The Ledger, every show

“I think if you're not putting yourself out there in losing, sometimes you're not chasing competitive enough things.”

“We did this survey of developers, and we asked them how many of them had a CFO who was telling them to spend less on Consumption versus more, and we actually found that seven times more companies are being told to, like, let it rip and spin more.”

“And one of the things that we're learning is like 50% of developers switch model families on a daily basis and 95% of developers switch models on a daily basis.”

“Cursor is going to build specialized coding models that are going to serve specialized coding tasks, especially for a lot of enterprise users.”

“Actually, this company is growing so quickly that on a multiples basis, you know, our first investment was at like four times, five times year-end ARR.”

“I think you can actually be successful in this market investing in consensus. And I think you can actually do really well investing in like non-consensus. I think you get hammered sitting in the middle.”

“We had fallen in love with our envy. We were chasing this round. It was going to happen in the two 50 or three hundred million dollar range. And, you know, we had these rigid rules about like, you definitely can't pay more than six times, six to eight times fo…”

“And I think nobody in the world does that better than Parker Conrad.”

“And I think like, I don't regret not breaking the rules in general, but you know, this would have been a time when it could have been worthwhile.”

“I think this is why, you know, the benchmarks that used to give us all comfort are largely obsolete now. And so, like, you have to be really clued into the usage intensity of your product and really understand how people are using it.”

“Today, you have to back into 20% the other way. Like, you do what the market will allow in the earliest possible investment. You sponsor a tender, you do a growth round, you do an IPO round, and you can ladder your way up to 20% ownership. You have to be a mul…”

“If you're just constantly stepping to the plate and trying to, you know, I can see at the series A that this is going to be a hundred billion dollar exit, you will just overswing and you will fail.”

“I think that company and a small handful of companies in the private market today are operating on a different plane. You know, I think it is not bombastic to say that some of those businesses could be trillion dollar companies.”

“I think it's probably a good time to be in the LBO business. I think it's probably a good time to be in the Toma Bravo Vista Blackstone KKR business. There will be homes for a lot of those companies, you know, who get themselves to a sustainable place and they…”

“Those companies will be bigger than the outcomes that I probably envisioned a year ago, and there is still time to be a part of some of them, and because, like, the innovation flywheel is just getting started. We are barely scratching the surface.”

“Fundamentally, people are valuing the future cash flows and the future terminal value of these companies differently, and I don't think that's wrong, but I do think this has been an overrotation.”

“I think there's generally an inverse correlation between how vocal somebody is and how helpful they actually are. So the person who just has to get the first and last word in and shows up at the board meeting and has to teach you something that you didn't alre…”

“You can actually be successful in this market investing in consensus.”

“90% of cursor users are daily active users of the agent product.”

“The agent product grew 15 X last year.”

“You know, the cloud agent product, which was new as of like October 30th, so it's only been in market for three months, is now responsible for 35% of merged PRs in cursor.”

“But I also think the way that a number of these verticals are going to play out in a number of the AI categories, there's going to be a couple of really big companies and several of them.”

“There have been investments where, you know, a company went from, they had a million dollars of ARR, and then in the period that you know, before they fundraise, they had like a four million dollar quarter, and it's like, they've got it. Like the product marke…”

“A lot of firms miss the model companies early, and we're guilty of it.”

“I think a healthy win rate would be, like, 80%.”

“Yeah, I mean, they passed GPT in the app store.”

“I mean, the greatest companies of three, four, five years ago, many have gotten totally beat up in the public markets. I believe many are oversold, but you know, that's a separate conversation.”

“With that said, I think that applies to like the 10 best private companies in the world. Like Databricks can do those things. Stripe can do those things. There's a lot of companies that just do need to get public.”

“We are not a part of Figma, but have a lot of respect for that company. But I know that Dylan is a generational founder, and it's a very important company with an incredible financial profile, and it just feels for a lot of ways, for a lot of reasons, oversold…”

“I think 11 Labs is a clear company that we wish we had been a part of. As you know, we haven't spent enough time with the founder, which is, you know, our loss. I think we really regret that one.”

“I don't know that I would characterize it as we lost, but the company that I, where I really, really loved the founder and we didn't get there was Shiv and a bridge. We actually hosted this AI dinner a couple of weeks ago and I was like, I'm going to manipulat…”

“The thing that still kind of inspires us, you know, through the Facebook parallel was, it was like the first platform company that we saw. So all the companies As associates that we were building relationships with, we're figuring out how they could like build…”

“Like, you have to have an outside-in viewpoint on which company is going to win before you even get the first meeting, and then you have to really show up and add some value and you know, Convince this entrepreneur that there's a compelling reason to work with…”

“So holistically, when we reflect on our work over the last couple of years, I think what we see is A seven billion dollar portfolio of really thoughtful, nuanced investments that we've selected very carefully.”

“I mean, if you think about it, 10 years ago, there were zero publicly traded companies worth a trillion dollars. Five years ago, there were five companies worth a trillion dollars. As of today, there's 14 with probably three or four private companies that are …”

“16 months ago, a hundred and fifty million dollar investment that I think is up 13 x today, and the world is now awakened to this company and how special it could potentially be.”

“We were investors in cursor at the time, but we certainly saw a lot of, you know, cursor as a choke point for downstream workflow creation and downstream tool recommendation. That probably emboldened us to make our second investment in cursor.”

“Growth can obscure and blind you to a lot of underlying ills in the business.”

“Investing is an art and a science. The science is understanding how to Properly value a company in the yard is understanding when to break the rules.”

“The reason that I think coding has become like the vertical in AI is because it shines on both dimensions. Like you can start using cursor in an afternoon and by that evening, like you're 10 times more productive. The time to value is very short. And then the …”

“There are two times more people using agents in cursor than using the tab feature.”

“There has never been a platform company for engineering as a vertical and engineers are like, I mean, this is the fastest growing, most dynamic vertical there is, and no one has ever owned that.”

“Never bet against Mike Cannonbrooks. Absolutely not.”

“There's a an appropriate congratulations and acknowledgement to Dan. There is a huge, loud, full-throated thank you to Alex, and then everybody gets the fuck back to work, you know, and like, it's a humbling industry, and you are only as good as the next thing…”

“I don't think that's actually the reason. I think it's because generally speaking, you want to go public and you want to be able to have like fairly clear line of sight to hitting the five billion dollar threshold and trading beyond that. Cause it's murky belo…”

“We didn't take liquidity out of Miro at seventeen billion”

“The example I would point to is, you know, CrowdStrike. Samir Gandhi and John Locke intersected CrowdStrike when it was, you know, there was like a million dollars of software revenue and there was a nine million dollar consulting business, and like, that was …”

“They're equally bad, but losing stings more. Having had the opportunity and failed, stings.”