YouSaid · the spoken record

Ev Randle

lines on the record: 83
first: 2025-11-10
most recent: 2025-11-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Thank you, Harry. It's been so awesome just to hang with you, and next time we'll do a pint in London next time I'm out there.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like when you think about the determinants of GDP growth being basically population and then GDP per capita and how much the birth rate is slowing, I think AI is going to be unbelievably good at continuing GDP growth. And I think continuing GDP growth and just growth of the economy and continuing growing the pie and having the middle class grow and having everyone feel more and more prosperous over time is the most single important variable in continuing a harmonious functional society. And I think it's going to do that in spades over the next 10 years.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say. Probably a mix I think over the next 10 years, the only thing that's ever made me less of a capitalist than I am is realizing that capitalism is really, really good at optimizing things and making them more efficient. And when the laser beam of capitalism moved from cars and TVs and electric goods and making them cheaper and moved to the minds of people, I think it actually has had a lot of negative consequences when social media had its rise. The thing that was optimizing for was how do we get people to glue their faces to the screen for as long as possible? That's been actually like a significant negative and probably the only negative that technology's had on society thus far. But I think when we look at what's happening in AI and the way that it's going to be able to, like Peter Thiel always talks about how the most important thing to keeping our society harmonious and functional is growth because as soon as this pie stops growing, things get a lot worse and people get a lot worse to each other because it's zero sum. I think unfortunately you're seeing a fair amount of that over where you live, Harry. And I think.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I win in my first pitch with him my first week, and my jaw was on the floor more than the founder. I was like, I have so much to learn from this guy. I'm like, I've never seen someone with a, like, that practices the craft of like infinite EQ and hospitality and just WordCraft like he does. It's unbelievable to witness.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'll do a data-driven one, which I think just Peter's, I mean, honestly, I think Eric is the most underrated picker. I think when you look at just some of the, like he's just done some, like, really low key things that have ended up being unbelievable. Like he'll have cerebrus, which, you know, we'll IPO at some point in the future that's going to be an unbelievable company. He has a lot of these sneaky absolute bangers. But I think if you go back and look at just like, okay, percent of Series A's that ended up being generational companies, I mean, Peter also has the advantage of being in the game for 20 plus years, but it's got to be Peter.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the thing that is most dangerous and the biggest risk to benchmark not being successful over the next two decades is stasis. We need to be dynamic. We need to always be evolving with the asset class while staying true to our North Stars. I am very much a believer that we don't have to leave our North Stars or bastardize our true North in order to continue to be involved with a very, very best companies. But at the end of the day, being involved with a very, very best companies is the currency by which we all live in this asset class. And that has to be the most important thing. And if there's ever a situation where we're letting our North Stars or we're letting something else wag, you know, the tail wag the dog and the dog being getting involved with the very, very best founders of building the best companies, that's when we need to re-evaluate our strategy and what we're doing.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biggest miss has to be open AI at 32. It was kind of a hard to fill around, I think. Like obviously, they did it, but it was very non-obvious at the time. And it was just one of those ones that is just so unbelievably painful because you miss the forest for the trees. You let these structure thing and the dilution thing trick you out of investing in what is maybe going to be the largest tech company of all time. And also just like being in that ecosystem, like it's just such an unbelievable group of people that I think even if it was just an okay return, you'd still want to be involved with Brad and Sam and all the people over there that are like defined a lot of what the AI industry is today. And yeah, so that one's hurts to this day.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You tell me, I played FIFA in high school, but I don't like playing real. You go watching Ronaldo and you're like, oh my God, like I could go play for Real one day. And it's like.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crazy I think I said you had a benchmark when I was 22 entering the industry, honestly. You enter the industry, you read evoys, I'm reading all of Bill Gurley's blog posts. It is a mythical place and it is one that you enter the industry as like a young investor and you think if I really work my ass off and I get pretty lucky, maybe one day I'll be able to compete for a seat there. So when it comes true and they give you the envelope with the offer and it, I don't know, it's almost like a childhood fantasy of joining the Yankees or something. It's super surreal. So obviously the people matter most and that was really important during the recruiting process was I felt unbelievable alignment and just really a level of closeness with Peter Eric and Chathan. But beyond that, I think the firm itself, it's just one of these mythical seats that you dream about from the day that you enter the asset class.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe Founder's Fund just because they have a very unique ability to incubate companies. And so I think when you think about like Androil, like the fund that Androil is in, it's just going to be like such an ungodly return on that capital. And so I think it's become a really, really competitive market. And the only way that you can like fend off how hard it is to buy equity is to sell equity or produce equity. And the way you produce equity is by incubating companies. And every few funds or every five to ten years, they've incubated an unbelievable company. Obviously, Scott Nolan over there is the most recent to do it. And so I think that's just a way to get differentiated returns that are hard to produce from anyone else.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, we're investors in cursor. I am not a believer in some of the companies that have raised a ton of money and have not released a product or like, I'm a huge believer in like, you got to get developers' hands on the product. So I think there's a couple companies that have raised billions of dollars and they're like, oh, we're going to build the best thing ever. But they don't actually have products that a lot of developers are using. That is going to be a rude awakening because you have like AI products get better via usage oftentimes if you have the right environments. It's like cloud code, codecs, cursor, the”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think honestly the quality of the AI cloud business model, again, I was very negative on it when Coreweave was first coming up. I was like, oh, this is just reselling a commodity. I actually think there's a lot of interesting things that people are doing and the demand for AI inference is just so astronomical that at least for now and for the next few years, I think it's going to overcome all business quality and like business equation concerns. I think at some point, you know, Corweave and all these things will probably go down like 70%. But obviously I thought that back when it was raising at $3 billion and now it's a $60 billion public company where the investors have been able to get liquidity. So I was definitely wrong.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Apparently, that's not her. I saw something on Twitter where someone's impersonating her is what I saw. Apparently she doesn't actually have access. So maybe it's one of your super fans.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In so many multiples of what you would get in a normal cycle. And so I think we think and we stay up all night thinking about like, well, what is going to be the Amazon and the Google and the Microsoft of this era? And then also I think it goes to our strategy where like, let's constrain our fund sizes, let's be careful about what we do so that we don't get too over our skis where we can easily weather a crash and LPs aren't going to go fleeing once there's a crash because we've been very careful with our capital and we haven't incinerated billions of dollars or something like that.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel the same. I think today relative to call it the dot-com boom and bust, I think if you really think deep down about what happened in that era, let's say you did the Amazon Series A, there was a point in time, four years later where it had IPO'd and then it was down 80% from IPO. But if you had held to today, you know, I forget if the Amazon A was 40 post or whatever it was, but you went from 40 posts to multiple trillions of dollars in value today is very similar in that there's going to be a ton of companies that are pump fakes that do end up going to zero or that go down 90%. But I think it's really important to position yourself so that you can survive the inevitable crash on the other side. And if you end up in these really incredible companies that end up still enduring and defining the next 20 to the 30 years of technology, you're going to be paid so many, like in like.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is like the last decadent thing that we're going to be doing. And I just feel like 2021 was all like that. There was just so many ridiculous things where I look back and it's like, why did we ever think either one, this like investment was a good idea or two, why were we like doing these very decadent things in Miami? It just seems ridiculous in hindsight.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my gosh. I mean, there were so many just absolutely absurd ones. Again, I was at Founders Fund, so we were spending a fair amount of time in Miami. I remember distinctly, I think it might have been like the third Miami Tech Week or something. And I think it was like December of 21 or maybe January of 22 when it was pretty clear that the bubble was bursting from COVID and like equity valuations were starting to get slashed like 30-40% in public markets. And we were just doing like these, we had some like very, very decadent party, I think like vanilla ice was performing or something. And like we were in Miami, there's all these crypto people. I was just like, oh my God. And I was sitting around and I was like, this reminds me exactly of the scene in the Dark Knight Rises where Anne Hathaway is dancing with Bruce Wayne and they're at this like fancy party and she's like, I don't know how you could think that you guys could do this glamorous decadent stuff while like Gotham is burning. And I was like, wow, we were at that party today. Like Gotham is burning. Like it's about to come to us. But for this time,”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Trade Republic Dolar app, which I'm sure you know, enter down in Latin America, is an instrumental, you know, the growth team over there is quite small. You got Napoleon, you got Matthias, and you got a few other, like Amin and a few other people. And he's just played a pretty big role in a lot of the really good growth investments as well. So I just think like for someone who also is ostensibly a growth investor, he's done a ton of really good early stage things.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing I always give Deleion crap for is that he does have an incredible track, but a lot of it is software. And so he loves to shit on software companies and people that invest in software and all these things. And I'm like, dude, you sourced the seed of ramp. You like Coastla owns an ungodly amount of sword health, which is an amazing company. And like, yes, obviously incubated Varda, which is a great company as well and all these things. But I'm like, a lot of your track record is in software. But no, honestly, I think a lot of people at Founders Fund have very underrated track records. I think Matthias Ventien, I think he's the most underrated venture capitalist that exists today. He's so quiet. He's never online boasting about himself or anything. But Dolar app, Trade Republic”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Yeah, I'll do a Swedish satellite antenna company or something that Deleenne did. And then I'll be guaranteed for a zero.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I won't lie to you, Harry. The weight of being a benchmark GP exists. Like, I definitely feel it. Like, it's you're like, wow, like, you know, the people that have walked these halls, Bill Gurley, Mitch Lasky, Matt Kohler, incredible people with incredible track records. And you feel a lot of pressure to live up to the history of this place and the history of the brand. I think I got really, really good advice. I won't name the partner so no one can trace back to what company they're talking about. But one of the partners coming in was like, look, there's going to be nothing better for you than if your first investment sucks. Because once you do one and it fails and you realize it's not the end of the world and like life goes on and like LPs still love us and like you're not fired, then you feel really comfortable and you start getting into a really, really”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have like 30 pretty good companies that I'm the point person on the relationship. I also really need to do investments because that's how people get promoted here. I really need to get a couple of these in the portfolio. And to me, sometimes it just feels like a little bit of a different job than like the craft of venture capital where you're almost playing the lottery where you're like, okay, I have these 30 names that I own. I'm going to try to do two of them. And then if one of them hits and is a huge success, then I'm going to get like tenure and I'll like get to be a GP and then I'll get more coverage and then everything will be okay. You know, it feels almost like a little bit more like investment banking or like a large private equity firm than it does like what people think of when they think of like being at a venture capital firm, which is like meet really interesting founders, build genuine relationships with them and only do the very, very best investments and partnerships. And I just think it's really gotten away with that. And I think it's inevitable and it's, again, like to that Conway's law point of venture capital firms. It just based on the fund sizes and the team structures of these places.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so yeah, maybe I should caveat by saying all on a relative basis, these people definitely aren't going to the coal mines and laboring all day under the hot sun or something. But yeah, I think, and I know I have so many friends at these funds and some of them are probably going to kill me for this part of the conversation. But something that I always tell, I've mentored a lot of people that are either coming out of private equity or thinking about moving firms in venture growth. And one of the first things I say to them, I just think about the day-to-day that I know exists in a lot of these mega funds. And if you think about it, if there's 50 investors, if you come in and you're like the 23rd partner at like, I don't know, like iconic or like one of these places, what companies do you get to cover? That's the first problem is like you end up getting like a very small sliver of the overall market because so many people have already like laid claim and are the point person on the very best companies with the very best founders. And so you end up like being focused on this local maxima where you're like, okay,”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A multi trillion dollar company. It is hilarious. I do think people gave them too much of a hard time. And I do think they might end up being okay.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely agree. I think Tiger's going to end up much better than anyone thought they were going to end up. I jokingly texted some on my friends and I was like, hashtag Justice for John Curtis. I actually think everyone put him as kind of this like pariah of like the personification of the excesses of 2021. But again, like his strategy might have proven prudent and the correct strategy all along because they got really big stakes in Databricks. They invested in OpenAI very, very early. I think they have a large position in OpenAI. They actually have large positions in a lot of these amazing companies that could continue to compound 5x more. They'll probably benefit from the liquidation preferences and the beauty of having preferred stock for a lot of the things that don't work. In the fullness of time, I mean, I'm sure it's not going to be the best portfolio that NELP's ever gotten, but I definitely don't think it's going to be like a money incinerating fund by any means. And I actually think it might end up being pretty okay if, you know, once Databricks is a $400, $500 billion company and OpenAI.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About benchmarks' competitive position in today's market because we can go to LPs, we can say, hey, we're shooting for higher than 5x net. We have the historical track record to back it up and we have the fund sizes to back it up as well. I mean, you had miles from Carnegie Mellon come on here and do the awesome math and the very clear math of, hey, do you know how hard it is to return 4x net on $8 billion, $10 billion? It is immensely hard and it defies the laws of physics. So I think there's a difference between are they going to make a ton of money and are they going to produce the returns that LPs really want this asset class to produce? Two very, very different things. But for now, the rubber won't meet the road because as you mentioned, there's just so much global demand from LPs, exposure to private technology. And they are happy to take lower returns. And so I don't think there's any end in sight. But I think on a relative basis between all of these different constituents and all these different GPs, there's a huge, huge delta and a huge differentiation between who can actually produce ventral-like returns.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they're all going to make an immense amount of money. But again, let's change the framework from absolute dollars to what you're giving each stakeholder of the three legs of the venture stool. So Venture has three stakeholders. You have your LPs, you have your founders, and you have each other as GPs within a firm. I don't think, as Ravi or Hamant or even Ben and Mark at this point, I don't think that they can go to LPs. One of those legs of the stool and say, hey, this basket of funds that were making you invest Pari Pasu across, we're going to get you 5x net on that. I don't think they can say that, or they at least can't say that with a straight face. And if you look at the recent return data, I think it suggests that. So I think they'll be able to make an immense amount of money on an absolute basis. But I think a lot of these LPs are in the business to make high money on money returns. Like they have PE for the low return stuff and they probably get better liquidity from PE. They're here for the high money on money returns. And this is one of the reasons why I'm extremely excited.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Subconsciously still is a firm. It's hard to care about something that's not your main product. And when you're writing billion dollar checks, that is your main product. That's what's going to make you all the money. If you put $3 billion in OpenAI and it's going to turn into $12 billion, it just subconsciously, whether it's conscious or not, it is unbelievably hard to then go and be like, we're also going to be the best Series A firm and we care just as much about Series A. Because why would you? Because 99 or not like 95% of the profit that you're going to make and the money in your pocket is going to come from the billion dollars you put in Databricks or the $3 billion you put in OpenAI or any of those things that have ended up being your main product. You just can't focus on everything and give it your all. And I think so even though it's less conscious for those firms like Founders Fun Thrive, it has become their main product and their main focus of consciously.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would push back. Well, there's two things. So I think obviously there's different subsegments of this now. Let's take the actual mega fund. The people that I think are most following this strategy, if you were to say, well, our GC or Lightspeed or some of these mega funds is the strategy investment velocity as a North Star to answer that question, I would have you go talk to the principles, the junior partners, and the associates at those firms. You interview 10 of those people and you tell me that capital velocity is not the North Star of those firms. I will cede victory to you, Harry. I think when you actually look at what's going on at the ground floor, it doesn't matter what Ravi Herman are saying. When you actually look at what's going on, the people actually going and doing these investments, they feel it. They feel that they need to get money out that door. And that's the only way that they're getting promoted up those organizations. So I think it's very, very real. On the Thrive side, I agree with you. I think that Josh would resent that characterization and it was probably too blunt of a characterization. But again, I think.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As their North Star. And that was one of the reasons why I was really confident in high conviction in joining Benchmark. Because if you look, how many of those tier one brands have moved more towards the benchmark side of the scale? There's basically none.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capital velocity, a lot of money out of the door every single year, low touch, good prices, like giving founders really good prices. And on the other end, who did I have? I had benchmark, ironically. And like that is going to be like the craft that is going to be high touch. It's going to be the best signal that you can get if you're a founder and they're going to be very, very involved. And then in the middle, I was like, we have the JCPenney Funds, which is like the dead zone. And I think like the crazy thing to me is like what's happened over the last four years, Harry? How many firms have moved towards the tiger side of the spectrum? Like Tiger died and we got six or seven more tigers out of like in the last four years. And obviously a lot of these firms are running different strategies. You know, Thrive and Founders fund doing extremely concentrated investments in really high quality companies. You have the mega funds like LightSpeed and GC doing their thing. It's a lot of different flavors of capital velocity as a North Star, but there are six to eight firms now doing capital velocity investment velocity.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Doug might have gotten that idea from me. I'm half kidding, but I wrote this piece back in 2021. I think it's the reason why we first DM'd. It was called Playing Different Games. Ostensibly, the piece was about the rise of Tiger. But what the piece was really about was the rise of a firm level strategy that surrounded itself around increasing investment velocity as the core strategy. And so the idea being that you could make more money as a firm and as a GP if you invested a lot more money per year, even if you thought the forward returns were going to be lower on average per investment. And the idea was like Tiger was really the first one to take this idea and really, really run with it and make it, you know, they raised $15 billion or whatever they did in 2021. John Curtis basically deployed it all over that 18-month period. And at the very bottom, this is the ironic part of that piece. At the very bottom, I said venture capital is going to bifurcate. And on one end, you're going to have the tiger model, which is high.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way you said it, honestly, people product and market, the people define everything else. They are the upstream engine that makes everything go. They're the most important piece. Two, I think the product that the people build just tell you so much about also the people. Like it's the greatest evidence of the quality of the people is the product that they build. And then market third, obviously I am a believer that like the market you're in ends up defining the size and then the founder determines what percent of that size you can get in your exit. But I just think it's the most fungible. Like I don't think you can turn a non-exceptional person into an exceptional person. I don't think you can take a team that can't build a good product and make them a team that can build a good product, but you can change markets, especially early on in a company's life. Like most of the amazing companies and exit stories had some pivot along the road, whether you're talking about Slack or any of these others. So I truly think that because it's the”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. Or, you know, Figma with designers. And I think David George, maybe it was on this show or another, you know, talked about how he under misunderstood and understated the TAM of Figma because he was, you know, he went back to the team and said, well, look at how many designers there are in the world. If you just do the p times Q, the price time, the quantity of designers, you don't get that big of a business. And obviously Figma then ended up penetrating a lot more different roles within a company beyond designers.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a lesson I think I learned from Mary mostly. It's one of my most important frameworks. You should understand the base case or the base rate future of the company looks like. So if you are an equity analyst and this was your hundredth company that you were doing like a little forward model for and you weren't paying that much attention and you're just like, okay, it just tripled, tripled, so it's going to double, double, double, or like whatever. If you just did like, hey, this is what the market thinks is sort of like the baseline of what this company should do. It's actually extremely helpful to lay that all out and visualize that. So I don't say like, oh, this is the bowlcase. This is the base case and this is the bear case. But I lay out like what are people underwriting to?”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the first 100x deals, I think, in SaaS, and people were like 100xAR. What the hell? Obviously, it ended up being 30, 40x unbelievable investment.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Later stage investing can actually really help you think about price even at the earlier stage because it really makes you think about, okay, like I'm going to ignore what feels like a large entry price relative to market. Like if you're in a market where everyone's like, oh, the series A market's 100 posts. And like if you do something at 200 posts, you're an idiot because that's like 2x more expensive, then you misrippling at 250. You know, the famous series A that Mamoon did where everyone's like, this guy's out of his mind. He just paid $250 for a series A company that barely has any revenue. And obviously you miss Parker's excellence. You miss the TAM that he's going after. You miss the product sequencing, the differentiation that he's going to build. And you miss the exceptional team that he had built. And so I think if you can always try to isolate like, hey, I'm not going to care about what's going on in the market. I'm going to care about what matters for an investment and how much upside I think there is in a vacuum. I think that matters a lot more. And it's something that you can actually get if you start your career and growth.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can get Think almost by starting my career as a growth investor, it actually really helps me. The first investment that I did at Kleiner Perkins when I came back in 2022 was SpaceX at $150 billion. And at the time, it's like, oh my God, like $150 billion entry price, the absolute numbers, can we really make a good return on this investment? And having to go through the process of saying, hey, let's not focus on just some large absolute figure. Let's look at the TAM. Let's look at their competitive position in their market. Let's look at what happens if this goes right. And let's look at the probability of it going right and who could potentially knock them off their perch to make it not go right. And when you actually zoom back and said, hey, let's just like take a few zeros off of every single number of the TAM, the evaluation, the revenue, everything. If you were to like look at it as a vanilla widget code and just reduce, took two orders of magnitude off of every number, you'd be like, this is an absolute no-brainer investment with a 10x upside case.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those founders. And so I wouldn't say that I'm an amazing investor yet. I don't have the track record yet to say that I am, but that is my North Star and that is my goal. And I'm going to work my ass off to do that where I'm just going to find, I think I've been able to tune my intuition. And even though I've used it to execute on gross stage investing, I think if you look at a lot of even the people that we think are gross stage investor, they're doing earlier stage companies now and doing a lot of different stages at the same time.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'll be vulnerable with you, Harry, and say that this was, when I was talking, this was a dinner I was having with Eric, the Tri on our team, and I was having a moment of insecurity when I was talking to him about the role of being a GPA benchmark and saying like, hey, you know, like I've mostly done growth. And he was like, dude, Bill Gurley was a public markets analyst before he came to benchmark. Like you certainly are not going to be the most off the wall hire that benchmark has made that's actually more par for the course for benchmark. And I think also when you look at like who do you think are the amazing investors today? I think they transcend stage. Like if you look at Pat Grady, does Pat Grady think of himself as a growth investor or does Pat Grady think of himself as just an amazing investor? Maybe he's too humble. He's a pretty humble guy. So maybe he doesn't think about himself as an amazing investor at all. But I look at what Pat does and I'm like, he finds incredible founders and investments that he thinks have an immense amount of upside. And he goes and partners with.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't think about stages like when he finds a Howie, when he finds a Brett, when he finds any of these founders, that is what he lets him, that's what guides him. And he's like, I'm going to find a way to become the most meaningful partner to this founder. And I'm going to find a way for the investment to make them a lot of money for our LPs. That is the mindset that we all have. And historically, I've done more growth. Like I focus more on series B and Beyond than I focus on early stage. So will I do more kind of series A, B or whatever we call it these days than Inception Seed investing, especially at first probably. But again, we're guided by those North Stars and finding founders that we really resonate with. And then typically we're able to find ways to make it work on the back end and for our investments to generate exceptional returns and all those things. So unlike a huge mega fund that is like we have our Series A partners, we have our Series B partners, we have our Series C partners, they do fintech, they do healthcare, they do blah, blah, blah. Like we don't think about those things at all. We really just think about our North Star.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Historically, again, going back to those North Stars that we talk about, when you think about the benchmark investment strategy, it's helpful to marry the North Stars that we talked about in terms of every investment needs to be potentially absolutely astronomical money on money returns for LPs. And we want to be the most meaningful partner to our founders. There's a lot of different ways to do that. And so you marry those North Stars with the personal investing style of each of the GPs. Like each of us is 25% a benchmark. And we work really well together and we're a super tight-knit team. But each of us has our own styles. And so even if Eric tends to love getting in right at inception and be the first check-in and really, really in the primordial soup. It doesn't mean that myself or Chathan or Peter are always going to operate exactly at that stage. We all have our particular preferences. Peter does an amazing job following his founder conviction.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I completely agree. And I also think the best founders, they don't want sycophants in the boardroom. Like they don't want GPT-40 in the boardroom telling them that everything that they do, they walk on water and that they do nothing wrong. Like they actually want other adults in the room that are going to push them, that are going to spar with them, and that are going to make the company better.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your responsibility as a board member to also potentially take remediations and action on behalf of all of the shareholders, all of the employees and the company? Like if you take a board seat like we do and you do have governance, you ultimately do have at least basic ethical and moral responsibilities. And I think it's actually a convenience for Deleion and some of the Founders Fund folks to absolve themselves of that weight and that responsibility just by being like, oh, it's not part of our thing. But I think it's almost out of laziness sometimes more than it is duty that they find to founders.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you read about or hear about the Google investment Kleiner and Sequoi do the Google investment and immediately start searching for a professional CEO. So it used to be the absolute norm that it's like, it's not even like, oh, we're going to push the founders out. It's like, no, you invest and then you all together go look to recruit a CEO. 2025 is immensely different than 2000. It's immensely different than 2010. It's even immensely different than 2015. And just the relationship between boards and founders have changed, the relationships between venture firms and management teams and companies have changed a lot. I think it's for the better. Obviously, I spent a fair amount of time of my career at Founders Fund. I love the idea of never firing founders. And having them lead their companies from the moment you partner until the IPO and beyond. But at the end of the day, they're also, like, I also am a believer in like basic governance. Like I'm also a believer in, like, if you do end up investing in someone who breaks the law or someone that's cross-ethical lines, it is”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll start with Delian's media strategy. Delian, and you know, I love Dellion. He's a close buddy of mine, so I don't think he'll mind me saying this because he certainly busts my balls more than enough. Dellion has always found an amazing kind of media and Twitter strategy, which is go find someone with a stalwart brand or like go find the biggest person on the playground and go punch them in the face. People love it and it gets a lot of likes and it gets a lot of clicks. And it helps raise your kind of profile. And it almost like elevates you to their positioning. He's in a to Sequoia an immense amount. He's done it to Andreessen over the years. And we have not been spared the clickbait Dellion tweets either. No, I think, I mean, obviously every story has an immense amount of nuance. And what happens between a board and a founder and a management team, there's just an immense amount that goes into every single one of those decisions. I think times also completely changed. Like in the 90s and early aughts,”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For not some vanilla percentage ownership number. Ironically, I think if you polled any of our founders and said, you know, do you regret the amount that the percentage ownership that you gave the benchmark? I don't think you'd get a single one of them to say, no, we gave benchmark too much. And I think that's one of the really special things about the history of the partnership. It's my third week, so obviously I've contributed nothing to that. I'm just speaking to the amazing work that all of our current and historical GPs have done for the platform. But I also do think that even when we get, and we still often do get really high ownership stakes, I don't think a single founder regrets that regrets that partnership.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Landscape than they were 10 years ago, 15 years ago, there's more bites, potential $100 billion or trillion dollar companies. There's just so many bites at the Apple in terms of how you can both be a really meaningful partner to the founders and to generate really, really exceptional returns. So in the Marcore case, yes, we didn't get high teens or 20% ownership. But I think if you talk to the Mercur folks and who they're most impactful, VC partner's been, I think they would say benchmark. And I think that's going to generate unbelievable returns for our LPs. And it's one of those ones that's you can do the math on what the money on money return has been thus far from our ownership stake. And so I think sometimes people confuse the inputs for the outputs at benchmark where it's like, oh, like they have to have 20% ownership and they only want to invest at 100 posts and all these things. And I think that couldn't be further from the truth. We really have those two nor stars. And whatever the asset class allows for in terms of the relationships that we build and how we can deliver the best for LPs and our founders, that is what we're serving to. And that's what we're optimizing.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. When I think about benchmarks North Stars, what we really care about in our investment strategy, and this relates to the ownership that we get in our investments or everyone else gets in their investments, we have two North Stars really that we think about. We want to be the highest ROI and closest partner to the founders that we partner with. We want to be their most meaningful VC and partner that they have from the moment that we partner with them until the company no longer exists. Like it can go public. We're still beyond the board until the company no longer is a going concern. And we want to generate the highest money on money returns that any of our LPs have in their venture portfolio. But that's basically it. As the asset class evolves, there are ways to really serve those two North stars without having to necessarily get 20% ownership every single time. We're all believers. I think you're a believer. We're certainly a believer that the outcomes are much, much, much larger in today's technology.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I do think it's an ongoing question because if all there is left is these billion dollar raises in order to build relationships with these people.”
2025-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source