Conviction

“We have a we have a team that we work with at Conviction that their setup is everybody is like, you know, none of the engineers write code by hand and they, they're all microphoned and they just like whisper to their agents all the time.”

“I remember he told me that price is a litmus test for your conviction.”

“And so I think beyond being like a yardstick to test your conviction, models aren't that useful, but for that, they're really, really good.”

“Then you got Sarah Gow's fund, Conviction, which is really quickly, you know, has moved up into the forefront of everybody's, you know, list.”

“I think there is a belief that there are things that, like, a two-, three-, four-year-old startup that is in founder mode can do that maybe a 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-, seventy-year-old venture firm cannot, so.”

“And then I'll go, like, early I'll go with Conviction, because I think Sarah, Sarah's great.”

“Maybe that there'd be an advantage versus the incumbent venture firms in that when the floor is lava, the dynamics of the markets change, the types of products and founders that you back change it's a lot for existing firms to ingest. And a lot of their mental…”

“If you break out the numbers here a bit more, the red is actually just a small number of foundation model labs, like what you would think of as the largest labs raising money, which is upwards of 30 to forty billion dollars this year, and so the reality of the…”

“Conviction starts to not result in outcomes that you want when a lot of different people get involved and you have to rely on other people for part of your outcomes that need to happen.”

“I think people are going to end up with domain-specific and even fine-tuned embeddings models from companies like Voyage or in-house because there's a, I think there's a lot of headroom on performance there.”

“If you have conviction and it's not clear, then you don't have conviction. Quite frankly, if you're like, I kind of think, you know, maybe we should, you know, they're like five things we should solve. I'm like, then you don't have conviction.”

“The idea that like a hundred K or even a million tokens is going to solve all our problems. And like, you just ask your questions and dump in all context naively is ridiculous to me. I think it's a really important area of product and research work.”

“I could have raised half a billion dollars, and I thought that doing this was, if I believe constraints breed discipline and creativity for founders, like, They also do for investors.”

“They're seed and series A investments, and we're putting a million to like eight or ten million dollars to work, and we'll, we're gonna be more concentrated than most seed funds”

“I think it is unlikely that if somebody wants to raise a hundred or two hundred million dollars at a billion dollars out of the gate, like, that is hard for us to, it's hard for me to imagine that making an impact on the fund.”

“I am increasingly convinced that, like, it's not knowable what the outcomes are from, for companies, like, at the very beginning, and specifically, like, how markets play out is unknowable, because, like, there are actors with agency determining how the market…”

“Like we are going to invest in the early rounds of a company and we're going to leave money on the table in the later rounds. And it's an explicit decision, but what it means, it's like very focusing, right? Like we make the bets we make with them. We're align…”

“For me, like I define it on a multiple basis, not an absolute dollar basis. Otherwise like I should have raised a larger fund. And like, you know, let's put best in class venture multiples on the board, right?”

“One of the VCisms I hate is conviction. Right. Because conviction can justify so much sloppy thinking, but it doesn't mean it's wrong.”

“I'd say, in general, the mistakes that I've made have been in that stubbornness versus conviction continuum, and not realizing soon enough when I'm being stubborn versus when I'm acting with high conviction.”

“Because the only way to have real conviction is to really know something, and you only have so much of a brain to do that.”