The Wisdom Wall

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

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

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

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

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

“the most important thing you need to do is separate social from media. The biggest mistake was combining them, and it creates a lot of perverse incentives.”

“Rough math, you know, for every dollar of food that if you and I bought inside of a restaurant, you know, from the cost structure, you're gonna have 30% of that in the food and the packaging. You're gonna have 30% of it in the rent. You're gonna have 30% of it in the labor. Something like that. Rough math. And on that…”

“It just turns out it's extraordinarily difficult, however, unless you're a large brand, or, you know, um, you know, a, a house of brands, someone like DoorDash, to be able to attract enough customers to make that math work.”

“It's not obvious to me that it's just a chat interface, that there are, you know, all of these different components that have to be solved. And so I think You know, the way I think about it is, okay, regardless of whatever we ship, um, whether it's on our own, um, you know, surface, other people's, you know, surfaces,…”

“my lesson from Waymo and on the AI side with TPUs, et cetera, I think to really push the curve well, particularly in areas where you have safety, regulatory, everything, you want the firsthand experience of the product feedback cycle. So I think having first party hardware will end up being very important.”

“one of the original, like, founding hypotheses of the company is if you want to start a security company for startups, you should actually start a compliance company. Because your customers never ask you for Security, but they do ask you for compliance.”

“I think the second part is market sizing is bullshit. Um, you know, you can, like, be as academic or whatever, strategery-ish, um, as you want about it, and, like, the market size today is only a predictor of the market size today.”

“And if all you did was kind of observing how other people drive when you trained the system, maybe observing, you know, just passively how people drive and how they interact, uh, maybe also, you know, driving the car yourself and then using imitative learning to train it. Um, mind that that's not enough. You have to do…”

“gambling is this idea where the business model is, you are the house, and your revenue is your customer's losses. Like, so, and a lot of the dynamic that you describe has to be true, because your incentive is like, well, somebody's making money, I gotta stop them, because they're making me lose, that's just going…”

“And if those dimensions, you don't have a good understanding of x one to x n, um, you cannot get a good estimate of y, right? And, and, And so you, the paper basically says that you need infinite markets. And prediction markets are this notion of infinite markets, which is like, you have to have a market for each one…”

“I wonder if in the short term, it might just be one of those idiosyncrasies of history, like mimicking a code base is actually the best way to make a general purpose agent work. And maybe over time we'll get fancier than that, but it's actually like a relatively efficient harness for an agent.”

“where there's a lot in, in the code that is more transient. You know, you might be fine to Delete that. What, what was the intention? What was the PRD? Like, what was the customer problem? Is actually the more durable asset.”

“I feel like I won't be like a self, Self-actualized software engineer in the future, if I'm too precious about that artifact, which used to be so central to me.”

“I feel like this view of a multi-agent world was you have all these agents that do tasks that are, uh, fraud detection. Uh, you know, another one over here for, you know, personalization, and then you make a super agent, it does all these things, and it looks really good on a whiteboard, like most, uh, like elegant…”

“if every single company in an industry has access to technology, I would say it's an imperative, not a competitive advantage.”

“my theory is the closer you get to literally the database is the value, i.e. a ledger, the more durable it is. The closer you get to be in a system of engagement, the less durable it is.”

“I think if we paused model development, we'd still have trillions of dollars of economic value. That have yet to be realized.”

“software engineering was the most scarce access, uh, asset in a company, and now it's the most plentiful, and I don't think we've ever lived in that world.”

“I think the atomic unit of productivity in AI is a process, not a person.”

“And my point on it is, if you look at it through the lens of like an end-to-end business process, you can turn science into engineering. And I think solving legal through AI, that's a science problem.”

“With the presence of Codex, you can produce amazing results. Those people are truly worth a thousand X other people, because it's relatively easy to find someone who's a great infrastructure engineer. Not easy easy, but like relatively. Finding someone with good taste, that's, that's relatively easy. Find someone who…”

“every decision you make in hardware is millions of dollars at a minimal, and often tens of millions of dollars. And so when you grow up in this Silicon Valley mindset of, like, everything's a two-way door. Bullshit. Hardware, everything's a one-way door.”

“The other analogy that would be the butterfly effect, which is like when things are much, much cheaper and much, much easier, a historical precedent gets thrown away.”

“And this progress is in large part due to stablecoins, where borderlessness allows fintechs to set up infrastructure that works everywhere. Global by default financial services are for the first time a real possibility.”

“What it's evolved into, and I think is today probably the, the largest point of differentiation at the meta level between ramp and maybe the, Uh, financial service providers that we compete with is they sell money and we sell time. They'll sell you a lower, like a loan at a lower cost of capital, you know, rewards at…”

“one of the first or second or third order effects of AI is the marginal cost of arguing has gone down to zero.”

“if you just try to say, I'm gonna have a better rewards program, uh, sure, maybe you can get that customer, you know, a dollar or a dollar 10 back, or some amount, uh, that pales in comparison to just helping them just like not spend that hundred dollars, like cancel the subscription. The economic leverage of that…”

“If you're using the easiest possible way to target ads, which is based on the context of the conversation, we're going to show you a roughly relevant ad. Number one, your market's way smaller because you have to hope someone starts a conversation that matches the inventory you have. Number two, you're getting into a My…”

“And the problem is that I think being an advertising based model is generally incompatible with being a platform. The whole point of a platform is you're letting something else shine, something else bring to the surface. You're just on your, you're the support structure. For something to take over.”

“Like your traditional classic investigative journalism, six month sort of piece. It's not well supported by this. What did support that was the bundle. Having lots of different writers in one publication altogether.”

“Yeah, the problem is the merchants who will drive, make that bundle valuable, have no incentive to join the bundle because they could make more just monetizing users directly.”

“what you're paying for when you, when you pay for me is you're paying for my ongoing production. I'm making a promise to you. I'm going to write something every day. And you're paying for that promise. You're not paying for the actual content. The content is a byproduct of that.”

“the reality is when it comes to platforms, you have to build, the price of becoming a platform is making a great product. So Apple gets platforms so they make great products, and they're terrible stewards of the platforms. Microsoft is a great platform steward, but they can't make good products, so they never get the…”

“The big, Myth of the UK right now is that we have a capital problem. We do not have a capital problem. We have a capital allocation problem. Our money is in our houses and it's overseas.”

“And so we believe, I believe that, you know, premium power is where you need to go with nuclear, and there's sort of like two, there's two places for that. One is what we're doing with Antares, which is go to the military, help them with mission critical need, um, where they're not cost sensitive, where they already…”

“In fact, one of the longest time we used to always obsess about, oh, how complex do the, the relationships have to be, or the data model needs to be to capture the essence of an enterprise, right? And it turns out, It's lots of parameters in the neural network with a lot of compute power.”

“if you kind of have the model's cognitive core separated from its knowledge, then you have essentially the continual learning, you know, formula, so to speak, or the algorithm, and then you just unleash it.”

“social cohesion is not a goal, right? Uh, winning in the marketplace is a goal. Um, but at some level, you have to orchestrate these large organizations. In fact, you may even have two competing teams, uh, by design.”

“Then mere model CEOs like us have to sort of also be, you know, you can sort of be in the re-founder mode, but don't think you're a founder. And that, that nuance, uh, I think is an important one.”

“And today, I don't know, I would estimate we might know 10 to 15% of human biology. So the machine's not going to be good at all until we get way above 50%.”

“Now, by happy accident, we are all now really pleased with, like, incretins, like our trisepetide to run them because they frequently demonstrate massive benefit. Uncardiovascular. And in some ways, it creates a barrier to entry for the next low-cost Chinese program or whatever, because it's this big, expensive thing…”

“I have a belief that if you're not generating, to generate double digit growth in the sector, you need to invest at 20 to 25% of sales in R&D. That's sort of a good, a positive return R&D stack.”

“the solar has gotten so cheap that you can actually kind of do the reverse process, and it makes financial sense, increasingly so over time.”

“if I see someone who is pretty successful do a series of crazy things over and over again, and yet they work out every single time, either they have root access, To the simulation. Or their model of reality is better than mine in some key way that I don't understand.”

“the biggest mistakes are selling the Costco's too early, because, uh, you know, the IRR is totally dependent upon what you assume the exit multiple is, like, and that is difficult to be precise about, you know, what the right exit multiple is for a business.”

“That's the nice thing about the private markets is that Once you invest, you can't sell, and usually for the best companies, that's a huge benefit ultimately.”

“risk management cannot happen after the fact. Like, anything you do after the fact is not risk management. It's actually just destroying capital. Risk management has to happen before the fact. Meaning, like, you size these positions so that, like, When it goes up, you don't have to cover.”

“Like, the U.S. is pretty quick at, like, seeing change happening, and then pricing in that change. In Europe, I find, um, you know, once a company, like a company like Rolls had underperformed for so long, I guess that European mutual funds, they just kind of got in their head that like, Rolls is something we just…”

“you're always gonna make the most money from multiple expansion. Just like, um, it's hard to have that differentiated view on a company's growth rate.”

“when you're producing less than 50,000 units a year, the engineering fixed cost and the operational fixed cost to run that is very high, so it's a structural cost challenge. But you reach an inflection. Well, just to run an engineering team to engineer all that content, but it's only finding its way into, you know, a…”

“There's been a number of EV launches from Existing manufacturers that haven't gone that well, and I think we get the causality backwards. We say, oh, it's because customers aren't ready to buy EVs. And I say, well, no, it's because the EV is not that compelling.”

“If you use software by others, you have to buy into their vision.”

“it's the sort of missing ingredient people talk about, you know, people talk about incentives shaping companies, and then policies shaping companies. So, those tend to be the two tools. And I think then, sort of generally, like, if people are really insightful, they, they talk about culture as well. But, um, it's the…”

“it's when something outperforms, it's usually the product of a place that doesn't make decisions by consensus, right, as we know.”

“people, people are not capable of being sufficiently optimistic about a business that really works. They, it just, it blows through all their projections.”

“Well, and, and the advantages of any organization structure occur immediately. The disadvantages only appear over time.”

“this in turn is why, uh, the employment, uh, uh, decisions of graduating, uh, Harvard and Stanford Business School students are such a great indicator. Yes. Possibly the best indicator of all of what's happening in the market, because, um, uh, if, if, if, if they go into tech, uh, market, it's, it's, it's, the market's…”

“the single strongest correlation of how a company will perform is which, how high status a VC does a series A is within the stack ranking of VCs. It is far more predictive, sadly, than, you know, my own selection or any other variable I can find. It's, it's almost deterministic.”

“it's not an accident that both Silicon Valley and Hollywood are the place, places that they are because the people involved went west as far as they could before they were literally stopped by the Pacific Ocean. Right, like, it was the ultimate selector in the build-out of the country to the people who were the most…”

“There is a trend where, if you go to the absolute cutting edge of tech, they're so sort of wilderness people that they don't have the conscientiousness. They, you know, go flying instead of turning up to the meetings. And it's almost like you get a second generation who go to the frontier, but a conscientiousness…”

“true transparency, true free speech is just, is a fundamental solvent, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, basically dissolving all centralized institutional authority. Um, and, and the reason for that is centralized institutional authority is never perfect, and, and it often has problems, and in fact, it often has very deep and…”

“The extreme version of this for good or ill is that the centralized state is an outcome of centralized media. The nation state is downstream from the newspaper.”

“Software engineering in the real world is so messy, you know, and there's all sorts of these things that come up. And I think in practice, you know, most disciplines look like this. And I would say the same thing about law or medicine or, and so on. And so while the general intelligence will continue to get smarter and…”

“The thing is when that happens, I don't think what we end up with is just pure ASI end of humanity, human knowledge work or whatever. I think the thing that we end up in is basically a point where the hard question is, all right, now what is the benchmark, right? And I think defining the benchmark in all of these…”

“seats don't really make sense when it is like, the AI themselves are arguably seats as well, you know, like they're, they're doing a lot of the labor too. And then on the other side, I think, um, you know, usage obviously just goes so naturally with the cogs themselves because a lot of this is, you know, effectively…”

“Getting rich is simply a representation of your added value to the world economy. In most cases, of course, as edge cases generally, The money on your bank account is how much value added to society.”

“I think it would be that robotics today is a completely different field in a different industry than it was five years ago. Like all of the things we thought we knew, all the businesses that were tried and failed, all of the tools that have become best practices and standard are now either like worthless or completely…”

“today you don't need a robot that's repeatable. You need a robot that's adaptable, like powered by neural networks, and if it makes a mistake or doesn't approach this object at exactly the right angle, it doesn't matter. It can, it can correct that.”

“If you're willing to completely let go of that and embrace today's tools, it's not the programming thing. You have to show a robot how to do a task and it can mimic that and let, you know, um, essentially chat GPT like technologies instruct these things at a high level with these tools and going into a home environment…”

“when we go from. 80 people to 400 people, our productivity per person is going to drop by 90%. And are we going to sign up for that and understand that it won't get better until we're past 400 people? I mean, that's the reality of the situation.”

“I think my heart was in the right place, but I was naive about the ability to get like a large corporation, which is like, it's like an aircraft carrier. You can't steer it. You can't get it to change its focus. Yeah. It's going to do what it wants to do or what it's already doing. Um, it was naive of me to think that…”

“What Snapchat proved was actually that it's not about the, the size of your network or the number of people you can contact on your network, it's about who you actually talk to. And that tends to be a much smaller group than the total size of the Potential network, or even your total number of friends, right?”

“that is one thing I love about hardware. It's way easier to protect our innovations and our ideas compared to, to software, especially today in the age of AI.”

“if you fix the voice agent, you'll have fixed text piece or like inherently as well.”

“you talk to university students and often their ideas for companies are pretty half-baked. Yeah, it's find my friends. It's like a college textbook exchange app, you know, but you know, there's like the five apps or whatever. Whereas so frequently what happens is people go out and they build successful products in the…”

“in the early days, before we had competitors, we tried to basically make this call response of, like, someone says, talk to you, someone says Vanta. And this really close association, which in the early, again, when we were just competing against consultants. Which worked really well until we had competitors who were…”

“I feel like investor updates with a lot of words and no metrics. Oh yeah, those are bad. Those are bad. And actually like, no investor updates is fine. Like you didn't have to send me. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, no with either very good or very bad. Yeah. Um, metrics is fine, but like, a lot of words in no metrics is…”

“And of course, you know, people like to talk about architectures, but architecture, you know, is important, but really a lot of it comes down primarily to your metrics, to your evaluation mechanisms, to, you know, all of the training recipes, and of course, new data.”

“It's deceptively easy to get started, but it is super hard to go, you know, the full distance and, you know, the number of knives, right? That you have to, like, there's, The standard, you know, engineering rule of thumb that, you know, every next nine takes, you know, 10 X more.”

“I think that the approach we took from the start was that financial services or healthcare, I think you can't ask for forgiveness. I think there's a big difference between losing people's money, see what goes wrong, like an FTX example that can go very wrong with healthcare.”

“because if you ban it, You're actually heightening, uh, the risks that you're trying to prevent, because now that activity is going offshore, right? Like, and where you cannot monitor it or police it or do anything to, to, to protect it.”

“I think it's great that our agents have spoken over the telephone already in English. ... but I don't think it's like the long-term future because there's so much value that you can provide. And put another way, the agents using a sophisticated, ... Application harness can just do a lot more, and do a lot more, like,…”

“It's actually easier when the, when the internet has never heard of you and you want to make a well-grounded agent, it's actually pretty easy because there's no temptation from the LLMs to go off script. So actually, I would say. Ironically, the harder challenge is when it's a very well-known brand, it's like, no, I…”

“So the interesting part about building an applied AI company is you can't have the luxury Of waiting for all the models to catch up with your aspirations. But you know they will. So you have to have the best technology and have to be comfortable with throwing it out. And so it's a real momentum and pace of innovation…”

“I would argue there's not a strong correlation between token usage or utilization and value. Um, there may be, but there's not always”

“if all of a sudden for some, uh, you know, clever reason you want to prove you can, the idea that, like, a competitor might have 10 people and beat you is probably more likely than even having a ten billion dollar company.”

“the framework that we use is, I don't know how you land this, is that the severity of a crime should be commiserate with the sophistication of technology.”

“I think the best inference chip today will be a train, a really good training chip as well.”

“The, the, the, the mixture of expert layer maps really well, but the attention does not.”

“if you looked at the bill pay system from the outside, you would say, we should have DNS for companies. So rather than a company Like, sending you their bank account details. You should, like, look them up in some central clearinghouse, and that way you confirm that you're not being phished, and a lot of spear phishing…”

“What actually matters, and this is a key thing, people get hung up on relative numbers, and what matters is absolute numbers. So it is better to have .one percent of your content is good if your content is like in the billions or trillions, as opposed to, oh, 10% of our content is good, but you only have a hundred…”

“I think it's much more likely to be the case that when the money is there, Maybe initially the money will come from international funds, and, and, you know, there is a lot of money internationally around, but I think it's much, much, much more likely that people are going to become risk-taking and going to be willing…”

“There, at least there are three things to me that are outside of the model at runtime that I think you kind of have to crack, right? One is memory, and all forms of memory, right? Short, long, um, right? Even like this, these big challenges of, you know, humans are great at long-term credit assignment, right? Which is…”

“What the startups were interested in were often better product experiences, and so if the startups want stable coins or usage-based billing or what have you, we should build for those needs, not just because we'll have a good startup business, but the enterprises will come around, and it took us, I would say, many…”

“So that's where I feel like all software, finally, when it grows up, it looks like an inbox and a messaging tool, uh, and a canvas with a blinking screen.”

“And so, the thing that maybe the meta thing for me is organizing layers will always emerge, even in an open ecosystem. And a lot of the category power moves to that organizing layer, and it's always unclear, like the last paradigm of, oh, this last time it was search engines. Today, it's chatbots.”

“The interesting dynamic at play is that in the fiat FX markets, as you get bigger, your pricing comes down. In the crypto markets, as you get bigger, your pricing goes up because the spreads widen. So the market is way more efficient for startups.”

“A lot of early stage companies that now have the actual stack to build everything that has taken, you know, the neobanks of the world, the Revoluts, the Klarna's decades to build and they can do in a year because everything's ready for them here.”

“there's deep value to bundles and to being able to layer our software with stablecoin orchestration, stablecoin issuance, with traditional fiat money movement and rails, with the networks that Stripe has built across like, you know, marketplaces and merchants. Um, and so there was a sense of we can take what are…”

“if you totally stay independent and you don't do any form of integration, there is like, One plus one equals maybe two, but probably less than two. Almost certainly, like, definitionally, you are setting yourself up for less than two.”

“Well, I mean, people in general, maybe you shouldn't start hardware companies. It's, um, it's kind of cursed in a way, but if you have the right skill set and the right mindset, um, and you're determined to just do the most ambitious thing you could possibly achieve, you should do it, right?”

“If you want to have the ability to, like, rapidly prototype electronic systems, you've got to have that here, servicing, servicing the US market, which is the strongest consumer market on earth. There's no reason you can't do it. No, you don't want to have, like, fourteen-year-olds in sweatshops soldering stuff…”

“if you've recently graduated or you're about to graduate, it's more important that you get a job and you kill it, do really, really well straight out of school. Than that you sit on the job market per year, and then compete against the next brand. Like, if you, it's, I, I see a lot of resumes, no doubt you've seen a…”

“You get way better outcomes with one-on-one tutoring focused on mastery learning, where you only progress through topics once the student has mastered the prior topic, and you kind of move your way sequentially through things. And schools almost definitionally can't do that.”

“one of the mistakes I've seen a lot of first-time founders make is, is they assume that an hour of coaching is as good as an hour of firing.”

“I think a better model, I don't know how to get there from here, but a better model might be that, um, every time like a, a lab or an agency or something is set up, it's, it's automatically set up with its destructor, right? Um, and after some fixed period, it sunsets.”

“one of the anomalous things about Elon's companies is that they're now quite old and quite large, and they haven't, they've got other organizational pathologies, but they haven't had that problem.”

“you can sell, like, the best companies you can sell easily, but those aren't the companies you want to sell. You know, it, it's, ah, we rarely transact in the secondary market, um, because, you know, we don't want to sell the best companies, and, um, and it's hard, like people think you can just transact in the…”

“if you have a portfolio of things that you've built over time, our monthly returns and quarterly returns are purely an output. Like there's nothing, it's, it is arbitrary in some respects.”

“if you buy great businesses, you overpay for them a little bit, you get their earnings wrong a little bit in the short term. Over time, value, you know, compounds, and time is your friend. Macro, that's not the case. Um, it's more of, like, a binary bet.”

“ultimately, the bottleneck is going to be electricity, and so companies that enable electricity production, assuming they have some moats, are going to be good investments.”

“The downside of a drive to efficiency is that it requires you to act on, on, on quantifiable, right? Like, you, you can only measure what you can measure, or for, like, somatically. So, that's not the entire, like, the space of how to make better companies. Like, there's a huge amount of things that are unquantifiable,…”

“Tech is extraordinarily bad at partnerships. It's, um, um, and, and, uh, I mean, it, it's, it's always treated as a, um, um, prisoner's dilemma that, uh, at some point, someone in the company realizes defecting gives you five points on the, on the map, and that sounds really, really good with the short-term focus. So…”

“the reason why you didn't invest is like, like you said, like there's 40,000 online stores in the world right now in 2008. And Well, you can get half of them, but that's not actually that big of a business. Um, and, um, what we miss is, like, well, Shopify itself was the solution to that problem. Like, the reason why…”

“I think, I think great entrepreneurs are ungovernable, and, um, uh, it's the problems often arise when people somehow manage to figure out how to, yeah.”

“We have significant science envy. Um, we, we, we even attempt to call it computer science. Um, there are some people who do computer science in the machine learning world, so that it's a, it's a real thing, but clearly that's not, It's a vocational art.”

“if you can teach that to students, it's worth more than most of the entire curriculums of, uh, subjects.”

“The danger is not investing too cheap or too dear. The danger is literally stopping.”

“The prosaic way that I put it is, you know, it's my experience as a founder is a top tier VC is a bridge loan of credibility, uh, at a point in time when the startup maybe deserves it, but just doesn't have it yet. Mm-hmm. And that credibility is harvested in the form of primarily personnel, um, money, and brand.”

“In all three of those markets, there's massive government subsidies, federal student loan programs, federal mortgage programs, federal healthcare programs, and if you insert, you know, basic economics, if you, if you constrain supply, you cause prices to rise, and if you subsidize demand, you cause prices to rise. And…”

“I have found people willing to tolerate any level of chronic pain in order to avoid acute pain. And so people would much rather lose slowly over five years than have the conversation that involves a dramatic change to stop losing.”

“a board cannot rescue a failing company.”

“The business version of this is, you used to be able to push a bad product to a strong channel with strong marketing and sales. You just can't do that anymore. Like, the product quality will out. You know, it's deterministic.”

“If you centralize everybody into a single giant village, you're gonna have all the dysfunctionality You're gonna have all, you're gonna have the crazed panics and freakouts of a village basically happening all the time, which is, you know, which is kind of, you know, which is in fact what we see.”

“maybe harder is not the right word. It's more just that the space is a bit more mature, and there's more of a playbook and like more existing knowledge. Yes. There's, there's obviously something unique with every business, but a lot of the details of, you know, here's how you should structure equity. Here's how you…”

“AI is, I'd say, uniquely different from some of these previous ways, in an important way, which is, you know, personal computer, or internet, or mobile phone. All of these had a, one of two things, or often both. Um, one was a big hardware component, of like, yeah, you had to just go ship modems to everybody, and you…”

“But the problem is if you're a founder and you raise money, you kind of need to go big or bust, right? That's kind of, it's hard to stay in between. You can't like make ten million dollars a year. You kind of need to make a hundred million dollars a year. You kind of need to become a unicorn.”

“One is where the regs are just bad, and the second is where the regulations are not standardized, where places where, you know, employment law is really annoyingly different across European countries, and so if you're a ten-person startup and you employ people across Europe, it's actually really cumbersome, whereas in…”

“I think they're Very poor tasks to start with counterintuitively. Uh, and the reason for that is laundry and dishes are things for which people are very particular about, about, and the cost of making a mistake is very high.”

“because it is just intractable to maintain a three-D map of every square inch of the planet and update it in real time, and then expect that every time you go somewhere, the map is still accurate on one hand, and also probably unrealistic to assume that every car built in the future is going to have these giant…”

“And I think phones have continued that trend of pulling people into the, into the screen rather than bringing people into the world, helping people share experiences together with their friends.”

“I think, like, my general thesis would be that it will probably mirror the way that we've been living for thousands of years, which is the vast majority of life is ephemeral, and then you save the things that are important, right?”

“that's on the, you know, big brand, you know, QSR side where a lot of the innovation, if you will, is in the process innovation, and then also how do you run, um, large groups of people And have very high and consistent standards of service. Extremely difficult, extremely difficult, and that's the IP, I would argue,…”

“I think it makes a ton of sense. The implementation of the idea is what, is what's difficult, right? And, um, you know, restaurants that have very limited seating, um, and very long seatings, you know, the opportunity cost for a cancellation is very high, you know, versus a restaurant that may have infinite production…”

“I don't think people like wake up in a garage and ship a better iPhone. Like that's not going to happen, right? But that's not how consumer internet is.”

“as we add more functionality to it, just the right way to navigate this big product surface area is an AI that's read all the API docs for you.”

“I think for a startup that's never done this, it is unhelpful, because it sort of opens up, you know, a maze in a way that's just not great, and that's why being prescriptive, like, is part of, I think, the, and Vanta's initial product market fit, I think it's actually largely due to that, in a way that that wasn't the…”

“And so if nothing else, what they actually are, they're ticket deflection for the GRC team. Because when your sales team sends them out, and you're like, doesn't it look good? And then if you have any questions, you know, here you go.”

“Freeways, for most of the time, not much happens. They're very well structured, because we designed them that way. But there is still that long tail of really complicated, um, stuff that happens where, uh, the consequences Of, you know, bed event are much more severe, right? The speed is much higher. Everything is, you…”

“So, so rarely does it work, and even if you win, you will probably lose. Like, you will end up getting killed in the process.”

“it turns out there's a lot of switches in the dashboard. Yeah. You know, there's no API for, and we are all as an industry collectively discovering that.”

“The cases that do make its way to your customer service team can end up more complex, sort of, by definition. So what's called average handle time will actually go up.”

“This is the moment where perhaps if you have a competitive equilibrium, you can absorb this technology, use it. And you'll have this window where you can like actually like shuffle the deck.”

“I think AI agents should have memory. I think AI agents should drive relationships, not conversations.”

“the fiduciary duty is you have a duty to the mission. And, uh, that is really clarifying and interesting as well, because when you're making decisions and you realize, you know, you have, your sole duty is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits humanity.”

“They do two things that actually are not helpful. They tell you a crime has happened. They don't actually help you solve it. And then what about your neighbor? And so what we'd realize is that every single security system was focused on the individual.”

“there's a really fast drop-off of where have you been in the last couple days versus, like, where were you a year ago? It's, it's very irrelevant in a criminal investigation.”

“The first would be, I don't know how you guys think about forecasting demand. It's a full-time profession at Flock. And it typically needs to be 12 to 18 months out. And if you look at the, like, hardware companies that don't make it, that's actually where they fail.”

“Make a really large systolic array. You can't beat that in area or power efficiency.”

“But as with the early internet, the future success of agentic commerce is contingent on universal interoperability. Our ascent through those five levels we discussed depends on our ability to all work together.”

“AR and AP are almost an adversarial process. You mentioned this, right? It's like, what do you want to do as a controller? Well, you want to pay as late as possible, and you want to collect as early as possible. And then you have this weird thing where, like, checks, like, it's not just an accident that they stick…”

“Text isn't the best interface for ads. Obviously visuals are generally better.”

“technology often makes old business models even more powerful before it kills them.”

“Spotify is arguably the best bundle on the internet, but the reason why they were able to assemble the bundle is because they only needed to negotiate with like four, For entities.”

“The problem is they don't share. Audio content is not shared.”

“And so if we lose a lot of companies to not listing here or exiting, that's going to be detrimental because you need those Entrepreneurs to reinvest to build up the ecosystem.”

“Organizing the data layer turns out to be probably the most complicated thing which spans the enterprise such that it can meet the intelligence”

“The connect connectors kind of work, but they don't really because they're too thin straws, right? You just need a much better data architecture where you have to essentially semantically embed all of these into one layer.”

“Part of the reason this is an evergreen pitch is because companies don't actually have all their data at their fingertips. Companies do not eat their data infrastructure vegetables.”

“as a CEO, one of the things I've recognized is there are two types of meetings, right? One meeting is where I'm just supposed to convene and, you know, keep my mouth shut, because convening was the real thing, right? It is like, don't overperform, just sit and, because all the work would have either happened, uh, or…”

“everybody thinks it's the system. It's that guy at the top or, you know, my VP and they have all the power and I have none. The reality is Power is a lot more diffused and distributed.”

“You know, there's no limit to human disease, and actually the longer we help people live, the more disease they'll be.”

“I think the majority of the stablecoin market today is B to B, and that'll change, but like the reality is basically it, where it is B to C, it's emerging markets, hence the US dollar preference, and where it's B to B, it's American companies, hence the US dollar preference.”

“Beyond that, there's, um, a reality which is, you get to have a relationship with your user that's much longer lasting. Ostensibly Uber has done this where Uber drivers get financing for their cars via Uber, but now any company can really do this where instead of like paying out and then the relationship ends because…”

“the only self custodial like asset is cash.”

“if you're serious about all these layers of the stack, you can't bind them all together because just like there's no way you're going to get that much. You know, if Microsoft is serious about the office suite, they're going to have it run on Mac and Windows because you're just not going to get a meaningful market share…”

“if you look at the, you know, the Gundo guys or, or whatever, like this kind of new generation of, um, industrially ambitious hardware entrepreneurs, Almost all of them have, like, an origin story that goes back into their, into their early teens or earlier of, like, just trying to make stuff, right?”

“If you interpret Henry Kaiser, Howard Hughes, Elon Musk, they decide that their circle of competence is not rockets or roads or what have you, but is engineering, and that engineering competence can be broadly applied to many potential domains.”

“But at the same time, like, the solar wave is, is exponential, right? And we know from COVID, amongst other things, that people are really bad at, like, understanding where they sit on an exponential curve and then correctly projecting into the future.”

“really good businesses are built by commodifying a complement and the complement be commodified here is, is like as much as possible of the solar Development, which is pretty much reduced to practice and commodified already at this point. And the part that you sit on top of that is the thing that takes that and turns…”

“Well, I think on the energy front, countries that have cheap energy can afford to screw up a lot of things, and they're still basically everyone is prosperous.”

“nothing is worse for your career than sitting in a job failing for you because you don't have the guts to quit and your manager won't fire you. And I've just seen this so many times. Um, cause you, you're not, it's not that you're not growing, it's you're going backwards in that time.”

“Up until the LLMs are very few tech companies where it's like a huge fixed investment. And then the incremental, ah, margins on the sales are extremely high.”

“I find that, like, um, generally, companies that have secularists almost never get bought. Like, I rarely has, do I ever see a CEO say, I want to go buy something that grows slower than I do, right? Like, this doesn't happen, right? Nobody wants, like, Take the time to do an acquisition that's going to, you know,…”

“if I'm thirty billion dollars, it's really, you can't really short five billion dollar companies”

“There's a true cost advantage to running electric vans for delivery. So the, you know, when you think about a delivery van, it spends a lot of its time sitting still. And so not having an engine idle, not having the same service, uh, frequency and all the engine maintenance and repairs, oil changes, Brake replacements,…”

“there's a certain move fast and break things mindset. And that's great for technology. It's great for pushing boundaries, but it's very different than the skills and the cultural mindset you need to run stable operations where, uh, let's say if you're running a manufacturing plant, you need repeatability, you need a…”

“companies are technology, um, themselves, um, they are technology by which You create, um, part of what they create is social acceptance for, you know, people, maybe tens of people, hundreds of people, 1010 of thousands of people, depending, um, to spend all their day pursuing a mission together.”

“the first 80% of every e-commerce business are the same. It's like, you need a checkout, you need credit cards, and you're taking credit cards for us, and, um, you know, like, you need the hosting, and the checkout, and all this got fixed, and admin interface. So, it's the last 20% that are actually quite unique”

“It's tremendously difficult to, um, Uh, synthetically, uh, test the, all the pieces that go into commerce, because it's, it's just like so complex with so many things. There's so many APIs, there's so much we have to, like, the shipping to, of course, all the payments, and payments is like, depending on the mix of…”

“the people who worked in search are, like, much more interested, they're fundamentally more interested in searching for papers, um, than, um, for products. And so, there's very few of the best people in search in, in, in a world of people who know most have actually ended up working specifically on product search,…”

“they sort of feel like input purchases, but they tend to be, like, very few people part with money unless they are like, holy shit, this is the thing I always wanted. Like, this is actually usually the longest. ... When you look at log files, you're gonna get a very incorrect view of the world. Um, it's very often the…”

“you will make mistakes, make them original, so there's alpha in it, so that you accrue some additional knowledge that now is unique to you.”

“that's sort of the core fundamental kind of truth adventure, which is, really, it's something for people with a 20, 3040, 50 year time horizon. You have to get across, you have to get all the way across the cycles.”

“And then what happens is, over time, what happens is the, the, the, and this is what I think, this is what happened to smartphones, and this is what happened with, um, and this is what I believe is happening to AI, which is the individuals get it first, adopt it first, the small businesses get it second, adopt it…”

“what most of the successful founders I work with do is they end up with a hybrid model where they're, like, deep in the details on some things, But they have a traditional system on the other hand.”

“the hardest part to get right is this inter interaction between like the AI, the complex agentic systems of like how the models are used and the user experience.”

“I think for a less mature space, when people don't know what the, the right questions to ask are, or, or how to even kind of think about it, like the, what, what is the right frame of reference? Then I think there's something about just having a really sharp intuition and coming to your own conclusions. And then at…”

“what we will probably need to see a lot more of over time is basically, like, um, delegating access, if that makes sense. Like, making it more clear that an agent can do something on your behalf, and, you know, in some sense, you're attaching some of your reputation to it, too. Yes, yes. There's a monetary question of…”

“you lose contact with the grounds of your own culture, your home country, and it's, everything's fine. People are nice, but you're like, um, it's, it fundamentally removes your foundational culture. At some point it starts.”

“if you make money, like as INIAC or even as a VC founder, like, it's very important to not spend all this money, because you're, you have a limited time in startups to make money, I think, like, and put this money in the market”

“if you have a machine that is a multitask machine and can do lots of small things that you would maybe even pay zero dollars for if it was a standalone machine, but when it's bundled into this general purpose machine that can Um, you know, pick up all the kids toys and, uh, clean the dishes off the table and put stuff…”

“the bar for commercial success for self-driving was like five, six nines of reliability. And, and understand that each extra nine of reliability you add, so 10 times better, takes probably 10 times more engineering work.”

“The problem comes in when you have a business that is premised on or conditioned upon, um, commercializing today's frontier of technology, because that will just take time. And we don't know if that's like one year or 10 years.”

“We know that consumers move around items a lot, which makes it extraordinarily difficult, you know, for any store to track their own inventory, um,”

“if you're a trader, you're like an expected value calculator. Like, I think about these sort of tail really bad outcomes all the time, and Luana oftentimes doesn't, and I think this is the thing that actually leads to great outcomes.”

“Um, so, I mean, it is just true, uh, hardware is massively parallel. Like, you've got tens of billions, hundreds of billions of, um, transistors on your chip, and it takes, like, maybe a hundred clock cycles to get from one side of the chip to the other, and so you can't, like, do a sequential computation involving…”

“reading what do I have to do next? Okay, how do I do that? Um, that is most of the cost on a CPU, whereas, um, if you, if you just keep the same instructions but make the payload a hundred times bigger, then you can shift most of the cost to be, um, in the actual work that you want to do.”

“average American business has an eight percent profit margin, um, and so mathematically speaking, a penny saved is equivalent to 12, uh, pennies of revenue earned”

“if you don't follow, Where developers are going, uh, it's hard to sort of be relevant in terms of tech platforms, and then you really need to understand the new workload in order to build a tech platform. Those are the two things that at least I've, uh, kept, and so therefore the only way. Uh, if you're not following…”

“The other thing about the spreadsheet is it's Turing complete, right? I mean, that's the, The other, you know, we sort of don't give it enough credit. It's like, I can make it do everything. A hundred percent. I mean, it's kind of like, you know, and you get into it without even thinking you're programming.”

“What I'd say about this job, is that there's like an asymmetry of emotion, right? Like, when you're making a lot of money, it's not like I'm, like, tap dancing around my house, like, euphoric, like, my lifestyle doesn't change. I feel like, yes, I'm happy that we're succeeding, but, you know, it's, I'm happy, but I'm…”

“one of the things that makes starting a car company so difficult is you need, ah, you know, a lot of, a lot of hard to obtain things all at the same time. So you need billions of dollars of capital, you need a team of thousands of engineers, you need hundreds of suppliers that would want to work with you and provide…”

“you really deal with log contention, and log contention is difficult. You, you, it's, it's very, very hard to, um, uh, scale if everyone at the same time wants to decrement an integer in the database just actually, um, then also the transaction involves Having to go to interchange and move money.”

“Often the, um, longest tenured institutions are universities and breweries.”