The Ledger, every show

“And then the thirty-two billion dollar round of OpenAI came around when I was at Kleiner Perkins, and all of a sudden I was like, oh man, this structure seems really gnarly. You know, they're gonna have to convert this somehow, it's a non-profit, they're selli…”

“The market of code generation has gone something like, I don't know, over the last two and a half years, it's gone from essentially zero To probably like six or seven billion dollars of ARR”

“A lot of what AI has been able to do, especially if it can touch something that a labor force within a category was doing before, we're seeing much, much bigger markets.”

“AI app companies are meaningfully different than SAS companies in like a dozen different ways. Yet we keep trying to shove all the metrics From these AI app companies into the frameworks that we created for SAS.”

“For a lot of these categories, the labs set the baseline in terms of customer experience. They're like, they're your competition at your base layer. And so whatever you can get from ChatGPT or whatever you can get from anything directly from the labs apps them…”

“One of the first hundred X deals, I think, in SaaS, and people were like, a hundred X ARR, what the hell? And obviously it ended up being, you know, I don't know, 30, 40 X, unbelievable investment.”

“And so I think beyond being like a yardstick to test your conviction, models aren't that useful, but for that, they're really, really good.”

“The way you said it, honestly, people, product and market. I think the people, Define everything else. They are the upstream engine that makes everything go. They're the most important piece. Two, I think the product that the people build tell you a lot about,…”

“This is one of the reasons why I'm extremely excited about benchmarks, competitive position in today's market, because we can go to LPs. We can say, Hey, we're shooting for higher than five X net. We have the historical track record to back it up. And we have …”

“There's going to be nothing better for you than if your first investment sucks. Because once you do one and it fails and you realize it's not the end of the world and like life goes on and like LP still love us and like you're not fired, then you feel really c…”

“I think a lot of people at Founders Fund have very underrated track records. I think Matthias van Tienen, I think he's the most underrated venture capitalist that exists today.”

“We're like, let's constrain our fund sizes. Let's be careful about what we do. So we don't get too over our skis, where we can easily weather a crash, and LPs aren't going to go fleeing once there's a crash, because we've been very careful with our capital, an…”

“Something like economic turmoil that happens today If you're investing in the venture asset class, isn't going to necessarily impact like your exit because ultimately the founders and the board and the management team have some control over when they exit. And…”

“If you look at someone like Neil Mehta's track record, it's like, is his hit rate, like, 90%? No, there's, like, a ton of flame outs in there. But he's just invested in situations where he's put, you know, 400 in and gotten five billion out. And it turns out, …”

“If you look at the poly market Calci odds on a Tesla SpaceX merger, again, you know, not, not that those markets are so big that they're that indicative, but I think the probability that they have on there is something like 70% in the next two years or somethi…”

“The Bessemer Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index over the last five years is down 44%, and the SOX, the iShare Semiconductor ETF is up 325%.”

“Everyone thinks of her as this quantitative investor. You know, she had the, her time as an equity researcher at Morgan Stanley during the.com. Bubble. And then she came to Kleiner Perkins, obviously, and everyone talks about these DCF models she creates and a…”

“And so from her, I just learned that when you use numbers in venture growth and when you want to be quantitatively driven, don't get stuck into a quantitative lens with it. Actually use that to drive the narrative and drive the story of an investment.”

“So there's a program, for example, at Founders Fund where anyone that works on an investment or if you're leading an investment, you can personally invest alongside the firm.”

“He had, like, a bonus system for PayPal employees. If they lived within, like, a couple miles of the office, you'd give them more money.”

“If you think about his huge, huge winners, whether it's Figma, Glean, Rippling, they all have like a common through line of the, you know, it's B to B software, but it's almost like consumer like software that, that demands really high user love and engagement…”

“Which is why it's such an unbelievably large business, probably a trillion dollar business if it was spun out of Amazon.”

“I'm a big believer in Conway's law and Conway's law is this programming concept that when it's super dumbed down for people like us, Harry says you ship your org. Yeah. You ship your org chart or the product you ship looks like your organizational structure. I…”

“You know, more than Brett Taylor, who represents this wave of AI applications. He's like the godfather of AI apps right now.”

“The outcomes are much, much, much larger in today's in today's technology landscape than they were 10 years ago, 15 years ago, there's more bites at, you know, potential hundred billion dollar, trillion dollar companies.”

“The best founders, they don't want sycophants in the boardroom. Like, they don't want GPT-Foro in the boardroom telling them that everything that they do, they walk on water, And that they do nothing wrong. Like, they actually want other adults in the room tha…”

“One of like the first investment that that I did at Kleiner Perkins when I came back in, was SpaceX at a hundred and fifty billion dollars.”

“Dude, you sourced the seed of ramp.”

“The competitive intensity of SaaS during the twenty-tens was much, much, much lower than it is today. Like during the twenty-tens, there was an entire crop of companies in the 2000, but then especially in the twenty-tens, you could basically pick either a vert…”

“As venture kind of becomes more, more institutionalized we're gonna see a lot more of them, for sure.”

“Conway's law exists for venture firms for sure, which means that you like, you invest your org chart. And it's like very hard to you know, have an investment strategy or a portfolio construction strategy. That doesn't match the size and kind of scope of your t…”

“Instead of Tiger, you know, continuing to be this large platform, you now have like four other platforms that were actually established in those days of 20, 21. And so it's like, okay, yeah, like you don't have Tiger, But like, how big is Andreessen's last fun…”

“With all of my college savings, I shorted Tesla. And I feel like everyone has gone through this experience. If they were a value investor at some point in their life where it was like, you know, you just, oh my God, Tesla, maybe it's not a fraud, but it's so o…”

“Like each of us is 25% of benchmark, and we work really well together, and we're a super tight-knit team, but each of us has our own styles.”

“Right now there are over 80 public SaaS companies that have more than five hundred million dollars of ARR.”