Uncapped with Jack Altman
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.
00:16:09 · Jack Altman, Ev Randle
[00:16:09] S0: CodeReview I'm glad you're getting all the plugs in as we go. [00:16:12] S1: I know. I'm listening. But it's crazy. It's like, if you have 10,000 x more code in the world, all of a sudden, all of these derivatives of cogeneration also need to grow that much. And then obviously, have a very excite... I know it's not public yet, but you have a very exciting investment in the CICD GitHub Action space, because, again, durable execution with temporal, browser use APIs, and now supply chain security with folks like ChainGuard and Socket. All of these categories, every single one I just mentioned, have companies in them that are doing the 10 to 100 to 300. You start one year at 10, you go to 100, and then you go to 300 or more. Which never used to happen. Never used to happen. [00:16:54] S0: And multiple are doing it in the same category at the same time. Yes. This is what was wild. I mean, know, it's like Lovable and Replit, for example, which I've obviously done great. But it's like everyone's like, isn't this, you know, isn't this club code? Isn't this codex? Mhmm. Yeah. It is. And they're going to do a version of it that is form fitted for a different purpose. And the whole thing is so big that it's just all going to work. That's right. Which kind of goes to the Eric point of it's all And going to I think probably the modification on that is in some of these categories where technology hits that hard, it's just so easy to underestimate it.
00:16:54 · Jack Altman, Ev Randle
[00:16:54] S0: And multiple are doing it in the same category at the same time. Yes. This is what was wild. I mean, know, it's like Lovable and Replit, for example, which I've obviously done great. But it's like everyone's like, isn't this, you know, isn't this club code? Isn't this codex? Mhmm. Yeah. It is. And they're going to do a version of it that is form fitted for a different purpose. And the whole thing is so big that it's just all going to work. That's right. Which kind of goes to the Eric point of it's all And going to I think probably the modification on that is in some of these categories where technology hits that hard, it's just so easy to underestimate it. [00:17:32] S1: Yeah, it really is. I think AI code generation, you can sort of abstract most of the value generation in AI today to cogen. It's probably the most impactful product market fit moment in the history of technology. [00:17:49] S0: Probably right. Yeah, I'm trying to think what else would even I mean, it's in... It's on it's on the order of iPhone moment or something like that. That's right. [00:17:55] S1: Yeah. Except for, you know, because so much of it is in the digital... Like, because the infrastructure was already there [00:17:59] S0: Yeah. It can just go so much wider, so much faster. [00:18:01] S1: It can go so much faster. Yes. Whereas, like, Uber and DoorDash and, you know, these companies that were built on the mobile internet that were in iPhones Yes. [00:18:09] S0: They were limited by the growth because they both in mobile
00:18:09 · Jack Altman, Ev Randle
[00:18:09] S0: They were limited by the growth because they both in mobile [00:18:11] S1: phones ahead of internet. Yeah. It's fascinating. [00:18:15] S0: Yeah. And it's funny, for knock on effects of this, I think part of what's weird for founders and VCs is when you've got a thread like this that's pulling so hard, not just on code itself, but like you're saying, all of the accoutrements around it that support it and come before it and come after it and are just kind of all getting sort of yanked upwards. It's like other categories that are very good. It's like when the opportunity cost is people are like, well, I can get this ridiculous ride over here. Right. That has a big effect. Huge impact. And it's weird because at once it's making it so that venture demand in these spaces is so obscene. And then LPs are obviously doing great and they're funding it. And it's all part of like one rational circus. But then you have these other categories, and the founder's like, well, what the hell? I have a good business, and it's hard to raise and all that thing. So it creates a weirdness. [00:19:16] S1: Historically, I've spent a fair amount of time in growth investing. And as a growth investor, you keep all these historical precedents of the growth trajectories of all these amazing previous companies. And I'll go back and look, and I think data I mean, might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure Datadog went like five to 18. [00:19:33] S0: Yeah. Five to 18. [00:19:35] S1: And five to 18 to maybe 40 to 50 or something.