The Ledger, every show

“And so, for me with Tesla, I think that they got away with accounting fraud. On warranty reserves and a whole bunch of other things. I think there was a lot of prestidigitation and magic of look over here while we're doing this. And today it doesn't matter bec…”

“I think that Europe is fucked, and there are bright lights of amazing entrepreneurs that are doing the very thing that Europe has historically not done, which is risk taking. The floor for Europe is higher than the US, so people do not fall through that, but t…”

“The smart employees at those funds know that they will likely never see a dollar of carry. The larger the fund you raise, the harder it is to return in venture.”

“On the capital market side, you see hundreds of billions of dollars destroyed of people that play the same game that you did back in 2000 with fiber optic cables.”

“If I had to come up with somewhat pejorative analogy, I think Samsung is going to be more like Intel. I think that they're just a little bit sclerotic and bureaucratic and slow moving, and it's going to sort of ebb and decline.”

“I think Micron is a US company which is going to be more constrained by restrictions that are put on export control, and I think SK being a Korean company is going to be able to skirt those in the same way that NVIDIA has with, you know, distribution to China …”

“Being able to do that is the real gold, and the large language models are effectively, like, over time, I think, going to trend toward zero in a commodity excavator of that data.”

“One of our companies, Runway ML, you can, and there's others that you can conjure. Today it's 10 seconds, but tomorrow it'll be two minutes, and full feature films with no key grips, no lighting, no costume design, no set design, no actors, and voices entirely…”

“Society benefits from everybody being plagued by these kinds of things, because it leads to human progress and, you know, woe to the Bay Area, you know adherent to mindfulness and meditation, you know, to find calm and peace. Like we don't get peace from pro…”

“And the quibble is with his relationship with the truth. And I look at Gates and I look at Bezos, both of whom I admire for different reasons. Bezos in particular, who I consider one of the greatest and most rational capital allocators, the amount of capital t…”

“You know, he has sold eight and a half billion dollars of stock. This was a wonderful way, just like his Twitter poll before to sell stock, to get out of Twitter. Now you could, I mean, sorry to get out of Tesla.”

“So I think that those two forces are really going to be probably the most important thing to me, more important than climate change, more important than a lot of the things that have captured the current zeitgeist.”

“I believe that that will be the next Afghanistan, particularly for Europe. I think that you will have Mali pulling France in. You will have Belgium being pulled in, you will have the UK and other EU countries adjacently being pulled in, the US being pulled in,…”

“I have a really politically incorrect one, which is older CEOs that by choice, not biologically, because there's a big difference, never had children. I find that for whatever reason, they tend to be very controlling. Now, my sample size here is like five of f…”

“Many of these businesses either have commercial deals that are tied to them, or economic terms that are tied to them where the VCs or the entrepreneurs that might be celebrating, they just became a unicorn and are valued over a billion dollars and SoftBank jus…”

“And then the last thing that I rail against also, which I think is utter BS is IBM Watson. And I think it's actually dangerous what they're promoting.”

“I think that there are a lot of tourist VCs who are in these domains that are going to lose a lot of money”

“I think that there is a culture that talks about praising and prizing failure, but I think it's disingenuous. I think people pretend to wear failure on, you know, as this badge, and every time you ever see an entrepreneur and you ask, oh, how are things going,…”

“And then you have like duration mismatch between like the hard assets and the financing. So like the chip, depending if you look at meta or Amazon debate, whether it's a three year or five year depreciation, but it's, you know, called three, the debt, Amortize…”

“So far with OpenAI, valuation has gone from, like, you know, sub hundred million to trillion and plus, and you've had six diaspora companies that have all achieved, you know, tens of billions of dollars that have spun off of it.”

“The long tail of funds that are subscale, I have predicted that you would see a 50% involuntary exit or extinction rate, that they would go out of business, and why? Because they're under-reserved, they've over-invested, they have too many portfolio companies,…”

“And I believe that at least General Atlantic, General Catalyst, Andreessen, maybe Insight, maybe Lightspeed, go public.”

“Anduril has raised several billion dollars now. There are a few companies that are competing with them. There's a long tail of wannabe next gen defense tech companies, but Anduril is the 800 pound gorilla next prime.”

“Our best outcomes, as an aside, have always been an oligopolistic industry structure where there's three or four players who are going to irrationally compete to own the asset because they want it and they don't want their competitor to get it leads to the bes…”

“I'm of the belief that 50% of your inference and your queries will be on device. They will not be on device going to the cloud. They will be on device. Locally hosted on models that are either etched into the silicon or using flash memory.”

“The next wave that I'm bullish about is going from two-dimensional AI in this current wave, which is pretty much saturated. That is everything from voice, video, images, text, code, anything that's popping off a screen, to thinking about the next wave of three…”

“Today, if you're a scientist, you have to go to a scientific lab, a wet bench, a white lab coat. You're working with pipettes and beakers, centrifuges, shaking tables. All of that is going to be done by robots. Completely automated labs operated in the cloud w…”

“There's another adjacent theme, which I think is also really interesting, which is AI portends the death of APIs. So APIs allow meta with their meta glasses or Ryan to be able to communicate with Uber and, you know, Spotify through the backend, through softwar…”

“I think that you're going to end up doing a lot of inference on device. Meaning, instead of going, ah, to the cloud and typing a query, like, 30 to 50% of your inference may be on an Apple or an Android device.”

“I would suspect that maybe you lose 10 to 30% of the people that you normally would have hired, but the people that are there are still like these 10 X coders, and now they have a machine that's helping them be like 20 to a hundred X.”

“The second that DeepSea comes out, it suddenly accelerated the internal strategic decisions from OpenAI of when are we gonna release models.”

“I think the people that are continuing to develop ever better models, unless they have proprietary data, are going to be sort of screwed.”

“So I'm absolutely convinced. Like, high certitude. I don't know exactly which company will do it. We've invested in some. They haven't worked. We'll invest in more. Hopefully they will. But this directional arrow of progress of the idea, by analogy, of machine…”

“So, I definitely think that there will be this recursive improvement, but you're still going back to being rate limited by time and biological or chemical reactions. You still need to instantiate this into a physical experiment. And so you can model and simula…”

“Like that, in 10 or 20 years, people look back and be like, how did we not see that coming? And look at all the jobs that are being created, because every single person is now creating And has, like, six virtual companies.”

“Where private credit in particular, I think, was wise to do a few years ago, and now is overdone.”

“There's something here to watch about the flood of retail money that will go into illiquid alts, private equity in particular, and new vehicles that are formed to be able to provide liquidity because of that. And I think that that's both going to be really int…”

“If there is an AI that is totally trained on my voice, and my likeness, and everything I've ever said, which I have done, that my kids would actually have a dad AI, and maybe they can consult it for questions, or, and is that a good thing, or a bad thing? I do…”

“I deeply believe that Anderil in the next few years will be a 30 to fifty billion dollar publicly traded business doing single-digit mid-billions of revenue with software-like margins that are not like these cost-plus margins, so that is gonna usher in a big w…”

“In the Pacific region with SOCOM, and there's a drone operator who's flying the drone, there's another drone operator who's piloting the weapon system, and there's two lawyers. So, they're helping the commander who is effectively given, like, a godshot of, you…”

“TikTok, of course, a huge one, right? We banned it years ago, right when it had become TikTok from Musical.ly, in part because at the time, I seemed like a conspiratorial nut saying, I don't trust this with the Chinese Communist Party having control over this.…”

“I think there's a ton of dry powder in venture capital and private equity, but a lot of it I call wet powder, and Because this money is basically reserved for companies and people don't realize.”

“In our own country, in the United States, 38% of researchers in AI are from China.”

“Eventually the great things that we've seen over the past few years, which are exceptional returns, not just unrealized, but realized and returned and distributed cash to LPs is going to either slow down or reverse and potentially be negative, which is somethi…”

“So what I think will tip this, and I would put my highest conviction that this is the cause, is LP indigestion.”

“The problem is there are a lot of competitors in many of those businesses, and often the reasons why one becomes that runaway success, even in the power law distribution within a sector, is sometimes random. Sometimes it's related to locks. Sometimes it's rela…”

“And in this environment, the amount of diligence that the average investor is doing to identify those risks is cursory at best. It is like showing up for the finals exam if you're in college or, you know, your kids and just winging it. People are just winging …”

“What I realized was what I should have done, which was a colossal and historic mistake, was make sure that we gave some interim liquidity. Because if we had put a few million dollars in that founder's pocket early on, the ability to stay the course would have …”