Big Companies

“You're going to look at these big companies in five years. They're all going to have their own cloud. They're all going to have their own models. They're all going to have their own silicon. They're all going to have their own data centers. Soup to nuts, they'…”

“The larger the room is, the less space there is for truth, right? But that is the death of companies. This is why big companies are so usually average.”

“I mean, I know a lot of people that think forward deployed engineers simply make up for a shitty product. There's, and there's something to that, right? I mean, like, look, you're basically, and I won't mention companies here, but there's big companies out the…”

“I've talked to a lot of big companies, 65 to 70% of their token consumption is open source model, right?”

“And a lot of big companies are going to be so terrified. They're just going to freeze and not do anything. And then people are going to actually start buying it on their own.”

“Management in big companies will resist it because it means lowering headcount, and it means the person who implements it might actually implement themselves out of a job.”

“And this again is, it's not really, I think, in the DNA of big companies to do this kind of very specific models that are targeted towards developers, rather than trying to solve a lot of things at the same time.”

“I know for a fact that big companies are training now LLMs in-house. Really, like, big companies who have the financial means to train chat to be like model are hiring people who train LLMs.”

“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.”

“One thing that hasn't changed is in the age of AI is big companies only have so many priorities. They can introduce a lot of little, little tests, but at the end of the day, it takes a lot of energy in a big company to Keep a big initiative going because there…”

“Every big company now has had, like, 10 AI presentations. They've had one from Microsoft and Google, they've had the one from their ad agency, they've had the one from Bain or BCG or McKinsey, they maybe had one from OpenAI, they've had stuff from Accenture, a…”

“It does work. There's a lot of really bad technology that has big companies right now.”

“And the interesting thing is big companies make the wrong potential bet. 90% of the time.”

“Anything the big companies have, the small and mid-sized companies want too. They're not different. They just need it packaged tightly and priced tightly so they consume, consume of it in bite-sized chunks.”

“The big companies win, which has been my talk track on this forever, which is like, you know, again, it's like playing Warcraft, too. As long as your cash balance keeps going up, and even better, when you hire super fancy researchers, the market rewards you an…”

“Uncertainty is actually a moat for startups. And I would differentiate uncertainty from risk. Risk is something that you can model on an Excel file. Risk is what you can say. I have a five percent chance of failure and so on. And if you're able to quantify ris…”

“When the clock cycle of the industry changes this much, startups almost always win, and we've probably never seen it change this much.”

“Every big company is now, like, 20 to 30% of big companies have got stuff in deployment, but every big company's got pilots.”

“The big companies, just because they have such incredible access to capital and distribution at this point, they can kind of build whatever they need anyway, right? So anything that does happen will be highly bespoke as opposed to like some industry-wide trend…”

“AI, unlike prior innovations, like unlike the transition from shrink rack software to the internet is just so good for the big companies, right? It's easy to slot in. It commodifies. I mean, there's just like, you can't, you cannot think of a better extending …”

“So from my point of view, I believe that these big companies will never try to focus sufficiently on the market verticals that will really make a huge difference to that particular market, and so the industry will flourish in each of these individual markets.”

“A lot of the big companies that did a lot of these acquisitions, they kind of all ended up shutting most of them down. Most of them don't work. Sure. You get it every once in a while you get like an Instagram, but like most of them are kind of nothings.”

“Big companies have the edge when things are like moving slowly and not that dynamic. And then when something like this or mobile or the internet or semiconductor revolution happens, or probably like back in the days of the industrial revolution, that was when …”

“One of the byproducts of constraining big companies from buying small companies is it hurts small companies. First of all, it makes them less valuable because if an investor you think that big companies can't buy small companies anymore, you may adjust what yo…”

“Some of the most time-wasting frameworks have also just come out of big companies, right? Where the context of the big company that may have made that framework super useful within that context doesn't translate to startup or small company or even big company …”

“One thing to keep in mind right now is that there are more jobs in the startup world than there are in the established company. Okay. In the tech world for product people, that's where new job creation has been happening. It's slower than it was before, but it…”

“That's more like a story of big companies can play the long run, and for you individually, inside that process, it might look like a loss, and you might feel like you're going around, going nowhere, Yet the company stays on the opportunity for long enough to m…”

“I think it will be startups, and of course they'll have tie-ups with big companies, but the open-mindedness, most of these breakthroughs won't come straight out of the big companies.”

“And like, if you play the big company game, they will always beat you. You always have to be thinking about, what would you have gotten fired for at the big company? That should be your playbook at the startup.”

“I think the little man and the everyday man in the U.S. Is sort of getting crushed by the big, you know, the big companies, the big banks, the big government, and increasingly there's like a nation of men and women who sort of feel purposeless and a little bit…”

“Big companies are not hiring nonconformist dissenters and rebels.”

“Independent wildcatters find 80% of the oil and gas in America Despite the fact that most of the mineral leases they acquire have been rejected by the big companies.”

“I don't think we're ever going to go back to the days of big companies having almost all co-located teams”

“If you look at the history of really big companies, so many of them, most investors thought that the idea was horrible.”

“This is something that big companies are actually better at than startups. Which is they don't fire you if the new initiative fails, right? Because then no one at a big company would ever join the new initiative, right? There are exceptions, but no one at Adob…”

“I think we're seeing this big move back from a lot of people going independent to partnering in some way either with big companies or bringing on operational help, and I think it makes total sense.”

“It's like the big companies are going to crush it. That will make people a bunch of money, which then they'll like disperse into other things.”

“This is not a problem for big companies because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.”

“Today in this economy, big companies are taking forever to make a decision on new technology purchases”

“Where things go wrong is the big companies, they don't want to sell your stuff. And I've tried this a bunch of times. They want to sell more of their own stuff.”

“And I think we're going to see that a lot in the next couple of years that this is going to be a requirement for big companies to work with Genesive AI.”

“I think the whole AI space is gonna be a very YOLO space, where, like, almost everyone dies, and, like, the big companies win almost everything, and there's gonna be some exception. Someone's gonna make a fucking fortune somewhere, that's gonna be super hard t…”

“That's the underlying problem is that in big companies like that, you own none of the success, and you pay for all of the downside risk. So there's really no incentive for you to take a risk, whereas in startups, it's the inverse.”

“Part of the reason that there's a focus on relentless pace is because more or less a slow moving startup is dead, right? So it's a key portion for the success of startups that they're speedy, that they're fast. If they're not faster than big companies, they're…”

“On the AI front, the big companies are using AI now to stop consumers even outside of Do Not Pay.”

“So, like, a lot of these companies, I think, are going to, like, really dramatically restructure over the course of the next five years.”

“No, but to the point of competition, you you're seeing cuts to, you know, all the non core projects at these big companies. This is going to be great for startups, right? Like the idea that Facebook could focus on, you know, a fourth, fifth, sixth thing is goi…”

“Big companies can, and they definitely have an advantage. But smaller companies, innovative startups, things like that don't really have as much say there.”

“Tech doesn't work like that. It hasn't worked like that since the seventies, maybe the eighties, but the days when like big companies could say, right, we're going to build the future. Like that's not how the future gets built.”

“Big companies are never going to pay everybody the same everywhere in the globe, at least the majority aren't. Some will, and more power to them, but most, most of that's going to go away by 50 or a hundred employees, right?”

“Big companies move from variable costs to fixed costs, and that's how they're able to get their pricing down and really beat the competition. When you get bigger, that's how you're able to knock out all the little companies that are out there, but it also is a…”

“I do think that climate change is going to be solved by technology, largely, and by people changing their daily routines, but technology is key, and I don't think it's going to be necessarily solved by the big companies. I think the solutions are going to come…”

“Big companies have realized they're not very good at R&D, at sort of good, at sort of new product development, and so what they have done is they have outsourced a lot of their R&D budgets to M&A, and so they let the startups run the experiments, you know, in …”

“Most really big companies didn't use all of those channels. They use one or two channels.”

“I can tell you that big companies that really want an asset, that really want to show commitment to that program, will fly, you know, a big portion of their executive committee out in final negotiations to say, hey we're committed.”

“I feel like that's always where big companies fall down, is they think they need an MBA running a P&L for something”

“Right, which is, for startups, a super interesting point, because it means, like, if you take the lead from the big companies in what to do, you'll see that all of them, they have the resources to, like, do everything five times.”

“Most big companies are terrible partners. They don't understand how to pilot things. They don't understand how to work with startups in a way that don't kill them. They spend way too much time on contract negotiations, and they just, they're unreliable.”

“So I think over the next, like, five years, this, like, alleged entrenched data advantage of big companies will turn out to be, you know, a big nothing.”

“For those ideas that sound bad but are good because of this phenomenon, this one no versus one yes, startups can win. In fact, startups usually do beat big companies in that category of ideas.”