The Ledger, every show

“This is one of these things we manufacture, like how wonderful it is. Benchmark has a flat partnership. I mean, who cares, right? It's not disciplined. It's optimized to make the most money.”

“And when everything can exit north of twenty billion, you know, it's I, even me, like I have an investment with a hundred million dollar position that took me years and years and years to get to right now. And then just watching a growth round where someone co…”

“Open AI, an anthropic, Kind of lied about the books, and they definitely lied about training on YouTube”

“I think this is going to fail because I don't think there is enough talent To do what we want to do in the enterprise. The idea makes sense to on a spreadsheet. It makes sense. Sad is smarter than me, but I, my today, my experience is it's going to fail with a…”

“I love it. Now that round trip revenue is like totally cool and not something you go to jail for, like, let's, let's do it every single place we can find it, right? Let's just do it. And I'm not saying there's anything literally wrong with it, but go for it, r…”

“There's no need for the most part, for a B tier. B level grade CS engineer. It's been devastated, right?”

“Like Cerebus is going public, I think today at like a forty billion dollar market cap. It has some interesting customers, but basically it only has two customers today in the Middle East that you've never heard of.”

“This is easy for me to, I don't want to be too much of an armchair quarterback from a product that feels terminal, but it's probably a good one. I think it's a good candidate, right?”

“So I, I'm out. If literally Chamath drops everything, but 80, 90, everything. And I see the sweat from his brow and I see all, and I see that cause the dude's fit and he's looking good. Right. He just had, A massive, the massive largest win of his career as an…”

“If the agent can run 24 seven autonomously, take all your data and build all the analytics, build all the dashboards, run autonomously out of it then your data can flow between apps and you won't even care where it lives and all the fears about headless become…”

“Open source is a bit of a fake because China's paying for all the trading, okay? It's not open source like a generation ago.”

“They have an enterprise base, which is, it has, you know, between 40 and 70% in, you know, gross margin just on inference.”

“When we started this show, you need to be a fucking prompt it. They would joke this was the highest paying job out of college was prompt engineers were making a 150,000 dollars out of college because they knew how to write a prompt. That skill's worthless toda…”

“It's a moat destroyer when LLMs will lift you from one vendor to the other, and I, you know, I don't even, like, I literally was doing a pitch this week, and the founder was going on and on about their moats, and I immediately didn't want to invest. Like, I ju…”

“I mean, for us there, so there'll be a whole generation of these people that are just never hired. There may be some folks that are laid off. I, and I think more commonly they'll just be slowly managed out and just replaced with agents.”

“I think the folks that hate benchmark from Uber, I think they deserve to hate benchmark.”

“The biggest issue we're going to have going forward is our agents are going to get so good. They sit idle all day long. They don't have enough work.”

“We replaced 500,000 dollars worth of employees with 257 dollars worth of agents, but the productivity is higher.”

“To be direct, I think by the end of this year, we're going to give up on reskilling. I think folks are going to stop pretending they can reskill folks that are not going to be able to make the jump to the agentic age.”

“Customers will prefer, prefer a great eye to a mediocre human. They'll prefer a great eye that solves their problem today, that knows the answer, to someone that has to get an engineer and an appointment to you next week, that doesn't know, that says I'm just …”

“We want to hire a human. To report to our AI VP of marketing.”

“I really do think by the end of the year, we're going to choose tokens over humans.”

“I think what will happen going into 2027 is an engineering QA departments will get destroyed because you'll be like, I got six QA engineers.”

“And so even, and so our startups that we're excited about, I think ultimately they will achieve the same historic level of bloat, maybe half the size, but they will get as bloated as they can because they will have much larger, broader product lines.”

“It's solar city on steroids, and we're all here for it because we love AI, but it makes no sense.”

“I'm saying there is already more natural attrition since Twenty-twenty than these numbers. So blaming it directly on overhiring is clickbait. It's clickbait because it's not mathematically true.”

“I mean, Corweave has nothing. What do Nebius and Corweave have? Nothing, no special technology, right?”

“And I just think this going back to seed is for suckers. Like you want to invest the hour it blows up. The minute it blows up, you want to get the DM and just wire the money in AI. That's the play.”

“We're gonna have to reflate and hire thousands and thousands of people per tech leader to avoid social unrest.”

“What Figma missed is I create this design. It's beautiful. I loop in the product team to approve it. And then I click a button, which it says push into full production prototype. And it just works. It works like, and you can, and the irony is Replit and Lovabl…”

“I actually think It's worse than that Rory, because I think these are going to be by far the layoffs that Harry just rattled off and the ones for this year, I believe are going to be far worse than any layoffs in our lifetimes. And I'll tell you why. And I kno…”

“I don't think in a year we're going to need any traditional marketing automation software. It's too dated. It doesn't work for agents marketing.”

“So I'll have to see, but we won't do, we'll never do Unless I'm forced to, I mean, if, you know, I do it for Sam Altman, but otherwise I'm not gonna do, there's, the firesides are dead and speakers are dead. There's just no point when podcasts are better.”

“Yeah, and every time you cut a corner, every time you invest in a founder that's really nice and really hardworking and really good guy, you never make any real money.”

“That's why I tell all founders to take the offer. I tell all founders to take it. The opposite of VCs, take it. It's, it is an intensity test. And if they push back and say, no, a billion is not enough. Great. Then go for it. But if they're not sure you may no…”

“Is it a partial replacement for junior marketers? Yeah, we don't need any.”

“A CMO today should be able to run their own campaigns, and this is why. I'm not saying you have to spin up Marketo or HubSpot. I'm saying you should be able to tell your agent, and our agent, our AIVP marketing started running its own campaigns the last two we…”

“And it just, I think most of the old SAS companies, the pre AIB to be players have become tragedy apps.”

“As workflows expand to do everything, as agents do more, they will pick the LLM, and I see no competitive advantage to Claude for most workflows.”

“They're not going to recommend Marketo for your agent to do marketing automation, ok? In fact, it mocked Marketo outreach and sales loft as tools useless to agents. Ok, this API grid. They said there is no place in the, an agent will never send an email throug…”

“Coupa, New Relic, Anaplan, even Zendesk, Avalara, Smartsheet they all look like they may not be able to fully repay their debt”

“This is a micro trend that I think is going to accelerate this year is founders giving the keys to their friends, not completely quitting, like eight months after an accelerator that didn't work out, but I mean, it's just, I'm at 40,000,050 1,000,020 million, …”

“Cause I think most CEOs I work with are not up for it is the truth. Cause most pre AI CEOs are not, they're not up. You guys know this too, from your portfolio, not all, but most are not actually up for the massive amount of, what's more than nine, nine, six, …”

“This is why now Figma feels like grandpa software. That's the thing. It feels like grandpa software. It feels like grandpa software and you don't, the NRR is still high. The company is still growing at top decile rates, but who wants to buy new stuff from gran…”

“Probably the most frustrating app I've used is clerk, right? For authentication on replica. It's just. Mind-numbingly hard to use.”

“I don't buy Dario anymore. He may well be the second greatest founder of all time behind Elon, but I am just so burnt out of the boy who cries wolf.”

“What I mean is listen, he may well be the second greatest founder of all time behind Elon. Look what he's done in five years, right? Five years to thirty billion, the grit, the greatest grudge startup of all time.”

“Like you know, I'm ready to move on to the new world and I'm almost, and I'm frankly ready to write off a lot of portfolio companies and a lot of public companies. It's time to move on guys. If you're not going to get there in April of 20, 26, then so be it. S…”