The Ledger, every show

“Well, first I'll say you don't need AGI to unemploy 30% of all Pink collar and white collar workers in the G-Twenty within the next 10 years.”

“I sincerely believe, and there's a large but quiet group of other experienced VCs with successful track records that who also believe that the strict segregation of funds by size has an information destroying or signal reducing aspect.”

“Meanwhile, the early stage investor Because they have to consider this capital formation risk is at best unconsciously and at worst very consciously biasing the nature of the investments that they pick towards what is popular or acceptable or soothing to the t…”

“I think that some LPs who over time are uncomfortable with Perhaps a 15 year, or some of my VC colleagues have quietly mentioned, maybe the equivalent of a 20 year long bond in venture. You know, those LPs may not be the right ones to go forward in the early s…”

“So with self-driving trucks, they're you're talking about potentially vastly reducing, if not completely disemploying, I guess to coin a term, three or four million of the last non-college educated middle class people in the United States, and quite a large si…”

“Whoever gets that AI first, not only has a huge advantage, but an advantage that is beyond the reach of human intellect to perceive until they have quote unquote lost the game.”

“Ordinary, ordinary humans like us can't respond to the demands of a truly successful startup, one that has this hard, sharp arc of takeoff and sleep eight hours and cook our own organic breakfast and get in a brisk six mile walk and then write a little bit of …”

“We didn't follow on. We didn't raise our hand to be the big dog in successive rounds. And it had nothing to do with the quality of the company. And people trust us when we explain that because the company was a wonderfully engineered, great SAS company deliver…”

“Ordinary, ordinary humans like us can't respond to the demands of a truly successful startup. One that has this hard, sharp arc of takeoff and sleep eight hours and cook our own organic breakfast and get in a brisk Six mile walk and then write a little bit of …”

“In three years, in very, very high risk investing, our worst case outcome was 95% return on capital. And in the failed companies, we got two X, three X cash on cash returns.”

“The verticals where people die, or vast amounts of money are lost, if the right answer is not arrived at in increasingly smaller windows of time, are, in fact, the most aggressive customers for some of these technologies.”

“We're investors in a company called Zen Payroll, ah, and we're investors there because they demonstrated in, on a very small amount Really, of their own money, that they could gut ADP. That customers deserted ADP in droves to have essentially single click, ove…”

“In each one of these, kind of, criteria, or vectors, or themes, there's a handful of billion dollar startups Ah yet to be, ah, yet to be built.”

“Pretty good tech with unbelievably good design actually will probably beat great tech with so-so design, and will definitely beat great tech with crappy design.”

“So I actually think privacy is not a threat. It's a business opportunity.”

“Handle those three things, and Europe will easily be a rival of the U.S. In the next 20 years. In startups and tech. Don't handle them, and it stays a backwater.”

“Likewise, as AI software begins to sort of perform idiot savant roles inside courts and legal systems and insurance companies in mainstream companies to adjudicate whether someone is employable, you have surrendered what used to be human decisions to a black b…”

“The near-term likelihood that global corporations or even startups, whatever engine of economic growth you want to point to, are going to accept a Udacity degree from an unemployed welder or an unemployed truck driver whose job was just taken by a truck driver…”

“The people who are creative or have an interesting idea may find themselves lifted up by even this simpler AI so that the, you know, 10,000 hours required today to become an expert in something can be vastly reduced.”

“In a perverse sense, their adjudication of whether that company deserves another three million or five million or seven million dollars is at least as good, if not better, than the next guy up the line, especially if that next guy up the line is by necessity D…”

“Our opportunity fund is in fact contractually prohibited from chasing deals outside of our portfolio.”

“Planet Labs is delivering massive informatics advantage to its customers by virtue of having become the second or third largest space power in the world measured in satellites.”

“We regretfully either say no up front or don't follow on in the kind of companies that somebody like Jason Lempton is going to make a fortune in.”

“In aggregate in just a couple of our early stage funds are companies have hard contracted gap bookings and or fully recognized gap revenue approaching what should be about two billion dollars in 2016.”

“In a portfolio of roughly 60 companies We've had six fail.”

“New York is, ah, is like the Saudi Arabia of design talent. Meaning, as Saudi Arabia is to oil, New York is to design talent.”

“We made a very conscious decision from the very beginning of our first institutional fund not to be a micro VC, not to be in the 30 to fifty million dollar fund size category, because if you disagree with conventional wisdom about a series A and you want to wr…”

“So follow on, three scan, because they are transforming both drug development and medicine by delivering a three D map From the subcellular level all the way up to complete organ systems a thousand times faster and with essentially infinitely greater accuracy …”

“They have almost a million discrete companies in a 140 countries worldwide from tiny companies in China up to a huge chunk of the fortune 100 addicted to their stuff. And they dwarf the footprint of Ariba and any other, you know, would be competitor.”

“Big data is a twenty-year secular trend.”

“Moleculo, they retain the rights to the blinded genetic data of every human or animal or plant that they are solving a problem for.”