The Ledger, every show

“I would posit that about half of the unicorns are not worth a billion dollars or more. In other words, 50% of the companies that are valued in the private markets as being worth more than a billion shouldn't be worth more than a billion.”

“And my sense is in 28, there's increasing talk about also trying to add a exit tax in California. So if you actually try and leave, they'll, they'll try and take a big chunk as sort of a penalty for that.”

“At least for now, it looks like effectively the Chinese government is subsidizing at least a large subset of these models, and that subsidy or surplus is effectively just being passed on to US enterprises We're adopting these models. In other words, it's a way…”

“Palmer Luckey is another one where I backed Andrew in the very first round, and he was controversial given what happened at Meta early on with him. I think in both cases, they basically got thrown under the bus in one form or another.”

“And the dangerous part in AI was there's state level initiatives that have been very negative or could have been very negative for AI. I think Scott Wiener proposed one in California. I think there's others that have been proposed in other states that you coul…”

“If you look at the big tech companies, for example, right now, many, not all of them, but many of them could probably shrink by 70% and be more effective, right?”

“It's a very traditional form of regulatory capture. If you have a big pharma company, they work with the government to prevent other entrants into the industry. And this is exactly what it felt like is at least partially happening. In the AI world. Now that ma…”

“And so I think AI is dramatically under-hyped, because most enterprises have not done anything in it, and that's where all the money is, all the changes, all the impact is, all the jobs, everything, right?”

“You actually should bring your professional self to work. You should bring the person who's going to be effective in a work environment and can work with all sorts of diverse people and be effective and doesn't bring all their morals and values and everything …”

“One argument I make sometimes is that big tech is effectively a big experiment in UBI, universal basic income, for people who went to good schools, right? You're literally just giving money to people for not doing very much.”

“If you look at what Musk did at Twitter, Where they cut 80% or whatever it was. I wouldn't be surprised if you could do things that are pretty close to that at a lot of the big tech companies.”

“If you look at the biggest successes in the startup world over time, they were either solo founders or very unequal founders. So that, and there's counter examples to that, of course, but that was Amazon, right? Jeff Bezos was the only founder. Microsoft, it w…”

“The degree to which we effectively had different forms of UBI or universal basic income in different sectors of the economy. Government is a clear example where there's enormous waste, fraud, grift, et cetera, happening. Parts of academia, if you just look at …”

“AI is in my opinion, dramatically under hyped right now. And I think part of that is number one, we're seeing massive actual revenue and impact without that much adoption, right?”

“You have these steps, and so it's this ladder that you're climbing, and eventually you're going to hit a point where it can do all of human services, right? And I don't know if that's GPT seven equivalent or eight or six or 10 or whatever, but we're going to g…”

“There's advances in science where, you know, you can now grow I can't if they use lamb or what, you know, up to some, you know, number of weeks of gestation, right? In a literal kind of membrane that's fed in nutrients and stuff. And if you'd asked me 10 years…”

“Investors have a strong incentive for you to keep going because you're just an option once they put money in. And so if they get 50 cents on the dollar, they don't care, and they'd rather you just keep trying because you're just a free option. They already hav…”

“I think I tend to look at data for these sorts of things. And I think the data on a lot of these topics is pretty weak.”

“Because SARS, they both snuffed out with the original form, but then it leaked four times in the first two years after it was cultured in a lab. It kept leaking from what eventually became the Wuhan Institute of Biology when they moved it from Beijing to Wuhan…”

“So you need physical form for the AI in order for it to truly be an existential threat. And that's why if I were to focus on an area, it'd probably be robotics or something like that, because that's where you suddenly give physical form to something. And if yo…”

“Musk was asking for a six month moratorium on progress, which seems to me very self-serving if you're simultaneously starting an LLM company, you know.”

“The singular determinant of startup success is the market. And it's not the strength of the team. And so I think a lot of people talk about how great teams will always figure it out. And I've seen great team after great team in a terrible market just die becau…”

“The biggest issue we had there is we had a bad investor who, as we were exiting the company, basically tried to claw more value for themselves as part of our exit. And this is sort of a Midas list investor who's very well known now.”

“Half of the unicorns are probably dramatically overvalued, and if they were public companies, their valuations would get chopped down pretty dramatically relative to where they are today.”

“There are very, very few companies that actually have data moats, and so I think that's often a red herring. I think maybe in genomics right now there may be interesting data moats to be formed, but in most industries data moats don't really exist.”

“And people Are, at least in my experience collectively, at least investing against the fact that they believe the speed is there, which is different from the market size. People are conflating the two things right now, in my opinion.”

“One is for the mid to late stage technology markets, people are continuing to invest as if there's velocity to get to a trillion for many companies where I don't think there's a velocity. Again, I think the, Some of them will get to 20, some will get to a hund…”

“And I think that's why you're seeing a flight to hardware companies. Oh, the labs will never do this hardware thing. And so we'll do that. And American dynamism and niche applications of AI and something that should be provided by an inference cloud. And et ce…”

“There's a handful of companies that should never, ever sell, at least any time in the near term. If you're anthropic, you shouldn't sell. If you're opening, you shouldn't sell. You know, there's a handful of these things that should never sell.”

“Yeah, I mean, the physical compute basically reinforces an oligopoly market because what it does is it creates a ceiling On the rate of progress any single lab can get, if effectively you assume the compute is roughly pro rata across the ecosystem to the big l…”

“I know some labs have slowed down on their hiring of researchers unless they're above a very, very high bar because the cost isn't the research or it's the compute associated with the person.”

“That's why I think the death of SAS is a little bit overstated because why would you use tokens on a bunch of SAS stuff that you're not actually paying that much for per year relative to the outcome of those same tokens being invested against a core product or…”

“We had a safety lobby in the seventies basically kill abundant clean energy for us, right?”

“OpenAI, Anthropic, and others are the fastest companies to ten billion dollars in revenue basically ever, right?”

“The difference between now and 15 years ago is there's a handful of companies with such large distribution that they're the natural homes to do new things. Because even if they're five years late, they can just cross sell it, right?”

“I think that fundamentally you know, there's so much demand for software and there's so little supply of engineering and reality relative to that demand that as you add this enormous boost of productivity to software engineers it just gets soaked up. Right. Be…”

“I think the one other thing people are bringing up that I don't quite buy is that agents are already making like big decisions for vendor purchases and things like that.”

“Because often for companies, there's about a 12 month window where your company's the most valuable will ever be, and then it crashes out. For a very small handful of companies, the answer is you should never, ever, ever sell. For most companies, the answer is…”

“The best way to defend against this is to build a bundle.”

“And so the difference with AI, Is the velocity of change is so high that what normally would have taken a decade, and you'd have a normal decade-long displacement cycle, is now happening in a year or two. And that's really the reason that these things are so t…”

“Some of the highest Scoring models against benchmarks now are Chinese models on the open source side. On the closer side, it's still a lot of the US models, but things like Quinn, DeepSeq, et cetera, are doing very well.”

“OpenAI, you know, almost bought Windsurf.”

“Early in technology waves, that's when you have all the low hanging fruit. And so one of my pieces of advice to founders is often who are doing really hard things right now in AI. I'm like, why are you doing the really hard thing? Just go do the dumb, easy thi…”

“There may be a subset of companies that are forever private, because they can afford to be. That may be Stripe, that may be SpaceX, that may be some other companies.”

“Definitionally, most startups are going to fail. And this wave is going to be just like every other one. And the place where every founder and investor think they are is in the right companies, right? And the reality is most people aren't, right? 90% of people…”

“I, my sense is that for many of these foundation lab companies, if you just do a revenue multiple and you look at the growth rate, it's actually pretty reasonable. That's true of OpenAI, that's true of Anthropic.”

“Political culture took over and prevented them from speaking their minds on things that were really clear on evidence. That huge impact for the patient population, yet nobody would stand up and say, actually, it's really bad that we're glorifying the fact that…”

“I think in a couple years we'll start thinking about it as we're selling units of cognition, right? We're selling bits of person time or person equivalent to do stuff for us.”