The Ledger, every show

“So probably of the unicorn class, I would bet that maybe five percent will ever be able to go public.”

“On the other side, you have things like Zendesk, right? Where it's like, how many licenses per seat do you need of Zendesk? If now every customer support ticket can be answered automatically, you need zero license. Like their revenue could go down a hundred pe…”

“And I think the metrics that they're kind of faking right now is it's like what percentage of our users are using AI and that's not using Gemini as a DAU. I'm sure of that. It's just like they have like an AI summary, something, something in there, but they're…”

“Well, and that's the thing, it's like, you know, software, like I'm very confident that all of the banks Cannot build software, will not be able to build software, will not build software.”

“And then it's like, do you want a coupon code? Oh, why? Yes, I do. Why would I not want a coupon code? 10% off, click here. You go click here. What does it do? It redirects you to an affiliate page. It puts a cookie on your machine. It redirects you back to th…”

“The real estate prices would crash, I guess, that, that would probably be the biggest one, because location, location, location would be shrunk down to, like, location doesn't matter.”

“The highest MDRs are actually for-profit education institutions. So some of them are, like, 50, like, I mean, I don't like these guys in particular, but, like, University of Phoenix.”

“And like, I think to me, one of the coolest things about a firm to this day is it has negative customer acquisition cost. I mean, it is paid to acquire a customer.”

“Because the per seat pricing, like if Zendesk said, we're just gonna charge you per seat per month for the current thing, you know, never make a change to our code or our pricing, that revenue stream is a hundred percent going to zero.”

“The vast majority of net new revenue that's happening in software land is actually coming from AI, both at the application layer and the infrastructure layer.”

“We're seeing the exact opposite, and I'll show two things. So there's a company called Ramp and they are kind of credit card expense management products, and you see this giant tick up in January of twenty-twenty-five”

“Something like 15% of adults on planet Earth now use ChatGPT every single week.”

“You're gonna hire a lot of AI. You're not going to get rid of a lot of humans.”

“I'm very, very bullish on incumbents. I hope I can say that because I don't think that, I think NetSuite is going to figure out 15 different ways to monetize with AI. I think that QuickBooks, Intuit has this goldmine on their hands where they're just gonna sta…”

“Somebody is going to out Salesforce, Salesforce, not for the hostages that they have, but is going to build the greenfield version of Salesforce because how is that possible? Everybody hates using Salesforce. There's a new company that's going to do this bette…”

“I could build a software product in like two weeks. That would have taken me two years. So that's going to massively increase the pressure on the application layer.”

“I actually gave a, I gave a talk to the exec team at JP Morgan about this, right? They're like, you know, what part of our business is going to be, you know, least touched by AI? And I said, you know, wealth management, right? Because what is wealth management…”

“It is just so consensus, like cloud was not consensus, mobile was not consensus, and that's why the incumbents kind of screwed up.”

“Is Adobe gonna sell as many seats if now you don't have to hire as many graphics designers? Or is Zendesk going to sell as many seats if the, Software just answers all the queries. Like, the answer is no.”

“So I think that will probably play out the same way here, because you just can't have a market where you have everybody lost leading and nobody's big enough to get any kind of scale effects.”

“Largely what it means is that people are going to be like 10 times more productive where I can't hire anybody to do this job, but I can hire AI to do it.”

“There's a piece that we wrote a little while ago showing that the price of housing in the Bay Area has declined massively in the past 25 years. If you're like, no, no, it hasn't. It's gone off. If you price it in Apple stock and Google stock, right?”

“There's a rumor that the Navier-Stokes equation is going to be solved by DeepMind, which would be huge.”

“If chat GPT gets, it gets that going, which I think is one of their top priorities, then like that's going to really steal the monetization engine bike. From Google.”

“So my thesis is that almost every software company has basically taken a filing cabinet and turned it into a database, and this is where the 2.2 trillion dollars of market cap has come from, this is where the three hundred billion dollars in annual software re…”

“Workday could probably triple their revenue if they start doing this because they're already the system of record.”

“They are starting to lose some of the free, but not any of them immune, right? They're losing some of these informational queries, like who won the Oscar in 1977, like that's not a monetizable query.”

“It is a very, very unique business model that is somewhat of a, it will stand the test of time and I think it's AI proof.”

“Now you have software agents that are effectively doing what for 65 years have been human work.”

“So that's why, you know, Salesforce, it's a two hundred billion dollar plus public company. If they don't do this right, they could lose all of their revenue or most of it. If they do it really well, they can 10 X the revenue.”

“I can't see a scenario where prices are more expensive than humans, or where prices don't just keep going down.”

“Contrast that with the other company that I co-founded a firm where we get paid to acquire customers in contrast to every other lending company where they have to pay a lot of money to acquire customers.”

“And actually, you know, in Australia, where interchange went down dramatically, it's like 50 basis points. Rewards went away. You didn't get your miles anymore. And then it was a giant transfer of wealth from the banks to the merchants, but none of that went b…”

“Exactly. It's probably going to go to buybacks M&A and dividends. And a lot of that is just kind of like reshuffling as opposed to actually building anything new.”

“Microsoft, in my opinion, never really They never did the same amount of control. Like, they never said, hey, this software product cannot be downloaded onto your Windows PC.”

“Like, so, Australia has interchange at 49 and a half basis points by law, and now, I mean, and this is not me supporting Visa. It's more of, It's very peculiar that you have an industry where when prices go down, consumers can be worse off. In Australia, now t…”

“I think it's going to happen in the U.S. Eventually.”

“You're probably not going to see somebody who's going to take over and take on Chase directly. It's more of, you'll see minor things like Lending Club that attack little bits and pieces of its business.”

“But the main thing that's going to change this is the software to identify, okay, we think that you are a positive quality payer. We see what's going on in your bank account. We see things that are just much, much better than what FICA can provide to us.”

“I was the one that coined this term”

“In the future, or even increasingly the present, you're gonna buy your house from, or sell your house to a company.”

“So this is the most frequently occurring number in a big, big list is zero. So if you find like a random real estate agent in Washington state, the highest chance number of transactions that they've made last year is zero.”

“So turns out in Sweden homeowners are paying one and a half percent if they want to sell their house. Even Canada, our northern neighbor has figured this out. They're only paying three percent and that keeps dropping. And the United States seems to be very stu…”

“I'd be surprised if we only have the large five incumbent technology platforms and there's not a sixth or a seventh or maybe there are only five because one of those gets displaced. Within a couple of years.”

“Bitcoin has not worked as a currency, but I believe it has worked and will continue to work as a store of value.”

“I'm just going to go tap into an ICO, and then they raise a hundred million dollars, and they don't know what to do with it, and they have no experience whatsoever. Like, sometimes that's not, I mean, maybe those will end well, but I would take the other side …”

“For us, it doesn't matter if we invest at twelve million pre or fifteen million pre or eighteen million pre. Like, there's really no difference. Like, we're optimizing for ownership, and that's what we really care about.”

“The cost of acquiring customers for their lending product is zero.”