The Ledger, every show

“I have negotiated one term sheet in a sauna with the founder. It's a great idea, because, especially if they're not used to the sauna, because you have the edge. You can just keep cranking it up.”

“This is one of the really strong anti-substack theories, which is like, you can't as an individual support these lawsuits. Like you can't afford it. It's actually quite expensive to be in the news gathering. It isn't quite risky. And so if you're going to do i…”

“You know, the YC story of all you need is product market fit and move on. I think it's just like a very antiquated story.”

“That, like, that was, like I mean, I understand it's still probably number one in the free app store or something, but, like, it's not gonna work.”

“This is our, from my perspective, the cynical take, which I think there's some validity to, is really what we're doing is the exact equivalent of the Chinese housing bubble, just our version of it, right? Which is like the Chinese needed to keep their economy …”

“If the markets are ultimately rational, it's very hard to see how capital gets rewarded on this long term.”

“All of the people who are, you know, some version of like, how do I sell data or give data or give context to chat GPT and get paid cents on the dollar are stupid, right? And like, it should be exactly the way around, which is you just use them as commodity ar…”

“Like when you back it all out, you're like, none of these are actually good businesses. They're kind of like product and growth shims towards something, but no one can really tell you what that something exactly is, right? Or how it's going to work as a busine…”

“Like, I don't think anyone thinks that just expanding LLMs and the current technology was just like, there was an era of people were just like, just throw two orders of magnitude, more compute at it, and the game is over. And like, I just, I think that narrati…”

“There's no one who can raise, who can do it on the scale of Elon and Sam right now, or at least demonstrating it. And so I think that's actually the real point of threat or the reason that there's probably so much animosity is like, look, they're just too simi…”

“I don't think anyone currently believes there's any sort of like long-term defensible important thing specifically around LLMs.”

“They're not going to break up the big tech companies because like, that's like the whole point is like they're trading partners of the big tech companies. They want to see them Win, in a lot of ways, on a global basis”

“Gary Tan, who runs YC, is a response to this, which is, PSA, do not attend SLO's Etiquette School”

“That's definitely what's gonna happen.”

“There are all these smart people in teams that like follow this like incubatory, listen to your customer, customer research, like iterate, solve a problem for demo day. And what they don't realize is they're signing themselves up for like a decade of working o…”

“The problem is bankers are still just pricing based on what things are worth when they should be pricing based on, like, mimetic warfare and, like, community shit to get the bump and let the degens pay the price, right, for their silliness.”

“The entire thing with AI is it's a great way to sink money and power and compute into a war with itself that produces no value.”

“I would go super under on Stripe going out. Those guys are too smart. They have a totally different plan. They have no interest in the public market. And there's no point to them in going public. There's plenty of liquidity in their currency.”

“The big companies win, which has been my talk track on this forever, which is like, you know, again, it's like playing Warcraft, too. As long as your cash balance keeps going up, and even better, when you hire super fancy researchers, the market rewards you an…”

“Like, the thing that's kind of wild to me though, and all this stuff is like, it's somehow still like trading as a trillion dollar company. Like, it's like, it's ridiculous, right? The whole thing, right? And like, it's transparently ridiculous.”

“And like, that's why I think ultimately, like, the people like Google and Facebook do win, because like, they have a money making machine that regenerates the money. And so the money is free for them. Whereas like, if you're open AI, and you have to raise it, …”

“If you can't, like, build applications with AI to do your own job better, you just are not good at your job anymore.”

“I bet it's going to be like 99%. That's how STEM works.”

“You have to go back to human based networks, because you can't trust anything you see or anything you're sent from an unvalidated source, right? So you end up with a very Going back to a more structured society versus a more open society because of AI.”

“Capitalism tends towards efficiency, but that's the whole beauty of it, but like requires structural inefficiency to profit, right? If there's no structural inefficiency, there's no profit, right? Which is why people talk about how AI is communist and, you kno…”

“I know full well, I know this is an investor. That the marks that you made up or the marks of SoftBank listed something somewhere are completely irrelevant. In fact, the negative signal in a lot of cases. So like the marks are irrelevant and stupid.”

“I don't know how you make multiples on a billion dollars consistently, right? In VC. I think once you're doing 10, you're playing a completely different game of asset gathering and asset deployment where you no longer have the same Goals. So I personally think…”

“Most of the money at Series A is completely wasted, right?”

“Is Chime an important company? I just don't see it, right? Like, is it, you know, it's good company? Like, they provided some banking products to unbanked people or underbanked people. I get it. It's not bad. They did a good job. They built a good app. But lik…”

“The other thing is people are short only fans because they have AI Google Gaga glasses on and they're like, this is going away because it's all wrong. Like that completely misunderstands. It's like literally the opposite. Like AI is amazing for only fans.”

“Well, same moment, I think is thematically correct and just annoying, but like, I think it's like, it's one of those things where you're like, okay, I'm a simultaneously going to massively accelerate the problem of fake things on the internet. And then also at…”

“Like I've actually come out of this exercise more cynical even than I was a month ago. Right. Or even a few weeks ago that any of these are going to be good, sustainable businesses, despite the fact it's clearly going to be everywhere in the air.”

“They're like, I totally buy the like SaaS is dead story.”

“I mean, that's obviously my pattern, which is, like, AI broadly is, like, not a good seed investment. It's an opportunity full stop, right?”

“You know, I'd actually argue that AI is kind of like mobile. It's not disruptive. It's great tech to be clear. It's important, but just as the internet, I would say that just as like mobile was just More internet and pervasive internet. AI is just like more te…”

“I honestly think what we're going to ultimately find is AI just gets sprinkled in everything. It's not that disruptive to the overall system.”

“I think what we're going to find is that, you know, a, The market, most of those funds are going away because they don't have that and they're not going to be.”

“You know, what does Tesla work from a DCF perspective? We talked about public markets and how you value these things. Not a fraction of what it's traded at, right?”

“The Mars narrative is so frustrating because it's so disingenuous on one hand, right? Like, it's just, like, the predictions are out of control. Like, it doesn't make any sense from, like, a fundamentals perspective.”

“The entertainment economy has got to go to zero, right? It's just an AI jerk off feed. It's going to be highly personalized, like whatever, like there's going to be no, there's no, there's, it's not like, I can't, I just don't imagine a world where there's any…”

“All Tesla is, is a very overpriced option on, like, robotic infinity self-driving robots, right?”

“When Masa buys, you sell the fuck out, right? And like, this would be the moment.”

“It's basically AOL Time Warner. If Time Warner had a shitload of debt and like the upshot is, is like the cheap money right now is for the AI thing.”

“And so because they have cheap money, they're buying all these like real assets with super cheap money. And That's gonna work out terribly for most investors.”

“So there's a pattern matching of all these exacts informed people going over there, which has absolutely nothing to do with like actually the quality of the business. Right. But it's purely about chasing that experience again at all costs, which is why you see…”

“I wouldn't be surprised if the number go up, get to run up higher, but I don't think it's fundamentally going to like be in the pantheon of important companies.”

“If it went away tomorrow, there's like four others that are basically the same thing.”

“This is like the last death knell of Zerp where people are like, fuck, we need to stuff a bunch of cash somewhere. Right. Ideally with downside protection, which is nice because we're buying like fucking real estate and servers and power.”