Tech Companies

“So I do think the, you know, the tech companies have, you A real issue around how AI has been presented, you know, and that is causing a lot of this backlash as well.”

“YC measured By like traditional metrics and market cap created or whatever is one of the hand, would be one of the handful of most valuable tech companies.”

“All of us come here and we talk about tech, we talk about creating impact, but majority of the companies that only really serve other startups or tech companies.”

“What, for most tech companies, AB tests have done have been the safety blanket for management.”

“Now these companies are, you know, nine, 1011 years in, and a lot of those gains are gone. So you gotta be careful with that big pop.”

“If you can be the largest tech company on the planet and still not make money, you might have oversized your ambitions a little and it might pay to come back a bit.”

“I think selling SaaS to tech companies is gonna be the toughest, because we can build stuff for ourselves.”

“To be direct, I think by the end of this year, we're going to give up on reskilling. I think folks are going to stop pretending they can reskill folks that are not going to be able to make the jump to the agentic age.”

“And so the same thing, by the way, is happening in the global fixed income market dominated historically by 10 large banks. It's about to be dominated by five large banks and five large tech companies. As much concentration as exists in the equity market, That…”

“Everybody is doing this because they overhired in the pandemic. AI is a convenient excuse.”

“You can judge us on cashflow minus SBC, which I generally think is the right way to judge companies.”

“Within two years, I think most of these companies will obsolete all the mechanical parts of building product.”

“I predict in the next 12 to 24 months, we're going to see massive shedding of staffs and then massive rehiring. But the re you might see a company shed 30,000 and hire 8000, but the 8000 people they're going to hire are going to all be AI first.”

“The fact that there's data show that the number of design roles is plateauing and just how teams are just not valuing design as much as you think.”

“I think for a lot of these tech companies, we've hit peak employment.”

“I think the black pill is I don't think most PMs know how to do that. In fact, many companies have zero people that know how to do that at all in any function.”

“Basically, it's the highest number of open roles in three and a half-ish years for engineers and PMs at tech companies globally.”

“But then I think the execution bar is actually very, very tight because there is like the magic around like the founding story, the problem that we're solving for customers, but because it's less technical differentiation, The execution bar of like every singl…”

“It's the most important number in tech companies. Gross dollar retention.”

“And so I kind of think like at some point the next shoe will drop and all of these tech companies have to really look at stock based comp because they literally incinerate most, if not all of their free cash flow fighting the dilution from stock based compensa…”

“And that's what this all feels like to me. It's like, nobody has any original ideas. So everybody's like, let's just put more electronics in people's pockets on their wrists on their face. And we'll see what ha you know, we'll see what works.”

“This is probably not the peak. Like, most of the estimates based on what companies themselves are saying for their estimated CapEx have a higher number for next year, right?”

“In some cases they're also fixing things that were just things that needed to be fixed pre-AI. They're just fixing it post-AI and it's sort of a bit of a, because it's happening post-AI, AI gets an effect.”

“What has happened is that in marketing, for example, the tech companies, the consulting firms that sell stacks, and I owe a lot of this to a guy called Adel Borky, very interesting, self-taught Libyan marketing writer, former boxer, Anil Borky, and I coined th…”

“They assured me that all the ratios of, like, debt versus net cash and all those kinds of things is the tech companies are still very, very conservative.”

“No, all the European regulation, they're not starting tech companies anymore that are big because they make it too hard.”

“I think the longer term problem is that it just it just erodes an immense amount of trust across the political spectrum you know, in, in in these companies, or at least the leadership of these companies”

“Like, I do remember the companies, the tech companies, I, I'm not gonna name names, but I will, I was in a conversation in one of the early days, I think it is in the middle of 2015, middle of 20 16 some tech companies avoid using the word AI because they were…”

“Well, a year or two ago, big companies did make commitments to be green as of, you know, as of, you know, as soon as they started inking deals with you know, nuclear companies and, Various energy providers for data centers, all those commitments basically got,…”

“Everyone had twice as many employees per dollar of revenue than they have today. People are twice as efficient as they were in 20, 21.”

“So what these companies allegedly are doing is putting these jobs in these, like, obscure newspapers so that Americans don't see them.”

“And then the trial lawyers are going to love it because it gives them a new basis for suing all these companies.”

“I think that's what most tech companies do when they hit a certain skill. They run away from these use cases. And I think it's a lost opportunity to help people. So we want to run towards these use cases by making the model behavior really, really great.”

“So in, in, especially in tech companies, you know, 20% of what you build drives 80% of the willingness to pay. But the irony is that the 20% is the easiest thing to build often.”

“Look, utility scale solar, look, the reality is that market is principally driven by CNI demand, commercial and industrial demand. What is that? Effectively, it amounts to tech companies, data center demand, right? Like, am I really worried substantively that …”

“So many of the tech companies that are most valuable today didn't really start with any technological breakthrough. They were built on some kind of technological breakthrough and they ended up building a lot more technology, but really a lot of these companies…”

“And I agree if you don't do that, and if you don't do it well, you're just going to be slow toast over the next two years.”

“I think the days of tech companies scaling to thousands of engineers are behind us because what I've found is a smaller, more compact team of very talented people that understand how to break down problems and naturally use AI to go faster.”

“I find these companies that decide to harvest, you know, the cash cow and buy all their shares back, you know, it never really works.”

“So when you connect the dots, the way that I interpret it is that I think companies will be much more aggressive on M&A. Jason, it's what you've been asking for. I think you're gonna get it, and I think the reason why you're gonna get it is you're gonna have a…”

“People will buy distribution. They'll buy good businesses. They'll buy a growth curve. They're not going to buy technology, right? The aqua hire era is long over because everyone's just figured out that they can just, it's just easier to eat, just buy the tale…”

“Post-internet where we are today. All of a sudden it's pretty easy to crack open all these things and say, look, it's all government dollars. Like we probably should have a holistic sense of what is going on and where money is flowing and some sort of like ove…”

“These tech companies are not philanthropies. This all started with a demand for more computer science graduates. People could be qualified for the jobs.”

“Those people that went into Vegas, I mean, they are in the tech companies. They are there, and they know exactly what they're doing”

“Very few companies actually get to have a second act, and what I realize, it's actually kind of very hard. You know, as a startup, you become successful understanding a space very, very well, right? Getting into another space for a second act, it's kind of ver…”

“But our perspective was that, how do we solve for the problem of every other companies, which will not follow the same route, which cannot follow the same route, and take the perspective of, like, we will never try to sell aggressively to tech companies, per s…”

“The very top layer, the top companies that Trump affiliates as liberal and anti-Trump will not have kind of a better life because of his administration, and the companies that are just the layer below, they will be able to acquire a lot more easily.”

“I think it just like opens opens up you know, silos of the companies make communication around, around product a lot more concrete because I can give you a working prototype and that'll change how, how people work. Like if you can imagine that everyone can mak…”

“If you look at employee donations to party by tech companies, it's all 90 something percent goes to Democrats.”

“At the end of the day, your competitive advantage will always come from your ability to measure more than your competitors, because then suddenly you're gonna do that.”

“The, you know, the days of rule 40, you're going out at 60 -20, those are gone. You have to be a 30 and 10, 40 and zero kind of growing into a nice profitability curve in order to get public.”

“Unlike tech companies, the old old economy companies tend to be very balance sheet heavy, and therefore they often tend to be a little leverage heavy.”

“The most common way that tech companies successfully position is they find an underserved sub-segment of the market, and then they attempt to dominate that sub-segment and then push out from there.”

“Most of these, like, very senior jobs in tech companies, you get paid a ton of money, and they're relatively easy, and after a certain level of tenure, you're never gonna get fired”

“These tech companies are so profitable and so good in so many ways that they can kind of run for a very long time. And parts of it will be very successful for decades to come, even if the culture is broken.”

“When there is that kind of, as it were, the zeitgeist, a time of layoffs, you can then kind of go, okay, I now have a permission to do some of the resetting in the business.”

“I don't think that much AI productivity is currently baked into the numbers. And rigged in the way that people are operating.”

“They're shoplifters, they've been shoplifters forever. So no, they're not just pointing to me, they're taking my things.”

“I think one of the key drivers over the course of the next several years in tech is going to be these expanding margins caused by you know, the tool set that they're investing in around AI.”

“One of the insights there is that most tech companies and a lot of companies now just have swag, but it's the same Gildan t-shirt or whatever hat and you're trying to stand out, you know? So How do you, even if the cost is two X or three X, like happy to pay t…”