YouSaid · the spoken record

Lucas Swisher

lines on the record: 67
first: 2026-02-23
most recent: 2026-02-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I'm excited about the products. This is one of the things that it's ingrained in everyone that joins Koto at the end of the day as we love technology, right? Like we're technology only firm. We love technology. We love these products. And the ability to just change our lives over the next decade and use so many new things I think is what has me most excited. Like I cannot wait for open AI's new device. Like we've it's going to be one of the first exciting new devices in some time. Like those types of things, I think is what I'm the most excited about is the products. Like using Cloud Code this year, oh my God, it's incredible.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not easy because if you've done this long enough, you have a lot of misses. I do remember very distinctly going and visiting Andorrell for the billion dollar round down in LA. I was assassin investor at the time. So why I was the one who went to visit Anderille, I won't know. But it was one of the, it was a classic case of back then, I think my perspective was slightly more myopic, right? I was mostly focused on SAS, very focused on metrics. And if you looked at that P&L, there's no way, you know, you're a P&L investor. There's no way you invest. Just is what it is. It was an ugly P&L. It was an example of me missing the force through the trees, not seeing just how special the founding team was there, just how important that trend was, where the world was going, right? And that's an example of where Founder Fund got that right. A lot of people got that right. We got that wrong.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it helps. It's like the king making. It certainly helps. I think if you look at some of the advantages that you have being in San Francisco, right, just the incredible amount of talent density, there are not very many people in the world that know how to work with these systems right now. That's just the reality. And many of them are stuck inside of two, three, four companies. But the rest, most of them are in a very small radius in the Bay Area. It's not impossible, but it's kind of like, why would you make your life harder?”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hi, I'm 19 years old. I mean, but it's amazing, right? Because you have this platform where young people are empowered and they're able to grow within the organization and bring other people in as they need. And you learn how to navigate a process at 19, 20, 21 years old. It's this incredible training ground. But I was the first one at Insight to leave my class. And it was hard because it was like, it was basically like stepping off the linear path. Like most of my life had been like very linear decisions. Not very hard to like take the SAT, do well, not very hard to accept Harvard, and then not very hard to go to insight, even though it was a little abnormal at the time. Like it was a billion dollar fund when I went. Going from insight and leaving your comfortable class in basically private equity SaaS and going to be the only associate on the West Coast in a place you didn't know, that was a little bit of a leap. I mean, that's my advice to all the young folks in their career is like, you got to get off the linear path. You have to. Like it's the only way. Get off the line.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leaving inside for Kleiner. I know a lot of people, so Harvard undergrad then went to Insight and I left Insight pretty early. I was the first one to leave. We hired classes of 10 back then. So it was like 10 analysts, all really young kids coming out of school. The junior summer internship at Insight was literally dialing for dollars. I mean, it's incredible training ground. I called 50 CEOs a week. Like literally cold call. I mean, this was 10 years ago, almost 15 years ago now.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so good, and they have the ability to reinvent themselves, right? I mean, they hired Ev, who's my old analyst so good for them.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had an early stage practice at the time that we were really involved with, and we did lose the A. You know, it goes back again to our, and I don't try to do very many A's. It goes back to our strategy, which is even sometimes if you miss an early round for the great companies in the world, there's always another round.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Winston from Harvey. It's not even close. I think it was because, one, I already believed when I came into the meeting, and then two, the founder market fit in the story was so clear so early. What are language models good at? Language, text in, text out. What is one of the most text-heavy professions? Law. What have I seen early on? Document generation. Document analysis. And his articulation of that thesis and that story, it was just like so spot on. I met him before the series A that Pat did. I remember being like, this is it. Like this is the one.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Change is hard, right? It's not like I can just throw Clot into an enterprise and all of a sudden it works. There's integration work that has to be done. There's deployment that has to be done. Like this stuff is complex.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the hardest question, right? And it's like if you go back to the last era, people always underestimate how long it takes to do things. And I think it's because they look at the consumer and they see how fast the consumer changes and adopts things and apply the same thing to enterprise. I don't think it's unlikely that we're going to wake up tomorrow and all these SaaS companies have evaporated. Change takes time, right? These things are going to take time. That said, these things are happening much faster than they were before. If you look at Anthropic, right, publicly available numbers, 9 billion of AR growing 800% at the same scale, the three hyperscalers on average, when they were 9 billion of ARR, were growing 60%. So it's happening faster than SAS did. We know that. It just is. Like, it's in the data, right? That's the story. But how long is it going to take for all of this to happen? I think it's going to take a long time because people are slow. They're sticking.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Size of outcomes. This is really simple like 12 months ago, I wasn't as convinced that we were really going to be able to address labor. This token machine concept that human inputs were going to become machine inputs. I wasn't all the way there. We were still kind of in an assistant world versus an agent world. I've become fully convinced on this. A lot of it is due to using a lot of the tools like Claude Code myself and just really feeling this. But that, my opinion has really changed on that in the last year. I think the outcomes this generation in technology are going to be so much bigger than the outcomes from the last generation”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's one of the things that we actually always try to think about is like, and it's a question that Philippe asks all the time, is like, who's going to want to help you and who's going to want to hurt you? Because that ultimately matters, right? Like having a lot of people want to help you and benefit from your growth is a very nice position to be in.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is because some of the other providers have been sort of at least until this point, right? Like this is always changing. But kind of from day one had architected themselves to be able to be partners with every cloud and to be with Tranium and TPUs and GPUs. And that takes a lot of infrastructure investment. But it means in a capacity constrained world where the demand for compute outstrips supply, their ability to do that makes them more cost effective. It gives them an advantage on where they can deploy. They can take capacity that other people can't. And that means, hey, in this world, that's an advantage.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah. It's incredible. And I think that's the bullcase. The bullcase on Anthropic is really simple and really straightforward.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll talk about the merits of both. OpenAI, incredible consumer franchise, the retention curves, the growth, all of this stuff, what they've done, it's insane. The innovation that's coming out of that business. On the consumer side, their strength that's emerging in enterprise with Codex and other coding use cases in these big transformational enterprise deals. And like a third unknown unknown vector, they have this like almost unknown unknown about it because they acquired Johnny Ice Company, right? Who knows what that could look like in five to ten years? They have this like SpaceX. You know, it's like, how do you value space? Well, how do you evaluate AI? It's like this unknown unknown element of just how big could it get? I think that's the whole case.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's incredible. I think Founders Fund strategy of being ultra concentrated in a few companies has just been this incredible strategy over time. And I think Pat Grady's ability to pick Series B's is like pretty unmatched pick and win Series B's. He's very, very good. And I think Sequoia is very good at that. So I think, again, they're good for different reasons, but again, it really depends on what you like.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I know, I know, I know. But if you're looking, if you're an LP, what you're looking for is the best return across different strategies. I think it's going to depend on what you're looking for, what your time resonance is. Let me give you the benefits, right? Mahun, I think he's going to have an incredibly high slugging average. Really amazing returns, but it's going to be more risk. Mary, I think you're going to get like this incredible growth portfolio of blue chip names. And then hoaring is going to provide you very strong, stable core returns. And I think like it really depends on what you're looking for, right? And LPs want different things. And they probably want exposure to all three in different ways.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't remember exactly, but I think the companies were Google and Square and Amazon, right? Like really insane customers. And this is when Figma had 500K of AR. And he saw the usage curves inside those three companies. He's like, we're at an inflection point. We're doing this. And that's what he's amazing at.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The gift that Mahoon hasn't, I think from the SaaS era, Mamoon, my view is he was the best Series A investor in the SAS era, period, right? I mean, if you look at his track record, it's incredible. Figma, Glean, Rippling, Slack. I mean, it's just this unbelievable hit after hit after hit. What Mamoon is special at and what he pays attention to and what I learned from him is there are distinct inflection points in companies. There are moments where they really kink. They kink up. And he is the master at seeing that around the Series A with very little data, being able to see it. I remember we going back to, I worked on Figma with him when I was an associate Kleiner. And I cut all the data from a moon. This is a very fun time. And I remember he took one look at it. And within 30 seconds, he was like, we're doing it. And there was this big company in vision at the time. And it was a great company. And everybody thought it was the winner. And he looked at that data and he was like, this is going to happen. And what he saw is the net retention curves, the customer behavior of really big companies. I think I.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So sticky. It's got to be so sticky because otherwise you're really, really fragile one move the wrong way and you have no margin for error, right? So like those are the types of places where data can help you. It can hurt you if you live in Excel all day and you are like just missing the force through the trees.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way that I phrase data and that phrase this to our team a lot, and this is what I really believe is data is a prerequisite. It is not the answer. The data must be very good. It's not the whole picture. And I remember I was sitting in a very old IC and we were when we were looking at Databricks at Kotu way back when, and Thomas was like, Lucas, you're missing the force through the trees here. Just because Net New ARR didn't accelerate dramatically in any given quarter does not mean this trend is not happening. And so net new ARR or whatever metric you want to use, their incredible guideposts, but you can't miss the force through the trees in this. Like the bigger picture, it really matters, but it is helpful, right? I'd say like the thing that I'm looking at the most with a lot of these kind of AI native businesses is if you're low margin, I need you to have high retention. You have to have it because if you leave no margin for error if that's not true. If you're going to be a low margin business to start, the customer behavior must be.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the biggest lesson is she has this, and it comes from her background of being at Morgan Stanley for a really long time. She has this incredible analytical bent of being able to see things and see stories and numbers that other folks don't and being willing to lean against the grain whenever she feels things. And she's able to tell these incredible stories with data and understand what's happening in the world based on data. I'll give you one example is I remember my second week at Kleiner. I didn't know how to model. I came from inside. I could barely model. I was great at talking to founders, but could barely model. And I found myself, you know, in the middle of modeling exercise with Mary and just getting absolutely destroyed. And one of the things she taught me is like, that is actually really important. Being able to express a company in a complex company in a few lines in Excel and tell stories with data is like an incredible skill. And she has this knack of being able to look at like sell in 95 and know there's an error. And so that's what I learned.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Away from the traditional Be like, yep, all in. Credit to those folks. And I mean, credit to the growth investors who took a leap on that one a little early too, right? It was very non-obvious. I mean, I worked for Mary Meeker when I was at Kleiner Perkins, and she was one of the folks that took a leap on Canva.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I love about Canva is they've shown that same ability that Databricks has where they're able to hop multiple S-curves and develop multiple products. They started as I'm sure you know the story, but it's incredible. Mel and Cliff started this business as a yearbook business. Making yearbooks, they successfully transitioned that online. They successfully transitioned that to SaaS. And now they've transitioned to many, many, many products, right? Canvas a suite of like a dozen products that are all growing extraordinarily quickly. So you have that dynamic. And then the other thing that I love is they were one of the first companies that really leaned into AI. I remember Cliff called me about this very early on because we were early investors and stabled diffusion. If you remember the image generation company in OpenAI and a few of these other businesses, he called us really early in this wave, like pre-Chat GPT in this wave and was like, hey, we're going to start integrating AI into our business now. And so that type of mentality, both the ability to develop multiple.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Levered to 401ks to indices. When you're a private company, people can mess with you a little bit more. It just is what it is. They can mess with you. When you're a public company and you are a big, important public company, it's harder to mess with businesses. And so you kind of have this rigor around you.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you've seen some of the things around some of these companies where it's like unbelievable, like the opacity of this. And the companies don't want that either. They want to know who their investors are, and you get the investors that you deserve. As you scale and you go public, so liquidity at scale is certainly one reason. The second reason is, and this second reason I think really does cut both ways, but the public markets are an incredible feedback mechanism for businesses. If you think about Netflix during their transition, the public markets were some of the first folks like the analysts and the public teams to really speak about that transition from the disk to streaming, from the CD to streaming. And I think, especially in an AI world, The public market's focusing the public markets are really, really smart. The 25-year-old analysts this and that, right? Like everybody's going to have varying degrees of intelligence or opinion, but the public markets are this incredible weighing machine that can give founders and teams amazing feedback on their businesses. And then the third thing is when you go public, it's sort of harder to touch you in some ways. It's easier to touch you from a buying and selling stock, but you're now a public company.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the reasons why companies have stayed private longer. I don't think most of those platform companies will stay private forever. I think there are a couple reasons that are good to go public today. One is real capital at scale. Real capital at scale, still say you're a trillion dollar plus company, it's available, but true liquidity that's not layers and layers and layers of SPVs and all this tricky shit and like managing your cap table, like true liquidity at scale.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there are segments of the market where it feels like that feels like a little bit of a problem. I think for these companies, and I'll just focus on what we do, right? For the companies that are explosively growing at the growth stage and have real product market fit, real product, real traction, I don't think so, right? You look at these companies that raise really rapid rounds in succession at the growth stage that actually have something underneath no because there's real ROIC on the capital that's being invested, right? There's real ROI for the dollars that are going into these businesses. Sometimes I think when growth funds in particular chase venture companies, right? We've talked about that delineation point. That's where I think it can get quite dangerous. It can make companies complacent. It can make companies spend too much on things that maybe it's not great. Like at that early stage, that kind of capital scarcity, I think, can breed actually great things. And so I think there are parts of the market where that's certainly true. These gross stage companies.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It certainly does, and it's an advantage, but it doesn't mean that you can't build a great business just because a bunch of tier ones are crowding into a name. I think there is the concept of it gives you an advantage. More capital does give you an advantage. There are some cases where historically it's given you a disadvantage. If you have so much capital and not a lot of product market fit, I'd say you probably had a disadvantage. If you have a lot of capital and insane product market fit that allows you to go hire a huge sales force, that's a huge advantage, right? Like if you're actively taking a market and you have way more capital, a better, right? Like this is like almost tautological. That is a huge advantage. But do I think that there's this concept of, well, if Kotu and Sequoya incline are all pile into a company that it's over? No.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it's a real thing I don't think the king making concept is a real thing. I think some companies attract more capital early. Some companies slingshot from behind. Do you want less capital?”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it's impossible, but I do think it is very hard. I think that's because the type of frameworks that you use, the types of things that you see are very different at different scales. Being able to read a balance sheet actually does matter for a pre-IPO company, right? Like that really matters. But seeing thousands of founders, thousands and thousands of thousands really matters for seed because what else do you have, you know, to go off of? And so I do think it really matters. I don't think it's impossible. I think there are some funds that have done it exceptionally well. But I think it's why you see for us, right, we as a fund, I actually think the public market skill set and the private market skill set is also different. And so having different folks that are focused on different things is really important because there are different parameters, different things that you see all day. And there are other people that you're competing with in all of those different segments that make it really tough to be the best at everything.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it's gotten harder for two reasons. One is you do have this megafine dynamic, but the other thing is we're in a different world than we were five years ago, right? Which is in general, people are coming out of the gate with bigger check sizes and bigger valuations. And that just raises the risk dramatically over time, right? So I think those are the two dynamics that are really at play. It's harder for a seed fund to buy 20% today or 10% today or 5% today than it was a few years ago because of this dynamic. And that has to do with a lot of different things. One of them is in a SaaS world, you didn't need that much capital. You started up, you kind of get going, whatever. In this world, businesses tend to be more capital intensive. They may be actually more durable at scale because of this makes it harder for the next intrinsic.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the places where we don't spend time, these pre revenue companies are really high valuations. I think this is a lesson that at least we've taken about ourselves from 2021 is that is not our business. The pre-revenue company at a really high valuation with no product is not our business. And I think a lot of investors are focused there right now. Because what ends up happening is if you can't invest in open AI and anthropic and revolut and SpaceX and Canva and all of the companies that are these great platform companies and you're locked in to a certain part of the ecosystem you make decisions that you can make. And so I think a lot of people are focused on that part of the ecosystem right now. And for us, that doesn't make sense from a risk-reward perspective. Our focus is real businesses that are growing really fast that we think are going to be really durable outcomes and actually generate liquidity for our investors. And again, it goes back to this principle around if I have a zero, I need a six and a six is really, really hard.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, from, I think gross margin, yes. But what you might say is, hey, I'm actually substituting a lower gross margin for lower OPEX because my engineering team, maybe it's more efficient. My sales team is using AI tools now. Maybe it's more efficient. My legal team, maybe it's smaller. Maybe I'm more efficient. So your terminal operating margin may actually be higher in this world than the last world. Your gross margin might be lower, but your operating margin, which is ultimately at the end of the day, is really what matters, may end up being higher.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The cost curve is coming down so fast. Say my inference margin is 10% today. It may have been negative a quarter ago and super negative two quarters ago, but the token costs are coming down so fast maybe I'll be, if I'm an application AI company, I'll probably be able to develop my own model for some of the workloads. I'll probably want to use frontier models for some of the workloads. I'll probably want to use really small cheap models for some of the workloads. And over time, I'll be able to optimize my margin. That's what we really believe is going to happen over time. But listen, these companies are structurally lower margin than the last generation because you pay the cloud and you pay the LLM.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the same business principles that have applied to businesses for the last three decades in technology are the same business principles that matter today. Margin matters, but it's nuanced. I would add an addendum to that. Margin matters at scale. The best businesses, in particular infrastructure, whenever there's a technology wave happening and architecture shift, some of the best businesses, not all of them, but some of the best businesses have had horrific margins early. The hyperscalers. The hyperscalers were low margin early. Those are the best software platform businesses in the world. Snowflake and Databricks. Very low margin early. A lot of people passed on those early rounds because they're, oh, in SaaS, you have to have 80% gross margin. Look at Snowflake. It's got 20, you know, margin matters, but early it can be a misleading indicator, especially when an architecture shift is happening. The reason why in AI, and I'll give you the ball case on this, right, is the reason why margin might not matter early on in a company's life in AI is.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And I think in today's world, the reality is in a SaaS world, the triple, triple, double, double, double was a thing. It was an incredible metric. These businesses were incredibly repeatable, very comparable. Now we exist in a world where if you have a product that the market likes, it is going to absolutely yank you into that market. It's not going to triple at the earliest stages. It is going to scream. And I think you really see that, right? And so those are the companies. And again, it's not like we think these companies are all bad and this and that. It's just our strategy is to find those and to work with those companies because that's where we think the disproportionate returns come from. And it's the companies that we have an advantage working with.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The short answer is I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen to those companies. I don't know what the terminal value is. I don't know what the exit pathways are, right? With private equity in the place that it's in with the public markets where it is. All I know is I have a lot of conviction and I see a path in the style of investing that we do. I don't know how to comment on the other part of the markets, right? There's this notion that like the triple, triple, triple, double, double, double is dead and these companies suck and all this stuff. I don't think that's true. They're a great companies. You can drive real margin from them. They make incredible businesses. It's just not our strategy.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, of course. I think, again, it goes back to that very simple principle. It's the big idea and the multiple products. And it's why we're really focused on that and why I harp on it literally nonstop is we've just overestimated TAM and we've overestimated the ability for companies to launch multiple products and expand into new TAMs. We're usually not getting things wrong on the basis of metrics or the team being good or it wasn't growing fast enough. It's really that question. And it's why we have applied and really raised the bar on the type of investing that we do is because of that, right? It's like we've gone wrong. And the nice thing is we have a, you know, we tend to have a very low loss ratio because of the style of investing that we do. But where we've gone wrong, it's that.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's certainly an option for liquidity now, right? A lot of folks, especially the early stage funds that have been in companies for a really long time, are taking advantage of this. And I think rightfully so. And again, I think it's why, even if you're in early stage fund, this is a great style of investing and it's the type of company that you want to be in because it's the only”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I'm going to need in my fund, but two, the company's not going to exit. I have to imagine this is why the big idea being in big ideas really matters. Somebody's got to sit on the other side of that stock. I have to be able to walk down the hallway to the folks that operate on our public side and say, do you want to buy this stock? Do you want to buy this stock more than all the other opportunities that you have? And so every investment I make, that is the rigor and the framework that I use is someday is my public counterpart going to want to own this stock over everything else in their book, or at least is there a chance?”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. A 3x is not enough to be exciting. And the math is really simple, right? SAMA fund, and I'm Ko2. I want to make a 3x net return for my investors. Sort of the baseline for what people would say is like a top quartile return and people get really excited about 3x net return for a fund, you know, 25% net IR, something around those bands. I'm going to have some things where I swing and I miss. Say I have a 1x. I need a 5x on the other side of that. Heaven forbid I have a loss and I have a zero. I need a 6. We obviously really try to avoid those, right? If I have a two, I need a four. So for me, I need to see a steady case where you can get that 3x. But I really need to believe that if the company 3x is I want to put more money in because it can 3x again. And I think this is a really critical thing that a lot of folks end up missing over time is ultimately I need to imagine a case where after I've made my 3x somebody else thinks they can make their 3x because otherwise one I'm not going to get those six x.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Listen, vertical SAS, I think you could talk about it a lot of different ways constrain TAM, AI risk, all kinds of stuff. They're still great businesses today. People have made a lot of money in vertical software over time. Think about insight, right? They've had incredible exits in vertical software over time. multi-billion dollar exits. In today's world, if you have a big fund, I don't think that's where you should be focused. I think you should be focused on the absolute mega outcomes, the platform companies that are going to generate that disproportionate return, and you're actually going to get liquidity out of.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company, now you can invest a billion dollars in any given round. Find invest a billion dollars in itinx that billion dollars as a 2x on a $5 billion fund. Now I need to be concentrated to make that happen, right? And I think, again, that's why we go back to our strategy. Few investments, big checks. You have to have that type of discipline to make those fund sizes work. The spray and prey does not work, but you can absolutely make it work. And then I think the second dynamic that's different, the outcomes are bigger now than they used to be. In the SaaS wave, I think it would have been really hard to make that fun size work. Because SaaS, you're constrained. The largest SaaS company in the world that's independent outside of Microsoft and the hyperscalers and Salesforce. Salesforce Workday ServiceNow. Those are like a couple hundred billion dollars in market cap. So it's going to be hard in that world, but in an AI world, if we actually think that we're augmenting labor, if we think that we can address a lot of these really big markets, if you move from human inputs to tokens, then you're going to have much bigger outcomes and the math works.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, if you are a venture fund that is staring down the barrel of having to deploy $3 billion, I think that is hard because, again, at the early stage, it is hard to capture disproportionate ownership in the few companies that actually generate all of that liquidity. If you're a small venture fund, I think it's super possible in today's world. You don't actually have to be catch the seed of SpaceX. You'd really like to because those are the only, the platform companies generate liquidity. But at the end of the day, you can get by with not capturing all of the great outcomes. If you have a $3 billion venture fund, the math is really hard. You have to capture a lot of those. The growth funds are a little bit different math. But I think just go back to your question about can a $5 billion growth fund scale and work? The answer is yes. The reason why is the markets changed in two different ways. Change number one, these companies are staying private longer. They're getting bigger while they're private. There are more opportunities to invest over time. So now where 10 years ago, you couldn't put a billion dollars in.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would separate the two asset classes almost in some way, right? Venture and growth in many ways, right? We've almost developed completely independently and separately. Obviously, there are firms that do both. There are firms that do both very well. If I was a venture fund staring down the barrel of a $3 billion venture fund, I think that's a tough putt. That's a tough battle to be a part of. What do you mean?”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And listen, that's part of the game. And as a founder, I completely empathize and understand that, right? I can understand how that would be a really tricky situation. From our perspective, it's when you're investing in large markets, oftentimes you are going to end up in assets that compete because they naturally expand TAMS. A great example of this is I think we were the only private investor that was invested in Snowflake and Databricks when they were both private. They started off in completely different areas. Databricks didn't have a data warehousing product and Snowflake didn't really do a lot of ELT. It was mostly built around the ecosystem. They grew together and we weren't invested when they were starting to compete because Snowflake went public a lot earlier. But at the same time, that happens in big markets.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you can, but it definitely makes your job harder, right? You want to make your job as easy as possible and not put up the barriers in ways to being able to win, to win a new investment. But I agree with you at scale when companies become these.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we're much more the latter. And I think there are two dynamics around this one is our view are very few companies that generate the disproportionate value in technology. If you look at the private markets today, take the whole private market ecosystem. 20 companies have generated 80% of the enterprise value. 20 companies, 80% of the enterprise value of all the private companies that exist in the world. And four companies have generated 65% of the enterprise value. Four companies. And so what really matters is being in those companies, those 20 platform companies that are generating the disproportionate amount of value. And then your next question is, all right, well, how? Like this wonderful framework. Like, we all would love to be in all of these platform companies, but like, how? And the answer is from our view, you can't do this brand bray at the early stage or the early growth stage. The reason why is you may be in the wrong horse or you may be in the wrong market and you may be investing your time wrong because there are very few companies, we need to make very few investments. Even at the early growth stage of the growth stage.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the more simplistic way that we think about it, and again, this is not a hard and fast rule and it's more qualitative than anything, is if I invest in this round of this price and the company executes, do I want to put more at a higher price? That's the litmus test. It's to say, all right, say I invest in a company at $5 billion. And it does super well this year. Is this a big enough idea? Is this generational enough? Is this transformational enough? Is the founder amazing enough that if in six months they wake up and say they want to raise at 10, then I'm going to want to do that.”
2026-02-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source