product on 16 shows · 14 statements across 14 episodes · said 35 times in 19 episodes since 2014
Another Podcast 10 
the a16z Podcast 5 
TBPN 5 
Top Founders 4 
the MAD Podcast 4 
the Neon Show 3 
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 1 
We Live to Build 1 
the Official SaaStr Podcast 1 
20VC 1 
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Another Podcast 10the a16z Podcast 5TBPN 5the MAD Podcast 4Top Founders 4the Neon Show 320VC 1We Live to Build 12 more shows
2026 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2025 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2024 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2022 8 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
2021 8 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
2019 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2016 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Andy Rachleff, Founder @ Benchmark & Wealthfront on What Makes The Best CEO & Board Member & Why Ivy League Endowments Are The Best Managed Capital In The World
- The Path to A.I. Augmented Human Intelligence // Christopher Nguyen, Arimo [FirstMark's Data Driven]
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
every mention on every show, scene by scene, with the transcript →
14 statements about PDF, every show
Abel: Always send contract drafts as Word documents, never PDFs
“Send a word document. Do not send a PDF. Cause they're going to always red line. Always send a word document of your paper”
Gaskill: Markdown is easier for LLMs to digest than PDFs or Docs
“Markdown files is because it's just the easiest sort of format for your LLM, for your agent to actually digest and understand, compared to if you were to give it your files as like a docs or a PDF file.”
Reganti: Frontier AI models still cannot parse messy PDFs and handwriting
“There are so many handwritten documents and really messy PDFs that cannot be passed even by the best of the models as of today.”
Noronha: Presentation software fails if it doesn't interoperate with legacy workflows
“We don't exist in an island. So people would say, yeah, I made something kind of cool in your product, but if I can't turn it into a PDF at the end of the day to send it to the client, then it's useless to me. In fact, it's worse than useless because I wasted …”
Andreessen: Millions downloaded their first PDF to read the Starr Report
“One of the first PDFs that a lot of people downloaded and read was the star report, which was the report on the Clinton Lewinsky affair by the independent council at that time. And so I remember like millions of people downloaded their first PDF to be able to …”
Silicon Valley multimodal AI workloads are video; enterprise workloads are PDFs
“So a lot of the cool Silicon Valley companies, their multimodal workloads are Mostly images and nowadays videos. A lot of the more traditional companies have a lot of PDFs.”
Martin: NotebookLM recognizes and analyzes purely image-based PDFs
“So if you have a PDF that's purely images, it will recognize it”
Cohen: OpenAI killed document wrapper startups by launching native PDF chat
“I mean, open AI, for example, right now, now allows you to upload a PDF file, right? Those are the upload PDF and talk to it. How many startups did that just kill? Startups and businesses, right? There are so many that came up and said, Ooh, we're going to par…”
Ramaswamy: Multimodal AI models will see strong adoption for parsing PDFs
“I think multimodal models will have a lot more business use cases where you're looking at PDFs.”
Evans: Emailing files flattens structured data to lowest common denominator
“And every time you email something, every time you save a file, you're kind of flattening out all of that context and that history and the structure data to it and turning it back into a PDF. It's like the lowest common denominator.”
Evans: Simple magazine PDFs worked commercially while expensive interactive redesigns failed
“The only things that I gather actually worked were people doing PDFs. In PDF of Model Railway World, they add zero extra cost, and suddenly they can sell globally, whereas the people trying to completely reinvent Vogue or Wired, suddenly you're spending double…”
Abernethy: Most FDA applications still arrive as static PDF files
“In fact, the way the majority of our applications still come in is through PDFs or sort of essentially large digital representations of what used to come in on trucks.”
PandaDoc templates outrank competitors because they use native HTML over PDFs
“What's fundamentally different about PandaDoc is that PandaDoc is not built on top of PDF. So the templates that we create, they're not PDF files. They're HTML pages. And when you send a document through Panda doc, you pretty much send a link to a web app, to …”