The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Gerstner: 100% of 2021's thousand unicorns will face down rounds
“Remember we had a thousand unicorns at the end of 2021. And I've said a hundred percent of those are going to do a down round. And we're still in the early stages of that reset to occur.”
Gerstner: Anthropic generating $5B to $6B in a single month
“We're seeing companies like Anthropic at five or six billion dollars of revenue in a single month, which is extraordinary.”
Gerstner predicts up to 40 percent of 2022 unicorns will disappear
“Yeah, I'd say 30 to 40% are these companies that were valued over a billion dollars that don't have product market fit. They'll disappear.”
Gerstner: Frontier AI labs pay 3x to 5x market price for compute
“Right now the shortage is so acute, and the willingness to pay from the Frontier Labs is so high because they all recognize they're on the verge of some massive breakthroughs. That they're willing to pay three, four, five X market pricing in order to get at sc…”
Gerstner: Secondary share pricing shifted from 20% discount to a premium
“Secondaries over the last couple of years, we're trading at a discount to market. So if we wanted to sell shares in one of our companies, Right, to buyers out there, they were willing to give us 80 cents on the dollar in order for us to get liquid so that we c…”
Gerstner: SpaceX IPO will trade at 40 to 50 times revenue
“This is why the SpaceX IPO is going to trade at 40 to 50 times revenue.”
Gerstner: Wall Street estimates Nvidia revenue growth flatlining under 10% CAGR from 2027-2029
“So if you look at that estimate, you know, starting in 20, 27, it basically flatlines 27 through 29 for Nvidia. Right? Less than 10% CAGR in terms of the growth for NVIDIA. They have by 20 29, them doing three hundred and sixty billion in revenue compared to t…”
Gerstner: AI startups are raising at $600M valuations on zero revenue
“We're seeing four or five, six hundred million dollar deals get done on zero revenue, two, three million dollars in revenue”
Gerstner: Post-9/11 US wars cost $8T and caused millions of deaths
“If we look at the wars the U.S. Has engaged in since September, it's estimated three to four million people have died in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan. We spent eight trillion dollars. Inflation adjusted, we spent four trillion in World War II. Eight trillion re…”
Brad Gerstner predicts Nvidia will beat earnings expectations through late 2023
“I don't think there's any problems with Nvidia. I think they're going to continue to perform. I think they're beat their numbers for the balance of the year.”
Brad Gerstner predicts upcoming AI funding rounds will dwarf Mistral's €105M seed
“There are going to be a couple of monster rounds, I think announced next week, like that are going to make this one look like kids play.”
Gerstner: Coinbase reported stock-based compensation equal to 70% of revenue
“Coinbase, I think just reported SBC, which Hold your hat, Saks, was 70% of revenue. Not 70% of their earnings. 70% of their revenue.”
Gerstner: Apple's IDFA changes 'pickpocketed' $2B from the advertising industry
“Apple's changes with IDFA literally pickpocketed the industry two billion dollars this year under the auspices of privacy.”
Gerstner: Mass public shootings are a uniquely American problem
“I would say that every fucking country on the planet has kids with mental health disorders, but not every country on the planet has kids getting shot up in schools and supermarkets and churches.”
Gerstner: Venture capital investments from 2020-2022 will produce lousy returns
“I think the vintage of the last 18 months will be lousy. So the capital deployed over the last 18 months won't have a lot of return.”
Gerstner: Post-COVID inflation will roll over and long-term trends will resume
“I think the much more likely explanation is that the trends that existed for 20 years still exist. They were interrupted temporarily by us saving ourselves from a catastrophe with COVID. The transient thing that everybody has come to make fun of, right? Transi…”
Gerstner: Tech growth stocks will be higher by May 2023
“We will be higher for growth stocks this time next year, but we may very well get there by way of lower and potentially meaningfully lower because the counterfactual to the hyperinflation argument is not, you can't deliver the counterfactual for at least four …”
Gerstner: Most companies IPOing in the next year will be down-rounds
“I think the vast majority of companies that come public in the next 12 months are going out below their last round's valuation.”
Gerstner: Tech market valuations will not bounce back to 2020–2021 peak levels
“Let me be absolutely clear. There is no bouncing back to where we were the last 18 months. That was the outlier. That was the make-believe.”
Gerstner: China will not supply weapons to Russia
“This is why they're not going to supply the Russians with weapons.”
Gerstner: Growth equity multiples face an additional 10-20% drawdown
“I suspect that there's another 10 to 20% to go, right? For a 10 year that's going to be sitting here at one eight.”
Gerstner: Prop 22 will become the regulatory model for New York and other states
“You're going to see if Prop. 22 passes, which I think it will tonight, it's going to be the architecture that New York and many other states follow. They're certainly not going to follow the disastrous AB five Example.”
Gerstner: Nadella reports over 30% ROIC for Microsoft token infrastructure
“Satya is out this week saying, you know, citing Morgan Stanley's report and saying they're seeing over a 30% return on invested capital in tokens as a service, right?”
Gerstner: Vast majority of AI compute offtake comes from 3 companies
“So the vast majority of the offtake commitments are coming from Anthropic, OpenAI, and NVIDIA. Right. When you hear about the hyperscalers building all of this, you know, this computer, they're building it out to sell to the people that we you know, that we ju…”
Gerstner: AI token prices dropped 90% annually over past 2.5 years
“Yeah, we've seen, we, we've seen 90% reductions in the price of tokens for each of the last two and a half years.”
Gerstner: US government will take action against AI model distillation
“I think the US government is going to take steps against distillation, which they should do.”
Gerstner: Trump Accounts Garnered Over $1B in Deposits Post-Launch
“After the launch of this, we had over a billion dollars of deposits.”
Gerstner: Secondary market transaction volume is double its 2021 peak
“We thought that was crazy at the end of 21. We're double that now in terms of secondary transactions.”
Gerstner: Secondary transactions equal 31% of primary VC activity in 2025
“This is the amount of employee secondary. So this is people buying into Anduril, Anthropic, SpaceX, now represents 31% of all primary venture activity. Is buying into these secondaries in 20, 25.”
Gerstner: SpaceX will use an innovative lockup structure for its IPO
“With respect to the lockup, I think this is the most innovative, and I think SpaceX is going to have a very similar innovation.”
Gerstner: Electricity costs are falling in Texas despite data center expansion
“In Texas, Where you're building the most data centers in the country, electricity costs are going down.”
Gerstner predicts OpenAI and Google will sandbox frontier AI models
“I think that OpenAI will end up doing the same thing. I think Google will end up doing the same thing.”
Gerstner: AI inference cost is down 90% year over year
“Inference cost is down by 90% year over year.”
Gerstner: X operates with 70% fewer employees than when Musk took over
“They have 70% fewer employees. Then they had the day Elon walked into the building.”
Gerstner: China is building 100 fission reactors while US builds zero
“We have a hundred fission reactors being built in China and zero in the United States.”
Gerstner: Less than half of people under 40 view capitalism favorably
“Less than half of people under the age of 40 have a favorable view of capitalism.”
Gerstner: Databricks re-accelerated growth past 60% over last three quarters
“Databricks just re-accelerated the last three quarters. They're growing over 60% at scale.”
Gerstner: DeepSeek, Anthropic, and OpenAI will launch Blackwell-trained models in 4–8 weeks
“And just this year, like we're going to see the first models over the course of the next four to eight weeks out of deep seek, out of anthropic, out of open AI that are trained on blackwell servers, right? You're going to see a next generation of models Far mo…”
Gerstner: 1.5 million families claimed Invest America accounts in five days
“In fact, in the last, I think, five days, 1.5 million families and kids have claimed their account.”
Gerstner: US credit card delinquencies are back to 2009 levels
“U.S. Credit card delinquencies are now back to, you know, 2009 levels, right?”
Gerstner: Cognition Is Valued at $15B, Decagon at $4B, Distill at $2B
“Their valuations of those three companies, one is Cognition now at 15,000,000,001 is Decagon now at four billion. And you know, and the other one is Distill that just raised at two billion.”
Gerstner: U.S. deportations averaged 200k under Clinton and 300k under Obama
“Court-ordered removals and deportations average 200,000 per year, 1997 to 2000. That's under Clinton. 200,000 a year. They averaged 300,000 a year, peaking at 400,000 under Obama. Right? Deportations plummeted under Biden.”
Gerstner: Nvidia captured nearly 100% of incremental AI data center revenues
“In twenty-twenty-two, two and a half years ago, NVIDIA and AMD had basically the same revenue, twenty-five billion dollars, right? This year, NVIDIA will do 10 X that at roughly, you know, 210, two hundred and thirty billion dollars, and AMD will do thirty-thr…”
Gerstner: San Francisco Fed proxy rate reaches highest level since 2000
“And we're now back to the highest level on that proxy rate since we've been since May of 2000. It's up over seven percent.”
Gerstner: Meta will launch major AI models and agents within six weeks
“Over the next four to six weeks. They're going to have massive launches out of the AI side of the business. I expect a lot more support for their open AI model or for their open LLM. I also think they're going to launch a bunch of agents on WhatsApp and Instag…”
Gerstner: ByteDance announced a $1B Nvidia chip purchase in June 2023
“ByteDance bought a billion dollars worth of Nvidia chips announced this week, right?”
Gerstner: $15 trillion of household net worth destroyed in five months
“We destroyed 15 trillion. You said this on pod 80. We destroyed 15 trillion of household net worth in the last five months.”
Gerstner: Only 21 public software companies have over $2B in revenue
“And public software companies over two billion in revenue. We got to 21. Ok. There are only 21 that are worth more than twenty-five billion dollars in all the public markets of all the millions of software companies that have been started.”