The Ledger, every show

“I think 50% of people in the venture business should not actually be in the business. There's too much money and there's like too many tourists. 50, 60% of people in this industry that actually probably add negative value to companies.”

“Don't count China out. I bet they win the AI world.”

“I think how they're going to get in trouble today and all this AI stuff is they just assume the exit multiple is 20 to 25 times. That's insanity.”

“And I think investing in open AI, a hundred billion is a little insane personally, but like, I don't know if it goes on to do like a trillion dollars of earnings. Yeah. I was going to be very wrong. I should have invested.”

“I worry that a bunch of these private equity owned assets that are over levered are ripe for disruption versus like independent software companies that are focused on growth, that are trying to innovate.”

“Overhyped, overfrothed and I believe this AI CapEx bubble will end badly.”

“Look, our fundament, my fundamental belief Is that the models will commoditize.”

“People that spin out of Like, Anthropic or OpenAI and raise money at, like, two billion dollars for a freaking idea. Like, there's nothing more than an idea and a napkin. To us, that seems complete lunacy.”

“I've never run a company in my life. By the way, nor have, like, 98% of venture investors or private equity investors.”

“I think it's insane. I think these funds are way too, and they, just do the math, the fund math on like how, they're clearly, you have to have the next open, you have to have the next Google, effectively, or the math doesn't work, I don't think.”

“I think investing in AI infrastructure today is like investing in websites in 1997.”

“The idea of a single-person AI company I think is, like, comical at best.”

“And you realize if the company calls you back, the company sucks.”

“Had that deal, been backed by Benchmark, like Vishra or Fett, Peter Fett, and one of those guys, backed a Benchmark, doing a minority deal based in Silicon Valley, it would have been five hundred million dollars.”

“Late last year we were buying ByteDance. We were paying five times earnings for it. It grows, like, 25, 30% a year.”

“Please tell me where all these like three X net funds are all run. It's a complete fallacy.”

“I believe I believe that, like, DPI is the most important thing, and marks are completely for suckers.”

“The idea, like, from what I understand, microstrategy is effectively issuing debt to buy, to go in the market and buy more To go to buy more like crypto and they just keep doing it. But if that reverses, eventually got paid on the debt. I don't know. It just s…”

“I think the amount of money that private equity Growth equity, venture firms cost their investors by not selling in mid to late 21 is in the tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars.”

“I think the venture growth ecosystem gets like a bad rap, but it's gonna be every alternative asset. Their 20 and 21 funds are gonna be awful relative to earlier funds because you had, you know, people thought they were gonna make, you know, a forex in, you kn…”

“We're looking for, like, this one-to-one ratio. In a world where capital is a commodity, if you can build a business that's growing nicely while burning less than your, well, burning less than your revenues, you've got a pretty good business.”

“Our belief, for right or wrong, is that the competitive advantage of software company has never been about R&D. We're not building semiconductor chips. Like we're not, it's, we're not building biotech and pharma companies. This isn't that it's to build like ch…”

“I think the best Chris suggested returns right now are in Public software names.”

“We are buyers. We're buying software stocks right now. You know, a portion of our funds can be invested in public equities, so we're buying companies like Procore, Workday, Appian.”

“What you're going to see is they're going to take numbers down at a bunch of companies. Give it a quarter or two. Companies will start to then, you know, beat numbers. Then they'll raise the numbers, and the stocks will start to work. But it's probably dead mo…”

“Well, the reason a lot of these stock or stocks and internet stocks are actually still not cheap is because the stock-based comp, like, the stock-based comp in a lot of these companies is totally nuts. Like, the amount of equity compensation and dilution of, l…”

“I think it is possible to see in a few years that this company's doing, you know, 70, eighty, hundred billion of earnings in the next five years.”

“Zero percent chance it'll list in the US. No, I mean, just to answer it, I have no clue, but no, it'll list in Hong Kong.”

“Look, if you look at the internet, the biggest innovation in internet is usually over the last decade or 15 years to come out of China.”

“Don't underestimate, like, Chinese creativeness and, like, ingenuity to, like, figure out how to, like, reverse engineer and engineer things in much cheaper ways than Americans can do.”

“There are a lot of people that invested in good companies or great companies in twenty-twenty and twenty-twenty-one at really stupid prices and didn't make money.”

“At some point, I don't know if it's three years, or five years, or seven years, for sure. People are gonna wake up in 20, in 2030, in 2032, and realize it's, oh my god, they're still all in this stuff from 20 12 and 20 15.”

“When LPs go to the biggest venture funds in the world, and private equity funds, and say, we're not investing in your next fund until you get liquidity in these names.”

“But what surprises me is that more funds, like, you know, if you were an early investor in Toast, and you're fully out of it, and you love the company, and the stock's down, like, 60%, like, why not go buy it again? Like, it surprises me more people don't do t…”

“And you invest in something that's worth, like, it's worth a hundred billion dollars. You're effectively saying to make a double with dilution, it's probably two hundred and fifty billion dollars. Like, that's making the bet it's gonna do twenty-five billion d…”

“I think the venture industry was about to be in for a rude awakening, and then AI showed up.”

“People didn't learn a damn thing from 20 and 21. It's, like, shocking.”

“Same thing's gonna happen. Prices are gonna plummet.”

“You know, since the iPhone came out in 2007, 2006, whatever it was, there's only been three companies built that did not exist before. That were a hundred billion dollar companies. ByteDance, Pindo Doe, and Uber.”

“Yes, we have a prep so we would get our one X, but if you told me today I could take a .7 X just to get out of it, I would happily cut you. I would happily do it.”

“If you are a early stage investor, when your company goes public, you should get off the board and sell the company.”

“There's just a lot of, like, I think a lot of people in this industry are very complacent. All of us as GPs, Need to do a better job getting money back to LPs and figuring out how to do it.”

“What I believe like emerging managers and people starting venture funds need to do is take advantage of the secondary wind of the secondary markets.”

“We look at a lot of these AI software, tons of these AI software companies, and like, the gross dollar retention rates are just like, Really, really low. It's actually, like, shocking.”

“The firm that I think has generated the best returns in the tech investing world over the last 3040 years, and it's become more a buyout fund, but they used to do tons of minorities, TA Associates.”

“I believe a great question that people don't ask, that they should ask. Any manager who is around, who's been around 10 plus years, hey, in September of 21, September 30th of 21, how much unlocked stock did you have in your portfolio? And let's say September, …”

“ByteDance North America is a, you know, single digit percentage of revenue.”

“I think they're gonna be one of the foremost AI companies on, on the planet over the next decade.”