The Ledger, every show

“I actually think the horizontal, like, experiences are addressable by startups now, because I think the big tech companies are just going to be too conservative.”

“In the sustaining versus disruptive innovation, I think AI is like pretty clearly a sustaining innovation in almost all cases. I think it like might be disruptive to Google. And so assuming like a scale up is still Competent and can still build new product. I …”

“If you're going to build an interesting company, I think you either have to attack it from, ah, you have the handful of researchers that can literally push the state of the art forward, which is like maybe eight organizations in the world, or You know and unde…”

“If you have some strict stack ranking of the teams within open AI, like only 10 problems can have like the top 10 teams on it. And so if you're any, if you're doing anything after like the top 10 problems that they have, then you're like by definition don't ha…”

“I personally am pretty skeptical. The reason is multifold. One is, I just think The technology and the research here is evolving so quickly that I think the number of data points you need to train a model is decreasing at, you know, some fixed efficiency level…”

“The mode to me is not really based on the data and the labels. It's more based on, well, now we have some specialty function. Let's say it's like radiology or dermatology, and you're labeling medical images, and now they have been trained to use our software f…”

“There were obviously sales and marketing teams at both Microsoft and Facebook, but you don't really build an intuition for how to like attack a new business category. I think unless you've worked at a startup.”

“I think there is a belief that there are things that, like, a two-, three-, four-year-old startup that is in founder mode can do that maybe a 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-, seventy-year-old venture firm cannot, so.”

“Consumer has the, this property that like very, very, very few things are going to work, but if it works really big, but if it doesn't work, it's often like really talented entrepreneurial founders that can then either like Take what they've built to a larger…”

“Another litmus test is just Would you want to quit and go work at the company?”

“The hard part of driving a car autonomously is the edge cases that live beyond 99.99, and I think those ones are just hard to imagine, let alone generate synthetically.”

“What I will say is I think almost every startup underprices its product.”

“I think too often what happens is you have people who build hardware that write really crappy software, or you have people who write software that are scared of building hardware, and so try to build software across a wide range of devices, you end up with kin…”

“I think he's like spent eighty billion dollars so, so far on like reality labs.”

“Like I mean, some companies are really fast enough to the races, but like, you know, Figma was like four or five years before it started to work. Notion was like four or five years before it started to work. Clay was four or five years before it started to wor…”

“Well, I mean, certainly there are things that are working, like obviously Cursor Cursor is working in a gigantic way. I think Harvey's working in a gigantic way. Decagon and Sierra seem like they're doing really, really well.”

“As I meet companies today, like the ones that I think are just really head and shoulders above the rest are typically the ones that are just amazing at focus, have incredible clarity of thought about what are we trying to accomplish? What are the steps we need…”

“They can come in and explain the entirety of their business in three to five minutes. And then the rest of the time is deep diving, poking on the margin to just understand sort of the fringes of the basic plan, then that's an exceptional pitch.”

“I have yet to meet a company once, think it wasn't interesting, and then have it actually be very interesting.”

“We do not want to be an instinctual or gut driven firm. I think we try to be very rigorous and rational about our investment decisions”

“And so in operating, I really think what is most important is just tempo and feedback loop.”

“Those decisions are effectively terminal. If you pass on a round and then someone else does it, that round is done and you can't go get a second bite at that apple.”

“So I think first and foremost, there will be a consolidation of many of these different SaaS apps. Two, I think there will be incumbents that see an opportunity to better integrate these things together and sort of have an all-in-one solution.”

“I probably made like seven or eight. One of them was Notion, which is probably the best of the bunch, but like Wealthfront, it was like Notion and Wealthfront and this company called Human interest, which is like a foreign provider and a couple others.”

“It is a negative signal. If you send a very long email”

“It takes eight to 10 years to really understand if a company is going to be great and enduring or not.”

“I took off almost two years I say took off because I kept, like, 15 boards, and so I was on, like 30 hours of board meetings and one-on-ones a week, but it was still amazing.”