The Wisdom Wall

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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'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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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,…”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's not about the room. It's about the show. You know, like everything we think of as social audio is really just a feature of creating a show, creating a new podcast.”

“most of what the VC process does is just measure a founder's ability to tell narratives, and that may be correlated with their ability to do marketing, but it's not correlated with whether their idea is fundamentally correct or not.”

“They will become gatekeepers. And so you have to have the threat of antitrust action hanging over their heads, or you will stifle innovation.”

“I think that work from home makes the best employees better, but it allows the worst employees to hide.”

“We're in a race, I think, for the future between technological acceleration and social and political deterioration.”

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

“And the thing about socialism is it can only make it. We talked about this last time. It can only make everyone equally poor. It never makes everyone equally rich. You end up killing the golden goose for everybody.”

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

“but, but when you start using the word privilege to describe all success, It implies that there's something, you know, unjust or unearned about it, and it needs to be reallocated. So, you know, I, that, that to me is another one of these political words is, we shouldn't be confusing success with privilege. They're two…”

“This ideology of victimization doesn't teach people the right things because you start to think that, you know, if you're wallowing in your oppression, then you don't have agency over your own life. You're blaming other people for not being successful, not getting ahead when what you should be doing is focusing on…”

“big companies have realized they're not very good at R&D, at sort of good, at sort of new product development, and so what they have done is they have outsourced a lot of their R&D budgets to M&A, and so they let the startups run the experiments, you know, in any category, uh, in any new area, you end up having a dozen…”

“No, I mean, let's think about that. What we're saying is we need the politicians to set up a regulatory body to control how the people talk about the politicians. I mean, that seems like a recipe for disaster.”

“the only way to solve AI cyber attacks is with AI powered cyber defense. We all know that.”

“I think in the past, the way that most SaaS Products thought they spent a lot of time on their user interface, and now they really got to think about the agent interface, not just user interface.”

“even though I think that you'll just increasingly tell your agent what to do instead of be clicking around or, you know, touching the screen, you still need a dashboard or a user interface to like check on it and just see readouts of information.”

“there are plenty of existing laws that apply to AI, and we should just think about using all of those before you start then creating a bunch of AI specific ones.”

“What they're really talking about is social media, and then they attribute all the ills of social media over to these new AI chat apps, and they are a little different.”

“Is that you don't get regime change just through air power alone. It takes boots on the ground, and most Americans are not willing to put boots on the ground in Iran to change the regime there.”

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

“these new, let's call them AI connected devices. I mean, they are, Surveillance devices. I mean, their whole point is to listen and see everything that you can hear and see and, you know, and then to give that data to AI to do something with.”

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

“what Elon showed is that a smart person can come in who basically, like you said, can go into demon mode, has a startup or innovation mentality, is willing to spend money, but wants to do it smartly, but is really hardcore, can come in and beat the supposed professionals of their own game.”

“You kind of have to mentally burn the boats when you do a startup.”

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

“I think that if you want people to stop questioning elections or engaging in election denial, you need to make the elections above reproach.”

“They're the biggest brands and they're not new brands. They're old brands. And we've seen that these old brands depreciate over time and people read way too much into them.”

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

“when we see a business that has B to C subscriptions and B to B, we place all the value on B to B. And the reason is because historically the churn rates and B to C are too high.”

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

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

“If you're an app developer, the key thing to understand is where does model innovation end and your innovation begin? Because if you get that wrong, you'll end up doing a bunch of stuff that the model will just obsolete in a few months.”

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

“So you have a classic developer network effect where you've got open AI aggregating hundreds of millions of consumers because they perceive that chat GPT is the best. Then you've got developers wanting to reach that audience. So they build custom GPTs on the open AI platform that actually gives chat GPT more…”

“Most CEOs work their way up through the corporate ladder. They get into the CEO chair and then they pay themselves huge amounts of money regardless of whether the company succeeds or fails.”

“I think because experts are able to go direct for every section of the paper now, people are realizing that the whole thing is bogus, and I think gel man amnesia is starting to wear off, and people are realizing That they should just go around these official channels and get their news direct.”

“I mean, it needs to be not just like a billion is not enough. You need to be doing. Trillions. Tens or hundreds of billions of volume to make these businesses like exciting at all.”

“This is why I basically skewed towards B to B SaaS is because a good B to B SaaS business will have net expansion. Instead of 50% churn, you'll do a 120% expansion. And so you're actually building a subscriber base with long-term value.”

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

“Big picture, I would say that populism is a nationalist reaction to the hyper globalization that happened that was encouraged by the elites over the past few decades.”

“The reason WhatsApp was a home run is because it was so capital efficient. They didn't burn that much. They didn't raise that much. So there's very little dilution for everybody.”

“I tweeted many years ago that the way I saw Excel was the long tail of use cases that hadn't moved into a dedicated SaaS app yet. And that the way that if you want it to be a SaaS founder, you're trying to come up with ideas, find some really complicated, uh, Excel spreadsheet that's used across many different…”

“The, the way politics works is that you don't somehow come together in the middle. I think one side has to win in the eyes of voters. Voters have to choose a path.”

“But what, what always happens is that when America has a vital interest, You always cloak it in liberal rhetoric about rights and freedom and democracy and that kind of thing. But what's frequently driving the decision is American interests underneath.”

“the media's job is to be fundamentally antagonistic with the people in power, not to cooperate with them.”

“there's only two good outcomes, right? There's IPOs, there's M&A, everything else basically goes, everything else is a zero, it goes bankrupt.”

“VCs generally would rather lead around in a new startup with a fresh cap table than in a cap table. They got to restructure because no one really wants to do restructuring work.”

“Why can't the company operate at breakeven if you're at 30 something million of ARR? You should be able to operate, you may not want to operate at breakeven, but you should be able to.”

“Listen, the typical depositor, even a fairly sophisticated depositor, like a small business, or even a high net worth individual, they're not in a position to evaluate the balance sheet of these banks.”

“when people are panicking about the state of their finances and worried about getting access to their cash, The first thing they dump is crypto because it is very liquid.”

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

“I think it's a pretty bad way to approach things because they create so much uncertainty in the marketplace and has a chilling effect on future acquisitions. Yeah. Like when you get approval from the government, you want to know you're good. And we have an approval process. So it seems to me, I agree with Jake. Like if…”

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

“I'd say one of the big issues with the institutional rot in our country is the lack of accountability when somebody gets it wrong. We saw this with COVID, right? The health establishment is saying that they want amnesty and Atlantic magazine was willing to give it to them. So the point is that this, this class of…”

“when interest rates go up, more and more money flows into the risk-free rate of return, and then that crowds out investment capital. And we've talked about it on the last pod, where if the risk-free rate is five percent, and then, like, high-quality corporate bonds are offering eight to 10%, Now, equity investments…”

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

“Every time the government's supposed to do something on a one-off emergency basis, Like Zerp, it ends up becoming institutionalized.”

“when they promise the founder that you'll be left alone, that usually lasts two years. That's coincidentally, usually the length of the, the earn out or the golden handcuffs.”

“Listen, I believe that if America is going to risk war with a nuclear armed power, there better be a vital interest at stake. Otherwise, we should find every diplomatic off ramp we can.”

“And I've kind of learned that doing anything in the physical world with atoms is 10 times harder than doing anything with bits.”

“I think where work from home is beneficial is on the hiring side, right? It's so much easier to hire for a job when your potential pool is anyone in the world. You're not just geographically limited to the city in which your office is. So that was the temptation for all these companies to go remote is it made hiring so…”

“That's why politicians are going to be as dishonest as the media allows them to be. And the media is not holding them accountable.”

“think about your spending, not last round's money, you're spending the next round's money. If you could just reorient your thinking that way, you'd burn a lot less money.”

“When you've lost 80% of your value and you're only growing 15 to 20%, it's going to take you a decade to grow back into your old valuation.”

“The other thing is that if you're in a turnaround situation where you're actually worried that the pref stack is larger than the value of the company. In other words, more money has gone into the company than the company may be worth at exit. Then what you need to do, because then, then there's nothing for the…”

“The number one metric that matters is DPI, which is the ratio of distributions to paid in capital. And it's basically money in versus money out, right? At the end of the day, that's all that matters is how much money did you put in the fund? How much money did you get out?”

“If you don't have a business model, you're just collecting donations.”

“it's not right versus left anymore. It's sort of, Populous versus elitist.”

“as a founder, you can be as messianic as you want to be. You can promise, you know, anything about your vision and what you intended to the future, but what you must do is be accurate about the current state of your business. You cannot lie about the deals that you've made about the current capabilities of your…”

“Because the media really has two kinds of stories. They build up and they tear down. And when they're done building you up, they're gonna tear you down because that's the only story left to write.”

“once the programs are created, there's going to be, it will create a special interest or constituency who is now dependent on those programs and no one's ever going to want to cut them.”

“historically, the best, the, the only times that you really have, um, it seems like fiscal responsibility is when you actually have, the best track records have been when you have Democratic presidents or Republican Congresses, and the Republicans suddenly find their principles on spending when there's a Democrat in…”

“when you're a startup, you face existential decisions daily, weekly, or monthly. You can't just disappear for six months. It's not going to work.”

“the idea that you as an individual investor are going to, like, you know, pick off the one cryptocurrency here or there to invest in, I mean, that's going to be a lottery. I would, I would find a manager, basically, who is really good, who has a track record, who understands this stuff.”

“I think, I think there's a lot of truth to that, that, um, and I worry about this with my own kids, that I think deprivation creates motivation. Especially to do something as hard as create a company, create a startup.”

“this is the thing about work-life balance that the people are always complaining about, people who are working too hard don't realize is that, yeah, you, you want to think about work-life balance, but, but across your entire life. I mean, one of the things you'll do in your twenties is work much harder to set yourself…”

“people given a choice between vaccine mandates or an anti-vax position, they will take the, the, um, the vax mandates.”

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

“This is why markets work better than politics, because Freeburg, in order for you to pursue what you want to pursue, you don't have to convince a majority of the country to support it. You just need to find one person who's willing to fund it. You know, you raise the money. So, and, and the same is true for every…”

“if you think of major technology investing waves as essentially a prediction market on what smart people think the future is going to look like, it's pretty scary that we're going from a utopian technology investing wave to a very dystopian technology.”

“One of my big takeaways from being in the tech industry for 20 years is that if you're smart, hardworking, and don't have behaviors that sabotage yourself, you will be successful in this industry, you know, over two decades.”

“Don't sell everything. Let your winners ride at least partially.”

“Instead of having the government doing all the R&D, and the government is good at some things, but R&D is not one of them.”

“There's always a trickle down from gross stocks in the public markets to, to venture, right? Because the, the last private investors, like the big funds who do the super late stage stuff, they're just doing an arbitrage on what they pay versus what the company's going to list for publicly. So when they see those…”

“I think that sort of digital gold is a phenomenal use case of Bitcoin, and the more oppressive all these countries become, the more they increase the value of that use case.”

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

“I understand there are these equalities, but you know what creates inequality? Economic booms. That's what creates inequality. What we should care about is not just inequality, but economic growth, real wage growth, poverty, how many people are below the poverty line, and concentrations of power.”

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

“you could argue that, that Biden or, or that Trump is the one unifying, the opposition to Trump is the one unifying force in the Democratic coalition. So the, the, the more Trump is out there, the, the more it bonds the Democratic coalition together.”

“If you're going to basically violate your stated mission, you either need to post the government order that required you to do that. Or you need to post a very well reasoned blog explaining why you're doing that.”

“Censorship always starts by censoring some outrage that everybody agrees should be censored. And no one even notices that what's happening is you're handing power To a group of people that they can now use against you in the future. Censorship always starts as something you like, and it ends as something you don't like…”

“The big learning from Yammer, uh, you know, we learned this at Yammer from 2008 to 2012 is that enterprises don't self-serve, right? They don't self-close. Bottom up, SAS products are phenomenal for generating top of funnel, basically generating leads, but you have to have salespeople Close the deals and enterprises…”

“gridlock is great for the markets, especially given the amount of stimulus that's taken place.”

“I think that 2020, if 2016 was an economic repudiation of the elites, 2020 is a cultural repudiation of the elites. That is the big issue in 2020.”

“I feel like that's where like these ballot initiatives make sense is when you want to overrule the legislature, but you know, it's kind of crazy for to be passing these laws directly when, you know, we don't know that much about them.”

“the societal value of a company doesn't come from whatever platitudes or political statements its CEO makes, but rather from the quality of its products and the impact of its products.”

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

“Um, you know, most of these celebrities don't like having to get beat up, you know, they're used to being very popular, and, um, and that's why they tend to be, I think, tough picks, um, Politically, is they don't, they tend to have a glass jaw.”

“Um, and, and the latter approach is smart when You know, there's a lot of upside in trying something and not much downside, you know, and, and the, the, the other approach of this sort of this scientific, the pseudoscientific sounding approach where you're constantly demanding conclusive evidence, it's actually people…”

“It turns out that if you have multiple agents, then the agents develop more context and expertise. So they get more specific”

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

“code is the gateway into enterprise and enterprise IT budgets.”

“I also think that Google is in an outstanding position to do the whole open claw thing. Because they already have access to your calendar, your documents, your email. So the agent doesn't really have to earn your trust because you already trust Google with all of your stuff.”

“So you don't need like a perfect API anymore. You just get the unstructured data, dump it in, and now it just works.”

“as the cost per token comes down more and more, that's going to enable AI to be used in more and more contexts where previously it wasn't economically efficient. Now it will be. So that's going to fuel the demand.”

“one of the reasons why a lot of these buildings are empty is because the equity holders don't have an incentive to put in more money to do the TIs necessary to sign new tenants. So you got these zombie buildings that even if there was a tenant who wanted the space at some lower rent, the owners of the building have no…”

“it's very hard to hide who you are when you're going for that period of time in an unscripted environment.”

“You can create all the models you want, and you can create an expectation of future fraud based on the prior fraud rates. However, if you change your verification standards, that data is no longer relevant. If you create a loophole big enough for a fraudster to drive a truck through, Then if a fraudster figures that…”

“So if for sure you knew the election was 51 49, The betting markets would swing to a hundred zero.”

“The betting markets seem to, uh, go based on momentum. So it, like, it indicates the swing in momentum. And then the polls obviously take a week or two.”

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

“it's not a good idea for startups to innovate on structure. Using a tried and true C-Corp Is the way to go.”

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

“No one, no one bets on chess because it's so obvious who's going to win. There's like a very precise rating system and so in poker, the poker is very different because you can have players at the same table and you know, who are the great players who are not the great players, but still in any given hand, the underdog…”

“I think it's a brilliant idea for Klarna to open source this, this tool, because it's not their business, right? This is just something they did as a, as a productivity improvement. They get the benefit back to them of the community working to advance that technology. So they don't have to put more engineers, like…”

“Most people's careers you have, like, you know, it's not like a smooth upward trajectory. There's like maybe a few pops that you get. You're lucky actually. If you get a few, because most people only have one or maybe two.”

“I could tell you in five minutes if it's a good business or not by looking at the P&L.”

“if we were on the board of a company that kept missing quarter after quarter, and the CEO said, no, look at all the good things I'm doing, we would probably still fire that CEO. Just because You're like, how do things get worse, right? You just take the chance that you bring in a new CEO, they're going to do better.”

“going public does allow you to reset your whole pref stack because all the preferred With all of the rights and preferences converts to common. So post IPO, you just have common. And so it is a way to like clear out all the structure and all the mess that has built up in a company and you can get to a real valuation…”

“The reason those multifamily developers are getting whammied right now is, again, it's not because of vacancy. Everyone wants their apartments. The problem is multiple compressions. The value is much lower, which means they can't get as much debt.”

“that's why all of a sudden the LP commitments have dried up is because they're over allocated to VC.”

“And if you want to go viral in the social media area, that's what you have to do. You have to lean into The issues that people are talking about that day.”

“two X is now the new three X. If you can grow two X in this environment, it's basically growing three X before.”

“In the consumer space, you really need to get to millions. And frankly, tens of millions is what it takes to have a successful consumer product.”

“you can build a really great product and a great team, but unless you hit that lighting in a bottle with distribution, you know, you won't get to the next level.”

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

“when everything's up and to the right and everything's going great and you're in a bull market and you can just keep raising money and definitely because there's always someone willing to lead the next round, then the money is a commodity. But when you're in a, in a down market and all of a sudden there is no market,…”

“the thing I came away with, Realizing is just how much agency, particularly founder CEOs have that they just don't use, you know, they're always like hemming and hawing and wringing their hands and acting like they're tied down by this or that. And the reality is they can do whatever they want just about, um, you know,…”

“I think founders who are better at sales probably skew more towards an enterprise strategy. Whereas if you're more of a product founder, you go after SMBs.”

“I think if you start with enterprises, it's very hard to go down market because it's a lot easier to add requirements to your product than to actually strip Complexity of a product that's actually surprisingly difficult to do.”

“But that creates an overhang on the next round because the new VCs coming in, They want their money to go into the company, not paying off a bank. So it actually makes the next round less attractive.”

“You can't invest in a company hoping for an unreasonable acquisition.”

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

“two X is the new three X. If you can grow two X year over year in this environment, that is as good as, or better than growing three X last year.”

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

“You have to think of pricing as not an element by itself, but as sort of the most important element of a go to market strategy. And there's no way that you can basically reprice Figma completely as part of some other bundle and expect not to create massive disruption to your go to market organization.”

“B to C only works if you can find a very low cost, scalable distribution channel.”

“You can get away with a lack of spending discipline if you're a 90% gross margin business like a Google, but when you're a real estate business who's got real cogs, not having spending discipline is actually a problem.”

“I think the fact that Tiger and the other kind of crossover investors, the fact they've pulled back way back from venture markets gives smaller firms like us an opportunity to do growth deals.”

“crypto is like a liquidity sponge. It sucks up when there's a lot of excess liquidity, it's sucks up that liquidity, but now that sponge is getting wrung out.”

“if you're a high burn company right now, that's not generating a lot of revenue to go along with it. You better slam on the brakes and rationalize your cost structure before it's too late.”

“Probably offsheet customer references. So the first thing we do is focus on the, on the metrics, right? And the, the financials, the SaaS metrics, all that kind of stuff. But then you want to talk to customers, and you want to understand the value they're getting out of the product, and ideally they're offsheet…”

“I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that Microsoft's effectively pivoted, with the exception of this gaming, into being an enterprise software company, and the politicians just care a lot less about enterprise software.”

“if you've got life-changing money in a, in a highly risky position, that's not diversified. I'm amending my advice of let your winners ride to take some, take some chips off the table prudently. Doesn't mean you sell everything, but just take some chips off the table.”

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

“look in the tech industry, we're all concerned about the future. No one pays a lot of attention to history.”

“when you're successful as the leader of a company, everyone imitates you. So now because Elon successful, everyone else is trying to Introduce their own electric cars. Whereas in politics, whenever you start a political organization, you know, an equal and opposite organization will spring up to oppose you.”

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

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

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

“if you're not on the board, your obligation is basically to respond when somebody asks you for something.”

“The reason why innovations happen so fast on the internet is because of, you know, one word, permissionless, right? Permissionless innovation. Nobody who has an idea for a startup needs to go get permission from someone in the government, you know, repeatedly.”

“what we've seen in just about every country is that nobody believes it's going to happen to them until it happens to them.”

“in a company, I'd have a product manager for the one dot O release and I have a different product manager for the two dot O release, because it's very hard for, you know, somebody to be all in on two different releases, which have two different schedules.”