The Ledger, every show

“So both Nvidia and all of these giant LM companies who are spending all this money on training are going to go to zero eventually.”

“That's a scale effect. And it's a very weak one. Yeah, no, he's very vulnerable. Just like Buzzfeed was very vulnerable and wasn't going to go anywhere.”

“AI is going to be like water. You're going to get free unlimited AI processing on your CPU. On your phone within three to four years. There's no doubt it's going to free”

“Oh, I mean, opinion is that I would sell. Yeah. NVIDIA compared to long-term, I would still be a Google and a Microsoft buyer because of the distribution.”

“What Zuckerberg is trying to do right now with his virtual world is still behind what Corey Andreka and Philip were able to do with the technology in 2003 and four.”

“So the number one thing that it rolls up into is speed. So you could lay out 16 characteristics that you're looking for, but all of those lead to one thing, which is speed. And so if we measure speed when we're meeting with the founders, that's the main thing …”

“Stan and I have never failed. We've never lost a dime for anyone. We've always made people money for the last 25 years”

“Why is it that sort of 85, 90% of all returns in tech have come from the Bay Area? It's because the mindsets here are slightly different from New York and London and LA and other things.”

“Between 94 and 2013, it was a fantastic time to start companies in the consumer software space and invest in them from seed or series A. In 2014, the window just closed. You can look at the number of unicorns created in two th from 2014 to today, and it's real…”

“And it could be a network effect, it could be an embeddedness, it could be a scale, or it could be a brand. Those are the four defensibilities in the digital world that now exist.”

“Pick the word first. And then figure out what the product does behind the word, because the word has a promise to it.”

“If I'm, you know, if I'm not good enough to play in the NBA, I shouldn't be in the NBA. Right. But this is the NBA. And so a 13% tax on being able to play in the NBA is nothing.”

“I think that AI has created a whole new set of consumer experiences. I think the window there will be open for three to four years for people. It hasn't even really started.”

“I think the space window is still open for another three to five years. But it'll start to close here soon, because remember, SpaceX started 20 years ago.”

“The way we look at it is the network effects is really the only one that's native to what we're doing, and therefore it's the most powerful.”

“Facebook may be around in 10 years, but it might not be, but it's pretty clear that messaging will be around because we're always going to be able to scan text with our eyes. That's a good interface for us. And so messaging is probably a longer term thing for …”

“And that formula of speed, quality, and then hiring in a superior way, that's what makes your giant sort of outcomes in these tech spaces. And I, and first mover isn't typically correlated with that.”

“What I say to all the founders is when you're pitching the deal, especially for investors, you want to use a number in every sentence you speak. If you say a sentence without using a number, then you have wasted that sentence.”

“So what's happening is we're moving into a world where much of the growth, at least digitally, is going to be coming from paid, and so we are becoming necessarily more fans of paid and just doing it right.”

“What I say is the psychological and emotional needs of the consumer are largely being met, and it's more difficult Of those emotional and psychological needs that you could tap into to generate that viral storm, to build a new network, to build a new identity …”

“It will be above.”

“We need to be teaching kids to ask the right questions. We need to be teaching kids to predict the future, not study history. We need to teach people to communicate and to lead, not to play soccer.”

“People talk about beat their chest and say, I'm a self-made man and it's complete bullshit. Like most, most of us are function of a sixth grade friend who put us on a completely different path.”

“If you are disagreeable, you end up doing better as a, as an entrepreneur and a founder and as a creator, because you don't have this need to please everyone all the time.”

“And he might end up building a brand around that chocolate. Right. But it'll take years, and it'll take hundreds of millions of dollars, and it's not clear that it'll happen.”

“Had I brought, if I had introduced an investment banker into this process, he would never would've Returned my email or walked away.”

“25 years ago, people who were coming to the Bay Area were coming because they were generative. They were coming because they wanted to create. And then because so much money was made by 2008, 2013, it's changed the tenor a little bit here, and we're ruining th…”

“I mean, we're just seven, eight years into the tech bio thing, and that's going to go, that window will be open for 30 years. We're going to learn so much about DNA and what's going on there.”

“Bitcoin is just purely a, Bitcoin's a meme coin. We just all believe in it.”

“One of them we call the asymptoting two-sided marketplace network effect. It means it doesn't keep going. Doesn't get better past a certain point. We're capable of seeing someone come in and compete with them pretty effectively on a lower price.”

“There was a guy named Scott who started Rise, R-Y-Z-E, in 2000, which was LinkedIn two years before LinkedIn. But he wasn't Reid Hoffman. And Reid knew the top 4000 people in Silicon Valley and emailed. And then once we were on, all the guys in New York wanted…”

“Had there been no competition like there was for Facebook when they were growing for two years in colleges, path would have been a big company.”

“And so that's why we haven't really failed yet. And we haven't ever lost anyone, any money, When we've been entrepreneurs and building companies.”

“You know, then you look at your next great success, Google, they were the eighth to market. You look at Facebook, they were the 156th to market with the same five features.”

“An example would be, I mean, certainly in naming, you watch a company like Yahoo you know, 20 years ago, they had such an incredible name that was different from every other company's name, and so the press wanted to talk about them all the time. The consumers…”

“We believe that often you need to identify a problem Figure out the language that addresses that problem, and then from that language, build a product that fulfills on the language.”

“We did a large study of companies that were, have been formed since 1994, 337 companies worth over a billion. And if you look at the market caps, the combined market caps of all these companies and identify, you know, which of them had network effects at their…”

“Pete Flint, my partner, he grew Trulia to a, you know, three and a half billion dollar acquisition with zero marketing spend.”

“So if you look at the top, you know seven companies in the world in terms of market cap, Five or six of them have network effects at their core. And that was not true. 30 years, 20 years ago.”

“Don't think of yourself as choosing a job or choosing an industry or think of yourself as choosing a network.”

“It's about an emotional flexibility that allows you to abandon what you were doing before and do the right thing going forward. It isn't speed on your original idea. It's speed toward success.”

“If Tiger Woods plays, the PGA makes one and a half billion dollars more per year, and if he's not playing, it's like, These nodes in these networks, and so if you could get Tiger to go over here, and you could get this, and this, and that, if you did the right…”

“We had gotten an offer for forty-five million as a company when we were called Emode, and then six months later, we got an offer for 110.”

“Look, there was three college social networks that came before Facebook, but it was the first one started at Harvard.”

“We had thirty million people before Facebook ever launched.”

“So the viral effect is about getting new users, and the network effect is about keeping those users, and they're very, very different things.”

“For me, it comes down to, do you have a list of experiments you still want to do and you're excited about. So you've had a vision, you've had an interest in a particular market space, and you've gotten fired up about it, you've started a company, you've tried …”

“We had an experience years ago where, you know, we were storing photos on a website, and we said, store your photos here, and it didn't really grow very much, so we just switched it to say, share your photos, and that switch of Change the product flow and chan…”