The Ledger, every show

“Literally, you can go from zero to 15 mil ARR in about four months with, like, two or three people and, like, hundreds of agents. Like, you know, a few hundred skill files.”

“There are real motes to these things. Like, there are structural reasons why a Microsoft isn't going anywhere. And then, I guess, This is sort of a little antithetical to what most, you know, most people in Silicon Valley would say, like, I want to start up to…”

“ABC News you know, literally the mainstream media TV channel of San Francisco and the Bay Area would not cover anti-Chinese and anti-Asian crime.”

“It was 13 years of not coding and then suddenly, boom, I'm doing about 400 X the amount of work that I was that year. The last time I was even sort of like two thirds of the time writing code.”

“And then I guarantee you like this time next year, like everyone's going to be saying what you heard here first, which is like every single person on the planet will have their own personal AI.”

“Claude in Chrome MCP is one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used. You know, every time it would try to do an action, it would think and think and think. There was crazy context bloat. Often it wouldn't even do anything, but it would take two to three…”

“So, you know, there's sort of this explosion in model capability. You know, we've been talking about this for several years, but then it feels like it's here. Like AGI is literally actually here.”

“I think they're like, there might be a case of two foie gras startups, like one being Harvey and the other one being open evidence, right?”

“We're seeing routinely YC companies with 10 or 20 people get to 10 or twenty million dollars a year in revenue in 10 or 20 months. And that's like literally never happened before in software.”

“The average rate at which YC companies grow their revenue during the YC batch, which is a 12 week process, is a 10% per week on average. I mean, some of the batches have been growing 15, 20% a week, but it's been at least 10% a week for more than a year.”

“I worry that some of these programs are just literally trying to teach people to become more you know, SBFs and Theranos. And that's like, you know, that's a waste of time. Like, and you're going to go to jail.”

“I think of O-three as basically about a 130 IQ, maybe O-three pro can be even smarter than that. When I really think about that, it's like, oh yeah, like a lot of the people who I've ever hired in my lifetime are like, yeah, O-three is smarter than that person…”

“I don't think, I agree more with Dellian comments about that there's not going to be many successful defense companies.”

“Without OpenAI success, SF would be dead and still dying.”

“If The founder and the CEO does not exercise agency, you know, then it's actually a political game, and then you have sort of fiefdoms that are fighting it out with one another, and the leader is not there, then you enter the situation where, ah, neither the l…”

“I guess it felt like a little bit of a prisoner's dilemma, because I think the result is that you know, tech progress itself decelerated. You have, like, the smartest people of a generation basically retired in place, working at places that, you know, the worl…”

“I think that we brought together about 200 of all of our top founders. You know, there are about 60 or 70 unicorns represented. And I think that we unlocked, you know, easily 10 to a hundred billion dollars in new market cap like that very night”

“Albedo is super hardcore because they basically have made spy satellites, but you know, they're better than what the U S government can do. And, you know, they might just replace replace that market for that.”

“Since then, Sam has told me that he actually wants to go to four orders of magnitude to get to a trillion dollars in you know, sort of spend.”

“Like you could make a strong case that AGI is basically already here. The majority of the tasks that, you know, 98% of knowledge workers do day-to-day it is now possible for a software engineer probably sitting in front of cursor, to write something that gets …”

“I think that SF got very, very bad because you couldn't say basic things like, I believe in algebra for middle schoolers, right?”

“There are researchers who are highly politically and ideologically motivated who have Control of the apparatus that is like, you know, sort of quote unquote science, I guess. And then you have real scientists, real mathematicians, real computer scientists at B…”

“We're more or less at the worst possible scenario right now. We have no information rights, no liquidity. Valuation committees at Fidelity and BlackRock basically get to mark things up and down with no information, so it's basically all sentiment.”

“From Palantir, I definitely learned that everything that's awesome in my life is kind of a cult. That starts with some sort of truth or belief that flies in the face of an orthodoxy, which is very punk, actually.”

“What's happening right now with vibe coding and agentic coding literally any given person could be 400 of that person, like, from two years, like, even, like, nine months ago you can be a multiple of yourself.”

“Like, you know, I was just doing an analysis on, like, pure sass, and I was like, oh, shoot, like, you know, a pure, like, per seat sass thing, like, not totally clear it will exist in another five or 10 years.”

“A markdown file is an employee. And it's an employee that will do the job perfectly every single time. And it'll do it like as many times as you want.”

“He has his agent look at the meeting transcripts from, like, All of his direct reports, and he, like, can see that, like, two levels down. And then the thing that really jumped out at me is, like, he can use meetings that he's not in. To figure out, like, what…”

“Like you could release something in a day or two that would have taken like six months. And if you could like multiply that out across, like the thing is like probably an org like Microsoft can't. But, like, a startup can. And every startup must.”

“So I think that, you know, the white pill to me is like, it's gonna be 20 years, and that's not a bad thing. That's actually a good thing. Yes. Like, society is way slower than you think. Government is way slower than you think. Every company in the world is w…”

“I think in the short term it'll probably keep looking like the way it is, but it seems inconceivable that it'll stay that form factor. Like, it's pretty clearly going to be voice. I think there's a lot around memory.”

“My guess is, like, next year, twenty-twenty-seven, will be, like, the harness wars. You know, and then, but it's really a cost thing. Like, it's just too expensive right now. You know but it won't be, like, there will be a war for a billion consumers. Right wh…”

“I mean, this is a great example of like consumer AI that is almost certainly going to be a 10 or a hundred billion dollar company. That no one's built yet.”

“And a new way to do it is actually have the LLMs just write the code you need right now. And then you write 10 or 20 times less code, but it's way more customizable. It does, you know, more and is more awesome. Between token maxing and even like, you know, don…”

“I mean, basically because the frontier models are that good, like, you know, I think that in two years, like, That'll be a 100,000 and, you know, down to 10,000 and a thousand. I mean, basically these orders of magnitude are about to happen.”

“It means that the ideal consumer moment is still like Three orders of magnitude away, but that means that the consumer revolution is actually in 2029.”

“That's when we're going to see the new meta. That's when we'll see the new snap. That's when we're going to see all of the future and it's not even a couple of years away.”

“And then now it's like, actually what would take a week or a month or a year, like you literally do in, you know, minutes, hours, or, you know, at the worst, like you could build a whole cathedral of like 20 to 40,000 lines of code. Like what would take a typi…”

“How do you build super intelligence inside a company? You do that on everything you do. And it's not more complicated than that. Like, you literally just compose everything that you do, and any given thing that any given person can do, you combine that in aggr…”

“What you spend a 100,000 or a million dollars a year on now, it will be commonplace like in, in two years, right? It'll, it won't cost a 100,000 in a year. It'll cost 10,000. And the year after that, it'll be like a couple hundred bucks, right? And everyone wi…”

“We basically have a choice to be made over the next, I don't think it's even that long. I think it's like 18 to 24 months. It might take five years, but there are sort of two scenarios”

“Our friend Jeff Lawson at Twilio built that company from nothing. To four billion dollars in, you know, actual revenue, like stock up 390% since IPO. I mean, by all accounts, you know, smash rip roaring success. And then his super voting shares expired after 1…”

“Basically, for the equivalent of, like, Five or 10 dollars of opus calls. I mean, I would estimate that it does the work of like, you know, a real human being that would have to like go painstaking through dozens of articles, read entire books about certain su…”

“I think now it's going to permeate every part of society. Like, every thing that we would call knowledge work could be token maxed.”

“I don't think that it means that we're going to get rid of people. I think it means that people need to still supply the agency.”

“All of the difficulty in energetic engineering today is when people try to do things that should be in markdown in code and it fails because code is brittle.”

“It's very significant for people who are technical because it actually raises the bar on like what you are capable of doing. Like all the people who are attacking me about lines of code, they particularly are, The people who are most likely to get wings if you…”

“One of the key maxims for YC is You know, how do you find good startup ideas, live in the future and build what's missing? Right. And so this is a profound version of that where all you have to do is commit your brain to look at, you know, spending 500 dollars…”