YouSaid · the spoken record

David George

lines on the record: 74
first: 2025-12-15
most recent: 2025-12-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You just took off 17 minutes of your life. So I think that's too extreme, but I do think that there's a positive version of that that could be super valuable. It'd be good for society, but I would love it as a consumer. And I think the technology capabilities are going to be there pretty shortly. The other is robotics. You know, we have not made a large investment in robotics, but I think it's going to be the largest category in AI, B2C, B2B. There's still kind of debate on what the right form factors are, whether it's at home help, whether it's industrial, like all these things. But I do think 10 years down the road, we're all going to have really helpful robotics assistance in B2C and B2B. And so I think it's going to be super exciting as a consumer, but I also think as an investor, it's going to present some awesome opportunities.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the personal side, I'm really excited. And by the way, these are two areas that I think over the next 10 years are going to be really exciting and really investable, but they're kind of early today. One is personal health, health management. I was with a really talented entrepreneur. Well, he's a former large company executive and he's thinking about starting a company. And his extreme version of it was tracking an AI coaching that happens for you that explains the trade-offs of every decision you make. That's a little bit too extreme, but more proactive, more involved management of personal health, I think is something that's going to happen. You know, it's one of these large consumer categories that hasn't really hit yet.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we have to go out of our way to go get that information and signal now. It actually has made us a better business at the early stage. And then as long as we're coordinating right from early stage through growth, it'll make us better. But we have to seek it out and do a little bit more work to get all that information.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To change this, but one of the elements about us scaling has been we've had to decentralize the way we run our business. And so when I first joined the firm, we used to sit around in partner meetings all day on Mondays, hear all the pitches from all the various sectors on Mondays. And then on Fridays too. Obviously, that's not a scalable approach to doing venture, especially given, you know, we're in a bunch of different sectors now. But selfishly at the growth fund side, that was extremely high signal great information, tons of soaked content with all the best thinkers.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell you what the spikes on both of them from my vantage point. I mean, look, they're both exceptional at every element of the job. Mark can see the future. Mark, if you give Mark any 10-year prediction, or he will give you 10-year predictions, they're very often right. Like most of the time, they're right. And he's often high on magnitude and it ends up being justified in the future. And so things that may seem, you know, too high or too crazy like in the fullness of time, he's generally right. You know, he knows consumer internet extremely well. He spikes there. Ben is probably the best management That I've ever encountered, you know, he also is a futuristic thinker, but he sort of spikes in that way. And then Mark spikes in the seeing the future way.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man. There are a bunch of really, really talented people at the early stage. I love that I get to learn from these people all the time. I think the people at the early stage that have developed the most clarity of thought on approach to early stage investing, like I think it's Dixon. You know, he obviously runs our crypto funds now, but he scouted generalist background as well. He's been doing this for a really long time. And I think he has the sort of clearest articulation of what our early stage strategy is, which has been adopted, I would say, across the firm. But I think he has the clearest view on it.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Best would be, you know, we partnered a lot with Nat and Daniel when they were still on the field. And so, you know, if they wanted to, actually, I guess they were off the field when they're investing. They got back on the field to do real jobs now. But if they were to come back off the field, I think it would be fun to work with them.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guys are all great. I have tons of respect for all those guys. We end up doing rounds together, we're in companies together. I think they're all great.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, of course. You know, it's actually a really good archetype in a lot of the vertical software categories. But you can definitely see it with those folks. And honestly, like speed of execution, aggression is a huge part of success in those categories.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so there are more extreme success versions of founders that I've backed and over time who I've gotten to know. One of the ones that struck me recently was the first meeting I had dinner with one of my partners, Santiago, with Shiv from a bridge. And I didn't know what necessarily to expect. I knew he was a doctor practicing cardiologist. I knew that, you know, he was making a lot of progress in his market. But he was one of these perfect archetypes where he knows his end market. He knows his product. He knows the technology. And yet is a total, total killer. Like he's this, you know, great bedside man or cardiologist, but an absolute killer. And so, you know, I love when I have those first meetings and you can already feel that.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but it's one of them 30 things in their AI divisions that they're trying to do. It's sort of like how AWS and the cloud have service offerings for basically everything that you could possibly have, and yet there's still tons of infrastructure companies that are independent”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But radiology AI has been able to do a better job than human radiologists prior to this whole wave. Like neural nets were able to do a better job than human radiologists and looking at scans. And yet since this sort of proliferation of AI, the number of radiologists has actually gone up. It hasn't declined. And so why is that the case? It turns out that radiologists only spend 30 to 40 percent of their time looking at the scans. There's another 60 to 70 percent of their time doing all the other stuff. And so the model companies aren't going to go do the work to figure out how to automate the other stuff, the 60 to 70 percent, but that's what the opportunity would represent for an independent company in that space. Does that make sense?”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They've crushed international, like, for what it's worth. I mean, they're really, really good in the U.S. And I'm a big fan of Gary. Know if it's in the last 12 months, but if you think about the moment that all of the models started to demonstrate their capabilities, there was a moment in time where we thought the models would eat everything in consumer and enterprise software. I think maybe there's a bit of a shift back toward this in public markets at least, that the models are going to eat all these application software categories. We fully changed our mind. I think there's going to be application software companies built on top of models in pretty much every direction. And so if you look at our investing behavior, it obviously reflects that. That's probably a little bit further back. That's probably more like 18 to 24 months ago. But we sort of all thought at first like the models will just do everything and subsume everything. And it turns out there's tons of stuff you have to do around the tasks that humans do in order to build a viable product. The example I like to give, I know it's a lightning round.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's extremely rare. And, like, Adam is a learner. He is like a deep student of the game that he's in. I'm really excited about Flow, you know, Mark and Ben and I are all involved and Justin from our team. They've sort of proven out the value prop of the product. You know, now it's just about scaling.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brought brand and a better product experience to a renter's life. There's a huge market opportunity for it. There's a great business model that goes with it. And if there's anybody who can do that, given the intersection of real estate and brand, I think it's Adam. If you think about the average entrepreneur walks in off the street and pitches us an idea, what is the likelihood that Adam can build a humongous company versus the average entrepreneur? It's extremely high. That's the theory behind it.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's world class at brand building, company building, product hiring. Those sound like things that are a little fuzzy, but they're not. I mean, they're the most important ingredients for early stage company building. He surround himself with an extraordinary team. He's got an incredible insight, which I think is fascinating. Obviously, homeownership is declining rapidly and people aren't able to buy homes. And there's a whole political and social issue with that. But it's the reality of the case. The average renter in the U.S. spends 30% of their disposable income on rent. It's the highest amount of spend of any category. And yet it's the only unbranded experience in anyone's life. If you think about, you know, the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the car you drive, you know, the places you go, all of those are branded experiences and consumers pay a premium for that branded better experience. You know, his idea was kind of, what if you actually”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remember what I said earlier about investing behind strength of strengths? Adam has extraordinary strengths. He has some of the strongest strengths of anybody, any entrepreneur in the market. It doesn't mean that he has no weaknesses, but he absolutely spikes in the areas that are most important for the business he's trying to build.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They'll try to get flow in soon. London's a tough market to enter. I mean, you remember what it was like for Uber to enter London in the first place. It got brought into the market kicking and screaming. But London, Tokyo, there'll be some of the best international markets possible for autonomous driving.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fast track the drug into full approval and just get it in the market because the benefits are so great. And he was comparing that to Waymo, which is like, hey, how many deaths are there on the roads per year? It would be irresponsible to block this, let alone not fast-track approval of it. It's going to be kind of the mother of all markets. Like I think autonomous driving and robotics are maybe the mother of all markets that are coming on AI.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way we did it was we you know we invested a smaller amount at the time just given we were conflicting points of view on it but that served us well because we kept a close relationship with the team and we wrote a much larger check into their most recent round and and i'm really excited about it i mean they have a very exciting future i'm going to san francisco after this and i am going to take a waymo on the freeway up to our office in san francisco from palo alto that's sort of a magical product experience this is one of those cases you know we talked earlier about potential future competition like this is one of those cases where there's going to be you know tremendous potential future competition but the product in the market today is magical and you know there was just an op-ed written i think there was new york times that was like it was done by a medical professional he said okay we now have enough data from waymo that shows they are seven to ten x safer than a human driver when we see results like this in clinical trials in the healthcare industry”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest one was our original investment in Waymo. So we invested in Waymo in early 2020. So we were the only VC fund that invested in Waymo in early 2020. It was extraordinary. I mean, the product was magic even at the time. We did demo rides. This is obviously well before they were everywhere on the road. We did demo rides. It could drive smoother than a human. They could do unprotected laughs. They could avoid construction sites. They could do all these really special things that you wouldn't think that an autonomous car could do at the time. But at the time, like they didn't have a product in the market. And I thought the valuation was really high. And so I said, here's all this analysis in our team. And, you know, we produced all this analysis that showed that, you know, the price was really high. And Mark and Ben, you know, were like, it's autonomous driving. What are you talking about? Like this is the endless market size. This can be the biggest company in consumer technology and they're the market leader.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try not to do that. I mean, look, the thing that we see that more often happens is companies diverge more often than they converge. And so the perception of what a conflict can be in the future often doesn't come into play. There are also examples in the opposite where we funded a company and then they pivoted and they pivoted into a different space. And, you know, we try and help the founders as much we can, even if that's the case.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, we don't. I mean, when we invest, we try to avoid conflicts as best we can, you know, especially if we're on the board. So, you know, it's the trickiest part of scale of our business. We don't always get it right.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Market can be bigger than we would expect or others would expect. Stripe is an example of this. SpaceX with Starlink is an example of this. Way more when we invested is an example of this. And then we also like to invest in the ones where we feel like the founders have an advantage in figuring out the next product. And so Andrew is like a perfect example of this. You know, we knew border towers would be a huge product line. But with the team, you know, we were also pretty high confident that they were going to figure out a bunch of other stuff. I wouldn't have predicted that they figured out autonomous fighter jets, which is pretty awesome. But the best ones, the best ones who know their market's the best, who have market leadership, who are product people, who are tech people, you know, they tend to find the next product areas. And that's what we want to find.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have to constantly reassess this. You should look back at our investment case for investing in Databricks in 2019. We did an investment out of our growth fund. It was one of our first investments, our largest growth fund investment in fund one at $6 billion. And our investment case never would have predicted what they became. And so we have to constantly push ourselves and think about how big they can become. I've been surprised at how big an absolute dollar terms the companies can be and how good they can be. So we constantly have to push ourselves on this. The example I always use is Google and Facebook. 10 years ago, Google and Facebook were monetizing their users at like one seventh of what they are today. It's hard to forecast that. It's hard to moneliting to think, you know, you're ever at like an in-state of productivity or in state of new products. So, you know, we've been surprised. We like to invest in the ones where there's a theory on how the”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they actually will diverge in pretty meaningful ways. This is sort of what we've seen in historical technology markets, but each will try and remain competitive in their spaces. B2B Anthropic is certainly putting more resource after it today. OpenAI is going to have a really good B2B business. They already do. So I think that market is going to be pretty competitive, not just coding, but general B2B API usage and moving up into the application stack. Both of them are obviously trying to do that. So I think that market is going to be pretty competitive. Google will play some part in that market, but the big head-to-head competition will come between AI and Anthropic. On the consumer side, it's ChatGPT. Ask my family in Kentucky, what do they use? They know what is AI? They know ChatGPT.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of errors of omission for current companies on the model side, Anthropic has done a really great job. We're not investors in anthropic. They've done a really good job. It's one of those cases where similar to cloud, like if you could own all of AWS, Azure, and GCP as independent companies, that would suit you pretty well. And again, that's one of those markets that was not winner-take-all, even though it's a scale market. You know, it's sort of oligopolistic. If the model companies turn out to be something similar, given how much we expect demand to grow, that's probably one.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm happy to answer it in a different way, which is. What I mean by finding beauty or opportunity is most of the time it's seeing a magnitude of greatness that isn't totally obvious on the surface. And so, you know, when we've made original investments in some of those companies, we invested in Androil in the growth fund when they had one program of record and it was bordered towers. And the bet was, can they be massively multi-product? And now they have many, many programs of record, some of the coolest products in the market. OpenAI, we invested before they had ChatGPT. And so often there's an opportunity where we see things that may be great in the future, even if the companies themselves are already great or hot.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“High served or well served on the gross margin point today, I'll say this. We give a little bit more of a pass than we used to. And if we ever see a company that pitches us as an AI company and they have SaaS gross margins, we ask a lot of questions. It probably means that people aren't actually using the AI features.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The history of technology inputs would suggest the margins will rationalize and the margins are going to go up. There's a high amount of uncertainty today. It's possible that this next generation of companies is 50% gross margins. If they're delivering a ton of value growing really fast, that's totally fine. Today, the input costs per token have gone down massively, but token usage has also gone up massively with the introduction of reasoning. So in the last year and a half or so, it's been a bit of a muddy picture on the input costs. I think over time that will rationalize, we'll go down. I think the market structure will end up sort of like cloud for the models. Where cloud costs for the average income customer are fine. And clouds and oligopoly and they make high profits. I think the model companies, you know, that serve APIs will be relatively oligopolistic. They'll probably have reasonably high margins. And the end customers will be pretty”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been historically surprised at how good the best companies can be and how fast they can grow, especially in markets that are early innings with a big technology shift. So I'm very optimistic. Those are abstract numbers. I also don't think that every great high growth company will end up trading for six times in the public markets. There are some that are going to trade higher based on very high growth rates or high cash flow. You know, it's hard to debate like an abstract financial case, but for most of these companies that we've backed, these winning apps, they're growing 3x faster than predecessor SaaS and cloud companies. And so, you know, sure, high valuations from the outside, I think in many of those cases are warranted.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't know. We've not been close to that. Obviously, we're existing investors in Decagon. So it's hard for me to have”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fast on product, and they win the market based on having the best product and the best distribution and all the things that we talk about. Or it's also possible that it's a sort of more distributed market sort of like payroll. Either way, the growth is staggering. The market pull is staggering. It's a decade on for us is a great company.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I think there's a good reason why there's excitement in the space. It's better, faster, cheaper already today with today's model quality. With the cost of the models. And so you don't need to believe any future state of a different product or a different model capability. The functionality is there. And so there's good reason why, you know, we put on EBCs for our portfolio companies. Every time Decagon appears in one of these EBCs, there's extremely high interest. And most of the time conversion to a deal. So I think the market pull the market size is what is most interesting about that space. If you look at like SaaS and cloud markets, about half of them are win or take vast majority, the overwhelming majority, and about half of them sort of break up of market share. So for example, you mentioned deal like payroll market, like payroll market is not a winner-take vast majority market. There are many markets like this in SaaS and cloud. And so it's possible that Decagon is the winner and they move really.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Chanel, Zenya, this is where Europe really thrives. Yeah, they're scale players and then they're specialists. And I think we're obviously a scale player. I think the risk is everything in between. Department stores that have general merchandise but don't have scale, for example. And that's a very risky place to be. So our strategy is very much build scale. And the reason we do that is because it gives a huge advantage from a resources standpoint to our portfolio companies.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the first place. And so if that money is going to go back to consumers or drivers or whatever it is in that case and just get funneled back to Google and Facebook, I don't think that kingmaking for that is necessarily a good strategy. But investing a lot of capital, having a brand that gives a seal of approval, it can definitely help make a company succeed. You know, I think Mark and Ben have described it well in the past. What are we giving to our founders? Partially what we're giving to our founders is a loan on our brand, you know, a seal of approval. You know, often, especially for early stage companies, it really can help with hiring. Have you heard that talk track of like what store do you want to be? There's sort of a barbelling of the retail market. There's Amazon and Walmart on the one end. And then on the other end, there's like extremely high end retail.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were early to figuring out that there would be a huge opportunity in AI. So they famously were in NVIDIA in that fund. And they did some really good investments like Slack, like Gardant. The one piece of it was missing was that capital as a weapon was a viable strategy. So capital is a weapon in enterprise is really, really hard to do because you physically have to hire people. You have to hire sales reps. You have to hire marketing people, et cetera. Capital is a weapon in consumer. Most of the time, it doesn't really work. Like I would say TikTok is maybe the exception. Maybe Uber. But, you know, the thing that maybe was wrong about it was we can kingmake if we just put the capital into the companies and then that will allow them to win. But that's a bit of an adverse selection machine where the companies that opt into that as their winning strategy are the ones that maybe don't have as good of a reason to win or competitive advantage.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think about investing in companies. So we always seek to invest in the winner. If the investment thesis is our investment is going to make them a winner, it's probably a pretty flimsy investment thesis. Now, an investment that we make in a company that is already attracting resources, hiring really well, able to raise capital well, able to deploy more money and to go to market, able to deploy more money into R&D, it can generally help. Like this is the whole theory of preferential attachment, which is why increasing returns to scale is a concept, even if you're not a network effect driven business, if you're Salesforce.com or workday or service now or crowdstrike, the more you become the leader, the more resources come your way. And the easier things get for you, potentially. We look for situations like that. I would contrast it with situations like the original Softbank Vision Fund did a lot of really good things. Honestly, they did a bunch of”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we spend all of our time thinking about where their market pull because those are the best places where you can build a company. Like all those companies that you described, there's extreme market pull. The reason they've grown really fast is not because they've poured tons of money into hiring sales reps. The reason they're going very fast is because there's tremendous customer pull. And so we look for, you know, we look for those markets.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's dead in this new world. I tend to think that companies, the number one way to measure a company is ultimately return on invested capital. The way you do that with an early stage company, mostly is efficiency of customer acquisition. Not every company needs to go, you know, zero to 100. Like it depends on what market they're in. But I do think the companies with AI, if there's very sort of starving end customers, high momentum gives you a chance to build a moat. And I think that's the most important thing about this sort of debate about how high of growth is good enough. It depends on the market you're in. In some markets, like they're not going to move as fast. But in the markets that are moving really fast, if you're not moving really fast, that's a risky place to be. But I think the most important thing about momentum is just it's relative to your peer set. If your peer set is growing really fast and your direct competitors are growing really fast and it's high retention and customer acquisition.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so this is a great question because I think this is where you have to be really discerning in the market. It does mean the same as it has before. If it is high retention and high engagement, the bar has actually gone up significantly for us when we look at AI companies because it grown so fast. And so you can't actually look at years of renewal behavior.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think that we'll see that, and I think we'll see that, and I think it will come with a business model shift. You know, you're talking about the public markets. Like in the public markets today, you are guilty until proven innocent. It's the full flip side of our criminal justice system. You are assumed that you are doomed by AI unless proven otherwise. I think there's probably opportunity. I mean, you can see the way the stock prices have gone. I don't have to play in that world. We get to bet on the next thing, but I do think that there's going to be a huge opportunity to shift that.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think it will happen. I think it will happen. I'm saying you're seeing green shoots. I don't think it necessarily means that every SaaS company is doomed. But, you know, even Microsoft has reduced their headcount by 6% over the last year or so.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a truck brokerage. So they take customers who need to ship stuff and trucking companies and they broker deals between the two so that they can ship things. Most of the industry in the US is actually intermediated. It's not direct. The trucking industry is very fragmented. So this is a large business. And historically, they've had football field-sized call centers of people making phone calls and connecting dots. They just disclosed in their last earnings that they saw a 40% productivity increase measured in shipments per person per day in their core business since the end of 2022. 40% increase. And it's AI driven. And so what's actually happened is their operating margin has gone up 680 basis points. Like that's very effective implementation of AI. And so people always ask, they're like, oh, well, is there real use?”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the only flaw in that logic is that has to be product driven, not top-down driven. Like that needs to be pulled from the market. That needs to be slapping the customers in the face that there's a value prop for them to go do that, as opposed to the CIOs or CEOs saying, you know, we need to do AI stuff. And so let's shift labor spend. I would say there's some encouraging data points. If you look at recent earnings reports, there are a couple of companies, and you got to like look kind of deep for these, but there are a couple of companies that have started to show signs of actually running their business differently and showing really high ROI from AI. Have you heard of CH Robinson?”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Data. So, what data do you actually access? If you have all three of those that undertake major change at the same time, I think you've got a really good chance for a startup to come and beat the incumbent, the new incumbent, if you will. At the same time, I just never in a million years would have thought that the big software companies could be as large as they are. And so I have to think that this next wave probably presents the opportunity for this next generation to be much larger than the previous generation. And it doesn't mean that they have to go eat all labor. We have that on slides too. But I don't think in practice that's actually what happens. I think in practice what actually happens is there's massive surplus that gets delivered to end customers. And you can still create much bigger companies than the previous generation.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, I think many of the incumbents, I call them the new incumbents. And the new incumbents are in much better position, I would say, than like, you know, licensed incumbents when SaaS came along. If I were to rank order the level of disruption that is coming for these companies, business model shift is number one. And so we can talk about examples where that's most in practice today. You know, Sarah and Kimberly from our side led investment investments in Dekagon. Customer service is the most obvious one where you can certainly price based on completion of a task. It's better, faster, cheaper value props to the customer. So if you are going to compete with a seat-based customer service thing, lookout, that's hard. And that's a business model shift. So that's like the most disruptive piece. The second most disruptive piece I would argue is UI and workflow. And then the third most disruptive piece is access to data.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not because they have a good business model. It's because we think the market might be too small. Those are mistakes, too. Like we always underestimate the size of a market and we have fun stories about that all over the place.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Often the takeaway is when we make an investment, we should always be investing in strength of strengths as opposed to lack of weaknesses. And so this is a philosophy that comes from Ben. If you have spiking strengths in a founder and a company, it's okay if there are weaknesses or concerns. Often the mistake will manifest itself as the fear of future competition, like the fear of theoretical competition, right? So that's the perfect articulation of what you just had for 11 labs. They say, oh my gosh, aren't the labs going to do it? It's the old VC trope of, you know, well, isn't Google going to do it? Or what happens if Facebook does this? If you overweight the fear of future theoretical competition, you can always talk yourself out of making an investment. And so we try really, really hard not to do that. Other mistakes, if we pass on great companies, it's not because they're the market.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's many of these. We don't get it right all the time. I think the most relevant are like we passed in and then we ended up fixing our own mistake.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source