startup

“I would say, you know, for people thinking about startups and so on, like you want your startup to have you know, a long-term defensible mode, ideally something that goes over time also. So anything around a unique dataset, for example, or unique, like feedbac…”

“You know, for entrepreneurs or startups that are listening in, I do believe that you don't have to train or fine tune a new model in order to create a legitimately useful product.”

“I'm seeing something very similar in the startup world where a lot of the early startups are basically technologists building stuff for themselves or mid-market tech companies as sort of the earliest adopters outside of a Google or a Microsoft or sort of the r…”

“I think that for startups that to understand that and to maybe align themselves with data graphs that are out there, because that's so essential for those applications to be relevant.”

“But at least for the next few years, it seems like where we're going to see that Really huge market cap incremental add maybe companies like OpenAI and some of the model companies, but also it seems like increasingly it's just going to be existing companies ad…”

“I feel like any set of startup waves always have these mimetic actions where there's almost these means of what to build that spread and that's happened in prior technology waves too. And the means are often correct. Not always, but often.”

“A lot of the really great math or programming problems are kind of about, you know, what are all these assumptions that you take for granted and which one of those might actually not be true, you know and a lot of these really tough problems and really interes…”

“Actually the mega tech companies have such unassailable moats, and they make so much money that they're actually somewhat incapable of, like, stomping anymore.”

“Too much money equals potentially just not doing the right things, and then the worst thing is, like, not even being able to cut to the point where you can get back on track.”

“I think most startups, their biggest battle is people not giving a shit.”

“If every time there's a new release of an AI model, somehow it decreases your value, it probably indicates you're not actually a solution. You're, you might be a slight value add on top of the models. I think there's a number of startups that unfortunately sor…”

“Even if you want to sell a market in which you have, you know, eight or nine or 10 potential buyers is going to be better for the startup than a market where you just have one or two. Both in terms of your negotiating leverage, you know, the valuation you migh…”

“Startups. We know how to like build products. I mean, we know how to raise money, hire people, build products. We know how to sell it. Sometimes we know how to market them, but I don't believe we know how to take care of our customers, especially in the B to B…”

“Means that cloud, you know, a lot of the cloud capacity is like, you know, the only way to get it is to sign long term commitments, which I think for a lot of startups is really not the right model for how things should be.”

“In the last few years, maybe it lasts like, you know, five, six years, like there's just, because startups have been a lot more mainstream, a lot of Folks in this demographic have gravitated towards startups as opposed to, you know, traditionally it'd be eithe…”

“They will leave their academic program because they want to commercialize their research, which to me is like a huge red flag, because that means you are, you're saying, I'm not going to be flexible on how I solve the problem. I'm going to force my solution in…”

“If I was a number one or number two in a market and I was a startup, I'd consider merging with the other party if there were the two main startup players, because the real threat will be fighting the incumbents.”

“Usually I think what happens is in the early stage of a startup life, you're competing with other startups. And if you're way ahead, it feels great, but eventually if they're incumbents in your market, they come in and the faster you capture the market and mov…”

“So it turns out one advantage that startups have is while you are early, you can serve kind of one user profile. Today, you know, if you're, I don't know, like Google, right? Google serves such a diverse set of user personas, you really have to think about a l…”

“Generally, when I talk to engineers that want to join startups, for example, and let's say they eventually want to start their own company, which is a very common profile, it's, in my opinion, it's like way more useful to join somewhere where they've already k…”

“The current startups you mentioned like startups that are trying to do what AI wrappers are trying to do on LLMs. And over time we're going to get better and better where we're going to squeeze their capability over time that you wouldn't need them.”

“Unless a company truly hits escape velocity and build a network effect or something else that's really defensible, usually incumbents can launch two, three years later and catch up.”

“Without open source, as you know, startups would be challenged. Companies that are in, in different industries, whether it's manufacturing, or transportation, or it could be in healthcare. Without open source today, all of that AI work would be suffocated.”

“Mastering the production, the skilled manufacturing piece of it is the thing that startups who are selling to the Defense Department have to also prove, hire for, demonstrate competence in, and so on.”

“The Office of Strategic Capital is a little more proactive. They're going to say, we have this whole, I'm going to go find companies that already exist that do this. So it's not for startups because it's a lending facility, if you will. So they're looking for …”

“Because often for companies, there's about a 12 month window where your company's the most valuable will ever be, and then it crashes out. For a very small handful of companies, the answer is you should never, ever, ever sell. For most companies, the answer is…”