The Ledger, every show
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks, across all 44 shows. Pick shows below, then mix any filter with any other.
shows 
every show 44 of 44
Vishria: AI success requires taste, customer understanding, and technical capability knowledge
“There are people who understand customer problems, People who have taste and people who understand the jagged edge of AI capabilities and are curious about it. And like, those are the three things. If you've got those three, if you're going to be, if you don't…”
Vishria: The best AI salespeople are founders bridging capability gaps
“Honestly, the best salesperson in any of these companies is a founder, and what they're doing is bridging the jagged edge to what the customer's capability is, and that's it.”
Vishria: Energy Bottlenecks Will Lead to Fewer and More Expensive AI Tokens
“If energy is what you need for compute and is the bottleneck, And there's unlimited demand for intelligence. Then it stands to reason that if we have a lot less energy, then we will have a lot less intelligence or a lot less tokens or a lot more expensive toke…”
Vishria: Training pipelines matter far more than application for household robots
“I think the exact same thing has happened in robotics. We're investors in, in Sunday robotics which is going after this exact It's such a cool company. It's a cool company, and, you know, they're doing household robots, but the key part before you get to house…”
Vishria: Benchling suffered seven years of churn in 12 months
“They never had a churn line. Never reported it. For the first of, like, six years that I worked with the company. So then they got seven years of churn in, like, 12 months.”
Vishria admits Benchmark was late to launch a growth fund
“You could argue we're a few years late, and I think I'd take that criticism. I think that but I think that opportunity exists for, on a go-forward basis and so, like, we should go do it.”
Vishria: Hardware companies cannot control their destiny like software companies do
“With software companies,
You know, aside from, like, building on AWS or whatever, you pretty much own your whole stack, and so you're really fully in control of your destiny in that way.
With hardware companies, you don't.
Like, there's an entire supply chain,…”
Vishria: Benchmark is investing at its highest pace since 2011
“There's a lot of uncertainty, but we've been more active than we've been since 2010 and 2011.”
Vishria: Benchmark has no sector specialists and maintains four to six partners
“I am not a sector specialist and nobody at Benchmark is. And I think the fundamental idea with Benchmark is there's a small group of people, a small group of partners who are all equal. And right now it's five of us, but sometimes it's four, sometimes it's six…”
Vishria: Passes on viable startups if he cannot pitch recruits
“When you look at that, I ask myself that question. And if I answer is like, you know what, I think it's a cool business. It'll probably work, but I just don't understand how I can make that pitch. Then I don't do it. Like, that's my, like, I just, I don't do i…”
Vishria: Tech incumbents are too paranoid and alert to be easily disrupted in AI
“Today's incumbents are and you know, this is a trope and not really an insight. Everyone's saying the same thing, but today's incumbents are paranoid and on top of things and like, you know, like is, is Microsoft and Nuance gonna move slower and whatever than …”
Vishria: Only sponsoring Benchmark partners see deal vote tallies
“Nobody knows what the votes are except the sponsoring partner.”
Vishria: Peter Fenton is people-first, while Bill Gurley is market-first
“Peter is very much like people first. Bill is very much, I would say like market first. And like, and that's, it's just a different, it's a different mental model and looking at these things.”
Vishria: Top VC partnerships require a mix of operators and career investors
“I think the top performing partnerships tend to have a mix of operators turned VCs and career investors, and I don't think that's an accident.”
Vishria: Benchmark always takes a board seat in its investments
“We take the board seat, we aim and aspire to be the entrepreneur's first call. That's a standard we hold ourselves to.”
An infrastructure revolution will power the next wave of consumer platforms
“These things are very cyclical, and again, this is overly simplistic, but I think we're in the midst of a infrastructure revolution. Maybe it's around ML, maybe it's around cloud, maybe it's some combination of these things that are coming together, and there …”
Vishria: Benchmark relies on a partner advocacy and voting system for investments
“Our investment process is one of advocacy of voting. So basically, there is an advocate. So one of the five of us falls in love with something, is probably the best way to describe it gets really excited about the entrepreneur and the opportunity All five of u…”
Vishria: Sunday Robotics uses gloves matching robot hands for data transfer
“Sunday uses gloves that are designed just with the robot hands, so they're perfect, so you get very good data transferability from one to another.”
Vishria: I have invested in only 18 companies across 12 years at Benchmark
“Each of us invests in one to two companies a year.
I think in my 12 years, I've invested in 18 companies total.
Crazy.
Which is a relatively small number
So it's very high conviction and very high commitment.”
Benchmark has met several AI medical scribe startups but passed on all
“I've met several of these companies over the years and we haven't invested in any.”
Vishria: Sponsoring partner at Benchmark decides whether to call deal votes
“We have a system where, like, we talk, and then, like, you can call, like, the sponsoring partner basically can call for a vote or not.”
Vishria: Former Benchmark partners are officially just LPs in current funds
“The official relationship is they're LPs. Like, that's the official relationship. Like, they're LPs with us like other LPs.”