Tech Startup

“I bet there'll be a hundred billion dollar startup acquired in the next 12 months.”

“I do not believe that you have to go do a tech startup to make millions in order. In fact, I think that's a terrible idea.”

“I think like all of the tech startups are afraid to actually hire someone that has had 20 years experience, 25 years experience. And the excuse that they use is like, that person is not going to feed the business. And I think it's bullshit. I think it's full w…”

“It might be a tax law partner in a big firm, but that's so extraordinarily unlikely because they already have clients that they're servicing. They're part of a partnership. They're kind of bought in. They kind of have dedicated their lives to that path. It cou…”

“If you have a tech startup, and like, tech is mostly the US economy now, you're kind of, if you own US stocks, you're kind of doubling down on your, what you're already doing, which is your income, right? So I actually could make an argument for why you might …”

“Media businesses don't follow the same pattern as tech startups, because if you're a media business and you Our founder who then hires people to make the product, which is right. If you have product market fit before you lose it. And maybe you hire people that…”

“Essentially there's 200 plus companies in tech that are like seed all the way to series B that have been acquired year to date, which is up 200% year over year.”

“Anyone that's got the numbers is gonna go public, right? In the next 12 months, they're all gonna go public.”

“It's quite clear. It's the best time in over a decade to start a company. Because we have this insane phenomenon of adoption, like adoption of LLM inference.”

“The causality is that if we put capital in place here, great companies will rise to the occasion and supply of companies will come.”

“In the last three, four years, this macro trend of tech startups looking at India for IPOs that has increased. So that gives some definitive benchmarks on evaluations, exit multiples, all of those, that is one.”

“And for that a good, thriving, liquid IPO market Is very, very important for tech startups. I think that's, we believe, I, and like at RTP, we believe this is the thing that till 2030, if it gets proven, then in India, like, then there's no stopping the countr…”

“During COVID, roughly all tech startups lost their way on spending. Capital was flowing freely, and teams often rapidly and dramatically overhired, boosted expenses on things non-crucial for the business, and spent wastefully.”

“For the last decade, you know, average tenure has been about 18 months in these kind of companies that we're talking about, which means it's very hard to actually build an experiment with culture in the way that we were for a while.”

“Assuming you're talking about the macro, like, it's, you know, I think most of the pain is yet to come. We'll still be ugly.”

“Europe tends to be very, very heavy into banks, insurance companies, there's a couple of great pharmas. Now, part of the problem isn't they're making, part of the problem is that any technology upstart, it starts in Germany, or starts in Berlin, or starts in t…”

“If you're a company that doesn't lay off people, you're gonna look pretty weird in this market to your investors. And they're gonna be wondering, why aren't you laying people off?”

“If someone made all their money investing in real estate or in strip malls or franchise McDonald's franchises or something like just something that is not remotely a tech startup, they will often ask for crazy terms that would make sense if they were investing…”

“I no longer think there are any qualified people starting tech companies that actually have bad ideas. I think all the ideas are good ideas. I think it's just a question of timing and execution.”

“My advice would be not to find, like, a small town local attorney to do this, though. Even if that, if they have written up an agreement for the dry cleaner down the street, the, you know, the car wash or whatever, I would always look for an attorney, whether …”

“And although investing seems different, I would never compare it to how difficult it is to growing a tech startup.”

“You need to have those skills in house. It needs to be part of your core competency as if you want to be a tech startup, you need to be able to build and distribute technology. That's just table stakes.”

“A-Star, a newly listed special acquisition company, which raised two hundred million dollars to acquire and take public a tech start-up,”

“The evolution of most of these companies, as they're getting bigger, tends to start with acquisition, Then focus much more on, you know, churn and retention, and then ultimately also to layer in resurrection as well.”

“In reality, the main form of disruption that happens in the tech industry are tech startups attacking tech incumbents.”

“I think the London Financial Centre versus tech are two separate things apart from where fintech is involved. They seem like two very different industries, unlike Wall Street where a lot of investment bankers are active in investing in tech startups.”

“Cheaper to start, more expensive to grow.”

“Like that's, it's like sort of like the startup equivalent is sort of you bet on the founder. I think that's even more the case in podcasting if that's possible”

“So the archetypal startup in 2000 might have had a hundred staff and a million users. Today it might have 10 staff and ten million users”

“People do not see the NBA as a startup. What is that called? It's not seen as like a positive resume item.”

“We have a burn rate bubble, meaning companies have lost, they've numbed themselves to the fact that you have to eventually replace the capital that you're burning with operating income”