The Ledger, every show

“Right now with AI, everything kind of looks like a sustaining innovation if you're an incumbent, which is like, instead of a user pressing the buttons in the application, let's have an agent run through the API and operate as if they were that user. And so all…”

“And it's like, okay, your job is now orchestration, you know, integration of work, planning, task management, reviewing, auditing, and that will, you know, that will radically change work.”

“Interestingly, there's probably, it probably behooves us to not over rotate on transforming yet internally for any given company, simply because the technology is changing so fast that like you probably wouldn't want to snap the line right now, run your whole …”

“And so I could underwrite a 10 X growth of the amount of custom software that gets written and the fact that these core systems don't go away because there's just actually going to be way more software in the world that gets created.”

“Now, that translates fine to agents, but I still would then bet on that, that vertical player doing that, as opposed to somebody prompts their way into ChatGPT to build a FDA compliance agent. I would still largely bet on, you know, complianceagent.ai to do th…”

“The theory of, like, the full abstraction away from the interface, and it's all an API call, I don't think that happens, and so, ironically, probably what will happen is in a couple years from now, we will see agents, like, rebuild entire web pages and dashboa…”

“What we do too many times with an AI is we like look at today's way of working and we're just like, AI will come in and take 30% of that. And it's like, no, no, no, we'll just do totally different things with AI.”

“So they'll hire more people and those will be, you'll have new types of jobs. Like we'll have jobs for people just to manage agents and Like, you'll have operations teams.”

“Like, I think we're all going to increasingly look almost like professional services companies, probably to some extent, because you're bringing now solutions to the customer as opposed to just a use our software. Hopefully you have the people to implement it.…”

“I'm actually very bullish right now. You know, there's like a little bit of a meme of like these AI coding tools. You can just swap them out. I think that's like a temporary thing that you'll see on Twitter or X or whatever. I think the mode is actually fantas…”

“This is a window in the next couple of years where I think we'll have the defining platforms get built and effectively cemented, assuming that they stay current, right? If you, if you're asleep at the wheel in this space, it's over, right? You only have, you c…”

“I would actually argue that MCP is a thing that only enhances the underlying moat. Because data wants to be free. That doesn't mean that there's no moat around managing the data and making it useful. It wants to be incorporated in some other workflow. So for u…”

“That, that ends up with just lots of economic distortions that everybody on the right would have called, you know, the left socialists. For trying to kind of implement central planning around supply chains.”

“You know, I would argue, you know, strongly that's a massive TAM increase because now software starts to go after labor spend.”

“I don't like the word replace because I think actually most of the upside is actually going to be for companies that now deploy labor at things that they wouldn't have deployed labor at before.”

“If you're an international entrepreneur right now and you're watching this, you're like, I can now finally outcompete the U S because they've just going to create friction for their own businesses.”

“The difference is the energy is very different where I think most companies I meet with and happen to be in New York and meeting lots of banks. The energy is like absolutely in the category of how many use cases can I apply this to? How do I start to lean in m…”

“Without chat GPT, none of this would have happened.”

“AI coding is very clearly in the pragmatists. You know, get up co-pilot now, I don't know, three years old cursor's flying off your shelves, wind service flying off the shelf, you know, replit, all these guys are kind of being, you know, used everywhere. So yo…”

“So, so this is the part that will take years to fully figure out and get right.”

“I think we could easily be two years from now where you just feel totally comfortable that like all the software you use can talk to all the other software in an agentic way.”

“You will grow faster because you're entering new markets, but you won't grow faster because there's some kind of like magical AI premium on your software. And those are two things to kind of decouple, which is like the price that you can charge because you hav…”

“I just don't think you can build a social network where, where financial You know, where monetization or incentives is at the core of the network. I think people have to join these things because they want the utility of whatever the network is.”

“Adding a financial incentive sort of creates this very perverse dynamic where, where sort of, you know, you want to invite 10 friends and they invite 10 friends and then the early people get all the money and then the later people don't get any of the money. A…”

“There'll be lots of companies that just blow billions of dollars doing, you know, training runs of a model that get, you know, supplanted instantly by Lama.”

“Zuck is our counter pressure on the price of AI right now, and I think that he has a way of monetizing AI that is, I mean, Google kind of has a similar thing, but they're, they have a more existential challenge that I think they're actually doing relatively we…”

“There's a classic, you know, sort of reflex within, within probably Democrat Party on, on, at this point, just because of Elon's support of Trump, that, that if something is a, is an Elon project, they're gonna, they're sort of gonna instantly respond no matte…”

“You eventually have the underlying service with enough competition, you have the underlying service eventually trend toward the cost of the infrastructure. So, so what we should expect is that the price of a token in AI land, you know, basically will be whatev…”

“I just don't think you can build a social network where financial You know, where monetization or incentives is at the core of the network. I think people have to join these things because they want the utility of whatever the network is. And that is how you s…”

“But like when you then compound, you know, Elon in there, it's like night and day in terms of, you know, one side is going to just reduce the regulation. It's going to be driving, it's going to be a growth oriented, you know, more dynamic, you know, kind of dr…”

“And I think it's a, it's clearly a distinct philosophy from what the Democrats pitch. And it actually aligns, frankly, more to my instincts, but there's other things on the Democrat side that kind of social topics and others that, that, you know, sort of have …”

“There's no question that we have let the party, slide, you know, out of being a sort of firmly pro-business, you know, pro-tech party at times. There's been issues around, you know, regulation that, that absolutely blocks the kind of innovation that we need.”

“But I think for like the pure play horizontal LLMs we, I think those will largely be subsumed by the big players with maybe room for one, two, three independent companies at scale that are not in the hyperscalers, but there will not be room for 50 companies. T…”

“AI is kind of the final I would say maybe death knell to that particular approach. If you're, if your data is not in the cloud or in a cloud ready form, I think it's gonna be extremely hard for you to get the full value of AI on your information.”

“But I would say I, I'm seeing no signs of AI models, slow down, anything plateau in terms of the innovation curves that that we're seeing.”

“At least so far empirically, every time that we've done that, we will actually reinvest in that area of the business.”

“And this is a, this is again, one of these windows Where 10, 20, 30, 50 companies will get started that, that were like the window in two, in the mid 2000 where like all of today's SaaS companies basically emerged in like a five year period essentially. And we…”

“I don't think ChatGPT itself is going to become a language tutor. I think it'll have the full capability to be a language tutor at the model level.”

“If what they have is better for the product that you're trying to deliver to customers, that is the only way that you're going to survive this.”

“So the I think the thing that will 100% guaranteed happen, like in five years from now, this will be the most obvious thing of all time. But when you look at like RPA, you had to be, you know, a relatively deep expert in, in RPA. You had to be like a midsize o…”

“Now, now Forex is clearly way, way too undervalued. It, you should be in the kind of, you know, six or eight X range.”

“I think the business model is still very good for the top, let's say five or so model providers where, where you will run into a question is, you know, could you be the 15th LLM, you know you know, training company. That, that seems tough, especially if your j…”

“And the equation goes from, okay, I got to call the HR team. I've got to make sure we have budget. We have to go hire a lot of people to now it's like, well, do you want like a hundred leads or a thousand leads or 10,000 leads? Not, and that's not going to be …”

“I don't think there's a totally, 100% classic innovator dilemma issue with the move to AI with Google. I think on the other end of this the business model could be as good, if not better.”

“I think unfortunately there's like an inevitable, there's going to be an inevitable, you know, that the music will stop at some point on, on, on this particular dynamic. Open AI, you know, aside, just because they actually do have the traction, they probably d…”

“Yeah, so I, I'm probably more in the, you know, 30 to 50% camp in, like, in the best case scenario right now with where we're at, and I think still coding is the number one use case”

“So like we're increasingly not limited by the architecture of the technology. And now we're just limited by like, can Jensen make these things cheaper? Can the, you know, can the engineers at open AI have more efficient model algorithms?”

“You do want it to be kind of just healthy to be at a six or eight X revenue multiple, and I make, I'm making up those numbers, but like, but that, you know, that tends to be a safe range if you assume the company's going to get 20, 30, 40% operating margin, gr…”