The Wisdom Wall

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

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

“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…”

“consumption-based pricing. It doesn't work, and what I mean is, you can have some adoption in the short term. The best example is Snowflake, but in the long term, it destroys your business, and the reason is because you don't know which data is valuable, and you're not going to put up with a variable business model…”

“So there's only one of two stable solutions. Either you pay the copyright holders, which I actually think doesn't work, And the reason is because someone in China will crawl it, and they just dump the weights, right? So they can just crawl and dump the compressed weights. Or if you crawl, make it open. At least…”

“one of the things the Democrats need to do is stop listening to the The foreign policy blob and the beltway exec, you know, pundits who've got fancy titles and fancy think tanks.”

“the second order effect is you're actually hurting the market and you're hurting the rebuild effort because you're reducing the incentive for folks to come in and fill the void in the market that is necessary for us to accelerate the development of 15,000 homes in a very short period of time.”

“do you think that we can run around the world imposing liberal democracy on other countries, and in some cases, shoving it down their throat, doing it at the end of a rifle barrel. And my argument is that's almost impossible to do. It almost always backfires.”

“you begin to erode liberalism in the United States because you build a deep state, right? And you want to understand that a lot of the complaints here about cracking down on freedom of speech and so forth and so on are related to the fact that we have this ambitious foreign policy.”

“I think that what the United States should do is worry about its own national interest. In some cases that's going to involve align ourselves with a dictator.”

“her theory is you gotta prevent the aggregation of power, so you gotta, you gotta fight every acquisition of note. And the problem, of course, is that actually quells venture capital investment.”

“And the tipping point is when half or more of the population begins to be employed by the government, at which point that concept is lost. Because now it is the government that is the employer, not one's own individual liberties and ability to go out and be enterprising And so I think that the budget of government…”

“You can design your career that way, but that is not a career that's going to enable you to either run a company as a CEO or be a founder of a startup or be on a track to one day being a founder or a CEO.”

“as with all things, when you're successful and you try to scale, returns decay. And this is not a, a slight on YC's returns, but it's what happens to everybody. So if you look at Blackstone's returns, they were incredible when they started, then they're Ok today. When you look at Sequoia's returns, they were incredible…”

“When you're buying old stakes into a new fund and crossing funds, it's sort of like actually one of those things that are supposed to be verboten. And when you're trying to build a good fund with great governance, This is actually at the top of the list of the things that you're never supposed to do, which is to…”

“Intellectual property is the least valuable it's ever been, right? More people develop things now via trade secret than patents. The whole patent system has become a little bit of a game.”

“I'd rather focus on is there copyright infringement in the output? Does the output mimic An original copyrighted source. And if it does, then that's where the infringement should lie. Not on the, how did you do it?”

“The reason Silicon Valley has been so successful is because it's so fucking far away from Washington, D.C.”

“Every year. And it does not matter how big the company is. You must manage up or out the bottom five to 10%.”

“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 DEI organization, right?”

“If telling the truth, which is basically a commodity, it's, it's weird, but it actually is a commodity. It's just there. The truth is there. And you can't build the business by telling the truth.”

“the SaaS business model Is really a temporary phenomenon that existed between ubiquity of the internet and the development of AI and low cost, low code tools for developing software.”

“I don't think there's any valor in being a founder. I think there's a lot of valor in building something that's really valuable for people, and if that means being a director of marketing, go do that instead.”

“When I got into my job in 2017, all the experts were saying to me, the big divide in the Middle East is between the Suis, the Sunnis and the Shias. And when I got there, I said, no, no, no, the divide is between leaders who want to give opportunity and betterment of life to their people and people who want to use…”

“Time is a computational phenomenon. Time is the, is the progressive change of the network.”

“now people can go online and just see how, um, yeah, how, how mentally limited a lot of elites are, uh, just by looking at their Twitter profiles, or the things that they say, things that they write about, whatever, um, uh, expressions that they have online,”

“out of a hundred interactions, a lot of the time, just people are having a bad day. Some other percentage of the time people are actually just being very classist because racism, it turns out is like a pretty severe perversion.”

“what you really want to do is, if there are reasons why, say, black kids aren't getting access to violins at the same, at a young age, because schools are underfunded or band programs are, are horrible in inner cities, That's where you want to intervene. You don't want to intervene at the point, at the meritocratic end…”

“the problems begin when you, when you sort of bless this idea that race is a super deep feature of who you are right from the start. When you bless that idea right from the start, it sends the signal that what people bring to the table is their racial identity, is their gender. Now, when you fast forward two years down…”

“Most VCs want to be your friend. And so they are hypocritically polite instead of brutally honest in a way that can actually help you make a better decision.”

“In that time, I have not seen, and people get surprised at this, one example of a large innovation that came from a large company or institution.”

“the profit system alone does not direct resources adequately.”

“They're spreading a negative open source, uh, uh, message, and I think it's precisely because they know it's their biggest threat, and I think what Meta's done with Llama II.”

“It seems to me that it's only founders who subtract in companies.”

“When you put in a hundred million dollars into a startup to buy compute, You are not buying whiz bang next generation IP. You are subsidizing capex.”

“And I think there's been just a great fallacy that's gone on. That you can have live work balance or life work balance, and you could have this nirvana where you have it all. The fact is the great companies are made by people who make great sacrifices, period, full stop. And if you're not willing to make the great…”

“You're going to invest in a company at a five hundred million dollar valuation and six weeks later, it's going to be worth zero because someone open source the exact same thing that you can now do for a hundred K.”

“And our capital allocation model is totally wrong size. Look, fund four for me was one billion dollars. Does that make sense? Nope. For the next three or four years? No, the right number may actually be fifty million dollars invested over the next four years.”

“If you look at any bloated organization that's building enterprise class software, you can string together a bunch of agents that will auto construct everything you need to build a much, much cheaper product that then you can deploy for other agents to consume. So you don't even need a sales team anymore.”

“If you're a deposit bank, you should be required to keep all of your assets in fully liquid securities that you mark to market every day.”

“If it was a highly proprietary asset, you would have never sold 49% of it to Microsoft for ten billion dollars, because you would assume that it was worth a trillion dollars. So it's a huge tell on the part of OpenAI, their deep understanding, and they understand it better than anybody else, that it's a bit of a capped…”

“Good founders have a responsibility to do what's right for themselves and their employees. Nobody else.”

“The crypto ecosystem and the model that so many kind of crypto businesses have engaged in over the years, which is if you can fester the belief, then there is a business. If you cannot fester the belief, there is no business that there isn't a fundamental productivity driver. It's about building a belief system.”

“if you have these irrational central bankers, That will, that are willing to constantly bail people out. You will never get a high functioning government because policy is irrelevant. Good policy doesn't matter. Bad policy doesn't matter. If any of it goes wrong. The central banker will come in and bail us out.”

“the markets don't, whether we like it or not, react to humanitarian crises. They react to the second and third order economic impacts of those things.”

“And this is why probiotics do not work. Probiotics are single microbes, single bacterial strains or fungal strains that we put into a pill, and we swallow it. And just because that microbe happens to have some beneficial effect, you know, on its own in a petri dish, it does not survive in your gut biome.”

“Any of these publicly traded, um, investment managers, they live and die by their ability to constantly be raising funds, which implicitly means you have to constantly be writing funds. The returns decay, but that's okay, because now you're feeding, you're, you know, you're taking money from pension funds and other…”

“Investing has never, will never, and is not ever a team sport.”

“my advice to founders who are on the right has actually been, don't be public about your political leanings, because you won't accomplish anything. You will just, you will be terminated by the mob. You should focus on building, you should focus on creating value, and then after you don't need the rest of the industry,…”

“The last thing I would say is, I think one thing that unites, I think, the old left that you would probably put yourself into, in with Glenn, like a Bernie leftist, and the new right, is that both consider two key things. One, the US can never act abroad in a legitimate good way. Everything the US does abroad is always…”

“Look, I think it, you know, the, the, the point of a company is to produce useful products and services for your fellow human beings. It is not, uh, you know, some political gathering place or a thing where it, that's the point of a company.”

“if taiwan really wants to be independent every adult there needs to learn how to fight and they need to have weapons And that's gonna be the best guarantee. We can be their ally, but that's gonna be the best guarantor is creating a credible deterrent to she moving on them.”

“The problem is VCs, they join a board, and they think that they have to quote add value. So they come in and they make a bunch of suggestions and recommendations and push you to do a bunch of things. And as Vinod has said correctly many times, they more often than not add negative value.”

“And in all these cases, from Google, to YouTube, to Twitter, and now to Spotify, the idea of being just an access, a platform for access is proving to be wrong. All of them are de facto publishers.”

“Whenever I see these grandiose prognostications of future progress, and then see these companies raise exorbitant amounts of money, I have never found a single example where it's ever worked. Ever. In fact, every time I see a company raise an exorbitant amount of money in a series A, I write them off in my head.”

“It's and that's, by the way, that that's, that's, in my opinion, based on everything I've looked at, the primary reason for the increase in education costs, because the government funds all the student loans, the increase in health care, the increase in defense, all of it is because the government is the customer and…”

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

“At the end of the day, this term of misinformation is just another vector for partisan attack, and it will be used by whoever we give the power to, to decide what misinformation is.”

“we have unfortunately gotten so confused that we've decided to fix the finish line and stagger the starting line, right? Because all of this still doesn't apply to rich people.”

“What I would encourage all of you to do is if you're in a position to actually accumulate political power, you have a responsibility to do so, and it is directly correlated with money. And so as you find comp found companies and you get liquidity, you have a responsibility to be engaged because you will have a louder…”

“If you want to participate in a public construct, if you want to consume a public resource, or if you want to provide a publicly funded good, then it's the broader public's rights that are superior to your individual rights.”

“We don't have a shortage of money. We have a shortage of capable people who know what to do with that money.”

“I think the best way to destroy a monopoly is to build better technology that disrupts them. And that has always been the case throughout history. And anytime government gets involved and tries to break up a monopoly in a way that is not natural to the way the market forces might demand, you end up declining an…”

“the developer network effects around an operating system monopoly are insuperable. They, you, you cannot overthrow them.”

“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.”

“And as it turns out, inflation is a phenomenal way to decrease levels of playing field. Absolutely. It decreases people's richness. So it makes rich people poor. That's really the most effective tool that you have To recalibrate, it's very, very hard to redistribute money. And I think every attempt at doing that has…”

“Government should not be for profit. You know, government should, I don't even think government should be breaking even. I think that government should be generally running at a loss. And then the net GDP, as long as that's positive and accretive, we're doing right as a society, right?”

“You're, you're, you might win this particular battle, but you're losing the war because you're now buying into the premise of cancel culture. You're now buying into this idea that we need to economically cancel people who disagree with us, and I, I really reject that.”

“That, that is what I call threat inflation, and it's the biggest tool the censors have for seizing power, because it, it, it convinces people.”

“Well, I also think what it means is identity politics is a stupid strategy. Forget whether you're offended by it or not. At this point, what's clear is it's a stupid fucking strategy. It doesn't work. It's a path to losing.”

“by having scale, by having incredible profits, by, and then by reinvesting it in R&D, creating jobs, innovating, it's the only way this kind of stuff is going to get done. You're not going to get it done by breaking up these companies and having a hundred companies that only have ten million dollars of profit each, and…”

“So for a modeler and a forecaster, the incentive is all around being conservative because that's how you're taken seriously. There's nobody that has any upside in showing a model that shows 10,000 people dying. All of the attention and the, the gravity with which you're taken and the attention that you get is when you…”

“And it is the common system of human power and control structure to tell a narrative of existential threat and leverage that narrative into your solution being the path to protection and safety.”

“AI is a tool of leverage. For humans. AI is not some magical genius super god that sits above us that understands things we don't understand. Every piece of the open AI message set that went back and forth between these agents is documented, can be read by people, can be understood by people, and we can see the work…”

“I mean, I'm giving open AI the benefit of the doubt. I'm saying it's probably unfounded, but as long as we have a closed model duopoly of frontier AI, and they're reserving the right to get into every vertical application there is, they're declaring in advance they're going to compete with their customers, so how can…”

“If you're a founder who's raising a Series A and you're trying to take chips off the table, I consider that to be a huge negative signal.”

“If you don't have communists and fascists in the same department having tea together, something has gone wrong because scientists are very extreme.”

“In some ways, NVIDIA is kind of becoming the central bank of AI. The Federal Reserve of AI. That is like a way to kind of conceptualize what they are doing. And in the same way, the federal reserve, like a lot of monetary policy, it works through private banks. Here you're going to have, um, and I'm probably more banks…”

“China wants everybody dependent on China, and them independent of you. That is their theory of the case. You, our markets are going to be so big and important, you can't do anything about it. You're going to be dependent, your economy, on our markets. We're going to leverage that, and then destroy, manipulate, and…”

“I would let universities, colleges across the United States go up, set a goal. You can go up to 20% foreign students. Today, some of them are sick, some are more. I don't care how you divide it between your grad and undergrad. That's up to you, yours. But those students pay full play. They pay full price. It would…”

“CapEx is high alpha, low beta in data center infrastructure, that capital, and model development theoretically could be high alpha, but it's very high beta. It's a very risky way to deploy capital.”

“If you're not at the frontier, you can't charge for the model layer itself. If you are at the frontier, you can charge a premium, and that's where Anthropic and OpenAI”

“I think maintenance mode becomes way easier with AI because you don't need the historical knowledge anymore. The AI can go in and sort of reconstitute that, that historical knowledge.”

“if you get the robot to be similar enough to a human, Then you can train on all the available video data out there of humans.”

“But there's always a massive sim to real gap. Things aren't simulated perfectly. And then, you know, as you pick up something in the real world and there's wave dynamics and there's condensation on the glass and the dynamics of the robot are not perfectly modeled, all these things are still very, very difficult. That…”

“at that point, it's probably specialty automation doing those things, because it's just twenty-four-seven doing it, and a humanoid doesn't make sense. It's not the most efficient thing for that specific task. A humanoid is useful for walking into human environments and doing human workflows.”

“These models are getting commoditized much faster than anybody thought. And how do we know this? Because there is no meaningful sustained advantage once a model publishes their performance criteria. What you see is literally within weeks, other models, some open, some close, some open weight, who are able to match and…”

“And the velocity at which it's happening, you see that the real business model is not in the foundational model anymore. It's at the application layer above, and it's in the infrastructure below, whether that's the cloud or whether that's chips.”

“I've never seen it in my 25 years in Silicon Valley where a sector of the economy can absorb hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars And then you think that there's going to be economic pricing power many decades into the future, and it effectively evaporates in months.”

“The best thing that can happen to them is 500 different models proliferate, and they support all of them because they will make so much money at the silicon layer.”

“Yeah, video, like, if I'm going to be wrong on the data centers, it's going to be because of video.”

“With AI, people are much more open to share what actually happened, give the information, and suddenly this emotional block of, like, in front of other human, I don't want to be able to say all of that, is, is, is very different.”

“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.”

“pre-training on videos gives, like, implicit understanding of the physics of interactions with the real world, and then you can get stuff like action prediction, like robotics out of the same model.”

“I think what really excites me is you can use the same kind of, um, AI model to make a movie and deploy that as a brain on a robot.”

“You can't rent intelligence from the same place that rents it to your competitor.”

“once a model is open source, it stops being Chinese in a way, right? Because you can now take that model. You can fork it. You can create your own version. You run it in an American data center on your own hardware. There's no packets going back to China. There's no data leakage going back to China.”

“They're awesome for the AI infrastructure providers. They just shift economic value from the margins of the frontier labs to the infrastructure.”

“there are a lot of portfolio managers who, if a stock breaks deal price, they sell it no matter what. They consider it a promise that was broken.”

“if our suppliers are sending us gifts in the mail, that's a really bad sign. It means we're overpaying. If our suppliers are telling us they never want to speak to us again, it means we're getting the right price.”

“You do not get economic mobility if the government is giving you a job or giving you money. You lose economic mobility. You become indentured to the government.”

“If you're a company, I think it's almost a non-starter. And the reason is because you could accidentally trip one of these things without even knowing it.”

“In the absence of power, this is all a moot conversation, and if you can't deliver power to hundreds and hundreds of megawatts and line of sight to gigawatts, it's all meaningless bullshit.”

“The, the core problem with wealth inequality in this country, the core problem with inflation in this country, the core problem, all of it roots back to excess government spending. End of story.”

“We have this technological compute revolution that is infinitely more infrastructure intensive than compute was in the last generations, and this is creating this really wild demand shock for infrastructural critical minerals, commodities, at the same time where there's a supply shock because we just haven't invested…”

“If you're an RIA and you're, you know, collecting assets, that is not venture. You know, venture, as I practice it at least, is a different craft where you are Making concentrated bets of your time and capital on entrepreneurs and helping them build a business.”

“private investors are often selling to management teams. And at some level that can mean telling management teams what they need to hear, because you want to be able to keep participating in the rounds.”

“I, I, I think historically more money is made after IPO than before. I, I, I think every single study shows that, uh, there is more money to be made both in percentage and in, in what we care about, which is absolute.”

“I think one thing that we've avoided is kind of evaluation, a solely valuation based approach. There's a, I've just seen I've seen too many people get run over by shorts that have dumb valuations, but they get captured on, you know, Reddit or one of these other things, and they just get their, you know, or like some of…”

“The fascinating thing about liquidity and valuation is The higher a stock price goes, and it's gonna sound sort of intuitive, but it's not, the more valuable the company becomes. You know, there's actually the increase in value of the company increases the value of the company, right? Because it lowers the cost of…”

“As we, as models get bigger, there's more efficiency that should lower the overall cost to give you a token in the world. That should compound to higher gross margins, ultimately more ways to pay for compute, and then access to compute is one of the really big competitive advantages at the moment.”

“If AI is this very powerful technology, I think it needs to be decentralized so that all of us can protect ourselves to some degree, right? We need to be able to run, we need to be able to run the AI ourselves on our own hardware if we so choose, so we're not beholden to a single company that might be in bed with a…”

“We're listening too much to the inventors of AI. I know that's appealing. They're geniuses. They're smart. We need to be listening to the frontline factory workers who are using AI saying, wow, I was able to add a third shift. I was able to hire more workers. Or the ICU nurse who says, I have more time to spend with my…”

“cross-sectionally, if you look at the valuations for all these AI names, they just, they can't all be accurate... The AI market is cross-sectionally inefficient right now, which is what I was trying to say.”

“the reality is that that DSA Market evolution is actually happening inside of Nvidia.”

“A lot of us is signals like that, particularly when a bunch of them get fired for Being so bureaucratic and hierarchical.”

“And what's happened in the last year in particular is agents have become so good and so fast and so cheap that many enterprises can simply spin up an alternative to a vertical SaaS solution.”

“the minute you make these products headless, Right. And you say, I'm just going to communicate with these products via MCP and with agents. You can't charge on a per seat basis.”

“I don't believe it was a physical versus digital thing. I believe it was a moment in time in the COVID, ZERP, massive money going in. We hadn't seen inflation yet. It was all of that happening. And the investor class was basically deciding we're going to look two and three years forward on your current growth.”

“you can't keep shooting two million dollar interceptors at 20,000 dollar drones and have that math work very long.”

“And I think a world where it's bipolar, where it's the United States and China, roughly as the two leading statesmen of the world, is probably the Nash equilibrium here.”

“computing decommoditizes its scale, right? Like, when, you know, anybody can run a GPU, but can you run a cluster that's large enough to train a model that can change the world?”

“It makes no sense for them. It would be an admission that all the data centers in CapEx they've built out still couldn't produce them the best model.”

“it's mostly an efficient way of training models to have bigger models that are used as, as, uh, teachers for smaller models, but it's not enough. And so you also need human signal.”

“If that, if that 500,000 dollar engineer did not consume at least 250,000 dollars worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed.”

“models is a technology, not a product. Models is a technology, not a service.”

“in the Uber world early days, if you didn't have capital, it didn't matter how good your app was, because Masa is going to put a billion dollars into your competitor, and you're going to lose 20% market share tomorrow. So a critical competency, in fact, your world class competencies, one of them has to be raising…”

“Where the models and the agents on top of them, whether it's Cloud Code, Codex, ChatGPT, they're no longer competing with IT budgets. They're now augmenting labor. They're competing with labor budgets.”

“Management in big companies will resist it because it means lowering headcount, and it means the person who implements it might actually implement themselves out of a job.”

“If you don't want your stuff to be used for department of war stuff, you shouldn't be selling to the department of war.”

“one of the reasons the primes are such a small number, it's not the only, but it's one, is they learn how to contract with the government. They learn how to go through the bureaucracy, and that became a competitive advantage.”

“We used to debate when. This is no longer a when moment. The market is very much in an if mode. Are these cash flows durable at all?”

“I actually want multiple exchanges to be successful in the industry because then we won't be the ones that get targeted all the time.”

“great powers define the international system, not mid-tier powers. And a bunch of second or third tier powers cannot redefine the international system, even if they band together.”

“As the dollar devalues and everything inflates in value, our asset prices go up, and we get wealthier and wealthier and wealthier. The majority of Americans do not own assets. They are net asset negative. As a result, they live off of income. And they do not benefit from the de-dollarization like asset holders do.”

“it seems like growth does not come from government spending, right? That's like the key that this is this Keynesian economic argument that I think is basically wrong. Like growth comes from Uh, having like deregulation, having low cost energy, allow the private markets to build.”

“What I think has happened is this is the delayed impact of good SaaS tools. That what's happened is your ability to extend your reach as a leader and as a manager to stay abreast of what's happening. Your scope is much, much bigger. And so the role of middle management, which was frequently to move information. To…”

“What it proves is that by assigning roles, right? So investigator, data analyst, domain expert, just giving even prompted roles to models, And then orchestrating them gets better results than any one single frontier model.”

“It actually means that where you went to school matters a lot less.”

“China is not just in a catch-up race, they're in a primacy race, and they are trying to develop primacy and lithography technology, which will give them primacy in manufacturing, Which will give them primacy in AI, which will give them economic leverage over the planet.”

“Hundred billion dollar deals are typically about things in the past. What is the future? Billion dollar deals.”

“being in the representation business, whether it be Marty Scorsese or Dwayne Johnson or Mark Wahlberg or Peter Berg or Greg, a whole host of my clients, Aaron Sork, enables me to make The deals over at TKO because I'm in the conversation with YouTube, Amazon, Netflix, all the people I need to be in business.”

“even after they got their income, if they went through a training program and got another job in a field that was growing, but it wasn't who they thought they were, it wasn't connected to their sense of identity or belonging, then you continue to have a displacement that's not just economic, but really deeper than…”

“About two thirds or more is terminal value appreciation, and you make very little. On your yield.”

“No matter how profitable you are, you can always cut 10%. No matter how unprofitable you are, it's difficult to cut more than 20%.”

“Like, for example, a company cannot say that it has really, really good product if its gross margins on support are very low.”

“So you guys, the single best thing I've learned out of everything I've ever done is your resting heart rate before sleep is the best thing you can do for your health.”

“you get a firm that has one success in their fund, And then they attract more capital because people think it's repeatable, and it's not.”

“we have no MD PhDs on our team at Sequoia, and I think, you know, it's very dangerous when people think that your success in one domain just naturally makes you, uh, gives you the right to compete in other domains.”

“So I don't think AI is a winner take all, uh, field.”

“And then you're rewarded if you do the most outlandish things, because we're in an attention economy, and if you pick a fight, people pay attention. And so if you're kind of sober, you're going to lose support from your, your own party, your own base.”

“Once you fall behind in chips, it's very, very difficult to catch up because the cycle gets on top of you. TSMC now has the best fabs in the world. The leading edge companies, Apple, Nvidia, AMD, they all build a TSMC. TSMC gets better at what they're building. An Intel, a Samsung, they don't get the opportunities. It…”

“My, my, like, uh, contrary opinion is that I think Visa and MasterCard are more technology companies, and if you look at their, like, profit margin on the gross payment volume, it's like 10 basis points. It's like vapor. I think the, the issuer and receiver bank, those are the most disruptible pieces on there because…”

“for an AI to be truly general, to build AGI, we feel that the AGI system needs to understand the world around us and the physical world around us, not just the abstract world of languages or mathematics.”

“a good test for it would be something like, um, give, uh, one of these modern AI systems, a knowledge cutoff of 19 oh one and see if it can come up with special relativity like Einstein did in 19 oh five, right? If it's able to do that, then I think, uh, we're onto something really, uh, really important. We're,…”

“So it's always better if you can do end-to-end learning and, and, and directly predict the thing that you're after from the data that you, you're, you're given.”

“I think, I think there's a natural logarithmic function associated with the amount of compute. So, uh, then, like, say for argument's sake, like, hen x more compute will double the intelligence. Maybe that's, that might be a rough rule of thumb.”

“the reason you get an open border is politicians do not want to address the real problems of the society, which would mean The workers of today have more value tomorrow than they have today.”

“when you get to the point where you're competing with someone, you've really something up.”

“The atom bomb killed religion. Hiroshima killed, killed, killed the West. Because, of course, you're God now. And every, every assumption we've made since August of 1945, 80 years ago, has been based on the core, often unstated belief that we're in full control of nature.”

“any society where people have to be encouraged to have sex, Is a society that has decided to extinguish itself”

“Energy, in my opinion, is not a climate change issue. Energy is a national security issue.”

“most of the value when you find that power law winner, most of the value is created when they are a public company.”

“the smaller the fund, the less diversified it is, which means the more they're likely to capture the winners. And you can actually see that the smaller funds generally have better performance than the bigger funds.”

“most of the value, when you find that power law winner, most of the value is created when they are a public company.”

“Is that it's much, much harder to run a very successful venture firm in my experience. It's much easier actually to be concentrated and to use the information asymmetry in your favor. It is an exceptionally difficult job to be a successful fund manager.”

“But if we keep flipping back and forth, we inhibit one of our greatest strengths, which is our technology and innovation.”

“you can, you can champion The amount of revenue that we're raising off of tariffs, but you can't do that at the same time that you're championing reshoring, because if you reshore, then that revenue is going to go away, presumably, right? You're not going to be buying products from overseas. You're going to be buying…”

“and for people that are spending money on site selection, I'll tell you one thing, you want to build it faster, go to where the stranded gas is, Build your power plant there. Build the AI factory next to it. You don't have to permit a transmission line. You don't have to permit a pipeline.”

“Being the low-cost producer is really going to matter in AI because, um, at some level, the amount of tokens you produce is intelligence because of test time compute, um, you know, post-training reinforcement learning, and so if you can produce those tokens at a lower cost, you'll have a big advantage.”

“The way to stay ahead of the product level is shipping a device. They've got to ship the device.”

“all of the attention mechanisms that are built into transformers, that really differentiate how good the models are need to literally be hand-tuned for every single target of silicon that you have.”

“When you allow these models to run over complicated tasks over long periods of time, The error rates compound to such a degree that the, that the resulting output is not worthwhile.”

“There is a non-linear relationship between the deficit and interest rates, which drives up the debt problem in a non-linear way, and it gets away from you, and you can't fix it.”

“we are generally able to, after we do that, take those learnings and basically put that capability into a general model. So there's not that much benefit. Um, you know, you could, you can get away with a somewhat smaller specialized model, a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper, but the trends have not gone that…”

“And there's this sort of false narrative that when you have tariffs, like a hundred percent of tariffs are going to get passed through in pricing and therefore tariff is like a tax, right? That retailer told us that they think only about 50% of the tariff gets passed in pricing.”

“I find these companies that decide to harvest, you know, the cash cow and buy all their shares back, you know, it never really works.”

“You can't solve this through government regulation. You just can't. But you solve it through nutrition, through empowering your farmers, through getting good food into these programs versus the ultra processed, et cetera, et cetera.”

“You know, I, I would argue, you know, strongly that's a massive TAM increase, um, because now software starts to go after labor spend.”

“I, I don't, I don't like the word replace because I think actually most of the upside is actually going to be for companies that now deploy labor at things that they wouldn't have deployed labor at before.”

“I think it's why the Democratic Party no longer connects, because they're too closely associated with, like, that type of, you know, that type of vibe.”

“The only reason you can be good at your job as an executive in the entertainment business is to really not look at human beings as humans. You have to look at them as objects.”

“So I think this idea that, like, you should follow your dream, which is this toxic American idea that I don't subscribe to. I think people have natures, they have skill sets, and they actually have to do something within the realm of that, and it requires being honest with children, which no one wants to do.”

“we need to measure and protect four critical areas. Everything else, I think we can deal with some inefficiency, some single points of failure, but the following four areas, Ezra, I would say are Sacrosanct. Number one is all of the technology, both the chips as well as the enabling technology around artificial…”

“my book Abundance with Derek Thompson is about the tendency Democrats have to subsidize things where they are choking off the supply of the thing they want people to have more of.”

“if we try to reconvene a new Bretton Woods, we have to have an anchor asset. So it's a really great question. What is that anchor asset? It has to be AI.”

“One TikTok sub is worth, you know, a hundred TikTok subs is maybe worth one YouTube sub.”

“so the key marker is lowering your resting heart rate before bed. That is the number, I'd say if you could mark, if you could optimize one marker in your entire life, it's that.”

“I think that the big unlock with these kind of agentic systems is not necessarily about replacing the easy human tasks, which everyone kind of thinks are kind of the obvious application of them. I think what we're missing is the ability to unlock really complex tasks that are not really manageable today.”

“And if all the guys who did PayPal, like Elon knows this by heart, right? Anybody who's been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen.”

“Yeah, I mean, we're, we're not going to crush labor like China and some other countries have done, so we gotta crush the energy price.”

“you don't want to design your policies around, like, the bottom five percent of the company. That would be a horrible mistake. Yeah, you want to design your policies against the top talent.”

“And so I think that the reason why things have become so bureaucratic and bloated is that there is just this propensity to run towards software because you think it's a solution. At best, it's a symptomatic aid. It doesn't address the root cause, and in fact, it promotes bureaucracy, and it promotes the bloat that…”

“he basically proved that there was still value in pre-training where size actually led to better outcomes.”

“I want to take on more technical risk and less market risk. This is the classic VC learning, right? Which is you want to build something that if people Get it. If you can deliver it, you know, people will want it. And it's just hard to build as opposed to you build it and you don't know if they want it.”

“The problem is that the nature of training these models is highly centralized. They benefit from supercomputer clustered compute. So it's not clear how any decentralized model can compete.”

“economic power and military power is downstream of technology. In fact, even culture is downstream of technology.”

“for every smart mathematical genius, there's many, many, many other people who have high EQ, and all of a sudden this tool actually takes the skill Away from the person with just a high IQ and says, if you have these other skills now, you can compete with me equally.”

“techno realist, which is technology is going to happen. Trying to stop it is like ordering the tides to stop. If we don't do it, somebody else will. China's going to do it or somebody else will do it. And it's better for us to be in control of the technology, to be the leader rather than passively waiting for it to…”

“If this all ends up in the control of one company, They're actually going to be slower to innovate than if there's a dynamic system, and that dynamic system by its nature will be open.”

“Almost all technology has network effects underneath, and so even if you are open, you're still going to win, and you're still going to control all the most of it.”

“when you get really, really good at copying and that time gets tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter, you eventually run out of things to copy. And then it flips to creativity, to creativity and innovation.”

“In either case, you don't want to hold that debt, because either there's a debt service problem, or there's a depreciation, you get paid back with a greater supply and cheaper Money, and that is the dynamics, and that's the mechanism”

“a great company that gets expensive is much worse than a bad company that's really cheap.”

“you can't lose the technology war because you'll lose the military war.”

“Anytime someone talks about waste, fraud, and abuse, they don't really want to cut government spending.”

“the ultimate AI winner will be the one with the lowest cost of infrastructure costs, the lowest cost of compute. And definitionally, you can't be the low cost provider if you're renting your compute from someone else.”

“Zuck is our counter pressure on the price of AI right now, and, um, I think that, uh, he, he has a way of monetizing AI that is, I mean, Google kind of has a similar thing, but they're, they have a more existential challenge that I think they're actually doing relatively well, uh, kind of dealing with, but Zuck, just…”

“I think the quality of these models have hit a wall, and it's the folks that own private information, for example, what Elon owns through X, that is going to make the game changer in the quality of the models.”

“At the end of the day, the only data point is, is this founder capable of building an iconic company? Period. And I prefer to compete when there's no metrics, because all the metrics you're gonna do is confuse you.”

“On the general liquidity thing, I don't think that the thing holding up acquisitions and IPOs is markets. I actually think it's investor and board expectations on valuation relative to where they put money in the last couple of years.”

“I think that the US economy Could be growing at four or five percent, but the reason that it doesn't grow at four or five percent is in that one single chart.”

“if you just follow the price of Bitcoin, the price of Doge, the Mexican US dollar exchange ratio, all of those things, we're, we're, we're leading, we're getting that up way before the prediction markets started moving because those are the truest, biggest markets and the most liquid markets.”

“a lot of them now do not view the job that they do as their only path to economic independence. And if anything, They may do a job, but then they're actively trading on the side. Something crypto options, whatever. They're on Robinhood. They're using Coinbase because it's almost like they've separated in their mind…”

“And I cannot think of a more fragile business model than the UI layer on top of widely available data. So the problem that Expedia has is the same that Booking and a bunch of these other folks have, which is that the principal heartbeat of the company, flight information and other things, are licensed to them by third…”

“It's a co-pilot model where the machine can do predictions. Probably now where we see the most value is Eliminating bad ideas that humans don't see, but in hindsight look obvious. So like, cause you can integrate a lot of multi source data and say the probability of this working based on prior experiments is like two…”

“Those that are determining the scope and size of these modernization projects are the same ones incentivized for that amount of dollars to be as high as it can be.”

“the atomic size of companies changes because each company will get much more leverage from using software and few people versus lots of people with a few pieces of software.”

“one of the byproducts of constraining big companies from buying small companies is it hurts small companies. First of all, it makes them less valuable because if an investor you think that big companies can't buy small companies anymore, you may adjust what you think that company's worth.”

“Being an active investor in the public market over 20 years has been a really bad business. We are fighting the machines, first of all, right? So, uh, Ken Griffin, Citadel, Renaissance, you know, all of these, you know, quants and algorithms, and that's number one. We're fighting the indices, right? Massive move away…”

“most people want to do the party line thing. It's not like they're sitting around going like, oh, I really don't want to vote this way, but I really feel like I have to, to save my career. There's this thing about being part of the club. People want to be part of the club. And so it's not like the thumb is, you know,…”

“When one party has total control, they overuse it. That is what happens, because when a party gets power, they think they're gonna have it forever, they overreach, and then the system corrects”

“Nikesh, you're spending too much time with the mistake. He said, if you go spend that time with a company that's growing it three times, they can grow it six times. We'll make our money up six times in that company instead of you trying to fix that from half back to one.”

“And furthermore, by getting bogged down in Ukraine, and now bogged down in the Middle East, it's become very difficult for us to pivot to Asia to deal with China, which is the principal threat that we face.”

“you can't do more globalization or more tax cuts here. That's not going to be the win.”

“Extreme optimism, extreme pessimism, they're both excuses for laziness.”

“I'm a believer in cancel culture now. I think it separates individuals from companies where they do not belong, where the values are not aligned”

“The algorithmic improvements that have come over the course of the last few years, ah, maybe are actually even outpacing the increased compute that's put into these models.”

“I just don't think this is the technology you want to just kind of keep close to the chest and hidden until it's like perfect.”

“There's no garbage collection for rules.”

“When, when, when the economy is growing four, five, six percent a year, then Democrats can kind of get what they want, Republicans can kind of get what they want, and it all makes sense. If the economy is growing between zero and one percent a year, then I think it makes the whole society and our political system a…”

“So it was going to take out basically these businesses today are running a call at 30% EBITDA margins at peak performance. That's like Chipotle's best class. By taking out labor, you could probably take out another 20 points of cost, which could translate into lower prices for consumers, higher throughput, lower wait…”

“Either the buyer pays way too much or the seller sells way too early.”

“the inevitable outcome of identity politics by giving everyone a definition on their race or their gender or their background or their religion is that you ultimately end up picking winners and losers. And you don't just get to pick winners. When you, when you make selections or prioritize things based on identity like…”

“the central idea of the coddling was that there are three great untruths, ideas that are so bad that if any young person believes all three, they're almost certain to be depressed, anxious, um, uh, not amount to much in life.”

“And never send your child to a camp that allows kids to keep phones on them.”

“whoever wins in the first inning usually isn't the one that's winning by the ninth inning, and so I would encourage anybody that's winning right now to monetize, get secondaries, take money off the table as fast as possible, because the future is unknown, and the more disruptive the technology is, the more entropy…”

“Using a computer to probabilistically copy something is still copying something.”

“when you've spent decades Casting about and misallocating capital and running your economy into the ground. The formula for fixing it is exactly the same. You cut entitlements and you reinvigorate the economy.”

“these systems are so complicated and concentrating bets are so important. Like one You know, at the time, before it was, like, obvious to do this, you have, like, DeepMind or whatever has all these different teams doing all these different things, and they're spreading their bets out, and you had OpenAI say, we're…”

“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 just flows freely to wherever the opportunity is.”

“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, you have to find network effects. You have to find data scale effects. There's other ways of building a product besides just trade secrets or,…”

“if you are investing in a company that is subject to, you know, HBM in their design decisions, or these specific optical cables, or a whole bunch of other things, you're going to be in a really difficult spot because Nvidia's bought them all.”

“A core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer Is comfortably insulated from the consequences of his or her belief.”

“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.”

“countries don't have a right to join NATO any more than I have a right to join Augusta Country Club. Just because I'm a golf player doesn't mean I get to join Augusta, okay? It's up to the current membership of Augusta or NATO to decide whether they're going to admit a country based on what is in their interests.”

“there's been a realization on how quickly foundational model development is commoditizing and how quickly costs are escalating”

“when I do the regression on all of my funds, you really need to reserve between 40 and 50% of a total fund size for reserves.”

“People with very high expectations have very low resilience. And unfortunately, resilience matters in success.”

“And greatness is not intelligence. It's greatness comes from character. And character is informed out of smart people. It's formed out of people who suffered.”

“I think that most people are not psychologically equipped for being successful in entrepreneurship.”

“never innovate on structure. All you do is create legal problems. There's a tried and true way of creating a startup, which is a C Corp. When you try to innovate on legal instead of product, it almost always backfires.”

“the only way that a company like Google or others that are trying to create a general purpose knowledge Q&A type service are going to be successful is if they enable some degree of personalization where the values and the choice about whether or not I want to decide if something is stereotypical or typical or whether…”

“The bigger your cash cow, the worse your culture can get. Without driving you out of business.”

“software is writing itself, and it's replacing a lot of human determinism. The way that humans think about constructing software is being completely redone with these, uh, Uh, learn models.”

“the context window is not correlated to the quality of the model outputs.”

“irrespective of the exponential growth of these things, like parameter size, quality is only growing linearly and now sub-linearly.”

“If you replace humans with bots, which is what this is, you're going to crush those things. SBC at the limit goes to zero because you don't have to give stock to a bot, right?”

“The trend I'm seeing with startups, like early stage startups, seed stage startups, which are really indicative of what startups will do later on, hiring people, cash basis, paying them hourly outside the United States, not having to worry about stock options, not having to worry about Healthcare, just finding a global…”

“By the same token, if you're a startup and you're not seeing improvement in your Q for sales, then you no longer have a macro excuse for why you're not doing well.”

“Software that doesn't have a fundamental lock-in does not have pricing power, number one, and number two, we are almost at the tipping point of a set of tools that will allow competitors in a matter of days to compete with an 80% feature complete solution at a fraction of the price.”

“there are a few difficult things in software. Few. I was just like, it's just true. And as a result, every product, this is not a Carta thing, every product will see a ton of competitors. So the only thing that you can do is have an extremely leveraged OPEX and an extremely low cost to serve. That is the only…”

“In single person, Efforts can yield what historically is required six, 12 or more people to do using co-pilot tools and AI.”

“the opposite may be true, that a monopoly enables investment in long term thinking and long term ideas that you never otherwise see.”

“if you're a startup and you're trying to consider where to put your Europe office, I would not choose the UK anymore. I used to think that the UK was number one because it was so easy, but you don't want to create that nexus if you can help it. It might subject you to a competition authority you don't want to deal with…”

“if you can avoid raising capital, you're better off because then you don't have any shareholder pressure to get liquid and that can create contortions in what you do and how you operate the business.”

“In fact, I think that the biggest changes that are necessary in society initially start as dangerous speech, and then they eventually become true, and then they become a standard, and then things change.”

“I think that the challenge with Difficult technology being developed in Silicon Valley is less about a dearth of capital or a dearth of ideas or a dearth of opportunities. It's more about a dearth of talent that finding the right folks who have the capabilities and have done this before to want to step back into the…”

“Infrastructure providers and app builders. That's my best guess of where money gets made here.”

“Like we care more about foreign wars and trans lives as like the obvious things that hold our society together start to fall apart. Cause like, how do you even deal with that? Am I, I'm, I don't know if I'm being very articulate, but I think that's what's happening.”

“There's something about affluence that over time convinces people to kill themselves.”

“I do think that there's this large element that the term equality gets recast into every aspect of society, which ultimately leads to this general point of view of Marxism, which is everyone has to have an equal outcome versus an equal opportunity.”

“So the revolutionary politics are not somehow coming from below the way you would expect a revolution to normally happen. They're being imposed from above. By some of the biggest winners in our society.”

“If you didn't have all the debt, you don't care about it. You shouldn't care about economic growth rate with respect to the measure of prosperity.”

“And when the majority discovered it could steal the goods of whomever it wanted, legally, legally, um, you would wind up with dictatorship.”

“what I saw with politicians is a lot of politicians We'll take polls and then moderate their perspectives. Uh, this is somebody who without pollsters and without any political experience, um, really put forward a lot of points of view and keep in mind in a Republican primary, a lot of his viewpoints on trade were very…”

“you can't kill your way out of an ideology”

“So we kind of have this trade off. We either can understand what's going to happen, in which case we don't let our AIs really do what they can do, or we, uh, always say, okay, we're going to run the risk of the AI doing something unexpected.”

“So this principle of computational equivalence says, whether you have a brain or a computer or mathematics or statistics or whatever else, you are really just equivalent in your computational sophistication to the system that you're trying to predict. And that's why you can't make that prediction. That's why…”

“The woke ideology is a form of cultural Marxism in which people are divided up into oppressor and oppressed groups.”

“it's easier to turn attention into capital than it is to turn capital into attention.”

“Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while often inflicting costs. On the lower classes.”

“I, I, I see it very distinctly that you, you can only, you know, be canceled for your opinion if you allow them to cancel you.”

“wherever we have policies that are meant to collect and help the most disadvantaged, we, we should preferentially use class as a variable rather than race.”

“Psychological safety, when you come to work, is a fallacy, right? I mean, this is, the worst thing you could do to somebody is to make them psychologically safe. The world is not safe.”

“Capitalism is by permission of democracy, and it can be revoked, that permission”

“history has shown that these kinds of businesses cannot defend take rate for a very long period of time, whether it's for competitive pressure, or whether it's because their suppliers actually develop more pricing power. Take rate tends to decay.”

“Well, to Freeberg's .1 of the downsides of taking all this excessive capital at these ridiculous valuations is that it produces a dynamic in your boardroom where your board members are at war with each other. The late stage investors are going to be at war with the early stage investors and the founders.”

“Because that price of power, it's not so much architecture dependent, it's learning rate dependent, right? At the end of the day, the amount of stuff in these things is all about the same. And so, the faster you get there, the better your cycles are, the lower you're gonna drive that cost.”

“the amount of capex that we will need to make this a reality is so gigantic, and I think you guys are honest about that. That unfortunately, you eventually replace the venture capitalists with tens or hundreds or even a few billion dollars with the sovereign wealth funds that you need with hundreds of billions and…”

“you said 10,000 hours. I think people should change that saying to 10,000 days, and I'm, I'm almost at my halfway point to 10,000 days. I think that's how people should start looking at things, because to be honest, 10,000 hours is pretty easy.”

“it's a mistake To think whenever anybody makes a judgment that doesn't turn out right in Washington, that it's because they had some bad political motive and were playing politics, rather than they were using their best judgment and they turned out to be wrong, and like human beings in public environments, they changed…”

“As you can see, they transpired in overlapping cycles that lasted about 250 years, with 10 to 20 year transition periods between them.”

“Typically, these transitions have been periods of great conflict, because leading powers don't decline without a fight.”

“regulation is the friend of the incumbent.”

“The reason Silicon Valley's been so successful is because it's so fucking far away from Washington, D.C.”

“if you aren't trying and iterating, you're a fucking loser. Go out and try something. And whether it works or not, X is a great place to then go and talk about it.”

“You either have to be default alive, which means profitable or default investable, which means that you're capable of producing metrics that a VC will fund. But really that starts with a hundred percent year over year growth.”

“a vast majority of the reason venture outperforms other asset classes has to do with these tiny windows when you have a super probably market, and if you don't, if you aren't around for that part, you know, if you strip those years out of a forty-year assessment, it's actually not that interesting an asset class”

“Once the company is public and the public has all the information through disclosures, The odds that I know something special that a seasoned public market investor doesn't is probably pretty low.”

“my general view is that companies should focus on making products and services for people who need them without apologizing for it. And yes, that's how you maximize profit for shareholders, by having a worthy mission and sticking to it. Without taking on social missions that are best carried out by institutions outside…”

“I think people would be far more. Scrutinizing of the medicines they took if it didn't come with the crowding out effect of that individual level of self-responsibility and due diligence that the government wasn't doing.”

“Yeah, and it really handcuffs the SEC. What are they going to do about Coinbase and every other exchange? I mean, if they're not selling securities, I think Coinbase and everybody else has always maintained they're selling tokens. This was the, this was the fulcrum argument for the SEC, and they just, they just lost.”

“There's so few ways to have a good exit in the tech industry that when you take away M&A. It puts a damper on all risk taking and the deployment of risk capital into the ecosystem.”

“It takes 10 years to prove you're good. And it takes 20 to prove, to prove that you can be consistently good and didn't get lucky. But in a few years, you can tell that somebody sucks.”

“Most people actually, when push comes to shove are a little afraid of the decisions they need to make to be truly successful. They're not willing to fire the people that they need to fire. They're not willing to be extreme in the product they want to build. They're not willing to price it. They're not willing to go to…”

“So even if you set out a team and said, just copy exactly what Figma has with a co-pilot. Enabling 50 engineers. That's like 500 engineers cranking on something. I would be surprised if they couldn't just replicate the product end to end.”

“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.”

“and so if they take BART and they have the confidence now to just integrate it into Gmail or integrate it into these other points where they already have hundreds of millions of users, that's like a really tough distribution barrier to overcome. That's the next step that I think if Google really wants to win here, they…”

“If you're a hot AI startup that's able to tap into the zeitgeist, that's doing something that's perceived as cutting edge or relevant. There's a strong why now and you're early, you know, you're early stage. You're able to raise money for that. The spigot is turned back on. There's a lot of funding for those types of…”

“I don't understand why you would have a 40 or 50 person company to try to get to an MVP. I think you can do that with three or four people.”

“It's actually turned Bitcoin. It's something of a honeypot now, because if you used it for nefarious transactions, your transactions record in the blockchain forever, just waiting for chain analysis to find it.”

“the more you insure at this point, the cheaper the insurance will actually be. Because now you don't have this money movement problem. And so, you know, the point is, the more you insure at this point, the cheaper the insurance will actually be. If you're an actuarial or free market underwriter, you know, free market…”

“They're highly leveraged. The deposits, from their standpoint, are leveraged. They're leveraged 10 to one. So their incentive is to go to the casino and gamble it because they get to keep all the upside, and if they lose it, It's basically someone else on the hook.”

“Whenever they try to, let me just say when starts trying to create laddered bond portfolios, They end up needing the money sooner than they thought. What I'd much rather see a startup do is buy a hundred percent UST bill backed money market fund run by the absolute biggest of the big Financial institutions, because you…”

“the downside of taking your funds out immediately is zero. And the upside is you might save a hundred percent of your money. So it's a rational decision when confidence is lost to take out your money.”

“For open AI, the way that it could become a trillion dollar company is actually by cutting the cost to such a low degree that nobody else can effectively compete with it. And then at that point, they can become a small, small, small tax. You'd rather just pay it than try to compete with it.”

“chat GPT is an incredibly important innovation. But it's an element of a platform who will get quickly commoditized because everybody will compete over time.”

“Any middleman business right now that doesn't have its own competitive mode can be competed against. Because now you can take all of those input costs that go into human capital, you can defer that, have a much smaller human capital pool, and push all of that extra money into traffic acquisition.”

“If you can get the cost of energy in this country to drop by 50 to 75%, and you can increase energy capacity by 10 to 20 fold, then you have a fighting chance, because you can actually grow the economy out of the problem. And that's really where I am optimistic and excited about opportunities like fusion, and you guys…”

“Anyway, the point, the point is increasing the tax rate is a great short-term solution, but over the long term, if that budget per citizen isn't brought in line, there is no way to tax the base enough without causing the tax base to leave.”

“whenever you see huge tectonic shifts in technology combined with periods of austerity, that's when the gargantuan dollars are made.”

“the rate at which you can make decisions Is a far greater predictor of success than the accuracy of the decisions you do make.”

“I just think that what he's learning and what we're living and seeing in real time is that there is no canonically right decision ever. In this space. There's only a decision where some percentage will support and some percentage will always be against.”

“investors tend to fall for this, not because investors are dumb, But because investors are so clear about what they're looking for and what they want. They're predictable. Yeah. Like we're, you know, VCs, especially we're looking for the hundred X outcome or whatever. So it's easy for this type of personality to…”

“All of these models as a service will be very much commoditized. And I think the real value is finding non-obvious sources of data that feed it. So it's all about training.”

“And I think if you were to go back and look at your 2020 plan, again, created at the end of 2019, you'd probably see that you could get by with half the headcount you have now, because probably you doubled your headcount during the last two years during these heady, heady times.”

“I think it's, it's a really clear supporting fact that there are going to be alternatives. And that these, what we thought were monopolies and what kind of became digital town squares and almost infrastructure are really just application layers. They're editorialized and there are going to be competitors.”

“the media's biggest power is the power to define when time begins on an issue.”

“And I think our next transition with AI is to transition from being creators to being narrators.”

“it's much, much, much easier to build value when you're competing against a monolithic product company versus an entangled platform company.”

“And for anyone who's doing a SAS company and you're in it five years and you still have zero revenue, uh, And like, that doesn't mean you're dead. I mean, they basically were a zero for five years. Absolutely nothing. And now it's a twenty billion dollar exit five years later.”

“the, the way that he described it to me, which is so true the minute he said it, I was like, my gosh, it's like Moore's law never ended, it just shifted to GPUs.”

“If you're not contribution margin positive today, free this bill in climate change, and the bill is the only way that you get there, you're DOA.”

“It's just that if you try to scale it, your returns will go to zero.”

“And the problem in that model is that by giving you so much money, capital becomes your primary asset as a business. And capital needs to be the fuel that enables your assets as a business to accelerate. But as soon as capital itself becomes your primary asset, the business is doomed to fail.”

“if you're a VC and you think you're the one with the thesis and you're the one who's going to make the difference, it's actually a seductive fallacy to fall into. It's the founder who has the thesis.”

“It is to no one's incentive to go out and try and retest something that someone's already published on, even though that's what you're supposed to do in science. There's no motivation. There's no dollars to do this. It's, um, it's a disincentive to your career. It's a disincentive to your ability as a scientist to…”

“When I see that the competitors have all been acquired by private equity companies, I generally think, okay, there's room for innovation here, because I know that the first thing that PE firms are going to do when they acquire a company is, like, zero out R&D, or just put the product on maintenance mode. There's no…”

“Wars happen when one or both sides misestimate their probability of winning. If both sides agree that one side or the other is going to win, typically you end up with diplomatic resolution. It's when both sides disagree about the possibility of winning that conflict actually, actually breaks out.”

“VR is the final computing platform. It's not the next one. It's the final one, and people talk about augmented reality, and it's very interesting. I love AR. We did a lot of great AR foundational work, but at the end of the day, if you can make a tool that allows you to experience anything, and in any way, that can…”

“Outside of, outside of productivity tools, though, uh, there's not a single company that can stay in one category and become really big. What does that mean? Um, there's not a single public company that doesn't have now an entire strategy that says we sell at SMB, mid-market, and enterprise, and so the thing for SaaS…”

“I think the way to get around that is you just give the poor kids choice. Because if you just give the poor kids choice, and now it's very clear, you're just doing it to help them, but even them being able to choose will put pressure and get rid of the hurt the bad schools and help the good schools.”

“I'm board meetings. I look, you know, I'm not an asshole. I'm a bitch, right? That's the, that's the summary of the situation.”

“I just don't think that like politics teaches people to think critically and it's like, yeah, part of that is like, they're not thinking probabilistically, but it's more like people just want to see their kind of priors confirmed.”

“One thing that people in Silicon Valley get right for all their faults and self-servingness in some ways, right, They kind of get the orders of magnitudes, right? They understand scale, um, and social media and the daily news cycle really collapses that, right? So some extremely important problem and some trivial…”

“And if you can basically make your cash last as long as possible, even if you cut to the bone and stop growing. If you come out the other end, and you're the only company that's left, you will win and run over the market.”

“The default action by every founder today should be a 90 degree course correction unless they have very good idiosyncratic reason in that business in terms of their outperformance to stay the course.”

“Where it will falter is we have a political system where the primaries for both sides are dictated by the looniest 10% of the left and the right. It makes practical gun control, just like abortion, an impossible task unless we completely turn our political class upside down on both sides of the aisle.”

“a mob like this, they don't build anything, you know, they don't create. What they do is they appropriate, they hijack something, they take its existing good reputation, which is real, which is a lot of power, And they spend it down.”

“When you have liquidity prior to success, that's not necessarily a good incentive. Like, I think success, liquidity should follow success with product, follow with users, follow with traction, not being advanced.”

“if you told me you thought inflation was going to be five percent for the next decade and the tenure was going to seven percent, I would say short every tech company in the market. No, no, no. Short everything in the market and don't invest a dollar in venture until you have line of sight and the market has repriced…”

“I think if, if, if 50 entrepreneurs try that trick, 49 are gonna auger in.”

“So this is why venture investors have an incentive to pay and set these crazy valuations because they don't really care what the valuation is as much as they care how much of all this preference is building. And do I rationally believe That the liquidation value of the company is at least that much money.”

“Otherwise, what will happen is if you join a company in this moment, at a fake valuation, and the valuation gets reset, you can effectively assume your options are worth zero.”

“our, the, the perception of any individual about the Supreme Court, and whether it's neutral and objective, or instead political and biased, tends to be Rooted 95% on whether you like what it's doing or not.”

“Institutionally, that sets an Unbelievably bad precedent if it creates the impression that leaking documents to the public leading to protests causes the Supreme Court to change its mind.”

“doubling people's money and generating 15 to 20% is the best you can expect if you are really excellent and long lived. That's the best.”

“When you add those three things together, You do need to get paid basically in the low to mid-twenties returns to be justified. Otherwise, you are much better off just owning the S&P 500.”

“It would be solved if you had a clearing house for equity derivatives, the same way you have for interest rate derivatives.”

“instead of just making up the content moderation policies as I went along, I would look at the peep at the cases where people have been wrestling with these decisions for decades. And I would create a content moderation policy inspired by First Amendment case law, where I would take these nine categories of, of sort of…”

“I see that lacking heavily in Silicon Valley, because the VCs are more incentivized to raise more money, to make more investments and then pay less attention and just go raise the next fund.”

“when you're trying to raise AUM, your customer is not the company. It's your customer is the LP.”

“if you can spend a dollar or less to generate an Incremental dollar of ARR. You're doing amazing. And, uh, 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 in startup land. And then when you start getting into…”

“What a no-fly zone means is that you're going to shoot down Russian planes. That's what it means. You are going to war. It may not be boots on the ground. It's boots in the sky.”

“great powers, whether it's Russia or the Soviet Union or us will behave viciously and ruthlessly towards anything they perceive as a threat to their national security and their vital national security interests.”

“If automation is the future of manufacturing, Then electricity and energy ends up being the biggest cost driver for those systems. And if our, if everything is on parity and everyone's got the same automation systems, whoever's got the cheaper energy wins.”

“I think that fun size dictates his behavior more than any singular other feature. When you're running a nine billion dollar fund, you just don't sweat that changing of the CEO”

“Microsoft is beyond the level of regulatory scrutiny that the rest of big tech actually has because they are consumer businesses.”

“They hire the tried and true experienced executives, who generally have older kids and live in a nice house and have made a bunch of money. And the earnestness, the motivation, the hunger, the fuel, the creativity, because they know what they know, and they're not willing to accept that they don't know what they don't…”

“when government fails and government is in fact the oppressor, I think it is the responsibility of other governments and other peoples to step in and have a voice and to take action.”

“these types of fulminations about human rights, when they become this sort of, you know, when, when people, when we get into this like frenzy, it's been the prelude and pretext for every misguided foreign intervention that we've had over the last 20 years.”

“This was the year that loose affiliations of individuals, um, could compete on a level playing field with organized capital. And I think that that's a really important trend for the future.”

“Whenever you hear equity used by a politician, it usually means there's a power grab involved.”

“For their portfolio as a whole, they would rather tell everyone, go hard, go fast, spend as much money as you can, and they hope that one out of 10 companies becomes a hundred X from there. And it's okay if nine out of 10 die. So they don't care if you die. They care if one out of 10 companies goes a hundred X.”

“Look, the thing about these policies, progressive policies is they hurt the communities that they, that they pretend to be speaking for the most. And so who is hurt by learning loss the most? It's disadvantaged kids who can't afford the tutors and the private Tutors.”

“We should always want equality, but not equity, because equity is zero sum, right? You know, a cap table. Once you give somebody else equity, it's dilutive to everybody else, but equality is infinite. You can have unbounded equality.”

“But regardless, the market is clearly right now in in productive assets, businesses, the market is looking at a time horizon that it has never looked at before, which is making bets that are at 10 15, 20 years in the future. And that's because of the condition that we're in right now from a monetary policy point of…”

“they're outsourcing R&D, and typically paying three times as much and typically getting one 10th in the return.”

“when you have a massive distribution advantage, feature parity is enough, and you can actually be slightly less than good enough on the features because distribution and bundling and packaging overpower a customer's desire to adopt a product.”

“I don't completely trust these companies that if it wasn't massively in their bottom line interest, that they would have stood up for free speech.”

“So if you're growing more than 50, 60% a year, you're fine. But if you're growing 20 or 30% and you're kind of a middling business and rates are going up and inflation is going up, you're in a very, very, very precarious spot.”

“My theory on this is that if you have, uh, 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.”