How I Invest with David Weisburd
01:02:58 · David Weisburd
[01:02:58] S1: I have to ask, what ending of the AI boom are we in?
01:03:03 · Brijesh Jeevarathnam
[01:03:03] S0: It's funny you ask me that because that's one of my favorite questions to ask our most trusted GPs. So, will paraphrase what they tell me. I've gotten various answers, including some that say, Oh, I think we're still in the kind of warmups. But I don't think a single person has told me it's going to post the fifth inning. So, in other words, it's still broadly kind of first half in people's consensus, whether it's kind of still pregame warmups or first or second inning. I like to sometimes go back and watch a presentation or a new product release from OpenAI or Anthropic and see what those very smart people, Sam Altman, Dario say. And what I find interesting is with the passage of time, even they cannot quite foresee where this is all going, right? And my point there is if the best minds in the world in AI cannot quite kind of prognosticate where we are in the AI cycle, generally optimistic, of course, but only directionally correct, I think we can all just say, well, we don't know what we don't know, but likely we still have a lot of room to go from here. One rubric that I like to talk about is, and this came from a few of our GPs, when there's a seminal moment in a particular technology, and maybe the best example is Netscape, the first kind of real public browser, I think it was 'ninety three, early '90s. There were many companies that were started in the internet 1.0 era, but the best ones came arguably kind of four to seven ish years out. And this is despite the .com issues. I'm talking about the Amazons and the Googles of the world, right? Even eBay.
01:04:53 · David Weisburd, Brijesh Jeevarathnam
[01:04:53] S1: Facebook as well. Think it was like the twelfth or thirteenth social network. [01:04:56] S0: Yes, exactly. Right? So, it came after the Friendster, MySpace era, right? Exactly. And if we then say, Look, history definitely rhymes, even if it doesn't repeat. And if we then say OpenAI and ChatGPT, that moment in fourth quarter of twenty twenty two, let's call it about four years ago from today, was that seminal AI moment. It certainly was the moment when AI burst into our consciousness, collective consciousness in a very, Oh my God, it's here kind of way. Could argue that we are just getting started with the Google, Amazon, your example, Facebook phase of this company creation, right? Only time will tell, but I feel it won't be a smooth journey necessarily, but there is a lot more to come in terms of company creation building around this mega wave. And I think it's easy to say it's all AI all the time, but there's a lot more to it in my opinion. I think AI is building on the prior waves that came before it. I think Sequoia did a good job recently talking about why is AI scaling so quickly? For example, distribution channels, right? With our smartphones and so on and so forth. I think AI is a wave built on all the prior waves that came before it that is creating a pace of change in terms of adoption by customers, in terms of monetization and really growth at scale. Anthropic OpenAI are good examples of this, that we've never seen before. And I don't think these are late innings. I think there's more to come.
01:06:35 · David Weisburd, Brijesh Jeevarathnam
[01:06:35] S1: A variation of this very question I like to ask people is if AI is a bubble, how's that possible? Like what part of the thesis would be wrong? And what people settle on is there's no way... There's no intrinsic value in the technology. People might be off on valuations or might be overly bullish, but there's no way this is a binary bubble like the eyeballs were for the .com bubble. There's just no possible way that there's no business use case for AI because everybody experiences the the productivity gains. [01:07:06] S0: Right. And and I certainly see that point. And at this moment in time, if one kind of uses your analogy and then adds like the dark fiber part of it, like, you know, was it ever lit up kind of thing. At this point in time, the demand for compute seems to be far outstripping the supply into the, at least the foreseeable future. And from a broad use case standpoint, it appears to be still very early in the AI wave. So, one could argue there's real legs to this potentially. And of course, you and I both know the most dangerous words in investing is this time it's different, but there are enough parameters to say that there is a lot more adoption and therefore monetization and therefore value creation to come from AI.
01:07:06 · Brijesh Jeevarathnam, David Weisburd
[01:07:06] S0: Right. And and I certainly see that point. And at this moment in time, if one kind of uses your analogy and then adds like the dark fiber part of it, like, you know, was it ever lit up kind of thing. At this point in time, the demand for compute seems to be far outstripping the supply into the, at least the foreseeable future. And from a broad use case standpoint, it appears to be still very early in the AI wave. So, one could argue there's real legs to this potentially. And of course, you and I both know the most dangerous words in investing is this time it's different, but there are enough parameters to say that there is a lot more adoption and therefore monetization and therefore value creation to come from AI. [01:08:06] S1: Well, speaking of innings, it's been 440 episodes since I first reached out to you, Brijesh. I think I've reached out to you probably close to a dozen times. So first of all, sorry for spamming you. Secondly, you probably don't even remember. People get so obsessed about being persistent, then they realize that nobody even... Nobody cares. You just need to keep on persisting. So it's an honor to have you on the podcast and thanks so much for jumping on.
01:08:06 · David Weisburd, Brijesh Jeevarathnam
[01:08:06] S1: Well, speaking of innings, it's been 440 episodes since I first reached out to you, Brijesh. I think I've reached out to you probably close to a dozen times. So first of all, sorry for spamming you. Secondly, you probably don't even remember. People get so obsessed about being persistent, then they realize that nobody even... Nobody cares. You just need to keep on persisting. So it's an honor to have you on the podcast and thanks so much for jumping on. [01:08:29] S0: David, I appreciate you saying that. I think this is my first podcast, in fact. And I appreciate what you have done and I respect hustle and persistence. And it was my objective to kind of make you wait. I'm not that kind of busy or important. You've certainly had many, many, many more seller guests. But I really respect what you've built in terms of a podcast that speaks to people in not just the investment world, but folks outside who want to learn about how investors think and where we're going. So congrats to you on the success and thank you for making time for me. [01:09:18] S1: Thank you so much Brijesh. I appreciate it.