The Wisdom Wall

“Like, I think the reality is like VR and like immersive experiences and all other realities are kind of great if your life sucks, right? Because then you're like, I'm gonna like live in a video game. But like, I think a lot of the problem with that type of stuff is like, it's just, It's not, if you have a good life and…”

“I think the whole point of AI is the switching cost for almost all this stuff goes to zero, right? And because switching cost is zero, there's just no value.”

“So if you have an actually transformative technology and you can swing it, you're better off buying your customers. Right. And then deploying your technology, but that credit that's predicated on actually having a better technology.”

“I actually think what we now have, Weirdly is effectively several markets for companies that are pretty decoupled from each other and kind of have their own logic and exist in their own vacuum. So like there is a public market, like the public market exists is the biggest, right? Um, there is a private market now.…”

“There's no more like magic numbers you hit and like a valuation framework that's consistent. It's actually much more about belief. You know, I, I say in the deck, it's a lot about this kind of new math of people want downside protection and then an option on infinity.”

“If you're running a fifty billion dollar venture fund, you can't possibly be deploying that well early, right? And actually you're paid to move gross dollars.”

“When, when they go public, The actual way re like the public markets value these funds has absolutely nothing to do with returns. It is a hundred percent the fee base, right?”

“You don't understand, like, this is a liability shifting thing. Like most, a lot of human jobs are not actually about doing the thing. They're about shifting liability and responsibility, right?”

“for 20 years, the way you start a social network is you say, who do you want to follow? And the way to start a social network today is say, who do you want to follow you?”

“AI, unlike prior innovations, like unlike the transition from shrink rack software to the internet is just so good for the big companies, right? It's easy to slot in. It commodifies. I mean, there's just like, you can't, you cannot think of a better extending innovation for a large company, right? That already has the…”

“It's an interesting social bandana because on one hand I'd argue that Instagram Has made it so that the real luxury consumption is experience and travel and being hot, right? Like all of a sudden like fitness is cool because like you can say you're hot and being hot is like way more expensive than a watch.”

“one of the dirty secrets, which, you know, it sounds like is in the venture capital world, entrepreneurs all day long will pitch you about how their CAC is very high, but the CAC will come down. Here's a secret CAC always goes up, right? It always goes up. Like the CAC goes up, not down.”

“Really successful things. You actually want fairly high barriers to entry so that the people who show up as your early customers are like deeply in need of it and true believers, right? Cause if they're deeply in need of it, they're gonna put up with a lot of crap to get what it is you're offering out of it because…”

“The problem, the problem with AI in general, and I think the entire AI discussion is, um, I always like to point out, it's like the, the average of infinity and zero is infinity, right? And so VCs aren't very good at math, but they can do that one. And so the problem is you say, okay, this is so disruptive that even…”

“it's not, you're not investing in the AI. You're investing in like a new way or a new approach to hiring, which happens to leverage AI. And I think there is an important distinction there.”

“don't confuse The fact that LLMs are powerful technology, like there's stuff you're going to do with them that are going to be great for all sorts of businesses with the disruption itself being a good business.”

“historically speaking, when big funds try to index the seed market, there are two problems. One is someone wakes up and does the math and they're like, this doesn't make any sense, right? Like even if you have the million dollar check at seed, if you're trying to deploy billions of dollars, like it's just an irrational…”

“the seed business model we run is definitely less consistently and meaningfully profitable than like being a, in a platform. There's no question, right?”

“As the world gets more unequal and outcomes are more discontinuous, debt financing does just broadly not make sense for people, right? The equity model.”

“if someone's buying a fund from you, They're really only buying the winners and the rest is bullshit, right? And like, so in an ideal world, they just carve out the pieces they want. Like, I want this position and this position and this position because I care about these companies or I have an infinity thesis on them.…”

“it's really hard to invest in seed creator businesses because the equity and the value of the community is held outside the company.”

“there's a thing I like to say about seed stage investing, which is no fucking bank shots. Right. And The more variables that have to be right domino style, the less likely it is that the thing actually happens.”