Insight certainty 3/5 debate potential 2/5

Smith: Founders Need 50 to 75 Pitches Before Getting Good

Todd Smith · Harnessing High-Performance Computing: Todd Smith’s Vision for OpnBook’s TAHO Infrastructure · Apr 29, 2025 · at 29:57

Todd Smith, co-founder and CEO of OpnBook, discusses the learning curve and volume required for first-time founders raising venture capital.

0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.1s
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“They shared, hey, look, you know, you're going to pitch anywhere between like a hundred, you know, a 150 times, like, and you're not going to get good at it until you're like halfway there. And I think that that's pretty accurate.”

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More from Todd Smith

Assertion Partly supported
Smith: Data center compute hardware sits idle roughly 40% of the time
“You find that that entire compute stack in that whole facility on average is really only being used approximately 54% of the time, meaning About 40% of the time, all of that hardware is sitting in an idle state.”
Todd Smith Apr 29, 2025 ▶ 10:49 Harnessing High-Performance Computing: Todd Smith’s Vision for OpnBook’s TAHO Infrastructure
Opinion
Smith: Legacy orchestration layers bottleneck modern GPUs like Nvidia H100s
“Reality is whether you have an older stack or if you have even maybe the newest NVIDIA's newest H 100 in your environment, regardless of what they are, they're being choked out a little bit by these old world or these legacy orchestration and scheduling layers…”
Todd Smith Apr 29, 2025 ▶ 12:19 Harnessing High-Performance Computing: Todd Smith’s Vision for OpnBook’s TAHO Infrastructure
Insight
Smith: Founders Should Demand Real-Time Feedback During the First Pitch
“It's important to hold them accountable to that time. We're both donating our time to this discussion, holding them accountable to provide you some real feedback, even in the moment if you can do it, it's, it, you're better off pushing yourself to do it and le…”
Todd Smith Apr 29, 2025 ▶ 31:56 Harnessing High-Performance Computing: Todd Smith’s Vision for OpnBook’s TAHO Infrastructure
Insight
Todd Smith: Infrastructure engineers avoid new tech to protect vesting equity
“This product, right this product is very attractive, or more attractive, easier to sell from a top-down perspective today. It's new tech. It's brand new tech that so nobody is an expert leveraging this tech yet, and there's a lot of experts out there that are …”
Todd Smith Apr 29, 2025 ▶ 34:16 Harnessing High-Performance Computing: Todd Smith’s Vision for OpnBook’s TAHO Infrastructure
Opinion
Smith: Hardware manufacturers cannot keep up with high-performance computing demands
“We see a lot of those hardware manufacturers of GPU and other data center hardware just blazing a trail today. we're really happy that they're building better solutions, but the reality is they can't keep up with high performance computing needs today.”
Todd Smith Apr 29, 2025 ▶ 1:19 Harnessing High-Performance Computing: Todd Smith’s Vision for OpnBook’s TAHO Infrastructure
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Smith: TAHO software unlocks existing hardware without requiring new data centers
“All of those high performance computing companies would be able to leverage this product, this Tahoe, the software infrastructure product, in order to really unleash the capabilities of their existing hardware without having to go get new hardware or even buil…”
Todd Smith Apr 29, 2025 ▶ 6:09 Harnessing High-Performance Computing: Todd Smith’s Vision for OpnBook’s TAHO Infrastructure
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