The Wisdom Wall

“don't use things like we're a family. I treat you like my family. Okay. Which is like a little bit true, but not true enough. And instead we're a professional sports team and we all got to fight every year to keep our position. Because if we can upgrade, we must to achieve the winning of the championship, which is…”

“But, but the thing people may not realize is the managers of the VC group at the large endowments have no incentive to try and right size this number. In fact, many of them are bonused on paper marks. And so, if anything, they have the reverse incentives to get them right.”

“every single day that you are hitting your plan, you are destroying equity value.”

“And that now I think the billionaire class has become subservient to the posting class.”

“I think when people say that, for the most part, what you end up with, and I do mean the most part, is some form of excuses as to why, sure, this is not great, but it will be if you wait long enough.”

“Not to say that the board doesn't have other responsibilities, but I think ultimately they should feed into creating shareholder value. If you go back to both Milton Friedman and things that Warren Buffett have said, of course, boards care about the communities that they serve, the products, the employees, Uh, proper…”

“And there's a little bit of this, um, I think of it again like Jevin's paradox, but for, for labor, which is that we have people who become incredibly more productive. We actually, we've hired a lot more people because of that, because there's no shortage of work to do, and now with the assistance of Claude, you know,…”

“Founders were over-delegating their companies to these professional managers. I'm not disparaging them, but they were detaching themselves, and they were being managed, rather than managing the company. And it was really about not apologizing about how you want to run a company, being in the details. That was Founder…”

“the hamster wheel of VC doesn't actually allow us to be long-term. Because if you are having to spend a lot of money for employees and you're, you're burning a rate of you have to raise every, like, year, year and a half, you end up optimizing for that next fundraise.”

“Cause the weird thing is an early stage employee takes way more risks than early stage founder.”

“I think if you want to be successful, you can go look at every single industry and you can say, okay, who is the dumbest people and what makes the most money? And if you go like attack that area, Probably pretty good space.”

“You know, YC puts out this, um, you know, quest for startups. My recommendation is like, that should be a list of startups you should not start. Because by the time that gets so consensus that this is a good area or super interesting, the amount of capital and the amount of smart people, it's like, it's like, you know,…”

“the best cultures are really almost cult-like. You know, uh, your culture is highly differentiated. It should actually kind of be hard for someone to inorganically insert into your culture, otherwise it's not a very differentiated culture whatsoever.”

“And one of the easiest thing to do there is if you have access to the budget, which, you know, federal politicians do, you just start subsidizing things, which makes the problem worse in the long term. But, you know, the electorate likes it in the short term.”

“Now it's like a badge of honor to have low gross margins because we're like, oh, at least people are using your AI products. You know, if we see, like we get these pitches and they're like, I have an AI thing and I got 75% gross margins. I'm like, well, no one's using the AI stuff then. Like that's doesn't really seem…”

“I think people in general overestimate the value of R&D. Let me qualify. They think that generally pouring money into building stuff pays, pays off. It's really not true at all. What we find is that there's a very small number of things that pay, pay off handsomely, and most things are a waste of money.”

“I know a lot of people's PMs are like, oh, you can't invest in TSMC because geopolitical risk, and it's like, no, dude, you can't invest in fucking Apple.”

“the teacher in front of the classroom is like the worst way to teach kids. And there's all these ways where kids can learn two, five, 10 times faster. But it doesn't work in the teacher in front of the classroom.”

“The biggest issue, education is hard because you have to define the product, and your customer bases have very different needs, right? This is why when I talk about public school being impossible, you, parents do not agree on what the purpose of an education is, right?”

“You know, one of the things that I did not realize going in is how few parents actually care about academics.”

“the VCs who I believe are the most successful VCs and have had the most, you know, storied careers tend to be the people that take every single introduction I send them, and then the VCs who are still building their careers and I send them deals are like, oh, you know, I'm a little swamp for bandwidth right now. I'm…”

“early liquidity was the bug and not the feature of crypto. Um, people got rich too quickly and they stopped building things.”

“I would suggest that what we might be seeing is the exact result of everyone copying the Yale model. You know, Howard Marks famously said, you make a lot of money when you do something non-consensus and accurate. But what if everyone copies David Swenson? What if everyone goes to 50% illiquid? Will it still work? I…”

“Some of those characteristics are exactly what we look for in a founder. We like micromanagers. We like people that are in the weeds. We like people that, uh, fire fast.”

“All right, yeah, I mean, it is, it's a really interesting time because on the one hand, um, the Pax Americana that we kind of developed after 1945 and then refurbished in 1990 at the end of the Cold War, Is really in crisis, but if you step back a little bit, American power is not in crisis.”

“It's, it's like our, the networks that we built up, the way of dealing with the world, the institutionalized relations with Europe, and so on, those are all burning or crumbling, but the United States as a power, it seems to me, is if anything, thanks to the information revolution and sort of this Extraordinary raises…”

“So, you know, if you, if you lie enough, The marginal cost of your 10,000th lie is nothing, while the marginal law of your first, second, or third, the marginal cost is very high. So all of the normal constraints on, on political figures, reputation, reputational, and so on, he does not pay.”

“I think that one of the impacts of the internet is that people want to be ruled by people again”

“Once you have built this global system, you then do something extremely treacherous, which is you invite everyone else to participate in your system.”

“A lot of Chinese energy policy can be understood as trying to avoid the trap of dependence on the global economy. So, you know, they've, they're doing the solar, they're doing, um, as much hydro as they can, and, and some of our friends in the environmental movement are saying, oh, it's so wonderful. They're so green.…”

“if our AI companies, if our tech companies can only benefit from the internal American market, that's actually not enough to generate the revenue and growth that they need, even to stay technologically equal, say to China, much less be ahead and be and be super profitable.”

“The information revolution, I think, enables countries to use their own cultures, languages, and so on as, as platforms, and Turkey is more Turkish. It's, it's less like Europe now than it was 25 years ago. India is becoming more, I think Japan is becoming more Japanese, so that in the industrial revolution there was a…”

“And it's also for us as a, as, as the power that has the most stuff, we're actually the most vulnerable to technological change because we've got more, we've got so many tanks that the tank becomes useless. That's more of a problem for us than it is for somebody who's figured out the tank killer.”

“What you don't want to do is help Ukraine win a war with Russia. What you want is for Russia to feel that if they attack Ukraine, the consequences would be so terrible that it's just not worth doing it. You know, that's anything other than deterrence involves like long, difficult, expensive, divisive wars with…”

“Automating your foreign policy decision-making process increases deterrence, and so we've turned that over to the AI, and if the AI thinks you're doing this, wham, right? And anything less than that is, no, I'm leaving a human decision point because I might decide not to do it.”

“I like to say there's no bad chips, there's only bad pricing. And I will make any chip work at the right price.”

“We tell our customers, look, our average throughput is going to be very competitive, but our P 99, our 99 percentile latency is not going to be controlled. It cannot be. And in return, I'll give you unbeatable economics. And I think that's the right fit for background agents.”

“The trick is that it's going to give me better access to power that no one else is going to touch, because it is so annoying to deal with that kind of outage. And if my chips are cheap enough, they're probably not going to be Nvidia racks. And if my chips are cheap enough, I don't mind the capital cost of having idle…”

“You want to pick something and say, I think they've underpriced the impact of how short we're going to be on HBM. We're going to push really hard in this other direction instead, which, you know, as an aside, I do think is probably the thing to attack most.”

“I think there's a little bit of magical thinking, which I just invoked in terms of manufacturing and whether it be fabs, whether that be actuators, like all these sort of precursors, like the, I think the degree to which we are dependent on China is underappreciated. And is not something that is going to be fixed…”

“I think that market is so huge and so large that if the models did not improve at all from where they are right now, the economic opportunity is actually massive.”

“Consumers don't want to pay. So there's two things to understand about consumers that Silicon Valley has to relearn about every 10 years. Number one, consumers do not want to pay for software. And number two, consumers do not care about being productive.”

“AI is this probabilistic endeavor. Apple is the king of deterministic products. Like, a physical product, you ship that iPhone, you ship it once, and it's gotta be, it's gotta be good.”

“If we get to a world where we actually run out of power, that's probably good for NVIDIA, because in a world where we're totally constrained on power, we have to get the best efficiency, the best token efficiency, and I think NVIDIA is still the most token efficient, um, and so that is a good world for them.”

“We used to be building castles. Now we're building sandcastles. They're going to get washed away. And that's, if you don't think of software that way. You have to embrace it because if you were an artisan and you were like, Hey, I built these like perfect foundation and castle and there's this bricks and it was like…”

“I think it's actually a complete inversion of how product development used to work to how product development happens now. And product development, you know, it always used to be, so you'd always say like, hey, product managers, you trained, oh, the product manager shouldn't, you know, should understand the technology,…”

“So it turns out that now, all of a sudden, database migration, which used to be, like, the, like, number one thing you would not do in software, is, like, kind of trivial.”

“In software, if you have, like, that kind of, like, logical block diagram of, like, why it works and everything else, you're kind of 80% of the way there, and it's a matter of, like, go-to-market execution. In hardware, um, you're, like, two percent of the way there. Like, there's things like physics and, you know,…”

“recently, relatively recently, in the last few years, um, because outcomes have gotten so much bigger and these markets are bigger and everything else, The circle of high cash on cash multiple opportunities is bigger than just early stage. And it's not so, so big that like there's like a gazillion new companies in…”

“ultimately, you know, the AI natives with their growth rates sucked all the oxygen out of the room and all the interest, and the window was missed.”

“all open source taking share does is kind of take margin dollars Out of the, ah, frontier model layer, and effectively by, thereby, you know, there, there is elasticity, thereby driving token demand, you need more demand for compute, and the margins, you know, anthropic, and Open source, they all run on the same…”

“You can, in a lot of cases, get slightly better outcomes at half the cost. But again, that half the cost, I think a lot of people hear that, they're like, that's bad for AI demand. It's actually not at all because the cost the user pays has, you know, is just a function of the margin on the tokens, and you're literally…”

“We were pretty sure, although as you mentioned we underestimated, that as the models got better and better, If we could continue to drive costs down, the demand for AI at a sufficiently high level and a sufficiently low price was basically uncapped.”

“But we also knew that no matter how efficient they got, you know, at some level, what we are about is turning Electricity into useful intelligence, and we were going to need more of that. No matter how good we are at that other layer, given this observation about demand, we were just going to want more.”

“I think probably the biggest return right now is creative software ideas to sort of squeeze more intelligence out of the units of compute that we have. And my sense is there's like orders of magnitude to go there.”

“AGI is not actually about any single model. It's the model. It's the machinery that makes the models, and from model to model, we actually are learning new things. We're figuring out new science. That stuff is working amazingly well.”

“Compute fleet, you know, like the scale of the compute fleet, the ability to make more compute, I think that's like a very durable advantage.”

“In order to produce a lot more Permian gas than even these seven plus BCF pipelines being built, we're already modeling, you'd need much, much higher oil for longer.”

“if your, your first close is a billion dollars, you tend to tap out at two billion. Uh, because your first close almost always is your hard re-elect number. Um, that has been my experience.”

“I don't really think there's such thing as risk loving, risk aversion. I think that there are only people who actually Perceive there's no risk. I think that no one actually really invests with a lot of risk. I think that, that people actually convince themselves that the risk is far less than, than what it really is…”

“The people who do well in politics now are just optimized for content. They're basically content creators because the polling is the timeline.”

“I would argue that those have started to flip now, whereas like Wall Street, because all these businesses have gone public, uh, you know, on Wall Street, you're comped on RSUs, and you're, you're thinking like a firm, and you're, you know, maybe it's, especially at the top, the top end of the firm, you're, you're,…”

“the personal financial situation of a manager is an incredibly underrated thing to ask about, right? Like, um, if you have a couple hundred million dollars in the bank account, in your bank account, and you're raising a thirty million dollar, uh, fund, that's very different than someone who has a million dollars in the…”

“We're sort of recreating the feudal system from first principles where there are the lords, um, Elon, Uh, Zuckerberg, Dario, Sam, and they're sort of, they can sort of make landed gentry by giving out allocations, because these allocations are sort of these, sort of like the best, uh, uh, best example of generational…”

“I think there is a real philosophy that's some sort of, like, neo-Buddhist utilitarianism, uh, that underlies the, like, technological developments in Silicon Valley, and it's interesting because you see it, like, Will McCastle, uh, gets involved with SPF and FTX. There's these sort of thinkers, uh, Like Nick Land, um,…”

“the entire semiconductors and data center industry is built on buffer. And what I mean by that is every part of the stack from the EDA tools to the power modules, to the circuit boards, to the chip design and standard cells, everything is built to be general purpose for everything, not just in the data center, but IOT…”

“Am I worried about four-year paper in most of the software names? Probably not. I mean, they're contracted out. This is not a four-year issue. That, that paper should be money good. Would I be worried about holding 30 year credit on, on, on, on, uh... On Salesforce or Oracle or any of these things. I just think that…”

“when you're in a fund cycle, when you have to deliver returns to a fund, uh, and to your investors, and then think about the next one, you are consumed by the business that you're running. Investment outcomes are kind of a product. Uh, that you sell, but you are ultimately running a business. And so your business…”

“I think there's tremendous alpha in the largest cap, because if you think about it, a small cap, it just takes one person to, to figure out it's good and move it up, but it takes a hundred people, a hundred diversified PMs to realize Google's not a loser, it's a winner, and can we figure that out before 95% of those…”

“The Tranium III needs to ramp into production because it has a switch scale up network, which you really need to economically inference MOE models.”

“Like my rule of thumb is one percent market share is going to be worth a hundred billion.”

“bitter lesson adjacent is the fact that coding might be the shortest path to ASI and useful AI. Because if you're really good at coding, you can write yourself code to do anything.”

“The companies that are doing the best today, that are seeing kind of their values increase the most, that are creating economic value, Are the companies with the highest ratio, highest effective ratio of utilized GPUs per human.”

“And so th this idea of a variable cost that's like on the incremental to serve a customer is, is, is a little bit like it doesn't really fit our business, right? It tries to maybe fit our business into like a software paradigm, but that's, that's not the case.”

“that paradigm does not exist in a company like, like a software company or a factory, right? If you, you can't repurpose, if you have a bunch of people doing R&D and that's your R&D expense, they can't go and become cogs, right? And vice versa in most traditional companies. Here, You really have that fungibility that's…”

“there's no product managers in industrial design. Like, you are the PM. There's industrial designers, and there's engineers. And there's program managers. So the designer is the product manager. So a design product is one function.”

“I think people are basically born good founders or said differently. It's innate. You don't have to learn how to be a good founder. No one is born a good CEO, and the job of CEO is completely counterintuitive, and almost all of your intuition about what to do is wrong.”

“You do not want to learn on the job how to be a CEO. In other words, trial and error is bad for a CEO. You know why trial and error is really bad? Because you hire somebody, they build an empire, they leave, and now you get to unwind their empire, and it takes like four years. So you've wasted years.”

“This notion that great leadership is hiring great people and trust them to know what to do. Well, how do you know they're great if you're not auditing what they're doing? And you actually want to start hands-on under control and give ground grudgingly.”

“Every investor wants to go into big markets. I don't like big markets. Big markets have a lot of competition. Go into a small market and make it big.”

“The best businesses are ones that founders run and they reinvent and they create so much equity in such a great moat that then when they hand it off, they will endure and grow after them.”

“We had a dinner about, I guess it was a year ago Christmas, and I had four or five of my best risk takers at dinner, and we had the debate, is, is, ah, a great trader's born or made? I'd say it was unanimous agreement at the table that 70% of it is, ah, is nature.”

“your ability to implement something is not actually that important. Your ability to choose the correct idea for AI to implement, and then your ability to sell that idea, or sell what the AI has implemented, is what matters. Your ability to garner capital towards that is what matters.”

“Economic value that the best model can deliver is growing faster Then our ability to actually serve those tokens to people via the infrastructure. And so this gap will continue to grow and the model labs will continue to have expanding margins until people in the hardware supply chain, infrastructure supply chain are…”

“Is that incredible scientists have already cracked the code on most of the medicines we need to protect us from most of the diseases that will claim most of our lives.”

“if you've got a company that was like growing steadily, but then there's a big up round, it's probably the case that that up round is not even enough up. That if it's like a two X up round, maybe it should be a four X up.”

“I think you need to, at a minimum, put your first of a kind manufacturing co-located with engineering and then better yet, Uh, small scale manufacturing, mid scale manufacturing, maybe a large scale. You can push it somewhere else and go to a lower cost center as opposed to like Southern California where so many of…”

“Don't hire a GC and outsource everything. You lose total control. The schedule could be, it's not in your hands anymore. You need to build your own in-house engineer, procure, construct, EPC firm as a team to go run your construction projects because it's one of the hardest things about this is not just engineering,…”

“All crises is generally a cause from not credit issues or others. There's, they might start in other issues, but it's, it's mismatched assets and liability.”

“The two parts to it are, first part is the industrialization of the fundraising process, right? It's a liability gathering. So literally raising as much, as much capital as you possibly can, literally as fast as you can. So that's sort of the industrialization of the liability side of the fundraising side that comes…”

“if you have capped upside and you're earning a 10% return and all the collateral that your 10% is based on can literally be basically taken out of your collateral package overnight. Or for that 10% return, you can be levered up because let's say there's an AI disruption and some software companies reposition their…”

“There's no semi-liquid, ok? There's no such thing as semi-liquid. Like, anyone that's an investor that's been through a bunch of cycles, there's liquid, and then there's illiquid”

“So the way you get common sense is by essentially using chain of thought. So the robot enters a, a scene, Uh, and instead of directly starting to move, it thinks about what it was asked to do. So if it was told to clean up the kitchen, looks at the scene and says, like, okay, based on this, I should pick up the plate.…”

“a good learning method can actually like compensate for deficient sensing fairly well.”

“So what that means is that the bottleneck had actually shifted from the lowest level, meaning the robot's ability to physically do the task, to this, like, middle level, where now the system is more bottlenecked by its ability to interpret the scene and select the correct next step, which can be supervised with…”

“So LLMs make certain kinds of representations very convenient. They make it very convenient to basically turn text into other text. But that's not necessarily the best representation for what an embodied system needs to do. Like sometimes it needs to think about things more spatially, sometimes semantically, sometimes…”

“We're looking for, like, this one-to-one ratio. In a world where capital is a commodity, if you can build a business that's growing nicely while burning less than your, well, burning less than your revenues, you've got a pretty good business.”

“Our belief, for right or wrong, is that the competitive advantage of software company has never been about R&D. We're not building semiconductor chips. Like we're not, it's, we're not building biotech and pharma companies. This isn't that it's to build like chamber of commerce software. You too could build this. Like,…”

“These are, like, generalist topics that I can probably find a thousand people that have, like, pretty, like, interesting, compelling ideas and can go pretty deep on that. But you can't create value there. You can create value if you're, like, I am the number one person in the entire world at this little niche thing,…”

“And I think a lot of enterprise software companies, they, they cannot ingest like a huge amount of capital. Like if you give me like a billion dollars right now, I don't know if I grow it like, you know, a thousand times faster than I am right now. And I don't necessarily think I should.”

“However, the venture model only works is if you can grow above 30% off of a 1,000,000,002 billion dollar base, and you have to like really look inside yourself and be like, does my model make sense for that?”

“financial services is like, is a key pillar. Like you can argue that financial services is like the first end to war to our country, right? Like we start with sanctions. We start on cutting them off from the US, from the US trade. We start with that before we put boots on the ground.”

“this sort of structured career ladder with progressions, it's perfectly designed to make you feel comfortable that you are growing. Like, it gives you some belief that there's a linear path to follow and you'll learn these things, but actually it's all fake.”

“the maximal rate of learning will be coincident with your maximum ability to tolerate pain.”

“if you just are willing to do that serially, just keep jumping off the deep end, go after problems you're frankly not qualified to go after, but you, you know, there is some belief you have the raw potential to do, like, you turn into a superhero. I think that's actually why Palantra is a founder factory.”

“I don't think a flat org structure is optimal. I think that that doesn't actually work. I think what you want is an org structure that can crystallize, is the right structure to solve the problem as it exists today, and is able to reform as the problem manipulates tomorrow.”

“The biggest lie that we bought from globalization is this concept of we will do the innovation and they will do the production. And what you have to recognize is that innovation is itself a consequence of productivity.”

“The primes are just downstream of the consequence of the incentives the government gives, and I think the worst incentive is cost plus contracting. Your upside is, is capitated. You're not supposed to take any risk. The government basically pays for your R&D, so you have no skin in the game, and you're still able to…”

“So why don't we manipulate patent length and say, look, drug companies, if you make your worldwide supply of your branded drugs here in the U.S., I will extend your patent length such that you recover two extra capex investment to go do that. That's a simple business case that every pharma company would underwrite in a…”

“Those roles, those learnings have now been domesticated. And so instead of firms, you know, paying multiples of the cost to bring over a Western professional to do it, Those learnings are now, you know, domestic. And, and so it's cheaper, and they have those skills, and so they don't need the West anymore.”

“President Trump came out and made this comment about, uh, I want housing prices for those who have a house to go up. He also talks about making it more affordable to buy a house. And so, you know, you can't do both. Yeah. Unless there's just a massive government subsidy.”

“If you were to say, like, what is an important difference of Netflix versus these models is Netflix's content was differentiated. The models are more similar than they are different in that, like, you know, at any given time, uh, OpenAI may have a better model, Anthropic may have a better model, but, you know, a lot of…”

“I think if you're Google or you are OpenAI, the, uh, differentiating factor will not necessarily be that Google gives you a better answer. Like if we were just like to, you know, uh, query Gemini or ChatGPT on something, uh, I, I don't think it's the case that we would say definitively one will give you a better answer…”

“I saw a podcast recently with a, with a Google, uh, researcher who left, and he said, like, oh, I don't even tell my daughter to study. It's just like, go out and have a good time. I think that's like a very destructive, like, way of going through life. Like, you should go through life thinking that you want to achieve…”

“I don't think hedge funds are a good business. Our business, like, it's horrible. It's like, it's amazing cash flows. The cash flows really well. It has no terminal value.”

“It's so hard to find great people. To be great CEOs. It's like, how are we gonna find 10? So I think it's great to be able to buy one business every once in a while and send in your A++ players to get involved.”

“By the way, like technology solutions Work much better than policy solutions. That's it. That's the other thing. Like policy solutions, it's very hard to make anything work.”

“Now, if you have, uh, the data and you have enough GPUs, you can solve damn near anything.”

“If you haven't been at like Google or Facebook or open AI or anthropic and like somebody gave you hundreds of millions of dollars to try and build a giant model and you weren't like one of the main people, then you probably don't know how to do it because you can't learn it in school.”

“The best entrepreneurs will only work with the top tier firms because that's how you're going to recruit great engineers. That's how you're going to get follow on money. Like everything comes out of that. So you'd never take money from a tier two if you could get it from tier one. And so that's why the tier ones always…”

“So the agent companies have no option, but to also start building and offering a system of records. So every company I know is now trying to figure out how do I build the entire platform and not just a system that does some workflows. I think last year, everyone was like, oh, we can do workflows. We can build what is…”

“So pure self-serve product would never have any reviews of any kind. You're going to be immediately activated Go on, and we'll do checks in real time based on what you're doing versus banning you or stopping you.”

“The good news is the being first doesn't matter. Why? Because you control, especially if you're in category one, which we described, you control your first party inventory. In fact, being second or third, you can learn from the iteration of mistakes as the first one makes. Your inventory is not going anywhere.”

“The other thing I always recommend to CEOs is a board role is like a marriage. Uh, once you get into it, it's very hard to get out of. So never, ever, ever invite anyone to join your board before spending at least a year with them.”

“And then with declining talent density, you need a bunch of rules to protect against the mistakes. And that only further drives out the high caliber people.”

“I've tried to run software like a manufacturing plant and, um, reducing error. And putting in process. Um, and then that doesn't get high productivity or high talent. And we should manage, uh, software much more artisanally with inspiration rather than management.”

“one of the best things is to do large severance packages, like four to nine months of, uh, salary. Um, and so it feels expensive at first, but one is it makes the person who's let go, uh, feel a little bit better. Because they've got a bunch of money in their pocket. Two, it helps the manager do their job because then…”

“the test that we encourage people to use is if someone were quitting, would you try to get them to stay, to keep them? Um, because that turns out to be a good test, uh, relative to, you know, all the relief we sometimes feel when someone not great moves on.”

“You want to be totally independent of your thinking and not consensus oriented at all, but you want to know what other people are thinking. Otherwise you're, you know, flying blind. So I think there's a high value on information gathering opinions, but then not averaging them.”

“I'm here as a board member as an insurance layer. Okay. If the company falls apart, I will step in and be part of replacing the CEO. And that's basically the entire job, which is replacing the CEO well.”

“contrarian thinking most of the time is wrong. Right. And once in a while it's right. And that's when you get the big reward. But you have to say most of the time, contrarian thinking is wrong. Um, and the conventional thinking is right.”

“we're in lean back mode, um, with a TV and we're mostly wanted to tell us a story. If you think of young kids, Two year olds. They're half of the time. They're like, you know, daddy, read me a story. And half of the time it's daddy play with me. And these like are two different modalities, um, that are different. One…”

“there's a hundred companies that stream now, uh, consumers can't particularly tell a difference between them. So I would say that's now just become part of the base, um, uh, systems. And commoditized. What's unique is still being able to do the AI recommendations, uh, all the deep learning on what do you, you know,…”

“no one on planet Earth knows how or why scaling laws for pre-training work. It, it's actually not a law, it's an empirical observation, and it's an empirical observation that we've measured extremely precisely and has held for a long time, but our understanding of scaling laws for pre-training, and maybe this is a…”

“AI is the first time in my career as a tech investor that being the low-cost producers ever mattered. Apple is not worth trillions because they're the low-cost producer of phones. Microsoft is not worth trillions because they're the low-cost producer of software. NVIDIA is not worth trillions because they're the…”

“it actually turns out that as these models get bigger, you can no longer run an experiment on a thousand GPU cluster and replicate it on a 100,000 GPUs. You need to run that experiment On 50,000 GPUs, and maybe it takes, you know, days, and so there's a very high opportunity cost, and so you have to have a really good…”

“So as long as power is a governor, the best products are going to win irrespective of price and have crazy pricing power.”

“90% of the technological surplus is going to go to the end users. Like, just start with that as the assumption, whether it's consumer, whether it's enterprise”

“the vast majority of market cap creation is going to go to the market leader. And this is probably underappreciated. Like we see this all the time with our peers in the, in the growth investing industry, where they say things like, yeah, you know, even the number two player, like is going to be really viable. Like…”

“One of the problems with the industry is the fund, the five-year fundraising cycle. To, to be able to raise your next fund, you have to deploy at a certain speed, and you need to return capital at a certain cadence, otherwise you don't get to do the next fund. And if there is a winter of risk, like we've had for the…”

“the biggest difference relative to railroads and dot com, Is the funds are coming from really rich companies. The magnificent six who are printing money out of their dominant positions are reinvesting a lot of this money into the capex that's powering all this innovation. So it's very healthy. It's not junk bond…”

“I don't know how to write an algorithm for AI. I don't know how to build a data center. I'm not in a chip business. I just know how to, Create really great live events, monetize them, have a great user experience. And it's the opposite because data says data centers aren't the opposite bet. Live is the opposite bet.”

“I think the podcasting business is going to become like the cable business. It's going to become like Oprah.”

“it's an unbelievably powerful symbol because it has, it stores potentiality. So the mind can imagine anything. So it's the ultimate story in some sense outside of the greatest story ever told where both all your desires and fantasies can be fulfilled and all your anxieties can be patched to such a degree. Maybe that…”

“most good investors are, uh, they recognize patterns. So I've seen a certain business model work, and I use that to select their investments. If done right, this is a very successful way of investing. And then there are the bad investors and the amazing investors, none of which is a pattern recognizer. So they actually…”

“I find that if someone is eight out of 10 smart, they can only discern the sevens from the sixes from the fives, but the eight and a half, the nines, the tens for them look like the same, like a big batch of, oh, they're so smart. And so to be able to distinguish the tens from the nines and the eights, you need to be…”

“the next phase that we're, we're entering and the one that I'm, I'm seeing in our company is one where you start thinking about these LLMs really as, as part of your product and your pro Programming them. So you're no longer writing the same code that you used to write with the help of LLMs. Your code is the LLM now.…”

“the U.S., in my words, is really great at setting a lot of ladders in place, but its firms are no longer really great at climbing these ladders. It is really the Chinese firms that are able to climb all of these big technological ladders.”

“By contrast, China has been much more open than Japan. China, most famously, is well known for building Apple's iPhones and Tesla's vehicles, and it, the communist system recognized that it was so far behind technological leaders, mostly through open the doors, with some restrictions, to Western companies to produce in…”

“I think that China, um, throughout its imperial history has substantially lacked a liberal tradition, um, a liberal tradition meaning one that is interested in restraining the power of the emperor, um, and Um, you know, promoting the power of the individual or the family or the corporation.”

“repression can grow worse while technological dynamism grows richer.”

“Like right now, I would argue that if you're building an application, you're Margin shouldn't really matter that much. Like, people will often sort of critique the coding agents like they're hemorrhaging money. Yeah, but, you know, again, things are improving exponentially, and, like, the cost will go down…”

“It's why these companies need, you know, millions of GPUs to train on. Not for, oh, I'm going to make a million GPU model. But because I need to try a bajillion different things because I don't know what will work.”

“I think it's, like, tremendously hilarious that people are like, oh my god, this person's getting paid a billion dollars? It is infeasible. It's like, how could this person possibly be worth that much? Well, they're running the experiments on chips that cost, you know, a hundred billion dollars. If every wasted…”

“Like, the gross profit dollars are going to the hardware layer, um, from all of this, for sure.”

“All of these other revolutions have been human, have been capital goods that reduce the amount of human capital you need, whereas this is just creating human capital, right?”

“autoregressive pre-trading on the internet doesn't work to get you to AGI.”

“I have always thought that the best arranging room for that is a group of people who are in conflict with each other, usually past their point of endurance, meaning the longer you push it, I found over time that when you push people somewhat past their endurance, when they like say, oh, please, can I go home? And you…”

“when you're dealing with editorial matters or new ideas or things that aren't yet, There's no research that can help or guide you. It can only mislead you, because it will essentially tell you what the past factual base has delivered to you, which has no relevance to a fresh idea.”

“And then you give people more responsibility than they qualify for. Because in that forge, you find out who swims and who doesn't. And if you have that kind of environment, Out of it's gonna come pretty good people.”

“the sort of top down approach I think is, is riddled with errors in, in thought. Whereas if you kind of look at what's my selling price, how does it compare? So you, you kind of want to see that average selling price and then compare it to companies that are targeting the same number of customer universe. And that…”

“We decided to go right after the undergrad kids, because we realized it's a really hard job, and if you've actually been working at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, you kind of get spoiled. And you don't want to go back to picking up a phone and calling somebody up without any context.”

“I said this to my LPs. I think this last annual meeting stage is not a strategy to me. Like you could argue seed investing is a very different Skill set generally. But I'd say it's not like we're incompetent to look at something quite that early. We're not nearly as good as a lot of the guys out there, and we don't…”

“I think investing is pattern recognition and everyone can draw their own, you know, Graphs out of those patterns, but you know, that's fundamentally the core thesis. Like you could be the smartest guy in the world, but if you don't see the patterns or if you don't see the deals, guess what? Your track record is not…”

“if you look at generational firms, Risk appetite is probably the biggest challenge that it goes down. And some, once in a while they get a wacky successful investor who just re-energizes the firm's risk tolerance and it goes back up again, but more often than not, it gets consumed by, look, this is a great business. If…”

“Because that's not what software ever was. It was never a technology barrier. It was always a business knowledge barrier.”

“You can teach kids to be these self-driven learners where they learn these concepts and actually are excited to learn two, five, 10 times faster, right? They, Kids want to learn as quickly as they can. Um, uh, assuming you give them their time back.”

“AI allows you to do precise instruction to the student. So, and then second, measure the results. And if you take the AI out, Right? Your effect is dominated by the classroom.”

“So motivation is 90% of the solution. Okay. The ed tech is 10%. And so this, this is actually just hitting the ed tech and the software and all that stuff. Even though I come from the software ground, the prob ed tech has failed, right? We keep putting ed tech into schools and test scores keep going down. So there's no…”

“Part of the problem on, on schooling today is everything has to be nonprofit, right? The organization is nonprofit. And so then you just, you're caught up scaling, right? There are good school system, you know, charter schools out there, you know, um, where their gating factor is, well, I'm waiting for someone to give…”

“You're looking at what is your DCF. You're pulling the cash out. And if it goes to zero, right there built, you know, there's built to last. There's for, there's a cycle in the company where it's built to dot. Right. And you're just like this, this product is done. Right. And what you're just doing is managing and…”

“because of the 23 strategy document, there's always one line. That someone can attach to and say, see, I'm aligned. Cause you said something and he's like, you need to go create your strategy where there's no escape, where your message is so simple. That everybody can sit there and they have to read it. And if they…”

“If, if it, if 85% worked, I'd do that, but it doesn't. I'm pushing it to where it needs to be for it to work, and if all of a sudden you back off those, it's gonna fail for some reason, right? If you don't believe your school needs to have kids love school, they'll go instead of vacation, you know, it's not gonna work.”

“There's going to be resistance at the large end employers. They have benefit staffs of hundreds of people. This person buys pharmacy, this person by dental, and they just manage the whole process. You don't need all those people when you give the money to the employees and say, hey, go buy your own health insurance.”

“physicians, 760,000 or so, all work on a cash basis. That's their, their accounting model. The hospital systems and the facilities that provide healthcare around the country work on a revenue basis. As long as I have enough revenue coming in, I can win. And then you have insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies…”

“your zip code is far more important than your genetic code. Where you live matters more than what you are.”

“if you look at all the data in the art world, it tends to work like this, this cycle continuously where things that were iconic 20 years ago tend to be undervalued 20 years later, then get very highly valued 30 to 40 years later.”

“What I focused on was ownership as a relative metric as opposed to an absolute metric. And what I mean by that was, I knew I could get five percent ownership in these deals very consistently, and I knew the firms that I was co-investing alongside can get 15% ownership in these deals very consistently. And back then…”

“pretty much every multistage tier one VC firm, um, will do a seed deal at 10% if, if, if they have to. If you push them down to six or seven, it's just not worth it. They'd rather wait for the Series A.”

“I found I've had a lot of success with dilution sensitive founders... they tend to just be a little bit more high conviction on what they're building. And they tend to believe that every percent of equity they give away is one percent of equity they'll never get back. And that's incredibly powerful because more so…”

“it's hard for me to believe if I meet somebody That if I can't get a sense that this person is special, or has been special, or has done impressive things in their life, that the first impressive thing they're ever going to do is this company that they're asking me to invest in.”

“when those firms are competing for a hyper-competitive financing, it tends to be the same one, two, or three partners who tends to do most of the selling and closing for those deals to bring those deals home, and very few venture capital firms have more than one, two, and at the most three individuals that can…”

“any theme that is good as a shelf life of somewhere between 12 months and 36 months, because ultimately there's a lot of smart people out there, and all of a sudden it's a really good theme. It comes in and it's a good theme, then it's a less good theme, then it comes to Okay theme, that it comes a bad theme, and then,…”

“Biometrics are a feature, not a product. The product is the experience.”

“I've always thought late stage was a euphemism for big check, you know, because you, if there, there are people willing to put three hundred million in an AI company that's 12 months old. Right. So that's not late stage. It's just big check.”

“people that have watched Google or Meta, you know, go from Looking expensive at twelve billion to three trillion. Like, if they assume something might be that, they can't overpay in their mind. Um, which I think is rational for the independent player.”

“there is some chance in my brain, and I haven't Fully thought through all the implications of this, that some of the revenue growth is, is resale, um, of compute. And so many of the players in the market are reselling a wrapper on top of a foundation model on top of a hosting service. And many of them, I think people…”

“All the stuff you read in every Buffett letter will not apply, um, in that, in that world of, of capital competition.”

“The, the very best CEOs, and I put people like Barton and Vinny off in there. Even Mark at, uh, at Meta has said this. They believe being public makes them run sharper. And one, one other negative of these companies staying private forever is they're not getting that feedback.”

“It's actually true of every venture capitalist in the world because you got a 50 50 shot when you change the CEO. And why would you put that risk on, um, on your portfolio?”

“we're in the middle of this just generational shift in the way everything gets capitalized, and the, the traditional relationship between investor asset manager, bank asset manager, S&P 500 issuer, and private alternative firm that is deemed to be more, you know, more of a private equity investor really stepping in and…”

“When we were in the recession and we had all this time to kind of look back at our track record, the best deals that we did were always ones where we put in either us or someone just like us to go run this business who knew nothing about the industry, but had these. Patrick O'Shaughnessy: Just raw, raw talent. Graham…”

“And actually, so actually my biggest job to enable AI is not AI engineering. It's old school engineering, exposing all this, these, this data that we have so that you can have a reasoning engine reason for you as a product person, or actually for me as a consumer potential over my own data in real time.”

“there's a big problem with technology companies is they optimize for growth at the expense of durability. But if you look at when do these giant companies, and he said tech companies, but you see this in all these companies, Raising Cane's is another example, where like they actually make more money three, four, five,…”

“overpay for talent because you can't really overpay for talent.”

“if you pulled everybody at this company and you asked them, are your best days ahead of you or behind you? What would the proportion of people say? And especially the most important people. It's not like year over year growth. It's not margins. It's not like strong form competitive advantage. It's not JDC. All of those…”

“the best companies and the worst companies at the Series B or Series A kind of trade at approximately the same multiples. There's exceptions here and there, but, but by and large, very few people could actually tell the difference between the two.”

“You find an idea or a young person, so that could be a director or an actor or an idea from Michael Crichton, and then you develop it, and then you finance it, you get it money, then you help them shape the business or the package, then you cast it, and then you get a distribution, and you market it. So that's the…”

“There's also a lot of room for owning just fantastic businesses that, to your point, whether you have an A plus CEO or an A minus, I'm not sure it really matters that much on the margin. We just want to make sure we're not paying too much for them, right?”

“The game of, you hand me an earnings release, and I'll tell you what the stock's gonna do, was actually a fundamental game that we were pretty good at a decade ago. Now, it's like, coin toss. What's the setup? You tell me. What's the whisper number? What are the, how are the pods lined up? Are they longest? Are they…”

“One of the lessons I learned from the Middle East is that if people aren't screaming at you, you're not on the right track, because everything I went in and said and did for the first three and a half years, everyone was screaming at me.”

“and, and really, from the time of Louis XIV right up until now, you could sort of argue the dominant theme of Global power politics has been this rise of this English-speaking maritime commercial liberal order, um, and then it's being contested successively by a series of great power continental states, France under…”

“I think since the 17th century, the key to power in the modern world is which countries can be most effective at Developing, harnessing, exploiting the power of new technology without blowing up internally because of the social stress and upheavals that new technology causes. And for a lot of reasons, I think first the…”

“It's not the case that Fable finds a superset of all bugs in software. You would find some bugs with a very small model that you don't find with a large model.”

“The long lens view to take on this is that we have, we have a form of intelligence that can tackle any verifiable problem. Any verifiable problem means most software. It means a lot of formal, like math proofs and similar. And it could also mean scientific discovery”

“And I would say the original sin of Transformers is that you've taken this extremely fundamentally memory bound layer and juxtaposed it right next to a compute bound layer. It is very difficult to have a single chip that is good at both compute operations and memory operations.”

“the signal you get from random human preference, or I guess unconditioned human preference, is not actually worth anything anymore. You want expert human preference at this point.”

“Basically, the idea is that if you want artificial general intelligence, the best way to get there is to just keep stacking specialized intelligences until you have no more gaps to fill.”

“And I think what's interesting about token consumption or AI consumption broadly is that it's no longer speculative. People buy tokens because they're immediately valuable to them. You don't hoard tokens, you use them immediately.”

“NVIDIA is really smart about this. They don't compete with their customers. NVIDIA takes a long view on everything. Um, why don't they even start with the NeoCloud? Why don't they just sell computer out the back door? Well, NVIDIA is really good. Jensen is really good at making his friends billionaires. He's made…”

“Like, he wants to create a diverse community of NeoClouds and inference providers who are all jockeying to create demand for NVIDIA, such that if any one of them Decides to, I don't know, vertically integrate or go with AMD or any other option. He's got three more people ready to, hungry to fill that position. It's…”

“The way to solve the geopolitical problem of Dependence on TSMC is to come up with a compute use case that is so massive that everyone is economically incentivized to bring other people up to speed. And then we get the sort of geopolitical insurance for free.”

“For meta, AI-generated content, to the extent they're the ones generating it, is actually a worse margin profile than what they have today, because what they have today is free.”

“Basically there are three things that we know how to do to speed up deep learning in hardware. Still till this day. Increase the number of cores. Increase the communication between cores. Bring the memory closer to the compute. Those are the three things. That's it. Those are only three dimensions that we know in…”

“Repetitive tasks in controlled environments is, like, more or less solved, and, like, you know, that'll continue to happen. But having tweaked tasks in real-world environments, that's where you need the AI. Like, that's where you need the AI plus the, plus the robots. And the trick with it all is you need a model that…”

“memory is, the more memory you put, With flop for a given unit of compute, the more tokens you get out. It's the single most important thing you could do to increase kind of token output per unit of compute.”

“One, like a boring one, is that AI is just very jagged. It's like superhuman genius in some ways, like dumb toddler and others. And people have, so far, extremely complementary skills to AI.”

“I think the most expensive money is borrowing money from your friends, because if you don't give the money back, your friendship is not the same anymore, but they trust you, and they want to see you do well, and their desire minus fear, which is, we talked about persuasion, their fear of losing money Is subordinate to…”

“I have never seen a committee, a consensus decision-making process, make a contrarian bet, unless the group is designed to make contrarian bets.”

“you have to have the courage, then, To lose the people who actually were the people who invest with you because you were contrarian. In other words, you have to have the courage to get past the innovator's dilemma. And so, if there's a set of folks, high net worth family offices, endowments, or whatever it is, or small…”

“So the first mistake that everybody makes is that they think that the logic Is where you're winning it. The logic actually is an output of a successful sales pitch, not the input.”

“It's very difficult for those companies to get funding because the story is, well, okay, fine. You grew 200% last year, but you know, you're only on an absolute terms. You're only at eight million of revenue and you're seven years in. Whereas I think literally if you just change the name and told a different story and…”

“someone just needs to sort of set the story and set the narrative and it doesn't even have to be right. But there's just a sort of confidence of like, this is what's going on. This is happening. Follow me, almost. When those come together, they just set a new narrative that everyone can kind of rest on for, for a…”

“the podcast world is still sort of highly naive to, um, serving content to the algorithm. Like, you know, if you get deep into the, like, Twitter group chats, especially now that they've posted the algorithm, like, there are all these, like, very specific things that you can do around replies and likes and length and…”

“I think a small amount of tastemakers read the books and then other people look at books And if they're like sort of blessed by the right people, then there's sort of this like mimetic, um, celebration of the thing.”

“Probably the most like enlightened way to consume this media is to not read it yourself and just sort of get the filtered takes from people around you at dinners and lunches and stuff. And you just sort of let them, you know, first of all, expose themselves to the radiation and then like kind of come back and tell you…”

“the current paradigm in which we live, The largest and most important finance firms come out of a culture of leveraged buyout, which first of all, it's a debt driven idea. It's financial engineering. It's, um, it's extractive insofar as the primary goal is to make a thing more profitable. And I'm not trying to…”

“Where should I put my 500 grand check? You probably shouldn't put it into like, you know, marginal five billion dollar growth fund... if you're a principal that can't write like sovereign or institution size checks, you're a totally different customer and the businesses are not designed to serve you as a customer. Like…”

“especially for an emerging manager, when you're truly just sort of underwriting the person, I think people still fail. They probably overweight the, uh, in my view, they, they overweight the investing thesis and track record and stuff and underweight just the like facts about the person.”

“I think a lot of the investing media actually serves For the people who are really good to dress up those ideas in a way that makes them feel differentiated and smart enough to what is actually sort of just long Elon or long Bitcoin.”

“I think what's so important in any sales pitch, which is what a job description should be, is, uh, disqualifying who you don't want. And the nice thing about a divisive statement is that, um, it, when it resonates, it deeply resonates with the person.”

“tech views itself as, you know, the ultimate philanthropy is the business that you're building. I don't think Silicon Valley today has the same sort of reflexive Need to justify or document or even launder sort of what they're doing through, you know, through going to book parties and, and, and arts and, and all this…”

“I think public markets are Substantially more difficult to hold than private markets.”

“So one is, it's a creative task. And so if it's a creative task, we need to leave it somewhat open-ended. A lot of companies that counter position to clay or in the space are like, hey, what you really want is salespeople are, people have literally used the word coin operated, right? And so what you need is something…”

“I think capitalism rewards risk, um, more than anything else. It's not, I think a lot of people think it rewards, it's like meritocracy. There are a lot of people who are working really hard, or hard work, which I think is silly. Um, there are a lot of people working really hard and not making a lot of money. Um, so…”

“I think you can create from a place of wholeness, and in fact, you will be less destructive in the world.”

“whenever you're picturing the future or anticipating the future, You're actually, it's kind of like Freud's death drive, right? You're actually just, the only thing that happens in the future is you die, you know, like the far future, whatever it is, and so you're accelerating that, um, and as soon as I had that…”

“when you're going from a 150, for example, to 300 people, you don't want to take the risk of doing something new, you're like, these people did it, but then you're going to get the same problems that they had.”

“a death doula for companies is, hey, if your company has achieved its mission, should we help it pass? Maybe it should have children and, like, people come out and they do cool stuff, but maybe we can institutionalize these things rather than trying to scale things that become zombies or become worse versions of their…”

“generally, you want to, um, when something gets to sort of 30, 40% penetrated, then you stop having exponential growth, which means the sell side catches up, and there's no longer big beats.”

“management teams would go out in the case of a spinoff. And do a road show that would present a very conservative view. Some might even say sandbag the numbers. Why? Because people are always creatures of incentives. Their incentive package would be set at the time of the spinoff.”

“I think if you look at a lot of the people who have underperformed or haven't survived the last decade or so, when people are really stuck on the idea of, of deep value, low multiples, and being really stubborn about How they viewed businesses and less flexible about moving into higher multiple companies or growthier…”

“I think if you're on a board because you are either getting status or you're getting income and that's your primary reason for doing it, not for representing shareholders, then that's where we come in to try to, um, disintermediate that, um, and take away some of the status or increase the cost of, of doing that.”

“the government actually really wants the companies to do this. It's really the management teams that are more entrenched, because the shareholders and the government kind of want that”

“If you buy too much compute, you go out of business. If you buy too little compute, you can't serve your customers and you're not at the frontier.”

“And the way to get to product market fit is to just create a six or seven star experience. But you can't create a six or seven star experience without going beyond. In other words, go beyond the edge of reality and work backwards.”

“When I tell somebody it's not good enough, I'm not saying you're not good enough. I'm saying I see potential and you don't see in yourself. That is the most motivating thing you can do, to say I believe in you and I believe you can do even more. And people will, they will, they will, they will climb a mountain for that…”

“people are not solving for this massive bazooka. People are solving for something that helps them to lose some weight, stabilize and be there. And I think that's really interesting because what that means to me is that what people really want is something that's going to give them a health advantage, but it's going to…”

“Most medicines that we need to be on for the rest of our lives that are going to be providing the chronic care, the different layers of that defensive health stack that will protect us from these diseases, those medicines today are priced as similarly to acute treatments, yet they need to be taken over decades.”

“And so if there's a trend inherently, you have many companies going after the same trend, you're going to have new entrance. It's become a thing. It's not about one company. It's about the theme. And if there's a theme, that's not about one company, then it's about many companies. And so, you know, how is it not the…”

“I think the, the thing that's most linked to stagnation is probably being a cost plus industry where there's very little incentive for progress, not much incentive to, to bring the cost structure down. And therefore you end up with this, like this fixed market size that never kicks off because, um, you just get kind of…”

“And in fact, you should just concentrate into the fewest number of companies possible and don't dilute your average returns by indexing.”

“The, the low competition thing typically would be associated with lower valuations, but I think that's trying to find value deals in venture is dumb idea. It's not the right plan.”

“every one of those interfaces that crosses another company is typically a fixed interface that's not going to move very quickly. And so you have to treat it as fixed. And so everyone's designing their individual piece against preconceived interface requirements. And you end up with a really calcified architecture of…”

“All that ultimately matters is a few companies per vintage, and you just have to be into those. And so certainly as a VC, much more than even private equity or hedge funds, as a VC, you don't actually have to work that hard meeting everybody. You can dive in as much as you want into specific companies and value add and…”

“when you look at post-World War II with this separation of commercial banks and investment banks, you basically have really after post-World War II, Kind of, 50 years, a pretty stable system other than the SNL crisis in the 19 eighties, which was a big event. It was a pretty good system, but the system wasn't optimized…”

“the wealth space in general, just for, for, just from a historical perspective, it is, it is typically the easiest to raise, the simplest to raise. It's typically the cheapest. That doesn't mean that they're not smart, just the cheapest. But the other characterization of the wealth space is that it's always easiest to…”

“any time society or finance system puts, you know, wealth or retail individuals next to principal risk taking, if you look throughout history, there's, that's where problems start to happen.”

“There can be good legislation, but there's a risk that it's not the right guardrail and it's not good for competitiveness. And it creates like the next crisis, the best. Answer is a market mechanism like you have within institutional investors, where if you do irresponsible things or you're not a good investor, if you…”

“the idea that you're gonna have a narrow investment strategy when the world's changing so much. You're gonna have oscillating supply-demand dynamics of good time, bad time. Like, it's just crazy to raise it, or too narrow strategy, unless you, like, Put a governor on the amount of capital raises.”

“So in my mind, the most important thing to get right is, um, To get the system to be general, and in particular, to get it to be general with respect to how it can be improved, right? So, for example, hand-designed robotic controllers are not very general with respect to how they can be improved because it requires…”

“And I think that's, that's like, there's something interesting there, because it suggests the power of generality, that when you have this, this kind of general system, you can really just, like, onboard all these crazy tasks without really doing anything particularly sophisticated.”

“Well, that's not often the best assumption because you need the right kind of data. Like, Maybe some data is easy, like, it's easy to get, like, videos of people doing something, but that doesn't mean that's the right kind of data, and it might be domain dependent, it might be dependent on the, on the, your thesis…”

“We actually, I, I, for one, strongly believe that if you think in If your budget in twenty-twenty-four for twenty-twenty-six was to have a 150 software engineers, you should still have a 150 software engineers, because those software engineers can be, like, exponentially more productive, and they can then create more…”

“and actually that like agents appear to consume more resources and actually people. And so like the, some of these consumption based models, like the growth of companies”

“as a founder, if you're building in like, I don't know, like AI or like stable coins or something that San Francisco believes is very consensus, but the world does not believe yet. That's actually a great operating environment because you can go and you can have these like outlandish ideas that other people are going…”

“financial services tend to be most innovative and most progressive in like their worst countries.”

“if you're an early stage founder, like you're going to lose probably 50 to 75% of your equity value due to dilution alone. You may lose 10 to 80% of your upside Buy the preference stack.”

“there's a reason that like margin lending and private companies is not, um, is, is like not a great business because when you want to take collateral that stock, that's usually the exact time when you do not want to hold that private stock.”

“So I think one of the best determiners for success of founders is can they find the most boring thing humanly possible interesting? And can they find that interesting over a multi-decade period?”

“One of the best kind of shifts I think Silicon Valley has done is we now are like, Hey, like Silicon Valley, we take an active role in the national security of the country. I, we, we didn't six, seven years ago, even though like, like America, like American society, American GDP growth is even more than ever completely…”

“all of your contributions to the world are going to come from your superpower. Like everything else is basically a waste of time.”

“there are some set of weaknesses you have that aren't just like, hey, I'm not like, I'm kind of average, or I'm maybe a standard div below average. It's like, you're like six divs below average here. It's not like something you can work on. The only strategy for Superman around kryptonite was to avoid it.”

“our conception of, of war is kinetic. It's like the lone heroic cowboy against the odds winning through heroism. Their conception of war is deception. It's the, the general who tricked the adversary to get into the valley and then flooded it. You want to win without firing a shot. And so a lot of the things that are…”

“The person is the program. Like, don't forget that Edward Hall built the Minuteman, and Schriever was the Air Force General that oversaw our ICBMs, and that we call it the Apollo program, but it was actually Gene Krantz's program, and the primacy of those people and getting the right people in those roles is…”

“Really quickly with a skilled but low-cost labor force and then add on the robotics has just allowed China to create a quality product at a price that nobody in the rest of the world's really been able to figure out yet.”

“I think the 20 thirties on is, who knows? The assumptions that you have to go into any model on this, you know, have such wide air bars, and you extrapolate out that many years, and you just create a garbage in, garbage out model.”

“The opponents to projects have gotten very clever about how to use, you know, the existing regulatory laws to delay and delay projects and in doing so, can often kill them.”

“And meanwhile, the researchers have kind of known for years that what's more important than the penalty, you know, if and when you're caught is probability you get caught. A lot of people who are, who are committing crime, you know, don't have that, you know, the ability to process. If I get caught, will I have a five…”

“You can regulate outputs rather than inputs in the system, and so, you know, I've been very favorable to, um, having the government try to get out of service, being the service provider in K-II, right? That, you know, the government doesn't do a great job of, Being both the regulator and the service provider, but the…”

“I rarely have seen, uh, any company succeed trying to do, go after Multiple end markets at the same time. Um, you know, it's usually you have an A team. An A team is focused on one thing. Uh, your culture as a company is oriented towards, uh, either consumer or enterprise.”

“if you're going to do it ultimately, uh, one, you can't really compete against companies that are using ads if you're not. Very hard. If you're ultimately gonna do it, you might as well start earlier, because you have to build a culture around, you know, um, it just takes time.”

“Autos are a bad business. It could be software autos, hardware autos. It is a bad business, and it's a really tough business to scale, uh, and very capital intensive.”

“There are tons of people investing in things that are just based on stories, like because of social media and because of Robin hood. And, and so there's just endless amounts of shorts.”

“Because to grow a brand like that is very hard. A lot of time and dollars. In case of Burger King, yes, we can grow the brand further, but it was about... Easy to open stores of a brand that everybody already wants.”

“The internet is here, so if you want to use AI, if you want to apply it to your business, you just do it. Like, there is no infrastructure that needs to be built to adopt the thing.”

“And the problem is if you create a system that tries to correct that, it doesn't make things more fair. It just, Transfers all the power to the person running the system. And that's what happened with Stalin. That's what happened with Ceausescu. That's what happened with Pol Pot. That's what happened with Mao.”

“Only the leaders got the context. So even if they're smarter than you, you still likely can have better judgment because you have all the knowledge.”

“most CEOs, Aren't as interested in investing as they think they are. Uh, and then also most CEOs aren't as good at helping somebody else learn the job.”

“So you need an investing team of like four or five people, but you, you have to, you can't address the whole technology market with five people. So you have to have multiple teams.”

“What we'd come to find out is that business would be very, Operationally complex, um, difficult to scale. You know, ultimately, as you scale that business, it starts to look more like a call center, and you'd be, um, inclined to start to automate away the very human you were selling in order to build anything that had…”

“I've come to look at it more like keeping a pretty broad funnel and hiring a lot of people. And then, you know, over the first year you really get to know them and you can figure out, um, what you want to do. Do you want to keep them or not?”

“If you over manage, for example, a tight process or specific hours that you have to be in the office or a wide variety of things, you filter out, uh, performance and creativity. And the looser that you can run, the more creative that the organization will be.”

“But it's getting us close to that edge of chaos where there's last minute saves and a lot of dynamism, uh, as you can possibly tolerate as opposed to say a semiconductor factor. which is trying to reduce variation and reduce error to get rid of variance. If you're going to be a creative organization, you want to be…”

“And often those are the best stocks when you go study the markets because you're already in a, in a physical world business where the technology advantage transitions into a physical mode advantage or a distribution or scale advantage.”

“the very best businesses that leverage technology leverage it in a way where they use it to lower costs and drive revenue that result in them gaining 30% or more incremental market share in their end market, and then they take that unit economic advantage. And they reinvest it in something that is persistent, even if…”

“if you get together every quarter and something deviates a little bit, You tend to excuse it. Of course, if it deviates a little bit for 12 straight quarters, actually, it's kind of staring you in the face.”

“if you're a small company, You don't have to be gap profitable, and you don't even have to have an ROI that is above your cost of capital, but you do have to show progress in your, your path towards it.”

“like one of Karpathy's great things was with software, anything you can specify, you can automate with AI, anything you can verify, you can automate.”

“I don't know that we're going to be curing cancer, but I do think from a ROI, almost an ROI S curve, we need to kind of hand off from intelligence to usefulness. And then usefulness will then have to hand off to scientific breakthrough, you know, just that creates whole new industries.”

“So the lowest cost energy, um, available in our solar system is solar energy and space, ok?”

“So if you can link these satellites in space together using lasers, you actually have a faster and more coherent network than in a data center on earth.”

“One of the things that I say about push businesses, which is, you know, you gotta go sell it. Like sometimes those are really successful and there's industries where this is the case, like cybersecurity and things like that. They don't tend to get easier over time. Like they tend to get harder. Like if you have to go…”

“if we are going to scale, you can't scale an organization with like 25 or 30 decision makers around the table. It's too hard. Like you can't make a trade-off between should we put an incremental dollar into a bio fund investment or a crypto investment, or how should we think about reserving this versus that?”

“A dominant platform will always be worth more than six times EBITDA.”

“the reason we do well in Latin America is we don't have a Latin America fund. Because if we had a Latin America fund. We're going to buy at the top and sell at the bottom.”

“one of the traps of our industry is you can only fundraise when things are very expensive because that's when everyone's on FOMO.”

“these generations of entrepreneurs, people who are in their thirties and forties, they're all children of the cultural revolution. Everything was taken away. From these families. Everything. And they are scarred, and they have something to prove, because they think something was stolen, and they will get it back. So…”

“You want to get going. You want to get deal experience. You want to get notches on your belt. And that's completely wrong, wrong, wrong instinct.”

“And then you have to be a specialist. Can't be a generalist anymore.”

“Um, we're also low trust cultures. The, um, even though most of them are religious, doesn't mean you can trust. So a higher percentage of the time you may find yourself with a crook, uh, across the table. So the value of referencing Is, is, is much more important. And how to do a good reference is super important…”

“For an investment, you do it with the family that has given you money to make investments. And you say, João, we're about to invest two hundred million dollars in this entrepreneur. Uh, you know his father, you know his grandfather. Do you think we should take this risk? And he's like, oh, no fucking way. He's a crook,…”

“For the mentoring to be impactful, I have to make it so obvious that it's so stupid, they haven't yet focused on this, that they're like, I'll show him. And then they act on it.”

“The new is, is really just the obvious uncovered through systematic trial and error over a certain period of time. So that by striving to stay within the obvious and trying to find a variation on the obvious, I think you have a higher chance, at least in storytelling, of, of discovering something novel that will still…”

“I think that's a recent meaning in the last 3040 years, uh, phenomenon where, where, Storytelling became entertainment almost exclusively, and, and I, I don't think that's really the genealogy of that space at all.”

“I think everything is about status and, and, um, every scene is about status and, uh, every scene is about a power differential is what we find relentlessly fascinating. Every interaction is, is, um, about status.”

“People love to just disappear and amass, right, and be relieved of the burden of individuality. But this is possible because someone has a will to power and steps up and says, I will do it.”

“we saw almost no correlation between the teams we considered more talented and more hardworking and those who came out on top, and so we concluded probably, I mean, it's not a huge sample, but probably to go from zero to one, Luck plays a huge role. There are so many factors and variables that you, you know, even if…”

“It's absolutely guaranteed to create at least some perverse incentives, because nobody can set perfect incentives. The world is too complicated. It changes too fast. For sure. So, even if you are a genius, uh, whatever you set as incentives will be imperfect.”

“Perhaps because they have this, they have to be so paranoid about the downside, this breeds in them a thoroughness, a thoughtfulness, that's not always the case with equity investors, for whom maybe that intuition of, oh, this team, this thing could go far is more important, like catching the big wins is more important…”

“I often find it a much better way to build credibility with them and trust if things break and you fix them very quickly as opposed to, uh, if they just don't care and don't notice anything about the products and whenever it's like one of my favorite things to do is just be, uh, Very quick to respond when a customer…”

“I'm a lot more interested in, in essentially assembling the Avengers at the company where everyone has like a clear superpower than a lot of people who just check the box on 10 things. It's like, if you're looking, the more things you are looking to Vet someone on, the more likely you are to get, ah, average people,…”

“you can, Get a lot of precision on how long things take, or you could do them a lot, you could do them very fast. It's hard to get both, because if you start to put a lot of importance on like measuring, uh, in advance, how long you think things will take and estimating them. Exactly. Right. It's like, you end up, uh,…”

“I think process, like best practice process are a good way to like move you to average on a, on a, in a discipline if you feel like you're below average, but often some of the people who are like most extreme on how fast I move or on any dimension that you're trying to measure tend to do things, um, in a very odd, non…”

“it's very easy to want to try to avoid that by hiring people who are purely incredibly loyal. And I don't think that's a good idea. It's like, I, I see it as a sign that we're hiring the right people.”

“Chinese and Americans are more alike than any other people.”

“I think the fundamental problem of among lawyers is that they are, for the most part, protectors of the rich. And, and that is essential in some ways, because you can't build companies worth four trillion dollars, like Nvidia, without substantial legal protections.”

“China is, is a Leninist system, uh, like the Soviet Union. But it has a thriving, substantial consumer economy, which is doing superbly well in terms of creating all sorts of products that the Soviet Union never created. All it did was a ton of heavy industry. It produced a lot of steel and chemicals, very little goods…”

“one of the, my conclusions, one of my new realizations after writing this book is that Maybe there can be too much state capacity. Maybe you don't want a state to be too efficient. Now, if the engineers are too efficient, and they really decide to track society, um, to go off track, they can go really off track before…”

“the other property, which I think is a little underrated, is that it's very easy to go live. And I think a lot of Gen AI use cases are struggling with that right now, especially at the enterprise level, because there's risk involved, right? Like people don't want to feel like, like something could go wrong for them…”

“I actually think, like, maybe one thing, the one way to think about it is that, like, AI use case will start eating the spectrum from both ends. And the reason why is that, uh, because engineers are the highest paid, like, they have the sophistication to, like, really leverage it well, and, like, it just, AI just gives…”

“so I, I don't know any company that's like, hey, I would like to just let go of a bunch of my engineers, because now I have coding agents. That's just like, there's infinite engineering work to do, so you're just augmenting them.”

“when you think about like moats in the agentic world, a lot of it is around, well, if you've kind of been working with a client for a year, Has your agent just continuously gotten better by learning from the data? And that's, it's like, that's a different concept than just like training on the data, but has it…”

“during the stage where people want to invest, but they haven't yet, ah, that's when they're most willing to be helpful. And so it's actually like a great way for you to use that to proxy how helpful they'll be afterwards. Because if they're not that helpful in that stage where they really, really want to invest,…”

“I think long-term, you do need that consumer buy-in, because that's where all the new data is going to come from.”

“And especially when you get into agents, um, an agent is not just a model, right? You have to like design it. You have to be able to put in guardrails. You have to be able to teach how to do new things. And that's where the sort of software layer on top of the models come in. And if, if that's valuable, then it's just…”

“Adding more people to the problem doesn't make it faster, right? Because there's so many things you're trying, you run these experiments, you learn something, and then you implement it. You tweak the knobs in these ways, in a hundred different ways, And then you see the trend line, and you're like, oh, so actually I…”

“Curiosity, I absolutely believe is innate. I mean, I guess people could try, oh, make me curious, you know? Yeah. I don't know how you'd go about that. I think you either have the biology, so much to me is about biology and not necessarily willful direction”

“usually when it's more difficult, the movies come out better. A happy set is a boring set.”

“when you're in a negotiation, you better be prepared. If I say no to blow the deal or you're never going to get what you want. And it was the greatest lesson in leverage and in organizing in your brain, how far you're prepared to go. And if you, if you must, and you must figure that out up front, you draw a line. And…”

“it's, it's rare, like to get the time to value and the ASP is really rare.”

“what I call, we call them venture buyouts, but the unlevered, 30, 40% growers, they're tweeners, right? They're not growing fast enough for a minority investor to get super excited, except at a very big discount. And they're not big enough TAMs for strategics to go jumping up and down saying, I need to own this asset.”

“capital is not a huge moat. Uh, it was with the vision fund. That was like awesome strategy. I just out raise everybody a way that I could do deals that no one else could do. You know, Warburg Pincus had that for a while too.”

“Like, how do you give somebody really valuable career advice in what we do? Because the outputs are so long coming and, uh, and there's so much luck. Let's not kid ourselves. Like there's a lot of luck in what we do. And I, Sort of start with like, well, if I took you out, what would have happened? Would the deal have…”

“And I just give you an unending stream of questions that you're engaged with that you really like, right? The amount of that you are going to learn is 10 times more than you would passively sitting in class, you know, disengaged.”

“one thing we've found is Super successful adults over invest in ambitious teens.”

“We spend plenty of money where for a hundred dollars or 400 dollars, we could literally change how everybody sees both their capability and how they see themselves.”

“You got to rebuild your whole school from the ground up, right? You can't just sort of tack it on, right? This is a full rebuild.”

“You don't want to give them a cush job or all this stuff. You want to put them on the hardest problems where they can work like crazy and do it.”

“if someone won't say the opposite, it shouldn't be on the list because then it's a platitude. So he's like, you know, like the controversial one when we were back then was integrity. Right. Cause everybody has integrity on it. Cause of course you want that. He's like, it's a waste word. He's like, cause no one's going…”

“Jack's like, Joe, I don't care if it comes from heaven above. If general electric doesn't get a return on its investment, your product sucks. You suck. Your company sucks.”

“Pushing the limit, right? Is where you get all the alpha, right? That's where you get all the benefit. Um, that it's at that extreme, um, where the real truths come out.”

“while I thought I was right a hundred percent of the time, I'm really only right about 35% of the time, but it's just the issue of making a decision and moving forward. And if you have a good management process around it, it will get better as you go along.”

“So the only difference between a for-profit and a not-for-profit that are well-run is the for-profit pays taxes.”

“banks always make, um, decisions for three reasons. Regulatory, regulatory, and regulatory. Uh, they, people think of banks as economic actors. They're not. They're regulatory actors.”

“I would argue it's almost like investment malpractice to invest in a distressed asset, not taking an active operational role in addition to the financial restructuring role.”

“I would also say one of the things I don't like that's happening out there is, um, the productization of investment decisions. So there's a lot of outsourcing of critical thinking because I can go to this person that can, that'll make this decision for me, and I'll go to this person who'll make that decision for me.…”

“if at any given time there is, you know, 50 important practicing artists in the world, um, or even the estates of the most iconic dead artists, They tend to be represented by the big four galleries, Hauser, Gagosian, Zwirner, Pace, and once they're represented by those galleries, they're now deemed a blue chip artist,…”

“And then it became very apparent to me that when a multi-stage fund and a seed fund tried to compete with one another, that it was very hard for a seed stage venture capital firm to compete with a multi-stage venture capital firm. Um, oftentimes, multi-stage venture capital firms had brand weight that the seed funds…”

“if you look between, like, it was either, I think, like, 2008 and 2011, there were about 1000 seed deals funded in that time frame, or at least publicly announced seed deals in that time frame, so there's some survivorship bias there, but what you need to ultimately look at is that Probably 80% of the companies got…”

“I think the local pivot is what kills companies”

“Venture is the only asset class where historical results is somewhat indicative of future performance, and you can actually somewhat forecast how a venture capital firm will do over time based on how they've done historically”

“I think the, Feedback lips and hedge funds are too tight. I think you can convince yourself you're a good investor or convince yourself you're a bad investor too quickly in, in, in hedge funds, and I think there's, which is why, I mean, if you look at hedge funds by, by, in default, They tend to have a shorter, ah,…”

“everybody suggested that I should start a company, and I think that's terrible advice to give anybody. You should never advise anybody to start a company. I should start it on their own, or not start one at all.”

“Arguably, their future track record won't be as good as their historical track record because the deals they were able to access to those platform funds might not be deals that they have the ability to access or win in the future.”

“I think what it does is actually kind of the opposite, is like, it just allows more people to be able to make music, and perform music, and create an experience that other people connect to. Like, I think music is just, you know, is my personal favorite form of self-expression. With these tools, I'd assume that more…”

“I think it's more important to have that, like, uh, paranoia, you know, deep within you that, like, forces you to, like, kind of live in fear your whole life or something, uh, that, that, like, allows you to be, you know, successful.”

“Like you don't have to be the CEO of your business. You know, hire someone that's great at that. That's going to deal with that. If you're the best product person, you're the best visionary at the company, don't be the CEO.”

“every area and every great company goes through a desert of disillusionment in investors' minds where, where it was great. And then all of a sudden there's people casting dispersions on the sustainability of it.”

“You can't be a founder of what will be a great technology franchise and do it part time and have a great, you know, great work life balances often gets bantied about. It's impossible.”

“So I have a firm believer in the best quality technology companies. One, one may at different points in time have to be aggressive on valuation and pay more. Um, but it will be a long-term win. So that's where the aggressiveness comes in. As opposed to thinking, well, intellectually, this should sell at X times…”

“The alternative, too, is sometimes people sell a piece of the GP, but that's mostly my casual analysis of it. Um, front-loading economics that you, you would otherwise get.”

“I think you end up with too many participants in a single field where you would have had whittling earlier. Um, and so you end up, so that, that makes market expansion more difficult because there's three to five survivors instead of one or two.”

“you have a pipe that has input and output and the output stuck. I guess the human digestive system might be the best way to think about it. And just eating more food doesn't help with the constipation problem.”

“The beautiful thing about annuities is it's, Long duration liabilities. What beautiful thing about retirement, long duration in terms of the life, 10, 2030, 50 years in some cases. Uh, that matches really well with long duration infrastructure projects. So the natural shift is to go from a more bank funded, shorter…”

“It's very hard to M&A your way into the business, because there's a origination culture that's been built here for 1520 years. I mean, just in credit. And to align yourself in a principle way, and to actually be able to talk, the origination isn't just having a bunch of sorcerers finding risk. Origination is also the…”

“Typically off balance sheet. It doesn't go against their existing debt quantum, so it's typically off balance sheet, typically longer duration, typically flexibility in some sort of Um, coupon and when it ramps, if it's a project that's ramping, we may give them a couple years at the onset that you probably couldn't…”

“cause in credit, it's not, it's not zero sum. You know, the equity markets are more zero sum. You win the deal. I lose the deal. Credit. It's like, you're going to be in this, you typically are in the same bond with them or seem loan, or maybe we'll be on the other side, but I know I'll be in the same side again. And…”

“with the playbook that you have, you can blend that down to five times EBITDA. You can borrow at five and a half and your platform's going to trade at 18. Like the investment committee decision there is not the hard part. The hard part is getting the CEO in place and the IT systems and all that.”

“We'll, we'll look at B plus industries that other people really don't look at as much, but we've compared that with an A plus team. We found that to be just a great combination. Um, we won't overpay for the A plus industry.”

“they usually mess up that first part. Like they, I mean, the investing is a pattern recognition business. They, you know, bankers don't want to sell to them because they're only going to ever do one deal with that banker. Um, they have a clock ticking. So there's a lot of stuff wrong with that first part. And then the…”

“I think that's the most important part of my job is, is Alpine the place where the best people want to come and work and spend their lives and their careers? That that's the most important part of my job.”

“And, you know, we execute for six months. In order for the overhead to not get too big, but we can't go to a year, then you can't react. A quarter is too short. It's too much planning overhead versus execution.”

“the reason you call it magic is because that person can't explain it. It isn't actually magic. It's just science. It's just, you are not smart enough to explain yourself.”

“my team, the, the, the, R and D team and, and all of Spotify, we are the R and D department of the music industry. And first people were like, what do you mean? And I'm like, well, look at it. It's an entire industry that doesn't have an R and D department. Like, you know, mobile phones has an R and D department. It's…”

“It was obvious if you read the books that the great entrepreneurs, once they find what they have, they love to do, low to zero introspection. Now they think deeply about their business, but they wake up every morning. They're not wondering like, what should I do today? They know exactly what they're doing.”

“the only reason to start a company is because the product, and then like you, so the company needs to assemble all the resources, but the product is, we exist to make the product, and then of course you, he, he talks about profitability a lot, because the profits allow you to keep making the product. Everything starts…”

“One might naively think that, that the investing business is about maximizing performance, which, but it's not, it's about maximizing, um, marketability and performance is a component of marketability, but really what you're trying to do is signal talent and the way you do that. Is by finding things with, um, short…”

“But in investing, you, you know, it is wildly accountable. You, you're making predictions about which businesses are going to win and which are going to lose, um, which, you know, to understand businesses are sort of complex social structures embedded in our society, which is a complex social structure. So what do you…”

“I've also noticed there's sort of moral panics that have happened and, um, you know, you can buy into moral panics much the way you can buy into economic panics and you can do well.”

“Oftentimes in internet and technology, good businesses are hidden in bad P&Ls.”

“Um, when people ask me, how do I learn how to collect art? Do I read all these books? I said, don't read anything. I told you this on the last podcast.”

“with the cost of capital coming back and largely gonna persist, we can debate at what level, you're seeing just winners and losers across industries in ways that we have not seen for a really long time... the free lunch of the zero interest rates and there's money for everyone almost forever. It felt like for many,…”

“We have been investors for really Two decades, almost, and continue to be in the aerospace, uh, market, both OEM and aftermarket, and continue to love those businesses. They have, you know, all of the attributes of businesses we like, great organic growth, great pricing power, you know, a lot of, as people fly more,…”

“And a lot of the modern Middle East in particular was really constructed by generals and US diplomats who were focused on strength and power as the way to create an equilibrium. But all that leads to is one creating strength and power, then the other trying to have more strength and power. And then it's a constant arms…”

“And I think that that's the right formula for people to be using going forward for diplomacy, not how do we out militarize each other? I think military is an important component to it, but to have an end state that's sustainable, you need to figure out how can people have a baseline of security, but then the…”

“I learned this the hard way when I was in Washington, that there's not really a big constituency for compromise, and these conflicts are very heated.”

“I think with the government, what I found with a lot of the career civil servants is there's actually a lot of incredible people there. But what happens is, is they're not really given a clear objective and they're not given empowerment to go and accomplish things. And nobody gets prizes for cutting costs or for trying…”

“in business, we're rewarded for taking risks, and when I do a company, or if I'm backing a founder, or if I'm building a company myself, I wanna be focused on things that might potentially fail, because we have big ambitious goals in government. The goal is to figure out how not to fail, and so people often don't take…”

“I'm less concerned with what the current state of the company is. I'm way more focused on what do I think that company can be in five years, or seven years, or 10 years. And if I have a very strong conviction that it could become that, then you kind of have to make sure you're paying an okay price today, but the price…”