The Ledger, every show

“Foundational models are the fastest depreciating asset in human history.”

“Every single day that you are hitting your plan, you are destroying equity value.”

“And so, I think, in the end, we're gonna end up with this application where AI really does help radiologists. It helps radiologists get more and more higher, higher throughput, because the AI can do some parts, and the radiologists do some parts, and they're c…”

“They're better investors. Also not necessarily better board members, not necessarily better advisors, not necessarily a better bunch of things, but definitely better.”

“I was talking to a team that had gone like this last week, I was talking to a team that had gone like zero to four million, a four person team, zero to four million in four months. Amazing. Like just amazing kind of revenue trajectory. But I put like almost no…”

“And the performance difference For a fireworks versus, like, a cloud provider is, like, five X. And that is just the speed performance. Then you add on top of that the, like, throughput, which is not visible externally. It's only visible if you look at, if you…”

“So it's just, it feels to me like we're gonna end up with an oligopoly Of winners, and there will be, I really believe they will be these, like, hundred billion dollar crazy smaller winners and so, like, that's, you know, that's, like, that just feels like tha…”

“We used to be building castles. Now we're building sandcastles. They're going to get washed away. And that's, if you don't think of software that way. You have to embrace it because if you were an artisan and you were like, Hey, I built these like perfect foun…”

“I think it's actually a complete inversion of how product development used to work to how product development happens now. And product development, you know, it always used to be, so you'd always say like, hey, product managers, you trained, oh, the product ma…”

“So it turns out that now, all of a sudden, database migration, which used to be, like, the, like, number one thing you would not do in software, is, like, kind of trivial.”

“Because it turns out that in a lot of these companies, you have reps doing 10 or 20, thirty million.”

“The bigger thing to me is that I think China's bringing on 10 times as much energy next year as we are in the U.S.”

“In software, if you have, like, that kind of, like, logical block diagram of, like, why it works and everything else, you're kind of 80% of the way there, and it's a matter of, like, go-to-market execution. In hardware you're, like, two percent of the way ther…”

“Recently, relatively recently, in the last few years because outcomes have gotten so much bigger and these markets are bigger and everything else, The circle of high cash on cash multiple opportunities is bigger than just early stage. And it's not so, so big t…”

“Take the Cerebrus example as a good one, which is, like, we took it public this time in May, but, like, we tried to take it public in twenty-twenty-four, and it would have been taken public at a much, much lower valuation, and like, you know, it would have bee…”

“You have an unbelievable ability to raise capital, which I think is why the labs will ultimately go.”

“Ultimately, you know, the AI natives with their growth rates sucked all the oxygen out of the room and all the interest, and the window was missed.”

“Will the CSPs do well? Yes. Yes. Will some of these neoclouds do well? Yes. Will the fireworks of the world do well? Yes. Will NVIDIA do well? Yes. Will these, like, chip startups do well? Or, you know, some set of them? Yes. Like, Are we gonna have edge infer…”

“There's so much zero-sum thinking, which is just like, okay, how do we cut up this pie, and they're gonna eat this much, and like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, Anthropic or whomever is gonna eat, 98% of the value, and they're gonna do all the drug discovery, and I …”

“I don't believe NVIDIA is going to be the only game to have content infrastructure layer.”

“We have a major, major shift in AI, which could be bigger than any of these other shifts on maybe combined.”

“So if the AI, if you can get AI good enough to eat much more of the 200,000 dollars of value attributed to your software engineer, IT person, it just follows that there's like 20 x more value creation and, like, there will be giant, giant outcomes.”

“We're a little ways away from like, from replacing the software engineer right now. We're like a bit away from that. And like, we haven't actually captured that much market value yet. And really no one's demonstrated anything close to that level. Quite yet.”

“And, like, it's not gonna be a 20 dollar a month subscription, that's not, like, the right way and it's not gonna be just, like, bundled API call, like, it's, there's gonna be much, much more sophistication and interesting models in that.”

“You know, I think one of the things that we maybe think about almost not at all Is almost never think about like fun cycle or fun timing or anything else. And we almost never think about or talk about portfolio construction or anything else.”

“I think this is why the memo writing culture at a lot of firms gets you in trouble because you put a lot of information You basically are, it encourages putting a lot of information that is like third and fourth order stuff Into document as if that is impactin…”

“I've worked on five companies that have gone from zero to more than 200 and revenue, and like, in not a single case did the economics at the very early stage, like, extrapolate all the way. Like, it's just not a thing. Not, not even the economics from when the…”

“I believe that the founders own more of their companies at exit at S one time, whatever it is, in this case, for those reasons.”

“For the entrepreneur, you do have to really think about the signaling risk of that being a seed investor, of a firm that also leads A's being a seed investor. What if they decide not to compete for the A? Then is that a bad signal to everyone else? I think gen…”

“That's a funny statement, because I think in the modern era, if you go back, call it the last 10 or 15 years of venture capitalists, there are only two that I can think of who have had multi-billion dollar consumer outcomes and multi-billion dollar enterprise …”

“Basically there are three things that we know how to do to speed up deep learning in hardware. Still till this day. Increase the number of cores. Increase the communication between cores. Bring the memory closer to the compute. Those are the three things. That…”

“Repetitive tasks in controlled environments is, like, more or less solved, and, like, you know, that'll continue to happen. But having tweaked tasks in real-world environments, that's where you need the AI. Like, that's where you need the AI plus the robots. A…”

“Ben, it seems like that's the future of education. If expertise matters less and less, what matters more and more is taste and, Being in touch with yourself and this kind of self-knowledge.”

“There were a couple times or two people and specifically that I think about where like what they wanted in comp and what I was like willing to give were separate. Like they were just off and they were so far out of market in terms of what their ask was. And I …”

“For, well, going back to, they haven't actually done these things at depth. They haven't done them themselves. They often lack like empathy and understanding. I think they often think that things are more deterministic than I think they actually are. And so li…”

“And in order to make the platform shift for a company, like what you're articulating, You have to kind of be willing to burn down the existing business and at least in short order. And there's a whole bunch of entrepreneurs who don't do that.”

“There's a couple of cases where just like violent execution by a determined team in a hyper competitive market where like nobody has an insight has worked.”

“The quickness of the scale is, is, is unlike, it's like three, four, five years of what SAS company, like your traditional SAS companies were doing. We're seeing in under a year and we have a whole portfolio of companies that are like this.”

“In terms of value accrual, like, you know, I think for Benchmark, like, we have a, we have no foundational model investments thus far anyway.”

“Through, through 30 years of performance, I think we have Unprecedented flexibility in what we do, and so if we want to write a fifty million dollar check, we can write a fifty million dollar check, and we have in cases.”

“I think in 20, 21, we made like three new investments as a firm. Three.”

“Our voting system is you vote one to 10. You can't vote five. Six and above is yes. Four and below is no.”

“With entrepreneurs really favoring, seemingly favoring operators, even as an operator, I can say, I think the pendulum has swung too far in that direction.”

“I think the context switching in terms of like, if you think about how you evaluate seeds or how you evaluate growth or evaluate some of these other things? Or how do you evaluate making a kind of quote unquote active investment where you take a board seat ver…”

“I think constraints are generally good and yield really special things. You know, it's the story of the vines, the grapevines that kind of fight the hardest to produce the best grapes. And I think we, I like to see us go back to an environment that rewards ope…”

“It's a Berlin-based company at the time, but there wasn't a single employee in the US, and yet they had built this incredible enterprise customer base of US companies, and that's just something that doesn't happen very often at all. You don't see companies clo…”

“Cloud did not scale anywhere close to as quick as what's happening right now.”

“And I think they view it probably as more of an opportunity than they did the cloud in terms of the potential impact on their business. I think they probably view it more as a threat than they did the cloud.”