Finance

“There are other functions, like executive assistants, chiefs of staff HR team members, finance, like, some more junior finance team members that don't, there's, don't have that much AI in their day-to-day. They, like, really don't. And a lot of their workflows…”

“Conversely, when you talk about something like finance, you know, the best way to close the books is accurately. You can't close it, you know, 10 X better than accurately. So as a result, you kind of have this bounded upside problem where it makes sense to use…”

“Self-improvement, kind of health and finance are the two areas that OpenAI is focused on.”

“You can right now build a Gentix that they're interoperating with your ERP, interoperating with some of your custom built tools to do a lot of the things that historically you had people doing, right? You're checking the, you know, the actuals to accruals, you…”

“I've done probably 10,000 cold calls back in my day in finance”

“There is an over allocation of talent in finance and law. Too many smart people are going into finance. We should have fewer people doing that and more people making stuff.”

“And I think it tends to be in finance that sometimes the smartest people are the most impatient. And because they want to use their intelligence and their IQ to be like, well, how can I speed this process up and get it as fast as I can? And that's the source o…”

“I think coding is a little harder, if I'm being honest with you, and you're telling me the hard one got automated. Why can't the easy one get automated? So I started to ask myself, how much can we do? And the answer is, it feels like a skill issue.”

“I feel like there could be a product in the next 10 years for finance people, where in hindsight, it is obviously the correct UI, but just like the spreadsheet kind of came out of nowhere as a UI, it may feel like it came out of nowhere at that time.”

“And so we hyper liquid really is what we think like credibly neutral protocol, which will ultimately be the rails that kind of all the finance kind of upgrades their tech stack.”

“The reason that finance can be such a tense topic and subject of so much debate in a way that meteorology is not, in finance, there's an infinite number of right answers for different people.”

“Oftentimes CEOs are great operators. They usually have come from sales or marketing or operations. They seldom come from finance, and it's not usually the career trajectory”

“By betting on a game, it makes it way more entertaining and engaging, and putting finance as that second screen experience alongside the sports is gonna drive all new engagement in sports TV.”

“I actually think that venture capitalists are probably the least sophisticated financiers, like on the planet. They just have hope, right? Like it's the only hopeful version of finance, right? Because it is like, you know, you're basically investing in people …”

“And I think we're now getting to the point in legal, in finance, and all these other areas where it's become a competitive disadvantage if you don't embrace it. So I think it will become default.”

“I'm not sure it's yet a competitive disadvantage, but I can imagine that becoming true in the next year or two as your tools get really, really good.”

“Two that are, I think, probably going to benefit a lot are technology and finance you know, where you're, You know, if you can make better financial decisions than competitors, you'll generate outsized returns, and that's why over the past, you know, 30 years,…”

“I think if you look at, like, the foundational pillars of life, your healthcare, your finance, your career, and your education, Like, education is, is arguably behind them all in terms of transformation.”

“B to B apps are not winner take all markets. Whether you look at HR or finance, CRM, they all have multiple players.”

“If you look at finance and how fast, ah, Excel went to 90% market penetration in finance. 1985 to 1986. Literally 18 months to 24 months, Excel took over all of finance. Everyone switched from using a calculator, the HP 12 C, to using Excel.”

“And so finance is the slowest moving, most lethargic, you know, ah, Leviath. It's the worst possible customer base to go after. Unless you're providing outsized alpha or real value. In which case, the minute that there's something real, Finance moves faster th…”

“So the number one category of people on the Forbes, 100 list is some version of finance, whether that's buying and selling companies, whether that's being an active investor in equities, whether that's being in, in hedge funds, but that's the number one way.”

“Creativity is a, really a critical part of earning money because If you're going to be successful in finance, you have to be creative. You have to be able to think of new things. You have to create new ideas. And so that background in art, you know, a lot of p…”

“I think we'll get to that point where medicine will be about incorporating all this data. Data about me as a patient, data about everyone else that's like me to be able to draw the best conclusions. That's something that is just a computer problem. And that mu…”

“In my world, let's say broadly I'm in the world of finance. There is no such thing as talent.”

“Grammarly is a good example of a company that has Generative work product that is valuable by most humans. Whereas in finance, the character of the insight, the depth of insight and the non-consensusness of the insight really requires fairly deep domain expert…”

“Frequently the most interesting and alpha generating material is not publicly available”

“Finance, nobody was doing that. Like, I realized like, everybody was perfect in finance. They never were wrong. They were on CNBC, like, oh, well, of course, they're gonna raise, decrease interest rates, and the market's gonna go up or down, and everybody's, l…”

“We made decisions based on a spreadsheet. We had a historical data on rep effectiveness in 20, 20 and 20, 21 in finance plugged the number going from 10 reps to 14 reps into the spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet said this was what was going to happen when we go…”

“Frequently, the same group that is arguing for more spending is the same one that owns the LTV calculation. This is a mistake. Finance should monitor LTV.”

“So the idea that investing and money Is more akin to like your taste in music where nobody's right or wrong. Everyone's just has a different view of what's good and what's bad. It's hard to grasp that in a field like finance where it's taught as a math-based f…”

“The benefit is you get access to people and things that you may not have gotten given what you've done. But the flip side of that is the other things that are probably negative, and I hate to say this, far outweigh what you actually get positive.”

“Utilities have more data than all of our peer industries. We have more data in our segment than healthcare, than finance. They would be jealous of our data sets, and yet we make some of the least use of our data of any industry”

“Science progresses secularly, but finance progresses cyclically, and that most ideas have been around before, and we repeat the same mistakes, and there's a lot to learn from studying past periods.”

“So early at Canva, it was owned by finance and that's because finance had a view on everything happening in the business.”

“So I think it's still going to be, I don't know, like five years, probably like, I don't think it's going to be like one day suddenly it's solved. I think it's going to unlock industries sequentially. So like, year one, maybe we can do this industry, and then …”

“I think if you're in. Like finance or healthcare, you'd probably be completely on-prem for the foreseeable future.”

“Finance, consulting, law, medicine, those were the like easy ones. And they had a lot of the characteristics of school. Like there was a clear application process. There was a clear steps. These steps were kind of imposed upon you. Like the, it was a very comf…”

“I will say scale is an unsolved problem in, in venture capital. It's a solved problem in finance because, you know, you don't have conflicts. Every asset's fungible.”

“It probably wasn't until we got to about a hundred million dollars in revenue that I fully relinquished some aspects of this. Hey, you're running finance. I trust you to do this. It wasn't until we hit much, much larger than that, that I was willing to relinqu…”

“And the idea was that employee data, because it's a lot more distributed, we think, than just the HR department and HR business systems you know, companies need a system that manages employee information. In a way that's not merely just about HR that sort of a…”

“And I think finance will have its time. It will be harder to do. There's more there's more nuances with money than there is with information”

“Finance globally is Is 11 to 12% of GDP. And finance as an industry doesn't produce anything that's inherently valuable. It's just an industry that is a lubricant for other sectors like healthcare, education, et cetera, to actually, like, make the world a bett…”

“And my hope is that, and my sense is that people won't even use the term DeFi in five to 10 years. It will just be called finance because we don't call finance today centralized finance.”

“What happened is, if we're honest with ourselves, the real change is happening in the tech world. There's not much innovation happening in finance. It's really operational alpha and scale.”

“So if you look at control ownership transactions over the last decade, I think something like 60, 65% of the new control owners in North American pro sports have either come from the technology sector or finance.”

“I think of growth like One may think about finance at a startup. And what I mean is finance as a startup is responsible for measuring the flow of capital in and out of the business and hopefully contributing ideas to optimizing the flow of that capital, earnin…”

“With CS and stats, by the way, you can understand finance, because it's crypto, or it'll all become crypto.”

“Because if economics and finance was predictable, if it was just a Newtonian exercise, then folks who have PhDs in finance would be billionaires, and we all know that's not the case.”

“The kind of risk you take in finance is really, really, really high probability of success and low return. Around the West Coast, it's sort of the opposite.”

“In finance, you can be someone who has no education, no background, no experience, And vastly outperform someone who has the best education, the best background, the best experience, which doesn't happen in any other field.”

“I think the more important explanation though, is that that happens because what matters in finance is not what you know. It's not your IQ or your intelligence. It's just how you behave. That's the most important. It's not the only thing that's important, but …”

“In 78, I was asked to start a high-yield bond fund, and high-yield bonds have been the, shall we say, epicenter, although it's an advised word today, for almost everything that's happened, interestingly, in finance in the last 40 years.”

“And I had a mentor a long time ago who told me that he believed that almost everything that was discoverable in finance would be arbitraged away, but human judgment would not, and that human judgment, good judgment, was rare, and that balancing it with emotion…”

“With the existing machine learning technology, of what we can do with that, how much have we done? Very little so far. So there's enormous amount for, enormous scope to do things there. Not just in finance, but in a lot of other fields, right?”

“The tools were just that. But the human element in finance and that the assumptions that you need to make swamp any of the other benefits that the data provided at the time.”

“Finance had what I felt was like so much of a zero sum game mentality where it's like, if I win, someone has to lose. If I get promoted, this person gets left behind, you know, bonus pool, like points and things like that. And it just brought out a lot of unat…”

“Four years ago when we started Entrepreneur First I know this from a recent conversation with a dean of engineering at one of the, you know, top technical institutions in the world that's very close to here, you know, they said 65% of their computer science gr…”

“Should every investor own maybe one Bitcoin? Yes, I think they should. And the reason is not so much as an investment. It's to start learning about this technology Which will be a major influence on finance in the future.”

“I learned early on that it's better to involve them early and get them to partner in, in terms of coming up with what your true costs are and making them part of the, solution rather than somebody that you present to at the end to debate with you.”