The Ledger, every show

“I actually put almost no weight on did they do it before and put all the weight on are they super unique, insanely talented, ruthless in a way that they understand how business is and can actually really get things done. I just invest in the founder regardless…”

“The valuation inflation is extremely real, and you will make less multiples because of that.”

“The media likes people who virtue signal, not necessarily people who speak their minds. Palmer has always been good about speaking his mind.”

“At the time when we did this, there was no other company in Silicon Valley innovating in defense.”

“I think if we're going to maximize returns, it would be over an even longer period of time.”

“I am a reaction, a reactive VC, a gut feel based VC”

“One thing that that gives us an advantage of is let's say somebody meets a company on a Wednesday. They don't have to wait till the next Monday morning partner meeting that has time to schedule for that team to come meet. We can do it much quicker than that.”

“Peter's usually pretty right on the macro things at the end of the day. Timing, timing does come into this stuff, and he's not always exactly right on timing, but at the end of the day, he's pretty good at being correct on, especially on, on macro Global macro…”

“Launch is like, you know, I'm bullish on launch going forward, but like, the applications of launch are where the, where everything is at, right? And like, telecom and global telecom, I mean, it's pretty huge.”

“What I'm actually looking for is, hey, is there some chance this person could have beaten me in my prime? Right, as a game, like playing their game. Their game is not going to be the same as mine. You're not going to beat me at my game, but playing their game,…”

“So I was the first investor in, in Oculus and Oculus was a company that I invested in, not just on the street. I mean, I obviously Brennan Palmer great, but like, I was like, try the actual product and I'm not a product person, but I tried the actual product a…”

“Like, I think the true human, like, iconic things are just going to be more and more valuable from, not just from a monetary perspective, but from a, Mindshare perspective, from like a you know, from an emotional perspective, right?”

“I've actually made a lot of money betting against the end of the world. With some pretty famous people.”

“For this to truly be transformative, it will have to start working in a way where you're either interacting with multiple people over a network who are wearing one, or even next to you and you're just watching different movies”

“What we see though is no matter what the era, there's just very few companies that matter. And this is what all venture capitalists kind of have to try and figure out and make sure they see, pick and get into the very few companies that matter.”

“For a while, I think the pendulum was already being on the shift, but for a while, it was close to 100% Of companies would say AI or LLM by, you know, minute two of the pitch or page one of the deck. And I think that that's changed. It's now just you know, a t…”

“There's such a huge price mismatch between, let's say a company's last round of financing and what the macro Is that it's really difficult to invest right now simply because private companies lag public markets in terms of pricing by quite a bit.”

“This is why I don't do public. I don't buy any public stocks ever.”

“Founder quality is still 80 to 90% of my investment thesis, right?”

“We definitely saw at the time that the network effect on Airbnb was, at the time, was huge, and yeah, the market was it was clear that they could penetrate into the travel market, or even the lodging market, which I guarantee you, Harry, is huge.”

“When we've made money for people, you have a lot of more latitude on how you can invest money. So you've got. The freedom to do whatever you want without people breathing down your neck.”

“The way that we do things at Founders Fund is everybody runs their own strategy based on what they are the best at.”

“Our funds are multi-billion dollars, right? Like if we have a. Ten million dollar check, there's no real difference between that going to zero or that going to. Thirty million. I mean, there's just no difference between those numbers.”

“I mean, I try and my life strategy is to maximize my dollars to fame ratio. Like I want to make a lot of returns for myself and LPs and have the minimal amount of fame possible, right?”

“We put more than, we put four hundred million in that company total now. This is just our most recent one was two hundred million.”

“Defense tech is an area that I'm bullish on, but there's nothing like Endural.”

“Everybody at Founders Fund runs their own strategy, and my strategy is very different from even everybody else's at Founders Fund, let alone other VCs.”

“I think it took Palantir a decade plus to get its first real government contract.”

“Yeah, I mean, we only sell to the US and our allies. We don't do anything where it would not be good with the US government to work with. We would not work with any countries that are not, you know, total allies in the United States.”

“Even if you have a really good tech team, and you're willing to do this, you need the, also the biz team, or the government relations team, or the government business team, a team that knows how to work with the government, or you just won't get anywhere.”

“It is truly transformative in the defense space to have a real software platform backing all of your products that doesn't exist. And so I do still think that that is the most important and impressive part of the company right now.”

“A lot of our best investments have been smaller checks That then we've been tracking the closely company closely enough that have grown into larger checks.”

“And so we always, when we're making a small investment, always tell the entrepreneur upfront, like, Hey, this is a potential signaling risk.”

“Affirm, because it's a ridiculously hard one run by one of the best founders in history with Max Levchin.”

“In 21, that said, like, You know, we had great, we had our best year ever in 20, 21, right?”

“We incubated the company from there.”

“This is about when maybe 20 people would be at a Y Combinator demo day, maybe 30.”

“We raised a fund called XGYC, no management fees, 10% carry, and invested in a bunch of fantastic Y Combinator companies in, in 20 oh seven, 20 oh eight.”

“It's not a category. I mean, I, I've said this stat a couple of times, but you know, when I first started doing venture capital, everything was social, local, mobile. It was like over 60% of the companies that I looked at, yeah, looked at in the first year wer…”

“And that's when I met Sean Parker and we became friends and he. Said, Hey, why don't you check out what we're doing at Founders Fund? And I came in and that's when we were considering a little investment in a company called SpaceX and, you know, said, this is …”