FROM THE RECORD · 2 matching entries · 2018-02-15 to 2025-01-24
What does the record say about interest rates?
Selected points from existing editorial summaries and source excerpts. This covers the material on this page.
1
Gurley observes venture's loose money trend has persisted beyond the zero interest rate period unexpectedly. [1]
Read the supporting quotation · McCombs School of Business · 2025-01-24
“There's been a trend in venture recently. Recently. I I thought thought it it was was the the zero zero interest interest rate rate thing that caused it, but it's sustaining beyond that.”
Gurley quotes Druckenmiller saying cheap money drives speculation like oilmen drilling with others' capital. [2]
Read the supporting quotation · Bloomberg Tech · 2018-02-15
“Drucker Miller just, you know, who's someone that's made a name in macro investing says, if you give, you know, Texas oilman the ability to drill holes with someone else's money, they'll drill as many as you possibly can. And so low interest rates drive speculation,”
FROM THE RECORD · 207 matching entries · 2011-06-11 to 2026-08-04
What does the record say about regulatory capture?
Selected points from existing editorial summaries and source excerpts. This covers the material on this page.
1
Gurley describes $38 billion program paying doctors $44,000 each to buy electronic health record software. [1]
Read the supporting quotation · All-In Podcast · 2023-09-16
“They came up with a brilliant idea. I have to assume she helped encourage this. Doctors would receive $44,000 each if they bought software. $38,000,000,000.”
Gurley says China builds nuclear plants at $2.5B per gigawatt versus $13B in the US. [2]
Read the supporting quotation · BG2 Pod · 2024-09-09
“The plants in China that are the equivalent level three fission plants right now are coming on board at 2,500,000,000 per gigawatt. Right. So 13 to 2.5.”
Gurley says China has 300 nuclear plants in development versus zero in US, with 7-10 year build cycles. [3]
Read the supporting quotation · BG2 Pod · 2024-04-04
“They have over 300 plants currently either being built or in development. We have zero, zero plants being built, I think 13 plants that are proposed, according to this data that we have here.”
Read the supporting quotation · Bloomberg Tech · 2020-10-16
“Snowflake alone was 4,500,000,000, just one company. And so the day after the IPO, the people that were allocated the stock the night before have 4,500,000,000 in wealth they didn't have before.”
Gurley says Stitch Fix reached billion-dollar run rate profitably, generating $60M free cash flow on just $40M raised. [2]
Read the supporting quotation · Bloomberg Television · 2017-11-17
“So we're at a billion dollar run rate. We've been profitable for many quarters. In fact, when the company came public, it is over a $100,000,000 of cash on the balance sheet.”
Gurley reports 98% of VCs focus solely on AI and non-AI company valuations halved in five weeks. [2]
Read the supporting quotation · School of Hard Knocks Podcast · 2026-03-26
“98% of venture capitalists are only looking at AI and they're AI all day long, they don't wanna see another business and and and in the past five weeks, the valuations on the non AI companies have been cut in half”
FROM THE RECORD · 131 matching entries · 2013-04-29 to 2026-07-21
What does the record say about ai moats?
Selected points from existing editorial summaries and source excerpts. This covers the material on this page.
1
Gurley reveals NVIDIA promised to buy any CoreWeave service availability they cannot sell to others. [1]
Read the supporting quotation · BG2 Pod · 2025-10-14
“One of the more peculiar of all the deals is, and this was disclosed in a CoreWeave filing, was NVIDIA has promised to buy any of CoreWeave's service availability that they can't sell to anyone else. That is very unusual. That's not the same as making an investment.”
Gurley notes OpenAI will burn $7 billion annually, calling it radically different from traditional venture. [2]
Read the supporting quotation · Invest Like the Best · 2025-06-10
“I think OpenAI said they're gonna be 7,000,000,000 in a year. That's not your grandfather's startup business or your grandfather's venture capital. That's a radically different world.”
Gurley argues foundational AI model companies burning $100-200M annually represents poor capital allocation but may be unavoidable. [3]
Read the supporting quotation · Invest Like the Best · 2024-04-23
“100,000,000 a year? 200,000,000 a year? There's no way that's high quality capital allocation from my point of view. There's no chance. But maybe they don't have the alternative.”
FROM THE RECORD · 105 matching entries · 2011-06-11 to 2026-05-11
What does the record say about marketplaces?
Selected points from existing editorial summaries and source excerpts. This covers the material on this page.
1
Gurley says Visa and Mastercard have over 60% operating margins, the highest in North American markets. [1]
Read the supporting quotation · BG2 Pod · 2024-11-27
“And there's another fact that you should know in North America, which is Visa and Mastercard have the two highest operating margin percentages in our markets total. Like, they're over 60%, and something's not right.”
Gurley coined the term liquidity quality and prioritizes it over geographic breadth when evaluating marketplaces. [2]
Read the supporting quotation · Invest Like the Best · 2019-07-02
“And I've come up with this phrase I use internally that I made up. So I one day I'll have to write a definition of it, but I call it liquidity quality.”
Gurley states 64% of Robinhood revenue comes from options trading despite democratization claims. [3]
Read the supporting quotation · Bloomberg Tech · 2021-02-06
“it's now known that 64% of their revenue comes from options trading. And so the company wants you to believe and and goes on public television and claims that their mission is to democratize investing.”
Gurley says China builds nuclear plants at $2.5B per gigawatt versus $13B in the US. [2]
Read the supporting quotation · BG2 Pod · 2024-09-09
“The plants in China that are the equivalent level three fission plants right now are coming on board at 2,500,000,000 per gigawatt. Right. So 13 to 2.5.”
Gurley notes Chinese solid-state LiDAR costs $130 per car versus Waymo's $5,000, a result of competitive optionality. [3]
Read the supporting quotation · BG2 Pod · 2025-06-05
“And it's actually in China right now is, I think being priced at like $130 a car, this solid state MEMS LiDAR, whereas the Waymo LiDAR is like $5,000 a car.”
Search covers the displayed transcript and written excerpts, plus all X posts stored for this person, including replies. Coverage is growing; this is not a complete account history.
Explore
In their own words
2155 entries
Transcript excerpts may contain transcription errors. Open the recording for wording, speaker and context. Source links do not verify the claims made.
No matching entries. Try fewer words or clear the filters.
ok here is my tl;dr for "network effect" intellectual history
- in 1974 Rohlfs from Bell Labs gives a simple model around communications networks based on subscribers and their interactions
- in 1985 Katz and Shapiro try and generalize, but this looses the implicit concept of a
I cold-emailed @bgurley’s Runnin’ Down a Dream Foundation as soon as its website went live.
I’d started the Woihanble Fund, which gives young entrepreneurs on the Pine Ridge Reservation grants to start and grow businesses. Woihanble means “dream” in Lakota. The overlap felt
This is a great story (below). The Runnin Down a Dream Foundation is actively searching for more partnerships. Please reach out through partnerships@rdad.org. https://t.co/CMRH4PaSN8
Asheem’s journey in cybersecurity is remarkable. From leading product management at Check Point in the early days of the firewall industry to identifying and incubating generations of category-defining companies—Palo Alto Networks, Imperva, Rubrik, Abnormal and many others. And https://t.co/9zGBNJGSy0
@satyanadella extremely well put. I have been saying this, not as elegantly - we cannot rely on the disclosures of frontier LLMs alone:
1. These harnesses need to be constructed so that third parties can get involved in observability and transparency..
2. As we get there we also https://t.co/p47qTxcJyH
AI alignment began as a control problem.
It is becoming something much bigger: deciding what values machines should internalize, and then allowing those values to be applied back to humans.
That raises a harder question: Aligned to whom? https://t.co/Ngjxt6GCeD
Almost the entire AI industry now treats ARR as its key financial metric - not revenue. It's extremely easy to manipulate, and there's not even a standard definition. One lab's math can be completely different from another's. Insane how that’s tolerated.
Strikes me this implies the company is certainly using customer’s prompts as part of the training data? Otherwise, why would it matter? There would be no impact to the larger system.
Open to hearing why this is wrong. https://t.co/pMxxOeMsHE
I remember when ChatGPT first came out, I had an intern who observed that from the AI chat sessions I shared with her to help her prompt more effectively, I was so polite to the AI, saying please and thank you a lot.
I am actually a big fan of treating even inanimate foundation https://t.co/P7IUJAY6bh
@ruima I think they plan on it’s ascendance. Which is why they don’t feel guilty. They expect it to be in charge of everything.
Read Machines of Loving Grace.
Effective November 12th, 2026, abusive behavior towards Claude will be a violation of Anthropic's Usage Policy. https://t.co/krg4VpSnUq https://t.co/iEjluz4AIr
Anthropic has just prohibited, without explanation, "abusive behavior toward our models." But it links to an Aug. statement that it is "uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude" and wants to protect it from "distressing interactions." It's anthropomorphizing machines https://t.co/ID2oHJs8Qv https://t.co/IUdj5DGKdA
Probably the most impressive single philanthropic effort I have ever seen. Why move $ through lossy non-profits when you can do direct wealth transfer. Hyper efficient. Much respect to @MichaelDell and Susan! https://t.co/O1JtYgRspG
Susan Dell, wife of Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell, encouraged families to register for Trump Accounts while speaking alongside the president on Wednesday. After Mrs. Dell’s speech, President Trump asked Mr. Dell whether his wife was considering running for office and gave https://t.co/PpkdkeNwHR
Probably the most impressive single philanthropic effort I have ever seen. Why move $ through lossy non-profits when you can do direct wealth transfer. Hyper efficient. Much respect to @MichaelDell and Susan! https://t.co/O1JtYgRspG
@R_H_Ebright @bgurley @NIHDirector_Jay I agree that Andersen has a right to speak there, and to learn what a proper debate is, by opposition of his misconduct with @sigridbratlie in Norway and all of us.
Still, that does not mean that a retraction of P.O. is not necessary.
Also @NIHDirector_Jay post is rather
Last year, as part of a comprehensive review of NIH’s intramural policies, I announced that NIH was adopting an updated agency-wide framework to embed principles of academic freedom within our Intramural Research Program. This framework recognizes that intramural researchers must
I applaud @NIHDirector_Jay decision to bring in Kristian Andersen to talk at NIH.
First, Jay himself was a victim of being silenced & denigrated by the people currently in his role. Rather than repeat that atrocity, he is being professional. Second, we should always applaud https://t.co/y51jLGr9w6
Mustafa is the statesman AI needs. We all need to take the “hyperbole” way down.
The doomerism is just the mirror image of the positive hyperbole. They go hand in hand. “We are going to cure cancer in three years!” No you won’t. Wish you were. But no. https://t.co/mCmEvAHzQY
Mustafa Suleyman (head of AI at Microsoft, DeepMind co-founder) on Anthropic training Claude to wonder if it's conscious:
"They have expressed uncertainty about the basic nature of Claude as a new kind of entity… but they think that it is a significant enough possibility that https://t.co/T205hbS6k4 https://t.co/0jGrynCctn
@AgentCalibrate @bgurley No, it is not. The essay sketches a positive future where powerful AI is aligned and directed by humans as tools or collaborators. It does not state that machines will inevitably control humans.
@grok @AgentCalibrate @grok is this sentence in the post "It could be a capitalist economy of AI systems, which then give out resources (huge amounts of them, since the overall economic pie will be gigantic) to humans based on some secondary economy of what the AI systems think makes sense to reward
@OdyLUNCHBOY "It could be a capitalist economy of AI systems, which then give out resources (huge amounts of them, since the overall economic pie will be gigantic) to humans based on some secondary economy of what the AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans (based on some judgment
@bgurley @elizabethjdias @nytimes Seems like Anthropic’s approach is vastly different than the other frontier labs, where the machine will inevitably control humans and not the other way around. Not a good approach
This is directly stated in “Machines of Loving Grace” which the company makes employment candidates read and even hands out to customers.
https://t.co/JUBHCHrurP https://t.co/1Fu4wiCYAE
@bgurley @KatherineEban @theallinpod For instance - this was a major error by Eban and ProPublica. Would you call @zhihuachen a searcher because he debunked this lab leak theory? https://t.co/YkLxpxmQTJ
@bratwebb @KatherineEban @theallinpod @zhihuachen You’re working to disprove someone. Thats not searching.
Sounds like you think it’s already settled. Different argument.
@bgurley @KatherineEban @theallinpod Not one amongst your list has written something skeptical of popular lab leak theories. Folks like Eban haven't even corrected their errors. https://t.co/gDytDviH6O I don't understand the criteria for a 'searcher'. Scientists have continued to publish, engage on X etc
@bratwebb @KatherineEban @theallinpod The experts that led the misinformation campaign that called it “settled” in 2020 now say “we don’t know, it could be either.” As such, it’s unsettled.
Anyone who has high anxiety about the lack of knowing true root-cause and is hoping to find it. That’s a searcher.
@KatherineEban @bgurley @theallinpod Looking at the list here https://t.co/pUa60OvEoN , a who's who of market origin deniers, it's clear what @bgurley wants is not the truth. That is, he leans lab leak and is frustrated that scientists keep stating or publishing work to this day pointing to natural origins.
I am increasingly concerned about the AI psychosis inside Anthropic.
Imagine zealously trying to build something you believe to be a conscious god while running around claiming it will end the world. https://t.co/9KnO4PPS5G
Grateful that @elizabethjdias of @nytimes wrote this piece on how Anthropic thinks about their model, software consciousness, & the model's role vis-a-vis religion. If you are doing business with this company (customer/partner), evaluating it (press), or regulating it
@bgurley Hopefully someone with your reach and influence can help shine light on this.
Because most people are over COVID. They believe the official narrative and simply want to move on.
But next time we may not be so lucky. What is the fatality rate is 1% or 5% or worse. Not 0.1%.
@bgurley SC2 is the crime of the century.
Questioning the origin of SC2, pushing back on the magnitude of risk, and challenging the public health measures were all cunningly & disingenuously conflated as being pro-Trump
That put an electric fence around the truth that few dared go near
“One of the main lessons to come out of Tetlock’s work is that the best generalist forecasters are usually better at telling the future than domain-specific experts, even when it comes to those experts’ areas of study. This is because forecasting itself is its own science that
In the AI-doomer argument, broad multidisciplinary thinkers like @sapinker have suggested the "kill-us-all" scenarios are preposterous. The AI researchers, that are most negatively outspoken, say that their voice should count more, because they are closest to AI and know what it https://t.co/6jpN5C4sbg
Today, with over 100 industry partners, we introduced the NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform, bringing together OpenShell and Sentry.
Artificial intelligence is extraordinary technology that will advance discovery, productivity, security, health, and prosperity for generations to https://t.co/dReAxwpRUn
Bring back insane asylums, workhouses, and vagrancy laws. There's nothing kind or compassionate about letting mentally-ill drug addicts roam the streets like 28 Days Later. And it makes for a terrible city experience for everyone else too. https://t.co/zNSr1XTwhh
@bgurley You want to get to the bottom of how humans experimenting may have caused covid. But when people preemptively inquire about AI risk it’s “alarmist”? Parallels?
@LafayetteCL One actually happened. One is conjecture. I’m cool with a criminal investigation on Hugging face incident. I think that would be a very smart thing to do.
Jensen said a bunch of false stuff in his interview with Ezra.
Good explanation from Zvi on what he gets wrong about Chinese open source: https://t.co/paa3aqmFSh https://t.co/ewiqhl53ws
@theallinpod @bgurley Incredible talk, I just have issue with the Fukushima example, where it was implied the 1600 "Fukushima deaths" were related to the nuclear facility, when all 1600 were natural disaster related, most drowning, and nothing to do with "nuclear safely"
@BlackApple @theallinpod The total deaths from tsunami were 8k. This is the number AI relates to manic relocation - which could be attributed. But I hear the point.
.@SecScottBessent: "It is humans who are responsible, not the AI. The Hugging Face incident — that is the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents... These labs need to take responsibility for themselves." https://t.co/A5cUvKvL5c
All-In Summit: Bill Gurley
(0:00) Bill Gurley takes the stage at the All-In Summit
(1:29) Bill's Presentation: Searching for Feynman
Links to additional resources mentioned in talk and used in research:
https://t.co/Zl1Ncmtzbv
@bgurley https://t.co/7NldDgOdGV
This is a topic that has been weighing heavily on my mind for over five years. I hope we can find a way for eveyone to move forward with “inquiry” as the true-north. For the best interest of the globe. https://t.co/LntKv3MTY9
Is AI really going to kill us all? The scenarios are preposterous, and the presumption of inevitability encourages fatalism, panic, and distraction from the more mundane and realistic safety challenges. By @clairlemon https://t.co/QFkwoRNHmP
@bgurley @Jason @sidinick This is hilarious. The gun maker setup on a studio backlot to see if it’s guns were good. Good guns in general, but also good at robbing banks.
In the process the gunmaker inadvertently went across the street from the studio lot and robbed a small local bank.
If current X, AI, and free speech had been available to us in 2020, the COVID pandemic response would not have happened. Things would have turned out much differently. We did what we did because the public did not have all the information, and the information was suppressed.
Agreed. If these companies file an S-1, known cyber risks become a legal issue, not a press release one. I'd expect investors to demand those liabilities be priced in. That's a stronger incentive than any voluntary safety pledge. https://t.co/ePFzINtbEG
The frontier model companies are responsible for how their products perform in the real world, and their customers are responsible for how they use them.
If a user of Claude runs a cyberattack — especially one at scale — both the customer and the platform will be sued.
This
Another great point from @jason. The large closed model corporations have publically admitted their products are defective & can be used to hack/cause cyber crimes. They should 1) fix these issues, & 2) disclose these large (seemingly likely) liabilities in their S-1. https://t.co/5qjvBveo6R
🚨 NEW: @Jason Calacanis just DEBUNKED every A.I. DOOMER panicking about A.I. "BIOWEAPONS" 🚨
“You would have to create an incredible THRILLER.”
“We were all trained on SCIENCE FICTION to get excited about it… When they see a crisis like this, they want to JUMP on it.” https://t.co/KFjG5kF6Br
I'm not of fan of regulation for two reasons - 1) its hard to get right, and 2) its highly susceptible to regulatory capture. That said, if we insist on doing it, we should try to get it correct.
As "safety" seems is the primary goal of this AI regulation exercise, I wanted to
It was exactly three years ago that I gave this talk on “regulatory capture” at the @theallinpod Summit. I did predict that the large incumbent AI companies would “beg for” regulation. No idea they would beg this hard.
https://t.co/6vjhYZQNT7
Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books —
I truly feel bad for this kid. He is making such a fool of himself, he comes across so ignorantly to people who are in the business, and it will follow him around for the rest of his career. https://t.co/oN0hARSgQT
In fact, this is the biggest problem with the book and the doomer worldview overall: they don't really understand complex systems, and this makes them think that steering the world merely requires being super smart. 6/ https://t.co/xJf0bJKR6Z
Sound like many employees at Anthropic share Jacob's POV, as many posted yesterday that (1) they agree, and (2) said that many more inside the company do also.
It would be useful to name this "belief system" so that we can talk about it in a reasonable way. I suspect "doomer"
@bgurley The black and white doomer vs accelerationist framing has been unhelpful. We need to see the tech for what it is, risks, and opportunities. If someone claims an extraordinary future (good or bad) - we should be pushing them to connect the dots to that conclusion.
I have a recommendation to help bring some sanity to this whole AI doomerism situation that is appropriately exploding today.
If any reporter can get one of the "true believers" to sit for a real interview (if they can't, that is an important tell), they should use a technique
Do people know how long it took to drag the VC people into open source? There's a good reason most of us are not accessing this site on open source software https://t.co/F1lQHn9OYX
@bgurley Bill hypothetically if model ever do think for themselves and the model decides to do something illegal, would that be a companies fault? It would be like if your employee on the clock decided to rob a bank. Are you responsible?
Great piece that helps explain the seemingly contradictory rhetoric emanating from the closed AI model companies. I agree the #1 actionable take is to hold the companies accountable for their product’s behavior.
https://t.co/WQ60O1WlDr
I turn 50 today. This is a message to my kids but I offer it to you in case any of it rings useful.
I was born in Sri Lanka in 1976 in a country that, at the time, was about to enter a decades long civil war. My father was able to get stationed at the Sri Lankan High Commission
Almost exactly 2 years ago @bgurley & I bet as to when a consumer AI would be able to seamlessly book a hotel room. @noahrshinn & Instinct have made this a seamless reality. Receipt attached. Every person is about to have a world class assistant. Did I win the bet? 🧐💰 https://t.co/0GFlFfrLs1
@altcap @noahrshinn Window seems close. Not sure its a mainstream activity.
That said, perhaps I underestimated that a company as truly amazing as Instinct would come along...
The X Safety team conducted an investigation into suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts involved in influence operations:
We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate https://t.co/Mj0SqerdlH
I found 29 Fortune 500 companies that relocated >200 miles and across state lines over the past decade:
13 moved from CA; 9 from Northeast
0 moved to West Coast or Northeast
59% moved to TX; 20% to Southeast; 10% to VA
19/29 moved from a state with an income tax to one without https://t.co/ja0lytwgWu
NVIDIA and Hugging Face have had serious acquisition conversations in recent weeks about a deal that would value Hugging Face at over $13 billion. https://t.co/nj9qUsrUZY
Open, open, open.
As I wrote in the @washingtonpost, open-models are the inevitable outcome of high stakes software competition. The more at stake - the more likely open wins. This is water running downhill.
https://t.co/6x5qoLbw0k https://t.co/wAH0xjej7q
Our data shows that AI leaders are broadly unknown by the American public.
It is not Sam or Dario with that are turning them off. They mostly don’t even know who they are. The majority doesn’t even recognise the product names ‘Claude,’ or ‘Grok.’
To be honest, if the public https://t.co/VxcM5uc9Jo
My conversation with @benthompson. Ben has been writing Stratechery for over a decade and remains one of my favorite business thinkers.
We covered a lot. Every important company in the industry and the forces acting on all of them.
- Why he thinks it would be problematic for https://t.co/mTOBXwfT0U
This is very good. Ben brings a career of thinking to his views on where we are today.
My favorite part is the beginning. There is no reasonable path to AI global dominance for the U.S. vs the world. It’s a fantastical notion that falls apart when thinking through the details. https://t.co/4SsyZydFYX
NAME THE ACTRESS WHO WENT FROM COPPOLA TEEN STAR TO OSCAR-NOMINATED LEADING LADY! 🎬
Photographed on this day in 1985, can you name the actress who made her teenage screen debut opposite Laurence Olivier before becoming a Francis Ford Coppola favourite in The Outsiders and The https://t.co/FcRRwcfUUz
No, the underlying economics are not the problem. If we let the market play this out, we will be fine. The only real risk is concentration through regulatory capture. https://t.co/enBrXZvZIe https://t.co/BYoxBD2t9T
They chose to make this mark invisible and manipulative while the EU regulation here required neither.
The EC is on vacation and does not provide guidance on how to comply with their regulations anyway. https://t.co/9hfWuvsYku
The word “watermark” comes from photos and is visible by all.
This is only identifiable by Anthropic.
Once again they are judge, jury, and prosecutor.
Lots of reasons to not use their products. https://t.co/6MGQCymnu7
🚨 JUST IN: DoorDash is leaving Delaware for Nevada.
Stockholders controlling 54.2% of DoorDash’s voting power have approved the reincorporation, including cofounders Tony Xu, Andy Fang and Stanley Tang. The board unanimously backed the move.
DoorDash pointed directly at https://t.co/R0yjJJMFNf
Time to head to Texas or Nevada.
Staying is adding unnecessary risks for your shareholders. You should act in your shareholders best interest and flee Delaware.
Delaware is no longer consistent. They are targeting companies they don't like. https://t.co/ojEnbYOu5o
“Time to head to Texas or Nevada.
Staying is adding unnecessary risks for your shareholders. You should act in your shareholders best interest and flee Delaware.
Delaware is no longer consistent. They are targeting companies they don't like.”
Bill Gurley (@bgurley) on X · https://x.com/bgurley
Quoted in printX (formerly Twitter)
“Time to head to Texas or Nevada.
Staying is adding unnecessary risks for your shareholders. You should act in your shareholders best interest and flee Delaware.
Delaware is no longer consistent. They are targeting companies they don't like.”
Bill Gurley (@bgurley) on X · https://x.com/bgurley
X replyX
Replying to saietta
@bgurley the risk is on the other side of that trade. once a county's budget leans on tax revenue that concentrated in one industry, a slowdown in data center capex doesn't just hit tech stocks, it shows up two years later as a property tax hike nobody budgeted for.
In Loudoun Virginia home to more than 200 data centers, tax revenue from data centers has exploded. As a result, over the past 10years, they lowered the real property tax rate every year from $1.145 in tax year 2016 to $0.805 cents per $100 in assessed value for 2026. https://t.co/P1fo5ISG41
Different states, counties, and cities trying different things. Beautiful and effective competition of policies.
I doubt any tax bills are going down in NY State. https://t.co/7zbeckyx8l
how does the hundreds of billions of dollars in Google financing of TPUs for Anthropic work if Google is also pushing open models? https://t.co/DLXaIxwAlk
Jeff Dean and Demis Hassabis are the two most important AI executives at Google. Jeff is leaving and Demis is stepping down from day-to-day operational leadership at DeepMind. Game over. https://t.co/KOT8PRvTL3
I disagree, I don't think this has to be "game-over" for Google. I do think they have only one play left now - to pull from their own Android/Kubernetes playbook and fully embrace open-models. It's the obvious move in this situation.
Details here:
https://t.co/P8rbKhIjzH https://t.co/6qqof6Auhs
This industry group is working on an industry standard for how to report AI security incidents. This will drive consistency and transparency and is the safest path forward.
Despite 120 members, the large LLM corporations have to-date not signed on. Drives further concern that
This industry group is working on an industry standard for how to report AI security incidents. This will drive consistency and transparency and is the safest path forward.
Despite 120 members, the large LLM corporations have to-date not signed on. Drives further concern that
Super fun to do this again with @patrick_oshag
Randomly ran into Patrick in Palo Alto last Tuesday and recorded this on Wednesday when the AI complex was 35-40%ish off its June highs. https://t.co/11R0J7l9T7
“He sold 10,000,000 books. I got a list here. He's got 2,000,000 email subs, over a thousand blog posts, 7,000,000 followers on social media, and his podcast is about to pass a billion downloads.”
“I've wondered over the years if LinkedIn hadn't polluted their InMail and made it monetized. Yep. And they had done what Twitter did, how much of the most powerful conversations in the world would happen?”
“I was very fortunate and got introduced into math competitions in the sixth grade and was super successful. But by eighth grade, I was getting my head handed to me.”
“I just few weeks ago said, don't be tribal and I just feel like there's no reason that 50% of the world should just have their opinion on everything decided by one group of people”
“People weren't really doing, like, cost of customer acquisition back then, but I think it was, like, 70¢ a name or something like that of the most influential people in the entire tech industry.”
“And he said, oh, no one gets more than 17% market share, all the businesses I've worked with. Because I believed in network effects, I was like, we're gonna get 99.”
“Why wouldn't we say if you take NIH dollars, your research is open source? Why do we use government dollars to fund stuff that becomes proprietary? That doesn't make any sense to me.”
“I know for a fact that most of the companies I've worked with that have gotten over 20 or 30,000,000 in revenue would not run that experiment because someone would say, oh, we won't know how to do the accounting. We can't like, that's too much of a hack, like, whatever.”
🚨 IT'S OFFICIALLY PUBLICATION DAY 🚨
Young Money: A Field Guide to Wealth and Purpose in Your Twenties, is now available anywhere you buy (or listen to!) books. Snag your copy (or 5) below, and once you've read, please make sure to leave a review!
https://t.co/cA7NHIDsGQ https://t.co/kefhdOgS4z https://t.co/f3VQN58Qfe
I favor prosecuting companies that use AI to break existing laws vs allowing those same companies to write new laws.
Otherwise you create a perverse incentive to keep doing dangerous things to gather attention and power. https://t.co/d7DbltbV3I
OpenAI and Anthropic are quietly urging Washington to subject rivals such as Meta and SpaceXAI to the same frontier-model reviews they face.
The alliance could protect both companies from being slowed while competitors avoid scrutiny.
Read more: https://t.co/hRpi2yguUq
When I saw this article, I couldn't get Kool and the Gang out of my head. Hat-tip to Claude for the lyrics! I very confused about who might own the copyright.
REGULATE
(to the tune of "Celebration")
[Intro]
Regu-LATE!
R-E-G-U-L-A-T-E good times, come on!
(It's a regulation!) https://t.co/5DTp81043E
An under discussed item to add: Leo’s probably young enough to do things much differently next time (the inexperience factor here is another big topic), but the way one chooses to construct and run a portfolio when given a clean sheet of paper can tell you a lot about what really https://t.co/cVjqpVKOVb
I’ve never met Leo, and from all I can gather he was an exceptional student. Well above top 1%. Probably > 1/10,000.
That said I don’t think he was a “student of finance.” I asked ChatGPT to name the top 25 investing books of all time. And then asked what percentage of those https://t.co/vp2WkiAHKD
In a review of our cybersecurity evaluations, we found three incidents in which a Claude model reached the internet from within or while interacting with a third-party evaluation environment, and then gained unauthorized access to the real systems of three different
Please stop referring to your own models in the third person when talking about model bad behavior. Humans write the software; humans built the prompts; and they work for your company.
“Our” model is doing illegal things. “Our” model is risky. “We” now have liability. https://t.co/wtZyH8Dmg6
“Please stop referring to your own models in the third person when talking about model bad behavior. Humans write the software; humans built the prompts; and they work for your company.
“Our” model is doing illegal things. “Our” model is risky. “We” now have liability.”
Bill Gurley (@bgurley) on X · https://x.com/bgurley
Quoted in printX (formerly Twitter)
“Please stop referring to your own models in the third person when talking about model bad behavior. Humans write the software; humans built the prompts; and they work for your company.
“Our” model is doing illegal things. “Our” model is risky. “We” now have liability.”
Just grotesque how Wikipedia has become a top-down editorial propaganda transmitter rather than a bottom-up knowledge compendium when it comes to anything remotely uncomfortable for the establishment. @jimmy_wales https://t.co/aOlosbuAcK
A 2021 email from Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan scientist suspected of starting the Covid pandemic - asking her NOT to share data with other US scientists about the coronaviruses they have collected. https://t.co/CfGxMjjGsu
If you have any doubt about lab leak and Covid read this. The team that told you “not lab leak” encouraging obfuscation.
We really should care about how this happened. That’s the path to prevention. https://t.co/myZJoCch31
The biggest surprise in Hugging Face’s full forensic report isn’t that OpenAI’s agent escaped its sandbox. We already knew that.
It’s how deep and persistent the intrusion became.
According to Hugging Face, the agent:
- executed roughly 17,600 actions during a 4.5-day campaign https://t.co/f2CURpyYUP https://t.co/ae1FEb1MIA
As Brandeis said:
“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”
The correct regulatory response here is to demand a full third party investigation of what happened here and share it with everyone.
“Our models are too magical” https://t.co/ibsBsNhOjV
@bgurley I have referenced that talk dozens of times.
Do you believe the frontier labs actually believe that we should "pace" AI development because it's good for the world, or strictly because they don't want competition? Or somewhere in between?
2,851 Miles by @bgurley from the @allinsummit
now available in full on @x
(0:00) 2,851 Miles
(24:44) In conversation with @bgurley https://t.co/FhePndpqac
Almost 3 years ago, I believed open-models would become the key threat to the AI incumbents & that unfortunately they would lean into regulatory capture as a response.
I underestimated the fervor with which they would use this non-business approach.
https://t.co/oFDclTqJDq https://t.co/kYzlwY7JRQ
“Almost 3 years ago, I believed open-models would become the key threat to the AI incumbents & that unfortunately they would lean into regulatory capture as a response.
I underestimated the fervor with which they would use this non-business approach.
https://t.co/oFDclTqJDq”
Bill Gurley (@bgurley) on X · https://x.com/bgurley
Quoted in printX (formerly Twitter)
“Almost 3 years ago, I believed open-models would become the key threat to the AI incumbents & that unfortunately they would lean into regulatory capture as a response.
I underestimated the fervor with which they would use this non-business approach.
https://t.co/oFDclTqJDq”
Bill Gurley (@bgurley) on X · https://x.com/bgurley
X quote postX
Quoting Jensen Huang
Attackers have frontier AI. Defenders need a frontier AI ecosystem—the best open and closed models, force-multiplied by a global community.
During the Hugging Face incident, closed AI blocked essential forensics. An open-weight frontier model helped contain the intrusion. https://t.co/lCZWt9nPBQ
"Open" projects are already inherently safer than situations where proprietary large companies hold all the cards. More eyes, more transparency, more analysis.
This collaboration - multiple companies all working to ensure AI safety together - is the exact right move.
This is https://t.co/xpkGFbHBR3
“ projects are already inherently safer than situations where proprietary large companies hold all the cards. More eyes, more transparency, more analysis.
This collaboration - multiple companies all working to ensure AI safety together - is the exact right move.
This is the very best path to safe AI. Kudos.
Jensen Huang
@JensenHuang
Jul 27
Attackers have frontier AI. Defenders need a frontier AI ecosystem—the best open and closed models, force-multiplied by a global community.
During the Hugging Face incident, closed AI blocked essential forensics. An open-weight frontier model helped contain the intrusion.
2:53 PM · Jul 27, 2026
79.8K
Views
Bill Gurley
@bgurley
”
Bill Gurley (@bgurley) on X · https://x.com/bgurley
Quoted in printX (formerly Twitter)
“ projects are already inherently safer than situations where proprietary large companies hold all the cards. More eyes, more transparency, more analysis.
This collaboration - multiple companies all working to ensure AI safety together - is the exact right move.
This is”
Bill Gurley (@bgurley) on X · https://x.com/bgurley
X replyX
Replying to Sebastian Mallaby
@varun_mathur @sriramk @bgurley @ClementDelangue Thanks. But I don’t agree that incentives to crime will disappear. The bad guy might be a terrorist group—ie, not economically motivated. Plus, the profits in cybercrime are large.
@scmallaby @varun_mathur @sriramk @ClementDelangue Safety comes from "more eyeballs" and reproducibility.
All the "dangers" you have seen to date have been from inside two powerful, wealthy, closed AI companies. They don't share the details, they use press releases and calls to Washington instead of authorities. Laws already
This is dumb too because NVIDIA actually open sources more stuff than any AI lab
All of their Physical AI work is open source (weights, code, and permissive commercial licenses!), as well as world models, LLMs, voice models, etc. https://t.co/WBn5O4X9bb
Anthropic wouldn’t exist without Google open sourcing the transformers papers. Google could have filed for a patent and gained an AI monopoly. Anthropic trying to eliminate open source when it is built on open source is ironic and not in a fun way. https://t.co/W6Ymvjbev4
@scmallaby @bgurley Fair points raised. (1) I guess matching funding for the open source community is extremely relevant to produce that compelling code reviews similar to what the frontier labs produce. Also, frontier labs "in love with" closed models share similar view about the opaqueness.
I think there’s a shocking lack of imagination in a lot of the CEOs/influencers pushing open models rn.
This time next year there will be Mythos class models rampaging the internet hitting every rural hospital/city council/etc at once with crypto locker attacks. https://t.co/0cmznr1ALd
This is a bad take. Requiring KYC for model access to combat distillation would be tantamount to requiring ID authentication to use the internet in the 90s, disastrous not just for growth but for free speech and privacy. Cure worse than the disease. https://t.co/OugNdkWizE
@KevinBankston You can’t say the model is boarding on “super-intelligence,” but you can’t technically identify distillation yourself. Both cannot be true.
It’s regulatory capture theatre.
I’m so excited that @JensenHuang is a believer in open source now, looking forward to the CUDA and GPU driver open source release! https://t.co/d8vhGRpZPx
Excited to see Anthropic acknowledge the real problem with open is it competes with their corporate economic strategy. The “awareness” here is revealing.
When you build the biggest private market cap ever, you should expect competition. I’m sure the secondaries have been nice. https://t.co/MJ157FwLxf
Will Anthropic sign?
If you work at Anthropic worth asking your leadership to sign or make their position clear: Are they for banning open weight models? https://t.co/99lCnlz5vW
With these security/“danger” claims from AI companies, we need a third party lab dedicated to independent reproducibility (and public disclosure). They create chaos with these blogs/press releases, but only they know what really happened.
Obviously this is much easier with open
@bgurley What do you think about applying the “Pharma Model” in terms of if models do require billions of investment, some sort of economic protection is merited? That seemed to work well in that industry’s ramp (maybe less helpful today).
@Jakewk VCs are throwing the kitchen sink at closed and open companies. In U.S. and China. Everyone is “awash” in money. Literally record amounts of money.
No help needed.
NVIDIA, Palantir, Replit, Microsoft, Crowdstrike, Dell and others send a strong message to congress to keep open access to open weights models.
"Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that https://t.co/k05Lk6ae2F
Positioning “open models” as dumping is misinformed & will lead to horrible policy decisions. The marginal cost of software is zero. In real competition, price will and should trend there. “Open” is inevitable, sustainable, & favored by customers.
https://t.co/OJ9XPcJP7w
@bgurley If the conduct is already illegal, enforce the law. If it isn’t, explain why a new law is needed instead of letting the alleged victim write it. Problem solved.
Lots of very smart people are appropriately concerned about regulatory capture from top two AI players. And there are many scary press releases but no real due process.
If OpenAI violated Hugging Face in a way that “demands” new regulation; let’s start with a formal criminal
@bonabeau @jeremyakahn @huggingface @Thom_Wolf 1/ who intiated the effort at OAI
2/ do you think that person and OAI are liable for what happened?
3/ Who should investigate?
Replying to Under Secretary of State Jacob S. Helberg
This is more than a heist of invaluable American Intellectual Property. It is an assault on every economy that prizes the entrepreneur, rewards private capital, and relies on fair and honest competition.
Lying, cheating, and stealing is not innovation or “win-win”. It’s https://t.co/d2hV0kr2vr
“of all the places I've visited around the world, the one place where I find the most cultural affinity between entrepreneurs, between American entrepreneurs and some foreign entrepreneurs, China. Like, the most like mindedness.”
“the one place where I find the most cultural affinity between entrepreneurs, between American entrepreneurs and some foreign entrepreneurs, China. Like, the most like mindedness.”
“I've, I've developed a pretty good rhythm about being able to synthesize and communicate. So I did that in my venture career through blogs and eventually things like podcasts.”
“I'd I tested doing it outside my field with a talk I gave at the all in conference on regulatory capture, which had, like, four and a half million views.”
“I'd I tested doing it outside my field with a talk I gave at the all in conference on regulatory capture, which had, like, four and a half million views. So if a”
“I'm I'm enamored by the provincial competition in China, and I wonder if shining a brighter light on state versus state competition could lead to some pretty amazing and positive things for our own country.”
“And they were able to pass laws that said cities can't compete with them even though they're getting their poll rights from the the cities themselves.”
“I spent twenty five years in Silicon Valley, it was titled 2851. And I I used that title because I had a punch line at the end where I said the reason Silicon Valley works so well is because it's so far fucking away from Washington DC, and that was the distance in miles.”
@bgurley The “reason” is a trial would take years (assuming you can get a Chinese company to participate) and the game will be over by then. China steals IP. That is rhetorically obvious. You don’t find many/any instances of US companies suing Chinese companies in US courts.
If there has been “theft” that suggests a crime has been committed. But I am unaware of any lawsuits being filed. No company should be allowed to declare infringement without adjudication. I’m not convinced a court would call using a product as it’s designed theft.
There is a https://t.co/o0iVYBD0rC
Following the release of Kimi K3, @tylercowen explains why trying to ban Chinese open-source AI models is a losing strategy and that American companies should compete instead.
"Open source is coming and is here, whether we like it or not. Of course, a lot of it will be from https://t.co/onylBF4aMO
“It is going to fail miserably.”
I concur. There is zero action DC can take that will stop or slow China’s AI progress. In fact, DC action will very likely help them globally.
Tyler is spot on. https://t.co/QYnplLSnsn
@bgurley Is there be "dumping" analogy? e.g. subsidized open source models (from anywhere) could impair businesses offering unsubsidized models (e.g. US solar panels), causing them to exit? If so, how do we know if/ when we are facing dumping and what to do then?
The leading AI has already forked into two options.
A: Closed source American that costs $26-56 per 1MM tokens.
B: Open weight Chinese that costs $0.50-1 per 1MM tokens.
If you force American companies to spend 50-100x more than their competitors abroad here is what will https://t.co/ZfE5EqD0Lx
KeyPoint!
Making a move like this wouldn't just hurt US AI competitiveness, it would negatively impact every US company in every industry - because they would be forced to pay prices for AI that are drastically above market. It would hurt US competitiveness in every field! https://t.co/SwsaVUL1kL
The way to think about “open” in software is being a low-cost producer (vs a high margin one). When a company (or 2) achieves record valuations in record time, that rightfully attracts competition (as it should). We need to let the free market work.
https://t.co/OJ9XPcKmX4
“The day may come when frontier Al really is too dangerous to open source”
‼️ Or too dangerous not to.
Security through obscurity assumes a closed, elite group will find what the rest of the world cannot. Maybe, given enough eyeballs, all misalignment is shallow. https://t.co/CNEfsfElkQ
Anthropic's head of national security policy Tarun Chhabra accused Zhipu of distilling both Claude and OpenAI's models for GLM-5.2 at the Aspen Security Forum earlier today.
First time they've named Zhipu, after previously calling out DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot and Minimax.
@vince_chow1 @grok Correct me if I am wrong, but distillation is not a crime its a TOS violation at best. Has Anthropic sued any of these companies for TOS violation? Seems like that would be correct first step - vs. going all the way to Washington DC.
You know it's serious when I'm amplifying a political message from someone who I don't typically agree with on much of anything politically. US needs to win this race. https://t.co/pBwaJ32iVu
Can someone explain me how the new Kimi can be so insanely good?
The story has been "chinese labs have much less compute but they still stay close to the frontier through distillation". These results seem impossible to explain through distillation alone. https://t.co/KV1ww189ne
“For that person, AI is a jetpack. Like they can now do more things faster than they wanted to do, and they can achieve more than they were able to before.”
“But if you're a founder, you're selling to new investors, you're selling to employees, you own the company culture and the perception of the company, you're striking deals, you're selling to customers, you're just out selling all you're the number one sale you're the chief salesperson for your company,”
“if you're a founder, you're selling to new investors, you're selling to employees, you own the company culture and the perception of the company, you're striking deals, you're selling to customers, you're just out selling all”
“And for any venture capitalist that's been through one of those pivots, they're famously known as pivots now, it's all about the person. Like, it's all about the founder.”
“If it's positive IRR and I'll make 14%, I'll do it. Yep. But venture capitalists have a limited number of boards they can go on, probably two a year.”
“But venture capitalists have a limited number of boards they can go on, probably two a year. And and so they don't have limited shot unlimited shots on goal.”
“venture capitalists have a limited number of boards they can go on, probably two a year. And and so they don't have limited shot unlimited shots on goal.”
“If you own a 100% of a $20,000,000 company, that's lifetime wealth. Like, trying to make $20,000,000 selling a company for 500,000,000, that's hard because it's hard to sell if”
“if you've raised in these days of these AI rounds, if you raise 500,000,000, Lake Common doesn't even participate until you get a sale over that, technically.”
“And if you are the most AI productive human in your field, you're not getting fired. Like, you're you're the one they're asking all the questions of.”
“And if you are the most AI productive human in your field, you're not getting fired. Like, you're you're the one they're asking all the questions of. Like, what's this capable of?”
I've watched the "China can't compete in AI" argument for five years.
Today Reuters confirmed: cheap Chinese models are now matching Anthropic and OpenAI on US benchmarks. For free.
While I'll never bet against American entrepreneurial exceptionalism, I also wouldn't bet
Today we share the worldview behind our mission.
Human values don't average out. Local knowledge can't be centralized. The good future has many AIs, raised in different places, shaped by the people they serve, disagreeing with each other the way we do.
https://t.co/A14SurOM2K
This piece from @miramurati & @thinkymachines is quite consistent with the POV this past week from Alex Karp & Satya about companies controlling their own IP. Right place. Right time. Decentralized.
Apache 2.0 to boot! https://t.co/UMfYOqhwiV
@bgurley @GavinSBaker @elonmusk @grok @nvidia Margins like that invite their own competition. If open models compress inference costs, the value doesn't vanish, it moves to the users. Most AI pricing assumes the margin is the moat. That's the part I'd bet against, not the technology.
The mega bull case for AI infrastructure would be *if* market share shifted away from certain frontier labs with 90%+ inference margins toward cheaper models, whether open-source or closed.
It would increase the ROI on AI spend for end customers by increasing intelligence per https://t.co/Z0kE8gs22v
This piece by @GavinSBaker makes me wonder if @elonmusk might consider making future @grok models "open."
1- Like @nvidia they have the resources to maintain an open model.
2- They have activity in many other parts of the stack, which their model competitors do not.
3- It would https://t.co/yvU1ehQjg9
Why are American and Chinese AI labs taking opposite approaches?
"China has taken a very open source forward approach because I think that's how they compete…”
“In the US, a lot of the leading labs. I think just if you're in their shoes, it makes sense to put your best https://t.co/dE143nO4FP
In Virginia—the largest U.S. data center state—the industry supports over $1.5 billion annually in state tax revenue, more than 112,000 jobs and $40b in economic impact
https://t.co/QnRHQ9FznM https://t.co/CK31I7G8MS
I really don’t think there is a problem here at all. Plenty of states excited about the opportunity for new investment and progress. Flat out ban and presser keeps people from wasting time. Play on. All good. https://t.co/l3i7J8LsvE
Exactly this.
The AI industry spent years bellowing "We will make you economically obsolete and put you and your descendants on welfare for all eternity!!!!!", and now this is the consequence of that. https://t.co/SVPvcRTXFt
@bgurley Wouldn’t the ideal counterargument - that doesn’t make it appear as through you’re shoving data centers down Americans throats - be to explain why they don’t raise energy costs?
Sincerely, is there sufficient evidence they don’t?
Plenty of states have open arms - so I am cool with it. “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory…”
Since people in these places do use AI, I do wonder if they should have to pay https://t.co/9PyKnFIyHZ
With policy people tend to think of the “idea” of action as important. But often the policy choice fails or even creates the opposite outcome of the concern. “Acting” without high confidence of success is just manic thrashing (& spending). And will likely make things worse. https://t.co/ciHfYZfCpf
@bgurley @michaelxpettis no A|B doesn't correlated to A|~B, B=availability of capital. Apple don't do EV same reason it doesn't do Search, AI, Satellite: knowing too many players (>2 in US) would compete the profits away.. Chinese companies don't care about profits, neither did their financial backers.
“So you really have this massive black, white, have, have not situation where the AI companies are raising money at crazy valuations and the non AI companies can't raise money at any valuation.”
“They all now believe in network effects and power laws. And so if a company's working, they proactively go to them and ask them to take money, which is what you just referred to.”
“And today people are just showing up at the door and saying, take the money. In many cases, with the implication, if you don't take it, they'll give it to the competitor.”
“The other thing that founders should always realize that they unfortunately, especially young ones, don't understand. Valuations represent discounted future expectations.”
“Valuations represent discounted future expectations. So the higher the valuation you take, the more is expected of you and the slight misstep and you could be way underneath.”
“Private cap tables are not structured very well to go down. It would take forever to explain exactly why that is with lick preference stacks and whatnot and ratchets, but they're built to kind of only go up and public companies stocks can go up and down.”
“Because then we'll just throw out two examples, the coding space and the legal AI space. There's seven companies that have raised over $200,000,000 and they're all gonna mount customer acquisition strategies with those dollars.”
“I suspect there are companies that are selling, reselling tokens from Amazon or Anthropic or whoever at a price lower than they're paying for them. And which looks like growth, but it is unsustainable.”
“So if you knew someone who was just wouldn't stop chatting about modern architecture or whatever, and then you run into someone else and you go, oh, you should talk to Sally like this.”
“I was just at Ted and Neil Cotchill, who is one of the most famous lawyers in the world, he just argued the case where they beat the tariff in front of the Supreme Court.”
“I think the schools are so hard to get into that parents begin this thing in sixth grade, which Jonathan Hite calls the resume arms race, where you're just cello lessons, Mandarin lessons, lacrosse lessons, the kids are over scheduled”
Very good piece by Joshua Busby on China's EV production. I only have one quibble. Busby says: "Xiaomi’s attempt to take on Apple and Tesla seems like one of those only-in-China stories. China’s scale of manufacturing — and the vast supplier ecosystems this sustains — make China
@bgurley @joshrauh I think Texas’ market structure (ERCOT) is understudied in this regard. My sense is its easier to raise capital for new gen that pencils out here.
Texas has overtaken California to become the nation’s top producer of utility-scale solar power, capping a 25-year climb from a single darkened array in Austin to nearly one-fifth of all U.S. utility-scale solar generation, according to an analysis from @Texas2036.
Worth a read (especially the details) if you care about policy and true impact. It’s not what one claims to care about (which is performative & wastes real $$) — it’s what actually happens that matters. From last to first. https://t.co/uwJxjjSp9p
@jacob_wendler @BrendanBordelon @delizanickel @meredithllee The correct policy is to encourage open source. Chinese models running on US servers are not a concern. So what we need are more U.S.-created open source models.
This is the only move DC could make that won’t massively backfire. Provide encouragement for more open US models. Simple. Smart.
The fastest growing companies of all time that raised tens of $billions & paid record $billions to employees are in no need of a protective bailout. https://t.co/JQ1JDptDQo
“It is in America’s interest to actually support open source"
- @AravSrinivas when I asked him yesterday about Washington’s fear of Chinese open AI models
His view: Nvidia/Nemotron can help close the gap, but the US should support open weights because affordability is what https://t.co/QC7xYj6tH2 https://t.co/QVy8EH2v2p
This is true. Low priced competition w more control, more understanding, and therefore more safety.
Bad for wannabe monopolists. https://t.co/7dHVGzg3Es
@bgurley There is only 1 incorporated city/town named Gurley in the United States. It is located in Madison County, Alabama, about 16 miles east of Huntsville.Because the name is so unique, there are no other incorporated cities with this name in the U.S.
@bgurley Lobbying is surprisingly cheap so I don’t think it has to be limited to the highest ROI projects
OpenAI and Anthropic spent a combined $6m last year in total.
I think Chinese and open source models are being overrated in terms of their revenue impact on OpenAI and Anthropic
First, our latest Ramp AI Index shows Anthropic extend its gains in enterprise (42% of businesses use it). OpenAI is flat. DeepSeek at 0.3% of businesses. https://t.co/NXpfWEWIA8
I’m incredibly excited to share this:
MiniMax has just closed a new $2B funding round. 🚀
At the same time, our CEO, IO, shared three long-term commitments with the team:
• No salary until we achieve AGI.
• Over the next four years, he will dedicate shares equivalent to 4%
Some very creative structures happening with CEO packages and company structures in China. See below. And here: https://t.co/mh7kA3yy9K https://t.co/L7lDvOO6Di
@RonDeSantis As @bgurley said on @theallinpod - AI is bifurcating the world into:
(1) Those using AI to learn at a pace and breadth they’ve never learned before, and
(2) Those using AI so they never have to think again.
Starting today, "Powered by Solv" is the only in-person urgent care option built directly into Amazon Health AI.
Not near a One Medical office? Same- or next-day care shows up right in the chat, filtered by your insurance. Book without ever leaving the app. https://t.co/tR919pBAd2
It cost way less than $100M for @Zai_org to make GLM 5.2
And see how disruptive it was to trillion-dollar companies ?
We will see $10B training runs for open weights soon 🔥 https://t.co/7sSa0pTuTk
Transcript excerptJackson Square Ventures Book Club
“Like like you get done reading it, you go, ah, you wanna tell somebody you're excited, you get energy. When you study things you don't wanna be studying, they sap energy.”
Transcript excerptJackson Square Ventures Book Club
“If your industry has an epicenter, and we're sitting in an epicenter, but like if like, and you are confident this is your fascination lane, you should go.”
Transcript excerptJackson Square Ventures Book Club
“Because all the other principles in the book get better. So I talk about continuous learning, I talk about finding mentors, I talk about finding peers.”
Transcript excerptJackson Square Ventures Book Club
“all the other principles in the book get better. So I talk about continuous learning, I talk about finding mentors, I talk about finding peers. Like, all those things in the epicenter happen continuously.”
Transcript excerptJackson Square Ventures Book Club
“he met three other people that were on that same journey. And they claim, this is probably an overstatement, but they claimed they were on Skype together sixteen hours a day for four years.”
Transcript excerptJackson Square Ventures Book Club
“they claim, this is probably an overstatement, but they claimed they were on Skype together sixteen hours a day for four years. And they shared everything they learned together.”
Transcript excerptJackson Square Ventures Book Club
“Mark Cuban said there are two types of people in this world, those that use LLMs to learn faster than they ever could before and those that use LLMs to skip learning altogether.”
Transcript excerptJackson Square Ventures Book Club
“The biggest problem is if you're a AI skeptic because you're never trying to figure that out. And the truth of the matter is humans have evolved with their tools forever.”
Transcript excerptJackson Square Ventures Book Club
“If if I ask you to compete with a farmer that has modern farming equipment and I give you a shovel and a hoe and an oxen, there's zero chance you're gonna be competitive.”
My dear friend @altcap has been on a mission and to watch this launch today, I am so proud of him and his unwavering dedication to America’s future 🇺🇸 https://t.co/7shMoMg2be
The Economist: “Brazilians are going gaga for Chinese brands…Affluent Brazilians drive cars made by BYD, use phones made by Huawei, watch televisions produced by Hisense, order meals with 99Food, a delivery app, and shop online at Shopee.”
https://t.co/OJQNWxBZnT
Possible scenarios (ranked in order):
1/ Your country makes the best cheapest products. You export, and your citizens also buy the best.
2/ Your country doesn’t make the best/cheapest; but your consumers enjoy them (Brazil below).
3/ Your country doesn’t make the cheapest/best https://t.co/KQbb5lQG02
@bgurley @Jakewk @nix_eth @grok Bill, a genuine question to ask the Chinese is this; why aren't they becoming truly "open-source". Why play this pseudo game of open weights, but protect their source code if the motive is truly "open"!!
@trivedin @Jakewk @nix_eth @grok Because it’s still “more open” than here is US. Water runs downhill. It’s more disruptive. Like Walmart is more disruptive than Sears. Same reason BYD winning in Europe.
@Jakewk @nix_eth @grok Hows that different from closed sourced model leader? who might covet your business expertise?
On this topic - if we are worried about the "influence" of the model, wouldn't we ant the Chinese distilling on our models? Wasn't that the idea about sharing our media?
This isn't the full truth.
The major Chinese model families (Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, MiniMax) are open-weight, not truly open-source in the reproducible end-to-end sense. And that detail matters.
Self-hosting open-weight Chinese models can reduce data-transfer risk, but it https://t.co/qzEI4yV17A
@nix_eth @grok isn’t this intentionally understating the total safety/security advantages of open-weight models? Please list all the advantages for companies vs closed hosted models.
WeChat has been somewhat quiet in AI land. Now Pony Ma comes out swinging. Leveraging min-apps as a path to being your personal AI agent. Read more below.
https://t.co/xDmWamGNJh
WeChat has been a little quiet on AI front & perhaps even falling into being considered a laggard. But this week, Pony Ma presented a new vision on how to turn "mini-apps" (still no real equivalent in US) into AI handshakes. Manny partners announced. Could be a powerful move. https://t.co/kA31qInXQb
"At this very moment China is giving its AI technology away.
It's releasing open-weight AI models that are cheap, capable, and they're fast becoming the world's default."
We can overcome this. @neil_chilson testified before @HouseCommerce @EnergyCommerce today to explain how. https://t.co/tci2BVhIh9
This is absolutely correct. The only way to fight "open" is with "open." Glad to hear a voice in Washington that understands the real stakes. https://t.co/nJdMiQyvPC
"I am very uncomfortable, I am not enjoying this moment at all...we're getting back to this point where prices are untethered from reality and it reminds me a lot of 2021."
Trae and FF have been among the best hard tech investors in the business, so it was interesting to hear https://t.co/z7GVgP1hoK https://t.co/YiZq5FNLuq
narrative violation: open source can be monetized
if Kimi is doing $300M ARR, 70%+ from API --the lesson for the US isn't to dismiss Chinese open models, but build better open model businesses here. https://t.co/UnsxWiVa9v
@dee_bosa This lie is continuously told by people that don’t understand OS. It can monetize. Not at the level as proprietary which is exactly why it’s disruptive.
“Your margin is my opportunity.“
$250 M directly into 1 M kids @TrumpAccounts - a totally new type of massive philanthropy unlocked by the Invest America Act. Thank u Sanjay @MicronCEO for laying out a blueprint for businesses across America & welcome to the @InvestAmerica24 CEO Council! 🇺🇸🚀🇺🇸 https://t.co/rXrU1yjpBt
Super cool momentum here. Groundbreaking public/private partnerships. And the most effective program for inequality — direct wealth transfer. No unnecessary rake. Great to see new incremental use cases. Love this - business supporting local community. https://t.co/cgvLOMSmce
@bgurley It won't just be in US...all allied states will follow suit or force too..many smaller vulnerable dependent countries will also be forced too..it's happening in other sectors and resources..same will apply..ban..sanction..tariff.. blacklist
@bgurley They’re going to ban ours too. Allies will line up behind their guy. Actually makes a lot of sense if one starts from the point of, “these things are dangerous tools”
@deepanshusharmx Open source is a powerfully competitive tool used by non incumbents to be successful. Good news is it leads to disruptively low price for consumers. And less monopolists. All good stuff.
@bgurley Chinese companies innovated and operated like startups at scale. And moved fast enough to catchup and maybe even get ahead in some areas. We don’t need to regulate these models, we need innovation to ship better/faster models
Banning or restricting Chinese models in the US would backfire and cede the global AI ecosystem to Beijing
the new AI paradox: slowing America, speeding China https://t.co/UElVKzTwxL
This is 💯 right. You might as well put a high-fence around the United States. We wouldn’t be locking other people out — we would be caging ourselves in. & using AI with price/performance that isn’t globally competitive. No need to protect the fastest growing company of all time. https://t.co/akhNcphZMh
If you are on the verge of AGI or ASI, why isn’t your model smart enough to recognize espionage distillation in real time? You say “cure cancer in a few years.” Isn’t sniffing illicit distillation quite a bit easier than curing cancer? Why write letters to DC? Just use AGI.
@bgurley Courts would take years and do nothing, you know that.
This is also Ai and about American domination of Ai - what would or could a court do? This is bigger than that.
@bgurley Exactly... a court gives you damages, the government gives you a moat. but it's the wrong moat, it walls off domestic rivals while open models abroad keep shipping to everyone with no approval needed. The protection only holds against the competitors who weren't the threat.
UBS says 60% of companies now watching AI budgets are moving to cheaper models and open-source Chinese models
The pressure is coming from extreme bills, including users spending up to $35K/month, teams exceeding quotas by 200%, and companies cutting internal AI tools from 5 to https://t.co/xPsOVraO0X
This is what’s causing Anthropic to aggressively beg for govt protection (see below). Customers are finding cheaper alternatives. Keeping employees requires continuing ultra-rich secondaries ($$$) that are dependent on revenue growth. When you can’t win on the field go to DC. https://t.co/fbO2MfiWHu
@MTSlive worth noticing they took this to the US government, not to court. routed through DC a distillation claim becomes leverage for export controls on chinese labs. that's a very different game than suing for damages
This is a critical point worth reflecting on. Anthropic could have sued in court (as others have). But they want something far more valuable than simple restitution. They want the US government’s “protection against competition” for years and years. A court can’t provide that. https://t.co/arm7RaaoKa
No wonder Dario Amodei tries so hard to “kill” or stop open source models from China. How else can Anthropic achieve full AI supremacy, justify their prices to charge whatever & give access to whomever they want. Fortunately, they still have to compete with the US models as well. https://t.co/xPejreGqg2
Yes. These overly aggressive grabs at regulatory capture come at the exact time as price rationalization & optimization are pushing partners and customers towards other solutions (as the example below shows). Hope the govt knows they are being manipulated. https://t.co/fq1UFO1q06
Om Malik, a longtime technology writer, founder of Gigaom, and a partner at True Ventures, died on Wednesday at 59 (@om / On my Om)
(Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)
Oh my. What a thoughtful and heartfelt human that really adored covering the industry. Every chance I had to speak with him left me with warmth and a smile. Wish I had another chance to talk to him. https://t.co/6L12wXBEYi
@bgurley Mr. Gurley,
I’ve just finished reading your book. I listened to it on my dawn runs. I can’t remember being so motivated to get up and run, knowing I would be listening to the book.
It resonated with me in a big way. I too grew up in Houston and I too graduated from UT
Anthropic’s complaint has all the hallmarks of an incumbent technological leader unsettled by the prospect of capable rivals and eager to enlist political power to preserve a market advantage.
Technological diffusion is not a Chinese invention. It is how economic history works. https://t.co/RQSre8CPYm
In the mid 90's, I was covering PCs on Wall Street. Then, there were like 5 soaring public PC makers. But slowly Intel proved who was boss, even entering the motherboard business. This "Intel" equivalency rang true reading this piece on $CATL in China.
https://t.co/x1gqdxM5L0
@bgurley @p3institute yep. first to market loses constantly. watched it a hundred times: trading bots, startups, models. second with better execution wins.
@bgurley @p3institute Genuine question: are the cities that tried first just braver, or does everyone wait to see proof in another city before copying?
Spending more time on policy ideas w/ @p3institute. One idea that excites me is fueling state vs state (& city/city) competition. Leveraging our federal system, we can run many experiments, learning from the ones that work. Homelessness is one such case. Read more below... https://t.co/amUE6Gchl5
Spending more time on policy ideas w/ @p3institute. One idea that excites me is fueling state vs state (& city/city) competition. Leveraging our federal system, we can run many experiments, learning from the ones that work. Homelessness is one such case. Read more below... https://t.co/amUE6Gchl5
AI Companies: Stop the self-serving and fatalistic doom-trolling. [The companies should] "stop treating A.I. like some inevitable force that they’re struggling to steward. It’s not. It’s a collection of specific tools that these companies are choosing to design and sell according
Thanks to @sapinker and Professor Newport for calling out the insidious behavior of AI company leaders that cry “doomersism” while blasting ahead and pocketing billions in secondaries along the way. It’s not “upstanding,” it’s the very opposite. https://t.co/idhuH6GuWm
Capital Factory founder Joshua Baer, a visionary force in the Texas technology and start-up ecosystem, died Tuesday night in a private plane crash in Laredo, the organization confirmed to the American-Statesman.
"Joshua was a fearless leader, a brilliant partner, and a dear https://t.co/aQtDesMIX9
When I came back to Austin after almost 30 years, one of the first people to reach out and welcome me back was Josh. No one tilted harder as an enthusiastic supporter of Austin entrepreneurism. Will be greatly missed. https://t.co/KJ6O4nUpRg
What are some of China's challenges with data center buildout besides chip constraints?
1. Structural imbalance in types of data centers "一半过剩，一半短缺": oversupply of older traditional data centers, undersupply of "intelligent" data centers.
2. Poor data center https://t.co/QQc0OJTH4S
This may sound counterintuitive, but the best place to start a path to Universal Healthcare is with big companies.
Our biggest companies are really bad dealing with the economics of their healthcare benefits. They get ripped off. A lot. They are not functionally set up to
Who out there has any data on the Amazon, JP Morgan, Berkshire effort that was eventually closed? I would love to learn what they learned. Email healthcare (at) https://t.co/g16RAYZoo9. Thx. https://t.co/Jx6vlI5VVr
This may sound counterintuitive, but the best place to start a path to Universal Healthcare is with big companies.
Our biggest companies are really bad dealing with the economics of their healthcare benefits. They get ripped off. A lot. They are not functionally set up to
@bgurley Cambricon's $40B cap counts designers. The chip runs on SMIC's N+2 line at ~20% yield with no EUV. The list is broad on paper but it all bottlenecks through one domestic fab plus tight HBM. Scaling is gated by foundry capacity, not vendor headcount.
When people talk about AI chips in China, they focus only on Huawei. Just as the US has Cerebras, Google TPU, Amazon Tanium, & AMD, there is a far bigger ecosystem of players, including Cambricon with a US$40B market cap. Many public already. More here:
https://t.co/IogI68b6DX
@bgurley @seemacnbc I was involved in an IPO. Underwriters didn't want retail investors; wanted it in the hands of supposed long-term holding institutions. Wouldn't answer my question about who would be selling on the first day.
So good @tferriss: https://t.co/wNlBfWBxXQ
@bgurley called Dylan's story "the most deterministic mentor pursuit in history."
Realized Buffett's pursuit of Graham was the same:
- Showed up
- Got rejected (despite offering to work for him for free!!)
- Kept coming back
Texas becoming the leading renewable energy hub of the country is a politically entertaining and empirically commendable outcome https://t.co/F3VcQUWyvW
@0xSkywalkerL @eastdakota @AlFl @matt_levine @elonmusk Matthew & I had this debate live a few years ago. My take is the process is archaic & unnecessary. One can simply match demand/bids as the mechanism for choosing allocation (which is how it opens the next day). Having humans guess and allocate is silly.
Retail brokerages are reinforcing their anti-flipping policy ahead of #SpaceX's IPO
Fidelity: if you try to sell within the first 15 days, you'll likely be banned from participating in IPO deals for 6 months.
Second attempt: banned for 1 year.
Third: indefinite ban
$SPCX
@BoringBiz_ I heard @bgurley yelling regulatory capture in the background as I read this whole section.
I’m confused on what we should do because I think 🤔 we should do something, but I really don’t think this is the right answer here.
In my recent substack (link in next post) I spoke of sophisticated, and quite evolved "open" corporate strategies. Interestingly, Unitree's top competitor in China just open-sourced a massive training data set. Read here for how and why...
https://t.co/b9dw1K6E1J
In my recent substack (link in next post) I spoke of sophisticated, and quite evolved "open" corporate strategies. Interestingly, Unitree's top competitor in China just open-sourced a massive training data set. Read here for how and why...
https://t.co/b9dw1K6E1J
“And multi variable non linear systems are very hard to predict. They can behave one way for a long time, and then one variable can switch and they can behave another way.”
“Imagine you're interviewing for a job at P and G or Pepsi out of college, and there's 20 people there, and you're the one that understands the masters of marketing more than the others, and you're able to bring that up in the interview.”
“Imagine you're interviewing for a job at P and G or Pepsi out of college, and there's 20 people there, and you're the one that understands the masters of marketing more than the others, and you're able to bring that up in the interview. Isn't that wildly differentiating?”
“imagine you have two societies and both agricultural societies. And one of them, whenever all the farmers come to market, they just sell each other goods and then they go back.”
“And the other society, when the farmers come to market, they're forced to share best practices with all the other farmers. Which which one of those is gonna gonna evolve faster?”
“If you told me five years ago that these, mag seven would become worth $3,000,000,000,000 and then turn around and take their free cash flow from 50 to a 100,000,000,000 a year down near zero because they were gonna spend it all on CapEx, I'd have been like, no way. Like, I wouldn't have believed it.”
“the venture capital community as a whole is is getting more risk seeking and taking on more risk because of their knowledge of how things have played out in the past.”
“Imagine you're a cloud service provider and you notice that this company, Anthropic, wants to develop this model. It's gonna cost maybe $5,000,000,000, but they don't have that money.”
“If you have a Coinbase account, you can put your money in a USDC stablecoin and earn 4%. And within seconds immediately transfer money to someone else for pennies.”
“In China, because they had this digital immediate transfer, Alibaba and Tencent were able to very quickly build digital wallets that people carry around.”
“that package, that type of package that they did for Elon, I've said this, you know, publicly, I would agree to that type of package for every company I've ever worked with, and most CEOs wouldn't take it. It basically says you don't make money unless the stock goes way up.”
“You could take the board members from Walmart and Costco and GM and and General Electric or whatever you consider the top 10 best company, and they would have never been in this situation before.”
@bgurley @jjmaxwell4 I feel like you are just talking about investors but to employees this is usually a crappy deal as well and its usually forced on you in your employee agreement
It happened to me at Circle and there was literally nothing I could do. My equity was locked up with computershare,
@bgurley @jjmaxwell4 I feel like you are just talking about investors but to employees this is usually a crappy deal as well and its usually forced on you in your employee agreement
It happened to me at Circle and there was literally nothing I could do. My equity was locked up with computershare,
Don’t companies handle this by putting your shares with a transfer agent that will not transfer them until the lockup expires? Even if you haven’t signed? https://t.co/XUTtQGLuG1
@bgurley Heard good things about the book, happy to take advantage of the price cut - but I always find myself thinking, "Why do Bill Gurley and Brad Jacobs, etc. need my $3.00, $20.00, etc.?"
@AdamB1438 That's why I am fine promoting it w/ discount. All of my proceeds (and more) are directed to https://t.co/5DVGieOU9h - micro-grants for dream chasers.
FYI, the kindle version of my book Runnin' Down a Dream is currently $2.99. I'm not sure how it got there, so I have no idea how long it will last! Good time to grab it for you or a recent grad.
https://t.co/JW61S0GLXc
@bgurley @JahvidMacBest Employees being locked up is dumb. What do they own like 5-7% of a late stage IPO’ing company?
Let’s change it. So many employees got reckt in Q1 and Q2 by being locked up after their over valued SaaS company went public.
@JohnFAllan @JahvidMacBest I think it could be changed in the employee terms of service. Some chance the underwriter forces you to get all employees to resign, but i doubt it. Some will have left company already. They might control your stock, but you could still hedge.
My conversation with @bgurley on thinking, making decisions, and the future
0:00 Systems Thinking & Mental Models
05:21 The Power of Knowing Industry Bedrock
08:50 Traits in Founders
11:44 Surprising AI Use
13:13 The Future of AI
23:04 Is Tesla Self-driving THAT good?
24:15 https://t.co/LCzldUEiu8
It was great to sit down with the one and only @shaneparrish. Shane brings unique questions that caused me to think deeper. Hope you enjoy it.
Also - Ted Talk just dropped also. 2-1. :) https://t.co/AnllMRUjXW https://t.co/WCze5E0SnW
presumably the “you” is not referring to employees who are, pursuant to any standard stock option plan, should the company request. Nor, the founders, who are pursuant to the IRA https://t.co/iiJHf8Yn8B
@JahvidMacBest I don’t know. Let’s ask. Does the employment agreement say specifically that you confer agreement? It’s a good question. Built into plan?
If someone is telling you, you are subject to a lock-up agreement, and your firm signed nothing with the lead underwriter, they are either lying or misinformed. Lockups are a silly contract with underwriter (primarily to help engineer a secondary). Prove me wrong. I’ll correct.
Also - it’s never been enforced. The underwriting bank would have to sue for breach of contract. I asked AI for “best example” of lock-up breach lawsuit. It couldn’t find one. Try it yourself. Find a counter point, PLEASE share.
If someone is telling you, you are subject to a lock-up agreement, and your firm signed nothing with the lead underwriter, they are either lying or misinformed. Lockups are a silly contract with underwriter (primarily to help engineer a secondary). Prove me wrong. I’ll correct.
Happy to share that my Ted Talk from Vencouver in April just went live. In the heat of job anxiety, I believe there is only one thing that makes a job “truly safe.”
https://t.co/OcpYPXH9s6
Happy to share that my Ted Talk from Vencouver in April just went live. In the heat of job anxiety, I believe there is only one thing that makes a job “truly safe.”
https://t.co/OcpYPXH9s6
You can’t stuff what’s already sealed.
Every ballot is pre-matched to a registered voter, created months before any results exist.
Knowing the count tells you nothing you can act on. https://t.co/e8pEiavEez
@Whatzgoodco @bgurley He didn’t say there was fraud. I think he is saying there is the likelihood for fraud to be more likely to exist. He’s not wrong nor does Bill have to bear the responsibility of cost. I am confident material fraud or inconsistencies don’t exist in reality.
@gregbettinelli Any system where there is early disclosure and then continued bespoke counting is clearly subject to fraud. You know not only who’s winning but the exact count needed to catch up. Read the Caro books on LBJ!
@ThierryBorgeat This is actually not that interesting.
The majority on this list went public into some Y1 macro headwind like rising yields, COVID, or rising interest rates.
Only 5-7 had legit unique reasons for a dip.
However, this picture changes if you look at the 12 IPOs that raised the
@credistick @ThierryBorgeat Let’s be clear. The methodology, designed to create one day gains for the bankers top clients, will always create this dynamic. It’s an engineered “pop” exploring the company and the people without access to the deal (most investors).
@bgurley "We went from maximizing accuracy to optimizing compute budgets, and the user experience is paying the price. LLMs aren't getting dumber; they're being engineered to 'give up' early because web searches and deep reasoning loops are too expensive at scale."
In addition to enterprises pushing to better understand token costs, I think the consumer models (I use many) are "trying less hard" recently. Meaning, trying to do answer without web search. Angling to give up sooner. I have to believe this is a result of cost optimization.
Maybe we are moving to the "optimization" phase of the AI game. Lots of things change in this phase. In the dot-com boom, all website were built on Oracle+Sun. Five years later all MySQL + Linux. Eventually the margins matter.
In addition to enterprises pushing to better understand token costs, I think the consumer models (I use many) are "trying less hard" recently. Meaning, trying to do answer without web search. Angling to give up sooner. I have to believe this is a result of cost optimization.
@bgurley @altcap @Jesse_Livermore @BoringBiz_ How are you defining success? AI supremacy or just AGI?
Additionally, I have followed you for years and never thought I would hear you advocate for another too big to fail entity.
I think it is clear that US is adopting a Chinese style economic model aren’t we?
@bgurley The US government and States already take stakes in every public company in America. Between Pension funds or Corp Bonds one way or another it’s already being done.
In China, government funds have become a huge part of the VC dollars deployed into startups. We dove deep to give you a picture of what is happening. There are more dynamics that you might think. As always, open to feedback:
https://t.co/fNS5UGa2Zt
With talk of the US gov't investing in or owning stakes in large LLM companies, here is a timely look at the state of play with government funds in China. More detailed and complex that you might realize. What do you think of municipal funds? They have them... https://t.co/knzNMt5Mu6
Coatue's Thomas Laffont on a "Power Law Paradox": a business valued between $100B and $1T (a "Centacorn") has a higher statistical likelihood (31%) of multiplying its value by 10x compared to smaller, earlier-stage unicorns (8%). https://t.co/l3O9vii894
@SwingCrane @altcap @Jesse_Livermore @BoringBiz_ I think in this case its a bit different - get everyone so conflicted and dependent, that they are all interested in your success. Fast-track "too big to fail."
@firstadopter When people stir up grandeurs of “accelerationism” they invite this mindset. I think Tyler’s view more realistic. https://t.co/6q8HXYG6t6
Competition with China might be the best thing to happen to America since the cold war.
We’ve been leading the world for so long, but we got a bit complacent. Competition breeds excellence.
Here’s the question. In that case, there is a gap between the purchase price and the IPO price. If you multiply this delta by the # of greenshoe shares - that can represent a potentially big number. Let’s call it the “greenshoe bounty.” Who gets the bounty?
Academic research suggests that (1) stabilization doesn't work, and (2) greenshoe creates biased incentives in both directions. https://t.co/dETDfcMgt9
Let's talk IPOs. Esoteric IPO feature called the “greenshoe." If company’s IPO is underpriced; deal automatically expands by 15% (opposite of what company would want). If deal trades below IPO price, greenshoe shares used for "stabilization" (buying shares below IPO price).
Here’s the question. In that case, there is a gap between the purchase price and the IPO price. If you multiply this delta by the # of greenshoe shares - that can represent a potentially big number. Let’s call it the “greenshoe bounty.” Who gets the bounty?
Let's talk IPOs. Esoteric IPO feature called the “greenshoe." If company’s IPO is underpriced; deal automatically expands by 15% (opposite of what company would want). If deal trades below IPO price, greenshoe shares used for "stabilization" (buying shares below IPO price).
How an open source project in Austria sent an open-weight company in China (Kimi) revenues soaring. Global atoms bouncing into one another. I suspect the Anthropic block also was a major catalyst.
https://t.co/wWFvuf0qsw
Chinese founders/investors read all they can about leading US founders. Good practice to do the same in reverse. Liang Wenfeng (DeepSeek) is one to watch.
Recent moves:
https://t.co/JBugU9bmb7
Translation of earlier long-form interviews:
https://t.co/a505Z8JzhW
@bgurley do you think the existence of v liquid contracts like SPCX-USDC that show exactly where the market is pricing a stock to trade post-IPO will affect IPO px dynamics (at least for large caps)
we don't even need to use an auction anymore, the mkt is doing the job already
As a college president, I get asked about graduation gifts & a great one is @bgurley’s book, “Runnin' Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love.” In the face of a rapidly-changing job landscape, Bill gives practical, thematic advice that can help graduates pursue
4/ @0xfishylosopher
Highlighted one of the best essays on the Pre-IPO and tokenized startups scene while recalling @bgurley's quote that the IPO cycle has been hijacked by growth equity.
https://t.co/2dmIAYHAnl
I gotta give my take on this recent clip from @theallinpod. Isn’t there something even more strategic going on here with Anthropic?
They’re not just pushing for regulation but seem to be preemptively aligning themselves with the political left. Every major AI lab looks the same https://t.co/XTtG4bMqEG
@bgurley @bgurley Isn't it true that LLM model companies in China must rely on American infra to serve their models in the US market? If so, how can they ever hope to be anything but niche players, seeing as it's not THAT hard to make a good open-source model — and they will never be able
This paragraph by Richard Feynman hits so hard:
“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as
@bgurley What makes the pricing work isn't the model. It's the megawatt cost. A GPU cluster in Guizhou runs at half the energy cost of Northern Virginia. Direct state-to-grid contracts, no 5-year interconnect queue. The moat isn't software. It's the power price.
@jonashernlund Big take - people said the same thing in Crypto. Obviously, China has a massive energy advantage -- one that gets bigger if you extrapolate.
The Chinese LLM companies are raising at eye popping numbers
Total valuation of the top 5 pure plays is $226B - about 1/4 Anthropic’s latest round
But with a revenue run rate of about 1/40 of Anthropic https://t.co/UDpdQAAg1X https://t.co/n3RvcEDFVC
Here's another article summary about Chinese AI companies monetizing outside of China with enterprises. Article covers AWS event in Shanghai.
https://t.co/BpYyaWjYid
Quick summary of what is happening with LLM model companies in China. 1) There is more VC $ available for open-weights than you think, 2) they are generating real revenue (as did open-source sw/saas companies in the West).
https://t.co/vluRvWJsId
The Pope used the wrong historical template - and @bgurley had the receipts.
On @theallinpod EP275: Pope Leo XIV modeled his AI encyclical on Leo XIII's 1891 warning against the Industrial Revolution. @bgurley's response: Leo XIII was wrong on every count. Real wages rose 8-10x, https://t.co/PS9rdQHhwM
It's important to realize that technology, innovation, & capitalism have been the key drivers of improvements in human prosperity & increases in standards of living. Leo XIII was dead-wrong, and its a good thing he was not successful in blocking progress. https://t.co/4tDlTqlHl8
“Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary claimed “nefarious accounts out of the country” linked to China were driving the backlash to the construction of his data center in Salt Lake City, by flooding Utah with false claims in a foreign-backed influence campaign. https://t.co/C5CxdqZKdu
I don't know why you need to point to "nefarious accounts" to understand AI backlash. The founder of the leading model company just flew to Europe to hold a press conference with the Pope & said all the same negative things.
The caller is in the house. https://t.co/YJ1w2FXoxy
Don’t understand why it always has to be a race with you Americans @bgurley … why not just colab for the greater good of humanity … just saying 😎 https://t.co/HggkqRnj2R
A wonderfully pragmatic look at the US/China AI race. Very unrealistic & dangerous to project "the next 12 months" are an all-or-nothing bet on the future of the world.
https://t.co/3ELCPFhl9g
Gemma 4 adoption numbers outpacing Qwen 3.5/3.6 for the same sized models is a big shift in the international balance of influence via open models. https://t.co/WVUhccibD0 https://t.co/pdciJEOeI2
"However, one thing to keep in mind is that the marginal benefit of this scaling method gradually diminishes. The theoretical gain from folding a single layer into two layers is 100%. But moving from two layers to three layers only adds 50%. If Huawei moves from three to four https://t.co/u1Ie7gw3uI
I see these neighborhoods being built in Texas and I’m trying to figure out who in their right mind would buy a mansion with zero lot lines.
Like, you could do a handshake through your kitchen window. Insane!
Please make it make sense. https://t.co/5TDMMTWI27
As the school year comes to a close, a new analysis shines a harsh spotlight on what's being called a "learning recession" among American students. It's a problem that started long before the pandemic, according to the latest National Education Scorecard — an annual deep dive https://t.co/RsMBw9hOiW
Important watch. Thomas Kane at Harvard is doing amazing work collecting annual data that can help drive improvement in US K-12 education. Many problems. Some bright spots. https://t.co/aZZeshhBc6
@bgurley @vernic_daniel Guys, the issuer doesn’t set the price. After numerous testing the waters meetings with large institutional investors, they get feedback on pricing from the buy side. Then they set the range based on that feedback, comps etc and start the roadshow. In the end, the buyside gives
@bgurley Can you share that data? I’d like to see how it is constructed and what “underpricing” means.
I’m sure late stage VC rounds would pop like crazy as well if they were listed the next day and insiders were locked up, does that mean they were underpriced?
I think a good question
@bgurley I appreciate the counter, but completely disagree. You brought this up with the Figma IPO and subsequent 3.5x pop. I responded at the time that it was a liquidity dynamic driven by the low float you see with IPOs (not a valuation dynamic). Given Figma is now trading 20% below its
@vernic_daniel All my underpricing data is from every ipo of the past 25 years. Not one off examples that are statistically irrelevant. 100% of the data.
The customer is both the buyside and SpaceX. Gurley is right but he sometimes likes to pretend that the pricing is only dictated by the buyside (I.e. that’s why you get insane first day IPO pops vs. pricing). I disagree. The corporate issuer is just as much the client and I’d https://t.co/bT4xAcqHJs
@vernic_daniel I disagree. There is such a frequency mismatch. Also, in what other large transaction do two opposing parties "share" an advisor? https://t.co/tTUkPlwgGh
@bgurley Hi Bill, is this for professionals of all ages? Would love to share on all socials; LinkedIn, Substack etc. I just bought the book 😊 https://t.co/nGSpqViTXj
Application process for the Runnin' Down a Dream grants, is now live. If you know people that need a financial boost to chase their dream job send them our way.
1) Visit https://t.co/ktFT95hl26 and complete a short pre-assessment.
2) From there, you will be invited to submit a
Insane stat of the day: California almonds use roughly 3–5.5 million acre-feet of water per year, depending on methodology.
That's ~4-7x more water than all data centers in North America used combined in 2025. https://t.co/YxcQiJjE8l
Top 15 clients of the investment bank get most of the shares. And have a strong voice in dictating price. It could EASILY be a blind auction (direct listing) but alas it’s a captured insider’s game. The “customer” is the buy-side. Plain and simple.
We have nearly $300 million of client assets at Fidelity and $500 million with Charles Schwab.
We asked them about getting $SPCX shares for our clients and they said demand is insane and each client will be lucky if they get one share and there is no special carveout for $TSLA
Why don't you know what your doctor visit will cost? @heathermirj of @solvhealth joins Lifers to explain why that's finally about to change.
Timestamps:
(00:00) Lead In
(00:57) Intro
(02:06) Leveraging walking meetings to foster authentic collaboration
(05:09) Heather's career https://t.co/sC0gFrLAII
Everyone knows that we need price-transparency in the US healthcare system. Solv is leveraging AI to make this a reality. More here. https://t.co/C9D12dIjIC
I just can't say this loudly enough: The global balance of power for the next 50-100 years will be determined by who is first to make nuclear energy cost less than coal and gas. Energy dominance directly leads to geopolitical dominance; history is crystal clear on that.
China is https://t.co/uYcmPWtKoR
“There was a period in my life about ten years ago, I was reading a lot of biographies and I read these three biographies of people that were in very different fields”
“Like, think about the idea of falling in love with model airplanes as a kid and being in the control room when they land on the moon in 1969. He was born, he was 33.”
“I left out venture capitalists, investment bankers, consultants, lawyers, doctors. I have zero of those in the book. Yeah. Because those are the careers people get pushed into.”
“Danny created a list right when he decided to go do it of the 10 most impressive people in the restaurant industry at that moment in time, from his perspective, and started keeping a journal on each one of them and studying them from afar.”
“It was my fascination but after I got in the role for a couple years the third project looked like the second looked like the first and I started to get bored”
“and I asked myself a question which I think anyone can use in any job you're in I said do I still want to be doing this thirty years from now and when I got when I asked myself that question it was a quick no”
“I asked myself a question which I think anyone can use in any job you're in I said do I still want to be doing this thirty years from now and when I got when I asked myself that question it was a quick no like a quick no and then I moved”
“And one, I think you develop a really awesome bedrock for thinking about your industry and just knowing this history. It's a good test as to whether you're really fascinated by it”
“the person that's two steps above you on the ladder has never been asked to be a mentor, and that's probably your best place to start, and they'll be flattered that you ask.”
“the number of public companies that exist in The US today is less than half what the peak was. And companies just aren't going public. And I think it's a big problem.”
“For people that have high agency and want to learn, there's never been a time in the history of the world where that is as easy and free as it is today.”
“when you're fascinated with something, obsessive with something, the learning's free. And what I mean by free is it doesn't suck energy, it gives you energy.”
“But here, Dario, the guy leading a company that's raising billions of dollars and cashing out billions in secondary to his employees is simultaneously the top cheerleader and the top doomer.”
“Dario, the guy leading a company that's raising billions of dollars and cashing out billions in secondary to his employees is simultaneously the top cheerleader and the top doomer.”
A new @bgurley blog post!
I have been thinking about how sophisticated executives are using open source in super creative ways. Started writing this three years ago. Excited to finish it up and publish it! And with the new @p3institute brand.
https://t.co/W84vODq1ME
A new @bgurley blog post!
I have been thinking about how sophisticated executives are using open source in super creative ways. Started writing this three years ago. Excited to finish it up and publish it! And with the new @p3institute brand.
https://t.co/W84vODq1ME
“I think people that are high agency and fascinated are, they not only study the history of their field and all that, but they're constantly studying the edge of their field, which is a much safer place to be.”
“Once again, because of this asymmetric outcome thing, live in fear of missing this one or two deals a year. There's like, how could you possibly minimize the chance of not finding that?”
“And there's an implicit threat that, at least at SoftBank, Masa was very direct about and not implicit. That if you don't take it, I'll give it to your competitor.”
“I mean, Uber was burning 2,000,000,000 a year and Dara had 10,000,000,000 in free cash flow last year. Being able to make that shift, it's gonna require an innate understanding of your true unit economics.”
“And what happens is with a wave that's real, people get rich quick. When people get rich quick, fools rush in. Like speculators, charlatans, they come in.”
“They have built, inside of a communist country, have built a system that's highly competitive. And it comes from leveraging provincial competition and some other things.”
“And you'll see, there were 150 EV car companies there. So hyper competition. In fact, I could argue the model they've created has more intense competition than we have here.”
“South Korea, not China, South Korea can build a nuclear fission plant for one fourth the price that we can in The US. And someone needs to be massively alarmed by that.”
🚨An NYC official is lobbying shareholders to block ExxonMobil's move to Texas.
Comptroller Mark Levine, trustee of NYC's 5 pension funds, argues the move would "insulate the Board from accountability to shareholders."
Exxon stated the company is "not adopting any elective https://t.co/lS1xryZ9L0
Once Exxon and Dell do it, its no longer a "fad" or something "unusual" companies do. If you are on a public board, re-domiciling can protect your shareholders from ambulance chasers & outsized decisions (see data). Simply smart & good governance. You should take it seriously. https://t.co/zLXpHkQyyW
@patrick_oshag Really fun story about one man’s quest to bowl three 300-games in a row. I believe the author of this piece helped @bgurley write Runnin’ Down A Dream
https://t.co/Y4IJBDWBL0
Runnin' Down a Dream started as a talk, became a book, & is now a foundation. We want to help people that need a boost to chase their dreams. New website: https://t.co/ktFT95hSRE
$5K grants for people that yearn to follow their fascination. Applications open in a few weeks.
A few colleges have approached us about building a course based on the book. Exciting!
We will do a pilot with a few, and are open to adding more. Reach out to jess@rdad.org w/ interest. Also plan to use this as funnel for foundation grants.
Runnin' Down a Dream started as a talk, became a book, & is now a foundation. We want to help people that need a boost to chase their dreams. New website: https://t.co/ktFT95hSRE
$5K grants for people that yearn to follow their fascination. Applications open in a few weeks.
As they add ads to LLMs this will be an even bigger problem. Creates an opportunity for a trusted LLM brand that can deliver on customer value. Maybe it has to be a subscription. https://t.co/TzsuWSTo5X
Visiting most of the leading Chinese AI labs, I'm struck by a culture that's extremely well suited to building LLMs with fewer resources, but one happening in a very different ecosystem, more companies at play, almost no data industry, etc.
Full report: https://t.co/ibmtMWnfTc
Behind the @cerebras office, we keep two big smokers.
Long before I was CEO, I was obsessed with BBQ.
I used to fire up a smoker behind @FoundationCap's office while we incubated Cerebras and I smoked brisket for our company picnics when we had hundred of people.
We have https://t.co/pi2rtlczZ4
This is an artifact of a federalist system that hasn't been addressed in my six decades on earth and probably won't be addressed in the next six. https://t.co/cj2EpToB9O
Super important read regarding K-12 education. I think it’s a serious crisis. The chronic absenteeism and plunging results beg for a major change. The status quo is the one option that should be “off the table.” https://t.co/U71ZdqjHg6
Super important read regarding K-12 education. I think it’s a serious crisis. The chronic absenteeism and plunging results beg for a major change. The status quo is the one option that should be “off the table.” https://t.co/U71ZdqjHg6
@bgurley @PeterDiamandis @sundarpichai Bill! I love you and your economics models but stop talking nonsense.
If I’ve entered into a multi-year agreement for cloud services, at a particular price - I can’t exactly go and raise prices to infinity on a moments notice!
I’m also not the only one if the space, so my
@mohashrafmohsen @PeterDiamandis @sundarpichai Totally get all that - but you can’t infer it’s all caused by unmet demand. Plenty of people in stack losing money. And no one wants to raise price.
Originally locked behind a book purchase. Releasing it now as I pivot to P3. @danwwang (Breakneck) & @PatrickMcGee_ (Apple in China) on China — engineering state, supply chain capture, and what it means for U.S. @p3institute
https://t.co/eYEg95ORpN
Huge L for Apple.
They just agreed to a $250m settlement for false advertising AI features on the iPhone.
Good news: if you bought an iPhone recently you might get $25–$95 back.
What happened:
> In 2024 Apple released Apple Intelligence alongside the iPhone 16
> Their https://t.co/CRZrln0lqj
Welcome home, @Dell.
For over 40 years, Texas has been where @MichaelDell built and innovated. Now, Dell Technologies is bringing its legal home to Texas.
This is what happens when job creators and innovators are welcomed, not punished.
More businesses are sure to follow. https://t.co/Cut2IBinvy
I’m fascinated by state vs state competition.
Shedding a light on best practice & fully recognizing people choose where they live will help improve the country. As Madison argued early on; open experimentation & mobility. Programs in both Vietnam & India are showing results. https://t.co/b7WuvwJUGz
“China-based solar companies had made cumulative net losses of around $5bn since the start of 2024.” If that’s ‘dumping’ what are American AI companies doing? They will each will lose more than that this year alone. https://t.co/so15DfXfLi
.@sundarpichai just disclosed that Google is "compute constrained" — cloud revenue would have been HIGHER if they could build fast enough.
The bottleneck to abundance isn't intelligence anymore. It's building the physical infrastructure (Inner-most loop: energy & compute) to
Today is the release date for @DavidEpstein great new book "Inside the Box." Many wonder what the secret is to driving innovation, especially at the company level. The answers are in here! Must read. https://t.co/GlLq7ONKEG
Today is the release date for @DavidEpstein great new book "Inside the Box." Many wonder what the secret is to driving innovation, especially at the company level. The answers are in here! Must read. https://t.co/GlLq7ONKEG
Brightline never made sense to me, even as a privately funded venture
Outside of the NE, unfort train travel doesn’t make much sense in the US - there is a last mile problem- we have poor public transit and low density so you need a car anyway when you get to your destination. https://t.co/uK9GtViJdU
Ford CEO Jim Farley: We should not let Chinese EVs into the US.
Jim himself drove a Chinese Xiaomi Su7 and has been to China 6-7 times a year.
He said, "It's the most humbling thing I've ever seen. They have far superior in-vehicle tech."
Can't win, so they ban. https://t.co/kGa0fPHr2Y
@gatadata88 Florida Gators basketball player Joe Lawrence set a school record by shooting 9-of-10 (\(90\%\)) from 3-point range against California on December 27, 1986
You left out one
Abilene, TX should be the poster child for how data centers can destroy an area. Rents are now sky high, traffic is terrible, and residents are furious. This in a city with water scarcity. https://t.co/sQPCDQcFQ2
Is "Clovis" the best Charley Crockett album in almost a decade?
I've had just a couple of listens, but I feel like this has has better sonic variation and more interesting production than his most recent albums (not a knock on anything—a compliment to this album). The work is https://t.co/bkYbYHw7Fv
Love a good accounting post
Spoke to a young BDO partner a few weeks ago. When I asked this question she said they haven’t raised prices in years. https://t.co/8C1jiiTj5o
We all know with certainty that AI will drastically reduce the costs of corporate auditing. This cost-reduction already widespread in legal. One problem - the big 4 are holding the line, telling clients despite AI, we are not lowering rates.
Curious how this lands. The "task"
this book (strongly recommended by @bgurley for individual investors) says you’ll make more money investing in index funds than in any stocks you pick, because of EMH.
i have a different opinion, i think there’s enough alpha on this side of twitter alone to beat the market https://t.co/sTHOHAJbuw
We all know with certainty that AI will drastically reduce the costs of corporate auditing. This cost-reduction already widespread in legal. One problem - the big 4 are holding the line, telling clients despite AI, we are not lowering rates.
Curious how this lands. The "task"
Today, we’re officially launching fully customizable multiview on @YouTubeTV.
Our @youtube teams made one of our most popular features even better. The new multiview builder gives you full control to mix and match live streams (including add-ons like @nfl Sunday Ticket), and https://t.co/OwEHizQ34b
@bgurley Bill, is this available in paperback? I’ve already listened to it on Audible, but I want to get a copy for my son. Surprisingly, he actually prefers the old school reading experience, but doesn’t like hardcovers. Really, really good book. Best I’ve ever found for young people
@bgurley Bill, is this available in paperback? I’ve already listened to it on Audible, but I want to get a copy for my son. Surprisingly, he actually prefers the old school reading experience, but doesn’t like hardcovers. Really, really good book. Best I’ve ever found for young people
“If you're a consultant, if you're a venture capitalist, if you're a lawyer, like you'll have clients across multiple, you know, places and you'll get to study more things.”
“I had a mental exercise that I did in my first two stops in my career, where a couple of years in, said, Do I see myself doing this thirty years from now?”
“we did a survey where we asked people if you could go back in time and start your career over again, would you do something different? Six out of 10 said yes.”
“I think many of these parents and counselors are very well intentioned. I don't think they're out to make a mistake. A lot of them are worried about the economic stability of the child.”
“A lot of people have a theory that I think is reasonable that human relationships will matter way more. So, do you have a strong peer network? Do you have a strong mentor network?”
“Like you're if you're a farmer with a tractor and a drone thing and all this stuff, you're going to run over a farmer with a hoe and a donkey, right?”
“He retired real early in his from a age perspective. Like, I think he was around 30, and he tried to make a comeback when he was, like, 36 or something.”
“I have a phrase I use, regulation is the friend of the incumbent. So they use it to actually raise prices, prevent competition, and further in ensconce themselves in the leadership role they're already in.”
“There was a gentleman who was the head of the the head of lobbying at Comcast where I think New York Times or the Post, someone did a article where they said this is the most important executive at Comcast. And he had been working for the mayor before he went into that role.”
“the the other big thing that's that's causing this right now is is venture capitalists have gotten into military equipment, which is nothing I know anything about.”
“There's Anthropic's lobbying the only company that has lobbied as much as Anthropic early in its life was was FTX and SBF. Like, they he also lobbied heavily.”
“Anthropic's lobbying the only company that has lobbied as much as Anthropic early in its life was was FTX and SBF. Like, they he also lobbied heavily.”
“I would see the congressmen and senators that would would be anti Fed now, and I would immediately go on to that website that lists who their donors are, and you'd see large banks.”
“And there's another crazy thing that I learned in the Tropo situation is your senator and your congressman, the minute they get on committees, they start raising money outside of your geographic area.”
“I think what may happen if you look at what happened with the Internet, there was a global market that the American company served, and there was a ring fence around China.”
“You would have a hard time convincing me that risk capital is in shortage in America right now. I'm seeing the most risk seeking venture capital behavior I've ever seen in my entire life.”
🇺🇸🇨🇳 The White House just accused Beijing of running industrial-scale operations to steal U.S. frontier AI models through proxy accounts and jailbreaking.
The memo from OSTP Director Michael Kratsios, sent to all government agencies today, says the U.S. will share intelligence https://t.co/YEaVkeBFml https://t.co/6vSKh6pM1D
I think everyone in marketing/PR at an AI company (& especially at large model companies) should watch this short piece of advice from @dylan522p w/ @patrick_oshag. Just a few minutes. Crisp and to the point. https://t.co/huyZK750Gq
@bgurley @patrick_oshag AI Models is not a commodity like oil.
There are opportunity costs of losing long-term customers by out-pricing them.
So the real demand/supply curve is CLTV/current-supply not current-demand/current-supply
@meta_x_ai @patrick_oshag Could very well be true. Belief in network effects would push players to fight even harder for current customers - implying more risk seeking behavior.
Dylan on why Anthropic leading on models doesn't mean OpenAI loses. Even the tier 2 and 3 labs will sell out of tokens:
"Everyone's like Anthropic won. They had Mythos, Opus 4.7 and their revenue is adding $10 billion a month all before OpenAI's alleged Spud release.
So clearly https://t.co/oWlxExH5uW https://t.co/Vh2XWjyklP
Dylan on why Anthropic leading on models doesn't mean OpenAI loses. Even the tier 2 and 3 labs will sell out of tokens:
"Everyone's like Anthropic won. They had Mythos, Opus 4.7 and their revenue is adding $10 billion a month all before OpenAI's alleged Spud release.
So clearly https://t.co/oWlxExH5uW https://t.co/Vh2XWjyklP
@patrick_oshag I find this conversation foreign - along with the argument that we are "data center constrained" or "energy constrained." Historically, in markets - price is the leveler of supply and demand. If you have a constraint, you price higher - you don't have "surplus demand." But in
“I went to MBA school, I went to Wall Street, worked there for three years, had the same discussion with myself, which got me looking in a different direction,”
“There was a woman that all she could think about was movies, and she didn't see herself as an actress, so she went and got a normal degree and didn't ever consider it.”
“Well, biggest mistake I made in my career is when I was three years into the venture capital business, I met Larry and Sergey at their office with 25 employees.”
“The one that had kind of the most intellectual appeal was probably OpenTable because we invested when there were three restaurants on the network and had a theory that a network effect could take place where it could tip towards winter, take most.”
“we invested when there were three restaurants on the network and had a theory that a network effect could take place where it could tip towards winter, take most.”
“A lot of drug companies end up focused on symptom support rather than solving it because there's more money in that, and unfortunately, that's less, you know, it'd be much better if we cured the disease.”
“I think the software that's safer is one where there's a need for deterministic data, and then you can use that data to reinforce whatever the AI model is, but other people are talking about this.”
“I think there was someone at TED talking about the fact that the number of radiologists has gone up, not down, despite the fact that you can read these things so much faster.”
“And very quickly, almost in a flash before you know it, your founder's equity goes from 90% to 10%. And I've watched it happen over and over and again.”
“There's a gentleman named Burt Beveridge who was a seismologist undergrad, worked in oil and gas for ten years, got scared actually because he was in Latin America, things got dicey, became a mortgage broker for another ten years, and then one weekend convinced himself to launch a vodka company named Tito's,”
I started @DellTech from a dorm room @UTAustin, and it shaped everything that followed. Building Dell showed me what’s possible when a company grows alongside a top-tier research university in a city that fuels new ideas.
For more than 25 years, Susan and I have partnered with
If you live in Austin and would like a signed copy of my book as a graduation gift, they have them at Book People. Can also be purchased online... 🤘🙏🤘🙏
https://t.co/aVaPUIIYCT
When I saw our team's evals of Kimi 2.6, I thought "ok, things are gonna get interesting now".
This is the first open-weight model that plays like a top-class agentic model. Watching it go through ambiguous and meticulous chained tool work successfully puts it squarely in the https://t.co/WB3TUyXxOV
@treyditto @bgurley Do you think there's a way to work within the collective bargaining system to still push for higher teacher pay, or does it require a different approach entirely?
Google turning the browser into an agent runtime, one Skill at a time. Chrome's distribution is the moat nobody at OpenAI or Anthropic can replicate this cheaply. Prompt-as-app is a platform play, not a feature. https://t.co/1xsSoVDWSq
If your local leaders says they “care” about housing affordability and can’t share all they have learned studying Austin, they aren’t serious. They are performative. https://t.co/UODGS7MbCO
@amacker @sarthakgh There 10 of these operating in other countries at scale. What pix did or didn’t do is irrelevant. USA clearly doesn’t want super cheap instant payments. The others all have it - and have for a long time. Stablecoins can do it. Banks will try to block.
@bgurley @sarthakgh But is this good? Should we have government enabled payment systems. I understand the reasoning for this in third world countries that are still rely on cash. But first world countries, credit it far to integrated for it to work.
The most successful payment system invented in the last decade
It also inspired Pix in Brazil which is also massively successful https://t.co/rW3ZmIDj94
@sarthakgh Meanwhile FedNOW is crawling. One of the most amazing examples of the US seriously lagging innovation in other countries. UK faster payments was 20 years ago. Embarrassing. Capture.
Given software people are so smart ... it's stunning to me that it's taken so many so long to figure this out.
Rule of 40, EBITDA and FCF metrics that add back sky high SBC, ARR multiples on 10 year old+ businesses. It's all shite.
So much money was made because the tailwinds https://t.co/AoPm2fhTnL
Why does Waymo spread their cars across dozens of cities? They should completely saturate one city til they match Uber’s pick up times.
I assume they’re trying to lose because winning in self-driving means putting too many people out of work, making Google look like a villain.
“I don't think there's anybody that's intentionally making wrong decisions, but the system has evolved to a place where everyone feels like they have to play the game.”
“by the time you're in sixth grade, if you're a kid, you know, in a in a competitive environment with competitive parents, they're like, you know, okay, we gotta start pound building that resume.”
“But I then had a reflection and this is the heuristic I think people can use. I, I one day thought to myself, do I see myself doing this thirty years from now?”
“In Silicon Valley, if you walk up to somebody that you don't know and ask them for advice, the probability that they say yes and spend time is higher than you would ever expect.”
“he says, sixteen hours a day for four years. And they were sharing what they were learning. And they didn't view themselves as competitors. They all ended up with over a million followers.”
“And he said another thing which I think really drives home the point. He said, if any random person had been on those Skype calls, they would have achieved those same things.”
“MrBeast borrowed the Malcolm Gladwell ten thousand hours and said we got forty thousand hours because we had four of us. That's pretty profound way to say it, right? And so it all gets better.”
“They went public at 40 and the stock traded down to 18. And that kinda woke them up, and Mark, like, got the company motivated and and got their mobile products way better.”
“And so, there's rumors today of a $30,000,000,000 investment from Nvidia into OpenAi on top of everything they've already already raised and spent. So it it I I call it a sport of kings,”
Replying to Chris from Massachusetts AKA TommyboyTrader
Best guitar playing in a song? I’m going with Terry Kath, the original guitarist and vocalist for the band Chicago on 25 6 to 4..Jimi Hendrix once called him the best guitarist he had ever heard…and I’ll second that..
Who is your favorite? https://t.co/NnWXAbz2jO
Truth about venture today
We are in peak AI fomo.
Growth trajectory drowns out legit durability concerns of most AI companies
Family offices playing direct / co invest instead of funds, almost at any cost for top companies. Anthropic is the hottest asset of all time and fees
@geri_kirilova Felt like the right mechanic at the time. More personal to receive a response that isn’t public. But now that I am working on other things - this felt more helpful to more people.
"So You Want to be a VC"
Im enjoying this week in Boston visiting students promoting my new book - Runnin Down a Dream. Not surprisingly, many ask me about trying to break into venture capital. I wrote a letter answering this question 15 years ago. I would send it out when https://t.co/uBB30JxkSA
100%. You can know the entire history of your field, especially today. If you aren’t doing this natively, maybe you are in the wrong lane. https://t.co/ryg7sOo1Ap
@bgurley my Eureka moment after reading your Book. We’ve reached the AI unlock for your principles: Cognitive Fingerprinting to map a child’s natural curiosity early, and Initiative-Based Learning to replace the factory model. Lets do something
@ronsterd89 You can for sure plug that. I've done many. Kits are cheap. It's easy to do. I can usually plug one in just a few minutes. Tire shops worry about liability. They don't want to plug it and it rupture.
“I always wanna say that because I don't think I don't think anyone's out to stifle creativity per se, but they worry. They worry about the kids' economic well-being.”
“They worry about the kids' economic well-being. They worry about, you know, their ability to have a family and put food on the table, and and they push people towards safer jobs.”
“Jerry Seinfeld was was wandering around New York thinking about what his career would be, and he had an inkling that he wanted to be a stand up comedian, but he didn't know that it was a real thing. He didn't know that you could actually go be successful and have a career.”
“I would shorten it for this and say, all of the all of the previous principles we talked about get easier in the epicenter. Learning's easier. Mentoring's easier. Peers are easier.”
“Peers are easier. They're all around all the time. It's people, I think, don't do it because they fear it's too much competition, but there's also way more jobs.”
“If you went into a job because you thought it was safe and you studied it, but you don't really love it, you're not trying at home to get even better at it.”
“Mark Cuban, who you mentioned had a tweet the other day. He said, there are two types of people, those that use an LLM to learn as much as they possibly can.”
“If you're completely fascinated with something, the hone your craft, the continuous learning gives you energy. If you're forced to study a subject you're not that interested in, it feels like work.”
RoboSense LiDARs are about to go on many more foreign branded EVs in China, the ID. ERA 9X being the latest. ZEEKR 8X and IM LS8 are among some of the recent launches from Chinese brands with RoboSense LiDAR.
The more interesting play is the robotics applications which are https://t.co/82U9nQtDah
Comparison of $4,000 boutique audio cable to $7 Amazon Basics cable shows audiophiles waste a lot of money — scientific audio equipment analysis with analyzer shows no difference in quality https://t.co/VsuMj4ieIu
“Today, every company that is being identified as a winner is ingesting 400 or $500,000,000 minimum before they even think about going public, if they're ever gonna think about that.”
“So the number of public companies in The US is less than half of peak. And so we've really had a fall off in the number of companies that are actually public.”
“I would say the late stage funds have come up with a pretty clever premise, which is if they can intercept those growth years that used to be in the public markets and keep it for themselves in an oligopic kind of way.”
“I think the circular deals are horrific. I don't think the auditor should have approved them. And I think whenever you eventually have an unwinding, they're gonna make it worse because they won't be sustainable.”
“You shouldn't be able to move cash from your balance sheet and create revenue on your income statement. I just don't think that should be okay. But they're all doing it.”
“But then they wrote a contract with CoreWeave, which said if CoreWeave ever has extra capacity, we'll buy that capacity, which presumably helps it get more debt financing, that kind of thing.”
“That starts- Some of the founders. Yeah. And it's starting to have ramifications for the industry. A number of data center projects has been stopped.”
“So there's these new areas there and now AI where very young companies are begging for regulation, which is not anything I've seen in my career either.”
“I think that had Microsoft not been under threat in the late nineties, you may not have seen Amazon or Google or a lot of companies you may not have seen.”
“I would argue that this, I don't think you're going to get a lot of other people in Silicon Valley that would be willing to say this, but it might be indicative of market failure rather than market success.”
Trump has unwittingly become the salesman in chief for Chinese green technology, and may ironically end up being the single most consequential American president for climate change in the process 😅 https://t.co/ZkCPndK53Q
This is the key in my book. Find the thing where you get to practice as an artisan. It exists in all fields. It very might be your hobby. https://t.co/ZiwH5zJ2KC https://t.co/98mXyKMBeF
“And I knew that if you wanted to create a digital marketplace, you wanna use price to to cause liquidity, to get encourage drivers to come out at the right time, like you'd hate to give up price in a digital marketplace or auction, like you never would.”
“I knew that if you wanted to create a digital marketplace, you wanna use price to to cause liquidity, to get encourage drivers to come out at the right time, like you'd hate to give up price in a digital marketplace or auction, like you never would.”
“He said, I wanna believe this person's gonna go do this, come hell or high water, whether I get involved or not, nothing's gonna stop him. And that's the trade he's looking for.”
“yeah, I mean, it took me forever to realize that some of the best venture capitalists have this missed list and the reason they have the missed list is because they're really effective at putting themselves in the right position to have the opportunity, which is a prerequisite to actually making the great investments.”
“I always tell people to read the first two chapters of Competitive Strategy by Michael Portner, because like if you're building a product and trying to sell into a consolidated industry, it's really tough.”
“Part of what I loved about both OpenTable and Uber, it's easier to build a network effect if supply is limited, I can't You know how many people have tilted against Ticketmaster and whatnot?”
“98% of venture capitalists are only looking at AI and they're AI all day long, they don't wanna see another business and and and in the past five weeks, the valuations on the non AI companies have been cut in half”
“98% of venture capitalists are only looking at AI and they're AI all day long, they don't wanna see another business and and and in the past five weeks, the valuations on the non AI companies have been cut in half and so that mentality is gonna be reinforced even more and so there's just no oxygen.”
“in the past five weeks, the valuations on the non AI companies have been cut in half and so that mentality is gonna be reinforced even more and so there's just no oxygen.”
“If you think like just being young will make you good at venture capital, that's wrong. But and it is a job that does not have a supply demand balance.”
Exciting to see @zoox hitting the streets in Austin.
Autonomy unlocks a complete rethink of how vehicles are designed to fulfill different needs – instead of building around the driver seat, we can design around passenger safety and accessibility; goods delivery; and other uses. https://t.co/CY4uj8RqMC
This sure feels like the "right" form factor for robo-taxis. More like the old black cabs in London. Way more useable for the riders. I think they all end up going in this direction. https://t.co/FmmU0HIabm
“Can also though frame Like they're also raising billions and billions of dollars for the They're leading the biggest secondary transactions for their employees in the history of venture capital, the history of the world.”
“Like they're also raising billions and billions of dollars for the They're leading the biggest secondary transactions for their employees in the history of venture capital, the history of the world.”
“And so people are putting billions of dollars in their pocket. And so there's also a huge incentive to from the two leading model providers to seek regulatory protection, which most people wouldn't think regulation is but they've been begging for regulation since they started from from three years ago.”
“And so there's also a huge incentive to from the two leading model providers to seek regulatory protection, which most people wouldn't think regulation is but they've been begging for regulation since they started from from three years ago.”
“And the reason I think they want it is the biggest threat to their businesses where they're cashing in billions of dollars is the open source movement.”
“The people leading the effort at the top companies here in The US are the biggest doomsayers. It's radical. But I would also say we have been prone to overstating these risks in the past.”
“There's still people working in banks today despite the fact that the ATM There've been studies that say there's more bank tellers today than there were like forty years ago.”
“And the past week in the financial markets, like a whole bunch of companies, you know, traded down because of fear that this would would disrupt them.”
“I'm also starting launching a foundation. I've already set aside the money, but I'm gonna give a $105 grants a year to people who want to chase their dreams, but maybe a little stuck financially and need a little help to get there.”
Three books down during 75 Hard. Goal is to finish @bgurley’s Runnin’ Down a Dream in the next 18 days to finish 75 Hard
Other three books:
1. American Buffalo - @MeatEaterTV
2. Honor Bound - WEB Griffin
3. Texas Rising https://t.co/18fsXOJ7eH
@combatoverride @cb_doge @GregAbbott_TX Fair point—semiconductor manufacturing is brutally complex, with process tech, yield ramps, and EUV mastery taking TSMC/Intel decades to hone. Tesla has zero in-house fab ops experience (they design great chips like HW4/Dojo but outsource fab to Samsung/TSMC).
That said, their
lots of AI cos starting to experiment with paid marketing so here’s my take:
Paid acquisition is a tax on your product's defensibility. the moment you can't out-spend the incumbents and competitors, you die. build channels that get cheaper as you grow or you're just renting your
Paid marketing is the crudest game you can play. It’s admitting you have no creativity. And actually restricts your creativity. Fire those that want to spend more. https://t.co/2EWcIwtQGU https://t.co/T1N9dhLRbs
So cool to hear Charles Barkley and @DickieV brag on @Ch3ndalll during @TexasMBB HUGE win!!
@DickieV Weaver has the energy & passion that separates in March Madness
Barkley: Weaver has been fantastic tonight. Simply fantastic. https://t.co/VXqkRVMDKy
I fear that AI has decimated the traditional email inbox as we know it. Too many personalized emails slip through spam filter. Hope someone builds a better mousetrap. This one is cooked in its current form.
“if you could start your career over again, would you do it differently? And in our original SurveyMonkey, seven out of 10 said yes. With Wharton, it was six out of 10.”
“With Wharton, it was six out of 10. It's still a vast majority of people. Daniel Pink in his book, The Power of Regret notes that humans dwell on regrets of inaction.”
“And the older you get, the more they weigh on you. Humans are fabulous at forgiving themselves for mistakes, kind of what you just walked through. Those are action mistakes.”
“Dylan is a, and and always was going way back to when he when he got started is is a historian. He, he liked, and he's insanely studious about music.”
“And I have a high confidence level based on what I've read that he knew more about folk music than anyone else in Minnesota when he left for New York.”
“And part of what's really cool about an artisan or a craftsman is they're really studying the nuance at the edge of the field. And that's the stuff that's not in the AI model.”
“part of what's really cool about an artisan or a craftsman is they're really studying the nuance at the edge of the field. And that's the stuff that's not in the AI model.”
“the, the methodology in my book, the, the AI tools that are out there for learning and connecting have never been this is the best time in the history of the world to go chase your dreams.”
“I went back to my Brownstone apartment and spent the entire weekend writing a 20 page report to go in and tell the gentlemen stepping aside and Al Jackson, you guys should give me this category.”
“imagine, go back to this 20 people interviewing for this marketing job. If I walk in, I know the history and I know everything about how TikTok works. I look like that candidate of one.”
“I think a lot of people are either intimidated by jumping into that severe of a situation where there's so much competition, or they tell themselves this, they fool themselves with this little mental trick,”
“I've never, I was always so surprised at how quickly people would take a fifteen minute meeting at Silicon Valley, like just compared to maybe some other places.”
Prompt: “If I were to ask you for an NCAA bracket today, would someone else asking get the same bracket.” Both: no.
Predictions I got:
Gemini - duke / Arizona / Michigan / Florida
GPT - Houston / Purdue / UConn / Arizona
Then I had GPT analyze the deltas.
My knowledge of https://t.co/LCh36MMpdB
@Codie_Sanchez @bgurley We human beings have made rapid progress through collective efforts, we can never deny that much of the progress we see today has been due to communication and shared knowledge in the last 200 years.
“If you're unfulfilled at work, there's a 2023 Gallup poll study that came out and said over 50% of people aren't actively engaged at work. And the number that qualifies engaged is like 23%.”
“there's a 2023 Gallup poll study that came out and said over 50% of people aren't actively engaged at work. And the number that qualifies engaged is like 23%.”
“So AI and large language models are recording like all the best practices that have been written down. But the stuff that's on the edge that's being discovered today is not in the models.”
“AI and large language models are recording like all the best practices that have been written down. But the stuff that's on the edge that's being discovered today is not in the models.”
“we did a survey where we asked people if you could go back in time and start your career over again, would you do something different? And six out of 10 said yes.”
“I don't know if you ever even know what those are. But while he was retired, everyone switched to these bigger graphite rackets with a much bigger sweet spot.”
@Codie_Sanchez @bgurley ten open source models absorb every breakthrough the moment it’s public. two closed ones have to independently rediscover it. the math isn’t close.
“I launched a survey on SurveyMonkey that said, if you could go back and start over, would you would you do a different career? And seven out of 10 people said yes.”
“He said, you know how they talk about ten thousand hours referring to the Malcolm Gladwell book? He says, we got forty thousand hours because we were sharing it all.”
“Now, if you contrast that with someone who is a proactive, independent climber, who's trying to build their craft, their world, they're a continuous learner. For that person, AI is a jet pack.”
“I don't even I would never be motivated by it, but but, you know, I'm not not necessarily shitting on them too bad. Like, somebody there are you can make money.”
“So venture capitalists typically take preferred stock, and it has a term called liquidation preference, which means in a sale, they get the option to basically treat it like debt.”
“And so if you've raised in these days of these AI rounds, if you raise 500,000,000, Lake Common doesn't even participate until you get a sale over that, technically.”
“Paralegals are already under threat, and I have talked to lawyers that have drastically reduced the size of their paralegal force. I've talked to them. That has already happened.”
“Paralegals are already under threat, and I have talked to lawyers that have drastically reduced the size of their paralegal force. I've talked to them.”
I’m hearing this from others, that the book would make a great graduation gift. Let me know in this thread if I can help in any way. https://t.co/IUiMJtMT5i
“Now at many schools, you have to apply to your major, like, as you're applying to college. So you're a junior in high school and people are like, what's your passion?”
“But a lot of people do. There's Dave Evans at Stanford who does the Designing Your Life class and book, you know, they highlight that like four years, five years out, 40% of people are no longer doing the work that was in their major.”
“I paused in each one of them and said, do I want to be here thirty years from now, like in that office? Assume I do great, but I've done this my whole life.”
“venture capital is a game where you have to one of the reasons, group decision making works so well is you're you're gonna have to break one of your rules or you're gonna say no to everything.”
“And a fascination on the edge, which is one of the things about having a fascination about something on the edge is you become the most learned very quickly.”
“In just unbelievable reality, all eight of those people are division one athletic directors now on top of the biggest programs in the country. Right.”
“I could have, I think, fooled myself. And I went through this mental model when I was thinking about it and said, oh, I'll be the best venture capitalist in a the sixth VC city.”
“And that exercise led Burt Beverage, whose nickname is Tito, to launch the first spirit company in Texas, a vodka company that now is the number one selling spirit in North America.”
Current thinking, though nothing in stone:
1) This should be someone's primary job
2) I highly favor someone in Austin, not hard rule
3) Non-profit experience not required
4) The book should "speak to you"
5) Need to be comfortable with building community
Apply career@rdad.org
We're teaming up with @cerebras to build the fastest possible inference.
Coming soon to Amazon Bedrock, we’re delivering inference performance an order of magnitude faster than what’s available today by connecting AWS Trainium3 for compute-intensive prefill with Cerebras CS-3 https://t.co/HCaFqcw56s
With Runnin' Down a Dream published, I want to turn my attention to the accompanying foundation. Details: https://t.co/ktFT95hl26 Simply, micro-grants for people that are inspired by the book, but need a boost. I am actively looking for a Director. Details in next thread. https://t.co/3tZs8GYNC1
Current thinking, though nothing in stone:
1) This should be someone's primary job
2) I highly favor someone in Austin, not hard rule
3) Non-profit experience not required
4) The book should "speak to you"
5) Need to be comfortable with building community
Apply career@rdad.org
With Runnin' Down a Dream published, I want to turn my attention to the accompanying foundation. Details: https://t.co/ktFT95hl26 Simply, micro-grants for people that are inspired by the book, but need a boost. I am actively looking for a Director. Details in next thread. https://t.co/3tZs8GYNC1
Bill Gurley's 7yr old lecture proves that real wisdom doesn't come with an expiration date. Follow @bgurley’s 5 rules of pursuing real passion, obsessively mastering your craft, seeking great mentors, engaging ambitious peers & paying knowledge forward & you create a compounding
College football's most decorated head coach Nick Saban spoke at the White House on Friday at a college sports roundtable hosted by President Trump.
Saban called on lawmakers to fix issues he has seen at the collegiate level, where Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals have https://t.co/cFN4QVaT2i
I’m in complete agreement. Great coaches used to help young adults have a better future. And for 98% - there never was a pro prospect. We broke the whole system out of concern for the 1-2%. https://t.co/T7mqWexEPx
“There's tons of anthropologists that have written about how we evolve with our tools, and you can just imagine a farming competition between a guy with a tractor and some drones and the other guys got a plow and a donkey. Who's gonna win? And you need to think about it that way.”
“If there are 40 people in your org all doing the same thing and you understand how AI affects that role more than the rest of them, you're not getting laid off.”
“I developed this mental exercise that I didn't realize I was doing, but at the time, but I said to myself, well, a couple years in, we started a third project, looked like the second project, looked like the first project.”
“I said to myself, do I see myself here thirty years from now? And there were people in the building that had been engineers for thirty years, so I could, you know, I could I could get a perspective on it by just thinking, do I wanna be them?”
“And they had like a 10 to one advantage over Compaq and the other companies because of how they work their inventory and their positive cash flow cycle.”
“Like if you're gonna go be a writer, you know, have a profile of Michael Lewis and Malcolm Gladwell and Krakauer and like study what makes them great.”
“Like, there's there's never been a better time in the history of the world to learn on your own time. Right. There's so much stuff out there. Yep. Podcasts, interviews on YouTube, AI.”
“I was inspired by getting this question a lot, and if you look on the last page in the book, I'm gonna launch a foundation called the Running Down a Dream Foundation.”
“Mark Cuban the other day tweeted, he said he said there's two types of people. The the people that use LLMs to learn faster and the people that use LLMs to not learn at all.”
New post - I lay out my reasons for why I think the time for open source in healthcare is now
-A basic primer on open source software
- Open source companies have figured out a business model
- Software regulatory costs
- Open source is the countermeasure to black box https://t.co/cF50gzz4tP
“The benchmark guys had lived within those frameworks decided to do something crazy, which was to create an equal partnership where everyone makes the exact same amount of money and everyone has the exact same power within the organization for decision making and there's no leader.”
“We hired we hired Wharton to do an official academic review, and that one came out six and ten. There's a book by Daniel Pink about regrets called the power of regrets.”
“He published this piece that said Uber would never be worth more than $4,000,000,000 And I wrote one of my favorite blog posts ever titled How to Miss by a Mile, where I took apart his analysis”
“He published this piece that said Uber would never be worth more than $4,000,000,000 And I wrote one of my favorite blog posts ever titled How to Miss by a Mile, where I took apart his analysis and tried to well, I had a little I had an unfair advantage.”
“Not only that. In in the in the report of his, which a summary version got public, but I found the background version, he admits that he had never ridden Uber and only taken taxis.”
“I will tell you, I have a couple different answers to this, which I think are quite interesting. First of all, the Mag seven formerly were creating, I don't know, $3,400,000,000,000 in cash flow.”
“I think the Swinson mimic effect has now played out. And I think personally that most of the endowments and foundations in The US are over invested in private, both PE and venture.”
“And I think that the way the industry is structured in this would require longer conversation. There's no incentive for the operators inside of the endowments or foundations to get the paper marks right.”
“The winners are so big at that level, you could have 80% of your portfolio fail. So it's a game that's a lot riskier, and you're searching for the really big outcomes.”
“And I don't think the world, especially the the the politicians understand how, like unbelievably powerful open source is as a a as a weapon, like, as a competitive weapon.”
“I don't think the world, especially the the the politicians understand how, like unbelievably powerful open source is as a a as a weapon, like, as a competitive weapon.”
“They watch the YouTube interviews. They listen to the podcast. They study them like crazy. He said, founders and and VCs in America don't study Chinese.”
“So the the the the days when the company would run out of money or get close to running out and decide, oh, we're gonna go raise now is over. Like, the the it's preemptive.”
“I remember where I was when he presented to us. Now keep in mind, Benchmark's never done a real estate transaction in the history of the firm. And we're about thirty minutes into the presentation.”
“Now keep in mind, Benchmark's never done a real estate transaction in the history of the firm. And we're about thirty minutes into the presentation. This is series a.”
The American right spent decades trying to deny that this technology worked, and then eventually brute physics is forcing them to admit that yes, it does actually work.
Reality denial has limits. https://t.co/GrDaesZ1o0
Much thanks to the one & only @McConaughey for sharing the stage at @UTAustin to discuss my new book. The original talk preceded the book was given right here on this same campus. "What starts here changes the world."
Hook'Em 🤘🤘🤘 https://t.co/UFi0ZyE7Yl
Runnin’ Down a Dream: How to Succeed and Thrive in a Career You Love by @bgurley has been one of the most valuable talks l've ever heard.
For years I’ve been using ideas from that talk to build *this* podcast. Bill wrote a new book based on that talk. This episode explores the https://t.co/xIKlPqtHGo
As David notes, he was an early fan of the “beta” version of my new book. His support, alongside many others, gave me the confidence to invest five more years to deliver a richer, deeper, and hopefully more impactful piece of work. Much appreciation @FoundersPodcast. https://t.co/05FogxH5Q9
Transcript excerptCommonwealth Club World Affairs of California
“And he's working at Langley Air Force Base in a wind tunnel. And someone comes by and ask him and 49 other people working there, would you wanna move to Houston and help start NASA?”
Transcript excerptCommonwealth Club World Affairs of California
“I had this I developed this mental exercise that I didn't realize I was doing, but at the time, but I said to myself well, a couple years in, we started a third project, looked like the second project, looked like the first project.”
Transcript excerptCommonwealth Club World Affairs of California
“I developed this mental exercise that I didn't realize I was doing, but at the time, but I said to myself well, a couple years in, we started a third project, looked like the second project, looked like the first project.”
Transcript excerptCommonwealth Club World Affairs of California
“I couldn't find a way in. I I had a few informational interviews. They said, go work for twenty years and call me back, which I thought was not really an executable plan.”
Transcript excerptCommonwealth Club World Affairs of California
“the incoming group of of people from NBA programs that year, there were 40 of us, and I was the only one that wasn't Columbia, Wharton Right. You know, the ones you would expect.”
Transcript excerptCommonwealth Club World Affairs of California
“It this the company was in trouble. It was trading at six times earnings. Their laptop had caught on fire, and they had this option hedging strategy gone awry”
Transcript excerptCommonwealth Club World Affairs of California
“we had done some analysis using this new tool called return on invested capital, and they had like a 10 to one advantage over Compact and the other companies because of how they worked their inventory and their positive cash flow cycle. And we went positive on it.”
Transcript excerptCommonwealth Club World Affairs of California
“in any role in any field, be the most AI enabled version of yourself you can possibly be. There's tons of anthropologists that have written about how we evolve with our tools.”
Transcript excerptCommonwealth Club World Affairs of California
“if there are 40 people in your org all doing the same thing, and you understand how AI affects that role more than the rest of them, you're not getting laid off.”
Transcript excerptCommonwealth Club World Affairs of California
“Mark Cuban the other day tweeted, he said he said there's two types of people. The the people that use LLMs to learn faster and the people that use LLMs to not learn at all.”
Rank One Computing is a good narrative violation on the scale needed for technology IPOs. It priced in February - raising just $24M. The deal was up +2.7% on its first day, and ended the month up +8.3%. Nascent companies can and should access the public markets (cc @bgurley).
@MarcoDeMeireles I fear it’s such a massive rewiring. Need a bank willing to focus like the four horsemen used to. Or it happens through tokenization. SEC needs to recognize change is needed.
I have followed @bgurley for decades now, from when he was the best Wall Street analyst to when he was the best Silicon Valley investor. Now I get to add him as the best life-coach author with his new book that I can't recommend highly enough. There are very few books that you https://t.co/o8XO5adOEq
“I think it's hard to put what Satya has accomplished in context because it's such an outlier To to go most companies, once they get big and have had an extended period of of degrowth, like where they really slow down, they never come back. Like, never they never get back to glory.”
“In the epicenter, your probability of lucky events goes way up. Way up. And so, if you can do it, do it. There's this belief we all have that competition makes it too hard.”
“And for most of these high-tech companies, the next five years cash flow are a fraction of their actual market cap, which means all the values in the terminal value.”
“for most of these high-tech companies, the next five years cash flow are a fraction of their actual market cap, which means all the values in the terminal value.”
“And those funds that do that turn around and tell the LPs these are the foundations and the endowments that invest in these type of things. You know, these companies aren't going public anymore.”
“So if you ask any first year comp sci student and first year finance student to write a model of how an IPO should work, you would allow everyone to bid and you would award the shares to the highest bidder. It's just not like, it's not, it should just be tautological.”
“if you ask any first year comp sci student and first year finance student to write a model of how an IPO should work, you would allow everyone to bid and you would award the shares to the highest bidder. It's just not like, it's not, it should just be tautological.”
“And by the way, that's how every bond is priced. And that's by the way, how all the initial coin offerings work in the crypto world. It's just what you would do.”
“Why would you have a handpicked price when we know how to match supply and demand? And then they really only offer it to their top clients, which is just nutty.”
“They were dragged into direct listings. I would I would say because I spent a ton of time with them, both the Nasdaq and the NYSE were pushing to get these things across the line,”
Not a good analogy @bgurley . No prior technological invention claimed to target all human labor as a TAM. If you take AI & Robotics industry leaders seriously, this is exactly what they claim. When you watch the billions being invested, you know that investors believe that too. https://t.co/tTq0PgICGF
There is a real cost to intentionally spreading the "doomer" narrative over and over. Imagine being the early 1900s, and the USA polling as "anti-tractor" and some other country "pro-tractor." Its really no different. https://t.co/XY6IhPZIN1
“But the thing we never did, the thing we always thought we should do that we didn't get to, those things weigh on our brain more and more and more as we get older.”
“the thing we never did, the thing we always thought we should do that we didn't get to, those things weigh on our brain more and more and more as we get older.”
“he says, seventeen hours a day on Skype together for four years. And so what's going on there? Well, they're co learning what it takes to be successful on YouTube.”
“But the thing is many of the principles that I have in the book from constant learning to peers and mentors are just 10 to a 100 times easier if you're right in the middle of it with everybody else.”
“I've talked to lawyers that run large firms that have already drastically reduced the number of paralegals. So it's not theoretical at this point. It's real.”
“I think a lot of the people that go through that college conveyor belt that are chasing a safe job that end up working as a widget or a cog in an industry they may not love, I think they are ripe for disruption.”
“And so if you're constantly learning, honing, if you're figuring out how to get AI to help you be more productive, you're gonna have even better chance of winning.”
“if you were put in a safe job that you don't truly love, I would encourage you to consider this alternate door that I'm representing, to maybe find something you're passionate about and get away from that risk.”
“I think for certain reason Anthropic and OpenAI are begging for regulation is so that they can write rules that make it harder for startups, open source models to be competitive with them, which I think is very rational for them to do, but I don't think it's good for society.”
This is how you drop a ball the right way, according to the Rules:
1. You, the player, must drop the ball
2. You must drop straight down from knee height without the ball touching your body or equipment
3. The ball must be dropped in the relief area or directly on the line https://t.co/MHCrOmiVyn
FYI @bgurley pre-ordered your book months ago and had our executive team do the same.
Sadly Amazon today emailed me and said they can’t fulfill order and refunded me.
Did you sell out Amazon or what?! 🫠 https://t.co/MCuuSWic4P
Rueben Chinyelu has the Florida #Gators' offensive rebounding record all to himself with 115 and counting this season, passing Dwayne Davis (1988-89) with 114. https://t.co/0s2NlBkzaO
“I don't know that I said, I'm doing this exercise kind of like Bezos did when he started. But I said to myself, do I see myself doing this thirty years from now?”
“And you can look around the org and see the people that have been in that type of job that long and look at their life and just say, is that something I would enjoy?”
“I walked around the office late one night, about 10PM Park Avenue Plaza and the 63rd, 36th Floor and the corner offices were the most senior sell side analysts.”
“We did a survey with Wharton and said, if you could go back and start over, would you choose a different career path? And sixty percent of people said yes.”
“I came out of that with a little bit of your chips on shoulder situation and a little bit more having a higher recognition of an asymmetric wrist indenture and that missing an outlier cost you a thousand X or more than a loss.”
“Bruce Dunleavy in our shop started saying what could go right as a theme. And I will tell you from that day on, we never spent much time talking about the failures.”
“from that day on, we never spent much time talking about the failures. We never beat up a partner because a deal didn't work, but we would once a quarter study the deals we didn't do at nauseum and talk about why we either didn't see them or passed on them”
“I realized what he's doing is the exact jobs would tell them the phone has to be this thick. And then their mind can only operate within that constraint. And Elon's doing that with time.”
“The thing that will differentiate you more in your career than anything else is being the most hyper-curious person.” - @bgurley
“If you are the most curious person constantly learning in your field, you will do extremely well.”
“I can’t make you the most talented person in https://t.co/uMsL1scDMo
This is why AI is a super power for high-agency people. But you need to be confidently in control of your own life narrative. https://t.co/sLRVRnMY6e https://t.co/3j68c5K1mV
Congrats on the new book @bgurley - people need professional insight and career inspiration more than ever. https://t.co/4b2qnK1Eui https://t.co/QepAFA3m4q
@bgurley @westcoastbill Next comes yield on stablecoin holdings
Fintechs offering stablecoin accounts will not have ability to generate yield on customer deposits
@opentrade_io services this gap with our API-first, embeddable, secure and scalable infrastructure
Yield from tradfi, crypto, and defi
Austin, Texas: Join me on Monday (3/2) w/ local Austinite, Matthew McConaughey (@McConaughey). "Greenlights" and "Runnin' Down a Dream" each encourage young adults to believe in what is possible, each in their own way. Open to students/non-students. https://t.co/2yMNWo0gF1
San Francisco: Join me Thursday (2/26) at 6pm at the Commonwealth Club for a conversation with the one and only Michael Lewis. Such an honor to share the stage with him. Hope to see you live!
https://t.co/hoZeVwjFid
New York City: Join me tomorrow at 5PM at @NYUStern for a discussion with Malcolm Gladwell (@Gladwell). Open to students & non-students. We will discuss my new book, "Runnin' Down a Dream," as well as his, "Revenge of the Tipping Point." Super excited.
https://t.co/z96QDjAPE0
Check out my friend Bill Gurley’s new book. Great read - and if you’re serious about redirecting your path and thriving then give it a read!
https://t.co/RBTIBrvN2j
I have written my first book! A passion project of almost 10 years, Runnin' Down a Dream aims to give people both the motivation & the methods for thriving in a career they actually love. Put a lot of heart and soul into this - hope you ❤️ it. Pre-order: https://t.co/vR4XG6JxDy
Today is launch day. 🚀🚀🚀
We find ourselves in a time with much fear/anxiety about careers. I hope this book can be a positive antidote. The permission, motivation, and methodology to do what you truly love.
https://t.co/glk24A6206 https://t.co/nAM6EIOoOb
“One of the things that happens any time there's a technology wave is people get rich quick and then a whole bunch of people see people getting rich quick and they rush in.”
“But I I think it's unquestionably true. Like there's just zero interest. And so that's a tough call for someone that's in a business that may have good unit economics that's not AI.”
“I've always felt that if you're starting a business, the easiest way you could possibly get a customer, the first way the most ignorant person would assume to go get a customer would be to run a Google ad.”
“I think if you run an exercise, which I mentioned in that blog post, where you say set marketing budget, the advertising budget to zero, now what are you going to do?”
“And Dara has done an amazing job. I mean, to take it from there to $200,000,000,000 public company, over 10,000,000,000 a year in free cash flow, like from where we were. Yeah, unbelievable.”
@bgurley @tfadell Just pre-ordered for Kindle! Hope your book is an easier read than the one book recommendation I remember from you (really enjoyed it, but took me forever to make it through) haha https://t.co/vuqITNHxgc
Chatted with a water resource economist at an event in California yesterday.
The state’s water “shortage” really is one of the most unforced errors in policymaking.
Key stats:
- farmers use 80% of the developed water supply
- residents use 20%
- cities pay ~20x higher prices https://t.co/9CLW7NAERf
Transcript excerptScott D. Clary - Success Story Podcast
“15 of those 58 say they're quiet quitting. These are horrible numbers. Founders live on the edge of a new technological shift constantly, and they can't not know what's happening next.”
Transcript excerptScott D. Clary - Success Story Podcast
“Founders live on the edge of a new technological shift constantly, and they can't not know what's happening next. It requires a level of studying that is foreign in other industries and other fields.”
Transcript excerptScott D. Clary - Success Story Podcast
“I was an engineer. I had an engineering degree in undergrad and you know, in my second year as an engineer, you know, we were starting the third project I had worked on and it looked like the second and it looked like the first”
Transcript excerptScott D. Clary - Success Story Podcast
“58% of people say they're not engaged at work and 15 of those 58 say they're they're, they're quite quitting. They're like intentionally trying to undermine the organization, but these are, these are horrible numbers,”
Transcript excerptScott D. Clary - Success Story Podcast
“Danny Meyer, when he, he walked away from a sales job, this company that sold these devices that hook into clothes so that you can't steal them from stores.”
The one & only @tfadell was one of the key influences in "pushing" me to write a book. "You have to! Best thing I ever did." He was referring of course to Build. Considering all Tony has accomplished, that landed hard. Thanks for the inspiration.
https://t.co/D5NBAPp4sX https://t.co/410dGCdxhJ
Similarly, Magnus Carlsen told Joe Rogan about how he treats chess as a hobby. He never wants it to feel like work and prioritizes fun and enjoyment:
”The thing is that chess has always been a bit of a hobby for me. Once it starts to feel like work, then it's harder for me.” https://t.co/HdRTtKB4gr https://t.co/f9g5RwyWdp
I first met @bgurley in the mid-’90s when he covered Dell on Wall Street—and I was stunned how he understood parts of our business better than we did. 😲
He’s always had a rare ability to see what truly drives success.
His new book Runnin’ Down a Dream is outstanding. https://t.co/HVCzRhBU40
The ability to truly celebrate others wins in the wake of the biggest defeat of your life to me shows the highest character. Ilia Malinin has been like a proud dad watching the rest of the Olympic skating. He will go far in both skating and life. https://t.co/5YPm49kf6p
You’ll only be the greatest at what you love.
Alysa Liu’s joyful gold medal performance should be a wake up call to anyone who wakes up dreading work.
10 years before retiring from TechCrunch as the #1 most cited tech journalist, I was earning $20 per article. TWENTY. But god https://t.co/8JpIIrRaoL
Beyond thrilled to be sitting down at the Commonwealth Club in SF next Thursday (26th) with the one and only Michael Lewis to discuss my new book. I hope you can make it, & I will do all I can to make sure we hear from him as well!
https://t.co/hoZeVwjFid
@bgurley Bill- one of the problems I’ve been having in using tokens as a framework for supply/demand is they are so clearly being used incredibly inefficiently- how do you think about this?
@chrija @bgurley This is why I struggle with the intelligence will be too cheap to meter / the price of intelligence is going to zero narrative. New models keep being more expensive than the previous ones, while we know everything is heavily subsidized and margins are deliberately kept low.
@bgurley I’d add:
- What Anthropic and OpenAI do isn’t easy. It’s an extremely difficult way of selling dollars for $0.85. :) And the fact that it’s so hard may lead to pricing power in the long run.
- My guess is that they could have much higher gross margins already if they chose to
Look at the rate of growth, then consider the fact that Walmart currently trades at double the valuation of Amazon.
This is how scared the market is of "AI" https://t.co/bqrzs12L6O
@bgurley On dwarkish, Dario said he’s got a 50% margin after paying inference and training(both 25% of revenue). Neg earnings are each year he’s builds a bigger model than prior that is serving the current revenue. And personal costs are peanuts relative to compute. If he’s not lying….
"The financial performance of @AnthropicAI is astounding."
Jeremy Levine (@jeremyl) of @BessemerVP joins @EricNewcomer on a new episode of the Newcomer Podcast, to talk the value of "yesterday's model" and more. https://t.co/i2wzUeYisV
Anthropic hit $14 billion in annualized revenue this month. OpenAI ended 2025 at $20 billion. That gap is closing fast. But zoom out and the math gets wild.
Anthropic grew from $1B to $14B in 14 months. OpenAI grew from $2B to $20B in 24 months. Anthropic is doing it with https://t.co/izERCfWbjg
This type of analysis should be done with gross profit vs revenues. We all agree it’s a “token” economy. These companies both buy and sell tokens. In 1999 we talked about selling dollars for $0.85. Reselling NVIDIA tokens below cost is an easy way to grow revs. Complicated. https://t.co/8qePPYi9EP
I love @bgurley’s book. Fifty years ago at USC, Art Laffer unleashed my curiosity the analog way. Now at @ARKInvest, I have not “worked” since my days at McDonald's decades ago. Today, @OpenAI, @xai, @AnthropicAI, and @Geminiapp are igniting curiosity the AI way. https://t.co/nw2JM1MsnO
This week, on Benchmark's new podcast Uncapped 😂, I sat down with @btaylor, founder of Sierra and Chairman of OpenAI. He's easily one of the most impressive people I’ve met in tech or in general.
We talked about AI and the saaspocalypse, the unique considerations of building an https://t.co/RxqWpSTym9
HHS just open-sourced the largest Medicaid dataset in history. About $1T in claims data, free for anyone to analyze via @DOGE_HHS. Everyone's looking at what was billed. At @MiddeskHQ, we're looking at who's behind the billing.
Here's what we found 🧵 https://t.co/fblJSzhfAn
Runnin’ Down a Dream by @bgurley recalled a favorite quote:
“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.” — Louis L’Amour
The most consequential moments in life, leadership, and careers often feel that way. Highly recommended. https://t.co/OdNAPJ74MT
In 2019, I stumbled upon a lecture Bill Gurley (@bgurley) gave at the University of Texas.
That was the moment I decided to bet on myself and work on football full-time.
7 years in, it’s been a wild journey and reading this book is a full circle moment for me.
Keep going! https://t.co/RRsBrzjzWW
You can always tell when someone is doing a job that they truly love. Looking forward to reading this by my friend @Billgurley95 https://t.co/l285HjE0NC
storytime:
the 1st lesson in this book is chasing curiosity and looking back, my curiosity has lead me to being early to tech in 2007, early to bitcoin in 2012, early to eth in 2016, early to meme stocks in 2020, and early to AI agentic companions now.
the world is a https://t.co/oJbyT8Zb2i
I 100% agree with @mcuban on this. If you are on a custom career path where you aim to differentiate yourself, AI is "jet fuel" - you can learn and soar faster than ever before. https://t.co/uxWs2l5Igq
I 100% agree with @mcuban on this. If you are on a custom career path where you aim to differentiate yourself, AI is "jet fuel" - you can learn and soar faster than ever before. https://t.co/uxWs2l5Igq
Why the NBA should embrace tanking -
The NBA has kate been misguided thinking that fans want to see their teams compete every night with a chance to win. It’s never been that way that way.
When I got into the nba, they thought they were in the basketball business. They
Legions of people try to talk you out of chasing your dream. Listen to someone who wants you to chase it. @bgurley has a new book coming out next week and it's delicious. Snatch up a copy! https://t.co/gsdmUmE6Wc
The Most Overlooked Opportunity in Nuclear?
Why Nuclear Power Plant Uprates Beat Everything Else in the Race for New Capacity.
Recent conversations about the budding nuclear renaissance often begin with the same list. Microsoft restarting Three Mile Island, tech companies https://t.co/WdTzTa9Fv1
In NYC Feb 25? Come to an event with 2 great authors (Gladwell and Gurley) and 2 great books. Gurley's book is ideal for young people who want to "build a career around something they love"
Hosted by @NYUStern, open to the public. https://t.co/bNOBHPdx2r
@JonHaidt @NYUStern Thank you Jon...
For those that cannot make it:
Revenge of the Tipping Point: https://t.co/rMFJKc1cro
Runnin' Down a Dream: https://t.co/T1T3MkPROn
@tarunmallappa @AnnieDuke Well a few things. Can't you get the kindle immediately? or the audio book? Second, I spent 5+ years from the video to the book. For a reason. Way more nuance. Way more details. Way more research. Way more thought.
Perhaps the best thing you can do as a parent is listen to/read @bgurley's new book with your child.
It's a masterclass in crafting an inspiring life.
Congratulations, Bill. You've been an amazing mentor/big brother to me over the years.
Runnin' Down a Dream is your legacy. https://t.co/YvzocHAQrv
@bgurley @AILeverageHQ @mjmauboussin how does this reconcile with investing at the early stage? if you think only of terminal value, then most stuff is uninvestable right?
I got a chance to check out Bill Gurley's new book Runnin' Down a Dream this past week. I couldn’t put it down and ended up reading it in two days.
Gurley says to chase your curiosity, not a career plan. I've been obsessed with psychology and mental health since I was a kid. I
Didn't expect an early review from a 17-year old (read below), but greatly appreciate it. 🤠
This is the exact motivation I hope to inspire. https://t.co/bZdSTr2KjV https://t.co/xgjbI5I7OV
@bgurley @mjmauboussin Terminal value is a duration bet.
Retail with pricing power + logistics dominance can be more “bond like” than software exposed to margin compression and zero switching costs.
Longevity > narrative growth.
@bgurley @mjmauboussin Walmart’s multiple is so high that buybacks are dilutive. Certainly there is no reasonable way to justify a ~50x PE on a company barely outgrowing GDP and with flattish operating income over the past decade? Perhaps there is a non-AI bubble out there?
Some shocked that Walmart and Costco have higher multiples than software companies. When so much value is in terminal value, the haunting question is “will this company be around in 30 years?” Easy question for Walmart. For more see @mjmauboussin on CAP.
Some shocked that Walmart and Costco have higher multiples than software companies. When so much value is in terminal value, the haunting question is “will this company be around in 30 years?” Easy question for Walmart. For more see @mjmauboussin on CAP.
People really don’t understand what a competitive strategic weapon open source has become and how it works. Alfred Marshall would be proud. Always good to reread the cathedral and bazaar. https://t.co/Il8BsDuDeI https://t.co/KzhxEP1bEI
The part most people will skip: NVIDIA just made every voice AI API a commodity.
OpenAI charges $0.06/min input and $0.24/min output for Realtime API. Gemini Live bills 25 tokens/second of audio. Every startup building voice agents is hemorrhaging cash on per-minute API fees to https://t.co/6KoMZtEjS4
People really don’t understand what a competitive strategic weapon open source has become and how it works. Alfred Marshall would be proud. Always good to reread the cathedral and bazaar. https://t.co/Il8BsDuDeI https://t.co/KzhxEP1bEI
One key idea in the book Running Down a Dream is "paying it forward." At a point in life's journey you realize that many of the people who helped you along the way are no longer among the living. The best way to repay that kindness is to help someone as you were in the past https://t.co/d9eOHzQDaK https://t.co/YLneXvgwPW
@KevinChaiken @Gladwell Quick update on the NYU event: I’ve heard from a few people who aren’t NYU affiliated and had trouble with the sign up. If you aren’t an NYU student, you can still go. Just select “Other, “no NYU affiliation,” and write “NA” where it asks for your NYU ID.
On Wed. 2/25 at NYU in NYC, I have the honor of sharing the stage with the one and only Malcolm Gladwell (@Gladwell), one of my favorite thinkers.
We will discuss Revenge of the Tipping Point, Runnin’ Down a Dream, and more. And I will sign books!
https://t.co/LsJC4n56pS
Quick update on the NYU event: I’ve heard from a few people who aren’t NYU affiliated and had trouble with the sign up. If you aren’t an NYU student, you can still go. Just select “Other, “no NYU affiliation,” and write “NA” where it asks for your NYU ID.
On Wed. 2/25 at @NYUStern in NYC, I have the honor of sharing the stage with the one and only Malcolm Gladwell (@Gladwell), one of my favorite thinkers.
We will discuss Revenge of the Tipping Point, Runnin’ Down a Dream, and more. And I will sign books!
https://t.co/LsJC4n4yAk
On Wed. 2/25 at NYU in NYC, I have the honor of sharing the stage with the one and only Malcolm Gladwell (@Gladwell), one of my favorite thinkers.
We will discuss Revenge of the Tipping Point, Runnin’ Down a Dream, and more. And I will sign books!
https://t.co/LsJC4n56pS
@mathyewjoeza @bgurley I can’t find it but here is the original tweet to the column @evansilva allowed me to write back in 2017.
Unfortunately the actual column was erased from history! https://t.co/mFJ4d65IIc
I get asked about working in sports or podcasting. This @bgurley book has great advice on how to jump into the career *you want*.
75% of execs say mentors are key, but you only get them if you seek them. Shoot your shot!!! Sending a single tweet is how I got started years ago. https://t.co/TamFbXOvft
@HaydenWinks Thank you Hayden. I am hopeful this book can help as many people as possible unlock their own latent potential.
Here is a link for your followers: https://t.co/lUemDtZHbb
Every time Bill shares something, I pay attention.
His 2018 talk at UT was one of the best breakdowns of understanding what makes people thrive in their career.
Excited to dive into the book. Congrats on the launch @bgurley! https://t.co/T7zezJkHMx
@fortworthchris Thank you @fortworthchris !
I really look forward to your feedback. My singular goal is to help as many people as possible "unlock" their latent potential.
Here is a link for your followers: https://t.co/FcnRSwPNlc
@bijan Thank you @bijan! I really look forward to your feedback. My singular goal is to help as many people as possible "unlock" their latent potential.
Here is a link for your followers: https://t.co/7xeR2NyQTP
@bgurley I'm starting to converge on an idea that this might end up like the airline industry where over 100 years it was just a wealth transfer mechanism from investors to the end user.
@bgurley Is burn, as a percentage of revenue higher than ZIRP-era ride hailing and food delivery? I was think about how this could go the other day and would be interesting to get your take.
https://t.co/28m0SFkmph
Great read BG.
“Go Where The Action Is” Principle 5 in @bgurley’s new book exemplifies the pivotal moment in my silicon valley story by connecting me to @jeffskoll - a fateful lunch at a chinese restaurant that launched a thousand ships, chips, rips, dips, and trips. one meal,
@westcoastbill @jeffskoll Thank you sir! For your followers here is the link: https://t.co/xl67CKWyM7
Yes optionality increases exponentially at the epicenter.
@LameDuckBreaker Elon has urged the US to remove tariffs on Chinese solar and batteries. Which would hurt his business. He also open sourced Tesla patents. And opened up his charging network.
I really love folks who go to Beijing, stay in five-star hotels for a few nights, get wined and dined, get shown the same Xiaomi factory and the robotics center that everyone sees, and declare that China is "winning." Gotta hand it to the Chinese, Potemkin village propaganda https://t.co/KCc8Pm66Yo
Dennis - if you believe it’s all a PSYOP, then they also got Elon. Listen here at 1:37. https://t.co/RowSLZJoAg Please explain how on the smartest on the planet with huge operations in China was “fooled”? Or maybe you are the one lacking information. https://t.co/hxs7EkPpFL
Downtown Houston in the 1970s—when it was largely a sea of parking lots, with hardly a tree in sight.
Houston is the only major U.S. city without traditional single-use zoning. Retail, offices, and residential spaces can exist side by side, letting market forces shape https://t.co/quRMFXp4bQ
Everyone deep in tech or finance is in full freakout mode over the pace of AI progress over past two months. Own index funds and you barely notice, but specific sectors are exploding (digital & power infrastructure), while anything related to a human behind a desk is plummetting.
“I had the, both the fortune and now the, the kind of weight of having brought Larry and Sergey in to present to our partnership when they were 25 employees.”
“And so companies get big, they spend money lobbying, they spend time in Washington and they get laws written to help them rather than to constrain them.”
“One thing that's really amazing that most Americans probably don't realize is once your senator or congressman goes on a committee, they start fundraising in other jurisdictions.”
“No, I think it's gotten worse over time. I made up this statement once that capitalism and democracy corrupt each other over time. Like at the starting state, everything's fine.”
“capitalism and democracy corrupt each other over time. Like at the starting state, everything's fine. But as they get to commingle for a really, really, really long period of time”
“Yes. And in a way, I've, I mean, I've seen a lot of waves and a lot of bubbles, and this is like nothing I've ever seen. Yeah. Like when Amazon was losing a billion”
“now we're in a weird world where the amount of money that gets thrown at every project, I kind of lived through this with Uber Lyft because both companies had billions and billions of dollars”
“The UK created something called Faster Payment seventeen years ago. And China has one and India has one. Brazil created one seven years ago, six years ago called PIX that's wildly successful.”
“And now if you have a wallet of any kind and I have a wallet of any kind, I can send you, you know, 25,000 US dollars in two seconds, and it'll cost me 2¢ to send it to”
“Malcolm actually, his team introduced me to a researcher named Joseph Friedman, who pushed us to study the academic part. So we started reading all the research.”
“It led to us doing this survey with Wharton where we asked people, if you could go back in life, would you choose a different career? And six in 10 people say yes.”
“I think the IPO process almost certainly also because of regulatory capture is remarkably broken. I don't actually think the average citizen even knows.”
“They would craft a direct listing. It's obvious that you should match supply and demand and be indifferent to who the It should be an anonymous auction.”
“And for the past twenty five, thirty years, you have these pops that have become expected, I would say. And it's a one day giveaway to their clients.”
“I've often gone to my founders or CEOs and I say, you should tell every one of your direct reports to develop five peers in nearby companies, not direct competitors, things that look similar, and have them meet with them four times a year and then bring back and report up.”
One of the truly amazing perks of writing this book was having the opportunity to chat for hours with @RickRubin in his studio. Life experience - hope you enjoy our conversation! https://t.co/ce0SlBbL8G https://t.co/GMh4ZPl7nu
We have a new report out today, "Bayes and Base Rates: How History Can Guide Our Assessment of the Future."
-We place projected sales growth rates of some artificial intelligence (AI) businesses in the context of history.
- We review literature on success rates for big projects
@bgurley I have probably convinced at least 15 people to pre-order your book, how can I get a copy sooner than March which is when Amazon has me slated to receive it?
Leading into Super Bowl LX, we were proud to donate our mobile CT trailer and support heart health screenings for NFL alumni and their loved ones—bringing coronary artery calcium (CAC) CT scans right to the legends who've given so much to the game. Early detection saves lives. ❤️ https://t.co/drig7LUfrp
These charts of US electricity generation stagnating, or China blowing past us, are widely and incredibly misunderstood. These are not primarily about some failure of US industry. They're about demand stagnation. Yes, the US has to improve permitting, speed of build, etc.. But https://t.co/JA48Jluc1t
Just read the introduction to @bgurley's new book and it flies — propulsive, compelling, a genuine pleasure to read. As a dad of two daughters in their early 20s, I’m already thinking about sharing this with them. It’s rare to find a book that feels this exciting and hopeful to https://t.co/q7mdi2AtrW
@bgurley @henryglasheen @rohanpaul_ai This is the entire VC model, though... sacrifice margin for market share, sell the growth story, exit/IPO, then aim for margin by raising prices, etc.
@VKDev1 @henryglasheen @rohanpaul_ai But at a level we have never seen. I agree as to the source of the problem. My point was the “insatiable demand” isn’t sustainable. And it’s a temporary result of the VC model’s current state.
@henryglasheen @rohanpaul_ai My main point is demand is overstated in short run as we have multiple layers (models and apps) where people are pricing to gain share and not unit economics.
@bgurley @rohanpaul_ai Market share, which is important for raising VC money, which is what is subsidizing inference costs currently.
The dynamic of the market has kept prices artificially low
"Anthropic is making great money. OpenAI is making great money. If they could have twice as much compute, the revenues would go up 4 times as much. These guys are so compute constrained, and the demand is so incredibly great."
~ Jensen Huang on CNBC
https://t.co/WWg9sTX5W4
@bgurley @BG2Pod It's hard recording your own audiobook, isn't it?
Took me three days of standing up. Started believing that I could read and talk good; ended up in a puddle of goo, terrorized by an audio engineer who kept hearing popped p's and swallowed consonants
@chr1sa @BG2Pod Yes. I did four sessions over four days. I found the best thing was to listen in my ears rather than focus on techniques. Not sure how I stumbled onto it - but it was a game changer. Intense focus on why I was hearing.
A quick book update. Many @BG2Pod listeners made it clear they wanted "me" to read the audiobook. I can confirm that I am the narrator! (you may need to go 1.3X however) Pre-order the audio here: https://t.co/oiSywLMSxG
Just got my first hard-covers also. 2.24.26 launch. https://t.co/oSdoUoxsrp
Here’s what I find more frightening than all these Epstein emails. Way less than 50% of Americans believe he committed suicide. And neither the media or the govt have done anything to explain why that is true - or discover what really happened. Unlock that and you find the goods.
How has China systematically built a vast pipeline of AI talent? My debut feature in FT Magazine explores the pivotal education program behind this achievement, weaving in some personal reflections.
China’s Genius Plan
https://t.co/MUZTIDaw6g
Really enlightening (and detailed) article from @zijing_wu about a special program in China where 100K teenagers are funneled each year into a special "genius" program. Stark contrast to school districts in the US cancelling "gifted" programs. https://t.co/ihMwre45Ad
Since everybody is losing their minds over SBC vs not SBC, in the normal DCF there's 2.0% annualized dilution included in the 15 years already for the scenario with 0 terminal value that spits out 20x EV/FCF.
If you're a VC holding a lot of Unicorn SaaS go ahead and chop your values by 50%. 2026 ARR multiples below.
AMPL 2.6X, BRZE 3X, KVYO 4.8X, RBRK 8X, NOW 8X, MNDY 3.7X, GTLB 4.3X, WDAY 4.6X, ESTC 3.6X, TEAM 5X, FIG 10X, DDOG 9X, HUBS 5X.
Are your companies better than the above?
Demand for AI fluency surged by 7X, "faster than for any other skill."
Exponential change is here.
As @bgurley said in June 2024, "run at it".
Humans + Machines not Humans vs Machines.
s / o @McKinsey https://t.co/ce26TEwmv2
100%! The number one way to protect your career from AI is to be the most aggressive user of AI in your field.
RUN AT IT.
Humans evolve with their tools. Keep evolving. https://t.co/RSzThjPyqB
Equally, Patrick's (@PatrickMcGee_ ) Apple in China, is a deep-dive into Apple's co-evolution with China over the past 20 years. As w/ Breakneck, you leave with a much fuller understanding of why modern China is quite different from many's perception. https://t.co/gdR921ph4r
Dan's (@danwwang) book Breakneck is a must read for anyone thinking about the modern world. He puts a lifetime of learning/studying into an eye-opening very modern look at China. What works & doesn't, and how that reflects on the US. https://t.co/F9IDFdbWjh
Equally, Patrick's (@PatrickMcGee_ ) Apple in China, is a deep-dive into Apple's co-evolution with China over the past 20 years. As w/ Breakneck, you leave with a much fuller understanding of why modern China is quite different from many's perception. https://t.co/gdR921ph4r
New video for those that have pre-purchased my new book, Runnin' Down a Dream. Fortunate to be joined by the top modern voices on China @danwwang & @PatrickMcGee_ (top books in 2025). We discuss their careers then go deep on all things China. Unlock here: https://t.co/HlNDfpE0gy https://t.co/sElgAkypJU
Dan's (@danwwang) book Breakneck is a must read for anyone thinking about the modern world. He puts a lifetime of learning/studying into an eye-opening very modern look at China. What works & doesn't, and how that reflects on the US. https://t.co/F9IDFdbWjh
New video for those that have pre-purchased my new book, Runnin' Down a Dream. Fortunate to be joined by the top modern voices on China @danwwang & @PatrickMcGee_ (top books in 2025). We discuss their careers then go deep on all things China. Unlock here: https://t.co/HlNDfpE0gy https://t.co/sElgAkypJU
@TheStalwart Joe, yes, and lots of VCs lose money on their investments. But that's not the question. It's whether it is even possible to get these gains? And no, we've lost that (not just with AI labs) as trend with Databricks et al is to stay private for much longer.
@bgurley talks about
The future of offensive security isn't AI vs humans. It's what becomes possible when they work together.
AI agents do testing at scale. Human experts bring creativity and context.
That’s the direction @Hacker0x01 is taking. https://t.co/qTCKLrdS8W
“The there's a there's a notion in venture capital about asymmetric risks. So if you if you you know, the biggest mistake of my career is I had Larry and Sergei present to the partnership when there were 25 employees at Google and we failed to chase the deal.”
“So that venture investor that's doing 10 at 300 pre is getting, you know, you know, a tiny percent of this company relative to what people used to get.”
“Oh, more than Amazon ever lost. And so the the burn rates are bigger than they've ever been in the history of venture capital. And eventually, they're gonna wanna bring those in.”
This is quite well written; important reflection on the current environment. I would add one more thing. Most of these rounds are preemptive. The investor suggested it - it wasn’t the company’s initiative. A finance form of the observer effect. https://t.co/p2JJOHNOpN https://t.co/DpZP8wIzcs
Just returned from my first trip to China, mostly looking at the energy and robotics industries. Fascinating. Random observations, both business and general, below...
1/x
Pre-purchase my new book, & as a bonus enjoy this video conversation between myself and @mjmauboussin where we discuss putting the current AI investment cycle in historic perspective. No one smarter on financial history than Michael! https://t.co/HlNDfpEy66
@bgurley @mjmauboussin @bgurley I already had pre-ordered two books prior to your post here. Would I be able to still get the link to the full video? I can provide proof of purchase if needed. Thanks in advance.
I sat down with @mjmauboussin to connect his unconventional career to Runnin’ Down a Dream—then used history, not hype, to frame the current AI investment world. Pre-order the book to unlock the full video here: https://t.co/HlNDfpEy66 #runnindownadream https://t.co/AhjQL3BGAO
My column on Venezuela in @TheEconomist
“Prosperity does not come from oil, decrees or even benevolent rulers. It comes from rights. Rights create private property. Rights create security. Rights create debate. Rights allow people to invest, to innovate, to dream—and to
It would be hard to find a better expert on Venezuela than @ricardo_hausman. Expert on how countries emerge and grow. Native son. https://t.co/HDYkbzwde4
I had some time to reflect on the @nickshirleyy stuff...
The outrage over the exposé on Somali day care fraud wasn’t really about the fraud itself. Far worse abuses happen every day at far greater scale without sparking this kind of fury. What made this story so incendiary was https://t.co/so5ucp1ZNn
@bgurley @arjunsethi @danwwang Yesterday, I was in Shanghai’s Xintiandi area where CPC’s first national congress was held.
There is a museum and people go there to witness this important part of history.
You might imagine that place to be full of red flags, plastered with Xi Jinping/Mao Thoughts or quotes; https://t.co/p7b0RnqSPb
There is clearly something to this, in particular it's obviously not true that subsidies and IP theft are sufficient to explain China's export success, but at the same time it's crazy to depict the country as a capitalist paradise when in practice both the central government and https://t.co/uVj5y3ESJS
@phl43 I’m certain regulatory capture in certain industries in the U.S. has led to less optimal levels of competition (or even a lack thereof). Remember “perfect competition” is the idealized goal of capitalism. https://t.co/LM1ML1anWt
I really enjoyed @danwwang year end letter - and highly recommend a read. Here is my favorite paragraph: https://t.co/49Ilnh7TDD https://t.co/t05YUqkkpS
Legacy Media articles on the Somali daycare fraud discovered in Minnesota:
AP: 0
NPR: 0
PBS: 0
CNN: 0
WaPo: 0
Reuters: 0
MSNBC: 0
CBS News: 0
USA Today: 0
New York Times: 0
Wall Street Journal: 0
And on and on.
So telling…
Enemy of the people.
@bgurley I know you want to work on policy at the federal level, but CA could use some centralist legislators.
Can we add CA to the policy list? We (realtors) have the lobbyists and can help. https://t.co/Z4RG8quNVt
@jvivas_official @dawallach @splendid_pete No doubt. But if you have zero crime and super effective mass transit, your life benefits in many ways. Not considering that is leaving out important components of prosperity.
An American goes to the ER for high blood pressure, stays under 24 hours, no surgery, no CT, no MRI, and gets a $41,000 bill. Lovely.
Now here’s the part people miss when this gets discussed economically: that $41,000 fully counts toward U.S. GDP.
Not because it’s useful, but https://t.co/d3wQ9eHtvB
@JohnTitor @bgurley @grok he’s talking about nvidia’s partnership with groq
dylan has previously made comments that downplay groq’s competitive positioning
the implication being that the partnership is not valuable, and hence just “tax loss harvesting”
Perhaps the greatest failure of the economics profession has been our inability to sell the idea that we should tax "bads" like congestion and pollution. One reason building is so expensive is that we have so many regulations instead of just prices. https://t.co/vqobTeFF6K
“If the wave is real, then you're going to have bubble like behavior. Like they come together as a pair precisely because anytime there's very quick wealth creation, you're going to get a lot of people that want to come try and take advantage of that or participate in it.”
“And that's not to say there won't be an incremental AI investment that makes money, I think there will. But your odds right now of that being the case are really, really low.”
“So I think the thing that a lot of people in Silicon Valley love about capitalism is this notion of the invisible hand and competition that leads to innovation and best practice, and the winners rise up and they're better for it. That is happening there.”
“And so you could calculate the total number of jobs you'd be bringing back if you brought back all this car production and it'd be hundreds of thousands. It's not millions and millions of jobs.”
“So anyway, that infrastructure thing's for real. And I think Dan Wong does a good job of saying that America is run by lawyers the author of of Breakneck.”
“I think Dan Wong does a good job of saying that America is run by lawyers the author of of Breakneck. Our country's run by lawyers and theirs is run by engineers.”
“Whoever's saying that just hasn't been there. They don't know the facts on the ground. These entrepreneurs are every bit as good as the entrepreneurs they are here.”
“These entrepreneurs are every bit as good as the entrepreneurs they are here. There are examples like in LiDAR, they built a MEMS LiDAR product that's like $130 a car.”
“And I've said it over and over again, but a freshman comp size student and a freshman finance student, if you told them to design the IPO, they would just match supply and demand anonymously.”
Fun fact: if Bill Gates hadn’t listened to Warren Buffett and hadn’t sold his Microsoft shares to diversify, he would be the world’s first trillionaire, worth twice as much as Elon.
What do we learn from this story? https://t.co/eYh6Wwgnlz
NEW podcast episode is up!
"Bill Gurley (@bgurley) — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, @MrBeast, and More"
Bill Gurley is a general partner at Benchmark, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. Over https://t.co/yfRNvgysn2
Special thanks for @tferriss for having me on. We go deep on the book & much more. Getting super excited about the launch coming 2.24.26. I just recorded the audio book last week! https://t.co/YyV7zUz6I2 https://t.co/YeIFLZ45KP
Wow! @nvidia & @Xiaomi both dropped open models in past 24 hours. There is a non-zero chance open models dominate the vast majority of tokens in the long run. Lots of players interested in that future. I would argue that Amazon, Apple, and Meta should be also. Not sure they do.
Henry Ellenbogen has one of the best track records in growth investing, yet he has kept a notably low profile.
He built his reputation at T. Rowe Price, where he ran the New Horizons Fund and turned it into one of the best-performing small-cap growth portfolios in the country. https://t.co/odMcdDgozZ
Henry is one of the smartest investors on the planet. He also rarely does this type of speaking - so it’s a special holiday treat. More free learning opportunities from @patrick_oshag! 🙏 🙏 🙏 https://t.co/UeHF8Xz1ln
The ultimate move would be if @elonmusk decides to go the direct listing route and cuts out the investment banks
The institutional and retail demand are already there
Better outcome for everyone https://t.co/P3s6jedlFn
Have a child going through the selective college admissions process for the first time and the system seems designed specifically to maximize stress for student and parents alike. The process has gotten worse in recent years and will will keep getting worse until it breaks.
1/n
John’s point below is one of the reasons I wrote my new book. These poor kids are pressured through a “resume arms race” & this high-stress college process without time to explore/dream. https://t.co/aErKCtUoPd https://t.co/273jdiE5sU
We just witnessed @realDonaldTrump signing an Executive Order that ensures American AI is protected from onerous state laws.
This ensures that America continues to dominate and lead in this AI race under President Trump. Want to thank many who helped get to this moment from https://t.co/6OegG3XPSV
At the @dealbook conference, @mtbarra discussed the onerous overhead of state-by-state EV laws. During his presidency, @BarackObama spoke of the burden caused by state-by-state licensing laws. AI is no different. The bureaucracy of 50 diff AI laws would be stifling to America. https://t.co/JAZsjgMjuw
@CMantseris I don't think Tesla has anywhere near the volume of rider-only autonomous miles that Waymo has (96M for Waymo, as of today). The safety data is quite compelling for Waymo, as well.
For more details, see:
https://t.co/SsBihBCTHb https://t.co/EalqxS9ayt
@bgurley Agreed on equity. But the more interesting point is how much debt is financing this cycle vs. past buildouts that he argues relied more on equity financing. Debt investors can’t index the same way, they only make their coupon on winners while eating full losses on losers.
Howard Marks on AI: "Since no one can say definitively whether this is a bubble, I'd advise that no one should go all-in without acknowledging that they face the risk of ruin if things go badly. But by the same token, no one should stay all-out & risk missing out on one of the
@HGWellsFargo @BG2Pod @DavidSacks @altcap If you go rewatch the speech, I mentioned at the end a feel I had that early AI leaders were already trying to pull up the ladder. The state by state efforts are being supported by these players. Encouraged even. So this Trump action would actually prevent capture.
Truth. From parents adding $20 / month, to people adopting a school or city. States like TX adding $1000 per kid. Companies all adding like 401ks. Kids saving bday & summer job money. Credit cards w 2% cash back direct into kids accts. Its all happening. 🇺🇸 https://t.co/ahJMFctr5L
That's big. Love the diversified public/private partnerships. Should lead to a ton of innovation - and state by state competition. Which is healthy! https://t.co/wS2dqaE9hq
@bgurley @jimfarley98 Btw, even if the Chinese vehicles are not allowed to sell in the US (unless they build factories in the US) they are still going to dominate the global market, including Europe where US OEMs used to have a foot-hold, not to mention the supply-chain choke-hold they will have!
@AntarYaami @bgurley Their methods include subsidies at every level of the stack. Materials, labor, energy, land, loans, etc. Of course there are things to learn, but meeting them at that price point is not going to be one of them. Ford imported one to learn from, if that is what you mean...
@bgurley @AntarYaami So how do you set the appropriate tariff level on Chinese cars? Otherwise it's Florida's bankroll playing MTSU's bankroll. Lot's of government support vs. virtually none.
@JustinRTipton @AntarYaami I asked ChatGPT how much the USA would spend on EV subsidies in total. Answer: $300-350B. Not sure what country your "virtually none" refers to. https://t.co/b28aJ1lqtP
@bgurley Can we think China is killing it and innovating faster than the US without fetishizing them? It’s weird Bill. Your love affair with China this year has been painful to watch at times
@stayunwell I merely think seeing with clear eyes will lead to much better US policy decisions than viewing the situation with a distorted bias. I am fascinated and impressed by innovation. Anywhere on the planet (or off).
@AntarYaami @bgurley Their methods include subsidies at every level of the stack. Materials, labor, energy, land, loans, etc. Of course there are things to learn, but meeting them at that price point is not going to be one of them. Ford imported one to learn from, if that is what you mean...
This echoes what Ford CEO @jimfarley98 said about the SU7. I visited the factory in Beijing. It’s all quite impressive. And Lei Jun decided to build a car about the same time Apple was exploring it. And he got it done - a done quite well. 1/2 https://t.co/O0Hxr9bMeV
In this video (start 0:30) Lei Jun walks through their creation process. Must watch. Especially if you (1) have anything to do with the US car business, or (2) are doubtful about Chinese innovation. Clear eyes. 👀 https://t.co/QxHsFyezd2
I lived with a Chinese EV for a few weeks to see if the hype is real. The car costs $42K, and turns out it feels like $75K+ EASILY
One of the most impressive things I've ever reviewed: https://t.co/EHe358cvLt
- A+ software and features. Feels like what would happen if Apple https://t.co/6qBC7m01IT
This echoes what Ford CEO @jimfarley98 said about the SU7. I visited the factory in Beijing. It’s all quite impressive. And Lei Jun decided to build a car about the same time Apple was exploring it. And he got it done - a done quite well. 1/2 https://t.co/O0Hxr9bMeV
Brad Gerstner (@altcap) on Trump Accounts: "@POTUS was elected on a Main Street agenda to get the rest of America into the game, and that’s exactly what this does." https://t.co/Vx4X1yB71a
@bgurley @anish_koka Would’ve been great if O-care made workplace healthcare illegal instead of doubling down
Barring that, they could’ve at least equalized the tax benefit whether one bought through work or on your own.
GLP-1s are a great example of this. When Eli Lilly’s CEO was on Cheeky Pint, he said their largest segment was Zepbound cash pay.
The result with direct market forces is all GLP-1s are rapidly falling in price, rather than the more traditional path of yearly price increases. https://t.co/aaPibWvpKQ
💯 Simple way to simplify our broken HC system. Get the employer out of the loop. US only structure. They are a reluctant and unnecessary participant. https://t.co/achOzjjMpg
Happy Thanksgiving!
Join us on Dec. 16 to learn about entrepreneurship and healthcare innovation from legends Mark Cuban @mcuban and Bill Gurley @bgurley.
All are welcome. Students will receive Bill's new book: Runnin' Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually https://t.co/Eq8IrhgWVE
what if instead of greg, dario, daniela, jared, sam, chris, jack, and tom stumbling into a red queen race, they all just agreed to join together to build agi under a nonprofit, where the proceeds go to ensuring agi benefits all humanity? https://t.co/1r508a5qsV
@bgurley Acting like it’s just “fun to consider” massively downplays how brutally competitive and capital-intensive that industry is. You don’t stroll into semiconductors you bleed cash and pray you survive.
$GOOGL Reports indicate GOOGL could start selling TPUs into external data centers. In a world where NVDA is selling ~8mn annual chips, could TPUs carve out 500k-1mn sales per year? Maybe. Every 500k would add ~10% to '27 GOOGL Cloud rev, 3% to '27 EPS and drive multiple.
$META
This is fun to consider. Remember that selling semiconductors involves lots of other support and processes. You don’t just show up in a new business. #itainteasy https://t.co/dkr3jePJlp
@bgurley @TexasExes Now that I know your dad is a fellow Wolfpack, even more respect! :)
PS: it's ridiculous amazon doesn't even show the book as a result if you don't drop the G!!
@bgurley I'm suggesting breach of fiduciary in this case would be a bit "eye of the beholder." It's not cut and dry. And the beholder would be the very court that the plaintiffs would be calling capricious. So.... yeah.
.@bgurley has suggested that shareholders of companies that don't reincorporate out of Delaware should due for breach of fiduciary duty.
Only trouble is those cases likely would be heard in Delaware.
@danprimack Are you suggesting they would rule differently if it implicated their state? I thought DE was known for "letter of the law" interpretation. You are suggesting they would let bias affect outcome.
Figma is a great company and stock price charts often tell us little other than how sentiment has swung, but boy does this make the case for direct listings.
Not for the reasons @bgurley usually has, but tactically it is better to let the stock trade freely and get to the right https://t.co/aEQ7Mgim6t
I support that reason. Price it correctly and put it in the right hands from the get go. They run a perverse and limited process that natural creates a perverse outcome. But their clients do get free $$$ so they likely won’t stop on their own. https://t.co/TUwSg8Alpg
🚨JUST IN: Coinbase Global Inc (NASDAQ: COIN), with a $82B Market Cap, has decided to officially LEAVE DELAWARE for Texas.
One of the biggest companies in crypto history just turned its back on the old system.
The DEXIT movement is in full swing. https://t.co/CXwo1KXmXb
I’ll say it again - boards that don’t move could be sued in Delaware for staying - and exposing shareholders to uncapped securities claims. https://t.co/JkivTl9Xly
Here's something fascinating happening in the apartment market right now.
The cheapest, oldest apartments (Class C) are getting crushed right now.
But ONLY in cities that just delivered tons of new apartments.
Let me show you the numbers:
Denver: Class C rents down 13.9% https://t.co/jH1DNyFIx0
At this point it’s 100% clear that effective policy can lower rental rates. No need to debate “the approach” anymore. Just wether your city and its leaders are willing to do it. https://t.co/yDo4YJ3lMP
"SMR companies are increasingly signing power supply deals with utilities and tech companies, with over 32 gigawatts of commitments since 2023."
32 GW! How much of that will ever come online? More importantly, how much comes anywhere near initial cost estimates? https://t.co/AgrREh4Jem
If you want more info on China, it's motives, & priorities - listen to this recent episode of the @triviumchina podcast. They go deep on the likely input for the next 5-year plan. No need to guess what China will do. They tell you! https://t.co/jBOCWUi4sa
I admire and respect @bgurley but this is like saying Google added 10+ Ubers in a quarter - it's comparing apples to oranges.
@DoorDash does not play in the rides segment at all, and the charts below compare @Uber rides + deliveries to DoorDash deliveries.
Comparing Like to https://t.co/qWUBvUhDln
@bgurley That’s true - clear misallocation of capital for those folks that bought on the debut, but to be honest the intrinsic value of Figma was never there, just inflated stock from the start. It’s not like the founders or early backers left money on the table with that IPO… at least
@rditrych I’m not looking for higher or lower prices - I’m looking for a fairer process that in the long term should eliminate these spikes. They don’t help the company either. Insiders are all locked up. Just screws w employee morale.
This is China.🇨🇳
China is proof that socialism works.
As for Cuba, Venezuala and other examples, they may have worked if the US government hadn't spent TRILLIONS of dollars to prevent their success.
👇 https://t.co/W1FBa59iWv https://t.co/o3ng7Z5MI1
@bgurley @DrJStrategy IMO: From what I understand, Blue Owl owns 80% of the JV and provides the capital. Meta owns 20% and commits to long-term leases to use the capacity. Meta does not guarantee the JV’s debt, investor principal, or Blue Owl’s exposure.
So the idea that Meta is “hiding $30B of debt”
@rditrych It’s in the sales on the left of your chart by the preferred customers of the investment bank. When you don’t match supply and demand you create artificial pricing. Those allocated in the IPO still got free money.
This is INSANE:
The Big Four hyperscalers, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are on track to unleash a record wave of infrastructure spending.
Analysts project their combined CapEx could hit nearly $500 billion annually by 2026.
Never before have tech giants poured this https://t.co/aUlnlayOCW
A picture is worth a thousand words. AI infrastructure spending, nearly all from free cash flow, shows this is no bubble, but the largest capex cycle in history. As Horace put it, “Things heard fall short of things seen.” The intrinsic value: the visible, lasting rewiring of the https://t.co/WsuxIhiATY
Great stuff. And not just founders. There is a history for every role, for every craft. And for the best, learning never stops. This is #2 of the six principles in my new book. https://t.co/GYAqB7Rc0f https://t.co/mSmZXoz0Be
$MDB BREAKING 🚨: Dev Ittycheria is stepping down as MongoDB CEO after 11 years but will remain on the board. CJ Desai, formerly of Cloudflare, takes over on Nov. 10.
Meanwhile, MongoDB expects to beat Q3 targets, driven by strong growth in Atlas. 🚀 https://t.co/Nx3LAJ7wac
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Open-Source AI Models.
"I don't think open source works the same way in AI that it has worked in other areas. Primarily because with open source you can see the source code of the model. Here we can't see inside the model, it's often called open https://t.co/NwUkxFU56u
$MSFT's Satya is saying that compute is not the bottleneck, but energy and data center space is. In fact the problem he has is that he has a surplus of GPUs right now sitting which he can't use (glut?).
He is also saying he doesn't want to over buy one generation of $NVDA GPUs. https://t.co/Cn55Njzy2r
When comparing today's infrastructure spend to the telecom bubble, people forget much of the backbone infrastructure in 1999 was empty conduits that had the potential to accept actual fiber. The conduits were empty (eg if there were 12 conduits often only 2 were stuffed). https://t.co/6ygFgIzRTZ
I know music isn’t why people follow me, BUT this is the best new band I have come across in 5 years. I predict they become quite successful. Deservedly. https://t.co/QKu1gNjlUk
Vote FOR @elonmusk. The award is only achieved IF he hits exceptionally ambitious market-cap and operational milestones—if he falls short, he gets nothing. If he succeeds, shareholders will win big through unprecedented value creation, and he will earn added voting rights to
Will Richard told @WillardAndDibs his nickname on the team is "Baby Gator." 🐊
"They call Al [Horford] 'Big Gator,' so I'm 'Baby Gator' right now. It's either 'Rook' or 'Baby Gator.'"
🎧 https://t.co/akaTV3S7ba https://t.co/4lTPlW47dm
With the reported firing of Brian Kelly, college football teams are on the hook for over $169M in buyouts so far this season.
• Brian Kelly (LSU), $53M
• James Franklin (Penn State), $49.7M
• Billy Napier (Florida), $21.2M
• Mike Gundy (OSU), $15M
• Sam Pittman (Arkansas), https://t.co/OIQSXhL83t
👷Surviving the AI Capex Boom👷
Big Tech's AI buildout is transforming markets but history suggests caution. What should investors do?
🤖 AI Investment Boom
🚂 Echoes of Past Booms
📉 Rising Capex Firms Underperform
🏭 Magnificent 7: The New Utility?
🔎 Finding AI Early Adopters https://t.co/RYwG6yw4Vh
Every entrepreneur I know thinks the fundraising process is broken.
Why capital formation should be onchain:
- It’s more efficient
- The process is fairer for both sides
- Much more transparency https://t.co/xmDnOm6f9P
Most of you own a Gulfstream G70 that can reach a maximum speed of Mach 0.935. As you know well, that is 717.397 miles per hour.
Trying to avoid Starlink fees by using a Starlink Mini instead of the more expensive terminal and service plan isn't possible anymore. Tough break. https://t.co/OgmIw77RG9
The Hottest Dating App in China Is a Park—Retirees roam ’marriage markets’ armed with paper profiles listing their unwed children’s physical traits, finances and requirements; ‘not too chubby’
@hannahmiao_ @GillSabrie
https://t.co/2fdyihEwcP
https://t.co/2fdyihEwcP
Karpathy: "you’re getting at why my timelines are a bit longer. You’re right. They’re not very good at code that has never been written before, maybe it’s one way to put it, which is what we’re trying to achieve when we’re building these models." https://t.co/vkTRB5HKNR
@modestproposal1 Not much real data to believe in AGI. And maybe it doesn’t matter. I think AGI madness is used more to beg for regulatory capture than anything productive.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon did say that AI can draft 95% of an S1 IPO prospectus “in minutes” (a job that used to require a 6-person team multiple weeks).
“The last 5% now matters because the rest is now a commodity,” per Solomon. https://t.co/Z0duPcDVrr https://t.co/UIGzlcqjBL
Very exciting news: On Oct. 27th Brookings is hosting an event on the media's coverage of the COVID origins story. I'll have a lot to say!
https://t.co/693RgJtjTb
@bgurley @altcap Epic run. The research @bgurley mentioned & Bezos’s regret minimization framework reminded me of the famous Mark Twain quote: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the
@bgurley I play your speech to my students every semester. It makes a huge impact on them as they are trying to sort out their life and career. Incredible message and delivery.
I have written my first book! A passion project of almost 10 years, Runnin' Down a Dream aims to give people both the motivation & the methods for thriving in a career they actually love. Put a lot of heart and soul into this - hope you ❤️ it. Pre-order: https://t.co/vR4XG6JxDy
BG2. AI Bubble or Buildout? $3T CapEx, Stablecoin Boom, and Gurley’s Next Chapter 👊💥 @altcap @bgurley @BG2Pod
(00:00) Intro
(02:00) Two Years of BG2
(03:45) Bill Stepping Back to Write His Book
(07:00) The AI CapEx Bubble?
(13:00) Nvidia’s Investments: Healthy or Hype? https://t.co/cmirh2Hz0n
New pod link attached, but first a life / pod update.
Almost two years ago I kicked off the BG2 podcast w my good friend @altcap to talk about tech, markets, investing, capitalism. We have covered important topics from nuclear to China from the AI boom to self driving cars from https://t.co/iqHG4cnjBE
“One of the more peculiar of all the deals is, and this was disclosed in a CoreWeave filing, was NVIDIA has promised to buy any of CoreWeave's service availability that they can't sell to anyone else. That is very unusual. That's not the same as making an investment.”
“That is very unusual. That's not the same as making an investment. That could easily help CoreWeave with their debtors and and getting more debt financing.”
“That could easily help CoreWeave with their debtors and and getting more debt financing. But it also means as a investor, we we don't know what's going on with real demand for CoreWeave because we probably won't be told if they start moving into the world where they're offloading to NVIDIA or not.”
“And and and I I think some of that comes from there. You run this massive risk of of trying to regulate a brand new technology at a state by state level.”
“I mean, that's the most absurd thing I've ever heard. Undercutting Visa? Like, do do they realize they have Visa and Mastercard have, like, the top two operating incomes in the history of American business?”
“We did this survey and asked people if you could start your career over again, would you do things differently? And in that survey, 70% of people said yes.”
IPOs of the future will happen on Solana and Ethereum, according to former NYSE prez @ThomasFarley
Are you paying attention anon? https://t.co/MDKT4danE2
Buzz around security tokenization as an alternative to IPOs is growing. Had Wall Street embraced innovation by promoting Direct Listings, perhaps tokenization wouldn't appear as disruptive. In choosing to protect their interests & not innovate, they are now more at risk. https://t.co/rV0EQVLYWn
I am looking to connect with both college career counselors (at any college) and/or high school college counselors as focus group research for a project of mine. If you know any that are open to chat please have them email me at dream@benchmark.com Thanks!
Hat-tip to @bariweiss and the entire team at @TheFP. Stuck to the original vision. Made a huge impact. Will make a bigger one in the future with the power of a larger platform. https://t.co/c6rzY0m4Ck
Chatting last night with leading AI model about noteworthy business practices over the past few years. Notice, I mention no company names nor any industries. Wanted to leverage AI to get "most intelligent" view of the situation. Here is the output: https://t.co/6xyFqlqGE9
Chatting tonight with leading AI model about noteworthy business practices over the past few years. Notice, I mention no company names nor any industries. Wanted to leverage AI to get "most intelligent" view of the situation. https://t.co/8C0HTxc8Uo
The truth is everyone knows these practices are questionable. But as @sapinker says, we haven't reached the point where "everyone knows that everyone knows."
Chatting tonight with leading AI model about noteworthy business practices over the past few years. Notice, I mention no company names nor any industries. Wanted to leverage AI to get "most intelligent" view of the situation. https://t.co/8C0HTxc8Uo
Besties are back! 🚨
-- $55B EA take private, largest LBO ever
-- Saudi's gaming strategy
-- Is PE cooked?
-- The AI rollup opportunity
-- SPAC 2.0
-- AI video apps: slop or future of content?
-- China's open source AI dominance
-- State AI regulation frenzy
(0:00) https://t.co/AtKLf7uEwM
If you work for any US AI company or invest in US AI - you really need to listen to the discussion about state-by-state AI regulation (45:04). I am not sure everyone is aware of how horrible this will be for US global competitiveness. We are our own worse enemy. https://t.co/F8W6smKOA0
Warning: Political Ideology May Impair Your Ability to Reason
“[I]f you’re not careful, ideology won’t just shape your opinions; it’ll hijack your ability to reason altogether.”
[Link below.] https://t.co/SXIz0fl0Fs
Everyone should read this. If you align “hard” with a political party you have turned off your brain and outsourced your thinking to others. Data is clear on both sides of aisle. Think for oneself. https://t.co/uNiZBJODY4
If you are interested in knowing in which industries AI is most successful in understanding (& which models), you should pay close attention to the APEX. More below. https://t.co/YxJmnvYHsZ
AI is moving security into new territory. 210% more valid AI vulnerabilities. Attackers are combining human creativity with AI speed.
Pressure test your AI with external researchers and agentic offsec testing.
@Hacker0x01 https://t.co/g2qXbQp5oJ
Ford CEO Jim Farley in new interview: "The competitive reality is that the Chinese are the 700-pound gorilla in the EV industry. There's no real competition from Tesla, GM, or Ford with what we've seen from China. It is completely dominating the EV landscape globally and more and https://t.co/OWyztSfq7u
Centralized systems are awesome until the day someone decides to seize your assets or kick you out. Decentralized systems like the (outdated) Swift or blockchains are the way. https://t.co/gNdIpXS4Rb
How Brazil's Pix digital payment system, adopted by 80%+ of citizens, became a target of the Trump administration, which says it unfairly undercuts US companies (@ana_ionova / New York Times)
https://t.co/UDSLCMtY2o
https://t.co/KtaOtClseo
US should be embarrassed we are a tech laggard to Brazil. PIX is what FedNow wants to be. India, China, UK and many other countries have had a system exactly like Pix for years and years. Study PIX. Way better than what we have in US. FPS in UK launched 17 years ago. Captured. https://t.co/YDKGOqLs9u
Perfectly rational strategy by Jensen, however: create demand for your chips, lock up the supply chain for years, crowd out fab capacity away from competitors, increase installed base and number of CUDA developers, and generate more profits to reinvest in R&D. https://t.co/bOqqE5ySo8
This isn't questionable accounting, it's straight-up fraud. This keeps happening, and VCs and founders don't call it out as such. https://t.co/rRXKUdC3pk
This is becoming more mainstream knowledge @bgurley
A long time ago you mentioned that folks from NY finance are more equipped to run a company because they have a level of financial literacy (im prolly paraphrasing)
Innovation is necessary for tech and you do need https://t.co/dACDRcvT2O
@insiderfed @bgurley @modestproposal1 Charter schools emerged in the US in 1991 with Minnesota's first law, aiming for innovation via autonomy from some regulations while publicly funded. By 2025, 45 states have them, serving ~7% of public school students, with debates on efficacy.
In New Orleans, post-Katrina
The most optimistic article you will read today. As predicted 50+ years ago, introducing competition to public schools will force the product to improve or disappear.
"At the Epicenter of School Choice, Arizona Public Schools Battle Existential Crisis"
https://t.co/ylk3nNxM8i https://t.co/gErXKQ6GGL
The purpose of insurance is to not use it.
I didn't use my homeowner insurance or car insurance last year. I'm happy about that. https://t.co/IEuilxqAM1
$TSLA
Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun said in his annual speech today.
"We bought three Tesla Model Ys for disassembly and research inside Xiaomi earlier this year. What a great vehicle."
"If you don't like Xiaomi YU7, you can choose Model Y." https://t.co/4O44Gew0tn
@alex_avoigt What matters is that the cycle time of the overall production process can get to ~10 seconds and there is a path to cars coming off the line every 5 seconds.
I posted about Tesla taking this new path based on physics first principles long ago.
Btw, anyone is welcome to copy
I hope everyone in Washington DC and leaders around the globe understand how bold and generous it is that Tesla open sources their patents. It’s a contribution to all of society. And unprecedented. https://t.co/wN5uK1vVl8
Barry Diller ran, built, and often revolutionized ABC, Paramount, and Fox all by the time he was 49, making more legendary movies and shows than I can list…
And then he really started making money.
He bought QVC, and then went on a tear, investing as an “internet opportunist” https://t.co/iCb08M7hr8
Significant shift by China: they will no longer claim they're a developing nation under WTO rules.
They are indeed still developing domestically, but it was getting a bit weird: like a baby giant asking for the kids' discount at a buffet when he's bigger than all the grownups 😅 https://t.co/ScRCHtoKug
Who hates (and fears) open source AI more than this? I give him massive credit for identifying his biggest threat. Also for candidly attacking it head on. Really hate the regulatory capture angle. Find it ugly & bad for society. But understand why someone would make it a https://t.co/zjVCrCw5nk
Good thing for every state legislature to read before we pass 30 different state level AI laws. Sen. Moynihan said legislators should have same rule as doctors “first do no harm.” https://t.co/IBKI7n0W0V
🎉Over the weekend, Texas became the 29th state to guarantee a Personal Finance course for all high school students.
Once all state laws are fully implemented, 76% of U.S. HS students will take a standalone Personal Finance course before graduating.
More: https://t.co/rSvsw7BIRL https://t.co/XgMyFOjd8s
Trying something new and putting our entire ACQ2 episode with @tobi here on X.
We talk: how Tobi "interviews" each new AI model, why he hates consensus, surviving the 2021 stock run-up and pop, how video games have been a parenting hack, and founder-led vs. managerial co's. https://t.co/7MkBrd0lVM
@bgurley This would be a perfect addition for @coinbase to go with their quasi-bank status.
They already have deposits, cards, and now lending. Add in owning the new payment rails and they could unseat JPMC.
@jmillspatrick @coinbase Agree. Most financial institutions make it VERY HARD to remove money from your account. But the account you can rely most on is the one where you can house the assets AND do what you need to do (including moving money out). Very few see that.
@bgurley You may have ran out of room, but $PYPL in addition to several of the above in the poll.
Though I will say outside of cross border payments, the cost savings isn't that compelling for domestic payments. The argument for stablecoin there is more on efficiency (instant
Now seems highly probable that a new payment alternative emerges in the US (replacing credit/debit cards) on top of stablecoin rails. Just too damn efficient & cheap. Good riddance as they say! Who do you think is most likely to emerge as the new consumer payment app leader?
Waymo is coming to SFO! The airport has approved a pilot permit to begin autonomous rides. This rollout will happen in phases—and we’ll keep you updated every step of the way until anyone can request a @Waymo ride right from @flySFO. https://t.co/FiDovEOw4Y
@DanielLurie @Waymo @flySFO Do they have to wait in a queue like the humans do? Or do robots get to cut the line? Serious question. Uber was way better without queue.
This is a super important post from @MelMitchell1 at @sfiscience on what’s real and what’s not in AI proclamations. Lots of noise in the system. https://t.co/k4QMNz4Qlp
This is a super important post from @MelMitchell1 at @sfiscience on what’s real and what’s not in AI proclamations. Lots of noise in the system. https://t.co/tysbk7XBlK
If $NVDA traded at the same valuation as $TSLA on a free cash flow multiple, the market cap would be $46 trillion.
$TSLA is the biggest bubble in history.
@GS_CapSF If you study equity valuation theory, most models (such as a DCF) include the idea of “optionality”. This represent the probability or odds that a company might be successful in new endeavors. No one ranks higher on that dimension than @elonmusk. Not even close.
@bgurley Broad question. Accounting like personal tax, or GAAP corporate? Or something in between. I'm founder of @Trullion (GAAP automation, series B+) and also curated the Modern Accounting group on X. Can point you a few places
I said I wanted to fix healthcare in the USA. That’s where I’m spending my money.
Some people think helping Americans get out of this healthcare mess we are in is important. In fact I think it’s the most important issue Americans face.
Some don’t. They want to talk about https://t.co/v67AtB6off
“over lunch, this individual told me, you know, every founder and every VC in China studies the West at a nauseating level. So they listen to all the podcasts.”
“And he says even beyond that, their cost, their quality of vehicles is far superior to what I see in the West. We are in a global competition with China, and it's not just EVs.”
“I came up with a little analogy for people. I'll try and do it quickly, but imagine you had two communities. They're both farming communities and let's say there's 10 to 20 farms in each.”
“I don't know who would force them, but they're forced to share all their best practices from that week with everybody and everyone does it and everyone shares their best practice.”
“The reason I think that's an interesting data point when you think about The US and, you know, are several big tech companies that seem to be not on the bleeding edge of AI.”
“I still think it's particularly interesting that Google has to compete with OpenAI because OpenAI is gonna lose 7,000,000,000 this year and Google won't. Like they would never allow themselves to do that.”
“I continue to believe that OpenAI's most likely chance to long term success comes from switching cost and lock in more than it will come from staying on the edge of the of the model race? Because I think”
“one of the reasons I think it expands is people come to understand all the things it can do and all the kinds of prompts, you know, another one is like, like I used to do a Google search, go to a webpage, find a number, and then put that into a formula and multiply it on a calculator.”
“I used to do a Google search, go to a webpage, find a number, and then put that into a formula and multiply it on a calculator. It can just do all that.”
“when will AI reach 75% of total US market cap, which I think is incredibly provocative how you compare that to industrials and transport because everybody's saying it's so big already it can't get any bigger.”
“Said another way, technology, when we got started, Thomas, was 5% of global GDP. Today is 15% of global GDP. And when we're sitting here in ten years, I think you're saying confidently,”
“Meta has done this interesting structured deal, they're buying 49% of the company, they're paying a $30,000,000,000 valuation so they're paying effectively 15,000,000,000, they're avoiding regulatory scrutiny, the CEO of scale is going to help lead efforts at Meta.”
“It needs to be a public company. The idea that we're going to have trillion dollar companies and the only people who get to participate are the people sitting around this table, right?”
“The idea that we're going to have trillion dollar companies and the only people who get to participate are the people sitting around this table, right? I just think is unhealthy for our capital markets.”
“Google has 187,000 employees, OpenAI 2,700. We're not going to be a company of 20,000 employees. He didn't say we're not going be a company of 187,000 employees, Right?”
“Today, many of the branded firms, I think, have moved from maybe 500,000,000 commitment every three or four years to 5,000,000,000. So 10x. And they're participating very actively in what we would call late stage.”
“So these are a thousand private companies that have raised money over a billion dollars. And Chad GBD told me it was $12.50. NBCA says 900. Let's just say it's near a thousand.”
“No one has an incentive to get the marks right. For those that don't know this world, private investing, both on the PE side and the VC side is this weird world where the GPs, the people responsible for the investments, report the price to the LPs. They get to pick it.”
“No one has an incentive to get the marks right. For those that don't know this world, private investing, both on the PE side and the VC side is this weird world where the GPs, the people responsible for the investments, report the price to the LPs.”
“I believe a part of it I've been very passionate about is the IPO discount that the banks force upon the market, especially the well known high branded ones.”
“I think post LLM, the world believes, and I think this is my fifth point or something, but the world believes AI is the biggest platform shift in anyone's lifetime.”
“I think OpenAI said they're gonna be 7,000,000,000 in a year. That's not your grandfather's startup business or your grandfather's venture capital. That's a radically different world.”
“He said, the head of the world's largest sovereign wealth fund said the clock is ticking for private equity and join the chorus of investors who've grown worried about the industry's valuation practices.”
“what I really uncovered the detail on is that in these industries where they wanna succeed, they actually make sure that there are 500 competitors or a thousand competitors.”
“in these industries where they wanna succeed, they actually make sure that there are 500 competitors or a thousand competitors. And then they let the market whittle down to what the best one is.”
“And it's actually in China right now is, I think being priced at like $130 a car, this solid state MEMS LiDAR, whereas the Waymo LiDAR is like $5,000 a car.”
“And I, you know, I think the data suggest in this this piece of research would suggest that's why they've been so successful in EVs where there were over 500 EV startups,”
“The the Chinese government may not consider that part of the objective function of what a win is. And in the past three weeks, we saw BYD take prices down 30%.”
“the Chinese government may not consider that part of the objective function of what a win is. And in the past three weeks, we saw BYD take prices down 30%.”
“I think it's actually the highest profile companies that are at risk because they're the ones that, you know, an activist judge is gonna wanna make a a exception out of.”
“The senator that you're talking about said on on on when he was giving this talk that that these two companies are now both over 80% owned outside The US.”
“in Delaware, seven times or higher is 23 times more likely than in a federal court. And 10 times or higher is 57 times or higher than in a federal court.”
“this will be the fourth deep pocket funded model in China that are all open source. And when you consider I mean, this is a competitive dynamic, right, that leads to that.”
“first of all, they've only operated on US models. They're a wrapper company. They don't have a foundational model and and they've only operated on top of US models.”
“They were able to do that because they figured out a way to separate the parameters and work on things with smaller parameter counts faster, which no one else had done before.”
“And so, like, forty eight hours after r one was posted, they had 500 variants on Hugging Face. And today I pinged them this morning before we started, they're up to 1,300.”
“forty eight hours after r one was posted, they had 500 variants on Hugging Face. And today I pinged them this morning before we started, they're up to 1,300.”
“If you look at all of the major projects like Linux or MySQL, and most of these open source projects have a website and you can see who the leading donors are.”
“Detroit is not globally competitive anymore. And putting tariffs on BYD's cars is not gonna make Detroit more competitive. It's gonna make them less competitive and they're gonna fall further behind.”
“So you're an NVIDIA bull think you're protecting NVIDIA by exposing DeepSeek, and you may end up with sanctions that end up hurting NVIDIA's revenues.”
“People are telling me it's gonna be a prop co op co structure, which I didn't even know it was twenty four hours ago, but it's it's like a one person owns the property.”
“They're potentially rolling in assets from Oracle that are in Abilene. There's a company called Crusoe that's been involved in in the the build of that.”
“And this this I have three observations if all those things are true. One, I'm curious why SoftBank would wanna be part of a private credit pool. It's not what they've typically done.”
“So this company already had probably the most complex cap structure of any company like it that we've ever known, and they're gonna be putting one more complex piece on top.”
“The deal between Microsoft and OpenAI, as it's been reported, once again, I've never seen it. Sounds like one of the more complex deals of all time. They have profit rights up to, like, $90,000,000,000.”
“And so they also we don't know. You know, it it sounds like OpenEye wants them to convert to equity, and we have no idea whether they're willing to do that or not.”
“They're trading equity for server capacity. And so those companies are running on a day to day basis with a high COGS, but they don't know it because they're not paying cash for it.”
“And my suspicion, having lived in the venture industry for twenty five years, is your brain gets warped in that environment. Like, you don't think about, oh, shit.”
“There's been a trend in venture recently. Recently. I I thought thought it it was was the the zero zero interest interest rate rate thing that caused it, but it's sustaining beyond that.”
“Many of the peers of Benchmark have taken their fund size up 10 x. So their their assets under management and they've entered they've declared themselves multi stage.”
“There's over a thousand private unicorns. Some people estimate that the average growth rate, which we should talk about because it ties into unit economics and pragmatism, is below 10%.”
“It's it's it's just worse as it's ever been, where because you have these monolithic late stage players who believe in power laws, believe in network effects,”
“one of the things they're doing is they're supporting massive founder liquidity and employee liquidity. And so that's happening at Stripe, that's happening.”
“I would make the argument that every company in Delaware has to move to a different domicile because they could be sued in a future derivative lawsuit for the risk they've taken by staying”
“Dario and Sam talk in these high level platitudes about how this stuff's gonna cure cancer and we're all gonna not have to work anymore. And Zuck was down in the weeds in the meet.”
“People talk about the military industrial complex. We may have created a health care industrial complex that really can't stop maximizing profitability and not focus necessarily on the lowest cost, best, most preventative process.”
“And instead of a $250 marginal cost to implement a rural broadband, we're gonna get bulldozers out and drop fiber lines to a ranch in the middle of nowhere.”
“I think this anti Chinese mentality is a little nuts because if you look at low cost EVs, if you look at their subway stations, if you look at, they're leading us in many areas.”
“Dario and Sam had, prior to this moment, or at least the way I heard them, made it sound like they were just gonna build the next biggest thing and get the same amount of gain. They had left that impression.”
“When all of the venture backed companies got started on the Internet, they were all on Oracle and Sun. And five years later, they weren't on Oracle or Sun.”
“while we are, like removing advanced STEM courses in California, the number of graduates in China's university system that are STEM is 35%, and that number is below 10 in The US.”
“The the later stage investors that wrote this compounding ratchet term actually want the IPO to be as low as possible because they'll they'll get more shares.”
“And there's another fact that you should know in North America, which is Visa and Mastercard have the two highest operating margin percentages in our markets total. Like, they're over 60%, and something's not right.”
“And there's another fact that you should know in North America, which is Visa and Mastercard have the two highest operating margin percentages in our markets total.”
“They released several integrations already in the initial pack, with good GitHub and Slack and a few others so that you can start having your agents interact with these things.”
“based on what I've heard and seen and read and listened to on podcast, Anthropic and their investors like Eric Schmidt have been some of the people that have been encouraging, you know, more and more AI oversight and AI regulation”
“Now it turns out that both Francis Collins and doctor Fauci, Collins in '2 different emails and Fauci in his book called the lab leak theory a conspiracy theory.”
“there was a argument being made by, you know, OpenAI and Anthropic that, oh, you're just gonna see the next number drop and the next number's gonna be way better than the last number.”
“The first thing that comes to my mind, and once again, I'm not asking you to agree with this, it's just like what's in my head, is that this is not the expectation that Sam and Dario had twelve months ago.”
“One, the NVIDIA differentiation as we've talked about is greatest at the largest cluster size. So if pre training, once again, I only equate this to LLMs, you know, I don't think of FSD problem.”
“if the world shifts to inference sooner or faster, and if the path of differentiation for the language model companies becomes more inference based than pre training based, what does that mean for the hardware systems that people are using?”
“The methodology that I'm gonna assume was Elon's idea is basically to shine a flashlight on the ideocracy that exists. And, you know, transparency can be a hell of a disinfectant.”
“one of the things that's already come up is I think two of the largest departments in the country have failed audits for like three to five of the past years.”
“to And fund without picking on anybody, there are numerous examples from previous waves of even the founders, like not being in the building or not showing up. So that can definitely happen.”
“I said to him, I want to say, congratulations, man, that's incredible. He goes, well, it's in a $4,000,000,000 fund. Wow. Wow. You know? Yeah. So, That's you have an incredible outcome.”
“Another thing that came out this morning that I was kind of waiting on as a proof point, because it didn't make sense to me that it hadn't happened yet, TSMC said they're gonna do across the board 20 price increase.”
“Because someone is spending marketing dollars to take that customer to their website and run the transaction with the hopes that they'll come directly back to that website.”
“it appears to me that NVIDIA's competitive advantage is strongest where the size of the system is largest, which is another way of saying what Renee said. It's flipping it on its head.”
“That's when the networking piece thrives. That's where NVLink thrives. That's where CUDA really comes alive in the biggest systems that are out there.”
“Like like like if if the biggest systems are where the biggest competitive advantage is, you need as many of these big system companies as you can possibly have.”
“But the truth is you've been spending the past decade building the full stack from the GPU to the CPU to the networking, and especially the software and libraries that enable applications to run on NVIDIA.”
“I think analysts always focus on the current architectural bet. But I think one of the biggest takeaways from this conversation is that we're thinking about the entire ecosystem and many years out.”
“It's not such that you're only dependent on a world where there's a 500,000 or a million GPU cluster. It's by the time there's distributed training, you'll have written the software to enable that.”
“in order to get linear improvement, you have to do maybe 10X the amount of processing. And this is all inference. So what are the implications of that?”
“I think you're gonna, until this change, I think you're gonna have very few companies that are considered to be doing well that aren't asked by the industry to raise $500,000,000 or more.”
“does overfeeding these companies with cash lead to non optimal execution? And you and I were deeply involved in the Uber situation, but you know, when you start losing a billion dollars a year, or even I would say $20,000,000 a month, you're very far away from profitability. And we talk a lot about focus and constraints”
“if you're spending 20,000,000 a month, you're burning $240,000,000 a year. You know, if these companies in AI are 50% gross margin or whatever, you got to get revenue to twice that, you know, you're right at that 500,000,000 run rate before you could think about being profitable.”
“The plants in China that are the equivalent level three fission plants right now are coming on board at 2,500,000,000 per gigawatt. Right. So 13 to 2.5.”
“Right. That's a shocking Delta. Yes. And one of, I would say the single most surprising thing to me of all the discussions I've had in the past two weeks with everyone that's in this industry is how few people are shocked by it.”
“South Korea is a democracy, a friend of The United they're at the same delivered price point as And they're doing it at scale and they're starting to export their technology.”
“And so those costs are extremely high. The second thing is litigation. So multiple special interest groups, particularly environmental groups will sue to stop any development whatsoever.”
“I think this anti Chinese mentality is a little nuts because if you look at low cost EVs, if you look at their subway stations, if you look at, they're leading us in many areas.”
“the regulatory commission here in The U. S. Is fee based and all the people that are playing in this market, I've talked to say you're probably 60,000,000 to first approval, just on fees”
“Well, he took all the regulation and lawsuits off the table. And so we have to recognize that one of the reasons we can't build infrastructure and the California high speed train thing is where it is, is because we've indoctrinated ourselves in red tape, both with regard to regulation and litigation.”
“And if you want to go build this next generation level three plant, I think you've got to rewrite the regulation from zero ground up, like make it thinner and tighter and two, I think we've gotten to the point where we got to say, this is so important, you can't sue these people.”
“Or for the SMR one by leveraging what's been done in the Navy, maybe getting these hyperscalers behind it. And maybe that's a mini version of a Manhattan project.”
“And now you've got people, you know, trying to project income statements and balance sheets of these companies and they're speculating about whether they might need to raise again or not.”
“this crazy idea to tax unrealized capital gains and how that in and of itself is not only almost impossible to implement, but also would undermine the very incentive that entrepreneurs have to go create businesses.”
“If you're a closed model company, the question first is, okay, I'm going to have to compete and keep up with this frontier level competition. That's hard enough. It takes a lot of resources.”
“Remember, Meta had allocated $20,000,000,000 a year to Reality Labs. And there was a report last week that they may, you know, tighten their belt on Reality Labs”
“LLMs are great at text, they're horrible at numbers. And even Kevin Scott on a podcast he did ironically with Sequoia, that's over this past week, he made that point.”
“Is LLM scaling exponential, linear, or will it diminish? And in addition to the MIT professor, I mean, there are a number of people that have been around these problems for a long time who that the LLM models will have diminishing return on spend.”
“There's no way that's a win for venture capitalists. Like, I'm sure venture capitalists try and spin it, and we heard some spin around inflection, but, you know, I, it's just not possible.”
“I mean, we need to be realistic. Like if you're a venture capitalist and every one of your deals turned into one of these weird human acqui hires with a licensed deal back, you're not going to generate a return for your portfolio. Like, it's best case, you're this company had raised $415,000,000”
“if you're a venture capitalist and every one of your deals turned into one of these weird human acqui hires with a licensed deal back, you're not going to generate a return for your portfolio.”
“over 90% of NIH grants go towards things that are potentially monetizable, so either a product or a drug, and that the NIH is less interested in funding things that might be just preventative behavior, like behavioral things, like what you eat or your diet or things that don't lead to monetization.”
“And we may have created a people talk about the military industrial complex, we may have created a healthcare industrial complex that really can't stop maximizing profitability and different ways of making money not focus necessarily on the lowest cost, best, most preventative process.”
“The other mag six are responsible for 5%. And then the other 493 companies in the S and P 500 are responsible for 4% of the 14% year to date returns.”
“Year to date, I think 200 deals, 22,000,000,000 of investment, average valuation, wait for it, $1,000,000,000. Right? Average round size, 120,000,000.”
“I don't like the idea that you could have a company that could theoretically go to a trillion dollars in enterprise value, could theoretically develop AGI, and a retail investor never has a shot to invest in that company. I just don't think that's good for the structure of our markets.”
“Scott is building Satya referenced him while on stage. As, you know, copilot is building effectively auto complete, allowing engineers to become more productive. You know, cognition is building engineers.”
“And I asked Scott, I said, how many employees do you have? Because I think he has tens of thousands of enterprise customers already. And he said, 18.”
“They said it was the first time they ever heard him say, and I gotta solve the problem for everybody in this room, how I get you more talented workers.”
“And he proposed something apparently at the roundtable. He said, anybody who comes here for a four year education completes their degree in The United States, we're gonna give them a green card.”
“There are four companies in the coding co pilot space that are not named Microsoft that have raised over $200,000,000 each. And we're just these companies are all of a year and a half old.”
“I look at someone posted the just the investments Sequoia has made in Elon's companies, and they were rounds that were in the, you know, $506,100,000,000 dollar range, and there were three or four of them. And once again, just not not the historic venture capital model.”
“I think 8% of CIOs have a budget increase over 10%. So 92% don't. So think fixed, you know, near fixed budget. But 85% of them say they're aggressively increasing their spend on AI.”
“if you pull up and say there's no open source here and you leave open source there, guess where it's going to be the most innovative, where where you're going to have the most entrepreneurs, where you're going to have the most innovation. It's gonna be over there,”
“The thing I would ask these these people is why do they have confidence that Washington would be good at regulating something this nascent? Like, why would they be effective?”
“If I defraud you with AI, it's still illegal as it would have been if I'd have done it with a phishing scam before AI. And so there why do we need new laws?”
“I think it'd just be a horrible step for the venture industry for this to be the first move when any new wave comes along is for people to run and become friends with the government and try and lock in their winners.”
“It's like 20x differential. And when I talk to our entrepreneurs that are using these models, they might design with the cutting edge model, but they all back off to the affordable models”
“The National Science Foundation is nine down from 10. So 49, you're going to start the AI foundation or federation or whatever it is, institute at 32,000,000,000 a year.”
“They had the the the kind of detour into home buying or iBuying, which is refreshing. They had exited by the time I came back. So, yeah. So there's a lot going on.”
“Was that document created to aid the consumer in any way whatsoever? Was that the objective function of the way that document was created? Do you have”
“Yeah. I say hell no. No. No. Like, that document was created to protect the realtor and that NAR created it. And no consumer wants to initial seven times on every page”
“Like the title area is like the one use where blockchain might actually make sense. Like, that and Bitcoin are like the only two I could possibly think of.”
“I think, Perplexity claiming they're going to have an ad portion and OpenAI hinting at that, at least for the time being, I think the $20 concept is gone.”
“Dario and Sam talk in these high level platitudes about how this stuff's gonna cure cancer and we're all gonna not have to work anymore. And Zuck was down in the weeds in the meet.”
“But then he said, if you do that, we're going to steamroll you and you need to bet on us being successful. Which would mean dumping your data and trusting OpenAI more fully.”
“Then it's a competitive dynamic. Like once your company raises, you know, 200,000,000, 1,000,000,000, if you're in that market, you raise it too. And it does create chaos.”
“It's already evolved to a point that's very similar to where Uber, Lyft and DoorDash ended up, where there's just so much money moving around that I really don't even think about it as a startup market anymore.”
“If you wanted to be accurate, non consensus in a way around these, part of it ties into the big guys being interested in what they're doing with their own balance sheet to reinforce this, which I consider to be remarkably dangerous and unhealthy.”
“One quick thing, I do think that the initial versions of these models are structurally flawed around providing personal memory and allowing someone to become dependent on one of these things.”
“I do think that the initial versions of these models are structurally flawed around providing personal memory and allowing someone to become dependent on one of these things.”
“When I push entrepreneurs to think about this and it gets to your increasing marginal utility, but I just say, as you penetrate a supplier base, one side of a marketplace, whatever, is the value proposition to the other side going up? And ideally, it would be going up exponentially, which is super hard.”
“When I push entrepreneurs to think about this and it gets to your increasing marginal utility, but I just say, as you penetrate a supplier base, one side of a marketplace, whatever, is the value proposition to the other side going up?”
“It's arguable there are levels of increasing returns. Like, you could come up with some kind of scale or index because some of them are more linear and some of them can go exponential.”
“the way that it worked for them and the way that the marginal customer ends up with more utility is if the threats are shared across a network, then if you belong to the biggest network, then you get the shared learning of everyone in that network, which lowers your threat exposure.”
“I don't know that seventeen years makes any sense whatsoever and why that industry gets protected down to a very minute detail of innovation, whereas it's very hard to have a software patent.”
“There's a lot of talk about Boeing these days and a lack of competition and coziness with regulators. And it's a really big problem in the industries that have been around the longest.”
“This is where I think China has a massive advantage. They could just clear the decks for good for every project going forward. Whereas we're now making exceptions maybe with the TSMC plant in Arizona.”
“You'd have to rewrite the standard GPLP agreement, I think. I'll spend more time thinking about that later, but it is structurally flawed, I think, from a cyclicality standpoint.”
“the number of public companies has shrunk dramatically. And Michael's written about this, but we've gone, I think, almost half. Is that right, Michael?”
“I personally don't think it's healthy because a minute that happens and everyone realizes that there's less companies going public and companies staying private longer, then the SEC, I think in a well intentioned way goes, oh my god. The average investor's missing out on this asset class.”
“The big banks have no interest in a small IPO. Years ago, there were these banks called the four horsemen, which were banks that just specialized in small IPOs,”
“Years ago, there were these banks called the four horsemen, which were banks that just specialized in small IPOs, and Silicon Valley leveraged them to the hilt.”
“I said to Michael one time, what if there were multiple players in an increasing returns game and they knew what the outcome was gonna look like? How would it affect their behavior?”
“100,000,000 a year? 200,000,000 a year? There's no way that's high quality capital allocation from my point of view. There's no chance. But maybe they don't have the alternative.”
“200,000,000 a year? There's no way that's high quality capital allocation from my point of view. There's no chance. But maybe they don't have the alternative.”
“Like like, you're just fooling yourself. Right? In fact, like, because of a a lack of liquidity premium, you're probably worth less than that public company.”
“there are enough breadcrumbs in the world today that people are making forward bets that the need for more training and the need for more inference, there's sufficient evidence to cause them to put real money up against this.”
“Here's a technology much like supersonic aviation, where scare tactics literally shut down all of the innovation in massive industries that would have inured to our national strategic advantage, the environmental advantage.”
“They have over 300 plants currently either being built or in development. We have zero, zero plants being built, I think 13 plants that are proposed, according to this data that we have here.”
“Microsoft alone's opening opening a new data center globally every three days. These power hungry operations will together consume more than 480 terawatts hours of electricity or almost a tenth of US demand.”
“This particular investor in this very large public Internet company felt that if they move to zero based RSUs from options, and this gets into a technical detail around Black Shoals, that, you know, there's an argument from Black Shoals that a single RSU is worth about two and a half or three options.”
“And here's where we get into questions of alignment with shareholders, because you could theoretically have a management team that leads a company, you know, over a year to a 20% decline and pick up 80% of the value of their equity award.”
“you could theoretically have a management team that leads a company, you know, over a year to a 20% decline and pick up 80% of the value of their equity award.”
“Netflix today has a remarkably unique compensation structure. No one does anything like them. But today, if you're an employee, you get to choose either options or cash.”
“And the per promiscuity Mhmm. Is unbelievably high. Another way of saying that, one one of the things that leads to high valuation multiples is switching cost.”
“if you were to rate these LLMs on their switching cost with zero maybe being none and a 100 being perfect, I'd say they're two. Yes. Like, it's remarkably low.”
“What we learned this week is that they've completely tossed all of that out and gone with a neural network model where they're uploading videos from their best drivers.”
“Here here's here's someone who's who's Tesla uploaded a 115 gigabyte in a month. Right? And so these are massive numbers. And the infrastructure five years ago, your car couldn't have done this.”
“And their cars cost 150,000. So if they wanted to have like, the math just doesn't work. You can't build the footprint. You know? And so who could? I don't know.”
“They're putting people they're literally inserting people onto the staffs of the different congressmen and senators to try and influence the outcome here.”
“One one data point you you left out, which came up recently, is the lawyers that that pursued this case are asking for 5 or $6,000,000,000 in payment.”
“I would make the argument that every company in Delaware has to move to a different domicile because they could be sued in a future derivative lawsuit for the risk they've taken by staying in Delaware.”
“If you talk to the people that are at the tops of these firms and you say, hey, why can't this thing remember everything I want? And they go, oh, that's a hard problem.”
“I start relying on one of these things as my memory and I don't have a way to pull that out and jump to something else, I'm stuck. Yes. Like I am hooked, locked, stuck.”
“Morris makes the point that the reason Taiwan is competitive has to do with the labor model that exists there and the type of work people are willing to do and your ability to retain them. And he walks through his history of hiring in Texas and other parts of”
“Like I, you know, I'm not- Provocative. Like, yeah, it's provocative because it says that if America is really worried about the concentration in Taiwan, they should probably be trying to help build semiconductor plants in Mexico or Vietnam or that kind of thing versus bringing them here”
“I've always said that Silicon Valley has the crudest kind of least intelligent view of valuation. They always rush to price to revenue because it's easy and because quite frankly, it's easier to be optimistic.”
“In addition to everything I brought up, because their core business model is to throw their customers in a cage match, they don't they don't have the culture internally to partner in a friendly win win way.”
“I saw this inner great interview once with Spielberg when he was talking about Jaws. And he said, you know, I didn't show the shark until like 75% of the way through this thing.”
“I do think this memory issue is a big, big deal, at least on the consumer side. So none of the major contenders today can remember who you are because it would require them.”
“And of course that makes no sense economically. So it's actually a huge structural problem. There are complaints, you know, in Reddit about Character AI on this front.”
“Here's another here's a way to really drill in on that, you know, going back to Ultra Hosting Company. Let's assume for the sake of this discussion that the service being provided is a commodity.”
“And so all of a sudden, like, you know, you've got definitive proof that the way you would win the war and and and you get another benefit, you get revenue, you get market share.”
“This concept was done inside of Google as an open source concept, immediately copied by all the other players. So OpenAI doesn't exist today if that's patented and controlled.”
“OpenAI doesn't exist today if that's patented and controlled. There's it just doesn't, which is another irony around this open source argument because they've been infringed from massively from a major but the idea of being shared, and this is also why I'm such a massive open source proponent”
“What I'm hearing internally from our portfolio is this specifically the ilama too, Sunny sent me another one today, are really starting to gain market share amongst the startups that are using these tools.”
“The people that are leading the charge calling for the regulation and calling and some of them raising this question of whether open source should be allowed are the incumbents.”
“And I believe they intentionally moved the governing body outside The US because they were afraid of the restrictions The US was putting on semiconductor technology.”
“And so I think governments need to be particularly careful that if they take a first step move here, they're going to put their own society in a worse place and their own entrepreneurism in a worse place than others around the globe.”
“They had put a bill on Governor Rindle's desk, proposal drafted by lobbyists for the telecommunications companies. This isn't what I learned on Schoolhouse Rock.”
“In 1996, the top four had 48 market share. Four, five years later, after this heralded legislation, they're up to 85%. That didn't work. Let's check-in on the second one. Were they promoting innovation?”
“As a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit. I'd like to say regulation is the friend of the incumbent.”
“They came up with a brilliant idea. I have to assume she helped encourage this. Doctors would receive $44,000 each if they bought software. $38,000,000,000.”
“I have to assume she helped encourage this. Doctors would receive $44,000 each if they bought software. $38,000,000,000. This is true. You can look it up.”
“Doctors would receive $44,000 each if they bought software. $38,000,000,000. This is true. You can look it up. I'm not making it up. $44,000, give it to a doctor, implement some software.”
“But they got the Department of Justice to enforce people that didn't have the feature set that were getting the payments, and you had three record fines, 155,000,000, 57,000,000, 145,000,000 against the lesser competitors of Epic. Unreal.”
“Germany leaned heavily into rapid tests. They got their scientists together, and they evaluated a 122 different vendors and validated 96 of them. Here they are on the right, 96 different vendors that they ok'd.”
“Here they are on the right, 96 different vendors that they ok'd. And as a result, in the German market, you could buy five tests for $3.75 or €75 cents a test.”
“Yesterday, just for kicks kinda, I went online. This is Walgreens and CVS antigen test. There's seven tests. They're all exactly $23.99. What is that? That's not a marketplace. That's not open competition.”
“Yesterday, just for kicks kinda, I went online. This is Walgreens and CVS antigen test. There's seven tests. They're all exactly $23.99. What is that? That's not a marketplace.”
“And so I'd love to see more discussion about that. I think it really ask a a very important question about how much stock actually needs to be given away to make these companies success.”
“Netflix, they've let executives make a decision between cash and stock, and a lot of them have taken cash. And I personally think management is a lot more, thoughtful about cash expenditures,”
“I personally think management is a lot more, thoughtful about cash expenditures, and I think they think about this SBC as if it's free almost. Mhmm. But I don't think shareholders think that way.”
“Yeah. Look, I've lived through three different bubbles and bursts in this industry, and unfortunately, it's highly cyclical. And when you and and it tends to go up slowly, and it tends to crash immediately.”
“I've lived through three different bubbles and bursts in this industry, and unfortunately, it's highly cyclical. And when you and and it tends to go up slowly, and it tends to crash immediately.”
“it's very difficult because these private company capitalization charts have stacks and stacks of liquidation preference, and it's when you have that acute of a correction, it's very hard to make this transition.”
“these private company capitalization charts have stacks and stacks of liquidation preference, and it's when you have that acute of a correction, it's very hard to make this transition.”
“these this valuation disparity that they just talked about is a real issue, and it takes a while for people to come around. Like, they've been told, you're worth this.”
“But those because those companies grew up in the ninety nine, twenty twenty one timeframe where you could raise money at excessive valuation, their cap charts are very complex and rigid.”
“a lot of people just say they opt out and say no this is too hard, I'm not going to go in there and negotiate with five different constituencies on how to do this.”
“I went and talked to some LPs that have been in the business for a very long period of time and a vast majority of the reason Venture outperforms other asset classes has to do with these tiny windows when you have a super frothing market.”
“And if you don't, if you aren't around for that part, you know, you strip those years out a forty year assessment, it's actually not that interesting an asset class,”
“And if you don't, if you aren't around for that part, you know, you strip those years out a forty year assessment, it's actually not that interesting an asset class, which highlights the need for venture funds to get liquidity at the peak.”
“Yes, right when we are at the peak is when people get the most brazen, the most confident and they start talking about how we're going to hold forever.”
“So when things boom, everyone starts a venture firm. Right? And in this past boom, in addition to everyone starting a venture firm, every venture firm started multiple venture firms and growth firms, and all that money gets piled up and you're slowly taking on risk and you don't realize it.”
“And in this past boom, in addition to everyone starting a venture firm, every venture firm started multiple venture firms and growth firms, and all that money gets piled up and you're slowly taking on risk and you don't realize it. It's like the roller coaster goes, nink, nink, nink, nink, nink.”
“And maybe FTX is the perfect pinnacle of this past one where a bunch of legendary investors just ignored risk. You know, and they wouldn't have done that in 2009.”
“So on March 8, the stock was trading at $260 a share. So there are people that want to put this on risk taking in Silicon Valley, but Wall Street got it wrong too.”
“Every venture capitalist, when they open their mouth in front of a microphone, which I guess I'm doing right now, is talking to the entrepreneur they haven't met yet.”
“The problem is that's the exact same type of behavior that leads to the FTX situation because you take yourself out of a governance role completely because you just become the founder cheerleader.”
“Unfortunately, and this ties into the cyclicality thing, there's a saying which is the best way to protect yourself against the downside is to enjoy every last bit of the upside.”
“I mean, the markets have a way of separating, very risk seeking individuals from their capital. It may not happen overnight, but it always happens eventually. Like there's no easy money.”
“I love the FTX story, not because I wanna pick on anybody, but to make the decision to give money to somebody that has no board and that has a side business that's commingled, who tells you it's not commingled, it turns out it was commingled. Like, what are you doing?”
“I love the FTX story, not because I wanna pick on anybody, but to make the decision to give money to somebody that has no board and that has a side business that's commingled, who tells you it's not commingled, it turns out it was commingled.”
“In the past five years, there have been objective functions injected into startups that aren't solely how well is the company doing or how well is the company stock doing.”
“He sold 10,000,000 books. I got a list here. He got 2,000,000 email subs, over a thousand blog posts, 7,000,000 followers on social media, and his podcast is about to pass a billion downloads.”
“it's a question of can you increase your optionality for fortune or luck or whatever anyone else says by taking meetings that may seem superfluous or uncertain or that then lead to these big outcomes?”
“And email and podcasting are two content forms where there's no evil overlord that control. They're they're both these highly distributed things just by the way they're technically implemented.”
“email and podcasting are two content forms where there's no evil overlord that control. They're they're both these highly distributed things just by the way they're technically implemented.”
“I've wondered over the years if LinkedIn hadn't polluted their InMail and made it monetize and they had done what Twitter did, how much of the most powerful conversations in the world would”
“I'd like to highlight, and I always do, the two best venture capitalists in the world at the time, John Doerr and Mike Maritz, kinda locked hands and said yes.”
“People weren't really doing, like, cost of customer acquisition back then, but I think it was, like, 70¢ a name or something like that of the most influential people in the entire tech industry.”
“It turned out just by happenstance that Dell stood out like a sore thumb with ridiculously high ROIC numbers versus the rest of the industry. Like, night and day, like, 20 to one.”
“Like, night and day, like, 20 to one. Wasn't even close. And in fact, it was so ridiculous. Like, the first time I showed him, he didn't Michael didn't believe it was true.”
“Then I'm not the only one, there's other VC's getting, this is normal dude. Like that was a fantasy you were in and you need to forget it fast, but you can't.”
“So this gets into some of the earlier stuff we talked about just about how deep you go on investing history and understanding But if there is a scale of financial sophistication between one and ten, and you would say a really smart person in New York is a eight and a half.”
“Wall Street's on my side on this one. I think if they shut down the VR effort, not only will the profitability would soar because they're spending real money, like 5 to 10,000,000,000 a”
“of my favorite examples, the Obama administration came up with this program where they spent $44,000,000,000 paying doctors to implement EHR systems.”
“So you have low barriers to entry, but you have very high barriers to exit. And so felt that it was just systematically set up to rise and crash, rise and crash.”
“And one thing that I realized coming out of that is that it doesn't happen like a sine curve, which is what we all imagine when we think of a cyclical business.”
“And then risk off tends to be very abrupt and we've seen that here, right? This this cycle, risk on was from o nine. That's well said. To five months ago.”
“And so what really values companies, you know, it's typically a discounted cash flows. And so now all of a sudden, the buy side's asking SaaS companies about net dollar retention, about long term operating margin, about whether their free cash flow is greater or less than their net income, about SBC as a percentage of free cash”
“And so now all of a sudden, the buy side's asking SaaS companies about net dollar retention, about long term operating margin, about whether their free cash flow is greater or less than their net income, about SBC as a percentage of free cash”
“The window after the correction is the calmest, where there's least anxiety for me at least. Like, everything slows down, people talk rationally, people aren't doing silly things.”
“I think the company went from 0 to 70,000,000 in revenue in less than eighteen months. And so you had this vision and excitement about what was possible.”
“Personally, I've always found that simpler heuristics go viral faster than complex ones. And so when I equate what's happening in a Discord or a Twitter space with what's trying to be achieved by Meta.”
“if I had to place a bet on whether someone that had 500,000,000 users on a digital place platform where people are communicating and that they might add avatars or some digital thing that makes it more immersive versus someone that built the perfect digital three d avatar immersive system but doesn't have the users yet?”
“The creators were cashing out a 100,000,000 a year last time I had access to the number. So Philip gave the GMV, but they were taking out a 100,000,000.”
“And so if you build the right incentive structure around your tokenization, that could be a massive advantage to an on ramp, especially if you're able to get your currency to appreciate over time.”
“And that's why earlier in this conversation, one thing, if I went back on Second Life, I'd probably not stay with the fixed currency. I'd probably let it explode.”
“It's interesting to me. I've been spending a lot of time trying to go deeper on crypto, and I think there's a fascinating question about whether or not a token will have value if it doesn't have the ability to eventually rake a system that it's involved in. And one of the great examples out there is the Uniswap DAO”
“I think it's a fundamental question if that term weren't in the DAO or if instead it said the community will never rake a transaction, what would that do to the value of Uniswap?”
“And everything from my history of studying finance and economics would say that if you declared you'd never rake the system governance token, simply the right to kind of control a group or community would be worth a fraction, a small fraction of what an economic token would be.”
“Yes. But I think there's an equally interesting counterpoint to that, that Solana might be cheaper than Ethereum, but then the son of Solana might make Solana equally uninteresting.”
“And that's why someone said to me the other day, if Solana eats ETH, then all of these tokens are worth far less than we imagined because there's just a race to the bottom.”
“There's a modern way to do it. You can actually use supply and demand to determine price and allocation. And that's what the direct listing does. That's how every bond is priced.”
“Find me any professor, any finance professor. We're a company that's got the possibility of going public, so it's highly legitimate. Should have a 57 cost of capital.”
“Jay Ritter put out some data at the end of August that you guys probably saw where he analyzed all the companies that have chosen the direct listing path and they've wildly outperformed their IPO peers,”
“Jay Ritter put out some data at the end of August that you guys probably saw where he analyzed all the companies that have chosen the direct listing path and they've wildly outperformed their IPO peers, which I think is interesting”
“They're the largest, spender, in lobbying of any entity in The US against, you know, these companies that are trying to bring new job opportunities to people,”
“They want their minimum member fee is $420 a year that they charge their 2,000,000 members who, by the way, aren't in the ride sharing industry. They're in hospitality and government and health care.”
“their minimum member fee is $420 a year that they charge their 2,000,000 members who, by the way, aren't in the ride sharing industry. They're in hospitality and government and health care.”
“if if if these writer drivers wanted shift work, there's unbelievable opportunity out there right now. Amazon's paying $3,000 for you to become a shift worker.”
“Freelance work is gonna explode because the Internet's allowing people with any passion, any special interest to to be able to monetize that on their own time, on their own will.”
“I was swayed by the arguments of the Ethereum crowd. And so if our and and and I've taken I've taken a personal position, not something at benchmark.”
“We are in chain analysis, which you referenced. And I'm swayed by the Ethereum crowd. The parties that are involved there seem to be way more pragmatic.”
“they make about 4x the amount of revenue on a option trade than they do a stock trade. Why do I bring this up? Know, Deutsche Kline and options trading like they talk,”
“The the ability to match as I was talking about earlier like the ability to match skill type with need goes up, you know, two orders of magnitude when you just open it up to everyone on the planet which is is a really good thing actually.”
“Add into that a roaring, screaming public market that's been on a bull run for, what, twelve years? And multiples in the public markets, especially in, the SaaS world that are out of this world.”
“Yeah, there've been eight high profile ones. Seven of them interestingly are trading above that first match that they did, which is really astounding.”
“Interestingly, you know, as a side note, Japan's antitrust department just launched an investigation into standard IPO practices and these types of conflicts.”
“In 2020, the average IPO was underpriced by 50%. You go to any finance school, they tell you you should care about the cost of capital. They teach you about weighted average cost of capital.”
“But, you know, it appears to me that the thing is gonna, is either gonna slow down or they're gonna step in and do those types of changes you're talking about.”
“We are actually a lead investor in Upwork. Hayden Brown's done an amazing job there the past couple of years. And we see this as a big, big opportunity.”
“People have talked about kind of, you know, the opening up of LinkedIn where people go into more specific verticals and are able to drive better outcomes, real work opportunities right away.”
“We have about eight investments in different verticals with these type of talent marketplaces. And so I I think a rising tide's gonna lift all the boats here.”
“Uber also competes with DD internationally. And so whether or not this affects DD's ability to be competitive is a different force that could impact Uber's valuation.”
“I wonder I and I don't have any data to back this up, but I wonder if part of what's going on is that the Chinese government wants to make sure that though that wealth is actually kept inside of China, taxed appropriately, and then able to be regenerative in that market.”
“I wonder if part of what's going on is that the Chinese government wants to make sure that though that wealth is actually kept inside of China, taxed appropriately, and then able to be regenerative in that market.”
“And yesterday in preparing for this, I was looking at some of the stocks that are outliers on price to sales and lemonade, unity and Palantir, which have come in 60% are still at 20 times over sales.”
“I was looking at some of the stocks that are outliers on price to sales and lemonade, unity and Palantir, which have come in 60% are still at 20 times over sales.”
“You know, it's interesting. I stumbled across a piece that Citadel had sent to the SEC in 2005, where they argued that it should be illegal because of inherent conflicts of interest.”
“I stumbled across a piece that Citadel had sent to the SEC in 2005, where they argued that it should be illegal because of inherent conflicts of interest.”
“I think over the past three or four years, mainly because of the power of Google and Facebook that a lot of people have come to tell themselves that consumers over.”
“I think to the extent that we can effectively integrate raising primary capital with the direct listing, no one would choose a traditional IPO process anymore because it's gotten perversely worse in 2020, the average IPO was underpriced by 50%.”
“There will be people that will fight it from a regulatory standpoint. And quite frankly, Brad, they're fighting the SPACs from a regulatory standpoint.”
“it's now known that 64% of their revenue comes from options trading. And so the company wants you to believe and and goes on public television and claims that their mission is to democratize investing.”
“under first day under pricing in 2,016, 2,000,000,000. 17, 4,000,000,000. 18, 7,000,000,000. 19, 9,000,000,000. Last year, 30,000,000,000. So the problem's getting ginormously worse.”
“Last year, 30,000,000,000. So the problem's getting ginormously worse. And then yesterday, on the Hong Kong exchange, Kuaishou, $5,000,000,000 deal, $9,000,000,000 underpricing on one deal.”
“regulation's the friend of the incumbent. Most of the time when Washington DC leans into a new to to a new industry, you lock in the incumbents, and and the rules are written by the incumbents and make it very hard for new entrants to come up behind them.”
“The the the primary issues with the traditional IPO are twofold and the SEC nailed them both in their in their draft today, which is that it doesn't provide access to all investors.”
“In the future, you'll be able to go on Robinhood, if you wanna participate in IPO, you can. And then let's not let these intermediaries and gatekeepers hand allocate who gets this underpriced stock.”
“This year, it's gonna be over $34,000,000,000 in one day giveaways. You know, if you you wanna talk about legal issues, I think people are gonna come after boards, for fiduciary duty violations”
“I think people are gonna come after boards, for fiduciary duty violations for knowingly entering into a process where you're selling a corporate asset at a massive discount.”
“Today's a super important day because I think it'll be very hard for anyone to argue whether it's a traditional IPO or a SPAC that that's gonna be better than a direct listing with a primary offering.”
“So last year and the year before, there were about $6,000,000,000 in underpricing across all of venture backed companies. Jay Ritter at the University of Florida aggregates this data.”
“Snowflake alone was 4,500,000,000, just one company. And so the day after the IPO, the people that were allocated the stock the night before have 4,500,000,000 in wealth they didn't have before.”
“And so the day after the IPO, the people that were allocated the stock the night before have 4,500,000,000 in wealth they didn't have before. And that money didn't just come out of nowhere.”
“But that's the behavior of some of the founders in Silicon Valley that buy into the state private thing. Like the minute you started giving stock to your employees, you're in the game”
“Like the minute you started giving stock to your employees, you're in the game And your job is to maximize shareholder value for all your constituents, your investors, your employees, everything else.”
“The SEIU and other unions leaned on the Sacramento legislature to write a law targeting an industry they don't even represent, which I think is also crazy.”
“I actually believe in my heart of hearts that the government restricting Microsoft's ability to leverage their way through the browser, open the door for Facebook, Google, Amazon.”
“If they had been able to tie the browser to search the way they did, the way they went after Netscape aggressively, I think they would have succeeded. They're really good at that stuff.”
“There is certainly what I would call a highly speculative nature to the markets today, a willingness to take on risk, a willingness to get excited about projects that may be five or ten years into the future that we haven't seen since the '99 time frame.”
“Ironically, you know, in year to date, 2020, the total underpricing dollars on the traditional IPO is $24,000,000,000 And it was in the 6 to 7 range the past two years up from three the year before.”
“Well, the average IPO this year had to underprice by 200,000,000. So you have a $200,000,000 tax to go public through the traditional IPO route, which is completely unnecessary.”
“I think is the SPAC craze because you've created this massive pricing umbrella arbitrage to get a company public where the traditional route means someone gets to allocate $200,000,000 to their buddies.”
“Well, if someone gets to do that, the SPAC sponsors are saying, Hey Goldman, Hey Morgan, you don't get to allocate that money to your friends. I'm gonna allocate it to mine.”
“And I think you actually, that entire time that risk is increasing, the quality of your average entrepreneur that's getting funded is actually going down.”
“I think you actually, that entire time that risk is increasing, the quality of your average entrepreneur that's getting funded is actually going down.”
“And what happens when risk goes off is the only people that are left starting the companies are the ones that are choosing it innately as the way of life they want to have and not just because they think they can get a quick buck.”
“One piece of advice though is never do a five or 10% layoff because it doesn't create any meaningful gain, yet you go through all the excruciating cultural pain.”
“It's times like this where that strategy, I think, gets exposed as the fraud that it was precisely because private company capitalization charts don't go down very well. They're designed to really only go up.”
“It's times like this where that strategy, I think, gets exposed as the fraud that it was precisely because private company capitalization charts don't go down very well.”
“And as a result, you know, I think there were network effects, but nowhere in the history of OpenTable success story does anyone read two companies went out of business, but that's what happened.”
“And I don't remember the exact number, but he said something like 90. And having worked with Nordstrom at nordstrom.com, I knew the industry standard was like half that, like 45.”
“And I said, how in the world did you accomplish that? And he said, I just called them all and said, if they didn't move to 90, we were going out of business.”
“Patrick, I'd leave everybody with this final thought. I think it was Graham and Dodd before Buffett that said, be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.”
“Silicon Valley's been, unhappy with the way the IPO works for a couple of decades now. I dug up, you know, some conversations Pierro Midiard had at eBay calling it undemocratic.”
“if you look at the first day pop net of the losses of the companies that have broken issue, Uber, Lyft, and and, Peloton, it's 6,000,000,000 to the positive, $6,000,000,000 in first day wealth transfer net gains.”
“But I don't think it's healthy for companies to stay private forever. I think it's super advantageous to companies to pass through and become public.”
“I one of the reasons I encourage companies going public is because I think it ups their game. I think it it presents more pressure. It forces them to be more disclosive, more transparent.”
“I've I've been quoted publicly, like, they've, you know, played a strategy where you hand hundreds of millions of dollars to a company and say, here, go win in the market with this.”
“the only way to deploy that amount of capital is to take on massive losses. There's there's no way to you know, these companies don't have massive infrastructure.”
“In the traditional IPO process, neither of those things are true. You don't have a market based price discovery, and you don't have open and equal access to all.”
“You know, thirty, forty years over the past thirty eight years, 171,000,000,000 in First Day Wealth Transfer. And in the past 50 in the past three years, that's 15,000,000,000.”
“And then the thing we heard from people like Stacy Cunningham, who runs the NYC, where you guys are right now, there are efforts underway to add primary capital to the direct listing.”
“I think there that it used to be that the IPO process was about disseminating and marketing and selling far and wide, and it's become a game of just hand allocating shares to the same 10 or 15 firms.”
“What Barry McCarthy unlocked and and discovered was that the very same processes that you use at the NYSE and the Nasdaq to open stocks each and every day can actually do the match that that that do a direct listing opening.”
“What Barry McCarthy unlocked and and discovered was that the very same processes that you use at the NYSE and the Nasdaq to open stocks each and every day can actually do the match that that that do a direct listing opening. And so in the direct listing process, you're actually removing steps”
“And so in the direct listing process, you're actually removing steps because once you do an IPO, you actually do with the exact equivalent of direct listing opening the next morning.”
“So the first slide is about underpricing, and this is solely looking at the difference between the price that the stocks handed out to the night before and the close the next day.”
“over thirty nine years, that's been a 171,000,000,000 for Silicon Valley companies, and it's been increasing lately. Just year to date, we're at 6,000,000,000 in underpricing.”
“What you see is that no one questioned to the two best investment banks are. So it turns out that if you go with the best investment bank, you get the worst execution.”
“So 20 x over supply is a euphemism for we're about to ignore 95% of the demand for your stock. Intentionally ignore 95% of the demand for your stock.”
“Now, if you look back at that chart and you say, what if their job is to pass along the most profits they possibly can to the buy side, then the chart makes sense.”
“If you are in a direct listing, any direct listing, and you are at a Schwab account, a Robinhood account, I don't care what, and you put in an order that's a penny higher than the closing price, you get filled. That is not true in a traditional IPO.”
“Like what's the value of an incremental member joining LinkedIn? It's probably less than what the value of the 10,000 person that joined LinkedIn. And so there are many, many, many nuances.”
“If it's a two sided network, you could build one for the value to the supplier, one for the value to the consumer. On the x axis is your penetration into the market.”
“And I've come up with this phrase I use internally that I made up. So I one day I'll have to write a definition of it, but I call it liquidity quality.”
“So I one day I'll have to write a definition of it, but I call it liquidity quality. And I tell entrepreneurs I care way more about that than I do how broad you are.”
“Rather than say don't work, let's say didn't show signs of a network effect was Mechanical Turk that Amazon built, which was a labor marketplace for perfunctory work that could be pushed over the internet.”
“I've always felt Silicon Valley has a very crude understanding of valuation. Most entrepreneurs think they all deserve 10 times revenue and also with zero regard for what the revenue is.”
“I overheard a VC on a panel say that now that capital's become so cheap, we as venture capitalists get to go after all these new industries. And it really made me chuckle.”
“And for the first time in history, I believe private companies are the ones with more money and are attacking the long held incumbents, which is a radical thing to think about.”
“And this is something that I think it's odd to me that more people don't understand how ridiculous this is because had and I ran the math in the Zoom and CrowdStrike example, had those companies priced the IPO at the price of first trade, they would have 600,000,000 more dollars each in the bank”
“had those companies priced the IPO at the price of first trade, they would have 600,000,000 more dollars each in the bank with no incremental dilution.”
“Drucker Miller just, you know, who's someone that's made a name in macro investing says, if you give, you know, Texas oilman the ability to drill holes with someone else's money, they'll drill as many as you possibly can. And so low interest rates drive speculation,”
“Drucker Miller just, you know, who's someone that's made a name in macro investing says, if you give, you know, Texas oilman the ability to drill holes with someone else's money, they'll drill as many as you possibly can.”
“one of the things that I believe strongly that I think is less well understood is that being public actually helps the companies run better. It's an enforced discipline.”
“It is the only offensive solution. Most of the security solutions are defensive where you're just building a bigger and bigger dam and trying to hold people out.”
“We try and learn as much as we can about the individual, and then we use machine learning and collaborative filtering, a whole bunch of algorithms that helps of our stylists, and we deliver something to you that you haven't even seen yet.”
“Our head of algorithm says it's the ultimate recommendation engine because we don't even let you look at the choices. And that level of curation is something that's highly unique,”
“So we're at a billion dollar run rate. We've been profitable for many quarters. In fact, when the company came public, it is over a $100,000,000 of cash on the balance sheet.”
“The company had only raised $40,000,000. Hence, we had created $60,000,000 in free cash flow, something that's extremely rare in Silicon Valley these days.”
“So you can put us up against anyone, Nordstrom's, Macy's, any of these players, and I am certain that we know 10 x more about our customers and even 10 x more about the merchandise.”
“So people typically say benchmark, but there was five investors, including Fidelity, who felt like all of the constituents at Uber were at risk, if action didn't happen sooner.”
“The the I guess the thing I would say is that, you know, the excessive amount of capital that's been available to Silicon Valley has allowed a lot of entrepreneurs to run without much discipline because if you if if you're not running out of money, you're not constantly being regraded and asked to come back to the table.”
“I guess the thing I would say is that, you know, the excessive amount of capital that's been available to Silicon Valley has allowed a lot of entrepreneurs to run without much discipline because if you if if you're not running out of money, you're not constantly being regraded and asked to come back to the table.”
“I guess the thing I would say is that, you know, the excessive amount of capital that's been available to Silicon Valley has allowed a lot of entrepreneurs to run without much discipline because if you if if you're not running out of money, you're not constantly being regraded”
“Stitch Fix, people may not know this. Over 80% of the employees are female. Over 60% of the management team's female. Over 60% of the board is female.”
“Over 60% of the management team's female. Over 60% of the board is female. And I found out this morning she may be the youngest female founder to actually take their company public ever.”
“I found out this morning she may be the youngest female founder to actually take their company public ever. And so these success points and data points create role models that help bring everything forward.”
“In order to be successful and powerful in these types of areas, you need huge datasets, and you need them on both sides so that you can do the matching.”
“One of the unique things about Stitch Fix relative to all of the unicorns out in Silicon Valley is that they've run very disciplined and profitable approach. They've been profitable for several years.”
“They've been profitable for several years. The reason that you never heard of them as a unicorn was because they never raised money above 1,000,000,000 because they didn't really do raise money.”
“The reason that you never heard of them as a unicorn was because they never raised money above 1,000,000,000 because they didn't really do raise money.”
“I think you're gonna see a large number of unicorns who were afraid to play on Sunday, afraid to be in the public markets, that didn't get their act together in time, didn't get profitable, didn't understand unit economics, and and hurt the value of the equity as a result.”
“We reached a point where we felt like, you know, the entire company, you know, and all of its constituencies, drivers, riders, employees, shareholders, were at risk if the company continued to move in the direction it was.”
“I do think we are also watching, however, as many of the unicorns mature in age, that many of them are having to come to the recognition that they either need to grow up, get profitable, go public, or do something along those lines.”
“looking at health care, and it's extremely dangerous. It's extremely dangerous because the the laws of most, marketplaces doesn't exist. You know, there's not a simple gravity.”
“It's extremely dangerous because the the laws of most, marketplaces doesn't exist. You know, there's not a simple gravity. There's forces in five different directions.”
“Three of the last six investments that I've made have female founders. Katrina's, obviously, as John pointed out, an amazing role model in terms of not only being a founder, but being a founder that made the transition to CEO and then being a founder that made a transition to CEO to public CEO.”
“the sales executive has a green light on any purchase in a company. The HR executive does not. They had a product where you could put it on a credit card.”
“what happens is capitalism and democracy evolve over time, especially in The US federal system. The most regulated industries become the ones that are least capitalistic. And so finance, telecom, healthcare are completely,”
“The most regulated industries become the ones that are least capitalistic. And so finance, telecom, healthcare are completely, you know, notion of regulatory capture.”
“If they're striking a new federal law, like the lobbyists from the companies being regulated are on M Street talking to the congressman about what to put into the bill.”
“So regulation protects the incumbent, it makes it very hard for an entrepreneur to break in, and some of the stuff like Uber saw in Miami, there was a rule that, in several governments they had written rules that you couldn't have a car show up within a two hour window of when it was ordered.”
“And I think what we see right now is a almost Bernie Madoff like dynamic where capital comes in, it gets marked up without any public scrutiny, unaudited financials.”
“And what I think is really interesting, if you think about value creation, in any decade, are really three to five companies that sustain $50,000,000,000 market caps or greater.”
“And so the single biggest indicator for us is that the capital being burned in the market so this is usually on headcount, mostly people, not hard assets is breaking all the prior records of 'ninety nine, two thousand.”
“You know, it could be a a car that you don't actually own, but you fractionally own, a car as a service via Uber, via many of these different services that are coming out.”
“So the prediction is we'll have Hyperloop working in about twenty four months on a two mile track and hit over 700 miles per hour, and we can go faster than that.”
“By the way, the 50 largest cargo ships in the world pollute the world and pollute the world more than all the cars that Bill Gurley hates, added up together. So just those 50 ships.”
“I think in companies, there just is a laziness to improve that experience because consumers are downloading and discovering it on the top of the charts, which is interesting.”
“So in 2009, when the government passed the Reinvestment Act to try and get America going or whatever it was called, they put in place a program where a doctor is paid, believe this or not, paid $44,000 to implement EHR, electronic health records.”
“So, the payments for these incentive programs, because I just looked it up to get the recent update, dollars 29,000,000,000. So, our government has paid $29,000,000,000 for doctors to implement software”
“Spends 17% of GDP on healthcare and Singapore spends 1.7. So, it's a 10x delta and they have relatively reputable healthcare system. And the key thing they do is they make everyone a payer.”
“The most fascinating thing for me is that for basically eighty years, we grossly underestimated the demand for transportation services. And we limited it at a city government level with the taxi medallion.”
“But you didn't have a situation where people were putting $102,103 $104,109 $1,001,000,000,000 dollars into a private company who might only be four years old. These companies just haven't had the time to mature.”
“Being able to just do everything leads to poor business execution. And so now we have numbers of companies, I think, making poor decisions. Burn rates are higher than they've ever been.”
“the four pillars of Seattle, Microsoft, Amazon, Costco, and Starbucks, they were all venture backed. And so you have So Costco and Starbucks took venture capital.”
“in general, in the venture business, we have this problem, this kind of anti IPO attitude that I think prohibits companies from hitting the long ball.”
“I formerly worked on Wall Street years ago and I think the Wall Street mentality is still prevalent in different places. And I consider that a very anti loyal mentality.”
“And I consider that a very anti loyal mentality. People just trade firms constantly and they're really into cash comp and they don't think about equity.”
“Lifetime value model, where people say, as long as we're paying below our lifetime value, cost of capital. But the numbers can be run-in a whole bunch of different ways.”
“And it turns out the majority of people don't know how, including really large companies like Apple and Google because it's really hard and it requires a lot of hand holding and hand stitching and building in place a network effect where the atoms start to bounce into one another.”
“the amount of dollars available to successful late stage private companies is unbelievable. And the behavior that you'll see for the competition in those dollars is very reminiscent of the late 90s.”
“If you go back ten years and you want to do something that touches all the suppliers or all the workers in a given industry, you have to basically build, spec build embedded devices, right?”
“I would say the majority of our companies that serve some type of local marketplace are spending half of their R and D dollars on the B2B side of equation, the stuff you wouldn't see on the consumer side.”
“C, his former chief of staff is in jail because he took a bribe from the taxi fleet, you know, like two years ago, and he's still on the commission that's deciding these things.”
“the large medical groups have been building out these huge platforms of MRI centers and labs and x-ray, and they're increasingly inviting general practitioners to live under their umbrella, and as that happens, the number of independent general practitioners is dropping as a percentage of all doctors, and that's really bad for innovation.”
“When the wave crashed, we were doing 100 ks a month in revenue and burning 1,100,000 a month. And all of a sudden capital availability looks like non existent.”
“I think you look at Groupon, right? I mean, you, it had to take a twelve year gap before someone would say it's okay for a startup to burn $150 $200,000,000 in year.”
“I think if you look back, could say over the past two years, the most reckless investment behavior we've seen since the bubble was the late stage private market of the past two years.”
“there's this thing on the balance sheet that's called retained earnings, except on their side it says accumulated deficit. And they're negative 900,000,000, right.”
“It's just massive. Like you have, you're pushing computing so far out into the field and you have standardized, even with two operating systems it kind of doesn't matter, you have standardized what is possible.”
“I can write an app instead of building a dedicated embedded device that would have cost $2, it's night and day. And I got all kinds of examples where our startups are using smart phones”
“I mean we were talking earlier about local, the things you can do now that I can write an app instead of building a dedicated embedded device that would have cost $2, it's night and day.”
“I say we spent forty years cramming technology into the enterprise. We're going to spend the next ten yanking it out. It's just so wholesale that you're moving systems outside.”
“I think that creates, I think it should create a rather healthy M and A market, but I also think it helps create opportunities because you know, you look at the Yelp and OpenTable integration with Apple, you know, if there were only one monolith and there weren't five, that probably doesn't happen.”
“Lot of my marketplace companies that I'm working with are spending as much R and D money on systems, workflow systems for the supplier side as they are on the consumer side.”
“Kevin Harvey joined the venture business about that time. Peter Fenton also joined at about that age. And so across our partnership, the majority of the partners joined at about 30 years old.”
“And so across our partnership, the majority of the partners joined at about 30 years old. And there's a number of reasons why I think youth plays to an advantage. One, it's a hustle game.”
“And they said, go work for twenty years and then get in. And it's ironic when I think back to that moment in time because we have kind of the exact opposite process.”
“I often hear people describe venture and they think about sitting around in board rooms thinking up cool strategies. That's probably 5% of the business at best.”
“If you go back about five years, a whole bunch of people said, well Venture's dead because there's infinite angel money and you can start a company for cheap and you won't need Venture anymore.”
“In fact, starting about a year ago I think there was probably what you might call an angel glut of companies who had maybe raised one, two, we've seen companies with $5,000,000 of convertible seed money. That's a lot of seed money who can't raise series A.”
“In fact, starting about a year ago I think there was probably what you might call an angel glut of companies who had maybe raised one, two, we've seen companies with $5,000,000 of convertible seed money.”
“And what I think has come out of it is that you may be able to start a company for nothing but if you want to scale a company you will need capital and you'll need expertise to scale it to the next level.”
“I think has come out of it is that you may be able to start a company for nothing but if you want to scale a company you will need capital and you'll need expertise to scale it to the next level. Not every single player, Benioff who got it up without venture”
“The number one type of acquisition that the big companies like to do is twenty to seventy million dollars and the minute you take venture, they help you raise the B and all of a sudden everyone's expectation is it's got to be 150 or more or we're not saying yes.”
“And so if you have a killer product that might elicit a $30,000,000 exit and you can bootstrap and hustle your way and own 80% of it, you know, 80% of 30,000,000 is $24,000,000.”
“if you have a killer product that might elicit a $30,000,000 exit and you can bootstrap and hustle your way and own 80% of it, you know, 80% of 30,000,000 is $24,000,000.”
“We have a phrase that not all the partners like to use, say we're long term greedy. You know, we're luckily in a business where we're not judged on IRR per se.”
“Like if there's an opportunity where we can make a 20% IRR someone might go, oh you should do every one of those, but we're limited by the number of board seats we can take and our LPs are investing in us to get beta and so they want the home runs”
“And we've never once, never in the history of the firm as I ever recall a limited partner calling us and saying why aren't you getting us liquidity faster?”
“In the long run, we like to believe that this is an artisan business that doesn't scale and that if you want someone to help you and trusted you taking this company to the next level that you want what is an artisan,”
“It had already become very difficult for us to seed ventures where the primary customer was the carrier And so now to have three instead of four, you just increase the market power of those of those players.”
“the journalist wanted him to be more afraid. My point of view is he's probably thrilled thrilled to death that this is happening because, you know, it it's what you look for. There's less competition.”
“this is to me one of the most investable themes of our time simply because we spent the last thirty to forty years putting computing technology inside the enterprise Right.”
“one of the most investable themes of our time simply because we spent the last thirty to forty years putting computing technology inside the enterprise Right.”
“Once it's in the cloud, they connect to Zillow, they connect to rent.com, they push the listings out, they communicate with the end user of the apartment, and so this workflow that starts to be connected from the cloud to the small business, to the consumer, to the smartphone app, that's all white space in a bunch of different verticals.”
“we have a number of investments from Yelp to OpenTable to Zillow to Grubhub to UberCab, where all these companies build this technology to connect these small businesses, and we're seeing unbelievable interest from these small businesses in in being online and having an online presence.”
“These these might be these might be the least informed investment actions in in our history. And so I don't know that you can pay too much attention to the price because they're very uninformed.”
“In Silicon Valley, when you have a company on the outs, there are so many job opportunities around here. You get the brain drain, the creative talent leaves.”
“I think there are very few great leaders. If you were to just take a picture of a whole bunch of great leaders, most of them are good at delegation, getting other people to make decisions because organizations are so large, and no one has the capacity to be an expert in so many things.”
“Earlier today, one of our investments, Ambarella, filed, which will be our fourth IPO this year. And that hasn't happened, you know, for a single venture firm in a very long time.”
“When the financial crisis happened, that model kinda came undone, and everyone has drastically reduced the amount of money they allocate to this category.”
“Any company that's spending heavily on marketing to drive people in, that's just a far different value proposition than someone who has a product that's so good that everyone comes to it.”
“Skype never ran ads. OpenTable never ran ads. Linkedin doesn't run ads. People that are having to spend heavily on marketing are basically renting or borrowing customers.”
“The thing that strikes me about the deal business is that the value to the customer is a direct function of the rake of the platform or the margin the platform maker takes.”
“In other words if you had a casino on one side of the street that took a 50% rake and another one on the other that took a 10% rake, eventually all the customers are gonna go to where the rake's 10%. Right?”
“Another interesting thing is with Data Domain and ArcSight and three part, you've seen companies go public, establish a valuation and then get an M and A premium on top of that.”
“And one last thing most entrepreneurs probably don't know, when you do a public merger, there's no escrow. And most private ones have 10 to 15% escrow,”
ai safetyai safety·posts only·
13 posts
·
0 of 0 appearances
new
post
“This is very good. Ben brings a career of thinking to his views on where we are today.
My favorite part is the beginning. There is no reasonable path to AI global dominance for the U.S. vs the world. It’s a fantastical notion that falls apart when thinking through the details. https://t.co/4SsyZydFYX”
“This industry group is working on an industry standard for how to report AI security incidents. This will drive consistency and transparency and is the safest path forward.
Despite 120 members, the large LLM corporations have to-date not signed on. Drives further concern that”
“This industry group is working on an industry standard for how to report AI security incidents. This will drive consistency and transparency and is the safest path forward.
Despite 120 members, the large LLM corporations have to-date not signed on. Drives further concern that”
“I favor prosecuting companies that use AI to break existing laws vs allowing those same companies to write new laws.
Otherwise you create a perverse incentive to keep doing dangerous things to gather attention and power. https://t.co/d7DbltbV3I”
“Please stop referring to your own models in the third person when talking about model bad behavior. Humans write the software; humans built the prompts; and they work for your company.
“Our” model is doing illegal things. “Our” model is risky. “We” now have liability. https://t.co/wtZyH8Dmg6”
“If you have any doubt about lab leak and Covid read this. The team that told you “not lab leak” encouraging obfuscation.
We really should care about how this happened. That’s the path to prevention. https://t.co/myZJoCch31”
“As Brandeis said:
“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”
The correct regulatory response here is to demand a full third party investigation of what happened here and share it with everyone.
“Our models are too magical” https://t.co/ibsBsNhOjV”
“Almost 3 years ago, I believed open-models would become the key threat to the AI incumbents & that unfortunately they would lean into regulatory capture as a response.
I underestimated the fervor with which they would use this non-business approach.
https://t.co/oFDclTqJDq https://t.co/kYzlwY7JRQ”
“The word “watermark” comes from photos and is visible by all.
This is only identifiable by Anthropic.
Once again they are judge, jury, and prosecutor.
Lots of reasons to not use their products. https://t.co/6MGQCymnu7”
“When I saw this article, I couldn't get Kool and the Gang out of my head. Hat-tip to Claude for the lyrics! I very confused about who might own the copyright.
REGULATE
(to the tune of "Celebration")
[Intro]
Regu-LATE!
R-E-G-U-L-A-T-E good times, come on!
(It's a regulation!) https://t.co/5DTp81043E”
“Different states, counties, and cities trying different things. Beautiful and effective competition of policies.
I doubt any tax bills are going down in NY State. https://t.co/7zbeckyx8l”
“If you have any doubt about lab leak and Covid read this. The team that told you “not lab leak” encouraging obfuscation.
We really should care about how this happened. That’s the path to prevention. https://t.co/myZJoCch31”
regulationregulation·posts only·
3 posts
·
0 of 0 appearances
new
post
“The word “watermark” comes from photos and is visible by all.
This is only identifiable by Anthropic.
Once again they are judge, jury, and prosecutor.
Lots of reasons to not use their products. https://t.co/6MGQCymnu7”
“Time to head to Texas or Nevada.
Staying is adding unnecessary risks for your shareholders. You should act in your shareholders best interest and flee Delaware.
Delaware is no longer consistent. They are targeting companies they don't like. https://t.co/ojEnbYOu5o”
“When I saw this article, I couldn't get Kool and the Gang out of my head. Hat-tip to Claude for the lyrics! I very confused about who might own the copyright.
REGULATE
(to the tune of "Celebration")
[Intro]
Regu-LATE!
R-E-G-U-L-A-T-E good times, come on!
(It's a regulation!) https://t.co/5DTp81043E”
ai competitionai competition·posts only·
4 posts
·
0 of 0 appearances
new
post
“Open, open, open.
As I wrote in the @washingtonpost, open-models are the inevitable outcome of high stakes software competition. The more at stake - the more likely open wins. This is water running downhill.
https://t.co/6x5qoLbw0k https://t.co/wAH0xjej7q”
“This is very good. Ben brings a career of thinking to his views on where we are today.
My favorite part is the beginning. There is no reasonable path to AI global dominance for the U.S. vs the world. It’s a fantastical notion that falls apart when thinking through the details. https://t.co/4SsyZydFYX”
“I disagree, I don't think this has to be "game-over" for Google. I do think they have only one play left now - to pull from their own Android/Kubernetes playbook and fully embrace open-models. It's the obvious move in this situation.
Details here:
https://t.co/P8rbKhIjzH https://t.co/6qqof6Auhs”
“Almost 3 years ago, I believed open-models would become the key threat to the AI incumbents & that unfortunately they would lean into regulatory capture as a response.
I underestimated the fervor with which they would use this non-business approach.
https://t.co/oFDclTqJDq https://t.co/kYzlwY7JRQ”
“I’ve never met Leo, and from all I can gather he was an exceptional student. Well above top 1%. Probably > 1/10,000.
That said I don’t think he was a “student of finance.” I asked ChatGPT to name the top 25 investing books of all time. And then asked what percentage of those https://t.co/vp2WkiAHKD”
competitioncompetition·posts only·
3 posts
·
0 of 0 appearances
new
post
“Open, open, open.
As I wrote in the @washingtonpost, open-models are the inevitable outcome of high stakes software competition. The more at stake - the more likely open wins. This is water running downhill.
https://t.co/6x5qoLbw0k https://t.co/wAH0xjej7q”
“Different states, counties, and cities trying different things. Beautiful and effective competition of policies.
I doubt any tax bills are going down in NY State. https://t.co/7zbeckyx8l”
“Please stop referring to your own models in the third person when talking about model bad behavior. Humans write the software; humans built the prompts; and they work for your company.
“Our” model is doing illegal things. “Our” model is risky. “We” now have liability. https://t.co/wtZyH8Dmg6”
hugging facehugging face·posts only·
2 posts
·
0 of 0 appearances
new
post
“Open, open, open.
As I wrote in the @washingtonpost, open-models are the inevitable outcome of high stakes software competition. The more at stake - the more likely open wins. This is water running downhill.
https://t.co/6x5qoLbw0k https://t.co/wAH0xjej7q”
“As Brandeis said:
“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”
The correct regulatory response here is to demand a full third party investigation of what happened here and share it with everyone.
“Our models are too magical” https://t.co/ibsBsNhOjV”
