Big Tech

“I think there are a set of products that labs are just culturally not set up and big tech not set up to go after. You think about launching, you know, a companion product at Google that may disagree with you, that may have sexual innuendo in it. Like these are…”

“There's a lot of iteration happening and the person should be kind of mentally prepared into that, you know, that type of work because usually if the person has a big tech background or something that's more stable, they're usually not comfortable with that.”

“When I talk about AI or when I conceive information about AI on tech Twitter, it's obviously very techno-optimist. We're excited about it. With anything being blasted to mainstream, there's Always a lot of skepticism around big tech, a lot of skepticism around…”

“There's truly oppositional research teams inside each company that I've now heard about for probably five to 10 times, like for different stories and companies that have been planted by the other. And it's like the nastiest PR setting I've seen in all of tech.…”

“It doesn't make sense for anyone else, like one of the big, you know, the big tech companies to have a competitive version of this because it's, they're not, and inherently it has to be open source. It has to be distributed. And so that's the big open cloud ad…”

“I couldn't do it when I was in big tech because I got a lot of pushback. They threatened to fire me a couple of times for Brand reasons.”

“For labs certainly for big tech, and perhaps increasingly for labs, the priorities get set in their promo committee, always. And if you're a PM, and it's always the sort of mid-career PMs, and I've been one of these, and you, like, the incentives are always to…”

“I, by the way, Brian would take the other side of your argument that the big labs or big tech will win an app generation. I think they just lack the focus.”

“I think that how I describe it is that big tech has all collectively realized that these language models plus scaffolding is going to unlock absolutely incredible value. And I have very high probability, barring extreme geopolitical situations, that big tech E…”

“Are they also interviewing with a big tech company? If so, that might indicate that they're not quite sure in which direction they want to go yet, and we'll have to circle back to selling on why should they be joining a startup in the first place.”

“Your main advantage is speed throughout the whole process. You can run this process within seven days, 10 days, maybe max two weeks. Big tech or even growth stage companies are going to move much slower than that.”

“And you might get signals early on that they really want to be in big tech, and that can be really hard to convince them otherwise, especially if it's like, say, comp package related or stability of job related. It's probably not worth fighting that battle bec…”

“I think actually there's a lot of big tech examples where they're kind of pushing really hard for their teams to use more code. They're being evaluated on how much code they're using. And they're just kind of getting more and more slop that nobody understands.…”

“So, because of the antitrust issues, companies are choosing to, you know, lift out teams, including the IP. But the bet they're making is the IP is changing so rapidly, you take a licensed copy of the IP, you leave the, you leave a copy behind, And that team, …”

“What we realized was, well, they're not always a hundred percent aligned with what's going on with the big tech folks.”

“If I was a regulator in America, I would like, even though I'm a free market person, I think it's become so extreme where you need, this is one area where I would say that almost that acquisitions need to be banned.”

“Little tech is extraordinarily different from big tech, which is extraordinarily different from the academic communities.”

“The most effective way, if you want to make comp for somebody coming out of big tech that, that wants to try and bet on one of these businesses is to hit series A to C before the valuation gets too high, take a percent and then just ride it.”

“Despite the fact that Anthropic has eleven billion plus dollars in funding from big tech that it's been able to compete in this market.”

“And it looks like the tariff threat is not going to be anywhere near as bad. And remember the economy was humming coming into that. So I think that it will continue now.”

“Big Tech is expected to spend three hundred thirty billion this year building largely data centers.”

“If you're not, if you, if you're not confident, you're going to win on offense, you want to play defense. And so for any large tech company, commoditizing a potential threat Is, is actually quite valuable.”

“And then we just received, we received a big, frightening cease and desist from one of the five biggest tech companies in the world. Of course, everyone got frightened about it. We had to abort the sales process.”

“And so in all those cases, these companies are spending one to three percent of their market cap on the MNAs, which is not like, that's not transformative MNA. It's really like, again, these big consolidators are just taking call options bets on these fast gro…”

“Apparently entry-level jobs from big tech, like big tech's hiring like 25% less this year than last.”

“Most of what our founders are trying to disrupt is, is big tech.”

“They only agree on two things. They only agree on big tech and China. This is the only two things they agree on, but they really agree on those things.”

“I suspect that for those reasons, it's something that The big tech companies will try, and we've seen Apple and Amazon and Google all dabble, but I think those experiments probably won't fit the way they want to build their company, and so I think they'll stay…”

“One argument I make sometimes is that big tech is effectively a big experiment in UBI, universal basic income, for people who went to good schools, right? You're literally just giving money to people for not doing very much.”

“If you look at what Musk did at Twitter, Where they cut 80% or whatever it was. I wouldn't be surprised if you could do things that are pretty close to that at a lot of the big tech companies.”

“I guess it felt like a little bit of a prisoner's dilemma, because I think the result is that you know, tech progress itself decelerated. You have, like, the smartest people of a generation basically retired in place, working at places that, you know, the worl…”

“I think what happened in those cases was like, they had the target in mind and then they worked to find a case they could bring. Right. And so I think that's why, like, you know, these cases have like varying degrees of strength to them because they started wi…”

“The capex pullback. I don't see it happening. We have big tech that's going to spend three hundred billion on capex this year plus. Much of that is going to AI, open AI, there's rumors now that, or reports, really, that they're about to raise forty billion dol…”

“I think you may see Antitrust actions that were, you know, sort of just as punitive in the Biden regime towards tech happening in the Trump regime towards big tech.”

“Big tech had a well known, although they won't admit it, but the fact is that they had an organized effort to restrict AI. To their own set of people. They said, let's erect entry barriers so that , right? This is they will never accept it, but this was a real…”

“They, as you said, they have been much more willing than the other big tech companies to think of themselves as an American company, which is incredibly important and also be willing to work with the government on programs where, you know, there's potentially …”

“You know, she misunderstands, like, kind of the role of how to stop the aggregation of power in large tech companies, because she says, well, if she stops large tech companies from buying small startups, what that means is venture capitalists, like myself, and…”

“If you under invest and AI is real, you're screwed. If you overinvest and AI is real, you're great. If you overinvest and AI isn't real, you still have a lot of assets. It's still valuable. Like there was a lot of dark fiber that wound up getting used later on…”

“I look at that and I say, does, is that a bubble? Right? Does this feel like a bubble? I say, no. It's not as good a deal as you got at the start of 23. And it's not as good a deal as you got to start at 24, but if we achieve the growth expectations we expect …”

“And I think what we can put to bed based upon the conversations we've had, what people are hearing out there, the conversations at CES, there are going to, these investments are going to show up in 20, 25, right?”

“And what we do know is that more and more and more regulation of big tech equals less and less and less acquisition of small tech. Which results in the complete and total freezing of the innovation ecosystem of Silicon Valley.”

“I don't think that they are, Trump is in the business of breaking up the big tech monopolies.”

“Forced transparency on that, and the big tech would hate it, and I think that's the right thing for Texas to do, so don't create a regulator, just like demand they do these things, you know?”

“The sum of the parts analysis would tell you that the breakup value is greater than the way that these companies get discounted. You can look at the multiples that they trade at, and you can see that. So if you're a shareholder of the company, you actually sil…”

“I think the best thing we could do for inflation would be a series of breaking up everything from big chicken and big pharma to big tech.”

“We might be in the first fear-based Investment bubble ever. Normally when you have an investment bubble, it's greed. In this case, there's an element of, I better invest in this.”

“I think that these companies cannot compete with tech companies by being more tech. And maybe that limits their growth over time. The only way to possibly compete with big tech and to compete with AI is to be more human, right? It's to make people feel good. L…”

“And what we do know is that more and more and more regulation of big tech equals less and less and less acquisition of small tech.”

“They ingest so much of the experience that the app developers are effectively R and D for the eventual big tech products.”

“Big tech has become increasingly pro-Democrat. Little tech has become increasingly pro-Republican, right? So if you're an upstart, if you're in crypto, if you're like a small AI company, I think you're much more likely to be pro-Republican. If you're a monopol…”

“What Lena Kahn fundamentally gets correct is that big tech really is a threat. It's a threat to free speech, it's increasingly oligarchic, it controls too much of what we're allowed to say, and also, It controls a lot of the ways in which capital gets invested…”

“The functional organization structure of big tech has kind of separated product managers from the product development process in many ways. They're not looking at data because data scientists are doing that. They're just parsing some of the reports that they g…”

“The Republican position on most issues is like a 60 to 70% winner, and yet the elections are a nail biter, and I think a lot of it has to do with the influence of the mainstream media and big tech.”

“One, it is almost certainly the case that this, the primary reason that these funky transactions are happening are, let's just call them non-standard is precisely to avoid federal Regulatory scrutiny.”

“And so I think one thing that we're going to see more of is off balance sheet financing.”

“We certainly are nowhere near the trough. But these don't, this doesn't feel to me like the stuff that bubbles are made of, right? I can make an argument that you could, these things could all be down 10% in the next three months, and none of them would be scr…”

“I think the M&A environment is going to be constrained due to our current FTC slash the more global regulatory viewpoint on whether they want M&A to happen or big tech to get bigger.”

“Quite honestly, I mean, part of what's happening is big tech is against us. There, there's a, there's basically a lot of the political issues now are a civil war inside the tech industry where, The big tech companies are lobbying very aggressively for what the…”

“The latest version of that that I'm very worried about is large tech companies acknowledging, hey, you know, we're not going to lose this AI thing. I think they're going to blame it on China and say, hey, it's a national security. Security thing we can't lose,…”

“It's like the classic dialogue thing is we got to limit the big tech and you're like, well, that's, if you want to really want to limit your economic future.”