The Ledger, every show
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks, across all 44 shows. Pick shows below, then mix any filter with any other.
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every show 44 of 44
George: Anthropic and OpenAI add more monthly revenue than tech giants
“Anthropic and OpenAI are adding more revenue per month than Meta, Google, or Microsoft.”
David George: Anthropic and OpenAI combined run rate could hit $200B
“And I wouldn't be surprised if the combination of those two companies is doing two hundred billion of revenue run rate.”
David George: AI market is not currently in a bubble
“I feel pretty confident saying that we're not in a bubble right now.”
George: AI model companies are adding more revenue than public software combined
“The model companies are adding more than the entire public software universe in terms of revenue added, you know, combined.”
George: Top AI IPOs will individually exceed all recent VC IPOs combined
“We actually did a similar analysis where we looked at all of the VC backed IPOs that happened over the last six years. And if you sum all of them up, they're A little over a trillion dollars. Like that's probably gonna be smaller than any of the three of the l…”
George: AI coding assistant Cursor has reached billions in revenue
“Cursor, as an example, is, you know, billions of dollars of revenue. And they're very small, and it's very early in their life.”
George: OpenAI and Anthropic added half of public software's 2025 net revenue
“Public software companies added forty six billion dollars of revenue in 20, 25. If you just add up OpenAI and Anthropic on their, on a run rate basis, they added almost half of that.”
a16z's larger venture funds consistently outperform its smaller funds
“Our funds consistently beat small, large, Diversified, concentrated venture funds. So our larger funds have outperformed our smaller ones, and our larger ones actually have similar multiples of money to our smaller ones across, across strategies.”
George: Aggressive crossover venture funds actually generate good returns
“First, I think there's a little bit of a misperception in the market about some of those firms who have been more aggressive recently. Their returns are pretty good. They've done a good job.”
George predicts AI wave will create over $25T in new market cap
“The last cycle created 25 trillion in market cap, new market cap, and a bunch of that went to the incumbents. But a lot of it went to startups and the new startups, and, you know, each one of these subsequent waves gets bigger than the prior one, and so, you k…”
George predicts consumer AI's final form will be proactive agents, not chatbots
“The end use case for consumers is not going to be a chatbot interface. Like that's the skeuomorphic version. We're going to have a native version. It's going to be proactive. It's going to do work on our behalf.”
George predicts robotics will surpass language AI categories within ten years
“We are nowhere on robotics, but I think robotics is going to be bigger than the language stuff. And I think it's going to happen in the next 10 years.”
The AI Market Will Be Non-Zero-Sum Across Labs, Open Source, and Apps
“Like, this is not an or thing. It's an and thing, right? Like, this is an and thing. Frontier's gonna work really well. Like, N minus one models are gonna work really well. Open source is gonna work really well. There's gonna be a bunch of application companie…”
Top a16z Portfolio Engineers Now Write Over 90% of Code With AI
“Our most sophisticated engineers, you know, were doing whatever, 20% of their code, you know, with AI to like, you know, whatever, 90 plus.”
AI Compute Capacity Will Remain Massively Undersupplied Through 2028
“So it seems more likely than given that fact pattern, if you go back to just the sort of macro situation that we're in, that we're, we under build on the supply side. For like through 28. And by the way, like there's no capacity available with all the forecast…”
George: Fewer than five companies currently offer frontier AI models
“Right now the number is smaller. It's not five. There's a tremendous amount of inelasticity for frontier intelligence right now.”
George: Scaled data center capacity unavailable until late 2028 or early 2029
“You can't get data center capacity at scale until late 28, early 29 right now, and that's just a fact.”
George: AI market will remain supply-constrained rather than bubble
“But I think it's more likely we remain supply constrained for the next three years than then we end up in bubble territory.”
David George: Top AI companies outperform SaaS while spending less on S&M
“The best AI companies that are growing the fastest are not the ones spending the most amount of money on sales and marketing, and they're spending less money on sales and marketing than their SaaS counterparts. And yet they're growing much, much faster.”
David George: AI will be the biggest model buster of his career
“Most importantly, we think that AI is going to be, you know, the biggest model buster that I've seen in my career, certainly.”
George: Oracle will be cash flow negative for years due to CapEx
“They're going to go cashflow negative for many years to come.”
David George: AI model companies will add 75-80% of public software's net revenue in 2026
“And I think if you were to do that same comparison for 2026, all of the entire public software industry, I mean, SAP, this is not just SaaS, like including SAP and older software companies. I think the AI companies, the model companies will be something like 7…”
George: $4.8T AI CapEx requires $1T annual AI revenue by 2030
“So current estimates put cumulative hyperscaler CapEx at a little less than five trillion by 20 30. So if you do napkin math on that to achieve a 10% hurdle rate on that 4.8 trillion or almost five trillion of investment, annual AI revenue would have to hit ab…”
George: AI CapEx payback will occur between 2030 and 2040
“I think the payback of this probably happens, you know, over a longer period of time, like, you know, between 2030 and 20 40 as well.”
a16z View: AI will become a ubiquitous utility like electricity or Wi-Fi
“Our house view now is that AI is going to end up like, You know, electricity or wifi. Like if you're getting, if you're accessing, you know, electricity at somebody's house, you're not like, Hey, let me chip in, you know, a few pennies for, you know, sitting i…”
Over half of global internet users have already used AI tools
“It's probably well over half of the global internet population has used AI tools already.”
AI infrastructure will be utilized more predictably than early internet broadband
“That is heartening to me that the supply build out will be utilized. Maybe in a more predictable way than, you know, broadband in the early internet build out days just cause it, you know, it's built on the back of the previous infrastructure stuff.”
George: Enterprises will not vibe code their own Salesforce replacements
“I don't think that like companies are going to vibe code up like their salesforce.com. That's just not worth it.”
George: a16z expects a 3x to 4x return on Databricks investment
“I happen to think that the return profile of that recent one in Databricks is, is very attractive. But, you know, we don't want an entire portfolio of things that we think are like pretty safe two X's, you know, where I think the question is, can we make five …”
53% of dollar gains in top recent IPOs came post-Series C
“We actually just looked at the 50 top IPOs from 2017 to 2025. And if you disaggregate where the dollars of return come from, 47% of the dollars of gain happens between the seed in the series B and 53% of the dollars of gain happened from series C plus.”
Most AI value creation will happen in private markets, not public
“And if you look at what's happening in the private versus public markets now, the size of the winners from a new tech wave, that's going to happen in the private markets.”
David George says no public CEO he knows regrets going public
“So, you know, I tell our CEOs all the time, I've been fortunate to work with a bunch of public companies. Never one of them has said, I regret going public.”
AI-native software companies will reach larger market caps than SaaS giants
“And so I have to think that this next wave probably presents the opportunity for this next generation to be much larger than the previous generation.”
Winning AI applications are growing three times faster than predecessor SaaS startups
“For most of these companies that we've backed, these winning apps, they're growing faster, three X faster, you know, than predecessor SaaS and cloud companies.”
Foundation model API providers will eventually operate as a high-margin oligopoly
“I think the market structure will end up sort of like cloud for the models where, you know, cloud costs for the average end customer are fine. And, you know, cloud's an oligopoly and they make high profits. I think the model companies, you know, that serve API…”
Independent AI application software companies will win across almost every category
“We fully changed our mind. I think there's going to be application software companies built on top of models in pretty much every direction.”
Robotics will become the largest category in artificial intelligence within 10 years
“You know, we have not made a large investment in robotics, but I think it's going to be the largest category in AI, B to C, B to B. You know, there's still kind of debate on what the right form factors are. Whether it's at home help, whether it's industrial, l…”
George: Future AI Interaction Will Shift from Reactive Chatbots to Proactive Systems
“I don't think that the future of how we interact with AI is going to be a chat pot. Like, I just think that's way too limiting. I think the big shift will be a sort of what is reactive today to something that's proactive in the future.”
George: Next-gen enterprise AI companies will surpass previous software giants
“The next generation of business companies can still be much bigger than the previous generation of companies given the capability gains.”
George: Waymo surpassed Lyft in San Francisco Bay Area market share
“There are something like 50,000 Lyft drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area and Waymo overtook them in market share.”
George: AI model industry will support multiple players like cloud computing
“On the model side so far, the way it looks like it's played out is It will be more like the cloud industry. Like it's not going to be a winner take all. Certain technical advantages seem limited in timeframe, right? Like there's kind of, you know, always this …”
George: AI companies will settle at 50% gross margins versus SaaS 80%
“I think there'll be lower margin businesses than SAS businesses. You know, maybe they end up as 50% margin companies as opposed to 80. But the size of the impact and the usage and the amount that they'll be able to capture to our point on business model earlie…”
George: AI model capabilities on higher-order tasks double every seven months
“I think if you give it a set of tasks that are slightly higher order, I think the models are currently doubling their capabilities every seven months.”
George: Google's Gemini models are currently state-of-the-art across multiple domains
“They actually have the best models right now. Like, they have the leading, you know, the state-of-the-art models in Gemini across a bunch of different domains.”
George: AI business models will adopt freemium over simple subscriptions
“And so, you know, I think there's a question of how it will play out. Will it just be a simple subscription or is there gonna be something more You know, freemium that comes along. I would bet on the latter. I would bet on the latter.”
George: AI market value will accrue primarily to applications and chips
“We're very high conviction that at the application layer you will have tremendous value and at the chip layer you will have tremendous value.”
George says post-reasoning AI models drove an adoption takeoff for Harvey
“Now, fast forward, post reasoning models, like that totally flipped. And you could see, you know, absolute takeoff of adoption, right? And so a bunch of different things happen at the same time. Lawyers got way more value out of the product. You could see it i…”