The Ledger, every show

“Like, everybody should be having more philosophical debates about the things that they are investing in. We don't have nearly enough philosophical debates about the implications. We just say, Hey, this is a hot technology and it looks like it's ripping and peo…”

“People are under-appreciating a lot of the, like, second and third order effects from, like, a supply chain perspective around defense, because they're so focused on, well, who's gonna be the next andurl, and it's like, you can make a lot of money investing in…”

“If you can identify the smartest people as early as possible and then support them relentlessly throughout their career, you have this sort of unfair advantage when those people eventually do start companies.”

“And we have very deliberately set up contrary research to be like antithetical to content marketing. Like we actively don't want this to be like pumping our own book, which is why we don't exclusively write about our portfolio companies. And even when we do wr…”

“Even if you abstract away from like the hype, you still feel like there is a moment in time where, you know, de-globalization is real. Increased global conflict is real. Like those things create market opportunities.”

“Fiction, like science fiction should be a guide for how we think about building reality.”

“Startups are supposed to fail. Like that's like, there are ideas. It is literally a mechanism of iteration and experimentation. Like startups are supposed to go out, try something, experiment. And if it fails, then the capital and the, like the, both the like …”

“Every once in a while that hype needs to deflate and flush out the hucksters. And candidly, the more that that hype ebbs and flows, the less likely it is that hucksters are going to come in because they've gotten hurt too many times.”

“As VCs, we invest in these firms that have durable competitive modes when venture firms have, it's largely brand, right? It's largely that, that Competitive advantage that comes from a brand.”

“I think that the center of gravity has shifted to your point, largely to the individual investors. And I think there's very few firms that have kept up with that shift in the center of gravity.”

“How many of them have scaled to over a billion dollars of revenue, like 203 hundred or something, right? Like it's a tiny fraction of companies that have truly gotten to that massive Scale.”

“Back in the day, we passed on Coinbase at 1.5 billion”

“In their very first pitch deck, he said, we are going to make billions of dollars by saving the government tens of billions of dollars of revenue and of costs.”

“During the cold war in the fifties and sixties, the DoD alone represented 36% of global R&D.”

“And like their first customer, if I remember correctly, it wasn't even the government. It was a private like ranch owner who wanted to monitor because there was like drug traffickers coming across his land.”

“Their first product they ever built and prototyped was? It was called Century, but it wasn't the tower. It was a autonomous firefighting tank that would roll into a forest fire and could deploy, like, fire suppression”

“I think five of the first 50 employees at ramp came from contrary, a lot of the people at retool, a lot of the people and roll.”

“The U.S. Was like, 40 plus percent of manufacturing capacity globally.”

“While he was in high school, he volunteered at a lab where they were basically doing research around how to use virtual reality to help soldiers deal with PTSD.”

“Like I think there are people like the Lenny's and the packies and folks like that, that have just really, I'm a big fan of Mario Gabrielle and the generalists, like those types of people I think have done an incredible job building a real asset.”