The Ledger, every show

“Of the, you know, law, banking, medicine, consulting. Those are like the four big tracks you have people had at Stanford in the, Probably in the late eighties when I was there, probably also in the early 2000 when you were there, maybe two thirds of the underg…”

“Both extreme optimism and extreme pessimism converge on laziness and on people not doing anything. So so I, yeah, so I think moderate optimism is the correct thing.”

“And so there was sort of an element where if you could get through, you would have no competition. And then, you know, a decade later, we still had no competition.”

“The, there's, it's generally been stagnant in the world of atoms, not the world of bits for something like 50 years.”

“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission basically hasn't approved a new reactor design in, in 50 plus years.”

“What we know from our companies is that remote work is not working”

“At a minimum, you run them, you try to run elections the same way you do it in every other Western democracy. You have one day voting. You have practically no absentee ballots. You have and it's, you know, it's one day where everything happens. It's not this t…”

“I certainly would not try to invest in a company that competed domestically inside China. I think that's virtually impossible.”

“It somehow, it doesn't happen in universities. It doesn't happen in government.”

“In retrospect, any applied engineering field was a bad idea. It was a bad idea to become a chemical engineer, you know, a mechanical engineer. AeroAstro was terrible. Nuclear engineering.”

“If you take the people who graduated from college in 2009, and you fast forward 12 years to 2021, the median person had more student debt 12 years later than they graduated with.”

“I don't think we are, but I think compared it's nothing compared to what it was at that time.”

“There was one of the investors I talked to years later who talked to us in summer of 2000 and said he didn't want to invest in the company because the CEO, Elon was living in a one bedroom condo in Palo Alto at the time, and the CEO was clearly lying to him be…”

“Opening a restaurant is my, sort of the paradigm example of an intensely competitive and really bad business idea.”

“Both Tesla and SpaceX were stories that involved complex coordination, where you needed to get a lot of different pieces to fit together in just the right way. And so if you ask, you know, what was the real breakthrough with Tesla, or the real breakthrough wit…”

“SpaceX was the first successful template to do it”

“In 2004, 2003, 2004, 2005, when we started Palantir the idea of trying to do a military related software startup. There was nobody who even wanted to give you money as a venture capitalist.”

“Another trend where I've tried investing some over, over the last decade is, you know, is, is all these marijuana related businesses. And it's like, yes, it's obviously like a big trend. But it's an obvious trend. And then It turned out to be extremely hard to…”

“It costs, you know, it costs to build a subway in Manhattan. It's like a billion dollars a mile.”

“It's in 2005 it was under Bush 43 that the bankruptcy laws Got rewritten in the U.S. Where you cannot discharge student debt even if you go bankrupt, and if you haven't paid it off by the time you're 65, your Social Security wage checks will be garnished.”

“The customer base was growing at sort of a five to seven percent daily compounding rate. It had hit a 100,000 users in, on February third, 2000, and got to a million by mid-April of 2000.”

“And so we closed on, yeah, we closed on a hundred million on Friday, March 31st, and the following Monday, the bottom fell out of the market.”

“We got to break even in September, 2001. We were the first company in the U.S. To file after nine 11, filed end of September.”

“Certainly, if you'd been able to keep it going as an independent company, it would be a lot bigger. 1012 years later”

“I think he had, it was like one third of it.”

“We ended up investing in SpaceX as Founders Fund in oh eight, sort of six years into the process, and people thought we were crazy to invest six years after they'd gotten started.”

“The last successful new car company in the U.S. Had been Jeep, which was started in 1941.”

“We've, you know, we've started to look at, we've started to look at this, yeah. It's definitely, yeah, it's all these challenges with it, but we've started to look at it.”

“The student debt was three hundred billion in 2000, It's basically close to two trillion at this point”

“If you signed up, you got 10 dollars. If you referred someone who signed up, you got 10 dollars. So we had a 20 dollar customer acquisition cost.”

“We did dial back the marketing pretty quickly, although there was there was there then emerged this very big fraud problem in rapid succession and so the burn stayed over ten million a month all the way through September, 2000.”

“Yeah, we'd started targeting eBay January, 2000. I'd say it was 30, 35% of the sellers on eBay were using us by April or May, so it was fairly heavily embedded.”