Dick Costolo
Managing Partner & Co-Founder, 01 Advisors. On 3 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executivefounderinvestorentertainer@dickc ↗LinkedIn ↗01a.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Dick Costolo served as CEO and COO of Twitter, guiding the company through its 2013 initial public offering and major revenue scaling. He previously co-founded FeedBurner and currently invests in startups through the venture firm 01 Advisors.
3shows
4appearances
47statements
8resolved
4supported
0contradicted
50%fully supported
15said about them ↓ Everything Dick Costolo said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Costolo: SpaceX will acquire Tesla
“I think SpaceX, I am one of the people that believes SpaceX will buy Tesla.”
Costolo: SpaceX could be worth over $2T on day one
“When SpaceX goes public, and I think it'll actually, could you could, it could end up being worth over two trillion dollars on day one, whether that's a fake price or not.”
Costolo: OpenAI commitments exceed $1T without revenue to back them
“When you go and run on the numbers, it adds up to crazy over a trillion dollars worth of commitments that don't have the, you know, and you don't see the revenue model or growth yet to back it up.”
Costolo: OpenAI will pop on IPO day but face intense quarterly scrutiny
“It will still do really, really well on day one because people are going to be like, it's the next stigma. It's the next Cerebrus. I can't, I, you know, I haven't been able to buy secondary before I want to be an investor. You have to own one of these things, …”
Costolo: Nikita Bier's product instincts rival Kevin Systrom and Evan Spiegel
“Nikita has an extraordinary instinct for product that I think only, I would say, Kevin Systrom and maybe, you know, Evan Spiegel with his initial instinct for Snapchat stories are comparable.”
Costolo: Advertising is undefeated because ARPU far exceeds premium subscriptions
“Advertising is undefeated as a business model. What you end up finding is that the average revenue per user is just much, much higher than you can get from a premium subscription.”
Costolo: AI data centers will stall without public buy-in from CEOs
“Again, writ large across the country, it goes back to the Darios and the Sams, et cetera, need to start painting a picture to the country about why this is great for us, or a lot of these data centers aren't going to get built.”
Costolo: AI will replace human-only medical diagnosis within ten years
“Healthcare, we're going to look back 10 years from now and go, oh my god, we let humans who had only seen four cases of this decide what to do next instead of running it through, you know, here are the symptoms and evaluating against terabytes of historical da…”
Costolo: AI recommendations will outperform human judgment when they disagree
“There are going to be lots of cases of, in specific domains of, it did this thing a human would never do, and there will be lots of machine learning examples of, well, the machine thinks we should do X, and the people think we should do Y, but the machines wil…”
Costolo: Veterans understand team alignment better than 95% of Valley managers
“If I had to summarize Ben's management course, it's make sure everybody understands what you understand, and people coming in from the military have that perspective much more deeply ingrained in them than 95% of people who are in management roles in Silicon V…”
Costolo: Silicon Valley hero mythology falsely elevates founders above normal people
“The thing that I believe that maybe many people in the industry disbelieve, I think that as opposed to the mythology of Silicon Valley of there are these sort of superheroes out there, and they have these amazing superpowers that the rest of us don't have, the…”
Costolo: Space data centers are at least 10 to 12 years away
“It's let's at least let's at least agree that it's at least 10 or 12 years away.”
Costolo: Anthropic initially planned to keep Claude Code internal
“You know, they weren't even initially gonna release Claude Code. I mean, they initially, my understanding from folks inside Anthropic is we were just gonna be like, wait, this is like a huge competitive advantage. To be able to increase the rate of speed with …”
Costolo: Mega-cap IPO distributions will reignite early-stage VC fundraising
“You've got all these university endowments and, Venture LPs, et cetera, that haven't had their big liquidity events that are now gonna be, you know, flush with distributions of SpaceX and Anthropic and OpenAI that are gonna be able to turn around and pour a bu…”
Costolo: Small AI startups like Granola vastly outperform Apple Siri
“It's surprising how Siri for, Siri or iMessage, for example, have been so impossibly slow to keep pace with what appear to be things that AI startups with 10 or 12 people have been extraordinarily successful at, like text to speech or speech to text. Granola, …”
Costolo: Meta's rolling layoffs are surprising given Zuckerberg's strategic sharpness
“What I would say specifically about Meta is Mark is extraordinarily sharp and a strategic thinker, and the thing that I've been surprised about is the little bit of the death by a thousand cuts on the layoffs.”
Costolo: Twitter partnered with Google to bypass Egypt's Arab Spring shutdown
“Egypt, you know, during the Arab Spring, we sort of started in Tunisia with people organizing protests on Twitter, and they were able to organize protests on Twitter because they were writing under pseudonyms and not, you know, their actual names, so people we…”
Costolo told Twitter's board he would leave peacefully without severance if asked
“I mean, I had the exact same conversation with my board many times, you know, long before the IPO. Like, hey, listen, when it comes time for, don't ever have any conversation behind my back about it. Just come tell me you're not the guy anymore, and I'll, like…”
Costolo: Improv comedy teaches founders to trust initial instincts
“Some of the things I learned about improvising helped me being an entrepreneur. 100%. There's no question about it. Things like you just have to run with whatever you've got to go on. Any, whatever your first idea is, whatever your instincts are, Run with thos…”
Costolo: Large-company employees can adapt as flexible startup 'stem cells'
“No, I don't agree with that thesis. I think that people surprise you and people who were in very specific functional roles in company X when it was 10,000 people can jump into a startup and be a, you know, what I would call a stem cell and play multiple roles …”
Costolo: Founders receive flawed advice driven by investor success bias
“A lot of CEOs and entrepreneurs are given bad advice by investors that are based on success biases of other things they've invested in, They're given bad advice by their CEOs who are giving their advice based on the success biases of their own companies.”
Costolo: Anthropic would benefit greatly from IPOing before OpenAI
“I think it would be great. I think it would be great for Anthropic if they can go first.”
Costolo: First mega-cap IPOs will soak up limited institutional liquidity
“Again, another, another advantage to going first and, or going second and not going third is there's not infinite capital out there. You're going to want to be in, you know, one or two of these things, and then probably, probably not all three Although we'll s…”
The other half of the tape: Dick Costolo's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 15 times in 11 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 4Matthew McCall 3Ryan Denehy 2Alex Kantrowitz 2Reshma Saujani 1Erik Torenberg 1Elad Gil 1Danny Rimer 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 10
the a16z Podcast 3
Big Technology 2
2026 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2021 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC Unscripted: Pricing is Crazy, Pre-Emptive Rounds are Normal, Pricing at 200x Revenue Multiple is Common, There is More Cash Than Ever. What Happens Next; Market Analysis with Ryan Denehy, Founder and CEO @ Electric
- 20VC: How To Deliver Feedback with Compassion and Clarity, WTF Are Values Really and How To Instill Them & Raising $50M+ From Index and Greylock but Remaining in Stealth for 12 Months with Linda Lian, Co-Founder & CEO @ CommonRoom
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2019 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2017 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Dick's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BIG TECHNOLOGYLEDGER | Managing Partner & Co-Founder, 01 Advisors | 1 | 18 | 100% 3/3 | full record on Big Technology → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Managing Partner & Co-Founder, 01 Advisors | 1 | 15 | — | full record on 20VC → |
| a16zLEDGER | Managing Partner & Co-Founder, 01 Advisors | 2 | 14 | 20% 1/5 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |