The Wisdom Wall

“the primary skill these vendors have is securing government contracts. Huge moat. Delivery of quality product. Be damned.”

“the models feel like they're getting fatter every month and they're sort of eating away at the edges of what you can do with them.”

“my assumption is that, ah, the private company should have very little, very little say in how the government uses those products”

“open source has always been this like pressure on SaaS, And it's always withstood that, and like, yeah, maybe, like, if you can just prompt it, and it feels like emailing your, your SaaS provider to reconfigure things, like, that is a real pressure, but I think it's underrated that, that open source CRMs have existed…”

“Agent and Commerce doesn't replace Shopify checkout. It's just a front end to the, to the checkout.”

“One of the reasons the Blue Origin moved a little bit slower than SpaceX, uh, is that, uh, they leaned a little bit harder on the exquisite system going really big, and Elon had this idea of, like, let's try and make a whole bunch of small things that we bundle together.”

“AUM weighted brain rot or AUM weighted slop is not an excuse for slop and, and, and controversial investments. If you put one percent of your fund into something that is just going to go all over the internet and be like, we are the most degenerate. We're the craziest. We're the most insane. We're the most fraudulent,…”

“The problem from, uh, the, the Carlota Perez perspective is that all of this spending on chips is relative to the sort of infrastructure she wrote about railroads, factories, fiber, short lived. If there's a bubble in railroads and we're like, we think railroads are going to unlock five percent GDP growth. It's…”

“Distribution is king. It's very clear that, that even if you built a better product, the best product is not going to win, and we see this with the, with the LLMs.”

“intelligence is, is so valuable and, and LLMs and AI is so valuable that, that, you know, yeah, even if you're like the sixth best model, you can still sell the intelligence if it's at the frontier level to the market at a market clearing price that still generates profit above what the NVIDIA GPUs cost and you still…”

“if you want to summon the AI God in a box, you gotta be a capitalist. It's not happening to a nonprofit. You're not just writing some clever algorithm with some altruistic.”

“there seems to be a massive pool of value in Being the consumer AI company, the aggregator, the front, the front page of artificial intelligence, getting installed on the home row of people's apps, setting it to the default search engine, setting it to the default webpage when you open a website. And, and then the B to…”

“if you under invest and AI is real, you're screwed. If you overinvest and AI is real, you're great. If you overinvest and AI isn't real, you still have, you still have a lot of assets. It's still valuable. Like there was a lot of dark fiber that wound up getting used later on. So like the, the, the risk reward…”

“I just, this is a different scenario because if you just download the Git repo for deep seek and you host it on Amazon or, you know, Google cloud or whatever, like there's, there's no data feeding back. Like you're not helping them improve the model at all. Like that's what Mark's getting at is that like it re it is,…”

“the biggest AI opportunity is that we've seen in the last few years have been the ones that the big labs just don't want to touch. It's like the AI girlfriend stuff. It's like too controversial. So probably not going to be killed by ChatGPT because they'll be like, yeah, sure. That is a hundred million dollar…”

“a lot of the AI doomers are fearful of a return of God. Have we talked about this? Basically this idea that, um, they live degenerate lives that are highly incongruent with any sort of moral framework. Um, and so, but they also believe God is dead. And so that's fine. They won't be punished because They don't believe…”

“the Founders Fund Teal model is, Very, very narrowly selected for monopoly power, power law outcomes. Can this be a trillion dollar company?”

“At a certain point, you max out the technology or business market size. And so this is very natural. We've seen this with, uh, all in going political and everyone getting really up in a tizzy about that, but it makes sense. They're growing their business then”

“YC has become essentially a union for startups. Because if you are a VC and you fuck over one YC company, you go in their database, every YC company hears about you, and instantly you're ostracized from the entire community”

“and I think that if you're a startup and you want attention, you want press, you should be courting hit pieces.”

“ads are just much better at price discrimination. And so if you have, if you have a billionaire in your audience and you also have a college kid in your audience and you're charging 10 dollars a month, they both pay 10 dollars a month. But, but if you're doing an ad based model, you'll get one dollar in ads from the…”

“in order to do the, the absolute, like, top-tier software engineering where stuff just works, like, you actually have to be a trillion-dollar company, like Apple. A ten-billion-dollar company just can't do it. Especially if it's an older company.”

“So if you think it's so totalizing, then you don't make the bunker. And so saying, hey, you don't have a bunker is not, is not proof that the person doesn't believe what they're saying.”

“Knowing nothing else, this should be your prior, because this is how productivity in competitive markets almost always works. A new technology comes out, it supports investment, it enhances productivity, everyone hires to go after all the, all the different, ah, battles.”

“the whole idea of, like, if the, if, if, if an amazing intelligence, an amazing model is made, should it be widely available? That's actually at odds with distillation, because you have to hunt those bad actors down, and you play this whack-a-mole.”

“The bull case for what Arlen is working on is that, uh, iMessage is a more universal interface. Text is the universal interface.”

“And that sort of direct payment, I think is going to be better received than this abstract, oh, yeah, my government's better funded, but are they gonna cut my taxes? Are they gonna successfully build that road? I don't know, and it doesn't help me pay my bills, which I think is what people want.”

“Others will probably wind up leveraging the possibility of going independent into more meaningful contracts within traditional media organizations. But it's, it's increasingly clear that a one size fits all approach, uh, perhaps with a tagline like, Independent creators are the future. I don't think that quite fits…”

“So if you have a model that can hack a system, it can usually patch that system for that hack in far less than six months, like probably in like an hour, like it can, it can see, oh, there's a, there's a exploit here and we ship the code, merged it in, and now that exploit is closed.”

“the ongoing question around building Um, these, you know, uh, one-person, high-growth companies is, is their durability, because if you can do it, and then I can do it, and then Tyler can do it, and then, and then anyone with, you know, access to a coding model can build it, very quickly we're going to erode each…”

“if an ad agency says it can't provide performance data because the channel doesn't provide it, It is merely a media buying intermediary. If you're an ad agency, you've got to figure out whether or not the ads that you pitch to your clients are actually working.”

“But the strong form of tall poppy syndrome does lead to lower startup formation. If you think that you will immediately be cut down in your society, you don't actually go out and hunt.”

“There's this whole idea that, like, you'll be able to build your own, like, CRM or your own ERP and vibe code it, and open source CRMs exist. There's one called Sweet CRM, there's Odo, there's ERP Next. Like, there are open source alternatives to Almost every piece of software. There's, there's an open source Photoshop…”

“the pushback against data centers, like, it really is this, like, meme of creating a permanent underclass, like, that type of thing, because you, I, I would, I would be so much more expecting of this pushback if it was like, oh, well, we know that, like, living next to a data center is dangerous for your health, like,…”

“the backlash can have an actual impact. So you should not just write it off and be like, well, obviously AI is going to happen. So this is, you know, it's inevitable. It's like, no, these, these, like we live in a democracy. Like if they vote, no more data centers. Look at what happened in nuclear people.”

“this is a disruptive innovation, this is not a sustaining innovation like mobile or cloud. Um, the, the, the AI version of, you know, X, Y, or Z SaaS company, uh, will not be like the mobile version of that SaaS company.”

“One interesting thing is that the, there isn't, there aren't a lot of open source, like, premier profiles. Like, I, I've edited a ton of videos for YouTube. There's a whole bunch of cuts in there. What I cut out, what I didn't. You could have that record, but it's not stored in GitHub. Like, it's just, you can't…”

“I almost prefer AI is holding up the stock market, but healthcare is holding up the economy because that's where we're seeing job gains and, and that's where like, The real economy. Like, there's always this disconnect between what's happening in the markets that's very forward-looking, and then there's, like, the, on…”

“RIP the dead internet theory. We're going into the zombie internet theory. And so the dead internet theory is that, you know, AI will slop up so many of these social networks, so much of the internet, so much SEO spam. That everything will just feel dead when you land on it. Uh, and I, and, and the zombie analogy is…”

“I think, uh, as soon as, as soon as there's a Wall Street, I mean, we love Katie, but as soon as there's a Wall Street Journal piece about a trend, the trend is effectively dead.”

“If TPUs are not for sale, Nvidia does have a monopoly. If Nvidia truly is the only seller in the market because Google is not a seller, uh, then yes, they still extract, they still extract monopoly power from every other buyer because every other buyer says, yeah, I'd love to buy TPUs, but I can't. So you're the only…”

“Also with the Nvidia news, it's like, how much can you actually read into AI demand based on Nvidia earnings? Because I feel like we're, we're projecting out like these deals five years in advance. We buy the chips, then we install them like that whole rumored, uh, deceleration in Chachapiti growth. If that Is real and…”

“Whenever there's a trillion dollars of spend going on, there is a de facto backstop.”

“It, it drives retention because it has a natural storyline of like, okay, how did I get this box? How much did I pay for it? What are my expectations? Do I have something on the line? Maybe I'm hoping to build a set, right? I want to build a set. I really am hoping for the red one or whatever. And, and then, and then…”

“The exact avenue from which you would expect management resistance to a disruptive innovation to, to flow is from the, is the CFO office. Like the CFO, uh, should be resistant to, uh, disruptive innovation. And when you look at the history of companies that got disrupted, the CFO is saying, we have a good business.…”

“Scale really matters. It's more of like an industrial question than a technology question at this point, and, ah, yeah, they seem really set up for it.”

“it doesn't make sense to do socialism in a two percent GDP growth economy. You need to get to 10% GDP growth, and that's like where all the AGI socialists come from, is they say, hey look, yeah, like UBI sounds crazy now, but when we're growing GDP 10%, there's gonna be so much money flowing around. It'll be easier to…”

“On one hand, chips remain the gating factor to the easiest route to a frontier model. On the other hand, this is why deep seek matters. They're, they're not the only route to something that is at least competitive.”

“Ooh, the co-CEO thing is always wrong.”

“compounding pharmacy regulations were written for, hey, your town might have a local pharmacist, and in a shortage, you should be able to walk down to the pharmacy, and they should be able to make you, uh, you know, something that they can't otherwise buy, and then this was taken, this law, it's very similar to the de…”

“this development creates a new scaling law that is totally independent of the original pre-training scaling law. Now you still want to train the best model you can by clearly leveraging as much compute as you can as many trillion tokens of high quality training data as possible. But that's just the beginning of the…”

“the thing that will kill TikTok is not, oh, be real, take one picture per day. It's actually the thing that gets someone to lock in on TikTok for three hours instead of one hour.”

“Seems like, yeah, good, like even more important than ever to switch from SEO to influencer marketing. Because you want to be baked into the LLM in a conversational way.”

“if you're a founder and you're trying to promote anything, just don't have the website in mind at all. Like it needs to be fully X native.”

“I think the war on the internet is how we should be thinking about what happened from the.com crash when the companies were seen as jokes and toys to now when they are ascendant, they are the most powerful platforms and the people that founded them and invested in them are the most powerful people in the world. Full…”

“I've always, I've always said this, that you should never sell your company, but if you do, you should be sure that you're on the track to be the CEO of the acquiring company.”

“If you want to move up and you know that it's just a corporate ladder and you just want to move up, best way to get your boss out of the picture, find a bunch of recruiters to recruit them away to a better job.”

“the seed fund, you're talking to a lot of founders. Some of them are going to be Like, very low quality just by nature. Some of them are going to be amazing, and you get in early, and that's cool, but like, if you really just want to hang out with really interesting entrepreneurs who are already de-risked, like Growth…”

“if you alleviate the housing pressure by building taller buildings in the core downtown and surrounding area, Well, then you don't need to be as dense once you get up into the mountains, and that leads to less fire risks.”

“and there's this conservation mindset, but the flip side of that is that if you don't have a lot of groundwater everywhere, and the, and the land around, around Los Angeles and in California is not just moist all the time, well then, it's prone to fire.”

“I think that art values come from stories. You like, wasn't it Van Gogh cut off his ear? Like by doing that, he canonized himself and the art, there's probably another person from the era. No, I mean, Da Vinci, like why is the Mona Lisa so valuable? Like it's not, it is like this, like, Groundbreaking, beautiful…”

“most of these AI things, they, they feel very, like, the average of everything. Every answer feels like the average of everything, and then the New York Times gets upset and says like, oh, it's exactly like us. It's like, well, it's kind of like the average of you and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post and…”

“no VC can write you off as a founder because you're a Christian, because there are now enough people who are serious that you won't be, you, you can wear it on your sleeve, whereas before people used to hide it, clearly.”

“And yeah, the tech industry hadn't learned to like circle the wagons at all. And so there was just, it was just complete, complete scapegoating and then just ostracization. And you just became an apostate very quickly for, for doing anything like this.”

“the mango seed round for anything over like two million, and there was a big question about like, Oh, is it, is it dangerous because, like, you have too much money and the valuation's too high for the seed? Now it's like, if you're not doing a mango seed round, you're not in the game.”

“a lot of the good takeaway from zero to one is understanding how important monopoly power is for raising money. And if you love a business and you're destined to build some business, Actually understand, does this have monopoly power? And if it doesn't, don't raise money.”

“money is not happiness. It's the second derivative of money that is happiness. It's not the, the absolute amount of money you have. It's the rate of acceleration.”

“once you get more structured, it's like you're spending more time organizing than you are actually thinking.”

“The, the whole thing is like, you have to understand what's going on in the tech press versus the tech community is like, it's, it's WWE. It's wrestling. Like, what happens on the court is left. Is left in the ring and, and, and, you know, you can't be the fan that thinks it's real.”

“I, I think that's, that's the big problem with, with the, the, the Democrat version of Rogan is that no one is really grinding out like, okay, how do I make sure that I have to be the stop? It almost felt like Caller Daddy was like, lucked into it and was like, okay, I guess we'll do this, but this wasn't our plan.…”

“It's garbage in, garbage out with McKinsey. If you show up with a good plan, they're gonna deliver some good plans for you, but, The inspiration has to come from the founder.”

“you couldn't just build a whole fund around social media investing, because if you missed Facebook, you were done, but you could build a fund around B to B SaaS, like base hits that were essentially Decacorns. And, and if you can build a business to ten billion dollars in under 10 years, you can easily charge two and…”

“Everyone wants a, a, a, a pattern or a playbook that they can, and that's the stuff that normally does really well on social media, is like, just, just do this checklist, just build this model, and this will deliver results, but as soon as you can concretize it, You lose all the alpha.”

“At a certain point, like once you, once you have the formula dialed in and you are the, the power law company, the competition is actually beneficial to you.”

“Ideas are not worthless. Most people should spend considerably more time thinking about what to work on before they start. And I couldn't agree with more, more with that.”

“I've long said that the work-life balance promoters on Twitter are just doing the game theoretic optimal strategy, which is tell all your competitors to take long vacations, not work hard.”

“the other issue with the compounding just from a business perspective is that I think that you're only allowed to do it from an FDA perspective when it's on shortage. And so you can build up this revenue stream and you can get subscribers, but then it could get, it could get kind of rugged by you if they go back in…”

“At the same time, like, I would expect all LLMs, unless you actually went in and put your thumb on the scale, to recommend Kamala, because that's what was being recommended in all the upstream source material, right? Like, like, Nature magazine, Science magazine, The Economist, The New Yorker, The New York Times, like,…”

“hit pieces are actually more effective at moving the needle than puff pieces.”

“Venture means, it needs to be, there's a 90%, there's a five percent chance this is a trillion dollar company, 90% chance it goes to zero, five percent chance the founder goes to jail, and I'm, Disgraced, and I never work again.”

“This is the market map thing. If it's on the market map, you don't have the vision.”

“She has a cornered resource in her audience. She's got attention where yes. Who knows if this is that much better than just asking vanilla chat GPT, but if she can drive people to this app, she can monetize that she's effectively acting as like an affiliate of open AI and sure. It's not going to be a trillion dollar…”

“Many, many cases, and we've talked about this before, but very interesting correlation between the great gamers, Elon, one of the greatest Diablo players of all time, SBF, One of the worst League of Legends players of all time.”

“If you're thinking about building your brand, just put together a mood board of popular influencers, and then just go and sponsor them, and then that will be your brand.”

“I think, I think that posting about politics is actually great for VCs because you want to know what you're getting yourself into at the board dinner.”

“I used to tell people, like, if you want to just be a successful entrepreneur, just never take a job. Because, like, eventually you'll have to figure it out. And like, but as soon as you say, like, I'm taking a couple years off to go work at Google or something, it's like, okay, this is the beginning of the end. Like,…”

“it's like the classic, like, uh, you know, programmer mistake of like marketing doesn't matter. In my opinion. So it's like, 90% is marketing. Let's talk about Nike. Is that a valuable company? Does that bring people joy? Is it valuable? It's 90% marketing, of course. And that's okay. Some things are marketing driven…”

“You always want to be the underdog, and so even if you have to pay someone to talk trash about you, it's totally worth it.”

“the comms teams of the 20 tens, their entire mandate was to destroy authenticity. And, and, and hide as much as possible, which is just very unsustainable.”

“part of the reason Joe Rogan blew up so huge on YouTube originally was because he chose the three hour format. So the algorithm, like the YouTube algorithm is a, is a expected value machine. So it takes the average view duration, which is how long on average someone will spend watching that piece of content. So for a…”

“retooling supply chains takes decades. And because it's not just, it's like you say like Chinese made batteries, but it's like, well, what are the ingredients to those batteries? Where'd those come from? Who does the packaging? What about the machines that package the batteries?”

“work-life balance always goes viral. So I don't know if this got dunked on, but like if, if you're, if you're rage baiting, like this is the best possible rage bait. If you're just trying to grow your account, like, because people will fight about this forever.”

“you gotta have an enemy. If you don't have an enemy, you don't have an ally. The only reason people rally together. The enemy of my, yeah. No, seriously. You have to have an enemy. If you don't have an enemy, there's no reason for someone to be your ally.”

“I think what Zuck realized is that the norm of avoiding ostentatious displays of wealth is entirely about intra-elite social status, and common people actually love stuff like this. And this is a hundred percent accurate.”

“Burning Man, I mean, I know why he hates it. Extremely high NPS, but can't invest in it. Because if you ever talk to somebody who goes to Burning Man, dude, you gotta go, it's so amazing. Extremely high NPS. But, they haven't scaled, they haven't monetized.”

“Uh, it's so easy to condense a PDOOM down to a single number, but I think people like stories. They want something that actually illustrates the chain of events that lead to the bad scenario, as opposed to these vague things where it's like, I have a lot of authority, I have a lot of insight, and five percent, or 20%.”

“because enterprise AI particularly, you're not going to be on the 20 dollar plan. You're not going to be on the 200 dollar plan. You're going to be consumption based. And you're going to look at it a lot more like a marketing line item that's proportional to your revenue, potentially.”

“the strong form of tall poppy syndrome leads to slower startup formation. Truly, fewer truly scaled companies, and ultimately a talent exodus or brain drain.”

“you only have so much ad inventory. And if you're running the call her daddy podcast and you're getting a lot of impressions, if there is someone like you could promote your product, but every time you do, you're not promoting another product that might pay you a higher CPM might be able to monetize those listeners…”

“even though we could go and vibe code that, all of a sudden, you're dealing with the different mobile carriers and the cell networks, and are they gonna flag you as spam, and Twilio has all these huge decades of relationships built out, In a real network there that, that even though it's just a tool, and it's just…”

“If we're going to get advances in viruses that deliver gene therapies or medical treatments, we got to rebrand virus. We got to come up with a new word, just like GLP one peptide that felt very safe.”

“so many tasks instead of just knowledge retrieval require actually firing up a browser, scraping it, writing some code, downloading things, you know, setting up an actual, uh, service and, and workflow as opposed to just something that can be done within the context window of a single LLM interaction.”

“counting the ooms stop sort of working when it's like, well, will this particular stock become a meme stock?”

“Like, the solution to piracy was not really to ban piracy. Like, you can still torrent things, but it's just so easy to use Apple TV and Spotify and Netflix that most people just wind up just paying five dollars, two dollars for a song, or, or 10 dollars a month for something that it effectively killed it just because…”

“If it turns out there is a limit, Alphabet can only benefit by going first.”

“Confidential filings don't fully obscure investor protections because all the traditional data needs to be released before any money changes hands, but it speeds up the time to market and increases coordination between private companies and their future shareholders in public markets.”

“AI is really coming everywhere, and so much is driven by voice AI as the interaction mode.”

“I've completely dropped out of the whole, like, don't make mistakes, don't hallucinate. I feel like all that's been either baked into the pre-training or post-training, or it's like even in the system prompt already.”

“Put the three fingers in front of your face, because if you put the three fingers in front of your face, the AI gets confused, and it breaks the deep fake that's happening underneath.”

“Let me tell you, rate limits kill retention. Like nothing, nothing is worse.”

“I feel like that has been the secret to success with the modern mall. There's a lot of malls that have sort of mid-tier or low-end retailers where it is actually pretty comparable to shopping online. You go in, there's no one that's really going to talk to you. The stuff's just there. It might be on the floor. It's…”

“in antitrust regulation, you know how they'll stop two firms from joining because that will create a monopoly, but they don't really have a tool in the tool chest for stopping a company from just shutting down and stopping competing.”

“Spotify doesn't really need to invest in generative AI. I heard a good analogy that was like, did, did, did, should, uh, Spotify have, like, released a guitar so that people can make more music? Like, no, because people will pick whatever tool is available, and then they will release that music on Spotify, and then the…”

“You can vibe code a pickup app that, you know, looks like Uber has a map, lets you click the button, accepts payment. But if there's no one on the other side of that network to actually come and pick you up, your, your Uber, Uber clone is dead in the water now.”

“It's, it's, it's essentially a consumption-based product, but psychologically, if I'm rolling out, ah, Claude to a company, and I set up seats for a team, I know that there's individual rate limits, so no one, no one individual is gonna, like, blow me up, basically.”

“there was incentive for a long time for companies that, where their moat was not software, to say, we're a software company, we need to hire the best software engineers, Look at our open source projects, focus on all the cool tech that we're building when really it was a marketplace, or really it was a liquidity…”

“You know, I, I think Apple, Google, like the really established brands do have the permission to sort of go higher, uh, higher abstraction. And just sort of do, like, these brand films. For the AI labs who are trying to push a particular product, it's, it's, it's, it feels like a little bit too soon, a little bit too…”

“Long context reinforcement learning has been very, very successful in the coding world because Git has a complete history of every line of code that's been written, every comment, why it happened.”

“RIP the dead internet theory. We're going into the zombie internet theory. And so, uh, the, the dead internet theory is that, you know, AI will slop up so many of these social networks, so much of the internet, so much SEO spam, that everything will just feel dead when you land on it. Uh, and I, and, and the zombie…”

“there's something about wrapping the text in a UI that feels familiar, that feels more human, because you're used to reading, like, you're, it's like the medium is the message, maybe, like, you're, you're seeing this LLM generated text in the Reddit UI, and that feels more human, and it kind of, like, levels it up a…”

“It used to be that if you wanted to, For credit, you had to find some like open source projects, somebody who had spent like weeks rebuilding the functionality, and then you could do it, but you couldn't generate all the content. So like it would be really, really sloppy. Now it's like a pretty polished product that…”

“China's fantastic at quickly grinding down manufacturing learning curves, developing high quality products at affordable prices, but creating an iconic brand, it just takes decades. And so it's better to buy than build. Like this is the one thing you buy instead of build.”

“Like, the financial system, although they probably don't want to talk about it, does have the ability to, like, effectively roll back, so if there was, like, some massive quantum hack, and, like, all the Morgan Stanley, or JP Morgan accounts, or Goldman Sachs accounts were, like, drained, uh, they would just be like,…”

“it does feel like we're going to enter a world where inference is load balanced across a variety of semiconductor stacks, and so, For really fast things, you might be going to a Grok or a Cerebris, or, you know, you might, for more basic stuff, you might be going to a legacy model that's cheaper to inference, and all…”

“if, if you build a wrapper that depends on the models not getting better, you're gonna have a bad time, because the models will just get better. So if your thing is, oh, it can't do long context windows, or it can't answer in pages and pages and pages, well, the models are gonna get better, and they're gonna do that,…”

“It is a tough position to be in because they don't have a, like, a public cloud. They don't have a cloud service, even though they are a hyperscaler.”

“If you have a, if you have a lot of cash flow as a big company, if you have the ability to borrow, uh, billions or hundreds of billions in the debt market, uh, you have to protect your hen house. Foxes might come by and might want to, might want to use you to co-sign a loan.”

“Apple has been building a brand around We don't access your data. We don't store your data. We would never train on your data. And, and that put them in an awkward position where they couldn't just snap their fingers and deliver a great AI experience. Whereas Google has been, Hey, you know, we'll give you Gmail for…”

“It's sort of like, You know, a, a, a stalking horse, another, another animal based analogy, but it's sort of a stalking horse for like, Hey, uh, Gemini and, and anthropic. Like if you guys don't lower your prices, we will go to the open source option. And that's sort of what Linux, how Linux works. It's like that, that…”

“I mean, if you're in the position to generate a lot of cashflow, it is kind of the per the game theoretic optimal thing to over invest in a new huge technology. You have to, uh, because if you don't invest in the technology wave happens, you look really stupid. You lose your job. If the technology wave happens and you…”

“The distribution of between craft and slop has been growing for decades, maybe forever, and is continuing to grow with the development of AI content.”

“the thing that she got right is that what an album is can be extremely monetized if you continue to think about what the, like the album is scarcity. Like you either have it or you don't, and the internet kind of reduced that scarcity to zero because you could stream it, you could pirate it. But there is still scarcity…”

“Whereas going from photos to videos, to reels, to stories, like all of that works within the same kind of UX, UI space. But if you try and bolt on like a productivity tool into a social network, it, it, it winds up being a little rough.”

“It's not, it is unspoken, but it is a nature, it is a natural game theoretic Nash equilibrium. Like, it is the natural state of things that both sides understand that to go to war would be mutually assured destruction, and so they don't even need to talk about it. And so instead, they both agree to keep prices where…”

“the nature of the, of Hollywood is like venture capital. Like it is a hits driven business. If you don't accept that you're going to have massive flops and egg on your face and embarrassing moments, you will not make it.”

“nothing will kill a joke, like independent of all the crazy astronomer, Chris Martin, Coldplay thing. There's nothing that will kill a joke faster than a series D enterprise SaaS company making the joke.”

“if you are, especially if you're a founder and you're going back into a company where you've hired a CEO, uh, you should be, you should probably not be talking about that. See that CEO. Uh, because if you come out and say they were not good and that's why I had to step back in, then that could hurt their career…”

“there's a ton of situations where you can go and RL on a specific task and it gets really, really good at it, but then you try and get it to do anything else and it's not that great.”

“one is there's actually distribution monopolies because, uh, all the big tobacco companies have trucks that go and deliver them to tobacco stores that are licensed. And so, If, if you have a set amount of tobacco store licenses, like gas stations that have a tobacco license, and then you have a relationship with that…”

“there's a stigma around hiring dev shops. You want to hire founding engineers. Like, you know, the title matters and the idea of like, okay, we have a full-time employee. We got somebody who's delivering. They're a high performer. Our team is cracked. We don't have to outsource the whole thing”

“The, the challenge now is not, can we get to the moon? It's the same thing with like, the challenge is not, can we build a flying car or can we build, we have helicopters. Can we build one humanoid robot or one self-driving car in San Francisco? It's like, can we actually scale these systems to the point that it is…”

“It's not VPNs are not suitable for venture backing. Typically it's all marketing. That's the entire expense is just getting people install the VPN.”

“the value of coinages is increasing in a, in a algorithmic feed environment, and compressing these big ideas down into pithy two-word phrases has, ah, disproportional returns to the actual popularization of these ideas.”

“there's this big like value trade off between, yeah, if you let the L, if you let the LLM reason for hours and you spend 2000 dollars per query, you can get remarkable results. But then is that really a fair benchmark against something that costs a dollar to inference or 10 cents? And so, uh, all of a sudden you need…”

“Uh, well, XAI explains why it is absolutely viable to have started late, provided you have the funds catch up quickly.”

“So lesson for founders, if you're, if you have somebody on your, on your board or your cap table, who's an interesting poster, who you want to feed a tweet to, uh, let them include a bullet point, maybe even include a little spelling mistake in there. So people are like, oh, like this is, this is artisanal.”

“In other words, the model does a much better job of filling out a thesis than coming up with one. And so, uh, it seems like it's, it's great. Deep research is super great for, hey, I, I, I, I already read the report. I understand this. I have a thesis. I just need you to go and pull together all the different quotes…”

“until, uh, until a competitive model, model goes free, you should not go free. This is just basic econ one-on-one. This is actually more capitalist. So like we are the capitalist. It's like charge until you can.”

“There was always just this big problem with like the crypto stuff like sounded good, but there, there was very little reason for a game company like Valve or Electronic Arts to say like, yeah, sure. You can take your assets out of our beautiful ecosystem that we taxed 30% on everything and we own a hundred percent of…”

“OpenAI is a software company with different long-term cost structure than that of an infrastructure company. That's fine if you're at Microsoft scale and profitability, but for entities that are losing money and looking to raise more, it makes sense to be different investment vehicles.”

“I think there's basically the opportunity for really young people to make more money. It's just bigger than ever, and what that means in terms of business savvy is specifically like, You get to a certain point, you're gonna have to learn about taxes, lawyers, like these things are gonna come in, and that's gonna teach…”

“There, there is a world where The law firm's getting 40% less inbound inquiries, but of the 60% that they're still getting, those are higher margin now because they're able to leverage AI.”

“if you look at, you know, a podcaster who has an RSS feed and someone listens to every single episode, well, the downloads are not, we talked to David Center about this, like his downloads might fluctuate by like, 10%. Episode to episode, but it's always in the same band. Whereas if you're in an algo feed, like a…”

“If you remove the thumb entirely, uh, you get, you get to be more viral.”

“the success of the Alexa and the Google home is just like check the boxes on features and make it super, super cheap and you'll just get crazy distribution. And people will put up with some of the other, other junk.”

“There is this relentless pursuit of productization here, where it's like, do you need a course for this, or can you just go do it? Like, a lot of these things, it's like, go watch a YouTube video, buy a book on it, and you'll just know how to do it, or just practice and learn from first principles.”

“you just gotta find the correct line and only post things that you're comfortable living on forever and being baked into the, the, the God in a box. Feeding the LLM.”

“that's the beauty of X is that it's not designed like siloed reddits. So you don't need to like go and take your account over to watch Twitter or tech Twitter or media Twitter or UFC Twitter to engage with those people. You can just kind of like follow a few people, engage post and the algorithm will send, sometimes it…”

“really like, the catalyst for your company being huge will be like what happened with the WatchFire app. Like when you save, WatchDuty, when you save your first home, like that should be your main KPI that you have on the wall of your company. It's just like, homes saved.”

“I imagine the correct formulation is like a blend. Like what happened with Anderle where it was like three Palantir guys, Palmer Luckey who had no experience in defense, but is like this crazy engineer. And then, and then Chris Brose joins who's been McCain's chief of staff and like, The swampiest dude in the world.…”

“There's a lot of that, like hustle porn. Like I need more mental models and need more frameworks before I go and build the thing. And nine times out of 10, it's just like, just go give a shot.”

“The biggest bull signal is when you're searching someone on the Wikipedia page, you go to the sources, it's some ISBN number, you go to Amazon, 2000 dollar book won't ship to you in a month because it's out of stock. You got to find some library that has it in stock, not digitized. There's no Kindle version. There's no…”

“Because I think too many people think about the deal is like one way. Like I just need the, the, the tenant or I just need the bank. And really it's like, he is creating almost like an arbitrage. Like the bank wants to lend to a parking lot that has a relationship with dollar rent a car. He's acting as the intermediary…”

“I just lock the account, and then it shuts down all the quote tweets, and then everyone just moves on, because like, they're not getting that, like, they don't have anything to go off of.”

“I do think that every founder, CEO should buy a Starlink and have it, because you cannot afford to not have good internet whenever you're traveling. Like, you're gonna be in some weird place, the internet's not gonna be good, you're gonna miss calls, and the cost is so low that you can't afford not to have it, and you…”

“and that's what you should ask when you're doing an interview show is do I really think that the person I'm doing this interview with, I will have them on in 20 years because I'm that confident that they'll be successful.”

“at some point you're going to need some sort of partnership or relationship with someone that does have a personal brand. And so that doesn't need to be you. That doesn't need to be the CEO.”

“If they can keep the same screen, get rid of the external screen, switch it to plastic instead of metal, so it's half the weight, like, and half the price, like, they have a winning formula, for sure.”

“you're not going to displace the PS five until you can give someone an experience that they can go and chill with for eight hours straight.”

“if you raise a billion dollar fund and you put a hundred million aside for million dollar seed rounds, that's a hundred companies. You're not going to hire a hundred associates with a billion dollar fund. And so the math just plays out much better. You get all these call options and then all these companies.”

“you're always in a bubble. You're either in a crash or a bubble. There's no normal time.”

“I mean, a venture fund is the, is like the best way to, Uh, price discriminate in, in an audience of founders because the higher value the founder, the more money you make when you invest.”

“the beauty of launching and getting, uh, drowned out is that if by definition, if no one, if your post doesn't go viral and doesn't get seen by everyone, well, no one saw it. So you can just post it again and people will see it for the first time.”

“It just also needs to be paired with like deregulation and changing the actual laws, because if there's a law that says in order to build a road, you need a rubber stamp and they fire everyone who does the rubber stamps, well then it will still be illegal to build roads.”

“if you are building a company, and someone asks you about your brand, and what car your brand would be if it was a car, and you can't say, you don't have a strong enough brand.”

“If your major post or your big moment like flops, by definition, no one saw it. So you can just take another swing.”

“Push, not pull. I've said this is always, always a really important UI pattern because it's so hard to think about.”

“If you have a critical partner like your bank or like your fulfillment center or, uh, some supplier, like you should be going out to dinner with them. You should be attending their, you know, kids wedding and going and really getting to know them because At the very least, even if their hands are tied and they say,…”

“story is what drives value in art, and so the fact that Bored Ape has this controversial, there's all these conspiracy theories about it, it's very fascinating.”

“If you're a venture capitalist and you're looking for outsized returns, you don't necessarily want to rip a check into someone with a Canon five D who's going to go make vlogs and who knows if it's going to hit. And if it does, it's going to look like a lifestyle business. Most likely you want to be in the platforms.”

“the rule of thumb is usually a dollar per subscriber on YouTube is like reasonable, reasonable monetization.”

“the next time you see some crazy banger and you think, oh, somebody already built it. There's probably 10, there's probably 10 YC companies that are doing this already. They aren't. Just go and build it.”

“And it's easier than ever, given the new X algorithm, because it, everything is getting more pushed out to the, to the, to the edges of the curve, essentially. Like, you will have a post that goes mega viral, and then the next one will get 26 likes.”

“I've since moved to just the Gmail spam button because if you hit that, it blocks the sender and it also sends the message to the Google algorithm that like this company sucks, which I like.”

“interns are not about getting output from the actual work that they do over the summer. It's about mentorship, evaluation, figuring out who the next generation of leaders will be at your firm, so. Uh, highly recommend over-investing in your intern programs.”

“there is something interesting where all of these creators go through this hero's journey where they're deified and then eventually torn down. Mr. Beast recently went through that.”

“I think illiquidity is a feature, just like, you know, uh, the fact that you can go and do your job every day and not be constantly getting marked, uh, is, is a great, uh, blessing, because it allows you to focus on”

“That's what I noticed on YouTube was like at a certain point, it's like pick a big topic. And make the best video about that topic. And it would always go viral.”

“the very like fundamental, like economic physics, like the laws of physics around the project to me are just so obvious because it's like, you have a, a resource Which is essentially land underneath cities that's extremely valuable that no one has access to. So if you can get access to it, that's incredibly valuable.”

“You know, like jokes aside, there is something very valuable about being a young founder and interacting with an extremely high ego investor, because at least there is some alignment there most of the time. So you can kind of get some reps in, deal with some sharp elbows and deal with like, it's almost lower stakes…”

“whenever we discover a new drug, scientists rush to demonstrate that all those lifestyle changes, the ones you should do anyway, actually work through the same mechanism as the wonder drug.”

“There's some condition that doctors recommend a lifestyle changes for. Then an exciting new medication comes out and over a generation or so, doctors go from demanding the lifestyle change to gesturing at the lifestyle change before prescribing the medication to finally just mostly prescribing the medication. This…”

“There were some minor sell offs, but like, like for, for the most part, like going long through that period was like the phenomenal strategy. And so, uh, even when it's frothy, like, like the, like the business cycle is more, is more of a, like a massive driver than Than, like, any specific, like, like, bubbly…”

“a huge portion of the alpha that was generated in Silicon Valley from the year 2000 onward was literally just saying, yeah, it doesn't matter if you're a 19 year old kid, we can, we trust you with a million dollars to go build something.”

“a lot of the best, really, really amazing VCs are on Bloomberg regularly, actually understanding what's happening in the public markets. And they're tracking that almost as much as what's happening in the venture portfolio.”

“people don't realize that like this, This, like, kind of zombie stage where you've done series A, series B, but never really hit escape velocity. Those two options still exist. It's probably just something more like an acquihire and more like a special situations deal with somebody like Jeremy.”

“When you start doing these mega projects, things really, really slow down. And so there's a, it seems like there's a lot of arbitrage right now in just, uh, deep tech, hard tech startups taking something really huge and then decomposing it into something that's more manageable”

“And when I think about the teams that show up with startups, like. Yeah, like, like, and are all very much a premade in the sense that you have Palmer, but then you also have, like, three Palantir executives. It's like, how is that not gonna be successful? They really stack the deck in their favor, right? So, watching…”

“And I've always told them like the format is Shark Tank. Like you need to do an episode where you're giving away money at the end of the episode every single time. It's very expensive because you actually have to be giving money away. But that's the way the Mr. Beast model works. Like you have to watch to the end…”

“Because there's such an adverse selection problem, like, you know, the, the, the power law companies are not showing up to Shark Tank.”

“if you're CNN, you are incentivized to sell ads and get Watch time and keep people watching. And if you're polymarket, you're incentivized for liquidity and providing correct prices. And so it's just a very different like incentive structure.”

“If you have the opportunity to go to like a billionaire's mansion who has like an insane amount of some sort of cornered asset in Trump's, in Trump's case, it's like social capital. But even if it's like somebody who's like, oh yeah, they're sitting on like a massive forest reserves or like water rights. And like, you…”

“people are just buying the attitude and like the brand and it doesn't matter what the product is. You know, they can sell anything.”

“These are dividends that get paid to society and, and pay back in probably better ways than most of the other things because they build the brand and founders want to work with them and so they get better deal flow. So it actually is rational.”

“This happens with hiring companies a lot. They're like doing great in a bull market. And then as soon as the riffs start and all the companies are laying off, their revenue just goes to zero because no one's hiring. So no one's paying for hiring platforms because there's just plenty of, of, of applications coming in…”

“This could lead to a bubble that pops, but it still could be amazing that all this stuff gets built out and there's all this infrastructure. And that's exactly what happened in the dot-com boom. There was a lot of dark fiber and that's what enabled Google to grow so fast because even though the internet bubble had…”

“you don't want The Anderil guys being like, oh, I'm moving on to the next hot thing because I just care about doing contrarian stuff. It's like, it's okay that they've gotten, that they, that they, they did the contrarian thing. They, they, they took the bet. They were correct. But now they have to go live that life…”

“And so it's like, there's all this, almost like this misclassification of like, the thing that solves the problem might not even look like it's in that category.”

“Like, it can kind of go viral, but it's just word of mouth, and that's Really, really hard to scale into like the normie. Crossing the chasm is going to be really, really difficult.”

“Hollywood is almost more like venture capital, where there's going to be some dogs, even the best, and you can't, you can't have everything be guaranteed because it's art, not engineering.”

“I do think, though, there should be more, uh, like, intellectual flexibility between the disciplines, especially with, like, uh, just how easy LLMs translating between different, uh, languages will be, so it's like, oh, yeah, there's some sort of, like, Little bit trickier, lower level language that you need to learn,…”

“This Araya Ask LinkedIn, like, you have to be, you have to be super connected. This is something that someone, like, some, like, the all-in podcast, or someone who's, like, really connected can start, because, like, the whole, the whole thing is, like, you're gonna, you're just gonna be going down market the entire…”

“that's where the AI models are really, really good when they're just swapping things over from one thing to the next. It's hard for them to do, like, truly novel new things, but they're pretty good at just, like, translation, transform, transformation, right?”

“when a reporter writes up an article, that's, like, the last five percent of the work that they've been doing. Like, 95% of the work is, like, collecting new facts that don't exist on the internet. And don't exist anywhere. Because they talked to someone, they got a fact out of them, they got information, and they…”

“So Call of Duty, the monetization, like, has ramped up a ton, but they reset the, like, the shittiness of the monetization every single cycle. So they're on annual cycle, essentially. Every year they come out with a new game, and every year you buy the game, and it's 60 dollars, and there's no pay to win mechanics,…”

“You know, I found two new AI phrases. Uh, I don't remember both of them, but one of them is, uh, in our increasingly online world, when someone's writing about, uh, online culture, or something that happened on the internet, or, like, with the boom of social media, like, there's two phrases that were popularized…”

“You want to track your sleep? Like, are you sleepy? Like, think about it. Come up with an answer. That's your sleep score.”

“A lot of this is just like waiting around for the screen in the Apple vision pro to commoditize to the point where, um, where other companies can start taking that same screen and putting it in other stuff, giving like actually doing all the testing and then Apple will ultimately like take that back.”

“The other interesting thing is like, if you look at like ESPN or CNBC, like those have brain rot elements where there'll be tickers at the bottom picture in picture, you go to Bloomberg and it's like, Someone's talking while they're giving you the news facts on the side. Like this idea of having a feed of content…”

“You need a real Rolodex. It's not enough just to have someone's phone or email these days. You got to be able to send them physical stuff and stand out.”

“when you find evidence that violates your, your, your strongly held beliefs, you just have to write it down because otherwise you're, you'll just be, oh, I, I can't even deal with that data point because it, it violates my, my current worldview.”

“Award shows should be more, if you're doing an award show for tech, you should lean towards, um, something that's a little bit more qualitative, a little bit more artistic, but you won't be doing an award show for tech because we already got that locked down, so don't copy us, ok?”

“the novel idea is a function of consistency. Like a lot of the ideas guys that we know and talk about have lots of ideas and they are consistent with their ability to create new ideas and then, and then test them in the real world.”

“I like printed stuff. It's more tactile. You can mark it up. You can take notes. It's less ethereal, and it goes in the stack, and this, this post will be immortalized in the stack of printed posts forever.”

“There's a lot of ways to expose the truth about someone through that. It's much better than just a coffee meeting, which is just vanilla.”

“making like bold design decisions like that, that are, they go against the, the obvious optimization of like square footage. Like it is going to cost you more to do this, but it's going to make a statement and it's going to be more important to the business long-term.”

“I mean, the trick is just, like, breaking free of the memetics around, like, what it takes to have a dozen kids. Like, yeah, you probably need to live on a ranch outside of a major city. Probably not raising a dozen kids in Manhattan unless you're a trillionaire, but if you're willing to go live in some interesting…”

“also just that, that meme template of, like, buy now, invest now, we're still small, like, people want to get in on things early, and so I, I think that works generally.”

“we have this current meme of you can just do things. But if you go back like 20 years, there was a similar meme of having a can do attitude. And it's the same thing. You can do, you can just do things. Having a can do attitude. Is somebody says, oh, can we get this done? You say, yeah, I have a can, can do attitude.…”

“There's also the shift from, uh, most people have like an app. And when you, when you reach a level of wealth, you have a guy. Like instead of, and instead of DoorDash, you have a personal chef. Instead of Uber, you have a personal driver. Instead of United Airlines app, you have a private plane.”