The Wisdom Wall

“Like, every American, instead of having a social security account, they should have the equivalent of a four or one K where they own stocks, and when they retire, they get all those stocks.”

“Education, I think, is probably the easiest, which is if you end the federal student loan program, I think you solve 90% of the problem in education.”

“the most important challenge for us as cyber security industry is to eliminate the men in the middle. Making defenses completely run by self-aware, sophisticated mega agents. And until we get to that point where we completely eliminate the men in the middle, uh, we are vulnerable.”

“There's like a power law of who gives value in terms of engineering. There's some people who do so much that keep the company alive, um, in any good successful big company. And there's a long tail of people who basically do nothing.”

“Um, so the challenge with being, um, an OEM, and an operator, and, and, and, and, and, a demand aggregator, an infrastructure player, you know, a pilot training company, a maintenance company, that's a lot of stuff to do at once. It's very hard to actually build a real business that will ultimately be profitable and…”

“pacifism as an idea is only possible inside of a governing system with a monopoly on violence. Like, you can't be a pacifist without a government monopoly on violence. That's just, like, not possible for humanity.”

“The goal is take humans out of dull, dirty, dangerous jobs, um, so we're not putting our, you know, men and women, brothers and sisters, in horribly dangerous situations, uh, and become as accurate and precise as possible. And that's really what Just War Theory is all about.”

“In the AI era, there's really only one place where actual human-generated content exists, and the value of that content is super valuable, like, really valuable, because it helps train the models.”

“Every successful company is a cult. And what a cult really means is you have a view about the world that's different than other normal people. And you're right to be successful. Like a cult doesn't have to be right, but the startup is a cult. That's right. And that's what makes a successful startup.”

“the decision that makes someone happy is usually the wrong decision for the business.”

“an investor's incentive is to get you to burn money because they believe it'll help you grow faster. And if it grows faster that you can always raise more money and burn more money and they can put more money in. So for you to burn, So they can deploy more capital that they can charge more fees on and they can own more…”

“If you don't believe that you yourself can get to a hundred mil ARR in the next year, then you should just, just don't fucking build a company cause you don't have the balls to do it.”

“From our perspective as a company, there's really no difference between diseases and traits. It's a false line in the sand that was drawn.”

“Essentially, money managers sell diversification as a way to, uh, increase their own importance and also to, to increase fees, some would argue.”

“And if you go back in history and you look at even just back to World War II, what has typically just determined naval power is who can build the most ships. It's not who can build the most exquisite, the most expensive, whose ships have the most on them in terms of payloads and weapons and all the other things. It's…”

“Yeah, Molly, my hottest take is I really do think that we're re-entering kind of the the world of the here and the now, and what I mean by that is I think being successful in real space, doing hard tech, building real things, and manufacturing with real tangible items is going to be the moat of the future, especially…”

“what has typically just determined naval power is who can build the The most ships. It's not who can build the most exquisite, the most expensive, whose ships have the most on them in terms of payloads and weapons and all the other things. It's like, who can just Build the most. Who has the industrial bases build the…”

“what we learned from all-electric is you just don't get the range and the payload capacity. That the military is looking for.”

“If you look at, um, 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.”

“Um, you know, I've always viewed the large space companies are going to have the ability to build on their own satellites and launch them. And, um, if you're beholden to someone else providing you all the critical components and you, your ability to scale is governed by their ability to scale. And that's not a place…”

“everything is a giant engineering compromise in the rocket world, and if you fill a room up with engineers, um, from every discipline, if one of those engineers from one of those disciplines is happy, you have failed. Like, everybody needs to be equally as miserable. Then you know you've got the right design, because…”

“We're over-indexing on the model. I think models are great. But being able to take that model, package that, all that context, all that knowledge, all that training, and be able to deliver a solution to you is what the next big sort of revolution needs to be.”

“The biggest mistake that people make during acquisitions is underestimate the intelligence of the people who built the business that you acquired. Because sometimes you take on the imperialistic attitude. I bought you, hence you must work for me.”

“AI can be great at 80% use cases. We live in the .1% use case. We're looking for the needle in the haystack. AI is not good at looking at the, for every needle in the haystack.”

“We infuse those AI native people into teams and say, keep hiring until you get to make sure that these people are more people in that team than people who've been there before. So once you start overwhelming these teams with more AI native people, you start watching that you start seeing a change in behavior. Features…”

“It's not at a place where you're just going to get a massive amount of inflow of advertisements that are diverse and creatively inspired and going to create lifts and campaigns, but their tools are available now so that humans can create ads much faster and much lower cost.”

“I think a big, big mistake that people are making is that because of the AI, building things become easier. People are making a lot of bad decisions, bad tastes, wasteful ideas that actually offset the empowerment of AI.”

“Generally factories are really efficient when they are large and centralized and three D printers can be very useful for adapting drones to Various mission sets, but you'd only be, like, the airframe or a payload adapter. Um, what we're trying to solve for is the really, like, core components in manufacturing process,…”

“We're not trying to re-industrialize, we're trying to industrialize something that never existed in America, pretty much. Like, like, electronics and drones specifically just never existed in America”

“It's really, probably, like, 75% of it is, like, the data that you're training on. Like, I would say for any AI model, it's like, there's always, like, you know, like, these, these, like, step functions and, like, algorithms and architectures and stuff, but the data is just so important”

“we're kind of getting to the point where you can solve basically any benchmark, right? Because what does it mean to have a benchmark? It means you've already defined the task. You've clarified what success or failure looks like. You've given a bunch of examples of what that task looks like and what the right behavior…”

“Like, these, you must build these new data centers, because at some point, all of your revenue will become here, and this revenue over here in the old data center, that was asset light, high margin, is now moving to asset heavy, lower margin, big dollars, but it's a completely new data center.”

“And then what you might have is ultimately you can mix and match Chinese physical robot with a Western brain. And I know that's happening.”

“So, you must be in this token flow to either resell or repackage the tokens with your context and your, your very specific application. You serving the token with your intelligence? Is it the proprietary closed source token? Is it the open source token? Sitting on a compute foundation that's creating and firing up the…”

“And I think the key metric for America should be to convert two percent of Americans from labor to capital each year. If that would be the KPI from America for the next 250 years, we would fucking crush it. Because what that means is that in 50 years, every American would be able to choose whether or not they want to…”

“Productivity means more with less, and growth comes out when productivity happens every single time in human history.”

“the K-shaped economy, I just want to go back on this, to your point. I don't think it's about jobs. I think it's about wealth. If you're stuck in that lower 50% because things are so unaffordable, you can't save money. And you can't pay your bills and you're not earning enough. You're stuck here. Meanwhile, people that…”

“So if you're a CIO, if you're a CEO, if you're about to make a multi-million, billion-dollar decision of which lab to build your intelligence on, plan for the climate, not for the weather. What does that mean? That's multi-model routing. That's evals. That's thinking about post-trained custom models.”

“The whole concept of a responsible engineer is what I learned there, and that person owned that part from first requirements all the way through to post-flight. There were no handoffs. There's no finger pointing. Either you got it done or you are no longer employed, and like that kind of accountability and that…”

“all my experience with AI so far have shown that on formal domains, things that are verifiable, Uh, you can get to amazing outcomes with enough IQ points, and yet judgment is like somehow not purely correlated with just adding IQ points to the model.”

“the thing that's changed massively in the new AI paradigm is that you can have businesses that are well over a billion dollars in revenue, um, that haven't proven out their unit economics. Um, they haven't proven out, you know, durable product differentiation. Uh, in many ways, it feels like the risk of impairment or a…”

“now gross margins, if your gross margins are high, that's actually a bad thing, because, you know, AI inference costs a lot of money, and if you have an AI product with high gross margins, that means that no one's using your AI features”

“And you have to, it's like a shift in mindset where, you know, let's say that it creates a draft pull request for some new feature, and it's not quite perfect. Your instinct typically would be to go in there and actually edit the pull request to make it better. But what you want to do is actually update the context,…”

“When it really is it, you just know, but when it's not quite it, you walk around unsure if it's it. And if you're asking like, is this it? Could it be it? It's definitely not it.”

“AI itself isn't a new platform. So when you think about new platforms like that used to be new mobile game councils, but you know, the web and the web in a browser was a new platform and mobile was a new platform. We all move into a place of discovery where we're talking about the new apps and services and we're…”

“most of these law firms and enterprises Can't rely on a single lab provider. So like there's a big risk if you're a law firm that if you just use Anthropic or you just use OpenAI, um, you run into conflict risk. So imagine you're using only Anthropics models as a law firm and you want to represent OpenAI. OpenAI is not…”

“The practical reality is that the product market fit for MIRA, for a high thrust, high Delta V space vehicle, Is it's closer to a fighter jet than a tugboat. This is a thing that the, the, what Space Force wants to do with this is move really fast at some foreign actor spacecraft and characterize it. That is not a…”

“if you want to move quickly, you absolutely must insource a lot of the development. You must build your own components. You must take as much internally as you can”

“We don't trust agents. We, we say, Hey, we can, we can try, we can try to set rules, but there needs to be hard guardrails and blocks for things like sensitive data being sent across.”

“I mean, I think enterprise sales for these large companies is much harder because the time to build the same exact product in house is just significantly lower. Um, there's also just less leverage. Like when you're doing a negotiation against the customer for why they should renew. Um, yeah. Like you can always just…”

“Because we're able to, like, this interaction data of, like, touching the world, um, and seeing what happens through trial and error is, like, um, it basically, uh, most of human intelligence, uh, is built this way, and I think this is, like, the last missing piece to get the true AGI, is this, like, real-world…”

“I think this is extremely important to get, if we want to solve, like, uh, uh, AGI and get to, like, human intelligence in the physical world, like, it's all going to start here with the hands for us.”

“In my mind, this is not a manufacturing problem. This is an intelligence problem.”

“pacifism really is a privilege of the protected. Like, there is somebody else who is willing to do those things and build those capabilities to protect our right to say, I don't want to be involved in that, and that's fine.”

“we've sort of led the wave around these AI rollups where the thesis was everywhere we offshored for labor productivity, we're now onshoring back with AI.”

“if in the US, sadly, if you're in the sub 75%, you live paycheck to paycheck to credit card, you do not have money to compound the markets. You just don't. And that's also why you see the people who have, who acquire those and build products for those and, you know, consumer fintech, you have to monetize those through…”

“If you're prepared for that journey, if you're ready to take it through the next 1015, 20 years, then it's time to go public. And it doesn't matter if on day one you're below your last private round, the question is where do you end up five years from now, 10 years from now?”

“I'll see someone with their very first liquidity, the very, very first liquidity, they take it and instead of doing something a little bit safe in case there's a rainy day, they turn around and they go put it in a bunch of like very early stage startups. Often referred to by their friends, right? And you just sort of…”

“if you go out at a lower price, and this is what I, the advice I generally give is go out at a lower price so you can have that momentum carry your price up. Everybody's happy. Your new investors are happy. Your employees will be happy. Um, it costs you a little bit of dilution, but I think it's the best marketing…”

“most companies are remote. As soon as you start being on two floors, three floors, you don't know the people in your company. Whether they're sitting on the third floor or they're at home, it doesn't really make a difference to you, right?”

“the idea and the technology at this stage, at the seed stage, is, is noise. It's part of the entropy. It's actually not helping me make the right decision. The best decision is to just watch the individual and decide if that's the individual you want to, to partner with.”

“An important company is not necessarily measured by revenues or ARR or valuation. Uh, it's about, it's measured by how much the market, how much practitioners depend on you. Do they consider you as a vendor, one of their trusted partners? And there are many companies that They have high revenues, they're selling…”

“Our view is that it's not a zero sum game. And part of that is, there is really no price on intelligence. You, if you're more intelligent, if your system is more intelligent, if your product is more intelligent, is your company more intelligent and makes better decisions, you're gonna make more money. And so, so long…”

“the threat of AI for these companies isn't actually related to their current valuation or frankly, even their current business. It's more related to the terminal value of, okay, maybe some of these companies are not benefiting from AI today. They haven't re-accelerated. Okay. So it's not impacting the business today.…”

“I have a personal view that I've developed, which is actually the size of the TAM is irrelevant. So I never listened to whenever an entrepreneur will pitch me a TAM, I really don't think about the TAM. I think about two things. I think about number one, Whatever number you want to give me for a TAM, a 100,000,000,007…”

“I think it's not about combating the bots because that will be a lost cause, but rather every human on these platforms will need some version of a proof of human and, and actually prove that their content is authentic.”

“What's really interesting is if something is linear and predictable, it actually is very easy to simulate. If you can simulate in a digital system, it's less interesting. It turns out, like, silicon has all these beautiful physics that are associated with it. We just try to, like, minimize. We say, like, where can I…”

“almost no iconic company in the history of venture capital has come from anyone's thesis area.”

“If your enterprise product can be PLG, then it must be, otherwise a PLG company will absolutely eat your lunch and destroy you.”

“when someone fundraises a private company, you're selling one, two percent of the company, right? When you're selling, when you're doing a transaction like this one, you're selling 100% of the company. So there's a very big difference between putting in a hundred million, you know, at a very high price and, you know,…”

“Lightspeed From a very early, very early on in, in sort of the, the AI kind of revolution took this, took this position that actually AI and foundation models are more akin to software and code than they are to business lines and strategies.”

“the biggest problem with optical camouflage, and the main reason you don't see a lot of money being put towards it in the modern defense base is it's not actually that useful. It's useful against human adversaries who do not have any other technology to aid them, and those are not really the enemies the United States…”

“I think like broadly across the defense industry, uh, this is a pattern that you saw happen with both Palantir and SpaceX as well, is that the big players, the primes, they don't really pay attention at all until their lunch is being eaten. And then the moment they realize their lunch is being eaten, they're going to…”

“You have to solve this at a commercially viable level, not at a defense specific level. It will always then be too expensive and unproducible. If you just have a defense exquisite magnet factory, like that doesn't work. You need a commercially viable magnet factory that defense uses that is in U.S. or allied territory…”

“pacifism as an idea is only possible inside of a governing system with a monopoly on violence. Like, you can't be a pacifist without a government monopoly on violence.”

“The point is, visible spectrum optic camouflage is actually quite easy, but something like this would be trivially easily seen By, uh, you know, an infrared camera, thermal camera, you know, lidar, radar. So the biggest problem with optical camouflage, and the main reason you don't see a lot of money being put towards…”

“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. Uh, I mean, occasionally there's a diamond in the rough that no one believed in, but generally speaking, that's not the case.”

“what it turns out that institutional investors want to hear, they think they want a different, they say they want, they think they want a differentiated strategy. They don't. What they want is This is exactly what you already know and are comfortable with, with this tiny twist that could deliver some alpha, but at the…”

“if you have a product that people are really passionate about, Um, and you have the right means to mobilize them. You can turn your customers into political advocates and be big, powerful entrenched interests, right? Like I might've deployed that really well, and I might've been taking that to other startups I've…”

“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.”

“I'm not sure that the right strategy for America is to say, oh, they can build a hundred ships a year, so we need to be able to build a hundred ships a year. Like, what I, what I would say a better strategy is if China's able to build a hundred ships a year, what, what if we just had a missile that could knock out a…”

“the experts are like, you know, like, this isn't safe because in almost all cases this doesn't work. Yeah, they're right, but in the one case where you change the world, it's the only way it can work.”

“early in technology waves, that's when you have all the low hanging fruit. And so one of my pieces of advice to founders is often, um, who are doing really hard things right now in AI. I'm like, why are you doing the really hard thing? Just go do the dumb, easy thing that you think is non-defensible and build…”

“And, uh, I think of ASI as us having automated 90% of the tasks that 90% of humans do today in front of a computer, right?”

“This industry had a huge shift after the reasoning models came out late last year, O-one being the first. The shift is, before the reasoning models, this industry needed simple data. Gobs and gobs of simple data. You needed a data factory. Or, ah, this industry needed somebody to find people really fast. After the…”

“It'll probably probably be a smaller model. Oftentimes we see a half a billion to a ten billion parameter model. That's the regime, not a trillion parameter model. And this will be faster, more accurate.”

“There's only, there's two formulations. One is you are in the top call one to 10 basis points on some specific trait. And that can, they can be very different. You can be the smartest person I've ever met. You can be the most tenacious person, persistent, um, best salesperson, best at assessing people. Like you have…”

“It's because you don't have any more barrels, you're just stacking ammunition behind the same number of barrels, so you're not going to get any more done, and you're just going to frustrate people.”

“99% of everything that matters is the CEO. Um, the most important lesson for me over the last 25 years is if you have the right CEO, things that people believe to be impossible, Or very possible, sometimes probable. If you have the wrong CEO, almost nothing else matters.”

“It was really the convergence of two things to my mind, uh, the availability of hardware that was built for another purpose in this case, gaming GPUs, and then also progress on the architecture where I see very strong parallels between what we've done and what has happened with, you know, transformers and attention and…”

“That stuff is really important, but it's a small piece of the puzzle of building a data center sized machine.”

“We get coached that there is a certain way to do a venture backed company. And the coaching is very often you got to get some kind of revenue by any means necessary really early. And that's certainly true if you're a SaaS company, right? Like if I'm building a SaaS company, I better go and produce some early revenues.…”

“when you're making a ton of revenue, uh, you're probably doing something, uh, that, you know, within reason you could call useful and, uh, uh, like a billion dollars of revenue would be a nice starting point for a useful machine like this. Um, uh, yeah, definitely what is not useful is pure pedagogical science, like…”

“There's also not a lot of technology risk in what we're doing because the automotive industry has existed for the past 10 years and like has been plowing money into electrification and high voltage power electronics and battery supply chains for 10 plus years now. It's all driven by execution risk.”

“when you're doing something different, What other people hear or see or imply about that difference is that what you're doing is better than what they're doing. There's always this comparison.”

“Keeping up with OpenAI product updates is a full-time job, and that's the, that's the strategy, is ship fast. Um, And I feel like that done at a consistent pace, I mean, just in, just this year alone, you've had Operator and Deep Research and ChatGPT agents and Codex, and these are in GPT-V now. I mean, we're halfway…”

“The ingredients of, um, call it being on the frontier are compute. CapEx, we spoke about it. Data, uh, which is sort of access accessible to everybody. We are saturated on, on, on the training data that exists. Talent. This is where the war is now.”

“if you're just copying and pasting China into the United States and trying to build a manufacturing business around that, you are doomed. Uh, you will absolutely fail because when you think about the unit economics, labor costs, Environmental regulations. Permits. You're not going to be able to just copy and paste.”

“I actually think that if you're looking for an investment that is protected from AGI, it's something like this, where it's extremely physical. You're bending steel, you're stacking blocks, you're building plants, you're laying concrete. It's going to be a long time before AI touches that level of the physical world.…”

“I think there's like two types of startups. There's innovation startups and, and execution startups. So an execution startup is like a, like a rippling or a MongoDB, where it's just like, if you build a better database or a better HRIS system, you have line of sight to billions in revenue. Like you don't have to worry.…”

“one of the biggest mistakes that startups and CEOs when they launch new products, um, make is they have such a great sales motion. They can push a product out to market that doesn't have a strong product market fit, but it, it feels like it does initially. Uh, and then it'll go up and then it'll stop.”

“what I tell the team about how to build AI products is you got to follow two rules. One is, um, differentiated customer experience that we couldn't do before AI existed. Like you do something for the customer that literally we could not have done a year ago. Just, we didn't have the technology. It just, it just wasn't…”

“I think the biggest feature of AI is not that it's smart, uh, it's that it's debuggable.”

“If the government can support kind of a critical problem here in subsidized pricing, um, and help create a market, right? Like there's no price, there's no market that exists right now here because you don't have the ability to get to critical scale... basically you, you need to sort of subsidize and solve the pricing…”

“Their LinkedIn's are going to say scaled an organization from 20 people to 200 people. And like people think associate their identities with how big of an organization they have or how big of a of an org they were able to scale and over what time. So there's this natural incentive of in order for me to move up in the…”

“And that's where we think automation has the highest leverage, not to replace people, but to really give the new workforce 10 times productivity, because we just don't have the people in America anymore to build these, you know, critical hardware for our customers as well as the DoD.”

“when you disconnect production from design, you get very bad at design.”

“I think the truth is that even with your board as a founder, I'm not sure your incentives are completely aligned because it's back to, well, first of all, what is the price on the table, right? Is it a nice two or three X for the VCs on the board or not? Because if it's not, they're going to tell you not to sell, even…”

“we believe that we monetize 20 times better Then other spend management systems, systems like Expensify or Concur, because we monetize through financial services.”

“Ultimately, we want to back companies that become generational and become very, very large. And a lot of the origin story of companies can be questioned when looked back in from the history or from sort of current looking back, like Facebook started was hard or not. Snapchat's beginning at Stanford campus was, you…”

“the current dynamic of the cost structure, especially for apps companies, Really favor this equation of gross almost equals profitability. The margin structure of some of these companies that we're investors in is incredible.”

“If you're a founder and you spend 10 hours thinking about burn and like cutting costs, that's 10 hours you didn't spend about making product and like making product decisions and making your product better and like growing your company.”

“You need to work where you live if you're serious about building the company. Like work-life balance should not be a thing that you think about. Your work should be your life and vice versa. And if that's the case, then the best way to, to realize this is by literally living where you work.”

“embryo selection will always be a relative optimization, right? IQ can explain a couple IQ points, right? Um, height, you can, you know, explain a couple inches, but principally if you, the most important kind of the ingredients for your embryos comes from mom and dad, right? So that's like by far the most important…”

“the triple, triple, double, double, double, sass thing is like, you throw it out the window, you know, it's like, there's a new, it's like, 10 x.”

“many, many times I have heard something that is not predictable, that is not recurring, be described as error. Um, and that, you know, historically, you know, traditionally error is, is predictable. It's recurring. It's like signed, you know, contracts, usually they're live. Um, and so like it, it's fine to use these…”

“I think it's very unclear right now what Out of all these companies who has a moat, but I do think like speed right now is kind of the only moat that you can have.”

“if you, you are not, like, feeling like you are running around all the time and everything's on fire, then, like, there's probably not a product market fit. Like, there's probably, it's, it's not, there's not that, the only, like, hyper-growth startups, even the ones that seem like they have their shit together, they…”

“in a world where, you know, AI and vibe coding is only proliferating, uh, and making it easier to replicate products, brand is possibly one of the most powerful motes, uh, and defensible aspects of, of, of a business.”

“I think that it is a better, uh, you'll perform better if it's a hobby, so, uh, you know, take that as you wish.”

“When you build a winner, you don't have what you have in the U S which is like, once there's a large, massive winner and outcome in the U S there's like 20 startups that get funded to go compete. Right. And Europe, it's not like that. The capital market is not mature. So you have, you know, we have a revolute type…”

“That, like, Jim Simons at Rentac versus, like, Robert Carroll, like, who would be a better earlier stage, early stage investor? And I think it's actually, like, Robert Carroll. Like, I think, like, literary nonfiction done really, really well, or journalism done really, really well, like, should actually be the best…”

“Remember when it was just data? You can get access to our data. Well, data is nothing. It's the, it's the way your employees are using that data to, to make value out of it. Guess what models do and good models are going to do it even better.”

“I think there's like a common misconception where like if, um, A fan, like a fan spends on one creator and it moves to another creator. They spend less on like the previous one, but we've seen that they just ended up spending like double.”

“At first, like a coding agent, for instance, right now is actually lifting up the at or below average programmers more and more. Like, if you're a solid programmer, but maybe not the best, like, you can get much more productive with an AI agent that helps you with programming, and the top programmers right now are not…”

“As an investor, I have shied away from what I call unicorn seed rounds, uh, largely because they merge seed stage risk with late stage returns. And if you understand expected value, that's just not a good place to be as an investor.”

“So I think if that happens and that's what the world looks like, then a LLM looks kind of like a query processor, uh, in a database. You give it context, it does its work, you get the answer out. But the point of leverage is the place with, at which the context Lives where the data gravity is and how the answer is…”

“If you are in AI or AI adjacent, you should be raising every three to four months, in my opinion, and you should be doing it aggressively.”

“A seed fund has a 10 to 12 year maturity, and it's really more like 15 years, and that's just the truth about venture capital. It takes longer for your fund to mature, and you might return your fund in year seven, eight, or nine, but you're yielding most of the profits in year 1213, 1415.”

“going public, if you don't have coverage, and you don't have an institutional base that wants to invest in you, like, is worse than being private. Because you now have a fixed market cap that doesn't go up. You don't really have liquidity.”

“it takes, you know, a decade or more, you know, barring a real firm, you know, a partnership breakup or, um, you know, something illegal, you know, right? Like it takes a decade or more for a underperforming fund To actually exit the market.”

“And then you get inside the industry and you realize like, actually it's a single hump. There's five percent of VCs who are really, really good at what they do. And even part of that is self-awareness, right? Oh, I'm best in these situations and this stage of company and this type of founder. And so I gravitate towards…”

“So many, maybe there are exceptions to this, but I think it is the norm that the ridiculously successful, crazy genius entrepreneur also has personality traits that you and I would not want to associate with, probably wouldn't want to work with, wouldn't want to marry, wouldn't even want to have them as a friend.”

“So the fact that we can point out Theranos and FTX and WeWork, I think doesn't, doesn't do justice to say that, like, you shouldn't believe in ridiculous stories, because the ones that do work out were also ridiculous stories.”

“The only way for Americans to be globally competitive with China is Literally just a labor equation, right? If we want to keep high wages in America, but compete globally, then we have to have high wage people that are using software and robotics to get a 10 X advantage. Otherwise you just end up in like a low labor…”

“large vertically integrated companies have two options. One is basically you do the whole thing and you win and you're like TSMC or like Tesla big, or you like die getting there. And there's no kind of halfway mark.”

“the way I would underwrite deep tech is basically like series B is the biggest risk point because you're starting to tip real money at the company. C and D is like what's already working. It's a fucking near monopoly. C to A is like, well, it's insane. And you're getting a lot of the company as an investor and, you…”

“Cause the other thing about deep tech is there is no, there is no iteration, honestly. Software companies, you can raise a couple million bucks, have an idea, test an idea, ship something new in four weeks. Whoops. Customer base sucks. Pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot. The amount of complexity in deep tech is just…”

“one of the reasons why the best companies have founded directly after recession has nothing to do with like pricing. It's just that you get people like Airbnb or Travis from Uber where they're just like, I have no other option. So my pain threshold is stupidly high because I have to do this with 200 grand. So the…”

“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. Uh, and that really anchors, you know, value in that market pretty low, which probably will make it hard for startups to…”

“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.”

“if we want to accomplish serving the Stanford dish, um, while serving a lot of other things, we probably would build something that's more modular. They could add up in the sum of its parts to the kind of performance that's required for that operation. But in the meantime, you can use it for a bunch of other things.”

“The, the, the funny thing is, like, space companies are really hard to kill. Like, the amount of space companies that should be dead, ah, and not, the sort of zombie companies is quite, quite incredible. It's not like other industries where, you know, you go to die, you just die. Like, space companies tend to linger…”

“the most amount of failure I'd say is because people don't build reliable stuff. And, um, it's easy to, to, to kind of rush it and throw something on orbit. But, um, I think the distance between putting something on orbit and putting something on an orbit that can last 12 years or go to a planet, that, that gap is just…”

“if you have a small launch vehicle, um, and you turn up to a large launch pad, um, the reality is that, um, you know, the fees don't change, and when you're trying to sell a rocket for, like, eight million dollars, you can't have a million and a half dollars worth of launch fees. On a fifty million dollar rocket, it…”

“Now, if you make heavy structures, Then you have to make super high performance engines. So you'd be lazy on your structures and like really difficult on your engine, or you can be really lazy on your engine and really difficult on your structures.”

“He looked at me and says, if you put in that much effort on the company that's doubling, they might quadruple. We might make more money on the one that quadruples than you fixing the one that's broken. That's an insight. Like, that was an insight from him to me. It's like, as operators, there's a tendency to try and…”

“an advertising company, if you can't make money, then you probably shouldn't be in business. Doesn't make any sense, because you're trying to deliver value to advertisers, you get paid for the value you deliver, and in theory, that should generate you something more than what your costs are.”

“Like if the AI starts writing all the ad creative, then all of it's going to eventually look the same and the user won't respond to the ad. So how do you create alpha? Well, you have to have really smart people that understand systems, understand what they're asking from the AI to output for them. And they need to…”

“The advertisers that invest in creative and are good at it, whether they're using AI tools to develop them or they're using people to develop them, can create lifts in an advertising system where everything else is automated.”

“if you look at, like, local voice AI vendors in, you know, certain countries, like, they actually are typically the best, because it's, you know, they speak the language, they understand it, and they can more quickly identify, like, which data is good and stuff to train on.”

“The, the really good coding IDE products, you know, the tool that you're, the, the tool that you're kind of like, um, sitting in and, and, and like using to look at the code itself versus the agent product, which is kind of that almost the engineer that you can delegate. Um, you obviously want this to be very hand in…”

“we went from a, let's call it a, uh, A software-centric world to a compute-centric world.”

“Anytime that there's a loophole that lets people transfer one asset for another without paying tax on the game, because it's called a tax-free transfer, you gotta cut all that. If you don't cut all that, then people are compounding value without paying taxes when they're realizing value along the way.”

“What happens when everyone owns a house? That's the only thing they own. Now you gotta get the price of the house to go up every year. Now housing is unaffordable to young people.”

“Libertarianism works well if you're willing to leave people behind and you don't expect that the social structure Will become disordered over time, but it does become disordered over time.”

“It's kind of like early days of internet. If we say, what is it, what is the ROI for email? Well, show me, you know, I mean, there are companies that say, prove me ROI before you use it. Uh, you know, am I typing an email? Should I try to figure out what the ROI of this email is before, you know, it's really hard to…”

“ultimately, the future of American manufacturing is not just automation, it's configuration”

“The whole concept of a responsible engineer is what I learned there, and that person owned that part from first requirements all the way through to post-flight. There were no handoffs. There was no finger pointing. Either you got it done, or you are no longer employed, and like that kind of accountability, and that…”

“you, you shouldn't be dependent on, on NVIDIA. Um, you, you shouldn't be dependent on one model maker. Um, I, I, I think that that rarely works out well, right? What, what you'd like to be as a, as a nation or as a big company is you'd like to have choices. And, um, I don't know if you need to own all the stack, but…”

“Five is, in almost every case, too many founders.”

“Google ultimately is a mapping company, They're gathering points of information. They're getting these players to take pictures of it, categorize it, tell them exactly where it is, and to scan that, that, that information. It's basically like free mapping data.”

“you can tell the health of a nation by its ability to tolerate comedy and rap music. Those two things have to exist for freedom. Rap music and comedy. And if either of those start to disappear, you're in trouble.”

“When you control capacity by owning the data centers and the GPUs, and you control the software, you're in an advantageous position to be able to Uh, meet the moment and, and deliver inference for a market that, you know, we fundamentally believe is going to grow exponentially.”

“In this era it's AI optimization. And so these products are now the distribution mechanism for all the downstream products and services that you can use. And they tend to prioritize the tools that have the best developer and user experience.”

“When Mythos first came out, I think the stock market thought that Mythos was going to kill a bunch of our security companies. Just look at CrowdStrike's stock price over the last six weeks. It actually is such a tailwind behind a lot of these companies, especially if you can be the platform that incorporates Mythos and…”

“And the evals we're running on stuff we're doing, stuff others are doing, like a lot of it is inherently non-verifiable. It's like, gotta be human judged at the end of the day. And you can set up more automatic methods for that, but you still have that human intent.”

“It's not like you have to do some fancy JSON thing. Like, that's what people like to popularize it online with, but I mean, you can just talk to them and ask them questions.”

“when you hear about all these companies, and you hear about all of these businesses that are going not like, you know, one to three to nine to 20, like they used to, but are going one to 20 to a hundred, or one to 30 to 300, all of that can be traced back to the enablement of a business model via inference, because the…”

“because these markets are so big in AI and elsewhere, uh, and because these companies are staying private for much longer, you actually have these situations where a late stage company can have much higher upside than like a series C, uh, which is super weird.”

“capitalism lifts everybody up. Um, it doesn't create equal outcomes. I actually don't think you want that. You want high growth that lifts everyone up.”

“Don't just try to optimize for optics of like, how do we look good into the world? People can see through that and it actually backfires. I think you should just have an opinion, stand for it, and don't apologize.”

“there is just this weird inversion of service that, that so often I think lots of times the service we want is, we just, is to not, not have to, like, not have to be, I hate to say it, but not have to be nice to a human, like not have to sit there and smile and have a conversation when you just want to go to your room.”

“B plus is the enemy of an A. B plus often, if we stick with the B plus, is taking up space. It's distracting us from unlocking the A, and to fail or to call the ball that that idea isn't that good, it in itself is really powerful”

“Buying the plane is just the beginning of the journey, right? That's the, that's the cheapest part of owning a plane. Then you have the pilots, the fixed cost, the mains cost, the fuel cost. You're probably looking at anywhere from Two to four million bucks a year to run the plane just, just, just, just to keep it…”

“Unless you have an operating business to run it through, you're There aren't really any tax benefits. If you're like a SpaceX employee and you have a lot of stock, right? You're not, you don't have a business to run this airplane through. So not only are you paying like sticker price for the flights, but you're…”

“Recapture is always taxed at ordinary income rates. So if you buy an airplane, And try to offset capital gains, right? Which is like, well, let's say your SpaceX shares, and then you sell it five years later and you recapture at ordinary income, you're essentially taking a very high interest loan from the government.…”

“And I think there's a bit of a misconception that, oh, legal is subjective, so you can't do this. And I think the thing for especially big law is a lot of the work you can actually quantify, and this is what senior associates and partners are doing when their junior associates do a bunch of this work.”

“And I think something people don't appreciate about the billable hour and why it's such a good mechanism is, It lets you price incredibly complex work at massive scale in a way that the entire industry can agree on, right?”

“normally, you know, companies need to, like, reinvent themselves maybe every, like, five years, 10 years, something like that. I think you have to do it every six months.”

“if you are making an acquisition, like, the number one thing you should be looking at is just talent. Because you can build things so much faster now, right? That it should literally just be talent.”

“I mean, I think generally the AI world has An issue around, like, expectations versus delivery of the, um, I think when we have these very dramatic statements about white collar go work going away or, um, you know, we will see, we will have AGI by 20 and 27. Like, I think you feed into this frenzy and people are…”

“getting to an argument about ownership percentage is like sort of distracting.”

“Venture capital to me has put the most money into the best companies possible at the best price possible. Nowhere in that is like portfolio management and reserve calculations and ownership percentages and all that nonsense.”

“And I always said it took, it took three versions of Merlin to get it to be really tight. And it took three versions also of Raptor. I always say it takes really three, three iterations to get to a really, really tight product and Raptor's there.”

“it used to be that, you know, a team that had a barrel of a PM or a manager and a bunch of ammunition could get a lot done, But now that you kind of can have one person just go use, you know, Codex, Cloud Code, whatever, to go build something, you really just need a lot of barrels to just go get things done, um, so…”

“I, I think, I think the best way to succeed is to just do things, and I think if you over-intellectualize your company building instead of actually doing anything, you're too high on Maslow's hierarchy, and that means that you're not actually able to suffer later.”

“one hot take that I have is that I've noticed a lot of companies, like, kind of over-engineering their, like, ML usage. Like, they'll have, like, They'll build their own custom models. They'll try to, um, train their own models when really, like, you should, you could probably just use the generic model and then focus…”

“where I find that people have difficulty is you hire attorneys, right, and they're going to tell you everything about, or CPAs, about these trusts, but they're not going to have the knowledge To compare that and contrast that to an investment strategy that generates loss. The real challenge I think for people is how do…”

“wealth managers, asset managers, It's very self-serving for them to say, hey, you should liquidate everything because, um, obviously they can't, they're not going to charge you fees on your, your, your concentrate position. It's your stock. You brought it to the table, but they will charge you fees if they build you a…”

“History has shown that hanging onto your stock Generally speaking, not always. There are counter examples, of course, to everything. Uh, generally, you know, that stock that got you to the liquidity point will probably continue to do pretty well.”

“But I'd say the vast majority of people should keep it for a while, uh, at least as long as they're engaged in the company, right?”

“So you see things L one, L two, you even see L three nested structures each time you're further and further away from the stock. And so there's more and more risks that you don't get, You know, what you thought you would, right? Because who's to say that the original person that started the very first, um, company…”

“If it's for a very young person, it's okay to have 80, 9000% alternatives, because they don't need the cash immediately. So let the stuff grow, you know, at the highest risk possible.”

“You just have to look at the underlying pieces and understand them, except that there's the additional complexity. How did they get this thing? Is it through an SPV? Is it through an L two SPV? What did they pay for that? How much of the sort of return is going to be Taken away along the way from the carries and the…”

“If structured properly, you can offset Almost all the income from the property. And then because of something called a step up in basis, a death, uh, when you sell that asset after you pass away, you don't owe tax on that either. So you, along the way, all the income you get from the asset doesn't pay tax because you…”

“You actually don't want to use Balance sheet for go-to-market. You want to use balance sheet for R&D and these more durable long-term investments.”

“I'd say number two is you have to be very ruthless about stating what the culture of the combined business is. You can't, I think this idea of you acquire companies and like everyone's friends and, you know, we're going to be like your little bit of your culture, a little bit of our culture. No, there's always a…”

“Private companies that are breaking into pretty much the top 25 in the world before they even go public. It's an unprecedented time, but I think that's what makes AI so exciting, is that you have these private companies that are capturing so much value and so much growth while staying private, and I think that that is…”

“I mean, it's, I've never seen so many bottlenecks at the same time, and I think that is what makes it so hard, because if it's just one, one vertical slice that's the bottleneck, you can say, okay, well, if they put enough dollars in, they'll be able to solve the bottleneck. But the problem is, is like, even if, let's…”

“I think if you really want to be taken seriously, you need to show up looking serious with them. Because they, they have a lot of people coming at them, and again, earlier there was not many of these companies, so they kind of maybe thought it was cool. Today there's a lot more companies, and they are showing up”

“If the incentive is, no matter what it costs you, I will give you 10% on top of that, that's your profit. Well, 10% of three billion is a much bigger number than 10% of a hundred and fifty million. And so, as a traditional prime, you are deeply incentivized to reinvent the wheel from scratch every single time. You're…”

“candidly, in some cases, the ocean is actually harder to build for than space, because space has a lot of just, like, neutralizing effects, right? It's just there. And as long as it's maintained, it can be maintained. I mean, you have satellites that have been, ah, in orbit since the sixties. Um, whereas the ocean is…”

“I am not big on these, like, sort of, like, super granular cascading OKRs through the whole organization. I'm very big on coming up with, like, targets that we're aiming at. I sort of think of these things as, like, you know, We think that this product for this market has enormous opportunity, organizing really small…”

“the wrong reason would be if you do that, ah, to take capital off yourself, because then you're misaligning with your investors. Ok? The investors gave you money. Carry has some value. You sell it to the third party, monetize, but your investors didn't. That would be a problem.”

“The irony of how we behave is, ah, we'll say in the same breath, I want to build a legacy defining company, and legacy companies are stupid. So somebody else is like you from the past is stupid, and your future legacy is important. That's just a disrespectful posture in society”

“That doesn't make any sense because just by wrapping it into a token doesn't mean it's ready for seven. Like, come on. Like also like, don't pretend like you don't know that. Like, you know, it's like, it's just a fucking rapper, you know, let's be straight, you know? And so there is, is this aspect of like, Hey, like…”

“you could kind of say, rule of thumb, one gigawatt data center, or per gigawatt, you have to spend about fifty billion dollars of capex.”

“The thing that's happened with the LLM powered models is you can now go from, I have an inkling in my head to I'm going to build a prototype to I'm going to not always, not necessarily always on your own, but with a bunch of co-conspirators to build something that's production ready in record short time.”

“And with AI, it's different where you're literally reading a paper, like, yeah, somebody's gonna implement it tomorrow and it's gonna be available. And then everyone's gonna take advantage of it.”

“I don't think the LMS are going to naturally always deliver beautifully crafted, elegant, and yet scientifically correct code. And so you'll still need some degree of taste, even so much to converse with the LM to steer towards the, the right outcome. And, um, for that, you have to understand what you're doing.”

“I think the, it's becoming a little bit less important now to be, let's say, a specialist software engineer in a given field, because The AI tools, they can turn you into a specialist much more quickly, but you need to be an expert in the AI tool use itself, and that is a real skill, and so we, we test for this hard…”

“I think this, this view that everything's gonna take a long, long, long time, and it requires, you know, many, many years of planning is, this is false. Uh, and I think, especially within the reality of today, This technology needs to get out there faster and faster and faster. We don't have the luxury of waiting three…”

“my, I, I guess my belief is that for many, many people, accomplishing something is really a big, important part in their life, and so it, it may be very dangerous if, Everyone can just go do their hobbies.”

“mostly the person who built a business, nine to nine percent is the business builder. Maybe a hundred percent.”

“The best value add is no value add. My opinion is that you want long-term passive capital, which is what the best capital is. Second best is that is that then you add, you add value.”

“most of these firms, the independent firms have spun out of banks and the banks themselves, uh, don't train people to be professional investors, right? These people are trained to be service providers. They're trained to be responsive. They're trained to be helpful, but the actual investment acumen when you're at a…”

“if you're trying to build a multi-asset class portfolio, global multi-asset class portfolio, you're going to hire a bunch of these sort of professional investors I mentioned. I don't know, you need five, six, seven of them, different asset classes. You've got, you know, you've got fixed income, obviously, stocks, which…”

“A lot of, again, firms will present you alternatives. They'll say you can do this, or you could do that. You tell me what you want. And they're doing this for various reasons. One, they may not actually have a strong opinion. Two, uh, it's liability. If I tell you do this and you do it, and then you're not happy, well,…”

“So you can create several trusts. Each of those trusts gets the now fifteen million dollar exemption before it was 10. So you can, you can do that. Married couples now can get both.”

“It's a big misconception. People think anonymity equals lack of safety. Um, as if real world platforms with bad behavior don't exist. There's plenty of platforms with real world identities and lots of bad behavior. What incentivizes good or bad behavior is, I think, the context. So the Reddit communities create this…”

“What's interesting about Reddit is you don't get famous in the real world for being good at Reddit. Um, you might become infamous once in a while. You don't become rich by being good at Reddit. So, which is not true on social media. You can become rich and famous by being good at social media. And so I think the…”

“Also the best new grads, like if you don't hire them as new grads, you will never see them. They will never be on the job market again. They're too valuable to ever let them be on the job market. So if you don't hire them when they're young, you will never see them. Or if you do, they're a hundred X more expensive.”

“But I think having a founder taking care of sales makes them care a lot more about the details that I would say a professional hires may not care about as much, and I think it's made a significant difference for the business.”

“I actually think it's a cheat code, if you think you have product market fit, to start going global very early.”

“whenever you have a large kind of market team like we do, like a couple thousand people, before a salesperson is comfortable with selling a product, it takes like nine months to nine to 12 months. And by being able to bring the zero of the product after month one, even though it's using the backend of the company we…”

“for every product that you sell there are Four personas that you need to, to care about. The person who has the pain, the person that has the authority to buy solution like you're selling, the person that is the user that actually uses the product day to day, and the person that owns the budget. For such a product. And…”

“There's one way in which running a public company is harder than running a private company. Like, one real way. And that is, people will write things about you in newspapers. So if you care about what the Wall Street Journal writes about you, running a public company is difficult.”

“But I find in the history of American corporations, and for Westworth, I think this is a uniquely like North American problem because it's not true in Japan, for example, but in history of American corporations, you get these significant moments of alpha followed by a slow decline once managers takeover, right?”

“But the best way to get the same outcome as everyone else Is grab a consulting firm, ask them what is the best practice in x industry, and do that. But what that gets you is what the industry does.”

“the best thing for culture is doing hard things together in person.”

“I also think that like people misprice risk in their head and they think waiting reduces risk. And in my experience, it just fucking doesn't. Like, it doesn't, right? All it does is take time away from time you could be spending doing other things.”

“literally all companies are, Are a collective effort to learn. And if we learn faster, we do more. So all this, all that matters, right? Like now, like if we do things faster, we'll also be wrong more frequently, but we would have been wrong that frequently just over a more stretched out amount of time. So let's just…”

“I think it's an interesting world where if execution is commoditized to compute, then it goes back to, okay, like literally the most creative person, but also the person who can control culture and dictate taste is the one who wins.”

“I find first time founders are zero percent calibrated to that type of thinking, and a few years in it is very difficult for them. And then repeat founders, of whom I work with several, always have a very similar logic because they've seen what happens, even if it's not to them, to their friends, once they've set those…”

“efficiency drops Really precipitously as you go over, like, 80 to a hundred people. That's what I've seen over and over again.”

“Because you can't do Twitter without getting canceled a few times. You can't do Twitter without getting hate a few times, without people saying the meanest things about you for the world to see. You can't, you just can't do it without it. And, and no, most people don't have the thick enough skin to be able to endure…”

“if you're doing five plus deals per partner a year, definitely five, but I would argue like even three or four at some .2 years in, you're going to have like six companies that you're heavily involved with, and you're not really going to have time to do work for any of them.”

“it turns out that the scaling laws are proportional to the amount of data you can train on. So you can't just arbitrarily make the model super big if the data set is just the internet. Uh, yeah, maybe you can accentuate that with other kinds of like proprietary internet data and do all kinds of other stuff, but order…”

“At any given point, you have one question you're trying to answer, and you want to go get that answer. That's all that you need to make something work. Don't overthink it. The one question we have right now is not any of that shit. All we need to know is do customers love this product? Is the answer yes or no?”

“Because the thing about finance teams is they're responsible for 100% of the spend in the company, right? If you're overspend, you go fire your CFO. But then at the same time, they only make five percent of the decisions. So the question becomes, 95% of the decisions are made all over the company.”

“If there are a set of companies, for example, that rely heavily on basically people power. They charge by the hour. They charge a lot of money. They make a lot of money. And now you're confronted with a technology like coding agents that can literally get jobs done for a 10th of the time. And so, embracing something…”

“Most people are not, like, taken out by competition. Most people sabotage themselves”

“The highest status thing you could do because I get access to people that the startup found to raise a hundred million dollars. Couldn't, they wouldn't even talk to them. Like I get access to the craziest people in the world because they benefit from my work.”

“I've talked to so many founders that started, that scaled, that sold, and are unbelievably depressed, or unhappy, or realizing that was my best idea. I'll never have an idea that that's good. I have three and a half decades of life, four decades of life ahead of me. And I can't take that back.”

“So w one of the things that I take a little bit of an issue with right now in venture is there's so much of a focus on this ARR number. And it's not even defined properly half the time, right? Like you might just take some, some of these companies are literally just taking like yesterday's subscription rate and like…”

“what a belief they had very, very early on, which I would characterize as super creative to both believe this and then pursue it, was that actually in the future, AI is going to make it so easy to create and such a personal experience to create. That these people that are creating, they're going to listen to their own…”

“if you're a huge foundation model and you can kind of hit every layer of the stack, there's probably more revenue for you to take advantage of than if you're just at the application layer.”

“Instead, we're investing our own money in building what we think the right products are, and then we sell them to the government. So we want to be going to the government Generally, with a product rather than a PowerPoint, or at least a prototype instead of a presentation, and that's gone really, really well for us. It…”

“concentration and venture is a really important one. Um, this is like the idea that you don't want to have a thousand investments in a billion dollar fund. You want to have like a massive amount of concentration in the top few positions in that fund. Um, that's something that has been really useful to us from a returns…”

“These, these critical technology areas were, were almost 10 years old since 2018, and if something's critical for 10 years, that means you're not making much progress on it.”

“So a lot of people have the mentality of, oh, this is a hundred million dollar check. Let's spend all our time. This is more important than like a one million seed check. But the reality is normally your a hundred million check is buying you 10% of a company. Your seed check for one million is also buying you 10% of…”

“Andrel never loses sight of who their customer is, and they have a ton, like, you know, there's tons of, like, collateral and white papers and documentation for their customers, but at the same time, they're hugely dependent on support from Washington for the work they're doing, and if you want people to believe in…”

“We're seeing more younger founders get into the game because experience is not as important as, uh, just innovation.”

“But if you double the valuation, that means you have half the number of shots that you can deploy. You just have to be twice as good. And so my push for the industry is if you're going to write a check that is twice as large for the, then you need to have twice the conviction.”

“I think revenue as the metric is, uh, is a lazy way of looking at the problem. You have to look at the underlying metrics and don't forget some of the best companies in the world over time have taken time to build before they reach revenue.”

“There's 20 trillion dollars, uh, in labor spend. Uh, software, I think it's like a one trillion dollar, so one trillion of the 20 is software. Like, that 20 trillion's up for grabs.”

“Every once in a while your passion lines up with something really important for the world or really important for A field or discipline or industry or society and great follow your passion, but most of the time it's really bad advice and it actually leads people to a suboptimal state in life.”

“you could think of them as a distributed search function, right? You have thousands of people exploring all the space of entrepreneurship. And so how can any one person or small group of people come up with better ideas and thousands of people in a distributed manner? You know, it's just impossible.”

“I think that, uh, there's a number of circumstances where people think something's, I'd say, 90% of the time founders think that they're going to compete and they don't. They tend to grow in very different directions, especially if it's two early stage companies.”

“people are kind of on this weird mimetic thing about autism. They're not autistic. You know, they read people very well, whether they care about how the person's feeling in the moment may matter less or more, but they can read people very well and they know how to motivate them and poke them”

“Now, for these verifiable domains like coding and math, instead of doing reinforcement learning with human feedback, you can do reinforcement learning. Because you can automatically check when you got the correct answer or not, uh, in these verifiable domains. Um, and with reinforcement learning, the w the way you…”

“the easiest way to defeat a weapon system is on the factory floor. And so the defense industrial base is where the fight is happening right now.”

“One, two, three used to be right in the metrics. You're a great company. One, three, 10. I think now it's one, 10, 50. For even the normal companies, the equivalent of SAS, that's expected of you.”

“company building, 99% of the time, Will be a team sport like American football, like basketball, but there is a lot of means also on Twitter, uh, X that then will be the single company, which will be a billion dollar company. And again, that will be rare, right?”

“I've found that you need to do it in person, which really reduces the scalability of it.”

“I think it's actually something you can teach yourself. Like it's an acquired taste. I think many things in life are that way. They're path dependent. You just decide to have energy.”

“Every company that's ever done that, uh, hasn't, hasn't done so well. There's this old documentary, which is a great movie called startup.com. I do not recommend this to founders.”

“you need to be able to be profitable or break even in a market when only four million Americans transact.”

“Their APIs are not public. They're hidden by a login. And the problem is because their API is hidden by a login. What does that mean? AI has not been trained on it. AI doesn't have access to it. So if we want to go to AI and ask, how do we change our integration to your software? It's not public, so AI doesn't know. If…”

“trust in banking meant people in suits, In marble offices with ties, shaking hands. And for whatever reason, banks still thinks that this emits trust. But for our generation that grew up with O seven and see our parents struggled through the financial crisis, that's everything but trust, right?”

“in quantum computing, you get all of these founders, they all show up and they all think that their way is the only way to do it and sling mud at everybody else. Everything else is crap. Um, uh, like, you can't win that game. Like, nobody wins in that game.”

“It seems like all the really good, the biggest things I've ever covered, they all take 10 to 12 years. I think Silicon Valley, sometimes you have this overnight sensation kind of thing where you see Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg turn up when they're 26 and they're worth a billion dollars, and I don't know, it all looks…”

“they're probably like the two areas where I feel the least comfortable trying to tell what's real from what's not real, because everybody's raised a ton of money, and it seems like serious people that are doing it, and they're smart people, and then you just can't tell if they've all convinced them. You can't tell,…”

“TRT, which is not a peptide, but again, I think every guy like over 30 should get tested for their hormone levels and then decide if they want to do it.”

“I don't think people should be judged for taking it either. I think there's a lot of like stigma around it and people are like, you cheated at losing weight. And it's like, I don't see how it's different than taking creatine to put on, you know, water weight and build some mass and like taking other, it's just another…”

“there's a trait that we look for that we call hyperfluency, and All the old Teal fellows had it. People like Dylan and Vitalik and Laura, uh, and now our new founders that we work with, some of which who have become fellows, people like Augustus from Rainmaker, Ethan from Mock, um, and Human from Solkoa as examples.…”

“Things are moving so fast that if you have a beautiful product roadmap, something's not right. You're probably not moving fast enough.”

“Bonus depreciation is awesome. If you're Boeing, It's awesome if you're a real estate developer. Um, 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 losses already, so the fact that they can write that off…”

“Well, like with resilience, one thing we learned, which is going to sound very obvious, but, um, you know, early on, we took a little bit of like, if we build it, they'll come strategy. That's a bad idea. Um, it's much better to buy or invest in a facility alongside a customer who has, you know, either already signed…”

“nuclear is sort of like the derivative to AI. If you believe that AI is going to go vertical, you should probably invest in nuclear, you know, because A, you're going to power it. B, you're going to be very insulated from, you know, the deflationary effects of that.”

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

“What makes venture unique as an asset class for us is that it has what I'll call a global topology. You know, you bring a company on to Carta because all the investors are minority holders. They bring a bunch of investors. They bring 20 investors. And then those 20 investors hopefully recommend some startups, which…”

“you could not create, uh, stop signs and, um, uh, highway systems when the automotive car was first invented, right? You had to sort of see how the technology evolved And then you can figure out what regulations are needed. So that's definitely how this will play out.”

“And if we think of what's happening in Russia, Ukraine, while people often talk about AI and autonomy, the real narrative is about quantity. And so for us having a strong manufacturing base that can build a lot of things, that is the best way to be able to lead to deterrence.”

“I would make the argument that the financial statement audit Is a war fighting capability.”

“And so in all those cases, these companies are spending one to three percent of their market cap on the MNAs, which is not like, that's not transformative MNA. It's really like, again, these big consolidators are just taking call options bets on these fast growing new companies.”

“I think that in a world of AI and as AI starts to mature, I think a lot of the benefits actually go to what I would call not the incumbents, but like the fast moving larger companies. Like, of course there will be a few companies that start from zero and explode, but you know, companies like Salesforce, like…”

“Paul Graham has an essay called never talk to corp dev that he published, I think like 15 years ago, um, which I, my hot take is I actually don't agree with it. And essentially his, his point is that look, as soon as you talk to a large big tech, or you talk to a potential acquire, you've kind of crossed the Rubicon,…”

“in M and A, it's the opposite. I think you don't want to be nice. You want to be not rude, but you want to be direct and you want to be harsh.”

“now we're at a place where private companies are very large. They've been staying private for a long time. They're secondary. They're tender offers. There are different ways of getting liquidity back as well. So I sort of look at this trend as larger companies have opportunities to continue to build and continue that…”

“I think six months ago, Molly, if we sat down and you were like, Oh, what are the interesting metrics? I might've said revenue per you revenue per employee. I don't even know if that makes sense anymore. There are so many companies that are just, that's mind boggling number that it's hard to compute.”

“I'd also say that in general, I think in some ways, all of this strategy stuff is a little bit over determined. And on some level, you either invested in a great company with a meaningful size or you didn't. And I think that, you know, it's easy to get lost in all this other stuff. But what it really comes down to is…”

“The part I'm least sure about with the framing is that the middle shouldn't exist. That I don't know if I have clarity on that yet. The reason is I still think that a series A or B or C founder, for the most part, is going to pick a partner that they really like, a brand that they trust and respect, a team that they…”

“My hot take is there's already a reasonable amount of UBI, and it's just in the form of, you know, companies employing people that the job is either zero productive or counterproductive. And so like, that's actually like a form of it that, that already happens.”

“Distribution is going at the end of the more important than anything. Technology could work backwards. You don't have distribution. You don't have a sustainable business.”

“the chat bot is obviously the wrong interface. What is the correct interface? I think Apple is exploring, like every, every single smart glass company, Apple, like they're exploring the idea of, uh, AI integrated in your life. And what this looks like for them is like liquid glass, like a translucent overlay. I think…”

“Virality is really important, but it means nothing if you can't do it consistently. But if you can do it consistently, then it's the most powerful thing in the world, and it will make you untouchable.”

“What I've learned is, if you have a post, you're, if you're in tech Twitter, and you have a post that does over, say, 40,000 impressions, you've hit pretty much every relevant decision maker in tech.”

“I think it's the same, you know, content playbook you use for SEO, put a lot of written content out there, make sure it's scrapable, make sure LLMs can get that into its, uh, It's context as well as, you know, making sure we have our content in other places with good backlinks. I think a lot of the SEO playbook is also…”

“as a solo founder, you remove this alignment step within co-founders where you have, we have several co-founders. Often the co-founders have to get aligned and then you get aligned to the rest of the company. So when you're a solo founder, It's just you and the company in constant harmony”

“every asset, every drone, every plane, every, ah, you know, ground vehicle, every UUV is a test asset. Fundamentally, it's, it's generating, you know, telemetry sensor data logs, just like you would, um, a hardware in the loop, you know, test stand, or a test cell, or a wind tunnel. Um, And so our, our whole vision is…”

“We are highly concentrated investors. We think diversification is the enemy of outlier returns.”

“And I think that to the extent these new products get introduced to the industry, it's gonna be because they see an unfair advantage, ah, in their ability to deliver on that because they have this unique insight into, like, what these companies really need and how to serve them.”

“none of this matters if you don't have a compelling brand that I believe can only be forged at the earliest stages.”

“Because if you marry wrong, it's tragic, but you can get a divorce, right? You can make a change. Once you pick a general contractor, and I know this from personal experience, having remodeled the house with my wife a couple years ago, you are stuck with that person. And this is more similar to what it's like working…”

“Don't not take investor meetings because you're not raising. And the reason for that is because you can do it in a contained way that allows you to understand what these people are about and who they are and do you vibe with them or not? And I think the problem with these, like, shotgun processes where, you know, the…”

“That said, um, it's not clear to me that, that construct needs to exist at seed and pre-seed in a way that, uh, necessarily, like, makes the company better off. And so typically what I see is that there are cases where, like, the founder wants to form a board, they want the investor involved at seed, and that's fine.…”

“the big mistake that, uh, some investors make, especially earlier in their career, because thesis driven work is, is a little bit easier to do, uh, than say developing relationships with people, which takes a lot longer. Is they tend to go and find the best company that fits their thesis or is on their market map, and…”

“the moment I lose the desire to go on Hacker News or go on Reddit or go on X and just figure out what's going on in the world and what people I don't know that I should get to know, that's the moment that I should probably hang up my cleats and move on because I just don't think you, you want it bad enough to be great…”

“basically healthcare is, a doctor's job is an informatics problem, right? You're computing between, when you're a doctor and you go see a patient, you're computing between a database of what you know about a patient, what you know about medicine, and what interventions you have in your toolkit. And you're just…”

“there's a, you probably see it on Twitter all the time, all these kind of young kind of, they call them cracked out engineers, growth hacking TikTok with the faceless videos and yada, yada, yada, and that stuff works. But that doesn't necessarily really work for a financial product where you want to build trust, you…”

“if you give a creative team a big budget, they naturally and, like, instinctively are gonna cut corners around creativity to drive growth.”

“The incentive structure is, is, is interesting actually for these, these companies in that they, uh, are typically, typically financially incentivized to spend money, not to save money. So in defense, this is called cost plus, uh, in the utility world, it's called, um, uh, it's called, uh, rate making, rate, rate…”

“there being bubbles in venture is a feature, not a bug, um, in that, uh, it is both the way that you can significantly lower the cost of capitals for the leaders of those, you know, sort of fields”

“some VC firms rather, uh, you know, take a more active stance and swapping out CEOs if the company's not performing well. But, uh, something I learned is like, that's usually, it usually doesn't work out. So, you know, you're really, In with this founder for the long haul”

“I think it's just a tall ask for your partner to be everything to you. People are just relying so much on leaning so much on their partners for literally everything where if you live in community, you don't have to do that.”

“if we wanted this to be, to get, be on a certain set of scale without regulators, like shutting it down or like having, um, it has to be regulated. And two is like, like any financial market, you have to be able to work with the brokers, like the Schwab's of the world, the Robin Hood's, and then the market like…”

“The difference is actually about whether the underlying thing, like the thing that you're actually engaging in, has actually some sort of economic, social, cultural relevance outside of the act of placing the trade, right? Like, and so, so it's like, is it artificial versus natural, right? Like if, if I roll a roulette…”

“there's no insider trading in commodities. Like it's all insider trading actually, like the whole thing. It's interesting because then like they have inside trading on the prices they think that they're going to sell and then how much they sold and so on.”

“And I think entrepreneurs are like extremely spiked in one thing, and then everything else is kind of like, close to zero, actually, like completely incapable of everything else. Uh, whereas a lot of, A lot of people that live a happy, healthy life are actually more like rounded. It's more balanced.”

“I do think, like, and people say this, and it's cheesy, and it's, like, also true, is that the founder really matters, and, like, there's definitely a midwit curve on that that I've written about before, which is, like, You think founders really matter and then you're like, no, no, no, market and like strategy and…”

“Cause I do think there's like just so much venture theater. Where, like, you just have to do a bunch of stuff because, like, your boss, you know, your GP expects it, or their LPs expect it. Like, there's just a bunch of, like, shit that you have to produce to, like, talk yourself into a decision.”

“If you go with this one particular architecture, what you're really doing is selling radiation by building these pulse power generators, and you can use that for, uh, Radhart Electronics and nuclear arsenal testing and, like, all these things that can, like, generate money on the same exact path that you need to go to,…”

“most of the LPs that are backing this segment, the venture capital segment, know that the real returns come from early stage and later stage is great, but it's a different, it's closer to their buyout category than it is to their, uh, what they call venture capital.”

“as long as humans are, are critical and we are, uh, to the advancement of these technologies and the advancement of the IP within our companies, that workflows, uh, some form of workflow is going to continue. And that's what call it SAS, call it workflow software. It is going to continue because that's where you get…”

“Like, I think the major takeaway from that piece is that the best organizations are going to use multiple models in concert with one another to power their end experiences. It would no longer be a world in which you just plug in to open AI's latest model.”

“We look for three things when we invest in software companies. We look for toil, lots of repetitive, really boring work. The second thing we look for is a labor market that cannot supply enough people to do that work. There aren't enough graduates or people who are excited to do it for the pay or people leave that job…”

“when someone says, what are you excited about? It's because they don't know what to be excited about themselves. And so they're fishing you to try to get excited about something, um, because they lack it in their lives. And, and so they're doing, they're outsourcing their work to you.”

“Well, if you think about it, all VCs are kind of, we have money, it's the same, right? It's not, the money's not different. Um, so what makes us stand apart is our ethics, and who we are, and what we stand for, and our our compass.”

“Not just like, hey, I've got a business plan, and I'm gonna go and sell SaaS, you know, things. It's gonna be nine 99, and people are gonna love it. Like, everyone says that. There's no alpha in that.”

“if it's, i.e. it's not a good business, but it feels good to do it, um, that actually doesn't have an impact at all.”

“One question I would often ask people is how big is monster energy? And they would often say like 2,000,000,003 billion. I think at the time it was seventy billion. Um, and so I think a lot of investors are magnitudes off in how big these categories can be.”

“when you think about The enterprise software of consumer spend. Pet is it. I mean, yes, you'll have that initial maybe 40 to 60% drop off in the first year, but after that, you're retaining 80 to 90% of your customer, of your dollar spend year after year, and so it's a, you can apply very similar frameworks from…”

“when you look at a burger shop, which traditionally has not been something that, you know, our LPs would know us for, and you see that it can, you know, it costs, it can generate a hundred You realize that that payback and life after payback is really interesting and rivals some of the more traditional software…”

“the beauty of some of these categories is they're not necessarily winner take all. Um, you know, there's some platform or network or brand effects, but winner can often take most as we saw in indirect to consumer pet. But if you ended up in two, three, four, or five, you're still making, underwriting your base, you're…”

“the longer it takes you to generate an artifact with Gen AI, uh, but the faster it is to verify if that artifact is actually useful and good, the better Gen AI can change that, that industry or that workflow.”

“as the cost of intelligence is going down. We're just going to use more intelligence. Everywhere, right? Like anything from your light switch to like your flight scheduling, uh, to your marketing automation, to your tier two support, everything will get more access to technology.”

“there are emerging managers who are coming to market with new funds, so call it Like a 20, 23 plus emerging manager who I think has the benefit of not getting caught up in what was, what's been a really challenging market cycle. And so if you're just starting a fund today and you're spinning out of a larger venture…”

“Microsoft doesn't care if the margins and foundation models are 80% or 30%. They can't lose that layer, right? Even if it's a commodity, it needs to be a commodity on Azure. Same thing with Amazon. Needs to be a commodity on AWS.”

“Defense primes are good at aeronautics. They're good at explosives. You know, I tend to, I always say, like, they're good at boom. Uh, don't compete on boom. Um, what they're bad at generally is software, is AI, is autonomy.”

“Most of these companies I mentioned that we invested in are started by people who were actually at one of these successful companies, Endural, Palantir, or SpaceX before, or who were in military service themselves, and they know sort of the landscape. It's very rare that someone's a complete outsider and comes in and…”

“This sort of like supervisor worker type paradigm where it's not workflow software, it's supervisor software where you supervise the agents.”

“the entire existence of nonstick pans is driven by the fact that people, like, basically stoves have, like, incomprehensible zero through 10 settings versus an exact temperature.”

“Like one thing I learned from Emory, who's the CEO of Frame.io is, um, is that there's no match for intensity. You, you need it. And he, he once gave me this really powerful analogy where he said, if I was training for the Olympics of figure skating, um, Nobody would ask me, do you have work-life balance? Like, I would…”

“it's, it's not SAS only SAS. It's not only AI. It's never going to be only FinTech, but the combination of these things together makes for a truly defensible, resilient business that, that I think is going to be really large.”

“if you're working, you know, average 80 hours a week versus somebody that's working 40 hours a week, whatever that takes them one year to figure out, it will take you four to six months.”

“I think where we have seen it actually working at some sort of scale would probably be coding, customer support, or sales. Um, and generally the ones that have worked better are very verticalized. So they're doing a, a clear workflow really well. They're not a general agent doing whatever you say and then outputting,…”

“Trey Stevens, uh, partner at Founders Fund, uh, and co-founder Vanderell just posted this good, uh, essay in Pirate Wires about how, like, like by the time that there's a market trend that you can like build a VC fund around, like it might be too late because the power law company has been established.”

“it's too, it's too easy to get VC pilled and be like, and be like, oh, well, like if I change my story a little bit, I could raise a bunch of money.”

“Empirically, about six deals in any fund drive 80% of the returns.”

“you often get input from investors who have never done what you've done before. And so it's like, well, meaning smart people saying smart things, but it's not actionable.”

“there's a ton of companies that can acquire businesses for 100 to five hundred million dollars. There's not so many who can acquire it for two billion or five billion. So if you're disciplined as an investor, if you're disciplined as a founder, and you're funding things at a 10,000,020 1,000,040 1,000,060 million…”

“to the extent that those answers, the answers you would tell a founder are different than what you tell an LP. I think at best it's confusing and at worst it's duplicitous, right? Like you're sort of somebody's the rube, right?”

“don't use AUM or increasing AUM as a measuring size for your success, for your momentum, for anything.”

“if you are an extraordinarily talented legal professional, Your incentive is not necessarily to go into immigration because you will probably earn a lot more going into corporate law or contract managed negotiation, and so immigration tends to be made up of a smattering of boutique law firms like immigration attorneys…”

“I actually think that a lot of things in kind of consumer Are generally somewhere between, call it like, 60 to 80% luck, and then, you know, 20 to 40% executing against that luck.”

“I think that, uh, many investors have absolutely zero business trying to, uh, tell entrepreneurs what to do at all. Um, I felt that way as an entrepreneur. I feel that way as an investor. Um, they just either haven't done the fucking thing. Uh, or they haven't been around long enough to have the pattern recognition to…”

“I used to always say that we are trying to add science to it, but I've come to the realization that it's way more effective to say that we want to make it easier to become artists for these operators, because they are really amazing, and they've got so much domain knowledge, but it's just so hard to learn, and the…”

“when I started writing, I had this really strong perspective that, you know, storytelling is really powerful, but at the end of the day, reality wins out. And increasingly over the last two years, as I've written more and kind of unpacked other people's stories, I have increasingly become convinced that stories shape…”

“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, there were other portfolio companies that they said, oh, if…”

“Daniel Kahneman, the great psychologist, he, he said something one time where he said, the greater, the degree of success, like the higher to the outlier, uh, the more standard deviations away from norm that you are of successful, the higher, the, the more luck played a role in that situation. And he said, there's…”

“I just think a lot of whether it's jealousy or economic pessimism is because people who don't feel good about their success They almost fantasize about other people failing in order to make themselves like justify their lower status in the world.”

“The right word to describe a lot of these people in any career, whether it's sports or startups, whatever it would be, is not even, it's not driven. It's not motivated. I think the right word is tortured. They are tortured that they are there. There's a problem they're trying to solve. They have not quite yet solved…”

“every company's valuation, whether it's a startup or a public company or even a bond, is a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow.”

“markets are always going to get to a ridiculous level because that's the only way that they can find the boundaries of what other people can put up with.”

“That's the reason why all ERPs are terrible is because you can't product manage your way to a good ERP. You kind of have to build it and use it yourself and then it finally becomes good.”

“The only way to produce that is that you run a manufacturing company with a vertically integrated software and robotics team so that you actually build the right product.”

“Many manufacturing companies have only picked like, you know, a low cost state. What ends up happening is No one wants to work there. So like looks good on an Excel spreadsheet, but, um, completely fails operationally.”

“the best engineers, frankly, just want two things. One is like three things. Work with other fantastic engineers. Work on really hard engineering problems that actually create business value and then have as few product managers as humanly possible.”

“The off switch can't be digital. And sometimes the best solution is just put an eight-bit drill through a hard drive.”

“the real competition for Varda is not, um, you know, these human rated platforms. They're so far off in economics. The real competition is like, can you actually do this in a way that, you know, integrates into people's terrestrial users, supply chains and terrestrial alternatives.”

“venture capital is also the worst asset class on the planet as well. Uh, there's not many funds where you can invest and you could lose money or, or lose like half your money. So venture capital is all about getting into the top, top quartile and getting to those top opportunities.”

“Power laws pretty much end at about a hundred million dollar valuation, right? Uh, depending on obviously like whether stuff will expand, you can't, you can't invest out a five hundred million dollar valuation, get a thousand X. It's just the math. Math doesn't work”

“One of the paradoxes of asset management is that as your fund scales, you actually become more attractive to the majority of capital in the markets, not the majority of LPs, but the majority of capital, and you start to get phone calls from people like CalPERS.”

“A lot of people say, you don't know until year 15 whether you're good at VC. That's completely idiotic because you obviously have people marking you up. Once you get to a series B, you could sell via secondary. So whether or not you choose to sell does not mean that that asset isn't worth anything.”

“So I think DPI is important. And DPI is kind of like ground truth. Like it's an equalizer. You could be the worst marketer in the world, but eventually like your DPI will catch up. Right? So it is a great equalizer is the most empirical fact, but it is a highly lagging indicator.”

“I think you sell 10, 10, 15, 20%. A lot of LGPs get short-term greedy. They're like, well, I wanted to let it ride and get more carry. Well, first of all, I could go down to zero. But secondly, if they're really thinking, you know, strategically, that DPI will help them raise their next fund.”

“I don't actually recommend 10. I think 15 is a good number.”

“If you have a portfolio of 25 in your, let's say, ten million dollar solo GP, the odds of you being a three X fund are high, if you're competent. Uh, the odds of you being a 20 X fund are low.”

“when A tiny girl or somebody else deploys money onto a cap table. They might say own five percent of that cap table, and they'll have, their dollars will have a leverage effect on the ecosystem as a whole. Because while they buy five percent of the company, they actually work up the other 95% of the, of the cap table.…”

“my thesis around the dropping cost of software and how that's leading towards a shift away from pure play SaaS and leading more towards vertically integrated companies.”

“what I'm actually seeing with this current flavor of AI is almost identical to what happened almost 10 years ago now, a little more than 10 years ago, uh, with predictive analytics.”

“Today with AI tooling, like, you can write code a lot faster, but that also means, like, your debug cycles are a lot faster, um, and so you spend a lot more time up front now, or it's prudent to spend a lot more time up front, you know, assembling all of your hardware on a bench, testing it there, Investing more…”

“the nice and kind of magical part about building autonomous boats is that all boats historically have been built for humans. And so when you actually, you know, thoughtfully choose to design hardware and software together, you actually get to reduce a lot of the complexity. So you can increase the amount of, uh,…”

“autonomous boats haven't been, you know, blessed with, uh, the, the legal approval from, from necessary from, from DHS and whatnot. Um, you still have manning requirements on autonomous boats so that you haven't had the economic push. And then on the other side, um, a lot of the things, as soon as you get into acoustic…”

“The commercial shipbuilding builds the supply chain, it builds the industrial base, it lets you build for scale, so that you're not only reliant on naval orders, which are bespoke orders and low volume.”

“what autonomy does, it actually lets you, in addition to controlling the ship, obviously, it actually lets you simplify the design of the ship because now people aren't required. Um, so that lets you design more simple ships that lets you produce at scale. It lets you drive down costs and it lets you open up markets…”

“if you're not co-designing with the hardware, software production in mind, then things aren't going to integrate, and they're not going to work. It's always going to fall down at that integration layer.”

“You need to, ah, send data. That is like how you monetize space.”

“I think like it's helpful to have founders that are kind of a step ahead of you so that you can kind of understand what are the problems that are gonna be around the corner.”

“the challenge with a staged combustion engine is you can't, you can't separate components and then go and test them individually and then bring them together. Um, it's sort of, you know, the first time you, you hot fire an engine, uh, you have to have the turbo pump and everything on it as, as one thing.”

“being a public company teaches you extreme discipline. Like you can't be messing around, uh, as a public company and, and, you know, wasting capital and, and not delivering.”

“there's no such thing as a small acquisition. Ironically, like, some of the smaller companies have consumed vastly amounts more time than some of the bigger companies.”

“sometimes it's easy to start something from scratch and formulate it in a way that best makes sense. Than to try and integrate with a whole bunch of rules that don't, don't fit.”

“being a public company really enforces that discipline of profitability and profitability is survival. You know, the, the rockets and satellites, and it's all cool, but at the end of the day, it's all for nothing if your economics aren't there and you're not comfortable.”

“So, the way I think about looking for life in the universe, I don't think there'll be, like, little, you know, watery sack kind of people floating through the universe. I think it's, you know, most likely, you know, evolved into some kind of, you know, either hardware silicon, or maybe even just signal, because if you…”

“government is non-linear. So you can put an input into a government and you just never know what you're going to get out.”

“If I can read what people have written over the last four years on LinkedIn, I can tell you who they are without having to ask them.”

“Um, and so that acts as a big heat sink, but we're still using, it's just a flat plate that's cut into a shape in two D versus having to be cast or CNC'd, which is just a lot cheaper for, for mass manufacturing.”