The Wisdom Wall

“Because if there's anything patriarchy hurts, it's men. We are just the symptoms. We just get, there's just domestic violence and rape and violence of all kinds against women, yes. But who really suffers, who never has an outlet, who never has the strength to cry in public, is men.”

“When in computer science, often you'll hear people say like, hey, like maybe I'm a system design architect, right? And I, my job is to think about like what the big distributed system is going to look like in Google search. Well, you don't spend every minute of every day doing that. Like when you, when your brain needs…”

“When you're doing game design or when you're doing behavioral design, one small incentive change, and I can engineer anger in a player. I can make two of you fight by just changing one variable, which might not even be important.”

“the reason behind those outages is mainly the cooling and, uh, systems and power generation and connectivity systems, because data centers were, uh, designed, engineered from a civil engineering point of view.”

“The currently, the thing is, oh, you know, we can give 500 crores for a big actors film, and then we'll make thousand crores. More likely to lose that 506 hundred crores, because it doesn't end there. India has a very high exhibitor tax. You're better off investing in five films for 10 CRH, or, or if you have 50…”

“It's a disastrous noise. Values can't come back. You have to start from the foundation, you know, once, I mean, we've heard of a lot of startup examples blowing up, you know, because once you reach a certain size, it's impossible to, you know, sort of revert.”

“I think, um, what we've found is really interesting is more and more people will actually be comfortable and have longer conversations when you disclose that they're talking to an AI agent in the beginning, which you, yeah, you wouldn't think so.”

“However, humanness, which is what, how I behave in a certain context scenario, how I talk, how I might interrupt another person, how I might express my opinion, that does not require large, large, large models. It actually requires the opposite. Smaller models that are a lot more flawed and a lot more, um, kind of, uh,…”

“science is not really a bottleneck, uh, in, in most cases. Getting, there's plenty of great research out there, and there are many ways researchers are discovering molecules, but getting from a great research paper to an actual drug that helps treat patients and generate revenues, that path is the most expensive,…”

“how the robot shows up is actually going to be more important than whether it can do the task or not, because a robot that's going to make a mistake who can apologize for it will be far more socially accepted than a robot that is just performing the task and maybe steamrolling some people.”

“each individual entity, whether it's a large language model or human, doesn't need to be a super genius. You can just be kind of okay. But together in aggregate, if you coordinate them in the right way, the community itself will be smarter than anything on the planet and any other AI system.”

“We might do the old T two D three triple twice, and then double, double, double over a period of five years in terms of revenue. That's a great revenue path, correct? And you kind of got to tell them, look, that used to be great. Now it's just good because great got redefined. And when the whole top, the whole ceiling…”

“There are some problems you shouldn't fight against. You should just surrender to those problems. You should become humble in front of those problems. And those problems don't affect you. Right. We want to fight against every problem. We want to solve every problem. Because not all problems are meant to be solved. A…”

“when, when, uh, when a corporate leads, uh, and as soon as legal gets involved, they usually want things like right of first refusal and most favored nation. And sometimes that can be absolutely fine. And sometimes if you're in a highly competitive industry, that becomes sort of a de facto poison pill, which isn't…”

“So what we, you know, and sometimes to our fault, we're a bit more realistic. Um, that can be a disadvantage in the venture capital space. You know, you are rewarded for being bold and brave, not conservative and realistic.”

“Where everyone in the VC space thinks that, okay, out of 10, two may work. I feel that there's, every company should have a right life cycle, should be given enough rope to deal with it because not every company will become a billion dollar company, but it can still survive and create value at 200 crores.”

“There were a lot of state-sponsored, government-sponsored fund of funds designed to increase the amount of investment in their region. They tended to have sort of that government feel, and I don't mean to be too negative, their intentions were good, but essentially they were a list of rules And so, uh, really smart…”

“And Jim once said to me, if somebody comes to me with a much better algorithm for, for trading, and another guy comes to me with a new source of data no one else has, I'm much more, I'd much rather pay for the data. You know, we'll figure out the algorithms.”

“If you are a CVC, if you want to maintain your life and sustain yourself over the very many vicissitudes of a corporate, of your, your mother company's, um, kind of changes, it's, it's really That's to be on the financial side.”

“Why do companies end up in the Bay Area getting on the ham, what I would like to call the hamster wheel of death, where you're just like always trying to catch up with your last post money. It's because in a lot of cases, check size, mandatory check size of these early stage firms, they could care less what the…”

“If you wait 24 months to raise, you're not gonna raise. I don't care how amazing you are, how amazing your technology is, you're off the venture tracks.”

“if you need customer success for your product to be Appealing, then you need to get back to that product market fit. Then you probably don't have good product market fit and you need to enhance that as opposed to supplementing it with people.”

“And what people don't talk about a lot in ventures, sometimes you don't necessarily get the product market fit. The market comes to you. And we just saw that with AI, where the market has changed, like the trend has changed a lot. And suddenly a bunch of companies that were on the sidelines Have been brought to the,…”

“And the M&A, the real smart M&A people are saying, okay, yeah, let's kick some tires and we'll go for a test drive and we'll look over everything under the hood. And then they realize, okay, you're basically running out of money. I'm just gonna, again, same thing. I'm gonna let you run down to basically nothing. I'm…”

“You have to produce basically a one X DPI in whatever fund you're in that they've invested in to get them to invest in the next fund. It doesn't matter how well it's shaping up versus the vintage. It doesn't matter if it's top core, top top decile. It doesn't matter what your angel investment track record is. It could…”

“And so like the, the, the risk to all these companies that are slow, Is that they're going to be outcompeted even if their competition is wrong, right?”

“there's only so many large enough seminal companies in an era that you're either in them or you're not. And if you're in them, then the valuation doesn't matter.”

“I found that those four things tend to live in or around a university, or they live in or around some sort of central community that touches all of them. So accelerators serve this purpose on a micro scale, but really university is the biggest portion of this.”

“They're not known for novelty. It is human creativity that does that, and you have to collide with the right people in order for those awesome ideas to emerge.”

“even if you look at part of my research in undergrad, so I looked at, okay, even on the East Coast, there's plenty of innovation, but the Harvard-MIT geographical region hasn't yielded the same outcomes as, say, the Stanford-Berkeley, Silicon Valley region, right? Well, a big part of it was because a lot of the…”

“And if you look and study risk in our business, it's not traditional sophisticated AI type fraud. It's simple velocity based fraud. Additionally, a lot of the banks, a lot of the issuers of the cards have tools you can use. So you combine what the network provides on the tooling with very simple velocity controls based…”

“So, uh, so media is not something that influences our decisions. Media is us and hence extremely crucial that we look at it, look at it with the same level of integrity and Seriousness that we look at, look at our brains with.”

“So if you, if you make, if you imagine, if you simulate a future, and if you have the right amount of credentials, You can make that future come true by the very virtue of giving a neutral, a seemingly neutral advice, a seemingly neutral prophecy.”

“The system either picks for the most corruptible or corrupts. What we need to look at is, why is it, why is it that the positions of power make people behave this way or select for a certain kind of person? It is not the individual. The individual is a symptom of a much larger problem. The larger problem is a system…”

“values are things that you inherit from the future that we seek to build together.”

“If you look at the value capture, the value capture, most amount of value capture happens on the IP level. We need to export IP, not export services. Services are fungible, services are automatable in the modern world.”

“there's still a huge delta between like, you know, a smart designer who knows what they're doing, making an improvement in a quick turn in about, you know, 30 minutes and exploring a few different options, uh, that accounts for the technical requirements of the product versus just burning tokens and asking AI to, to do…”

“nowadays there are tons of different AI tools, applications, platforms, but, but everyone is getting tired of certain Uh, software as a service model. Uh, you know, everyone demands results, you know, like end to end, uh, uh, results basically.”

“I've met a lot of founders who hang on, you know, thinking that, um, you know, it's quitting is bad, and my opinion, I don't know that I agree with that. I think at some point it's very mature to say, hey, I'm wrong, this isn't working, um, and then having a, an honest conversation, uh, with your co-founders, your…”

“So, yeah, I think Women's Day exists to bring, uh, to make noise about women's issues. Yeah. But there really is nothing called a woman's issue.”

“But I know all of ours are consistent in how they treat you and, and, and predictable in their behavior. And for that, there's always a category of people that would prefer that.”

“So all these stories, when you look at them, because they are, you know, real life choices, frameworks that are being made in real time within Ramayana, you can see them, you know, and apply them equally well in the modern day world. And that's what a startup founder can actually pick up from.”

“if it's a, uh, something core enterprise technology, you won't find many startups who have built a solution which are scalable. Right. It could be your CRM. It could be your big finance solution and all. It's very difficult to find because that's why these established players are like established from so long because…”

“Maybe contrast that with, like, there's a lot of Wall Street Journal stories of three-day family retreats and seven-day family retreats that not only are huge time commitments, but cost a lot of money. That just doesn't work for most people that, that, that we've talked to, and we were looking for something that, that…”

“I think that that's why being a founder in the AI world is so hard is because the product has to be there because everybody can get the product to where it should be. But then breaking through the noise of everybody having this type of product is challenging.”

“And part of that profession is built on intentionally creating confusing, obscuring what things actually mean. Whenever you boil down what's happening within most contracts and most of the law, it's just English. Like you can get to a point where it's pretty simple. Like none of this stuff is really that hard.”

“I think the only right solution in this case is, Even though you have a local model, or even though you're using the enterprise safe version of the model is just to eliminate the data completely. So if you don't have anything sensitive that goes to AI in the first place, you don't have to worry about any, any bad…”

“I think the feedback loop and the, uh, MVP cycle just decreases a lot. And the, uh, basically the entry level towards entrepreneurship, as we know and understand it today, it's pretty, uh, low right now because of AI, right? Everyone that they, they can just use the free model, uh, generate something that they, uh, had…”

“There's a lot of iteration happening and the person should be kind of mentally prepared into that, you know, that type of work because usually if the person has a big tech background or something that's more stable, they're usually not comfortable with that.”

“when we see other apps that seem to be bringing a lot of those concepts into GLP-ONE tracking, I think that's just inherently not going to resonate as much with this community”

“Yeah, well, we go from next token prediction of information and knowledge to next token prediction of feelings and intention.”

“So just it being math doesn't mean anything. That's the, that's the truth of just words on paper too, but people are profoundly affected by reading the Harry Potter series or Lord of the Rings. It's just words on paper, but it stokes our imagination. The same thing can be done with what's basically applied math.”

“If you give enough people a double-blind test of an AI, our AI specifically, controlling a Minecraft bot, and if over some, say, arbitrary threshold, 50, 60%, Actually get it wrong and think an AI is a human, you've passed a behavior turing test to some degree.”

“I would say the single biggest moat in the AI age that we are living in now, I think is actually going down the learning curve by making the effort.”

“I actually do agree that the terms might be different, but the exhibited behavior is the same.”

“I think that the trust can also erode if the system becomes prescriptive, trying to protect you from yourself.”

“Oh, the biggest myth about AI right now is it is actually giving you the answer. It is actually giving you what you want to hear.”

“who's using the product, and how does it work, and sort of what are the channels of distribution. Important for the downstream stuff. But much less relevant for the initial sort of building blocks of a brand platform.”

“I would rarely advocate for any one individual to become the sole spokesperson for a brand because, you know, the world changes and the world grows. And I think, um, uh, finding, and sometimes it's about taking the founder's values and making those values work. Resolent and redolent within the brand, but it's still,…”

“For any scientist or engineer who wants to be the CEO to actually run the business, that is why Activate exists as well, because we are, you know, we firmly believe if you are trying to retire risk in these hard tech ventures in the very early days, there is a model that we're proving where the, the scientific founder…”

“I think a lot of firms fall into the trap of they're really good at a certain stage. That's why they raise funds. That's why they raise multiple funds. But then because they raise such large funds, they have to start to think about, okay, now we're actually edging into buyout territory because we have to put in a…”

“That there's going to be consolidation in the financial services industry. I see a lot of specialized niche players, the resurgence of that in the last two years. So that stands corrected.”

“you can actually make a case to solve the absolute biggest problems, because the odds of succeeding are actually higher than if you solve mediocre problems.”

“even the way the healthcare today looks at, You know, the human body is very binary. Either you are healthy or you are diseased. The moment you are diseased, there is an ecosystem to serve you. But you are, but that's not what is happening. What is happening exactly is that you are on a spectrum.”

“A lot of companies are rushing towards, like I said, like, the most frontier, uh, forefront tech of what they could be building, and that's really exciting because the industry is moving really fast, and there's lots of really awesome things being built that, you know, a decade ago wouldn't have been possible, um, but…”

“if you're pitching this future, that this is what the future's going to look like, and this is what's going to happen, but then, but then you're pitching that while you're doubting yourself, like, no one else is going to believe you that you're going to be able to do it, so you have to believe it yourself, like, truly,…”

“if you've given people the markers and you said, this is what we need out of the job, and they're not getting through it, move quickly, right? It's not working. Let's not go through the theater saying, like, we're going to do a performance plan when you know it's not going to work. Just give them the time and say,…”

“Historically, it's always been clear that the greatest artists are involved in the whole process, but people, you know, wrongly misinterpret art as being just in your space and, you know, going crazy in a room, and the whole world is bad, but because you're not making it only for yourself.”

“where the market will be cannot be based on market research and PowerPoint presentation. It's just an insight based on actually engaging deeply.”

“no one's going to mind if they have a game that does a billion dollars worldwide and doesn't get nominated for a Game of the Award. I think you'll, you'll survive. You know, I have enough money to build my next game and be nominated. But if you get nominated for the best awards and all that stuff, and you tank like a…”

“now I understand completely clearly that consciousness is actually a product not on the, on the, uh, of the brain, but also of our all senses, and sensors, and Um, basically, uh, um, brain itself doesn't produce consciousness. Consciousness is a whole, you know, in and out resonance moment when conscious, uh, um,…”

“new transformational companies, by definition, rarely emerge from existing categories. So we actually find this application layer relatively uninteresting, again, from a pre-seed and seed stage venture perspective, um, which is where, you know, we largely operate.”

“usually when companies sell these types of systems, they are selling into labor budgets of customers, not software budgets.”

“Get a few people that believe in you to, and just get some capital together, or invest very small amounts even of your own capital, and just get going. I think that's more important than, you know, going to school and going to get your MBA, even though I got my MBA a long time ago, um, and getting into the right firm.”

“Um, and I'll just say the one best practice I can recommend to everybody is if you have any kind of original data So that could be anything from like customer data to original research reports, any kind of unique source data that you can turn into good content for your site. That stuff is like AI gold, because when…”

“The model that we use in the book, Christian, is that we treat cryptos like companies. So technically they're different from companies. Legally they're different, but we can think of them much the same. So investing in a crypto is like investing in a company in the sense that we can analyze the cryptos user base. In…”

“Uh, there's very, there's no such thing as a good putt and a bad putt. Okay. Is there a repeatable putt? Uh, famously, Tiger Woods has a big swinging door stroke that if you showed just his putter head to a coach and they didn't know who it was, they would say that's probably a bad putter. But he is so consistent that…”

“trying to scope out 90 days for us is, uh, an insane prospect. I'd rather hear where you want to be in two years and just make sure we're all pointed in the right direction.”

“My opinion of what AI does for all of us is it brings us up to basically from incompetence to competent at anything it can do. So if you can't Photoshop. You know, you can now Photoshop, you can't do it as well as an actual, uh, uh, designer, but now you can. If you couldn't figure out how to write a press release, if…”

“It's impossible to think of all the different ways that people will try to get around those safeguards, right? So this idea that you can test in safety after the fact, Should be dead on arrival, but everybody's doing it because it's easy and because they're stuck with the problem that the architecture that everyone's…”

“So the ability to move, um, quickly because you're not managing billions, at least typically most of us aren't. And, uh, also the ability to have patience are two hugely underrated advantages that really can make you money as a small investor.”

“You cannot invest into the same companies that you were investing into at a fifty million dollar fund at a three hundred million dollar fund in the same way.”

“And I felt both these extremes won't work for a modern man. Because traditional spirituality is too intense for him. But the pseudo spirituality, which is currently trending is not going to give him the depth that he is actually looking for.”

“There is no problem in adapting a scripture or a story to present that scripture or the story in a modern context for a modern audience. Right. As long as I'm not interpreting the, the psychology behind those characters, or rather misinterpreting, I would say. Right. And I'm not changing the storyline itself to suit my…”

“90% of our problems in life are simply because we don't know who we are. We're simply trying to fit in and try to be somebody else.”

“most people surround themselves, especially, you know, um, leaders surround themselves with weak people because they feel that they feel stronger among those weak people without realizing that they are going to become an average of those five.”

“Ideas don't, don't come by thinking. They just come when you deserve them. When you invoke them, basically.”

“Unfortunately, today, most people seek nourishment in movies, in, you know, scrolling on the social media. They feel that is what is, you know, decreasing the stress without realizing that actually subtly increasing the stress. It is not helping you relax. It is actually helping you move faster towards your burnout.”

“So today the value is actually in the, the, the, the humanities and the commerce side, because tech is sort of going to be democratized and much more easily available.”

“In the past, it was all about information asymmetry. Even in the stock market, someone got some information, someone else. Nowadays, that information asymmetry is gone with the advent or anything. So I think having a better sense of the market and you can call it reading the market is where the value is.”

“In a scarcity era, you can consume as much and hoard it because you don't have much. So we would hoard information. We would also hoard food. We get a food, we'll just eat it because we don't know when we'll get now. Today, we are applying the same mental model in the abundance era. More food, obesity. More information…”

“venture building is a discipline. Is essentially using similar tools and similar mindsets to PE operators. And there's overlap. The scale is much different, but there's an overlap in how to operationalize and go down to the essence of a decision as fast as possible.”

“the deals that get done are the obvious ones. And, and the one, you know, and because if somebody doesn't understand, especially in deep tech or advanced technologies, uh, if there's somebody that doesn't get it, like, They like, or, or they did one deal four years ago and they got burned and they just don't like the…”

“It cannot sustain on books. Um, you have to, unfortunately, um, which kind of kills the fun in it. Look at it. Um, if you're trying to make it into a business, you have to look at it as an IP, and then you try and expand upon it.”

“one of the things I noticed about women, actually, is that we traditionally have underestimated the power of networking. We've underestimated the, the power of connections for doing business. And I, I do think men have realized this a lot long ago. Um, and we have been a little bit late to the party because, um,…”

“And the core of all of these issues comes from relationships, right? While people will say that they've had career issues in the past, or they've had financial issues in the past, or they will have You know, a lot of other kind of issues, right? But what we realized is that the core, at the core of what they do, it is…”

“At different stages of your life, your expectations from them versus what they provide to you is going to be always misaligned. And that is always going to get into a bit of a dysfunctional relationship.”

“If you're doing a very, very good before even writing a line of code or creating any type of first prototype, uh, because we're, we're firm believers, uh, in the fact that you should first close deals before you start developing your solution.”

“So I think what you're telling is five percent of the actual decision. And 95% is the emotion that you need to tap into. The emotional mind.”

“In corporate innovation, we're not always there to just find the best business case. One, we're there to help the people in innovation shine for their board and sometimes also get promotions that that's a hidden benefit.”

“What I start to see is that innovation is basically An extra account management contact point, if done properly. Um, and it, it could help you, but it, you know, there's a very thin line here, but it could help you create more interactions with your current client base and upgrade them, and based on that, go into…”

“Um, from the validation perspective, it's not a role because if you do your market research and your validation proper, you learn about the different aspects of the culture during the validation process itself. So if you, if you know what questions to ask during your, your validation, uh, phase, you also learn the…”

“if you, you know where there's a tipping point, and typically it's, it's, you know, if you in your niche are dominating 10% of the market, you can start looking into adjacent niches, or From a negative perspective, if you see that your, your, um, sales are being limited because you have to change your prices, or you…”

“How the talent is the same bar, how some of these, you know, some of the GCC talent will become enterprise leaders is the way you should measure the efficacy of, you know, a GCC.”

“So I think what a lot of founders forget is that the investors need the companies more than the companies need the capital. Because the company can go on its own, right? And capital is fungible and basically a commodity, whereas the companies are not.”

“if you want to hit the US, if you want to Crack the US market. Do London first. Uh, because then you're much in a much better shape when you go to, when you go off to America and that could be a very quick process as well.”

“So stepping in there with policy that says do not go on this, that's a big deal for things in the medical setting where you may have, you know, people use the word guardrails to talk about AI where they're like, we're going to put guardrails so it doesn't do these things. Um, guardrails can still be smashed through by…”

“If somebody can ask the agent to make arbitrary tool calls, you really just need to make sure that those APIs and systems it's calling are properly secured versus trusting the AI is only going to make the right calls there.”

“And that's where they're bringing ROI. It's not in co-pilots to ask information about your handbook. It's about agents actually doing work for your team.”

“if a whole, if a human's now tasked with reviewing everything, we find a lot of times, uh, say you're doing a claims adjustment or underwriting an insurance place, um, capacity, you would have where you're not making the value back because the person that's checking it could have quoted that policy faster, could have…”

“If you have to pay for the sun, that's not a great model, business model, and the economics of that really don't work out when you're competing with farms that don't have to do that.”

“the more success a founder has with a given startup, the more that business ascends and grows in revenue and valuation, that actually the less control that founder ends up having or the founders end up having of their own business, because most startups that try and grow really quickly end up taking on a lot of…”

“Venture board members are normally distributed. The large group of them are in the middle. And they're fine. They have little to no operating experience. And they provide value in four ways. They make introductions. They write checks. They provide some strategy help with big questions, like at 30,000 feet, and they…”

“at any given time, we think that a startup is working backwards from one of three things, very simply. I'm either working backwards from M&A. I'm working backwards from profitability. I'm working backwards from the next fundraise. You got to choose one.”

“I generally feel the way things work in India is something happens in us. It takes about five years for it to reach Singapore and it takes about like four years more for it to reach India. Right. I'm just sort of culturally, that's how just things move. Right. So you're always lagging by about 10 odd years.”

“I think where you usually fail is the ability to give candid feedback. And I think if you give someone candid feedback, I think a lot of people are able to change and evolve, and not everyone, obviously, but at least you try, and I believe in trying, because I think if a person gets candid feedback, and they're able to…”

“every team should have an agentic bot that is starting maybe as a junior, becomes a senior, becomes a manager with their capabilities.”

“And I believe it needs to be as a full stack management. I think that's the only way to change the status quo and to change the thing that they've been operating In the wrong way for so many years, and that's why we are doing the end-to-end solution and not just an app or just a software.”

“the corporate world and the NGO and social world and the climate action world are two distinct environments. Right. Someone who's In the corporate world cannot see a career for himself or herself in that particular zone and vice versa. One is lack of skill, lack of intent, and lack of enough remuneration or career…”

“Uh, and I think we've come to a conclusion that if you're building something net new, because the, Business aspect of it, the product aspect of it is only in your brains, right? It's only the two of you or the three of you, how many co-founders you are. For that to be translated in the form of interaction is something…”

“We believe that what startups actually need are real opportunities to validate product market fit with customers. They don't need to be mentored. They don't need a bunch of classes or workshops.”

“And I actually just read some, some research this morning that shows, um, you know, investing in 50 companies in a fund actually gives you potential for better returns than picking very, very few select investments that, um, knowing that like a third of them are going to fail. And, you know, they're, it's because…”

“if you're taking bets on things that are already showing positive, you know, wins, um, then you're, you're not really fueling all the innovation from the bottom.”

“whereas technology was once a pretty big moat that you could create, can't, it's not much of a moat anymore, because other folks can develop quickly, too. So what becomes more important now is networks and relationships.”

“Uh, in fact, uh, if you look through history, the most important thing is how big is the market they're going after. But, but right after that is the founder.”

“Product is not science. And product, in most cases, especially when it is human centric and highly driven on experiences, or based on experiences, it can, it, it, it can't be cautious of data driven.”

“But bottom line, I would say, is it's a different asset class than venture. You got to treat it differently. You've got to have many more shots on goal, and you have to be very vigilant about the, uh, basis, the, the cost at which you get in.”

“speed is actually, after all, speed and relationships are, after all, more important. Like the leadership team, and it comes back to the team. Do they have the right advisors? Do they have, or do they have experienced people in the leadership team who help them open doors? Because it's, you know, we are, it's always a…”

“we don't need to understand a lot of AI to be able to, you know, um, I kind of lose my relevance now because I don't, we don't need AI scientists to, uh, work with AI systems or build AI systems and all that, so, um, I, One of the places that I always recommend young people and students to kind of focus is, uh, focus…”

“the underlying intelligence and model is being commoditized, right, then where is differentiation going to come? How do you build defensibility as a founder? If it's not the model, which for 90% of folks it isn't, then it is either the data you're bringing to the table, so hard to access, but domain expertise certainly…”

“If you have like a family startup where husband and wife start a company that can work and we have an example for that, but, uh, it's rare. So it's usually more, uh, that you have a group of people with different backgrounds.”

“and actually sometimes it's better. Somebody is there who Made the experience and was not successful because he knows exactly what he doesn't have to do again, rather than people who say, oh yeah, my, my, my startup was successful. I sold it for a billion because sometimes this is not because that entrepreneur is that…”

“So what is creativity? It's all, uh, I would say iterations on patterns, and whether it's farm AI or humans, right, and nothing existed historically in a vacuum, so even bouts of human creativity were all based on past learnings, and so arguably creativity is overrated, and so I think it's really about authenticity in…”

“there's a lot of people out there who have never really heard no before in their life. And maybe, you know, Harvard said no, but Yale said yes. Facebook said no, but Microsoft said yes. Um, you know, Goldman Sachs said no, but Morgan Stanley said yes. They, you know, there's a lot of people who have not had to fight…”

“we think that being founder friendly is being LP friendly and being LP friendly is being founder friendly. The only way that that, you know, equilibrium ever gets messed up is when GPs put themselves first.”

“I think it's easier to generate cash on cash returns purely off good investments than it is to do financial returns. And find strategic value in companies.”

“these physicians are, are trained a certain way. They're not trained to focus on prevention. They're trained to follow the guidelines that our health system has put in place, which are very rigorous and they're reactive. They're not proactive.”

“you're going to invest the same amount of time to get money out of the venture arm of a university that you would be to go to a family office or a wealthy philanthropist, um, and get checks for a half a million or a million dollars.”

“genetics. I don't want to say they don't matter, but they're not the decision maker. Uh, what really matters is epigenetics. It's what you're expressing. It's what's going on in your environment that's activating those genes. In a positive or negative way.”

“It is a rare moment in history where your technology is so far ahead of the application layer that there is so much that we need to do here to catch up.”

“Look, I'm, I'm of the use someone else's money mindset. Um, don't use your own hard earned money. Um, what we're doing is high risk enough. Uh, what you're able to put in your bank account, you need to save and protect for your family. Uh, if you have something really good, um, you know, go find investors that have a…”

“that wasn't the case, you know, five, 10 years ago where you could just, you know, have a team of college kids, cold calling customers, uh, pitching, pitching their ideas. You know, that model unfortunately is, doesn't work anymore.”

“if you work with somebody at a big company in the past, and they were a top performer, they may very well be your lowest performer in a startup, um, because it takes a complete different DNA and skillset, uh, to, to be successful as an early Uh, individual contributor or any role in a startup in kind of the first kind…”

“If you, one way to know that you're creating a good product is that people hate it. And here's why. If I told you, like, I'm going to solve your X problem, like whatever that problem is, um, you're going to get your hopes up. And when that doesn't fully meet your expectations, which your product won't at first, they're…”

“the Delta just isn't really there for like the management burden that it creates, you know, so you can look at a unit and say, Hey, we're going to get two grand a month in rent for this two bed, one bath. And we could get three grand or 3500 bucks a month if we were to do short term on this. But you know, the turn…”

“fundraising is such a big thing, uh, when you, you know, being, uh, an intrapreneur, I come across some founders just like, I just want to operate companies, and I don't want to raise funds, and thinking that fundraising is our job, which I don't, I don't totally agree with it, but, you know, fundraising, uh, requires,…”

“The pitch meeting is probably the worst possible environment, in my opinion, to really get to know somebody, you know, and I'm sure everyone would say that it's a necessary part of the process, so that's okay.”

“Had I pattern matched and said, oh, hotels is where investors have lost the most money. It's a really hard business. I won't do it. No, someone can out execute somebody else and solve a very complex problem that you may not be able to solve.”

“You're looking at university accelerators, I think in general, um, you know, you know, they tend to be something like, you know, 12 week courses to, to teach or mentor a university of research to found the company. Um, Sometimes, you know, it's not to say that it doesn't, it doesn't work, um, but they generally, you…”

“these companies didn't say they need capital as much as they needed connections and insight. And so if we could bring that, that could have a real big impact on the company.”

“we have a geographic thesis that you can build great companies anywhere. And that at the pre-seed sort of first check stage, you know, you're best served with a local partner.”

“you get these big funds injecting large amounts of capital into these very early companies, which sort of defeats the purpose of seed. Where, you know, our whole idea is like we take a capital efficient team, give them enough money to go run their experiments, improve product market fit, and then we capture a big value…”

“Now, as an investor, I wouldn't touch it, because I think there's going to be a lot of saturation, there's going to be a lot of M&A activity, but where I would go, where no one is really talking about, is what are the infrastructure adjacent things to aviation and to eVTOLs, right?”

“And I think when you talk about actual thought leadership, it's founder driven, it's not VC driven.”

“a lot of people will say, oh, just warm intros. No, do cold intros. Some of my best contacts are actually cold intros.”

“especially in more traditional industries, you go, you go in and you lead with AI, you completely lose the plot because in the best forms of AI, in our opinion, are those that are actually invisible.”

“I mean, not always you find revenues. Revenue is the wrong proxy to look for, where the right proxy is to kind of look for validations, right?”

“So I always recommend if you have access to capital, don't worry about the incremental dilution at this stage, because work on, you can work on making the pie bigger, and that's where you have more capital and more people around you to help you make that pie bigger.”

“if you're kind of completely focused on bootstrapping yourself perennially, you, you miss the market. Because you, you, you miss making those investments and somebody else will come and accelerate and, you know, build that, uh, build that, you know, 10 X advantage.”

“As opposed to both the founders thinking that everything is a co-jointed decision. That's always a recipe for, for a disaster.”

“strategy, uh, for early stage startups should, uh, you know, my recommendation should never be on the offensive, that we have this patent, so you can't do it. Rather, it should be the other way around, since we have the patent, so we are, you know, legit to do it.”

“I do not believe in co-CEOs. Um, I think that is a really difficult thing to make work. Uh, I think in the end, you really need to have one person in charge.”

“Then when it comes time to do your first hire, it's really a trick question too. You don't hire one, you hire two. You need to hire two AEs, because, or, or, or call it, you know, junior salespeople, or just salespeople with a little bit of experience, because those two will, if you have one, they get too cozy. Two,…”

“I think one of the interesting things about our job is, is there an opportunity to invest in companies that look boring and then make them tech companies? And that's, that's very different. I don't think a lot of people are saying that they're mostly sort of saying, oh, I can, I can, you know, get rid of a whole…”

“if you are charging your car with energy produced from a coal plant, you've actually got a coal fired car there, right? Um, if you're charging your car from the solar units on top of your house, and you're charging it your own garage, well, then you've got a truly green car.”

“the reality is in the first three years of the company, it's a lot more command and control. When you're, when you're trying to double every year, you need people and you don't, you don't have the same amount of time To teach and to be patient”

“the best terms for a financing round are mutually disagreeable. That's how you know you got to the right spot. Everybody's, you know, equally unhappy with it around the table.”

“The, the CEO's time is simultaneously the company's most valuable resource and it's most constrained, so I, I don't want stuff lobbed over the fence at me. Anything that I'm dealing with that I don't have to, like, actually reduces the probability of success”

“I think it builds a sense of trust and camaraderie that's like worth a lot more than the inefficiency lost for three or six months while you're finding out the right pairing.”

“you built the thing. People are buying the thing, find more people that will buy that thing. Because the, the insight there is that a lot of times what we, what we tend to do is we tend to look past the people that are already paying us. Right. And you, you go and you look and you realize that, well, there's a customer…”

“So if you can invest a dollar in a asset that would return you the same amount of value as a dollar investment in another asset, but because of the perception of risk and other systemic biases, Your investment of that dollar in this asset gives you a greater return because for a dollar you get 20%, 30%, 50% of the…”

“in the world of retail is essentially a trading business. You're buying from someone, selling to someone else. There is no IP you're creating. There's no IP that you own. And if you don't have your own IP that, as a business model, it's always going to be weak.”

“When you create a small task and not be generalist and get in and monitor its performance, look at the success of it, tell it when it did it right. And when it didn't do it correctly, the learning curve is incredible. The performance, um, is it outpaces human capacity because we, we rightfully have human error in our…”

“so it is not, we don't have, you know, a huge sales force team. We don't believe you need that. We need, you need a good, great story. You need a tight process, and you need to have the right data partners from a sales perspective to enrich that pipeline, um, that you need.”

“I think, I think you got to be in the office, um, at least three or four days a week. I think there's definitely a spot for hybrid. Um, I think you're not going to get, like, top talent if you can't have the flexibility when, you know, kids have, kids have soccer practice or someone's sick. Like, you have to have a…”

“customers always come with feedback, and the biggest mistake is to take this feedback and run with the product with it. So, we have to add a buffer. Which is identifying a leading and a lagging factor.”

“And you can have ten million in the bank or a couple 100,000. This is not gonna, not gonna change. One engineer or 20. So there is a bare minimum that you need. If you have less than that, you're crippling the business. But then there's a very also maximum. More than that, it's really, ah, like negligent. You know,…”

“Uh, we see a lot of products that help, uh, to make AI interviews and so on, and professionals, especially the best ones, they hate the idea that, uh, uh, like the companies, uh, they, they sent their AI representative to, to, uh, to make this interview, and, uh, so, like, it looks like, um, AI things, uh, they can…”

“And now these AI agent comes, and they're between the authentication and the actual purchase, the actual click for, for the buy. So, but the user isn't pressing the button anymore. The software is basically, and that shifts, I would say, a key question on authorization. Which means, did the user truly intend to…”

“I think the, I mean, unless it's really, really unique deep tech, uh, it's, it's a spectrum. It's, it's less shifted towards code that you have built versus, uh, again, uh, distribution or how do you approach the market? Uh, it's, it's not a hundred percent that, but I think it going towards that it's, it's almost a…”

“money was so cheap that power law investing was relatively easy to do. Right. Um, make 20 bets, and if one becomes a unicorn, it lifts, it's the rising tide, you know, and if you were lucky enough to be an Uber or Tesla or Facebook or whomever, right, at the right time, then you did great.”

“Is that the returns that you can achieve at seed stage investing, um, are, are enormous and, and they are at, at, at a higher level of probability. It's, it's at the simple, it's simple math. It's the law of numbers. It's, it's no different than saying, can I get a, two X return on a house? I pay, 250,000 for, More…”

“I would actually recommend when starting out, try to just get something in front of someone as fast as possible. And try to charge as early as possible, and don't worry about it being perfect. Your version of perfect could be completely useless.”

“Cause without hundreds and millions of dollars in this market from a You know, taking hundreds of million from a VC, you just can't get a B to C product anywhere. It's just so expensive”

“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, um, some real feedback, even in the moment, um, uh, if you can do it, it's, it, you're better off pushing yourself to do it and learning how to do that early on, dividends…”

“This product, right, uh, this product is very attractive, or more attractive, easier to sell from a top-down perspective, um, today. Uh, it's new tech. It's brand new tech that, um, so nobody is an expert leveraging this tech yet, and there's a lot of experts out there that are pretty comfortable, um, uh, um, there's a…”

“hallucination is like a feature and not a bug, especially in creative industry, because if you're generating a, um, let's say a banner for a newsletter, you want it to be creative, quirky.”

“Mostly when we think about ethics, we're thinking from a Western point of view, uh, some things that might be acceptable, maybe an Indian context, uh, or maybe a Chinese context, uh, may not be very similar to what we look from a different aspect.”

“great people are self-managing mostly, right? They don't need good managers. They're just going to be amazing no matter what.”

“The challenge in higher ed is that most people that have Ed tech companies, they build technology for the college first, and then they try to repurpose that technology for the students. And that's disastrous because Gen Z will absolutely eviscerate you, right? You have to build for them first, and then you allow it to…”

“anyone who's going to try to refinance you and help get you out of that position is oftentimes going to look at you on a, lever you on a revenue basis. So if you raised ten million bucks, but you only got, and you took three million, but you only got to two or three million in revenue, for whatever reason, uh, it's…”

“If you're not able to do that, but you're able to sell it for fifty million, let's just say, and you own 40% of that, You probably made just as much or more money as you made if you were that public founder of that public company.”

“LTV to CAC. Eh, not that important to us. LTV can be gamed. It's hard to know. Sometimes you don't have enough history or data.”

“you can have a bad product or a product that's it's seeing improvements in great customer service, and you have a company, but if you flip that equation, you got a great product and bad customer service, you don't have a company.”

“We say it needs to, these enterprise sales at, when you're selling a 100,000 dollar ACV deals, 250,000 ACV deals, around ten million, maybe eight to ten million, seems to be where it is, but there is definitely some art to picking that up, but the playbook seems to be consistent.”

“No, my baby lives in my house. A company is a collection of assets and people that work together. To maximize shareholder value. And as a founder, remember that your value in a financial sense is really that the equity that, that you hold.”

“You can tell what stage of a company and what type of management they have. By the quality, by the theme, just by the look of the deck. And it sounds shallow and maybe a lot of investors won't admit it, but I make a definite judgment call on that.”

“I think in this part of the market, so the more founder part of the market, the early stage venture-ish part, I don't think interest rates really matter. Candidly, they do more in the middle market because things are built on leverage and interest coverage and things that are a little more sensitive. There's financial…”

“Because you can't just have only startups, because they, they just won't be able to disrupt the system, right? So you need everybody else on board as well.”

“If you want to, if you want to build a big company, then you need the money behind you, I think. But if you're just looking to build a product that you can get to market, get some success and sell it, bootstrap it as long as you can.”

“I also think that this is why a lot of well-funded early companies don't do well. Because when you have all the money in the world, you don't have to claw and scratch and just dig in and figure it out. Like you have money to throw at it. And You can keep going and you may be going down the wrong direction based on…”

“when we make our own hardware plus software systems, we really know everything about how those systems work. We can optimize all the trade-offs throughout the systems. And so there's some really powerful benefits that come from doing it that way. Even if the investor community writes off some of that revenue as…”

“This company is doing 600 K in ARR. They might as well be doing zero, because it makes about the same difference in terms of the inflection point of the company. And some people are like, oh, we want to see at least a million. I still go to the fact it's a million is peanuts. Three million is peanuts. Like I've seen…”

“The greatest sign that a founder is fundable is when you are running a process with them, and they are running a process towards convergence, there is competition in the deal. When you get a deal, when you get a deal and nobody else is competing for it, you might want to pay extra attention to some of the details…”

“A CEO's job is to fundraise. Literally, the successful CEO's Are, and this is of an early stage company, right? Don't take that quote and make like a meme of me. It's really, no, that's not independent. It's like series seed to really, I would say series B. Your job is to fundraise. Once you get to series B, it's all,…”

“I think it's really important that if you really love doing zero to 20, That you just do zero to 20, and when it gets to 20, you sell, and you give it to somebody else who really loves 20 to 50, and you go back to do zero to 20 again.”

“what I see in a lot of early stage seed type managers or venture managers, I see a lot of entrepreneurs that think they can become investors and, and it's, it's easy to I presume that they, because they've been an entrepreneur, they know how to do it. And that I definitely have found isn't the case.”

“I think you have to pair Uh, strategy with capabilities. So if I'm talking to a, a manager that is going to be very active, uh, you know, in their portfolio companies, sit on boards, coach management teams through key growth areas, like hiring sales teams, going to market, building most go to market motions, hiring…”

“frankly, to give our first sort of hot take of the conversation, I would say that the, that a lot of the conservatism is driven by Legal and regulatory exposure that there is just a lot of purchasing decisions.”

“I experience in healthcare as unique as healthcare is. Um, at experience in healthcare itself is less critical. It depends on the company, but is less critical than you might think as much as there's a, there is a big learning curve, but there's such a huge learning curve with being an entrepreneur, regardless that. I,…”

“Tam is not an ingredient for startup, for startup success. That's like a feature of the world. And so I think Focusing too much on the big problems and why this is a great problem to solve or whatever is a bit of a distraction from the real core point of here's a buyer. They want to buy it. Here's how we're going to…”

“Because the reality is that a co-founder is never going to be as passionate about my idea as they are about their own. And I think that was one of the biggest learnings from Sproutbox is that it's really dangerous to start a company and then try to find somebody to come in and be the co-founder who's going to be the…”

“if, if you get to the point where, Your studio staff depends on making an investment. In other words, I don't make an investment. There's no money to pay the team. That puts a really unnatural pressure on the general partners to make an investment, even if there is no optimal candidate for investment. I would say…”

“Craftsmanship is not quick. And at the end of the day, the things that are going to succeed are not the thing you did the quickest. It's probably going to be the thing you took your time and did right.”

“Because the moment I enforce something to them, and that's not their nature, it will be destroyed.”

“And I think raising capital on the dream is probably one of the easiest rounds you're ever going to have, right? To raise as a founder.”

“I encourage my founders to try to take money for at least 24, if not 36 months of runway, assuming that there is no significant increase in revenue.”

“Consumers are unreliable in verbalizing what they're experiencing, and we all have a very different experience when tasting or smelling something, and the language is not adequate, but the good news is that it's irrelevant in being able to predict whether or not you like something”

“for me personally, is an element is like, you send me the deck as the pre-read opening versus get on a call, right, is I say, be proactive. If you really have something that good, and you'll send me the deck right up front, and it's that good, I'm going to want to talk to you.”

“I think there's a ton of opportunities that you think about of smaller companies, that 20 to fifty million dollar is that some people call it the aqua hire, but right, it's like a founder can come in, your founders can come in, in 18 months, take a couple million, where they can then become very off, right? Very low…”

“I think with the first time founder, especially one that went to a second tier school, like a good school, but not a great school. And some of that's in a second tier city. There's that chip on their shoulder. There's that aggressiveness, the pugnaciousness. They really want to prove it. They want to prove that they…”

“In some cases, it actually benefits founders to not be forthright because they don't know where the company is going to go and To raise money. If you got, if a founder goes out and says, Hey, I'm shooting for a 30 to 50, sixty million dollar exit... And if you pitch that to a lot of VCs and I go, yeah, I really applaud…”

“sometimes to our fault, we're a bit more realistic. That can be a disadvantage in the venture capital space. You are rewarded for being bold and brave, not conservative and realistic.”

“one of the things I noticed about women actually Is that we traditionally have underestimated the power of networking. We've underestimated the, the power of connections for doing business. And I do think men have realized this a lot long ago. And we have been a little bit late to the party because everything we have…”

“If you wanted to rebuild Salesforce, you probably could. There's not a lot of like crazy proprietary technology there. And that's true with most software companies.”

“And the fact that people are asking you for other things probably indicates that your pain point's not big enough.”

“There are so many factors and variables into the rankings, and that's why the first thing I'll tell you is niche down. You just say, we're going to create the best marketing tool for every vertical, every platform. Good luck. It's not going to happen.”

“I love like the pretty dashboards of looking at, uh, CAC and CAC payback and burn multiple and all that stuff. But this early on, not saying that stuff isn't valuable, but it doesn't matter. All that matters is, are you solving a need Are you a painkiller or a vitamin? Be a painkiller.”

“You got growth investors who usually do CD doing A's and B's. You got A and B investors doing Seeds, you got seeds doing pre-seeds, you got pre-seed investors trying to invest in people before they know they have an idea, right? So it's like this knock-on effect.”

“the profile of a founder at the application layer is a wild experimentalist, right? So you need somebody who's like right at the jagged edge of what's possible, who is not in love with their technology. Because their technology today is changing constantly underneath them. And they actually don't control a lot of it,…”

“And then on the model side, you're looking for like world expert, reinforcement learning people who have a, a scientific insight on something that what you're really trying to find there is how you compare the researcher's intuition With like product thinking and, and being able to bring it to market because that gap…”

“There are four key things that need to have, like, bump into each other for a company to perform. You need researchers with novel ideas. You need, or founders with novel ideas. You need operational help, whether that be in the form of talent or, um, mentorship to help them execute. You need customers, and you need…”

“really in the earliest days of your company, everyone who takes a chance on you is taking a chance on you, not just your investors or your employees, but also your early customers, particularly in enterprise space. So you want to make sure you mesh with someone who clicks with you as a person that is going to enjoy…”

“a lot of success isn't necessarily that someone's more capable than you are, or any smarter. A lot of it is they know people you don't.”

“Because in the end, when you're sending money, There's no invisible markup. When you're doing TVs, you can put a 20, 30% markup. Your consumer doesn't know what your profit is. When you're moving money, the consumer sees exactly how much you're charging. So they need, they need low cost payments to be able to have…”

“Slow payments are less risky. Instant payments are more risky. So it's part of the instant payment mantra that you have to deliver a risk solution with it as well.”

“In a payment business where your merchants grow a little bit every month and it's hard for them to switch, just deliver great service at reasonable price and you'll keep your merchants. And so predictability and payments is easier.”

“The constitution of intelligence itself, if you look at the, if you look at any of the leading definitions of intelligence from cognitive neurobiology, evolutionary biology, computer sciences, cybernetics, any, any, take any framework, take any lens, uh, that looks at intelligence as a definition, uh, invariably, uh,…”

“It's what we call the antagonist method, which Anand and I call the antagonist method, where what we're basically doing is putting you in the position of the antagonist, of what would be the antagonist in your life, and giving you all the tools to attack the voters. Now, when you come back out, you realize that you are…”

“Craft is not just visual polish. Visual polish helps you, helps you create a better poster. But it could just be gold-plated garbage at the end of the day.”

“the potential and possibilities of AI is progressing at a much faster rate than humans ability to adopt and integrate those tools into production workflows.”

“if you just give people a play, uh, you know, uh, you know, sandbox to play in, um, without constraints, without, you know, knowing what success looks like, you know, they're going to just, you know, like many a company below their entire year's AI budget in the first, you know, half of the year. And that's what we're…”

“We run into it a lot at the application layer where people build wrappers, so much, so to speak on top of these LLMs, like the antithesis of building a moat, right? You need some underlying IP and tech, your own model, your own data set, something else that is powering the insights you deliver or the productivity you…”

“The problem is people. The problem is that it's, you got a standardized process and get everyone to use the tool in a very similar way, right? To gain insights. That's what AI is, is, is decoupling. Now you're not necessarily as reliant on people to get to the data. You don't necessarily need to structure it. You can…”

“it's getting really great people just to talk to each other. The power of that, it's like soft diplomacy. Uh, it is, it is the most effective, I found, way to sell.”

“it's really taking one of those burning pain points of our customers, which, which is not maybe subject to the long sales cycles, and then, uh, you know, building a solution for them and expanding.”

“the AI can take you Uh, maybe 95% of the way there, uh, but this five percent has to come from human basically, uh, agreeing, and that's very important for compliance too, because the insurance companies have to maintain records, the DSOs, or dental organizations have to maintain records.”

“coordination of benefits, then you, some of those rules cannot be codified deterministically. You have to make high-level decisions, and that's where the advent of agents has been very helpful, is to manage this deterministic rule sets, in addition to also dealing with inherently non-deterministic problems.”

“one of the things that happens a lot in the healthcare system, because it's not a fault of the healthcare system, it's just, it is a, it's the nature of whatever it is, is that a lot of, uh, communication gets distilled down to one person, and then there's no opportunity for that communication to open back up to the…”

“I think what has happened is that a lot of these big healthcare platforms have Become really siloed. And that is for the sake of data safety. And that's should be a hundred percent should be. And so what has resulted in that is that the go between all of these different caregiving or different hospital pieces of…”

“Um, the big lesson that we learned in the beginning is that I had originally set it up as individual memberships, so if I wanted to have it for my family, I would have to buy it. Then another person would buy it and all that. And that's just, that's too much friction. Because what happens in a family where someone is…”

“the technical piece, as a non-technical founder, the technical piece has become so much less of a hill or a hurdle. The, um, the AI piece, so much less of a hill or a hurdle.”

“The artist is not very separate from somebody who has a historical overview, and the producer is not somebody who's separate from someone who could have gotten into academics. Everything requires you to use your brain.”

“If you, ah, if you're gonna talk to Shabana Azmi or Nazeeruddin Shah, who I deeply admire, as actors from like a, you know, generation, two generations away, ah, they will tell you that independent films will give you a lot of satisfaction and a lot of love and global acclaim, ah, but no money.”

“You know what a developed country is where rich people take public transport. A developed country is not where poor people can buy one four wheeler.”

“aircraft data is insanely good, and it's very good over broad, big geographies. It just cannot respond as fast, and it cannot get the, like, the unit economics that we can get with drones at a smaller scale.”

“Everywhere we fly, it's the same kind of drones with the same sort of missions. We can add complexity to the type of drone types and the mission types, but they're literally creating a layer that's the same here in Vancouver as it is in London, that it is in Sydney, Australia. Everything is the same, exactly the same,…”

“And so like these foundation models and like how this works, it's not like you build it and then it just lives there. This thing has got to be living and constantly rebuilding itself.”

“It's also the hardest, right? It's so regulated and so, um, secure that if we can survive in this space, then we can definitely bring it to other industries.”

“when, when I refer GCC, I'm not talking about where you are more, uh, uh, headcount driven cost arbitrage. That's more like, uh, becoming a internal supplier of talent. Instead of your big SIs, you are using that lens, uh, I'm not using, I'm using the lens of value. And impact, which are like modern GCCs.”

“Solutions are also developed. But when the solutions went into production, three to five months passed, and they realized, oh God, we have not considered the cost of tokenization.”

“you cannot have like entire year you will run a hundred of POCs and then in December you come and tell me, okay, now I have learned next year I'll do a better job. You have to do a, because I lost the, because for innovation, the timing is also very critical. So you can't waste like 12 months and then after December…”

“Not being transparent.”

“Plus any POC don't do in silo. I, I often see that the POCs are done, um, by a tech team, and there is no business involved. Right? So that in an agile way, that validation, that course correction, calibration, helps a lot for your POC to be successful.”

“when we go through the regular routes, especially as a startups, through our, The bureaucracies of the entire large organization to the procurement, legal, it is very, very difficult for, it's a maze difficult for startups to navigate through. Whereas when, um, an innovation team drives that and, um, helps us navigate…”

“as long as if there are say three, four teams getting involved, for example, there is an innovation or there is a, the, the business or the technology team, if at least two, two parties are strongly inclined and involved, It's easy to navigate and get that moving.”

“these industries are deterministic. So you cannot rip and replace. You have to work with legacy systems.”

“SAS is not technology. It's a business model, how you sell stuff, right?”

“So what was happening prior to sort of, you know, you can say, like, The current AI native revolution that we are going through is, it was more visibility. Then came the little bit of analytics, right? Like, you know, people were analyzing, there were dashboards everywhere, you know. But now what is happening, it is AI…”

“So it's become data symmetry. You need data asymmetry, right, to find your edge. And our edge is our founder.”

“Investors at first pass will include as many possible rights and privileges for the investment firm as possible. And it is expected and very common that a founder will negotiate those and make sure that the company is in the best spot to go forward”

“If you're good at interviewing, that means you get the job. That means you're not hiring people who are good at the job. You're hiring people who are good at interviewing about the job, and that is kind of a miss here”

“I can deliberate, but my time to decision-making has not changed. And that has become uniform for the entire, I think, industry, right? And that's where the limits of productivity are.”

“engineers, they're using like Things like plot code, or they're using Microsoft Copilot to increase their productivity to do faster code reviews. That's, um, that, that's the benefits, but at the same time, you're basically giving a full access to your full code base to do basically a black, black box model that, um,…”

“the local models, most of the time, they are not as good as the cloud models, just because, uh, to run a fully fledged AI model on your local hardware, hardware just requires a lot of, um, uh, compute to, to make it as efficient as, as the cloud versions.”

“AI in general unlocks, um, a lot of potential in people who didn't know how to write code. So in, in recent years, we've seen a number of startups that are rising from, you know, from the ground up with like solo founders using AI agents, like 10 different AI agents to run the business.”

“what we've seen so far is there's a five percent chance of, uh, Hypothesis being correct. So if you're on 52 hypotheses in a year, only two or three of them will work. So, so the whole year you're working and only, uh, three of them will, will work in the best case.”

“Things got so much easier once I did take a day job and start bringing in some regular income instead of trying to constantly, uh, you know, force my, my, you know, fledgling businesses to try to support me financially. Uh, I think that's something that would have made it a lot easier to think clearly and creatively,…”

“And in some cases, simultaneously exposing a million plus structures. So you have so many structures exposed at the same time, uh, that it is impossible for firefighters to be everywhere all at once.”

“the investor world, uh, has historically been, you know, sort of a follower type approach. Um, you'll have investors that are smart and they will nonetheless say come up with all the reasons why it doesn't make sense. And then you have investors that are smart. They have Range. They've seen how it can make sense. They…”

“If you think about an agent as an employee, an agent can be hacked the same way that an employee can be hacked, or an agent can find itself with access to information that it shouldn't necessarily have and misuse that information or share that information With a human employee that shouldn't happen, right?”

“Aging is not a linear process. We feel that a 50 to a 60 to a 70 to a 80, the aging will move in a certain graph. It doesn't. It comes with its own blips. And sometimes the crash is very, very exponential.”

“The belief system that, you know, the only successful way a family can operate is joint families. Right. That belief system is changing. Similarly, the belief system that, um, you know, children have to be around, and that's the only way that seniors will be taken care of, or their parents will be taken care of well,…”

“If you are in that 55 to 65 years of age, as a senior, you are not thinking of so much healthcare. You are thinking more about Travel. You're thinking more about food. You're thinking more about infrastructure. You're thinking more about leisure and sports. So you think of a decision of the community basis that as you…”

“seniors don't like wearing those big, chunky watches. Uh, we've seen that in our own example when we launched the, launched the fault detection watch.”

“AI doesn't feel human. Um, it's turn by turn. It kind of always collapses to being a helpful assistant.”

“I didn't believe that just creating these infinite three D worlds is enough. You had to fill the worlds with life for, for humans to actually want to be there. If you just go to like, I don't know, the desert, it's just empty. Who cares? But if you go to a city, it's teeming with life. But if a city is completely…”

“So what really is happening is that the personalized access to can you solve my problem is becoming democratized. It had not happened before. Can you give me information got democratized, but can you solve my problem is now starting to get democratized.”

“AI is not really a thing because you said, right, it moves very fast and quickly gives you the answer. It's not trained to not give you the answer. It is actually trained to give you the answer. Anything you say, it'll give you the answer. So taming it to say, no, no, no, no, don't give me the answer is actually a…”

“the exam is trying to provide a little bit of a measurement of, it's an observation of what your current understanding, state of understanding and capabilities is to somebody else who's going to make some judgment based on that. But again, it's a sampling, right? If you didn't sleep well, if you had upset tummy the…”

“So one of the core design principles which we had in the company is every model development has to be a tailwind for us, not headwind. If tomorrow Google launches a new Gemini model or OpenAI launches a new GPT model or like, you know, something like deep secret current shows up. We should be super excited, and our…”

“when you do it this way, people who struggle with it end up falling out, and they're not your users anymore. And the people who use it, they get trained to say a very particular phrase to you. So they cannot even explore what else can you do, because they will always say, Like, you know, this is what it is. And now it…”

“began to realize there was a pretty significant opportunity gap for many of those early stage founders who have a need to tell their story and build some foundational assets, but have none of that capability or acts of that capability. In their company or in their network.”

“there's a big difference in, from my perspective, between product marketing, how are you going to sell a product, to whom, what cycle, and what elements, what price point, what specs. And brand marketing, which is really about what's the larger proposition here.”

“having that point of view, that larger idea or ideal, is often a really powerful moat To defend against the inevitable parodization of categories, and it's a really valuable guide to inspire next generation innovation around what your product wants to be next, right? So it's both a defense against the erosion of…”

“oddly versus other companies, the people, your, your, your, your partners are your product, right?”

“not just talking about what we, what has been done, which is such the playbook, you know, the sort of like the funding announcements are sort of like the we're in blank, and we're in X, and we're in Y, and well, so is everybody else. Um, that kind of steady drumbeat. Rather, what is your point of view, right? If brands…”

“If you have the wrong message in the right channel, it's the wrong channel, right?”

“I always say, if you know what you believe, you know how to behave, if you have a clear point of view of what your brand is about, I think it illuminates opportunities for, um, uh, those companies at even the earliest stages to do something, um, Audacious, to do something daring, to do something unignorable through…”

“if you look at the history of American Express, that wasn't a parody product. It was a sub-parody product. It was a credit card that costs money that you can use fewer places than other people. Like, it was, it was kind of unintelligible, and the idea of membership that's special somehow, like, began, was a real, um,…”

“most founders have wonderful brand instincts. They do, because they're, they've narrated, they know their plot twists, they know their enemy, they know the moral of the story, they don't articulate it that way.”

“If you think about LP engagement as being the head of sales, and if you think about being a CMO as the head of marketing, we were very aligned, you know, and I think, um, worked very closely to sort of make sure the narrative that we were developing and telling in the world was one that was, um, consistent with and…”

“This is, Essentially the outsourced R&D arm of every industry. And I think, you know, it's important to remind policymakers of that. There's no more Bell Labs. You know, there's no more, um, all the innovation happens in some lab and some, some big Fortune 500 company. That just, that's not where it is.”

“I think for too long, too many people are trying to say, I want to be Silicon Valley here, as opposed to really concentrating and thinking about what their region might be known for, what are they really good at, and how can they find their niche in the entrepreneurial world.”

“one of the best insertion moments in a person's career trajectory is really right after that PhD or like during or right after the postdoc, because at that moment in time, They're making a career decision, right?”

“these corporations, they're operating at a scale that is really unimaginable to many entrepreneurs. And so it's not so simple to just take your thing that you created and just slide it into a product or service line. There's a lot that needs to happen. And so while the incentive structures inside corporates may not be…”

“To me, inflection points occur in any corporate or enterprises journey is when you're meaningfully able to win over first consumer's love, then the consumer's trust, and then the consumer's confidence. And the three are independent things.”

“you can become a master of the game once you know the rules. And if you're going out to play cricket, you need to draw out the pitch first, where the boundary is. Or if you're going to play tennis or badminton, you need to draw out the court and know where the boundaries are. Then go and play your best game.”

“in order to build a good product, you can be a good product tech manager. But in order to build a great product, you need to be a consumer insights manager. You need to know your consumer, really know your consumer. You need to know where they like spending their time, where they like spending their money. You need to…”

“When they come and say my product has no competition.”

“So I guess the lesson for fellow founders here, yes, you might be disadvantaged in terms of, you know, whether or not you, you play golf with the CEO of Pfizer, uh, and it might feel like it's impossible to penetrate this big pharma world. However, if your research matters, and if you have some strong ideas right now…”

“Once you get to that level of excellence and being your word, then you expect it of other people, and then comes the challenge of, like, oh, but here's the next thing. You get to lead, and it means you get to work with people that didn't get to go through that academy that you did, and you may not find people like you…”

“Now, if you're hiring right people, you don't need to obviously give them directions. You just give them a problem statement. Sometimes they find the problem statement. You enable them in terms of how do you, you know, They can get the work done. That is my second style of leadership, of course, that I do that. But if…”

“Because there is no pill for longevity. Longevity means that you have to have good practices, which means you have to let go of your current lifestyle, Not a hundred percent, but to a certain 80, 90%, where you are disciplined, you are doing things on time.”

“people assume the technical capability or the capability of a robot is dependent on the demo, but that's actually just not true at all. It's very much like, what is the robot built for? Who is it built for? And is it serving that purpose?”

“So, uh, you can, you can take all your emails, you can dump that into chat TPT, and it's really not going to be very good at, Figuring out that information, right? But if you, if you think about pairing that with your structured information of like, what's a transaction, right? Who's a contact that I care about?”

“there's a line that that customer crosses where you say, this just isn't worth it for what I'm trying to do with the business. And you have to be able to say no with conviction, right? No, if a, this might be the end of this relationship and conversation. If you can get to a place to do that, it's important to draw the…”

“The way the younger generation is, the way Gen Z, younger millennials are, They either give you nothing or they give you everything. So, which means they'll give you just two seconds and just swipe up. Right. Or if they like your series, they'll binge watch, they'll commit an entire weekend to it and binge watch it.”

“It's not just that it's empty hours, and a movie is two hours, so it's 35 times the work. It's actually many further times the work, because you're, as the creator, you're not in control of the journey.”

“If the game has to be successful, if the game has to be a phenomenon, it has to be, you know, 90% people who are not involved in any Indian situation at all, basically.”

“It's just people. There's nothing else. Processing power is a small part of it, but 90% is just people. So you have 101 100,000, whatever the hell people it is, you're paying tens of millions of dollars of salary in Grand Theft Auto's case or millions of dollars every month. The longer you take, the more your cost is.”

“in a startup, you have prototypes, and, and you can launch, you can soft test everything, and you can test a little bit, you can test a little bit more, you can test with, with one buyer, blah, blah, blah. In a game also, you're always testing, but ultimately, there's one day when you launch the game. That's it. You,…”

“And the higher, the higher pressure, this is on a movie because you can't do anything. It's the highest pressure. You can do some testing for like 200 people and you can say, ha, We'll reshoot. What can you do? Like 1:02, you can't get everything together again. You're done basically.”

“So focus first on pre-sale and do your post-sale consultations, customer success, customer support part afterwards.”

“Then you realize that in reality, five percent of your bookings actually happening on the, um, at the wrong time. Or agent is saying, I sent an SMS, but never did. Or it, um, asks you to provide an email You are not doing that just because you've forgotten. Agent never will ask again, close the conversation, and…”

“I think one of the things that happens or one of the ancillary benefits of getting married that young and presuming you've got your head screwed on right is that you end up working more because you're focused on taking care of your family. And so you accumulate a whole host of, you know, experience assets in your…”

“people who click those links, who come to your website through the links on AI tools, Are very highly engaged, uh, users because think about this is somebody that's so interested in this topic. They've searched it in chat GPT. They got the answer. They click the link. They went to the site. So they tend to spend much…”

“The basic approach is we recommend a basic, highly diversified portfolio, let's say, 60% stocks, 40% bonds, right? Just kind of your traditional portfolio, highly diversified, meaning, you know, an all stock index fund and an all bond index fund. We start there. And then we say, let's take a small slice of that pie and…”

“the way to answer that question, whether you're an AI native or AI adjacent, is really simple. If the LLMs, all of the LLMs on the planet disappeared, would your company, would your department, would your role continue As, you know, as if nothing happened, or would it diminish, would it demolish and you couldn't keep…”

“your job as a CEO, as a founder, is to train emotional control under pressure. Most founders and CEOs are on an emotional rollercoaster.”

“Um, you just gotta learn how to absorb fear without, like, letting it leak downstream.”

“what I see is there's a lot of competition in, um, in offering incentives, incentives in land, in, uh, these type of things, while for Dutch companies, it is much more important that there is a, you know, a system in place that, that is relatively stable and that, There is access to the courts. If you have a problem…”

“The biggest challenge is always to get the bank account, but even there, We have some solutions now also with Indian banks that have a European presence and, uh, to see how that works.”

“Golf putting has become this great Trojan horse for us, uh, not to give away the strategy, but, uh, if you want to talk to a CEO of a major corporation or a CFO or talk to, uh, any kind of leadership, don't go to them saying, I have a great B to B SaaS solution for you. Say, I have some really cool golf tech I want to…”

“you've got to give to your mentor just as much as you're getting. Right, like, and in whatever way that you can do it, right, if you're younger, I want the younger people telling me about AI. Like, what's the next thing? Like, I, it shouldn't just be me and pouring, pouring, pouring. I want to know what you know. I…”

“So during our beta program, because of the kind of wide swath of usage we had, we had tons and tons of like super positive reinforcing, like people want this. What we were not paying as detailed attention to because of all of that love was how much of that was specifically around user to user engagement. And it turned…”

“everyone recognizes that, you know, what you would historically hire a consultant to do is in your back pocket. And if that remains the case, and all indications are that it will be, then what becomes a premium, and I think a large part of it is relationships. It's the human element of, you know, yes, generating value,…”

“Like when we started Augie, there were no L I mean, there were, but LMs were not commonly used or available for most developers. So one of the people on the team was an actual expert at AI video transformations. Amazingly over the course of the four years, that skill became sort of commoditized.”

“You, you, you can't, you can't mediocrely prompt your way to improvement, right? You can only improve by taking that mediocre prompt, taking the mediocre output, Doing your own editing and then getting some other person to come back and smack you over the head and tell you, nope, that wasn't a very good job. And here's…”

“The journey is very identical for every GCC startup, at least 12 to 18 months. Of course, there are some variances on where you start and where you are going. And the first 12 to 18 months is typically, how do I set up even a legal entity? How do I get my first set of people? What compliance is going to look like in…”

“The other aspect is we are a, um, a bold brand. Um, our colors are vibrant, and when you walk through our office, you see seven-leven, you experience seven-leven. That's how we have created our office space, which is critical again for the talent here, the GCC employs to connect with the parent organization that has to…”

“Startups, if I have to say are extremely good problem solvers. Not necessarily great at navigating through the nuances of an enterprise relationships and figuring out how to sell probably.”

“in today's world, especially for large enterprises, because some of the small and mid-sized enterprises are okay to let go of the data in a different environment with certain contractual regulations and rules and the penalties, but not large enterprises because an event is much more damaging than the value itself,…”

“you end up pivoting, learning use cases when you work with enterprises, what you thought about as a product at the beginning, and you actually deliver it, it's going to be completely different because you pivoted so many times, because you learn by working with enterprises and solving those use cases, you pivot…”

“So one thing which I can see is when there is a good amount of Hand holding or a program management happens, uh, from the enterprise side, uh, this relationship really blossoms and becomes really good, and typically we're seen when either, uh, innovation teams, or even, uh, maybe like, um, a champion internally carved…”

“You know, it candidly, if you put a tagline on that, it used to be really cool to say how many people worked for you. The higher the number, the better. And now the exact opposite is true. You want to have as lean a team as possible. You know, the idea of having a million dollars of revenue per full-time employee is…”

“the degree of truly making sure you're not translating any of that language with your, you know, going in here and coming out the other end with your language and your wants and your, that's going to kill you as a young company.”

“You know, we actually underestimate people. We underestimate what people want and what people are looking for. Right. In fact, we feel that people are looking for something superficial, whereas actually people are looking for something deep.”

“The first, the most important thing that you should look for, which is a very clear measurement or yardstick to figure out whether you're growing in your spiritual journey or no, is your ability to respond to situations, whether it's good and bad.”

“The second yardstick, which signifies that you have made a significant progress in your spiritual journey is that you Know the value of solitude. You know the value of being able to derive joy from within and not depend on external sources for joy.”

“If your mind is agitated, simply work on your body. And if your body is agitated, work on your mind.”

“There are some wars, you don't need to win. You just need to leave those wars. You have to pick up your fights. What is worth fighting? There are some wars that are not worth fighting at all. Drop them.”

“What works one day will not work the second day. Every day you need a new strategy to fight against your enemy. Some enemies you fight, some enemies you surrender to. And that's how we win the modern battles of life.”

“You know, all players who play to win, they are miserable. But players who play because they enjoy the game, they really do well.”

“If anyone can do these five things, one of these five things every day for at least 15 minutes to an hour, it will have a massive impact on their own life and ensure that they don't burn out and they're filling up their well again and again.”

“in sales, we may be somewhat uniquely, uh, focused on hiring, uh, ex attorneys, um, who can sort of speak the language and engage with clients. Uh, that's what gives us sort of a very rapid sales cycle. Um, and enables us to be a much, much higher than benchmark, uh, organization when it comes to sales efficiency and…”

“So when people talk about AI strategy or, you know, what should data do? I said, uh, you know, let's first talk about strategy and finance and commercial. And then we can figure out how to, uh, you know, use this data and analytics to make those things meaningful.”

“You know, so I think the, the most interesting problems which are useful is very, are usually very boring in nature. So data quality is a very boring topic. No one would say, get excited by data quality. But that's a huge problem.”

“So I think model models around digital twins, they are the easy ones because, you know, if you make a digital twin of a, of a equipment in one place, wherever else that equipment is there. So those are the easy ones, which we are trying to, which is the reason this, this need for Uh, you know, asset taxonomy came about…”

“I think the technology people need to take time to understand how the real world works. And within that, how this technology can be, you know, subsumed. I think we tend to believe that our technology is, is the superset. Everyone else has to come and comply with it. I think we all know that that's not how it works.…”

“So many a times we tell people that don't think of sustainability as a, as a, as a extra thing that you have to do and over and over everything. Sometimes you do better logistics. You will save cost, but you will also save, you know, become more, you know, sustainable.”

“when, when you have to use data and analytics, start with something very basic and simple, not very complex, because many a time the analytics people would love to do some complicated model.”

“when you have large public listed companies, With their own goals and their own strategies, uh, bring them together at a point in time is not always possible. So it requires some effort over a long period of time to get there because they're all having their own goals.”

“unless we get the right cost, we get the right dealer incentive and the right trust branding. Some of the other things may not happen.”

“If someone is following the same strategy in any business than the next person, we can still help them become better. But then the delta is only X. But if someone is finding a differentiated strategy, the delta can be far higher.”

“Think of your own self as a product. Think of your own life as a, you know, keep adding features and launching them every two, not two weeks, maybe two quarters, and then learn from experience and then keep adding. So there is no career path. There's only a learning path or a, or a human path.”

“So a venture builder is a type of a fund operating company on both. Which is focusing on producing companies in a repeatable fashion, and it is counting on having a higher success rate than launching companies individually, because you're relying on a, um, set of shared experiences, know how, and back office services…”

“my, uh, Personal experience has been that it has been relatively easy to be, to find open doors when you are a small ventures and relatively small product looking for early adopters who are Open to some risk, willing to test the waters, willing to give something a try just because it sounds interesting. And this type…”

“So I can either recommend it very early on when somebody is still thinking that they're in the stages before they even started doing a go to market and outbound, then it's, then it's the best moment for them to shift their mindset and focus solely as a US centric or global company before they start speaking in the…”

“usually the last 20% of any stage is an area where a lot of time and effort on both sides is wasted.”

“We also knew that typically emerging managers executing a fund one strategy, you're really auditioning for fund two. And the easiest way to put together a clear venture strategy is to have a thesis that's somewhat unique to you, but you, you become married to it for quite a long time.”

“When you're talking to institutional allocators and professional, um, LPs, family offices and endowments, when you've got a basket of SPVs, they don't look at it the same way as a, as a pooled capital vehicle for obvious reasons. Um, and so if you really think ultimately what you want to do is raise a fund, then either…”

“We knew that the right time to get onto a cap table was when a company had solved at least one of the multiple vectors of risk. There's team risk, there's market risk, there's product risk, regulatory risk in some domains, all these vectors of risk.”

“The way that those products and industries evolve, you can't use the same rubric like you can looking at SAS and applying the rule of 40.”

“Like we all, we all know the myth. Everyone thinks there's a pre C to C to series a B, et cetera. I mean, there could be five seed rounds. There could be Two priced seed rounds and three safe rounds in between. It takes as long as it takes to make the turn.”

“corporate venture does have a little bit higher, uh, leadership turnover or, you know, active investor turnover. And so the continuity, uh, GPs and funds, uh, They're usually around for a long time, and so that partnership is also helpful to create, you know, continuity for the company”

“There's, there's other first time founders, um, that fall into a little bit of a thinking trap, which is they decided that they wanted to get startup experience. So rather than joining a startup led by someone fantastic, they decided that they had to do it on their own. And so they might not even be ready to be the CEO…”

“Any, any, and by the way, any, any CEO that says I'm going to sell the company in four years for wide dollars to this buyer, like probably move on to the next deal.”

“Like, I, I think to be a successful entrepreneur in the first place, at least for me, I feel like I'm an optimist. I want to make positive change, positive impact on the world. Uh, and I'm also a perfectionist, which like drives me to do well, but I think those two things also make me probably not the best scrutinizing…”

“We understood from the first day that, um, people are not going to travel in India for something like this. You'll have to take it to them.”

“there isn't a set formula for valuations in this, at least in the exhibition space, it's a multiple of revenue. Profitability, um, a mix between a multiple of the revenue and profitability.”

“If you don't like the people who are looking to do an investment deal with you before you've even closed the deal, don't close the deal. There's an old adage that says, if people show you who they are, believe them. And if people show you who they are and you don't like who they show you to be, don't imagine they're…”

“However, if you're trying to scale a trashy value proposition, or if you're trying to get a trashy value proposition to market, it's also accelerating the trashy part. So having proper conversations with potential customers is still key, because that's, I don't see AI taking over that.”

“For that target, multiply by 10 should be the pipeline of our industries, because conversion is, takes one is to 10.”

“when I was talking about the cluster, I said, make a cluster as a product. Where it came from, right? It came from a learning of my copied style of functioning that, or learning from that, that until I have to find a new product, I will not be able to sell the product.”

“in the context of, uh, six hundred billion market cap company that Visa is, um, what we do financially is not going to move the needle”

“if you're really selling to enterprise buyers, um, having something that's like 20% better than what they have today is not going to do it, right? Because there's a lot of, a lot of work. Like I've gone through the procurement process at companies, like it's an investment, right? To onboard a new supplier, to change…”

“you might be working really hard on something that can, that then gets Completely obviated by a product release from a large company. Um, and that's even faster now than it has been, um, in previous cycles.”

“You know, a GCC is at the top of the food chain. You cannot start a location with GCC. You can, GCCs come somewhere along the journey. So, you know, you've got to start with services companies. You've got to have the infrastructure. You've got to have the universities. You've got to have the upscaling mechanisms. GCCs…”

“adding a feature is almost never solved to go to market problem.”

“So the signal isn't in the response. The signal is in the usage and we didn't have the usage.”

“And so, you know, as Josh Koppelman calls it, solving the penny problem, getting someone who has skin in the game, it's huge. It's, it's a, it's a step function, right?”

“I think the other piece of advice related to this go to market that I tend to give entrepreneurs when I'm advising and mentoring them is you got to think of it almost as a series of experiments. To the point where sometimes I'll even start to make a spreadsheet. We have a spreadsheet inside dash labs of like, here's…”

“taking an investor on the board, right? It's kind of a one-way door. It's, you can't really fire board members. Um, or if you can, like, it can be very difficult and painful. Um, take an investor on your cap table who doesn't really have any rights. They can be annoying, but they really can't do much.”

“AI is meant for predicting things where we don't have perfect knowledge, and so that's just a fundamental, you can see it as a limitation, but you also can see it as really, I think of it as a benefit of AI, because there are all kinds of algorithms that We couldn't have without having something that is predicting or…”

“Cause the big unlock that most people have yet to experience is going beyond chatting with an AI system to having it work for them. But most people I find have a really hard time of cresting the idea of Having it do work for you without going through these baby steps of getting up to understand it.”

“So my suggestion usually to everybody is start with the biggest and you can test the smaller ones to see if they keep up or keep well enough for what you're trying to do. But if it really matters, start with the biggest and then use a tool like swept to speed Cut it down to potentially an extremely small model that…”

“It's not, it doesn't have maybe emotion and movement, and so we're calling it slop, and it's a, it's a natural reaction to we don't, it's, uh, we used to talk about it in CGI as the uncanny valley. It's something that feels really close to human, but there's something wrong with it.”

“the companies who are winning are the ones who have excellent understanding of their internal operations of how these things work, and they can go, well, we do this, and it's not quite an assembly line. There's still creativity and maybe the results or the judgments that are made, but they understand the workflow. As…”

“the other problem I see is the constant reward mechanism of keep the conversation going of it always asks you a follow-up, which is not great for workflows. I want my workflow to stop, not to continuously work.”