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KR Sridhar

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2026-06-29
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2026-06-29
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  1. “I think if everything else were equal, what you're saying would absolutely be true, but the creative prowess, the innovative entrepreneurial spirit that you see in the United States is still a major trump card that the US has over any other place in the world today. And I would say that human spirit is going to be able to overcome whatever other obstacles we have. I would say don't short the US, don't short Silicon Valley.”

    2026-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Leo Aschenbrenner's Largest Holding: Inside the $90BN Bloom Energy | Why Electricity, Not AI Models, Will Decide the Winners of the AI Race | Why We Are Not in an AI Capex Bubble | Energy Sovereignty and The Future of Power with KR Sridhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Look in an asymmetric world where not every player views regulation and growth at that level, I don't think I would agree with him. If there was a global phenomenon and everybody on the planet agreed that we will throttle and move at a particular speed, that's a different story. But that's utopia. That never happens. So being left behind because a particular country, a particular geography throttled it, when somebody moved at breakneck speed becomes a real detriment to the region that throttled it.”

    2026-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Leo Aschenbrenner's Largest Holding: Inside the $90BN Bloom Energy | Why Electricity, Not AI Models, Will Decide the Winners of the AI Race | Why We Are Not in an AI Capex Bubble | Energy Sovereignty and The Future of Power with KR Sridhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “The single biggest bottleneck in terms of introducing a new concept into society is the friction associated with new ideas. On a big macro scale, it is for good reasons, very large infrastructure in the world has been designed and regulated to move slowly. And we are entering an age where that huge amount of regulation that intentionally creates friction in the process, which was beneficial in the past, becomes an impediment to our growth. And I'm particularly sensitive that I'm here in the European continent.”

    2026-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Leo Aschenbrenner's Largest Holding: Inside the $90BN Bloom Energy | Why Electricity, Not AI Models, Will Decide the Winners of the AI Race | Why We Are Not in an AI Capex Bubble | Energy Sovereignty and The Future of Power with KR Sridhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Wisdom. AI is not going to give you wisdom. AI is not going to give you happiness. AI is not going to give you empathy to relate to people the way you need to. At the end of the day, a bot giving you counseling is not going to be the same as you and me sitting here talking to each other, looking at each other, understanding the facial expressions, relating to one another. So humans are social animals.”

    2026-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Leo Aschenbrenner's Largest Holding: Inside the $90BN Bloom Energy | Why Electricity, Not AI Models, Will Decide the Winners of the AI Race | Why We Are Not in an AI Capex Bubble | Energy Sovereignty and The Future of Power with KR Sridhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “People confuse markets, stock prices, and infrastructure and cyclical changes. The stock market is going to go through whatever it goes through. Any revolution, and I would call AI absolutely a revolution, it's almost a hockey stick on a hockey stick. Technology itself, digitization itself was on a hockey stick in terms of us going from the mechanical age infrastructure to the digital infrastructure. AI has come and put a hockey stick on that hockey stick. So that's what we are experiencing. Anything going at that speed, will it have bumps along the road? Will it have pauses along the way? Most probably yes. We don't know of anything else in human history of this scale and this magnitude, but is the trajectory, is the normal course after the course correction still going to be this phenomenal course? I absolutely believe so. For the first time in human history, we are”

    2026-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Leo Aschenbrenner's Largest Holding: Inside the $90BN Bloom Energy | Why Electricity, Not AI Models, Will Decide the Winners of the AI Race | Why We Are Not in an AI Capex Bubble | Energy Sovereignty and The Future of Power with KR Sridhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Matters. So, when we have our all-Heinz meetings, or forget the All Hands meetings, if you're having a dinner party with executives, when I toast these days, I always remember to say, we're toasting right now this great champagne or whatever it is that we're toasting, but we're able to do this because there are some technicians on the floor right now. Nobody is policing them, but their pride, their dedication. They're building an amazing product. Let's toast to them.”

    2026-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Leo Aschenbrenner's Largest Holding: Inside the $90BN Bloom Energy | Why Electricity, Not AI Models, Will Decide the Winners of the AI Race | Why We Are Not in an AI Capex Bubble | Energy Sovereignty and The Future of Power with KR Sridhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Great question. So, this is not just about the shop floor. What Andy Grove was teaching you was you need to have the empathy to be able to relate to every aspect of your business and when you develop that empathy and when you practice that empathy by walking on the floor talking to your shop floor team members who are building your product, they will tell you things and the things they tell you are going to make the difference in you being a good company and a great company. You do the same thing with your customers. You don't tell them why your product is great and they should buy. You go there to find out what is their pain and what problems do they want you to solve for them. That's empathy. Then you design your product accordingly. Here's what I can tell you. Our shop floor employees walking there talking to them and telling them why it matters, telling them why what they do.”

    2026-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Leo Aschenbrenner's Largest Holding: Inside the $90BN Bloom Energy | Why Electricity, Not AI Models, Will Decide the Winners of the AI Race | Why We Are Not in an AI Capex Bubble | Energy Sovereignty and The Future of Power with KR Sridhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Is like care, just leans over and he says, I want to know what's wrong with you. And it shocks me. It just shocks me for a moment. I said back and I go, I'm trying to build a great device that's going to be beneficial to people. I don't know what's wrong with me. And he says, you're such a smart guy. You built this technology that's just absolutely amazing. If you walk the floors and talk to the people out there, they are going to tell you why it's not working because they don't understand what they're building. Have you talked to people and have they told you what they don't know? It dawns on me that I've never done that. Then he says, I know all these other guys want to go through those training binders. None of us know your product better than you. If you're smart enough to design it, you'll be smart enough to figure it out. Don't waste your time listening to everybody else and me. Go figure it out. That was the best piece of advice I ever got.”

    2026-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Leo Aschenbrenner's Largest Holding: Inside the $90BN Bloom Energy | Why Electricity, Not AI Models, Will Decide the Winners of the AI Race | Why We Are Not in an AI Capex Bubble | Energy Sovereignty and The Future of Power with KR Sridhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “We are talking about the time when we still used paper for everything, right? So we had them all packed. We had an entire executive team sitting on one side of a large boardroom. These great advisors sitting on the other side, including Andy Grove. And we had dinner ordered and we had all these stacks. We were thinking we're going to stay up all night until we get to solving the problem. So we all sit down and as soon as we start talking, I don't know that we finish the first sentence. And he says, can we stop for a minute? And he says, can everybody else in the room leave from the executive team other than KR? And so I have this group of illuminaries sitting on the other side and me sitting on this side looking, it almost looks like a firing squad. And then Andy says, what's wrong? So I begin to explain what I think may be wrong. He says, no, no, stop. What's wrong? I say something else thinking that I didn't get through to him properly. And after the third time he...”

    2026-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Leo Aschenbrenner's Largest Holding: Inside the $90BN Bloom Energy | Why Electricity, Not AI Models, Will Decide the Winners of the AI Race | Why We Are Not in an AI Capex Bubble | Energy Sovereignty and The Future of Power with KR Sridhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “For somebody who is just a technician, who does not know the engineering content, but will do exactly what they're being told to make these boxes. So here we build the next ten, the next twenty, they're all going out in the field and failing spectacularly. And it's a shock because in those early days, they're expensive first units. Repetition is on the line. So I go, this cannot scale. So I just stop production. I call my board and I say, I need help. I need people to come and help me. Tell me how to do manufacturing. I don't know. One of the people that come is 90 Grow who became a great friend and a mentor and a valley legend. And then there are some other manufacturing gurus. One of them was on my board. So we were asked to compile all the data we had. So we have three ring binders after three ring binders.”

    2026-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Leo Aschenbrenner's Largest Holding: Inside the $90BN Bloom Energy | Why Electricity, Not AI Models, Will Decide the Winners of the AI Race | Why We Are Not in an AI Capex Bubble | Energy Sovereignty and The Future of Power with KR Sridhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Sure, I'm a technologist. I used to be a rocket scientist. So here I am starting a company. And when I started the company, if you had given me, if you had said P&L, EBIDA, all those financial terms, I wouldn't even know what that meant. And I learnt along the way. So here I am. I know how to build one off and really well because that's what we did for the space missions. That's what we did in our university labs. So we'd built this one-off two-off of the first Bloom boxes that are out there working at Google, other places doing very well. After we built the first five, me and the engineer said, we can now hand it off to manufacturing and ask them to make it. Little did we know our engineering intent, our design intent, everything we knew had to be written up in such elaborate terms in terms of manufacturing instructions.”

    2026-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Leo Aschenbrenner's Largest Holding: Inside the $90BN Bloom Energy | Why Electricity, Not AI Models, Will Decide the Winners of the AI Race | Why We Are Not in an AI Capex Bubble | Energy Sovereignty and The Future of Power with KR Sridhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “There was not a single night I went home and worried about the company surviving or doing well or whether I had made a mistake jumping into this field. There were several days, there were several times where the company had existential threats to it that we had to overcome. But in my mind, again, failure was never an option. So I really never once worried about when we wake up tomorrow morning, are we going to be better off than we were the previous day?”

    2026-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Leo Aschenbrenner's Largest Holding: Inside the $90BN Bloom Energy | Why Electricity, Not AI Models, Will Decide the Winners of the AI Race | Why We Are Not in an AI Capex Bubble | Energy Sovereignty and The Future of Power with KR Sridhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “If you look at my 2001 PowerPoint presentation, which was the pitch to Kleiner Perkins, who was my first investor, John Dore, the summary page puts out a data center, it puts out a Bloom box powering the data center, the waste heat providing the cooling for the data center, and it being connected to nothing else. What we are doing today, the reason it's becoming the darling, is those data centers are finally waking up and saying this is the right solution for us. For me, the period between 2001 and now the 25 years was never a question of if. It was a question of when and how soon.”

    2026-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Leo Aschenbrenner's Largest Holding: Inside the $90BN Bloom Energy | Why Electricity, Not AI Models, Will Decide the Winners of the AI Race | Why We Are Not in an AI Capex Bubble | Energy Sovereignty and The Future of Power with KR Sridhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “The really hard experiences are what shape you, what you're really made of. It's very easy to feel like you're a hero and everything is going well for you. These hard experiences, as hard as they may be, if you just learn from it and look forward, don't look in the rearview mirror. When you're driving, you're looking through the windshield. You're looking forward. You just look in the rearview mirror only to learn, not to play the bad movie again and again. If that was a bad experience for you, it's like watching a bad movie. Why would you play the bad movie again in your mind? Learn from it, look forward, believe that tomorrow is always going to be better than today. At a minimum, life gets easier when you have that attitude.”

    2026-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Leo Aschenbrenner's Largest Holding: Inside the $90BN Bloom Energy | Why Electricity, Not AI Models, Will Decide the Winners of the AI Race | Why We Are Not in an AI Capex Bubble | Energy Sovereignty and The Future of Power with KR Sridhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Lose is something I simply cannot contemplate. There's nothing that I do where I put effort, I put time, and I think of failure as an option. Before starting the company, I did the Mars missions. And there, you cannot call a plumber on Mars. You cannot fix something along the way. So what you do is you think through, let me think about the ten big things a boom can happen and it ruins your life. Then you say, okay, I'm going to mitigate that by every possible workaround because something's going to happen. So I hate failure, but the way I deal with failure is risk mitigation. Think about the things that can go wrong and prepare ahead of time for a plan around it. Bad things can happen. You can fall down. Falling down is not what I'm concerned about. It's about the getting up.”

    2026-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Leo Aschenbrenner's Largest Holding: Inside the $90BN Bloom Energy | Why Electricity, Not AI Models, Will Decide the Winners of the AI Race | Why We Are Not in an AI Capex Bubble | Energy Sovereignty and The Future of Power with KR Sridhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Is something I simply cannot contemplate. There's nothing that I do where I put effort, I put time, and I think of failure as an option. Revolution, and I would call AI absolutely a revolution. It's almost a hockey stick on a hockey stick. Clearly, electricity becomes the key factor. We believe bringing power to the edge has to happen. Electricity in the world is a $5.5 trillion market. Last year, our revenues were $2 billion. When power is democratized, access is not restricted by people who are in power. And that's true democracy. I would say don't short the US, don't short Silicon Valley.”

    2026-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Leo Aschenbrenner's Largest Holding: Inside the $90BN Bloom Energy | Why Electricity, Not AI Models, Will Decide the Winners of the AI Race | Why We Are Not in an AI Capex Bubble | Energy Sovereignty and The Future of Power with KR Sridhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source