Capital

“But right now, especially with the labs for the first time, you know, in my career, you can take capital and throw it at a company and it compounds their advantage.”

“You have an unbelievable ability to raise capital, which I think is why the labs will ultimately go.”

“The compelling teams have raised anywhere from a hundred million dollars to billions of dollars, and now they need to effectively deploy that and get Commercial use cases starting to ramp, and then I expect them to be able to raise an order of magnitude more c…”

“Anytime that there's a loophole that lets people transfer one asset for another without paying tax on the game, because it's called a tax-free transfer, you gotta cut all that. If you don't cut all that, then people are compounding value without paying taxes w…”

“The main reason of capital being Available to you as a private company. I think that stays. And so this balance will persist.”

“In the next six months, the capital cannot help. Six months is too short time. You have what you have, you need to deliver.”

“What we're seeing with kind of the perception of funds and the idea of value add and tiers of investors is that perhaps capital isn't so fungible after all.”

“The modern forms of leverage are code, media, and capital. Zero marginal cost and uncapped and accesses this sort of global marketplace.”

“It goes back to like one of our founding principles, which is attention is more valuable than capital.”

“If you have so much capital and not a lot of product market fit, I'd say you probably had a disadvantage. If you have a lot of capital and insane product market fit that allows you to go hire a huge sales force, that's a huge advantage, right?”

“Oh, in the hundreds of millions.”

“So I think what a lot of founders forget is that the investors need the companies more than the companies need the capital. Because the company can go on its own, right? And capital is fungible and basically a commodity, whereas the companies are not.”

“If the markets are ultimately rational, it's very hard to see how capital gets rewarded on this long term.”

“In US and other countries, they really don't care what you do once you're off. The, when you're doing all this, you really need a huge support from backing from all your, you need to convince them first, your internal network. And if they're giving you that, y…”

“But once AGI arrives, you don't need labor buy-in anymore. Right. Like you don't need folks like me to approve of the thing that you're building or of your morals or whatever. Right. Like capital begets capital in that world. And that can easily spiral out of …”

“One of the most important things that Elon has been able to do over the last many years across multiple companies, like, his real genius is matching enormous amounts of capital with technology companies, right? Like, that's what he does. That's what the market…”

“The capital is definitely massively eroding the returns.”

“Capital is basically a commodity at this point. So the only differentiation is going to be like you being, you know, a cult leader personality.”

“The, your ability to convert your capital into meaningful experiences or useful experiences declines as you age. Your lung capacity goes down. Your muscle mass goes down. Your fragility goes up. Your, even your attitude. You're like, I don't like that anymore.”

“Sauron is coming. Thanks to Kevin Hartz over at a star VC. He's starting a home security firm. It's not fully live yet, but maybe go get on the wait list if that's something that you're interested in.”

“We, at Capital, we were rolling out a Stablecoin custody product when we were informed by our bank partner that we were gonna have to jettison a lot of our Digital asset oriented customers. And so our entire product strategy like fell apart because we couldn't…”

“At Capital, we were one of the first advertisers of Founders Podcasts. And at the time, it's so funny what, like, two years does. I think we paid him, like, 5000 for the quarter.”

“Don't raise too much capital. I think there's all this perspective where we've got plenty of runway that's healthy, that's good. On the other, on the one hand, like, you know, VCs aren't stupid. So if you're gonna raise too much capital, you get diluted early …”

“Most people think capital is sunk cost, almost like a grant, but capital needs to be returned. It's a soft loan, needs to be returned.”

“Don't take more capital than you need because the constraint You know, breeds a lot of creativity.”

“Getting to serve the families and the institutions that give us capital, the trust with their capital for 30 years, the amount of trust that they have with us to give somebody capital for 30 years.”

“There's always a pendulum between labor and capital. Workers and investors, and it kind of swings back and forth of who's taking the lion's share of the spoils in this economy. In the 19 twenties, it was capital. From the 19, probably fifties to seventies, it …”

“There's just as much capital chasing fewer and fewer folks that can grow at triple digit rates.”

“Too much money equals potentially just not doing the right things, and then the worst thing is, like, not even being able to cut to the point where you can get back on track.”

“If I'm going to build a marketplace that, you know, requires mass consumer adoption to build that type of mind share, I'm going to need to be exceptionally well capitalized and be prepared to raise, you know, a lot of capital.”

“China is a net capital exporter, right? Like, to the point here, like, you know, they send us far more capital than we send them.”

“And 10 times more capital coming is not going to give you 10 times fast result. In fact, it's going to slow the process down.”

“I think what will also happen is that even, even when the winter is over, the disciplined ways of building companies will come back and people will start building higher valued companies with much less capital.”

“At some point, we are going to have to think about moving, and the government is already talking about it. Actually, moving the capital back into where the big airport is.”

“There's plenty of capital available for people who are second time founders and the first one was not a successful exit.”

“In some of these markets, there's actually extended wait periods in order to get access to the market to us. That's another sign that there's lots of capital waiting to get into these markets.”

“I have several that, a couple that raised it north of a billion dollars in valuation with double digits, ah, millions in revenue, ok? And hooray, they have a lot of money in the bank. None of them are ever planning to ever raise another dollar of capital. It's…”

“When capital is scarce, things are cheap, and when capital is abundant, things are expensive. Where the opportunity is, is when you've built up capital and been able to hold on to it through those periods to be able to take advantage of the moments to be greed…”

“Anytime you see capital flowing into something, you should worry about returns. That's just, that's like a basic rule.”

“Great leaps of progress and humanity are not correlated to dollars all the time. In fact, most examples are the exact opposite, which is it's more about small and extremely nimble and talented management teams That generate human progress.”

“So it's like lending and big physical things definitely require a lot of money. It's not obvious to me that there are many other business categories that require a lot of money where cash is the advantage.”

“There is a humongous amount of capital in this market today, right? There's been so much liquidity that capital, at least, you know, leave the last three, four months when the market has dropped, but there's been a lot of capital. And so capital is no longer t…”

“But it's also true that capital is a commodity.”

“This year alone will deploy over a billion dollars of capital.”

“Why do the tigers of the world win deals is because they were, they are faster than anyone with their capital, and they're willing to pay higher premiums than anyone with their capital, but generally, capital is commoditized”

“It is so discouraging to me that there are still so little capital that flows. To women CEOs and women founders.”

“Right now there is a lack of high quality entrepreneurs and there's an excess of capital. And so people, investors are trying to fund whatever they can.”

“I think in the 10 years to 20 17, Ted, when I looked it up, US shale companies blew through about three hundred billion of capital.”

“And it used to be that capital was scarce to go start these things because it was so expensive. Now capital is abundant. The capacity is abundant. You can go and try all these things. All of the technology to try them is abundant. What's scarce then in my mind…”

“When capital costs almost nothing, you probably should take it.”

“I wish I had access to some capital so that I could have materialized my 20 in a bay such that I was a billionaire today.”

“The valuable asset is not capital. There's lots of capital, particularly in this low interest rate environment that you and I are living in. It's access. The scarce resource is access.”

“Capital, which I think is one of the most, how should I say, misunderstood asset, often because we get emotional about money. In the startup ecosystem. Neither is money that important, nor is money that unimportant, right? To your success, you know?”

“I believe that capital is a very powerful weapon, but you actually have to really know it's like weapons grade plutonium, right? Like you have to know which way to direct it. Otherwise you can actually become the victim of that weapon.”

“Because once a robot can do something, you've turned labor into capital because it's all electricity.”

“Capital doesn't follow fundamentals. Fundamentals follow capital.”

“Not only do valuations come down, but in the busts, usually there just isn't capital at any price. So you have to make sure you always have a reserve on your balance sheet, and I think you also have to have a business plan that allows you to make rapid adjustm…”

“The first thing that went through my mind was, I wonder if that was a Black Lives Matter protest or Black Lives Matter protest that stormed in the capital, how much of a bloodbath it would have been. It would have been one of the biggest bloodbaths in, in Amer…”

“What seems to be very clear already is that companies are valuing cash, access to capital, certainty of close, and it's not just about lowest cost of capital. If you went back a year or two years for sure, and the more credit oriented type deals in our market,…”

“When you have so much capital coming in, that's when bad habits can start creeping in into the minds of the boards and the management”