The Ledger, every show

“You know, I think if you do it, if you do the math, that's a bigger corporate debacle from a value creation, value loss perspective than Kodak's inability to commercialize a digital camera, just because the opportunity cost of that is so immense.”

“Like this, the vibe coding era is gonna be remembered for a Chernobyl style disaster is my prediction. People are vibe coding software that they do not understand. And it's only a matter of time with all the hype that's being poured into this right now. It is …”

“The number one biggest finding, I think, for a use of LLMs is that LLMs cause the Dunning-Kruger effect to be magnified. They convince you that you're more capable than you are at while they degrade your actual capabilities.”

“Founders either have to agree to or not this system. And so we actually are the ones propping it up. We're giving it the fresh meat it needs to survive because it's so value destroying.”

“Again, if you think I'm exaggerating, the product managers at Johnson & Johnson put asbestos in the baby powder. And covered it up because although they said their purpose, their mission statement was patient health, their actual mission had become growth opti…”

“Listen, Google's on the brink of collapse. You know, obviously they have many other lines of business. I'm sure it'll be fine. But like the search engine is extremely vulnerable now. And obviously with AI on the rise, like people are really worried about what'…”

“The investor centric view of corporations, what's called the shareholder primacy theory of corporations is just wrong. It's wrong. Even if all you care about is maximizing returns for shareholders.”

“I think it's extremely obvious if you look at the data that's been published so far, that part of the reason they have an enterprise advantage is because they have a trust advantage.”

“I think in the long run, people who invest now in craftsmanship, in the understanding of software principles, architectural principles, artistic principles, whatever the thing is, are going to be so much better off. They're going to wind up being like incredib…”

“So we actually know the valuation consequences of quarterly reporting, and it's roughly a five percent loss of total equity value. Companies are five percent less valuable when they report quarterly than semiannual. So the academic research on this is pretty g…”

“They created something called the long-term benefit trust. Which is like a multi-branch government, right? So you have the for-profit PPC, and then you have the board of directors accountable to a second entity, this outside trust, and the data shows that comp…”

“What they call in context learning is not learning. It's just token prediction does next token guessing. So what happens is it just, it inevitably convinces itself To do average work, because that's what's in the training data.”

“If you just send it off to do the artifacts for you, if you have it make a product that you don't understand how that product is or what it works, if you don't talk to the customers, but you have the machine talk to customers for you, it will not actually acce…”

“It's only a matter of time before someone vibe codes their way into a massive mission critical disaster. When they deploy code they think they understand, but they don't.”

“In fact, if you've noticed, I don't know if you've noticed the headlines in recent months that the SEC is considering eliminating quarterly reporting for the first time in 40 years. That's our petition.”

“Data says that tobacco companies make about 6000 dollars per death.”

“The thing I didn't really understand is how much evidence we have that these so-called best practices suck. They're like literally value destroying.”

“What I really think is that we shouldn't be just building Investor controlled companies or founder controlled companies. There's a third way. Interesting. We can be building mission controlled companies where the mission itself has sovereignty and these compan…”

“They have something like eight billion dollars a year in net income. But there's been all these studies. They create six hundred billion dollars a year in costs just in the U.S. That have to be borne by others. I think it's three hundred billion in direct heal…”

“You forget that you take a venture investment from a venture firm. You're not taking investment from that individual person. You're taking investment from a company. Then that person leaves. And now you're stuck with some new person and you've given all these …”

“In the history of the world. Shareholder primacy has never been subject to any referendum, any legislative action, nothing. So it's weird. If you learned in school, how a bill becomes a law, There's no law for shareholder primacy.”

“Founder control is not that great either, because I know a lot of people who are like basically trapped They can never quit their company because they're like the one, they're like literally the human shield blocking every, that's too much. And of course peopl…”

“So if you have a board, like classic Silicon Valley board would be two VCs, two founders, and an independent. That's supposed to be fair because it's two and two balance. That is basically just investors control your company.”

“So we know for sure That if they had not done this, all of the major R&D programs of Nova Nordisk would have been canceled. We know because the company they were going to merge with two years later was bought by Merck, and that's what happened.”

“Companies with this structure are six times more likely to live to year 50. 10% versus 60% probability.”

“According to Harvard Law School, among venture-backed companies that have the standard best practices set up that you got from your lawyer, ok? Only 20% of founders are still the CEO three years after going public.”

“The trustees of the nonprofit foundation once had to intervene to protect the for-profit from this exact temptation to want to sell it out. And I won't get into the whole story. They did the right thing in this case because they had the legal power to do so. T…”

“According to the legal documents, you yourself signed your company's literal charter that you have right now, and this is not some hypothetical future thing you've already put in motion. A rule that says you have a fiduciary duty to say yes in this situation.”

“The trust that they gained is the reason why they're a seventy billion dollar company today.”

“Google report its quarterly report on time because there is a massive, unbelievably expensive apparatus to make sure it happens every time. And don't be evil was just a slogan. So if someone tells you I'm serious about something, great. Now show me the apparat…”

“For the vast majority of the time, for hundreds of years, we have had joint stock corporations. Only the last 40 have we had this idea. Before the eighties, it was considered obvious. Our grandparents thought it was obvious. Our great grandparents thought it w…”

“Most of the best companies today are using this structure. Like all the major AI labs are incorporated as BBC's Anthropic most famously of all.”

“They turned down a two hundred million dollar contract and bore the wrath of the world's largest army and government.”

“If you don't know what that is, you need to Ask an LLM to explain it to you and just say, Eric said founders preferred shares could potentially make me like personally an extra billion dollars someday.”

“Right now, we kind of have this dichotomy between what I call investor controlled companies and founder controlled companies. And everyone's like, you got to pick one or the other, but neither alternative is very good. What we want to create are what I call mi…”

“This is the number one unsolved problem in AI. It's not the tech, we're making great progress on the technical alignment problem, but we haven't made jack progress on the human alignment problem, which is that we've known since the development of Conway's laws…”

“I can remember where I was when Jeremy told me, by the way, he doesn't think the company will ever need more than 12 employees. And I was like, oh sure, you mean like this month, you know, but it's like, no, over its entire life.”

“That really is like, to me, the number one thing I've learned from this and all forms of vibe coding and all the things that I've played with is that it's just extremely easy to get into this kind of like soporific state where the AI is doing the thinking for …”

“I do think some of these vertical specialized wrapper companies, they might be able to use their wrapperness Build up customer relationships, collect proprietary data, you know, I don't know, train their own models, build their own new thing. That is theoretic…”

“Facebook even commissioned the scientific research to find out if their product makes people depressed. And then they found out that it does. And they were like, oh, better bury that. Instead of take it seriously and do something about it.”

“The ESG movement has been a total failure. You know, from my perspective, because Philip Morris has great ESG scores.”

“MVP is simply for whatever the hypothesis is that we're trying to test, what is the most efficient way to get the validation we need about whether the hypothesis is true or not?”

“First, the first tip is write out the list of features that are necessary in your MVP, cut it in half, and cut it in half again and build that.”

“If you're asking whether you should pivot or not, you probably know the answer already. That's the first thing to just like straight up say, we will, like people call me sometimes. They're like, I want to know if I have product market fit. Like, well, the fact…”

“At the end of the day, AI is a management technology. It, like, the thing it does is manage intelligence and other intelligences.”

“So it's actually be really easy, you know, not in the not too distant future. It'd be very easy for someone to just be like, summarize for me, everything my company is doing. And You won't need, like, tons of middle managers to do that for you or just, you'll …”

“We're gonna have a new wave of founders who take that seriously, who are gonna just, they're gonna steamroll.”

“Believe it or not, if you got, if you went to a fancy law firm and they filed for you the standard articles of incorporation that are used in Silicon Valley, most governance experts upon reading those documents would say you have a fiduciary duty to say yes.”