00:45:53 · Aydin Senkut, Eric Newcomer
[00:45:53] S0: I don't really think as much as what the other investors are going to pay is that I basically think about what will be the terminal value of the company. More than the investors themselves, the question that we ask is how can this company be so important that it is an independent company? And today that lens is like you have to be at a billion to 10,000,000,000 revenues. And by the way, you can't wait eight to ten years to get there. You've got to get there in three to five years. But the other thing is if you find the right zip codes, like let me give you an example. If you find anything in like the overall like AI infrastructure and chip industry, like you have multiple trillion dollar companies. And we have this like interesting like theorem that any company will easily spend up to 1% to 2% of their market cap to acquire a company. The question is for a $5,000,000,000,000 company, that's $100,000,000,000 For a $5,000,000,000 company, that's like $100,000,000 So if you're in the right zip code and even when things don't go right, but you build something so critical, there is going to be an acquire for a very large amount. [00:46:56] S1: Well, that's been a theme in venture capital recently has been these acquisitions or deals where it's like poolside, hugging face companies where people didn't even necessarily think they were going to go the distance. And they've had these amazing acquisitions. So the acquisitions is a sort of defense of some of these companies.
00:46:56 · Eric Newcomer, Aydin Senkut
[00:46:56] S1: Well, that's been a theme in venture capital recently has been these acquisitions or deals where it's like poolside, hugging face companies where people didn't even necessarily think they were going to go the distance. And they've had these amazing acquisitions. So the acquisitions is a sort of defense of some of these companies. [00:47:14] S0: And I think this is a really good eye opener because we talk about business traction and you can argue like, hey, these companies maybe didn't have a significant of a business traction, but we were in poolside. But what they have done is they built a critical asset, strategic asset. It's like we're in New York. There are certain like areas of New York like even if you wanted office or home like you just can't get it. You know what I mean? Like something that is very rare strategic asset or you become a gatekeeper like Shopify was a gatekeeper in commerce, Adyen was a gatekeeper in payments, Supabase is the gatekeeper for infrastructure for all the AI apps. So if you have a strategic role and you become the home of a very important community, right? Like that was Hugging Face and for Poolside They took their model, open sourced it and have like some other really great assets and they found great talent. Even that has value. So even if the business performance has not ensued yet, there is still great value in the company. And I'm glad that it is being monetized. [00:48:11] S1: You said earlier in the conversation that a lot of your investments have this sort of democratization flavor. [00:48:18] S0: Yes.
00:48:18 · Aydin Senkut, Eric Newcomer
[00:48:18] S0: Yes. [00:48:18] S1: I'm curious what you're seeing now. I mean, there's this vibe coding moment. Mean, I'm asking partially self interested, oh, where's the creator economy going? I think there was a sub thread in some of our emerging companies where they were like creator adjacent. I don't know how bullish you were or weren't on sort of the creator economy. What's your read on where that stands and where do you see sort of like democratization of entrepreneurs
00:48:42 · Aydin Senkut
[00:48:42] S0: Yeah, to that I mean, look, we have I feel like both Notion and Canva like come at this from different angles like Canva in terms of like creativity and then Notion from just like, hey, like we want to be the underlying foundation of knowledge for every company or even like one of our great New York companies, Runway, like people said, hey, like the big models are going to do everything. You can't be an independent company or like a very strong company doing just AI for video models. And Runway is doing just fine. I mean, went against OpenAI, it went against Google and it's still doing really well. So I think I'm also like tracking platforms like Substack. What I love about it is whether it's like a platform we invested in or not, anything that's democratization of talent or democratization of access to information or using knowledge overall is net positive for humanity. So whether it was like Patreon, whatever, some of these we weren't in. But I love the fact that these platforms basically made people say, you know what, like instead of being an employee, I actually want to start something. I want to create value by myself. I want to bet on myself. And before maybe like without these platforms existing, there was a lot of friction. But now like between Shopify and commerce and Substack and Patreon and like some of our other companies like Canva and all of that, I just love the fact like for instance, like one of the like untold stories of Canva, I don't know if you know this but in the beginning they wanted to like include all the images in clipart and they were not available on the web. So the founders went around the world and came back with like literally hundreds if not thousands of disk drives full of images. And they went to the creators and said, Look, right now you're selling it and you have to charge a very high price because your distribution is tiny, micro. How about you give them to us? We're going to give you a lot smaller piece but we can give you access to everyone in the world that they will then use your art and the things that you created. What an incredible idea. Until then nobody has dared to do it. So even Canva in his own way has done such a great job of not just democratizing design but also give a way to creators, like to do a lot more than what they've been able to do before.
00:50:55 · Eric Newcomer
[00:50:55] S1: I know you've been gone for a long time, far longer than you were there. But I'm sure you've invested out of Google since and maintain some relationships and are a closer observer of it. There's been some crumbling of the DeepMind team. I'm curious what your read of their strengths and weaknesses are right now.
00:51:15 · Aydin Senkut
[00:51:15] S0: I mean, I'm extremely bullish on Google. Let me present the following framework. We talk a lot about AI but one thing people don't talk enough about is what is the raw material of AI? The raw material of AI is data. Well, who has the most unique and most scalable data in the world? Let's think about it. The whole map, the whole organization, like the whole information, YouTube, like all the videos, wow, like Google also runs one of the two most important mobile operating systems. They have Chrome, the browser, like anything that you touch. There is Google payments like email. Let's talk about Gmail. You know why it's fascinating? When I was at Google there was this crazy decision whether we're to do email or not. And the biggest thing was until we do email there was a reason for people to get out of the Google platform. Because even though we're great at search, the only thing people do more than search is email. So unless we figured out email in a way that nobody does, like we're always going to be exposed. And it wasn't like, Oh, we need to make money of email. I don't think people even correctly understood that. It was just that with email there was no reason for people to leave the Google umbrella. Same thing with YouTube. I remember people ask me when Facebook went public, what do you think Google is going to do? I'm like, are you kidding me? Have you looked at YouTube? This is going to be the largest platform in the world. Somebody was talking about how like Netflix growth is like stalling and YouTube is absolutely going off the charts after Google put like tens of billions of dollars into it and like a billion and 0.5 acquisition is probably going to be like hundreds of billions of dollars business within Google. So I'm super bullish on them and I didn't even get a chance to talk about Waymo. I mean, we talk about self driving cars and I know Elon and Tesla get the light but like guess who has the highest number of miles in self driving cars? It's Google.