Uncapped with Jack Altman
00:09:36 · Jack Altman, Ev Randle
[00:09:36] S0: I don't know about Perdue Farms. I'm just I'm just guessing. [00:09:38] S1: Chick fil A has an amazing engineering team. [00:09:40] S0: Yeah. And you think they're supercharged by AI? [00:09:41] S1: I bet they are. Everyone everyone loves the Chick-fil-A [00:09:44] S0: don't know about robotics might help them too. [00:09:46] S1: Yeah. But Yeah. [00:09:47] S0: So I think there's a little diffusion that needs to happen on the consumption of token side. [00:09:51] S1: It's 100% true. And I think... So then... So so you have, like, weirdness in growth is, I think, one reason why people will be cautious about the stock potentially. There's debates. I think this is a core debate, which is how much cogen and related TAM. So for cogen specifically, how long does the fusion take? And then how much just cogen TAM is left? And then what is the [00:10:13] S0: next thing? How do you think about the cogen Tam? Like, you know, the analogy could be something like in in ZERP, you know, time Yeah. When everybody went remote. Mhmm. It was like Zoom got this absurd pull forward. Yep. And it was basically like everybody who wanted a Zoom account got it. And so Zoom grew ridiculously. And then it had maybe not full saturation, but, like, roughly, it got saturated. And obviously, at least in our corner of the world, everybody who might want to use AI programming has been using AI programming for a while. [00:10:46] S1: Yeah.
00:10:46 · Ev Randle, Jack Altman
[00:10:46] S1: Yeah. [00:10:47] S0: And then you have market share trades, and you have those kinds of other things, but you don't get 10x year over year from that forever. Yeah. But then you probably have a lot of other places in the economy where it's not even close. Yeah. So I don't know how [00:10:58] S1: you think about, like, the the code TAM. It is... It's funny because I, like, I think of back to your saturation point of, like, things that are saturated with, like, a Zoom call. There's a You either have the call saturation point. That's right. Can I get on? Do my headphones correct correctly? [00:11:13] S0: But you could always have another coding agent. [00:11:15] S1: You could always have... It's like you you [00:11:17] S0: have, like, 30 agents going out once probably. Right? [00:11:19] S1: All the time. Yeah. All the time. [00:11:20] S0: Building stuff. [00:11:20] S1: Just building stuff. Yeah. Just just Just technical. Figuring out how to be mean to you in our in our partner meeting. In the chat. But with Zoom, it's like there's a very clear ceiling in asymptote. And I think the really interesting thing that we've seen with code is I think there probably is some asymptote, but the asymptote isn't like a crazy place. And what I mean by that is some of our newer companies, like, companies that have been started kind of post OPUS 4.5, I'd say, the way that they build software [00:11:48] S0: Yes. Looks almost nothing. It's like nothing. [00:11:51] S1: It's Nothing like how you built software in 2019.
00:11:51 · Ev Randle, Jack Altman
[00:11:51] S1: It's Nothing like how you built software in 2019. [00:11:54] S0: I met up with one of our founders that we just seeded, and he... You know, there's no other... Or there's, like, one other engineer on the team right now. But we went for a walk, and he's got, like... You know, he's doing some stuff on his phone. Like, what are you doing? He's like, oh, I just... I have, like, a few agents running, and it's gonna be done by the time we're done and all this stuff. I'm just like... It's just a different there's just a different way to do it now. [00:12:16] S1: And just like the idea of a software factory, and it's like a new organizational structure for building software products, and a lot of it is not even human driven anymore. [00:12:27] S0: So basically, within Silicon Valley, there could still be many x to go. [00:12:31] S1: Yeah. And then I think it's like, if you think that, Okay, you either have to adopt that method of building software products or get left in the dust, you assume that on some timeline, the rest of the economy starts to at least look more like that than not. And that's where I think that I'm relatively I don't know if you can go have the 10x growth that you had again or something. But in terms of the durability of code gen, think that you could continue to see Double every year for a while. [00:12:58] S0: It's insane. [00:12:59] S1: 100%. And I think there's enough to do that.
00:12:59 · Ev Randle, Jack Altman
[00:12:59] S1: 100%. And I think there's enough to do that. [00:13:01] S0: I mean, other thing around that is all of the startups and markets around code, the right answer has basically just been bet on all of it. And it's been funny because in a lot of these, let's say, code related spaces, you're like, this can't possibly be that big, or there's three of them, or whatever. They just seem to keep going. And it seems like the market pull on some of the code adjacent areas is ridiculous, which is one of things we talked about earlier this week. [00:13:31] S1: 100%. It's funny. So a lot of people, I think, know about the AI bottleneck trade that happened in the public markets. A lot of people probably participated in some version of that. But basically, after ChatGPT came out in November 2022, there was almost immediately AI demand, first for ChatGPT and then other products, started skyrocketing. And people were like, okay. Well, LLM training and inference runs on GPU, so let's buy NVIDIA. So like, NVIDIA goes up a ton. But then people were like, shit. What else goes into an AI data center? Like, what else, like, goes on? Like, what else will be impacted? What derivatives of GPUs are impacted? And so I have, like, a list of these things that went through. So, like, twenty twenty three servers and racks. Super Micro went up 10 x. Dell went up a ton. Cooling equipment, so a company called Vertiv, went up a ton. 'twenty three and 'twenty four, Arista basically doubled in both 'twenty three and 'twenty four. [00:14:23] S0: That's crazy.
00:14:23 · Jack Altman, Ev Randle
[00:14:23] S0: That's crazy. [00:14:23] S1: In 'twenty five, power generation, Vistra went up three and a half x. Oklo in nuclear, people were pulling forward the future of nuclear. Bloom Energy went up 4x in 2025. Data center equipment, GE Vernova went up 2x in 2025. And then '25 and '26, obviously, we've seen memory and storage. So SanDisk, Western Digital, Micron, Seagate all went up at least 3x, I think, in 2025. And then now in '26, now that agents are now using more CPUs again, you have Intel up 120% this year. So it was [00:14:55] S0: like It's like following an egg through a snake. It's just like Yeah. [00:14:58] S1: You use, like, a new derivative, like, every, like, every, every, every year. Or like, there's like three new derivatives every year that you could have gotten, like, a multibagger return on in [00:15:06] S0: the public markets. Leopold spoke of this. You know? It's just like [00:15:09] S1: The profit. [00:15:10] S0: The profit. But then there
00:15:10 · Jack Altman, Ev Randle
[00:15:10] S0: The profit. But then there [00:15:11] S1: was like... So then in Venture, the version of this that happened is sort of like what what I think you could call, like, the code gen PMF derivative. Yeah. So, like, obviously, like, in... So so ChatGPT comes out in November 2022, but, really, this really kicks off in November '25 when Opus 4.5 comes out and supercharges Claude Code. That's right. And that creates this mega product market fit moment for CodeGen. And then, like, right after that, you had, like, basically... And, again, this is sort of a parallel to all these public categories where you had vibe coding infra. Yeah. So you had, like, back end as a service and databases, Supabase took off. Clickhouse in our portfolios continued to accelerate like crazy deployment hosts, so like Vercel, Railway, Cloudflare. The inference clouds, obviously, we're large investors in Fireworks, is growing like crazy, base 10 modal. Data companies like Mercor in the Benchmark portfolio. CodeSandbox companies like Modal and E2B are growing like crazy. Web Search, Exa, also a benchmark portfolio company. [00:16:09] S0: CodeReview I'm glad you're getting all the plugs in as we go.