The Wisdom Wall, every show

“Yes. Get rid of them. Build a, build a professional service organization. Hire more SEs who can do it. Customer success. Look, people think that's blasphemy. I get it. I don't believe in it. I inherited our customer success when Frank came in and he gave it to me. I got rid of it. It was an expense that I didn't see…”

“There is this idea, somehow, the desire to, and the ability to dominate, is linked with intelligence. A statement that a lot of people are making, including Jeff Hinton recently, That somehow, as soon as a machine becomes intelligent, it becomes uncontrollable because it's being smarter than us. It can influence us in…”

“Because if there's anything patriarchy hurts, it's men. We are just the symptoms. We just get, there's just domestic violence and rape and violence of all kinds against women, yes. But who really suffers, who never has an outlet, who never has the strength to cry in public, is men.”

“Whereas these things are exchanging information at like a trillion bits. So they're kind of billions of times better than us at sharing information. Now that's scary. It means you could have a whole swarm of these things with identical weights running on different hardware, sharing information, um, very, very…”

“when you give people feedback negative, uh, individually, you're optimizing for the atomic unit, not the system. The reason why to do it in public is it's more important for all the colleagues to understand that there's an issue it's being addressed.”

“No, no, I don't believe in that at all. Like high performance machines don't have psychological safety. They're about winning.”

“There's, there's been this correlation between the number of folks at a company and the output from the company Uh, for, you know, decades and decades. I think that basically broke the first week of December, and what we were seeing is that one or two engineers, or a designer and an engineer who was on the tools, quote…”

“You can have dispossessed urban poor forever, and nothing happens, but if you piss off the twenty-something-year-old middle class, the overeducated elites, they tend to cause trouble.”

“The use of inside information gets to the truth faster. And I think that has value, especially if it uncovers corruption or misdeeds. And so if people make money along the way, and that's the incentive that it takes for folks to work around what would otherwise be whistleblower laws or something else to get to the…”

“don't use things like we're a family. I treat you like my family. Okay. Which is like a little bit true, but not true enough. And instead we're a professional sports team and we all got to fight every year to keep our position. Because if we can upgrade, we must to achieve the winning of the championship, which is…”

“If you have a gun pointed to your head today, would you have done more? If the answer is yes, that means you're not doing a good job.”

“If you haven't gotten a boost this year from AI, fire half your team right before the holidays, give them a turkey and three months of severance, but they failed. You have a, your team is not good enough. They had 18 months to ship a product that mattered in this world.”

“You're close to, you know, eight hundred billion of market cap needed to return a Forex net for those multi-stage funds. Now, for reference, twenty-twenty-one, the best exit year of all time, there was 850 billion-ish of market cap exit value from that year. Ok, you need an entire year of IPOs in M&A just for this, you…”

“what happens is from, from a political standpoint is the cities that are run right there in, in, in, in their local democracies, it's these super high end kind of, you know, very progressive elites. And then it's sort of the clientele underclass. Right. Um, that, um, you know, of, you know, in the U.S. it's Hispanic…”

“If any company in the world has a marketing team and the head of marketing does not have a 100,000, at least a 100,000 followers. Like, you, you need to replace them. Like, like the game has changed.”

“But, but the thing people may not realize is the managers of the VC group at the large endowments have no incentive to try and right size this number. In fact, many of them are bonused on paper marks. And so, if anything, they have the reverse incentives to get them right.”

“The only advice I gave to this particular CEO is, um, immediate, like he was hybrid. So I said to force a hundred percent of people returned to office in 30 days and let everyone go, except your S tier engineers, letting them all go. Because you don't need them.”

“Like, I think the reality is like VR and like immersive experiences and all other realities are kind of great if your life sucks, right? Because then you're like, I'm gonna like live in a video game. But like, I think a lot of the problem with that type of stuff is like, it's just, It's not, if you have a good life and…”

“When you're investing your own money, do the right thing. When you're investing my money, pay the minimum you can pay.”

“I think there is a Correlation between how aggressively people predict AGI is coming and how much capital they need to raise. So you've got Emodi from Anthropic, you've got Altman, OpenAI, Musk, XAI, all of these guys are saying that it's just around the corner and this industry is moving incredibly quickly. Then in…”

“those number twos are always expendable. Um, they have to be.”

“when you do the pricing, I think that the best logical thing to do is pick a price that the alternative care, in other words, a world without this drug, you would forego all those costs for this drug.”

“I think you can learn more by studying World of Warcraft raiding guilds than you can learn from studying companies about coordination and, and, um, And, and, and what great looks like.”

“I said, I would take everything in your portfolio that received a valuation over the last two years, over five hundred million dollars, and I'd mark it down by 50%. What do you mean? And I said, well, if I look at the average gross stock in the NASDAQ, it's down 50%.”

“And so the one thing we absolutely have to do is research sunlight reflection. And so we have no way out of this without reflecting sunlight back into the solar system to buy us some time.”

“I, I think monopolies are good because monopolies are just like lazy, and it's easier to innovate and compete against a monopoly, to be honest, than it is to compete against cronyism.”

“venture capital is a business about outliers, and when somebody succeeds, their opinion, and I think their decision-making gets over-indexed on their successes, which often, as you know, are outliers, and it's hard to generalize from a single outlier, and my belief is the most successful people in venture capital…”

“But what we don't want, which I think is not commonly supported by other early stage startups is what we don't really want at this stage is diversity of thoughts, and I know that doesn't make sense. It's, it's a little counterintuitive, but the reason why we don't is the way I view it is we're playing a football game,…”

“90% of the value added of a venture capitalist is finding and choosing the right investments.”

“I would tell the 25 year old there's enough platforms, there are enough people working on AI, there's a lot of competitor overcrowding, don't go there, start a boutique hotel business, or start very nice, clean, budget hotel business, and you will have a lot of success.”

“And compared to a few years ago, You do not have the need to go and hire people that you do not trust, that you do not trust to have high agency or the right skills, because you can use an agent to do those things.”

“And I see some other companies that are around our size starting to go hire a PM or a marketer or something like that. And that just feels like the old way of building a software business. And ultimately that's gonna lead to something where 10% of the people are thinking about how to make a great product. And the other…”

“But if you ask the most sophisticated individuals at the labs, it's not actually RSI that's occurring, which could lead to some sort of runaway winner because they were an epsilon ahead of the others. It's auto catalytic effects, which just means you're using the new technology to improve your process, but it's not…”

“Well, I, you know, here's the one thing I would say that here's the hopeful point, which is I always say that nobody has a growth problem these days. They have a product problem.”

“when you get down to a lower level, because you can no longer have on-off APIs, because everything is scriptable, because these things can script any interface and interact anyway, as long as you have data sovereignty, meaning like it's your data, they're all completely interoperable. And like, there's nothing they can…”

“I think you have to inject some misery in your kids' lives so they have that hunger. It can be fake because they know it, but you can't give them everything because otherwise they won't be hungry.”

“A term sheet is not worth the paper it's written on, but once you sign it, Both sides, I think you have to honor it. You know, many times, uh, we're out, we're, I'm on the board of a company, and we signed a term sheet with an investor, and then three days later, someone's interested in a much higher price. There's no…”

“And then I think another aspect of this is specifically doing this in a way where part of the story is either slowing down China or cutting a deal with China such that China doesn't overtake and, and, and, you know, break this whole proposal.”

“Tell me who the established leaders of, of a field will block, but will not short. Fund that guy for now”

“For 53 years, you've been denied new boom, vroom, and zoom, and potentially The stagnation in physics may have led to the survival of the human species because the boom is so terrifying.”

“Nine billion doesn't clear the bar for seed investing in 2026.”

“there is a case for a company that raises a hundred million dollars, uses it productively and in a focused way, and is able to deliver a different value proposition than the very same team would be able to do with 20.”

“What matters is that no lead is secure. And projections don't mean anything, right? And so I think that's the real story is it's too easy to switch. Leads don't matter. It's going to be impossible to financially price any of this stuff.”

“If no, if you're not into your 20, 27 roadmap deep into it by August of 20, 26 in the agentic world, your team is not good enough to survive today.”

“Well, I think whatever we do, uh, there will be both existential risks and individual risks. So it's not as if we have a choice between avoiding risks and confronting risks. So it's, uh, it's looking at these different alternatives and weighing up the, the risks and benefits. Um, and, and that would be some optimal…”

“the way I think about it is an operator who's running a company is a, if they're good, is a grandmaster of chess. The VC, and by the way, that grandmaster of chess, this operator, entrepreneur, Is playing this chess match somewhere between 60 and 80 hours a week. And is like, really knows this thing. And it's like,…”

“Like if an antelope limps in the Serengeti, the lion will take it down even if it's not hungry. Can't even fucking help it. Uh, it's just what is, what he does. And that's kind of the nature of most VCs. This, the, the nature of it is they will, if the, if you are on the Serengeti and limping, you will, you will be…”

“my philosophy is that the Ecom playbook Is the right playbook for SAS? Because if you look at e-comm, you have every single cent needs to equal a purchase or an ad to cart. You have hundreds of UGC creators, variety of creative, and you also have a ton of channels that you're essentially balancing to showcase the…”

“my hot take was probably fire most of your marketing team that is not a systems thinker. Like, stop brute forcing people in. Hire the right people into the roles because the role has changed.”

“You know when kids drop out of college, David? Third grade. That's when they start dropping out, and when you have 50% of your kids not reading at grade level, college cost is not your problem.”

“We've created this reflexivity. We're now, we justify overspending on the basis of prior overspending having worked out. Well, in prior episodes where that happened, people were not justifying the overspending by saying, say, in rural electrification, you know, this may look bad, but it worked out in railroads. No, no,…”

“So much of the improvement we've seen in the last 18 months has really been about the imposition of harnesses, effective nannies, sitting on top of bratty kids, and not about the actual structural improvements in the models themselves, and that's a sort of a huge misunderstanding, but it's reflective of where we're…”

“So your brain books the fantasy as like a partial payment on the real thing. And it actually gives you the reward before you've done the work. So the drive to do the actual work drains out of you. Fascinating. So in other words, manifestation is actually anesthesia, not fuel.”

“every single day that you are hitting your plan, you are destroying equity value.”

“the intelligence now doesn't need like the graph and the multi-agent lattice work and harness because it will constrain this level of intelligence.”

“The reason this never happens is because big fancy investors, not us lowly seed investors, but big fancy ones, have no interest in the write down, right? It's a massive write down, right, for them. And they'd rather just stick it on their books and pretend like it's worth something it's not until the last possible…”

“If for many aspects, I think the closed open distinction is almost orthogonal to the safe and safe. People don't understand that, you know, easily because it's easier to do bad mapping than to try to understand the subtlety.”

“Technical moats are not real moats. Like, I, I, there's no portion of basis's long-term terminal value that stems from some, you know, secret RL trick we found that nobody else found.”

“And, and the folks with the highest usage may actually have the most incentive to leave. It's not a clear correlation to success, right?”

“That doesn't mean that they're not distilling. They may still be using distillation as a sub-step in their training procedure, But it does mean that distillation is only part of the story and that there's something that those labs are doing above and beyond distillation that's bringing the performance up above what the…”

“wherever possible, it's kind of optimal to not have a product manager, uh, and instead have design and engineering going through those, those kinds of steps and making sure that their muscles are well repped.”

“hiring so many PMs infantilizers The engineers and the designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but just never had to, because there was always a PM to babysit them.”

“actually top down is pretty good because folks at the top, generally speaking, can make quick decisions and remove all of this alignment debate. They have probably more macro context than most folks and assuming that they are genuinely in touch with ground truth and are good enough. It's actually a really efficient…”

“So if you, if you believe in job destruction, like in any kind of very large scale way, you basically don't believe that markets adapt and you, and you basically don't believe that some other company will emerge and say, I'm gonna just do this way better. And the way I'm going to do it way better is by adding people…”

“The reality is when you're getting open weights, you're not getting, it's not the same thing because all you get is the fixed weights that allow you to run the model. What you don't know is the black box inside those weights and how they work.”

“in the old regime, I think when there is really prolonged and serious imbalance in trade, I think, I mean, if we use history as a benchmark, war is unfortunately the war that we would have to visit or revisit what that is when the two countries or countries, one country with other countries cannot resolve their…”

“you have to be in the big outliers to drive great returns, and you're better off being in them at a very small percent than owning a large percent of a company that exits for three to 500. Those just aren't going to move the needle.”

“And in in order to survive in this new world, you're going to work a lot more, not a lot less.”

“Federal preemption is good When you are pro regulatory capture.”

“I like to go to the line. We should be like a few inches off the line. That's a good thing to do.”

“Like, every American, instead of having a social security account, they should have the equivalent of a four or one K where they own stocks, and when they retire, they get all those stocks.”

“Education, I think, is probably the easiest, which is if you end the federal student loan program, I think you solve 90% of the problem in education.”

“What, for most tech companies, AB tests have done have been the safety blanket for management.”

“But, like, you taking any action as a single country does nothing, right? Like, and all it does is protect certain companies, right? And their, and their market caps.”

“Being canceled is a choice. You can choose to get canceled and retreat from the public eye, but I think if you're still out there, at some point, honestly, the haters kind of give up.”

“so many breakthroughs rely on a little bit of pushing the boundaries. I mean, Uber did with taxi regulation. Airbnb did with regulation. You're right. Polymarket did in terms of how they're regulated. So I'm actually going to get off my high horse and say you actually won that round. Is that, I mean, the interesting…”

“There's no way of objectively seeing the difference between the emotions of a Of, um, reward maximizing biological brain and the emotions of a reward maximizing artificial brain.”

“This is like the great fallacy of enterprise software that you can just sell to the users, and it's like it only ever worked for Slack and one other company. Maybe Notion, but even Notion has capped out.”

“if you were trying to do the same amount of work and you believe you can do it with fewer people and therefore you shrink, um, your competition can also do the same, but they chose actually not to do the same amount of work. They chose to actually, you know, elevate and build a 10 X better product or build 10 times…”

“The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those on the outside world have missed.”

“And I think that's a new and interesting divide where before we were like, I need a technical co-founder and that's not really it anymore because everyone can code. Um, I think it's about your Your set of sensitivities and desire to make something new and go fast versus make something polished and really high quality.”

“The moment that a company, an industry, wants to consolidate, needs to consolidate, is the moment regulators are most likely to stop them consolidating. And whereas the actual time when action would matter, like when it, when it's growing and a company is making the right acquisitions to take over an industry,…”

“And that now I think the billionaire class has become subservient to the posting class.”

“I asked him, what are a couple of the biggest lessons? And one of them was, never pass on price. So Fred says, never pass on price.”

“the primary skill these vendors have is securing government contracts. Huge moat. Delivery of quality product. Be damned.”

“I, I actually have a lot of coaches, but I've chosen all them, and I'm not coachable by a VC who's never held this job, who never sat in this seat, and so I, I guess it's not exactly advice, but it was implied advice of, you know, I should pretend that I'm going to learn something from, uh, the person with money or the…”

“If the agent can run 24 seven autonomously, take all your data and build all the analytics, build all the dashboards, run autonomously out of it, um, then your data can flow between apps and you won't even care where it lives and all the fears about headless become true because Claude is your head and you don't need,…”

“But if you want to avoid war, you need to increase your defense budget. It's the only way to avoid, uh, avoid war.”

“It's a moat destroyer when LLMs will lift you from one vendor to the other, and, um, I, you know, I don't even, like, I literally was doing a pitch this week, and the founder was going on and on about their moats, and I, I immediately didn't want to invest. Like, I just, enough, I don't, you don't, your moat can be LLM…”

“I think when people say that, for the most part, what you end up with, and I do mean the most part, is some form of excuses as to why, sure, this is not great, but it will be if you wait long enough.”

“the idea that work from home is going to benefit highly paid employees is sort of a total fantasy. Like, work from home done correctly, you should be hiring the world's greatest geniuses. There should be a labor arbitrage here, where you're finding really, really smart people who make a lot less money because of the,…”

“There's a very common Silicon Valley fallacy, which is there's like research is like the pinnacle. And then there's engineers who implement the research, you know, they're not quite there, but you know, they're still great. And then there's sales and marketing and all that dirty stuff. Oh, if only we could build a…”

“especially there's some high schools that, like, really focus on, like, you must do the math olympic, like, you must do this, the Amy, to then go to the IMO, and, like, this is the path to success, where actually that's kind of anti-signal, because there it's, like, you're not owning your fate or choosing your agency,…”

“If we need FDEs to make the product work, we have a shit product. Like, the point of FDEs should be accelerate and get them consuming faster. If you're putting in FDEs, because that's the only way you'll get a deal done, I'm sorry, my friend, you have a shit product.”

“Customers will prefer, prefer a great eye to a mediocre human. They'll prefer a great eye that solves their problem today, that knows the answer, to someone that has to get an engineer and an appointment to you next week, that doesn't know, that says I'm just new to the account because your old account manager quit…”

“One of the big lessons investing is if Chinese are a competitor, be very careful because they will overproduce and kill you.”

“Because specialists at major inflection points are usually wrong. If you're not able to compare, you don't know what good or bad is.”

“And if the trailer is sick, then like, that means you have good taste, that means you have a story people are gonna care about, like, it means all the good things. And if your story is boring, or there's no good trailer, then your company's gonna suck.”

“We're going to have to accept that intelligence isn't just biological. We can have things that are non-biological that are other beings like us, and we really don't want to share that.”

“It's not that scale is all you need. You need to also have, have good ideas to, to guide the scaling.”

“You have these crazy, huge systems that have all sorts of interesting phenomena, and, and, you know, if you think about it the right way, they don't grok. There's just this nice continuity.”

“You have every incentive in the world to juice the valuation because that means that it gets anchored there and then you go out at a higher value. Like, then you realize that at the expense of the retail market.”

“too many teams Waste time getting to a minimum viable product that they can put out in the market, and we don't have time anymore for that. We need a failure machine at the top of the funnel. We need to get to a minimum idea state that gets vibe coded.”

“I think that you owe it to, in that moral contract to your good employees, to fire the weak people. And they're not bad people. They may be really smart. They are not effective in your organization. They are not taking hills.”

“And if you want to win, then actually it's something that I think attracts the right type of person and absolutely repels the wrong type of person.”

“So naturally there, there's, there's roles, I think that, that creep in, you know, you get the, like a lawyer and accountant are not going to work in the same way that, um, you know, a software engineer might. Um, and that's just a fact of life. So, okay. So if they don't want to work quite as hard, then you just need…”

“Akerloff argues once those things come on board, you get this slow diffusion of a totally new market terms where, you know, people expected birth control and the pill to, to get rid of unwanted pregnancies, but it actually had the opposite effect because it destroyed the shotgun marriage norm.”

“Not to say that the board doesn't have other responsibilities, but I think ultimately they should feed into creating shareholder value. If you go back to both Milton Friedman and things that Warren Buffett have said, of course, boards care about the communities that they serve, the products, the employees, Uh, proper…”

“And I just think this going back to seed is for suckers. Like you want to invest the hour it blows up. The minute it blows up, you want to get the DM and just wire the money in AI. That's the play.”

“it turns out that, like, the thing that was hampering the world was being worried about security and privacy and all the things that could go wrong, and when you, like, worry a bit less, you're like, oh my god, these things are unbelievably powerful.”

“Historically, everything in education has been nonprofit. And the problem with nonprofits is nonprofits are non-scalable, which is the better your product, the faster your donations go away, right?”

“every, every healthy sales organization should be attrating the bottom 10% every year. You should be getting rid of 10% of your sales force every year.”

“if we do try and slow down AI, we kind of lose this moment of balance that's necessary when you have a technology proliferation, like we saw with the arms race after World War II, that, you know, we're gonna see again here.”

“I think selling in deprecated Nvidia GPUs to China. Lowers the odds of them developing their own alternative ecosystem, which would be a lot power hungrier, um, because you use optical, you bring in optical a lot earlier for scale up fabrics.”

“There's like the kingmaker firms that you should accept at any price. Um, one example would be Founders Fund or Sequoia, uh, or people like that. Um, and so if you get an offer from them at X and the offer from, um, someone else is at two X, you should take their offer because even if you're maximizing, um, amount…”

“Someone, someone, uh, someone could argue that if, if a country currently doesn't work on their own nuclear program, They're doing a disservice to their country and the government should be fired. Like, because it seems like from the recent world history that, that, that is like the only way to actually provide…”

“the companies that you can build on top of just the consumer and healthcare, Oftentimes there's the kind of companies that, that paint themselves into a corner that can never be trustworthy enough to go enterprise. They're the kind of companies where the business models would require you to take multiple showers every…”

“So I'll have to see, but we won't do, we'll never do, uh, Unless I'm forced to, I mean, if, you know, I do it for Sam Altman, but otherwise I'm not gonna do, there's, the firesides are dead and speakers are dead. There's just no point when podcasts are better.”

“Yeah, and every time you cut a corner, every time you invest in a founder that's really nice and really hardworking and really good guy, you never make any, any real money.”

“The problem with that is the minute you take capital from a traditional investment fund, you are on this, like, rat race where everyone is chasing growth and these, you know, whatever the hot metric of the month is.”

“in the early days, why would you go to a middleman, like a venture firm, whose value add is to connect you to somebody else, who by the way, then still doesn't have any interest in actually helping you, right? Versus going directly to these companies that you want to sell to anyways. And having them partner with you.”

“And there's a little bit of this, um, I think of it again like Jevin's paradox, but for, for labor, which is that we have people who become incredibly more productive. We actually, we've hired a lot more people because of that, because there's no shortage of work to do, and now with the assistance of Claude, you know,…”

“If your group's entire purpose for existing is to fight an enemy, then you need to make sure that that enemy exists. To do that, of course, of course, of course, you would fund them.”

“any Harvard MBA can cut costs. If you're smart, you could do it. It takes a genius to grow revenue.”

“Like you should be the strongest individual contributor in your team if you're leading that team. If you need a people manager, we'll give you a people manager to manage the communication. But I want you mainly hands on keyboard coding, designing, talking to users.”

“And those who urge entrepreneurs to never give up? Charlatans. Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else is genius. Giving up doesn't mean stopping. Don't ever stop.”

“A CMO today should be able to run their own campaigns, and this is why. I'm not saying you have to spin up, uh, Marketo or HubSpot. I'm saying you should be able to tell your agent, and our agent, our AIVP marketing started running its own campaigns the last two weeks, and it's better, and so, You don't even need to…”

“So if you just rely on your experience from 10 years ago, even though you may have been successful, I think that's actually makes you like really dangerous because now you're like credible and wrong. It's one thing when you're just wrong and you don't have credibility that people don't listen to you anyways, but…”

“What I don't like about drawdown funds, the traditional private equity fund is, you know, you commit to them, they charge your management fees for a while, They find a deal, they draw it down, so your money's not been in the ground for a few years. And then a few years later, if it's a successful deal, they sell it for…”

“Founders were over-delegating their companies to these professional managers. I'm not disparaging them, but they were detaching themselves, and they were being managed, rather than managing the company. And it was really about not apologizing about how you want to run a company, being in the details. That was Founder…”

“It replaces merit of organization, um, with pull of individuals. Who is attracted to these places? The people who want to do something that, uh, for which you have to use, um, You know, pull. And, um, um, you know, the, the smoothest talkers, the people who, it's not the builders who are doing it, um, they go and like…”

“I never believed in saving cash for a rainy day. I feel like I'm a big believer in what we're building. I believe in where we're going. So if I believe in the future, and we're a really high cash-generated business, We should always be buying back our shares.”

“at least on the writing side, every time there is an intervention, a human intervention, it should feel a little bit like a bug.”

“And like, obviously I bias towards having college athletes because they've, they've learned how to work hard. All you gotta do is teach them how to work smart. If you teach them how to work smart, it's really tough to teach someone how to work hard.”

“outbound will never be dead. You can't reach every single company and every single buyer with whatever marketing you're doing.”

“Anybody that's like, oh, well, you know, we're just going to cut our SDR team in half, I'm like, hmm, okay. That's an interesting move, right? That's a, that's a scared play that you're making because you're saying I can get the same productivity for half versus saying I can get this productivity and now I'm going to…”

“And the reason I did that then is a belief that if the role was going to get automated, Or that AI was not being adopted fast enough in those departments. It's time to let those people go and rebuild the organization as if we were building it knowing what technologies were available to us today.”

“The only way to fix a culture like that is to go and fire 99% of people and just rebuild it from the ground up.”

“The other thing I found is when we go out and we drink and we start shooting the shit, really good ideas can come of that too. It's not that we're going out and with a bunch of coworkers and talking about baseball. We're going out with a bunch of coworkers and getting drunk together and talking about work…”

“the second you care about that KPI and you chase it, you're selling from your own core business to go diversify. You're not focused on your day job.”

“I don't, I think network effects are certainly an important piece of the puzzle for sure. Um, but I don't think they're enough when it comes to these sorts of software, uh, you know, software cloning.”

“They don't need to learn how to code. They need to learn how to create. They need to learn how to build.”

“Software is almost useless. It's almost worthless now because anybody can create it.”

“my theory is the, the ability to directly participate in online virtual combat, uh, is shunting away a lot of the energy that in the past would have, would have translated to street violence.”

“On the one hand, just predicting what comes next sounds like a pedestrian task, but if you really can predict the next word out of Einstein's mouth, you are at least as smart as Einstein.”

“If he can't get Box to 20 to 30% growth I'm, I'm giving up on, on the rest of the world.”

“So these companies are talking about their things in apocalyptic terms, which make it necessary for us to judge the management teams, judge their actions, Look at the terms of service. Understand how they fit in our supply chain. This technology is like nothing we've ever seen, so you can't compare it to, you know, a…”

“AI alignment, don't get me wrong, is hard, but not the hardest problem. Human alignment is really the problem right now.”

“Like one of the reasons why, you know, sometimes it's controversial to say this, but one of the reasons why the net impact of by higher undiscovered talent is you wind up skewing younger. It's not because you need young people. It's that younger people have by definition, less data. It's like, you know, we use credit…”

“Customers don't know what They want, and they're very bad because it's a subconscious decision, especially for consumers. Like what I purchased, what I wear is not a conscious decision. And when you're consciously trying to answer a subconscious decision, you actually give misleading information.”

“I don't want to deter people from taking ambitious shots on goal. And if you overemphasize failures and, you know, really people think they're going to get criticized. This is where the psychological safety maybe has some validity, which is be ambitious, be bold. Don't worry about the failing part, unless there's…”

“In the world where, like, Snowflake grew up, um, like, that made sense. In the world we are in today with AI, that doesn't make any sense. Because fundamentally, like, anyone can spin up a competitor of your product in the next two days. Anyone.”

“AI doesn't take your job, AI makes you the CEO.”

“I don't think abstention from participating in the building of technology for national security is a morally neutral decision. You are making a moral decision when you decide to abstain”

“I think at the limit, it's actually kind of indefensible to have A perspective other than lawful use, because if you are salami slicing the policy, that's actually tyranny by tech bro. You know, a small number of people are constraining the maneuver space of a democracy with no accountability to the populace.”

“a lot of the way that we built software, which was like, we're going to build all these little shims in between, and there's going to be all this open source software and I'm going to use yours and you're going to use mine and it's going to make my life easier. Like a lot of that stuff goes away when these models can…”

“And I think that's right because realistically, in the journey of what's going on, the only significant things we've done, I've said this before in the podcast, we put in the money and we put in more money when they need it. We decide to hire or not hire and fire the CEO. We agree the broad strategic direction, and…”

“these kids are disengaged. They are addicted to TikTok and Fortnite, and they have mental health problems, and all these issues that are occurring, and they're the outcome of low standards, not high standards.”

“when we designed our educational system, I think we're the only school in the world who, if a kid's not learning, it's our fault. It's the system's fault. It's not the kid's.”

“don't ever do diamonds in the rough, only do diamonds.”

“and so I say no, you don't, because I think, like, if, if you're trying to fulfill your personal emotional needs at work, like, I think that's a very fundamental problem, and you shouldn't try to do that.”

“we always say, do not bring your whole self to work. Like, whatever you do, do not bring your whole self to work.”

“We need to be selfish, and we need to be greedy. Those are good trades for an early stage investor.”

“the venture business as a whole doesn't, doesn't work. It doesn't work. It shouldn't work. Uh, and, and returns, uh, distribution, uh, are not divided equally between players.”

“you could not really get Gradient descent to encode, uh, uh, sort of like reasoning style algorithms. It was not because the models could not represent these algorithms. It was because gradient descent could not find them, right? So the problem was that it wasn't about deep learning not being trained complete or…”

“And talk about the technology, and I see it just as fundamentally two different problems. There's driver assist systems, and then there is full autonomy. And I think it's deceptive to think of them as kind of incremental, uh, you know, on one spectrum of complexity.”

“If you work in defense, and if you start a defense company, your moral compass tends to be pretty clear on this question, which is, we have a democratically elected set of governments that represent the US, the Alliance, NATO, all of the countries participating. They set the rules, uh, and we abide by those rules.”

“Many committees are a nearly impossible task where, particularly in the endowment business, colleges, because rich graduates who've made big donations, Would love to sit on the board. They are treated with kid gloves because they're wonderfully good at making money at private equity or venture capital or hedge funds…”

“That's the reason why I said that even for most chips, if you can't keep up with the state of the technology and the pace that we're running, even when the chips are free, it's not cheap enough.”

“If you find your logic being reduced to, I've got to get rid of this much money this month, and this entrepreneur is amazing, so I'm not sure about the opportunity, and I don't like the price, but have a goal. If that's your logic, let me give you some advice. Have your fun size.”

“the hamster wheel of VC doesn't actually allow us to be long-term. Because if you are having to spend a lot of money for employees and you're, you're burning a rate of you have to raise every, like, year, year and a half, you end up optimizing for that next fundraise.”

“Cause the weird thing is an early stage employee takes way more risks than early stage founder.”

“I think if you want to be successful, you can go look at every single industry and you can say, okay, who is the dumbest people and what makes the most money? And if you go like attack that area, Probably pretty good space.”

“You know, YC puts out this, um, you know, quest for startups. My recommendation is like, that should be a list of startups you should not start. Because by the time that gets so consensus that this is a good area or super interesting, the amount of capital and the amount of smart people, it's like, it's like, you know,…”

“we see at Silicon Valley where, you know, kind of there, these guys get under pressure and, you know, they kind of feel anxious or whatever, and they decide that, you know, somebody tells them about psychedelics and they try it and, and they kind of come out the other end as a changed person. And, and they kind of come…”

“For any founder in the first year, investing in paid as the means of growth is a death trap.”

“Unless you've been in the business for five years plus, You do not know your LTV. Period.”

“paid marketing to me is, uh, Is a cheap way out, and it's not competitively defensible. I should say cheap. It's actually the most expensive way out, and it's not competitively defensible at all, and it's not sustainable.”

“There, there are two that everybody's worried about like their future, but there are basically two ways to know you have a future. One, you have some vocational training. So it's like, or two, you're neurodivergent.”

“the most important challenge for us as cyber security industry is to eliminate the men in the middle. Making defenses completely run by self-aware, sophisticated mega agents. And until we get to that point where we completely eliminate the men in the middle, uh, we are vulnerable.”

“the best cultures are really almost cult-like. You know, uh, your culture is highly differentiated. It should actually kind of be hard for someone to inorganically insert into your culture, otherwise it's not a very differentiated culture whatsoever.”

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

“To admit that you are worried about software taking your job as a software builder is to effectively say that you are a bad software engineer, right?”

“Like every agent will leak data if it's allowed to, like every single agent will. That's how goal seeking works.”

“And one of the easiest thing to do there is if you have access to the budget, which, you know, federal politicians do, you just start subsidizing things, which makes the problem worse in the long term. But, you know, the electorate likes it in the short term.”

“Unilaterally imposing restrictions, even if those restrictions are good, isn't just an issue as far as who rules us, the democracy issue, that sort of Palmer Luckey, I think very eloquently raised. It's inviting Very bad outcomes for those asserting that in general.”

“I think it is a safer equilibrium To have China dependent on Taiwan than to try to cut them off from Taiwan while we are dependent on Taiwan. Taiwan is 70 miles off the coast of China. It's not an ideal position in the world for us to have a dependency on it and China to not have a dependency on it.”

“the docile, yes, subservient people never turn out to be good. The arrogant pricks are the ones who do better.”

“Pain is a fantastic amplifier of capability. Some sort of, like, grudge, pain, anger, but, you know, the, the child that had a wonderful upbringing is a wonderful human being and not a great entrepreneur in many cases, at least at scale, at mega scale, because it just requires a level of Self-flagellation almost, you…”

“To be a very successful investor, you have to be extremely, extremely single-minded. You need to come to your own conclusions. Uh, you cannot have others help you. Uh, it is not a team sport. That is probably the single most important thing. Whenever I see teams of investors, I think these idiots are going to lose…”

“I do think this is why a lot of fundamentally based value strategies have struggled for a long time, because the alpha in those strategies Was being willing to own these stocks that other people were embarrassed to own because they were so out of favor. And you didn't have that different of an opinion on the future…”

“I think the funny thing about America is that, uh, we love speculation and speculation actually creates real value. People think of speculation as this bad thing, but in the case, in this case, we sort of got really lucky in that there was this meme stock moment for the company, which allowed us to hire and bring on…”

“What do they say? Praise in public and criticize in private. I fundamentally disagree with that notion. I think what you have to do is establish enough trust among the team so that you are comfortable critiquing and debating in public. But when you're in private, Take that moment to build the trust because if you build…”

“It literally becomes an issue of like raise capital, turn that directly into growth, use that to raise three times more. And if you can keep doing that, you literally can outspend any company that's built. Not any company. You can outspend the aggregate of companies on top of you, and therefore you'll necessarily take…”

“I'd actually don't think any of the agent vendors are safe from disruption because we will, even us, like everyone's promiscuous with agents. We will switch it. Like, this is so much better than what we had two weeks ago. We'll switch to the next one.”

“Well, I did, I did that, uh, quite a lot, and I think it's, why do you want to do that? Well, um, first of all, you, if your gut feel is good, and, you know, people don't believe in gut feel if you call it gut feel. If you call it pattern recognition, more people believe in it. But if your, if your pattern recognition…”

“if I meet investors today that haven't actually downloaded and tried to build something themselves, I think they don't have the skill set to make an evaluation of the company they're looking at.”

“and, uh, the single most common feature is a broken relationship with their father.”

“I personally have found that billionaires are generally very high character people because the key to being really successful is to create allies along the way such that you're put in a room of opportunities when you're not physically there.”

“Like wanting to be liked, I don't think is a good feature of a CEO and wanting to be the best place to work probably isn't the right way to go.”

“you gotta get off the ground, and you gotta break free of, of gravity, but then there's a point where you actually just want to sit in orbit and sort of maintain. You want to be within a certain range and fluctuate a little bit up, a little bit down, but be in this comfortable place where you're just orbiting. You're…”

“the moment they go raise money, they've cut off almost every option. They think they've expanded their experience and their opportunities, but they've cut off almost every possible off-ramp outcome because now they have to be in big business or they fail. That's it. That's one option. I mean, some people become very…”

“once you grow and you get to a certain size, you need experts. That's the biggest bunch of bullshit ever. I mean, literally like the number of people that I brought in to Tom's later, like once we were like a couple hundred million dollar business that quote had like big company expertise did not help. If anything, it,…”

“the basic takeaway is that most every male, 40 and older, should probably be taking somewhere between 2.5 and five milligrams of Tadalafil, not necessarily for erectile function, although it will augment that as well, but to lower blood pressure and to improve vasodilation for the brain, for the prostate.”

“I just think we have to give up on TAM. We just have to let the revenue show us the path to TAM.”

“Because the field is changing so much at any point in time, you know, a lot of people are kind of in this local, local maximum. And if you just blindly listen to your customers, they'll, they'll be like, yeah, I want a better vector store. Like I want a better, uh, I want a better, you know, agent framework for this.…”

“No. There's, it's not rational when you let someone go. I mean, you want to think it through, but it's, it's an instinct that you could get someone better for that role. So that the test we use is called the keeper test. Would you fight to keep that employee if they were leaving on their own?”

“I think there are only two types of companies for private companies. They're growing at insane rates or they're unfundable.”

“There's like a power law of who gives value in terms of engineering. There's some people who do so much that keep the company alive, um, in any good successful big company. And there's a long tail of people who basically do nothing.”

“they're good at getting attention, which, by the way, is more important than making a good product.”

“By the way, from the LP perspective, diversification at the level of the GP makes no sense, because they have multiple GPs, so, so the, the, the, the, the diversification gives nothing to LPs.”

“however, if you, uh, if you are a fund that is more middle of the road and you're not sure how Is it gonna be a raise or not? You're gonna find any excuse to keep the prices up, right? To look good on paper.”

“You know, if, if, if, if the typical, if a partner in a, in a, uh, in a partnership, especially large partnership with some, with politics and all that, uh, they're much more interested in their investments succeeding than anything else because that's their career.”

“Well, to be really brilliant, I call it, there has to be a bend in the pipe. You know, whether it's through trauma or through your, your interpretation of, of yourself, of how that could happen... It's usually trauma from when they were younger... you put that trauma, compare with an innate talent, And it makes…”

“So fundamentally and functionally, there are two ways that California can be saved. Number one, you pass an amendment to the Constitution to fix this pension liability problem. And number two is the state has the ability to declare bankruptcy.”

“Like a third of your company, you need to part ways with them. They're not fit for this new world. They don't want to build the same way you want to build. They don't like fast, crazy fast pace. They don't like chaos.”

“You can't AB test the important things and the details are mostly false positives. So it's an enormous waste of time unless you're incredibly sophisticated.”

“Um, so the challenge with being, um, an OEM, and an operator, and, and, and, and, and, a demand aggregator, an infrastructure player, you know, a pilot training company, a maintenance company, that's a lot of stuff to do at once. It's very hard to actually build a real business that will ultimately be profitable and…”

“the AI traffic is going to reveal something to you. You will review, reveal promising areas for new development. You will all of a sudden see very early on. Which products are gaining traction, and you should 100% copy those products. You should copy those products and build them right into your system.”

“investing in technology, uh, you really have to be in deep in the tech to be good at it. And I think that it's very possible as, you know, people get older, you know, they get less into it sometimes. And so, you know, at that point we got to make a change.”

“if you're a founder, software is no longer any sort of differentiator. Software is just like consumable. Like, it's just like, it's like a piece of media. Like, it's not like you can't build a software company.”

“Your competitors likely have a bunch of C players, so you want to go hire C players simply because they know the space? Ok, that's a short-term solve. Basically what you're solving for is you want to reduce ramp time, you want them to be able to get enabled faster because they know the domain. Fine, problem is nine…”

“Inside sales is, your sales leader is in the office five days a week, and the inside sales reps have to be sitting there. Have to be. So inside sales is an in-office deal. And, and there could be no exceptions in my opinion.”

“You should be shooting the bottom 10% of your sales organization every year.”

“You can identify a point, a top, oh, .1% founder Without talking to them. I don't think you can do it without any interactions, but without talk, I do, I a hundred percent believe it's possible.”

“Reskill is a delusion. Reskill is something we say to, to make everybody feel better. Reskilling is like when you get, when you, they do layoffs and they bring you in the room and they give you a packet of jobs potentially. It's just to make people feel better. No one's ever reskilled anyone ever, and it's harder in…”

“If you're not going to offend anybody, you're not going to have any impact.”

“you can have low cost energy, you can have, uh, more energy, and you can have lower carbon energy at the same time.”

“I actually think there are not enough ambitious founders out there, because ultimately the, the, the throughput of the company, like how many parallel work streams you can take at a given time is dictated by number of great leaders you have in the company.”

“Yeah, I'd say, like, as I said before, like, this is, This is very hard, like, this only way to do it, like, we're going against, you know, big, big, big energy companies with, like, huge balance sheets. You know, billions in revenue. The only way to win is, you know, with much more balance sheets, much less cash, much…”

“I always tell young entrepreneurs, don't give up control of your business to the VCs. They may talk a good game, but they're not fundamentally aligned with you.”

“the bar for good enough for AI GTM, it's not as high as we think. It's just like, uh, you know, a, a facsimile of your best person reproduced as best we can. It's going to beat your mid pack person. It's going to beat the person that literally knows nothing about your product.”

“Obamacare had this one incredibly fatal flaw, which I still cannot understand how these folks did not understand this. They capped the gross margin. Some people at the extremely high level would say, well, that makes sense, except it doesn't, because then how you make more money is by just charging more. If you can…”

“We talk in Silicon Valley about never quit, but that is complete absolute venture capital bullshit. The incentive of venture capitalist is to put money into your company and milk you dry. They never get their money back. There is no way for them to take that investment back. And so the only logical desire that they…”

“every time you see a bug, every time you see a bug, not most of the time, every time you go and you drop it at the feet of the product manager or the engineering manager, every time. In public, preferably.”

“Your job is not to be one of those buffers. Your job is to preserve that intensity at its highest possible level and let the buffering happen somewhere else.”

“Don't work for a chill boss. Don't be a chill boss. It's the most pejorative label I could give you. Chill boss or chill PM. Don't be chill. Chill doesn't accomplish shit. Be intense, be good, be respectful, be intense. Don't be chill.”

“And now we've discovered that it is for a larger and larger and larger class of Piece of bodies of code. It is better to just start over and rewrite it from scratch than it is to try to fix it. The LLM will do a better job.”

“guardrails don't work. They just don't work. They really don't work. Um, and, uh, they're quite likely to make you overconfident in your security posture, which is, uh, which is a really big, big problem.”

“pacifism as an idea is only possible inside of a governing system with a monopoly on violence. Like, you can't be a pacifist without a government monopoly on violence. That's just, like, not possible for humanity.”

“You know, they, they call it privacy, but that's just a cover for, I don't trust the police to do their job effectively.”

“You can't, you're not going to solve the prison problem by not enforcing the law. Like, that's just, you just make the, you punish the victims on behalf of the criminals at that point, which is, I think that's a very dangerous thing for a society to do.”

“they tried to solve this on the latent space level. Um, I think I've It's shown every single time that that doesn't work.”

“The goal is take humans out of dull, dirty, dangerous jobs, um, so we're not putting our, you know, men and women, brothers and sisters, in horribly dangerous situations, uh, and become as accurate and precise as possible. And that's really what Just War Theory is all about.”

“there is a positive benefit to monopolies because they create the cash flows that fund these sorts of boondoggle basic research. A lot of the most important technologies that move society forward come out of these.”

“There are some benefits to having flexibility and hybrid, but creating culture and creating, um, collaboration and learning, that's not one of the benefits. You know, you really have to get people together to be able to do that”

“I also think marketing is not that complicated. I mean, it's not like engineering where, you know, our VP of engineering, he has so much deep, deep, deep knowledge in the domain. I just don't believe it's that way for marketing. I think people overly complex it, but at the end of the day, it's an intuitive thing.”

“There's no real incentive structure for an EPC to want better software. It's the same reason your law firm doesn't necessarily want like AI software to help them accelerate, you know, and reduce their billables.”

“All these lengthy environmental reviews turn out to be dramatically harmful to the environment because we can't fix the bottlenecks. We can't create the new transmission lines that carry electricity from the, you know, renewable sources and such. It's, it's overwhelmingly harmful to the environment to have slow…”

“A lot of times when you go to a team that's six or seven or 10 people, more than the manager, I think it's actually better to ask everybody else that works with in that team who should be fired.”

“if you're spending your time thinking about the person instead of the problem, the person is the problem.”

“The smart employees at those funds know that they will likely never see a dollar of carry. The larger the fund you raise, the harder it is to return in venture.”

“The older you get, the more you try to apply your experience. And if you've come from an existing company, we may have picked up bad habits. I'm not saying we don't have bad habits at Dyson, but I'm saying you picked up the habits of that company, which may not be the right sort of attitude that we want. This attitude…”

“this is why I tell founders to take their exits and then say no, because they can go bigger, but, but by default, take it.”

“It's much easier In my mind, I think, to be a large company executive, because you have all these resources, you have all this leverage, you actually work less hard in your product market fit”

“Now it's like a badge of honor to have low gross margins because we're like, oh, at least people are using your AI products. You know, if we see, like we get these pitches and they're like, I have an AI thing and I got 75% gross margins. I'm like, well, no one's using the AI stuff then. Like that's doesn't really seem…”

“I think when you get down to the practicality of how people use these things and their actual preferences or whatever, it just doesn't play out that way. It's not as much of a lock-in as you want it to be.”

“why would I care, as an example, about somebody's win-loss reports when your sales force sucks? I'm trying to change your sales force. Why would I look at the win-loss reports when people really don't know why they won and certainly don't know why they lost?”

“It's not just another flavored sugar water differentiated by color or taste or flavor. It is an efficiency product. I'm talking about improving endurance, concentration, reaction time, speed, vigilance, and emotional status. Taste is of no importance whatsoever.”

“At the end of the day, though, it's just like, does not, there seem to be enough solutions, especially if you are as willing to pay as you, as people are in AI, that I don't really expect it to be a significant bottleneck.”

“I fully believe if they're like, hey, Sequoia led our seed, and I'm like, hey, are they doing your A, and they're like, Well, they're doing their pro rata. I'm like, this is not a good company. Like, objectively is not a good company.”

“it's not, you're not buying a decision, you're, you're, you're buying an entry ticket into an event, which then get, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

“I feel like because of PR goals, AGI has been hyped up as a finish line, but I don't think it's a finish line. It's just, we'll have continually improving capabilities for, you know, decades to come.”

“The companies with something to lose whose statements over time have become more moderated. So, you know, I, I find that as your established company, you just say more sensible things, but there are some companies that I think are at greater existential risk. Um, and I find those companies, some of those companies that…”

“As you go from what we have today, which is mostly a very specific intelligence, not a general intelligence, but as labs succeed at their goal of building this general intelligence, We really need to stop using the steering control paradigm.”

“I used to laugh whenever a drawdown private fund has a risk manager. I'm like, well, what does that person do? Because you don't hold cash. You don't hedge. Are they on your investment committee telling you what not to do? Because all of your risk comes from sizing the bets and what you're investing in from the get go.…”

“And ultimately I believe hybrid is the worst. The worst thing is the thing where like you have half of the team in person. They have an enormous information advantage. They figure out their own rituals and ways of communicating and collaborating. The other half of the team sits somewhere else. You try to come together…”

“The most folks from the last decade or 15 years are not the right people for the next decade.”

“the idea of integrating onto a site hundreds and hundreds of very small containerized electrolyzers, it turns out to be quite expensive. And in no small part, it's expensive because it's very hard to drive the cost out of those units, but also because the footprint of the entire plant ends up being quite large, and…”

“When you have demand like this, like you have for, um, uh, the initial GC, like the initial hyperscaler clouds. Um, and I think we're seeing an even greater cohorted demand curve for, for AI inference. Sometimes you just got to shut your mind up and, and invest with the momentum.”

“I, I definitely disagree with that. I think the moat is still fundamentally in technology, not in, in distribution.”

“To me, sometimes it just feels like a little bit of like, uh, it just feels like a different job than like the craft of venture capital where you're almost playing the lottery where you're like, okay, I have these 30 names that I own. I'm gonna try to do two of them, and then if one of them hits and is a huge success,…”

“So I say the mid-market doesn't exist, because what is a mid-market hire? It's either low, it's either low end enterprise or upper end SMB. And if you bleed those two games, you're going to lose. They're so distinctly different.”

“Early adopters are those logos because they have to continue to stay at the number one spot. So they'll take, they'll take tons of, you know, uh, swings to continue to stay in the number one, staying in the number one spots, the hardest part, right?”

“selling them as service, even though the technology is powering it on the back end, is the fastest way to get your foot in the door. It's, it's what they know how to buy.”

“We bring in a CRO pre-product. You need a salesperson to create the sales playbook.”

“If you're going to be in my interview process, you are either uniquely qualified to qualify, or you are uniquely qualified to sell. If you are not one of those two things, you are not getting into the interview process.”

“Very common thing people say in software, uh, in, in, in venture. Oh, the only execution, the only mode is execution, which is not, which is definitely not a mode.”

“They say, okay, well, you know, quality, price, and speed, you have to pick two. And I think that that is like the most losing mindset in business and engineering and design and whatever the thing is. And that the The, the trade-offs between those three are usually an illusion that usually the thing that can be…”

“because of how these AI tutor works. It's not about IQ. It's literally about effort. Wow. And we show them if you, if with this tutor put in the right way in the, in the system, they all can do it. And it literally will calculate for them. It's this many hours of time. For you to get to top one percent.”

“for sure in, you know, K through eight, the K through eight curriculum, you know, if you take 95% of America, they could all be top one percent, that there's just nothing intellectually challenging enough. If done with a mastery-based education, with an individualized tutor, that they couldn't get to top one percent,…”

“the reason is nonprofit means non-scalable. Like if I have a set of donations, right. And I build the world's best product, the better the product, the faster my money goes away. And now I'm done, right?”

“I think people in general overestimate the value of R&D. Let me qualify. They think that generally pouring money into building stuff pays, pays off. It's really not true at all. What we find is that there's a very small number of things that pay, pay off handsomely, and most things are a waste of money.”

“It is definitionally impossible, given what we just discussed, to succeed in AI without gross margin pressure, and I do not know why they have concerns, because we have an existence proof that a software company can deal well with declining margins in Microsoft and Adobe to the whole AI thing came along.”

“I don't believe in King making and that's maybe a controversial thing to say. I think one of the lessons, you know, you'd think like, oh, Sequoia should be able to King make companies and like, that's so great. And that would be, by the way, if that was true, it'd be really economically valuable for our LPs if that was…”

“A lot of engineers think that code quality is important to building a successful product. The two have nothing to do with each other.”

“if you read the history of, of those people at that time, specifically people like Oppenheimer, you realize, yeah, the people who invent the technology have no special moral claim. Uh, they have no special predictive power for the consequences of the technology, and they have no, no basis for a superior moral claim on…”

“In the AI era, there's really only one place where actual human-generated content exists, and the value of that content is super valuable, like, really valuable, because it helps train the models.”

“if, if there are insiders from day one, it doesn't matter how much dispersion of supply, mindshare, talent, et cetera. There is the, the sort of like the big bang moment will always be there and will always sort of like a scar on the record of the thing.”

“OpenAI could swap out the underlying model, And still accrue the vast majority of, of value. So, hypothetically, you could have ChatGPT, chat.com, powered not by GPT-Five, but instead powered by Gemini or Claude, and still see positive user growth, monetization, because at the end of the day, most of the users aren't…”

“No, I think pro rata should be earned.”

“Uh, but in his mind, in his mind, most chief marketing officers are not good. The truth is I actually agree with him. And for a while I was looking for a CMO with this experience, that experience, that experience, and what I've realized is, like, the best CMOs I've encountered over the last few years are the ones that…”

“I give feedback in front of everybody. Feedback is learning. For what reason are you the only person who should learn from this? We should all learn from that opportunity. I don't take people aside. We are not optimizing for not embarrassing somebody. We're optimizing for the company learning from our mistakes.”

“I just don't see another way to be able to create the incentives for investors because they know that if they invest a lot of money in rare earth processing, that all China has to do is slash the prices and drive them out of business.”

“Academically, it's actually funny, because school's a bundle, and actually the easiest and cheapest things to fix is actually the academics, right? Because that's tech-driven. Versus the rest of the day is all very human driven.”

“Well, it depends on who you are, and that kind of goes to the recycling or the circularness of some of these things. Obviously, the OpenAI, Microsoft, or OpenAI Oracle, goes back to the OpenAI Oracle deal. And, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you money that you're gonna invest in our infrastructure, or how, how…”

“I think if you're going to own double digits, my view ethically is you got to be there till the end. Otherwise, you're dead weight on the cap table.”

“So I think if you're going to reinvent an industry, you don't want experts.”

“All the knowledge in a company is with the individual contributors are doing the work and the customers that like, there's no There's no knowledge with the people who are talking to you as CEO who are on your staff.”

“Don't try and fix them. They can't be fixed. It's not going to happen.”

“we just felt and continue to feel very strongly around creating a consistent, fully integrated digital experience where you're not jumping between apps, let's say from like a CarPlay app back to the vehicle app, and it's, it's quite jarring when you don't have, let's say, vehicle level controls when you're in the…”

“everything around how they're building this company is incentivized to push the absolute least efficient solutions possible to actually make their own economics work.”

“a very important premise of a free society is inequality.”

“Alzheimer's, cardiovascular disease, Diabetes, obesity, that these are all symptoms of unhealthy skeletal muscle”

“all these stories of software is for a certain segment of a market are skills issues, and that's exactly what they sounded like when I first heard about it. It's convenience to the company making the software to say, we are focused on one segment, and by the way, we are all the segment, like, focused on the richest…”

“it's better to give a precious lead to an ad to a B plus AI than to give it to someone in sales. That's going to quit, not show up or screw up the deal.”

“all of the people who are, you know, some version of like, how do I sell data or give data or give context to chat GPT and get paid cents on the dollar are stupid, right? And like, it should be exactly the way around, which is you just use them as commodity arms dealers for the business you already have and the…”

“you can never build enough houses for homeless because you're just going to keep attracting more and more and more people.”

“I probably would not hire that Silicon Valley. Why? I think what you need to bring to the table is hunger, is lots of dignity, lots of dedication, lots of experimental mindset, and you cannot get there when you basically worked for, like, best-in-class companies, seeing how growth runs there, And you come into a small…”

“Product managers are effectively glorified UI managers, so we're trying to make sure that us common folks can interact with data and some sort of engineering algorithm behind it because we're not smart enough to talk to the engineering algorithm ourselves.”

“the whole work life balancing is BS. Like if you're building something, there's no work life balance. And the reason why that is, is I think you have to go through a lot of cycles. And so the more like, if you work more, you go through more cycles, fail more, you fix more. And so if you, if you, you can work seven days…”

“number three is, um, it's gonna be a cult of personality, and it's gonna be a cult of personality not just inside the company, but outside the company. And we're not gonna, you know, we're not gonna spend any money on marketing. We're not gonna put any time at IR. What we're gonna do is we're gonna put on the show of…”

“he's polarized the market very deliberately, you know, in the same way that I think a lot of great entrepreneurs do, which is, you know, people that either love him or hate him, they either love the products, hate the products, That's very helpful from a business standpoint, recruiting standpoint, because it does…”

“I know a lot of people's PMs are like, oh, you can't invest in TSMC because geopolitical risk, and it's like, no, dude, you can't invest in fucking Apple.”

“For developed enterprises, it's not the best route. Uh, the best route is, to me, a much simpler one. If you create value working in a project, or you create value to whatever degree you create it, You should share in that value on a cash basis, meaning any time period, a year. Just take every year. If the enterprise…”

“I've heard a retention arguments from time immemorial, decades of, well, we do this to retain people. I think that's ridiculous. You retain people, people stay in your enterprise because they like what they do, and there's opportunity there. Uh, a handcuff, so to speak, or they stay because they haven't vested in this…”

“a low number of really exquisite weapons is not gonna win a conflict, and I think Ukraine kind of definitively showed that to the world, that that is not a winning strategy.”

“the incentive systems around a lot of these things are, like, if you go to the doctor, parents, one, want these ADHD, you know, Want, want, want these diagnoses. And the reason the parents want them is because it gives you extra time, it gives you extra resources, you can then opt your kid out of certain things in…”

“I think it's pretty clear that our modern world in the last couple of decades, there's a cumulative effect of environmental exposures that children are getting. Whether it's microplastics, whether it's chemicals in the food, whether it's just the environmental exposure in the air related to small molecules, whether…”

“Hold is your best time to trade on, to legally trade on inside information, though. If you're on the board or close to it, it's your best time to trade on that illegal by not trading. Yeah, you can hold legally with inside information. It's a privileged position. You can sit on that board and know what's coming next…”

“If you're an advanced math problem, and you're doing seven times eight, and seven times eight to you is still a calculation. Right? You're doomed, right? There's just, there's no way around it. You'll start making careless errors.”

“If you don't give them a fact base, then their opinions are just making stuff up. You have to reason over a fact base.”

“the place where decentralization is really, really important is at the very bottom of the stack, right? You need decentralization at the Ethereum layer, at base, because what that enables is it enables this global platform that everyone can come and participate on. Now on top of that platform, the thing that we're…”

“I'm a very firm believer, and I actually took that from back then, and it's still true today, that you will only understand the problems that you could solve and the potential solutions if you're there. Everyone in product says that you have to speak to your customers, and I say that's bullshit. Speaking to your…”

“much of what we see in terms of The evolution of society in the West can be viewed through a lens of Suicide. That the West may be committing suicide financially in our deficit spending, in terms of birth rate decline, so we're, we're kind of destroying our dollar, we're destroying our head count because of the birth…”

“Every successful company is a cult. And what a cult really means is you have a view about the world that's different than other normal people. And you're right to be successful. Like a cult doesn't have to be right, but the startup is a cult. That's right. And that's what makes a successful startup.”

“I think you should not collect revenue and not onboard customers until you know that you are going to get a million of revenue as quickly as possible.”

“I would say that most successful startups are like cults in many ways”

“there are all these smart people in teams that like follow this like incubatory, listen to your customer, customer research, like iterate, solve a problem for demo day. And what they don't realize is they're signing themselves up for like a decade of working on a problem. They don't give a Fuck about.”

“The problem is bankers are still just pricing based on what things are worth when they should be pricing based on, like, mimetic warfare and, like, community shit to get the bump and let the degens pay the price, right, for their silliness.”

“obviously domain expertise is still important, But it's not as important as it used to be. It's exponentially less important.”

“Oh, we're going to make your human beings 10% more efficient because of the AI co-pilot. When reality is they're gonna want a product that is like, no, no, no, I don't need 75% of these people anymore. Give me that product.”

“all the things that you perceive that are happening to you that are bad, you know, be it like the systems against you or somebody undercut you or racism or sexism or this or that or the other is very small compared to like, it means a lot if you believe it, you know, if you believe what people say about you, if you…”

“if you care about not being surveilled illegally, if you care about the treatment of people who come into the country illegally, but deserve adequate treatment, if you care about lives, In Gaza, in Ukraine, and all over the world where Palantir is used. You're gonna want the best software in the world, because it's the…”

“The, the way you commit suicide in the, in the West is you stop believing that your particular culture has something superior in it.”

“conflating a nation state with an ethnic group is not a long-term strategy. It's not wise, because you are tied to the, to the temporal politics, the politics of the moment.”

“What does the business of the future look like? Actually, the interesting thing is workers become more valuable, like actually trained workers become more valuable. This is exactly the opposite of what people are saying, but it's true. The person at the top is actually crazy valuable. People with technical expertise…”

“The entire thing with AI is it's a great way to sink money and power and compute into a war with itself that produces no value.”

“the age doesn't fix Social Security anymore. You gotta means test it.”

“I mean, I, I think there's a lot of truth to that except, um, you don't want to go too close to that stuff because, because you'll actually kill the propulsion system in analyzing it.”

“my underlying belief is early markets are actually pretty darn efficient, a lot more efficient than, than people realize.”

“I think in these times where you don't know the TAM and things are moving quickly, you definitely want to pick the best team. I don't think you should overthink the space, but like asking questions about like TAM or valuation or value makes a lot less sense because that's actually what's uncertain.”

“anybody listening who, who is a VC, you can take as many board as you want. The actual board work itself is not. The question is, can you still be available to founders and add value whether you're on the board or not?”

“one big reason why so many people in this country are forced to do stuff which is strictly not per the law or the regulatory framework is because those laws and, ah, regulations are so onerous that to do business in India, you almost have to beat them.”

“They're a reflection of how much the model had been trained on those benchmarks.”

“No, no, that's not a matter of time. That's, that's fundamentally the, the way that sequence models work. Like we are training statistical models of text.”

“Like fundamentally, I think alignment and post training doesn't really make sense as a long-term solution. If you can easily align a model through post training, you can easily misalign a model through post training. If it's easy to put it in, it's easy to take it out. If it's really hard to put it in, it's really hard…”

“I see PM as, think of it as like a hire of last resort. And so I don't think a company should be allergic to hiring them, but it shouldn't be the default.”

“I honestly think you don't need a CPO until maybe like as a founder, you're starting to think about transitioning into the chairman role.”

“I think it's incredible marketing. It's a way of differentiating against sort of the market. Everybody's going to be intense, but we're super intense. And so like, we're going to be like Olympians and, you know, in terms of work ethic, it's like a coded way of saying, Hey, we're self-selecting to like 20 to 26 year…”

“the only thing that matters for culture is growth, like, business growth, because for a business that's growing at, like, an amazing clip, it's always gonna have Cultural sort of issues that, you know, make it kind of suck to like work there, but everybody's okay with that and leaned in because they see a path for…”

“what I learned was that for something that has a commitment to end user experience, you cannot do it with open source.”

“the teacher in front of the classroom is like the worst way to teach kids. And there's all these ways where kids can learn two, five, 10 times faster. But it doesn't work in the teacher in front of the classroom.”

“The biggest issue, education is hard because you have to define the product, and your customer bases have very different needs, right? This is why when I talk about public school being impossible, you, parents do not agree on what the purpose of an education is, right?”

“You know, one of the things that I did not realize going in is how few parents actually care about academics.”

“there is no, as far as I can tell, as far as we can tell, there is no inherent endemic mode In the technology stack to AI, other than just overcoming the bootstrap problem.”

“Kids coming out of school today that are fearless in the questions they ask and the follow-ups and their ability to prompt, they have more skill than everybody in every major corporation with under a thousand employees.”

“And it's my strong belief that great employees and great companies want and are constructed out of a very clear and strong hierarchy. Where it is the responsibility of the CEO to make brave and hard decisions unilaterally. Yes, using their experts as inputs and be responsible for the outcome.”

“They also put Lena Kahn in. Now Zuckerberg is a cutthroat business executive. He likes to buy companies. That's his thing. And Twitter was known for buying a lot of companies. So now you got Lena Kahn saying, We're gonna, we're gonna come down hard on you, not let you buy anything. And at the same time, this other…”

“But I would say that less than 10% of companies we see are taking this hard stance, but I would say they are probably the ones that are farthest along getting the most adoption and are seeing the most results of the ones that are taking those hard stances.”

“Until we've solved cancer, every month that we're not rushing to the frontier of accelerating biological discovery or scientific progress is a month that millions of people are suffering from disease that we could be solving with the eye.”

“You don't need half your company, and Palantir and Shopify are proving it. You don't need half your company. You literally don't need half the people working at your company. You don't need them today.”

“their ROIC is, like, extremely high on CPU and storage, and, and to assume that it can, like, translate over to GPUs is, is a bit of a fallacy, which is why, which is why a lot of these companies are moving in, right?”

“If you look at, uh, the most incredible companies in the past, you know, you look at Revolut, you look at Deliveroo, all of these companies, the amount of work that these founders and these early teams put in was, was tremendous. I mean, it was seven days a week, you know, it was nights and weekends. I mean, that's…”

“The actual regulator of taxis is Uber or Lyft because they have real-time tracking. They have star ratings on both sides. Or your, um, you know, some, you know, the FCC or something like who issued licenses. Well, the actual regulator of speech or what have you said, YouTube or Facebook.”

“the actual way of regulating big companies is with a thousand startup piranhas, not by this regulation.”

“Ironically, as a brand person, I would say products more important than brand right now. Products all that matters actually brand secondary.”

“my mental model on the dinner is the bankers have just screwed you over for a buck a share, and in return, they buy you a very expensive dinner, and they liquor you up so you forget.”

“So why not give away product and not try to focus on product market fit and give it away for free and get them to pay for something that is more valuable. Or something which has a bigger, forget valuable, something that has a bigger market. You now have all these leads of businesses that are using payroll software, a…”

“I think it's easier to build an average product, give it away for free, collect a lot of leads and sell them into something else where people in that space also pay for. And then now you got a cheaper flywheel than spending money on Google ads or trying to do SEO or social media marketing or anything like that.”

“He said, uh, that's like saying this other guy would be a better husband for your wife. Might be true, but like, don't act on it. Like, this is your company. You need to stay in there.”

“I work with many, and when they actively manage, they do not get the right decisions. They push managers to do things they shouldn't do. They push them to go enterprise before they should, push them to do more products, push them to scale faster, take more cash on because they want markups. I think you want passive.”

“Like, I think one of the biggest benefits of going so viral is now you don't really have to talk to users as much because you can sort of see user data and the quicker you get to see user data, like I'd rather see 70,000 user data points rather than talk to seven users. Um, and I think this is, it allows you to iterate…”

“to be in the mind of the audience, you must be in the eyes of the audience. And that means necessarily go viral and go viral necessarily means be controversial.”

“listening to their customers, which is a good habit if you're trying to be incremental, a really bad thing if you're trying to be revolutionary.”

“These guys jumping ship proves it actually. Right? Like if, if they were so sure that they were on the path to AGI or super intelligence or whatever we're going to call it this week, they would have stayed with the team and the system that they were already working on. Instead, they chose to take money and move…”

“this is actually what led to wokeness because it was, you know, you've heard the saying go woke, go broke, right? Yeah. But in their case, it was actually go broke, go woke. Okay. Not my original coinage, but applied to this graph, it's relatively original because wokeness was, what happened was they just fell off a…”

“Blue America was disrupted by the internet, and so they began wokeness to take a piece of Red America's pie, and the tech clash to try and take back control from the internet. Red America was disrupted by China, so the trade war was against China, and Trump was against Blue America.”

“Build your own distribution to avoid distortion, ok? That is to say, any content you have, it should be posted on your feeds. Why would you go and feed it to some journo? You've got some scoop. You don't need them for distribution anymore.”

“the other uncomfortable truths are like the rule is the mostly the highly educated, connected founders do better than the not highly educated, connected founders. Like the top, like people, I think we want to have this feeling that it's egalitarian and or it's a pyramid meritocracy that somehow brands and schools and…”

“And those are honestly amazing businesses because the demand is so absurdly high that no matter what, when you get more, uh, supply of therapists, even if it means that you're just paying therapists less and you're getting more therapists and you're getting less qualified people, like you can build a business.”

“my view for what it's worth is I think people should do what, what it takes to, to move to San Francisco. If that's not possible, that's not where your customers are based. At the very least, as you said, move to a tier one city and try and be as close to, uh, you know, folks that are also building stuff.”

“GPT, ChatGPT, Cod, all of them, are simply machines that are trained to regurgitate all the materials they've read online, right? They're amazing machines, they can do programming, all that stuff, but they are a function of their data. You know, like you say, garbage in, garbage out. If you get a garbage, it's gonna…”

“No matter how much you're driving the, the forward, the company technically, if you're working for someone whose motivations are not sincere, who's not an honest person, who does not truly want to make the world better, it's not going to work. You're just contributing to something bad.”

“the VCs who I believe are the most successful VCs and have had the most, you know, storied careers tend to be the people that take every single introduction I send them, and then the VCs who are still building their careers and I send them deals are like, oh, you know, I'm a little swamp for bandwidth right now. I'm…”

“early liquidity was the bug and not the feature of crypto. Um, people got rich too quickly and they stopped building things.”

“there's a crypto angle to at least three of them, because obviously there's a crypto angle to money, there's a crypto angle to AI in terms of constraints. This crypto angle to the drones, because you're going to want the control plane for the drones to be on chain, since that's the part that can't get hacked, whereas…”

“the decision that makes someone happy is usually the wrong decision for the business.”

“an investor's incentive is to get you to burn money because they believe it'll help you grow faster. And if it grows faster that you can always raise more money and burn more money and they can put more money in. So for you to burn, So they can deploy more capital that they can charge more fees on and they can own more…”

“if you don't come out there and say, look, the fundamental, uh, way that the town has functioned on the basis of 50 years, uh, under the Impoundment Control Act, if you don't kind of go out there and, and describe that, and name it, and say, you know, we have fundamental problems with it, uh, you're not setting…”

“Some people are simply two to three times better, like two to three times faster than anybody else, right? They just code faster. There are some people who simply have two to three times more better ideas. There are people who simply work two to three times as hard. There are people who have two to three times fewer…”

“The problem is what people don't understand is there are no other algorithms other than Shor's that get you that amazing speed up. So you're better off using the machines we have now. There's, there's no payoff even possible in the future unless we have a new breakthrough like Shores or something like that.”

“Our thought was that this was the time where you can actually start a, um, you know, a generational frontier lab that does not need to be coupled to a, you know, to a big cloud provider, uh, because if you do it right, you'll actually be able to generate, um, you know, sufficient revenues to not have to be acquired or…”

“There's no such thing as generalization. There's just bringing the test distribution into train.”

“nobody gives a shit about on chain issuance. Like the only place where people are even thinking about on chain issuance is like in your head. What people want is capital as a service.”

“there's this sort of like idea in Silicon Valley that you should learn a lot from failures. And I, I, I'm not sure that I agree a lot with, I think that actually people probably learn a lot more from their successes and, you know, companies fail for like, Many dumb reasons. And like, it's really hard to sort of take a…”

“there are some things that I don't believe in is like MVPs first and foremost is like, if you're building something that people will not be able to use or is not good enough, especially these days where it's It's so much easier to build software, so the attention span for people to actually try out new software…”

“There's one, uh, controversial take, uh, for me working with LLMs is, uh, don't use TypeScript. Use plain JavaScript. Use JSX. Uh, it's easier for models to write code this way.”

“My rule is if you haven't grown because of AI, you've failed.”

“Cause I'm realistic enough to say that even if I, you know, if you have a venture board member who is an amazing board member, but can no longer speak to the money. Because there's no longer at the vent, at that venture firm, then to a rounding error, they're useless.”