Thomas Laffont

“That doesn't include three companies that we know will be coming public pretty shortly, SpaceX obviously in the next few weeks, and we know Anthropic just today, the headlines hit that they've submitted confidentially for their S-one.”

“The number one driver correlated to the valuation of SpaceX is cadence of launches.”

“We believe that a wide variety of companies and governments and militaries will want to own their own constellations so they can control their own destiny.”

“Anthropic in particular is scaling like no other company that we've ever seen.”

“So the data showed us that if you're a unicorn, the odds of you one day becoming a Decacorn are about eight percent. If you're a Decacorn, so that means you're over ten billion, the odds of you becoming a hundred billion dollar company, not much better. Eight …”

“So we think ultimately that in this era, the amount of memory per user could quintuple just based on the demand that these AI systems are requiring to provide their services.”

“Shown that Anthropic even had a profitable month, I believe, is what was reported.”

“I do think that the narrative of, oh, these models are commodities, and these companies are gonna get, I think, that's been pretty thoroughly disproven now, right?”

“I represented Jordana Brewster who's to, who's a friend now and is married to a friend of mine, but one day on one of the casting sheets it said, hey a Jordana Brewster-like actress for this role, so I called and I said, well, what about Jordana Brewster? This…”

“And pretty soon if you started in semis at the time, all the roads led to one company and that was in Cupertino and it was Apple. Why? Well, because the iPod was starting to really gain traction, and an iPod was a semiconductor product, it had NAM flash, it ha…”

“LPs are not talked a lot about in venture, which is kind of interesting. Like we talked a lot about the founder. We talked a lot about the companies, but I would say for us, we are pretty clear that our customer at the end of the day is our LPs.”

“I have virtually no outside investments, right? I do some as favors and things like that, but almost everything I have and own is in our funds.”

“The difference to me with this specific cycle is everybody agrees it's going to happen and it's happening quicker and the stakes are higher than any other. So I think every board is ultra motivated. Every founder is focused on this.”

“If I view a perceived conflict between companies even if they're later stage, I will always let the founders know. Directly. And I'm not asking for their permission.”

“I think to me what will happen is the analytics are going to get so much better. And these systems are going to know and they're going to be able to look at your, WhatsApp, and your messages, and your emails, and all of your calls, and they're going to be able…”

“In an ideal world, I would recommend, well, you can delete the transcript. The transcript's not that relevant, because maybe you batted an idea back and forth three times, and you said something that turned out not to be true, but you figured that out later. S…”

“One of my biggest lessons looking at private market investors versus public market investors is the appetite for institutions in the public market for assets that are perceived to have significant downside, i.e., like, 70 or 80% that are marked to market, I ha…”

“Of all of the IPOs since 2020, if you look at the value created or destroyed from their IPO price, you can see it as a cohort, we've destroyed almost two hundred twenty five billion in market cap, offset by the value creation of 84. So, net negative as a cohor…”

“The fact is that since 2022, both in 22, 23, and 24, we had fewer IPOs than in 2008 and 2009, the depths of the financial crisis, and 2001 and 2002, post the greatest bubble in history in tech.”

“If we don't get these companies to go public in my opinion, we are as an industry gonna have to face really hard questions with the ultimate funders of our industry, who, by the way, are not our funds, but are the investors in our funds, right? And eventually,…”

“Kotu is an investor of mine, and I look at Philippe LaFont, Thomas LaFont, and the way that Kotu manages risk, and I am mesmerized by their ability to understand market dynamics and react to it in really smart ways. They aren't enamored by the companies that t…”

“Byron would tell you, and I think Thomas from KOTU as well as, you know, as we were going through the partner meeting process, it was, you know, they're sending a zoom link over and saying, Hey, you know, just zoom in at this time. And that'll be that. And I s…”