The Ledger, every show

“I mean, we put our money where our mouth is. We've been a buyer. So over, and that's again, like we a year ago when we were buyers, we still wouldn't have didn't conceive of that.”

“Our belief is that the foundation models are going to be the new hyperscalers.”

“The better in Anthropic was that they would be one of those companies and that they had the chance to compete at the one slot, which we very much still think they do.”

“In my mind, I'm thinking a year and I'm holding off whether that means 13 months, whether it's a calendar year or through the end of January, but I think it's that soon.”

“I think there's going to be a lot of trillion dollar businesses that are created from this.”

“I think the numbers right now, the top three LLMs, if you include you know, Anthropoc, OpenAI, and X in there, ah, are gonna raise a hundred billion dollars in this six month period”

“I think AI is going to do the same thing, that what it can do you know, with Service Titan, as they talk about automating the technician experience and the ability to go out there and have a co-pilot alongside of you.”

“That question's already being answered. It's not even a debate anymore, Harry. It's over. These tech solutions are absolutely addressing, you know, software, hardware, and services budgets comprehensively, and they're doing it in a very successful way.”

“I think we're going to see the era of the micro business. I think that we're going to have, you know, 10 person companies that are crossing billion dollar valuations and, you know, kids in schools are going to be able to launch businesses in real time in, in w…”

“We're seeing businesses go from zero to a hundred million in 1.5 years. That's the supernova profile.”

“And I assure you, one of the coolest things about the profile of anthropic and perplexity and Canvan, these businesses is the math actually pencils out.”

“The curve is still up into the right, without a doubt, and I do believe that we will cross over this term. You know, people use you know various different terms about you know, levels of reasoning and awareness and AGI and the like. I have no doubt we're, if w…”

“This maturation is going to make it tough in the middle.”

“It is one of the few asset cycles where past performance is an indicator of future success.”

“Vast majority are not going to get public and consolidation will make sense because at the core, a lot of these businesses are very high gross margin and are run pretty inefficiently because we've got a growth mindset and we're certainly not optimizing for cos…”

“Historically, it has underperformed the S&P and probably will again in this case but you'll make money.”

“Like, when you actually see the anthropic numbers that he's now sharing, and like, this is real, and, you know, their path to billions and billions in revenue, and, you know, really compelling unit economics, I just, we have never seen this in the history of o…”

“The average multiple is trading north of twenty-x revenue, and you look at a snowflake that's trading at 80 times revenue. That's not sustainable.”

“At this rate, it is quite possible that Azure competes for AWS for the top slot in the coming years. And we're already seeing signs of that on the enterprise side specifically.”

“In oh eight, we did see several venture debt providers, not the tier one folks, but the level below them block lines or recall lines. And in, in one very painful case in our portfolio, it killed the company, a company that should not have died because of the c…”

“So I think the, it's safe to assume that the new entrance or the fringe entrance in most cases are going to be the ones most impacted. That applies to venture firms, debt firms, corporate venture firms, et cetera. There, there's even potentially the crossover …”

“I do believe the economic impact from this is going to be unfortunately more significant when than people are digesting yet. And this could take several quarters and well into next year for the overall economy to get started again.”

“Whatever rich prices we're paying today, We will get rewarded many times over if we pick the winners and hold onto them long term, and so we're certainly anxious as everyone else is around the multiples. They are rich, but at the end of the day, I absolutely b…”

“You hear a lot about this idea of worker displacement around automation. Ah, we see the other side of this, though. The AI and machine learning and, ah, productivity gains that are coming in particular from this human and machine pairing. In areas where you've…”

“Prediction one is that this year and in the coming few years will be the era of the human-assisted AI. Take the most valuable knowledge workers, the high wage employees across your customer base, and figure out how to help them. Figure out how to take you know…”

“So we are entering an era where different interfaces, and in some case, no graphical interface, is the winning paradigm.”

“A number of these delivery businesses, as an example, have been targeted. And I suspect several of those will have unfortunate outcomes and will not have further capital available.”

“A year and a half ago, I had three CEOs in the same year tap out, including one that had to go away and needed real time.”

“I look at a company like a Canva, or I look at a company like Intercom that's at a scale where in some ways they're already becoming an incumbent in those markets, and yet they're disrupting themselves at awesome rates and have AI products that are already, yo…”

“We're over a trillion dollars In private market cap now among just the top 100 cloud AI companies right now which is just a astronomical number to consider.”

“We're seeing, you know, other firms adding asset management businesses and debt products and roll-ups and doing all sorts of things. You know, there's some kernels in there that we agree with. There's a lot in there we probably aren't going to pursue.”

“There are private cloud companies that now have line of sight, or in Canva's case and a few others, will be crossing the billion dollar ARR mark while still private.”

“They're certainly one of Stripe's largest customers, if not the largest, and yet it's a great relationship. And at any point, of course, Shopify could have brought that in house.”

“I do believe that the world is going to skew to a bimodal curve where there's going to be Super stage or regional firms. I put you in that bucket where you are going to be a fantastic early stage European partner for seed stage firms, and we look forward to co…”

“These companies are growing at north of 40% on the public side, and on the private side, usually growing 80 to a hundred percent plus for the best companies, and so you can absorb some multiple compression and still compound value and be a win for everyone inv…”

“And we do believe that within the next three years, cloud will become the dominant delivery model for all of software in this enabled cloud first world.”

“The other thing though, for those of you operating businesses that are already funded and are thinking through plans is that you're going to get a hall pass on the next few quarters in, in terms of the numbers. Now that doesn't help you if you're in a fundrais…”

“This by contrast is the fastest 30% plus decline by the broad market in history. I mean, this beats the great depression, the oh, wait, the dot com, et cetera.”

“I think the M&A market is going to be extremely active later this year and open much more aggressively than the IPO market will.”

“And we've actually empirically modeled this. If you look at founding dates of the great companies that we think of across tech, and it's amazingly even across cycles, what you tend to see those that exits do cluster.”

“And so there's this macro battle of risk going on with the legacy vendors, and there will be some fatalities there, but it's enabling the infrastructure service layer that now the pure place can continue to benefit from.”

“You're going to see these Ten billion dollar plus caliber companies starting to flip from private to public, and the lights will turn on on this segment in a way that public market investors and, frankly, the community more broadly doesn't yet fully appreciate”

“So the most recently announced one is a small company in Austin That people probably haven't heard of yet called scale factor, which I firmly believe will be a household name in the coming years.”

“And if you extrapolate this, take 10, take a third off the growth rate, 10 full points of CAGR, we still have a line of sight to crossing that trillion dollar milestone in the next few years as an industry.”

“Companies like Stripe and Adyen will certainly be multi-billion dollar successors.”

“And so we absolutely believe That applications more and more are going to layer in payment capabilities and find that as an upsell driver that's a hidden gem and massively expand your market size as a result.”

“In enterprise applications, we absolutely believe that screen lists will increasingly lead to success.”

“It's really the late stage private companies that are going to get squeezed the hardest in the coming months because they've had this reality distortion field in the jobs in the sense of valuations and operations in some cases. That were, that was really fuele…”