The Ledger, every show

“Believing in AI and believing that infinite capex in the next two years, those are very different concepts. You can believe in AI, but also believe that the amount of capex in the next 24 months may be difficult to pay back.”

“The wrong takeaway is, oh, Google knows something we don't know, and therefore is making this investment, and therefore hundreds of billions of dollars of AI revenue are guaranteed in the next two years. That's the extrapolation I think people were making that…”

“These big tech companies are producers of compute. Startups are consumers of compute. So if you believe there is an overproduction of compute and that compute prices go down, startups win because they are buying those compute. Lower cost of compute directly tr…”

“All these researchers, they jump from one lab to the other. It's not like there's that much differentiation anymore between the actual models that these companies are launching.”

“If you are simply injecting AI so that you can tell investors that you have AI and so that you can, you know, talk on your marketing page about how you have AI, then you're just injecting a new cost item with actually no benefit to the consumer. And if there's…”

“If you had pricing power before AI, you'll have pricing power after AI. If you didn't have pricing power before AI, you probably won't have pricing power after AI.”

“Jensen is the Steve Jobs of our era.”

“I think the vertical integration piece is gonna matter in the sense of you can't have a separate team running the data center and a separate team building the model. That is just not gonna work as these models get bigger and bigger. You need to deeply couple t…”

“I think the evidence of the last couple of years is in order to play in the big model game, you need a cash machine and that cash machine cannot be the AI business, right?”

“I think it's really hard to argue today that any of the big model companies has a data advantage. Compute, it's just a commodity that you pay for. So it's hard to argue that any of them has a compute advantage.”

“And so I'll propose my own three things that I think are the three things that matter. And I would summarize it as servers, steel, and power.”

“I think in 12 months you'll see all these charts coming out of, like, more factories are getting built than ever before, and all this stuff. The industrial revolution is just getting started.”

“And I think one of the great ironies, and this is me as a capitalist speaking, right, is that the forces of capitalism, AI, will drive more energy revolution than any amount of political regulation could have, right?”

“And so I think one thing that we're going to see more of is off balance sheet financing.”

“There's this great line that people at Sequoia say, which is Sequoia hires investors, breaks them down, and then rebuilds them in the Sequoia mold.”

“I think my deal flow basically didn't change at all.”

“I think that the eight players around this four D chess board Think they are playing for the highest stakes in the universe. They are playing to be the emperor of the universe, and whatever that means. The person who controls AGI, whatever that means.”

“I think the strategy is corner the world's talent in AI and win period.”

“The organic talent flows simply are not there for the big tech companies in a way that 10 years ago, really good people did go to work at these companies. And today they are not perceived as leading edge companies.”

“Microsoft's distribution machine is amazing. So it, Microsoft benefits, if OpenAI and the labs win, and it's all frontier models, and it's not commoditized, he owns a lot of that. He's going to do great. If they get to AGI, great. Like owning 20% of AGI is pre…”

“Like, the valley is this place that is so devoid of God.”

“Consumers of compute benefit from a bubble, because if we overproduce compute, prices go down, your cogs goes down, and your gross margin goes up.”

“Generators are sold out until 2030”

“AI is now one of the biggest contributors to GDP growth in the United States”

“Well, I think the simple version would be OpenAI and Anthropic are now steel servers and power companies. And that's like a big change that's happened in the last 12 months. And so I actually think we're, you know, in many ways, OpenAI and Anthropic are becomi…”

“A gigawatt is forty billion dollars to build out. Jensen says it's 50 or 60 if you use the next generation Vero Rubin chips. So let's say it's somewhere between 40 and sixty billion.”

“And so I think you have a similar dynamic here where the mag seven are just a humongous portion of the market. Now these companies are great. They have cash machines, like they're going to do fine, but I do think we should be concerned that these companies rep…”

“I actually agree with him fundamentally that AI is going to affect five percent of GDP. Probably where I disagree with Massa, so I think he used the nine trillion dollars. I think that's the number he used. It's going to Disrupt nine trillion of GDP. And then …”

“People over estimate the monopolistic nature of businesses, and that we're living in this sort of unique Gilded Age monopolistic era, and that that Is, is not the steady state of business.”

“Plenty of companies that get critiqued for having low gross margins end up being super healthy businesses in the long run. You know, Snowflake was one of the big indicts on Snowflake in the early days was that it had a low gross margin. Obviously it's a very g…”

“Companies that are on that trajectory or have crossed that trajectory are companies like Harvey and Open Evidence and I think, and Clay and Juicebox.”

“So I do think, look, there's no way around it. Skoya was late to defense.”

“So the other two national champions that I've invested in, one is a company called Kella, which we think is going to be a national champion. It's based in Israel. The thesis is that Israel has the best people in the world for this, and they can help defend the…”

“I think that people are underestimating voice as an interface for AI.”

“The bigger these models get, the more that scaling laws become the dominant thing, and so I think there's a really good argument to be made that basically the data center is the most important asset.”

“This cloud business today is a two hundred and fifty billion dollar business. So the cloud business today is the same size as the SaaS sector. That's the business that Azure, Google and AWS control is the same size as the entire SaaS sector.”

“Data centers take about two years to build. You are going to build, and it costs about two billion dollars per data center.”

“The evidence today, I think, is more strongly in favor of scaling laws, and I hope to see more evidence of the, of these other breakthroughs being able to drive progress”

“There will be some sectors where you're right, things get commoditized, and they just basically get bid down to zero percent gross margin.”

“The cloud guys are stuck in more of a prisoner's dilemma. They have to keep investing. If they do not invest, they risk losing market share in one of the greatest businesses of all time.”

“I visited this company that's building long duration batteries that I had invested in at KOTU. They literally built a billion dollar factory in the last 12 months.”

“We don't, and I, you know, there's sort of an interesting phenomenon here, which is, you know, the Biden administration passed the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, and this was this huge stimulus bill that basically incentivized everyone to build solar and bu…”

“And so I don't know that it's going to be this like loud crisis that people anticipate. I think it's going to be a slow track for more renewable energy, more power on the grid. And we're just going to, we're going to plot our way there.”

“I think that China is going to catch up.”

“And something I like to say to people is I don't think the hardest part of venture is figuring out what are the good companies. I think the hardest part of venture is figuring out when are you going to put your neck on the line for this company and all good pa…”

“The bar for success is so, so, so high. Unless this company is one of the 50 most important companies in the world. You haven't done your job well.”

“Selection is the most important and I think, and then I think winning comes behind that and sourcing probably is actually, maybe it's tied, but I think it's probably third.”

“The best founders don't want to meet with VCs. That's the reality of it. You have to convince them.”