The Ledger, every show

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

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

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

“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 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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Are all of our software companies going to be completely disrupted and all of them go away? And like, I don't know, like I'm taking a stand that it's they're not. But like, I guess I could be totally wrong.”

“We've, I think we've only lost all of our money, like in one deal ever.”

“Probably a third of our exits have been secondaries.”

“If we do like an eight criteria deal versus like a five criteria deal, there's like actually no correlation to like, it was a better deal.”

“ByteDance Grows at, you know, 30% a year with massive profits.”

“This is nothing like this. This is like amateur hour. This is like nothing. Like, this isn't even volatile compared to like what was going on back then.”

“A lot of these, like, companies will retrain people. They'll do different things. It's a, it's remarkable throughout history. There's been, like, lots of technological disruption over the last hundred years, and, like, people find new things.”

“Just look how much, like, stock option dilution there is at a bunch of these big Silicon Valley companies. It's not as bad outside of Silicon Valley, but, like, the dilution is real.”

“I do think that investors are very, very, very focused on DPI now.”

“Listen, if your plan is to try to stay private forever, you're just not for us. Like, we just don't want to invest in you.”

“The problem with the IPO market is actually totally fine. If you look at IPO performance of companies, they've actually done pretty well versus opening day prices.”

“And our model is like, we're going to be 95% backed by individuals and we're going to treat those individuals like gold.”

“Hong Kong, for sure. Like, by the way, Tencent's listed in Hong Kong. It's gigantic. Hong Kong, a hundred percent.”

“This is the same size business in terms of earnings grows faster.”

“A hundred percent. When? I don't know. It might be like a slow You know, it might be like a slow hole in the canoe, but eventually, yes, they will, yes, a hundred percent.”

“50, 60% of our companies are, like, profitable businesses.”

“We sold like in the secondary markets like 40 or 50 bucks in toast. The stock today is like 30 bucks.”

“When we invest in a business, and when we exit, it's something like 75% of the time, the person who was running the business when we invest is still involved in the company.”

“They probably talk to, like, they probably talk to 30,000 companies a year.”

“TAs has definitely come down. They're more private equity-like.”

“If you look today at the 10 largest e-commerce companies in the United States, You know, six or seven out of 10 of them are traditional retailers.”

“And, you know, like Apple's spending very little right now, you know, and those other three or four companies are spending insane amounts of money.”

“So if you were to look at your average software company that goes public, You know, if you look at cumulative spend since inception, it's usually around, like, 30% is R&D. So like, a huge amount of these businesses are about, like, sales and marketing, distrib…”

“I actually think the biggest disruption you're gonna see is in, like, manufacturing, is in, like, healthcare, is in you know, think about, like, the companies that can figure out how to get drugs to market much faster than anybody else. Like, I think AI could …”

“Most big companies that are, like, financially regulated, you can't even go on to Claude or ChatGPT. Like, you can't even, like, get on the system to do work.”

“I would suspect over the next, you will, as our names come through, you know, you will see more things like sales, like Salesforce, people put in place big buyback programs to start buying back stock here. I think you'll see it.”

“We, in the US, we are gonna run into major issues around power.”

“LPs want money back, and the people that stay in, they're gonna be in business 1015, 20 years from now, are people that will continue to give money back to their investors.”

“If I was them, like, I know that all these companies, they drive EBITDA margins from five percent to 40%.”

“Private equity funds don't have enough money to write like, forty billion dollar checks in the companies.”