Tech

“So the much, I think, to the surprise of both the tech world and the political world, they're, they've been driven in on each other. And there's a kind of renationalization of tech and of the economy that we see.”

“And I also believe that we're going to be seeing a cost revolution in health care, that this tech is going to make it easy. People will have, 50 years from now, better health care and cheaper health care than anybody has today.”

“And the reason tech has been so successful so quickly and has had so much human impact is because it's been lightly regulated. And I think it's better to keep it that way than not, and we'll lose optimism, we'll lose momentum, we'll lose progress, and that's w…”

“When a decision is self-evident in tech, it's probably too late. Meaning when I know something is going to happen, And you know it also, one of us is too late if we haven't done something about it.”

“It skews quite heavily to tech, particularly in the venture part of the portfolio, probably around 30 to 35%.”

“One of the characteristics of tech is that the moment that you understand something and you know how it works and what's going to happen, Is the moment you should move on to something else, you should always be looking for the quiet places where we don't know …”

“Today, for example, in 12 months now, we have almost nothing in semiconductors. We have almost nothing in tech.”

“I think you have to be a tech person today. It's such a, it's a big and growing and compounding part of the economy. It affects everything else.”

“I think on a relative basis, tech essentially got as cheap as it's been versus the rest of the market has at any point over the last 10 years.”

“I think that whether you agree or disagree with what's going on right now it's objective that for tech the current administration is a lot better.”

“So, so to some extent, the speed of our change in, in tech actually reduces the ability for the tech to get diffused into the really, really important workflows. Because now you have a lot of paralysis in, in just making decisions.”

“What's happening in modern life with the hustle culture, the engineered culture that we live in, where the tip of the spear is the way and amount that we're using tech in our lives. Is pushing us to the left hemispheres of our brain, where we don't deal with, …”

“And the idea is to unify that across the department because we spend, you know, a hundred fifty billion dollars a year on tech in one way or another.”

“So today the value is actually in the humanities and the commerce side, because tech is sort of going to be democratized and much more easily available.”

“I think like because sort of the way they communicate is much more about almost these like faceless companies rather than the people, I think it's like easy to hate on them and underappreciate. So I think they need to tell their story and go direct.”

“And if you ask me five years from now, 10 years from now, is that percentage going to be higher or lower? I think the answer is pretty straightforward. It's going to be higher. It's just a question. Is it going to be 10 or 15?”

“Tech is extraordinarily bad at partnerships. It's and I mean, it, it's always treated as a prisoner's dilemma that at some point, someone in the company realizes defecting gives you five points on the map, and that sounds really, really good with the short-ter…”

“Yeah, it, you know, it's clearly a problem. I'd say it's maybe a little bit less of a problem than it was a dozen years ago, because I think a dozen years ago, it was almost a blind spot.”

“One of the things they were doing years ago is they're like, oh my God, everybody in tech is so white and blah, blah, blah. Obviously, it's like so much more international than the journos.”

“That is a fundamentally new set of primitives that journos aren't equipped to deal with because we're talking about math, right? And they can't do math. You know, they're anti-selective. If they could do math, they'd be in tech usually, right?”

“So this is, I think, a very underrated bear case for tech in terms of AI, at least for this time period, is they've lost that That murky bargaining power over employees that they enjoyed for decades. And currently you're seeing what happens when you don't have…”

“For the last 25, 30 years Tech meaning broadly, you know, computer science, software, internet, mobile internet now, now crypto and AI in the last few years, this has been, this, there's been, this has been sort of this one vector of progress in our society. T…”

“Of the, you know, law, banking, medicine, consulting. Those are like the four big tracks you have people had at Stanford in the, Probably in the late eighties when I was there, probably also in the early 2000 when you were there, maybe two thirds of the underg…”

“Slightly worried that this is going to be like a five-year wave, going to be trendy, going to fade out.”

“I think we got a couple more, 10 X's left to go. I think the ceiling is far from where we're at now. I just think we have a couple, you know, 10 X sell downs on the way too.”

“Software, and especially tech, it's just every six months, every 12 months cycle, they don't, we don't think enough about create something that lasts. I care creating something that's, at least the form factor lasts longer than half 18 months.”

“If you look at the people who have purchased control of North American sports teams over the last decade, 80% of them come from tech or private markets.”

“Yelling is a great way to get your point across if used highly strategically. You cannot yell all the time. You cannot yell on every call. You cannot yell once a week. You probably shouldn't yell once a month, but once a quarter, keep that as a tool in your to…”

“Tech for many years, unlike Hollywood, which is also a good, Segue really tried to stay out of politics, kind of stay as particularly when you look at like, just to use San Francisco as an example, right? Like other than a few key players in the San Francisco …”

“It's like there's a few guys in tech with a lot of money keeping Republican candidates alive, and we need every single one of them.”

“In the peak years up to half of total tax receipts for the state of California come from the top thousand individual taxpayers. Which is basically all tech.”

“The changes that are coming to us because of tech are so earth-shattering and so fast that they are changing the basic conditions of America's liberal democracy in ways that I think it may not survive.”

“I think the Europeans, for example, have ensured they'll never participate in tech again. You know, they keep shooting themselves in the foot.”

“What we see in so many sales interactions, especially in tech, is that salespeople will show up with the clown car of experts, the subject matter experts, the solutions engineers, the product people, the executive sponsors, and then they will just punt to thes…”

“It's so easy to get Overwhelmed by data, especially in tech. And as soon as you have anybody using your product, the attention turns to numbers, and testing, and people try to be very scientific about it.”

“Tech shifted from a vertical to a horizontal. So the places, the types of businesses that venture and early stage tech venture capitalists were funding fundamentally expanded at a huge level too.”

“Yeah, the last five percent, I think, is the next five years of tech or something.”

“What's the largest number of billionaires? And most people think it's tech and it's not. And then they think it's real estate and it's not, it's financial services, but it's not hedge funds and it's not VC funds, some VC funds, but not most, very small. It's p…”

“One thing that I never understand in tech, and everyone here will probably disagree with me, or maybe agree with me, is that when you start a business, you're supposed to tell your potential investors exactly who your customer is before your product exists, an…”

“Privacy is like vegetables and we give it up. We will happily give it up for just the promise of a moment of pleasure or convenience. Well, that, cause, cause that's the junk food. And like, we just go for the junk food. That's the reality of the situation is …”

“Sam is the closest thing that we have to an emergent mogul in tech.”

“In, you know, in a hundred years, when the archaeologists look back and they see tech in the sort of early years of tech, the first 3034 years, they'll say that the biggest surprise was how much we thought it was okay to not train managers.”

“I think for me if you apply that same kind of like principle now, I would tend to look a lot at like the weirdos of tech, right? People who are at the fringes, people who have, who've been always considered like, oh, you're just toying around. This is like a b…”

“Well, so the sort of meta observation we were chatting about earlier is that this is moving massively faster than most recent things in tech. Cause no one needs, you don't need to buy a new device. You don't need to learn any programming language. Like, well, …”

“In biotech, you can actually like learn to pick up most of the operating stuff from being an investor. Whereas I think in tech, like, you know, being an investor in a software company certainly doesn't make you a programmer.”

“I think that tech will have a tough year. I think energy will have a really shit year. And probably the biggest asset class that is going to get pressured is going to be junk debt.”

“You know, there's a longer conversation to have around chips, which I think have become strategically interesting to the rest of tech for the first time in a very long time like beyond, beyond just Apple.”

“I think a lot of tech is adopted almost city by city, and so I think that one of the things we got right in the early years was focusing on a few cities like New York, Berlin, London, to really grow the scene there, and then you get positive word of mouth.”

“I think people who are in tech, especially are certain bubbles of tech. That's the default. It's like the first thing I do, I have an idea now let's go raise money.”

“Power in tech is network effects, almost always. Occasionally you have scale effects, brand effects, but generally it's network effects.”

“There was not a single VC or angel out there that wanted to touch anything tech in 2001, 2002.”

“In tech people figured out if I start blogging about my shit and tweeting about my shit, I get my reputation goes up. I get better deal flow. I get to invest in better, more badass companies. It's like actually strategic.”

“So I would be long tech. I'd be long innovation for the next 50 years.”

“I actually see a lot of women investors on the biotech side. I think less on the tech side, but I think the numbers are great and growing.”

“Mobile has been the center of tech, was the center of tech, for sort of, from, say, 2010, for something like a decade, and it happened, and we get it, and we understand it all”

“I think one of the biggest fears I have a little bit with tech right now is we're not guided by great principles.”

“On the East coast, for example, media, media businesses have sort of software engineers as a second class citizen, right? They're just guys who build the app and the writers are kind of the first class, right? Traditionally in tech, it's been the opposite. You…”

“Part of like my general thesis for all of this stuff is like tech is becoming a regulated industry. You're getting it regulated the way the food supply chain is regulated.”

“Especially the tech press, their agenda basically is hatred of tech. I mean, they hate the people they're reporting on.”

“The first 50 years of tech, of cars or aircraft were about making car companies and working out what cars are and working out what aircraft are, and the second 50 years was everything that happened once everyone had a car, and everything that happened once air…”