AI Companies

“And I think we are seeing that everywhere across AI companies of like, you know, the model becomes a platform, becomes application.”

“As long as they can demonstrate a path to margin expansion over the course of the next few years, while still growing at these unprecedented levels with very healthy balance sheets, I worry less about gross margins like we did five years ago in traditional ent…”

“I think that a bunch of likely government action at least seems to push in favor of AI companies keeping their models internal and not deploying them, which I think for the risks that I'm most worried about doesn't help and in fact is anti-helpful”

“There's a lot of risk from just internal deployment, especially if you're deploying within AI companies and government, right, which are two of the most high stakes Applications”

“AI companies are not robust to employees at those AI companies or to outside actors in terms of stealing their model, sabotaging their models, or like back-drawing their models, or like data poisoning them.”

“But then that actually really happens by sort of early in 20, 28, like SWE is fully automated. SWE within AI companies is fully automated.”

“Because it turns out that in a lot of these companies, you have reps doing 10 or 20, thirty million.”

“Honestly, the best salesperson in any of these companies is a founder, and what they're doing is bridging the jagged edge to what the customer's capability is, and that's it.”

“I fundamentally believe that for AI companies in the future, you have to have interesting data strategy. Do you have access to data that no one else has access to? Do you know how to collect data that is very hard to collect?”

“There'll be a settlement where they are going to be able to claim their content.”

“All the AI companies should get together, take 10% of your revenue, put it in a pool, and keep paying the people and getting permission from them, so you can get updates on the content”

“We have the top 10 AI companies in the world as customers.”

“In database world, when I was at Oracle, the most expensive person you can get is called Oracle DBA, database administrator, and they were the most expensive people that you have to hire when you're running Oracle, and now These AI companies are saying, we don…”

“If you don't have any control on running that agent yourself, if you don't own the learning that it actually that actually, like, you know, gains over the years, then you're basically fully dependent on these AI companies, you know, to do, you know, to get you…”

“So like more than one in six signups at AI companies are this kind of abuse.”

“There's going to kind of be like a black hole and suck it all up. Which I'm sure that that's not going to be what ends up happening. I think that they're all going to get a lot smarter than that. And I think most don't even want to do that in the first place”

“Like, I don't see another scenario if this trend were to continue, these companies will have to be nationalized in one way or another. And then maybe some form of UBI, like universal basic income.”

“When you hear about all these companies, and you hear about all of these businesses that are going not like, you know, one to three to nine to 20, like they used to, but are going one to 20 to a hundred, or one to 30 to 300, all of that can be traced back to t…”

“So will AI's build an amazing sort of profile of you based off of all the personal data and then use that for ads? Most certainly.”

“I think the AI companies They've been a little bit, Like, first, there's too much fear mongering, right? Like, this is going to take everyone's jobs, and you should come regulate us, and I don't think that's helpful or necessary.”

“No, because I don't like why is like kind of the upshot, you know, it's like, it's not like I don't understand the rationale for doing it in them and not in other things, if that makes sense. There's lots of critical infrastructure.”

“And then notably, even for the AI companies, they're actually growing on subscription spend faster than they're growing on token spend.”

“Now, the job loss apocalypse is not a story I believe in. I don't think the data supports it.”

“These days that this persona of the company you're talking about that get to a hundred million ARR real quick, it's not necessarily the same stickiness of revenue and time will tell.”

“There used to be like, Battery and Neeraj had mentioned whatever the three triples, two doubles kind of a thing triple, triple, double, double, double, or whatever that, whatever the norm used to be that playbook's out of the window, right? Like right now with…”

“Why Amazon was, you know, they had a big burn rate, but then Uber took it to a new level but now it's had an, they've added a zero.”

“I mean, if you visit very high growth AI companies, at least in San Francisco you know, the offices are pretty full on the weekends. And I don't think it's a coincidence.”

“The economics of a general or an AI company are just fundamentally different than software. That like, it's more akin to industrial companies or something, because you're paying for The compute costs. So the resources in can scale linearly or somewhat linearly…”

“Well, anyway, it's gotten to the point where they held a briefing for the companies yesterday. So that, that is saying, talking about plans to pre-review, which obviously would be a sea change for this administration.”

“There were a lot of conversation about hitting data walls, and it seems like we did not quite hit it. So the larger the model is, the more data it needs to ingest to be trained. And it seems like different companies kind of found different ways to overcome the…”

“The soundbite is that there are AI companies, I'm not, doesn't matter which ones, that are hiring the Former employees of ad agencies to do their job, to play act their old job, and then recording all of it in order to get the training data to learn marketing …”

“The whole model distillation debate, which is super important to actually protect the economic value of these hundreds of billions of dollars in investments in AI companies.”

“I think it's actually very important that AI companies start to establish similar governance policies, because this is something that requires that level of just oversight and of assurance. It is a becoming You know, a massive industry, and just like there are…”

“You can't just sort of trust models to get safer by getting bigger. You have to put in the work to actually make them safer. And this is, I think what a lot of AI companies are investing in. This is why we in fact do have models that are improving on these dim…”

“I think by getting students and teachers excited about the capabilities and features of the AI that you're offering, creates a foundation that, that they'll, they'll want to be comfortable with, and they'll stick with those tools for a long, long time.”

“Where he said over a year ago, before data centers even became a hot political topic, that we should let our AI companies Stand up their own power generation behind the meter.”

“And there's some chance that in the next two years, there's a blip in the market. All these AI companies are burning money. And if you're sitting there with twenty five billion dollars, you could have been saying, come to daddy. I got money. Let's talk about h…”

“92% of AI companies are failing.”

“Maybe pension funds should be buying into all the big AI companies and making sure that everyone has a piece of that. Or sovereign funds. Maybe everyone, every country should have a sovereign wealth fund that does that.”

“And I think if any of the AI companies have been public, they would have been getting decimated.”

“Most of the AI companies we talk to, they have no real understanding of like what is real deep operations, and how do you actually function across like 150 countries and like makes making things actually work.”

“I actually don't think like quote unquote AI companies are Very set up for success. That's actually probably not where value is going to accrue.”

“Because the winning AI companies are raising, you know, 1,000,000,010 of billions, in some cases, hundreds of billions of dollars. Right. The old world of ten million or thirty million dollar, fifty million dollar checks, you know, where VCs tap out, it's just…”

“I feel like for AI at some point it will become relevant that hardware comes pre-installed and with the software, which is AI first and to be in hardware for all of these AI companies will become increasingly relevant.”

“Because it is just a matter of time until some person inside of one of these companies goes on some lunatic moral tirade, and then jeopardizes your business against something that is nothing about law, but is everything about subjectivity.”

“If you take the top hundred SaaS companies, And the top hundred of these new AI companies, and you look at the median, ah, the median rate of growth, I guess, I saw the Stripe report was like, 3.6 times faster as of a few months ago.”

“The job of an engineer at one of these companies now is much more supervising these agents as opposed to writing the code yourself.”

“At a high level, the big AI companies have made these safety pledges of how they will treat their systems as they get more and more capable, but they are largely self-enforced. And so there's a lot of temptation to water down your commitments and go ahead with…”

“AI companies are starting to be like open source companies because it's viral with the easy to use product.”

“The fastest growing AI companies are reaching a hundred million bucks of revenue significantly faster than the fastest growing SaaS companies in their era.”

“Roughly speaking, the AI companies are growing two and a half times plus faster than the non AI companies.”

“Gross margins are a little bit worse for AI companies.”

“And I think if you were to do that same comparison for 2026, all of the entire public software industry, I mean, SAP, this is not just SaaS, like including SAP and older software companies. I think the AI companies, the model companies will be something like 7…”

“I am skeptical as to the survivor, the survival rate of many of the AI companies that I see starting today because they're going to perpetually drink their data through a straw from other systems. And those other systems are never, ever, ever going to let othe…”

“I think when you go to the AI websites, I think the different AI companies have the personalities of the engineers that are Programming them. And I think you see that bias in the information you're given.”

“I think the SpaceX IPO will actually help all private companies this year, including the AI companies, just because it creates a lot of liquidity, and it draws a lot of capital, you know, into tech, and, you know, people are gonna, like, it's, it will just cre…”

“The AI companies are getting bigger faster than anything we've ever seen. The investment amounts are bigger than anything we've ever seen.”

“There are still going to be, and already are a lot of AI companies that are buzzy and exciting that get far overvalued. And those founders are going to be faced with some difficult choices in the coming years. That's inevitable.”

“Second point of leverage would be legislation, right? It's not going to happen in the United States, you know, but it might happen in Europe. It could happen in Australia, right?”

“I think that the venture capital, the seed venture capitalists who invest in companies that are branded as AI companies are going to lose an impossibly large amount of money in the coming years.”