Brian Singerman

“Brian Singerman, who invests in funds and then invests in the companies beneath those funds, has a rule that if the manager's like, balls to the wall, I am all in on this company, he'll automatically write the check.”

“When I did get to meet Elon and learn more about SpaceX, it was extremely clear That there was nobody else like him on the planet who could actually pull something like SpaceX off”

“I didn't read a financial report ever. I still don't know how to read financial reports, right? The one time I ever had to do a spreadsheet, my wife had to do it for me, right?”

“Peter's usually pretty right on the macro things at the end of the day. Timing, timing does come into this stuff, and he's not always exactly right on timing, but at the end of the day, he's pretty good at being correct on, especially on, on macro Global macro…”

“What I'm actually looking for is, hey, is there some chance this person could have beaten me in my prime? Right, as a game, like playing their game. Their game is not going to be the same as mine. You're not going to beat me at my game, but playing their game,…”

“So I was the first investor in, in Oculus and Oculus was a company that I invested in, not just on the street. I mean, I obviously Brennan Palmer great, but like, I was like, try the actual product and I'm not a product person, but I tried the actual product a…”

“Like, I think the true human, like, iconic things are just going to be more and more valuable from, not just from a monetary perspective, but from a, Mindshare perspective, from like a you know, from an emotional perspective, right?”

“Like, I would almost say that, like, having an awesome music department or an awesome art department is even more important than Having an awesome math program right now.”

“I've actually made a lot of money betting against the end of the world. With some pretty famous people.”

“Brian Singerman is not raising his own fund.”

“Obviously there are people within Founders Fund that explicitly choose to not work on the fifth one, you know, sort of whatsoever, right? You know, Brian and Trey's, you know, sort of strategy is we believe the best founders, you know, sort of need no help, an…”

“Oh, a multitude of times. I mean, I probably had at least, you know, sort of six, you know you know Singerman, you know, sort of one-on-ones where he has to be like telling what the fuck.”

“When we started out, when Postmates started out, this thing sounded so crazy that the only people that wanted to give us money were Brian Singerman and Peter Thiel.”

“He puts in every fund founders fund, I think puts up to 25%. Somebody could correct me, but up to 25%, a single position, they've done that with SpaceX, Airbnb, all these, you know, iconic companies.”

“For this to truly be transformative, it will have to start working in a way where you're either interacting with multiple people over a network who are wearing one, or even next to you and you're just watching different movies”

“It's not a category. I mean, I, I've said this stat a couple of times, but you know, when I first started doing venture capital, everything was social, local, mobile. It was like over 60% of the companies that I looked at, yeah, looked at in the first year wer…”

“I said founders fund, and I said it because of something that Brian Singerman told me, which is like, we are unparalleled in the willingness to have extreme revenue, extreme capital concentration on a per company basis, which means we could lose a lot. But if …”

“When I think about Brian Singerman and Pat Grady, They're not worried at all about it going to zero, but they are very worried about upside maximization, and I think you get that uncapped upside lack of fear of downside through immense success.”

“Brian Singerman at Founders Fund said on the show recently about how he was unable to do his job in COVID as he could not meet founders in person”

“And that's when I met Sean Parker and we became friends and he. Said, Hey, why don't you check out what we're doing at Founders Fund? And I came in and that's when we were considering a little investment in a company called SpaceX and, you know, said, this is …”

“With venture being about upside maximization, Are you really just looking for, like, a good deal, or do you just want to invest in the best companies? And I would argue it's all the latter.”

“And right now, I've personally slowed down investing a ton simply because you cannot get a good price on the best companies.”

“This is why I don't do public. I don't buy any public stocks ever.”

“Founder quality is still 80 to 90% of my investment thesis, right?”

“I don't think about reserves ever. Period. Like, I literally never think, I never think a second about reserves.”

“If it's a unique strategy that is differentiated from the current partners that are here, we are interested in hiring that person, and that's really paid off. Like our focus on not hiring clones, our focus on not hiring just people who are generically good, ou…”

“I can't stand boards. Private company boards, like, I would much rather do strategy dinners with founders, and they know that.”

“Meeting a founder in person is just critical. I was terrible at this job during COVID, right? Like when you couldn't meet founders in person. I'm just terrible at this job without being able to meet founders in person.”

“Our funds are multi-billion dollars, right? Like if we have a. Ten million dollar check, there's no real difference between that going to zero or that going to. Thirty million. I mean, there's just no difference between those numbers.”

“Where I'm best is at writing these two, three, four hundred million dollar checks. And so, you know, if I'm using my own, practicing what I preach, it's like, if I'm comfortable writing a, let's say the most, the biggest check I'm comfortable writing is a five…”

“I wish I had written 500, I wish we had written a five hundred million dollar check into Airbnb at the, you know, one and a half billion dollar round instead of a, whatever, a hundred and fifty million dollar check.”

“Loss ratios don't matter. Losing, I can't, you know, you don't want to lose a five hundred million dollar check, right? Because it's going to be then ridiculously hard for you to return that, to return multiples on that fund. Whereas, like, if you lose, in a f…”

“Enduro is going to be an extremely valuable company. I am, there's, yes, quite sure of that. We are not going to lose that two hundred million dollar check. That two hundred million dollars will turn into, you know, two billion.”

“If you are the type of person that is going to do work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, and make sure it's perfect before you invest or make sure it's perfect before you hire, you are just not going to do well in this business. Period.”

“We don't have hubris about knowing the public markets better than anybody else with the fact that we were able to distribute. You know, end of 2021, when a lot of people kind of held was worked out in our favor this time.”

“I mean, I try and my life strategy is to maximize my dollars to fame ratio. Like I want to make a lot of returns for myself and LPs and have the minimal amount of fame possible, right?”

“Defense tech is an area that I'm bullish on, but there's nothing like Endural.”

“I think Brian's a hundred percent right on that, and I've learned a lot from him on how to concentrate capital into companies.”

“I don't know how to operate companies. I'm not going to seed your top of funnel. I'm not going to Do a bunch of like low level operations work for the company. But what I am pretty good at is, is strategy.”

“I actually put almost no weight on did they do it before and put all the weight on are they super unique, insanely talented, ruthless in a way that they understand how business is and can actually really get things done. I just invest in the founder regardless…”

“I can't do it on Zoom, and I, therefore, I'm not really doing Zoom investing anymore, period.”

“The flip side of that is someone like Brian Singerman, who I think is one of the best reactive investors in the Valley, where he has no theses, doesn't think about the future, and just listens to the founder and the story and uses his own frameworks and is abl…”

“And so I think the big takeaway from my thinking there is that, you know, he was the first person to tell me that investing is much more like a multiplayer strategy game than it is like any other asset class.”

“We raised a fund called XGYC, no management fees, 10% carry, and invested in a bunch of fantastic Y Combinator companies in, in 20 oh seven, 20 oh eight.”

“For my job at this fund is to generate massive returns. And for our funds, you simply have to invest in the world's most important companies in order to generate those returns. It doesn't need to be quick. It doesn't need to be overnight. But long-term, they n…”

“I think if we're going to maximize returns, it would be over an even longer period of time.”

“I am a reaction, a reactive VC, a gut feel based VC”

“Venture capital to me is a Purely a game of upside maximization. And while this may be in trouble, you know, this may get me in trouble. I actually don't. Downside minimization is completely unimportant to me.”

“These are the types of what we mean by complex coordination companies that once they've developed that the ability to operate in that complex way, it may, it's a huge moat. So that's a huge moat for us that other companies cannot simply clone. You can't just h…”

“Brian Singerman is a computer science, you know, major from Stanford that worked at Google that led the STEM-centric steel, which was one of the best outcomes in biotech history, but even more so, it's done some groundbreaking work at curing cancer, and that's…”