The Ledger, every show

“I think it'll be a trillion dollar company next year. Yes. I think they could probably raise at the end of the year. Ah, you know, end of the year Q two, I think open AI could raise it a trillion dollars. No problem.”

“I think it's actually a convenience for Delian and some of the Founders Fund folks to absolve themselves of that weight and that responsibility just by being like, oh, it's not part of our, it's not part of our thing. But I think, you know, it's almost out of …”

“Outside of China, there are basically no good open source models.”

“Zooming out, I think the most important thing in all this Is that we step back from Anthropic and realize that the models are to place now, whether they're from Anthropic or elsewhere, where they can autonomously find and chain multiple vulnerabilities togethe…”

“Like Mr. All itself has fallen very far behind on, on the actual model side, and they've done a very good job becoming this inference platform and the FDE model and all these things, but they're outside of China.”

“No, it fucking sucks. It's terrible. It's a complete and utter failure on, on our part. And I think we, we'd all say that.”

“I don't think Ravi or Hamant or even Ben and Mark at this point, I don't think that they can go to LPs and say, hey, we're going to get you five X net on that.”

“When you have demand like this, like you have for the initial GC, like the initial hyperscaler clouds. And I think we're seeing an even greater cohorted demand curve for AI inference. Sometimes you just got to shut your mind up and invest with the momentum.”

“I definitely disagree with that. I think the moat is still fundamentally in technology, not in, in distribution.”

“If you were to say, well, our GC or Lightspeed or some of these mega funds is the strategy investment velocity as a north star. To answer that question, I would have you go talk to the principals, the junior partners and the associates at those firms. You inte…”

“If there's 50 investors if you come in and you're like the 23rd partner at like, I don't know, like Iconic or like one of these places like what companies do you get to cover? And so they, like that, that's the first problem is like you end up getting like a v…”

“To me, sometimes it just feels like a little bit of like it just feels like a different job than like the craft of venture capital where you're almost playing the lottery where you're like, okay, I have these 30 names that I own. I'm gonna try to do two of the…”

“I think at some point, like they'll probably, you know, Corweave and all these things will probably go down like 70%.”

“At the face of it, this is a Rubicon moment in the history of the AI industry. It's the first time that the US has ostensibly regulated an AI model based on capabilities.”

“There's a partner here at Benchmark that says any liquidity for pre-AI SaaS companies is top decile performance. Any liquidity at all.”

“I would personally probably take the under in six months, not because I don't think that the company is going to be valued extremely well... But if I had to go over under, I'd go under from six months from now.”

“With the right harness and the right amount of test time compute, you can use open models to find all of the vulnerabilities that Fable can find.”

“And what Owen did, and what the whole team at Intercom did, or Finn did, is they took a situation where the equity of the company was essentially worthless because no, no one's gonna buy 300 growing seven. It just, you know, it's just not, it's not a SaaS asse…”

“And now every single good AI company that they could acquire is too big for them to acquire and they can't do it. And so then it's like, well, we don't have the talent internally. We can't build a good AI product portfolio because we don't have the talent. The…”

“We think it's in, in terms of the things that are still in the first inning that are going to become trillion dollar, you know, we're trillion dollar companies are going to be produced. We think it's one of the prime candidates for sure.”

“What ended up mattering is that it, you know, it's had the strongest and highest growth trajectory Of any technology company in history.”

“Like there's just no way that it's not going to be the most important kind of consumer destination over the next five years and consumer app over the next five years.”

“And Sonnet and all the models that they have is probably still a little bit ahead of OpenAI, but I think given ChatGPT, I think I would probably rather do OpenAI at 500 than Anthropic at three 50, but I both think that they're relatively good investments even …”

“A golden category is a category that, as like the entire market for a single product adds a billion of net new ARR in a single year. And like, if you find a golden category, you essentially, if you're, especially if you're a multi-stage fund, you have to have …”

“Instead of adding, you know, a billion dollars of net new this year, I think code generation is going to add, I don't know, four or five billion dollars of net new across every single product and service that's available for people to buy, both on the B to B a…”

“But if your average gross profit per customer Can be four or five X that of a normal SAS company, then you actually have much more absolute dollars of gross profit per customer and potentially a much, much larger market than you do for SAS companies as well.”

“And it's such a better intellectual exercise than trying to compare it to SAS, which is just a very, very different business. And it has a very different pricing and business model that, that isn't going to be as relevant, I think over the next 10 years.”

“When CoreWeave was first raising in private markets, I was like, oh my god, this is, they're reselling a commodity, you know, they're a middleman, they're a broker of compute, it's gonna be low margin, yada, yada, yada. How wrong was I?”

“Jasper, you know, I think it went zero to a hundred very, very quickly, but then actually started shrinking. And it was because it was sort of easy come, easy go with the revenue and they hadn't built enough scaffolding and they hadn't built enough like actual…”

“I don't think the sources of moats have changed from SaaS to AI necessarily. Like, the seven powers are still the seven powers. All the same ways to build differentiation are there.”

“Out of our last fund, our five best investments in that last fund today held at LRP last round price are about a 60 X. We have two 30 X's and we have two 20 X's. Since ChatGPT was released, there isn't an open AI round that touches That return multiple and tha…”

“I think sometimes people confuse the inputs for the outputs at benchmark where it's like, oh, like they have to have 20% ownership and they only want to invest at a hundred posts. All these things. And I think that's, that couldn't be further from the truth. W…”

“When you're writing billion dollar checks, that is your main product. Like it's, that's, what's going to make you all the money. And so if you put three billion dollars in open AI and it's going to turn into twelve billion dollars, it just subconsciously, whet…”

“Today is very similar in that there's going to be a ton of companies that are pump fakes that do end up going to zero or that go down 90%. But I think it's really important to position yourself so that you can survive the inevitable crash on the other side. An…”

“There's going to be a very, very large set of tasks that models do that are not on the frontier. And those are going to continue to get dirt cheap. I actually think that at the frontier, you're probably going to see continued price decreases on a per token bas…”

“The majority of all of that, or at least the plurality of all of that is ChatGPT. And ChatGPT, even though it is served by a foundation model company, is an application. It is a consumer subscription that has an immense amount of power. It has an immense amoun…”

“I do think as some customers crack these agentic products that look and Monetize more like labor. AI revenue could actually exceed the quality of SAS revenue just because you're getting so much more gross profit per customer or like customer relationship than …”

“And the asset class has grown so much that if you're an amazing company, Compounding your intrinsic value at 25, 30% a year at scale, you can raise practically unlimited capital.”

“The main one, or one of the main ones is that you can be a lot more aggressive on M&A. You know, Databricks, for example, you know, bought this company, Tabular. I think the reported valuation was two billion, and it was also reported that they were either pre…”

“It's almost like the better the company, the longer they wait to IPO because they can be private, you know, again, compounding their value at 30 plus percent IRRs for much, much longer than they used to.”

“Anyone that has been blindly loyal to Elon, they've all got stupidly rich.”

“When OpenAI or when Google, like, they're going to get to Mythos Fable quality models very soon, within the next three to six months, and then we're going to see.”

“You have, I mean, Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, Datadog, Palantir, all these companies trade above 15 times NTM revenue again.”

“If you're already the market leader and you only have share to lose if you're already the incumbent, that's a really tough place to be because there's not really share to gain, there's only share to lose, and AI is a great way to for startups to take share fro…”

“I looked at Adobe and I was like, this thing trades for eight times LTM free cash flow.”

“I think we should not be placing that much emphasis on margins today.”

“I think Tiger's gonna end up much better than anyone thought they were going to end up.”

“Peter, I think so much of his cleverness and so much of his genius is actually in the way that he builds his firms rather even than his investments.”