YouTube video summary

Output from command in shell 963938:
WARNING: Your yt-dlp version (2025.12.08) is older than 90 days!
         It is strongly recommended to always use the latest version.
         You installed yt-dlp with pip or using the wheel from PyPi; Use that to update.
         To suppress this warning, add --no-update to your command/config.
[youtube] Extracting URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y82q5Lw7_8E
[youtube] Y82q5Lw7_8E: Downloading webpage
[youtube] Y82q5Lw7_8E: Downloading tv client config
[youtube] Y82q5Lw7_8E: Downloading player f551602d-main
[youtube] Y82q5Lw7_8E: Downloading tv player API JSON
[youtube] Y82q5Lw7_8E: Downloading android sdkless player API JSON
[youtube] [jsc:deno] Solving JS challenges using deno
WARNING: [youtube] [jsc] Remote components challenge solver script (deno) and NPM package (deno) were skipped. These may be required to solve JS challenges. You can enable these downloads with  --remote-components ejs:github  (recommended) or  --remote-components ejs:npm , respectively. For more information and alternatives, refer to  https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS
WARNING: [youtube] Y82q5Lw7_8E: n challenge solving failed: Some formats may be missing. Ensure you have a supported JavaScript runtime and challenge solver script distribution installed. Review any warnings presented before this message. For more details, refer to  https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS
[info] Y82q5Lw7_8E: Downloading subtitles: en
[info] Y82q5Lw7_8E: Downloading 1 format(s): 139-18
[info] Writing video subtitles to: yt_synopsis.en.vtt
[download] Destination: yt_synopsis.en.vtt

[download]    1.00KiB at  Unknown B/s (00:00:00)
[download]    3.00KiB at  Unknown B/s (00:00:00)
[download]    7.00KiB at  Unknown B/s (00:00:00)
[download]   15.00KiB at    4.92MiB/s (00:00:00)
[download]   31.00KiB at    3.00MiB/s (00:00:00)
[download]   63.00KiB at    2.70MiB/s (00:00:00)
[download]  127.00KiB at    3.39MiB/s (00:00:00)
[download]  255.00KiB at    4.49MiB/s (00:00:00)
[download]  511.00KiB at    6.60MiB/s (00:00:00)
[download]  851.89KiB at    8.97MiB/s (00:00:00)
[download] 100% of  851.89KiB in 00:00:00 at 3.34MiB/s

Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 495198:
The Billion Dollar PDF
-rw-r--r--  1 root1  wheel  872339 Jul  8 01:33 yt_synopsis.en.vtt


Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 076bcb:
<string>:10: FutureWarning: Possible set difference at position 9
   77235 yt_synopsis.txt
  548601 yt_synopsis.txt


Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell ee4696:
280412 chars
you can, you know, form billions of you can, you know, form billions of dollars of capital around simply setting dollars of capital around simply setting dollars of capital around simply setting a new idea. Every once in a while, a new idea. Every once in a while, a new idea. Every once in a while, someone basically crystallizes a notion someone basically crystallizes a notion someone basically crystallizes a notion right at the right time in the right way right at the right time in the right way right at the right time in the right way that sort of becomes the foundational that sort of becomes the foundational that sort of becomes the foundational viewpoint or opinion on a certain era. viewpoint or opinion on a certain era. viewpoint or opinion on a certain era. Everyone is a little panicked. They Everyone is a little panicked. They Everyone is a little panicked. They don't know what's going on. And someone don't know what's going on. And someone don't know what's going on. And someone just needs to sort of set the story and just needs to sort of set the story and just needs to sort of set the story and set the narrative. And it doesn't even set the narrative. And it doesn't even set the narrative. And it doesn't even have to be right, but there's just a have to be right, but there's just a have to be right, but there's just a sort of confidence of like this is sort of confidence of like this is sort of confidence of like this is happening. Follow me. Capital just happening. Follow me. Capital just happening. Follow me. Capital just follows the billion dollar PDF around follows the billion dollar PDF around follows the billion dollar PDF around the field. So, we're going to have the chance to So, we're going to have the chance to talk about uh as we do on a daily basis, talk about uh as we do on a daily basis, talk about uh as we do on a daily basis, you and I, 57 different ideas. But I'm you and I, 57 different ideas. But I'm you and I, 57 different ideas. But I'm


Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 59bcc1:
187376 chars
you can, you know, form billions of you can, you know, form billions of dollars of capital around simply setting dollars of capital around simply setting a new idea. Every once in a while, a new idea. Every once in a while, someone basically crystallizes a notion someone basically crystallizes a notion right at the right time in the right way right at the right time in the right way that sort of becomes the foundational that sort of becomes the foundational viewpoint or opinion on a certain era. viewpoint or opinion on a certain era. Everyone is a little panicked. They Everyone is a little panicked. They don't know what's going on. And someone don't know what's going on. And someone just needs to sort of set the story and just needs to sort of set the story and set the narrative. And it doesn't even set the narrative. And it doesn't even have to be right, but there's just a have to be right, but there's just a sort of confidence of like this is sort of confidence of like this is happening. Follow me. Capital just happening. Follow me. Capital just follows the billion dollar PDF around follows the billion dollar PDF around the field. So, we're going to have the chance to So, we're going to have the chance to talk about uh as we do on a daily basis, talk about uh as we do on a daily basis, you and I, 57 different ideas. But I'm you and I, 57 different ideas. But I'm always interested to begin with you a always interested to begin with you a couple questions about investing. I s


Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 7cad87:
WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

00:00:00.080 --> 00:00:01.990 align:start position:0%
 
you<00:00:00.320><c> can,</c><00:00:00.560><c> you</c><00:00:00.719><c> know,</c><00:00:00.880><c> form</c><00:00:01.520><c> billions</c><00:00:01.839><c> of</c>

00:00:01.990 --> 00:00:02.000 align:start position:0%
you can, you know, form billions of
 

00:00:02.000 --> 00:00:04.710 align:start position:0%
you can, you know, form billions of
dollars<00:00:02.240><c> of</c><00:00:02.399><c> capital</c><00:00:03.200><c> around</c><00:00:03.760><c> simply</c><00:00:04.319><c> setting</c>

00:00:04.710 --> 00:00:04.720 align:start position:0%
dollars of capital around simply setting
 

00:00:04.720 --> 00:00:07.030 align:start position:0%
dollars of capital around simply setting
a<00:00:04.960><c> new</c><00:00:05.120><c> idea.</c><00:00:05.600><c> Every</c><00:00:05.839><c> once</c><00:00:06.080><c> in</c><00:00:06.160><c> a</c><00:00:06.319><c> while,</c>

00:00:07.030 --> 00:00:07.040 align:start position:0%
a new idea. Every once in a while,
 

00:00:07.040 --> 00:00:10.470 align:start position:0%
a new idea. Every once in a while,
someone<00:00:07.359><c> basically</c><00:00:08.160><c> crystallizes</c><00:00:09.360><c> a</c><00:00:09.760><c> notion</c>

00:00:10.470 --> 00:00:10.480 align:start position:0%
someone basically crystallizes a notion
 

00:00:10.480 --> 00:00:12.950 align:start position:0%
someone basically crystallizes a notion
right<00:00:10.639><c> at</c><00:00:10.880><c> the</c><00:00:11.040><c> right</c><00:00:11.200><c> time</c><00:00:11.519><c> in</c><00:00:11.759><c> the</c><00:00:11.920><c> right</c><00:00:12.160><c> way</c>

00:00:12.950 --> 00:00:12.960 align:start position:0%
right at the right time in the right way
 

00:00:12.960 --> 00:00:15.110 align:start position:0%
right at the right time in the right way
that<00:00:13.200><c> sort</c><00:00:13.440><c> of</c><00:00:13.519><c> becomes</c><00:00:13.840><c> the</c><00:00:14.160><c> foundational</c>

00:00:15.110 --> 00:00:15.120 align:start position:0%
that sort of becomes the foundational


Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 93ca00:
93461 chars
you can, you know, form billions of dollars of capital around simply setting a new idea. Every once in a while, someone basically crystallizes a notion right at the right time in the right way that sort of becomes the foundational viewpoint or opinion on a certain era. Everyone is a little panicked. They don't know what's going on. And someone just needs to sort of set the story and set the narrative. And it doesn't even have to be right, but there's just a sort of confidence of like this is happening. Follow me. Capital just follows the billion dollar PDF around the field. So, we're going to have the chance to talk about uh as we do on a daily basis, you and I, 57 different ideas. But I'm always interested to begin with you a couple questions about investing. I sit near you. We share an office. So, I get to hear a lot of these stories every day. And I think it would be really fun for you to turn your observations from all those god knows how many hundreds of conversations with founders of these companies and with the capital that has backed them in the past to sort of share what you've learned from that frontier over the last 18 months framed as advice for founders and advice for capital because I I just don't know very many investors that are looking at situations like you are with such a high rep count. So, what have you learned in the first 18 months of doing this? I've >> learned a lot. You really realize in let's say long-term private markets that the great filter so to speak for funds is their storytelling ability fundamentally because you know their product which is like realized cash returns take a decade. And so the thing that you're selling in the interim, whether it's through, you know, a quarterly update or your event or just your one-on-one conversations with your LPs or whatever, is really just narrative. A particular situation that's very interesting that we've seen a lot of is twofold. One is that the business is kind of old but has started to


Exit code: 0

<file-view path="/tmp/yt_synopsis.txt" start_line="1" end_line="1" total_lines="1">
  1|you can, you know, form billions of dollars of capital around simply setting a new idea. Every once in a while, someone basically crystallizes a notion right at the right time in the right way that sort of becomes the foundational viewpoint or opinion on a certain era. Everyone is a little panicked. They don't know what's going on. And someone just needs to sort of set the story and set the narrative. And it doesn't even have to be right, but there's just a sort of confidence of like this is happening. Follow me. Capital just follows the billion dollar PDF around the field. So, we're going to have the chance to talk about uh as we do on a daily basis, you and I, 57 different ideas. But I'm always interested to begin with you a couple questions about investing. I sit near you. We share an office. So, I get to hear a lot of these stories every day. And I think it would be really fun for you to turn your observations from all those god knows how many hundreds of conversations with founders of these companies and with the capital that has backed them in the past to sort of share what you've learned from that frontier over the last 18 months framed as advice for founders and advice for capital because I I just don't know very many investors that are looking at situations like you are with such a high rep count. So, what have you learned in the first 18 months of doing this? I've &gt;&gt; learned a lot. You really realize in let's say long-term private markets that the great filter so to speak for funds is their storytelling ability fundamentally because you know their product which is like realized cash returns take a decade. And so the thing that you're selling in the interim, whether it's through, you know, a quarterly update or your event or just your one-on-one conversations with your LPs or whatever, is really just narrative. A particular situation that's very interesting that we've seen a lot of is twofold. One is that the business is kind of old but has started to... [truncated 91462 chars]
</file-view>

Output from command in shell 415a64:
4 parts


Exit code: 0

<file-view path="/tmp/yt_part_0.txt" start_line="1" end_line="1" total_lines="1">
  1|you can, you know, form billions of dollars of capital around simply setting a new idea. Every once in a while, someone basically crystallizes a notion right at the right time in the right way that sort of becomes the foundational viewpoint or opinion on a certain era. Everyone is a little panicked. They don't know what's going on. And someone just needs to sort of set the story and set the narrative. And it doesn't even have to be right, but there's just a sort of confidence of like this is happening. Follow me. Capital just follows the billion dollar PDF around the field. So, we're going to have the chance to talk about uh as we do on a daily basis, you and I, 57 different ideas. But I'm always interested to begin with you a couple questions about investing. I sit near you. We share an office. So, I get to hear a lot of these stories every day. And I think it would be really fun for you to turn your observations from all those god knows how many hundreds of conversations with founders of these companies and with the capital that has backed them in the past to sort of share what you've learned from that frontier over the last 18 months framed as advice for founders and advice for capital because I I just don't know very many investors that are looking at situations like you are with such a high rep count. So, what have you learned in the first 18 months of doing this? I've &gt;&gt; learned a lot. You really realize in let's say long-term private markets that the great filter so to speak for funds is their storytelling ability fundamentally because you know their product which is like realized cash returns take a decade. And so the thing that you're selling in the interim, whether it's through, you know, a quarterly update or your event or just your one-on-one conversations with your LPs or whatever, is really just narrative. A particular situation that's very interesting that we've seen a lot of is twofold. One is that the business is kind of old but has started to... [truncated 22994 chars]
</file-view>

Output from command in shell e1195e:
   24994 yt_part_0.txt
   24993 yt_part_1.txt
   24999 yt_part_2.txt
   18473 yt_part_3.txt
   93459 total
you can, you know, form billions of dollars of capital around simply setting a new idea. Every once in a while, someone basically crystallizes a notion right at the right time in the right way that sort of becomes the foundational viewpoint or opinion on a certain era. Everyone is a little panicked. They don't know what's going on. And someone just needs to sort of set the story and set the narrative. And it doesn't even have to be right, but there's just a sort of confidence of like this is happening. Follow me. Capital just follows the billion dollar PDF around the field. So, we're going to have the chance to talk about uh as we do on a daily basis, you and I, 57 different ideas. But I'm always interested to begin with you a couple questions about investing. I sit near you. We share an office. So, I get to hear a lot of these stories every day. And I think it would be really fun for you to turn your observations from all those god knows how many hundreds of conversations with founders of these companies and with the capital that has backed them in the past to sort of share what you've learned from that frontier over the last 18 months framed as advice for founders and advice for capital because I I just don't know very many investors that are looking at situations like you are with such a high rep count. So, what have you learned in the first 18 months of doing this? I've >> learned a lot. You really realize in let's say long-term private markets that the great filter so to speak for funds is their storytelling ability fundamentally because you know their product which is like realized cash returns take a decade. And so the thing that you're selling in the interim, whether it's through, you know, a quarterly update or your event or just your one-on-one conversations with your LPs or whatever, is really just narrative. A particular situation that's very interesting that we've seen a lot of is twofold. One is that the business is kind of old but has started to do well recently. That's an interesting scenario because it's one of these instances where merely because the company, the story again, the narrative of the company is that it's 7 years old. Let's say the company has really started to inflect. Maybe it's because of AI or maybe it's because of something else, but they're six or seven years into their life. It's very difficult for those companies to get funding because the story is well, okay, fine. You grew 200% last year, but you know, you're only on in absolute terms, you're only at 8 million of revenue and you're 7 years in. Whereas I think literally if you just changed the name and told a different story and just you know sort of arbitrarily started the clock two years ago um you that company would actually be like really hot and so like that's an interesting situation. The fix I think is just to be more flexible on narrative and story. sort of a derivative of that problem is just the amount of businesses where they're in a spot where it's kind of working, things are starting to go well, but they're faced with three choices, which is basically they're not going to raise a significant up round. And so really, they're staring down a bridge round uh strategic like M&A acquire or cutting to profitability. And those are just really hard situations. If you're in that situation, I think um that's where you really want to get creative with the cap table. And if you have some cash, buy back your investors, convert everyone to common, really start to spend more time on the cap table because otherwise like I've been shocked at sort of how hostile insider bridge rounds really are. I think this is like an underdised part of >> just they have like you know 3x liquidation preferences or warrants or ratchets or other things. Um there there's sort of this like interesting idea that if you're extractive to the downside, everyone sort of booze you. But if you're extractive for the upside where you say, you know, I want the right to invest at the same price in 2 years from now. Um, they're both like similarly extractive, but because one is like an optimistic extractive, everyone loves that one. >> So, what advice would you give to founders in thinking about their cap table from the start? >> We're obviously in a highly volatile, highly uncertain period right now. No one knows if it's the death of software. I think it's, you know, certainly the most unprecedented and uncertain time since at least like the transition of the internet. And so I think what you want in that time is the is a lot of optionality and the ability to be nimble and the ability to really be able to do what is right for the business and not be constrained by the cap table. And so you know maybe your business needs to become a service a services business. Maybe you need to acquire other companies. Maybe you need to run profitably for a while. You know maybe you need to change your whole business model. maybe like you know if per seat pricing uh goes away you need to pivot to usage maybe you need to fire a bunch of your customers and so I think like you know in in volatile times it's always useful to have optionality and so I think like I guess the general piece of advice is just unless you're certain that you want to just like try this one thing and it's going to be huge or zero you should think about optionality which usually means raising less raising from investors with a wider mandate um not getting stuck in all these weird problems where you need to continue to raise more money and if you don't it's bad for employees it's bad for recruiting uh people's options get underwater they start to leave like all those things sort of reduce optionality it's funny cuz in general I think like commitment is a much better strategy than optionality but I think in highly volatile times where it's hard to tell the future you basically just want to control for being able to like be super nimble turn on a dime do what you want not be constrained by like well we're set up our capital is set up in such a way that we can really only do this one thing which is also true for investors by the way they're same problem. >> Going back to the investors and the construction of an effective narrative for building an investing firm before you've delivered the 10-year investment returns or whatever, you have this great idea called the billion-dollar PDF. Can you describe what you mean by that and what the interesting components of a billion dollar PDF tend to be? This is sort of an idea that you and I came up with in a joking way that like kind of turned out to be true I think the more we thought about it which is every once in a while someone basically crystallizes a notion right at the right time in the right way that sort of becomes the foundational viewpoint or opinion on a certain era and I think it's just this idea of everyone's a little bit uncertain everyone is a little panicked they don't know what's going on and someone just needs to sort of set the story and set the narrative and it doesn't even have to be Right. But there's just a sort of confidence of like this is what's going on. This is happening. Follow me almost. When those come together, they just set a new narrative that everyone can kind of rest on for for a period really until the the next PDF comes along. And um and the billion dollar PDF thing is this idea that really like you can, you know, form billions of dollars of capital uh in one way or another around simply setting a new idea. And then, you know, maybe you can think of capital as like uh 10-year-olds playing soccer. you know, they all sort of just follow the ball around and they're just the capital just follows the billion dollar PDF around the field. >> It's probably a good excuse to talk about I don't know how long we'll talk about this topic, probably a long time. This joint notion of posting, which I guess is a, you know, a billion dollar PDF is just like the ultimate form of that or something. And the furnace that is the timeline of predominantly X, that's that's where I get my timeline. There's other places as well, but it seems like these notions have really taken over people's desires and attention, meaning like everyone wants to ultimately have a spot on that timeline. It's a strange phenomenon. I'd love you to just riff on there's like five or six sub components of the timeline that I want to ask you about, but maybe to start just how you're thinking about this strange modern >> I think it's downstream of technological change. I think the technological change is really the uni feed. So, what people don't appreciate about X is that everyone gets served the same 500 tweets per day and it's hundreds of millions of daily active users. And, you know, uh the thing that people who don't post don't realize is just how many, you know, whatever the the poster to lurker ratio on these things is enormous. And so, it's really hard to feel the impact unless you're actually like getting onto the feed and seeing all the people that you didn't know were reading X all day uh commenting on your thing. I'm always surprised like when I post a good tweet and you know whoever texts me about it that I literally had no you know so it could be someone I know well and I had no idea that they read Twitter all day but everyone reads Twitter all day and so the uni feed I think is sort of the technological catalyst for this phenomenon. It is X, by the way. Like I I it's interesting how X is sort of like it's sort of the Lindy social network. Like it's it's just gonna it probably is never going to reach the scale of the others, but it just fills this like vital role. And it's interesting to me how it's like, you know, however long in probably almost 20 years now. Uh and it's still sort of more important than ever of just just like source of truth almost for the whole world. And what that means is everyone is reading the same thing. It's the it's the global newspaper, right? And so in the same way that you know people would talk about the latest article in the journal 30 years ago now it's the latest tweet or the latest essay on on on X. And so I think what that creates is that all the sort of most important people in the world at least when it comes to capital markets and politics and um I'm sure some other journalism >> entrepreneurship technology >> they're reading their daily paper every morning and uh these things really form opinion and they price securities and they dictate where capital flows and they certainly write policy and so there's this idea that another great filter perhaps is that like whether your institution will only survive if it's timeline native. And what that means is that it is reactive to and reflexive to the timeline. Reactive meaning that it, you know, is constantly monitoring the timeline and and and and reflexive in that its actions then affect the timeline which it it then sort of reads and reacts to. And you can think of, you know, the White House is obviously like this. Uh venture capital is like this. Um certainly public equities are like this. There's this idea of like what is the story? And what's interesting, it's funny, like one of the things I get emails about the most is uh a comment I made somewhere about how like posting is the last great meritocracy. I get emails about that because people are like that really clicked in my head and I started posting and posting changes your life if you're good at it. That's still true today, maybe more true than ever. And it is sort of a meritocracy in a weird way. Now there's the algorithms and AI and all this stuff, but like it's still, you know, in some ways it's a lot more meritocratic than it used to be. like everything it's been lotteryified and so like you know in the old times you had to like sort of grind away and build this huge following and then by virtue of having a big following you cou

Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 847d67:
ld post a really inane uh tweet and it would be very popular but that doesn't happen anymore now you just you can you can literally be like a new account and just write a good post and then the algorithm selects you and it'll display you in front of 500 million people. It's sort of this like weird thing where you have the global newspaper that everyone reads that everyone finds highly influential. There's also this like this sort of um meta thing where it's like the newspaper if you could see all the influential people reacting to the articles in the newspaper and then by virtue of reacting to it making the thing more important and anyone can post to it. People are still very much underestimating how much policy gets dictated from the timeline, how much uh venture rounds are done on the timeline, how much businesses are built on the timeline. And I think increasingly everything will just become sort of timeline native. I think TPBN is a great example of this. Um, and certainly right like you know in this in in when we're recording this every other day someone wrote writes some sort of you know pornographic fanfic about AI and it moves the public markets dramatically. And so I I I think again it sort of comes back to this billion dollar PDF idea of when there's uncertainty people are just looking for what is the story? What is the most compelling story? And the way that it works on the timeline is it's not, you know, um it's not this well-considered book that comes out that everyone talks about for a year. It's sort of what is the thing that sounds smart, feels good, is it has to be entertaining. Maybe maybe that's another change is like a good post has to be very entertaining cuz people are on the timeline to be entertained. Like they they can lie to themselves and say they're on it for other reasons, but it's just to be entertained and that's obviously what the algorithms are selecting for. And so there's this idea that like the most entertaining novel, somewhat in… (10994 chars truncated)

Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 3b3fd5:
===PART1===
scientists as priests. Sort of the scientific pro project has fallen apart a little bit. Um this is widely discussed. We looked to physics as hopefully going to provide us meaning. It hasn't. Physics has largely stalled since the war. And so I think we've moved beyond science as as a source of meaning. And so I think like there's this billionaire class that we've sort of looked to as the new source of meaning. Like like on its surface it doesn't make a lot of sense that we would spend so much time caring about what billionaires think about whatever physics or theology or health or topics unrelated to acrewing a billion dollars. But the reason we do I think is this is our new priestly class which is we've said okay you know the values that are important in our society are being successful at business and to be successful at business you generally have to be smart and hardworking and so these are the people that have ascended to the highest realm of piety in our value system and so we're going to listen to them we were willing to like take scientific and medical advice from I would say people who are either in the billionaire class or are adjacent to the billionaire class which is the poster class which is like the new class I think and so the the peak guy thing is like this idea that I think we've had enough of the billionaire there's basically been a lot of billionaire warship part of it is that they've gotten way less scarce I think billionaires at least like sort of state of mind billionaires have probably grown 100x in the last 20 years probably more we sort of look to them to provide us these answers and um it has not been satisfying and so you know I think this notion that like I want to catch every podcast with this billionaire and I'm going to study his routines and habits and care about what he thinks about these things has come to its like full saturation. I think there's also this like secondary idea which is that money I think we've just seen is not as powerful as we maybe maybe it once was or we or we think it is in so far as um you know certainly our political landscape we have not seen uh the donor class be nearly as successful as they maybe used to be or we thought they were. If you're a billionaire, you're sort of quite limited on the things that you can do visav like an African warlord or even, you know, certainly a upper baron, right? And so maybe there's the these sort of like three forces of inflation is sort of driving down what it means to be a billionaire at all. And then the evolution of like power structures in society are also limiting like Andrew Carnegie could take up arms against his workers, but like now if you if you like post the wrong thing as a as like a billionaire, you have to resign. So So like there's this sense that this whole class has just become less important. And then I also think look like just the media and podcast it's just saturated. There's just you you you get it. You you understand this thing. Um but we but we don't want to take life advice. We don't want to hear about what's happening from from the billionaire class um anymore. And so I I would say that like that whole set just feels very saturated. It feels unlikely that there's a marginal billionaire that I'm going to learn something very interesting from on a podcast. And I don't think that was the case like six years ago. And so the logical question is like what is the next class as we sort of flail around looking for our next set of priests? And I look I think I think it's the poster and uh and I think you can see this because I think the billionaire class is a little bit differential to the poster. And so like one very clear way is the science class sort of inherited the priests the priesthood after the actual priests and then you can always look which class is subservient to the next to see who's next and like the science class becomes subservient to the billionaire class. This is certainly the the Epstein lesson, right? Which is all the scientists are clamoring around the sort of money and glamour and that now I think the billionaire class has become subservient to the posting class. And so, so I I think you can sort of see who society collectively chooses to be like, "All right, this is the guy I want to listen to for two hours and, you know, base my life on." >> Subservient to the poster class evidenced how why do you say they're subservient to the posters? >> I was at this thing a while ago and it was a bunch of billionaire investors and they were all fighting over who could sit next to Tyler Cowan because he's the most interesting person there. >> Yeah. Every room has a boss. Every room has a boss who is Yeah. Exactly. And I think um I think there's there's very much something to that. It's sort of that simple. And uh there's sort of this line of subservience. >> There's also this interesting point about it's just scarcity like always. And the billionaire inflation thing is the seed of their demise that if there's so many billionaires, if you know, Grant Cardone is a billionaire and so is Elon Musk or something. It just makes it so stupid. And so we either need a new class at the top and it's not Deca or sent a billionaire like that doesn't who cares. It's it's like something else that distinguishes. We need to like reclassify the top 100 or something. Robert Barren. Yeah. It it just seems like there's too many of them so no one so I don't care anymore. And it's it seems much easier to get a billion dollars than it does to gain the real estate in people's minds or on the timeline that like the top couple of posters can do. >> If I could just have it by decree, it would be who is a liquid inflationadjusted billionaire. I think that numbers probably hasn't changed a whole lot. But again, I think if I I always find it so useful to take this sort of like retrospective uh historic frame. Net worth is like this new idea. It's like a really new idea. If you read like Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy, like you know, they're talking about how wealthy all the men are. Mr. Darcy is discussed as getting £10,000 a year from his estate. That's his wealth. It's his cash flow. And it's funny like no one there's not like a scene >> did a DCF for Mr. >> Yeah. There's there's not there's not like a scene in Pride and Prejudice where they're like, does he have a lot of margin loan against his estate? And there's also not this idea of well, okay, his estate's worth, you know, whatever 200,000 because he would never sell his estate. It's like why would you it's not viewed as assets. So it's this like holy conceptual just points on a leaderboard like truly because you can't spend it. I really think it's kind of crash to say about billionaire is like a state of mind between like private markets and uh net worth as a concept uh and then inflation. Billionaire is now sort of like something you can just be dubbed. I think you'll come to see billionaire as sort of this like sort of political label that's only tangentially related. I mean, you see this on the timeline a lot, which is people get referred to as billionaire who are, you know, not rich at all, but they sort of have these traits and associations. And so I think this term similar to millionaire, right? Like millionaire, >> no one says that anymore. >> Yeah. And it used to be um it used to sort of carry the same weight as billionaire, but now millionaire is sort of just this like it's a it's yeah it's a it's both irrelevant but it also like what it when you say someone's a millionaire you're sort of just saying they're like a you know whatever upper middle class wellto-do person with a >> but it doesn't matter if they have $5 million or $800,000. It's like this looser class thing as maybe the currency gets devalued both in terms of in in the literal sense and also in the sort of what you can do with it sense. I mean time is fixed, right? And so then the new scarcity is just like attention you can draw on the on the screen. >> If you think about the most interesting posters today, I'm not asking you to endorse them one way or the other, but just the people that you think are the most interesting. >> Who who comes to mind? The distinction to draw is there are um there are the the people that I want to get tweet notifications for because I actually think each one of their posts is really good and that's like a vanishingly small number and then there are good posters who have really made something of themselves because of their prolificness. I mean the the other sort of problem with posting is like it still does reward prolificness which I am still sternly against. I always think Twitter should be dictated by followers divided by posts but that's not how it works. It just rewards prolificness. I think there's this idea that like the most important media property won't be watched. The most important author isn't read. The most important philosopher is not understood. The the most important stock has no fundamentals. Like everything I think like in a world of fiat currency, everything sort of becomes this like weird fiat thing. Certainly it's true about philosophers, authors, like does anyone really read the books these authors write? I don't think so. I think a small amount of taste makers read the books and then other people look at books as idols and if they're like sort of blessed by the right people then there's sort of this like mimetic um celebration of the thing and even podcasts like you said right like clips do a lot better than the podcast episode like I I I think I pride myself like I can tell if a podcast or a blog essay or a book or something is good or not without having read it just by like sort of triangulating it. like I I know which one of your episodes do well without listening to them because I can sort of like feel from the reception and and like to some extent that is the thing like you can imagine a world where there's a few clips from a podcast but no one ever listens to the podcast but like I don't actually think that would diminish the value of the property. It's like everything is being um processed and packaged for uh catching attention but taking the least amount of that person's time. >> Yeah. I heard this interesting story about a publication that has x millions of followers or whatever or readers, however they describe it, and the person behind it told me like something like 95% of the readers are people that scroll through like the quote highlights on Instagram or something and whatever. They're still a reader. And it's just a fascinating it it's to me it's all quite depressing that we're all the world of posters and content has reoriented around this this monolithic timeline and they're all just feeding it what it wants. But that's the game you sort of have to play. And I'm curious, I know you went, I don't know, 6 months or something completely off of it, like you just you just disappeared. What was that like? And is that uh a path that you would encourage people to give a try, opting out? >> I think my takeaway from that would simply be that one should not fool themselves that they are looking for anything other than entertainment in all the media that they consume because it is produced to be entertaining. It's selected to be entertaining. It's edited to be entertaining. The job to be done of what is on the screen is to entertain you. And so I think that is the big lesson which is like look like I'm not going to tell people how much entertainment they should have in their life, but that is what it is fundamentally. Rolex or Nike can convince you that their thing is an investment or an asset versus a liability. And so then you'll spend way more money on it. podcasts and posts and essays can convince you that what you're reading is useful for you and like productive and and and anything other than watching TV all day. whether I want to spend an hour a day on the timeline or eight hours a day on the timeline. It's just about like how much do I want to be entertained and you know any anything else that I would say about it I think is is is fairly fairly milktoast in the sense that like yeah it doesn't you don't really miss anything uh if you're like a relative if you're not a complete hermit like you hear about what's important it gets filtered through you probably the most like enlightened way to consume this media is to not read it yourself and just sort of get the filtered takes from people around you at dinners and lunches and stuff and you just sort of let um you know first of all expose themselves to the radiation and then like kind of come back and tell you what's what's interesting or not on there. >> Our friend Jesse thinks about it this way who he refuses any algorithm in his life and we were like well how do you know it's including news which is just an algorithm. It's like how do

Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell a63eeb:
 you know what's going on? He said well people tell you >> yeah that would be my takeaway. The freedom versus impact question. >> Do you believe that trade-off's real? >> I think it's real. One of the questions I'm interested in is there seems to be I'm I'm always interested in this in in various classes of classes of guys, archetypes, genres, whatever. And um there seems to have been this type of person that's largely gone extinct which is and again I I unfortunately I think this is probably all just explained away by technology which is sort of a boring but maybe accurate explanation but like theodore Roosevelts or the Andrew Carnegies of the world who are able to uh spend a lot of their time in leisure a lot of time away from their business and um you know what's so interesting like for Carnegie for example, is, you know, he he he's he's arguably still the richest person or very close to the richest person uh that's ever lived. But I'm fascinated by this idea of like is that necessarily true? Like does the idea that you have to be working, you know, 22 hours a day to get these sort of worldchanging outcomes. Is that necessarily true? Like I I I think it's interesting of like a I think Larry Ellison is like the contemporary figure who sort of bucks this trend and you know he he he he claims to have started Oracle very much with the intention of being able to disappear for 2 weeks to sail or whatever and still by all accounts sort of like drops in and drops out and can you still be a player and not be like jacked in 24/7? It's unfathomable that the president of the United States could be off the grid for a month but is that true in business? I don't know. Is is is a lot of hard work performative? Maybe in the case of Carnegie, it's interesting because he was self-conscious his whole life about joining this sort of society. Maybe it's the posters of his day. Like he he he he knew that for him money wasn't going to be enough and he wanted to be acce… (9993 chars truncated)

Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell f55449:
===PART2===
engineering to make a lot of money in a way that the quality of the business itself is maybe ancillary to to to the to the core trade. Um, and those are the founding, you know, the what the founders and the founding acts of these large firms today are. And so, you know, now that the Apollo and Blackstones and KKRs of the world, um, you know, I think in a lot of cases the leverage buyout is a very small part of what they do today, but I do think it's still like in the core culture. And one thing that, you know, we've pondered about before is like what what does the next 20 or 30 years look like when the those firm the the largest financial firms in the world, their founding action was seed investing. It's equitydriven. It's power law. It's hugely optimistic. It's largely qualitative. Um, you know, what is it? What would a Blackstone and Apollo look like if that was the core seed at the at the start of the, you know, the inception of the firm? Um, and I don't have a great answer. I just think that it is like it's notable, you know, in the same way that sort of equity financing is a far newer idea than debt financing. And um you know equity financing is obviously a far more optimistic idea. It's um it's uncapped to the upside. And so there's all these sort of philosophical ideas around equity versus debt. And debt is far more ancient and and you know debt obviously has very controversial past about whether it's morally good at all. Um, and so I, you know, I do think like there's this idea of like what if the crux of finance is with these kind of wildly optimistic people versus people who might be more conservative, more concerned about the downside, more concerned about maybe one way of looking at it is a shift from the quantitive to >> Vanta automates security and compliance for over 16,000 fastmoving companies like Ramp, Curser, and Harvey, keeping them audit ready around the clock. It's the number one agentic trust platform and it now helps companies like yours watch for the risks that show up between audits across your vendors, your AI tools, and your whole environment. Every new tool your team signs up for, every vendor that turns on AI features is an opportunity for something to go wrong. And most security programs weren't built for AI's pace of growth. The Vant agent works like a 247 GRC engineer in the background, finding issues, drafting fixes for you, and cutting vendor assessment time by up to 50%. Whether you're a fast growing startup or a global enterprise, Vanta helps you earn and prove trust. Invest like the best listeners. Get a special offer for $1,000 off at vanta.com/invest. Ridgeline is the first endto-end system of record with embedded AI for investment management firms. Running portfolio accounting, reconciliation, reporting, trading, and compliance on one unified platform. Firms are moving off legacy technology and onto Ridgeline because of how far ahead Ridgeline's AI features are compared to anything else in investment management software. I've been hearing from a lot of investment managers about AI and they fall roughly into two camps with some unsure of where to even start and others convinced they can build their own order management system over a weekend. The reality is that running an investment firm will always require governance, controls, and a single source of truth for your data. And no amount of AI enthusiasm changes that requirement. Ridgeline is built on exactly that foundation, which is why I believe that firms that come out ahead in the AI era will be the ones running on Ridgeline's unified platform. If you're serious about your firm's AI strategy, Ridgeline should be part of that conversation. You can request a demo at ridgeline.ai. What other differences are interesting to you between East Coast and West Coast finance? The people doing it, the optimism versus not pessimism, but realism or dollar orientation. There's truth to the caricature which is east coast is um extractive, pessimistic, um west coast is naive, stupid uh uh you know I think like that is true to some obvious extent. Um and I think they're merging now. Uh and I think look it's no coincidence that uh that the west coast is definitely eating the east coast. Venture capital has created the biggest businesses in the world and private equity has not. Um and where private equity has it's largely been through uh through sort of acquisition and again financial engineering. And so it's sort of inarguable that venture capital is this sort of much better force for the world. It's a you know it's this tiny little asset class that has produced all the most important things in the world. Um, it's also this sort of uh civilizational technology which is you're willing to give young people millions of dollars to try a very speculative idea with like basically no retribution or downside if if it doesn't work. Um, so it's clearly this amazing force. I think there's been a very interesting like flip in uh in compensation between east and west. When I was growing up, my understanding was that uh you know Wall Street is where you would get paid huge amounts of cash on a yearly basis. um you would have no enduring equity value, but you would get paid a lot of liquid cash on a fairly regular basis. And the West Coast was this idea where you would, you know, be rich on paper. You would have um equity that would be this maybe be this enormous payoff in some distant future. Um, and I think what's sort of interesting is I you could argue, uh, and I would argue that those have started to flip now, whereas like Wall Street because all these businesses have gone public, uh, you know, on Wall Street, you're comped on RSUs and you're you're thinking like a firm and you're, you know, maybe it's, especially at the top the top end of the firm, you're you're you're less worried about the carry in any one fund and you're more worried about the stock price and performance of the firm as a whole. and and then and interestingly in Silicon Valley it's almost moved towards a uh like an annual cash basis but given how these markets you know companies staying private creates these sort of mature secondary markets um and there's these you know the sort of de facto yearly tender is becoming almost a almost a parallel liquid marketplace and so you're actually paid huge amounts of cash in Silicon Valley and I think we've seen that with with certainly with the AI stuff and even you know venture capital firms getting acquired and GPS leaving their firms terms and and all this sort of stuff where it actually is becoming more money driven, more liquid, more more well maybe not more money driven, but certainly more liquid, more mercenary. And I think like I'm always interested in these structural shifts and how that starts to change things where um you know uh the valley is a place where you're liquid and you're getting cash out yearly and you're jumping from firm to firm and uh and and Wall Street is a place where you have a bunch of RSUs and and uh and and you're sort of you know thinking more about the long term and and the enterprise value of the firm. >> If you add all this up, where are you looking for opportunity? like you you have such an interesting mandate because you can kind of you could do a venture style growth equity deal. You could do a special situations private equity style deal. You've historically across your career invested in dozens of effectively software companies. Um you've I think so far wisely avoided companies that could get railroaded by cloud code or something like this and but nonetheless like I think you're still curious about where there might be value in software. How are you approaching just as a pure investor, how are you approaching this very strange high ball, high uncertainty >> We've largely sat on the sidelines. Um we're very fortunate to have such a such a wide mandate in sort of what we can do and look at. Maybe the only consensus view is like the niche sort of apocalyptic vision at some of the core the core zealots at the labs. Um but outside of that, I think it's really sort of a jump ball. And so it's it's hard to say. I think the one thing that maybe I could say in general is that markets lack a lot of nuance. I think you know SAS is a business model. It's not um it's it's literally just a business model of this idea that you pay usually per person per month or per year for access to a tool that helps you use your computer. Um I think in that sense SAS is in a lot of trouble. Uh but I don't think for a lot of these businesses that are you know being really sold off today out of fear that that is actually what is important to the business at all. It is actually interesting to me. I wrote a post recently about the idea that like um a public manager being long uh the mag 7 is you know without taking a specific view on the trade is probably like good capital allocation because sometimes you just got to do the really obvious thing and just follow consensus. consensus is, you know, usually right. Um, and you know, one of the push backs that I got to that is, well, these things, you know, they're the biggest companies in the world. They're priced to perfection, but like I think it's underrated the fact that the 52- week variance on these things is like nearly 100% for the biggest companies in the world. And so, they're not priced well at all. And the market lacks extreme nuance. I think it goes back to what we were talking about which is you know probably someone smarter than me could could draw out a much clearer picture but there's something to do with passive flows and the marginal price of security and what's informing the marginal price of securities is the posts in the group chats that the random people are writing that the algorithm's chosen I mean in this way I've actually never thought of it before but like in this way the algorithm the AI frankly because that's what my understanding is that's what's driving um most of the algorithms uh now on Twitter and YouTube and stuff is pricing the market in some very real sense because it's choosing the narrative that it wants to show to people and then those people are pricing off that and so you know I I just think it it's another lesson which is like markets are not efficient there's no nuance um so you know that would be the big thing that we're seeing today I think I think there's a lot of delusion either direction the most honest thing for a lot of managers to do would be to sit it out but they're structurally unable or unwilling to do that and so you just sort of, you know, hope for the best and put capital out the door and it's sort of a problem for tomorrow. Um, and so I think a lot of things are still getting priced irrationally in the private markets in ways that are um totally unrelated to the quality of the business, but are more of a function of just the the the incentive structures of the funds. >> You mentioned the SAS is just a model and there's all there's good and there's bad. What do you think about this trend of super capex heavy uh tokenheavy real world asset like there's this new genre of company that seems to have emerged as really dominant. I was looking the other day I was curious in our portfolio what percent was not pure bits and it's like 60s something percent is is not just software by you know based on the market value of our investments. I was surprised by that like it's a really high percentage whereas VCs have mostly historically been like all software for the last 10 or 15 years. What do you make of this class of this trend this class of business lower gross margins you know things like this? One way that you can look at this um is you know we were really in the late innings in let's call it 2016 2017 on of okay returns in venture capital have been very high and so and now we've seen whatever 20 years of venture returns being very good and so logically capital is going to flow into the asset class. The problem is that the venture market is largely constrained in that the amount of uh great businesses that are started is relatively fixed probably I believe downstream of um of how many great founders there are I think there's just a finite amount more and more capital flows into venture there's basically a finite amount of companies so you have to put more money into the same amount of companies and um this was becoming a real problem uh uh right before AI and co which is that there's only so much money that you can cram into a B2B software business and especially when annoyingly the companies are getting um cheaper and cheaper to start and so you know functionally what you saw and what you still see to some extent but but what you really saw was that all this capital was just flowing to land owners and to uh compensation packages basically. Um and so it was like this real problem which is that like you know capital hates getting blocked. It's like water

Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 00d8f9:
. It wants to find the most efficient path and it was getting blocked because it wanted to flow into venture because there was backward-looking higher returns but like it was just constrained. You can only cram so much money into these companies and you know it was a lot of what inspired me to start my fund was seeing this problem which was just that like the amount of money these companies are raising is unrelated to the amount of money they need. And then you know almost as if like uh you know DSX Machina uh all of a sudden there was two great categories that could just soak up this capital and and and I really do believe in some sense that the like businesses and assets are sponges for capital and that the excess if the you know in an era of back then we had negative interest rates and stuff the capital has to go somewhere and if it has nowhere to go it will create somewhere for it to go and I think that there's a very sort of um uh arising of these high capex businesses of of AI, the ultimate high capex project and obviously all the hardware stuff. Um, and so I think in some sense like you could say that the capital markets were desperately looking for a place to go to to to to put the capital and there was no place and so these companies almost got created downstream of capital which I think is a little bit different of the narrative than than than most people would look at. So that's sort of the philosophical view. the economic view. I think part of the reason SAS is getting punished so much today in the market is because it was this idea of you're selling a copy of a string fundamentally. That's what a software product is. And the marginal copy of a string is very close to zero. And so um with zero marginal cost, the thing that you're selling uh should be highly profitable. The vision of that was that you will have high upfront costs and then you will have um very high gross margins and hopefully one day very high net margins. Although the net margin seem to … (9999 chars truncated)

Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 080de2:
===PART3===
affect your track record and you're going to have to explain it and all these other factors that are not related to like do you think this is a good investment or You and me are always so interested in the sort of what I'll call the underbelly of finance. And you have this funny idea around uh the the sort of feudalike system that is emerging in the world of SPVS and the big private companies. Can you share that idea? >> There is this funny notion. I mean it's sort of specific to the labs but it's it's a broader a broader thing as well. I suppose we're sort of recreating the feudal system from first principles where there are the lords um Elon uh Zuckerberg Dario Sam and they're sort of they can sort of make land and gentry by giving out allocations because these allocations are sort of these sort of like the best uh gener uh best example of generational wealth. you know, you sort of you get this allocation in SpaceX or in Whimo or whatever and uh you get to charge huge fees on it and it's sort of this like wholly synthetic product which is someone gives you a sort of arbitrary number. Um, again, like they know you don't have the money, so they know you're going to go fill it. And then you get to go out and basically say, I've been given like a deed on on on literally like the king has given me 500 acres on on on in his country, and you know, Elon has given me $100 million to allocate in SpaceX, and you get to go out and charge fees and make a bunch of money from it. And there's this sort of this thing of like, do you have allocation? And I guess I'm interested in it because it's sort of this like purely relational wholly synthetic thing that I'm not sure has ever existed before or or certainly not at the scale and magnitude where like you can go due to your relationship basically get this like landed estate and then take it to a sovereign or a foundation and they will pay you for that access like a pure sort of um paid for access. But maybe where it's different is like, you know, you could say that's just brokering, but the difference is obviously that, you know, brokering is sort of like a one-time transaction, but these allocations sort of, you know, they live on forever. >> What's the most egregious fee setup you've seen in one of these? no GP commit 10% one-time upfront fee with some carry structure generally where you're just like demanding basically that you get paid like life-changing amounts of money with zero risk and then you also get a huge amount of upside. The other thing is like they often don't have um I've seen a few that have don't have a term limit. I know there was like famously some a lot of SpaceX ones. I think people are doing that 10 years ago and uh I know there's certainly some some that just have just collect the fever of it. But I mean to Capital's credit, you're very happy to be paying that 2% on the SpaceX thing that you did 15 years ago. Um uh and so it's sort of a win-win. It's not to say these are all bad. It's just it's sort of funny cuz it's not investing. It's not strictly brokering. It's this very like different thing that is like a wholly insider access game. And then of course all there's there's all the fraud and bad behavior that I think comes with all the bubble and stuff. How do you think about your own productivity for lack of a better word? We talked before about how content is really just entertainment, not learning. We shouldn't kid ourselves about that. So therefore, it is largely unproductive, which is fine. It's entertainment. How do you think about to the extent you care about yourself personally being a lot more productive with all this insane tool? >> I certainly care about productivity. For me, by far the most generative thing is are conversations, which I guess are downstream of relationships. And so I don't feel I think part of the reason my book reading has gone down is I'm friends with a lot of people who read a lot of books. Uh and so I I think like if I could only keep one thing, it would be conversations with people that I find interesting. And um but I also think like I'm uniquely tolerant of uh sort of distasteful and weird people. Like I do think part of the reason I get asked a fair amount like what's your media diet and conversations are my answer and I it always feels like the answer sort of falls flat with people and I think it's because they're not friends with like weirdos like like a lot of my friends I think are sort of um people would largely like find strange at best, distasteful at worst. If I can't predict what the person's going to say after knowing them, I like them a lot. And that's obviously like a very high variance thing. Old books are good. I've read a lot of old books in my life, but I think YouTube remains underrated. Like there's a lot of really obscure things on YouTube. YouTube sort of remains the library of Alexandria of of our time maybe of ever. But yeah, YouTube doesn't feel generative. I think the only thing that's generative is conversations. And you know, so far in early 2026, I would say chat bots can lull you into feeling generative, but if I actually look at like the actions that I've taken, like you can feel really productive after like a good 2-hour session in a chatbot, but I actually don't think they're that ultimately that generative. If you think about great investing ideas, what is the right balance between simplicity and complexity? If you think of both in the ones that you've done yourself but also >> I really do think people value complexity for the sake of complexity a lot. I think a lot of investors are in the like feel clever look smart game more than the money game. And so, you know, personally, I think this has been a big area of like self-development for me, which is the clever thing is not always the thing that makes money obviously. Um, and so I think like you either have to say I am looking for investment ideas that are so complex that no one is going to do them or it should actually be quite simple. I I'm a bigger and bigger believer in the in the simplicity which is like you probably want to be long Elon Musk, you know, or like like that level of idea. I actually think like the the gift is being able to sell that idea. I think a lot of the investing media actually serves for the people who are really good to dress up those ideas in a way that makes them feel differentiated and smart enough to what is actually sort of just long Elon or long Bitcoin. I think of a guy that I know who exclusively does bankruptcies and he makes a lot of money but like that's very complex and very difficult but you know it's a tremendous amount of work. It's grimy. It's difficult. it's there's a lot of risk and uh uh interpersonal stuff and and like that to me is like an example of getting paid for complexity whereas a good example of simplicity is like you should just buy like big companies when they're at their 200 200 week moving average and it like I love that idea cuz it's just so simple um but it's right one story that I absolutely love cutting through the mess and getting to like complete clarity on how to evaluate an investment is from Richard Rainwater water, which is, you know, um he there there's these stories about him that he you would basically come into his office with a yellow legal pad. Uh and you would write out your thesis on one page and then you would tell him what percentage of your net worth you're going to put in the deal. And based on your one-page thesis and the percentage of the net worth it was going to put in, he would say yes or no. And I think that's genius. Like I I really um now people don't do that because uh that's really hard. It makes things way harder. First of all, it's hard to write a compelling thesis in a page. Much easier to do it in a 400page slide deck. And second of all, no one wants to say, well, I'm only putting 3% of my net worth in this, you know. Uh, and to me, that's one of the most simple, clear examples of really cutting to is this a good investment or not that I've ever heard. One of the, I think, natural points of leverage now is the ability to hire extraordinarily well, which means two things. attract an amazing differentiated talent pool and then select from that group effectively. >> that's something that you thought a ton about in building your business and it seems like a skill that if you got good at it would be unbelievably valuable in this era specifically where the returns to like outlier talent seem to be going up and up and up. What did you learn about the the two stages of that process? like and I'm especially interested in attracting a unique pool of talent in the first place. >> Maybe the most practical thing is that I think is very lowhanging fruit is just the the job description. Um, I think job descriptions are one of these things where they are written for nobody to be to be read by nobody. And they're sort of this like token document like it's more about does the job description exist uh is more the question versus like what's written in the job description. And so I tried to write one that followed a very simple rule which was a uh you know I was going to obviously I was going to post it on on Twitter and LinkedIn. And so I think anything you post has to be a good standalone post, you know, um it can't just it can't be something that you but it can't be something that you wouldn't share if you didn't know me. Um uh and so that's the first and then the second I think was really that I think I think what's so important in any sales pitch, which is what a job description should be, is uh disqualifying who you don't want. And the nice thing about a divisive statement is that um when it resonates, it deeply resonates with the person. And so I just try to think of okay like what are all the traits that I would want someone to have and try and make them again to go back to the like uh how you do one thing is how you do everything that would make them the type of person that I was interested. Obviously the skills and the experience was going to be table stakes. I tried to write out um traits and ideas that would really be inspiring and for the right person to be like, "Wo, like this person really gets me, understands me, and would make people mad." One of the things that I posted, uh the one that kind of was was the funniest was uh or or got the most reaction was um you're an ideological minority at a top 10 school. And what I love about that is that it's entirely open for interpretation. So, you know, um, uh, I would get people who would be many different things, right? Who'd be angry that I only want a top 10 school. The nice thing about top 10 school is it's a fully ambiguous statement. And so, you know, what I love about it is um, I love about it that I mean, a there's there's some schools that I think uncontroversially are top 10 and so I get those people. Uh, but you can also just sort of assert that your school is a top 10. And I had a few people from schools that I would not say were anywhere close just sort of assert that and I thought that was great. I had people select out because they were sort of like you know oh I don't know if my school is I'm not going to apply that's great cuz I don't want those people. And then ideological minority was really interesting. I had a certain idea in mind but people gave me all kinds of answers about ideological because you know I didn't necessarily political. There was all kind of answers around um you know how that person stood out at the at their school. And so I think like those statements are great because they're like highly ambiguous. They can be um there's a bit of a inherent test of confidence. And uh and then you know I would even get a few posts that were like hey you know I I think this is [ __ ] You should hire me. I didn't go to a top 10 school. You're an idiot and I love that person too. Right. And so like I think the more you can do statements like that where they like get this sort of reaction is great. Uh, and you sort of like do all like imagine what you would have to do in an interview to like get at all of those various traits. Um, and so yeah, statements like that I think are are very much underutilized in these job descriptions. >> It's a cool idea baking the interview into the job post itself. It seems to me like an underrated area of inquiry today that I know you're interested in is the cultural and intellectual traditions behind major movements. And I think that that has certainly been true in this wave of technology. And it's not something I see talked about, written about very much. And I'd love you to just riff on your interpretation of the key uh sets of beliefs behind the people and the institutions that are ushering in the biggest wave of technology change that we've probably ever seen. >> I'm interested in mispricings in qualities and attributes. uh about things and people and places. I don't know if this has always been true, but it's true today. I think there's some uh qualities and attributes that are, you know, widely recognized and priced efficiently, let's say. Um height, IQ, resume, etc. And then there's other traits and characteristics that um we have just decided collectively not to price for Silicon Valley. people sort of the philosophers and thinkers and um sort of like mimemetic ideas that underpin the whole thing. I think there is a real philosophy that some sort of like neo Buddhist utilitarianism uh that underlies the like technological developments in Silicon Valley. And it's interesting because you see it like Will Massel uh gets involved with SPF and FTX. there's these sort of thinkers like Nick Land um that are their sort of ideas percolate underneath the surface in the valley and are influential in everyone but are not necessarily named. I mean now they have been. Um you could say the same thing about Curtis Yarvin. I thought it was remarkable for years how you could sort of hear Curtis's ideas coming out of the mouth of mouths of the the big tech leaders without being named. There's things like leverage research and all these intellectual characters that I think you know in the same way that I think um uh people's religious beliefs are generally underrated by secular people in terms of how important that is as a guiding light. I think uh in the valley in the development of these technologies these sorts of cultural and philosophical ideas are underrated like the you know like it or not the models are highly utilitarian. They have this weird mix of religious ideas from from Judaism, from Buddhism, um, and this sort of like utilitarian bent that turns into effect of altruism and and you know, people sort of think like, okay, like you know, this is just cultural whatever, but it it these things matter. And it just feels to me that this whole cultural epicenter has been highly underrated in general and informing um why these things get built and what the world views inherent in them are. and what the inherent worldviews are in the people who build them. It almost feels to me that um that was Wall Street in the 80s was sort of vain uh almost pagan the strong and the beautiful or what's most important. There's a hedonistic aspect to it. There's an openness that it's a little bit nihilist because it's all just about getting money. It's not the same notion. And I think at the crux of that is that technology views itself as totally self-righteous which is that like the thing that they are building it's not nakedly sindriven or driven out of a greed or ambition. It's driven out of this you know nominally altruistic idea of no we're building this thing this products that the whole world uses. It's it's positive some um which is true on the surface but I do think that it's almost it's almost pathological to the point where there's no recognition of all the other factors. It's almost sort of shadowesque. Um, and there's none of this notion of like, well, if you work in finance, you sort of need to try you need to translate the gains from finance into something worthy into into art, into architecture, into philanthropy, into just culture in general, or into the place that you live. None of that exists because I think tech views itself as, you know, the the ultimate philanthropy is is the business that you're building. I don't think Silicon Valley today has the same sort of need to justify or document or even launder sort of what they're doing through, you know, through going to book parties and and and arts and and all this sort of stuff. Um, and I think it's like this interesting this interesting difference and I I wish that more people would um try and document this stuff because it's all there. all the crazy all the sex, drugs and rock and roll is there in its own sort of like nerdy autistic way and the culture again I think culture is just like vastly underrated and and religious beliefs whether literally religious or sort of pseudo religious but but but filling that void >> as always when we talk I wish we had three more hours. Thanks for doing this with me again. Thanks for your time. >> Thanks for having me. >> You know how small advantages compound over time? That's true in investing and just as true in how you run your company. Your spending system is your capital allocation strategy. RAMP makes it smarter by default. Better data, better decisions, better economics over time. See how at ramp.com/invest. As your business grows, Vanta scales with you, automating compliance and giving you a single source of truth for security and risk. Learn more at The best AI and software companies from OpenAI to cursor to perplexity use work OS to become enterprise ready overnight, not in months. Visit workos.com to skip the unglamorous infrastructure work and focus on your product. Ridgeline is redefining asset management technology as a true partner, not just a software vendor. They've helped firms 5x and scale, enabling faster growth, smarter operations, and a competitive edge. Visit ridgelineapps.com to see what they can unlock for your firm. Every investment firm is unique, and generic AI doesn't understand your process. Rogo does. It's an AI platform built specifically for Wall Street, connected to your data, understanding your process, and producing real outputs. Check them out at rogo.ai/invest.

Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 6169bd:
   8 PDF
   3 essay
   1 Dario


Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell dd078a:
 sort of set the story and set the narrative. And it doesn't even have to be right, but there's just a sort of confidence of like this is happening. Follow me. Capital just follows the billion dollar PDF around the field. So, we're going to have the chance to talk about uh as we do on a daily basis, you and I, 57 different ideas. But I'm always interested to begin with you a couple questions about in
rs and the construction of an effective narrative for building an investing firm before you've delivered the 10-year investment returns or whatever, you have this great idea called the billion-dollar PDF. Can you describe what you mean by that and what the interesting components of a billion dollar PDF tend to be? This is sort of an idea that you and I came up with in a joking way that like kind of t
like this is what's going on. This is happening. Follow me almost. When those come together, they just set a new narrative that everyone can kind of rest on for for a period really until the the next PDF comes along. And um and the billion dollar PDF thing is this idea that really like you can, you know, form billions of dollars of capital uh in one way or another around simply setting a new idea. An
n, you know, maybe you can think of capital as like uh 10-year-olds playing soccer. you know, they all sort of just follow the ball around and they're just the capital just follows the billion dollar PDF around the field. >> It's probably a good excuse to talk about I don't know how long we'll talk about this topic, probably a long time. This joint notion of posting, which I guess is a, you kno
y other day someone wrote writes some sort of you know pornographic fanfic about AI and it moves the public markets dramatically. And so I I I think again it sort of comes back to this billion dollar PDF idea of when there's uncertainty people are just looking for what is the story? What is the most compelling story? And the way that it works on the timeline is it's not, you know, um it's not this we


Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 88f61e:
? And so in the same way that you know people would talk about the latest article in the journal 30 years ago now it's the latest tweet or the latest essay on on on X. And so I think what that creates is that all the sort of most important people in the world at least when it comes to capital markets and
dcasts like you said right like clips do a lot better than the podcast episode like I I I think I pride myself like I can tell if a podcast or a blog essay or a book or something is good or not without having read it just by like sort of triangulating it. like I I know which one of your episodes do well 
 convince you that their thing is an investment or an asset versus a liability. And so then you'll spend way more money on it. podcasts and posts and essays can convince you that what you're reading is useful for you and like productive and and and anything other than watching TV all day. whether I want 


Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell c68365:
e business is kind of old but has started to do well recently. That's an interesting scenario because it's one of these instances where merely because the company, the story again, the narrative of the company is that it's 7 years old. Let's say the company has really started to inflect. Maybe it's because of AI or maybe it's 
ions of dollars of capital uh in one way or another around simply setting a new idea. And then, you know, maybe you can think of capital as like uh 10-year-olds playing soccer. you know, they all sort of just follow the ball around and they're just the capital just follows the billion dollar PDF around the field. >> It's
and seeing all the people that you didn't know were reading X all day uh commenting on your thing. I'm always surprised like when I post a good tweet and you know whoever texts me about it that I literally had no you know so it could be someone I know well and I had no idea that they read Twitter all day but everyone reads Twit
nd and reflexive in that its actions then affect the timeline which it it then sort of reads and reacts to. And you can think of, you know, the White House is obviously like this. Uh venture capital is like this. Um certainly public equities are like this. There's this idea of like what is the story? And what's interesting, it
at is the most compelling story? And the way that it works on the timeline is it's not, you know, um it's not this well-considered book that comes out that everyone talks about for a year. It's sort of what is the thing that sounds smart, feels good, is it has to be entertaining. Maybe maybe that's another change is like a goo
 that like being a little bit tortured, having a bit of a like messed up personal life just in general. Yeah. I you can think of the idea of like >> comics or something. >> Yeah. And maybe posting is a little bit like uh a writer mixed with a comedian or something like that. Certainly has the comedic element of you
heir time in leisure a lot of time away from their business and um you know what's so interesting like for Carnegie for example, is, you know, he he he's he's arguably still the richest person or very close to the richest person uh that's ever lived. But I'm fascinated by this idea of like is that necessarily true? Like does 
the grid for a month but is that true in business? I don't know. Is is is a lot of hard work performative? Maybe in the case of Carnegie, it's interesting because he was self-conscious his whole life about joining this sort of society. Maybe it's the posters of his day. Like he he he he knew that for him money wasn't going to
nerative. If you think about great investing ideas, what is the right balance between simplicity and complexity? If you think of both in the ones that you've done yourself but also >> I really do think people value complexity for the sake of complexity a lot. I think a lot of investors are in the like feel clever look sm
 and uh uh interpersonal stuff and and like that to me is like an example of getting paid for complexity whereas a good example of simplicity is like you should just buy like big companies when they're at their 200 200 week moving average and it like I love that idea cuz it's just so simple um but it's right one story that I 

Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 951177:
t of timeline native. I think TPBN is a great example of this. Um, and certainly right like you know in this in in when we're recording this every other day someone wrote writes some sort of you know pornographic fanfic about AI and it moves the public markets dramatically. And so I I I think again it sort of comes back to this billion dollar PDF idea of when there's uncertainty people are just looking for wh


Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 5ecb82:
on the timeline, how much businesses are built on the timeline. And I think increasingly everything will just become sort of timeline native. I think TPBN is a great example of this. Um, and certainly right like you know in this in in when we're recording this every other day someone wrote writes some s


Exit code: 0

# Web Content from https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/

[
][1]
[ Portfolio ][2] [ Team ][3]
Focus Areas
Focus Areas
[ AI ][4]
[ American Dynamism ][5]
[ Bio + Health ][6]
[ Consumer ][7]
[ Crypto ][8]
[ Cultural Leadership Fund ][9]
[ Enterprise ][10]
[ Fintech ][11]
[ Growth ][12]
[ Infrastructure ][13]
[ Perennial ][14]
[ Speedrun ][15]
Content
Content
[ News & Content ][16]
News & Content

#### The Latest

Infra

#### new [ Investing in Netris ][17]

Guido Appenzeller, Raghu Raghuram, and Jason Cui
Infra

#### new [ Investing in Mirendil ][18]

Matt Bornstein and Malika Aubakirova
Consumer

#### new [ The World-Building Doors Are Open, Again. ][19]

Josh Elman
Enterprise

#### new [ Investing in Probook ][20]

Alex Rampell, David Haber, Olivia Moore, and Seema Amble
[ Newsletters ][21]
[ Podcast Network ][22]
[ Books ][23]
Programs
Programs
[ a16z Build ][24]
[ College Talent ][25]
Company
Company
[ About ][26]
[ Jobs ][27]
[ Offices ][28]
[ a16z Global ][29]
[ Strategic Partnerships ][30]
[ Twitter ][31] [ Linkedin ][32] [ Facebook ][33] [ Instagram ][34] [ Youtube-alt ][35] [ Substack
][36]
Close
General

# Why Software Is Eating the World

Marc Andreessen Posted August 20, 2011
Available in
* [ Español ][37]
* [ Português ][38]
Subscribe
Share
Share
[
][39] [
Email
][40] [
X
][41] [
LinkedIn
][42] [
Facebook
][43] [
Hacker News
][44] [
WhatsApp
][45] [
Flipboard
][46] [
Reddit
][47]
Share
Share
[
][48] [
Email
][49] [
X
][50] [
LinkedIn
][51] [
Facebook
][52] [
Hacker News
][53] [
WhatsApp
][54] [
Flipboard
][55] [
Reddit
][56]

Software is eating the world.

More than 10 years after the peak of the 1990s dot-com bubble, a dozen or so new Internet companies
like Facebook and Twitter are sparking controversy in Silicon Valley, due to their rapidly growing
private market valuations, and even the occasional successful IPO. With scars from the heyday of
Webvan and Pets.com still fresh in the investor psyche, people are asking, “Isn’t this just a
dangerous new bubble?”

I, along with others, have been arguing the other side of the case. (I am co-founder and general
partner of venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, which has invested in Facebook, Groupon, Skype,
Twitter, Zynga, and Foursquare, among others. I am also personally an investor in LinkedIn.) We
believe that many of the prominent new Internet companies are building real, high-growth,
high-margin, highly defensible businesses.

Today’s stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for
major public technology companies. Apple, for example, has a P/E ratio of around 15.2—about the same
as the broader stock market, despite Apple’s immense profitability and dominant market position
(Apple in the last couple weeks became the biggest company in America, judged by market
capitalization, surpassing Exxon Mobil). And, perhaps most telling, you can’t have a bubble when
people are constantly screaming “Bubble!”

But too much of the debate is still around financial valuation, as opposed to the underlying
intrinsic value of the best of Silicon Valley’s new companies. My own theory is that we are in the
middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are
poised to take over large swathes of the economy.

More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online
services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon
Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established
industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by
software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than
not.

Why is this happening now?

Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor,
and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform
industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.

Over two billion people now use the broadband Internet, up from perhaps 50 million a decade ago,
when I was at Netscape, the company I co-founded. In the next 10 years, I expect at least five
billion people worldwide to own smartphones, giving every individual with such a phone instant
access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day.

On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new
global software-powered start-ups in many industries—without the need to invest in new
infrastructure and train new employees. In 2000, when my partner Ben Horowitz was CEO of the first
cloud computing company, Loudcloud, the cost of a customer running a basic Internet application was
approximately $150,000 a month. Running that same application today in Amazon’s cloud costs about
$1,500 a month.

With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global
economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired—the dream of every cyber-visionary of
the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later.

Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional
business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon. In 2001, Borders agreed to hand
over its online business to Amazon under the theory that online book sales were non-strategic and
unimportant.

Oops.

Today, the world’s largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company—its core capability is its
amazing software engine for selling virtually everything online, no retail stores necessary. On top
of that, while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy, Amazon rearranged its
web site to promote its Kindle digital books over physical books for the first time. Now even the
books themselves are software.

Today’s largest video service by number of subscribers is a software company: Netflix. How Netflix
eviscerated Blockbuster is an old story, but now other traditional entertainment providers are
facing the same threat. Comcast, Time Warner and others are responding by transforming themselves
into software companies with efforts such as TV Everywhere, which liberates content from the
physical cable and connects it to smartphones and tablets.

Today’s dominant music companies are software companies, too: Apple’s iTunes, Spotify and Pandora.
Traditional record labels increasingly exist only to provide those software companies with content.
Industry revenue from digital channels totaled $4.6 billion in 2010, growing to 29% of total revenue
from 2% in 2004.

Today’s fastest growing entertainment companies are videogame makers—again, software—with the
industry growing to $60 billion from $30 billion five years ago. And the fastest growing major
videogame company is Zynga (maker of games including FarmVille), which delivers its games entirely
online. Zynga’s first-quarter revenues grew to $235 million this year, more than double revenues
from a year earlier. Rovio, maker of Angry Birds, is expected to clear $100 million in revenue this
year (the company was nearly bankrupt when it debuted the popular game on the iPhone in late 2009).
Meanwhile, traditional videogame powerhouses like Electronic Arts and Nintendo have seen revenues
stagnate and fall.

The best new movie production company in many decades, Pixar, was a software company.
Disney—Disney!—had to buy Pixar, a software company, to remain relevant in animated movies.

Photography, of course, was eaten by software long ago. It’s virtually impossible to buy a mobile
phone that doesn’t include a software-powered camera, and photos are uploaded automatically to the
Internet for permanent archiving and global sharing. Companies like Shutterfly, Snapfish and Flickr
have stepped into Kodak’s place.

Today’s largest direct marketing platform is a software company—Google. Now it’s been joined by
Groupon, Living Social, Foursquare and others, which are using software to eat the retail marketing
industry. Groupon generated over $700 million in revenue in 2010, after being in business for only
two years.

Today’s fastest growing telecom company is Skype, a software company that was just bought by
Microsoft for $8.5 billion. CenturyLink, the third largest telecom company in the U.S., with a $20
billion market cap, had 15 million access lines at the end of June 30—declining at an annual rate of
about 7%. Excluding the revenue from its Qwest acquisition, CenturyLink’s revenue from these legacy
services declined by more than 11%. Meanwhile, the two biggest telecom companies, AT&T and Verizon,
have survived by transforming themselves into software companies, partnering with Apple and other
smartphone makers.

LinkedIn is today’s fastest growing recruiting company. For the first time ever, on LinkedIn,
employees can maintain their own resumes for recruiters to search in real time—giving LinkedIn the
opportunity to eat the lucrative $400 billion recruiting industry.

Software is also eating much of the value chain of industries that are widely viewed as primarily
existing in the physical world. In today’s cars, software runs the engines, controls safety
features, entertains passengers, guides drivers to destinations and connects each car to mobile,
satellite and GPS networks. The days when a car aficionado could repair his or her own car are long
past, due primarily to the high software content. The trend toward hybrid and electric vehicles will
only accelerate the software shift—electric cars are completely computer controlled. And the
creation of software-powered driverless cars is already under way at Google and the major car
companies.

Today’s leading real-world retailer, Wal-Mart, uses software to power its logistics and distribution
capabilities, whic… (81 chars truncated)
… (390 lines truncated)
<truncation_notice>
Full output written to: /var/folders/d9/mzhyr7lx6xbf236j5ll9v_300000gn/T/devin-overflows-501/877c10e1/content.txt
</truncation_notice>

<file-view path="/var/folders/d9/mzhyr7lx6xbf236j5ll9v_300000gn/T/devin-overflows-501/877c10e1/content.txt" start_line="60" end_line="259" total_lines="627">
 60|[ Strategic Partnerships ][30]
 61|[ Twitter ][31] [ Linkedin ][32] [ Facebook ][33] [ Instagram ][34] [ Youtube-alt ][35] [ Substack
 62|][36]
 63|Close
 64|General
 65|
 66|# Why Software Is Eating the World
 67|
 68|Marc Andreessen Posted August 20, 2011
 69|Available in
 70|* [ Español ][37]
 71|* [ Português ][38]
 72|Subscribe
 73|Share
 74|Share
 75|[
 76|][39] [
 77|Email
 78|][40] [
 79|X
 80|][41] [
 81|LinkedIn
 82|][42] [
 83|Facebook
 84|][43] [
 85|Hacker News
 86|][44] [
 87|WhatsApp
 88|][45] [
 89|Flipboard
 90|][46] [
 91|Reddit
 92|][47]
 93|Share
 94|Share
 95|[
 96|][48] [
 97|Email
 98|][49] [
 99|X
100|][50] [
101|LinkedIn
102|][51] [
103|Facebook
104|][52] [
105|Hacker News
106|][53] [
107|WhatsApp
108|][54] [
109|Flipboard
110|][55] [
111|Reddit
112|][56]
113|
114|Software is eating the world.
115|
116|More than 10 years after the peak of the 1990s dot-com bubble, a dozen or so new Internet companies
117|like Facebook and Twitter are sparking controversy in Silicon Valley, due to their rapidly growing
118|private market valuations, and even the occasional successful IPO. With scars from the heyday of
119|Webvan and Pets.com still fresh in the investor psyche, people are asking, “Isn’t this just a
120|dangerous new bubble?”
121|
122|I, along with others, have been arguing the other side of the case. (I am co-founder and general
123|partner of venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, which has invested in Facebook, Groupon, Skype,
124|Twitter, Zynga, and Foursquare, among others. I am also personally an investor in LinkedIn.) We
125|believe that many of the prominent new Internet companies are building real, high-growth,
126|high-margin, highly defensible businesses.
127|
128|Today’s stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for
129|major public technology companies. Apple, for example, has a P/E ratio of around 15.2—about the same
130|as the broader stock market, despite Apple’s immense profitability and dominant market position
131|(Apple in the last couple weeks became the biggest company in America, judged by market
132|capitalization, surpassing Exxon Mobil). And, perhaps most telling, you can’t have a bubble when
133|people are constantly screaming “Bubble!”
134|
135|But too much of the debate is still around financial valuation, as opposed to the underlying
136|intrinsic value of the best of Silicon Valley’s new companies. My own theory is that we are in the
137|middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are
138|poised to take over large swathes of the economy.
139|
140|More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online
141|services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon
142|Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established
143|industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by
144|software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than
145|not.
146|
147|Why is this happening now?
148|
149|Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor,
150|and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform
151|industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.
152|
153|Over two billion people now use the broadband Internet, up from perhaps 50 million a decade ago,
154|when I was at Netscape, the company I co-founded. In the next 10 years, I expect at least five
155|billion people worldwide to own smartphones, giving every individual with such a phone instant
156|access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day.
157|
158|On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new
159|global software-powered start-ups in many industries—without the need to invest in new
160|infrastructure and train new employees. In 2000, when my partner Ben Horowitz was CEO of the first
161|cloud computing company, Loudcloud, the cost of a customer running a basic Internet application was
162|approximately $150,000 a month. Running that same application today in Amazon’s cloud costs about
163|$1,500 a month.
164|
165|With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global
166|economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired—the dream of every cyber-visionary of
167|the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later.
168|
169|Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional
170|business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon. In 2001, Borders agreed to hand
171|over its online business to Amazon under the theory that online book sales were non-strategic and
172|unimportant.
173|
174|Oops.
175|
176|Today, the world’s largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company—its core capability is its
177|amazing software engine for selling virtually everything online, no retail stores necessary. On top
178|of that, while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy, Amazon rearranged its
179|web site to promote its Kindle digital books over physical books for the first time. Now even the
180|books themselves are software.
181|
182|Today’s largest video service by number of subscribers is a software company: Netflix. How Netflix
183|eviscerated Blockbuster is an old story, but now other traditional entertainment providers are
184|facing the same threat. Comcast, Time Warner and others are responding by transforming themselves
185|into software companies with efforts such as TV Everywhere, which liberates content from the
186|physical cable and connects it to smartphones and tablets.
187|
188|Today’s dominant music companies are software companies, too: Apple’s iTunes, Spotify and Pandora.
189|Traditional record labels increasingly exist only to provide those software companies with content.
190|Industry revenue from digital channels totaled $4.6 billion in 2010, growing to 29% of total revenue
191|from 2% in 2004.
192|
193|Today’s fastest growing entertainment companies are videogame makers—again, software—with the
194|industry growing to $60 billion from $30 billion five years ago. And the fastest growing major
195|videogame company is Zynga (maker of games including FarmVille), which delivers its games entirely
196|online. Zynga’s first-quarter revenues grew to $235 million this year, more than double revenues
197|from a year earlier. Rovio, maker of Angry Birds, is expected to clear $100 million in revenue this
198|year (the company was nearly bankrupt when it debuted the popular game on the iPhone in late 2009).
199|Meanwhile, traditional videogame powerhouses like Electronic Arts and Nintendo have seen revenues
200|stagnate and fall.
201|
202|The best new movie production company in many decades, Pixar, was a software company.
203|Disney—Disney!—had to buy Pixar, a software company, to remain relevant in animated movies.
204|
205|Photography, of course, was eaten by software long ago. It’s virtually impossible to buy a mobile
206|phone that doesn’t include a software-powered camera, and photos are uploaded automatically to the
207|Internet for permanent archiving and global sharing. Companies like Shutterfly, Snapfish and Flickr
208|have stepped into Kodak’s place.
209|
210|Today’s largest direct marketing platform is a software company—Google. Now it’s been joined by
211|Groupon, Living Social, Foursquare and others, which are using software to eat the retail marketing
212|industry. Groupon generated over $700 million in revenue in 2010, after being in business for only
213|two years.
214|
215|Today’s fastest growing telecom company is Skype, a software company that was just bought by
216|Microsoft for $8.5 billion. CenturyLink, the third largest telecom company in the U.S., with a $20
217|billion market cap, had 15 million access lines at the end of June 30—declining at an annual rate of
218|about 7%. Excluding the revenue from its Qwest acquisition, CenturyLink’s revenue from these legacy
219|services declined by more than 11%. Meanwhile, the two biggest telecom companies, AT&T and Verizon,
220|have survived by transforming themselves into software companies, partnering with Apple and other
221|smartphone makers.
222|
223|LinkedIn is today’s fastest growing recruiting company. For the first time ever, on LinkedIn,
224|employees can maintain their own resumes for recruiters to search in real time—giving LinkedIn the
225|opportunity to eat the lucrative $400 billion recruiting industry.
226|
227|Software is also eating much of the value chain of industries that are widely viewed as primarily
228|existing in the physical world. In today’s cars, software runs the engines, controls safety
229|features, entertains passengers, guides drivers to destinations and connects each car to mobile,
230|satellite and GPS networks. The days when a car aficionado could repair his or her own car are long
231|past, due primarily to the high software content. The trend toward hybrid and electric vehicles will
232|only accelerate the software shift—electric cars are completely computer controlled. And the
233|creation of software-powered driverless cars is already under way at Google and the major car
234|companies.
235|
236|Today’s leading real-world retailer, Wal-Mart, uses software to power its logistics and distribution
237|capabilities, which it has used to crush its competition. Likewise for FedEx, which is best thought
238|of as a software network that happens to have trucks, planes and distribution hubs attached. And the
239|success or failure of airlines today and in the future hinges on their ability to price tickets and
240|optimize routes and yields correctly—with software.
241|
242|Oil and gas companies were early innovators in supercomputing and data visualization and analysis,
243|which are crucial to today’s oil and gas exploration efforts. Agriculture is increasingly powered by
244|software as well, including satellite analysis of soils linked to per-acre seed selection software
245|algorithms.
246|
247|The financial services industry has been visibly transformed by software over the last 30 years.
248|Practically every financial transaction, from someone buying a cup of coffee to someone trading a
249|trillion dollars of credit default derivatives, is done in software. And many of the leading
250|innovators in financial services are software companies, such as Square, which allows anyone to
251|accept credit card payments with a mobile phone, and PayPal, which generated more than $1 billion in
252|revenue in the second quarter of this year, up 31% over the previous year.
253|
254|Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation. My
255|venture capital firm is backing aggressive start-ups in both of these gigantic and critical
256|industries. We believe both of these industries, which historically have been highly resistant to
257|entrepreneurial change, are primed for tipping by great new software-centric entrepreneurs.
258|
259|Even national defense is increasingly software-based. The modern combat soldier is embedded in a web
</file-view>

<file-view path="/var/folders/d9/mzhyr7lx6xbf236j5ll9v_300000gn/T/devin-overflows-501/877c10e1/content.txt" start_line="259" end_line="458" total_lines="627">
259|Even national defense is increasingly software-based. The modern combat soldier is embedded in a web
260|of software that provides intelligence, communications, logistics and weapons guidance.
261|Software-powered drones launch airstrikes without putting human pilots at risk. Intelligence
262|agencies do large-scale data mining with software to uncover and track potential terrorist plots.
263|
264|Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming. This includes even
265|industries that are software-based today. Great incumbent software companies like Oracle and
266|Microsoft are increasingly threatened with irrelevance by new software offerings like Salesforce.com
267|and Android (especially in a world where Google owns a major handset maker).
268|
269|In some industries, particularly those with a heavy real-world component such as oil and gas, the
270|software revolution is primarily an opportunity for incumbents. But in many industries, new software
271|ideas will result in the rise of new Silicon Valley-style start-ups that invade existing industries
272|with impunity. Over the next 10 years, the battles between incumbents and software-powered
273|insurgents will be epic. Joseph Schumpeter, the economist who coined the term “creative
274|destruction,” would be proud.
275|
276|And while people watching the values of their 401(k)s bounce up and down the last few weeks might
277|doubt it, this is a profoundly positive story for the American economy, in particular. It’s not an
278|accident that many of the biggest recent technology companies—including Google, Amazon, eBay and
279|more—are American companies. Our combination of great research universities, a pro-risk business
280|culture, deep pools of innovation-seeking equity capital and reliable business and contract law is
281|unprecedented and unparalleled in the world.
282|
283|Still, we face several challenges.
284|
285|First of all, every new company today is being built in the face of massive economic headwinds,
286|making the challenge far greater than it was in the relatively benign ’90s. The good news about
287|building a company during times like this is that the companies that do succeed are going to be
288|extremely strong and resilient. And when the economy finally stabilizes, look out—the best of the
289|new companies will grow even faster.
290|
291|Secondly, many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to
292|participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy
293|since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers,
294|managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside
295|job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high. This
296|problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on
297|the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again.
298|There’s no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go.
299|
300|Finally, the new companies need to prove their worth. They need to build strong cultures, delight
301|their customers, establish their own competitive advantages and, yes, justify their rising
302|valuations. No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an
303|established industry to be easy. It’s brutally difficult.
304|
305|I’m privileged to work with some of the best of the new breed of software companies, and I can tell
306|you they’re really good at what they do. If they perform to my and others’ expectations, they are
307|going to be highly valuable cornerstone companies in the global economy, eating markets far larger
308|than the technology industry has historically been able to pursue.
309|
310|Instead of constantly questioning their valuations, let’s seek to understand how the new generation
311|of technology companies are doing what they do, what the broader consequences are for businesses and
312|the economy and what we can collectively do to expand the number of innovative new software
313|companies created in the U.S. and around the world.
314|
315|That’s the big opportunity. I know where I’m putting my money.
316|
317|***Originally [published][57] in The Wall Street Journal on August 20, 2011. ***
318|
319|About the Contributor
320|
321|#### Marc Andreessen
322|* [X][58]
323|* [Substack][59]
324|
325|is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
326|
327|More From this Contributor
328|* [X][60]
329|* [Substack][61]
330|* [ **Marc Andreessen on AI, California, and the Future of America | Joe Rogan** Marc Andreessen and
331|  Joe Rogan ][62]
332|* [ **Marc Andreessen on Builder Culture in the Age of AI** Marc Andreessen and Erik Torenberg ][63]
333|* [ **Marc Andreessen: Monitoring the Situation and the Future of Media** Marc Andreessen, Theo
334|  Jaffee, and Erik Torenberg ][64]
335|* [ **Marc Andreessen on AI Winters and Agent Breakthroughs** Marc Andreessen, Shawn Wang (Swyx),
336|  and Alessio Fanelli ][65]
337|* [ **Marc Andreessen on Evaluating Founders and AI’s Consumer Surplus** Marc Andreessen and Harry
338|  Stebbings ][66]
339|Recommended For You
340|General
341|
342|#### new [New Media, One Year In][67]
343|
344|Erik Torenberg, Alex Danco, Elena Burger, Henry Williams, Tom Hollands, Brent Liang, and Gaby
345|Goldberg
346|Enterprise
347|
348|#### [Everything is Recorded Now][68]
349|
350|David Haber
351|General
352|
353|#### [A16Z Investor Relations is now Global Partnerships][69]
354|
355|Jen Kha
356|**Recommended For You**
357|General
358|
359|#### new [New Media, One Year In][70]
360|
361|Erik Torenberg, Alex Danco, Elena Burger, Henry Williams, Tom Hollands, Brent Liang, and Gaby
362|Goldberg
363|Enterprise
364|
365|#### [Everything is Recorded Now][71]
366|
367|David Haber
368|General
369|
370|#### [A16Z Investor Relations is now Global Partnerships][72]
371|
372|Jen Kha
373|General
374|
375|#### [A16Z’s global mission][73]
376|
377|Ben Horowitz
378|General
379|
380|#### [Technology is Security, for America and Her Allies][74]
381|
382|Anne Neuberger
383|**Recommended for You**
384|General
385|
386|#### new [New Media, One Year In][75]
387|
388|Erik Torenberg, Alex Danco, Elena Burger, Henry Williams, Tom Hollands, Brent Liang, and Gaby
389|Goldberg
390|Enterprise
391|
392|#### [Everything is Recorded Now][76]
393|
394|David Haber
395|General
396|
397|#### [A16Z Investor Relations is now Global Partnerships][77]
398|
399|Jen Kha
400|General
401|
402|#### [A16Z’s global mission][78]
403|
404|Ben Horowitz
405|General
406|
407|#### [Technology is Security, for America and Her Allies][79]
408|
409|Anne Neuberger
410|General
411|
412|#### [Helping Our Portfolio Companies Expand Globally][80]
413|
414|Raghu Raghuram
415|General
416|
417|#### [Need Series C? Call a16z][81]
418|
419|Alex Danco
420|American Dynamism
421|
422|#### [Welcome General (R) Bryan P. Fenton][82]
423|
424|David Ulevitch
425|General
426|
427|#### [Call the Plumber; We’ve Got a Leaky Abstraction][83]
428|
429|Alex Danco
430|General
431|
432|#### [Asserting American Leadership in Open Source AI][84]
433|
434|Jai Ramaswamy and Matt Perault
435|General
436|
437|#### [The Internet is Real Life][85]
438|
439|Erik Torenberg
440|General
441|
442|#### [SF is back – and the tech social scene is being run by the terminally online][86]
443|
444|Katie Kirsch
445|Load More
446|
447|## Expert News by a16z
448|
449|We have built a network of experts who are deeply rooted in technology and how it’s shaping our
450|future. Subscribe to our newsletters to receive their perspectives.
451|
452|[See All Newsletters][87]
453|
454|## Expert News by a16z
455|
456|We have built a network of experts who are deeply rooted in technology and how it’s shaping our
457|future. Subscribe to our newsletters to receive their perspectives.
</file-view>

Output from command in shell 6c573d:
what have you learned in the first 18 months of doing this? I've >> learned a lot. You really realize in let's say long-term private markets that the great filter so to speak for funds is their storytelling ability fundamentally because you know their product which is like realized cash returns take 
ory and just you know sort of arbitrarily started the clock two years ago um you that company would actually be like really hot and so like that's an interesting situation. The fix I think is just to be more flexible on narrative and story. sort of a derivative of that problem is just the amount of business
eryone to common, really start to spend more time on the cap table because otherwise like I've been shocked at sort of how hostile insider bridge rounds really are. I think this is like an underdised part of >> just they have like you know 3x liquidation preferences or warrants or ratchets or other t
ly means raising less raising from investors with a wider mandate um not getting stuck in all these weird problems where you need to continue to raise more money and if you don't it's bad for employees it's bad for recruiting uh people's options get underwater they start to leave like all those things so
sires and attention, meaning like everyone wants to ultimately have a spot on that timeline. It's a strange phenomenon. I'd love you to just riff on there's like five or six sub components of the timeline that I want to ask you about, but maybe to start just how you're thinking about this strange modern &g
wnstream of technological change. I think the technological change is really the uni feed. So, what people don't appreciate about X is that everyone gets served the same 500 tweets per day and it's hundreds of millions of daily active users. And, you know, uh the thing that people who don't post don't realize i
lurker ratio on these things is enormous. And so, it's really hard to feel the impact unless you're actually like getting onto the feed and seeing all the people that you didn't know were reading X all day uh commenting on your thing. I'm always surprised like when I post a good tweet and you know whoever t
ood at it. That's still true today, maybe more true than ever. And it is sort of a meritocracy in a weird way. Now there's the algorithms and AI and all this stuff, but like it's still, you know, in some ways it's a lot more meritocratic than it used to be. like everything it's been lotteryified and so l
 algorithm selects you and it'll display you in front of 500 million people. It's sort of this like weird thing where you have the global newspaper that everyone reads that everyone finds highly influential. There's also this like this sort of um meta thing where it's like the newspaper if you could see 
st has to be very entertaining cuz people are on the timeline to be entertained. Like they they can lie to themselves and say they're on it for other reasons, but it's just to be entertained and that's obviously what the algorithms are selecting for. And so there's this idea that like the most entertai
amp.com/invest. Felix by Rogo is a personal finance agent that turns a single prompt into finished clientready work using your firm's own templates, context, and standards. Send Felix an email like, "Take these comments and turn them for me." Or, "Udate my tracker with the context of these emails." Or,
out things. And like that's probably is that the right way to think about the timeline is like that actually is all that matters is that you get one of those. So you should be you should be living at the edge of the distribution as much as possible in in in what you're posting about writing about. I mean I 
obscene amount of your viewers are watching on watching or listening on YouTube um which is new and no one you know you even if you subscribe to a podcast on YouTube they're not going to show you every single episode in chronological order. So I think this stuff is all just new just downstream of technolo
 posted the algorithm, like there are all these like very specific things that you can do around replies and likes and length and all these like ultimately numbers that the algorithm is selecting for. And um you know, I I would say like streamers and people on YouTube and stuff certainly understand tha
e interviews that I listen to and the things that I read and all this stuff are great. And like I I don't think I don't have an appetite for books just because they're harder to read. I think I'm like feeling nourished from the other sources. And it's interesting, right? Cuz like, you know, if you think about 
 we didn't call it like uh we didn't pick neutral or positive terms for these activities. Um, and I don't think ever anyone ever like would, you know, self-conceive of reading a lot of books as being this like very negative thing. So the counter-argument would be that no actually we have this deep sense that t
bout understanding the wants and desires of the the median, the average person, but the timeline is actually it sort of shifts back to a more Republican model, which is that you're caring about whatever it is a few hundred thousand people who are influential. And um you know uh uh Ben Sass the uh the um the
ke I don't know if that's a good or bad thing but it's it's certainly a very different group that I don't think correlates super tightly to any particular demographic trait >> You're friends with many or most of the great posters. What makes a great >> You know, I think it's not that dissimilar to 
ution of like power structures in society are also limiting like Andrew Carnegie could take up arms against his workers, but like now if you if you like post the wrong thing as a as like a billionaire, you have to resign. So So like there's this sense that this whole class has just become less important. A
 a marginal billionaire that I'm going to learn something very interesting from on a podcast. And I don't think that was the case like six years ago. And so the logical question is like what is the next class as we sort of flail around looking for our next set of priests? And I look I think I think it's the po
fy the top 100 or something. Robert Barren. Yeah. It it just seems like there's too many of them so no one so I don't care anymore. And it's it seems much easier to get a billion dollars than it does to gain the real estate in people's minds or on the timeline that like the top couple of posters can do. &
 getting £10,000 a year from his estate. That's his wealth. It's his cash flow. And it's funny like no one there's not like a scene >> did a DCF for Mr. >> Yeah. There's there's not there's not like a scene in Pride and Prejudice where they're like, does he have a lot of margin loan against hi
nd associations. And so I think this term similar to millionaire, right? Like millionaire, >> no one says that anymore. >> Yeah. And it used to be um it used to sort of carry the same weight as billionaire, but now millionaire is sort of just this like it's a it's yeah it's a it's both irrelev
 draw is there are um there are the the people that I want to get tweet notifications for because I actually think each one of their posts is really good and that's like a vanishingly small number and then there are good posters who have really made something of themselves because of their prolificness. I m
her sort of problem with posting is like it still does reward prolificness which I am still sternly against. I always think Twitter should be dictated by followers divided by posts but that's not how it works. It just rewards prolificness. I think there's this idea that like the most important media proper
als. Like everything I think like in a world of fiat currency, everything sort of becomes this like weird fiat thing. Certainly it's true about philosophers, authors, like does anyone really read the books these authors write? I don't think so. I think a small amount of taste makers read the books and th
 extent that is the thing like you can imagine a world where there's a few clips from a podcast but no one ever listens to the podcast but like I don't actually think that would diminish the value of the property. It's like everything is being um processed and packaged for uh catching attention but taking
 you >> yeah that would be my takeaway. The freedom versus impact question. >> Do you believe that trade-off's real? >> I think it's real. One of the questions I'm interested in is there seems to be I'm I'm always interested in this in in various classes of classes of guys, archetypes
ff and you know in that sense like there's nothing new under the sun. You know the I I I I firmly believe this to be true that like the the end state uh is just posting like the amount of billionaires and founders who turn to Twitter after they acrew their wealth or start a podcast or >> start a 
acrue fame. The other way of looking at it would be that again like wealth is less valuable and you actually realize that the scarce asset is attention and influence and so you know you're almost hedging against the sort of you know rapidly devaluing uh nature of your money and and trying to switch to what 
 you and I are know that we're most interested in are not posters. there's sort of some interesting opposite and um like they've resisted the temptation or something like that and that that makes me wonder if it's almost like a trap. Um but it's such an interesting concept that hard work is performative is 
first of all, anything that can be automated should be automated. I think it's really hard to argue against that uh when you when you really really think about it. Um, and so you know, the the the notion to me that uh I might I might be in the last years of my life where I ever have to sit down in front of
h is like, um, you know, the the work from home thing I think is like a a strong indication of well actually like most people don't have 40 hours of work to be done. like they they maybe have 40 hours of like meetings to sit in or they have 40 hours that they have to be uh on standby but you know I think th
 this huge improvement. The people, the reason people are so attached to work from home is cuz they actually have like 2 or 3 hours of work to do per day. And so work from home Fridays is like a is a soft launch of the four 4 day work week. And I think this is all fine. Like to me, the fact that we can cont
an we used to. and we're still able to be just as >> Some of these jobs maybe are made up and actually people will be happier not ushering bits from one place to another on a screen or something. I'm curious how you think about searching for one's vocation. >> You texted me one time something th
 primary goal is to make a thing more profitable. And I'm not trying to disparage leverage biods. I don't think they're like as evil as people say, but the idea is like kind of the core idea behind it is like using debt and financial engineering to make a lot of money in a way that the quality of the business 
nthusiasm changes that requirement. Ridgeline is built on exactly that foundation, which is why I believe that firms that come out ahead in the AI era will be the ones running on Ridgeline's unified platform. If you're serious about your firm's AI strategy, Ridgeline should be part of that conversation
t of de facto yearly tender is becoming almost a almost a parallel liquid marketplace and so you're actually paid huge amounts of cash in Silicon Valley and I think we've seen that with with certainly with the AI stuff and even you know venture capital firms getting acquired and GPS leaving their firms term
lue in software. How are you approaching just as a pure investor, how are you approaching this very strange high ball, high uncertainty >> We've largely sat on the sidelines. Um we're very fortunate to have such a such a wide mandate in sort of what we can do and look at. Maybe the only consensus vie
ool that helps you use your computer. Um I think in that sense SAS is in a lot of trouble. Uh but I don't think for a lot of these businesses that are you know being really sold off today out of fear that that is actually what is important to the business at all. It is actually interesting to me. I wrote a pos
… (32 lines truncated)

Exit code: 0

`| head -40` was parsed out (40 of 72 total lines shown).
<truncation_notice>
Full output written to: /var/folders/d9/mzhyr7lx6xbf236j5ll9v_300000gn/T/devin-overflows-501/3e1a5516/content.txt
</truncation_notice>

Output from command in shell 02b98a:
ngs I get emails about the most is uh a comment I made somewhere about how like posting is the last great meritocracy. I get emails about that because people are like that really clicked in my head and I started posting and posting changes your life if you're good at it. That's still true today, maybe more true than
 to acrewing a billion dollars. But the reason we do I think is this is our new priestly class which is we've said okay you know the values that are important in our society are being successful at business and to be successful at business you generally have to be smart and hardworking and so 
priesthood after the actual priests and then you can always look which class is subservient to the next to see who's next and like the science class becomes subservient to the billionaire class. This is certainly the the Epstein lesson, right? Which is all the scientists are clamoring aroun
sort of money and glamour and that now I think the billionaire class has become subservient to the posting class. And so, so I I think you can sort of see who society collectively chooses to be like, "All right, this is the guy I want to listen to for two hours and, you know, base my life o
" >> Subservient to the poster class evidenced how why do you say they're subservient to the posters? >> I was at this thing a while ago and it was a bunch of billionaire investors and they were all fighting over who could sit next to Tyler Cowan because he's the most interestin
it works. It just rewards prolificness. I think there's this idea that like the most important media property won't be watched. The most important author isn't read. The most important philosopher is not understood. The the most important stock has no fundamentals. Like everything I think like in a world of fiat
wonder if it's almost like a trap. Um but it's such an interesting concept that hard work is performative is the is the phrase you used. It actually makes me wonder the hard work being performative thing how you're thinking about this AI and job displacement question which you and I have talked about a b
rspective, look, I think it's great. I think first of all, anything that can be automated should be automated. I think it's really hard to argue against that uh when you when you really really think about it. Um, and so you know, the the the notion to me that uh I might I might be in the last ye
this like shows through the cracks, right? Which is like, um, you know, the the work from home thing I think is like a a strong indication of well actually like most people don't have 40 hours of work to be done. like they they maybe have 40 hours of like meetings to sit in or they have 40 hou
 backyard but you still got to be on the line 10 hours a day. Um, yeah, I guess work from home, like maybe you can have lunch at home and your commute, you don't have a commute anymore. And that's but it's not like this huge improvement. The people, the reason people are so attached to work fr
 home is cuz they actually have like 2 or 3 hours of work to do per day. And so work from home Fridays is like a is a soft launch of the four 4 day work week. And I think this is all fine. Like to me, the fact that we can continue paying people to work from home or do 4 days a week or whatever
rames success and failure in a cool way that maybe cuts through this, you know, priestly class thing of like looking to others to tell us what to do versus looking internally. Can you expand on that? >> I think there's something um even just aesthetically bad about waste. And I think uh 
 know without taking a specific view on the trade is probably like good capital allocation because sometimes you just got to do the really obvious thing and just follow consensus. consensus is, you know, usually right. Um, and you know, one of the push backs that I got to that is, well, th
me could could draw out a much clearer picture but there's something to do with passive flows and the marginal price of security and what's informing the marginal price of securities is the posts in the group chats that the random people are writing that the algorithm's chosen I mean in this 
 person. You know, I think you and I are both big believers in the idea of like how you do one thing is how you do everything. And so, um, I think the more that you can probe, you know, like I think like the personal financial situation of a manager is an incredibly underrated thing to ask about, ri
e underbelly of finance. And you have this funny idea around uh the the sort of feudalike system that is emerging in the world of SPVS and the big private companies. Can you share that idea? >> There is this funny notion. I mean it's sort of specific to the labs but it's it's a b
rio Sam and they're sort of they can sort of make land and gentry by giving out allocations because these allocations are sort of these sort of like the best uh gener uh best example of generational wealth. you know, you sort of you get this allocation in SpaceX or in Whimo or whatever and
unch of money from it. And there's this sort of this thing of like, do you have allocation? And I guess I'm interested in it because it's sort of this like purely relational wholly synthetic thing that I'm not sure has ever existed before or or certainly not at the scale and magnitude wher
sly that, you know, brokering is sort of like a one-time transaction, but these allocations sort of, you know, they live on forever. >> What's the most egregious fee setup you've seen in one of these? no GP commit 10% one-time upfront fee with some carry structure generally where you
 with people that I find interesting. And um but I also think like I'm uniquely tolerant of uh sort of distasteful and weird people. Like I do think part of the reason I get asked a fair amount like what's your media diet and conversations are my answer and I it always feels like the answer
f falls flat with people and I think it's because they're not friends with like weirdos like like a lot of my friends I think are sort of um people would largely like find strange at best, distasteful at worst. If I can't predict what the person's going to say after knowing them, I like
viously like a very high variance thing. Old books are good. I've read a lot of old books in my life, but I think YouTube remains underrated. Like there's a lot of really obscure things on YouTube. YouTube sort of remains the library of Alexandria of of our time maybe of ever. But yeah, Y
ones that you've done yourself but also >> I really do think people value complexity for the sake of complexity a lot. I think a lot of investors are in the like feel clever look smart game more than the money game. And so, you know, personally, I think this has been a big area of like self-devel
 bigger believer in the in the simplicity which is like you probably want to be long Elon Musk, you know, or like like that level of idea. I actually think like the the gift is being able to sell that idea. I think a lot of the investing media actually serves for the people who are really
akes them feel differentiated and smart enough to what is actually sort of just long Elon or long Bitcoin. I think of a guy that I know who exclusively does bankruptcies and he makes a lot of money but like that's very complex and very difficult but you know it's a tremendous amount of wo
licity is like you should just buy like big companies when they're at their 200 200 week moving average and it like I love that idea cuz it's just so simple um but it's right one story that I absolutely love cutting through the mess and getting to like complete clarity on how to evaluate an investment 
e most practical thing is that I think is very lowhanging fruit is just the the job description. Um, I think job descriptions are one of these things where they are written for nobody to be to be read by nobody. And they're sort of this like token document like it's more about does the job desc
ly that I think I think what's so important in any sales pitch, which is what a job description should be, is uh disqualifying who you don't want. And the nice thing about a divisive statement is that um when it resonates, it deeply resonates with the person. And so I just try to think of okay 
ould want someone to have and try and make them again to go back to the like uh how you do one thing is how you do everything that would make them the type of person that I was interested. Obviously the skills and the experience was going to be table stakes. I tried to write out um traits and ideas 
ind of was was the funniest was uh or or got the most reaction was um you're an ideological minority at a top 10 school. And what I love about that is that it's entirely open for interpretation. So, you know, um, uh, I would get people who would be many different things, right? Who'd be angry that I
 is I'm not going to apply that's great cuz I don't want those people. And then ideological minority was really interesting. I had a certain idea in mind but people gave me all kinds of answers about ideological because you know I didn't necessarily political. There was all kind of answers around um
ou know I I think this is [ __ ] You should hire me. I didn't go to a top 10 school. You're an idiot and I love that person too. Right. And so like I think the more you can do statements like that where they like get this sort of reaction is great. Uh, and you sort of like do all li
 so yeah, statements like that I think are are very much underutilized in these job descriptions. >> It's a cool idea baking the interview into the job post itself. It seems to me like an underrated area of inquiry today that I know you're interested in is the cultural and intellectual tr
rpin the whole thing. I think there is a real philosophy that some sort of like neo Buddhist utilitarianism uh that underlies the like technological developments in Silicon Valley. And it's interesting because you see it like Will Massel uh gets involved with SPF and FTX. there's these sort 
ssarily named. I mean now they have been. Um you could say the same thing about Curtis Yarvin. I thought it was remarkable for years how you could sort of hear Curtis's ideas coming out of the mouth of mouths of the the big tech leaders without being named. There's things like leverage resear
cal ideas are underrated like the you know like it or not the models are highly utilitarian. They have this weird mix of religious ideas from from Judaism, from Buddhism, um, and this sort of like utilitarian bent that turns into effect of altruism and and you know, people sort of think lik
ion. And I think at the crux of that is that technology views itself as totally self-righteous which is that like the thing that they are building it's not nakedly sindriven or driven out of a greed or ambition. It's driven out of this you know nominally altruistic idea of no we're building th
oint where there's no recognition of all the other factors. It's almost sort of shadowesque. Um, and there's none of this notion of like, well, if you work in finance, you sort of need to try you need to translate the gains from finance into something worthy into into art, into architecture
 just as true in how you run your company. Your spending system is your capital allocation strategy. RAMP makes it smarter by default. Better data, better decisions, better economics over time. See how at ramp.com/invest. As your business grows, Vanta scales with you, automating compliance

Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 3959c2:
total 16
drwxr-xr-x    6 root1  staff   192 Jul  7 19:37 .
drwxr-x---+ 158 root1  staff  5056 Jul  8 19:27 ..
-rw-r--r--    1 root1  staff   798 Jun 18 00:36 argv.json
-rw-------    1 root1  staff   181 Jul  7 19:37 config.local.json
drwxr-xr-x   10 root1  staff   320 Jul  4 05:07 extensions
drwxr-xr-x    4 root1  staff   128 Jul  7 23:27 skills
total 16
drwxr-xr-x    6 root1  staff   192 Jul  7 19:37 .
drwxr-x---+ 158 root1  staff  5056 Jul  8 19:27 ..
-rw-r--r--    1 root1  staff   798 Jun 18 00:36 argv.json
-rw-------    1 root1  staff   181 Jul  7 19:37 config.local.json
drwxr-xr-x   10 root1  staff   320 Jul  4 05:07 extensions
drwxr-xr-x    4 root1  staff   128 Jul  7 23:27 skills


Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 6a7137:
/Users/root1/.config/demucs-gui/history.db
/Users/root1/.local/share/devin/cli/sessions.db
/Users/root1/Library/com.apple.internal.ck/history.db
/Users/root1/Library/Safari/History.db
/Users/root1/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.iBooks/CRDTModelContext/bookdatastored.ReadingHistoryModelContext.db
/Users/root1/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.iBooks/CRDTModelFileSyncContext/bookdatastored-ReadingHistoryModel-SyncInfoContext.db


Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 52e2d6:
app_state                refinery_schema_history  tool_call_state        
message_nodes            rendered_commits       
prompt_history           sessions               


Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 905164:
CREATE TABLE sessions (
  id TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
  working_directory TEXT NOT NULL,
  backend_type TEXT NOT NULL,
  model TEXT NOT NULL,
  agent_mode TEXT NOT NULL,
  created_at INTEGER NOT NULL,
  last_activity_at INTEGER NOT NULL, title TEXT, main_chain_id INTEGER, shell_last_seen_index INTEGER DEFAULT 0, cogs_json TEXT, workspace_dirs TEXT, hidden INTEGER NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, metadata TEXT);
CREATE INDEX idx_sessions_activity
  ON sessions(last_activity_at DESC);
CREATE INDEX idx_sessions_hidden ON sessions(hidden);


Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell b1999d:
phantom-thursday|YouTube video summary|1970-01-21 07:24:59|1970-01-21 07:26:04
adorable-tick|Setup omp.sh|1970-01-21 07:25:57|1970-01-21 07:26:04
merciful-speak|OLED Review By Someone Who Actually Plays Game|1970-01-21 07:25:01|1970-01-21 07:26:04
fluff-turner|Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up|1970-01-21 07:24:44|1970-01-21 07:26:03
glossy-cardinal|Casual Greeting|1970-01-21 07:25:57|1970-01-21 07:25:57


Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 45e022:
phantom-thursday|YouTube video summary|1783564097|1783499603
adorable-tick|Setup omp.sh|1783564054|1783557261
merciful-speak|OLED Review By Someone Who Actually Plays Game|1783564020|1783501889
fluff-turner|Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up|1783563898|1783484933
glossy-cardinal|Casual Greeting|1783557320|1783557316


Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell a50cf5:
Error: in prepare, no such column: id
  SELECT id, substr(content, 1, 200) FROM message_nodes WHERE session_id = 'phan
         ^--- error here

Exit code: 1

Output from command in shell 3eab35:
CREATE TABLE message_nodes (
  row_id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT,
  session_id TEXT NOT NULL,
  node_id INTEGER NOT NULL,           -- node_id within this session's forest
  parent_node_id INTEGER,             -- NULL for root nodes
… (8 lines truncated)

Exit code: 0

`| head -5` was parsed out (5 of 13 total lines shown).
<truncation_notice>
Full output written to: /var/folders/d9/mzhyr7lx6xbf236j5ll9v_300000gn/T/devin-overflows-501/573cbe03/content.txt
</truncation_notice>

Output from command in shell ef7a32:
Error: in prepare, no such column: content
  SELECT substr(content, 1, 300) FROM message_nodes WHERE session_id = 'phantom-
                ^--- error here


Exit code: 1

Output from command in shell 526a56:
0|row_id|INTEGER|0||1
1|session_id|TEXT|1||0
2|node_id|INTEGER|1||0
3|parent_node_id|INTEGER|0||0
4|chat_message|TEXT|1||0
5|created_at|INTEGER|1||0
6|metadata|TEXT|0||0


Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell c34fde:
{"message_id":"043a4bc7-8b88-44e8-98cd-9e20740f4edb","role":"system","content":"<system_info>\nThe following information is automatically generated context about your current environment.\nCurrent wor
{"message_id":"219a0c37-25d9-4d85-951e-1da3db1acd5b","role":"system","content":"<rules type=\"always-on\">\n<rule name=\"AGENTS\" path=\"/Users/root1/AGENTS.md\">\n# Agent Preferences\n\n- If I ever p


Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 845db6:
{"message_id":"46e6f207-a6f4-44b2-877f-24cb052e8ede","role":"user","content":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y82q5Lw7_8E write a good synopis of all points made","metadata":{"num_tokens":null,"is_use


Exit code: 0

Output from command in shell 960c5d:
phantom-thursday|The Billion Dollar PDF — synopsis, Software is Eating the World, & contrarian ideas


Exit code: 0