startup

“Big tech is doing a good job of anchoring the price of all these features pretty low, like co-pilots, 20 dollars a month per developer. It's incredibly cheap relative to the value that it does add. And that really anchors, you know, value in that market pretty…”

“They're really subsidizing the space, a lot of big tech, which I think is positive for open source and positive for users, hard for startups.”

“When they look back in hindsight and they have two or three massive, massive winners, massive exits by and large, those were not the companies that they expected to be driving their portfolio returns when they first made those investments. And by and large, th…”

“The number of people who are capable of building a great business Is way smaller than the number of people who are capable of building a great product.”

“And the hit rate is probably going to be much lower now, and there's going to be a significant calling of both VCs and startups because The stories got ridiculous”

“Startups are supposed to fail. Like that's like, there are ideas. It is literally a mechanism of iteration and experimentation. Like startups are supposed to go out, try something, experiment. And if it fails, then the capital and the, like the, both the like …”

“When you reflect on your experience building companies, you really romanticize it a lot. You kind of remember all the glorious achievements and fun times and like milestones, and you suppress all the terrible shit that you've endured and all the fucking trauma…”

“You can get 10, 20, thirty million dollar contracts from the DIU very early stages to create prototypes to compete for some program”

“When things are inflecting, you probably have two to three weeks to catch it. And by catching it, I mean, convincing the founder, doing the diligence, getting to a handshake, And that's really hard to do.”

“If you can build a software company selling to startups you can build a software company selling to anybody.”

“Yeah, about 2500 venture funds, about 35,000 startups.”

“Bonus depreciation is awesome. If you're Boeing, It's awesome if you're a real estate developer. And that's great, but it doesn't do anything for a startup because they're a C Corp. So it doesn't pass through their investors. They have plenty of net operating …”

“And I think that it's probably the biggest reality of this reindustrialization concept, I think is that it's going to require the federal government and some state governments and startup companies to interact in a way that is probably hasn't happened in a lon…”

“So that fifty million dollars comes with a ton of overhead of auditing, accounting, tons of oversight, and as a taxpayer, that feels totally appropriate, but it's so burdensome for a small company. It's almost impossible for these small companies to cope with …”

“Like, any really great startup to get into typically doesn't need your money in the first place, right? Anyone who desperately needs your money There might be a reason why. I mean, occasionally there's a diamond in the rough that no one believed in, but genera…”

“Every startup that I invest in at C, like, I have no expectation of ever seeing liquidity for a decade, right? The seven year, I don't know where the seven year thing came from... A decade is the norm.”

“The game of startups and VC is just so dirty. There's so many liars and sociopaths and just very dangerous people that I've seen, you know, in the last decade, I do not like a lot of this behavior.”

“Because if you raise too much money, we've seen companies where this happens to, A, there's an illusion of success. So the people aren't hungry anymore. We're already successful. We're a billion dollar company. Can we even fail? Right? Like that's one. Number …”

“I think with this current generation of tech, there's power law to startups, power law to venture capital firms, but I think there's also fundamentally power laws to people.”

“I think people are genuinely curious and people are genuinely excited about innovation. About startups. They just don't have, like, an easy entry point to that.”

“You know, you have you know, these inference platforms that have nine-figure contracts with startups. Like that, you know, there's very rare SaaS companies that have nine-figure contracts with anyone, much less a startup, and now you have a lot of these AI com…”

“If you look at if I look back and think of, you know, lots of startups that I've seen or been involved with, the ones that have failed most spectacularly have been the ones that have been funded the most well.”