David Sachs

“When we moved Yammer to San Francisco, which was 2009, I think we were able to get space for 20 dollars a foot per year.”

“I think that the schools will reopen and they'll, they'll do all this planning. There'll be all these like pods and half days and smaller groups and that kind of thing. And then somebody's going to, there'll be like one case, either a kid or, you know, one fam…”

“I think the execution would be a disaster if we actually impose a lot of these rules. If we broke up these companies, if we stopped Amazon from innovating, I think that that would be a disaster for those companies and for the economy, because I do think they d…”

“I think he's the scariest monopolist out of the whole bunch. You know, if you look at kind of Amazon versus say Google or Facebook or Apple, I mean, those other companies are sort of sticking to their original footprint. Whereas Amazon keeps expanding into new…”

“I think COVID is going to be a distant memory by next summer. I really do.”

“The only way you're going to get something like that through is if you agree to something like a one-for-one tax reduction in other areas, right?”

“I believe in the, you know, in greenhouse, the greenhouse gas theory and that, yeah, that it's, you know, that manmade CO two emissions are going to have an impact on the environment.”

“This is going to come down to Pennsylvania, Michigan, and it's going to take days to do those counts and we're probably gonna end up in the courts.”

“They were interested in buying the company for around two hundred fifty million dollars.”

“One of my biggest learnings as an investor has been to let your winners ride. You know, my biggest mistake as an investor has not been the losers. It's all, it's been selling the winners prematurely.”

“PayPal is now a two hundred fifty billion dollar company. We sold it in 2002 for 1.5 billion.”

“45% increase in, burglaries in one year, 35% increase in stolen cars, 30% increase in homicides.”

“I think that that there will be prosecutions. I think that the, these people were captured on video. There's a lot of talk on Twitter and everybody is in favor of finding out who they are, applying facial recognition and Bringing charges. So I think there will…”

“We've had this sweeping appropriation of power by, you know, half a dozen oligarchs who now have the right. To determine what we see and read and people are cheering because they hate Trump so much. They can't see that the biggest power grab in history has hap…”

“The average student in California costs 18,000 dollars a year, roughly, ok? And we have a classroom size on average of about 25 students. It's actually higher than the national average.”

“Everybody wants free speech for themselves and their allies, but they want to deny it to people they disagree with. And, you know, they never seem to realize that censorship is a problem until it gets turned against them.”

“It's why I'm in, like, 27 unicorns.”

“He testified for five hours. And said nothing quotable, you know, which is pretty much the best you can do in that situation.”

“So back in 2007 I thought Twitter was going to take off. I had like a former employee who wanted to sell secondary. And so, you know, I had a deal worked out to buy, I think a couple 100,000 dollars of shares at, I don't know, a forty million dollar valuation …”

“Any company That's trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars or, you know, has a billion dollar plus like evaluation before shipping a product is presumptively fraud.”

“1979, a severe recession begins, which ultimately leads to -.3% GDP growth in 1980. The word stagflation misery index become household terms. We had unemployment of six percent on its way to 7.2% in 1980. We had a 13.3% in inflation rate. The prime rate for th…”

“Everything, the price levels are basically double where they were just, I would say, like a year ago.”

“You're not going to raise twenty two billion from this. You're going to raise, it's actually going to lead to a decrease in tax revenue because so many of these people are going to leave the state and they're going to take investment with them, their businesse…”

“I mean, this idea of wearing a mask after you've already been vaccinated never made any sense. This idea of locking down the whole economy instead of isolating the at risk people for a whole year. It doesn't make sense.”

“I don't think they're gonna get the votes in this legislator. There's six Democrats have already come out against it. So I don't think it's gonna pass this year or next year”

“And I think the more you, that you try to chase value. As a VC, I think the more you end up investing in companies that aren't really that great, like you're trying to find things that are mispriced as opposed to just investing in the best companies.”

“Listen, if you're going to make an argument that fundamentally makes sense, you don't need to tell people, oh, go follow the science. You don't need to appeal to some external authority. You can just lay out your argument and it makes sense. When do you need t…”

“Whenever you read a story about some rich person going broke, it's all, there's always debt involved, right?”

“Public sector unions are completely different, right? Because when the teachers union goes to negotiate, who are they negotiating with? They're negotiating with Gavin Newsom, and the teachers union is his biggest contributor. So who has an incentive to oppose …”

“So if you take M&A off the table, you are basically denying a lot of attractive exits for risk capital, and that's going to ultimately hurt the returns for risk capital and lead to less of it.”

“I don't think this bill is a serious proposal to become law.”

“Five million came from Soros, five million came from Reed Hastings, five million came from BLM.”

“This whole idea of these radical decarcerationists, they are running for DA in every major city. This is going to be a national trend, and they're going to cause a lot of carnage, a lot of death and destruction until the people realize, and there will inevitab…”

“I actually disagree with you guys that we're not going to learn more about what happened. We're going to learn a lot more. And it's going to get worse and worse.”

“The whole Frank Slootman thing last week where he puts out a pretty Mild statement about supporting diversity, but not to the point where it's, it jeopardizes merit. You know, there was a giant uproar over that. He has to walk it back and issue an apology.”

“Now they're going to be able to IPO at like a 50, 60, seventy billion dollar valuation”

“So, I think you could be in a situation where we do not have, they will call it school reopening, but we will not have five day a week in-person learning”

“It's like child abuse.”

“Newsom was recently caught in a lie saying that, you know, they had basically treated 90,000 acres. This is what this article I'll put in the chat said. In reality, that only really treated about 11,000 acres.”

“So I think we're at the point now where if you're not vaccinated, You're gonna get the Delta variant.”

“Well, I'll tell you, I don't like the idea of government having the power to stick a needle in your arm, but I do think that employers, workplaces, schools, I think it's very reasonable for them to say, if you want to come back to the workplace, you have to ge…”

“This bestie got a breakthrough infection outdoors at a restaurant. Number one, got it outdoors. Number two, got it from somebody who was also vaccinated.”

“If you got one of those guys, you got one guy like Kissinger on your board, it's okay. If they're all like that, it's a problem.”

“Every startup, their founding mission is a bit of an over promise. And just because it doesn't come true, doesn't make it fraud.”

“There's a lot of people who hate social networking in the traditional legacy media because they've been disrupted Buy Facebook, buy these social media companies, and so they're looking. They took their money, and they're looking to publicize any article about …”

“Now, did gender play into it? Yeah, but I think not necessarily in the way that Ellen Powell thinks in this sense that the media wanted to believe so badly that the next Steve Jobs was going to be a woman that they kind of look past what should have been stari…”

“I do believe that there are people in power who want to censor social networks because they don't like the disruptive democratizing force that it represents.”

“I think it's hard for somebody who in the moment took credit for every decision, for every piece of press, for claim to be the Jobsian micromanager, to all of a sudden now turn around and say, no, that wasn't me making the decisions. I was under the spell of s…”

“If you look at the amount of funding that goes into startups, I mean, it's now in the hundreds of billions every year. And so if you have this mentality of I'm going to bootstrap it, You're probably going to lose to a competitor who's simply willing to raise m…”

“And I've actually heard that staffers on Capitol Hill are calling this the Peter Thiel provision.”

“One of the brilliant provisions in this reconciliation bill is they're actually disallowing retirement funds to invest in alternative assets, including startups and venture capital funds.”

“I think there is a sensible way to provide some restrictions on these retirement accounts, but the way they're doing it is so punitive, I think it is motivated by political revenge against Peter.”

“We, you know, we have these conferences in the tech industry, and they're frankly run by people who hate Tech and the tech industry and people who are successful tickets, right? Exactly. And so the I see these tech founders going up on these stages and subject…”

“I think as a matter of policy, the right policy here is to let private employers decide whether they're going to require vaccination or not. I think private organizations have the right to do that. If, you know, if a restaurateur wants to say that we are going…”

“What it's going to do is it's going to get, it's going to give people an incentive. It's going to warp the incentives for saving because what it's going to say to people is you want to do well, but not too well. Because if you hit the cap, you're now subject t…”

“My theory on this is that if you have government spending as a, you know, share of the economy at around 20% from a tax and spending standpoint, things basically work, ok? But as you try to go up to 25 and 30%, it starts to break.”

“My recommendation would be to get involved in startups first, generally get some operating experience, and that would serve you well.”

“I genuinely think it's a great thing that it got done so quickly. It's a miracle of science, and I think it's helped a lot of people. I mean, all of us. I mean, it's the thing that's going to end the pandemic. Largely already has.”

“The other thing it'll lead to just quickly is A change in who has political power, because, you know, ultimately, you know, money is the mother's milk of politics, and the people who are making all these returns will eventually fund politicians”

“Anybody really anywhere in the world who can learn how to write code can now, you know, make a six figure plus salary because Of remote work.”

“I invested in locals, which is Dave Rubin's thing.”

“So, look, this is just woke capitalism. This is wokeism out of control.”

“When a startup gets a billion-dollar-plus valuation without a product, invariably, it ends up somewhere between a disappointment and outright fraud.”

“We've already seen in the past five weeks, we've seen 30 to 40% correction in the public markets for growth stocks and SaaS companies. That is absolutely going to trickle down to venture valuations.”

“I will predict that even the blue areas of the country are gonna have fatigue with all these COVID restrictions and So even the blue state governors who are addicted to their state of emergencies and their restrictions and lockdowns and closures and mask manda…”

“These so-called auditors are actually political consultants who are members of the Democratic Party, who are friends of the senators who are pushing for this. They're political activists.”

“In our world, the biggest winner was Tiger Global. They basically productize growth stage capital by far the biggest deployer of late stage funding. They productized it. So pretty much founders can just send their metrics on like a single sheet of paper and th…”

“These new pills have, I think, a very good shot of doing it next year because they're protease inhibitors, so they stop the virus From replicating, and just, and even if the spike proteins mutate, it will not prevent these protease inhibitors from working. So …”

“The most lowestem company, I had the New York Times.”

“There's going to be a ballot initiative that says that any Parent who wants to send their kid to an accredited school can get a voucher for 13,000 dollars from the state.”

“I invest in B to B subscription businesses. I hate B to C subscription businesses, and the reason is just the churn rates.”

“I think the reaction of a lot of big tech companies, this is going to be to stop doing M and A until the situation gets clarified because they just don't know you know, targets are target companies are going to want to have huge breakup fees and it's just goin…”

“When we looked at this company, they had great numbers. It's just, the valuation was ahead of those numbers, but the numbers were always great.”

“What I've heard is that the crossover investors like Tiger, like Kotu, who are deploying all this money, they've really slowed down now. I think they're all kind of licking their wounds. And so like all of this money that was flooding into the venture space is…”

“Our philosophy now is just to be price takers and just to pick the companies that we want to be in and then the market sets the price.”

“I think that politicians are using the threat of regulation to try and drive the speech policies they want on these social networks.”

“I'm just like, how brainwashed this generation that we're raising. I mean, they're going to be so neurotic, but they're also like brainwashed.”

“Listen, I mean, when I supported the mask mandate at the very beginning of the pandemic, you know, it was always as an interim measure. If I had known that people would want to continue this thing forever, there's no way I would have supported it.”

“Last summer, I wrote a piece for Barry Weiss as a sub stack talking about how financial de-platform would be the next wave of online censorship.”

“We could be energy independent for free right now if we were just to repeal some of these executive orders. I mean, we were energy independent like a year or two ago until we banned fracking.”

“With cable news and now social media. And partisan rhetoric. It all pushes us towards continual escalation and World War III.”

“Yeah. I mean, I think a hundred times ARR is over, but we, no one really knows where it's landing. So I've seen some deals get done at 60 to 80 times, but no one really knows where it should be.”

“I think that there's going to be a trickle down effect of what's happened in the market to privates. And the valuations are going to go back to their pre-COVID levels.”

“The broad contours of what a peace deal would look like, which is there's three main pieces. Neutrality for Ukraine. The Russians insist that it not be part of NATO. They get to keep Crimea, which they annexed in 2014. That's been a fait accompli. And then som…”

“What the US should be doing is leading, they should be pushing for Lead, not bleed. Lead the way to a ceasefire, not to inflict maximum damage on the Russian regime.”

“I think part of what's going on with the companies you mentioned is that they're physical world companies. They are very capital intensive. They burn a lot of money. They're operationally intensive. I have sort of sour, I soured on those businesses years ago. …”

“If you can spend a dollar or less to generate an Incremental dollar of ARR. You're doing amazing. And between one and two is good. So in other words, if you're burning twenty million in a year to add an incremental ten million of ARR, you're doing quite well i…”

“And if you were to subject them to securities laws, And impose KYC and accreditation. You have to go through all these hoops just to add one to your wallet. It would destroy the potential functionality created by these systems.”

“In our second fund, we had about a hundred and twenty million of a firm stock, and we were sitting on it because we believe in the company and still do, and we're still sitting on it. And that was like a hundred million dollar mistake.”

“It pops the asset bubble, It vaporizes something like 14% of global wealth, and then simultaneously workers feel a lot poorer because their wages haven't kept up with inflation.”

“Well, yeah, I mean, look, but within the next six months, the talent market is not gonna be as hot.”

“We don't like to do deals that way, but you'll start to see them happen later this year when, you know, companies get more desperate.”

“I see smart people on both sides of this. I hear Jason Lemkin's been saying, I think this is kind of short, deep, sweet, six month reset. Fred Wilson just wrote 18 months at least. I think Sequoia is saying two years. I mean, I think our instinct is 18 months …”

“The new normal is going to look like the old normal, meaning the pre-COVID normal. We had the abnormal period was this two-year COVID period where 10 trillion of liquidity is pumped into the system. Things are going back to what they look like before all of th…”

“I've been maybe subpoenaed like three times in my entire career, and I've never been subpoenaed in my capacity as an individual.”

“I had no coordination with Elon before appearing on any of those shows. I just went on those shows and said what I think.”

“Historically, that number was around six. You know, the median SaaS company was trading at about six times their next 12 months revenue, and it went all the way to 15 during this sort of COVID bubble in twenty-twenty-one. And for the high-growth SaaS companies…”

“What popped the bubble was that interest rates went from four to six percent in, from 1999 to 2000. That's what popped the bubble.”

“Actually, I'm already creating it, so I haven't unveiled it yet, but there's something I'm incubating right now.”

“The exact magnitude of how well you do, I think is ultimately, it is substantially affected by timing.”

“Do I think that Trump should be allowed back? Yeah, I do.”

“I think slurs, slurs, banned or out, but arguments, I don't know that we should be banning entire categories of arguments.”

“I think this policy with regard to planes specifically is going to be futile. It's going to be at best harm reduction because as long as there's many ways to publish this information on Reddit, it's on Facebook.”

“We're going to have major economic headwinds for the next Four to six quarters, call it a year and a half.”

“And what they saw is that you're the later the stage, the bigger the valuation correction. So series D rounds went from three and a half billion to five hundred and twenty seven million. That's an 85% drop. Series C went from five hundred and two million to hu…”

“Political speech, speech criticizing the people in power is the most protected category of speech because the founders of the country understood that the people in power will always try to insulate themselves from accountability.”

“I am not a candidate for CEO of Twitter.”

“The trend that I am going to suggest will be to your great disappointment, J Cal, which is Trump's influence in the GOP continues to wane.”

“And that's why capital flows are moving hugely right now from equities into bonds, especially if we're going to a recession, which is inherently deflationary.”

“If you can be the first out there, In a given vertical with a proprietary data set, and then you get the advantage, the moat of reinforcement learning, that would be the way to create, I think, a sustainable business.”

“Unless this virus turns into Ebola, I'm never getting boosted again. I'll tell you that right now.”

“The mask became the blue equivalent of the red MAGA hat.”

“90 to 95% of the questions are going to be like that, and the AI is going to do an unbelievable job, better than a human, for free, and you're going to learn to trust the AI.”

“That any review that a restaurant or business doesn't like on Yelp, they could sue Yelp for that. Without section two 30”

“If there's a job reduction, it would be more the case where they've got a team of five accountants, and they go to two or three because now they're just much more productive. I don't think they go to zero.”

“I warn founders going into this year do not have a burn multiple greater than two because there's just so many headwinds right now that what happens is if you end up missing your revenue forecast, your burn multiple is going to look terrible. It could shoot up…”

“10% of their portfolio is basically being loaned out to startups who have no credit.”

“I think it is divestiture or shutdown for TikTok.”

“So I think there's three phases to this financial crisis. We're in phase one, and I think CRE and government debt are the next two phases.”

“I would bet dollars to dimes, that the story is very similar to a case we had in LA recently, the Brianna Kupfer case, where a young woman was basically stabbed For no reason by a psychotic homeless person who had been through the revolving door of the jail an…”

“I don't own, I don't have a dollar invested in any of these office towers”

“So you're going to replace permissionless innovation with going to Washington to go through some approval process, and it will be the politically connected, it'll be the big donors who get their projects approved, and the next Mark Zuckerberg, who's trying to …”

“I, yeah, I think we're pretty close for let's call it hobbyists or amateurs to be able to create pretty nice looking movies using these types of tools.”

“And what we will do by racing to create a new FDA is destroying American innovation in the sector, and other countries will not slow down. They will beat us to the punch here.”

“We're going to end up in a situation in which the big tech companies have inordinate influence over this new regulatory agency, and since It's not clear what the regulatory agency is even supposed to be doing yet. They're gonna end up promulgating a bunch of r…”

“I think is really the best hope that America has to get out of its horrible fiscal situation and all this debt. We need a massive productivity boost to get out of the massive debt bubble that we're in.”

“I think over the last few years during COVID, you saw tremendous movement between states. I think that's going to slow down a lot now because people just can't afford to trade houses.”

“I think the economists a year from now may say that the recession had already begun.”

“When you get to series A and you want us to write a 10, 12, fifteen million dollar check, we kind of want to see some revenue.”

“The money is being sucked out of the system. Like the tide before a tsunami and the tsunami is going to be all the Failures and bankruptcies.”

“If you're only growing 10, 15, 20%, even 50% a year, you're not a VC backable startup. You're a private equity play.”

“The burn is the one thing they totally control.”

“I think what will happen if Biden drops out is we'll get a flood of establishment Democrat candidates in the race. Newsom, maybe J.B. Pritzker, Harris for sure.”

“Or Roald Dahl's books are being posthumously edited. So like books are literally being rewritten in a way that their authors never intended. That is positively Orwellian. That really is.”

“That 20, 24 would be a Newsom DeSantis race. I still think there's like a 10, 20% chance of that.”

“You've had seven million plus illegals come across it during the Biden administration, and the administration obviously doesn't have the will to do anything about it.”

“If you look at the cost of low-skill immigration, the average low-skill immigrant household receives approximately 30,000 dollars in direct benefits from the government. By contrast, these households only pay about 10,000 dollars in taxes. So even though Those…”

“I think that it's been masked by the fact that the rest of the economy seems to be okay, but this is the worst software recession we've been in. I think since the dot-com crash”

“However, I think there's going to be a one to two year period of distress for all of these companies that raised in the peak. 20, 2020, 21, and are now running out of money, and they don't have enough revenue, they're not growing fast enough, and or their burn…”

“I think that what was discussed at that hearing that Sam Altman testified at, I think it's an existential threat to Silicon Valley, because You know, what Sam proposed was, well, we're gonna, we should have a new regulatory agency, kind of like the Atomic Ener…”

“So you take a 10 hour shooting day, you're only shooting for two hours of that. And then that two hours is maybe three, two or three pages of material. So two or three minutes.”

“What we heard is that Airtable still has something like two thirds of the money that is raised in the bank.”

“So when you put all these things together, I wasn't able to get the exact numbers, but if you just do a little bit of napkin math here, my guess is that air table is somewhere in the half a billion of ARR Club.”

“And I think it'll have a nice IPO at some point when they decide they want to do it.”

“There is a big wave of re valuations or down rounds coming.”

“Look, regardless of what you think about Trump, this Mayorkas revelation completely and utterly vindicates his approach to wanting to build a wall.”

“So I think you're going to see this dynamic for the next 18 months or so.”

“The board was totally incompetent. I mean, listen, if a board is going to take a drastic action of firing the founder CEO when everything is going great. I mean, cause everything's been going great at open AI. It's incumbent on them to explain their actions an…”

“And it feels like actually it's the people on the left who are generally in this camp Of wanting to slow us down and mire us in regulations and make it harder to make progress technologically because that's something they don't control.”

“But I do think that revolutionary change in the narrow category of technology is ultimately good for us. I know it creates challenges. I know it creates disruption. People do lose their jobs and have to find new ones. But it is the basis for American prosperit…”

“If you had told me at the time that that would subject our acquisition by Microsoft to the CMA over there, and that they would take some novel interpretation and go, hold up my deal, there's no way I would have wanted to open an office in the UK.”

“I think, again, the software recession, I'm calling an end to the software recession. Officially.”

“I think the failure of that whole debacle will put the nail in the coffin of the EA movement.”

“I do not think that the balance sheets of regional banks are healthy enough to survive without this continued liquidity from this program. So I think the feds can have to do something to either replace the program, extend the program.”

“I would bet against the magnificent seven just because I believe that what goes up must come down, and the hotter they are, the harder they fall. I'm not saying that the magnificent seven are actually going to go down. I'm just saying that the S&P four 93 Are …”

“I optioned this book along with Jack Selby, who's another PayPal mafia alum who has a film company. And so we've optioned this and we have just made a deal with Drake's company called Dream Crew to turn this into some sort of television series.”

“Another thing I think we're likely to see in the Middle East is Continued attacks on US military bases in Iraq and Syria. So that whole region is a powder keg. And if it develops into a wider regional war, then I think you can see an oil shock. And if there's …”

“So I don't think this is going to have any impact other than to escalate the conflict in the Middle East and put us on a path to war with Iran, which is really where the neocons want to take us. You've heard, obviously, the warmongers like Lindsey Graham are c…”

“The allies who participated in the campaign of airstrikes were UK, Australia, Canada, Netherlands, and Bahrain. But I don't think they actually did anything. I don't think they contributed any assets. They just provided their names to this operation and provid…”

“I mean, the Houthis have been at war on and off With the Saudis for a decade, and the Saudis been backed by Western weapons, and we have not been able to defeat the Houthis. So this missile strike last night is not gonna deter them. It's not gonna stop them. T…”

“My prediction for the year was bumpy landing. I thought soft landing was a little too optimistic. And I also thought that this big stock market rally that we had in November, December was too much too soon.”

“And as a result of what the Houthis are doing, it's having to go around the Horn of Africa, it's adding two or three weeks to the trip, and it's raising the cost of a shipping container from China from, say, 1500 dollars to 3000 dollars.”

“But Biden could lose the election this year over this issue. I mean, this is his worst issue.”

“Every single one of our bases in Syria and Iraq, and we have a lot, are going to be sitting ducks.”

“The defense industry is dominated by five of these prime defense contractors who work on cost plus are basically an oligopoly.”

“Number one, the ones that are successful have a cultural meritocracy. Number two, they're non-bureaucratic, and they don't have too much G&A, basically overhead in the company. Now, all those things are contradicted by having a large HR team or especially a DE…”

“I just don't put any of the things that they're saying or doing in the same category. As say what Elon has been doing in terms of taking on the powers that be in terms of rolling back censorship and promoting free speech on, on X. I mean, Elon, I think has tak…”

“I think in the near term, it's all about industrial applications or maybe even military applications.”

“History shows that presidents, once they win reelection, are more likely To get us into war rather than less because they don't have to fear voters.”

“Jason, I don't think it's a five year timeframe. I think it's longer than that. That's just my guess.”

“We should just kind of see where it goes before trying to clamp down.”

“I actually got pitched by a founder recently to create a rights marketplace with Copyright holders on the one side, or rights holders, could be musicians, could be movie studios, could be anyone who owns content, and then AI companies on the other that want to…”

“Somebody will litigate this. It could be these songwriters. Who knows? And then we're gonna get some messy arbitration around fair use. And it's probably gonna work its way up over the different circuit courts. You'll probably get different judgments. And fina…”

“Not yet, but it's paving the way for something.”

“In my experience, when you try to do two hard things, you actually square the complexity and you square the difficulty as opposed to just adding it.”

“He combines the foreign policy of Dick Cheney with the economic policy of Elizabeth Warren.”

“I think one of the reasons why the tech industry moves so fast and innovates so well is because of the happy coincidence that California doesn't allow non-competes, and so the industry's never had them. And as a result of that, like you're saying, the talent j…”

“Well, just because these agreements are no longer enforceable doesn't mean that businesses don't have moats. It just means you have to look in other places. I mean, you have to find network effects. You have to find data scale effects. There's other ways of bu…”

“They're going to absolutely go after your retirement accounts because that's the only way they're going to pay off these liabilities.”

“Well, that's where I want to go with it, is I call that promptless, which is I want the AI just to chime in when it determines that it has relevant information and can help the team, even if it hasn't been summoned yet. But we need some model improvement for t…”

“I always tell founders, just go all in on your best idea. They're always asking me for permission to pivot, and I always tell them, do, go for the best idea. Don't hedge. Don't try to do five things at once. Just go all in on your best idea.”

“B to C subscriptions, it's just not a very attractive business model because consumers just aren't willing to pay a lot and they have high churn rates and there's no possibility of expansion really.”

“The only reason we haven't gone broke or experienced hyperinflation is because we're the world's reserve currency.”

“When we did PayPal, none of us knew anything about payments, that was one of the reasons we were successful. All the payments experts told us it couldn't be done.”

“Probably not. I mean, not until we're forced to”

“So I suspect they're going to move in more of a B to B direction over time because that's where the real money is.”

“If you're in one of the handful of export industries in America, and I'm talking about if you're in Hollywood or you're in big finance or you're in software, then globalization has been great for you because it has created huge global markets for our products.…”

“You are the one who is fighting a legal battle to kick some of those people, the public. Kick the public off of the public beach in front of your beach house.”

“The last two companies that I talked to, which are exciting companies, they're at ten million of ARR and they want billion dollar valuations.”

“Look, if Joe Biden had just shut down the border for the last four years, he would be in a materially different position.”

“So what's going to happen is you're just going to have basically a log jam.”

“These big tech companies are not building out all of this infrastructure because they've modeled out the ROI and it's extremely positive. They're doing it because it's an arms race.”

“Well, I wasn't supposed to talk about that, but I saw that someone leaked it to the New York Times this morning, so it's out there. And yeah, I'm going to be speaking there next week.”

“I think there's a common denominator here that both Macron and Biden would rather throw the government of the country to radicals and communists than implement sensible restrictions on immigration.”

“If you're running an institution, you have to be able to fire people when they don't perform. But we have lost that ability of our federal government.”

“Imagine if Elon had bought Twitter, but he wasn't allowed to fire anybody. Do you think he would have been able to restore free speech? Do you think he'd be able to restore innovation? No.”

“Do not hedge your bets. I think that's just really important for founders. And it goes back to what you're saying. It's just so Hard to execute any idea that you can't be hedged as a founder.”

“No, I never asked anybody to do that, and a good reason why is I don't want to trouble my founders.”

“And we just had a ton of capital come into the industry because the Fed and the federal government airdropped 10 trillion dollars of liquidity onto the economy in reaction to COVID.”

“The Fed's rate cut on September 18th. I think that in hindsight, it was too big.”

“Believing you're going to be an influencer is like believing that you're going to be like a rock star or movie actor or something like that. Pro athlete. Yeah. It's like a one in a million shot.”

“If you've got an economy that's doing quite well, and there's a lot of job creation going on, then it's a good time to actually cut government because the private sector can reabsorb these people.”

“That story that you told is gonna be told by the legacy media and all the haters and the enemies, regardless of what Elon and Vink do.”

“Well, you know, there, there's a lot of scuttlebutt online that Nicole Shanahan is going to run for governor of California. And I'd be all in favor of that.”

“I mean, to be honest, I was starting to feel really annoyed with you, Jcal, on the pod. I wasn't sure how much longer I could put up with it, to be perfectly frank, but, you know, tonight, you kind of remind me why it's fun to do this.”

“13, and then 13, well, we got another million on top of it, so we ended up raising thirteen million that night”

“My biggest political surprise was that even in deep blue cities, like San Francisco, the voters rejected the woke left in favor of more moderate alternatives. So, here in San Francisco, we got Daniel Lurie as mayor. He was elected. Dean Preston and Aaron Peski…”

“The executive order actually provides that the secretary of the treasury will not sell the Bitcoin. Okay. We're prohibited from selling the Bitcoin.”

“With respect to reserve, the EO provides that the secretaries that I'm talking about treasury and commerce, they're allowed to figure out strategies to accumulate more Bitcoin for the reserve. If those strategies are budget neutral and don't cost the taxpayer …”

“Since I'm in the government, I can't be an owner, but I told him I'd be happy to be member number one.”

“So the amount of compute required to serve all these new applications is going to be massive, which is why I think the CapEx build out actually makes sense.”

“In any event, the reason why the progress is so rapid with coding is because code compiles and you can Determine objectively whether it works or not. You can validate it. And so that makes it a perfect area for AI to get better at through reinforcement learnin…”

“That's true for founding members who have additional benefits, but there's also a lower level. That's the more reasonable membership level.”

“He also signed an executive order ending the use of disparate impact for affirmative action.”

“Whenever the media puts these experts on to tell you that there is chaos and doom, that has proven to be an excellent time to buy the dip. So I think this is a very easy way to trade the Trump presidency.”

“No, that's Michael Kratzios. I just do my two issues. I've got AI and crypto.”

“We put out a plan today that has 90 concrete actions that at least the executive branch can take to help us win the AI race.”

“If this continues, we're going to have a patchwork of 50 different state regulatory regimes, as opposed to one seamless national network. And look, China is, they've declared that AI is a national priority for them. They understand how strategic it is. And I t…”

“That was something we didn't have in the Biden administration not to make it political, but we didn't have a seat at the table, and now we have David Sachs in the White House, so this is a real turnaround”

“Every consumer, every business is going to want to run AI. A lot of them are going to want to run it on their own infrastructure. Consumers are going to want to run it on their own phone. You're going to have an AI that's highly personalized to you. And so eve…”

“And if there is no federal standard, what you're going to see is that the blue states will drive this ban on quote unquote algorithmic discrimination, which will lead to DEI being Promoted in models, which is what the Biden administration wanted. You will see …”

“We just came off a quarter of 3.8% economic growth Of which, 40% was attributable to AI.”

“I think that we had some really idiotic legislation under Biden that President Trump and David Sachs have largely unwound.”

“If it were true, That we were seeing massive AI job loss. You would see the percent of white collar jobs dropping in the economy. That has not happened.”

“Where I disagree with my friends on the right is I just don't think that's what's going to happen. I mean, I could be wrong, but I just don't think that's what's happening. It hasn't happened yet. I don't think that's what's going to happen.”

“At Stanford, they said that if you're disabled, you get more time on tests, and you can kind of be unproctored, and kind of... Accommodations. Right. So now, 50% of students at Stanford say they're disabled.”

“I think ultimately this will bring down rates for residential consumers for two reasons. One is that when the data centers create their own power. They can sell back or donate back to the grid when they connect. They don't have to connect to the grid, but once…”

“And look, I think the takeaways for me are number one, that this will be the year of the rise of the personal AI assistant.”

“So I think Google is in a tremendous position to offer a personal AI system that's connected with your email and calendar.”

“The New York Times clearly has a list of people they consider approved targets. They're all right-coded. People like Elon or Peter Thiel and even J. Cal, Because of his association with us, I guess, and they become the targets, but the people who've donated hu…”

“The number one person in the Epstein files from Silicon Valley, which is Reid Hoffman, mentioned 2600 times, had a multi-year relationship with Epstein.”

“With this rate payer protection pledge, what you're going to see is that it could actually bring down consumer prices, because what happens is that when these data centers then set up their own power and connect to the grid, they can give back the excess to th…”

“So my guess is we're going to see a lot of patches over the next few months. I think that that will resolve the problem.”

“But there's no way That that button gets pushed without going to Pelosi for the sign off. Right. I mean, she's like the boss of this operation.”

“Well, I think Chamath is right that the data centers become very unpopular, probably in 30 states they're just going to ban them outright.”

“It's going to. Have a massive impact on demand for second homes in New York, which will crash the whole market.”

“They're going to end this year. At 80 to a hundred billion, at least on the current trajectory.”

“The open AI growth rate's been around three to four X a year. The anthropic growth rate has been around 10 X a year.”

“Category number three ironically, again, is Anthropic itself. It has allied itself politically with a lot of the Doomer groups, a lot of the NIMBY groups.”

“The last time I weighed in on some Elon litigation, I got deposed for six hours.”

“The longer the time horizon for a task, the more likely it is to Go off the rails.”

“Well, I'm not in favor of Bernie's proposal because it's a straight up confiscation of property, and I just think that'd be a terrible precedent.”

“My guess is that it would follow, and we'll see about 60% of a hundred percent trillion dollar market cap companies getting to 10 trillion in the next few years.”

“Look, this is all downstream. This is all downstream of the fact that these AI CEOs have been scaring the daylights out of the public with respect to AI.”

“I'm not a day-to-day employee of the White House, and I only got the readout of this once the letter was sent. So, you know, I wasn't involved.”

“This is, I think, the tactic is you stay open until you catch the frontier or you get close to it. And then there's a really compelling incentive to go close because you want to capture all the value for yourself.”

“10 percent's not gonna satisfy the rabid dogs. Let me tell you, they're gonna go for a hundred percent.”

“I think they were expecting to end the year at sixty billion of ARR. And I think they're forecasting more like seventy five billion of exit ARR.”

“I don't believe that China has caught up. I still think we are six months ahead.”

“And my view is that it's real that I think there will be a return on all of this capex. I don't try to predict stocks or tell people when they should be buyers, but you look at the hyperscalers, they have invested pretty much all of their free cashflow. And th…”

“And my view is that I think it's driven by momentum, meaning that over the past year, you've had this roughly 10 X run up in memory chip stocks, and you've seen this overall huge rise in any stock that's related to the AI boom.”