No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:07:34 · Elad Gil
[00:07:34] S0: Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. There's there's like a list. You can make a list of, like, five or six areas that seem promising. And then part of it too is you actually if it's a physically it's a physical goods company, energy, robotics, etcetera, do you actually have the footprint to get there that fast? Again, I'm doubting the size of some of these markets. I'm doubting the speed at which you can get there. Yeah. A 100%. And that's the issue. And people are, at least in my experience, collectively at least investing against the fact that they believe the speed is there, which is different from the market size. People are conflating the two things right now in my opinion. The other phenomena that I think is happening is almost the opposite of it, which is I see some really, really excellent founders going after niche markets because they're not scared of the Neolabs. And I think there's much less head to head competition. If you look at the markets that Harvey or Open Evidence or Decagon or any of these folks at Sierra entered four or five years ago, three or four years ago even, Cognition two ish years ago, it was big, big markets that could be in the roadmaps of these labs. But I feel like the the two things are happening at the same time. One is for the mid to late stage technology markets, people are continuing to invest as if there's velocity to get to a trillion for many companies where I don't think there's a velocity. Again, I think some of them will get to 20, some will get to a 100, some of course will go to zero. And then there's a separate thread of all the new stuff that's coming. How aggressive and ambitious are the founders relative to what the labs are doing? And I think that's why you're seeing a flight to hardware companies. Oh, the labs will never do this hardware thing, and so we'll do that. And American Dynamism, and niche applications of AI, and something that should be provided by an inference cloud, and etcetera, etcetera. Right? So there's a lot of these types of companies that I think are gonna be potentially a bit more derivative. And don't get wrong, there's people doing huge amazing things simultaneously. Right? It's not every startup. But there's more and more, at least to my perception, of people doing smaller niche things out of fear of the labs. And that's also I think a negative.
00:09:37 · Sarah Guo, Elad Gil
[00:09:37] S1: And you feel like they're being too meek, like they should just take on the head on competition because you can create a much better experience and go just compete on the product, on the distribution, any of it. [00:09:46] S0: I think so. Yeah. For certain markets. Of course, there's some markets where the labs will just eat it naturally, but there's a bunch of markets where they won't. But I think people are staying away from both. [00:09:54] S1: Oh, we have companies in the portfolio that are going against pretty central premises. So I don't think all the founders are being too meek. [00:10:00] S0: Oh, I don't think it's all. I think there's more. My point is it's more a trend line and it's the newest stuff. I'm not saying a thing that's a year old or two years old. I feel like it's a trend line that's shifting. And again, it's not all of them. It's just enough of a subset. It's a subset of the good founders. I'm not concerned about the median founder. I'm concerned about the best founders. What are they doing? [00:10:22] S1: I am more often disappointed right now that founders are being less ambitious than they could be. So maybe that's the trend that I'm talking about. We were talking about when companies when founders should sell their companies. What is your thinking on it at this point in time or your framework for it?
00:10:40 · Elad Gil
[00:10:40] S0: There's a handful of companies that should never ever sell, at least anytime in the near term. If you're Anthropic, you shouldn't sell. If you're OpenAI, you shouldn't sell. There's a handful of these things that should never sell. Most companies in any given era should at least consider it. And there's usually a time maximizing window where your best outcome is a sale within that window. It's like a twelve to eighteen month period, usually where the company's worth the most it'll ever be worth. And I I think we saw one major exit where that was probably the case reasonably recently. I think there's other companies that should really actively think about it. From a hygiene perspective, maybe what companies should do I think Ben Horowitz wrote about this once. Basically, do a preplanned once a year board meeting where the discussion topic is in a non emotional way. Should we consider exiting this next six months period? And it's prescheduled, so it's not the founders pushing for it. It's not the investors pushing. It's just a rational conversation. And the answer to the conversation may be no. We should keep going. We still think we have XYZ ahead of us. Amazing. But I think it's very useful for people to have that sort of conversation because I feel like in the cycle, every year of AI time is like three to four years of normal cycle time. And so three years is like a decade. Right? Like, if you think of what existed in AI three years ago from a model capability perspective, from a vertical app perspective, from AI roll ups, from you name it, any any of the stuff like infrastructure, whatever, radically different world three years ago. And so we're on an accelerated timeline right now where everything is moving faster. And that means that you should double check your thinking more frequently because the underlying fact set is changing faster than it ever has. I don't know. What do you think? What's your what's your approach to exits or not exits?
00:12:23 · Sarah Guo, Elad Gil
[00:12:23] S1: I agree with you that there there are a set of companies that should never sell unless they cannot finance their future. Right? If I think about maybe one principle that is like new for this point in time is I might ask at that board meeting or at that meeting once a quarter or once a year or whatever you think is the right pacing today. And it's more often than it was a few years ago. [00:12:49] S0: Yeah. It's every six months.
00:12:49 · Elad Gil, Sarah Guo
[00:12:49] S0: Yeah. It's every six months. [00:12:50] S1: Okay. So every six months. Great. Are you capturing value as costs fall and capabilities increase? Because if you're the on the wrong side of this secular change and you can't get to the other side of it, you should in fact, like, sell. You don't have good ideas about how to be on the right side of history. So I I think that's a question people should ask them ask themselves. And then if you think about our our friends at Cursor, is the way you want to compete capital compute access? And is it perhaps a maximally valuable point in time? That's an interesting question. But I think that, like, you know, more broadly, it's a it's a I feel like it's a very personal and very interesting risk management question. I do think people should ask themselves. Right? Like, the idea that there is pride around, like, never considering this as nonsense. The situational awareness situation is a good reminder that everyone has to stay alive to profit as well. Hedge funds are different than companies. They have to survive to compound. But I I think even just the premise of, like, you need to match your financing structure to your thesis horizon and then be able to, like, continually finance the company to the promised land of whatever you're trying to
00:14:04 · Elad Gil
[00:14:04] S0: do. Yeah. I think the financing part though is gonna be there because basically what's happening, because of this rapid rise of $3,000,000,000,000 plus companies in a short timeframe, an enormous amount of venture capital is starting to get returned. And that means people are raising bigger and bigger funds, and they need to put it somewhere, they're going to put it against trillion dollar companies of the future. And so I do think we're going to see an ongoing rise in valuations most likely over the next year or two, much more than we've seen today. And obviously, there'll be some great things in there and there'll be a bunch of stuff that doesn't deserve it, but I actually think financing is going to get easier, not harder. And so I'd view it less as financing and more what do you think is the true likely expected outcome of your company? Not what investors are telling you, not what the press is telling you, not what Twitter is telling you. Just sit down and run the math. And then remember that at some point, you'll probably trade at 10x or something, maybe 15x. And so then the question is, what is your thing going to be worth? And remember, eventually things slow down in terms of compounding too. And you can decide where that slowdown happens. But you kind of do that math. You do future dilution. You look at your potential outcome. You look at years of work it'll take to get there. And you can come to a conclusion because there's two types of opportunity costs that are risk management. There's risk management against the value of the thing you're doing. But the biggest opportunity cost is your time. Your most productive years of your life are on the line right now. And you can either walk away with a good amount of money to go to the next giant thing. Now having done it before, they're going to work with you again, etcetera, etcetera, or you can roll the dice. And you can decide to roll the dice. That may be the right answer. And again, for some companies, absolutely, you should do that. But for others, may be, hey, actually, now is maybe the time to go. Secondary is an intermediate option, which I actually don't think is always that great because it sells for some short term needs, but it doesn't actually create a solution. And you see a lot of people from 2020, 2021, store running companies five years later that aren't working.