Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Clark: AI-native youth excel at frontier model experimentation

Philip Clark · Inside Thrive Capital: Investing in OpenAI, Wiz, Cursor, Nudge, Physical Intelligence · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · Nov 24, 2025 · at 43:33

Philip Clark, Partner at Thrive Capital, explains why OpenAI and Cursor actively recruit young researchers in their early twenties.

0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 16.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The people who almost hold the model weights in their brains because they've been brought up thinking about AI natively are really, really good at the creative thinking and experiments and hypothesis testing that is necessary to push the performance of these models.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Philip Clark

Opinion
Clark: Every major large model paradigm has originated at OpenAI
“Every single major paradigm In large models at this sort of macro level that has been very successful to my knowledge has come from open AI or at least been originated at open AI.”
Philip Clark Nov 24, 2025 ▶ 46:47 Inside Thrive Capital: Investing in OpenAI, Wiz, Cursor, Nudge, Physical Intelligence · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
Assertion Supported
Clark: Cursor reached hundreds of millions in run-rate revenue in 18 months
“I think when we invested, there were a couple tens of thousands of users and you know, low single digits, million air are fast forward to today. I don't think the company publicly publishes revenue, but call it on the Many, many hundreds of millions of run rat…”
Philip Clark Nov 24, 2025 ▶ 6:24 Inside Thrive Capital: Investing in OpenAI, Wiz, Cursor, Nudge, Physical Intelligence · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Clark: Some of the most valuable companies will be in hardware
“I am fairly confident that We are going to produce some of the world's most valuable companies in hardware over the next decade.”
Philip Clark Nov 24, 2025 ▶ 28:15 Inside Thrive Capital: Investing in OpenAI, Wiz, Cursor, Nudge, Physical Intelligence · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Clark: Wiz closed six-figure enterprise deals in weeks or months
“And so Wiz was Closing on these like very healthy six figure deals in a matter of weeks or months, which was just unprecedented. You know, normally you have small deals and fast cycles. You can have big deals and slow cycles, which had more or less figured out…”
Philip Clark Nov 24, 2025 ▶ 16:18 Inside Thrive Capital: Investing in OpenAI, Wiz, Cursor, Nudge, Physical Intelligence · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Clark: SpaceX, Tesla, and Anduril accelerated growth at multi-billion scale
“I was looking at the revenue curves actually of and roll and SpaceX and Tesla the other day, and they are some of the only companies that have actually accelerated growth at scale, which is to say they are growing at a faster rate at multi-billion dollar scale…”
Philip Clark Nov 24, 2025 ▶ 25:22 Inside Thrive Capital: Investing in OpenAI, Wiz, Cursor, Nudge, Physical Intelligence · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Clark: Starlink generates large majority of SpaceX revenue and cash flow
“Created the opportunity for them to build a Starlink, which is now one of the most powerful internet constellations in the world. And it's actually driving a very, very large majority Of overall free cashflow and revenue for the business.”
Philip Clark Nov 24, 2025 ▶ 26:58 Inside Thrive Capital: Investing in OpenAI, Wiz, Cursor, Nudge, Physical Intelligence · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 160 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.