Chasing Trillion-Dollar Companies, Founder Ambition, Token Budgets, & Regulatory Capture

“Anthropic basically didn't exist five years ago. OpenAI was still quite early. I think GPT-III just came out and SpaceX was trading at 80, a hundred, something like that.”

“And like, I think like being able to rethink market size is just still like a key underpriced investor skill right now at any stage, right?”

“Coding, I think is like a much, much bigger market than anyone thought.”

“And people Are, at least in my experience collectively, at least investing against the fact that they believe the speed is there, which is different from the market size. People are conflating the two things right now, in my opinion.”

“One is for the mid to late stage technology markets, people are continuing to invest as if there's velocity to get to a trillion for many companies where I don't think there's a velocity. Again, I think the, Some of them will get to 20, some will get to a hund…”

“And I think that's why you're seeing a flight to hardware companies. Oh, the labs will never do this hardware thing. And so we'll do that. And American dynamism and niche applications of AI and something that should be provided by an inference cloud. And et ce…”

“I am more often disappointed right now that founders are being, like, less ambitious than they could be.”

“There's a handful of companies that should never, ever sell, at least any time in the near term. If you're anthropic, you shouldn't sell. If you're opening, you shouldn't sell. You know, there's a handful of these things that should never sell.”

“Most companies in any given era should at least consider it, and there's usually a time maximizing window where your best outcome is a sale within that window. It's like a 12 to 18 month period, usually where the company's worth the most it'll ever be worth.”

“In this cycle, every year of AI time is like three to four years of normal cycle time. And so three years is like a decade, right?”

“Because if you're on the wrong side of this secular change, and you can't get to the other side of it, you should in fact, like, sell. You don't have good ideas about how to be on the right side of history.”

“And so I do think we're going to see a ongoing rise in valuations most likely over the next year or two, much more than we've seen today. And obviously there'll be some great things in there and there'll be a bunch of stuff that doesn't deserve it, but I actua…”

“There's risk management against the value of the thing you're doing, but the biggest opportunity cost is your time. Your most productive years of your life are on the line right now. And you can either walk away with a good amount of money, go to the next gian…”

“Secondary is an intermediate option, which I actually don't think is always that great because it solves for some short term needs, but it doesn't actually create a solution. And you see a lot of people from 20, 20, 21 still running companies five years later …”

“The data I have is that a number of very smart and even very self-aware research scientists have felt that, you know, there was some knee in the curve on recursive self-improvement or ASI, 18 months away, every 18 months for the last five years.”

“The question of, like, how you are going to go gather that data for less verifiable, more complex domains, or do you run into the actual constraints on the, like, physical compute accessibility side? Like, I think that's probably more of a limiter than this be…”

“Yeah, I mean, the physical compute basically reinforces an oligopoly market because what it does is it creates a ceiling On the rate of progress any single lab can get, if effectively you assume the compute is roughly pro rata across the ecosystem to the big l…”

“I mean, I always wonder about second order effects of that belief of it's 18 months away, because That does suggest there could be a burnout cycle in 18 months.”

“I know some labs have slowed down on their hiring of researchers unless they're above a very, very high bar because the cost isn't the research or it's the compute associated with the person.”

“That's why I think the death of SAS is a little bit overstated because why would you use tokens on a bunch of SAS stuff that you're not actually paying that much for per year relative to the outcome of those same tokens being invested against a core product or…”

“And then I think the next wave is what are the projects and people that should actually get outsized pieces of a token budget. And what is that return on investment? Is this sort of next shift that's coming? It'll take some time though. I mean, many people are…”

“So even if there is some displacement of engineers at some point in the future, I don't know when that is or if it happens, but if it does happen, there's lots and lots of homes for them. Because there's tons of enterprises that never had the capability set or…”

“But I think the immediate effect is that A huge number of people that are attempting to create value or do new things in California choose to leave. It's right. That's already happening. It's hard to move an entire ecosystem very quickly. This is the fastest w…”

“And my sense is in 28, there's increasing talk about also trying to add a exit tax in California. So if you actually try and leave, they'll, they'll try and take a big chunk as sort of a penalty for that.”

“So I do think we are seeing these shifts, and these shifts are purely driven by regulation. They're not driven by, is Texas a better or worse place to live? I mean, it impacts things, right? But it's regulatory shifts driving people out.”

“I think we are going to, like, as an industry consume all of the compute and power available. Whatever the underlying architectures.”

“I think whatever it is gets copied and then the labs do it and they have all the computing, you know, that's the, High probability outcome.”

“We had a safety lobby in the seventies basically kill abundant clean energy for us, right?”

“And the reason tech has been so successful so quickly and has had so much human impact is because it's been lightly regulated. And I think it's better to keep it that way than not, and we'll lose optimism, we'll lose momentum, we'll lose progress, and that's w…”