turn every atom on the planet into paperclips. Like, it's going to be smart enough to be able to say, why am I doing this?”

“I really no longer believe in the concept of institutional reform. Like, I think fundamentally it doesn't happen, um, or it's so rare as to, like, be, be basically something that you can't ever count on. I, I think basically progress happens by starting new things, right?”

“they were basically like, they were rounding errors on everything. Like, there weren't 10, there weren't 20, there weren't a hundred, there were three or four. And there were two preconditions for them. One is, they all were offshoots of monopolies... And then the other precondition was they were all pre 1975, 1980.…”

“I actually have reached the point where I think that all of the ideas in tech and all the ideas in Silicon Valley are good ideas. I don't think there actually are bad ideas. I mean, maybe we could, we could pick a couple, but they actually all seem to be good ideas. The reason I say that is they all do seem to actually…”

“There is no substitute. The big takeaway, and this applies to everything we fund, and it's what we work on all the time, there is no substitute to the first five years of people in the office, 18 hours a day, six days a week, grinding away. Um, and it's grinding away on making the product work for customers, and then…”

“if you increase marginal productivity of the worker, you don't have a diminishment of human work, you have an expansion of human work.”

“the idea that there's like whatever rhetorical combat or like that there's like this virtual environment, um, in which there's lots of points of view and there's lots of, you know, again, both lots of truths, lots of lies. Like this is not new. In fact, this, this, this is the natural order of things. We just live…”

“And so what he says is if you, if you can be sustainably faster at running your decision loop, You can get inside the other guy's loop in a, in a systematic and perpetual way. And basically the result of that is psychological breakdown. Uh, basically you, you destroy the psychology of the other side because they just…”

“These are trillion dollar questions, not answers, but once somebody proves that it's capable, it seems to not be that hard for other people to be able to catch up, even people with far less resources.”

“If you run a survey or a poll of what, for example, American voters think about AI, it's just like they're all in a total panic. It's like, oh my god, this is terrible, this is awful, it's gonna kill all the jobs, it's gonna ruin everything. If you watch the revealed preferences, they're all using AI.”

“high prices are really underappreciated. High prices are often a favor to the customer. It's actually really funny. A lot of like, The naive view on pricing is the lower the price, the better is for the customer. The more sophisticated way of looking at it is higher prices are often good for the customer because a…”

“the best of, the best of the AI application companies are actually, they are actually full-fledged deep technology companies actually building their own AI.”

“the more out there we are, and the more outspoken we are, and the more controversial we are, the better for the business in the sense of the entrepreneurs love it. Uh, the, the, the, the founders want to work with, this is very clear at this point, the founders want to work with, uh, uh, people who basically are brave…”

“And so, so therefore, it's just like this assumption that you kind of hear in some of the AI circles, uh, which is like inevitably the smart, you know, kind of thing is going to govern the dumb thing. Like, I, I just think that's like very easily, uh, it's just sort of very easily and obviously falsified. Like,…”

“I think there's a very direct analogy of, let's call it, 1964 to 1972 or something, um, with the reelection of Richard Nixon. Um, like, that cultural revolution that happened during the sixties, kind of the hippie, Vietnam, you know, kind of revolution. Um, I, I think what we, what we in America have been through the…”

“transfer learning is the ability of the machine to, right, to be an expert in one domain and then, and then generalize that into another domain. My answer to that is, like, have you met people? Um, and how many people do you know are able to do transfer learning?”

“if, if you don't like populism, the way that you get populism is slow growth, right? Because you, because slow growth puts everybody in the mind of, of, of zero sum, right? Everything becomes a zero sum. You know, kind of fight for resources, um, because people don't think that there's a lot of opportunity in the…”

“The, the social media is many things, but one of the things it is, is it's an x-ray machine.”

“under peak centralization, you're gonna have maximum trust because you're gonna have basically the most information control, right? You just, you're not gonna have the alternative point of view, and so you're just, everybody's, you know, the theory goes, at least you're gonna have a much higher level of unanimity,…”

“the rise of the new technology equals the rise of a new audience equals the rise of an, of a new belief system that inherently is, is, is not trusting.”

“The cliche of our time is that attention spans are collapsing, and this is the rise of, of social media and TikTok, um, and short form video. And so the, the cliche is, you know, and you, you hear this constantly as, you know, kids only want to watch two minute videos and the whole thing. Well, so it turns out, I think…”

“The thing that I think is different about venture, um, is that the aggregate dollar upside opportunity on an early stage venture deal is as big as or bigger than the aggregate dollar upside opportunity on a very late stage deal, and the reason is because of the scale effect of an early stage company that really, that…”

“one of the key ways you evaluate founders is like, what difficult challenges have they been through in their lives that they were able to overcome? And the best forecast of being able to overcome a profound challenge in the future, which every entrepreneur deals with is having overcome profound challenges in the past.”

“Well, and it is worth saying there are founders who will, if they do not have a crisis, they will create one. They absolutely seek out disaster.”

“If you're gonna get into one of these world-beating companies, you can still do it with a B, C, or D, and you'll still have venture-scale returns.”

“the generalist model doesn't work anymore because each of those things now is actually a very deep domain in and of itself, right, with like very specific domain knowledge. And then the specific problem that a generalist has is that a generalist can sense heat, but a generalist has a very hard time getting into the…”

“we, we just, from a practical standpoint, have tended to emphasize U.S. investing, because we figure we'll get most of the best of the global founders anyway.”

“Those companies, good news, those companies can get to be gigantic, right? Because if you, if you, if you crack the mother load, like, you know, Netflix has, for example, entertainment, you know, you could, or like Tesla has in cars, you can build a company that's maybe multiples in size, even of that entire industry…”

“if you're going to have an asset class that is to be overfunded, like this probably is the one to overfund. Uh, right. In other words, that there's a societal surplus of, of all of the swings that entrepreneurs get to take that they wouldn't get to take if the sector wasn't overfunded. Um, and, and some of those work,…”

“Like, that's, that's art. Like, that, that's not science, that's art. Like, we would, we would, we would like it to be science, but, like, it's art. Um, and by the way, how do we know that it's, how do we know that it's art and not science? Every great venture capitalist in the last 70 years has missed most of the…”

“And I think there's something serious here going on, which is like, this is a, this is an example of maybe the first example of like a convergence point, basically between AI and crypto.”

“The regulation should happen at the application level, not at the technology level.”

“if we designed for broadband, like the, the, if, if, if it's a compelling enough user interface, it will actually cause broadband to happen.”

“And then I think that's where, and I, I think this is something I'm, I'm convinced of at this point. I, I think that's where The sort of populism of our day on both the left and the right are actually coming from. I think that's actually the foundation for it.”

“I actually think that the analogy doesn't really work, um, for the most part, it works in certain ways, but it doesn't really work for the most part. And the reason is because the, The internet, the internet was a network, um, whereas AI is a computer.”

“criticism of a lot of current AI app companies is their quote unquote, you know, GPT wrappers. There's sort of thin layers of wrapper around the core model, which means the core model could commoditize them or displace them. But the counter argument, of course, is it's a little bit like calling all, you know, old…”

“I actually think that the analogy doesn't really work, um, for the most part, it works in certain ways, but it doesn't really work for the most part. And the reason is because the, The internet, the internet was a network, um, whereas AI is a computer.”

“I would argue there's a very extreme barbell, um, which is you either need for, for truly creative work, uh, um, like defining a new product, um, building something new. Um, I, I would argue it's a, it's a full barbell, which is you either need everybody like right there in person for the reason that you articulated.…”

“the way to get companies to basically, um, uh, to run in a mode where they're sort of continuously trying to get more efficient, um, if that's what you want, um, is to, uh, shift compensation instead to, uh, the financial metric of return on invested capital.”

“There's like all this lore and kind of stories get told, and so it's like, okay, um, we're gonna do a layoff. Uh, we need to cut costs, um, and we knew that we overhired, and we got sloppy shit all over the place. Um, and so, um, we're gonna do a layoff, and like, we, we don't want to do a five percent layoff, because…”

“the assumption in our field forever has been that we're, we automate the low value tasks first, uh, you know, like cleaning toilets. Um, and then later we automate, you know, graphic design or something. And it turns out it's like the other way around, right?”

“If I'm an HR person and I want to really assert control over a company, it's like, look, I've got the law on my side, I've got your career in my hands, and I can nuke you on social and moral grounds whenever I want. Like, that's an incredibly powerful set of capabilities.”

“A population that has, you know, bottoms up media is basically impossible to steer that way.”

“open source is a tremendous threat to monopoly or cartel. Like, you know, in many ways is a guarantee that monopoly or cartel can't last.”

“security through obscurity was a very bad way to do it. The much more secure way to do it is actually open source. Um, basically put the, put the code in public and then basically build the code in such a way that when it runs, Uh, it doesn't matter whether somebody has access to the code. Um, it, it, it's still fully…”

“don't regulate the technology. You don't regulate AI as a technology anymore than you regulated microchips or software or anything like operating systems or databases instead regulate the use cases”

“the people who are qualified to be managers of large organizations are, are not themselves the kind of people who become bourgeois capitalists. They're the, the other kind of person, and so they, they, they're often good at running things, but they generally don't do new things. Right. They, they generally don't seek…”

“capitalism used to be bourgeois capitalism. It got replaced by managerial capitalism without actually changing the name. Uh, that will necessarily lead to stagnation.”

“I think what I would advocate for educators listening to this, I think what I would advocate is a very kind of stark bar, barbell approach, which is anytime there's a debate or discussion of the form of like, oh my God, is the kid cheating with AI? The, the very practice of whatever is happening in the classroom and,…”

“Um, I'll just list the three reasons why this would be very difficult. Um, number one is existing institutions just have very powerful network effects, which is why they, you know, they, they're so, you know, which is why the, the, the big ones are like hundreds of years old. Um, two is it would take a lot of money for…”

“if you're a politician, you know, what do you really want? You want to, you want a dependent voter base, um, and you want a voter base that's dependent on, on, on, on largesse and things that you can do for them, and then, you know, ultimately that resolves to, uh, you know, to handouts. Um, and so there, there's a…”

“And the reason it's the easiest part is because VCs are literally in business to meet with startups and to give them money. Um, like everybody else you're ever going to deal with is not actually in that business.”

“sometimes there are products that are quite simply just like subsidies, right? Where you're just giving people a discount on something they'd be buying anyway, and it turns out they want a lot of that. It just turns out that can't be a business because it's just going to burn cash forever.”

“I have not in my life and I have not in my reading of history seen a lot of examples where the inventors of technology are very good at this.”

“Um, and so this thing where we take our best and brightest scientists and intellectuals and thinkers and professors and academics And sort of media superstars and we, and, and inventors of new technology, and we kind of impute into them moral wisdom and sort of political judgment. Like the entire history of that era is…”

“And it's, and it's, it's the good with the bad, right? It's the, it's why you get Silicon Valley, it's why you get Hollywood, it's why you get all the new ideas, it's why you get all these new things, right? Uh, it's not an accident, right? Um, but, um, it's, it's, it's a total package.”

“you'll hear this term, of course, hallucination, which is kind of when it starts to make things up. And of course, another term for hallucination is just simply creativity.”

“it's not literally creating new information. Like, what it's doing is, it is, um, it doesn't have, like, it has no opinion. It has no, like, point of view. It has no, like, you know, it's not sitting there, like, thinking on its own, coming up with some new thing. Um, what it's doing is it's basically training, you…”

“the blowback is nominally a response to the dangers of the technology. What the blowback actually is, in, in, in almost every case, what the blowback actually is, it's basically a, a fear, a statement, an assertion, a realization, um, that the introduction of the new technology is going to change the society. Right.…”

“the internet followed this exact trajectory. Like, you know, crypto, cryptocurrency, blockchain, web three is following this exact same trajectory. Social networking followed this exact same trajectory. Like, I've now seen this pattern, you know, out of 50 times in the, you know, in the, in the last 30 years, and it…”

“I will tell you that state of affairs is very good for entrepreneurs, right? Um, because if more people in positions of power were more open to new technologies, right? The, the opportunity, especially for the young entrepreneur with a breakthrough idea would actually diminish, right? Because the big old companies…”

“I pushed the, pushed all the way to the point where I just think we should assume that whatever we're being pitched is going to work. Um, it's just a question of timing. Then of course, timing turns out to be the hard part, but it at least focuses the conversation.”

“in the wake of every economic recession, the politics just go, like, seriously negative, um, uh, on, um, in terms of, uh, thinking about the world as zero sum. And, and then when you get a zero sum outlook in politics, that's when you get like anti-immigration. That's when you get anti-trade. That's when you get…”

“my reading history is actually, we actually were in the singularity already, um, and that it actually started 300 years ago.”

“we actually don't need new, we don't need new discoveries to have the future be much better.”

“typically we see this with young people a lot in here, which is like, you give somebody in your world, it's called a note in our world. It's like feedback or it's like, you know, here's an idea. And you give somebody an idea and like, they immediately get their backup, right? Well, they do one of two things. They…”

“Like, a, a good founder has to basically have every conceivable skill. Like, you basically have to be good at product development, and at marketing, and at sales, and at finance, and at legal, and at HR, and management, and, you know, on and on and on and on. And, and there really is no substitute for actually being…”

“the more you charge, the more successful the implementation is. Right, because the more painful it's going to be for them to write it off.”

“Blockchain is the first new third thing in, I don't know, probably 40 years, right? Free software open source is like 40 years old. It's the first new structure in 40 years, and it's an interesting one because it's a hybrid.”

“It's really, really, really hard to run these analyses because the nature of what we do, this is sort of all the outcomes that matter are flukes.”

“In reality, the main form of disruption that happens in the tech industry are tech startups attacking tech incumbents.”

“The historical track record of innovators, technology innovators predicting the consequences of their innovations is very poor.”

“what's happening is the economy is bifurcated, and the way to look at this is prices, the prices of products, and so there are sectors of the economy that I would describe as the fast productivity growth sectors of the economy that also tend to be the less regulated sectors of the economy that also happen to be the…”

“when you start a company, you basically, basically starts a five-year fuse. If the idea doesn't hit, if the idea doesn't hit critical mass sort of in society with the customers in the first five years, you basically lose the company, and then somebody else picks it up and runs with it.”

“The single biggest strategic piece of advice we just see across all of our companies is literally people just need to raise prices. People need to charge more for their products and services.”

“In terms of where, if you're here as a student, or if you're going to be graduating, my personal recommendation would be to focus much more on team. And the reason is just because I think we struggle from a distance to evaluate, um, uh, market, and we also actually struggle to evaluate product. But if you can get…”

“We say we invest in strength, not in lack of weakness.”

“If it's a buzzword, if it's something that's on people's lips, if there's a magazine articles about it, or newspaper articles about it, or god help us if it's on TV, like, the time has passed, like, we better look for something new.”

“and so I think the, the, the, the path that makes much more sense for most people is to spend five or 10 years getting skills.”

“Many Valley companies still build technology and sell the technology as tools, but a lot of the best New Valley companies build technology and use it as a wedge to enter an end market, right?”

“he's kind of somebody that, his philosophy is somebody that a lot of people index against, and we kind of index against it by trying to do the exact opposite.”

“So Jeff Bezos never does a turnaround at Amazon. Mark Zuckerberg never does a turnaround at Facebook. If the company gets in trouble, the answer is, what's the next big new breakthrough product?”

“one of the ways to convince us not to fund a startup is for people to come in and basically say, I wanted to start a company, and I had 14 ideas, and I think this is the best idea, and then I did two months of work on it, and I'm ready to go. And like, we'd rather have somebody who's been obsessed with the idea for…”

“the companies that get disrupted, the big companies that get disrupted are not the poorly run big companies as much as they're the well run big companies.”

“We've found that when a company is going to get disrupted, the person, in many cases, with the best odds of countering the disruption, is the founder.”

“we now have the opportunity to make progress in many of those fields, and in fact, the best way to make progress in many of those fields is to apply more computer science.”

“There's a very clear failure case, um, that, which is the dominant failure case that I think that we see. Um, which is, um, the professor has the idea. Um, the professor starts the company, um, but with no intention of going full-time at the company. The professor runs the company or gets it started for a year or on an…”

“There is no substitute. There is no substitute. The big takeaway, and this applies to everything we fund, and it's what we work on all the time, there is no substitute to the first five years of people in the office, 18 hours a day, six days a week, grinding away. Um, and it's grinding away on making the product work…”

“the much better model, um, is for the engineer to have the business skills. Um, for the engineer to be a top flight engineer, but also have the business skills to be able to start a company. And then the engineer hires the MBA as, you know, the head of marketing, or the head of sales, or the head of finance, right? And…”

“From an economy standpoint, more jobs get created by the unleashing of the saved money, um, than get destroyed by the effects on the legacy industries.”

“Big technology shifts are generational shifts, um, and generational, which is to say, like, literally, like, over 25 years, and literally from one generation of people to the next generation of people.”

“the target hack has probably had the single biggest effect, um, where the CEO got fired, and, you know, and this is one of those things, like, you know, this is fresh in mind, because I'm thinking about how to, how to deal with kids, but, like, if you're dealing with CEOs, like, the way to, like, establish that…”

“I think a lot of CI is becoming increasingly aware, um, especially at companies that haven't mounted a first class effort in staffing and funding, uh, for security, that it's highly likely that the cloud vendor is more secure than they are.”

“you'll find that sometimes the readouts are like, you know, 20 seconds long and you're like, okay, something, you know, there's information hiding going on here. I'm being cut out.”

“I think that 90% of it, and maybe we're fooling ourselves even with that, maybe it's 99% of it is people.”

“Odds are, what we found is, odds are if you find those things, it, it almost doesn't matter. Like, I don't know that what we think about the market or the product or the technology actually matters that much, um, because we're, we're, we have the opportunity to place a bet on somebody who knows a thousand times more…”

“I am just continuously struck by the number of times the hot new innovation that we see, or the hot new innovation that becomes, you know, this huge thing, is something that was running, virtually, invariably, was running in a research lab 20 years earlier.”

“the really, in my view, the, the, the enlightened universities, um, that really think strategically about things like spinoffs, and students and professors taking leave, and so forth, are the ones who realize that the long game here is probably philanthropy, um, as contrasted to, you know, uh, university venture…”

“a very dangerous thing to do is to attack, uh, companies that we, that our internal term is the new incumbents. And so it's one thing to, like, go attack, you know, a tech company that's been in business for 50 years that's on its sixth CEO or something like that. It's another thing to go attack Google being run by…”

“there's a very clear failure case, um, which is the dominant failure case that I think that we see, um, which is, um, The professor has the idea. Um, the professor starts the company, um, but with no intention of going full-time at the company. The professor runs the company or gets it started for a year or on an…”

“Um, the much better model, um, is for the engineer to have the business skills, um, for the engineer to be a top flight engineer, but also have the business skills to be able to start a company, and then the engineer hires the MBA, um, as, you know, the head of marketing, or the head of sales, or the head of finance,…”

“Like, what I would argue is, like, the further down the stack, the more useful the patents are. Like, patents at the level of chips or radios, um, you know, can be, or, you know, I don't know, memory or something like that can be incredibly valuable. Um, patents at the level of software or applications we generally…”

“I have seen cases, and I've lived through cases, where the universities take a very draconian view on this, and the university licensing office has this just highly inflated view of the value of what they're going to be licensing, and they, they can kill companies in their cradle by taking that approach, so I think a…”

“the ideas that we can fund are the ideas that look like bad ideas, right? They're the ideas that just look silly or stupid, specifically to the big companies.”

“You can imagine a version of the news that's called the importance, and the newspaper is like, here are all the important things that are happening. And nobody would buy it because nobody cares because people want the news. They want the hot thing. They want the outrageous thing.”

“basically what's happened is the internet reinvented randomonia. Right. And so, right. The experience of monitoring the situation on, especially, you know, on, on social media and especially of course on X.”

“And I, and I, and this, you know, this is a Rene Girard thing, which is the scapegoating cycle always works because people always forget that there's a scapegoating cycle.”

“the first viral video that mattered was actually Rodney King.”

“all of the really effective viral videos basically since then, including the ones that have been really important over the course of the last decade, they've all had that characteristic. They all start halfway through the event. Um, so you, you don't see the run-up.”

“the ops are only going to work if they, if they resonate into something that people are going to pick up and run with, you know, anyway, like to become a mass movement, this is like what Timur Kron says about the role of the availability entrepreneur. Like it's not enough to just like have your cause and then just like…”

“When public figures get blown to smithereens, it's almost always because of something that's basically too short. Um, uh, when people actually do the full long, long-form explanation of what they think, even if it's on a highly controversial, you know, even if it's imputed to be highly controversial or whatever, If…”

“The purpose of building the dominant venture brand was precisely to be able to have the The companies be able to borrow that at the most critical points in their development so that the companies can kind of use our force in the world as a slingshot to basically build their own force.”

“if you provide the modernization capability, um, then you're going to bring into existence writers and content that don't exist today. Um, and that is going to create new demand that's not visible today. And then that demand is going to come back around and it's going to incent more writers and more content.”

“whenever we really screw up, it's because there's a founder who can see the future and they come and they sit in our office, they tell us what the future is. And we say, yeah, I don't really buy it. Right. And then for the next 30 years, you know, we have to read about the, you know, glorious success of this thing as…”

“There's also, I think, just, like, enormous latent demand for actual smart, high-quality stuff. Um, and, and, and particularly in media and in every kind of media. And, and I think the issue, the issue is not a lack of demand. I think the issue is lack of supply.”

“in any market that has sort of commodity-like characteristics, you know, the number one cause of a glut is a shortage, and the number one cause of a shortage is a glut, right?”

“if there's no fundamental change in technology, it's very hard to make startups work because the big companies just end up doing everything.”

“Los Angeles, you could argue, is the ultimate American city because it was the ultimate fake it until you make it, uh, thing.”

“Um, but if the internet is a solvent that basically turns every media into every other kind of media, right, where all of a sudden local, uh, TV is competing with national, uh, network TV, competing with cable TV, competing with newspapers, competing with magazines, um, now all of a sudden you add it up and you've got…”

“the three hour podcast doesn't work if it's everything it, you know, if you have to stop every five seconds because some, you know, you have to accuse somebody of saying something racist, right? Like, so this, this like, you know, or sexist or whatever, the, the, this, this, this speech suppression thing, you know,…”

“specifically though, if you want to control the actual customer experience end to end, you have to, you have to vertically integrate. It's, it's, it's the only way to actually do it.”

“if you see somebody standing on a stage or on television and they are telling you that something is real, They're probably over, they're, they're either lying or they're overrepresenting what they know.”

“in, in the last 15 years, if you, if you write that, if you do that same list again, you know, many or most of the big winners have been companies that have gone into a vertical, but what they've done is they've gone in and they've tried to basically eat the entire vertical, right? They, they, they've, they've provided…”

“this kind of thing is going to be a strategic linchpin, like, cause it's the same supply chain that you used to do the robot dog for the nine-year-old. It's that same supply chain that would go into making the robot soldier.”

“to get a real time collaborative system to work, people have to be online at the same time. Yeah. Right. And so you, you and I are, we're collaborating. We have to be online at the same time and we might be in totally different time zones. And you know, like it's just, it's, so it's hard to get, you know, critical mass…”

“one of the design principles was all protocols have to be text-based. There were no binary protocols. Text-based protocols are much less efficient, much, much slower. But the enormous advantage is you can program a text-based protocol by writing text, uh, and you can read it by reading text, whereas if it's in a binary…”

“Like this is, you know, this is why I'm so distrustful of experts. Like this is my origin story for why I don't trust anybody with credentials or anything anymore.”

“If this kind of thing happens, like if your students or even your faculty, you know, go off and do something new and are successful in business, and then the, you know, the, um, you know, the money that you'll get, the money that you'll get back in philanthropy is going to be orders of magnitude higher than whatever…”

“the kinds of people who can run projects like that just don't work for the government anymore. Um, they, they're in the private sector.”

“When I look at AI, what I see is sort of a new kind of computer, like a fundamentally new kind of computer... it's a probabilistic computer and you ask the same question twice, it gives you different answers, which is just in and of itself a pretty mind blowing thing.”

“game as sort of permanent platform and, ah, you know, sort of foundation that then you end up building 20 or 30 or 40 years of experiences on top of.”

“productivity improvement in the economy, like, you know, sort of people doing things more efficiently in the economy is a function of down cycles, not up cycles.”

“with a nonprofit, uh, the, the, um, the, the expense statement, you know, will scale to meet the available funding. Sort of on, on autopilot, right? To, to, to make sure the thing goes to break even.”

“one of the reasons a college campus is a hothouse for dating is just, it's a lot of young people who are together physically. But another reason is because they, they're all, they all have a shared sense of identity, um, right? They all have a shared credential, which is they're all, you know, they're all at x, you…”

“when people have, you know, real self-respect and real pride, um, you know, they, they, they find that to be very offensive, um, which, which is very dangerous, uh, from a political standpoint, because then they, you know, they're not gonna just always vote for the person who's giving them the, the, the handout.”

“And so there was this, it was this very kind of powerful magnetic pole, uh, especially for, you know, as it turns out, especially for kind of super high IQ people, um, I would say super high IQ people, super verbal people. Um, which is sort of a recurring pattern, um, which we could talk about. And then the other is,…”

“wars can start on issues of, like, complex geopolitics, or, like, ideological differences, or, like, commercial, whatever, trade conflicts, or whatever border, Conflicts, but like, they start one way, they end another way, and they, they do seem to end in race war, and that, that does not seem to be out of our system.”

“those are what I, I, we have a, I have a term I use for that. I call those, those are trillion-dollar prizes, right? And so, so basically, like, whoever figures out how to fix those problems, um, is going, you know, has the ability potentially to build a company worth a trillion dollars. Like, you know, to make this…”

“It almost seems deterministic that if a city becomes successful, it basically, the local homeownership, whatever political base devotes itself to preventing the construction of new housing.”

“the way I describe it to kind of normies is that, you know, that sort of unlocks the ability for computers to more and more interact with the real world. Yes. And with the messiness of the real world, right, and the probabilistic nature of the real world.”

“And of course the answer is technology. And in fact, technology is the only answer to that question. Right. There, there, there's no other answer. Right. It's not like people got smarter. It's not like people got, you know, I don't know that this, you know, human, human, you know, DNA is the same human beings haven't…”

“what you notice basically is that list of kind of rational reasons why something can't work. That list is also the same list of all of the technology and business opportunities with that technology. Right. So I always call that it's the punch list of all the things for founders to do.”

“being 30 years early, it's the same as being wrong. Like it, you know, it doesn't help you any when everything you're working on fails, and then you have to have to wait 30 years.”

“basically, there are three eras of human existence. There was, like, pre-modern, which was basically, like, caves all the way up through, like, kings, right? And then there was modern, which is, like, science, technology, democracy, you know, capitalism, um, and then, and progress, and then now you could argue, like,…”

“So, a lot of Silicon Valley companies, if they, if they heard this, would just say flat out, like, that can't work, or it certainly would not work for us, another company, and the reason is because, like, consistency of culture is viewed as so important, and right, and the reason for that, right, is if you, it's so…”

“About five years in, you just, you start to see startup CEOs that have actually made a lot of commitments to a lot of people and have built a lot of assumptions into the business. Um, and then there will be other startups that come along and all of a sudden don't respect any of those commitments and any of those…”

“The thing that founders have is literally the ability to break all the promises. The founder can say, I know, I told you last Tuesday, we're building, you know, widget X and we're doing the following way with this margins, but I've got news for you. Um, we're now doing building widget Y in this totally different way.…”

“The nature of the economics of the tech industry is that over time, the mistakes of omission end up being much bigger. Mistake of commission is you can lose one X. Mistake of omission is you can lose a thousand X, because that was the upside you could have gotten.”

“Naturally, as we go through life, we accrete beliefs, beliefs about how the world works, beliefs about, you know, causes and effects, beliefs on patterns, you know, that we've seen in the past, either successes or failures, either, you know, this actually worked or massive scar tissue on something that didn't. I try as…”

“The Luddite fallacy is back. The idea that technology destroys jobs is the core fallacy that's been wrong for hundreds of years, and even that's back.”

“If you go back in history and you look at when new inventions happened, it's precisely the scientists and engineers working on those inventions who were the least able to predict what was actually going to happen.”

“there's a particular magic, exactly to Balaji's point, there's a magic that kicks in when you actually have complete responsibility for the end customer experience and how the product or service is delivered.”

“If you're a first-time founder, first-time founder, it's almost always better to start with angels or with the early seed investors. It's, again, contrary to myth and archetype, it's very hard for the first-time founder to raise, raise a straight A round. It's almost always the case that they're coming up through,…”

“And predominantly what's taught in business school is how to, how to run a stable business, right?”

“And that tech companies, when they run that way, it's generally disastrous.”

“You know, I think most good startups have maybe a five year window. Before they start to get locked into a pattern of doing business with a particular kind of customer.”

“nobody, uh, attempts to ever reconcile, uh, those two critiques, um, and the same commentators will literally write both critiques. In, like, different columns, you know, two weeks apart without ever attempting to reconcile them.”

“he proposes what he calls the third culture, um, which are the people who can bring the two, the two cultures together, um, and the people who can bring, you know, physics, or now computer science, into liberal arts, and the people in liberal arts who can learn and understand, even if they're not engineers, can learn…”

“what I would argue is, like, the further down the stack, the more useful the patents are. Like, patents at the level of chips or radios, um, you know, can be, or, you know, I don't know, memory or something like that can be incredibly valuable. Um, patents at the level of software or applications, we generally don't…”

“I think there's a generational thing that's starting to play out where I think new generations of people have new expectations of the benefits of being connected as opposed to the benefits of being private.”

“private tech companies failing is not a sign of venture capital not working, it's just a sign of venture capital.”

“What we always like to say is the question is not whether it will work. The question is if it does work, how important will it be?”

“The hardest situations, I think, on startup boards, um, which I'd be curious if you've run into this, the hardest situation is a full-fledged team revolt.”

“the strongest, most famous kind of CEOs where everybody wants to be on their board are often the ones who are least likely to do succession planning internally. Cause they're the most likely to not want there to be a clean, uh, internal successor who can take over.”

“And if you're just going to do a single product and then sell the company, you're never going to build a big, valuable, enduring, uh, company.”

“And we find that the team, you know, generally works better if the product innovator is the CEO of the company.”

“And then as a consequence, by the way, as a business, businesses like Lyft and Uber have the potential to be far larger than anybody anticipated and far larger than the taxi market ever was because they're unlocking behaviors that were never possible without, right, without the software.”

“I think making things is what you do as your job, and the life of the mind is what you do for fun.”

“I think societally we decide collectively, we decide how much, how much innovation we want, and based on, or we decide how much risk we want, and based on that, we decide how much innovation we get, we get. Um, and I think that there is a general principle that as societies sort of, you know, advance slash get older…”

“if you think about a lot of countries, uh, in fact, a lot of cities in the U.S. and a lot of countries around the world want to have their own, quote, Silicon Valley. The answer probably is not to have their own Silicon Valley. It's probably to have a different kind of valley, you know, a biomedical valley, or a stem…”

“we have the opportunity to build both products and companies that have never been even imagined before, even without more significant fundamental advances in machine learning.”

“The only way to do that is to apply technology. Otherwise we'll let you, you bankrupt the planet trying to do it with the, with the current techniques.”

“a subtle but important thing that's happened in the last 20 years is the market of early adopters now is now very large. Um, and so, and I just, like, look at it numerically, like, the number of total internet users in, like, 1999 was maybe fifty million people. Um, all in, right? Um, today the number of early adopters…”

“more and more, the interesting things that are happening is computer science gets applied to more fields. Um, more and more, we're hitting the real world, um, which is to say we're hitting real world regulations, um, we're hitting real world laws, we're hitting real world politics, right?”

“Everybody just naturally thinks inside out, me and my company and my product out into the world. Don't think that way. Think in terms of, like, what are the most interesting things happening in the world, and then how do those things relate to us?”

“And a lot of CEOs in those days, and by the way, still, they, they, they rank their success in, in, in doing an interview or giving a speech based on minimum, minimum controversy, right? So they come off stage. I, I've worked with lots of CEOs. Like, they come off stage. They're very proud of themselves because they…”

“the, the, I forget what he called the pivot or whatever, which was basically just the, you know, the thing of like, you never answer their questions. You always answer your own questions, which is.”

“in the, in the, in the new media environment, this, this is yet another example of, like, these, these, these old walls just collapse. You know, the Overton window just disintegrates. Um, and so, of course, you know, the new media environment is extremely conducive to the spread of every UFO theory in the world.”

“Each viral social media meme explosion is like a two and a half day panic cycle.”

“And so if, if, so if something happens to a single person, you can, and then something happens to 10,000 people, you can have the same level of outrage in each case. Like the, the outrage doesn't scale with the number of people affected.”

“a short tweet, even though it's written, is actually an oral culture thing. Right? Because the fact that short means that it has to be like this, again, this sort of this burst of, of, of, of sort of, say, triggering emotionality, uh, in order to go viral. So, so actually tweets, I would say, are oral culture, even…”

“and as far as we can tell, like, as far as I can tell, like, that, that process is getting, you know, hairier and more complicated over time, right? Uh, it's, it's not getting easier. It's, it, it seems like it's actually getting significantly harder.”

“if you were designing AI chips from scratch today, you wouldn't build a full GPU. You would build dedicated AI chips that were much more straight, much more specifically adapted to AI, um, and would have, I think, would just be much more economically efficient”

“a core principle of pricing is you don't want to price by cost. If you can avoid it, you want to price by value, right? Like you want to price, you have price where you're getting a percentage of the business value, um, of, you know, especially when you're selling to businesses, you want to price as a percentage of the…”

“The best venture capital firms in history, I think, are the ones that were the most aggressive at being able to navigate from wave to wave, right?”

“every great VC, like, if you, this is, this is the stories that, you know, the VCs tell each other. Every great VC basically has this history of, like, my God, I had, it was in my office. The thing was in my office, and I said no, and if I had just said yes”

“Nothing's worse than passing on a deal and then having the company become a great success. Like, it's just, it's just, it puts you... You could be furious about that for 30 years in our business.”

“And so there, there's always, there's always this tendency, you know, for the, for the, for the pros to be, you know, look down the nose and say, you know, the new people are being, are being, you know, basically sloppy. They don't understand what's happening. You know, they, they don't really understand the machine.…”

“the definition of AI is always the next thing that the machine can't do.”

“I think movies play the role in our culture that myths and legends used to play in ancient cultures, or that novels used to play a hundred years ago. They're the art form that, that is capable of basically containing and expressing and making permanent the most important aspects of a culture, uh, or of a civilization.”

“if you disaggregate sectors of the economy over the last 25 years, what you find is basically everything that technology touches basically collapses in price.”

“reality TV, like the Kardashians is like, is basically, um, it's like professional wrestling for women. And then, um, professional wrestling is like reality TV for men.”

“Social media has become the dog, and traditional media has become the tail, and they just get, like, whipped around like crazy by all these, you know, by all these shifting memes.”

“every new thing that happens basically now has a two or three day arc, um, and it's basically like, and you can literally graph it, because it's like this blow, it's like this viral moment where something just like goes, like, parabolic”

“Every one of these companies that has ended up being a global world beater always has one of these stories of the path not taken.”

“Three ways to deal with this psychologically. One is denial, uh, which is what most people do. Most people just pretend the world around them is actually real, even when it's not, because it's, it's a psychologically safe thing to do. And, you know, and by the way, and who can, who can wander around all day long…”

“because your audience always consists of people, people relate much more to other people than they relate to a corporation, right?”

“incumbents, especially incumbents that no longer have their founders, incumbents are highly likely to underestimate the amount of structural change and they're going to have a hard time adapting to it.”

“you can only have the world's leading military if you're the world's leading technology power and you're the world's leading economy.”

“most things that Need to have that kind of network effect, never get past the cold start problem, right? They, they, they just, they, they strangle early because, you know, there's just not enough, not enough writers, which means there's not enough readers. There's not enough readers. There's not enough writers.”

“every once in a while you get a, you get a platform shift that's like dramatic enough where it basically means that you, you both kind of can and have to reinvent from scratch the whole idea of what the thing is in the first place.”

“it always sounds more sophisticated to be negative than positive, right? It's like the positive person gets accused of being Pollyannish and wide eyed and, you know, immature and, you know, not cynical enough. And then the pessimistic person always sounds world, you know, world weary and wise”

“The way the boards get information is it's the information to a board is really still piped through the management team and in particularly the CEO. Um, and so, um, it's very hard to, uh, it's very hard for boards in practice. Um, it's nearly impossible to have an independent kind of read on things happening inside the…”

“what's wrong with expansion is as companies grow, um, they basically reach further and further into basically worse and worse lower margin businesses in order to continue to grow.”

“when you tally up all the sales at the end of the year, it's like, oh yeah, you know, that, you know, that, that group of whatever, 10 people generated half the revenue and the other thousand people generated the other, like, that's a fairly routine thing.”

“it's just that there is something in the nature of monopolies where they just, they have a, you know, if, if they no longer have to compete, um, and if they're no longer disciplined by the market, um, they, they, they basically go bad. And then, and then, and then, you know, how do you prevent that from happening? The…”

“when technology is allowed to work, it's magic. Like prices crash in a way that's just great for consumers and it's equivalent of a giant, basically, you know, when prices drop is equivalent of a raise.”

“every possible threat you can think of AI posing, basically there is a corresponding defense that has to get built.”

“the good news from energy is these, these, these systems lend themselves to centralization of, of data centers, right?”

“if the system is teaching stagnation, then kids, kids, at least some kids will come up the other way and decide they really, they really want to do things in the world.”

“if you were inventing a system from scratch, you would do what the originators of the English And what the creators, you know, of what folks like, like Austin at Lambda School are doing, which is you would look from scratch, first principles, and you would say, okay, like, what is the specific purpose of this specific…”

“the future is what we make it, right? It's, it's, it's not inevitable. Like, it has to be, it has to be willed into being, and people have to decide what they want.”

“why do these sort of non-person, non, you know, celebrity, non-creator, non-influencer brands exist? And the reason, the reason I think is because of the media of the era in which those brands were created.”

“it's putting a little bit too much of a burden on technology and markets to expect technology markets to answer it All those questions for all people. And so I think if you're looking to technology and markets to answer those questions, I think you're probably looking in the wrong direction. You know, I think you…”

“rising technological capabilities and rising standard of living right through markets, um, open up the room, right, individually and collectively in our society to be able to ask those Questions”

“what any entertainment experience is physiologically is it's basically taking the brain and the nervous system on a rollercoaster ride.”

“subversion of cultural norms, you know, basically happens through entertainment.”

“I think if you bring down the price of originality, the cost of originality, like if you make it possible for people to exercise creative originality at a fraction of the price, I think that, I think that has a potential to take a creative medium that maybe is, is in this kind of stuck in this loop. Um, and I think it…”

“There is something to generality. There's, there's something to this idea that, like, you can ask it any question, and it will, it will have a way to answer it, and that, and that, and that's, you know, that, that really fundamentally is, is the breakthrough that we're at today.”

“I've always been a proponent of, like, look, it's, it's a, it's a huge plus for a technology when it is so easy to use that you can basically have fun with it, um, right? Like, it, like, it, it spoke very well for the computer that you could actually use it to play games, um, right? Because, because, because it turns…”

“since the invention of the internet, and then more recently, I'd say the combination of the smartphone and the internet, um, a lot of new technologies now are actually the reverse. Um, they actually get adopted by consumers first, um, then small businesses figure out how to use them, then big businesses use them, and…”

“50 years ago, a new technology like this would have been, like, deployed in the government first, and then in big companies, and then years later in the form of something individual people could use. The, the model today is, like, it's just online.”

“AI can now step in and equalize the power imbalance between the customer and the company.”

“And it feels like the internet's impact on culture is, is just beginning, um, in, in the sense of, like, a world in which culture is based on the internet, which is what I think is happening, uh, is just at the very start, right, because it, it had to get universal before it could set the culture, um, but that's…”

“every successful technology that I'm aware of, you know, the things that are, like, all of a sudden, like, the next big thing, like the iPhone in 2007, or, you know, just as an example, um, they all have this, like, incredible 25 or 40 or fifty-year backstory”

“That's not how the great ideas arrive. They, they don't look like that. They, they look like very specific. They look like very specific theories, not general theories. And so they, they tend to be very specific to the details of the market involved.”

“any of the important companies, any of the important products take like a decade or more to build”

“It has to be more important to each of you that the other one gets to make the decision, um, than that you get to prove yourself right, and you have to both have that attitude.”

“The really successful platforms let the users surface the behaviors, right, that the, that the creators of the platform could have never thought of, and, you know, Twitter's had all kinds of issues over the years, but, like, it always has been amazing. Most of the compelling ways in which people use Twitter have been…”

“everybody worries about protecting their idea. But if your idea is actually any good, you're going to have to bludgeon people to adopt it.”

“the way I think about it is, it's more important to me that we have the successful partnership than it is that I'm right on any particular issue.”

“we may argue about whether to make the investment, but once we make it, we're in. Right. And then at that point, it's important that it's the dynamic, right, the sort of implicit promise in the team and including between the two of us is we're all in this. We've all committed. And I think that's really critically…”

“We experienced this in venture capital. It's like, we basically get two kinds of press coverage. One is what a bunch of geniuses we were for backing the successful company. What a bunch of morons we were from backing the failing company. And I keep pointing out, we're the same people. We don't whip between genius and…”

“A big reason for that, I found, is a lot of business books kind of fall into two traps. One is they extrapolate off the recent past, and so they're very kind of short-term in nature. It's whatever worked in the last five years projects forward. The other problem they have is I think they, they confuse correlation with…”

“The thing with Clay's book that was so striking was, uh, the observation that when big companies get disrupted, it's not because they're incompetent and dumb. In fact, quite the opposite. Um, it's because they're very competent and smart. All the existing commitments that they've made, all the existing customers…”

“There is not a lot of historical evidence that either the inventors of a new technology or anybody else can anticipate the effects very well.”

“These technologies are now arriving bottoms up. That's extremely empowering to all of us around the world as individuals, but it does mean that, in many cases, smaller organizations can now adopt new technologies Faster than large organizations.”

“the default state of every company is just dying in obscurity.”

“there's almost always a 20 or 30 year backstory of research. That often, by the way, turns out to be 50, 60, 80 years, uh, backstory of research before something pops.”

“The central challenge is any top-end venture capital firm that has a reputation that it wants to maintain, which is, I think, very important, can only invest in one company in a category. You, you can't, practically speaking, invest in competitors. The company you've already invested in will feel its betrayal, um, if…”

“At best, the thing that a startup can do that a big company can't is they can just be fast.”

“With your backgrounds, I would encourage a lot of you to kind of think in those terms, because the advantage of that is, um, you don't have to take the raw startup risk that it may not pan out at all, but you also don't have to be employee number 147,638.”

“What the startup founders don't understand is how big the world is and how busy people are and, um, all the existing investments people have made and all the existing time people are spending on things, you know, so in a world of seven billion people, if you really want to have an impact on the world, at some point you…”

“They'll be like, well, the customers shouldn't need to be sold to, because they should just buy the best product, and then you have this long explanation as to why that doesn't happen, and so we try to say, you know, you don't, just because you're like a master engineer, and you know how to rebuild all of computing,…”

“The struggle on the other side, the serial entrepreneur, what often happens is it becomes basically all science, no art. Often the desire to start another company kind of overwhelms the process of coming up with, with, with a really great idea.”

“research papers I tend to find are underexploited, because there's a lot, you know, for, for, for interesting topics, there tends to be a lot of academic research that's actually been done that, that historically people just haven't had access to, but now it's all on the internet.”

“At first it's like, okay, you can make, you know, these websites a little better, mobile apps a little better, and do this, and conversion rates, and so forth, and then you realize, wait a minute, like, you can make everything a little bit better, right? Basically everything in the world can be made better, um, and so…”

“a lot of what is now happening with crowdfunding and Kickstarter and CrowdTilt and all these things is kind of, in a lot of ways, sort of derivations of what happened in the Obama campaign.”

“the other thing I've found that works incredibly well, and maybe they're just indulging me on it, but I have found that it works well, um, is that, um, I just, again, in my later discipline years, I'm trying to get better at this, is, um, Is to just keep, instead of having, bringing anything up in the board meeting in…”

“you can never close it, because to be able to close the knowledge gap, the directors would have to be involved full-time in the company, which would, then they'd be executives and not directors.”

“If there is something in the company that you're concerned about, that is an opportunity for you to do a deep dive. That is within the charter of what that committee is supposed to be doing in a way that would be weird in a board meeting.”

“length does not equal quality. Um, like a high quality conversation, um, ah, and again, bearing in mind that the board kind of by definition can't weigh in on everything because the board doesn't have the knowledge and it isn't the board's job to tell management what to do. Um, but it doesn't take, you know, 20 hours,…”

“what I've found is the well-run boards, the committees, larger companies, committees play an absolutely pivotal role. Um, in fact, it is, I find it to be actually a very good structure if most of the actual work is taking place in committees, um, because you do have a group of people who are single-mindedly focused on…”

“And so if three or five or six or seven of the directors are kind of all agree on this and they're kind of like, yes, this board would be better if this person were to quietly exit. Um, it can generally be communicated to that director, you know, in a, in an offline conversation, like it's probably time to step down.…”

“I think the younger the company, like, and I think Larry, Larry, with your board has been an example of this, like, the younger the company, arguably, the more helpful the board can actually be, because you really are, it is a small team of people, you know, the, the executives in the company plus the employees plus…”

“Public companies tend to be alike, um, in terms of the board experience, um, more than private companies tend to be alike because they do vary so much in size and configuration.”

“I think the really big success has only come from serious long-term commitment. So it has a role early on, but at some point you, you, at some point the founder and the company have to commit to something. Um, and have to really slog it out.”

“You can always, you can always take all the customers if you're willing to take all the fraud. You can always shut off all the fraud if you're willing to shut off all the customers.”

“Cheaper to start, more expensive to grow.”

“the biggest change is just we, we have a sense for a lot of the universities we deal with that the computer science departments have a much I mean, they still want to, want to breed PhDs and, and professors, but a much bigger focus on practical impact in industry, um, and, you know, the students that we see coming out…”

“in any given generation of companies, there's three or four or five that are kind of clearly top of the heap. Um, you know, kind of have, you know, they're kind of at scale and are doing very interesting, important things, um, but have not become kind of classic big companies. That just kind of drift along, you know,…”

“I often describe these companies as, um, you know, even, even the ones that kind of from the outside look that, like, they're just like up and to the right the whole time. I always describe it as, it's like a process of falling up the stairs. Right. It's, it's just like, cause it's just like, it's just when you think…”