The Ledger, every show

“Oh, that's definitely going national.”

“The Andurl founding team are all so complimentary to each other and different, but respect each other so much and are good in different ways that Not any one of them, not any one of the four of them could have, like, pulled this off, but I do think that the co…”

“I don't think about reserves ever. Period. Like, I literally never think, I never think a second about reserves.”

“Loss ratios don't matter. Losing, I can't, you know, you don't want to lose a five hundred million dollar check, right? Because it's going to be then ridiculously hard for you to return that, to return multiples on that fund. Whereas, like, if you lose, in a f…”

“Enduro is going to be an extremely valuable company. I am, there's, yes, quite sure of that. We are not going to lose that two hundred million dollar check. That two hundred million dollars will turn into, you know, two billion.”

“Palmer is just one of the greatest technology innovators in history, period.”

“I think the government and the DOD want to work with Silicon Valley and innovative entrepreneurs. I think that the, it's ridiculous that, I don't think it is anymore, but it was so unpopular for a few years that people were like, oh, the government doesn't wan…”

“Venture capital to me is a Purely a game of upside maximization. And while this may be in trouble, you know, this may get me in trouble. I actually don't. Downside minimization is completely unimportant to me.”

“I didn't read a financial report ever. I still don't know how to read financial reports, right? The one time I ever had to do a spreadsheet, my wife had to do it for me, right?”

“This is going to impact the middle class way more than it's going to affect mobile billionaires.”

“A venture fund, like, three X's over the course of, like, 10 to 12 years, I don't even think that that beats the S&P. I'm pretty sure it, like, loses to a Vanguard no-load index fund.”

“Like, I would almost say that, like, having an awesome music department or an awesome art department is even more important than Having an awesome math program right now.”

“My partner, Peter Thiel is. Brilliant macroeconomist and probably the best in the business at this, and he can't even predict this, right? Like predicting macro is extremely hard.”

“With venture being about upside maximization, Are you really just looking for, like, a good deal, or do you just want to invest in the best companies? And I would argue it's all the latter.”

“If even the best companies want You know, end of 2021, beginning of 2022 prices where other comps in their market have gone down by 80%, then we're just, we're also just not going to play that game. Like, we don't have any pressure to invest capital.”

“And right now, I've personally slowed down investing a ton simply because you cannot get a good price on the best companies.”

“I don't think anybody can see that something is going to be, or they can say they've got their thesis and I, you know, whatever, but like, I don't think you can predict a hundred billion dollar companies at the seed stage. That's silly, but you can predict, He…”

“The part that's just harder and harder over the years as you do this longer and quite frankly get older is the seeing. You've got to keep your networks fresh. You've got to like make sure that you're somehow still connected, right? Cause your networks get stal…”

“You're trying to maximize your upside. You're not trying to minimize your downside. This is why I've never understood these like, oh, we're going to do a round with three X participating preferred and around with a whole bunch of structure. I mean, like I get …”

“Raise whatever fund size you can in order to like be comfortable writing a 25 to 30% of fund size check, right? Like if you're not comfortable writing a more than a five million dollar check, do not raise more than a twenty-five million dollar fund.”

“You have to actually be orders of magnitude better than the incumbents in order to win contracts legitimately, in order to really build a company in the space. It takes top-tier technologists to be able to do this, to be able to compete with the Lockheeds and …”

“I can't do it on Zoom, and I, therefore, I'm not really doing Zoom investing anymore, period.”

“For my job at this fund is to generate massive returns. And for our funds, you simply have to invest in the world's most important companies in order to generate those returns. It doesn't need to be quick. It doesn't need to be overnight. But long-term, they n…”

“Now, Founders Fund doesn't have any Monday morning partner meeting. We never have, and we never will.”

“These are the types of what we mean by complex coordination companies that once they've developed that the ability to operate in that complex way, it may, it's a huge moat. So that's a huge moat for us that other companies cannot simply clone. You can't just h…”

“There's a reason why Peter Thiel is the greatest venture capitalist in history, right?”

“When I did get to meet Elon and learn more about SpaceX, it was extremely clear That there was nobody else like him on the planet who could actually pull something like SpaceX off”

“It has, for sure.”

“Venture capital to me has put the most money into the best companies possible at the best price possible. Nowhere in that is like portfolio management and reserve calculations and ownership percentages and all that nonsense.”

“If SpaceX didn't work, Founders Fund would not exist. Like, we bet our careers, essentially, on SpaceX”

“You know, we put a lot of money into it. I think we put like 30 something percent of.”

“Fantasy does not really work well for other sports, and it works so well perfectly for football that it just gets people entertained and jazzed about the NFL who even otherwise wouldn't care about watching it, right? And I do think that, you know, the betting …”

“And that's why a lot of these esports things are pretty challenging other than for the game developers themselves, because they can sell a lot of copies of their games because parents buy kids games, right? But any other model in terms of the esports portion o…”

“So this concept of buy low, sell high, like using regular stock market phrases in venture to me just doesn't make any sense.”

“Our strategy has always been to distribute shares slash capital right when we can in companies simply because we don't think we know the public markets better than anybody else.”

“We've had so many discussions about this and about what the last couple of years means, and did we go too fast in 20, 21? And of course we did”

“If we are good investors, we raise another fund, which we've done, and there's no reason the best companies can't go across multiple funds.”

“Brand can be noise and detrimental for the seeing part for the diligence, you know, for the you know, seeing companies part, but the for the sourcing”

“If it's a unique strategy that is differentiated from the current partners that are here, we are interested in hiring that person, and that's really paid off. Like our focus on not hiring clones, our focus on not hiring just people who are generically good, ou…”

“I can't stand boards. Private company boards, like, I would much rather do strategy dinners with founders, and they know that.”

“Meeting a founder in person is just critical. I was terrible at this job during COVID, right? Like when you couldn't meet founders in person. I'm just terrible at this job without being able to meet founders in person.”

“Where I'm best is at writing these two, three, four hundred million dollar checks. And so, you know, if I'm using my own, practicing what I preach, it's like, if I'm comfortable writing a, let's say the most, the biggest check I'm comfortable writing is a five…”

“I wish I had written 500, I wish we had written a five hundred million dollar check into Airbnb at the, you know, one and a half billion dollar round instead of a, whatever, a hundred and fifty million dollar check.”

“If you are the type of person that is going to do work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, and make sure it's perfect before you invest or make sure it's perfect before you hire, you are just not going to do well in this business. Period.”

“We don't have hubris about knowing the public markets better than anybody else with the fact that we were able to distribute. You know, end of 2021, when a lot of people kind of held was worked out in our favor this time.”

“Usually the best board members, not, not necessarily investors, right, but the best board members are ones who, Really know the sector that the company is, and know people in that sector really well, such that they can easily connect said company with other pe…”

“I don't know how to operate companies. I'm not going to seed your top of funnel. I'm not going to Do a bunch of like low level operations work for the company. But what I am pretty good at is, is strategy.”

“I think it took Andrel two years. The speed at which these guys were able to break in to these large government contracts was astounding.”