The Ledger, every show

“OpenAI was the first to code, right? With GitHub Copilot. I mean, they provided the weights. As far as I know, and they lost that. And they were first to image with Dali, and they lost that. And they were the first to video with Sora. And as far as I can tell,…”

“Every time I look at vertical SAS, I'm like, why do we even care about the technical team? It's fucking crud, man. It's like, crud is like create, you know, read, update, delete. It's like, they all do the same thing. They all just kind of look like a web app.…”

“China is a lot of very smart people. They're incredibly capable. They're great researchers. They can build stuff as great as well as we can, and they can open source it. We did not enable them. They do this even with export controls on chips. Right? So there's…”

“Google is Google. They have all the data, they have all the intelligence and like their models are getting trounced. By open AI and by anthropic.”

“People in the abstract say things like, now you're marketing to agents, you're like an API, you've got a good idea. I actually think that's almost exactly wrong.”

“It literally becomes an issue of like raise capital, turn that directly into growth, use that to raise three times more. And if you can keep doing that, you literally can outspend any company that's built. Not any company. You can outspend the aggregate of com…”

“This system has been gamed for a very long time. It's very hard for startups. To hire because of the lottery system. It's locked up by the large companies, the consultants, Amazon and Google and like that has to change, and I think a very reasonable way to do …”

“It's very, very tough to get a job between like 80 and a 120 K in, in much of the United States because of this, right? And so this isn't about like a new grad being a software engineer, because the reality is, is the expected value of a software engineer over…”

“It's dangerous to do non-consensus investing. Like, that's a dangerous idea. If you're alone in your view, you may just be missing something.”

“My underlying belief is early markets are actually pretty darn efficient, a lot more efficient than people realize.”

“One of them is the traditional media just turned on tech and it hates tech.”

“My view is, is the infrastructure is where the value is. Every time you have a platform shift, you'll get a new set of infrastructure companies, and then a bunch of apps get built on top of those. But like the value is going to accrue largely to the infrastruc…”

“I think in these times where you don't know the TAM and things are moving quickly, you definitely want to pick the best team. I don't think you should overthink the space, but like asking questions about like TAM or valuation or value makes a lot less sense be…”

“Anybody listening who is a VC, you can take as many board as you want. The actual board work itself is not. The question is, can you still be available to founders and add value whether you're on the board or not?”

“There is no, as far as I can tell, as far as we can tell, there is no inherent endemic mode In the technology stack to AI, other than just overcoming the bootstrap problem.”

“Historically, China's just not been able to build software, at least for, like, the prosumer enterprise market, which is kind of my world. They've just never really been able to do that, and so I think that, you know, their ability to compete at, like, a softw…”

“Some firms that were very, very relevant, we just never see anymore. I mean, like the founders don't talk about them. They're not there. They're not in the deals.”

“And then you forward by a year, and they've got the best models by far, and we're way behind.”

“The answer is the PDoom without AI is actually quite a bit greater than the PDoom with AI.”

“I think that right now open source is most dangerous because China is better at it than we are, and as a result of that.”

“I don't think that R-One itself as a standalone is going to have that deep of an impact.”

“We're seeing the fastest growing companies we've seen in the history of the internet, including, by the way, the internet itself. And this is by measure for revenue or the number of users, et cetera, right?”

“And so I know the question and the heart of the question is, is we should regulate, you know, AI and this and that. And I think it's the actual opposite. I think we should regulate the regulators and let it be what it wants to be.”

“I don't know if operating helps or not. Like, I don't know if it helps you pick. I don't know if it helps you close. I don't know. Like, I don't know how to answer that. Probably not. It probably hurts more than helps.”

“And you should work in the evenings, and you should work on weekends. And if you don't, like, I, like, I just don't think you deserve to be investing in these companies. You just don't.”

“A lot of investors talk about actually in the, a lot of investors talk about thesis. I don't think that's the right way to think about investing at all. I think it's just so crazy to come up with some story, which to your point is more retrofit. So I'm definit…”

“I think that model is basically going away. It's being eaten on the bottom by bottom up, which we can talk about later, and I believe on the top it's been eaten by services.”

“I almost feel like open source is just being superseded by any software as a service, and what I mean by that is the following. It's like, as soon as you host something as a service, people don't seem to ask so much about open source, right?”

“And I think, like, for me, like, the crowning example of this has been Apple. Any number of security vendors will tell you, like, when we try and, you know, provide a solution on top of Apple, they don't want to admit that they're insecure.”

“One thing which is different than IT and industry in the past is it seems pretty clear because the value is in data, and because the value is in optimization, that the infrastructure layer will be free.”

“We've talked about this, but it seems like closed source shippable software is, is on its way out or dead.”

“If you look at these examples of quote unquote successful open source companies, in almost every case, they were going after and cannibalizing an existing market, which is way more difficult than actually doing new innovation, right?”

“I mean, the supply, if you look at the supply across the board, it's basically all booked out to twenty-twenty-eight.”

“The right analog here is like the steam engine or electricity. In the following way, like, we've introduced this new thing that you can turn to work, and there's some very obvious applications now, but there's probably 3040 years of throwing computer problems.…”

“GrokBot got really right is, no, how about if it's actually an employee? So now you have this thing that's an entity, and it doesn't have, like, special access to your keys or whatever. It has its own computer, and it has its own browser, and because these are…”

“Today to build a frontier model costs, let's say, three to five billion dollars, right? So, and let's, you know, and that's to train it. And so the inference has to pay back at least that. Of course, right? You know, in order for any of this stuff to be viable…”

“By the way, it is so bad that right now if we have new companies going for GPUs, it's often in Mexico or Australia or in other country just because it is so difficult in the United States.”

“We may actually be entering an era where the optimization in the hardware is absolutely meaningful to the upside of the business in a way that we haven't seen in the past.”

“The first one is the labs are so desperate that they will engage with startups. And so, like, we actually have quite a bit of signal early on because they're, you know, the labs are, Inking deals with companies before they actually have hardware available. And…”

“It turns out that you don't speak to these models in code. You speak to these as humans in natural languages. Therefore, the model has to, like, understand, like, the breadth of human experience and language, right? And so, you know, that means in order to bui…”

“Like if you really believe in the product, you would never do a plugin because then you're part of somebody else's product. If you really believed in the product, you wouldn't do enterprise early, you do it later, because the product itself is the kind of go-t…”

“So very classically, if you view your competitive set, say the large labs will basically subsidize or give away the single surf tier. But then they actually have, they command great margins in third party and they command great margins in the enterprise.”

“If I'm writing a program, I'll like, whatever, I'll use a cloud database, I'll use storage, I'll use networking, you know, whatever it is, but like correctness and logic for the program is under the programmer's control. Maybe I'll use a third party library. B…”

“And right now, if I give. 20 people a billion dollars, they can actually use it usefully. It's very, so it's like we've kind of moved the industry from like this engineering bound problem to a capital problem.”

“No, you're building the machinery. I'm saying in this case, if you're like, I want to exhaustively explore every protein combination. Right. We can just turn that into a money problem. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of very strange.”

“I sit in these boards too. So the board goes to the CEO. What does the board say? We need more AI. And what does the CEO said? Oh, okay. I'll get like a consultant to do more AI. And then they have some centralized project that nobody knows how it works. They …”

“What we're seeing instead is instead of viewing AI as software, like just view it as a user. And so instead, like take your product Make it a CLI tool and then have the AI be an agent that actually uses this. You're not fusing the two. You're just making it mo…”

“Right now, many companies are incentivizing people to use AI by counting tokens.”