Hardware

“This is a project that would require wholesale replacement of most of the hardware and probably changes in the cooling system and probably changes in other aspects of these data centers continuously and probably, you know, depending on the math, anywhere from …”

“Basically there are three things that we know how to do to speed up deep learning in hardware. Still till this day. Increase the number of cores. Increase the communication between cores. Bring the memory closer to the compute. Those are the three things. That…”

“In software, if you have, like, that kind of, like, logical block diagram of, like, why it works and everything else, you're kind of 80% of the way there, and it's a matter of, like, go-to-market execution. In hardware you're, like, two percent of the way ther…”

“You know, the point of sale software was not the whole solution. We, we've really focused on being a point of sale system, and we discovered early on that just trying to sell the software by itself and the customer goes and sources the right hardware, trying t…”

“Most open labs are trying to make models that can be run on as wide of hardware as possible rather than targeting just like a single chip.”

“This is one of these lies told by old people at big, dumb companies, and it's just not true. And by the way, all those people suck. So don't worry about it. Go build real things.”

“One of the reasons I'm interested in new hardware is we're talking earlier about how a very powerful thing with AI is that it can be always on and proactive and just understand all your context, but current hardware is not, it's not good for that.”

“There's no hardware that you can't hack with one of these things.”

“When you decouple models from just the hardware can do it now. That used to be a constraint. So the hardware is very fast and accurate now, which was actually.”

“Earlier when we started the fund in 2011, we did invest in a few hardware plays, but over the years we realized to invest in a hardware play, A, you need a longer term perspective, B, you need a lot of capital, and C the sales cycle and adoption takes a lot lo…”

“What we realized was, and this is what most people get wrong when they're trying to do this themselves. They'll, they'll take the reading of tokens or what's called pre-fill, and they'll do that on one piece of hardware, and then they'll put the generation of …”

“Software was an incredible business for the last 20 years. Building SaaS, and there's still opportunities in, in building SaaS, building consumer mobile apps, enterprise apps, but the mode is, is moving to hardware”

“This skill is so rare because it sits between worlds. Software people often avoid hardware and hardware people sometimes avoid distribution and AI. So the person who could connect open source AI models, physical prototyping and manufacturing has a shot at buil…”

“The moats that are still working are still the same ones, which is hardware, because it's so hard to actually create hardware. Network effects. Network effects has always been really hard to create, but once you have it, oh boy, this is a gift that is going to…”

“You had a significant shift in the value proposition. Where was the value coming from? It went from software back to hardware.”

“Apple's always been an incredible hardware company, and I think, ah, this is, you know, an era where hardware will matter even more because software is gonna face waves of commoditization pressure.”

“Definitely in the vibe coding era, there are a crop of engineers that they don't think about hardware at all, and we don't have that luxury.”

“If, and if you get, Curious enough about software, you ultimately end up in hardware, right?”

“That is one thing I love about hardware. It's way easier to protect our innovations and our ideas compared to software, especially today in the age of AI.”

“I think a 100,000 units in hardware is kind of like the first threshold of like, okay, you've got a product people are interested in and want to buy.”

“My lesson from Waymo and on the AI side with TPUs, et cetera, I think to really push the curve well, particularly in areas where you have safety, regulatory, everything, you want the firsthand experience of the product feedback cycle. So I think having first p…”

“I feel like for AI at some point it will become relevant that hardware comes pre-installed and with the software, which is AI first and to be in hardware for all of these AI companies will become increasingly relevant.”

“So, I mean, it is just true hardware is massively parallel. Like, you've got tens of billions, hundreds of billions of transistors on your chip, and it takes, like, maybe a hundred clock cycles to get from one side of the chip to the other, and so you can't, l…”

“What I realized when I met a lot of other people in the tech business, all, all the companies and everything, they're engineering societies fundamentally. And I find, you can't generalize it, but there are people that aren't like that, but for the most part, w…”

“You set out on a blank sheet of paper and you say you want to build the best hardware, but cost, MOQ, supply chain, which vendors will work with you, which chips you have access to, those all start narrowing your choices down to, you know, maybe just ok hardwa…”

“Software and hardware is, is not really a natural boundary. It's just where we decide to draw the line and say, okay, this is something I make configurable or I don't.”

“I am fairly confident that We are going to produce some of the world's most valuable companies in hardware over the next decade.”

“Maybe Stripe should take on a hardware line of business. If we find one That's good enough. Like, we wouldn't be opposed to it. I think we just haven't had a good idea yet.”

“So if you are the incumbent, you have an advantage because people are designing their models for your hardware. It doesn't even matter if there's a better architecture out there. It's not going to run well, so it's not a better architecture.”

“The iPad is a Mac. The Mac is an iPad in terms of the hardware.”

“They're like, they're going to do a hardware thing. Yeah, of course they're going to try. Hardware is so hard. You know what I mean? Like I put their probability of them succeeding at hardware so low.”

“I've always felt that the bottleneck in robotics isn't so much the hardware, although obviously there's many, many companies, and working on fantastic hardware, and we partner with a lot of them, But it's actually the software intelligence that I think is alwa…”

“So like, it looks like in the nearest future, we probably will not need like VC firms for companies which operates as a SaaS or something similar where you do not need to investigate in in, like in hardware or in biotech or something like that.”

“I'll go hardware. I think if you take a hardware company out to market, the people, investors, immediate response is, oh, that's really hard. But the paradox about venture capital is you need it to be difficult to be valuable. You need to be contrarian and rig…”

“The top 10 most valuable country companies in the world right now. It's like seven out of 10 of them have like a hardware, like an extreme, like hardware component, right? Like the biggest companies being built today are hardware companies.”

“A little bit of that is because you get, you know, maybe like a two X benefit price performance from hardware every generation. Like if you're lucky but you get a much bigger improvement price performance wise from. All of the things that you're doing in the s…”

“I think it boils down to hardware is not an area that we feel like we have a specialty, and it's a challenging thing for us to step in and support hardware business.”

“I think for our firm in the hardware space, I usually look for companies that like are a bit further along from a revenue perspective, and I think That's just the risk tolerance that I personally have as an investor for hardware.”

“Anything that's hard to do is hard to disrupt. And there's a lot of SaaS and AI going on in the market right now, and for us, it's like, once we have a hardware component there, it's very difficult to remove, just because the city doesn't want to have to make …”

“We do a lot of hardware, and I don't know why, it always seems to take seven million dollars to get to a commercial product.”

“You can't really do much in hardware for less than five million bucks”

“It is hard because it involves a lot of multiple players that you will have to interact with versus, you know, software, right? You pretty much, you can create your own software package and then so The engagements that you'll need to have within the ecosystem …”

“Software will always match the complexity on the most advanced hardware it can run on.”

“Even if your model is theoretically more efficient, if somebody goes and runs it and it's two times slower one of the things that, that we've learned is that if you're in that situation, it's just going to be dead on arrival. So you want to be designing your a…”

“It's a great business model. You sell a piece of hardware and then you sell the ink.”

“Unfortunately, I think what people don't realize is that the way to get better latency, like significantly better latency, is actually in the hardware. And that's why we see Grok, G-R-O-Q be able to exceed all these GPU-based inference platforms significantly,…”

“There is no advantage. There is zero advantage for a start to do hardware. It's just harder, period, and you get nothing for it. Nothing.”

“My view is actually hardware is still the bottleneck, and AI is also a little bit of bottleneck, but, like, I don't think there's any, like, obvious breakthroughs we need. I think it's just work.”

“In categories that are really resistant to adopting software, oftentimes hardware is a great Trojan horse where you can sell that the customer base is used to purchasing some form of hardware. And then from there, you're able to layer in software capabilities …”

“So if you want to build trillion dollar businesses, hardware works.”

“Well, I think that hardware is it's like entrepreneurship on expert mode, right? Like it's a very bad thing to try to do if you're a first time entrepreneur.”

“Neural networks had a bad name cause the hardware wasn't good enough.”

“The reason this whole field is working so well is because Now we have this magic hardware that's great at these dense matrix multiplications. And so you can do them like orders of magnitude faster than you can do anything that involves poking around in memory.”

“At the end of the day, in my mind, that's the one and only thing we know really works. If you want to push deep learning forward is to make it faster and more effective and more efficient on a given piece of Hardware.”

“There is this feedback loop where somehow The model architectures that take advantage of hardware become popular, and the hardware will also kind of evolve to optimize a little bit for that kind of architecture, and software framework software frameworks will …”

“Hardware has, my understanding is has a kind of a longer time scale. So you need to design hardware, you need to manufacture it, you know, maybe on the order of three to five years or something like that. So you know, people are taking different bets but the, …”

“Once you build hardware, once you've stabilized your platform, you've got a really powerful lead. You've got a really powerful moat that internet businesses can never deliver on. Almost never. SaaS maybe. Internet powered businesses, almost never.”

“What you end up doing is stacking a lot of hardware defined limited investments on top of each other. And you end up with a grid that's not Modernizing quick enough. It's expensive because ultimately in the bigger picture, that's a more expensive way to do thi…”

“I think there's some, like escape velocity needed for any entrepreneur to get into hardware. I think that's just, like, really tough.”

“Like, there's, like, there's physics in hardware. It's, like, there's rules that we can follow that are either right or wrong, and in software marketplaces, it's not, right?”